Medical collaboration with authoritarian regimes historically has served to facilitate the use of torture as a tool of repression and to justify atrocities with the language of public health. Because scholarship on medicalized killing and biomedicalist rhetoric and ideology is heavily focused on Nazi Germany, this article seeks to expand the discourse to include other periods in which medicalized torture occurred, specifically in Argentina from 1976 to 1983, when the country was ruled by the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional military regime. (...) The extent to which medical personnel embedded themselves within the Proceso regime’s killing apparatus has escaped full recognition by both scholars and human rights activists. This article reconstructs the narrative of the Proceso’s human rights abuses to argue that health professionals knowingly and often enthusiastically facilitated, oversaw, and participated in every phase of the “disappearance,” torture, and mass murder process. (shrink)

A Physicalist Manifesto is a full treatment of the comprehensive physicalist view that, in some important sense, everything is physical. Andrew Melnyk argues that the view is best formulated by appeal to a carefully worked-out notion of realization, rather than supervenience; that, so formulated, physicalism must be importantly reductionist; that it need not repudiate causal and explanatory claims framed in non-physical language; and that it has the a posteriori epistemic status of a broad-scope scientific hypothesis. Two concluding chapters argue (...) in detail that contemporary science provides no significant empirical evidence against physicalism and some considerable evidence for it. Written in a brisk, candid and exceptionally clear style, this 2003 book should appeal to professionals and students in philosophy of mind, metaphysics and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Science as Practice and Culture explores one of the newest and most controversial developments within the rapidly changing field of science studies: the move toward studying scientific practice--the work of doing science--and the associated move toward studying scientific culture, understood as the field of resources that practice operates in and on. Andrew Pickering has invited leading historians, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists of science to prepare original essays for this volume. The essays range over the physical and biological sciences and (...) mathematics, and are divided into two parts. In part I, the contributors map out a coherent set of perspectives on scientific practice and culture, and relate their analyses to central topics in the philosophy of science such as realism, relativism, and incommensurability. The essays in part II seek to delineate the study of science as practice in arguments across its borders with the sociology of scientific knowledge, social epistemology, and reflexive ethnography. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION I What is teleology? If you ever look closely at an ants' nest, you will see an intricate network of pathways and chambers teeming with ...

This article provides an ethical analysis of the U.S. practice guideline update on disorders of consciousness. Our analysis focuses on the guideline’s recommendations regarding the use of investigational neuroimaging methods to assess brain‐injured patients. Complex and multifaceted ethical issues have emerged because these methods alter the clinical understanding of consciousness. We address issues of false hope, patient suffering, and cost. We argue that, in spite of these concerns, there is significant benefit to using neuroimaging to assess brain‐injured patients in most (...) cases. (shrink)

Nicolas Malebranche is one of the most important philosophers of the 17th Century after Descartes. A pioneer of Rationalism, he was one of the first to champion and to further Cartesian ideas. Andrew Pyle places Malebranche's work in the context of Descartes and other philosophers, and also in its relation to ideas about faith and reason. He examines the entirety of Malebranche's writings, including the famous The Search After Truth , which was admired and criticized by both Leibniz and (...) Locke. Pyle presents an integrated account of Malebranche's central theses, occasionalism and 'vision in God', before exploring and assessing Malebranche's contribution to debates on physics and biology, and his views on the soul, self-knowledge, grace, and the freedom of the will. This penetrating and wide-ranging study will be of interest to not only philosophers, but also to historians of science and philosophy, theologians, and students of the Enlightenment or 17th Century thought. (shrink)

This article distinguishes between a telic and a deontic version of Derek Parfit's influential Priority View. Employing the distinction, it shows that the existence of variations in how intrapersonal and interpersonal conflicts should be resolved fails to provide a compelling case in favour of relational egalitarianism and against all pure versions of the Priority View. In addition, the article argues that those variations are better understood as providing counterevidence to certain distribution-sensitive versions of consequentialism.

This commentary critically examines a recent qualitative study, published in this issue of Neuroethics, on the attitudes of family caregivers toward evidence of covert consciousness in brain-injured patients.

Thomas Aquinas devoted a substantial proportion of his greatest works to the virtues. Yet, despite the availability of these texts, Aquinas’s virtue ethics remains mysterious, leaving readers with many unanswered questions. In this book, Pinsent argues that the key to understanding Aquinas’s approach is to be found in an association between: a) attributes he appends to the virtues, and b) interpersonal capacities investigated by the science of social cognition, especially in the context of autistic spectrum disorder. The book uses this (...) research to argue that Aquinas’s approach to the virtues is radically non-Aristotelian and founded on the concept of second-person relatedness. To demonstrate the explanatory power of this principle, Pinsent shows how the second-person perspective gives interpretation to Aquinas’s descriptions of the virtues and offers a key to long-standing problems, such as the reconciliation of magnanimity and humility. The principle of second-person relatedness also interprets acts that Aquinas describes as the fruition of the virtues. Pinsent concludes by considering how this approach may shape future developments in virtue ethics. (shrink)

Nicolas Malebranche is one of the most important philosophers of the seventeenth century after Descartes. A pioneer of rationalism, he was one of the first to champion and to further Cartesian ideas. Andrew Pyle places Malebranche's work in the context of Descartes and other philosophers, and also in its relation to ideas about faith and reason. He examines the entirety of Malebranche's writings, including the famous The Search After Truth, which was admired and criticized by both Leibniz and Locke. (...) Pyle presents an integrated account of Malebranche's central theses, occasionalism and 'vision in God', before exploring and assessing Malebranche's contribution to debates on physics and biology, and his views on the soul, self-knowledge, grace and the freedom of the will. This penetrating and wide-ranging study will be of interest to not only philosophers, but also to historians of science and philosophy, theologians, and students of the Enlightenment or seventeenth century thought. (shrink)

Many explanations in physics rely on idealized models of physical systems. These explanations fail to satisfy the conditions of standard normative accounts of explanation. Recently, some philosophers have claimed that idealizations can be used to underwrite explanation nonetheless, but only when they are what have variously been called representational, Galilean, controllable or harmless idealizations. This paper argues that such a half-measure is untenable and that idealizations not of this sort can have explanatory capacities.

Formed in the wake of May 1968, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) was a radical resistance movement active in France in the early 1970's. Theorist Michel Foucault was heavily involved. This book collects interdisciplinary essays that explore the GIP's resources both for Foucault studies and for prison activism today.

In recent years ‘bioart’ has been lauded in the social sciences for its creative engagements with the ontological stakes of new forms of biotechnical life in-the-making. In this paper I push further to explore the ontogenetic potentials of bioart-encounters to generate new capacities for thinking and perceiving the nonhuman agencies imbricated in the becoming of subjects. To explore this potential I stage an encounter with Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, highlighting three implications for theorizations of the constitution and transformation of (...) subjects. First, Simondon forces us to rethink the subject in terms of its transductive emergence from pre-individual processes, and its metastable susceptibility to ongoing transformations. Second, he substitutes voluntarist conceptions of thought with an involuntarist primacy of material encounters as the conditions for novel individuations. Finally, I argue that Simondon enables a thinking of the politics of the art-encounter in terms of its ontogenetic capacity to materially produce, rather than merely represent, new subjects and worlds. (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)

A common methodological adage holds that diverse evidence better confirms a hypothesis than does the same amount of similar evidence. Proponents of Bayesian approaches to scientific reasoning such as Horwich, Howson and Urbach, and Earman claim to offer both a precise rendering of this maxim in probabilistic terms and an explanation of why the maxim should be part of the methodological canon of good science. This paper contends that these claims are mistaken and that, at best, Bayesian accounts of diverse (...) evidence are crucially incomplete. This failure should lend renewed force to a long-neglected global worry about Bayesian approaches. (shrink)

In this article, I present an argument that suggests neuroscience should inform judgments of decision-making capacity. First, I review key behavioral and neurocognitive data to demonstrate that neuroscientific tests might be predictive of decision-making capacity, and that these tests might inform clinical judgments of capacity. Second, I argue that, consistent with the principles of autonomy and justice, such data should inform judgements of decision-making capacity. While the neuroscience of decision-making capacity still requires time to mature, there is strong reason to (...) believe that neuroscience might assist clinicians in adjudicating difficult cases in the future. This article focuses on the assessment of capacity in brain injury patients who have profound communication impairments, however, the overarching aim of the article is to highlight the potential use of neuroscience to improve our understanding of the relationship between cognition and decision-making capacity. (shrink)

The human primate is a deeply cultural species, our cognition being shaped by culture, and cultural transmission amounting to an “epidemic of mental representations” (Sperber, 1996). The architecture of this aspect of human cognition has been shaped by our evolutionary past in ways that we can now begin to discern through comparative studies of other primates. Processes of social learning (learning from others) are important for cognitive science to understand because they are cognitively complex and take many interrelated forms; they (...) shape traditions, cultures and nonsocial aspects of cognition; and in turn they may be shaped by their cultural context. The study of primate social learning and culture has in recent years enjoyed a renaissance, providing a wealth of new findings, key aspects of which are reviewed. The focus is on cognitive issues, including learning about the consequences, sequential structure and hierarchical organization of actions; relating stored knowledge to the assimilation of new social knowledge; feedback guiding the construction of imitations; conceptual grasp of imitation; and the reciprocal relationship between social learning and culture. (shrink)

In this article, I present an argument that suggests neuroscience should inform judgments of decision-making capacity. First, I review key behavioral and neurocognitive data to demonstrate that neuroscientific tests might be predictive of decision-making capacity, and that these tests might inform clinical judgments of capacity. Second, I argue that, consistent with the principles of autonomy and justice, such data should inform judgements of decision-making capacity. While the neuroscience of decision-making capacity still requires time to mature, there is strong reason to (...) believe that neuroscience might assist clinicians in adjudicating difficult cases in the future. This article focuses on the assessment of capacity in brain injury patients who have profound communication impairments, however, the overarching aim of the article is to highlight the potential use of neuroscience to improve our understanding of the relationship between cognition and decision-making capacity. (shrink)

:In this paper, the author argues that Joseph Fins’ mosaic decisionmaking model for brain-injured patients is untenable. He supports this claim by identifying three problems with mosaic decisionmaking. First, that it is unclear whether a mosaic is a conceptually adequate metaphor for a decisionmaking process that is intended to promote patient autonomy. Second, that the proposed legal framework for mosaic decisionmaking is inappropriate. Third, that it is unclear how we ought to select patients for participation in mosaic decisionmaking.

Discourse between pupils represents a core element of citizenship education in England. However, as it is currently presented within the curriculum, discourse adopts the form of the rather broad terms of 'discussion' and 'debate'. These terms are diffuse, and in themselves offer little pedagogical guidance for teachers implementing the curriculum in schools. Moreover, there has been little academic reflection in England as to how theoretical ideas on civic dialogue may usefully inform approaches to pupil discourse. For this reason, how pupils (...) experience discursive learning activities is likely to depend on how individual schools and teachers understand the terms 'discussion' and 'debate' and the way in which this understanding is translated into pupil learning activities. This article explores how recourse to deliberative democratic theory, and in particular to the principle of contestatory deliberative democracy found within recent republican writing, may be useful in helping educators to consider critically the capacities needed for effective civic discourse as a well as the outcomes of pupils' dialogical engagement. (shrink)

This book offers an exciting re-interpretation of Auguste Comte, the founder of French sociology. Following the development of his philosophy of positivism, Comte later focused on the importance of the emotions in his philosophy resulting in the creation of a new religious system, the Religion of Humanity. Andrew Wernick provides the first in-depth critique of Comte's concept of religion and its place in his thinking on politics, sociology and philosophy of science. He places Comte's ideas in the context of (...) post-1789 French political and intellectual history, and of modern philosophy, especially postmodernism. Wernick relates Comte to Marx and Nietzsche as seminal figures of modernity and examines key features of modern and postmodern French social theory, tracing the inherent flaws and disintegration of Comte's system. Wernick offers original and fascinating insights in this rich study which will attract a wide audience from sociologists and philosophers to cultural theorists and historians. (shrink)

One of the key achievements of critical realism has been to expose the modernist myth of universal reason, which holds that authentic knowledge claims must be objectively ‘pure’, uncontaminated by the subjectivity of local place, specific time and particular culture. Wright aims to address the lack of any substantial and sustained engagement between critical realism and theological critical realism with particular regard to: (a) the distinctive ontological claims of Christianity; (b) their epistemic warrant and intellectual legitimacy; and (c) scrutiny of (...) the primary source of the ontological claims of Christianity, namely the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. As such, it functions as a prolegomena to a much needed wider debate, guided by the under-labouring services of critical realism, between Christianity and various other religious and secular worldviews. This important new text will help stimulate a debate that has yet to get out of first gear. This book will appeal to academics, graduate and post-graduate students especially, but also Christian clergy, ministers and informed laity, and members of the general public concerned with the nature of religion and its place in contemporary society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 30.4 (2000) 38-58 [Access article in PDF] Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead Andrew Norris Death is most frightening, since it is a boundary. —Aristotle, Nicomachean EthicsAnd as the same thing there exists in us living and dead and the waking and the sleeping and young and old: for these things having changed round are those, and those having changed round are these. —Heraclitus, (...) Fragment 88 What is politics today? What is its relationship to the tradition from which it emerges? The questions are difficult ones to answer in part because contemporary politics seems so schizophrenic. In affluent Western countries politics is increasingly a matter of spectacle on the one hand and managed economies on the other. Hannah Arendt seems quite confirmed in her claim that the once-glorious public realm of appearance is fundamentally degraded when it is overrun by concerns more appropriate to the private realm, such as household management and gossip. If this "unnatural growth of the natural" [47] inclines us to nostalgia for a time when the two realms were more decisively separated, such nostalgia is likely intensified by the "ethnic cleansing," rape camps, and genocide that we now associate with names such as "Yugoslavia" and "Rwanda." But as improbable as any flight to the past may be, it is even less likely that the politics of that past could help us navigate the treacherous waters of our current technological society. I have in mind not only the familiar claim that the attempted genocides of our time are only made possible by quite modern forms of technology, organization, and experience, 1 but also recent scientific and "medical" advances. Consider just two: first, the corporate driven and controlled development of biotechnologies, in which huge multinationals are acquiring patents to genetic "information" such as "all human blood cells that have come from the umbilical cord of [any] newborn child." If there is any doubt that such developments will lead us to redefine the human being, these may be laid to rest by the case of John Moore, an Alaskan businessman who found his own body parts had been patented, without his knowledge, by the University of California at Los Angeles and licensed to the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Corporation [Rifkin 60-61]. So much for Locke's attempt to ground the institution of private property in the fact that "every Man has a Property in his own Person"! 2 In its place we seem to be moving [End Page 38] toward something more like the "logical synthesis of biology and economy" called for by the National Socialist Institut allemand in Paris in 1942 [Agamben, Homo Sacer 145]. A similar process of redefinition is already underway in the field of death, a phenomenon that scientists and lawyers are having a harder and harder time pinning down. Where once death was defined by the cessation of the movement of the heart and lungs, recent life support technologies have forced scientists to define death in terms of such technologies. Witness Doctor Norman Shumway's defense of the definition of death as brain death: "I'm saying that anyone whose brain is dead is dead. It is the one determinant that would be universally applicable, because the brain is the one organ that can't be transplanted" [163]. By implication, if and when technology is developed that allows for brain transplants, even those whose brains are "dead" will be brought back to some kind of life, perhaps as organ farms for others who are less ambiguously alive.Giorgio Agamben, from whose book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life I take both this last grisly example and its analysis, argues that, contrary to appearances, such developments do not represent a radical break with the tradition. His analysis both builds upon and corrects Michel Foucault's claim that politics in our time is constituted by disciplines of normalization and subjectification that Foucault labels "bio-power." For Foucault, biopower is fundamentally modern. "What might be called a society's 'threshold of modernity,'" he writes, "has been reached when the life of the species is wagered... (shrink)

Beall and Cotnoir (2017) argue that theists may accept the claim that God's omnipotence is fully unrestricted if they also adopt a suitable nonclassical logic. Their primary focus is on the infamous Stone problem (i.e., whether God can create a stone too heavy for God to lift). We show how unrestricted omnipotence generates Curry‐like paradoxes. The upshot is that Beall and Cotnoir only provide a solution to one version of the Stone problem, but that unrestricted omnipotence generates other problems which (...) they do not adequately address. (shrink)

There is a long and distinguished history of ethical thought in both business and medicine dating back to ancient times. Yet, the emergence of distinct academic disciplines ("business ethics" and "bioethics") which are also tied to broader social movements is a very recent phenomenon. In spite of the apparent affinities that would seem to emerge from this connection, many have argued that the differences between business and medicine make any constructive interaction between business ethics and bioethics minimal. Indeed, little has (...) been done to specifically examine the potential for collaboration and interdisciplinary research. This paper argues that there is considerable potential for constructive interaction between these two movements based on three major arguments: that the differences between medicine and business have been exaggerated, that both the fields face a number of urgent problems that are common to each, and that the model of bioethics can serve as a useful guide for business ethicists. (shrink)

There is a long and distinguished history of ethical thought in both business and medicine dating back to ancient times. Yet, the emergence of distinct academic disciplines [“business ethics” and “bioethics”) which are also tied to broader social movements is a very recent phenomenon. In spite of the apparent affinities that would seem to emerge from this connection, many have argued that the differences between business and medicine make any constructive interaction between business ethics and bioethics minimal. Indeed, little has (...) been done to specifically examine the potential for collaboration and interdisciplinary research. This paper argues that there is considerable potential for constructive interaction between these two movements based on three major arguments: that the differences between medicine and business have been exaggerated, that both fields face a number of urgent problems that are common to each, and that the model of bioethics can serve as a useful guide for business ethicists. (shrink)

This paper examines G. A. Cohen's final criticism of Ronald Dworkin's theory of equality of resources, which targets its treatment of inequalities that arise when some individuals make luckier choices than others make. Rebutting Cohen's argument that such option luck inequalities fail to be just in an unqualified sense, the paper argues that choice does not merely render inequality legitimate but instead can sometimes make inequality just. It also examines the relationship between Cohen's criticism and the conception of equality developed (...) in his earlier influential paper,. (shrink)

In recent work, Joshua Glasgow has offered a definition of racism that is supposed to put to rest the debates between cognitive, behavioral, attitudinal, and institutionalist definitions. The key to such a definition, he argues, is the idea of disrespect. He claims: “φ is racist if and only if φ is disrespectful toward members of racialized group R as Rs.” While this definition may capture an important commonality among cognitive, behavioral, and attitudinal accounts of racism, I argue that his attempt (...) to expand the definition to cover institutional or “structural” racism is less persuasive. Alternatively, I argue that structural racism must be understood in terms of injustice rather than disrespect. This involves giving a fuller account of how institutions are related to the beliefs, actions, and intentions of individuals, and thus how they can come to embody a certain kind of agency. (shrink)

John Rawls's famous difference principle is capable of at least four distinct statements, each of which occurs in A Theory of Justice. According to what I shall term the Crude Principle it is a necessary and sufficient condition for the justice of an institutional scheme which expands social and economic inequality that, subject to the satisfaction of more weighty principles, it increases the level of advantage of the least advantaged. Expressing this principle Rawls writes that,Assuming the framework of institutions required (...) by equal liberty and fair equality of opportunity, the higher expectations of those better situated are just if and only if they work as part of a scheme which improves the expectations of the least advantaged members of society. The intuitive idea is that the social order is not to establish and secure the more attractive prospects of those better off unless doing so is to the advantage of those less fortunate. (shrink)

In recent work, Joshua Glasgow has offered a definition of racism that is supposed to put to rest the debates between cognitive, behavioral, attitudinal, and institutionalist definitions. The key to such a definition, he argues, is the idea of disrespect. He claims: “φ is racist if and only if φ is disrespectful toward members of racialized group R as Rs.” While this definition may capture an important commonality among cognitive, behavioral, and attitudinal accounts of racism, I argue that his attempt (...) to expand the definition to cover institutional or “structural” racism is less persuasive. Alternatively, I argue that structural racism must be understood in terms of injustice rather than disrespect. This involves giving a fuller account of how institutions are related to the beliefs, actions, and intentions of individuals, and thus how they can come to embody a certain kind of agency. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to consider the ways in which civic republican theory can provide a meaningful and useful account of social justice, one that is which holds resonance for educational debates. Recognising the need for educationalists interested in civic republicanism to pay greater attention to ideas of justice—and in particular social justice as it concerns relationships between citizens —it is argued that a form of civic republicanism committed to freedom as non-domination is capable of providing a substantive (...) model for analysing social justice within educational arenas. After positioning the contribution offered here within existing educational literature on civic republicanism, salient elements of social justice as freedom as non-domination are identified. On this basis, debates concerning the existence and potential expansion of state grammar schools in England are considered in relation to the account of republican social justice as non-domination. It is argued that from this republican position grammar schools represent an arbitrary domination of the interests of those less well off by those with greater material and cultural capital and in doing so lead to advantages for some at the expense of others. Though the focus of the paper is on grammar schools in England, it is suggested that republican justice may be a useful frame for considering similar educational cases in England and elsewhere. (shrink)