Koan Zen is a philosophical practice that bears a strong family resemblance to Wittgenstein's approach to philosophy. In this paper I hope to show that this resemblance is especially evident when we compare the Zen method of koan with Wittgenstein's suggestion, towards the end of his Tractatus, about what would constitute the only correct method in philosophy. Both koan Zen and Wittgenstein's method set limits to the reach of philosophical discourse. Each rules metaphysical speculation out of bounds. Neither, however, represents (...) a rejection of the metaphysical. Where Wittgenstein enjoins silence in the face of the unsayable, a silence that allows the metaphysical to show itself, koan Zen calls for concrete demonstrations of that which cannot be captured in rational discourse. I attempt to illustrate this through discussion of a number of koans that serve as reminders that the philosopher (and Zen master) should say nothing except what can be said. (shrink)

Recent reports published by the United Nations and the World Health Organization suggest that the brain drain of healthcare professionals from the developing to the developed world is decimating the provision of healthcare in poor countries. The migration of these key workers is driven by a combination of economic inequalities and the recruitment policies of governments in the rich world. This article assesses the impact of the healthcare brain drain and argues that wealthy countries have a moral obligation to reduce (...) the flow of healthcare workers from the developing to the developed world. (shrink)

This study explored the relationship of current incidences of academic dishonesty with future norm/rule-violating behavior. Data were collected from 154 college students enrolled in introductory and upper-level psychology students at a large Midwest public university who received credit for participating. The sample included students from many different majors and all years of study. Participants completed a self-report survey that included a measure of Academic Dishonesty (including three subscales: Self-Dishonest, Social Falsifying, and Plagiarism) and an Imagined Futures Scale (five subscales that (...) included Norm/Rule Violating, Physically Threatening, Culturally Diverse, Emotionally Distressing, and Agentic Futures). Correlation analyses indicated a significant positive relationship between all three Academic Dishonesty subscales and an imagined norm/rule-violating future. Further, regression analyses revealed social falsifying as being significantly predictive of a norm/ rule-violating future. Suggestions are made alerting educators to the importance of monitoring and discouraging academic dishonesty as it may lead to rule-violating behavior in the future. (shrink)

The onomasticon of Hellenistic Uruk demonstrates that, in some cases, individuals with Greek names were included in otherwise Babylonian families. Often, such Greek names have been interpreted by scholars as evidence for Hellenization. This article suggests an alternate explanation, based on evidence throughout the family trees for a series of naming practices that focus on the perpetuation of names of female relatives and transmission of preferred family names through maternal lines. Particularly important to this discussion are the practices of mammonymy, (...) a term coined here to refer to papponymy’s gendered parallel, i.e., the naming of a girl after her grandmother or other female ancestor, and the practice, previously unexamined in the Assyriological literature, of “maternal-line papponymy,” the tradition of naming a son for his maternal grandfather or other male ancestor from a maternal line. Maternal-line papponymy can be observed in family trees in which the members bear only Babylonian names, as well as in family trees that include individuals with Babylonian names and individuals with Greek names. The Greek names used for boys are often those of fathers or grandfathers of women with Greek names who married into these Babylonian families. This article argues that the incorporation of Greek names into the elite Babylonian families of Hellenistic Uruk cannot be assumed to be straightforward evidence of impulses toward “Hellenization.” Rather, this evidence indicates that Greek names were given to sons in such families within the context of traditional Babylonian maternal-line naming practices. This finding has important implications for scholarship’s understanding of acculturation and the display of cultural identity in Hellenistic Babylonia. (shrink)

Carl Craver investigates what we are doing when we sue neuroscience to explain what's going on in the brain.

Carl F. Craver investigates what we are doing when we use neuroscience to explain what's going on in the brain. When does an explanation succeed and when does it fail? Craver offers explicit standards for successful explanation of the workings of the brain, on the basis of a systematic view about what neuroscientific explanations are.

In this paper I argue against one variety of contextualism about aesthetic predicates such as “beautiful.” Contextualist analyses of these and other predicates have been subject to several challenges surrounding disagreement. Focusing on one kind of contextualism— individualized indexical contextualism —I unpack these various challenges and consider the responses available to the contextualist. The three responses I consider are as follows: giving an alternative analysis of the concept of disagreement ; claiming that speakers suffer from semantic blindness; and claiming that (...) attributions of beauty carry presuppositions of commonality. I will argue that none of the available strategies gives a response which both satisfactorily explains all of the disagreement -data and is plausible independent of significant evidence in favor of contextualism. I conclude that individualized indexical contextualism about the aesthetic is untenable, although this does not rule out alternative contextualist approaches to the aesthetic. (shrink)

Traces the development of the integral and the differential calculus and related theories since ancient times.

The General Medical Council’s Outcome for Graduates, published in 2018,1 is the latest guidance for medical schools on the GMC’s expectations of the undergraduate medical curriculum. One of its three top level outcomes—Professional Values and Behaviours—refers to medical ethics and law, professionalism and patient safety competencies. Furthermore, the recent proliferation of patient safety inquiries in the UK2–4 has elevated the emphasis on ethical medical practice5 and critical medical ethics and law competencies for future doctors. In response to these developments and (...) to ensure an up to date offering, the Institute of Medical Ethics Education Committee has updated the consensus statement on the core curriculum for medical ethics and law for doctors of tomorrow.6 This refined curriculum is the result of a national consultation process. We asked for the views of all lead teachers of medical ethics and law in all UK medical schools, the UK’s chief medical officers, the GMC, and delegates at our annual education conference in 2017 who …. (shrink)

This collection of articles and associated discussion papers focuses on a problem that has attracted increasing attention from linguists and psychologists throughout the world during the past several years. Reduced to essentials, the problem is that of discovering the character of the mental capacities that make it possible for human beings to attain knowledge of their language on the basis of fragmentary and haphazard early linguistic experience. A fundamental assumption running through all of these contributions is that people possess strong (...) innate predispositions that are critical for success in this task. (shrink)

According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific (...) explanation. In C. G. Hempel (Ed.), Aspects of scientific explanation (pp. 331–496). New York: Free Press; Kitcher (1989); Machamer, P., Darden, L., & Craver, C. F. (2000). Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67(1), 1–25). My concern is with the minimal suggestion that an adequate philosophical theory of scientific explanation can limit its attention to the format or structure with which theories are represented. The representational subsumption view is a plausible hypothesis about the psychology of understanding. It is also a plausible claim about how scientists present their knowledge to the world. However, one cannot address the central questions for a philosophical theory of scientific explanation without turning one’s attention from the structure of representations to the basic commitments about the worldly structures that plausibly count as explanatory. A philosophical theory of scientific explanation should achieve two goals. The first is explanatory demarcation. It should show how explanation relates with other scientific achievements, such as control, description, measurement, prediction, and taxonomy. The second is explanatory normativity. It should say when putative explanations succeed and fail. One cannot achieve these goals without undertaking commitments about the kinds of ontic structures that plausibly count as explanatory. Representations convey explanatory information about a phenomenon when and only when they describe the ontic explanations for those phenomena. (shrink)

Individuals who experience stereotype threat – the pressure resulting from social comparisons that are perceived as unfavourable – show performance decrements across a wide range of tasks. One account of this effect is that the cognitive pressure triggered by such threat drains the same cognitive resources that are implicated in the respective task. The present study investigates whether mindfulness can be used to moderate stereotype threat, as mindfulness has previously been shown to alleviate working-memory load. Our results show that performance (...) decrements that typically occur under stereotype threat can indeed be reversed when the individual engages in a brief mindfulness task. The theoretical implications of our findings are discussed. (shrink)

During the later years of his life, the late Professor Alexander devoted much of his time to the study of our aesthetic and moral experience. In regard to the latter, Alexander was impressed by Adam Smith's treatment of the Moral Sentiments and especially with what he considered his sure insight in seeking for the ground of obligation in the causes of conduct, rather than in its effects. These causes were the passions. In this he was in sympathy with his contemporary (...) Hobhouse, who asserted with conviction that action rested on impulse feeling, and that it was useless to look for anything whether it was called Practical Reason or anything else, that stood outside the body of impulse feeling and controlled it. I think it was the considered opinion of Alexander, as it was that of Hobhouse, that if Psychology had anything to teach us bearing upon Morals, it was that the springs of human conduct must be looked for in our inherited tendencies with their associated emotions. Fear, sorrow, joy, repulsion, curiosity, pugnacity, self-assertion, the sex instinct, and acquisitiveness and constructiveness, are present, not only in men of all living races, but also in most of the higher animals. These specific tendencies and emotions, with certain complex passions such as admiration, reverence, scorn and the rest; together with one or two general tendencies such as sympathy and imitativeness, arising out of the nature of mental processes, must have played a leading role in the determination of human conduct, both in its lower and higher grades. (shrink)

I have tried to expound Whitehead's doctrine of Creativity and of actual entities. Nothing remains but to give a brief summary of what has been said in the foregoing notes.Creativity is the ultimate activity and principle of novelty in the Universe.The world is said to consist of “actual entities,” not substances. An actual entity is also called an “actual occasion.” It is essentially a genetic process, having two sides, the process of “becoming,” and the outcome of the process named the (...) “satisfaction.” The satisfaction is the fully determined achievement abstracted from the process. On attaining satisfaction the actual entity viewed as a self-creating subject loses its “final” causation, and as a subject perishes, but the “satisfaction” remains as a potential constituent for the emergence of a new actual entity. This is its “efficient” causation. The potentiality of the satisfaction for a new creation is called its “objective immortality”: in this capacity it functions as an “object” for the self-creation of another actual entity. (shrink)

The Universe cannot be exhaustively analysed if we stop at actual entities or even societies of actual entities which, as we shall see later when we discuss the notion of ‘nexus,’ are equivalent to what we ordinarily mean by enduring objects such as a stone, a tree, or a man. There is another class of entities which plays an important part in the constitution of the Universe called ‘eternal objects,’ and we must now proceed to an understanding of these.

In earlier articles an account has been given of some of the chief notions in the Organic Philosophy, namely Creativity, Actual Entities, Eternal Objects, God. In the present article the writer will endeavour to present Whitehead's doctrine concerning the space-time continuum and the nature of enduring objects implicated therein.

In my last article I described fully the important type of entity in Whitehead's philosophy called “propositions,” and explained the part they played in conscious experience. We learnt that “consciousness” was a certain kind of emergent quality associated with the late phase of concrescence of some high-grade actual entities. It was pointed out that whenever consciousness was present in experience, this proved to be the subjective form of an integral synthetic feeling composed of a physical feeling and a pro-positional feeling. (...) This integral feeling was said to be a feeling of contrast between “actuality” and “ideality,” between a fact and a possibility. That is to say consciousness is the subjective form of the feeling of a contrast between what actuality is, and might not be, or what actuality is not, and yet might be. We can now proceed to deal with a number of higher phases of experience such as “belief,” “conscious perception,” “judgment,” together with experiences termed by Whitehead “physical purposes.”. (shrink)

When the weather is fair, it is the custom of the writer to take a walk across the common which abuts on to his house and garden. This morning he observed the fresh green of the spring grass, and at the same time heard from an adjacent hawthorn bush the cheerful song of the thrush. As he proceeded, the scent of burning brushwood in a clearing near by was smelt. He picked up a stick lying on the grass and used (...) it as a staff. Within a few minutes he had enjoyed sense experience through eyes, ears, nose and hands. In the autumn he hopes to gather from the bushes a handful of blackberries, as he has done in many previous years, and enjoy their luscious taste. (shrink)

Here a distinguished American historian challenges the belief that the eighteenth century was essentially modern in its temper. In crystalline prose Carl Becker demonstrates that the period commonly described as the Age of Reason was, in fact, very far from that; that Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, and Locke were living in a medieval world, and that these philosophers “demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials.” In a new foreword, Johnson Kent Wright looks (...) at the book’s continuing relevance within the context of current discussion about the Enlightenment. “Will remain a classic—a beautifully finished literary product.”—Charles A. Beard, _American Historical Review_ “_The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers _remains_ _one of the most distinctive American contributions to the historical literature on the Enlightenment.... [It] is likely to beguile and provoke readers for a long time to come.”—Johnson Kent Wright, from the foreword. (shrink)

Jung has never pursued the "psychology of religion" apart from general psychology. The unique importance of his work lies rather in his discovery and treatment of religious, or potentially religious, factors in his investigation into the unconscious as a whole and in his general therapeutic practice. In Answer to Job , first published in Zurich in 1952, Jung employs the familiar language of theological discourse. Such terms as "God," "wisdom," and "evil" are the touchstones of his argument. And yet, Answer (...) to Job , perhaps Jung's most controversial work, is not an essay in theology as much as it is an examination of the symbolic role that theological concepts play in a person's psychic life. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of how democratic governance is possible. It analyses democracy as a laminated system consisting of three interdependent levels – the political/institutional, the socia...

We argue that intelligible appeals to interlevel causes (top-down and bottom-up) can be understood, without remainder, as appeals to mechanistically mediated effects. Mechanistically mediated effects are hybrids of causal and constitutive relations, where the causal relations are exclusively intralevel. The idea of causation would have to stretch to the breaking point to accommodate interlevel causes. The notion of a mechanistically mediated effect is preferable because it can do all of the required work without appealing to mysterious interlevel causes. When interlevel (...) causes can be translated into mechanistically mediated effects, the posited relationship is intelligible and should raise no special philosophical objections. When they cannot, they are suspect. (shrink)

In earlier articles I explained the fundamental entities in the Organic Philosophy, namely: actual entities or actual occasions, and eternal objects. But there is also a third type of entity called “propositions,” very important for the introduction of novelty into our world, and indispensable for “consciousness” and the higher phases of experience. Before discussing Consciousness and these higher phases, it is necessary, therefore, to give an account of propositions.

Not all models are explanatory. Some models are data summaries. Some models sketch explanations but leave crucial details unspecified or hidden behind filler terms. Some models are used to conjecture a how-possibly explanation without regard to whether it is a how-actually explanation. I use the Hodgkin and Huxley model of the action potential to illustrate these ways that models can be useful without explaining. I then use the subsequent development of the explanation of the action potential to show what is (...) required of an adequate mechanistic model. Mechanistic models are explanatory. (shrink)

Some philosophers writing on the possibility of faultless disagreement have argued that the only way to account for the intuition that there could be disagreements which are faultless in every sense is to accept a relativistic semantics. In this article we demonstrate that this view is mistaken by constructing an absolutist semantics for a particular domain – aesthetic discourse – which allows for the possibility of genuinely faultless disagreements. We argue that this position is an improvement over previous absolutist responses (...) to the relativist's challenge and that it presents an independently plausible account of the semantics of aesthetic discourse. (shrink)