This best-selling anthology of readings with case studies provides insightful and comprehensive treatment of ethical issues in medicine. Appropriate for courses taught in philosophy departments as well as in schools of medicine and nursing, the collection covers provocative topics such as conflicts of interest in medicine, advance directives, physician-assisted suicide, and the rationing of health care. The text's effective pedagogical features include chapter introductions, argument sketches, explanations of medical terms, headnotes, and annotated bibliographies.

Recent articles in biomedical ethics have begun to explore both the relevance of family interests in treatment decisions and the resultant ramifications for physicians' obligations to patients. This article addresses two important questions regarding physicians' obligations vis-a-vis family interests: (1) What should a physician do when the exercise of patient autonomy threatens to negate the patient's moral obligations to other family members? (2) Does respect for patient autonomy typically require efforts on the part of physicians to keep patients' treatment decisions (...) from being influenced by family considerations? A series of clarifications about the concept of autonomy is also presented. (shrink)

: This article begins with a discussion of persistent vegetative state (PVS), focusing on concerns related to both diagnosis and prognosis and paying special attention to the 1994 Multi-Society Task Force report on the medical aspects of PVS. The article explores the impact of diagnostic and prognostic uncertainties on prospective thinking regarding the possibility of PVS and considers the closely related question of how prospective thinkers might craft advance directives in order to deal most effectively with this possibility.

In its seventh edition, "Social Ethics: Morality and Social Policy" continues to provide material that will encourage reflective and critical examination of key contemporary moral problems. With additional readings and a new organization that groups related chapters together under four categories, this edition enhances the teachability that was the most salient characteristic of previous editions. The text maintains its ability to bring the central issues into clear focus, while allowing supporting arguments for widely diverse positions to be presented by those (...) who embrace them. (shrink)

With an assortment of readings and perspectives from some of the most respected thinkers of our time, Social Ethics: Morality and Social Policy provides a balanced, engaging introduction to today’s most pressing social and moral problems. This highly popular anthology illuminates the issues at the heart of each contemporary problem and encourages critical, fair-minded examination of varying viewpoints―all presented in the words of those who embrace them. Helpful editorial features include substantial chapter introductions, a summary preceding each selection, discussion questions, (...) and bibliographies for further reading. (shrink)

This book's thirty essays explore philosophically the nature and morality of sexual perversion, cybersex, masturbation, homosexuality, contraception, same-sex marriage, promiscuity, pedophilia, date rape, sexual objectification, teacher-student relationships, pornography, and prostitution. Authors include Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Nagel, Alan Goldman, John Finnis, Sallie Tisdale, Robin West, Alan Wertheimer, John Corvino, Cheshire Calhoun, Jerome Neu, and Alan Soble, among others. A valuable resource for sex researchers as well as undergraduate courses in the philosophy of sex.

In 2006, based on the advice of 50 international experts, the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society and the European Society for Paediatric Endocrinology issued a consensus statement on the nomenclature and management of children who have a phenotype that is neither typical male nor female (Lee et al. 2006). Responding to a decade of criticism over the terminology that had been in place, including such terms as intersex, hermaphrodite, or pseudohermaphrodite, they proposed to call those conditions in which the patient (...) does not have the typical male or female gonads, chromosomes, or anatomy "disorders of sexual development."While this proposed change in nomenclature is helpful, in order to truly effect a .. (shrink)

Natural kinds are often contrasted with other kinds of scientific kinds, especially functional kinds, because of a presumed categorical difference in explanatory value: supposedly, natural kinds can ground explanations, while other kinds of kinds cannot. I argue against this view of natural kinds by examining a particular type of explanation—mechanistic explanation—and showing that functional kinds do the same work there as traditionally recognized natural kinds are supposed to do in “standard” scientific explanations. Breaking down this categorical distinction between traditional natural (...) kinds and other kinds of kinds, I argue, delivers two goods: It provides us with a view of natural kindhood that does justice to the epistemic roles of kinds in scientific explanations. And it allows us to solve a problem that HPC theory, currently one of the more popular accounts of natural kindhood, confronts. (shrink)

The Genesis of God: A Theological Genealogy. By Thomas J.J. Altizer. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993. pp.200.

It describes and explains the patient-centered model examining and evaluating qualitative and quantitative research. It comprehensively covers the evolution and the six interactive components of the patient-centered clinical method, taking the reader through the relationships between the patient and doctor and the patient and clinician. All the editors are professors in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Western Ontario, London, Canada.

Big Ideas for Little Kids includes everything a teacher, a parent, or a college student needs to teach philosophy to elementary school children from picture books. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book explains why it is important to allow young children access to philosophy during primary-school education. Wartenberg also gives advice on how to construct a "learner-centered" classroom, in which children discuss philosophical issues with one another as they respond to open-ended questions by saying whether they agree (...) or disagree with what others have said. (shrink)

This work argues for the need to close the gap between the fields of the philosophy of religion and religious studies. Thomas A. Lewis takes up what, in recent years, has often been seen as a fundamental reason for excluding religious ethics and philosophy of religion from religious studies: their explicit normativity. Against this presupposition, Lewis argues that normativity is pervasive--not unique to ethics and philosophy of religion--and therefore not a reason to exclude them from religious studies. He bridges (...) more philosophical and historical subfields by arguing for the importance of history to the philosophy of religion. He considers the future of religious ethics, explaining that the field as whole should learn from the methodological developments associated with recent work in comparative religious ethics and 'comparative religious ethics' should no longer be conceived as a distinct subfield. The concluding chapter engages broader, post-9/11 arguments about the importance of studying religion, arguing that prominent contemporary notions of 'religious literacy' actually hinder our ability to grasp the significance of religion and impact in the world today. (shrink)

When making decisions, humans can observe many kinds of information about others' activities, but their effects on performance are not well understood. We investigated social learning strategies using a simple problem-solving task in which participants search a complex space, and each can view and imitate others' solutions. Results showed that participants combined multiple sources of information to guide learning, including payoffs of peers' solutions, popularity of solution elements among peers, similarity of peers' solutions to their own, and relative payoffs from (...) individual exploration. Furthermore, performance was positively associated with imitation rates at both the individual and group levels. When peers' payoffs were hidden, popularity and similarity biases reversed, participants searched more broadly and randomly, and both quality and equity of exploration suffered. We conclude that when peers' solutions can be effectively compared, imitation does not simply permit scrounging, but it can also facilitate propagation of good solutions for further cumulative exploration. (shrink)

The ‘music appreciation as contemplation’ paradigm of traditional aesthetics and music education assumes that music exists to be contemplated for itself. The resulting distantiation of music and music education from life creates a legitimation crisis for music education. Failing to make a noteworthy musical difference for society, a politics of advocacy attempts to justify music education. Praxial theories of music, instead, see music as pragmatically social in origin, meaning, and value. A praxial approach to music education stresses that appreciation is (...) seen in use; thus, it seeks to ‘make a difference’ that students and society find musically noteworthy. (shrink)

Non-epistemic values play important roles in classificatory practice, such that philosophical accounts of kinds and classification should be able to accommodate them. Available accounts fail to do so, however. Our aim is to fill this lacuna by showing how non-epistemic values feature in scientific classification, and how they can be incorporated into a philosophical theory of classification and kinds. To achieve this, we present a novel account of kinds and classification, discuss examples from biological classification where non-epistemic values play decisive (...) roles, and show how this account accommodates the role of non-epistemic values. (shrink)

In Civic Liberalism, prominent political theorist Thomas A. Spragens, Jr. asserts that most versions of democratic ideals—libertarianism, liberal egalitarianism, difference liberalism, and the liberalism of fear—lead our polity significantly astray. Spragens offers another alternative. He argues that we should recover the multiple and complex aspirations found within the tradition of democratic liberalism and integrate them into a more compelling public philosophy for our time—or what he calls civic liberalism.

Organizational ecology is commonly seen as a Darwinian research program that seeks to explain the diversity of organizational structures, properties and behaviors as the product of selection in past social environments in a similar manner as evolutionary biology seeks to explain the forms, properties and behaviors of organisms as consequences of selection in past natural environments. We argue that this explanatory strategy does not succeed because organizational ecology theory lacks an evolutionary mechanism that could be identified as the principal cause (...) of organizational diversity. The “evolution” of organizational populations by means of selection, which organizational ecologists put forward as the mechanism responsible for the extant diversity of organizational forms, is not evolution in any proper sense, because organizational populations do not have what it takes to participate in evolutionary processes. This implies that organizational ecology is not a Darwinian research program and that it cannot explain organizational diversity. (shrink)

There are two main inspirations for an analysis of an important post-Śaṇkara text: the recent controversial debate in "Philosophy East and West" concerning the status of anubhava as a pramāṇa for Śaṅkara, and recent scholarship in the epistemology of religious experience that focuses on broader mechanisms of knowing to determine the epistemic significance of religious experience. These projects are combined and extended, and it is argued that the "Vivekacūḍāmaṇi" dances between the poles of "internalism" and "externalism" with considerable social and (...) epistemic consequences on universalism, exclusivism, and the justification of claims that follow upon liberating experience. (shrink)

This chapter examines the status of psychopathy as a scientific kind. I argue that the debate on the question whether psychopathy is a scientific kind as it is conducted at present (i.e., by asking whether psychopathy is a natural kind), is misguided. It relies too much on traditional philosophical views of what natural kinds (or: legitimate scientific kinds) are and how such kinds perform epistemic roles in the sciences. The paper introduces an alternative approach to the question what scientific (or: (...) natural) kinds are. On this alternative approach, the Grounded Functionality Account of natural kinds, psychopathy emerges as a “good” scientific kind that is best understood as a region on a multidimensional space of behaviors rather than as a traditional natural kind. (shrink)

Natural kinds are often contrasted with other kinds of scientific kinds, especially functional kinds, because of a presumed categorical difference in explanatory value: supposedly, natural kinds can ground explanations, while other kinds of kinds cannot. I argue against this view of natural kinds by examining a particular type of explanation—mechanistic explanation—and showing that functional kinds do the same work there as traditionally recognized natural kinds are supposed to do in “standard” scientific explanations. Breaking down this categorical distinction between traditional natural (...) kinds and other kinds of kinds, I argue, delivers two goods: It provides us with a view of natural kindhood that does justice to the epistemic roles of kinds in scientific explanations. And it allows us to solve a problem that HPC theory, currently one of the more popular accounts of natural kindhood, confronts. (shrink)

There are two main inspirations for an analysis of an important post-Śaṇkara text: the recent controversial debate in "Philosophy East and West" concerning the status of anubhava as a pramāṇa for Śaṅkara, and recent scholarship in the epistemology of religious experience that focuses on broader mechanisms of knowing to determine the epistemic significance of religious experience. These projects are combined and extended, and it is argued that the "Vivekacūḍāmaṇi" dances between the poles of "internalism" and "externalism" with considerable social and (...) epistemic consequences on universalism, exclusivism, and the justification of claims that follow upon liberating experience. (shrink)

While evolutionary thinking is increasingly becoming popular in fields of investigation outside the biological sciences, it remains unclear how helpful it is there and whether it actually yields good explanations of the phenomena under study. Here we examine the ontology of a recent approach to applying evolutionary thinking outside biology, the generalized Darwinism approach proposed by Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen. We examine the ontology of populations in biology and in GD, and argue that biological evolutionary theory sets ontological criteria (...) that GD fails to meet. We suggest two options to revise the population concept in GD: reformulating the concept in terms of inheritance and reproduction such that it comes to pick out individuals similar to evolving populations, or trying to build an adequate population concept on a principle of differential retention instead of differential reproduction. 1 Introduction2 Generalized Darwinism2.1 What is generalized Darwinism?2.2 Darwinian principles3 The Ontology of Generalized Darwinism: What Are Populations?3.1 The population concept of generalized Darwinism3.2 The population concept in evolutionary theory4 Locating Evolving Systems in Generalized Darwinism5 Conclusion. (shrink)

Attending closely to Hegel's social, political, and intellectual context, the book begins with Hegel's early concerns with a modern civil religion in the ...

The ‘music appreciation as contemplation’ paradigm of traditional aesthetics and music education assumes that music exists to be contemplated for itself. The resulting distantiation of music and music education from life creates a legitimation crisis for music education. Failing to make a noteworthy musical difference for society, a politics of advocacy attempts to justify music education. Praxial theories of music, instead, see music as pragmatically social in origin, meaning, and value. A praxial approach to music education stresses that appreciation is (...) seen in use; thus, it seeks to ‘make a difference’ that students and society find musically noteworthy. (shrink)

This essay offers a diagnosis of what may be at stake in the current preoccupation with defining science‐based educational research. The diagnosis unfolds in several readings: The first is a charitable and considerate appraisal that draws attention to the fact that advocating experimental methods as important to a science of educational research is not an inherently evil thing to do. Subsequent readings are grimmer, suggesting more deleterious consequences of the science‐based research movement for the entire enterprise of educational practice and (...) research. The central thesis of the essay is that making arguments about method and science the focal point in the current quarrel may be largely beside the point. Instead, educational researchers should join the political and public conversation about the place of educational science in society and about how science is both implicated in and confronts the politics of what counts as knowledge. (shrink)

The twelve essays in this volume aim at providing philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, and legal theorists with an opportunity to examine the cluster of related issues that will need to be addressed as scholars struggle to come to grips with the picture of human agency being pieced together by researchers in the biosciences.

BackgroundDespite rapid growth of the scientific literature, no consensus guidelines have emerged to define the optimal criteria for editors to grade submitted manuscripts. The purpose of this project was to assess the peer reviewer metrics currently used in the surgical literature to evaluate original manuscript submissions.MethodsManuscript grading forms for 14 of the highest circulation general surgery-related journals were evaluated for content, including the type and number of quantitative and qualitative questions asked of peer reviewers. Reviewer grading forms for the seven (...) surgical journals with the higher impact factors were compared to the seven surgical journals with lower impact factors using Fisher’s exact tests.ResultsImpact factors of the studied journals ranged from 1.73 to 8.57, with a median impact factor of 4.26 in the higher group and 2.81 in the lower group. The content of the grading forms was found to vary considerably. Relatively few journals asked reviewers to grade specific components of a manuscript. Higher impact factor journal manuscript grading forms more frequently addressed statistical analysis, ethical considerations, and conflict of interest. In contrast, lower impact factor journals more commonly requested reviewers to make qualitative assessments of novelty/originality, scientific validity, and scientific importance.ConclusionSubstantial variation exists in the grading criteria used to evaluate original manuscripts submitted to the surgical literature for peer review, with differential emphasis placed on certain criteria correlated to journal impact factors. (shrink)

A major issue in philosophical debates on the species problem concerns the opposition between two seemingly incompatible views of the metaphysics of species: the view that species are individuals and the view that species are natural kinds. In two recent papers in this journal, Olivier Rieppel suggested that this opposition is much less deep than it seems at first sight. Rieppel used a recently developed philosophical account of natural kindhood, namely Richard Boyd’s “homeostatic property cluster” theory, to argue that every (...) species taxon can be conceived of as an individual that constitutes the single member of its own specific natural kind. In this paper I criticize Rieppel’s approach and argue that it does not deliver what it is supposed to, namely an account of species as kinds about which generalized statements can be made. (shrink)

Beginning with a Cuban Catholic ritual in Miami, this book takes readers on a momentous theoretical journey toward a new understanding of religion.

Keith DeRose gives an invalid argument for contextualism in “Assertion, Knowledge, and Context.” In section 2.4, entitled “The Argument for Contextualism,” DeRose makes the following remarks. “The knowledge account of assertion provides a powerful argument for contextualism: If the standards for when one is in a position to warrantedly assert that P are the same as those that comprise a truth-condition for ‘I know P,’ then if the former vary with context, so do the latter. In short: The knowledge account (...) of assertion together with the context-sensitivity of assertability yields contextualism about knowledge”. (shrink)