Cartesian dualism has been viewed by medical theorists to be oneof the chief causes of a reductionist/mechanistic treatment ofthe patient. Although I aver that Cartesian dualism is one culprit for the misapprehension of the genuine treatment of patients in termsof both mind and body, I argue that interactive dualism whichstresses the interaction of mind and body is essential to treatpatients with dignity and compassion. Thus, adequate medical carethat is humanistic in nature is difficult (if not impossible)to achieve without physicians adhering (...) to a dualistic frameworkin which the body and person is treated during illness. (shrink)

Many theorists in epistemology and mind accept externalism with respect to content—namely, the claim that the conditions that individuate mental content are external to the occurrence of that content as a mental fact. Whatever it is that distinguishes a pain in the knee from a pain in the toe—or, alternatively, whatever it is that makes it possible for the subject to discriminate this pain as a pain in the knee from that pain as a pain in the toe—are factors and (...) conditions located in the physical and external world. This much externalism seems to be required even if one is a thoroughly entrenched mentalist. This “content externalism” is captured, fairly effectively, by the more traditional distinction between concepts and percepts. What is then asserted by the mentalist is that concepts have their source or origin in the external world, but the perceptual content does not. Perceptual content can be identified in different ways which are: the view that identifies the distinguishing feature of the perceptual with qualia, a position not far removed from the Lockean distinction between Primary and Secondary qualities; or, the perceptual might also be characterized in terms of representationalism, where qualia are an essential part of the representational medium, but where the representational medium contains conceptual content as well. In either case, the perceptual is Type and/or Token distinct from whatever is the external physical conditions or states of affairs causally responsible for the occurrence of either the conceptual content or the perceptual content. An argument for the claim that percepts are essential and necessary is that, without such percepts, there can be no experience. It is doubtful. (shrink)

Douglas Langston’s book is an important contribution to the literature on ethics since it re-establishes the importance of “conscience” as a useful tool in ethical theorizing. Contemporary ethicists criticize conscience and outwardly reject any use of the concept to develop an adequate ethical theory. Even virtue theorists refrain from talking much about conscience as an important analytic tool. Langston believes that this is an important omission that must be rethought for the purposes of developing an effective ethical theory that is (...) applicable to human beings in their search for living fulfilled lives. Throughout the book, Langston examines some of the main reasons why conscience has been abandoned as a useful analytic tool in ethical theorizing by contemporary theorists. One reason that Langston cites is that, after the seventeenth century, philosophers regarded conscience as a faculty that was distinct from the intellect, will, and memory. It may have been better if some of these theorists postulated some type of interaction between these faculties instead of arguing that each of them should be kept separate and distinct. Another reason may be the long identification of conscience with some set of rules for behaviour. This reduces conscience to a set of observable rules that are followed by an individual. It extricates the person from the action and reduces the responsibility that an individual should feel when acting in a particular situation. In addition, when one removes moral reasoning from conscience, its only function is to make one feel uncomfortable when one refrains from doing the right thing. This is insufficient in building an ethical theory or in living a moral life. What is needed is a more positive view of the notion of conscience, which is possible when one regards it as more than a faculty whose judgements are infallible. One of Langston’s themes in the book is that it is possible to develop a positive view of conscience that can also be used as an analytic tool in developing an effective ethical theory. (shrink)

Mental Reality is concerned with three questions: is reference to non-mental phenomena central and indispensable for an effective account of the nature of mental phenomena? ; is reference to publicly observable phenomena central and necessary for an effective account of every, or even some, mental phenomena? ; and is reference to behaviour essential to any adequate account of all, or almost all, mental states and occurrences?. Galen Strawson’s summary answer to these questions is, on the whole, negative, but there are (...) several qualifications. The view he defends is experiential realism. Experiential realism asserts that experience is contentful and experience is what it is like to be who and what one is. Experience is necessarily conscious experience, and one sense of the meaning of the problematic term “consciousness” is the ordinary, everyday, waking consciousness, as distinct from dream-state consciousness. As Strawson uses the word, “conscious” in the expression “conscious experience” is pleonastic. The other alternative is for the term “conscious” to be central and “experience” becomes pleonastic. This is a matter of strategy, and depends on the audience. Strawson’s audience is the contemporary theorist in the philosophy of mind rather than the phenomenologist, and then only those theorists who insist on reductive or eliminative materialism, or those varieties of functionalism in which consciousness is incidental and ontologically, epistemologically, or explanatorily irrelevant. (shrink)

André Gallois’s book is a sustained defence of first-person authority in epistemology and the philosophy of mind. His work is set against the externalist tide of current epistemology in which many philosophers are sceptical about first-person authority with respect to their beliefs. This implies that other individuals are in a better position to determine what our beliefs are than we ourselves can be, which highlights the authority of third person accounts of justification. Gallois’s work is a direct attack on such (...) views since he argues that it is only from within the first-person perspective that an individual can determine whether s is justified in believing x. Without relying on observation, an individual can justifiably self-attribute consciously held beliefs. Thus, first-person authority is essential for developing an adequate theory of knowledge since the justification of belief is impossible unless the first-person perspective is prior and privileged. (shrink)

Written by two of the leading figures in the field, this is a lucid and systematic introduction to semantics as applied to transformational grammars of the ...

This book offers a major reassessment of Peter Abelard's modal logic and theory of modalities, presenting them as far more uniform and consistent than was until now recognized. Irene Binini offers new ways of connecting Abelard's modal views with other parts of his logic, semantics, metaphysics and theology. Further, the work also provides a comprehensive study of the logical context in which Abelard's theories originated and developed, by presenting fresh evidence about many 11th- and 12th-century sources that are still (...) unpublished. This analysis sheds new light on the relations between Abelard and ancient authors such as Aristotle, Boethius, and Priscian, as well as between Abelard and his contemporaries, such as Anselm of Canterbury, William of Champeaux, Joscelin of Soissons, and Alberic of Paris. (shrink)

A fascinating account of exemplarity in the context of deconstruction.

For the first time, the reader can have a synoptic view of the reception of Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, East and West, in a multicultural perspective. All the major themes of Pythagoreanism are addressed, from mathematics, number philosophy and metaphysics to ethics and religious thought.

El sistema penitenciario de Ecuador enfrenta una crisis estructural de proporciones preocupantes. Esta investigación se centra en analizar las diversas causas que han precipitado esta situación, con el objetivo de determinar la responsabilidad del Estado ecuatoriano en esta crisis. Se examina específicamente si el Estado cumple adecuadamente con su obligación de rehabilitar a los condenados y reintegrarlos a la sociedad tras el cumplimiento de sus penas. Se evidencia una ausencia significativa de programas efectivos de reinserción para las Personas Privadas de (...) Libertad (PPL), lo que directamente contribuye a la crisis carcelaria actúa. El propósito de este estudio es analizar críticamente la situación del sistema penitenciario ecuatoriano, identificando las deficiencias en los programas de rehabilitación y reinserción social ofrecidos a las PPL. Se busca determinar si el Estado es el principal responsable de la crisis carcelaria mediante el análisis de diversas fuentes bibliográficas y la evaluación de su cumplimiento de las obligaciones legales y humanitarias hacia este grupo vulnerable. Se llevó a cabo una investigación cualitativa, donde se analizaron diversas fuentes bibliográficas especializadas para abordar el problema del sistema penitenciario en Ecuador. Se examinaron informes gubernamentales, estudios académicos y documentos legales pertinentes para comprender a fondo las causas subyacentes de la crisis carcelaria. Esta metodología permitió una evaluación exhaustiva de las deficiencias institucionales y la falta de programas de rehabilitación adecuados para las PPL en el país. Los resultados de la investigación revelan una serie de factores que contribuyen a la crisis carcelaria en Ecuador. Entre ellos se destacan el hacinamiento, la sobrepoblación, el debilitamiento institucional, el tráfico de drogas y armas, entre otros. Se evidencia que el Estado no cumple adecuadamente con su obligación de rehabilitar a los condenados y reintegrarlos a la sociedad, lo que agrava la situación y hace más miserable la vida de las PPL dentro de los centros de reclusión. Este estudio confirma que el Estado ecuatoriano es el principal responsable de la crisis carcelaria existente en el país. La falta de programas efectivos de rehabilitación y reinserción social para las PPL, junto con otras deficiencias institucionales, ha exacerbado la situación. Es imperativo que el Estado tome medidas urgentes y efectivas para abordar estas deficiencias y garantizar el respeto de los derechos humanos y la dignidad de las personas privadas de libertad en Ecuador. (shrink)

The automatic prediction of court case judgments using Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing is challenged by the variety of norms and regulations, the inherent complexity of the forensic language, and the length of legal judgments. Although state-of-the-art transformer-based architectures and Large Language Models (LLMs) are pre-trained on large-scale datasets, the underlying model reasoning is not transparent to the legal expert. This paper jointly addresses court judgment prediction and explanation by not only predicting the judgment but also providing legal experts (...) with sentence-based explanations. To boost the performance of both tasks we leverage a legal named entity recognition step, which automatically annotates documents with meaningful domain-specific entity tags and masks the corresponding fine-grained descriptions. In such a way, transformer-based architectures and Large Language Models can attend to in-domain entity-related information in the inference process while neglecting irrelevant details. Furthermore, the explainer can boost the relevance of entity-enriched sentences while limiting the diffusion of potentially sensitive information. We also explore the use of in-context learning and lightweight fine-tuning to tailor LLMs to the legal language style and the downstream prediction and explanation tasks. The results obtained on a benchmark dataset from the Indian judicial system show the superior performance of entity-aware approaches to both judgment prediction and explanation. (shrink)

For a few decades now, debates around the effects of 'new public measures' in education have pointed to how the emphasis on increased accountability and high stakes testing has led to some worrying phenomena, thus changing teachers' practices and roles. These include narrowing of the curriculum, gaming and teaching to the test. This chapter discusses these kinds of knowledge and abilities as fundamentally depending on our understanding of the role of teachers within an educational system and in relation to educational (...) aims. The particular standpoint from which it tackles these issues revolves around asking whether the notion of autonomy is significant to teachers' roles and activities, and hence bears on our conception of teaching expertise. The chapter argues that the notion of autonomy is problematic: it conflates rather different psychological, phenomenological and normative elements. The discussion in the chapter culminates in an analysis of current policy arrangements in England. (shrink)

Introduction: Time and the shared world -- The "subject" of inquiry -- Mineness and the practical first-person -- Being and otherness: Sartre's critique -- Heideggerian aprioricity and the categories of being -- The temporality of care -- Fursorge: acknowledging the other Dasein -- Authenticity, inauthenticity, and the extremes of Fursorge -- Conclusion.

By putting existential phenomenology into conversation with virtue ethics, this book offers a new interpretation of human flourishing. It rejects characterizations of flourishing as either a private subjective state or an objective worldly status, arguing that flourishing is rather a successfully negotiated self-world fit – a condition involving both the essential dependence of the self upon the world and others, and the lived normative responsiveness of the agent striving to be in the world well. A central argument of the book (...) is that there is an irreducible normative plurality arising from the different practical perspectives we can adopt – the first, second, and third-person stances – all of which make different kinds of normative claim that we understand ourselves as having reason to meet. Flourishing is human excellence within each of these normative domains achieved in such a way that success in one domain does not compromise success in another. Existential Flourishing provides a correspondingly transformed interpretation of the virtues as solutions to various existential problems we face in responding to these normative domains. The book also addresses traditional problems in virtue ethics and analyzes the structure of four virtues in detail: justice, patience, modesty, and courage. (shrink)