I argue that God’s holiness as conceived in Hebrew Scripture grounds human obligations to obey divine commands. To disobey the commands of a holy God would disrespect a basic good, which we have decisive reason to avoid doing. God’s holiness may be a somewhat obscure property––though I propose transcendence and perfect morality as necessary conditions––but His omniscience and perfect morality guarantee that He would not command human beings to do things that His holiness would not ground His authority to command. (...) I conclude by replying to objections. (shrink)

This textbook brings the humanities to students in order to evoke the humanity of students. It helps to form individuals who take charge of their own minds, who are free from narrow and unreflective forms of thought, and who act compassionately in their public and professional worlds. Using concepts and methods of the humanities, the book addresses undergraduate and premed students, medical students, and students in other health professions, as well as physicians and other healthcare practitioners. It encourages them to (...) consider the ethical and existential issues related to the experience of disease, care of the dying, health policy, religion and health, and medical technology. Case studies, images, questions for discussion, and role-playing exercises help readers to engage in the practical, interpretive, and analytical aspects of the material, developing skills for critical thinking as well as compassionate care. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 3, March 2020, Page 37-39.

We use the format of a hypothetical case study to review issues related to pharmaceutical product approval and physician prescribing practices. In this case, a new FDA-approved drug is recommended for a patient who subsequently experiences an adverse event that may or may not be related to the prescription. This case raises a number of ethical and legal considerations physicians routinely face when deciding whether to recommend such drugs for their patients. Despite the need for ongoing observation by the regulatory (...) apparatus, physicians should be cognizant of the limitations of the drug approval system and the post-approval prescription drug surveillance system. We discuss physicians’ ethical obligations when faced with a newly approved drug, including seeking out independent sources of learning, reporting adverse effects, and notifying patients about limitations in available knowledge about therapeutic recommendations. (shrink)

Stephen Cole Kleene was one of the greatest logicians of the twentieth century and this book is the influential textbook he wrote to teach the subject to the next generation. It was first published in 1952, some twenty years after the publication of Godel's paper on the incompleteness of arithmetic, which marked, if not the beginning of modern logic. The 1930s was a time of creativity and ferment in the subject, when the notion of computable moved from the realm (...) of philosophical speculation to the realm of science. This was accomplished by the work of Kurt Gode1, Alan Turing, and Alonzo Church, who gave three apparently different precise definitions of computable. When they all turned out to be equivalent, there was a collective realization that this was indeed the right notion. Kleene played a key role in this process. One could say that he was there at the beginning of modern logic. He showed the equivalence of lambda calculus with Turing machines and with Godel's recursion equations, and developed the modern machinery of partial recursive functions. This textbook played an invaluable part in educating the logicians of the present. It played an important role in their own logical education.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Going Polyphonic I: With Namita Goswami et al.Alyson Cole and Kyoo LeeThis time around, we go polyphonic.The articles in the next two issues, Vol. 13 and Vol. 14, explore critical questions, paradigm-shifting idseas, and fresh connections arising from the intimately networked fields of intersectional, decolonial, and trans studies today. “Polyphonia,” a term we borrowed from music, is meant to characterize ways in which each piece as in a (...) “note” remains distinctly their own while dialogically and dynamically connected to an evolving ecosystem of ideas and visions in the making. As an umbrella term, it is meant to shelter resonances from each article that speaks directly not only of, but to, theory today by doing it in their own way.In this issue, we are presenting “A Forum on Namita Goswami’s Subjects That Matter.” It consists of seven responses to Goswami’s pioneering work on intersectionality as exemplified by her recent book, Subjects That Matter: Philosophy, Feminism, and Postcolonial Theory (SUNY Press, 2019) as well as the earlier co-edited volume, Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach (Routledge, 2014, co-edited by Maeve M. O’Donovan, Namita Goswami, and Lisa Yount). What is polyphonic about this assemblage is its interlocutory structure and orientation: each scholar—Al Frankowski, Falguni Sheth, Jennifer Scuro, Lauren Guilmette, Luce deLire, Russell Ford, and Tyler M. Williams, all coming from different angles, perspectives, and positions—discusses their reading of Goswami on intersectionality while showing how and where their own scholarship meets hers. Goswami, in turn, responds to each response while providing a synthesized account of what she gleans from this choral interaction, what she finds inspiring, as well as challenging. The articles in the next issue, [End Page 1] Vol. 14, following the forum, will virtually continue the music, although not in direct response to Goswami’s work.We hope you will join us in this somewhat experimental virtual symposium that is not even on Zoom. We hope you will join us in thinking that this more literalized model of a “scholarly conversation,” actual and virtual, vitally embodies the very spirit of interdisciplinary, intergenerational, intercontinental intersectionality as a conversation, ongoing intellectual encounters among many of us in various “sub-fields,” for the lack of a better word, that, again literally, cannot be neatly contained in any disciplinary terms, boxes, or territories.The tranScripts section in this issue consists of two entries, the first of which is the fourth installment of Mieke Bal’s Moments of Meaning-Making, J–L. Then we have Margaret Carson’s translation of Juliana González on Remedios Varo.Again, this issue has been a labor of collective love. We would like to thank all the brilliant authors and extraordinarily generous and helpful peer reviewers for this issue, not to mention the ever so resourceful and skillful editorial staff at the press we constantly rely on for expert guidance and feedback, all of whom have been inspirations for us editors. [End Page 2]Copyright © 2024 State University of New York... (shrink)

From roughly 1965 to 1995, Columbia University's Department of Sociology was a leading center for social study of science, both nationally and internationally. It was often referred to as the Merton School or Columbia School, and four scholars paved its way : Robert K. Merton, Harriet Zuckerman, Stephen Cole, and Jonathan Cole. The goal of the Columbia School was to create and legitimate a new sociological specialty focusing on the scientific community and the growth of scientific knowledge and (...) they did this by exploring the norms, values, and structure of science. The core values of the scientific and university system and the norms attached to them consisted of deeply held beliefs as well as principles that determined how individuals would act. They were organizing principles designed to support the institution in meeting its goals and mission. They influenced the types of social structures that developed to carry out the activities of scientists. Edited by Jonathan R. Cole, this collection of individually and co-authored papers and essays by Cole represents some of the work produced by Cole and his close collaborators over the past 50 years. the essays are contextualized with an introduction by Cole. The pieces in this volume represent the major concerns on the Columbia School, whose focus of attention was not on the production of individual pieces of knowledge, but on the social systems that made that production possible. (shrink)

Simon Blackburn’s supervenience argument—focusing on the mysterious “ban on mixed worlds”—is still subject to a variety of conflicting interpretations. In this paper, I hope to provide a defense of the argument that clarifies both the argument and the objections it must overcome. Many of the extant objections, I will argue, fail to engage the argument in its true form. And to counter the more compelling objections, it will be necessary to bring in additional argumentation that Blackburn himself does not clearly (...) provide. One important upshot of this discussion is that moral realism is not the only target of the argument: it raises trouble for a variety of metaethical views wed to realist-friendly construals of moral evaluation. Rightly understood, this argument not only survives the prominent responses, but turns out to be more powerful than his critics and Blackburn himself have recognized. (shrink)

That conditional, if-then reasoning does not emerge until 4–5 years has long been accepted. Here we show that children barely 3 years old can do conditional reasoning. All that was needed was a superficial change to the stimuli: When color was a property of the shapes rather than of the background, 3-year-olds could succeed. Three-year-olds do not seem to use color to inform them which shape is correct unless color is a property of the shapes themselves. While CD requires integrating (...) color and shape information, the dimensional change card sort task requires keeping those dimension cognitively separate – inhibiting attention to one when sorting by the other. For DCCS, a superficial change to the stimuli that is the inverse of what helps on CD enables 3-year-olds to succeed when normally they do not until ∼4⁤12 years. As we and others have previously shown, 3-year-olds can succeed at DCCS when color is a property of the background, instead of a property of the stimulus. Our findings on CD and DCCS suggest that scaffolding preschoolers’ emerging conceptual skills by changing the way stimuli look enables 3-year-olds to demonstrate reasoning abilities long thought beyond their grasp. Evidently, children of 3 years have difficulty mentally separating dimensions of the same object and difficulty mentally integrating dimensions not part of the same object. Our present CD findings plus our earlier DCCS findings provide strong evidence against prominent cognitive complexity, conditional reasoning, and graded memory theories for why 3-year-olds fail these two tasks. The ways we have traditionally queried children may have obscured the budding reasoning competencies present at 3 years of age. (shrink)

This volume contains an array of essays that reflect, and reflect upon, the recent revival of scholarly interest in the self and consciousness. Various relevant issues are addressed in conceptually challenging ways, such as how consciousness and different forms of self-relevant experience develop in infancy and childhood and are related to the acquisition of skill; the role of the self in social development; the phenomenology of being conscious and its metapsychological implications; and the cultural foundations of conceptualizations of consciousness. Written (...) by notable scholars in several areas of psychology, philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, and anthropology, the essays are of interest to readers from a variety of disciplines concerned with central, substantive questions in contemporary social science, and the humanities. (shrink)

Organizations are faced with the challenge of responding to increasing pressures to promote diversity in various ways. We draw attention to one possible proactive organizational response—the incorporation of diversity in organizational identity. This initial response necessarily evokes subsequent tasks of managing the changed identity. Therefore, this article also addresses the management of diversity identity within organizations, and relevant organizational outcomes. Our theoretical model is grounded in institutional theory, and we propose that the management of diversity identity can impact both perceptions (...) of legitimacy as well as diversity identity. Adequate, inadequate, and optimal management of diversity identity have differential effects on legitimacy and diversity identity. We contribute to the literature by a) unbundling initial and later firm responses to promoting diversity at the organizational level, and b) offering a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of managing diversity identity within organizations. (shrink)

Until comparatively recently, say the middle of the last century, spinal cord injury was fatal as pressure sores and other infections took their toll. Those with severe brain injuries, unable to move or even communicate, fared even worse; without movement or feeding such patients were nursed until nature took its course. Over the last few decades medical and nursing advances have enabled some of these vegetative patients to survive for considerable time, provoking, at times, ethical and legal dilemmas. Though they (...) survived, without overt behaviour or clear communication their carers were frequently unsure how much residual function remained. Now real progress is occurring in this area thanks to the application of neuro-scientific methods by some outstanding groups of workers. Subjects with severe brain injury may begin in complete, unresponsive coma but then ‘lighten’ to one of three categories. In vegetative state (VS), patients are apparently awake but without evidence of voluntary behaviour and have no apparent awareness of self or environment, whilst in minimally conscious state (MCS) patients have some behaviour beyond the reflex but are not able to communicate effectively. These conditions usually result from widespread brain damage at either or both cortical and subcortical levels due to injury or anoxia, though they can also be seen in end stage neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s. In locked in syndrome (LIS), patients ‘awake’ from coma, usually due to stroke, aware of their surroundings and their situation but unable to speak or move, beyond eye lid control and eye movement. For many, LIS will be recognised from Bauby’s extraordinary account in ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,’ though, incidentally, it was presaged in Samuel Beckett’s novella ‘The Unnameable.’ LIS reflects a profound disconnection between brain and body, except for the upper cranial nerves involved in eyelid movement. The overriding question is how much awareness these patients have.. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas, one of the "founding fathers" of just war theory, offers an account of virtuous warfare in practice. The author argues that Aquinas's approach to warfare, with its emphasis on justice and charity, is helpful in providing a coherent moral account of war to which Christians can subscribe. Particular attention is given to the role of charity, since this virtue is the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian soldier. Charity compels him to soldier justly, and by fighting justly, he is (...) elevated by God to friendship with God. Notable features of this approach are its emphasis on the criteria for judging whether a war is just and its relativizing of the criteria for proper combat behavior. (shrink)

Background Encounters of moral distress have long-term consequences on healthcare workers’ physical and mental health, leading to job dissatisfaction, reduced patient care, and high levels of burnout, exhaustion, and intentions to quit. Yet, research on approaches to ameliorate moral distress across the health workforce is limited. Research Objective The aim of our study was to qualitatively explore multi-professional perspectives of healthcare social workers, chaplains, and patient liaisons on ways to reduce moral distress and heighten well-being at a southern U.S. academic (...) medical center. Participants & Research Context Purposive sampling and chain-referral methods assisted with recruitment through hospital listservs, staff meetings, and newsletters. Interested participants contacted the principal investigator and all interviews were conducted in-person. Consent was attained prior to interviews. All interviews were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Research Design Directed content analysis was used to deductively organize codes and to develop themes in conjunction with the National Academy of Medicine’s National Plan for Health Workforce Well-Being. Rigor was attained through peer-debriefing, data triangulation methods, and frequent research team meetings. Ethical Considerations Ethics approval was obtained from the university and medical center institutional review boards. Findings Themes demonstrate that rather than offering interventions in the aftermath of moral distress, multilevel daily practices ought to be considered that pre-emptively identify and reduce morally distressing encounters through (1) the care team, (2) management and leadership, and (3) the health care industry. Strategies include interdisciplinary decision-making, trusting managerial relationships, and organizational policies and practices that explicitly invest in mental health promotion and diverse leadership opportunities. Conclusion Moral distress interventions ought to target short-term stress reactions while also addressing the long-term impacts of moral residue. Health systems must financially commit to an ethical workplace culture that explicitly values mental health and well-being. (shrink)

No writer or public intellectual of our era has been as sensitive to the role of faith in the lives of ordinary Americans as Robert Coles. Though not religious in the conventional sense, Coles is unparalleled in his astute understanding and respect for the relationship between secular life and sacredness, which cuts across his large body of work. Drawing inspiration from figures like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, and Simone Weil, Coles’s extensive writings explore the tug of war between faith and (...) doubt. As Coles himself admits, the “back-and-forthness between faith and doubt is the story of my life.” These thirty-one thought-provoking essays are drawn from Coles’s weekly column in the Catholic publication America. In them, he turns his inquisitive lens on a range of subjects and issues, from writers and painters to his recent reading and film viewing, contemporary events and lingering controversies, recollections of past and present mentors, events of his own daily life, and ordinary encounters with students, patients, neighbors, and friends. Addressing moral questions openly and honestly with a rare combination of rectitude and authorial modesty, these essays position Coles as a preeminent, durable, and trusted voice in the continuing national conversation over religion, civic life, and moral purpose. (shrink)

This article reviews Cornelia Vismann’s 2008 book Files: Law and Media Technology. In addition to an overview of Vismann’s media materialist approach to the study of the law, it provides both a consideration of her relationship to Friedrich Kittler’s media theory and a more focused examination of certain functional writing entities that might extend Vismann’s genealogical approach. It is suggested that a closer analysis of one such entity, the list, can offer further insight into the epistemological and ontological questions the (...) book provokes. (shrink)

This article analyzes a crucial aspect of the #MeToo phenomenon overlooked in all the commentary: the sign under which this activism has been taking place. Our premise is that to comprehend the novel politics that #MeToo incites, we need to understand the political grammar of the sign. #MeToo hails individuals to recognize their serial collectivity and assembles them into a fluid yet cohesive group. Straddling the particular and universal, the sign allows for a range of genres of speaking out and (...) joining in, thereby reconfiguring the possibilities of feminist political assemblage. We begin by providing an overview of the arguments summoned in opposition to #MeToo that have dominated public discourse. Next, we examine #MeToo in the context of debates within feminism, demonstrating how #MeToo addresses enduring tensions over the terms of coalitional politics. Finally, we analyze the sign itself, focusing first on the distinctive grammar #MeToo deploys, and then on the politics it facilitates. We argue that #MeToo allows feminists to grapple with the challenges of difference in innovative ways—not only contextually or with respect to the varying positionalities of individuals assembled under the sign, but also in upholding a continuum of sexual violation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Liberal political philosophy has little of interest to say about the social liberty of the physically disabled. It accepts that the physically disabled and the able‐bodied are equally at liberty, even though the former can do far less than the latter; and it concludes that there are no interesting political statements we can make about their situation. In this essay, I assume that the physically disabled are unfree, not merely unable, to use public facilities which do not take their (...) disability into account, thereby excluding them. I criticise liberal theories of liberty by exposing and questioning the assumptions which entail the liberal theorist's rejecting this claim. I conclude that there is a form of negative liberty which does enable the liberal theorist to make political statements about the freedom of the disabled [1]. (shrink)

The literature on public perceptions of, and attitudes towards, nanotechnology used in the agrifood sector is reviewed. Research into consumer perceptions and attitudes has focused on general applications of nanotechnology, rather than within the agrifood sector. Perceptions of risk and benefit associated with different applications of nanotechnology, including agrifood applications, shape consumer attitudes, and acceptance, together with ethical concerns related to environmental impact or animal welfare. Attitudes are currently moderately positive across all areas of application. The occurrence of a negative (...) or positive incident in the agri-food sector may crystallise consumer views regarding acceptance or rejection of nanotechnology products. •Acceptance of agrifood nanotechnology based on perceptions of risk, benefit and ethics.•Attitudes towards nanotechnology in general are currently moderately positive.•Occurrence of a major nanotechnology-related "event" may crystallise consumer attitude. (shrink)

Lay persons may have intuitions about morality's objectivity. What do these intuitions look like? And what are their causes and consequences? In recent years, an increasing number of scholars have begun to investigate these questions empirically. This article presents and assesses the resulting area of research as well as its potential philosophical implications. First, we introduce the methods of empirical research on folk moral objectivism. Second, we provide an overview of the findings that have so far been made. Third, we (...) raise a number of methodological worries that cast doubt upon these findings. And fourth, we discuss ways in which lay persons' intuitions aboutmoral objectivity may bear on philosophical claims. (shrink)

Many metaethicists agree that as ordinary people experience morality as a realm of objective truths, we have a prima facie reason to believe that it actually is such a realm. Recently, worries have been raised about the validity of the extant psychological research on this argument’s empirical hypothesis. Our aim is to advance this research, taking these worries into account. First, we propose a new experimental design for measuring folk intuitions about moral objectivity that may serve as an inspiration for (...) future studies. Then we report and discuss the results of a survey that was based on this design. In our study, most of our participants denied the existence of objective truths about most or all moral issues. In particular, many of them had the intuition that whether moral sentences are true depends both on their own moral beliefs and on the dominant moral beliefs within their culture. This finding suggests that the realist presumptive argument may have to be rejected and that instead anti-realism may have a presumption in its favor. (shrink)

Undergraduate students with no prior classroom instruction in mathematical logic will benefit from this evenhanded multipart text by one of the centuries greatest authorities on the subject. Part I offers an elementary but thorough overview of mathematical logic of first order. The treatment does not stop with a single method of formulating logic; students receive instruction in a variety of techniques, first learning model theory (truth tables), then Hilbert-type proof theory, and proof theory handled through derived rules. Part II supplements (...) the material covered in Part I and introduces some of the newer ideas and the more profound results of logical research in the twentieth century. Subsequent chapters introduce the study of formal number theory, with surveys of the famous incompleteness and undecidability results of Godel, Church, Turing, and others. The emphasis in the final chapter reverts to logic, with examinations of Godel's completeness theorem, Gentzen's theorem, Skolem's paradox and nonstandard models of arithmetic, and other theorems. Unabridged republication of the edition published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York, 1967. Preface. Bibliography. Theorem and Lemma Numbers: Pages. List of Postulates. Symbols and Notations. Index. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Healer's Power. By Howard Brody.

In a majority of situations the normal adult maintains posture or moves without consciously monitoring motor activity. Posture and movement are usually close to automatic; they tend to take care of themselves, outside of attentive regard. One's body, in such cases, effaces itself as one is geared into a particular intentional goal. This effacement is possible because of the normal functioning of a body schema. Body schema can be defined as a system of preconscious, subpersonal processes that play a dynamic (...) role in governing posture and movement (Head, 1920). There is an important and often overlooked conceptual difference between the subpersonal body schema and what is usually called body image . The latter is most often defined as a conscious idea or mental representation that one has of one's own body (for example, Adame, Radell, Johnson, and Cole, 1991; Gardner and Moncrieff, 1988; Schilder, 1935). Despite the conceptual difference many researchers use the terms interchangeably, leading to both a terminological and conceptual confusion. (shrink)

Much of Edmonton’s municipal past lacked any overarching development plan. Once such absentee municipal planning gave way to more concrete forms of municipal planning in terms of shaping the urban environment, conflicting goals soon emerged. Between 1949 and the early 1980s a conflict in planning goals within both the Edmonton District Planning Commission and the City of Edmonton, at this time governed with a commission board became apparent. Often this conflict played out in Edmonton’s river valley with competing visions of (...) preservation and freeway construction. River valley neighborhoods were threatened with land acquisition policies that viewed the river valley as the sole domain of parkland. Concurrently, those neighborhoods and much of the river valley were also threatened by the Metropolitan Edmonton Transportation Study. Citizen engagement in an otherwise politically apathetic city led to its demise, although the threat of large-scale removal of river valley parks and homes throughout the city loomed for some time. The period between 1949 and 1983 represents a period in Edmonton’s history where environmental protection policy clashed with transportation policy that advocated for the wholesale destruction of the river valley and countless homes. It is this conflict that led to increased political awareness that directly contributed to the demise of the METS scheme and gave rise to renewed support for river valley protection while making rapid transit a possibility for Edmonton. (shrink)

In these seventeen essays, distinguished senior scholars discuss the conceptual issues surrounding the idea of freedom of inquiry and scrutinize a variety of obstacles to such inquiry that they have encountered in their personal and professional experience. Their discussion of threats to freedom traverses a wide disciplinary and institutional, political and economic range covering specific restrictions linked to speech codes, the interests of donors, institutional review board licensing, political pressure groups, and government policy, as well as phenomena of high generality, (...) such as intellectual orthodoxy, in which coercion is barely visible and often self-imposed. As the editors say in their introduction: "No freedom can be taken for granted, even in the most well-functioning of formal democracies. Exposing the tendencies that undermine freedom of inquiry and their hidden sources and widespread implications is in itself an exercise in and for democracy.". (shrink)