ObjectiveTo evaluate the relationship between recently trained paediatricians' ethics knowledge and exposure to a formal ethics or professionalism curriculum during residency.MethodsWe conducted a cross-sectional survey of recently trained paediatricians which included a validated 23-item instrument called the Test of Residents' Ethics Knowledge for Pediatrics. The sample included paediatricians who completed medical school in 2006–2008, whose primary specialty was paediatrics or a paediatric subspecialty, and who completed paediatric residency training in 2010–2011. This sample was stratified based on residency programme variables: presence (...) of a formal curriculum in ethics or professionalism, programme size and American Board of Pediatrics certifying exam passage rate. Paediatricians were randomly selected from each stratum for survey participation.ResultsAmong the 370 responding paediatricians (55%), the mean knowledge score was 17.3 (SD 2.2) out of a possible 23. Presence of a formal curriculum in ethics and/or professionalism was not significantly associated with knowledge. Knowledge was lowest on items about parental requests for a child to undergo genetic testing (2 items, 44% and 85% incorrect), preserving patient confidentiality over email (55% incorrect), decision-making regarding life-sustaining technologies (61% incorrect), and decision-making principles such as assent and parental permission (2 items, 47% and 49% incorrect).ConclusionsThis study highlights several areas in which paediatricians' knowledge may be low and that are amenable to targeted educational interventions. These findings should prompt discussion and research among ethicists and educators about how ethics and professionalism curricula can more consistently influence paediatricians' knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore how the prospect of artificial placenta technology (nearing clinical trials in human subjects) should encourage further consideration of the loss experienced by individuals when their pregnancy ends unexpectedly. Discussions of pregnancy loss are intertwined with procreative loss, whereby the gestated entity has died when the pregnancy ends. However, we demonstrate how pregnancy loss can and does exist separate to procreative loss in circumstances where the gestated entity survives the premature ending of the pregnancy. In outlining (...) the value that can be attached to pregnancy beyond fetal-centric narratives, we illustrate how pregnancy loss, separate to procreative loss, can be experienced. This loss has already been recognised among parents who have experienced an unexpected early ending of their pregnancy, resulting in their child being cared for in neonatal intensive care unit. Artificial placentas, however, may exacerbate these feelings and make pregnancy loss (without procreative loss) more visible. We argue that pregnancy is an embodied state in which gestation is facilitated by the body but gestation itself should be recognised as a process—and one that could be separable from pregnancy. In demarcating the two, we explore the different ways in which pregnancy loss can be understood. Our objective in this paper goes beyond contributing to our philosophical understanding of pregnancy towards practical-orientated conclusions regarding the care pathways surrounding the artificial placenta. We make recommendations including the need for counselling and careful consideration of the language used when an artificial placenta is used. (shrink)

Disability is primarily a social phenomenon -- a way of being a minority, a way of facing social oppression, but not a way of being inherently or intrinsically worse off. This is how disability is understood in the Disability Rights and Disability Pride movements; but there is a massive disconnect with the way disability is typically viewed within analytic philosophy. The idea that disability is not inherently bad or sub-optimal is one that many philosophers treat with open skepticism, and sometimes (...) even with scorn. The goal of this book is to articulate and defend a version of the view of disability that is common in the Disability Rights movement. To be physically disabled is not to have a defective body, but simply to have a minority body. (shrink)

Instead of treating art as a unique creation that requires reason and refined taste to appreciate, Elizabeth Grosz argues that art-especially architecture, music, and painting-is born from the disruptive forces of sexual selection. She approaches art as a form of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire, and in doing so, finds that the meaning of art comes from the intensities and sensations it inspires, not just its intention and aesthetic. By regarding our most cultured human accomplishments as (...) the result of the excessive, nonfunctional forces of sexual attraction and seduction, Grosz encourages us to see art as a kind of bodily enhancement or mode of sensation enabling living bodies to experience and transform the universe. Art can be understood as a way for bodies to augment themselves and their capacity for perception and affection-a way to grow and evolve through sensation. Through this framework, which knits together the theories of Charles Darwin, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Jakob von Uexküll, we are able to grasp art's deep animal lineage. Grosz argues that art is not tied to the predictable and known but to new futures not contained in the present. Its animal affiliations ensure that art is intensely political and charged with the creation of new worlds and new forms of living. According to Grosz, art is the way in which life experiments with materiality, or nature, in order to bring about change. (shrink)

We apply Benacerraf’s distinction between mathematical ontology and mathematical practice to examine contrasting interpretations of infinitesimal mathematics of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, in the work of Bos, Ferraro, Laugwitz, and others. We detect Weierstrass’s ghost behind some of the received historiography on Euler’s infinitesimal mathematics, as when Ferraro proposes to understand Euler in terms of a Weierstrassian notion of limit and Fraser declares classical analysis to be a “primary point of reference for understanding the eighteenth-century theories.” Meanwhile, scholars like (...) Bos and Laugwitz seek to explore Eulerian methodology, practice, and procedures in a way more faithful to Euler’s own. Euler’s use of infinite integers and the associated infinite products are analyzed in the context of his infinite product decomposition for the sine function. Euler’s principle of cancellation is compared to the Leibnizian transcendental law of homogeneity. The Leibnizian law of continuity similarly finds echoes in Euler. We argue that Ferraro’s assumption that Euler worked with a classical notion of quantity is symptomatic of a post-Weierstrassian placement of Euler in the Archimedean track for the development of analysis, as well as a blurring of the distinction between the dual tracks noted by Bos. Interpreting Euler in an Archimedean conceptual framework obscures important aspects of Euler’s work. Such a framework is profitably replaced by a syntactically more versatile modern infinitesimal framework that provides better proxies for his inferential moves. (shrink)

Many evidentialists are impermissivists. But there’s no in-principle reason for this. In this paper, I examine and motivate permissivist evidentialism. Not only are permissivism and evidentialism compatible but there are unique benefits that arise for this combination of views. In particular, permissivist evidentialism respects the importance of evidence while capturing its limitations and provides a plausible and attractive explanation of the relationship between the epistemic and non-epistemic. Permissivist evidentialism is thus an attractive option in logical space that hasn’t received enough (...) attention. (shrink)

Social constructionism is often considered a form of anti-realism. But in contemporary feminist philosophy, an increasing number of philosophers defend views that are well-described as both realist and social constructionist. In this paper, I use the work of Sally Haslanger as an example of realist social constructionism. I argue: that Haslanger is best interpreted as defending metaphysical realism about social structures; that this type of metaphysical realism about the social world presents challenges to some popular ways of understanding metaphysical realism.

Much of the literature on the relationship between belief and credence has focused on the reduction question: that is, whether either belief or credence reduces to the other. This debate, while important, only scratches the surface of the belief-credence connection. Even on the anti-reductive dualist view, belief and credence could still be very tightly connected. Here, I explore questions about the belief-credence connection that go beyond reduction. This paper is dedicated to what I call the independence question: just how independent (...) are belief and credence? I look at this question from two angles: a descriptive one (as a psychological matter, how much can belief and credence come apart?) and a normative one (for a rational person, how closely connected are belief and credence?) Ultimately, I suggest that the two attitudes are more independent than one might think. (shrink)

If the world itself is metaphysically indeterminate in a specified respect, what follows? In this paper, we develop a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy answering this question.

Women as commercial baby factories, nature as an economic resource, life as one big shopping mall: This is what we get when we use the market as a common ...

This new and important study of semantic change examines how new meanings arise through language use, especially the various ways in which speakers and writers experiment with uses of words and constructions in the flow of strategic interaction with addressees. In the last few decades there has been growing interest in exploring systemicities in semantic change from a number of perspectives including theories of metaphor, pragmatic inferencing, and grammaticalization. Like earlier studies, these have for the most part been based on (...) data taken out of context. This book is the first detailed examination of semantic change from the perspective of historical pragmatics and discourse analysis. Drawing on extensive corpus data from over a thousand years of English and Japanese textual history, Traugott and Dasher show that most changes in meaning originate in and are motivated by the associative flow of speech and conceptual metonymy. (shrink)

In this project I am concerned with the extent to which conceptual engineering happens in domains outside of philosophy, and if so, what that might look like. Specifically, I’ll argue that...

Intention is one of the masterworks of twentieth-century philosophy in English. First published in 1957, it has acquired the status of a modern philosophical classic. The book attempts to show in detail that the natural and widely accepted picture of what we mean by an intention gives rise to insoluble problems and must be abandoned. This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

Feminist epistemology has often been understood as the study of feminine "ways of knowing." But feminist epistemology is better understood as the branch of naturalized, social epistemology that studies the various influences of norms and conceptions of gender and gendered interests and experiences on the production of knowledge. This understanding avoids dubious claims about feminine cognitive differences and enables feminist research in various disciplines to pose deep internal critiques of mainstream research.

I offer an account of what trust is, and of what epistemic self-trust consists in. I identify five distinct arguments extracted from Chapter 2 of Zagzebski's Epistemic Authority for the rationality and epistemic legitimacy of epistemic self-trust. I take issue with the general account of human rational self-regulation on which one of her arguments rests. Zagzebski maintains that this consists in restoring harmony in the psyche by eliminating conflict and so ending. I argue that epistemic rationality is distinct from psychic (...) mechanisms aimed at eliminating dissonance, and these two sometimes pull in opposed directions. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Barry Loewer attempts to defend Humeanism about laws of nature from a charge that Humean laws are not adequately explanatory. Central to his defense is a distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations: even if Humeans cannot offer further metaphysical explanations of particular features of their “mosaic,” that does not preclude them from offering scientific explanations of these features. According to Marc Lange, however, Loewer’s distinction is of no avail. Defending a transitivity principle linking scientific explanantia to (...) their metaphysical grounds, Lange argues that a charge of explanatory inadequacy resurfaces once this intuitive principle is in place. This paper surveys, on behalf of the Humean, three strategies for responding to Lange’s criticism. The ready availability of these strategies suggests that Lange’s argument may not bolster anti-Humean convictions, since the argument rests on premises that those not antecedently sharing these convictions may well reject. The three strategies also correspond to three interesting ways of thinking about relations of grounding linking Humean laws and their instances, all of which are consistent with theses of Humean supervenience, and some of which have been heretofore overlooked. (shrink)

There is no prepared script for social and cultural life. People work it out as they go along. Creativity and Cultural Improvisation casts fresh, anthropological eyes on the cultural sites of creativity that form part of our social matrix. The book explores the ways creative agency is attributed in the graphic and performing arts and in intellectual property law. It shows how the sources of creativity are embedded in social, political and religious institutions, examines the relation between creativity and the (...) perception and passage of time, and reviews the creativity and improvisational quality of anthropological scholarship itself. Individual essays examine how the concept of creativity has changed in the history of modern social theory, and question its applicability as a term of cross-cultural analysis. The contributors highlight the collaborative and political dimensions of creativity and thus challenge the idea that creativity arises only from individual talent and expression. (shrink)

Credences are similar to levels of confidence, represented as a value on the [0,1] interval. This chapter sheds light on questions about credence, including its relationship to full belief, with an eye toward the empirical relevance of credence. First, I’ll provide a brief epistemological history of credence and lay out some of the main theories of the nature of credence. Then, I’ll provide an overview of the main views on how credences relate to full beliefs. Finally, I’ll turn to the (...) empirical, and suggest some ways that cognitive science does and could answer questions about credence, such as what credences one has, how credences relate to beliefs, and the extent to which we can control our credences. (shrink)

This comprehensive and up-to-date textbook gives a clear account of the different philosophical and theoretical approaches to psychology and discusses major philosophical questions such as free will and the relation between mind and body.

Philosophical theories of gender are typically understood as theories of what it is to be a woman, a man, a nonbinary person, and so on. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake. There’s good reason to suppose that our best philosophical theory of gender might not directly match up to or give the extensions of ordinary gender categories like ‘woman’.

Can visual interaction with artwork prompt healing? Can the brain recover from traumatic experiences and help heal the whole body? Since the 1940s, art therapists have claimed that the production of art can help heal past traumas. Similarly, occupational therapists have employed techniques from arts and crafts since the end of World War II to retrain soldiers helping them recover from the trauma of war. The global Covid-19 pandemic has caused health-related and psychological problems--isolation, increased anxiety, and fear--for people of (...) all ages, with the rates of such traumas affecting children tripling over the past two years. According to the Nebraska-based quilting company, Accuquilt, during the first six months of pandemic isolation in 2020, sales more than doubled as new customers showed a desire to participate in arts and crafts from home. This essay explores various approaches to the arts to determine how art may restore dignity and health following traumatic experiences. (shrink)

This book is composed of research presented at the fourth international Queering Paradigms Conference (QP4), held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It intends to contribute to building a queer postcolonial critique of the current politics of queer activism and of queer knowledge production and circulation.

More than forty years have passed since Congress, in response to the Civil Rights Movement, enacted sweeping antidiscrimination laws in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. As a signal achievement of that legacy, in 2008, Americans elected their first African American president. Some would argue that we have finally arrived at a postracial America, butThe Imperative of Integration indicates otherwise. Elizabeth Anderson demonstrates that, despite progress toward (...) racial equality, African Americans remain disadvantaged on virtually all measures of well-being. Segregation remains a key cause of these problems, and Anderson skillfully shows why racial integration is needed to address these issues. Weaving together extensive social science findings--in economics, sociology, and psychology--with political theory, this book provides a compelling argument for reviving the ideal of racial integration to overcome injustice and inequality, and to build a better democracy. -/- Considering the effects of segregation and integration across multiple social arenas, Anderson exposes the deficiencies of racial views on both the right and the left. She reveals the limitations of conservative explanations for black disadvantage in terms of cultural pathology within the black community and explains why color blindness is morally misguided. Multicultural celebrations of group differences are also not enough to solve our racial problems. Anderson provides a distinctive rationale for affirmative action as a tool for promoting integration, and explores how integration can be practiced beyond affirmative action. -/- Offering an expansive model for practicing political philosophy in close collaboration with the social sciences, this book is a trenchant examination of how racial integration can lead to a more robust and responsive democracy. (shrink)

The first half of the 17th century was a time of intellectual ferment when wars of natural philosophy were echoes of religious wars, as we illustrate by a case study of an apparently innocuous mathematical technique called adequality pioneered by the honorable judge Pierre de Fermat, its relation to indivisibles, as well as to other hocus-pocus. André Weil noted that simple applications of adequality involving polynomials can be treated purely algebraically but more general problems like the cycloid curve cannot be (...) so treated and involve additional tools–leading the mathematician Fermat potentially into troubled waters. Breger attacks Tannery for tampering with Fermat’s manuscript but it is Breger who tampers with Fermat’s procedure by moving all terms to the left-hand side so as to accord better with Breger’s own interpretation emphasizing the double root idea. We provide modern proxies for Fermat’s procedures in terms of relations of infinite proximity as well as the standard part function. (shrink)

Metaphysical orthodoxy maintains that the relation of ontological dependence is irreflexive, asymmetric, and transitive. The goal of this paper is to challenge that orthodoxy by arguing that ontological dependence should be understood as non- symmetric, rather than asymmetric. If we give up the asymmetry of dependence, interesting things follow for what we can say about metaphysical explanation— particularly for the prospects of explanatory holism.

When are we obligated to believe someone? To what extent are people authorities about their own experiences? What kind of harm might we enact when we doubt? Questions like these lie at the heart of many debates in social and feminist epistemology, and they’re the driving issue behind a key conceptual framework in these debates—gaslighting. But while the concept of gaslighting has provided fruitful insight, it's also proven somewhat difficult to adjudicate, and seems prone to over-application. In what follows, I (...) argue that Katherine Hawley's theory of trust can provide a useful alternative lens for looking at contested testimony. To do this, I focus on a particularly complex—but increasingly popular—application of gaslighting: the physician/patient relationship, and the idea of ‘medical gaslighting’. I argue that, even though patients can experience harm when they are disbelieved, there are nevertheless good reasons for physicians not to trust patients about at least some of their own narratives. (shrink)

'Since the middle of the twentieth century,' writes Elizabeth Johnson, 'there has been a renaissance of new insights into God in the Christian tradition. On different continents, under pressure from historical events and social conditions, people of faith have glimpsed the living God in fresh ways. It is not that a wholly different God is discovered from the One believed in by previous generations. Christian faith does not believe in a new God but, finding itself in new situations, seeks (...) the presence of God there. Aspects long-forgotten are brought into new relationships with current events, and the depths of divine compassion are appreciated in ways not previously imagined.' This book sets out the fruit of these discoveries. The first chapter describes Johnson's point of departure and the rules of engagement, with each succeeding chapter distilling a discrete idea of God. Featured are transcendental, political, liberation, feminist, black, Hispanic, interreligious, and ecological theologies, ending with the particular Christian idea of the one God as Trinity. >. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to (i) examine the concept of epistemic paternalism and (ii) explore the consequences of normative questions one might ask about it. I begin by critically examining several definitions of epistemic paternalism that have been proposed, and suggesting ways they might be improved. I then contrast epistemic and general paternalism and argue that it’s difficult to see what makes epistemic paternalism an epistemic phenomenon at all. Next, I turn to the various normative questions one might (...) ask about epistemic paternalism and discuss the literature’s assumptions of epistemic consequentialism and veritism. I close by comparing and contrasting epistemic paternalism with other topics in social epistemology, such as disagreement or testimony. (shrink)

What is the work ethic? Does it justify policies that promote the wealth and power of the One Percent at workers' expense? Or does it advance policies that promote workers' dignity and standing? Hijacked explores how the history of political economy has been a contest between these two ideas about whom the work ethic is supposed to serve. Today's neoliberal ideology deploys the work ethic on behalf of the One Percent. However, workers and their advocates have long used the work (...) ethic on behalf of ordinary people. By exposing the ideological roots of contemporary neoliberalism as a perversion of the seventeenth-century Protestant work ethic, Elizabeth Anderson shows how we can reclaim the original goals of the work ethic, and uplift ourselves again. Hijacked persuasively and powerfully demonstrates how ideas inspired by the work ethic informed debates among leading political economists of the past, and how these ideas can help us today. (shrink)

The Metaphysics of Experience styles itself as "a Sherpa guide to Process and Reality, whose function is to assist the serious reader in grasping the meaning of the text and to prevent falls into misinterpretation." Although originally published in 1925, Process and Reality has perhaps even more relevance to the contemporary scene in physics, biology, psychology, and the social sciences than it had in the mid-twenties. Hence its internal difficulty, its quasi-inaccessibility, is all the more tragic, since, unlike most metaphysical (...) endeavors, it is capable of interpretating and unifying theories in the above sciences in terms of an organic world view, instead of selecting one theory as the paradigm and reducing all others to it. Because Alfred North Whitehead is so crucial to modern philosophy, The Metaphysics of Experience plays an important role in making Process and Reality accessible to a wider readership. (shrink)

Darwinian matters : life, force and change -- Biological difference -- The evolution of sex and race -- Nietzsche's Darwin -- History and the untimely -- The eternal return and the overman -- Bergsonian differences -- The philosophy of life -- Intuition and the virtual -- The future.

This paper introduces and motivates a solution to a dilemma from peer disagreement. Following Buchak (2021), I argue that peer disagreement puts us in an epistemic dilemma: there is reason to think that our opinions should both change and not change when we encounter disagreement with our epistemic peers. I argue that we can solve this dilemma by changing our credences, but not our beliefs in response to disagreement. I explain how my view solves the dilemma in question, and then (...) offer two additional arguments for it: one related to contents and attitudes, and another related to epistemic peerhood. (shrink)

Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments—and why we can’t see it One in four American workers says their workplace is a “dictatorship.” Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are—private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers’ speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, (...) diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom. (shrink)

Grosz gives a critical overview of Lacan's work from a feminist perspective. Discussing previous attempts to give a feminist reading of his work, she argues for women's autonomy based on an indifference to the Lacanian phallus.

Anscombe guides us through the Tractatus and, thereby, Wittgenstein's early philosophy as a whole. She shows in particular how his arguments developed out of the discussions of Russell and Frege. This reprint is of the fourth, corrected edition.

Climate Change and the Moral Agent examines the moral foundations of climate change and makes a case for collective action on climate change by appealing to moralized collective self-interest, collective ability to aid, and an expanded understanding of collective responsibility for harm.

Classically, an osculating circle at a point of a planar curve is introduced technically, often with formula giving its radius and the coordinates of its center. In this note, we propose a new and intuitive definition of this concept: among all the circles which have, on the considered point, the same tangent as the studied curve and thus seem equal to the curve through a microscope, the osculating circle is this that seems equal to the curve through a microscope within (...) microscope. (shrink)