In a systematic investigation of national art histories, Bernard Smith’s Place, Taste and Tradition: A Study of Australian Art since 1788, first published in 1945, would likely emerge as an Ur-text of the genre. The book’s rewriting of Australian art history within a Marxist tradition of ‘culturalist’ criticism was a major advance on the available models. Its success stems in no small part from its judicious and balanced account of how social forces intersect. The book privileges economic production as a (...) primary force, as does any Marxian text deserving of the name, but no more than it privileges cultural production and reception as primary forces. (shrink)

This book provides an elegant account of the nature of the individual, without reducing it to a cluster of universals or claiming that it is a bare particular that must be acknowledged but never articulated.

Continuing the investigation in his earlier Individuals and individuality, Martine (philosophy, U. of Alabama) demonstrates that indeterminacy in our experience is logically bound to the determinate dimensions of thought and practice.

Is there a place for the tragic vision in an orderly scheme of things? This is the question that Patrick Madigan asks in an interesting essay that explores not only the place of tragedy and comedy in human experience, but also the place of the opening that tragedy represents in the Aristotelian system. He argues that Aristotle's view of being, if rightly understood, can accept and even embrace the tragic vision, and moreover that the perspective on human experience laid open (...) by tragedy can lead to a more complete understanding of ourselves and the world we try to come to terms with. He argues that it is only in the dreadful character of tragic experience that we can be shocked out of a complacent "doxalogical slumber" into the genuinely self-critical examination required for the attainment of theoretical knowledge. (shrink)

The latest volume in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy series, this work brings together some of the best and most influential recent philosophical scholarship on Nietzsche. Opening with a substantial introduction by John Richardson, it covers: Nietzsche's views on truth and knowledge, his 'doctrines' of the eternal recurrence and will to power, his distinction between Apollinian and Dionysian art, his critique of morality, his conceptions of agency and self-creation, and his genealogical method. For each of these issues, the papers (...) show Nietzsche's continuing philosophical importance. Giving a clear and accessible overview, while retaining an analytical philosophical approach throughout, this volume is essential reading for all students of Nietzsche. (shrink)

Logic and Reality is a collection of essays by philosophers, logicians, mathematicians, and computer scientists, celebrating the work of the late distinguished philosopher Arthur Prior on the eightieth anniversary of his birth. Topics range from philosophical discussions of the nature of time and of the nature of logic itself, to descriptions of computer systems that can reason and take account of the fact that they exist in a temporal world.

The growth of self-tracking and personal surveillance has given rise to the Quantified Self movement. Members of this movement seek to enhance their personal well-being, productivity, and self-actualization through the tracking and gamification of personal data. The technologies that make this possible can also track and gamify aspects of our interpersonal, romantic relationships. Several authors have begun to challenge the ethical and normative implications of this development. In this article, we build upon this work to provide a detailed ethical analysis (...) of the Quantified Relationship. We identify eight core objections to the QR and subject them to critical scrutiny. We argue that although critics raise legitimate concerns, there are ways in which tracking technologies can be used to support and facilitate good relationships. We thus adopt a stance of cautious openness toward this technology and advocate the development of a research agenda for the positive use of QR technologies. (shrink)

The Metaphysical Club, a gathering of intellectuals in the 1870s associated with Harvard, is widely recognized as the crucible where pragmatism, America's distinctively original philosophy, was refined and proclaimed. Louis Menand's bestseller about the group was a dramatic publishing success. However, only three actual members - Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles S. Peirce, and William James - appear in this book, alongside other thinkers such as John Dewey who were never in the Club. The Real Metaphysical Club tells the (...) full story of how this influential group shifted the course of philosophy in America. In addition to pioneering pragmatism, the group explored radical empiricism and idealism, and formulated personalism and process philosophy, equally important developments. This volume contains thirty-seven important writings dating from 1870 to 1885 by the real members of the Metaphysical Club. The first section centers on pragmatism and science; the second part collects writings of the lawyers; and the third part covers idealist and personalist philosophers. Many of these writings have never been reprinted before, and nothing like this impressive collection has ever been attempted. A general introduction provides a narrative history, and the editors' three introductions to the volume's sections vividly bring to life the intense meetings, sustained debates, and pioneering thought from the Metaphysical Club. (shrink)

Although the last decade has seen a proliferation of ontological approaches to arguments, many of them employ ad hoc solutions to representing arguments, lack interoperability with other ontologies, or cover arguments only as part of a broader approach to evidence. To provide a better ontological representation of arguments, we present the Arguments Ontology (ArgO), a small ontology for arguments that is designed to be imported and easily extended by researchers who work in different upper-level ontology frameworks, different logics, and different (...) approaches to argument evaluation. Unlike most ontological approaches to arguments, ArgO utilizes Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as an upper-level ontology, and may be used alongside other commonly used ontologies in the BFO framework, including boththe Information Artifact Ontology (IAO), and the Information Entity Ontology (INFO). Critically, our proposal is principled, based on rigorous definitions and formal axioms out of which characterizations of arguments naturally fall. It is our hope that ArgO may assist researchers in many projects, including: integrating heterogeneous sources of evidence, structuring the content of semantic wikis, and enhancing semantic reasoning. (shrink)

The opening sentence of Christopher Meyers’ Target Article is “Lying to one’s patient is wrong”. The author continues, “This truism is one that bioethicists have heartedly endorsed fo...

In September 2015 a well-publicised Campaign Against Sex Robots (CASR) was launched. Modelled on the longer-standing Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, the CASR opposes the development of sex robots on the grounds that the technology is being developed with a particular model of female-male relations (the prostitute-john model) in mind, and that this will prove harmful in various ways. In this chapter, we consider carefully the merits of campaigning against such a technology. We make three main arguments. First, we (...) argue that the particular claims advanced by the CASR are unpersuasive, partly due to a lack of clarity about the campaign’s aims and partly due to substantive defects in the main ethical objections put forward by campaign’s founder(s). Second, broadening our inquiry beyond the arguments proferred by the campaign itself, we argue that it would be very difficult to endorse a general campaign against sex robots unless one embraced a highly conservative attitude towards the ethics of sex, which is likely to be unpalatable to those who are active in the campaign. In making this argument we draw upon lessons from the campaign against killer robots. Finally, we conclude by suggesting that although a generalised campaign against sex robots is unwarranted, there are legitimate concerns that one can raise about the development of sex robots. (shrink)

Traditionally, forces are causes of a special sort. Forces have been conceived to be the direct or immediate causes of things. Other sorts of causes act indirectly by producing forces which are transmitted in various ways to produce various effects. However, forces are supposed to act directly without the mediation of anything else. But forces, so conceived, appear to be occult. They are mysterious, because we have no clear conception of what they are, as opposed to what they are postulated (...) to do; and they seem to be hidden from direct observations. There is, therefore, strong initial motivation for trying to eliminate forces from physics. Furthermore, as we shall explain, powerful arguments can be mounted to show that theories with forces can always be recast as theories without them. Hence it seems that forces should be eliminated, in the interests of simplicity. We argue, however, that forces should not be eliminated--just differently construed. For the effect of elimination is to leave us without any adequate account of the causal relationships forces were postulated to explain. And this would remain the case, even if forces could be identified with some merely dispositional properties of physical systems. In our view, forces are species of the causal relation itself, and as such have a different ontological status from the sorts of entities normally considered to be related as causes to effects. (shrink)

The growth of self-tracking and personal surveillance has given rise to the Quantified Self movement. Members of this movement seek to enhance their personal well-being, productivity, and self-actualization through the tracking and gamification of personal data. The technologies that make this possible can also track and gamify aspects of our interpersonal, romantic relationships. Several authors have begun to challenge the ethical and normative implications of this development. In this article, we build upon this work to provide a detailed ethical analysis (...) of the Quantified Relationship. We identify eight core objections to the QR and subject them to critical scrutiny. We argue that although critics raise legitimate concerns, there are ways in which tracking technologies can be used to support and facilitate good relationships. We thus adopt a stance of cautious openness toward this technology and advocate the development of a research agenda for the positive use of QR technologies. (shrink)

It took nearly two thousand years for society to recognize the Hippocratic insistence that “the doctor knows best”1 was an inadequate approach to medical decisionmaking. Today, patient-centered medicine has come to understand that the individual patient has a significant role in the decisionmaking process.2.

What constitutes a “good” life—not necessarily a morally good life, but a life that is good for the person who lived it? In response to this question of “well-being," philosophers have offered three significant answers: A good life is one in which a person can satisfy their desires (“Desire-Satisfaction” or “Preferentism”), one that includes certain good features (“Objectivism”), or one in which pleasurable states dominate or outweigh painful ones (“Hedonism”). To adjudicate among these competing theories, moral philosophers traditionally gather data (...) from thought experiments and intuition. In this chapter, we supplement that traditional approach with a pair of experimental studies that examine whether the three theories reflect laypeople’s intuitions about well-being. The empirical studies yield two primary findings. First, they provide evidence for lay "well-being pluralism": laypeople treat desire satisfaction, positive objective conditions, and happiness as all constitutive of well-being. Second, the studies provide evidence of "hedonic dominance": laypeople evaluate an individual’s happiness as more important to an individual’s overall well-being than desire satisfaction or objective conditions. (shrink)

A central theme of the volume is whether impartiality and partiality are really opposed dimensions or if they can be harmoniously reconciled in one picture of ...

In this thesis, Semantics, Meta-Semantics, and Ontology, I provide a critique of the method of truth in metaphysics. Davidson has suggested that we can determine the metaphysical nature and structure of reality through semantic investigations. By contrast, I argue that it is not semantics, but meta-semantics, which reveals the metaphysically necessary and sufficient truth conditions of our claims. As a consequence I reject the Quinean criterion of ontological commitment. In Part I, chapter 1, I argue that the metaphysically primary truth (...) bearers are not propositions, but rather concrete representations, either beliefs or sentences. I show, in chapter 2, that we can give sense to a truth predicate applying to sentences, given a truth operator and quantification into sentence position. I argue that this strategy does not commit us to the existence of propositions serving as truth bearers. In Part II I argue that although we must assign semantic values to sentences and/or predicates, the meaningfulness of these expressions is not thereby explained. In chapter 3 I articulate Davidson’s problem of predication and his solution, but argue that he was wrong to attribute this solution to Tarski. In chapter 4 I examine the semantics of modal languages; I conclude that although they require semantic values for predicates and/or sentences we should be instrumentalists about these theories. In Part III I consider the relationship between truth and existence. In chapter 5, I defend Pluralism about truth: in some domains of discourse, I claim, semantic reference plays a merely instrumental role in explaining truth. In chapter 6, I show that Hume’s Principle, which is committed by the Quinean criterion to the existence of numbers, can be true even though numbers do not exist. In doing so, I appeal to meta-semantic and diachronic considerations. In the conclusion I compare my views on ontology and commitment to Jody Azzouni’s; and in the appendix I suggest how one might pursue diachronic linguistics. (shrink)

The opinion of Mr. Justice Francis of the English High Court which denied the parents of Charlie Gard, who had been born with an extremely rare mutation of a genetic disease, the right to take their child to the United States for a proposed experimental treatment occasioned world wide attention including that of the Pope, President Trump, and the US Congress. The case raise anew a debate as old as the foundation of Western medicine on who should decide and on (...) what standard when there is a conflict between a family and the treating physicians over a possible treatment. This paper will explore the different approaches of the British and American courts on the issue and the various proposals from that of John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice to a processed-based approach for resolving such disputes. As carefully crafted as the opinion of Mr Justice Nicholas Francis in the Gard case proved to be, it left commentators unsatisfied. A widespread criticism, captured in an article by Michael Dougherty in The National Review was for the state to ‘get out of the way of the parents trying to act in the best interests of the child’.1 Although he conceded the parents could be adding to the suffering of the child by taking Charlie to America for an experimental therapy and agreed that such a choice ‘may be the wrong decision,’ in Dougherty’s view, it should still be ‘their decision’. Dougherty’s stand was the popular response to the question of ‘Who should decide?’ It fails, however, to propose any rationale for the decision. It provided no norms, no standards and no guidelines for the parents. Their motive could equally well be indifference to the suffering of the child as concern for his well-being. Furthermore, even good, loving parents may make …. (shrink)

To paraphrase Lewis Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from his Through the Looking Glass, “The time has come to talk of many things.” Not as the Walrus did in the nursery rhyme, “of sho...

In most children’s hospitals, there are very few ethics consultations, even though there are many ethically complex cases. We hypothesize that the reason for this may be that hospitals develop different mechanisms to address ethical issues and that many of these mechanisms are closer in spirit to the goals of the pioneers of clinical ethics than is the mechanism of a formal ethics consultation. To show how this is true, we first review the history of collaboration between philosophers and physicians (...) about clinical dilemmas. Then, as a case-study, we describe the different venues that have developed at one children’s hospital to address ethical issues. At our hospital, there are nine different venues in which ethical issues are regularly and explicitly addressed. They are ethics committee meetings, Nursing Ethics Forum, ethics Brown Bag workshops, PICU ethics rounds, Grand Rounds, NICU Comprehensive Care Rounds, Palliative Care Team case conferences, multidisciplinary consults in Fetal Health Center, and ethics consultations. In our hospital, ethics consults account for only a tiny percentage of ethics discussions. We suspect that most hospitals have multiple and varied venues for ethics discussions. We hope this case study will stimulate research in other hospitals analyzing the various ways in which ethicists and ethics committees can build an ethical environment in hospitals. Such research might suggest that ethicists need to develop a different set of “core competencies” than the ones that are needed to do ethics consultations. Instead, they should focus on their skills in creating multiple “moral spaces” in which regular and ongoing discussion of ethical issues would take place. A successful ethicist would empower everyone in the hospital to speak up about the values that they believe are central to respectful, collaborative practice and patient care. Such a role is closer to what the first hospital philosophers set out to do than in the role of the typical hospital ethics consultant today. (shrink)

Past debates surrounding wilderness have not led to constructive dialogue but instead have created a rift between dueling sides. Far from academic, this debate has important ethical, policy, and pr...

We give a coalgebraic view of the restricted Priestley duality between Heyting algebras and Heyting spaces. More precisely, we show that the category of Heyting spaces is isomorphic to a full subcategory of the category of all -coalgebras, based on Boolean spaces, where is the functor which maps a Boolean space to its hyperspace of nonempty closed subsets. As an appendix, we include a proof of the characterization of Heyting spaces and the morphisms between them.

Psychologists are increasingly interested in embodiment based on the assumption that thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are grounded in bodily interaction with the environment. We examine how embodiment is used in social psychology, and we explore the ways in which embodied approaches enrich traditional theories. Although research in this area is burgeoning, much of it has been more descriptive than explanatory. We provide a critical discussion of the trajectory of embodiment research in social psychology. We contend that future researchers should engage (...) in a phenomenon-based approach, highlight the theoretical boundary conditions and mediators involved, explore novel action-relevant outcome measures, and address the role of individual differences broadly defined. Such research will likely provide a more explanatory account of the role of embodiment in general terms as well as how it expands the knowledge base in social psychology. (shrink)

We show that someone who believes in both gunk and the possibility of supertasks has to give up either a plausible principle about where gunk can be located, or plausible conservation principles.

Introduction: Neurobiological systems engineering models are useful for treating patients. We show a model of “high opioid tone” autism and present a hypothesis about how autism is caused by administration of opioids during childbirth.Main Symptoms: Clinical diagnosis of autism in a 25 year old man was confirmed by a Social Responsiveness Scale self-rating of 79, severe, and a Social Communications Questionnaire by the patient's father scoring 27. Cold pressor time was 190 seconds—unusually long, consonant with the high pain tolerance of (...) autism.Therapeutic Intervention and Outcomes: At naltrexone 50 mg/day SRS fell to 54 and SCQ-−2–9; both non-significant. CPT fell to 28, repeat 39 s. Improved relatedness was experienced ambivalently, understood as feelings never before experienced—causing pain. Non-compliance with naltrexone was followed by cutting open his palm and drinking alcoholically. Transference focused psychotherapy has helped him remain naltrexone—compliant while he works on issues of identity and relatedness.Conclusion: The model suggests studies that could be conducted to both prevent and treat this form of autism. (shrink)

Unconscious Incarnations considers the status of the body in psychoanalytic theory and practice, bringing Freud and Lacan into conversation with continental philosophy to explore the heterogeneity of embodied life. By doing so, the body is no longer merely an object of scientific inquiry but also a lived body, a source of excessive intuition and affectivity, and a raw animality distinct from mere materiality. The contributors to this volume consist of philosophers, psychoanalytic scholars, and practitioners whose interdisciplinary explorations reformulate traditional psychoanalytic (...) concepts such as trauma, healing, desire, subjectivity, and the unconscious. Collectively, they build toward the conclusion that phenomenologies of embodiment move psychoanalytic theory and practice away from representationalist models and toward an incarnational approach to psychic life. Under such a carnal horizon, trauma manifests as wounds and scars, therapy as touch, subjectivity as bodily boundedness, and the unconscious 'real' as an excessive remainder of flesh. Unconscious incarnations signal events where the unsignifiable appears among signifiers, the invisible within the visible, and absence within presence. In sum: where the flesh becomes word and the word retains its flesh. Unconscious Incarnations seeks to evoke this incarnational approach in order to break through tacit taboos toward the body in psychology and psychoanalysis. This interdisciplinary work will appeal greatly to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as philosophy scholars and clinical psychologists. (shrink)

The host actin nucleation machinery is subverted by many bacterial pathogens to facilitate their entry, motility, replication, and survival. The majority of research conducted in the past primarily focused on exploitation of a host actin nucleator, the Arp2/3 complex, by bacterial pathogens. Recently, new studies have begun to explore the role of formins, another family of host actin nucleators, in bacterial pathogenesis. This review provides an overview of recent advances in the study of the exploitation of the Arp2/3 complex and (...) formins by bacterial pathogens. Secreted bacterial effector proteins seem to manipulate the regulation of these actin nucleators or functionally mimic them to drive bacterial entry, motility and survival within host cells. An enhanced understanding of how formins are exploited will provide us with greater insight into how a fundamental eurkaryotic cellular process is utilized by bacteria and will also advance our knowledge of host‐pathogen interactions. (shrink)

This paper examines and critiques the ethical issues in postmortem sperm retrieval and the use of postmortem sperm to create new life. The article was occasioned by the recent request of the parents of a West Point cadet who died in a skiing accident at the Academy to retrieve and use his sperm to honor his memory and perpetuate the family name. The request occasioned national media attention. A trial court judge in New York in a two-page order authorized both (...) the retrieval and use of the postmortem sperm. (shrink)

Despite Augustine's reputation as the father of Christian intolerance, one finds in his thought the surprising claim that within non-Christian writings there are 'some truths in regard even to the worship of the One God.' The essays here uncover provocative points of comparison and similarity between Christianity and other religions to further such an Augustinian dialogue.

Philosophical Pragmatism and International Relations bridges the gap between philosophical pragmatism and international relations, two disciplinary perspectives that together shed light on how to advance the study and conduct of foreign affairs. Authors in this collection discuss a broad range of issues, from policy relevance to peacekeeping operations, with an eye to understanding how this distinctly American philosophy, pragmatism, can improve both international relations research and foreign policy practice.

This volume explores how Catholicism began and continues to open its doors to the wider world and to other confessions in embracing ecumenism, thanks to the vision and legacy of the Second Vatican Council. It explores such themes as the twentieth century context preceding the council; parallels between Vatican II and previous councils; its distinctively pastoral character; the legacy of the council in relation to issues such as church-world dynamics, as well as to ethics, social justice, economic activity. Several chapters (...) discuss the role of women in the church before, during, and since the council. Others discern inculturation in relation to Vatican II. The book also contains a wide and original range of ecumenical considerations of the council, including by and in relation to Free Church, Reformed, Orthodox, and Anglican perspectives. Finally, it considers the Council’s ongoing promise and remaining challenges with regard to ecumenical issues, including a groundbreaking essay on the future of ecumenical dialogue by Cardinal Walter Kasper. (shrink)

The children were nestled all snug in their beds.While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.Clement Moore's cherished ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas captures the hopes, dreams and visions...