Scientists seeking hard evidence of prayer's curative powers misunderstand the nature of prayer in the Western theistic traditions. Yet theistically consonant ways in which religious belief may influence health do not figure as they should in current professional practice.

Modern physicians are taught that they should not involve themselves in their patients’ religious concerns. Many worry that doing so would be intrusive, manipulative, difficult, and embarrassing. Patients, however, often want their physicians to explore questions of religion and faith with them. If these questions are broached in a sensitive and flexible way, they can be a natural and appropriate part of the physician‐patient relationship.

Kaveny recommends models drawn from the Gospel of John and the practices of the early church for modern Christians in their response to older women and their health needs. She draws upon a historical reconstruction of the early Christian Order of Widows to propose a normative standard of care for elderly women, one that attends seriously to their bodily needs but also to their needs for inclusion and engagement in the social and vocational world both as givers and recipients of (...) care. This is also to serve as an overarching model for a bioethics that prizes the embodied existence of all women and rejects judgments of appropriate treatment based on their social utility. The following response raises questions about the exegetical and historical foundations of Kaveny?s analysis. However, these caveats may not detract substantially from the normative usefulness of her work. (shrink)

Language -- Image -- Time -- Body -- Dream -- Myth -- Baudelaire -- Rescue -- Remembrance.

This study assesses the extent to which job application forms violate the New Zealand Human Rights Act. The sample for the study includes 229 job application forms, collected from a variety of large and small, public- and private-sector organizations that together employ approximately 200,000 workers. Two hundred and four or 88% of the job application forms contain at least one violation of the Act. One hundred and sixty five or 72% contain two or more and 140 or 61% contain three (...) or more violations. The most common violations concern age, gender, nationality, and disability. The least common concern political opinion, ethical belief, religious belief, and sexual orientation. Despite widespread violations, many forms do have non-discriminatory questions that yield the same kind of useful information as discriminatory questions. Employers could incorporate these into their job application forms to bring themselves into compliance with the law. The same lessons also generally apply to North American employers, given the high degree of comparability between American, Canadian, and New Zealand anti-discrimination laws. (shrink)

Before the semester begins, a teacher tells his students: “There will be exactly one exam this semester. It will not take place on a day that is an immediate-successor of a day that you are currently in a position to know is not the exam-day”. Both the students and the teacher know – it is common knowledge – that no exam can be given on the first day of the semester. Since the teacher is truthful and reliable, it seems that (...) the students can know that what he says is true. However, in that case, assuming the students can know that they know whatever it is they know (KK) and assuming their knowledge is closed under entailment (closure), the students can reason from what they know to the conclusion that no exam will take place during the semester. This conclusion contradicts what they supposedly know: that there will be an exam. This puzzle, we argue, gives rise to a new consideration for the rejection of KK. We discuss unique features of the argument, especially in comparison to Timothy Williamson's rejection of KK in light of other versions of the surprise exam paradox. (shrink)

As recent elections in Iran and Iraq have shown, the increasing diversity of religious practices around the world may redefine democracy as we know it—leaving many of us to wonder just how compatible religion and democracy really are. _The Pluralist Paradigm _explores this difficult question with essays from a variety of disciplines, including theology, philosophy, political science, sociology, and ethics. It will be an ideal reference for anyone concerned with fostering tolerance in a progressively global society.

The theory of lower previsions is designed around the principles of coherence and sure-loss avoidance, thus steers clear of all the updating anomalies highlighted in Gong and Meng's "Judicious Judgment Meets Unsettling Updating: Dilation, Sure Loss, and Simpson's Paradox" except dilation. In fact, the traditional problem with the theory of imprecise probability is that coherent inference is too complicated rather than unsettling. Progress has been made simplifying coherent inference by demoting sets of probabilities from fundamental building blocks to secondary representations (...) that are derived or discarded as needed. (shrink)

Quantifier variance is a well-known view in contemporary metaontology, but it remains very widely misunderstood by critics. Here we briefly and clearly explain the metasemantics of quantifier variance and distinguish between modest and strong forms of variance (Section I), explain some key applications (Section II), clear up some misunderstandings and address objections (Section III), and point the way toward future directions of quantifier-variance-related research (Section IV).

The Tattvapaplavasimha is a philosophical text unique of its kind it is the only text of the Carvaka Lokayata school which has survived and the only Sanskrit work in which full-fledged scepticism is propounded. Notwithstanding that it has been hitherto almost completely ignored. The present book consists of an introduction detailed analysis edition translation with extensive notes of the first half of the text. In the introduction Jayarasi`s affiliation to the Lokayata school is reassessed and his place in the historical (...) development of Indian Philosophy evaluated. New evidence for the dating of Jayarasi is examined and a new dating is suggested. (shrink)

Street art has exploded: it pervades our back alleys, surrounds us at bus-stops, covers billboards, competes with advertising and generally serves as urban wallpaper in most cities. But what is street art? A far cry from mere graffiti, street art has gained some social acceptance, but it remains neither officially sanctioned like public art, nor institutionally condoned, like its more traditional artistic cousins in museums. Somewhere in between these two extremes, street art has emerged, occupying a metaphysically suspect grey area (...) between illegal activity and bona fide art. This paper explores the nature of this emerging art form and draws out some of the differences between street art, public art and ‘mere’ graffiti. (shrink)

Ed. Daniel Greenberger, 750pp May 1995 164.95.

This work seeks to shed light on one of the most enigmatic masterpieces of twentieth-century thought.

To clarify the proper role of values in science, focusing on controversial expert responses to Covid-19, this article examines the status of (in)convenient hypotheses. Polarizing cases like health experts downplaying mask efficacy to save resources for healthcare workers, or scientists dismissing “accidental lab leak” hypotheses in view of potential xenophobia, plausibly involve modifying evidential standards for (in)convenient claims. Societies could accept that scientists handle (in)convenient claims just like nonscientists, and give experts less political power. Or societies could hold scientists to (...) a higher bar, by expecting them not to modify evidential standards to avoid costs only incidentally tied to error. (shrink)

I argue that activists have co-opted street art as a tool for addressing epistemic injustices, injustices that result from negative identity prejudices that silence certain groups of people unfairly. To defend this claim, I explore the special nature of street art that makes it an especially appropriate tool for activists to enlist in the fight against epistemic injustices. From there, I will examine in detail two case studies which illustrate how street art is used to respond to and correct for (...) these injustices: first, the street art series, “Stop Telling Women to Smile” by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, and then Chris Metzger’s Inside Out Project in Baltimore. Drawing on these examples, I highlight the features in virtue of which street art constitutes a particularly effective tool for correcting epistemic injustices. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the relationship between witness-bearing arts as a form of creative activism designed to respond to social injustices. In the first section, I present some common features of bearing witness, as conceptualized within media studies and journalism. Then I explain how artworks placed in the streets can bear witness in a similar way. I argue that witness-bearing art transmits knowledge about certain unjust and harmful events, which then places a moral burden or responsibility on the viewer. (...) To defend this view, I offer some examples of activist art that bears witness to certain events. I suggest that witness-bearing art is placed in the streets in order to make certain truths publicly available, by offering evidence of them embedded in the artwork. The final section considers why the bearing witness is especially effective for activist art. Witness-bearing art plays a crucial knowledge-transmitting function, one which enables art to engage in creative activism. I conclude by considering how witness-bearing art offers a powerful and persuasive voice for the oppressed. (shrink)

Il s'agit là d'un livre sur la lecture et l'écriture. Son véritable thème est cependant l'impertinence, voire l'impossibilité. A quoi bon, en effet, écrire sur la lecture quand il suffit de lire? Et que peut-on dire de plus sur l'écriture si l'on écrit déjà? Ainsi ce livre ne comportera-t-il, à proprement parler, aucune matière, et ne transmettra-t-il essentiellement qu'un mouvement : celui de la lecture des testes des autres et de l'écriture qu'elle entraînera. Seul le mouvement peut changer une impossibilité (...) en possibilité, voire en nécessité. Ayant compris, dans une vie antérieure de lecteur, l'impossibilité du Tractatus de Wittgenstein comme livre de pensée, on touchera ici à la nécessité qu'il soit écrit. Puis on explorera, avec " Pierre Ménard, auteur, du Quichotte ", une curieuse possibilité, celle que cette nécessité d'écrire soit le fait du lecteur et non pas de l'auteur. Enfin on aboutira, avec Joseph Joubert et Maurice Blanchot, à l'impossibilité d'écrire, c'est-à-dire à la question de la possibilité de la littérature posée enfin avant celle de la philosophie. C'est en effet avec Blanchot que s'ouvrira le passage entre la philosophie et la littérature et que l'engin de l'écriture atteindra sa " vitesse de libération ". Il prendra alors tout son sens d'une écriture postérieure qui, bien qu'elle fasse suite à l'impossibilité de la pensée, n'en a plus forcément besoin du " pré-texte ". C'est le moment où l'on conçoit, avec Blanchot, " que, dans une œuvre littéraire, on puisse exprimer des pensées aussi difficiles et d'une forme aussi abstraite que dans un ouvrage philosophique, mais à condition qu'elles ne soient pas encore pensées ". (shrink)

This article concerns the ways in which authors from various fields conceptualise the ethical issues arising in the conduct of research. We reviewed critically and systematically the literature concerning the ethics of conducting research in order to engage in a reflection about the vocabulary and conceptual categories used in the publications reviewed. To understand better how the ethical issues involved in conducting research are conceptualised in the publications reviewed, we 1) established an inventory of the conceptualisations reviewed, and 2) we (...) critically assessed them. We found that the publications reviewed mostly showed examples of descriptive ethics, in that most authors describe ethical issues without reflecting much on them, which could be explained both by 1) a lack of ethical education in research contexts, and 2) by the fact that we do not know what researchers know (or do not) about ethical issues. Additionally, the definitions identified in the publications are scarce and at times imprecise, but this seems more to point out the ethical vocabulary’s difficulties in certain contexts. Further, very few authors offer proper conceptualisations of the ethical issues arising in conducting research. When dealing with vast arrays of ethical issues to conceptualise, perhaps one ought to remember that some typologies already exist that could guide further reflection and help understand other realities for which the current ethical vocabulary may be lacking. We believe that combining the reviewed typologies, both with other well-developed typologies and critical reflection, could help support better ethical practice in conducting research. (shrink)

Relative essentialism, the view that multiple objects about which there are distinct de re modal truths can occupy the same space at the same time, is a metaphysical view that dissolves a number of metaphysical issues. The present essay constructs and defends relative essentialism and argues that it is implicit in some of the ideas of W. V. Quine and Donald Davidson. Davidson’s published views about individuation and sameness can accommodate the common-sense insights about change and persistence of Aristotle and (...) Kripke. Aristotle and Kripke have to give up unmediated direct reference resting on a unique correct articulation of reality into entities. Davidson has to acknowledge a distinction between descriptions giving accidental and those giving essential features of an object. Quine and Davidson were in a position to be a relative essentialist, but were over-impressed by supervenience. The relative essentialist view of beings developed from Quine and Davidson strongly suggests the Heideggerian distinction between beings and Being, and is the perspective from which analytic philosophy can engage that topic. Relative essentialism also connects analytic philosophy to Derrida’s thinking about differance. (shrink)

What determines the degree to which some event harms a subject? According to the counterfactual comparative account, an event is harmful for a subject to the extent that she would have been overall better off if it had not occurred. Unlike the causation based account, this view nicely accounts for deprivational harms, including the harm of death, and for cases in which events constitute a harm rather than causing it. However, I argue, it ultimately fails, since not every intrinsically bad (...) state that is counterfactually dependent on an event contributes to its degree of harm. So while the causation based account is too restrictive, the counterfactual comparative view is not restrictive enough. In light of this, I suggest an alternative, explanation based account of overall harm, according to which the degree to which some event is harmful for a subject is determined by the degree to which (crudely) the states explained by it are overall more intrinsically bad than intrinsically good for her. (shrink)

Collaboration in the arts is no longer a conscious choice to make a deliberate artistic statement, but instead a necessity of artistic survival. In today’s hybrid world of virtual mobility, collaboration decentralizes creative strategies, enabling artists to carve new territories and maintain practice-based autonomy in an increasingly commercial and saturated art world. Collaboration now transforms not only artistic practices but also the development of cultural institutions, communities and personal lifestyles. This book explores why collaboration has become so integrated into a (...) greater understanding of creative artistic practice. It draws on an emerging generation of contributors—from the arts, art history, sociology, political science, and philosophy—to engage directly with the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of collaborative practice of the future. (shrink)

Stoffregen & Bardy's target article is based on the assumption that our senses' ultimate purpose is to provide us with perfect information about the outside world. We argue that it is often more important that information be available quickly than that it be perfect. Consequently our nervous system processes different aspects of information about our surrounding as separately as possible. The separation is not between the senses, but between separate aspects of our surrounding. This results in inconsistencies between judgments: sometimes (...) because different frames of reference are used. Such inconsistencies are fundamental to the way the information is picked up, however, and hence cannot be avoided with clearer instructions to the subjects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A History of American Music EducationSondra Wieland HoweA History of American Music Education, 3rd edition, by Michael L. Mark and Charles L. Gary. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Education, 2007, 500 pp., $95.00 cloth, $44.95 paper.Mark and Gary's editions of A History of American Music Education are indispensable reading for every music education student, practicing professional music educator, and the general reader who is interested in the development (...) of music teaching in American public schools. Based on excellent secondary sources, this history presents an overview of music education from Colonial America, through the development of textbooks in the nineteenth century and the growth of professional organizations in the early twentieth century, to the expansion of the curriculum and the role of government in education since 1950.This third edition is written by Michael L. Mark, professor emeritus at Towson University in Maryland, and dedicated to the memory of his friend and coauthor, Charles L. Gary.1 Mark has written two other books that complement the history editions. Contemporary Music Education surveys various reform projects since the 1950s, trends in the philosophy of music education, government policies, and the development of new methods.2Music Education: Source Readings includes writings about music education from both the European and American perspectives.3 There are many recent articles and dissertations on the history of music education, but the only recent book is Terese Volk's Music, Education, and Multiculturalism, which describes school programs and materials emphasizing multiculturalism in the twentieth century from a historical perspective.4 Publications in musicology add to our knowledge of the history of music in American society, but musicologists rarely write about music in public schools. Publications on the history of education are helpful in understanding trends in music education, but these publications do not discuss music.The third edition of A History of American Music Education is expanded to 500 pages from the approximately 400 pages of the earlier editions, largely because of new formatting and [End Page 115] spacing that make the third edition easier to read. Each chapter has a reference list in APA style in contrast to the Chicago Manual style of the earlier editions, with endnotes plus a bibliography at the end of each chapter. The material in Mark's third edition is basically the same as the earlier editions, with some expansion of the history of music education after 1950.This book, based on secondary sources, is an overview of the history of music in American public schools, showing the response of education to societal needs during various historical periods. There is an emphasis on the role of national music organizations, especially MENC: The National Association for Music Education (MENC), in advocating for the importance of music for every child. The historical account includes the various justifications for teaching music and discussions of the meaning of music. There were times when music educators were interested in aesthetics, but there were also many times when they were mainly interested in a practical understanding of music and extrinsic motives for including music in the school curriculum.5The first section on "The Western Heritage" (chapters 1-3) briefly covers music in Jewish traditions through the Greek and Roman cultures because the insights of these ancient thinkers influenced all Western societies. The chapter on the Middle Ages through the Reformation shows the role of music as a practical subject, part of the quadrivium with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. As music became an integral part of the church, musicians developed methods of teaching note reading. Martin Luther promoted the singing of "good music" in schools and education in the vernacular for the middle classes. With the development of Italian conservatories and the patronage of music by the elite classes of the Renaissance, music training became specialized for musicians working in the church and courts. These various conflicting European opinions of the role of music in society influenced American education.The second section on "The New World" (chapters 4-5) emphasizes the use of music as a means of praising God. Spanish musicians established successful music education programs in Peru and Mexico to promote Christianity. The French brought Christianity to... (shrink)

Women music educators in the USA have been active in public and private schools, churches, and community organizations. In the nineteenth century, Julia E. Crane founded the Crane Institute of Music, the first institution to train music supervisors; and women developed kindergarten programs throughout the US. In the "private sphere," women taught in home studios and Sunday schools, and published children's songs and hymns. In 1907, the Music Supervisors National Conference (which became the Music Educators National Conference) was founded under (...) the leadership of Frances E. Clark, although only thirteen women have been president of MENC between 1907 and 2010. In the twentieth century, women have edited music textbook series and served on editorial boards of music education journals. This survey of nationally prominent music educators shows the importance of quality education, guiding personal philosophies, positive supportive mentors, and leadership opportunities within the profession for developing successful lifetime careers. (shrink)

On the basis of careful textual exegesis and philosophical analysis, and contrary to the received view, Mark R. Wheeler demonstrates that Aristotle presents and systematically explicates his definition of the essence of the truth in the Metaphysics. Aristotle states the nominal definitions of the terms "truth" and "falsehood" as part of his arguments in defense of the logical axioms. These nominal definitions express conceptions of truth and falsehood his philosophical opponents would have recognized and accepted in the context of dialectical (...) argument. On the basis of these nominal definitions, Aristotle develops his definitions of the essences of truth and falsehood--his "real" definitions of truth and falsehood. Aristotle's methodical exposition of his essential definitions of truth and falsehood in the Metaphysics serves as a well-developed example of how his philosophical inquiry starts with nominal definitions and ends with real definitions. Wheeler also argues for the novel claim that Aristotle defines the most fundamental kind of truth in terms of accurate measurement. Aristotle's metrical conception of truth serves as the theoretical basis for specifying the truth conditions of various assertions, for identifying the sorts of beings implicated in these truth conditions, and for explaining the nature of approximate truth and falsehood. Far from offering us a minimal account of truth, Wheeler shows how Aristotle offers us a sophisticated and metrical theory of truth. (shrink)

Background In February, 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the ban on medical assistance in dying. In June, 2016, the federal government passed Bill C-14, permitting MAiD. Current medical students will be the first physician cohort to enter a system permissive of MAiD, and may help to ensure equitable access to care. This study assessed medical student views on MAiD, factors influencing these views, and opportunities for medical education. Methods An exploratory cross-sectional survey was developed and distributed to (...) medical students across all years of a three-year Canadian undergraduate medical program. The investigators administered the survey to participants during academic sessions from November to December, 2015. Analysis of the results included summary descriptive statistics, Pearson’s chi-square test of independence to identify differences between participants by year of study, logistic regression to identify factors that influence students’ stances on MAiD, and Wilcoxon signed rank test to measure changes in student support for MAiD and comfort discussing MAiD. Results There were 405 participants for a response rate of 87%. The majority of students supported the Supreme Court’s decision, 61% would provide the means for a patient to end their life, and 38% would personally administer a lethal medication. Students who were more willing to provide the means for MAiD found medical education/clinical experience and patient autonomy to be important contributors to their stances on MAiD. Those students who were less willing to provide the means for MAiD found religious/spiritual beliefs and teachings, as well as concern about potential negative consequences, to be important contributors to their stances on MAiD. Educational training desired by participants included medicolegal, communication skills, technical skills, and religious. Conclusions Medical students generally supported and would provide the means for MAiD to patients. They also indicated a desire for directed medical education on MAiD. (shrink)