The city of Montpellier on the river Lez was the commercial and intellectual center of the Languedoc in 1289 when Peter of John Olivi made his way back to his home territory of southern France.2 The city was only a few centuries old, with no ties back to Greece or even Rome. The original settlement at Maguelone received an episcopal see as early as the sixth century, but the destruction of the town in the eighth century moved the community upriver (...) to the area that became Montpellier.3 The city had emerged as a new trading port in the eleventh and twelfth centuries under the leadership of the lords of Montpellier, an unbroken line of eight men named Guillaume who reigned from 986 to 1204. The surviving heiress of... (shrink)

The Canadian-American biologist Edmund Vincent Cowdry played an important role in the birth and development of the science of aging, gerontology. In particular, he contributed to the growth of gerontology as a multidisciplinary scientific field in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. With the support of the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, he organized the first scientific conference on aging at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where scientists from various fields gathered to discuss aging as a scientific research topic. He also (...) edited Problems of Ageing (1939), the first handbook on the current state of aging research, to which specialists from diverse disciplines contributed. The authors of this book eventually formed the Gerontological Society in 1945 as a multidisciplinary scientific organization, and some of its members, under Cowdry's leadership, formed the International Association of Gerontology in 1950. This article historically traces this development by focusing on Cowdry's ideas and activities. I argue that the social and economic turmoil during the Great Depression along with Cowdry's training and experience as a biologist – cytologist in particular – and as a textbook editor became an important basis of his efforts to construct gerontology in this direction. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

A historical investigation of the exclusion of Africa and Asia from modern histories of philosophy.

Hume's Aesthetic Theory examines the neglected area of the development of aesthetics in empiricist thinking, exploring the link between the empiricist background of aesthetics in the eighteenth century and the work of David Hume.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in AestheticsDabney TownsendValues of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics, by Paul Guyer; 359 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, $75.00, $27.99 paper.This volume collects thirteen essays that range over topics from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century. The earliest was published in 1986, the last in 2004, and three appear here for the first time. They are grouped topically by period—"I. Mostly (...) before Kant; II. Mostly Kant; III. Mostly After Kant"—rather than chronologically. While this order is useful, it introduces some dislocation if one approaches the book as a whole since the last essay in the book is the first chronologically, and part of the interest of the book lies in the changes in Paul Guyer's positions over time that are reflected in his careful reconsideration of topics that he has dealt with more extensively in his volumes on Kant's [End Page 422] philosophy. As one of the most important contemporary interpreters of Kant's aesthetics, those reconsiderations are well worth attending to.The focus of all of the essays is clearly on Kant's aesthetics. That perspective is clear even when Guyer is discussing the history of aesthetics prior to Kant. As he notes, "this history of the first decades of modern aesthetics has obviously been written with an eye to Kant" ("Origins of Modern Aesthetics: 1711–1735," pp. 32–33). It continues in the discussions of recent aesthetics. For example, Guyer concludes that "the effect that is intended on the revised Beardsleyan definition [of art] is in the tradition of the Kantian concept of the free play of imagination and understanding" ("From Jupiter's Eagle to Warhol's Boxes," p. 313). Danto and Mothersill are also, it is argued, in the Kantian tradition.There are, of course, some problems with this perspective, especially with regard to the pre-Kantian history of aesthetics. For example, Guyer finds Kant's distinction between pure beauty and apprehended beauty reflected in an earlier distinction between beauty of form and beauty of interest or utility. He writes: "The foundation of this theory [Hume's theory of beauty in the Treatise and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals] is the division of beauty into two classes, the first that of pleasurable sentiment caused by an immediate response—that is, a response not mediated by the intervention of imagination or judgment—to the form or other perceptual qualities of an object, and the second that of pleasurable sentiment, which arises only when the perception of the form of an object is supplemented by a concept or concepts brought to bear on it by imagination or judgment." ("The Standard of Taste and the 'Most ardent Desire of Society,'" p. 46). What Guyer identifies as a distinction between kinds of beauty is for Hume a distinction between sources of ideas, however. The second kind of beauty requires reflection and the combination of other ideas. For Hume, there are not two kinds of beauty but two ways that the ideas of beauty, which is just a form of pleasure, are sorted. Reservations about Guyer's perspective on the earlier history of aesthetics do not detract from the interest of his analysis, however, which is always careful and detailed.The central eight essays labeled "Mostly Kant" trace themes that Guyer has treated in much greater detail in his earlier books. Two central themes are especially prominent throughout these essays. First, Guyer views Kant's theory of beauty as the harmony of the imagination and the understanding: "The concept of the free yet harmonious play between the cognitive powers of imagination and understanding is the central concept in Kant's explanation of the experience of beauty and the analysis of the judgment of taste" ("The Harmony of the Faculties Revisited," p. 77). He refers back to essentially this formulation throughout the subsequent essays. Much of the interest of these essays lies in the way Guyer explicates and defends this central thesis against alternative readings of Kant and objections that it is inconsistent with the freedom from concepts and the purity of beauty that Kant claims.Second, Guyer reads Kant's aesthetics as... (shrink)

Taste and Experience in Eighteenth Century Aesthetics acknowledges theories of taste, beauty, the fine arts, genius, expression, the sublime and the picturesque in their own right, distinct from later theories of an exclusively aesthetic kind of experience. By drawing on a wealth of thinkers, including several marginalised philosophers, Dabney Townsend presents a novel reading of the century to challenge our understanding of art and move towards a unique way of thinking about aesthetics. Speaking of a proto-aesthetic, Townsend surveys theories (...) of taste and beauty arising from the empiricist shift in philosophy. A proto-aesthetic was shaped by the philosophers who followed Locke and accepted that theories of taste and beauty must be products of experience alone. Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Alexander Gerard and Thomas Reid were among the most important advocates, joined by others who re-thought traditional topics. Featuring chapters tracing its philosophical principles, issues raised by the subjectivity of the empiricist approach and the more academic proto-aesthetic formed toward the end of the century, Townsend argues that Lockean empiricism laid the foundations for what we now call aesthetics. (shrink)

Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit dem Problem des malum. Während wir in der Regel ohne Zögern davon ausgehen, daß wir von Natur aus nach dem Guten streben, drängt sich dennoch zugleich die Frage nach dem Wesen, dem Ursprung und dem Sinn des malum unmittelbar auf. Aber die Frage nach dem malum ist ein immer noch offenes Problem. Aus diesem Grunde soll hier versucht werden, das Problem des malum im Hinblick auf die Geschichte der Philosophie zu erörtern. In Zentrum dieser Arbeit (...) soll die Lehre vom malum bei Thomas von Aquin stehen. Es wird dabei vor allem der Grund für ein sachgemäßes Verständnis des thomistischen Ansatzes gelegt, wie er in den Schriften De malo, Summa Theologiae und De veritate vorliegt. Er zeichnet sich vor allem durch eine differenzierte Analyse des malum aus, das als 'moralisch Schlechtes', 'Fehler in der Erkenntnis' und 'natürliches und technisches Fehlen' in Betracht gezogen wird. (shrink)

_Hume's Aesthetic Theory_ examines the neglected area of the development of aesthetics in empiricist thinking, exploring the link between the empiricist background of aesthetics in the eighteenth century and the work of David Hume. This is a major contribution to our understanding of Hume's general philosophy and provides fresh insights into the history of aesthetics.

The problem of unconceived alternatives can be undermined, regardless of whether the possibility space of alternatives is bounded or unbounded. If it is bounded, pessimists need to justify their assumption that the probability that scientists have not yet eliminated enough false alternatives is higher than the probability that scientists have already eliminated enough false alternatives. If it is unbounded, pessimists need to justify their assumption that the probability that scientists have not yet moved from the possibility space of false alternatives (...) to the possibility space of true alternatives is higher than the probability that scientists have already moved from the former to the latter space. (shrink)

This book provides philosophers of science with new theoretical resources for making their own contributions to the scientific realism debate. Readers will encounter old and new arguments for and against scientific realism. They will also be given useful tips for how to provide influential formulations of scientific realism and antirealism. Finally, they will see how scientific realism relates to scientific progress, scientific understanding, mathematical realism, and scientific practice.

The epistemic account and the noetic account hold that the essence of scientific progress is the increase in knowledge and understanding, respectively. Dellsén (2018) criticizes the epistemic account (Park, 2017a) and defends the noetic account (Dellsén, 2016). I argue that Dellsén’s criticisms against the epistemic account fail, and that his notion of understanding, which he claims requires neither belief nor justification, cannot explain scientific progress, although it can explain fictional progress in science-fiction.

Contemporary theories of consciousness are based on widely different concepts of its nature, most or all of which probably embody aspects of the truth about it. Starting with a concept of consciousness indicated by the phrase “the feeling of what happens” (the title of a book by Antonio Damásio), we attempt to build a framework capable of supporting and resolving divergent views. We picture consciousness in terms of Reality experiencing itself from the perspective of cognitive agents. Each conscious experience is (...) regarded as composed of momentary feeling events that are combined by recognition and evaluation into extended conscious episodes that bind cognitive contents with a wide range of apparent durations (0.1 secs to 2 or more secs, for us humans, depending on circumstances and context). Three necessary conditions for the existence of consciousness are identified: a) a ground of Reality, envisaged as an universal field of potentiality encompassing all possible manifestations, whether material or 'mental'; b) a transitional zone, leading to; c) a manifest world with its fundamental divisions into material, 'informational' and quale-endowed aspects. We explore ideas about the nature of these necessary conditions, how they may relate to one another and whether our suggestions have empirical implications. (shrink)

Extensional scientific realism is the view that each believable scientific theory is supported by the unique first-order evidence for it and that if we want to believe that it is true, we should rely on its unique first-order evidence. In contrast, intensional scientific realism is the view that all believable scientific theories have a common feature and that we should rely on it to determine whether a theory is believable or not. Fitzpatrick argues that extensional realism is immune, while intensional (...) realism is not, to the pessimistic induction. I reply that if extensional realism overcomes the pessimistic induction at all, that is because it implicitly relies on the theoretical resource of intensional realism. I also argue that extensional realism, by nature, cannot embed a criterion for distinguishing between believable and unbelievable theories. (shrink)

Robinson argues that by certain threshold criteria, pregnant women qualify for a higher moral status by reason of their pregnancies. While her intention is to make this a status upgrade for women, we worry that it may result in a status downgrade for women as a class, by presupposing and reinforcing women’s value in relation to their reproductive labour. Historically, central to feminist analysis is resistance to reductive accounts of women in relation to their reproductivity. For example, de Beauvoir addressed (...) men’s transcendence and contrasted it with women’s immanence, a status distinction possible because women are mired in expectations that they will marry, produce children and remain in the domestic realm; and for her part, Firestone argued that biological reproduction underlies women’s inferiority to men and that ‘The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both (should) be replaced by…artificial reproduction’1 2 Her concern was to liberate women from expectations of biological reproduction so their productive value in society is not reduced to their reproductive contributions. A formidable body of analysis in this same vein cautions against collapsing the value of women into their pregnancies, so much so that some commentators even distinguish ‘mothering’ from gestation.3 Robinson’s argument that pregnant women qualify at a higher threshold of personhood emphasises …. (shrink)

Nanay (2017) argues for unconscious mental imagery, inter alia based on the assumption that successful performance in imagery tasks requires the manipulation of mental imagery. I challenge this assumption with the help of results presented in Shepard and Metzler (1971), Zeman et al. (2010), and Keogh and Pearson (2018). The studies suggest that imagery tasks can be successfully performed by means of cognitive/propositional strategies which do not rely on imagery.

Van Fraassen contends that there is no argument that rationally compels us to disbelieve a successful theory, T. I object that this contention places upon him the burden of showing that scientific antirealists’ favorite arguments, such as the pessimistic induction, do not rationally compel us to disbelieve T. Van Fraassen uses the English view of rationality to rationally disbelieve T. I argue that realists can use it to rationally believe T, despite scientific antirealists’ favorite arguments against T.

Scientific realists claim that the best of successful rival theories is (approximately) true. Relative realists object that we cannot make the absolute judgment that a theory is successful, and that we can only make the relative judgment that it is more successful than its competitor. I argue that this objection is undermined by the cases in which empirical equivalents are successful. Relative realists invoke the argument from a bad lot to undermine scientific realism and to support relative realism. In response, (...) I construct the argument from double spaces. It is similar to the argument from a bad lot, but threatens many philosophical inferences, including relative realists’ inference from comparative success to comparative truth. (shrink)

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, shortages of scarce healthcare resources consistently presented significant moral and practical challenges. While the importance of vaccines as a key pharmaceutical intervention to stem pandemic scarcity was widely publicized, a sizable proportion of the population chose not to vaccinate. In response, some have defended the use of vaccination status as a criterion for the allocation of scarce medical resources. In this paper, we critically interpret this burgeoning literature, and describe a framework for thinking about vaccine-sensitive resource (...) allocation using the values of responsibility, reciprocity, and justice. Although our aim here is not to defend a single view of vaccine-sensitive resource allocation, we believe that attending critically with the diversity of arguments in favor (and against) vaccine-sensitivity reveals a number of questions that a vaccine-sensitive approach to allocation should answer in future pandemics. (shrink)

Healey (2019a) makes four comments on my (Park, 2019a) objections to van Fraassen’s positions. The four comments concern the issues of whether ‘disbelief’ is appropriate or inappropriate to characterize van Fraassen’s position, what the relationship between a theory and models is for van Fraassen, whether he believes or not that a theory is empirically adequate, and whether destructive empiricism is tenable or not. I reply to those comments in this paper.

I explain why, from the perspective of knowledge-centric anti-luck epistemology, objective act consequentialist theories of ethics imply skepticism about the moral status of our prospective actions and also tend to be self-defeating, undermining the justification of consequentialist theories themselves. For according to knowledge-centric anti-luck epistemology there are modal anti-luck demands on both knowledge and justification, and it turns out that our beliefs about the moral status of our prospective actions are almost never able to satisfy these demands if objective act (...) consequentialism is true. This kind of applied moral skepticism introduces problematic limits on our ability to use objective act consequentialism’s explanatory power as evidence for its truth. This is, in part, a product of higher-order defeat as I explain in the final section. There is, however, a silver lining for objective act consequentialists. For there is at least one type of objective act consequentialism, prior existence consequentialism, that is poised to avoid at least some of the epistemic problems discussed in this paper. (shrink)

Evolutionary theory coheres with its neighboring theories, such as the theory of plate tectonics, molecular biology, electromagnetic theory, and the germ theory of disease. These neighboring theories were previously unconceived, but they were later conceived, and then they cohered with evolutionary theory. Since evolutionary theory has been strengthened by its several neighboring theories that were previously unconceived, it will be strengthened by infinitely many hitherto unconceived neighboring theories. This argument for evolutionary theory echoes the problem of unconceived alternatives. Ironically, however, (...) the former recommends that we take the realist attitude toward evolutionary theory, while the latter recommends that we take the antirealist attitude toward it. (shrink)

The wider the gap between rivaling positions, the more there can be debates between rivaling interlocutors. The gap between the respective formulations of scientific realism and antirealism that invoke the Prussian conception of rationality is wider than the gap between the respective formulations of scientific realism and antirealism that invoke the English conception of rationality. Therefore, scientific realists and antirealists should choose the former over the latter as the framework of their debate.

This paper examines the possibility of parenting as a queer practice. Examining definitions of “queer” as resistant to presumptions and practices of reprosexuality and repro-narrativity (Michael Warner), bourgeouis norms of domestic space and family time (Judith Halberstam), and policies of reproductive futurism (Lee Edelman), I argue that queer parenting is possible. Indeed, parenting that resists practices of normalization are, in part, realized by certain types of postmodern families. However, fully actualizing the possibility of parenting queerly—and thus teaching our children the (...) values of non-normativity--requires engaging political struggles for distributive justice. These are, thus, the struggles that should be at the center of queer politics, rather than the current struggles for gay marriage and homoparental rights. (shrink)

Lyons’s (2003, 2018) axiological realism holds that science pursues true theories. I object that despite its name, it is a variant of scientific antirealism, and is susceptible to all the problems with scientific antirealism. Lyons (2003, 2018) also advances a variant of surrealism as an alternative to the realist explanation for success. I object that it does not give rise to understanding because it is an ad hoc explanans and because it gives a conditional explanation. Lyons might use axiological realism (...) to account for the success of a theory. I object that some alternative axiological explanations are better than the axiological realist explanation, and that the axiological realist explanation is teleological. Finally, I argue that Putnam’s realist position is more elegant than Lyons’s. (shrink)

Van Fraassen infers the truth of the contextual theory from his observation that it has passed a crucial test. Mizrahi infers the comparative truth of our best theories from his observation that they are more successful than their competitors. Their inferences require, according to the argument from double spaces, the prior belief that it is more likely that their target theories were pulled out from the T-space than from the O-space. The T-space is the logical space of unconceived theories whose (...) appearances agree with their realities; the O-space is the logical space of unconceived theories whose appearances may agree or disagree with their realities. (shrink)

We can have credences in an infinite number of propositions—that is, our opinion set can be infinite. Accuracy-first epistemologists have devoted themselves to evaluating credal states with the help of the concept of ‘accuracy’. Unfortunately, under several innocuous assumptions, infinite opinion sets yield several undesirable results, some of which are even fatal, to accuracy-first epistemology. Moreover, accuracy-first epistemologists cannot circumvent these difficulties in any standard way. In this regard, we will suggest a non-standard approach, called a relativistic approach, to accuracy-first (...) epistemology and show that such an approach can successfully circumvent undesirable results while having some advantages over the standard approach. (shrink)

An examination of the debates over the so-called 'false' memory syndrome. In this paper, I concur that memory is malleable, but interrogate notions of truth and falsity underlying standards used to evaluate the accuracy of memories of abuse. Such standards divert us, I suggest, from recognizing the truth behind widespread recollections of abuse at the hands of patriarchy.