Plural predication is a pervasive part of ordinary language. We can say that some people are fifty in number, are surrounding a building, come from many countries, and are classmates. These predicates can be true of some people without being true of any one of them; they are non-distributive predications. However, the apparatus of modern logic does not allow a place for them. Thomas McKay here explores the enrichment of logic with non-distributive plural predication and quantification. His book (...) will be of great interest to philosophers of language, linguists, metaphysicians, and logicians. (shrink)

Anyone who admits the existence of composite objects allows a certain kind of coincidence, coincidence of a thing with its parts. I argue here that a similar sort of coincidence, coincidence of a thing with the stuff that constitutes it, should be equally acceptable. Acknowledgement of this is enough to solve the traditional problem of the coincidence of a statue and the clay or bronze it is made of. In support of this, I offer some principles for the persistence of (...) stuff that are general, not relying on the particular features of a kind of stuff in the way that principles for the persistence for a thing would. This provides a non-arbitrary grounding for stuff that is independent of the conditions on the nature and persistence of things the stuff composes. The principles also provide a general basis for responding to other questions about coincident stuff. (shrink)

This paper mentions several different sorts of "essentialism," and examines various senses in which quantified modal logic is "committed to" the most troublesome kind of essentialism. It is argued that essentialism is neither provable, Nor entailed by any contingently true non-Modal sentence. But quantified modal logic is committed to the meaningfulness of essentialism. This sort of commitment may be made innocuous by requiring that essentialism simply be made logically false; some of the consequences of taking this line are explored.

In studying logic, one learns how to establish that a conclusion follows from a set of premises. Those arguments that exhibit one of the valid forms of the deductive system under study are valid. There may be questions about what forms are exhibited by various arguments - Is this English conditional really truth-functional? Is this disjunction really inclusive? Are the English predicates used with uniform meaning? - but none of these problems undermine the claim that if an argument exhibits a (...) valid form of a system for deductive logic, then that argument is valid.When we move on to study invalidity, however, we find that the situation is not parallel. Every argument is an instance of some invalid argument forms, and we cannot say that every instance of every invalid form is invalid. (shrink)

This paper critiques the standard presentation of arguments from analogy in logic textbooks and offers an alternative way of understanding them which renders them both more plausible and more easily evaluated for their strength. The typical presentation presents analogies as inductive arguments in which a set of properties, known to be shared by two logical domains, supports an inference about a further property, known to belong to one domain and inferred to belong to the target domain. But framed in these (...) terms, the strength of the argument depends entirely on the relevance of the known shared properties to the inferred shared property, meaning the argument rests on an unstated assumption. Against this view, the author maintains that arguments from analogy are figurative ways of addressing properties of the target logical domain. By comparing or contrasting two logical domains, analogies articulate a general principle which illustrates something difficult to imagine or to describe literally about the target domain. Analogies can be reformulated and evaluated as deductive arguments on this view, with their chief logical import being the inquiry they incite in students as to whether the general principle is true and sufficiently general to apply to the target domain. (shrink)

Students of culture have been increasingly concerned with the ways in which cultural values are 'inscribed' on the body. These essays go beyond this passive construal of the body to a position in which embodiment is understood as the existential condition of cultural life. From this standpoint embodiment is reducible neither to representations of the body, to the body as an objectification of power, to the body as a physical entity or biological organism, nor to the body as an inalienable (...) centre of individual consciousness. This more sensate and dynamic view is applied by the contributors to a variety of topics, including the expression of emotion, the experience of pain, ritual healing, dietary customs, and political violence. Their purpose is to contribute to a phenomenological theory of culture and self - an anthropology that is not merely about the body, but from the body. (shrink)

What today divides analytical from Continental philosophy? This paper argues that the present divide is not what it once was. Today, the divide concerns the styles in which philosophers deal with intellectual problems: solving them, pressing them, resolving them, or dissolving them. Using ‘the boundary problem’, or ‘the democratic paradox’, as an example, we argue for two theses. First, the difference between most analytical and most Continental philosophers today is that Continental philosophers find intelligible two styles of dealing with problems (...) that most analytical philosophers find unintelligible: pressing them and resolving them. Second, when it comes to a genuine divide in which not understanding the other side’s basic philosophical purposes combines with disagreement on fundamental questions of doctrine, the only such divide today is that between those analytical philosophers who tend to solve problems and those Continental philosophers who tend to press problems. It is among these subgroups that there is a real philosophical divide today. So the analytical–Continental divide is more a matter of style than of substance; but as we try to show, differences in style shape differences over substance. (shrink)

There are doubtless many with personal experience of suffering, or of comforting others in distress, who would agree with Milton thus far that philosophic argument is powerless to satisfy those who in their anguish ask the question ‘Why did it happen to me?’ Yet to think so is to underestimate both the necessity and the power of reason: clarity of mind and the disposition to argue are commonly enhanced rather than diminished by suffering; and if reason is an essential part (...) of man's nature, it should serve him, if anywhere, in the trials of life. We have every justification, therefore, despite common opinion, for seeking a rational answer to the question proposed. It must, however, be admitted at the outset that there is no direct answer to the question which can both withstand critical scrutiny and bring genuine comfort to the afflicted, an answer, that is, which accepts the question as it stands with its attendant presuppositions; but there is an indirect answer, which, precisely by rejecting one or more of these presuppositions and restating the question, can indeed satisfy these two requirements. Before such an answer can be outlined, however, the question in its traditional form must be examined and the traditional answers to it critically reviewed. (shrink)

There is an unresolved stand-off between ontological naturalism and phenomenological thought regarding the question whether normativity can be reduced to physical entities. While the ontological naturalist line of thought is well established in analytic philosophy, the phenomenological reasoning for the irreducibility of normativity has been largely left ignored by proponents of naturalism. Drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Schütz, Stein and others, I reconstruct a phenomenological argument according to which natural science (as the foundation of naturalization projects) is itself (...) a part of the essentially normative life-world to the effect that ontological naturalism faces a bootstrapping problem. I aim to demonstrate that this stand-off is grounded in a deep disagreement about the possibility of reduction. I close by arguing that this deep disagreement turns on the question which conception about the nature of (natural) science is true. This result pits a perfectionist model of science (implied by ontological naturalism) against a pragmatist conception of science (in favour of the phenomenological argument). The motivation is that transforming the disagreement about the controversial principle into a disagreement about conceptions of science may help to offer a foundation for different attempts at solving the stand-off. (shrink)

Under present accounting rules, lessees frequently structure contracts for leased assets, in situations where they enjoy benefits similar to outright ownership, in a way that keeps both the leased assets and related liabilities off their books. This method of accounting creates off-balance sheet financing and is called operating lease accounting. The paper debates the ethicality of intentionally structuring lease contracts to avoid disclosing leased asset and liability amounts and describes the “slippery slope” of rule-based accounting for synthetic leases and special (...) purpose entities, that, in the author’s opinion, led to the accounting debacles at Enron and other companies. The ethical intent that is implicit in the Securities and Exchange Commission and Financial Accounting Standards Board regulations is discussed and suggestions for improving the ethicality of financial reporting are provided. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America. by Thomas R. Cole.

It was William Blake's insight that the Christian churches, by inverting the Incarnation and the dialectical vision of Paul, have repressed the body, divided God from creation, substituted judgment for grace, and repudiated imagination, compassion, and the original apocalyptic faith of early Christianity. Blake's prophetic poetry thus contributes to the renewal of Christian ethics by a process of subversion and negation of Christian moral, ecclesiastical, and theological traditions, which are recognized precisely as inversions of Jesus, and therefore as instances of (...) the forms of evil that God-in-Christ overcomes through Incarnation, reversing the Fall. Blake's great epic poems, particularly Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem (1804–20), embody his heterodox representation of the final coincidence of Christ and Satan through which, at last, all things are made new. (shrink)

While Wittgenstein’s work has been extensively investigated in relation to many other important and influential philosophers, there is very little scholarly work that positively investigates the relationship between the work of Wittgenstein and Wilhelm Dilthey. To the contrary, some commentators like Hacker (2001a) suggest that Dilthey’s work (and that of other hermeneuticists) simply pales or is obsolete in comparison to Wittgenstein’s own insights. Against such assessments, this article posits that Wittgenstein’s and Dilthey’s thought most crucially intersects at the related topics (...) of scientism on the one hand and scientific and philosophical method on the other. In reconstructing Dilthey’s conceptions of understanding versus explaining and central points of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, it becomes apparent that they share a staunch rejection of scientism and use the notion of understanding as a means to prevent methodologies from the natural sciences encroaching onto the human sciences (in Dilthey’s case) and philosophy (in Wittgenstein’s case). Notwithstanding a number of central ways in which these thinkers differ, this article closes by suggesting that there is some evidence according to which Wittgenstein, like Dilthey, can reasonably be understood as championing some central tenets of the hermeneutical tradition. (shrink)

Although several theories of online syntactic processing assume the parallel activation of multiple syntactic representations, evidence supporting simultaneous activation has been inconclusive. Here, the continuous and non‐ballistic properties of computer mouse movements are exploited, by recording their streaming x, y coordinates to procure evidence regarding parallel versus serial processing. Participants heard structurally ambiguous sentences while viewing scenes with properties either supporting or not supporting the difficult modifier interpretation. The curvatures of the elicited trajectories revealed both an effect of visual context (...) and graded competition between simultaneously active syntactic representations. The results are discussed in the context of 3 major groups of theories within the domain of sentence processing. (shrink)

Plagiarism and other transgressions of the norms of academic integrity appear to be a persistent problem among upper secondary students. Numerous surveys have revealed high levels of infringement of what appear to be clearly stated rules. Less attention has been given to students’ understanding of academic integrity, and to the potential misconceptions and false beliefs that may make it difficult for them to comply with existing rules and handle complex real-life situations.In this paper we report findings from a survey of (...) European upper secondary students’ views on issues relating to academic integrity. We relate these findings to the students’ training about academic integrity, self-reported level of questionable behavior and country of study.A total of 1654 students at 51 institutions located in 6 European countries participated in the study. The participants generally believed they had a good understanding of the rules applying to them and knew how to behave in compliance with norms of academic integrity. The results indicate, however, that often, in practice, this belief was mistaken. Many students had an inadequate understanding of core elements of academic integrity. They were uncertain about how to act, and they struggled in the handling of complex situations that require context-sensitive judgement. While some differences between countries were identified, they were modest and exhibited no clear pattern. Our results also suggest that reducing students’ level of uncertainty and, to a lesser degree, improving their level of knowledge could lead them to engage less in certain types of questionable behaviours. Surprisingly, the effect of academic training is modest and ambiguous. The study also confirms that perception of peer behaviour has the strongest association with student engagement in questionable behaviours. Thus, academic integrity at the upper secondary level cannot be explained simply in terms of individual ethics or knowledge. (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu was one of the most influential social thinkers of the past half-century, known for both his theoretical and methodological contributions and his wide-ranging empirical investigations into colonial power in Algeria, the educational system in France, the forms of state power, and the history of artistic and scientific fields-among many other topics. Despite the depth and breadth of his influence, however, Bourdieu's legacy has yet to be assessed in a comprehensive manner. The Oxford Handbook of Pierre Bourdieu fills this (...) gap by offering a sweeping overview of Bourdieu's impact on the social sciences and humanities. Thomas Medvetz and Jeffrey J. Sallaz have gathered a diverse array of leading scholars who place Bourdieu's work in the wider scope of intellectual history, trace the development of his thought, offer original interpretations and critical engagement, and discuss the likely impact of his ideas on future social research. The Handbook highlights Bourdieu's contributions to established areas of research-including the study of markets, the law, cultural production, and politics-and illustrates how his concepts have generated new fields and objects of study. (shrink)

When an individual facing intractable pain is given an estimate of a few months to live, does hastening death become a viable and legitimate alternative for willing patients? Has the time come for physicians to do away with the traditional notion of healthcare as maintaining or improving physical and mental health, and instead accept their own limitations by facilitating death when requested? The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge held the 2013 Varsity Medical Debate on the motion “This House Would Legalise (...) Assisted Dying”. This article summarises the key arguments developed over the course of the debate. We will explore how assisted dying can affect both the patient and doctor; the nature of consent and limits of autonomy; the effects on society; the viability of a proposed model; and, perhaps most importantly, the potential need for the practice within our current medico-legal framework. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Definitions of “Technology” Problems of Culture Dilemmas of Determinism References and Further Reading.

This paper will discuss the origin of the human mind, and the qualitative discontinuity between human and animal cognition. We locate the source of this discontinuity within the language faculty, and thus take the origin of the mind to depend on the origin of the language faculty. We will look at one such proposal put forward by Hauser et al. (Science 298:1569-1579, 2002), which takes the evolution of a Merge trait (recursion) to solely explain the differences between human and animal (...) cognition. We argue that the Merge-only hypothesis fails to account for various aspects of the human mind. Instead we propose that the process of lexicalisation is also unique to humans, and that this process is key to explaining the vast qualitative differences. We will argue that lexicalisation is a process through which concepts are reformatted to be able to take on semantic features and to take part in grammatical relations. These are both necessary conditions for a grammatical mind and the increased ability to express conceptual content. We therefore propose a possible explanans for the discontinuity between humans and animals, namely that merge with lexicalisation (and consequently semantic features and grammatical relations) is a minimal requirement for the human mind. (shrink)

As engineering applications require management of ever larger volumes of data, ontologies offer the potential to capture, manage, and augment data with the capability for automated reasoning and semantic querying. Unfortunately, considerable barriers hinder wider deployment of ontologies in engineering. Key among these is lack of a shared top-level ontology to unify and organise disparate aspects of the field and coordinate co-development of orthogonal ontologies. As a result, many engineering ontologies are limited to their scope, and functionally difficult to extend (...) or interoperate with other engineering ontologies. This paper demonstrates how the use of a top-level ontology, specifically the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), greatly facilitates interoperability of multiple engineering-related ontologies. We constructed a system of formal linked ontologies by re-engineering legacy ontologies to be conformant with BFO and developing new BFO-conformant ontologies to capture knowledge in the engineering design, enterprise, human factors, manufacturing, and application domain of additive manufacturing. The resulting Integrated Framework for Additively Manufactured Products (IFAMP), including the body knowledge instantiated on its basis, serve as the basis for a proposed Design with Additive Manufacturing Method (DWAM), which we believe can support the design of innovative products with semantically enhanced ideation tools and enhanced access to application domain knowledge. The method and its facilitation through the ontological framework are demonstrated using a case study in medicine. (shrink)

We assess the current state of sociology of religion, particularly in the United States, for the extent to which a “critical sociology of religion” currently exists and how it might look if it did. We focus particular attention on two areas of inquiry: religion and health; and religion and violence.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE EUCHARISTIC THEOLOGIES OF LAUDA SION AND THOMAS AQUINAS'S SUMMA THEOLOGIAE THOMAS J. BELL Emory University Atlanta, Georgia MANY works associated with Thomas Aquinas stand both the Office and Mass for the Feast of Corpus Christi.1 The earliest witness to this association comes from two of Thomas's Dominican brothers and younger contemporaries, Tolomeo of Lucca and William of Tocco. Around 1317 Tolomeo wrote in his (...) Historia Ecclesiastica: " Thomas composed [the Corpus Christi Office] in full, including the lessons and all the parts to be recited by day or night; the Mass, too, and whatever has to be sung on the day." 2 William, in his Historia beati Thomae completed around 1320, lists the liturgy of Corpus Christi among Thomas's works and informs us that Thomas wrote the liturgy " at the request of Pope Urban [IV]." 3 It is known that on August 11, 1264, Urban, in the bull Transiturus, declared that the Feast of Corpus Christi was to be celebrated throughout Christendom according to a "new, Roman," liturgy.4 Thomas had returned from Paris to Italy, his 1 This does not mean that Thomas created the liturgy for the feast de nova. Rather it means that Thomas selected and combined older elements from the Scriptures, the Fathers, and existing liturgies, only venturing to write from scratch those hymns and prayers necessary for expressing the theological and devotional views central to the Feast of Corpus Christi. In other words, Thomas wrote or pieced together texts " proper " to the feast and united them with the " ordinary " texts of the Mass and Office. 2 James A. Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d'Aquino: His Life, Thought and Works (Washington, D.C., 1974), p. 177. a Ibid., pp. 132, 177. 4 Ibid., pp. 179, 183. For a partial translation of the bull Transiturus see also Darwell Stone, A History of the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (London, 1909), vol. 1, 344-46. This "new, Roman" liturgy promulgated by Urban IV was, indeed, a new 163 164 THOMAS J. BELL homeland, five years before the bull was published. Furthermore, by 1264 he had developed a "warm friendship" with Urban, whom we know to have commissioned Thomas to write several works between 1261 and 1265.5 These facts have led most scholars since the early fourteenth century to conclude that Urban's "new" liturgy was the work of Thomas.6 In recent years, however, Cyrille Lambot has questioned whether Thomas wrote or compiled the liturgy promulgated by Urban. He has noted that Reginald of Piperno, Thomas's amanuensis and companion from 1259 to 1274, did not include the liturgy for Corpus Christi in his list of Thomas's works. Moreover, the Dominican Order, like most Orders and dioceses, did not adopt Urban's liturgy for the Feast of Corpus Christi until 1317, when John XXII required its use throughout Western Christendom.7 If Thomas had written the liturgy, argues liturgy composed for the celebration of Corpus Christi. Around 1246 a certain John, a religious of Mont-Cornillon, had compiled a liturgy for the " Body of the Lord " that was in place throughout the diocese of Liege. Being so impressed by the solemnities of the Liege eucharistic celebration, Hugh of Saint-Cher, a Dominican and the cardinal legate of Germany, declared in 1252 that the feast of Corpus Christi was to be celebrated throughout the territory under his leadership. Jacques Pantaleon, the future Urban IV, knew the solemnities of Liege from his time as the city's archdeacon. It seems that upon his election as Pope, Urban was urged by many people to establish the Feast throughout Christendom. Eventually he did this with the publication of the bull Transiturus. For more details, see Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d'Aquino, pp. 178-79. 0 Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d'Aquino, p. 147. 6 The liturgy for the Feast of Corpus Christi that is associated with Thomas is not identical with the one currently used in both the Roman rite and Dominican rite. The modern texts for the Feast reflect the liturgical reforms that have occurred since Thomas's day. Notwithstanding these reforms, the Mass for the Feast (Cibavit eos), which includes Lauda Sion, has for the most part... (shrink)

Although Bernard Lonergan is known primarily for his cognitional theory and theological methodology, he long sought to formulate a modern philosophy of history free of progressive and Marxist biases. Yet he never addressed this in any single work, and his reflections on the subject are scattered in various writings. In this pioneering work, Thomas McPartland shows how Lonergan’s overall philosophical position offers a fresh and comprehensive basis for considering historiography. Taking Lonergan’s philosophy of historical existence into the realm of (...) an epistemological philosophy of history, he demonstrates how the philosopher’s approach builds on the actual performance of historians and, as a result, integrates the insights of historical specialists into a framework of functional complementarity. McPartland draws on all of Lonergan’s philosophical writing—as well as on the vast literature of historiography—to detail Lonergan’s notions of historical method, historical objectivity, and historical knowledge. Along the way, he explains what Lonergan means by hermeneutics; by historical description, explanation, ideal-types, and narrative; by evaluative and dialectical analyses; and how these elements are all functionally related to each other. He also delineates the defining features of psychohistory, cultural history, intellectual history, history of ideas, and history of philosophy, indicating how these disciplines play complementary roles in the critical encounter with the past. Ultimately, McPartland argues that Lonergan has established the principles of a historical discipline—the history of consciousness—that weaves together a philosophy of consciousness with rigorous historical research to grasp long-term trends resulting from “differentiations of consciousness.” His work offers a distinct perspective on historical method that takes historical objectivity seriously while providing new insight into the thought of this important philosopher. (shrink)

Since the 19th century, innocence has been a hallmark of childhood. The innocence of children is seen as both a sanctity worth defending and a feature that excuses the unavoidable mistakes of adolescence. While beneficial in many settings, notions of childhood innocence are often entangled with values judgements. Inherent in innocence is the notion that that which we are innocent of is undesirable. Further, attributing innocence to some implies the tolerability of blame for others. This has unique implications in a (...) medical setting. This essay explores the implications of espousing the innocence of paediatric patients. Ultimately, because attribution of innocence is both prone to bias and rooted in the same framework as blame, it degrades patient-centred care and compromises the patient–provider relationship. I argue that avoiding such characterisations may allow providers to more effectively promote paediatric health. (shrink)