Mary Shelley’sFrankensteinhas captured the public imagination ever since it was first published over 200 years ago. While the narrative reflected 19th-century anxieties about the emerging scientific revolution, it also suggested some clear moral lessons that remain relevant today. In a sense,Frankensteinwas a work of bioethics written a century and a half before the discipline came to exist. This paper revisits the lessons ofFrankensteinregarding the creation and manipulation of life in the light of recent developments in stem cell and neurobiological research. (...) It argues that these lessons are becoming more relevant than ever. (shrink)

It is surprisingly difficult to justify private property. Two questions are at stake: (a) a metaphysical and juridical one concerning the nature of property and (b) an ethical one concerning our attitude toward wealth. This issue reached an unprecedented importance during the 12th and 13th centuries as a new moral ideal emerged. This essays analyses the controversy (with emphasis on Bonaventure’s Defense of the Mendicants) by first locating it in relation to the philosophical and theological authorities as well as the (...) Roman law. It argues that the dispute between the defenders of paupertas altissima and their opponents concerns the limit of the law. Gerard of Abbeville and John XXII saw a contradiction in a right to use that would exclude ownership. Yet, what the Franciscans were seeking was use without right. To relate to the world as something that is essentially inappropriable is to seek a form of life (a rule) prior to the law. Centuries after, such a possibility remains to be discovered. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore the ethics of restricting visitation to hospitals during an infectious disease outbreak. We aim to answer three questions: What are the features of an ethically justified hospital visitor restriction policy? Should policies include scope for case‐by‐case exemptions? How should decisions about exemptions be made? Based on a critical interpretive review of the existing ethical literature on visitor restrictions, we argue that an ethically justified hospital visitor restriction policy has the following features: proportionality, comprehensiveness, harm mitigation, (...) exemptions for specific patient populations, visitation decisions made separately from a patient's treating clinicians, transparency, and consistency in application. We also argue that an ethical policy ought to include scope for case‐by‐case exemptions for individual patients. We propose a process for ethical decision‐making that provides a shared language and structure to decrease the risks and burdens of decision‐making when clinicians or managers are considering requests for exemptions. (shrink)

Atomism, the view that indivisible atoms are the basic building blocks of physical reality, has a distinguished history. But it might not be true. The history of physical science certainly gives many of us pause. Every time some class of objects appeared to be the entities that Newton had described as “solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable Particles” out of which “God in the Beginning formed Matter,” further research revealed that these objects were divisible after all. One might be tempted to (...) see that history as confirming Leibniz’s dismissal of atomism as a “youthful prejudice.” Perhaps material objects and their parts are always divisible. There are no extended atoms; nor are there point particles which compose material beings. (shrink)

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition.

Reissued here in its corrected second edition of 1864, this essay by John Stuart Mill argues for a utilitarian theory of morality. Originally printed as a series of three articles in Fraser's Magazine in 1861, the work sought to refine the 'greatest happiness' principle that had been championed by Jeremy Bentham, defending it from common criticisms, and offering a justification of its validity. Following Bentham, Mill holds that actions can be judged as right or wrong depending on whether they (...) promote happiness or 'the reverse of happiness'. Although attracted by Bentham's consequentialist framework based on empirical evidence rather than intuition, Mill separates happiness into 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures, arguing for a weighted system of measurement when making and judging decisions. Dissected and debated since its first appearance, the essay is Mill's key discussion on the topic and remains a fundamental text in the study of ethics. (shrink)

The master argument posits a metaphysical thesis: Diodorus does away with Aristotle’s dunamis understood as a power simultaneously oriented toward being and non-being and proclaims that possibilities that fail to actualize are simply nothing. My contention is that this claim is not a mere application of Diodorus’ contribution to modal logic. Rather, Diodorus creates an ontologico-temporal concept of possibility and impossibility. Diodorus envisions the future as the past that the future will become. Since what will have been can never be (...) the accomplishment of a possibility that did not obtain, and since the future is destined to become past, any futural possibility that doesn’t actualize is neither futural nor even possible. (shrink)

In this philosophically sophisticated and historically significant work, John H. Zammito reconstructs Kant's composition of The Critique of Judgment and reveals that it underwent three major transformations before publication. He shows that Kant not only made his "cognitive" turn, expanding the project from a "Critique of Taste" to a Critique of Judgment but he also made an "ethical" turn. This "ethical" turn was provoked by controversies in German philosophical and religious culture, in particular the writings of Johann Herder and (...) the Sturm und Drang movement in art and science, as well as the related pantheism controversy. Such topicality made the Third Critique pivotal in creating a "Kantian" movement in the 1790s, leading directly to German Idealism and Romanticism. The austerity and grandeur of Kant's philosophical writings sometimes make it hard to recognize them as the products of a historical individual situated in the particular constellation of his time and society. Here Kant emerges as a concrete historical figure struggling to preserve the achievements of cosmopolitan Aufkl-rung against challenges in natural science, religion, and politics in the late 1780s. More specifically Zammito suggests that Kant's Third Critique was animated throughout by a fierce personal rivalry with Herder and by a strong commitment to traditional Christian ideas of God and human moral freedom. "A work of extraordinary erudition. Zammito's study is both comprehensive and novel, connecting Kant's work with the aesthetic and religious controversies of the late eighteenth century. He seems to have read everything. I know of no comparable historical study of Kant's Third Critique."-Arnulf Zweig, translator and editor of Kant's ;IPhilosophical Correspondence, 1759-1799;X "An intricate, subtle, and exciting explanation of how Kant's thinking developed and adjusted to new challenges over the decade from the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to the appearance of the Critique of Judgment. "--John W. Burbidge, Review of Metaphysics "There has been for a long time a serious gap in English commentary on Kant's Critique of Judgment Zammito's book finally fills it. All students and scholars of Kant will want to consult it."--Frederick Beiser, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

J.L. Mackie insists that ordinary evaluative thought presents itself as a matter of sensitivity to aspects of the world. And this phenomenological thesis seems correct. When one or another variety of philosophical non-cognitivism claims to capture the truth about what the experience of value is like, or (in a familiar surrogate for phenomenology) about what we mean by our evaluative language, the claim is never based on careful attention to the lived character of evaluative thought or discourse. The idea is, (...) rather, that the very concept of the cognitive or factual rules out the possibility of an undiluted representation of how things are, enjoying, nevertheless, the internal relation to 'attitudes' or the will that would be needed to count as evaluative. On this view the phenomenology of value would involve a mere incoherence, if it were as Mackie says--a possibility that then tends (naturally enough) not to be so much as entertained. But, as Mackie sees, there is no satisfactory justification for supposing that the factual is, by definition, attitudinatively and motivationally neutral. This clears away the only obstacle to accepting his phenomenological claim; and the upshot is that non-cognitivism must offer to correct the phenomenology of value, rather than give an account of it. -/- In Machie's view the correction is called for. In this paper I want to suggest that he attributes an unmerited plausibility to this thesis, by giving a false picture of what one is committed to if one resists it. (shrink)

In his preface Mr Wilson writes 'I feel that a great many adults … would do better to spend less time in simply accepting the concepts of others uncritically, and more time in learning how to analyse concepts in general'. Mr Wilson starts by describing the techniques of conceptual analysis. He then gives examples of them in action by composing answers to specific questions and by criticism of quoted passages of argument. Chapter 3 sums up the importance of this kind (...) of mental activity. Chapter 4 presents selections for the reader to analyse, followed by questions of university entrance/scholarship type. This is a book to be worked through, in a sense a text-book. (shrink)

Family firms are ubiquitous and play a crucial role across all world economies, but how they differ in the disclosure of social and environmental actions from non-family firms has been largely overlooked in the literature. Advancing the discourse on corporate social responsibility reporting, we examine how family influence on a business organization affects CSR reporting. The arguments developed here draw on institutional theory, using a rich body of empirical evidence gathered through a content analysis of the CSR reports of 98 (...) large- and medium-sized Italian firms. The grounded theory analysis informs and contextualizes several differences in the type and content of corporate social responsibility reports of family and non-family firms. Our findings show that in comparison to non-family firms, family firms disseminate a greater variety of CSR reports, are less compliant with CSR standards and place emphasis on different CSR topics. We, thus, contribute to the family business and corporate social responsibility reporting literatures in several ways, offering implications for practice and outlining promising avenues for future research. (shrink)

Foreword I. Critical rationalism is a genuinely new philosophical perspective. It is not, however, one systematic view. The development of it by Popper and ...

This essay is concerned with two interrelated questions. First, a broad question: in what sense is Skepticism a philosophy− or in what sense is it “philosophy” (as we will see, these are not identical questions)? Second, a narrow one: how should we understand the process whereby ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) emerges out of epochē (suspension of judgment)? The first question arises because Skepticism is often portrayed as anti-philosophy. This depiction, I contend, surreptitiously turns a Skeptical method into a so-called Skeptical (...) doctrine which is then either condemned for being self-refuting or salvaged as a plausible (albeit odd) epistemological theory. Instead, philosophy, for the Skeptics, is a matter of practice. Skepticism is not so much a philosophy that has a worldview to proclaim as it is a philosophy that invites us to perform something. (shrink)

Everyone loves something or somebody, and most people are concerned with loving another person like themselves, all equal. This book is based on the belief that getting clear about the concept and meaning of love between equals is essential for success in our practical lives. For how can we love properly unless we have a fairly clear idea of what love is? The book is written in ordinary language and for the ordinary person, without jargon or philosophical technicalities. It aims (...) to show that love between equals involves a single basic disposition, though that disposition expresses itself in various ways. Thus, after an introduction explaining the need for analysis and clarification, the author then deals in order with love as desire or need; with intrinsic friendship and sharing the self; with basic difficulties concerning power, dependence, altruism and paranoia; with sex and erotic love; and finally with the value in human life of love between equals. The work as a whole gives clear, coherent and practical guidance for all who wish to grasp what such love is really like. (shrink)

The diversity of interpretations of Aristotle’s treatment of chance and luck springs from an apparent contradiction between the claims that “chance events are for the sake of something” and that “chance events are not for the sake of their outcome.” Chance seems to entail the denial of an end. Yet Aristotle systematically refers it to what is for the sake of an end. This paper suggests that, in order to give an account of chance, a reference to “per accidens causes” (...) is not sufficient. Chance occurs as a parody of teleology; it is a“for-no-purpose” that looks like a purpose. The notion of “irony” is suggested as a way of accounting for a situation that keeps an ambiguity open. The fact that chance is thought of in relation to teleology does not mean that it is “reappropriated” by teleology. Rather,chance reveals a hiatus that betrays the limitation of a language concerned with substances to account for events. (shrink)

This essay addresses the following questions: How does the meta-sensory function of koine aisthesis relate to its other functions? How can a meta-level arise from the immanence of sensation? Can we give an account of meta-sensation that doesn’t assume a transcendental plane? My contention is that the representationalist model doesn’t apply to Aristotle and that Aristotle offers an alternative that is worth exploring. I propose to interpret the meta-sensory power of the koine aisthesis in terms of the sensing of the (...) limits of perception. The sensing of the limit of sensation is the sensing of sensation itself qua potentiality as exemplified by Aristotle’s observations on the experience of seeing darkness or hearing silence. If it is so, sensing-that-I-sense doesn’t require an appeal to a transcendent faculty and arises from the immanent experience of sensation itself. (shrink)

Ed. Daniel Greenberger, 750pp May 1995 164.95.

This paper focuses on Aristotle’s discussion of PNC in Metaphysics Gamma and argues that the argument operates at three different levels: ontological, doxastic, and semantic through the invocation of three philosophical personae: the first one can only state what is otherwise unprovable, the second one can only confirm that we should trust PNC, the third one denies PNC and must be silenced. Aristotle cannot prove what is beyond proof. This situation results in a fundamental ambiguity in the figure of the (...) philosopher. The Metaphysics is written from the standpoint of an investigative thinker who admits her puzzlement before a question that will forever remain open and imagines another philosopher who has achieved a god-like insight into the first principles of all things. The path from the first figure to the second one, however, remains an enigmatic leap. (shrink)

John Webster provides a major scholarly analysis, the first in any language, of the final sections of the Church Dogmatics. He focuses on the theme of human agency in Barth's late ethics and doctrine of baptism, placing the discussion in the context of an interpretation of the Dogmatics as an intrinsically ethical dogmatics. The first two chapters survey the themes of agency, covenant and human reality in the Dogmatics as a whole; later chapters give a thorough analysis of Church (...) Dogmatics IV/4 and the posthumously published text The Christian Life. A final chapter examines the significance of Barth's work for contemporary accounts of moral selfhood. The book is important not only for a detailed analysis of a neglected part of Barth's oeuvre, but also because it casts into question much of what has hitherto been written about Barth's ethical dogmatics. (shrink)

I argue that incomprehensibility (what the ancient skeptics called acatalepsia) plays a central role in the skepticism of both Bayle and Hume. I challenge a commonly held view (recently argued by Todd Ryan) that Hume, unlike Bayle, does not present oppositions of reason--what Kant called antimonies.

This book investigates the central role of reason in Islamic intellectual life. Despite widespread characterization of Islam as a system of belief based only on revelation, John Walbridge argues that rational methods, not fundamentalism, have characterized Islamic law, philosophy and education since the medieval period. His research demonstrates that this medieval Islamic rational tradition was opposed by both modernists and fundamentalists, resulting in a general collapse of traditional Islamic intellectual life and its replacement by more modern but far shallower (...) forms of thought. However, the resources of this Islamic scholarly tradition remain an integral part of the Islamic intellectual tradition and will prove vital to its revival. The future of Islam, Walbridge argues, will be marked by a return to rationalism"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

We present several new studies focusing on “salience effects”—the decreased tendency to attribute knowledge to someone when an unrealized possibility of error has been made salient in a given conversational context. These studies suggest a complicated picture of epistemic universalism: there may be structural universals, universal epistemic parameters that influence epistemic intuitions, but that these parameters vary in such a way that epistemic intuitions, in either their strength or propositional content, can display patterns of genuine cross-cultural diversity.

1. 1735-1738 -- 2. 1738-1743 -- 3. 1743-1754 -- 4. 1755-1765 -- 5. 1765-1775 -- 6. 1776-1786 -- 7. 1787-91.

Whiskey Lao -- Fair warning -- Randomness at large -- We the addicted -- The best possible world -- The importance of being doomed -- Moral responsibility -- The upper limit to the value of possible worlds.

A brief account of educational aims, focussing on preparation for a life of autonomous well-being.

Time prevents being from forming a totality. Whenever there is time fragmentation and multiplicity occur. Yet, there also ought to be continuity since it is thesame being that was, is and will be. Because of time, being must be both identical and different. This is the key problem that Aristotle attempts to resolve in his discussion of time in Book IV of the Physics. This essay considers three privileged notions: limit, number and ecstasies on which Aristotle relies at crucial moments (...) of his inquiry and shows (1) that limit, number, and ecstasies are actually three ways of approaching the same phenomenon, and (2) how they allow Aristotle to reconcile divisibility and indivisibility. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 48, Issue 1, pp 119 - 146 Masks are devices and symbols. In the first instance, they are artifacts that allow opposite poles to take each other’s place. They split the world into appearance and reality, manifest and repressed, sacred and profane. In this sense, they are dualistic. But by so doing they invert these terms. In this sense, they are dialectical. In the second instance, they exemplify doubt about people’s identities and the veracity of their words; (...) they denote duplicity, inauthenticity, and hypocrisy. The conjunction of these two senses resides in the fact that masks are at the threshold between reality and fiction. Such a threshold makes possible the emergence of a space of play which asserts that the world does not express a determinate and final order but is infinitely open to the emergence of new, yet transient, forms of self-organization and open new spatiotemporal worlds. (shrink)

It is a common view that Ockham’s critique of Scotus’s position on the issue of contingency is “devastating,” for it seems obvious that a possibility that does notactualize is simply no possibility. This rejection however does not commit Ockham to necessitarism, for the consideration of the temporal discontinuity of volitions should suffice to save contingency. But does it? Is it the case that diachronic volitions (which Scotus also acknowledges) are sufficient?This essay argues that (1) the debate between Ockham and Scotus (...) is not to be reduced to a logical disagreement (Scotus’s and Ockham’s modal logics are actually substantially similar) but is properly ontological inasmuch as it concerns the reduction and eventual identification of being with actuality and of actuality with reality in the sense of manifest; (2) the retrograding movement of truth from the present (Ockham’s 3rd suppositio) entails a temporal gap between present and future; and (3) Ockham’s solution depends on a conception of the will that cannot simply be identified with, and accounted for in terms of successive volitions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Stepping Off the Edge of the Earth:A bariatric patient’s journey out of obesityNikki MassieI have been overweight my entire life. When I was born—three weeks early—I weighed 9 lbs., 3 oz. I proceeded to trend on the high end of the weight percentile for my age. By the time I was 14 years old I’d surpassed 200 lbs. By the time I graduated high school I’d hit 250 lbs.Even (...) today, after losing a considerable amount of weight from having Roux–en–Y gastric bypass surgery, I am still considered overweight according to the body mass index.All this is to say that the way I think about my health, my body and my life is very much from the perspective of someone who has never experienced the so–called condition of being “normal.”Enough is EnoughI’ve been asked many times how I decided to have bariatric surgery. The answer isn’t simple. Because I’d been overweight all my life, the notion of being anything but overweight seemed a bit absurd to me. Not absurd as in, “I would not be happy if I were smaller” but more like, “I don’t know if this could ever happen for me and, if it did, who would I be?”Truth be told, I wasn’t entirely unhappy as an overweight woman. By the account of my primary care physician I also was not necessarily unhealthy for an overweight person. I didn’t have high blood pressure or diabetes (I wasn’t even pre–diabetic). My heart seemed to work fine. I was just very, very large.However, I’d been large (or larger than others) my entire life. In many ways my very identity was inextractable from that fact. While I can’t speak for my entire culture, my experience as an African–American woman is one where women of size were not reviled, but celebrated. Being too thin was always presented to me as a negative cultural value, I believe because it was associated with drug use.That means that growing up I didn’t have some of the experiences other obese people had. There were a few people who teased me but they were the exception, not the norm. I don’t recall being lonely because of my size. I dated avidly throughout my adolescence. I was asked to, and went to, both my proms.I proceeded into young adulthood with a few bumps along the way. I suffered a bout of depression in my sophomore year of college and just after my 21st birthday I found the first signs of what would be massive hair loss from alopecia areata (although did not know that’s what it was at the [End Page 107] time). Otherwise, I was fairly healthy and no more or less happy than any other 21 year–old I knew.At age 22, I had my first child, a daughter. This was the beginning of an upward weight climb that took me from being very overweight into very obese. At age 21, I weighed about 240 lbs. (I am 5 ft. 8 inches tall). By the time I was 26 (and after I had a second daughter), I weighed in at 340 lbs.At this point I began to want to lose weight. I no longer liked the way I looked in pictures. My increased clothing size and cost depressed me even further. My attempts at dieting, however, failed miserably. I did seek help from my primary care physicians (I went through several throughout my young adulthood). Each time I’d be given a copy of the food pyramid and a pamphlet explaining the health benefits of losing weight.But how? How exactly does one lose weight? In my mind it was some strange combination of sadistic exercise and starvation. That’s what I saw in magazines. Women who ate the equivalent of one meal per day who exercised many hours a day. I had no desire to do either and so I continued on my trend upward.During that time my mother (now deceased) worried about my weight a lot. I’d... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment by Frederick C. BeiserJohn W. YoltonFrederick C. Beiser. The Sovereignty of Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. xi + 332. Cloth, $39.50.Beiser characterizes the methodology of his study as historical and philosophical: historical in placing texts in their own context and in uncovering the intentions (...) of their authors; philosophical in reconstructing and appraising arguments (ix). Both methods are necessary for good historical work. The second is often practiced without the first, to the detriment of philosophy and its history. “A philosopher who reconstructs arguments without the aid of history indulges in mere guesswork and anachronism, measuring the standards of philosophical relevance and importance by the concerns of his own age” (x). Equally, understanding the arguments and ideas of, e.g., seventeenth-century writers, “also involves testing their truth: seeing how they cohere with one another, what their consequences are, whether they follow from the evidence adduced for them, and if they reply to the objections made against them” (x). This splendid study of the role of reason in seventeenth-century religion, science, and philosophy is a fine example of careful textual-historical scholarship with rigorous philosophical analysis.The goal of his study is to tell “the story of how rationalism, in the very specific sense of the sovereignty of reason, arose in seventeenth-century England” (5). Starting with an introduction which discusses such topics as “The Paradox of the English Enlightenment,” “Rationalism in the English Church,” “The Enlightenment and the New Sciences,” Beiser proceeds to detailed presentations and discussions of “The Protestant Challenge” (Chap. 1); Richard Hookers’s defense of reason (Chap. 2); the views of the Great Tew Circle, e.g., Falkland, Chillingworth, Hammond, Hales (Chap. 3); the Cambridge Platonists (Chap. 4); the nature of Enthusiasm (Chap. 5); John Toland and Deism (Chap. 6); and ethical rationalism (Chap. 7).Many of the topics covered have been the subjects of other books and articles. What marks Beiser’s account is the freshness of his approach, the many new insights and suggestions about the tensions between the holders of traditional doctrines and newer challenges. Beiser’s writing is clear, and the issues are carefully presented and analyzed. One of the central themes is the mistake of equating “rationalism with the critique or rejection of religion” (15), of identifying enlightenment with secularization (14). The appeals to reason often emerge from within orthodox religion, whose defenders were trying to cope with their own internal tensions. “Once we consider the Cambridge Platonists’ early reaction to predestination, it becomes clear that it was not Hobbes but Calvin who first posed the danger of atheism for them. For it was Calvin’s theology, and not Hobbes’s materialism, that inspired the fear of God that [End Page 138] they regarded as the source of atheism. In the eyes of the Cambridge Platonists, Hobbes’s materialism was only a false remedy for that fear...” (147). A similar point is made later: “the foundations of a rational theology” in Whichcote “did not arise from any need to combat a creeping Hobbesianism. Rather, it grew up from the inner struggles and torments of the Protestant soul” (165).Equally significant is Beiser’s analysis of enthusiasm, the appeals to divine inspiration rather than to reason or evidence: “We should be aware of accepting the contemporary caricature of the enthusiasts, which portrayed them as zealous and ignorant anti–intellectuals with no cogent or coherent philosophical position of their own” (187). His analysis of the enthusiasts stresses the epistemological nature of their position, rather than the usual theological, ethical, or political dimensions (193). He insists that “enthusiasm is essentially a philosophical concept. Historically, it arose as a response to the problem of the sources and criteria of religious knowledge” (187). The search for criteria is a pervasive feature of Beiser’s study: Luther’s and Calvin’s efforts to draw the boundary between faith and reason (24); Richard Hooker’s failure to “provide an epistemological foundation for his theory of natural law” (67); the need for a criterion to distinguish genuine from false revelation... (shrink)