Jenkins (2007) charges that the language advanced in Beall (2007) is either expressively impoverished, or inconsistent. We argue that Jenkins’ objections are based on unreasonably strong constraints on formal theories of truth. Our primary concern is not to defend the ‘paranormal’ framework advanced in Beall, but to respond to a common – and implausible – ‘revenge’-style charge directed at a certain class of formal theories of truth and paradox.

Religion and the Rebel, Colin Wilson's second volume from his internationally acclaimed Outsider Cycle, is a casebook about and for rebels. With inspirational wisdom and engaging clarity, Wilson shows us that the purpose of religion, of our personal relationship with the sacred and the all-pervading mystery of existence, is to expand our consciousness and intensify our sense of life. Wilson heroically claims that the power to create meaning resides in our mental and spiritual discipline. Examining the lives and works (...) of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Rilke, Shaw, Pascal, Swedenborg, Rimbaud and Scott Fitzgerald, among others, Wilson explores the main existential questions and shows how these remarkable writers, scientists, philosophers and poets faced their need for transcendence. Like many of us, they were driven by a need to become more than men. Religion and the Rebel is an outstanding and enjoyable book that combines philosophical analysis, historical interest, and religious insight. (shrink)

Context: The need to reinvigorate medical confidentiality protections is recognised as an important objective in building patient trust necessary for successful health outcomes. Little is known about patient understanding and expectations from medical confidentiality.Objective: To identify and describe patient views of medical confidentiality and to assess provisionally the range of these views.Design: Qualitative study using indepth, open ended face-to-face interviews.Setting: Southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey, USA.Participants: A total of 85 women interviewed at two clinical sites and three community/research centres.Main (...) outcome measures: Subjects’ understanding of medical confidentiality, beliefs about the handling of confidential information and concerns influencing disclosure of information to doctors.Results: The subjects defined medical confidentiality as the expectation that something done or said would be kept “private” but differed on what information was confidential and the basis and methods for protecting information. Some considered all medical information as confidential and thought confidentiality protections functioned to limit its circulation to medical uses and reimbursement needs. Others defined only sensitive or potentially stigmatising information as confidential. Many of these also defined medical confidentiality as a strict limit prohibiting information release, although some noted that specific permission or urgent need could override this limit.Conclusions: Patients share a basic understanding of confidentiality as protection of information, but some might have expectations that are likely not met by current practice nor anticipated by doctors. Doctors should recognise that patients might have their own medical confidentiality models. They should address divergences from current practice and provide support to those who face emotional or practical obstacles to self-revelation. (shrink)

One of the principal challenges to human survival will be for human beings, embedded in a plurality of cultural contexts, to engage with and learn from one another respectfully in the continuing task of creating a more liveable world. I argue here that theoretical psychology can contribute to setting some of the terms for this effort through the kind of conception it advances of the person as agent. I discuss broadly two philosophical perspectives toward human agency which have become prominent (...) in psychology in the last few decades, the humanistic and the hermeneutic. I argue that these two different frameworks make complementary contributions to the project of understanding ourselves and furthering the development of our humanity. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

We consider the complex interactions between rape culture and epistemology. A central case study is the consideration of a deferential attitude about the epistemology of sexual assault testimony. According to the deferential attitude, individuals and institutions should decline to act on allegations of sexual assault unless and until they are proven in a formal setting, i.e., a criminal court. We attack this deference from several angles, including the pervasiveness of rape culture in the criminal justice system, the epistemology of testimony (...) and norms connecting knowledge and action, the harms of tacit idealizations away from important contextual factors, and a contextualist semantics for 'knows' ascriptions. (shrink)

'There is much food for thought in McGinn's discussions and each chapter is rich with a series of considerations for thinking that the currently received views on the various topics have some serious difficulties that need confronting... For those interested in metaphysics and the philosophy of logic, this book will stimulate much further thought' -Mind 'The sweep of the book is broad and the pace is brisk... There is much material here to provide the basis for many a deep philosophical (...) discussion' -Mind 'Lucid and provocative little book... clear, direct and well argued' -Times Higher Education SupplementIdentity, existence, predication, necessity, and truth are fundamental philosophical concerns. Colin McGinn treats them both philosophically and logically, aiming for maximum clarity and minimum pointless formalism. He contends that there are real logical properties that challenge naturalistic metaphysical outlooks. These concepts are not definable, though we can say a good deal about how they work. The aim of Logical Properties is to bring philosophy back to philosophical logic. (shrink)

The commentary argues that we cannot be sure that human consciousness has survival value and that in order to understand the origins and, perhaps, the function of consciousness, we should examine the behavioural and neural precursors to consciousness in nonhumans. An example is given of research on the role of context in decisions regarding fleeing from probable predators in the Mongolian gerbil.

Book Information The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy. The Blackwell Guide to Continental Philosophy Robert C. Solomon and David Sherman, eds., Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, viii + 345, $69.30 (cloth) Edited by Robert C. Solomon; and David Sherman. Oxford: Blackwell. Pp. viii + 345. $69.30 (cloth:).

In What the Body Commands, Colin Klein proposes and defends a novel theory of pain. Klein argues that pains are imperative; they are sensations with a content, and that content is a command to protect the injured part of the body. He terms this view "imperativism about pain," and argues that imperativism can account for two puzzling features of pain: its strong motivating power and its uninformative nature. Klein argues that the biological purpose of pain is homeostatic; like hunger (...) and thirst, pain helps solve a challenge to bodily integrity. It does so by motivating you to act in ways that help the body recover. If you obey pain's command, you get better. He develops his account to handle a variety of pain phenomena and applies it to solve a number of historically puzzling cases. Klein's intent is to defend the imperativist view in a pure form -- without requiring pain to represent facts about the world.Klein presents a model of imperative content showing that intrinsically motivating sensations are best understood as imperatives, and argues that pain belongs to this class. He considers the distinction between pain and suffering; explains how pain motivates; addresses variations among pains; and offers an imperativist account of maladaptive pains, pains that don't appear to hurt, masochism, and why pain feels bad. (shrink)

In their book ‘Corporate Social Opportunity’, Grayson and Hodges maintain that ‘the driver for business success is entrepreneurialism, a competitive instinct and a willingness to look for innovation from non‐traditional areas such as those increasingly found within the corporate social responsibility agenda’. Such opportunities are described as ‘commercially viable activities which also advance environmental and social sustainability’. There are three dimensions to corporate social opportunity – innovation in products and services, serving unserved markets and building new business models. While small‐ (...) and medium‐sized enterprises have traditionally been presented as non‐entrepreneurial in this area, this paper demonstrates how SMEs can take advantage of the opportunities presented by CSR. Using data from 24 detailed case studies of UK SMEs from a range of sectors, the paper explores the numerous CSR opportunities that present themselves to SMEs, such as developing innovative products and services and exploiting niche markets. There are inevitable challenges for SMEs undertaking CSR, but by their very nature they have many characteristics that can aid the adoption of CSR; the paper explores these characteristics and how the utilisation of positive qualities will help SMEs make the most of CSOs. Integrating CSR into the core of a company is crucial to its success. Using the case studies to illustrate key points, the paper suggests how CSR can be built into a company's systems and become ‘just the way we do things’. There are a number of factors that characterise the CSO ‘mentality’ in an organisation, and Grayson and Hodges's book describes seven steps that will move a company in the direction of a ‘want to do’ CSO mentality. This paper adapts these steps for SMEs, and by transferring and building on knowledge from the 24 detailed case studies, it develops a ‘business opportunity’ model of CSR for SMEs. (shrink)

Colin Morris traces the origin of the concept of the individual, not to the Renaissance where it is popularly assumed to have been invented, but farther back, ...

The heart of this book is the reciprocal relationship between philosophical theories of mind and empirical studies of animal cognition.

Wittgenstein famously ended his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein 1922) by writing: "Whereof one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence." (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.) In that earliest work, Wittgenstein gives no clue about whether this aphorism applied to animal minds, or whether he would have included philosophical discussions about animal minds as among those displaying "the most fundamental confusions (of which the whole of philosophy is full)" (1922, TLP 3.324), but given his later writings on (...) language and thought, it seems a plausible hypothesis. Years later he wrote in the Philosophical Investigations (1968, p. 223) another aphoristic statement: "If a lion could speak, we would not understand him." (Wenn der Löwe sprechen könnte, wir könnten ihn nicht verstehen.) Decades of philosophical discussion about what Wittgenstein meant by these remarks illustrate another point: when philosophers speak, we do not fully understand them. (shrink)

Reviews the book Time and psychological explanation by Brent D. Slife . In this book Prof. Slife has taken on the task of showing how the Western conception of time is a construct whose use in psychology is in need of just such a review. The object of Slife's critique is the modern Western tradition which takes time to be an objective and linear entity. This perspective, of course, derives from the work and thinking of Sir Isaac Newton, and it (...) is an orientation which has been fundamental to the development of Western science and culture since the period of the Enlightenment. Prof. Slife argues that the Newtonian time paradigm rests on five somewhat overlapping conceptual elements which are basic to traditional scientific explanation. These are the notions of "objectivity," "continuity," "linearity," "universality," and "reductionism." Some of these characteristics can be seen to be features of the way Newton envisioned time itself and some are aspects of events to be accounted for, because they exist in absolute time. In sum Prof. Slife has made a philosophically literate case for the need to analyze the limiting effects of Newtonian notions of time on psychology's theory and practice. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

The partial aim of this paper is to suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology is prefigured in Schelling’s conception of God as presented in Ages of the World. This will specifically be demonstrated by explicating the parallels between Merleau-Ponty’s paradoxical notion of the flesh and Schelling’s equally complex idea of Ungrund. Understanding the significance of Schelling’s influence on Merleau-Ponty becomes pivotal upon the recognition that the contemporary French political philosopher Claude Lefort’s idea of the political instituting politics is directly linked to Merleau-Ponty’s (...) ontology of the invisible and visible. The implication here involves the suggestion that Lefort’s conception of the political parallels Schelling’s conception of God as mediated by Merleau-Ponty. It is then suggested that the political form of modernity should be understood less as the emergence of a novel form and conceived of more as an originary dimension where the theological and the political become indistinguishable. (shrink)

This essay attempts to provide a historical account of Michael Oakeshott’s famous distinction between civil and enterprise association. As such, it demonstrates that Oakeshott’s political skepticism and his concomitant view of civil association can in part be explained by his reliance on Augustinian theology. In a similar vein, Oakeshott’s linkage of enterprise association with the rationalism of Bacon must be considered in terms of Oakeshott’s understanding of Pelagianism and Gnosticism. Unsurprisingly, it will be demonstrated that despite Oakeshott’s disagreements with the (...) political philosopher Eric Voegelin, he was very impressed by Voegelin’s work on the Gnostic origins of modernity. Consequently, a major claim of this essay is that Oakeshott’s speculative understanding of modern political thought constitutes a theological genealogy of political modernity in all but name. (shrink)

Many, including Marx, Rawls, and the contemporary 'Black Lives Matter' movement, embrace the ambition to secure terms of co-existence in which the worth of people's lives becomes a lived reality rather than an empty boast. This book asks whether, as some believe, the philosophical idea of human dignity can help achieve that ambition. Offering a new fourfold typology of dignity concepts, Colin Bird argues that human dignity can perform this role only if certain traditional ways of conceiving it are (...) abandoned. Accordingly, Bird rejects the idea that human dignity refers to the inherent worth or status of individuals, and instead reinterprets it as a social relation, constituted by affects of respect and the modes of mutual attention which they generate. What emerges is a new vision of human dignity as a vital political value, and an arresting vindication of its role as an agent of critical reflection on politics. (shrink)

This volume provides a guide to the discussion among biologists and philosophersabout the role of concepts such as function and design in an evolutionary understanding oflife.

We propose that the prevalent moral aversion to AWS is supported by a pair of compelling objections. First, we argue that even a sophisticated robot is not the kind of thing that is capable of replicating human moral judgment. This conclusion follows if human moral judgment is not codifiable, i.e., it cannot be captured by a list of rules. Moral judgment requires either the ability to engage in wide reflective equilibrium, the ability to perceive certain facts as moral considerations, moral (...) imagination, or the ability to have moral experiences with a particular phenomenological character. Robots cannot in principle possess these abilities, so robots cannot in principle replicate human moral judgment. If robots cannot in principle replicate human moral judgment then it is morally problematic to deploy AWS with that aim in mind. Second, we then argue that even if it is possible for a sufficiently sophisticated robot to make ‘moral decisions’ that are extensionally indistinguishable from (or better than) human moral decisions, these ‘decisions’ could not be made for the right reasons. This means that the ‘moral decisions’ made by AWS are bound to be morally deficient in at least one respect even if they are extensionally indistinguishable from human ones. Our objections to AWS support the prevalent aversion to the employment of AWS in war. They also enjoy several significant advantages over the most common objections to AWS in the literature. (shrink)

Unraveling the molecular detail of insulin receptor activation has proved challenging, but a major advance is the recent determination of crystallographic structures of insulin in complex with its primary binding site on the receptor. The current model for insulin receptor activation is that two distinct surfaces of insulin monomer engage sequentially with two distinct binding sites on the extracellular surface of the insulin receptor, which is itself a disulfide‐linked (αβ)2 homodimer. In the process, conformational changes occur both within the hormone (...) and the receptor, the latter resulting in the disruption of the intracellular interactions that hold the kinase domains in their basal state and in the initiation of the phosphorylation events that drive insulin signaling. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the extant structural data relating to hormone binding and how it effects receptor activation, as well as to discuss the issues that remain unresolved. (shrink)

This note motivates a logic for a theory that can express its own notion of logical consequence—a ‘syntactically closed’ theory of naive validity. The main issue for such a logic is Curry’s paradox, which is averted by the failure of contraction. The logic features two related, but different, implication connectives. A Hilbert system is proposed that is complete and non-trivial.

Research suggests that contact with nature can be beneficial, for example leading to improvements in mood, cognition, and health. A distinct but related idea is the personality construct of subjective nature connectedness, a stable individual difference in cognitive, affective, and experiential connection with the natural environment. Subjective nature connectedness is a strong predictor of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors that may also be positively associated with subjective well-being. This meta-analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between nature connectedness and happiness. Based (...) on 30 samples ( n = 8523), a fixed-effect meta-analysis found a small but significant effect size ( r = 0.19). Those who are more connected to nature tended to experience more positive affect, vitality, and life satisfaction compared to those less connected to nature. Publication status, year, average age, and percentage of females in the sample were not significant moderators. Vitality had the strongest relationship with nature connectedness ( r = 0.24), followed by positive affect ( r = 0.22) and life satisfaction ( r = 0.17). In terms of specific nature connectedness measures, associations were the strongest between happiness and inclusion of nature in self ( r = 0.27), compared to nature relatedness ( r = 0.18) and connectedness to nature ( r = 0.18). This research highlights the importance of considering personality when examining the psychological benefits of nature. The results suggest that closer human-nature relationships do not have to come at the expense of happiness. Rather, this meta-analysis shows that being connected to nature and feeling happy are, in fact, connected. (shrink)

As arti® cial intelligence moves ever closer to the goal of producing fully autonomous agents, the question of how to design and implement an arti® cial moral agent (AMA) becomes increasingly pressing. Robots possessing autonomous capacities to do things that are useful to humans will also have the capacity to do things that are harmful to humans and other sentient beings. Theoretical challenges to developing arti® cial moral agents result both from controversies among ethicists about moral theory itself, and from (...) computational limits to the implementation of such theories. In this paper the ethical disputes are surveyed, the possibility of a `moral Turing Test ’ is considered and the computational di culties accompanying the diŒerent types of approach are assessed. Human-like performance, which is prone to include immoral actions, may not be acceptable in machines, but moral perfection may be computationally unattainable. The risks posed by autonomous machines ignorantly or deliberately harming people and other sentient beings are great. The development of machines with enough intelligence to assess the eŒects of their actions on sentient beings and act accordingly may ultimately be the most important task faced by the designers of arti® cially intelligent automata. (shrink)

Logical consequence is the relation that obtains between premises and conclusion(s) in a valid argument. Orthodoxy has it that valid arguments are necessarily truth-preserving, but this platitude only raises a number of further questions, such as: how does the truth of premises guarantee the truth of a conclusion, and what constraints does validity impose on rational belief? This volume presents thirteen essays by some of the most important scholars in the field of philosophical logic. The essays offer ground-breaking new insights (...) into the nature of logical consequence; the relation between logic and inference; how the semantics and pragmatics of natural language bear on logic; the relativity of logic; and the structural properties of the consequence relation. (shrink)

Political philosophers have recently begun to take seriously methodological questions concerning what a theoretical examination of political ideals is suppose to accomplish and how effective theorising in ideal theory is in securing those aims. Andrew Mason and G.A. Cohen, for example, believe that the fundamental principles of justice are logically independent of issues of feasibility and questions about human nature. Their position contrasts sharply with political theorists like John Dunn and Joseph Carens who believe that normative theorising must be integrated (...) with an appreciation of the empirical realities of one’s society. Rather than bracket questions of feasibility and human nature, empirically-oriented political theorists believe that real, non- ideal considerations must be taken seriously when deriving normative theories of justice.1 And some justice-theorists, most notably John Rawls, attempt to. (shrink)

Recent work in philosophical logic has taken interesting and unexpected turns. It has seen not only a proliferation of logical systems, but new applications of a wide range of different formal theories to philosophical questions. As a result, philosophers have been forced to revisit the nature and foundation of core logical concepts, chief amongst which is the concept of logical consequence. This essay sets the contributions of the volume in context and identifies how they advance important debates within the philosophy (...) of logic. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, widely recognized as one of the most important yet difficult philosophers of the 20th century. In this much-needed introduction, Davis unpacks the concepts at the centre of Levinas's thought - alterity, the Other, the Face, infinity - concepts which have previously presented readers with major problems of interpretation. Davis traces the development of Levinas's thought over six decades, describing the context in which he worked, (...) and the impact of his writings. He argues that Levinas's work remains tied to the ontological tradition with which he wants to break, and demonstrates how his later writing tries to overcome this dependency by its increasingly disruptive, sometimes opaque, textual practice. He discusses Levinas's theological writings and his relationship to Judaism, as well as the reception of his work by contemporary thinkers, arguing that the influence of his work has led to a growing interest in ethical issues among poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers in recent years. Comprehensive and clearly written, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers in continental philosophy, French studies, literary theory and theology. (shrink)