In A Theory of Justice, Rawls attempts to ground intergenerational justice by "virtual representation" through a thickening of the veil of ignorance. Contractors don't know to what generation they belong. This approach is flawed and will not result in the just savings principle Rawls hopes to justify. The project of grounding intergenerational duties on a social contractarian foundation is misconceived. Non-overlapping generations do not stand in relation to one another that is central to the contractarian approach.

Several authors, including Thomas Nagel and David Gauthier, have defended the view that reasons of self-interest (prudential reasons) are rationally binding. That is, there is always a reason, bearing on the rational advisability, based on one's self-interest and, as a result, a person may act irrationally by knowingly acting against such reasons regardless of the person's desires or values. Both Nagel and Gauthier argue from the rationally mandatory nature of prudential reasons to the conclusion that moral reasons can be rationally (...) mandatory, challenging the neo-Humean position that practical reasons that bear on an agent's rationality are essentially grounded on the agent's subjective, contingent, conative states. I argue, pace Nagel and Gauthier, that prudential reasons are not rationally mandatory--that the rational requirement to act in one's own interest, when it exists, is, as the neo-Humean insists, grounded on one's subjective, contingent, conative states. Prudential reasons are not reasons for every (conceivable) agent--not in the sense that bears on the rational advisability of action. (shrink)

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls provides several arguments contractors in the original position using maximin reasoning, which leads directly to the difference principle. These arguments are inadequate to support the claim that maximin reasoning is the uniquely rational approach to choice in the original position.

In his book, The Grounds of Moral Judgment, Russell Grice argues for a thesis he calls "the contract ground thesis," which connects the interest of members of a group in making a contract to the existence of an obligation and reason to abide by that contract. This thesis has been challenged by Jesse Kalin and subsequently defended by Grice. We show that Grice's defense fails--the contract ground thesis is without justification.

On the basis of the characterization of autonomy set out by Beauchamp and Childress in Principles of Biomedical Ethics, we first explore some of the parameters along which autonomy may vary in degree through a series of hypothetical examples drawn from various settings; and, second and in more detail, we examine how the range of autonomy is affected through informed consent to various medical diagnostic tests. Our conclusions are (1) that there are significant implications for patient autonomy inherent in new (...) and forthcoming diagnostic modalities, and (2) that attention should be paid to these implications in formulating policies for both clinical practice and research. We close with (a) some specific policy recommendations for clinical practice and research, and (b) some metaphysical speculations raised by our explorations. (shrink)

This book discusses in dialogue form the basic principles of mathematics and its applications including the question: What is mathematics? What does its specific method consist of? What is its relation to the sciences and humanities? What can it offer to specialists in different fields? How can it be applied in practice and in discovering the laws of nature? Dramatized by the dialogue form and shown in the historical movements in which they originated, these questions are discussed in their full (...) complexity, yet are easily comprehended. The first dialogue, whose chief actor is Socrates, leads the reader to the source of modern mathematics in Athens in the 5th Century BC. The second dialogue, featuring Archimedes, takes place during the siege of Syracuse in 212 BC and shows the birth of applied mathematics. The third dialogue occurs in the year 1633 in Rome, its chief character being Galileo Galilei who fully realized the central importance of the mathematical method in discovering the laws of nature. Intended as supplemental reading for philosophy of mathematics courses at the high school or college level it will be of interest to both specialists and non-specialists in mathematics. Alfréd Rényi was born in Budapest Hungary in 1921. He studied mathematics and physics at the University of Budapest and received his Ph. D. from the University of Szaged in 1945. Since 1950 he has been Director of the Mathematical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and since 1952 a professor at the University of Budapest. Dr. Renyi was a visiting professor at Michigan State University in 1961, at the University of Michigan in 1964 and at Stanford University in 1966. His main fields of research are probability theory, mathematical statistics and information theory, and he has also worked in analytic number theory as well as in various branches of analysis, combinatorial analysis and geometry. (shrink)

This thesis looks at explanation in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and in religious reflection. Although these fields differ radically in the objects studied and the methods employed, they do evidence certain formal commonalities when one inquires into the nature of the explanatory endeavor as it is manifested in each. By exploring the links between explanations and the various contexts or disciplines in which they occur, I attempt to provide a general framework for speaking of rational explanations in these (...) diverse areas. ;In an opening chapter I consider several alternatives regarding the epistemic status of religious explanations, focusing finally on the model of "intersubjective explanation." Contemporary defenses of intersubjective religious explanation are placed within the context of the broader faith/reason debate, and a quick survey is made of recent advocates of this position. I then turn to the methodology dispute in the philosophy of the natural sciences . My aim is to mediate between purely formal analyses of explanatory structure and the more recent emphasis on contextual and pragmatic factors. ;In the social sciences, many have argued, explanation is subordinate to intuitive understanding. After tracing the explanation versus understanding debate from Dilthey to the present, I present the recent work of Jurgen Habermas as a case study in the problems of social scientific rationality. Explanations in the social sciences are rational reconstructions of human meaning contexts, and "Verstehen" is required as a precondition for material adequacy. Such explanations are linked to the individual or communal effort to "make sense" of, or bring coherence into, subjective and intersubjective "worlds." ;After an excursus on philosophical explanations and the problem of philosophical rationality, I attempt a brief phenomenology of religious beliefs as explanations. As in the social sphere, religious explanations represent the believer's attempt to "make sense" of her experience in light of a given religious tradition. Although the comprehensive nature of religious explanations makes comparisons difficult--in the limit case they verge on ineffability--the concepts of meaning and coherence allow us to speak of the rationality of religious belief without total equivocation. ;The final chapter turns to the study and evaluation of religious explanations as they occur in the discipline of theology. Under the rubric "theology as a science," I defend theology's dual status as an academic discipline and as believing reflection in the service of the religious community. Through vitally concerned with the truth of its assertions, theology also shares the goals of coherence and intersubjective criticizability with its scientific counterparts. (shrink)

"Us-and-Them fiction" of any sort has never particularly interested me. … Identity is basically a synonym for category, and while categories make language possible, they make problems in life—especially when your try to assign subjects to them. People almost never fit, or never fit for long.In a 2015 interview with Cecilia D'Anastasio, Samuel Delany shares his motivations for writing science fiction from his position as a queer black man. Despite his trepidation about the limiting "categories" within "us-and-them-fiction," and the dangers (...) of essentialist identity politics, Delany notes that his experiences are embedded in each of his texts—even when the protagonists are heterosexual, Asian, Native American, or... (shrink)

Memory should make more available things that are more likely to be needed. Across multiple environmental domains, it has been shown that such a system would match qualitatively the memory effects involving repetition, delay, and spacing (Schooler & Anderson, 2017). To obtain data of sufficient size to study how detailed patterns of past appearance predict probability of being needed again, we examined the patterns with which words appear in large two data sets: tweets from popular sources and comments on popular (...) subreddits. The two data sets show remarkably similar statistics, which are also consistent with earlier, smaller studies of environmental statistics. None of a candidate set of mathematical models of memory do well at predicting the observed patterns in these environments. A new model of human memory based on the environmental model proposed by Anderson and Milson (1989) did better at predicting the environmental data and a wide range of behavioral studies that measure memory availability by probability of recall and speed of retrieval. A critical variable in this model was range, the span of time over which an item occurs, which was discovered in mining the environmental data. These results suggest that theories of memory can be guided by mining of the statistical structure of the environment. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This book, a member of the Series in Affective Science, is a unique interdisciplinary sequence of articles on the cognitive neuroscience of emotion by some of ...

In an article recently published in this journal Prof. David F. Hult argues that a distich absent from Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS fonds français 794 , is superfluous to a proper understanding of Chrétien de Troyes's Le Chevalier de la Charrette . Quite possibly, Hult argues, it represents a scribal accretion that can make no irrefutable claim to be indispensable to a modern scholarly edition of this text. The distich in question was printed by Wendelin Foerster in his edition of (...) the Charrette . Here is Foerster's text. (shrink)

National education is a conscious and planned effort to help children develop their potential be spiritually strong, religious, intelligent, a strong personality and noble character and noble skills. For this reason, education not only focuses on the aspect of children's knowledge but also on religion and morals aspects. This education begins in the family through communication patterns that are created between parents and children in the form of interpersonal communication that can increase the religiosity of adolescents. Therefore, this article aims (...) to measure the interpersonal communication within the family. The author uses quantitative methods with technical correlation to determine the relationship between two variables, namely interpersonal communication in the family and youth religiosity, and includes 303 adolescents as a sample. The data were collected using a Likert scale and processed using Excel and SPSS 16 programs in order to obtain the results that the application of good interpersonal communication in families will increase adolescent religiosity. This leads to the conclusion 'there is a mutually influential relationship between interpersonal communication in the family and adolescent religiosity'.CONTRIBUTION: This article contributes to Christian families in increasing interpersonal communication as a pattern of youth formation, because it can increase their religiosity. (shrink)