Sally Gadow's tenure as professor of nursing at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center during my doctoral studies radically changed my view on science, nursing, relationships, and most importantly, the world. In this paper, I use ideas stimulated by Gadow's classes to argue that recognizing ambiguity through an attitude of metaphysical revolt can free nurses to form relationships with patients who are complex subjects rather than objects to be treated. I will first discuss Camus’ ideas of absurdity from the (...) Myth of Sisyphus, comparing the awake passions of Don Juan and the maniacal (and fatal) love of Romeo and Juliet (1955). Merleau‐Ponty's (1962) work on the dialectic of human sexuality sheds light on the intrinsic bodily ambiguity of human existence as seen through sexual attraction. de Beauvoir (1948) further lends insight into ideas of ambiguity, relationship, and freedom. Finally, I will argue that recognition of the intrinsic ambiguity of existence coupled with an attitude of metaphysical revolt may free nurses and patients from external frameworks that limit experience, impose meaning, and in the process, sever human relationship. (shrink)

Nondescriptivist views in many areas of philosophy have long been associated with the commitment that in contrast to other domains of discourse, there are no propositions in their particular domain. For example, the ‘no truth conditions’ theory of conditionals1 is understood as the view that conditionals don’t express propositions, noncognitivist expressivism in metaethics is understood as advocating the view that there are not really moral propositions,2 and expressivism about epistemic modals is thought of as the view that there is no (...) such thing as the proposition that Jack might be at home, over and above the proposition that Jack is at home.3 Of course, it is nearly always acknowledged that advocates of a nondescriptivist theory need not deny that there are conditional, moral, or modal propositions ‘at the end of the day’ – for if they also endorse a deflationary reading of talk about propositions, as famously advocated by Simon Blackburn, then they can employ such deflationary talk just as much as the rest of us. They just don’t appeal to propositions to do any of the work in their theories. Rather, they ‘earn the right’ to talk about propositions.4 It is the aim of this paper to upset this way of thinking about the proper attitude of nondescriptivists toward propositions, and to advocate a more constructive and in some ways more radical alternative on behalf of the nondescriptivist. I will begin by introducing and developing a set of problems that are faced by any nondescriptivist theory which tries to do without propositions. All of these problems are easily solved by any view which postulates propositions across the board, but none of them are solved by merely deflationary talk about propositions – their most promising solutions require propositions to do real theoretical work, and therefore the problems themselves remind us of and illustrate some of the important reasons why it is worth positing propositions in the first place.. (shrink)

Particularists in ethics emphasize that the normative is holistic, and invite us to infer with them that it therefore defies generalization. This has been supposed to present an obstacle to traditional moral theorizing, to have striking implications for moral epistemology and moral deliberation, and to rule out reductive theories of the normative, making it a bold and important thesis across the areas of normative theory, moral epistemology, moral psychology, and normative metaphysics. Though particularists emphasize the importance of the holism of (...) the normative, however, it is not something that they have been able to explain. In this paper I’ll show how to use a small number of simple and, I’ll argue, independently compelling assumptions in order to both predict and explain the holistic features of the normative with respect to the non-normative. The basic idea of the paper is simple. It is that normative claims are holistic because they are general, rather than because they defy generalization. (shrink)

The author wishes to add the following correction to his paper published in Philosophies [1]:The repeated fragment from lines 13–18 and part of 19 on page 69 should be deleted [...].

The author wishes to add the following correction to his paper published in Philosophies [1]:The repeated fragment from lines 13–18 and part of 19 on page 69 should be deleted [...].

López-Escobar, E. G. K. Introduction.--Kueker, D. W. Back-and-forth arguments and infinitary logics.--Green, J. Consistency properties for finite quantifier languages.--Cunningham, E. Chain models.--Gregory, J. On a finiteness condition for infinitary languages.

Analogy belongs to the class of concepts notorious for a variety of definitions generating continuing disputes about their preferred understanding. Analogy is typically defined by or at least associated with similarity, but as long as similarity remains undefined this association does not eliminate ambiguity. In this paper, analogy is considered synonymous with a slightly generalized mathematical concept of similarity which under the name of tolerance relation has been the subject of extensive studies over several decades. In this approach, analogy can (...) be mathematically formalized in terms of the sequence of binary relations of increased generality, from the identity, equivalence, tolerance, to weak tolerance relations. Each of these relations has cryptomorphic presentations relevant to the study of analogy. The formalism requires only two assumptions which are satisfied in all of the earlier attempts to formulate adequate definitions which met expectations of the intuitive use of the word analogy in general contexts. The mathematical formalism presented here permits theoretical analysis of analogy in the contrasting comparison with abstraction, showing its higher level of complexity, providing a precise methodology for its study and informing philosophical reflection. Also, arguments are presented for the legitimate expectation that better understanding of analogy can help mathematics in establishing a unified and universal concept of a structure. (shrink)

Expressivists famously have important and difficult problems with semantics and logic. Their difficulties providing an adequate account of the semantics of material conditionals involving moral terms, and explaining why they have the right semantic and logical properties – for example, why they validate modus ponens – have received a great deal of attention. Cian Dorr [2002] points out that their problems do not stop here, but also extend to epistemology. The problem he poses for expressivists is the problem of wishful (...) thinking. David Enoch [2003] has claimed that expressivists can avoid wishful thinking, and offered a fairly detailed account of how. In this paper I explain the details of Enoch’s account, and why his reasoning fails in several different places. (shrink)

This essay brings together the perspectives of phenomenology and East Asian philosophies through an engagement with Dōgen, Heidegger, Nishida, and Nishitani to address the concept of place in relation to the concept and feeling of homelessness. With respect to the notion of dwelling and finding one’s place in the world and with oneself, the experience of being and feeling lost psychologically will be considered as a way (dao) toward overcoming nihilism and as an opening to attaining an awakened mind.

As topics in the philosophy of emotion, pleasure and displeasure get less than their fair share of attention. On the one hand, there is the fact that pleasure and displeasure are given no role at all in many theories of the emotions, and secondary roles in many others.1 On the other, there is the centrality of pleasure and displeasure to being emotional. A woman who tears up because of a blustery wind, while an ill-advised burrito weighs heavily upon her digestive (...) tract, feels an impressive number of the sensations felt by someone who is gut-wrenchingly sad. Yet, unless she feels bad, the way she feels is only a pale echo of the feeling of sadness. If she feels good in spite of the burrito and the wind, then she does not feel at all the way she would if she were sad. Likewise, a man falling asleep can hardly fail to feel his muscles relax, his heart rate fall, and so on, but unless he feels good his state is only a shadow of feeling content. This paper will begin with a sketch of the nature of pleasure and displeasure, and the relation between them and the feelings that are characteristic of emotions. It will then argue that the capacity to feel pleased and displeased is, quite literally, a sense modality: one allowing us to perceive net change in the satisfaction of our intrinsic desires. As with any sense modality, the capacity to feel pleased and displeased displays substantial modularity. The paper concludes by considering the ways in which the modularity of pleasure and displeasure contributes to effects that might reasonably be called “the modularity of the emotions.”. (shrink)

The relation between the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions is "the great problem" of Western philosophy, according to Emmanuel Levinas. In this book Brian Schroeder, Silvia Benso, and an international group of philosophers address the relationship between Levinas and the world of ancient thought. In addition to philosophy, themes touching on religion, mythology, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and politics are also explored. The volume as a whole provides a unified and extended discussion of how an engagement between Levinas and thinkers (...) from the ancient tradition works to enrich understandings of both. This book opens new pathways in ancient and modern philosophical studies as it illuminates new interpretations of Levinas' ethics and his social and political philosophy. (shrink)

When should we listen to our guts and when should we ignore them? What makes disgust and other related emotions morally relevant in some situations but not others? In this paper, I argue that emotions are morally relevant only when they are backed up by reasons and arguments.

On the surface, developing a social psychology of science seems compelling as a way to understand how individual social cognition – in aggregate – contributes towards individual and group behavior within scientific communities (Kitcher, 2002). However, in cases where the functional input-output profile of psychological processes cannot be mapped directly onto the observed behavior of working scientists, it becomes clear that the relationship between psychological claims and normative philosophy of science should be refined. For example, a robust body of social (...) psychological research demonstrates implicit gender bias in the evaluation of others (e.g., Steinpreis, Anders, & Ritzke, 1999). Many expected implicit bias to be a major cause of women’s underrepresentation in math intensive fields of science; however, quantitative sociological research of hiring and manuscript and grant evaluation has discovered no gender disparity in outcomes (Ceci & Williams, 2011). Why might this be so? This paper will discuss methodological challenges that go beyond classic problems of external validity in extrapolating psychological effects and explanations to scientific communities. These problems include more complex external validity issues raised by the introduction of multi-process models of cognition (e.g., implicit versus explicit social cognition) as well as the reflexive role that folk and experimental theories of social psychology play in guiding the behavior of scientists at the individual and community level. (shrink)

This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors). After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. On this view, what it is for an agent to believe a proposition is (...) for her credence in this proposition to be above a certain threshold, a threshold that varies depending on pragmatic factors. We show that while this account of belief can provide an elegant explanation of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, it is not alone in doing so, for an alternative account of belief, which we call the reasoning disposition account, can do so as well. And the latter account, we argue, is far more plausible than pragmatic credal reductivism, since it accords far better with a number of claims about belief that are very hard to deny. (shrink)

Imagine you are walking down a city street. It is windy and raining. Amidst the bustle you see a young woman. She sits under a railway bridge, hardly protected from the rain and holds a woolen hat containing a small number of coins. You can see that she trembles from the cold. Or imagine seeing an old woman walking in the street at dusk, clutching her bag with one hand and a walking stick with the other. A group of male (...) youths walk behind her without overtaking, drunk and in the mood for mischief. It doesn't need an academic to say what vulnerability is. We can all see it, much more often than we care to. (shrink)

edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Häyry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics.

Wittgenstein shows that understanding is a capacity, and cannot be accounted for by mental representations of what is understood. But if a person’s understanding or thinking cannot be accounted for by occurrences of mental representations, then understanding that person cannot be a matter of knowing what is going on inside him or her: what representations he or she has in his or her mind. That, I argue, is the point of Wittgenstein’s famous and frequently misunderstood saying, “If a lion could (...) talk we wouldn’t be able to understand it.” Our inability to understand a strange creature would not be overcome if that creature could speak and lay open to us on the mental operations inside its mind. Finally, I explain in what way understanding other people is not an entirely intellectual affair, but also has moral and aesthetic dimensions. -/- . (shrink)

As topics in the philosophy of emotion, pleasure and displeasure get less than their fair share of attention. On the one hand, there is the fact that pleasure and displeasure are given no role at all in many theories of the emotions, and secondary roles in many others.1 On the other, there is the centrality of pleasure and displeasure to being emotional. A woman who tears up because of a blustery wind, while an ill-advised burrito weighs heavily upon her digestive (...) tract, feels an impressive number of the sensations felt by someone who is gut-wrenchingly sad. Yet, unless she feels bad, the way she feels is only a pale echo of the feeling of sadness. If she feels good in spite of the burrito and the wind, then she does not feel at all the way she would if she were sad. Likewise, a man falling asleep can hardly fail to feel his muscles relax, his heart rate fall, and so on, but unless he feels good his state is only a shadow of feeling content. This paper will begin with a sketch of the nature of pleasure and displeasure, and the relation between them and the feelings that are characteristic of emotions. It will then argue that the capacity to feel pleased and displeased is, quite literally, a sense modality: one allowing us to perceive net change in the satisfaction of our intrinsic desires. As with any sense modality, the capacity to feel pleased and displeased displays substantial modularity. The paper concludes by considering the ways in which the modularity of pleasure and displeasure contributes to effects that might reasonably be called “the modularity of the emotions.”. (shrink)

Benefit sharing has been a recurrent theme in international debates for the past two decades. However, despite its prominence in law, medical ethics and political philosophy, the concept has never been satisfactorily defined. In this conceptual paper, a definition that combines current legal guidelines with input from ethics debates is developed. Philosophers like boxes; protective casings into which they can put concisely-defined concepts. Autonomy is the human capacity for self-determination; beneficence denotes the virtue of good deeds, coercion is the intentional (...) threat of harm and so on. What about benefit sharing? Does the concept have a box and are the contents clearly defined? The answer to this question has to be no. The concept of benefit sharing is almost unique in that various disciplines use it regularly without precise definitions. In this article, a definition for benefit sharing is provided, to eliminate unnecessary ambiguity. (shrink)

New Tenth Anniversary edition of this classic text with a new preface by the author, compares myths about meat-eating with myths about manliness, and seeks to ...

Introduction : first things : two black and blue thoughts -- Author's note I. a sewing needle inside a plastic and rubber suction cup sitting on a watch spring, or, an object for seeing nothing -- Elegy of milk, in black and blue : the bruising of La Chambre claire -- "A" is for Alice, for amnesia, for anamnesis: a fairy tale (almost blue) called La Jetée -- Happiness with a long piece of black leader : Chris Marker's sans soleil (...) -- Author's note II. She wrote me -- "Summer was inside the marble": Alain Resnais and Magurite Duras's Hiroshima mon amour. (shrink)

Pateman challenges the way contemporary society functions by questioning the standard interpretation of an idea that is deeply embedded in American and British political thought: that our rights and freedoms derive from the social contract explicated by Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau and interpreted in the United States by the Founding Fathers. The author shows how we are told only half the story of the original contract that establishes modern patriarchy. The sexual contract is ignored and thus men's patriarchal right over (...) women is also glossed over. No attention is paid to the problems that arise when women are excluded from the original contract but incorporated into the new contractual order. One of the main targets of the book is those who try to turn contractarian theory to progressive use, and a major thesis of the book is that this is not possible. Thus those feminists who have looked to a more "proper" contract- one between genuinely equal partners, or one entered into without any coercion- are misleading themselves. In the author's words, "In contract theory universal freedom is always a hypothesis, a story, a political fiction. Contract always generates political right in the forms of domination and subordination." Thus the book is also aimed at mainstream political theorists, and socialist and other critics of contract theory. The author offers a sweeping challenge to conventional understandings- of both left and right- of actual contracts in everyday life: the marriage contract, the employment contract, the prostitution contract, and the new surrogate mother contract. By bringing a feminist perspective to bear on the contradictions and paradoxes surrounding women and contract, and the relation between the sexes, she is able to shed new light on fundamental political problems of freedom and subordination. (shrink)

Pt. I. The road to mechanism : ancient Greece to the scientific revolution. Body and soul at war : Plato -- Body and nature : Aristotle and the Stoics -- The resurrection of the body : Christianity -- From astrology to the cult of dissection : the Renaissance -- The body-machine : Descartes -- The road not followed : Spinoza -- pt. II. The limits of mechanism : contemporary problems and solutions. The legacy of mechanism : the fragmenting and disappearing (...) body -- Recovering the body : yoga -- Recovering the body : alternative medicine. (shrink)

This book offers a lucid and highly readable account of Wittgenstein's philosophy, framed against the background of his extraordinary life and character. Woven together with a biographical narrative, the chapters explain the key ideas of Wittgenstein's work, from his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, to his mature masterpiece, the Philosophical Investigations.

A new translation by Martin Hammond of Xenophon's Memorabilia and Apology of Socrates, with introduction and notes by Carol Atack, in the Oxford World's Classics series. -/- ISBN: 9780198856092 -/- 'Who would you say knows himself?' -/- In 399 BCE Socrates was tried in Athens on charges of irreligion and corruption of the young, convicted, and sentenced to death. Like Plato, an almost exact contemporary, in his youth Xenophon (c. 430-c. 354 BCE) was one of the circle of mainly upper-class (...) young Athenians attracted to Socrates' teaching. His Memorabilia is both a passionate defence of Socrates against those charges, and a kaleidoscopic picture of the man he knew, painted in a series of mini-dialogues and shorter vignettes, with a varied and deftly characterized cast—entitled and ambitious young men, atheists and hedonists, artists and artisans, Socrates' own stroppy teenage son Lamprocles, the glamorous courtesan Theodote. Topics given Socrates' characteristic questioning treatment include education, law, justice, government, political and military leadership, democracy and tyranny, friendship, care of the body and the soul, and concepts of the divine. Xenophon sees Socrates as above all a supreme moral educator, coaxing and challenging his associates to make themselves better people, not least by the example of how he lived his own life. Self-knowledge, leading to a reasoned self-control, was for Socrates the essential first step on the path to virtue, and some found it uncomfortable. The Apology is a moving account of Socrates' behaviour and bearing in his last days, immediately before, during, and after his trial. (shrink)

The intentionalist about consciousness holds that the qualitative character of experience, “what it’s like,” is determined by the contents of a select group of special intentional states of the subject. Fred Dretske (1995), Mike Thau (2002), Michael Tye (1995) and many others have embraced intentionalism, but these philosophers have not generally appreciated that, since we are intimately familiar with the qualitative character of experience, we thereby have special access to the nature of these contents. In this paper, we take advantage (...) of this fact to show that intentionalism is incompatible with the idea that these contents are singular or general propositions, and thus that intentionalism is incompatible with one dominant trend in thinking about contents in general. In particular, there appear to be insoluble difficulties in explaining how the phenomenology of place and time can be explained by any intentionalist theory appealing to singular or general propositions. (shrink)