Approach to Aesthetics represents the realization of a project that Frank Sibley, who died in January 1996, did not live to complete on his own. The volume not only brings together Sibley’s major published papers on philosophical aesthetics but also includes five hitherto unpublished pieces written in his later years. These five pieces, some originally prepared by Sibley for oral presentation, were left by him in virtually complete versions and have needed only the kind of editorial attention required to meet (...) the exigencies of publication. Never having presented his views on aesthetics in a single book-length study, Sibley eventually came to see the publication of a collection of his most significant papers as a viable substitute. In asking the editors, shortly before his death, to undertake this project, Sibley himself provided a list of the published papers that he wanted to include as well as a second list of unpublished work that he wanted the editors to consider. There can be no doubt, therefore, that the current volume faithfully reflects Sibley’s wishes and intentions—and this to a very fine detail. The first eleven items in the collection are presented in the precise order in which Sibley listed them for the editors. Moreover, the title of the volume and even the two epigraphs were his choice. (shrink)

Community Partnered Participatory Research is grounded in the ethical principle of respect for persons participating in the research enterprise. The critical importance of respect for person...

Nietzsche distinguished between two forces in art: Apollonian, which represents order and reason, and Dionysian, which represents chaos and energy. Economists, Ward argues, have operated for too long under the assumption that their work reflects the scientific, Apollonian principals that inform physics when they simply do not apply to economics: 'constants' in economics stand in for variables, and the core scientific principles of prediction and replication are all but ignored by economists. Ward encourages economists to reintegrate the standard (...) rigor of the scientific method into their work while embracing the fact of the shape-shifting changeability of human beings. Economists can still aspire to scientific standards, as is demonstrated by the success of biology, in which there is considerable Dionysian variability. Economists must avoid the temptation to wish away dynamic complexity and diversity and must recognize, among other things, that the desire to take risks is fundamentally human. The second half of the book takes some first steps toward creating this new Dionysian Economics. (shrink)

The dominant unspoken philosophical basis of medical care in the United States is a form of Cartesian reductionism that views the body as a machine and medical professionals as technicians whose job is to repair that machine. The purpose of this paper is to advocate for an alternative philosophy of medicine based on the concept of healing relationships between clinicians and patients. This is accomplished first by exploring the ethical and philosophical work of Pellegrino and Thomasma and then by connecting (...) Martin Buber's philosophical work on the nature of relationships to an empirically derived model of the medical healing relationship. The Healing Relationship Model was developed by the authors through qualitative analysis of interviews of physicians and patients. Clinician-patient healing relationships are a special form of what Buber calls I-Thou relationships, characterized by dialog and mutuality, but a mutuality limited by the inherent asymmetry of the clinician-patient relationship. The Healing Relationship Model identifies three processes necessary for such relationships to develop and be sustained: Valuing, Appreciating Power and Abiding. We explore in detail how these processes, as well as other components of the model resonate with Buber's concepts of I-Thou and I-It relationships. The resulting combined conceptual model illuminates the wholeness underlying the dual roles of clinicians as healers and providers of technical biomedicine. On the basis of our analysis, we argue that health care should be focused on healing, with I-Thou relationships at its core. (shrink)

The ability to learn the direction of causal relations is critical for understanding and acting in the world. We investigated how children learn causal directionality in situations in which the states of variables are temporally dependent (i.e., autocorrelated). In Experiment 1, children learned about causal direction by comparing the states of one variable before versus after an intervention on another variable. In Experiment 2, children reliably inferred causal directionality merely from observing how two variables change over time; they interpreted Y (...) changing without a change in X as evidence that Y does not influence X. Both of these strategies make sense if one believes the variables to be temporally dependent. We discuss the implications of these results for interpreting previous findings. More broadly, given that many real-world environments are characterized by temporal dependency, these results suggest strategies that children may use to learn the causal structure of their environments. (shrink)

I Introduction: Philosophy and Social Science Men "know," but they no longer are so certain that their knowledge will not be rearranged. ...