Proponents of modal versions of the ontological argument have traditionally defended the prernise that God possibly exists by arguing that such a premise is more plausible than its negation. In this paper I argue that such a defense is insufficient to justify acceptance of the premise within the scope of a modal proof, and that this insufficiency accounts for the lack of probative force of these versions of the ontological argument. Rather, I claim that what is needed is a defense (...) of the claim of God’s possibility against the claim that He possibly does not exist. I give reasons for suspecting that no such defense is possible within the scope of modal ontological arguments. (shrink)

Proponents of modal versions of the ontological argument have traditionally defended the prernise that God possibly exists by arguing that such a premise is more plausible than its negation. In this paper I argue that such a defense is insufficient to justify acceptance of the premise within the scope of a modal proof, and that this insufficiency accounts for the lack of probative force of these versions of the ontological argument. Rather, I claim that what is needed is a defense (...) of the claim of God’s possibility against the claim that He possibly does not exist. I give reasons for suspecting that no such defense is possible within the scope of modal ontological arguments. (shrink)

In this paper I present three problems for Simmons' singularity theory of truth as he presents it in Universality and the Liar. I begin with a brief overview of the theory and then present the three problems I see for it. The first problem shows that the singularity theory is in conflict with our ordinary notion of truth. I present a set of sentences that the singularity theory evaluates differently than does our pretheoretic concept of truth. The second problem shows (...) that Simmons' theory is incomplete, in the sense that there are sentences of its object language of which it does not have the resources to evaluate. The third problem suggests that Simmons theory does not, contrary to the claim of the book, allow for semantic universality. I consider Simmons' extension of the singularity theory to accommodate truth-in-a-context and show that it is inconsistent with his basic theory. Specifically I present a sentence which diagonalizes out of the basic theory. (shrink)

This book includes both classic and more contemporary readings by both professional philosophers and other people with philosophically intriguing viewpoints. The material provided is diverse, yet also contains certain themes to achieve the element of unity. One such theme, the debate of the "nationalist" focus on blackness vs. the many critics of this focus, runs through a great number of issues and readings.

There are important studies that have directly focused on how, in times of conflict, it is possible for previously law abiding people to commit the most atrocious acts of cruelty and violence. The work of Erich Fromm, Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman and Ernest Becker have all contemplated the driving force of aggression and mass violence to further our understanding of how people are capable of engaging in extreme forms of cruelty and violence. This paper specifically addresses these issues by focusing (...) on C. P. Taylor’s play Good. This provocative play examines how a seemingly ‘good’ and intelligent university professor can gradually become caught up in the workings of the Third Reich. Taylor highlights the importance of appreciating how people can be steadily incorporated into an ideologically destructive system. I argue that the theatre is a powerful medium to explore these complex issues. The audience of Good find themselves confronted with the following question—‘What would you have done?’. (shrink)

Ernest Becker’s work addresses the implications that arise from being aware of our own mortality. Like Sartre, Becker recognises that human beings have the potential to transcend and look beyond their immediate situation, but his work also confronts the darker aspects of human existence that arise from our self-awareness. The aim of the paper is to provide an overview of Becker’s work and to show the potential of Becker’s theory of evil to inform a number of contemporary debates in the (...) social sciences. Although Becker’s work directly examines why human beings can act so inhumanly towards one another, his theory is not altogether pessimistic. The paper concludes by arguing that Becker’s theory intended to create new possibilities for living in more creative and humane world. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Public health ethics is emerging as a new field of inquiry, distinct not only from public health law, but also from traditional medical ethics and research ethics. Public health professional and scholarly attention is focusing on ways that ethical analysis and a new public health code of ethics can be a resource for health professionals working in the field. This article provides a preliminary exploration of the ethical issues faced by public health professionals in day-to-day practice and of the type (...) of ethics education and support they believe may be helpful. (shrink)

Public health ethics is emerging as a new field of inquiry, distinct not only from public health law, but also from traditional medical ethics and research ethics. Public health professional and scholarly attention is focusing on ways that ethical analysis and a new public health code of ethics can be a resource for health professionals working in the field. This article provides a preliminary exploration of the ethical issues faced by public health professionals in day-to-day practice and of the type (...) of ethics education and support they believe may be helpful. (shrink)

The issue of public health ethics has received much attention in recent years and is seen as a new field, distinct from medical ethics. Faculty from the University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Georgetown University, the University of Minnesota, and others received a grant from the Greenwall Foundation to examine this new field of public health ethics and identify the unique principles that distinguish it from the study of medical ethics. In the course of that study, which (...) included exploring the field with public health practitioners, a number of distinguishing ethical principles emerged. The moral principles appropriate for public health officials included producing benefits; avoiding, preventing and removing harms; producing a maximum balance of benefits over harms; and distributing benefits and burdens fairly. (shrink)

Donald Coxeter died in 2003, at a ripe old age of 96. Though I had regularly seen him at mathematics talks in Toronto for over twenty years, I never felt rushed to seek him out. It seemed he would go on forever. His death left me regretting my missed opportunity and Siobhan Robert's excellent book makes me regret it even more. Like any good biography of an intellectual, King of Infinite Space contains personal details and mathematical achievements in some detail. (...) Thus, we learn of the traumatic effects on Coxeter of his parents' divorce, his search for a spouse, his vegetarianism, and his progressive politics. We also learn a fair bit about the kaleidoscopes he made while in Cambridge during his student days in order to study the symmetry properties of polyhedra. These involved mirrors that Coxeter had specially constructed for this purpose. Along the way we are treated to interesting tidbits, such as G.H. Hardy's detestation of mirrors . There are brief accounts of the brilliant notation Coxeter invented, known as Coxeter diagrams, and of course, the now famous Coxeter groups. Short appendices fill in a bit more detail. It is all very well done and thoroughly engrossing.Wittgenstein befriended Coxeter, who was part of the very small group to whom …. (shrink)

George Du Maurier’s best-selling novel, Trilby (1894), is as important because of its defiance of social and cultural norms as it is for its apparent compliance with them. Trilby is a fiction that, like its eponymous heroine, attempts to negotiate the perilously fine line between the highbrow and the lowbrow, or to put it another way, between fine art and political commentary on one side, and pornography and sensationalism on the other. This article examines the way that Du Maurier engages (...) his readership in this textual tease – his seduction of the reader – by suggesting the possibility of a peep show where everything that Victorian respectability abhors may be on display, and then his narratological dressing of the text, to ensure that where there is sexual non-conformity there is also moralism, and where there is social confrontation there is also historical distance. Understanding the textual appeal of Trilby as a character, the artist’s model who enchanted the fin-de-siècle reading public, is essential to appreciating how the discourses of pornography and fine art interact and have consequently evolved. This article therefore examines why Trilby succeeded with the Victorians where other, similarly sexually active heroines – such as Thomas Hardy’s Sue Bridehead – failed. Trilby the novel and Trilby the woman are both broken down by their author into manageable parts, a pornographic fetishistic technique that simultaneously eroticises, and makes more palatable, the textual and the physical bodies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Roots of RomanticismJames SchmidtIsaiah Berlin. The Roots of Romanticism. The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Bollingen Series XXXV:45. Edited by Henry Hardy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. xvi + 171. Cloth. $19.95.Originally delivered in the spring of 1965 and subsequently broadcast several times over the BBC, Berlin's lectures on romanticism have long been esteemed by his (...) admirers. Berlin nevertheless resisted their publication, hoping one day to write a book on romanticism. His literary executor Henry Hardy reports, however, "not so much as a sentence of the intended work was ever written" (x). Thus Hardy's edition of these lectures constitutes Berlin's most extended reflection on a theme that loomed large in his understanding of the modern world: the romantic critique of the Enlightenment.Surprisingly few romantics actually appear in these pages. Those who do arrive late, linger briefly, and are usually German. Fichte enters on page 88, followed by Schelling (97) and the Schlegel brothers (104), with brief appearances by E. T. A. Hoffman and Johann Ludwig Tieck (114-6). Only in his closing ruminations on the impact of romanticism does Berlin cast a glance at Byron, Chateaubriand, and Sir Walter Scott. Most of the book explores what Berlin takes to be romanticism's "roots," which he locates in a few eighteenth-century German writers who, when romanticism finally burst upon the scene, were either disgusted by it (Jacobi, Schiller, and Goethe) or dead (Hamann). A few years later Berlin made these proto-romantics the charter members of the movement he dubbed "the Counter-Enlightenment"—a concept that would have a considerable career of its own. Berlin's concern is thus less with romanticism per se than "with the revolution of which romanticism, at any rate in some of its guises, is the strongest expression and symptom" (xiii).As Berlin saw it, this revolution involved a rejection of the idea that 1) "all [End Page 451] genuine questions can be answered," 2) "all these answers are knowable," and 3) "all these answers must be compatible with one another" (21-2). Upon these three principles, he insists, "the whole Western tradition rested" (21), and their rejection constitutes "the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West" (1). Berlin holds that the Enlightenment left these principles unshaken. It was the romantics who questioned the "ruinous" belief that "there is one single solution to all human ills" (which carries the insidious corollary that "you must impose this solution no matter what cost") and thus laid the foundations for "liberalism, toleration, decency and the appreciation of the imperfections of life" (146-7), causes which are usually associated (wrongly, according to Berlin) with the Enlightenment.These arguments will not be unfamiliar to those who know Berlin's works. Reading him is a bit like listening to Vivaldi: taken individually, his essays are clever, vigorously argued, and elegantly crafted; but reading them in sequence soon leads to a nagging sense of having heard it all before. Berlin's work was animated by an awareness of the diversity of plausible answers that could be given to the question of how life should be lived and by an impassioned defense of this plurality of possibilities against the illusion of an ultimate solution. One can admire the defense of liberalism that Berlin drew from these convictions and yet have reservations about the historical accuracy of his account of the relationship between romanticism and the Enlightenment. It is hard to see Hamann as a supporter of pluralism and harder still to see the philosophes—who rejected the dogmatic esprit de systèm in favor of an experimentalist esprit systématique—as oblivious to the multiplicity of ways in which good lives could be lived. Lessing's views on religious questions were a good deal more skeptical and open-ended than Jacobi's. Fichte and Schelling sought to bring a greater systematic coherence to Kant's philosophy, not to dismantle it. Once one moves from general claims about "romanticism" and "the Enlightenment" to assess specific thinkers, the picture becomes a good deal messier than Berlin lets on. Early romantics... (shrink)

Asbestos-related illnesses contribute to the deaths of more than 100,000 people worldwide (ILO 2006) and the plight of sufferers of these illnesses has become a global ethical issue. A leading, Australian building products corporation, James Hardie, created a complex corporate structure that included the establishment of a “Victims Compensation Fund”, and moved its corporate headquarters to the Netherlands to reduce its liabilities. Hardie claimed that this move was tax minimization (Haigh 2006). In this study case, a number of ethical (...) issues provides the opportunity to discuss many business-society questions. These include the duties of the company towards a wide range of stakeholders affected in some way by Hardie’s earlier production of asbestos-related products and its subsequent responses to the question of compensation. (shrink)

Drawing on calls by researchers to examine corporate scandals involving potential conflicts of interest or compromise to professional independence involving the actuarial profession, this article outlines one such case. The consulting actuaries – to a large Australian listed company, James Hardie Industries Limited – found themselves advising two parties in a corporate restructuring where the interests of each were sometimes competing and the interests of the public appeared to be ignored. The James Hardie case is instructive in a (...) number of ways: first, it demonstrates the subtlety with which conflicts of interest or pressures on professional independence can arise; second, it demonstrates how important professional issues can be obfuscated by more obvious and pressing financial and strategic issues; and finally it demonstrates that adherence to professional codes of conduct and the ease with which professional ethics can be compromised when those codes are vague and transgressions are rarely actionable. The James Hardie case highlights structural issues in the employment of consulting actuaries which presents risks to the profession. It demonstrates that the combination of an aggressive corporate management with a strategic agenda reliant on consulting actuaries that have a vested interest in promoting and maintaining valuable relationships, both financially and professionally, results in ethical challenges. (shrink)

Drawing on calls by researchers to examine corporate scandals involving potential conflicts of interest or compromise to professional independence involving the actuarial profession, this article outlines one such case. The consulting actuaries – to a large Australian listed company, James Hardie Industries Limited – found themselves advising two parties in a corporate restructuring where the interests of each were sometimes competing and the interests of the public appeared to be ignored. The James Hardie case is instructive in a (...) number of ways: first, it demonstrates the subtlety with which conflicts of interest or pressures on professional independence can arise; second, it demonstrates how important professional issues can be obfuscated by more obvious and pressing financial and strategic issues; and finally it demonstrates that adherence to professional codes of conduct and the ease with which professional ethics can be compromised when those codes are vague and transgressions are rarely actionable. The James Hardie case highlights structural issues in the employment of consulting actuaries which presents risks to the profession. It demonstrates that the combination of an aggressive corporate management with a strategic agenda reliant on consulting actuaries that have a vested interest in promoting and maintaining valuable relationships, both financially and professionally, results in ethical challenges. (shrink)

Isaiah Berlin was one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century - a man who set ideas on fire. His defence of liberty and plurality was passionate and persuasive and inspired a generation. His ideas - especially his reasoned rejection of excessive certainty and political despotism - have become even more prescient and vital today.But who was the man behind such influential views? In Search of Isaiah Berlin tells the compelling story of a decades-long collaboration between Berlin and his (...) editor, Henry Hardy, who made it his vocation to bring Berlin's huge body of work into print. Hardy discovered that Berlin had written far more than people thought, much of it unpublished. As he describes his struggles with Berlin, who was almost on principle unwilling to have his work published, an intimate and revealing picture of the self-deprecating philosopher emerges. This is a unique portrait of a man who gave us a new way of thinking about the human predicament, and whose work had for most of his life remained largely out of view. (shrink)

This is the first critical study of The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze's most important work on language and ethics, as well as the main source of his vital philosophy of the event.James Williams explains the originality of Deleuze's work with careful definitions of all his innovative terms and a detailed description of the complex structure he constructs. This reading makes connections to his ground-breaking work on literature, to his critical but also progressive relation to the sciences, and to (...) his controversial denial of the priority of standard logics, human values and 'meaning' in thinking.This book will open new debates and develop current ones around Deleuze's work in philosophy, politics, literature, linguistics, cultural studies and sociology. (shrink)

Conjectures are made on the text of three passages in Tibullus, Books 1–2: 1.4.26 hastam … suam for crines … suos, 2.1.56 membra for bache, 2.4.60 aliis rebus for alias herbas.

Predatory grooming is a form of abuse most familiar from high-profile cases of sexual misconduct, for example, the Nassar case at Michigan State. Predatory groomers target individuals in a systematic effort to lead them into relationships in which they are vulnerable to exploitation. This is an example of a broader form of epistemic misconduct that Leydon-Hardy describes as epistemic infringement, where this involves the contravention of social and epistemic norms in a way that undermines our epistemic agency. In this chapter, (...) Leydon-Hardy looks at the distinctive epistemic harm caused by epistemic infringement. She argues that this harm cannot be understood simply as the victim’s having a false belief, or even as her being alienated from her belief-forming mechanisms. A deeper understanding of the harm caused by infringement shows that it stems from damage to one’s epistemic agency, and indeed, to one’s personhood. (shrink)

"A very good book indeed: there is scarcely an issue anyone has thought to raise about the topic which Childress fails to treat with sensitivity and good judgement....Future discussions of paternalism in health care will have to come to terms with the contentions of this book, which must be reckoned the best existing treatment of its subject."--Ethics. "A clear, scholarly and balanced analysis....This is a book I can recommend to physicians, ethicists, students of both fields, and to those most affected--the (...) patients themselves."--Edmund D. Pellegrino, John Carroll Professor of Medicine and Medical Humanities, Georgetown University Medical Center. (shrink)

Noted psychologist and philosopher develops his own brand of pragmatism, based on theories of C. S. Peirce. Emphasis on "radical empiricism," versus the transcendental and rationalist tradition. One of the most important books in American philosophy. Note.

A revised, expanded and fully up-to-date critical introduction to Deleuze's most important work of philosophyBy critically analysing Deleuze's methods, principles and arguments, James Williams helps readers to engage with the revolutionary core of Deleuze's philosophy and take up positions for or against its most innovative and controversial ideas.

Moral philosophy is the study of what morality is and what it requires of us. As Socrates said, it's about "how we ought to live"-and why. It would be helpful if we could begin with a simple, uncontroversial definition of what morality is. Unfortunately, we cannot. There are many rival theories, each expounding a different conception of what it means to live morally, and any definition that goes beyond Socrates's simple formula-tion is bound to offend at least one of them. (...) This should make us cautious, but it need not paralyze us. In this chapter, I will describe the "minimum conception" of morality. (shrink)

The Confucian tradition, which places the virtue of ren or fellow feeling at its heart as a ‘gateway’ to the more concrete virtues of common Western parlance, offers a potential antidote to the excesses of a Western business ethics which, even after its recent academic reembrace of the Aristotelian tradition, in practice still too often instrumentalises virtue in the service of a ‘rational’ or ‘reasonable’ constraining of the profit motive. The deeper, intrinsic ‘ethos’ promised by a Confucian approach also finds (...) its echo in the West in the work of Hans Küng’s Weltethos project, led today on the business ethics front by Klaus Leisinger and Claus Dierksmeier. This paper explores a dilemma at the heart of the World Ethos movement seen from the twin peaks of the World Ethics Institute at Peking University and the Weltethos Institut at the University of Tübingen: namely, whether a business ethics culture accustomed to thinking in terms of CSR-esque lists of corporate values, virtues or principles can best be reformed via documents like the UN Global Compact, the 2010 Global Economic Ethic Manifesto, or even the UN Sustainable Development Goals, or whether a more radical, revolutionary quest for an inner ‘ethos’, to be lived and experienced by self-cultivating individuals engaged in business all over the world regardless of background, ought somehow to be undertaken parallel to these endeavours. The authors outline possible steps towards such a transformation of the management community’s understanding of virtue, without, however, dismissing the contribution of traditional, dilemma-oriented Western thinking about applied ethics in general, and business ethics in particular. (shrink)

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a (...) compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

Hubert Dreyfus has argued that cases of absorbed bodily coping show that there is no room for self-awareness in flow experiences of experts. In this paper, I argue against Dreyfus’ maxim of vanishing self-awareness by suggesting that awareness of agency is present in expert bodily action. First, I discuss the phenomenon of absorbed bodily coping by discussing flow experiences involved in expert bodily action: merging into the flow; immersion in the flow; emergence out of flow. I argue against the claim (...) that flow experience does not involve an awareness of agency for each of these features, while conceding that fluent agency does not involve self-awareness in the thetic sense. I challenge the assumption that the awareness of fluent agency must be understood in terms of a thetic awareness of agency. Instead, I develop an Anscombean account of the awareness of fluent agency in terms of the phenomenal character of knowing one’s aims. I respond to the challenge that if an Anscombean account of the awareness of agency is to succeed, then agents must be able to answer Anscombean questions. I consider the objection that awareness of agency is not a form of self-awareness by outlining an account of self-awareness as self-synthesis that is distinct from self-perception and self-ascription, but which makes room for self-awareness in expert bodily action. (shrink)

Introduction: our environment is out of control -- The foundation: your environment shapes you -- Every hero is the product of a situation : understanding the proximity effect -- How your environment shapes you : the myth of willpower -- Use positive-stress environments to promote change -- Create enriched environments : the key of "forcing functions" to promote change -- More than good intentions : how to adapt to new and difficult environments -- Grow into your goals : outsource your (...) motivation to high pressure environments -- Optimal environments for rapid learning : shortcuts to success -- Rotate your environments : change it up based on the work you're doing -- Find unique collaborations : design your world through transformational relationships -- Never forget where you came from : remember the environment where you began -- Pse rejuvinating environments to promote recovery and growth -- Establish your value system : the clearer you get, the more successful you'll be -- Remove everything that conflicts with your values : how to make tough choices -- Change your defaults : outsource your behavior to your environment -- Create triggers to prevent self-sabotage : putting failure-planning to work -- Shock your routine : the power of regular sabbaticals -- Reset your body and brain every week: the power of a fast -- Designate a sacred space : create an environment to stay on course -- Conclusion: no matter where you are, you can change -- Acknowledgments -- Index -- About the author. (shrink)