It is the purpose of the following pages to reconsider the basic problem of induction. According to Hume the concomitance of A with B on one or more occasions gives no valid presumption that A will be accompanied by B on any other occasion. The data of experience may give rise to an association of ideas or set up mental habits, but they provide no reasonable grounds for expecting similar concomitances or sequences in future. If this is correct, we have (...) no starting point for the formation of any valid opinions about matters of fact; we remain ice-bound in a region of total scepticism. (shrink)

This volume critically and constructively discusses philosophical questions which have particular bearing on the formulation of educational aims. The book is divided into three major parts: the first deals with the nature of education, and discusses the various general aims, such as 'mental health', 'socialization' and 'creativity' which have been thought to characterize it; the second section is concerned with the nature of reason and its relationship to feeling, will and action; finally the development of different aspects of reason in (...) an educational context is considered. (shrink)

The paper uses questionnaire responses provided by a sample of ethical investors to investigate willingness to sacrifice ethical considerations for financial reward. The paper examines the amount of financial reward necessary to cause an ethical investor to accept a switch from good ethical performance to poor ethical performance. Conjoint analysis is used to allow quantification of the utilities derived from different combinations of ethical and financial performance. Ethical investors are shown to vary in their willingness to sacrifice ethical for financial (...) performance, and hence to display more heterogeneity than the all-encompassing ‘ethical’ label implies. Because of the existence of sub-groups of ethical investors with different attitudes towards financial reward, an attempt has been made to associate observable investors’ characteristics with their level of willingness to trade-off morality for cash. One sub-group of investors in particular appears highly resistant to the idea of accepting higher financial return as compensation for poor ethical performance. This unwillingness casts doubt on Jensen and Meckling’s widely reported claim that trade-off behaviour is ubiquitous in all areas of life. (shrink)

If a hereditary predisposition to colorectal cancer or breast cancer is diagnosed, most guidelines state that clinical geneticists should request index patients to inform their at-risk relatives about the existence of this condition in their family, thus enabling them to consider presymptomatic genetic testing. Those identified as mutation carriers can undertake strategies to reduce their risk of developing the disease or to facilitate early diagnosis. This procedure of informing relatives through the index patient has been criticised, as it results in (...) relatively few requests for genetic testing, conceivably because a certain number of relatives remain uninformed. This pilot study explored attitudes toward informing family members and relevant practices among clinical geneticists. In general, clinical geneticists consider it to be in the interests of family members to be informed and acknowledge that this goal is not accomplished by current procedures. The reasons given for maintaining present practices despite this include clinical ‘mores’, uncertainty about the legal right of doctors to inform family members themselves, and, importantly, a lack of resources. We discuss these reasons from an ethical point of view and conclude that they are partly uninformed and inconsistent. If informing relatives is considered to be in their best interests, clinical geneticists should consider informing relatives themselves. In the common situation in which index patients do not object to informing relatives, no legal obstacles prevent geneticists from doing so. An evaluation of these findings among professionals may lead to a more active approach in clinical practice. (shrink)

Everyone who takes a serious interest in the mind-body problem ought to read this book, which is an attempted tour de force in defense of the identity-theory. The reader should have a taste for formal logic, including some set theory, in order to judge whether the author's penchant for slipping into symbolic notation is required by his argument.

Irwin’s book is the first critical and systematic study of Plato’s moral theory in the early and middle dialogues. This is not as surprising as it sounds, if one knows the complexity of the subject and the lack of consensus surrounding it. Irwin quickly challenges his reader with the difficulties. He lays out what he claims are the central assumptions behind Plato’s moral theory with cogency and a firm sense of the evidence. His abbreviations for these assumptions are at first (...) distracting, but need no apology. Irwin examines the role of Socrates’ elenchos [[sic]] in ethics, having surveyed the components of the ordinary beliefs tested by elenchos, [[sic]] which he calls the ‘Homeric’ and ‘law’ conceptions of virtue. He then subjects Socrates’ positive doctrines, and Plato’s responses to them, to a sustained critical analysis. He claims that Socrates is committed to a "craft analogy" as his model of rationality, which entails that virtue is a craft-discipline, that the virtues are instrumental in prescribing means to a determinate final good, and the denial of incontinence; and that Plato develops doubts about Socratic doctrines and finally adopts the view that the final good is neither determinate nor even unitary, that the virtues are not instrumental or prescriptive with relation to the Good but rather are components of it, that the Good itself is a teleologically ordered system of Forms, and that incontinence is possible because the three parts of the soul can have conflicting desires. Irwin’s suggestion that we think of the Good as a system of Forms is not new, similar views having been proposed by Gosling and by Findlay, but the evidence is notoriously unclear. Irwin’s central claim about Plato’s anti-Socratic view in the Republic rests on his view that Plato realized that "an attempt to reduce the good to undisputed non-moral properties will fail." This view is controversial, but it is an important claim. A different interpretation of the Good, for instance as itself a higher level property of Forms, would clearly affect his central claim, since such a property of Forms could still be a determinate end. Another potential problem for Irwin is the description of the good at Republic 505e1 as "what every soul pursues and for the sake of which it does everything," which, despite Irwin’s attempt to find alternate readings, prima facie seems to count against his anti-Socratic interpretation. In general, his view that Plato opts for an indeterminate end, and that Plato gives up the craft analogy, seems too sharply stated. It is not that clear that Plato gives up a single overarching eudaimonia fixed for everyone; and Plato seems to flirt, even in late dialogues, with the to him tantalizing possibility of an architectonic craft-knowledge that fits all actions and other crafts into a system of coordinated means to a determinate end. Here it becomes important to know Irwin’s precise views about the later dialogues. (shrink)

This book is not about the theory of Forms as such, but about Plato’s epistemological realism, his view, in opposition to Protagorean relativism, that there is a realm of fact that counts as the common object of our true beliefs, judgments, and knowledge. This book fills a longstanding need for a lucid, condensed, readable account of aspects of Plato’s thought that emerge in certain of Plato’s middle and later dialogues and pose issues of contemporary philosophical merit. It is White’s contention (...) that Plato’s discontent with the "method of hypothesis" tentatively tried in Meno, Phaedo, and Republic, and his theory of naming in the Cratylus, lead to the breakdown of his theory of knowledge and, eventually, of the possibility of meaningful inquiry, with the objects of inquiry framed in advance by a specification of the object. The key thesis in White’s contention appears to be a view that he attributes to the Cratylus, that "the genuine use of a name is thought to require the apprehension of its nominatum, in a way excluding any confusion of it with other things" ; for, if the only thing that can be named is a Form, and if believing, judging, and knowing are a kind of being confronted in one’s mental "visual" field with an object, and we cannot accept the beliefs of others for purposes of inquiry, then how is it possible to inquire about, or to define what one already apprehends and recognizes? (shrink)