Book reviewed in this article: Ethical Dilemmas and Social Science Research. By Paul Davidson Reynolds.

This book contains programmatic essays that focus on broad-ranging proposals for re-envisioning a discipline of comparative philosophy of religions. It also contains a number of case studies focussing on the interpretation of particular religio-historical data from comparatively oriented philosophical perspectives.

During spring of 2020, environmental ethics students at a medium sized metropolitan university in the Southeastern United States were asked to read and comment on classic essays from Robert Heilbroner and Garrett Hardin, essays regarding our responsibilities towards future generations. In general, students seemed to hold more with Heilbroner’s stance, which left room for compassion, while condemning Hardin’s harshness. Students were then asked to provide written responses stating whether they would personally sacrifice their eventual retirement in order to stop COVID-19 (...) and the reasons for their views. Responses were analyzed and categorized to detect inconsistencies between students’ described views and their willingness to personally sacrifice for the sake of others. Almost 72% of respondents asserted that they would be willing to intervene to stop the novel coronavirus by sacrificing their retirement. A fair number of respondents that stated they would sacrifice said that they would do so because they would benefit personally from the avoidance of guilt and/or from the opportunity to feel good about themselves, suggesting that even seemingly selfless behaviors are sometimes driven by egoistic motivations. Forty percent of all respondents held inconsistent views. Most notably, a number of students condemned Hardin for his lack of compassion, yet were not willing to act compassionately themselves. (shrink)

Over the past 50 years, academic-industrial collaborations and technology transfer have played an increasingly prominent role in the biomedical sciences. These relationships can speed the delivery of innovative drugs and medical technologies to clinical practice, creating important public health benefits as well as income for universities and their faculty. At the same time, they raise ethical concerns, particularly when research involves human subjects in clinical trials. Lapses in oversight of industry sponsored clinical trials at universities, and especially patient deaths in (...) a number of trials, have brought these issues into the public spotlight and have led the federal government to intensify its oversight of clinical research. The leadership of Harvard Medical School convened a group of leaders in academic medicine to formulate guidelines on individual financial conflicts of interest. They and other groups are working to formulate a national consensus on this issue. (shrink)

We extend the relational algebra of Chin and Tarski so that it is multisorted or, as we prefer, typed. Each type supports a local Boolean algebra outfitted with a converse operator. From Lyndon, we know that relation algebras cannot be represented as proper relation algebras where a proper relation algebra has binary relations as elements and the algebra is singly-typed. Here, the intensional conjunction, which was to represent relational composition in Chin and Tarski, spans three different local algebras, thus the (...) term distributed in the title. Since we do not rely on proper relation algebras, we are free to re-express the algebras as typed. In doing so, we allow many different intensional conjunction operators. We construct a typed logic over these algebras, also known as heterogeneous algebras of Birkhoff and Lipson. The logic can be seen as a form of relevance logic with a classical negation connective where the Routley-Meyer star operator is reified as a converse connective in the logic. Relevance logic itself is not typed but our work shows how it can be made so. Some of the properties of classical relevance logic are weakened from Routley-Meyer’s version which is too strong for a logic over relation algebras. (shrink)

"The book as a whole seeks to reinvigorate an academic discipline (philosophy of religion) which has fallen on hard times, and to do so by building a bridge between philosophy and empirical-historical studies of religion. The topic is both significant and timely. Too long the empiricists have been inadequately sophisticated philosophically and too long the philosophers have ignored historical data both in its breadth and depth. In not only calling for bridges between these disciplines, but actually building some, the work (...) makes a significant contribution to both." -- Alan Miller "This book is useful because it provides some insights both into the ways scholars think about various aspects of religious behavior, and also information about important features of such behavior. Both myth and philosophy are topics of great significance, and have been discussed by many philosophers and historians of religions and some anthropologists. An interesting set of questions about the nature of religion, and nature of philosophy and their relationships (and also about the nature of myth and its relationship to philosophy) is emerging at the forefront of academic discussions in departments of religion, departments of philosophy, and departments of anthropology. It contains some well-written and conceptually interesting essays." -- E. Thomas Lawson. (shrink)

Sir Joshua Reynolds RA FRS FRSA (1723-1792) was an important and influential 18th century English painter, specialising in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting which depended on idealisation of the imperfect. Showing an early interest in art, Reynolds was apprenticed in 1740 to the fashionable portrait painter Thomas Hudson, with whom he remained until 1743. From 1749 to 1752, he spent over two years in Italy, where he studied the Old Masters and acquired a taste (...) for the "Grand Style." Unfortunately, whilst in Rome, Reynolds suffered a severe cold which left him partially deaf and, as a result, he began to carry a small ear trumpet with which he is often pictured. From 1753 until the end of his life he lived in London, his talents gaining recognition soon after his arrival in France. He was one of the founders and first President of the Royal Academy. George III appreciated his merits and knighted him in 1769. He was one of the earliest members of the Royal Society of Arts, helped found the Society of Artists, and, with Gainsborough, established the Royal Academy of Arts as a spin-off organisation. (shrink)

Although Thomas Aquinas assumes that all knowledge begins in the senses, he maintains that substantial forms and the essences of material things are not apparent to the senses. Clearly, the noetic of abstraction per se cannot account for our knowledge of them. Thomas often says that they are “unknown in themselves” but “become known” through their accidents. The author argues that properties, or proper accidents — namely, accidents that are interconvertible with a subject — play a crucial role (...) in this obscure area of Thomas’s thought. Beginning with an examination of the property in logic , the author goes on to examine Thomas’s accounts of heat as a property of fire, and the powers of the soul as properties of its essence. Thomas maintains that such properties flow from the essence by a causal relation that he calls resultatio, but that their coexistence with the essence is absolutely necessary in a quasi-logical manner . Finally, the author suggests that in Thomas’s view, accidents really do make the hidden quiddities of their subjects known: knowing created things through their accidents is not at all like knowing God through creatures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:METHOD DIVORCED FROM CONTENT IN THEOLOGY? AN ASSESSMENT OF LONERGAN'S METHOD IN THEOLOGY TERRENCE REYNOLDS Brown University Providence, Rhode Island IN IDS INTRODUCTION to Method in Theology, Bernard Lonergan flatly maintains that he intends to· write not theology but only method in theology.1 He therefore proposes.to concern himself solely with the operations theologians perform and to suspend consideration of the objects they seek to expound. He is looking (...) for "a normative pattern of recurrent and related operations yielding cumulative and progressive results." 2 To arrive at his method, Lonergan relies upon the cognitional theory which he ha,d outlined with great sophistication in Insight. He argues that the dynamism of the human mind and the principles of its operations as revealed by introspective psycihology lead to a model of the nature of scientific method in general and, by extension, to method in theology. It is through the transcendental method that Lonergan discovers in the procedures of the human mind the basic pattern of operations by which wl1l cognitiona1 activity takes plaice. This pattern, he maintains, yields cumulative results in thelogical inquiry as well as in any fie1d of investigation. He therefore intends to demonstrate that theology can be studied in the same manner as any other discipline. Critics have respectfully suggested that, while Lonergan's system is an imposing one, he has introduced unworkable and 1 Bernard Lonergan, Method 4ln Theology (New York, 1979), p. XII. 2 Lonergan, Method, p. 5. 245 246 TERRENCE REYNOLDS misleading distinctions into his work; in particular, he has fa~led to explicate his thoologiicaJ. p11emises and thereby leaves uTIJc!lear the presuppositions upon which his Method rests. Method, they argue, cannot be divorced from theology, and the p11ecise writing of the form.er cannot be carried out without attention to the latter. Avery Dulles, Mauri!Oe Wiles, and Anthony Ke1ly have all leveled the charge that Method suffers from this detaichment of method from content. The purpose of this essay wiH he to discuss Lonergan's achievement in Method in Theology but then to consider the extent to which his critics may be right. Um:Lerstanding Lonergan's methodologiical enterprise requires a familiarity with his cognitionrul theory as delineated in Jnsi,ght, for his complex theory of knowing establishes the anthropology upon whiJCh he grounds his Method. Basically, he pr:obes.for ·the answers to thl"ee questions: 1) What happens when we a11e knowing? 2) Why do we cal~ that knowing? and 3) What is known when that is happening? The ans1wer to the first question yie1ds his cognitionrul theory, the second his epistemology,.and the thi11d his met:aphysics.3 Since •all knowing is a quest.for explanaition, founded upon the ass111mption of the intelligibility of the universe, the on-going search for explanation in the finite sphere implies a finail e:q>i1anation and this is be[ng itseH. In apprehending the processes of cognition, one can begin to recognize the means by which the search for·this reality is universally conducted: Thoroughly understand what it is to understand, and not only will you understand the broad lines of all that there is to be understood, but you will possess a fixed base, an invariant pattern, opening upon all further developments of understanding.4 a Lonergan, Method, p. 25. 4 Bernard Lonergan, Insight (New York, 1957), p. XVIII. Lonergan's cognitional theory draws from the work of Thomas and Kant but moves creatively beyond them in his emphasis upon the dynamism of the human mind and the nature of the reality it perceives and comes to know. For Kant, to whom Lonergan's work is often compared, the mind imposes a conceptual framework and an intelligible order upon that which it seeks to understand METHOD AND CONTENT IN THEOLOGY Lonergan's use of introspective psychology reveals four levds in human consciousness, the empir1ca1, the intellectual, the rationa1l, and the moml. The empirical ~eveJ. concentrates upon experience itself and involves the hasic questioning and intel"est in one's surroundings which all subsequent self-transcende1J1ce presupposes. It is " experiencing one's experiencing, understanding, judging and deciding." 5 Intellectual consciousness considers the elements passed on to it as " unknown " by... (shrink)

For the first time in three centuries, this book brings back into print three discourses now confirmed to have been written by the young Thomas Hobbes. Their contents may well lead to a resolution of the long-standing controversy surrounding Hobbes's early influences and the subsequent development of his thought. The volume begins with the recent history of the discourses, first published as part of the anonymous seventeenth-century work, _Horae Subsecivae_. Drawing upon both internal evidence and external confirmation afforded by (...) new statistical "wordprinting" techniques, the editors present a compelling case for Hobbes's authorship. Saxonhouse and Reynolds present the complete texts of the discourse with full annotations and modernized spellings. These are followed by a lengthy essay analyzing the pieces' significance for Hobbes's intellectual development and modern political thought more generally. The discourses provide the strongest evidence to date for the profound influences of Bacon and Machiavelli on the young Hobbes, and they add a new dimension to the much-debated impact of the scientific method on his thought. The book also contains both introductory and in-depth explanations of statistical "wordprinting.". (shrink)

For the first time in three centuries, this book brings back into print three discourses now confirmed to have been written by the young Thomas Hobbes. Their contents may well lead to a resolution of the long-standing controversy surrounding Hobbes's early influences and the subsequent development of his thought. The volume begins with the recent history of the discourses, first published as part of the anonymous seventeenth-century work, _Horae Subsecivae_. Drawing upon both internal evidence and external confirmation afforded by (...) new statistical "wordprinting" techniques, the editors present a compelling case for Hobbes's authorship. Saxonhouse and Reynolds present the complete texts of the discourse with full annotations and modernized spellings. These are followed by a lengthy essay analyzing the pieces' significance for Hobbes's intellectual development and modern political thought more generally. The discourses provide the strongest evidence to date for the profound influences of Bacon and Machiavelli on the young Hobbes, and they add a new dimension to the much-debated impact of the scientific method on his thought. The book also contains both introductory and in-depth explanations of statistical "wordprinting.". (shrink)

As the first President of the Royal Academy of Arts, Joshua Reynolds played a pivotal role in shaping the course of British art in the 18th century. In these discourses, Reynolds reflects on the nature of art, the role of the artist, and the importance of aesthetic education. With insightful commentary on the works of the Old Masters and a wealth of practical advice for aspiring artists, this volume is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of (...) art or art theory. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

For the first time in three centuries, this book brings back into print three discourses now confirmed to have been written by the young Thomas Hobbes. Their contents may well lead to a resolution of the long-standing controversy surrounding Hobbes's early influences and the subsequent development of his thought. The volume begins with the recent history of the discourses, first published as part of the anonymous seventeenth-century work, Horae Subsecivae . Drawing upon both internal evidence and external confirmation afforded (...) by new statistical "wordprinting" techniques, the editors present a compelling case for Hobbes's authorship. Saxonhouse and Reynolds present the complete texts of the discourse with full annotations and modernized spellings. These are followed by a lengthy essay analyzing the pieces' significance for Hobbes's intellectual development and modern political thought more generally. The discourses provide the strongest evidence to date for the profound influences of Bacon and Machiavelli on the young Hobbes, and they add a new dimension to the much-debated impact of the scientific method on his thought. The book also contains both introductory and in-depth explanations of statistical "wordprinting.". (shrink)

This paper examines the significance and originality of Hobbes’s use of ‘mind’, rather than ‘soul’, in his writings on human nature. To this end, his terminology in the discussion of the ‘faculties of the mind’ in The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1640) is considered in the context of English-language accounts of the ‘faculties of the soul’ in three widely-read works from the first half of the seventeenth century: Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), (...) Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), and Edward Reynolds’s A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (1640). For Hobbes’s contemporaries, man’s soul conveyed God-like powers to human beings; for Hobbes this is a dangerous idea. Accordingly, he establishes a sharp divide between ‘soul’ and ‘mind’, understanding the two terms to be concerned with two very different things: one with soteriology, the other with mental abilities. Like his contemporaries, Hobbes thought that understanding the faculties reveals the way to live a good life. But unlike them, his moral and political philosophy relies on citizens accepting that they are not like God, rather than looking to restore the ‘divine’ within themselves. (shrink)

This paper argues that epistemic errors rooted in group- or identity- based biases, especially those pertaining to disability, are undertheorized in the literature on medical error. After sketching dominant taxonomies of medical error, we turn to the field of social epistemology to understand the role that epistemic schemas play in contributing to medical errors that disproportionately affect patients from marginalized social groups. We examine the effects of this unequal distribution through a detailed case study of ableism. There are four primary (...) mechanisms through which the epistemic schema of ableism distorts communication between nondisabled physicians and disabled patients: testimonial injustice, epistemic overconfidence, epistemic erasure, and epistemic derailing. Measures against epistemic injustices in general and against schema-based medical errors in particular are ultimately issues of justice that must be better addressed at all levels of health care practice. (shrink)

Perhaps only Tar Baby is as enigmatic and compelling a figure from Afro-American mythic discourse as is that oxymoron, the Signifying Monkey.3 The ironic reversal of a received racist image of the black as simianlike, the Signifying Monkey—he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language—is our trope for repetition and revision, indeed, is our trope of chiasmus itself, repeating and simultaneously reversing in one deft, discursive act. If Vico and Burke, (...) or Nietzsche, Paul de Man, and Harold Bloom, are correct in identifying “master tropes,” then we might think of these as the “master’s tropes,” and of signifying as the slave’s trope, the trope of tropes, as Bloom characterizes metalepsis, “a trope-reversing trope, a figure of a figure.” Signifying is a trope that subsumes other rhetorical tropes, including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, and also hyberbole, litotes, and metalepsis. To this list, we could easily add aporia, chiasmus, and catachresis, all of which are used in the ritual of signifying.The black tradition has its own subdivisions of signifying, which we could readily identify with the typology of figures received from classical and medieval rhetoric, as Bloom has done with his “maps of misprision.” In black discourse “signifying” means modes of figuration itself. When one signifies, as Kimberly W. Benston puns, one “tropes-a-dope.” The black rhetorical tropes subsumed under signifying would include “marking,” “loud-talking,” “specifying,” “testifying,” “calling out”, “sounding,” “rapping,” and “playing the dozens.”4 3. On Tar Baby, see Ralph Ellison, “Hidden Man and Complex Fate: A Writer’s Experience in the United States,” Shadow and Act, p. 147, and Toni Morrison, Tar Baby. On the black as quasi-simian, see Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, trans. Beatrice Reynolds, p. 105; Aristotle Historia Animalium 606b; Thomas Herbert, Some Years Travels, pp. 16-17; and John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 8th ed., 2 vols., 2:53.4. Geneva Smitherman defines these and other black tropes and then traces their use in several black texts. Smitherman’s work, like that of Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and Abrahams, is especially significant for literary theory. See Smitherman, Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America, pp. 101-66. See also nn. 13 and 14 below. (shrink)

Despite its short historical moment in the sun, behaviorism has become something akin to a theoria non grata, a position that dare not be explicitly endorsed. The reasons for this are complex, of course, and they include sociological factors which we cannot consider here, but to put it briefly: many have doubted the ambition to establish law-like relationships between mental states and behavior that dispense with any sort of mentalistic or intentional idiom, judging that explanations of intelligent behavior require reference (...) to qualia and/or mental events. Today, when behaviorism is discussed at all, it is usually in a negative manner, either as an attempt to discredit an opponent’s view via a reductio, or by enabling a position to distinguish its identity and positive claims by reference to what it is (allegedly) not. In this paper, however, we argue that the ghost of behaviorism is present in influential, contemporary work in the field of embodied and enactive cognition, and even in aspects of the phenomenological tradition that these theorists draw on. Rather than take this to be a problem for these views as some have, we argue that once the behaviorist dimensions are clarified and distinguished from the straw-man version of the view, it is in fact an asset, one which will help with task of setting forth a scientifically reputable version of enactivism and/or philosophical behaviorism that is nonetheless not brain-centric but behavior-centric. While this is a bit like “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” strategy, as Shaun Gallagher notes (2019), with the shared enemy of behaviorism and enactivism being classical Cartesian views and/or orthodox cognitivism in its various guises, the task of this paper is to render this alliance philosophically plausible. Doi: 10.1007/s11229-019-02432-1. (shrink)

Although pragmatism and phenomenology have both contributed significantly to the genealogy of so-called “4E” – embodied, embedded, enactive and extended – cognition, there is benefit to be had from a systematic comparative study of these roots. As existing 4E cognition literature has tended to emphasise one or the other tradition, issues remain to be addressed concerning their commonalities – and possible incompatibilities. We begin by exploring pragmatism and phenomenology’s shared focus on contesting intellectualism, and its key assumption of mindedness as (...) representation. We then outline distinctive insights from both traditions regarding the nature and role of habits, in order to put forward a habit-based epistemology as an alternative to the Cartesian idea-based epistemology that has dominated modern philosophy. We pay particular attention to the work of classical pragmatist C.S. Peirce, arguing that his semiotics, which analyses sign-use as habit, shows how theorists of embodied cognition can break a certain false dichotomy between embodiment and logical or intellectual structure which has prevented them from fully theorising propositional knowledge. In this way, our work both augments and challenges the Dewey/Merleau-Ponty connection that has been much more extensively explored by the field. (shrink)

In a thought experiment we want to test how the emergence of adult neural stem cells could constitute an example for a scientific revolution in the sense of Thomas Kuhn. In his major work, The structure of scientific revolutions, 3rd edn, University of Chicago Press, Chicago (Kuhn 1996), the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, states that scientific progress is not a cumulative process, but new theories appear by a rather revolutionary sequence of events. Kuhn built his theory on (...) landmark events taken from chemistry and physics, lacking examples from biology. Beginning with Ramon y Cajal’s famous quote, no new neurons after birth , from the early years of the twentieth century, and Reynolds and Weiss’s conflicting finding in 1992 of adult neural stem cells giving rise to new neurons, we will test how the finding of neural stem cells in the adult brain matches with Kuhn’s theory. The pivotal problem of defining a paradigm will be our main focus, since the emergence of adult neural stem cells has been acclaimed by the scientific community as the rebuttal of Ramon y Cajal’s paradigm. (shrink)