As a result of increased interest in global health, more and more medical students and trainees from the.

Recent scholarship in technology and society studies has given attention to the notion of technological citizenship. This article seeks to further integrate perspectives on this topic with theoretical contributions about the development of moral autonomy. The author challenges the presumption that the strategy of expanding opportunities for participation in technological decision making will in itself develop people's autonomy and citizenship. He argues that concurrent efforts must be made to democratize the political-economic structures of key technologies and to help people prepare (...) morally for citizenship roles in governing these technologies. On this basis, a series of initiatives are suggested. (shrink)

Depue & Collins's (D&C's) work relies on extrapolation from data obtained through studies in experimental animals, and needs support from studies of the role of dopamine (DA) neurotransmission in human behaviour. Here we review evidence from two sources: (1) studies of patients with Parkinson's disease and (2) positron emission tomography (PET) studies of DA neurotransmission, which we believe lend support to Depue & Collins's theory, and which can potentially form the basis for a true neurochemistry of personality.

Edmund Husserl (1859—1938) was an influential thinker of the first half of the twentieth century. His philosophy was heavily influenced by the works of Franz Brentano and Bernard Bolzano, and was also influenced in various ways by interaction with contemporaries such as Alexius Meinong, Kasimir Twardowski, and Gottlob Frege. In his own right, Husserl is considered the founder of twentieth century Phenomenology with influence extending to thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and to contemporary continental philosophy generally. (...) Husserl’s philosophy is also being discussed in connection with contemporary research in the cognitive sciences, logic, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind, as well as in discussions of collective intentionality. At the center of Husserl’s philosophical investigations is the notion of the intentionality of consciousness and the related notion of intentional content (what Husserl first called ‘act-matter’ and then the intentional ‘noema’). To say that thought is “intentional” is to say that it is of the nature of thought to be directed toward or about objects. To speak of the “intentional content” of a thought is to speak of the mode or way in which a thought is about an object. Different thoughts present objects in different ways (from different perspectives or under different descriptions) and one way of doing justice to this fact is to speak of these thoughts as having different intentional contents. For Husserl, intentionality includes a wide range of phenomena, from perceptions, judgments, and memories to the experience of other conscious subjects as subjects (inter-subjective experience) and aesthetic experience, just to name a few. Given the pervasive role he takes intentionality to play in all thought and experience, Husserl believes that a systematic theory of intentionality has a role to play in clarifying and founding most other areas of philosophical concern, such as the theory of consciousness, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of logic, epistemology, and the philosophies of action and value. This article presents the key elements of Husserl’s understanding of intentionality and intentional content, specifically as these are developed in his works Logical Investigations and Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. (shrink)

As the title suggests, Breeur’s project is to discuss three key ideas: lies, stupidity, and imposture. The book is organized into two parts of two chapters each, followed by an appendix. The individual chapters and sub-sections are well-written and philosophically sophisticated. However, the reader will be disappointed if they expect a sustained analysis of the relations among the book’s titular ideas or a unified account of their role in the breakdown of respect for truth more broadly. Breeur’s approach is more (...) episodic, laying out valuable considerations and enticing formulations, but often breaking off before spelling out their full implications or connecting them to previous discussions in the book. His discussion clearly opens up these additional avenues of thought, but the task of going down them is left largely to the reader. This review briefly takes up each of Breeur’s themes: lies, stupidity, and imposture. (shrink)

OBJECTIVE: To apply component analysis, a structured approach to the ethical analysis of risks and potential benefits in research, to published emergency research using a waiver of/exception from informed consent. The hypothesis was that component analysis could be used with a high degree of interrater reliability, and that the vast majority of emergency research would comply with a minimal-risk threshold. METHODS: A Medline search and manual search were done to identify studies using a waiver of/exception from informed consent published between (...) July 1996 and December 2000. A review panel of physicians and bioethicists independently classified nontherapeutic procedures in each study as minimal risk, probably minimal risk, or probably more than minimal risk. RESULTS: Seventy studies using a waiver of/exception from informed consent were identified. A majority of reviewers classified nontherapeutic procedures in 62 studies (88.6%) as minimal risk. Reviewers classified nontherapeutic procedures in six studies (8.6%) as minimal risk or probably minimal risk. In two studies (2.9%), nontherapeutic procedures were classified as probably more than minimal risk. The intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.89 (95% CI = 0.85 to 0.93), indicating very high interrater reliability. CONCLUSIONS: Component analysis can be used with high reliability to review emergency research and may improve the consistency of institutional review board review of emergency research. The vast majority of published emergency research performed using a waiver of/exception from consent complies with a properly-applied minimal-risk threshold. A minimal-risk threshold for nontherapeutic procedures protects subjects better than current U.S. regulations while permitting important emergency research to continue. (shrink)

The notion of function is indispensable to our understanding of distinctions such as that between being broken and being in working order (for artifacts) and between being diseased and being healthy (for organisms). A clear account of the ontology of functions and functioning is thus an important desideratum for any top-level ontology intended for application to domains such as engineering or medicine. The benefit of using top-level ontologies in applied ontology can only be realized when each of the categories identified (...) and defined by a top-level ontology is integrated with the others in a coherent fashion. Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) has from the beginning included function as one of its categories, exploiting a version of the etiological account of function that is framed at a level of generality sufficient to accommodate both biological and artifactual functions. This account has been subjected to a series of criticisms and refinements. We here articulate BFO’s account of function, provide some reasons for favoring it over competing views, and defend it against objections. (shrink)

Zika infection in pregnant women is associated with an elevated probability of giving birth to a child with microcephaly and multiple other disabilities. Public health messaging on Zika prevention has predominantly targeted women who know they are pregnant or intend to become pregnant, but not teenage females for whom unintended pregnancy is more likely. Vulnerabilities among this population to reproductive risks associated with Zika are further amplified by restrictive abortion laws in several Zika-impacted states. Key to prevention is enhanced, targeted (...) public health messaging centered on teens nationally and particularly in certain high-risk regions. (shrink)

This exploratory study set out to pilot use of a Risk Innovation approach to support the development of advanced biopreservation technologies, and the societally beneficial development of advanced technologies more broadly. This is the first study to apply the Risk Innovation approach — which has previously been used to help individual organizations clarify areas of value and threats — to multiple entities involved in developing an emerging technology.

ABSTRACTMiranda Fricker has characterized epistemic injustice as “a kind of injustice in which someone is wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower” (2007, Epistemic injustice: Power & the e...

This article briefly outlines Ørsted's early aesthetic thought by placing it in the context of his affiliations with early German romanticism, and by examining the poetics and philosophy of language contained in a prize-winning essay on aesthetics that he wrote in 1796. Further, this article presents an example of how aesthetic and linguistic strategies in his writing helped shape the meaning of the theoretical terms utilized in his early scientific work. Toward this end, the focus of the article will be (...) limited to a central passage from the first installment of his Kemiske Breve (Chemical Letters), which he published in 1798 at the age of twenty-one. (shrink)

BonJour has proposed background conditions on internalist justification, which Kornblith argues are inconsistent with a core internalist ‘credo’ – that subjects internally alike are justificationally alike – signaling the ‘death’ of internalism. The funeral arrangements are premature, though more systematic consideration of background conditions is needed. The majority of BonJour's conditions are not background conditions as their failure makes an epistemically relevant internal difference. This neutralizes Kornblith's criticisms and reveals how the proposed conditions are not departures from internalism. BonJour's background (...) conditions are simply conditions, the credo remains intact, and Kornblith's objections do not spell problems for internalism, let alone death. (shrink)

Recent literature on epistemic innocence develops the idea that a defective cognitive process may nevertheless merit special consideration insofar as it confers an epistemic benefit that would not otherwise be available. For example, confabulation may be epistemically innocent when it makes a subject more likely to form future true beliefs or helps her maintain a coherent self-concept. I consider the role of confabulation in typical cases of interpersonal gaslighting, and argue that confabulation will not be epistemically innocent in such cases (...) even if it does preserve a coherent self-concept or belief-set for the subject. Analyzing the role of confabulation in gaslighting illustrates its role in on-going interpersonal relationships, and augments already growing evidence that confabulation may be quite widespread. The role of confabulation in gaslighting shows that whether confabulation confers epistemic benefits will depend greatly on the interpersonal context in which it is deployed, while whether a coherent self-concept is epistemically beneficial will depend to a great extent on the content of that self-concept. This shows that the notion of an epistemically harmful or beneficial feature of a cognitive process can and should be further clarified, and that doing so has both theoretical and practical advantages in understanding epistemic innocence itself. (shrink)

I propose a novel compatibilist interpretation of Leibniz’s mature views concerning what is metaphysically basic. Drawing on a compatibilist reading of Aristotle on primary substance in the Categories and Metaphysics Z, I argue that Leibniz is working with two complementary ways of being metaphysically basic—one applying to immaterial monads, the other to corporeal substances. Although corporeal substances derive their status as basic from their dominant monads, they are nevertheless fully real, unified, and genuinely capable of acting. This perspective respects Leibniz’s (...) idealist tendencies and his commitment to the reality of bodies without attributing inconsistency to his considered views. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Harmonizing Leibniz’s OntologyVolume 51, Issue 3ANDREW D. H. STUMPF DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000704Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Harmonizing Leibniz’s OntologyVolume 51, Issue 3ANDREW D. H. STUMPF DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000704Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Harmonizing Leibniz’s OntologyVolume 51, Issue 3ANDREW D. H. STUMPF DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0012217312000704Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

Aristotle is essentially human; that is, for all possible worlds metaphysically consistent with our own, if Aristotle exists, then he is human. This is a claim about the essential property of an object. The claim that objects have essential properties has been hotly disputed, but for present purposes, we can bracket that issue. In this essay, we are interested, rather, in the question of whether properties themselves have essential properties (or features) for their existence. We call those who suppose they (...) do “property essentialists”; those who do not, “property anti-essentialists,” or “quidditists.” We offer two complementary arguments. Our total argument is under-girded by two assumptions: transworld identity theory and “received view” counterfactual semantics, a la David Lewis. We then argue that, if one presumes that these are true, then one risks running headlong into paradox if one also accepts property anti-essentialism. That's the first argument. By contrast, if one accepts these same assumptions in conjunction with property essentialism, then the paradox is avoided. This is the second argument. We take it that our arguments work to show that, between property essentialism and quidditism, the property essentialist is on better footing. Plausibly, properties themselves do have essential properties for their existence. (shrink)

Theology, Fantasy, and the Imagination analyzes theological, religious, and philosophical themes in classical Christian fantasy, contemporary “post-Christian” fantasy, and fantasy at play in table top games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: the Gathering.

Paul Churchland argues that the continuity of human intellectual development provides evidence against folk psychology and traditional epistemology, since these latter find purchase only at the later stages of intellectual development. He supports this contention with an analogy from the history of thermodynamics. Careful attention to the thermodynamics analogy shows that the argument from continuity does not provide independent support for eliminative materialism. The argument also rests upon claims about continuity which do not support the claim that the continuity of (...) intellectual development is evidence for the elimination of folk psychology. Traditional epistemology and folk psychology should not yet be abandoned. (shrink)

The Importance of Philosophy in Teacher Education maps the gradual decline of philosophy as a central, integrated part of educational studies. Chapters consider how this decline has impacted teacher education and practice, offering new directions for the reintegration of philosophical thinking in teacher preparation and development. Touching on key points in history, this valuable collection of chapters accurately appraises the global decline of philosophy of education in teacher education programs and seeks to understand the external and endemic causes of changed (...) attitudes towards a discipline which was once assigned such a central place in teacher education. Chapters illustrate how a grounding in the theoretical and ethical dimensions of teaching, learning, and education systems contribute in meaningful ways to being a good teacher, and trace the consequences of a decline in philosophy on individuals' professional development and on the evolution of the teaching profession more broadly. With this in mind, the text focusses on the future of teacher education and considers how we can ensure that philosophy of education feeds into the excellence of teaching today. This book will be of great interest to graduate, postgraduate students as well as research scholars in the field of educational philosophy and history of education. In addition, it will be useful for those involved in teacher education, and in particular, course, module and program development. (shrink)

A central frustration of recent political discourse is the consistent reduction of politically relevant factual and critical speech to mere expression of partisan commitment. Partisans of “the other side”—members of the other tribe—are viewed as de facto wrong, because partisans, even when their speech invokes mere facts or purportedly shared political principles. Ideally, democratic political discourse operates along at least two central dimensions: a dimension of shared factual, historical, and political assumptions, and a more contested dimension of interpretation, prioritization, and (...) evaluation that results in diverse and often competing understandings of what is good, and so of what is best to collectively pursue. Debates among advocates of competing conceptions of the good and partisans of diverse world views identifiable in terms of the second dimension are, on this picture, constrained and grounded by the shared factual and political commitments of the first, thus ensuring a meaningful basis for ongoing political engagement. While there is little reason to think this ideal has ever been perfectly realized, in recent political discourse statements that events have occurred, drugs are effective, or transparency is important in political conduct cannot seem to get uptake except as mere expressions of political partisanship any more than an actor on stage trying to convince her audience of the danger of a real fire that has broken out in the theater can get uptake for this claim except as an expression in a theatrical performance. In both cases, the real content and discursive intent of speech is undermined by the context in which it occurs. In the case of the actor on stage, the appropriate rules for uptake and interpretation are being followed, just to unfortunate effect. However, in the case of political discourse something seems to be wrong with the rules for uptake and interpretation that have come to dominate in many quarters. This essay relies on recent discussions of silencing and epistemic injustice to introduce the ideas of partisan silencing and hyper-partisan silencing in an attempt to say more precisely what has gone wrong with the rules for uptake and interpretation in political discourse. It then relies on Hannah Arendt’s analyses of truth and lies in politics to connect these phenomena to underlying features of political action and speech. Conditions of partisan and hyperpartisan silencing turn out to be a natural, if not inevitable, consequence of the relationship of truth-telling and deception to political action itself as Arendt understands this. Finally, the essay elaborates on two suggestive passages from Arendt’s 1967 essay “Truth and Politics” to propose potential strategies for resisting conditions of hyperpartisan silencing. Because hyper-partisan silencing itself imposes a certain discursive logic, there are kinds of political speech and action that might succeed in being understood as sincere and so in being persuasive—even in the face of hyper-partisan silencing—precisely because they challenge the assumptions that underpin this discursive logic itself. (shrink)

Pliny the Elder in Natural History, xiii, 74–82, described in detail specifications for the manufacturing of papyrus. However, there was a spurious omission pertaining to the height of the manufactured sheet in sentence 78. Johnson has listed the different theories explaining this as an oversight or that a standard height-to-width ratio existed, thus making the specification of the height redundant. The latter is not substantiated by the measurement of the dimensions of extant papyrus rolls. Johnson proposed a more rational theory, (...) that it was most important to specify the width but this does not explain the absence of any specification of height, even as a measurement of secondary importance. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of when and why duties are conditional on compliance on the part of others, by examining the role of reciprocity in Rawls's theory of justice. In particular, it argues that the idea of reciprocity and the relational nature of distributive justice can help explain three otherwise puzzling aspects of Rawls's view: (1) his claim that justice has to be "congruent" with the good; (2) his claim that the justification of a political conception of justice depends (...) on showing that an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehenisve doctrines is possible, even after the freestanding argument for the political conception has been successfully completed; (3) his claim that there are no global duties of distributive justice, beyond the non-comparative duties of aid and reparation. Each of these arguments has been the subject of controversy partly because of a lack of attention to reciprocity, the paper argues, and the relational nature of Rawls's non-luck-egalitarian position. (shrink)

Kriegel described the problem of intentional inexistence as one of the ‘perennial problems of philosophy’, 307–340, 2007: 307). In the same paper, Kriegel alluded to a modal realist solution to the problem of intentional inexistence. However, Kriegel does not state by name who defends the kind of modal realist solution he has in mind. Kriegel also points out that even what he believes to be the strongest version of modal realism does not pass the ‘principle of representation’ and thus modal (...) realism is not an adequate solution to the problem of intentional inexistence. In this paper, I respond to Kriegel by defending a modal realist solution that he did not consider in 2007, called ‘extended modal realism’. EMR is a version of modal realism where possible worlds are not completely isolated as they are under the Lewisian model. Rather, under EMR worlds are, in a way, spatiotemporally related. The fact EMR worlds are related allows EMR to sufficiently pass the principle of representation and thus can be deemed a legitimate solution to the problem of intentional inexistence. I conclude that either EMR can pass the principle of representation in some cases or, and I think the more sensible option, we give up on the principle of representation altogether. (shrink)

The author, editor of Russell and Analytic Philosophy and Bertrand Russell: Critical Assessments, is also a long-time member of Russellians Anonymous, an international charitable organization founded to help combat the debilitating effects of Russellianism. For the record, it's true that while at the Munich conference a speaker did begin his comments with the first two sentences quoted below. No doubt historians will continue to debate exactly what followed afterwards.

This essay is an attempt to demonstrate that Charles Taylor’s “social imaginaries” should not be viewed as sources of identity. For Taylor, making sense of society’s practices allows an individual to develop a conception of the self – an idea Taylor borrows from Hegel. I therefore suggest that Kierkegaard’s critiques against Hegel may similarly be used against Taylor’s conception of identity. Kierkegaard’s critiques of Hegel are applicable to Taylor’s social imaginaries for two reasons. First, Hegel’s system only provides approximations—mediation in (...) the ethical nullifies the individual’s subjective relation to Kierkegaard’s “Absolute” by objectivizing the relation. Thus, despair ensues. Second, if knowledge of the Absolute is mediated through social imaginaries, the individual’s responsibility to perpetually renew faith in her constituting power is diminished. Taylor’s “system” is therefore insufficient for achieving a positive view of existence because selfhood is properly understood through the inward subjectivity of one’s relation to her constituting power. (shrink)