This paper consists of two sections. In section one, I explore Val Plumwood's description of the features of normative dualism, and briefly discuss how these features are manifest in Immanuel Kant's view of nature. In section two, I evaluate the claims of Holly L. Wilson, who argues that Kant is not a normative dualist. Against Wilson, I will argue that Kant maintains normative dualisms between humans/nature, humans/animals, humans I culture, and men/women. As such, Kant's philosophy is antithetical to the aims (...) of ecofeminism, which seeks to expose and dismantle such dualistic thinking. (shrink)

: This paper consists of two sections. In section one, I explore Val Plumwood's description of the features of normative dualism, and briefly discuss how these features are manifest in Immanuel Kant's view of nature. In section two, I evaluate the claims of Holly L. Wilson, who argues that Kant is not a normative dualist. Against Wilson, I will argue that Kant maintains normative dualisms between humans/nature, humans/animals, humans/culture, and men/women. As such, Kant's philosophy is antithetical to the aims of (...) ecofeminism, which seeks to expose and dismantle such dualistic thinking. (shrink)

Measuring responsiveness to gain accurate diagnosis in populations with disorders of consciousness (DOC) is of central concern because these patients have such complex clinical presentations. Due to the uncertainty of accuracy for both behavioral and neurophysiological measures in DOC, combined assessment approaches are recommended. A number of standardized behavioral measures can be used with adults with DOC with minor to moderate reservations relating to the measures’ psychometric properties and clinical applicability. However, no measures have been standardized for use with pediatric (...) DOC populations. When adapting adult measures for children, confounding factors include developmental considerations for language-based items included in all DOC measures. Given the lack of pediatric DOC measures, there is a pressing need for measures that are sensitive to the complex clinical presentations typical of DOC and that can accommodate the developmental levels of pediatric populations. The music therapy assessment tool for awareness in disorders of consciousness (MATADOC) is a music-based measure that has been standardized for adults with DOC. Given its emphasis on non-language based sensory stimuli, it is well-suited to pediatric populations spanning developmental stages. In a pre-pilot exploratory study, we examined the clinical utility of this measure and explored trends for test-retest and inter-rater agreement as well as its performance against external reference standards. In several cases, MATADOC items in the visual and auditory domains produced outcomes suggestive of higher level functioning when compared to outcomes provided by other DOC measures. Preliminary findings suggest that the MATADOC provides a useful protocol and measure for behavioral assessment and clinical treatment planning with pediatric DOC. Further research with a larger sample is warranted to test a version of the MATADOC that is refined to meet developmental needs of pediatric DOC populations. (shrink)

The Moral Life: Obligation and Affirmation examines the broad scope of moral thought and behavior over the centuries. Moyers considers the notion of morals from various perspectives, asking: if everything is a matter of interpretation and morality is not written in stone, then how should we live?

Through an interdisciplinary approach, this book explores premodern, modern, and postmodern moral perspectives to identify the problems and challenges facing moral thinking in the 1990's and beyond.

Mouse vs. Cat in Chinese Literature: Tales and Commentary. Translated and introduced by Wilt l. Idema. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019. Pp. xvii + 254. $30.

Contrary to what Jeanne Moyer asserts, Kant does not have a normative dualism going in his works on teleological judgment and these can be used to develop a more woman friendly view of human nature.

In online social networks, the audience size commanded by an organization or an individual is a critical measure of that entity’s popularity and this measure has important economic and/or political implications. Such efforts to measure popularity of users or exploit knowledge about their audience are complicated by the presence of fake profiles on these networks. In this study, analysis of 62 million publicly available Twitter user profiles was conducted and a strategy to identify automatically generated fake profiles was established. Using (...) a combination of a pattern-matching algorithm on screen-names and an analysis of update times, a reasonable number of highly reliable fake user accounts were identified. Analysis of profile creation times and URLs of these fake accounts revealed their distinct behavior relative to a ground truth data set. The characteristics of friends and followers of users in the two data sets further revealed the very different nature of the two groups. The ratio of number of followers-to-friends for ground truth users was ∼1, consistent with past observations, while the fake profiles had a median ratio ∼30, indicating that the fake users we identified were primarily focused on gathering friends. An analysis of the temporal evolution of accounts over 2 years showed that the friends-to-followers ratio increased over time for fake profiles while they decreased for ground truth users. Our results, thus, suggest that a profile-based approach can be used for identifying a core set of fake online social network users in a time-efficient manner. (shrink)

This article re-evaluates the significance attributed to Hecataeus¿ encounter with the Theban priests described by Herodotus (2.143) by setting it against the evidence of Late Period Egyptian representations of the past. In the first part a critique is offered of various approaches Classicists have taken to this episode and its impact on Greek historiography. Classicists have generally imagined this as an encounter in which the young, dynamic and creative Greeks construct an image of the static, ossified and incredibly old culture (...) of the Egyptians, a move which reveals deeper assumptions in the scholarly discourse on Greeks and ¿other¿ cultures in the Mediterranean world. But the civilization that Herodotus confronted in his long excursus on Egypt was not an abstract, eternal Egypt. Rather, it was the Egypt of his own day, at a specific historical moment ¿ a culture with a particular understanding of its own long history. The second part presents evidence of lengthy Late Period priestly genealogies, and more general archaizing tendencies. Remarkable examples survive of the sort of visual genealogy which would have impressed upon the travelling Greek historians the long continuum of the Egyptian past. These include statues with genealogical inscriptions and relief sculptures representing generations of priests succeeding to their fathers¿ office. These priestly evocations of a present firmly anchored in the Egyptian past are part of a wider pattern of cultivating links with the historical past in the Late Period of Egyptian history. Thus, it is not simply the marvel of a massive expanse of time which Herodotus encountered in Egypt, but a mediated cultural awareness of that time. The third part of the essay argues that Herodotus used this long human past presented by the Egyptian priests in order to criticize genealogical and mythical representations of the past and develop the notion of an historical past. On the basis of this example, the article concludes by urging a reconsideration of the scholarly paradigm for imagining the encounter between Greeks and ¿others¿ in ethnographic discourse in order to recognize the agency of the Egyptian priests, and other non-Greek ¿informants¿. (shrink)

The fission of a person involves what common sense describes as a single person surviving as two distinct people. Thus, say most metaphysicians, this paradox shows us that common sense is inconsistent with the transitivity of identity. Lewis’s theory of overlapping persons, buttressed with tensed identity, gives us one way to reconcile the common sense claims. Lewis’s account, however, implausibly says that reference to a person about to undergo fission is ambiguous. A better way to reconcile the claims of common (...) sense, one that avoids this ambiguity, is to recognize branching persons, persons who have multiple pasts or futures. (shrink)

For those who think the statue and the piece of copper that compose it are distinct objects that coincide, there is a burden of explanation. After all, common sense says that different ordinary objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. A common argument in favour of four-dimensionalism (or ?perdurantism? or ?temporal parts theory?) is that it provides the resources for a superior explanation of this coincidence. This, however, is mistaken. Any explanatory work done by the four-dimensionalist notion (...) of absolute parthood rests ultimately on notions equally available to the three-dimensionalist. Thus, a neutral explanation of coincidence is at least as good while avoiding commitment to temporal parts. ?Many thanks to David Christensen, Louis deRosset, Matti Eklund, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 5, May 2019, Page 74-76.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 10, Page 49-50, October 2012.

Kim argues that weak and global supervenience are too weak to guarantee any sort of dependency. Of the three original forms of supervenience, strong, weak, and global, each commonly wielded across all branches of philosophy, two are thus cast aside as uninteresting or useless. His arguments, however, fail to appreciate the strength of weak and global supervenience. I investigate what weak and global supervenience relations are functionally and how they relate to strong supervenience. For a large class of properties, weak (...) and global supervenience are equivalent to strong supervenience. I then offer a series of arguments showing that it is precisely because of their strength, not their weakness, that both weak and global supervenience are useless in characterizing any dependencies of interest to philosophers. (shrink)

As of this writing, twenty‐one states have passed laws barring transgender youth‐athletes from competing on public‐school sports teams in accordance with their gender identity. Proponents of these regulations claim that transgender females in particular have inherent physiological advantages that threaten a “level playing field” for their cisgender competitors. Existing evidence is limited but does not support these restrictions. Gathering more robust data will require allowing transgender youth to compete (rather than preemptively barring them), but even if trans females are shown (...) to retain some advantage, this would not have greater moral significance than the many other “fair” physical and economic advantages found across sports. These regulations deprive transgender youth, an exceptionally vulnerable population, from the vast physical, mental, and social benefits of sports. While we advocate for transgender inclusion under our current, gender‐segregated model of sport, we propose changes to the overarching structure that would promote a more inclusive and fairer athletic environment. (shrink)

Puzzles about persistence and change through time, i.e., about identity across time, have foundered on confusion about what it is for ‘two things’ to be have ‘the same thing’ at a time. This is most directly seen in the dispute over whether material objects can occupy exactly the same place at the same time. This paper defends the possibility of such coincidence against several arguments to the contrary. Distinguishing a temporally relative from an absolute sense of ‘the same’, we see (...) that the intuition, ‘this is only one thing’, and the dictum, ‘two things cannot occupy the same place at the same time’, are individuating things at a time rather than absolutely and are therefore compatible with coincidence. Several other objections philosophers have raised ride on this same ambiguity. Burke, originating what has become the most popular objection to coincidence, argues that if coincidence is possible there would be no explanation of how objects that are qualitatively the same at a time could belong to different sorts. But we can explain an object’s sort by appealing to its properties at other times. Burke’s argument to the contrary equivocates on different notions of ‘cross-time identity’ and ‘the statue’. From a largely negative series of arguments emerges a positive picture of what it means to say multiple things coincide and of why an object’s historical properties explain its sort rather than vice versa – in short, of how coincidence is possible. (shrink)

Objective: This study examined whether patients who were randomly assigned to their preferred therapy arm had stronger engagement with their treatment than those who were randomly assigned to a non-preferred therapy arm.Method: Data were drawn from a RCT comparing Individual Meaning-Centered Psychotherapy, with Individual Supportive Psychotherapy, in patients with advanced cancer. Treatment engagement was operationalized as patients' perceptions of the therapeutic alliance with their therapist and therapy sessions attended. Two 2 by 2 Analysis of Variance models were used, with treatment (...) preference and treatment assignment as the independent variables and working alliance and number of sessions attended as outcome variables.Results: Patients who preferred and were assigned to IMCP reported a significantly stronger alliance than those who preferred IMCP but were assigned to ISP.Conclusions: The findings from this study have broader implications for research on psychotherapy beyond the appeal of IMCP in advanced cancer patients. Patients who prefer a novel psychotherapy that they cannot engage in elsewhere, but receive the standard treatment may experience weaker alliance than patients who prefer the standard but receive the novel therapy.Trial registration:Clinicaltrial.gov ID: NCT01323309. (shrink)

Drawing on work of the past decade, this volume brings together articles from the philosophy, history, and sociology of science, and many other branches of the biological sciences. The volume delves into the latest theoretical controversies as well as burning questions of contemporary social importance. The issues considered include the nature of evolutionary theory, biology and ethics, the challenge from religion, and the social implications of biology today (in particular the Human Genome Project).