(2013). Sickle Cell Disease and the “Difficult Patient” Conundrum. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 3-10. doi: 10.1080/15265161.2013.767954.

Many neuroimaging studies of semantic memory have argued that knowledge of an object's perceptual properties are represented in a modality-specific manner. These studies often base their argument on finding activation in the left-hemisphere fusiform gyrus-a region assumed to be involved in perceptual processing-when the participant is verifying verbal statements about objects and properties. In this paper, we report an extension of one of these influential papers-Kan, Barsalou, Solomon, Minor, and Thompson-Schill (2003 )-and present evidence for an amodal component in the (...) representation and processing of perceptual knowledge. Participants were required to verify object-property statements (e.g., "cat-whiskers?"; "bear-wings?") while they were being scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We replicated Kan et al.'s activation in the left fusiform gyrus, but also found activation in regions of left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and middle-temporal gyrus, areas known to reflect amodal processes or representations. Further, only activations in the left IFG, an amodal area, were correlated with measures of behavioural performance. (shrink)

This article examines some of the reasons why banks and insurance companies have been accused of discrimination, and shows that this is by and large a false accusation. Economic analysis demonstrates that racial discrimination is not a profit‐maximizing strategy. Actually, unwise public policies are actually precluding many consumers from the market.

Pragmatic Genealogy involves constructing fictional, quasi-historical models in order to discover what might explain and justify our concepts, ideas or practices. It arguably originated with Hume, but its most prominent practitioners are Edward Craig, Bernard Williams and Mathieu Queloz. Its defenders allege that the method allows us to understand “what the concept does for us, what its role in our life might be” (Craig, 1990), and that this in turn can ground practical reasons to preserve or further a conceptual practice. (...) In this paper, I argue that none of this is true, and that only a turn to the actual recent history of such practices can reveal those sorts of practical reasons. (shrink)

Nicholas Allott considers Chomsky at ninety. [This is a short introduction to Chomsky's linguistic work, its implications for our knowledge about language and the mind, and its connections with the political philosophy that is implicit in his work on international relations and the media. I argue that Chomsky's contribution to linguistics, cognitive science and philosophy should not be controversial. He has been a major influence on the computational/representational view of the mind that is now taken for granted in serious (...) work in linguistics and cognitive psychology. His work in linguistics revolutionised the field, leading to the discovery of grammatical principles with considerable explanatory power, and has shifted the burden against those who oppose Universal Grammar: an innate, domain-specific system that underlies our linguistic abilities. Chomsky's political work includes detailed critiques of US and other Western policy, particularly foreign policy, and, with Edward Herman, a model that seeks to explain how radical opinions and inconvenient facts are excluded from the media. Chomsky also has a political philosophy, although he does not set it out in detail. He sees human beings as intrinsically creative and with an instinct for freedom, and he takes these features of human nature to favour a libertarian socialist society.]. (shrink)

This essay aims to identify a semiotic consciousness found in New England Transcendentalism, consisting of the worldview that signs are pervasively present throughout nature and society. It finds that this worldview exists as a historical strand of thought stretching through the 19th century and, ultimately, further beyond, thereby making up an early movement in American semiotics. In this context, I furthermore see Transcendentalist thought informing the backdrop of Charles Peirce’s groundbreaking theory of signs later in the century, especially his metaphysical (...) claims about a “universe... perfused with signs”1 (1906: EP 2.394). In order to bring into full view the presence of a semiotic consciousness in Transcendentalism, I first address the intellectual history and genealogical roots that helped shape the minds of the Transcendentalists. Relevant influences include those both local to New England and imported from abroad, in particular the theologies of Jonathan Edwards and of Emanuel Swedenborg. Next, I directly examine the ideas of the figurehead of the Transcendentalist movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, together with his Concord peers, Amos Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau. Taking them as my case studies, I track the different ways a like-minded interest in signs takes shape within their individual projects. Focus-ing on their descriptions of nature, we find it in their experiences of the natural environment, their understanding of phenomena as representational and poetic, and their belief in the dialogical sharing of ideas across minds and species. Along the way, I further work out some of the aspects of a general theory of signs identifi-able within the Transcendentalist perspective, as well as distinguish it from other theoretical alternatives. Ultimately, I contend that the Transcendentalists held a similar idea of nature existing as a sign representing deep and varied meanings. (shrink)

The paper examines the current debates regarding the grounding of human rights in a pluralistic, culturally diverse world. It analyses the challenges which come today from certain policies of human rights which instrumentalize them under the pretext of a “global war on terror” and redefi ne them in terms of democracy promotion and regime change, as well as those challenges which come from ideologies which question the core principles of human rights and provoke the so called “crisis of legitimization.” The (...) paper argues for the necessity of restoring the genuine meaning of human rights and of the role of citizens in striving for their implementation. At the heart of the analysis is Kant’s concept of human rights as freedom. With Kant as its backdrop, the paper shows that the claim that religious worldviews provide the only intelligible foundation, as in Nicholas Wolterstorff, faces serious challenges in a pluralistic, culturally diverse world. The paper then analyzes the non-religious philosophical concepts which seek to develop an account of human rights that does not depend upon controversial metaphysical or religious doctrines. It examines an account of human rights from the perspective of discourse ethics as developed by Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. It also analyses the concepts of human dignity and “emerging morality” by Arturo Roig and the “ethics of liberation” by Enrique Dussel. The analysis shows the ongoing relevance of Kant’s ideas and their recent development by the theorists of discourse ethics and of dialogical and democratic cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Moore’s BeginningsNicholas GriffinConsuelo Preti. The Metaphysical Basis of Ethics: G. E. Moore and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Pp. xx, 268. isbn: 978-0-230-27762-5, us$57.50 (hb); 978-1-137-31907-4, us$44.99 (ebook).For many years now Consuelo Preti has been studying the life and work of G. E. Moore, especially in the period before the First World War when he and Russell were closest. In a series of important (...) publications, she has transformed our knowledge of the early Moore, making full use of his papers, now in the Cambridge University Library after many years in private hands. Of these, the most important, at least for Russell scholars, was the publication of Moore’s two Fellowship dissertations, which she edited with Thomas Baldwin,1 for it was with the second of these that Moore broke free from neo-Hegelianism and took Russell with him. Preti now follows this up with an extensive and detailed account of the dissertations’ intellectual background.Moore submitted two dissertations—both called “The Metaphysical Basis of Ethics”—in an attempt to win a six-year Trinity College Prize Fellowship. The first, in 1897, like most first attempts at a Trinity Prize Fellowship, failed; but the second, the following year, was successful. In his autobiography Moore famously said that he didn’t think “the world or the sciences would ever have suggested to me any philosophical problems. What has suggested philosophical problems to me is things which other philosophers have said about the world [End Page 86] and the sciences.”2 Accordingly, his first dissertation was “an attempt to make sense” of Kant’s “extremely mysterious assertions” about freedom and the second an attempt “to see clearly what Kant meant” by the “very mystifying manner” in which he used the word “reason”.3 This may seem a long way from the metaphysical basis of ethics, but the concept of will was central to Kant’s ethics, so it was natural to inquire in what sense, if any, an action could be said to be freely willed and this in turn to the distinction between actions which were caused and those which were undertaken for a reason.As Moore admits in the preface to the first dissertation, he had not had time to complete it as he intended. As it stands, it consists of a longish introduction, a single very long chapter on “Freedom, with special reference to Kant”,4 and an appendix on Sidgwick’s hedonism. Almost all this material reappears in the second dissertation, but the long chapter was there divided into two, separating Moore’s treatment of Kant from his own views on freedom. (Both Sidgwick and Edward Caird, his examiners in 1897, had complained that it was not easy to tell when he was interpreting Kant and when he was giving his own views.)5 The appendix on Sidgwick’s hedonism is joined by a new one on the dating of Kant’s ethical writings. (Caird had complained that he had not paid enough attention to this in the 1897 dissertation.) There is a new introduction and a brief concluding chapter directly on Kant’s ethics. But, most importantly, Moore opened the 1898 dissertation with two wholly new chapters: “On the meaning of ‘Reason’ in Kant” and “Reason”. It was the second of these, the bulk of which Moore published in Mind in 1899 under the title “The Nature of Judgment”, that inaugurated the revolution in philosophy associated with his name and Russell’s.Preti doesn’t get to this part of the story until her fourth and final chapter. Most of her book is taken up with a wide-ranging and detailed back-story to the dissertations and she begins, reasonably enough, with what has become known (even in English) as the Psychologismusstreit: the quarrel about psychologism. Psychologism was a doctrine defined to be false: an inappropriate appeal to psychological elements in constructing a philosophical position. Of course, the keyword here is “inappropriate”, and substantive debates raged as to which psychological elements were inappropriate to which philosophical projects.6 By the late nineteenth century, most Anglophone... (shrink)

In 1887 the Open Court Publishing Company had its founding in a philosophy of monism. The company’s proprietor Edward C. Hegeler began the enterprise in an effort to promote his personal philosophic, religious, and moral ideas. He believed that these ideas could be conciliated with the growing scientific trends of the late nineteenth century, and that monism was the intellectual framework for doing so. Paul Carus, the editor of the journals The Open Court and The Monist, joined Hegeler as an (...) intellectual ally in this regard. For thirty years he openly defended the doctrines of monism in countless articles and books, successfully grounding the Open Court on this philosophy. This paper uncovers the historical development of the philosophical origin of the Open Court as it began with Hegeler’s personal religious motives, his ideological tension with the original editor Benjamin Underwood, and his embrace of the monistic writings of Paul Carus. It also examines Hegeler’s and Carus’s publications and personal letters from the 1880s and 1890s in order to determine the fundamental doctrines of their unique sense of monism. In Carus’s writings in particular is proposed a monism of causality that is compatible with a deterministic worldview and a unitary conception of the sciences. Also, both Carus and Hegeler propose a monistic ethics of meliorism that conceives the diverse periods of human history to be evolving toward the one final end of the moral improvement of humankind. While these are the positive doctrines that they accept, they further reject the antitheses of philosophical dualism and irreligious attitude of agnosticism of all varieties. (shrink)

IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, the advance of modern particle physics and the discovery of an inherent probabilism at the heart of the natural order has thrown scientific determinism into doubt. The central question that issues from such findings in physics is whether nature is inherently indeterminate or simply defectively known. If the answer is the former, then this development calls into question the central theoretical justification for the Kantian project. For although Kant makes rhetorical allusion to Nicholas Copernicus, his (...) theory plainly stands in defense of Sir Isaac Newton’s classical mechanics. (shrink)

There has been much first-rate work done in recent years both by way of criticizing Humean assumptions and explicating alter native concepts of causal explanation and non-logical necessity. Roderick Chisholm early showed the inadequacies of neo-Humean views of explanation in his articles on counterfactual inference, and C. J. Ducasse, Sterling Lamprecht, William Kneale, Nicholas Maxwell, Richard Taylor, G. E. M. Anscombe, P. T. Geach, Milton Fisk, Baruch Brody, Peter Alexander, R. Harré, and William Wallace, among others, have articulated interesting (...) alternative views to the Humean ones they have so trenchantly criticized. We will be concerned with the recent work of Harré and Wallace in this study. Harré has not only launched a fresh attack but has also presented what is probably the most fully developed neorealistic [[sic]] alternative. Wallace’s work is basically historical but has an intentional systematic import also. The books of the two authors are mutually supportive. (shrink)

In this far-reaching essay, historian Michael Edward Moore examines modernity as an historical epoch following the end of the medieval period -- and as a "messianic concept of time." In the early twentieth century, a debate over the meaning and origins of modernity unfolded among the philosophers Ernst Cassirer, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Blumenberg. These thinkers tried to resolve the puzzle of the fifteenth-century master Nicholas of Cusa. Was Cusanus the last great medieval thinker, his ideas a summa of (...) medieval tradition? Or was he a mysterious epochal figure, seated at one end of the bridge leading to modern thought? Nicholas of Cusa lived during a time of historical and existential crisis, or kairos, when medieval governments and cherished sources of unity were shaken. Likewise, the debate over his significance took place during a later phase of crisis for Europe, in the decades before and after the Second World War, when the collapse of European civilization was witnessed. Moore argues that modernity, so intently examined as an historical and spiritual problem, has significance for our contemporary sense of crisis. (shrink)

For Moore, it is a paradox that although I would be absurd in asserting that (it is raining but I don.

This paper examines the status of explanation in the natural sciences and ethics by focusing on the important role of empirical evidence and theoretical properties. As a means of exploring these issues, the debate between Nicholas Sturgeon and Gilbert Harman will serve as a central point in the discussion, since Sturgeon has provided several arguments against Harman's attempt to draw a distinction between scientific and moral explanation. Specifically, Sturgeon holds that the special function of observation and testing, which we (...) commonly believe to be relevant only in science, can be applied to moral cases with equal justification. Overall, Sturgeon's arguments will be exposed as deficient in several respects, which is an aspect of this debate often overlooked. (shrink)

Approaches to Meaning in Music presents a survey of the problems and issues inherent in pursuing meaning and signification in music, and attempts to rectify the conundrums that have plagued philosophers, artists, and theorists since the time of Pythagoras. This collection brings together essays that reflect a variety of diverse perspectives on approaches to musical meaning. Established music theorists and musicologists cover topics including musical aspect and temporality, collage, borrowing and association, musical symbols and creative mythopoesis, the articulation of silence, (...) the mutual interaction of cultural and music-artistic phenomena, and the analysis of gesture. Contributors are Byron Almén, J. Peter Burkholder, Nicholas Cook, Robert S. Hatten, Patrick McCreless, Jann Pasler, and Edward Pearsall. (shrink)

: In her recent paper, “How to Escape Indictment for Impiety: Teaching as Punishment in the Euthyphro,” G. Fay Edwards argues that if Socrates were to become Euthyphro’s student, this should count as the appropriate punishment for Socrates’ alleged crime. In this paper, we show that the interpretation Edwards has proposed conflicts with what Socrates has to say about the functional role of punishment in the Apology, and that the account Socrates gives in the Apology, properly understood, also (...) provides the correct interpretation of what Socrates says in the Euthyphro about the role of instruction for wrongdoers. (shrink)

This book is a collection of articles dealing with criticisms of Robert S. Hartman’s theory of formal axiology. During his lifetime, Hartman wrote responses to many of his critics. Some of these were previously published but many are published here for the first time. In particular, published here are Hartman’s replies to such critics as Hector Neri Castañeda, Charles Hartshorne, Rem B. Edwards, Robert E. Carter, G. R. Grice, Nicholas Rescher, Robert W. Mueller, Gordon Welty, Pete Gunter, George (...) Kimball Plochmann, William Eckhardt, and Robert S. Brumbaugh. Crticial essays and responses to them developed by Rem B. Edwards, Frank G. Forrest, and Mark A. Moore after Hartman’s untimely death in 1973 are also included. (shrink)

This Handbook contains forty essays by an international team of experts on the antecedents, the content, and the reception of the Dionysian corpus, a body of writings falsely ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, a convert of St Paul, but actually written about 500 AD. The first section contains discussions of the genesis of the corpus, its Christian antecedents, and its Neoplatonic influences. In the second section, studies on the Syriac reception, the relation of the Syriac to the original Greek, and (...) the editing of the Greek by John of Scythopolis are followed by contributions on the use of the corpus in such Byzantine authors as Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus, Theodore the Studite, Niketas Stethatos, Gregory Palamas, and Gemistus Pletho. In the third section attention turns to the Western tradition, represented first by the translators John Scotus Eriugena, John Sarracenus, and Robert Grosseteste and then by such readers as the Victorines, the early Franciscans, Albert the Great, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Dante, the English mystics, Nicholas of Cusa, and Marsilio Ficino. The contributors to the final section survey the effect on Western readers of Lorenzo Valla's proof of the inauthenticity of the corpus and the subsequent exposure of its dependence on Proclus by Koch and Stiglmayr. The authors studied in this section include Erasmus, Luther and his followers, Vladimir Lossky, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Jacques Derrida, as well as modern thinkers of the Greek Church. Essays on Dionysius as a mystic and a political theologian conclude the volume. (shrink)

This volume commemorates the 6th centennial of the birth of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), a Renaissance polymath whose interests included law, politics, metaphysics, epistemology, theology, mysticism and relations between Christians and non-Christian peoples. The contributors to this volume reflect Cusanus' multiple interests; and, by doing so they commemorate three deceased luminaries of the American Cusanus Society: F. Edward Cranz, Thomas P. McTighe and Charles Trinkaus. Contributors include: Christopher M. Bellitto, H. Lawrence Bond, Elizabeth Brient, Louis Dupré, Wilhelm Dupré, Walter (...) Andreas Euler, Lawrence Hundersmarck, Thomas M. Izbicki, Dennis D. Martin, Yelena Matusevich, Bernard McGinn, Clyde Lee Miller, Thomas E. Morrissey, Brian A. Pavlac, and Morimichi Watanabe. Publications by Charles Trinkaus: - Edited by C. Trinkaus and H.A. Oberman, The pursuit of holiness in late medieval and renaissance religion, ISBN: 978 90 04 03791 5 (Out of print). (shrink)