Liberty after Liberalism frees the concept of the active citizen from both the territorial confines of the nation-state and the limits imposed by republican, city-state models. Lawrence Quill advances a theory of global republicanism, one that is able to respond directly to the changing realities of political life. By adopting a "publicly ironic" approach to politics, Quill revives the idea of public freedom within a global context thereby providing an important supplement to contemporary theories of cosmopolitan democracy.

In Nostalgia and Political Theory, Lawrence Quill advocates the central importance of nostalgia as a theoretical response to the 'historic' past and a vertiginous present. He does so by offering detailed analyses of diverse theoretical approaches, from the ancient world to the modern day, in order to reassess the relation between nostalgia and politics. Quill proposes nostalgia as an organizing concept, silently (and not so silently) influencing theorists as they construct critiques of the present or visions of (...) the political future. Nostalgia and Political Theory surveys key contributions to nostalgic and anti-nostalgic thinking from across the political spectrum. Assessing the influence of photography, radio, television, and personal computing on changing conceptions of the past, Quill also considers the relation between populism, nationalism, and nostalgia. By challenging those who would dismiss nostalgia as irrational or a symptom of cultural malaise, Quill concludes by advancing the case for a liberal theory of nostalgia. Nostalgia and Political Theory will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of political theory, social theory, sociology, philosophy, political science, memory studies, and nostalgia studies. (shrink)

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and their application within the field of mental health provision raise issues that cross social, economic, and philosophical boundaries. While Therapeutic A.I. promises to disrupt the current provision of mental health services to reach populations without access to adequate mental health care there are risks. This paper addresses the philosophical problems posed by Therapeutic A.I. I suggest that in the absence of legal guidelines there is a need for philosophical guidance that prioritizes the dignity of (...) clients/consumers. To that end, I advance Rosen’s concept of dignity-as-respectfulness as the most appropriate philosophical principle to guide the application of Therapeutic A.I. (shrink)

In 1982, Neil Postman wrote The Disappearance of Childhood. In that work, Postman recounted the invention of childhood in the modern world and its demise at the hands of, among other things, the electronic media. In Postman’s view, television had transformed education into ‘edutainment.’ The implications of this loss were devastating. Taking up where Postman left off I wish to reexamine his claim and amend and update his thesis by suggesting that, after the latest electronic turn, we now live in (...) societies where a meaningful conception of adulthood is disappearing. It is disappearing, in part, because of an impoverished conception of citizenship. Yet it is additionally undermined because, claims to the ascendancy of the ‘knowledge worker’ notwithstanding, the fundamental connection between education and employment is unraveling. In this climate, the purposes of education are constantly queried and scrutinized as its telos is redefined by criteria external to the practice of education: cost-effectiveness, value-for-money, and so on. I suggest that only be reclaiming a meaningful conception of adulthood can education be defended and only by so doing can individuals hope to understand the world around them. (shrink)

This paper offers some critical thoughts concerning the concept of "civic" or "political" friendship within commercial societies. In response to Badhwar's suggestion (2008) that the "free market" provides the best opportunities for political friendship, I argue that civic philia cannot be reduced to a form of "market-friendship." This was already apparent to early advocates of the market who recognized the fragility of friendship under capitalism. Subsequent attempts to address this dilemma bring into focus the deficiency of market friendships and the (...) concept of friendship more broadly. In conclusion, I argue that Kant's attempt to circumscribe friendship for the sake of "civility" contains the seeds of friendship's renewal. (shrink)

Arendt’s theoretical influence is generally traced to Heidegger and experientially to the traumatic events that occurred in Europe during the Second World War. Here, we suggest that Arendt’s conception of politics may be usefully enriched via a proto-anthropic principle found in Augustine and adopted by Arendt throughout her writings. By appealing to this anthropic principle; that without a spectator there could be no world; a profound connection is made between the ‘cosmic jackpot’ of life in the universe and the uniquely (...) human activity that takes place in the political realm. By making this connection we suggest that solutions present themselves to a central puzzle arising in Arendt’s thought: namely, what it is that people actually do in the political realm. The first solution directly addresses the issue of content: what people talk about in Arendt’s public space. The second addresses the importance of ‘maintaining’ a space of appearances. The third considers the effect of participating in and observing the public domain. Consequently, we conclude that, for Arendt, action is nothing less than the activity of ‘world-making.’. (shrink)

In recent years consciousness has become a significant area of study in the cognitive sciences. The Frontiers of Consciousness is a major interdisciplinary exploration of consciousness. The book stems from the Chichele lectures held at All Souls College in Oxford, and features contributions from a 'who's who' of authorities from both philosophy and psychology. The result is a truly interdisciplinary volume, which tackles some of the biggest and most impenetrable problems in consciousness. The book includes chapters considering the apparent explanatory (...) gap between science and consciousness, our conscious experience of emotions such as fear, and of willed actions by ourselves and others. It looks at subjective differences between two ways in which visual information guides behaviour, and scientific investigation of consciousness in non-human animals. It looks at the challenges that the mind-brain relation presents for clinical practice as well as for theories of consciousness. The book draws on leading research from philosophy, experimental psychology, functional imaging of the brain, neuropsychology, neuroscience, and clinical neurology. Distinctive in its accessibility, authority, and its depth of coverage, Frontiers of Consciousness will be a groundbreaking and influential addition to the consciousness literature. (shrink)

Our autonomy can be compromised by limitations in our capacities, or by the power relationships within which we are embedded. If we insist that real consent requires full autonomy, then virtually no sex will turn out to be consensual. I argue that under conditions of compromised autonomy, consent must be socially and interpersonally scaffolded. To understand consent as an ethically crucial but nonideal concept, we need to think about how it is related to other requirements for ethical sex, such as (...) the ability to exit a situation, trust, safety, broader social support, epistemic standing in the community, and more. (shrink)

Euthanasia and assisted suicide was openly permitted but not technically legal in the Netherlands for decades. In 2002, it was formally legalised through the Termination of Life on Request and Assisted Suicide Review Procedures Act, subject to two main criteria: the patient had to be capable of making voluntary decisions and the patient had to experience unbearable suffering without prospect of improvement. Within the Netherlands, EAS has wide acceptance, and the public in general seems to favour a liberal interpretation of (...) both of these requirements. Physicians are expected to use ‘their own moral compass’ to decide about personal participation, and it is generally possible and permissible to find a substitute physician if the patient meets the legally required criteria but the physician is not comfortable assisting. Over the years, multiple quantitative and qualitative studies have explored the Dutch practice of EAS,1–3 but relatively little is known about the edges of what counts as meeting these criteria and how acceptable the practice is for physicians who participate. The study by Snijdewind et al gives a glimpse of these boundaries and suggests that at least sometimes the criteria are being stretched and adapted to meet the perceived needs of patients, and some participating physicians are relatively uncomfortable with some of the requests with which they are faced.4 Just how rare or common these ‘edgy’ cases are within the larger practice of EAS in the Netherlands cannot be answered by …. (shrink)

City Living is about urban spaces, urban dwellers, and how these spaces and people make, shape, and change one another. More people live in cities than ever before: more than 50% of the earth's people are urban dwellers. As downtown cores gentrify and globalize, they are becoming more diverse than ever, along lines of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sexuality, and age. Meanwhile, we are in the early stages of what seems sure to be a period of intense civil unrest. During (...) such periods, cities generally become the primary sites where tensions and resistance are concentrated, negotiated, and performed. For all of these reasons, understanding cities and contemporary city living is pressing and exciting from almost any disciplinary and political perspective. Quill R Kukla offers the first systematic philosophical investigation of the nature of city life and city dwellers. The book draws on empirical and ethnographic work in geography, anthropology, urban planning, and several other disciplines in order to explore the impact that cities have on their dwellers and that dwellers have on their cities. It begins with a philosophical exploration of spatially embodied agency and of the specific forms of agency and spatiality that are distinctive of urban life. It explores how gentrification is enacted and experienced at the level of embodied agency, arguing that gentrifying spaces are contested territories that shape and are shaped by their dwellers. The book then moves to an exploration of repurposed cities, which are cities materially designed to support one sociopolitical order, but in which that order collapsed, leaving new dwellers to use the space in new ways. Through detailed original ethnography of the repurposed cities of Berlin and Johannesburg, Kukla makes the case that in repurposed cities, we can see vividly how material spaces shape and constrain the agency and experience of dwellers, while dwellers creatively shape the spaces they inhabit in accordance with their needs. The book concludes with a reconsideration of the right to the city, asking what would be involved in creating a city that enabled the agency and flourishing of all its diverse inhabitants. (shrink)

When I say “I know Sarah,” or “I know Berlin,” what sort of knowledge am I claiming? Such knowledge of a particular is, I claim, not reducible to either propositional knowledge-that or to traditional physical know-how. Mere, bare knowledge by acquaintance also does not capture the kind of knowledge being claimed here. Using knowledge of a place as my central example, I argue that this kind of knowledge-of, or “objectual knowledge” as it is sometimes called, is of a distinctive epistemological (...) sort. It is a genre of inherently first-personal aesthetic knowledge, but it also, like know-how, involves active skill. I end by exploring a couple of classic problems in aesthetic epistemology, applied to the case of knowledge-of as active aesthetic knowledge. (shrink)

When I say “I know Sarah,” or “I know Berlin,” what sort of knowledge am I claiming? Such knowledge of a particular is, I claim, not reducible to either propositional knowledge-that or to traditional physical know-how. Mere, bare knowledge by acquaintance also does not capture the kind of knowledge being claimed here. Using knowledge of a place as my central example, I argue that this kind of knowledge-of, or “objectual knowledge” as it is sometimes called, is of a distinctive epistemological (...) sort. It is a genre of inherently first-personal aesthetic knowledge, but it also, like know-how, involves active skill. I end by exploring a couple of classic problems in aesthetic epistemology, applied to the case of knowledge-of as active aesthetic knowledge. (shrink)

In Games: Agency as Art, Thi Nguyen has given us a deep and compelling picture of agency as much more layered, volatile, environment-dependent and discontinuous than it appears in most philosophical accounts. Games ‘inscribe … forms of agency into artifactual vessels’.1 1 When we play a game, we take up a form of agency, including a set of motivations, values and goals, which has been artificially provided by the game. Our purpose in playing, in the kinds of gameplay that interest (...) Nguyen, is to have the aesthetic experience of first-personally exercising the kind of agency sculpted by the game. As we move in and out of gameplay, we take up and drop values, motives, and goals that are provided to us by the game. Games can expand our autonomy and the richness of life by allowing us to practice different forms of agency, taking on different ends for the aesthetic experience of striving to meet them. While I am on board with these central moves of Nguyen’s book, in this essay I will argue that the situation is substantially messier than Nguyen portrays it as being. Game play, I will claim, is inextricably embedded and entangled in its larger social, material and cultural context. Conversely, I will argue, everyday life is routinely sculpted in ways Nguyen claims are distinctive of games. (shrink)

I argue that the concept of disease serves such radically different strategic purposes for different kinds of stakeholders that coming up with a unified philosophical definition of disease is hopeless. Instead, I defend a radically pluralist, pragmatist account of when it is appropriate to mobilize the concept of disease. I argue that it is appropriate to categorize a condition as a disease when it serves legitimate strategic goals to at least partially medicalize that condition, and when the condition is pathological (...) from inside the epistemology and metaphysics of medicine. While some conditions, like pancreatic cancer, are legitimate diseases from all stakeholders’ points of view and in any context, and while other conditions, like homosexuality, are not diseases from any legitimate point of view, there is a range of interesting, messy cases—including Deafness, autism, pre-hypertension, infertility, and ADHD, for example—whose disease status is irreducibly context-dependent and under contest. (shrink)

Voluntary active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide remain technically illegal in the Netherlands, but the practices are openly tolerated provided that physicians adhere to carefully constructed guidelines. Harsh criticism of the Dutch practice by authors in the United States and Great Britain has made achieving a balanced understanding of its clinical, moral, and policy implications very difficult. Similar practice patterns probably exist in the United States, but they are conducted in secret because of a more uncertain legal and ethical climate. In (...) this manuscript, we plan to compare end-of-life care in the United States and the Netherlands with regard to underlying values, justifications, and practices. We will explore the risks and benefits of each system for a real patient who was faced with a common end-of-life clinical dilemma, and close with challenges for public policies in both countries. (shrink)

Traditional moral explorations of sexual violation are dyadic: they focus on the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim, considered in relative isolation. We argue that the moral texture of sexual violation and its fallout only shows up once we see acts of sexual violation as acts that occur within an ecosystem. An ecosystem is made up of dwellers and an environment embedded in a broad, thick, interdependent, and relatively stable web of norms, practices, environments, material and institutional structures. We (...) argue that many of the important and interesting harms wrought by sexual violation can only be understood as ecological harms. To illustrate this, we focus on sexual violations that occur within a specific type of ecosystem, namely an academic department with a graduate program. We examine the possible damaging effects of sexual violation on the ecology of a department. We also consider what makes an ecosystem resilient and relatively able to self-repair, and how sexual violation within an ecosystem may weaken its self-repairing resources. We show that looking at sexual violation through this ecological lens lets us identify harms that are otherwise obscured or difficult to locate. (shrink)

Examines the theories of Socrates, Kant, Dewey, Piaget, and others to explore the implications of Socrates' question "what is a virtuous man, and what is a virtuous school and society which educates virtuous men.".

In this issue of The Journal of Medical Ethics, xxx and colleagues report a randomized trial of the influence of default options on delivery room management of an extremely premature infant. They report that among respondents to the hypothetical vignette, those who received the resuscitation default were significantly more likely to choose resuscitation compared with those who were told that the default was comfort care. While the results warrant attention and further investigation, several methodological shortcomings limit the conclusions that can (...) be drawn from this study. (shrink)

Voluntary active euthanasia (VAE) and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) remain technically illegal in the Netherlands, but the practices are openly tolerated provided that physicians adhere to carefully constructed guidelines. Harsh criticism of the Dutch practice by authors in the United States and Great Britain has made achieving a balanced understanding of its clinical, moral, and policy implications very difficult. Similar practice patterns probably exist in the United States, but they are conducted in secret because of a more uncertain legal and ethical (...) climate. In this manuscript, we plan to compare end-of-life care in the United States and the Netherlands with regard to underlying values, justifications, and practices. We will explore the risks and benefits of each system for a real patient who was faced with a common end-of-life clinical dilemma, and close with challenges for public policies in both countries. (shrink)

Palliative care and hospice should be the standards of care for all terminally ill patients. The first place for clinicians to go when responding to a request for assisted death is to ensure the adequacy of palliative interventions. Although such interventions are generally effective, a small percentage of patients will suffer intolerably despite receiving state-of-the-art palliative care, and a few of these patients will request a physician-assisted death. Five potential “last resort” interventions are available under these circumstances: (1) accelerating opioids (...) for pain or dyspnea; (2) stopping potentially life-prolonging therapies; (3) voluntarily stopping eating and drinking; (4) palliative sedation (potentially to unconsciousness); and (5) physician-assisted death. Patient, family, and clinicians should search for the least harmful way to respond to intolerable end-of-life suffering in ways that are effective and also respect the values of the major participants. A system that allows an open response to such cases ultimately protects patients by ensuring a full clinical evaluation and search for alternative responses, while reinforcing the need to be responsive and to not abandon. (shrink)

Discussions of uptake in the philosophy of language focus our attention on what role other people have in fixing the import, success, influence and social life of a speech act. The general idea in most discussions of uptake, despite their differences and disagreements, is whether and how an audience is cooperative or uncooperative when a speaker plays a critical role in how speech acts function. This essay is primarily concerned with “refusals”, or uncooperative uptakes. The essay analyzes the varieties of (...) refusal; when refusal is possible why it might be challenging and when it is ethical. It examines how and when the uptake of a speech act can constitute the pragmatic form and force of the original speech act. (shrink)

In my career as a primary care physician and as a palliative care consultant, I have assisted many patients to die with their full consent. None of them wanted to die, and all would have chosen other paths had their disease not been so severe and irreversible. To a person, none of these patients thought of themselves as “suicidal,” and they would have found that label preposterous and demeaning. In fact, the kind of personal disintegration that the label implies is (...) just what is trying to be prevented by those choosing this possibility. So on behalf of patients who have chosen this option, I reject the title of this debate as it unnecessarily tars the discussion with the suggestion of mental illness. In my primary care practice, I have also met many patients who were “suicidal” in the mental health sense of the word, and rest assured I have assisted none of them to die. In fact, I have at times had them involuntarily hospitalized to prevent them from carrying out their wishes. (shrink)

Introduction: Fundamental Ontology as a "Fundamental Ethics" In his "Letter on Humanism" Martin Heidegger claims that the fundamental ontology he works out ...

Cultural narratives shape how we think about the world, including how we decide when the end of life begins. Hospice care has become an integral part of the end‐of‐life care in the United States, but as it has grown, its policies and practices have also imposed cultural narratives, like those associated with the “six‐month rule” that the majority of the end of life takes place in the final six months of life. This idea is embedded in policies for a range (...) of care practices and reimbursement processes, even though six months is not always a meaningful marker. In the case of people living with advanced dementia, six months is both too early in the trajectory to facilitate conversations and too late in the trajectory to ensure decision‐making capacity. This essay encourages scholars and policy‐makers to consider how cultural narratives may limit what they think is possible in care for people living with dementia. (shrink)

I propose that primary conscious awareness arises from synchronized activity in dendrites of neurons in dorsal thalamic nuclei, mediated particularly by inhibitory interactions with thalamic reticular neurons. In support, I offer four evidential pillars: consciousness is restricted to the results of cortical computations; thalamus is the common locus of action of brain injury in vegetative state and of general anesthetics; the anatomy and physiology of the thalamus imply a central role in consciousness; neural synchronization is a neural correlate of consciousness.

According to the biopsychosocial model, developed by the late Dr. George Engel, how physicians approach patients and the problems they present is very much ...

Maps provide us with an easily recognizable version of the new demarcation problem: On the one hand, we are all familiar with graphics and maps that unacceptably distort our perceptions without being technically inaccurate or fictive; indeed there are whole websites groups devoted to curating such images for fun. On the other hand, there are multiple unavoidably value-laden choices that must be made in the production of any map. Producing a map requires choosing everything from the colors and thicknesses of (...) the lines, the scale, the projection system, the categories and parameters represented, and much more. There is no neutral default for any of these choices, and all of them shape what information the map communicates. All the visual choices involved in producing a map enable some information to be conveyed at the cost of hiding or distorting other information, as map makers themselves routinely acknowledge and discuss. Hence there are no straightforward answers to questions about the line between distortion and legitimate representational choices. I explore three distinctive kinds of epistemic risks in map-making that generate special versions of the demarcation problem, which I dub aesthetic risk, categorization risk, and simplification risk. I argue that in each case, even good maps – maps that are accurate and epistemically valuable – have the potential to mislead us. I end by looking at maps that offer special epistemic benefits by making clear their own lack of value-neutrality while still being accurate and epistemically fecund. (shrink)

This paper obtains the weak completeness and decidability results for standard systems of modal logic using models built from formulas themselves. This line of work began with Fine (Notre Dame J. Form. Log. 16:229-237, 1975). There are two ways in which our work advances on that paper: First, the definition of our models is mainly based on the relation Kozen and Parikh used in their proof of the completeness of PDL, see (Theor. Comp. Sci. 113-118, 1981). The point is to (...) develop a general model-construction method based on this definition. We do this and thereby obtain the completeness of most of the standard modal systems, and in addition apply the method to some other systems of interest. None of the results use filtration, but in our final section we explore the connection. (shrink)

Originally published in 1986. The theory of events presented is one that construes events to be concrete particulars; and it embodies an attempt to take seriously the idea that events are the changes that objects undergo when they change. The theory is about what an event really is, about when events are identical, about what properties events have essentially, and about what relations events bear to entities of other kinds. In addition, this book contains an account of what philosophers are (...) up to when they provide reasons for thinking that objects belonging to metaphysically interesting kinds exist. It also gives an account of the role of criteria of identity in such reasons, and an account of what criteria of identity must be like in order for them to be able to play such a role. (shrink)