Aristotle's defense of Dunamis -- Power and potentiality -- Rational and nonrational powers -- The priority of actuality -- Ontological hierarchy, normativity, and gender.

This article focuses on three recent discussions on determinism in the philosophy of science. First, determinism and predictability will be discussed. Then, second, the paper turns to the topic of determinism, indeterminism, observational equivalence and randomness. Finally, third, there will be a discussion about deterministic probabilities. The paper will end with a conclusion.

The general theme of this article is the actual practice of how definitions are justified and formulated in mathematics. The theoretical insights of this article are based on a case study of topological definitions of chaos. After introducing this case study, I identify the three kinds of justification which are important for topological definitions of chaos: natural-world-justification, condition-justification and redundancy-justification. To my knowledge, the latter two have not been identified before. I argue that these three kinds of justification are widespread (...) in mathematics. After that, I first discuss the state of the art in the literature about the justification of definitions in the light of actual mathematical practice. I then go on to criticize Lakatos’s account of proof-generated definitions—the main account in the literature on this issue—as being limited and also misguided: as for topological definitions of chaos, in nearly all mathematical fields various kinds of justification are found and are also reasonable. (shrink)

The received wisdom in statistical mechanics is that isolated systems, when left to themselves, approach equilibrium. But under what circumstances does an equilibrium state exist and an approach to equilibrium take place? In this paper we address these questions from the vantage point of the long-run fraction of time definition of Boltzmannian equilibrium that we developed in two recent papers. After a short summary of Boltzmannian statistical mechanics and our definition of equilibrium, we state an existence theorem which provides general (...) criteria for the existence of an equilibrium state. We first illustrate how the theorem works with a toy example, which allows us to illustrate the various elements of the theorem in a simple setting. After a look at the ergodic programme, we discuss equilibria in a number of different gas systems: the ideal gas, the dilute gas, the Kac gas, the stadium gas, the mushroom gas and the multi-mushroom gas. In the conclusion we briefly summarise the main points and highlight open questions. (shrink)

Abstract Narrative thinking has a very important role in our ordinary everyday lives?in our thinking about fiction, about the historical past, about how things might have been, and about our own past and our plans for the future. In this paper, which is part of a larger project, I will be focusing on just one kind of narrative thinking: the kind that we sometimes engage in when we think about, evaluate, and respond emotionally to, our own past lives from a (...) perspective that is external to the remembered events. Being able to do this is an essential part of what it is to have a narrative sense of self. Sometimes, I will suggest, we fail to have such responses?we are not able to think and feel as we should about an episode in our lives. On such occasions, there is a gap in our narrative sense of self?a gap which opens up especially where the past is in some sense tragic or traumatic. The desire to close this gap is what I will call a desire for emotional closure. (shrink)

Charlotte Witt extracts from this text a coherent and provocative view about sensible substance by focusing on Aristotle's account of form or essence.

Peter Goldie opens the path to a deeper understanding of our emotional lives through a lucid philosophical exploration of this surprisingly neglected topic. Drawing on philosophy, literature and science, Goldie considers the roles of culture and evolution in the development of our emotional capabilities. He examines the links between emotion, mood, and character, and places the emotions in the context of consciousness, thought, feeling, and imagination. He explains how it is that we are able to make sense of our own (...) and other people's emotions, and how we can explain the very human things which emotions lead us to do. He argues that it is only from the personal point of view that thoughts, reasons, feelings, and actions come into view. This fascinating book gives an accessible but penetrating exploration of an important but mysterious subject. Any reader interested in emotion and its role in understanding our lives will find much to think about here. (shrink)

Objective: To examine students’ attitudes and potential behaviour to a competent patient’s request for withdrawal of treatment as they pass through a modern medical curriculum.Design: Cohort design.Setting: University of Glasgow Medical School, United Kingdom.Subjects: A cohort of students entering Glasgow University’s new learner centred, integrated medical curriculum in October 1996.Methods: Students’ responses before and after year 1, after year 3, and after year 5 to the assisted suicide vignette of the Ethics in Health Care Survey instrument, were examined quantitatively and (...) qualitatively. Analysis of students’ multichoice answers enabled measurement of the movement towards professional consensus opinion. Analysis of written justifications helped determine whether their reasoning was consistent with professional consensus and enabled measurement of change in knowledge content and recognition of the values inherent in the vignette. Themes on students’ reasoning behind their decision to withdraw treatment or not were also identified.Results: Students’ answers were found to be consistent with professional consensus opinion precurriculum and remained so throughout the curriculum. There was an improvement in the knowledge content of the written responses following the first year of the curriculum, which was sustained postcurriculum. However, students were found to analyse the section mainly in terms of autonomy, with few responses considering the other main ethical principles or the wider ethical perspective. Students were unclear on their legal responsibilities.Conclusions: Students should be encouraged to consider all relevant ethical principles and the wider ethical perspective when deliberating ethical dilemmas. Students should have a clear understanding of their legal responsibilities. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Testimony from victims of gendered violence is often wrongly disbelieved. This paper explores a way to address this problem by developing a phenomenological approach to testimony. Guided by the concept of ‘disclosedness’, a tripartite analysis of testimony as an affective, embodied, communicative act is developed. Affect indicates how scepticism may arise through the social moods that often attune agents to victims’ testimony. The embodiment of meaning suggests testimony should not be approached as an assertion, but as a process of (...) ‘articulating an understanding’. This account is deepened in the discussion of testimony as a communicative act. It is argued that testimony must be considered as a relational whole, and thus our aim in receiving victims’ testimony should be to honour the relational conditions under which the truth of testimony can be heard. Approaching testimony as the collaborative process of enabling an understanding to be articulated can enhance our conception of gendered violence, whilst also better serving the victims of gendered violence by helping to overcome the lack of trust and excessive scepticism with which victims’ testimony is often met. (shrink)

Objective: To examine students’ attitudes and potential behaviour to a possible intimate relationship with a patient as they pass through a modern medical curriculum.Design: A cohort study of students entering Glasgow University’s new learner centred, integrated medical curriculum in October 1996.Methods: Students’ pre year 1 and post year 1, post year 3, and post year 5 responses to the “attractive patient” vignette of the Ethics in Health Care Survey instrument were examined quantitatively and qualitatively. Analysis of students’ multi-choice answers enabled (...) measurement of the movement towards professional consensus opinion. Analysis of written justifications helped determine whether their reasoning was consistent with professional consensus and enabled measurement of change in knowledge content and recognition of the values inherent in the vignette. Themes on students’ reasoning behind their decision to enter a relationship or not were also identified.Results: No significant movement towards consensus was found at any point in the curriculum. There was little improvement in students’ performance in terms of knowledge content and their abilities to recognise the values inherent in the vignette. In deciding to enter a relationship with the patient the most frequently used reasoning was that it could be justified if the patient changed their doctor.Conclusions: Teaching on the subject of sexual or improper relationships between doctors and patients, including relationships with former patients requires to be made explicit. Case based teaching would fit in with the ethos of the problem based, integrated medical curriculum. (shrink)

Objective: To examine students’ attitudes and potential behaviour towards informing a 12-year-old patient of her terminal prognosis in a situation in which her parents do not wish her to be told, as they pass through a modern medical curriculum.Design: A cohort study of students entering Glasgow University’s new medical curriculum in October 1996.Methods: Students’ responses obtained before year 1 and at the end of years 1, 3, and 5 to the “childhood leukaemia” vignette of the Ethics in Health Care Survey (...) Instrument were examined quantitatively and qualitatively. Analysis of the students’ multichoice answers enabled measurement of the movement towards professional consensus opinion. An analysis of their written justifications for their answers helped to determine whether their reasoning was consistent with professional consensus and enabled measurement of changes in knowledge content and recognition of the values inherent in the vignette. Themes on the students’ reasoning behind their decision to tell the patient or not were also identified.Results: Unlike other vignettes of the EHCI in which autonomy was a main theme, few students chose the consensus answer before year 1 and there was no significant movement towards consensus at any point during the course. In defence of their decision to withhold information, the students expressed strong paternalistic opinions. The patient’s age was seen as a barrier to respecting her autonomy.Conclusions: It is important to identify students’ perceptions on entry to medical school. Transformative learning theory may provide the basis for an approach to foster doctors who consider the rights of young people. Small-group teaching is most conducive to this approach. The importance of positive role modelling is also emphasised. (shrink)

It is a genuine pleasure to engage with the insightful and generous comments of my colleagues. I have learned a lot from them, and I hope to continue our conversations in the future. The range of c...

Emotions, I will argue, involve two kinds of feeling: bodily feeling and feeling towards. Both are intentional, in the sense of being directed towards an object. Bodily feelings are directed towards the condition of one's body, although they can reveal truths about the world beyond the bounds of one's body – that, for example, there is something dangerous nearby. Feelings towards are directed towards the object of the emotion – a thing or a person, a state of affairs, an action (...) or an event; such emotional feelings involve a special way of thinking of the object of the emotion, and I draw an analogy with Frank Jackson's well-known knowledge argument to show this. Finally, I try to show that, even if materialism is true, the phenomenology of emotional feelings, as described from a personal perspective, cannot be captured using only the theoretical concepts available for the impersonal stance of the sciences. (shrink)

The religious autobiography of John Henry Newman (1801-1890), in which he discusses his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

This book brings together a comprehensive collection of the writings of one of the greatest philosophers in the Western tradition. Along with five of John Locke's major essays, seventy shorter essays are included that stand outside the canonical works that Locke published during his lifetime. For the first time students will be able to fully explore the evolution of Locke's ideas concerning the philosophical foundations of morality and sociability, the boundary of church and state, the shaping of constitutions, and the (...) conduct of government and public policy. (shrink)

Empathy has for a long time, at least since the eighteenth century, been seen as centrally important in relation to our capacity to gain a grasp of the content of other people's minds, and predict and explain what they will think, feel, and do; and in relation to our capacity to respond to others ethically. In addition, empathy is seen as having a central role in aesthetics, in the understanding of our engagement with works of art and with fictional characters. (...) A fuller understanding of empathy is now offered by the interaction of research in science and the humanities. This volume draws together nineteen original chapters by leading researchers across several disciplines, together with an extensive Introduction by the editors. The individual chapters reveal how important it is, in a wide range of fields of enquiry, to bring to bear an understanding of the role of empathy in its various guises. It offers the ideal starting-point for the exploration of this intriguing aspect of human life. (shrink)

I argue that it is possible, in the right circumstances, to see what the kind thing is to do: in the right circumstances, we can, literally, see deontic facts, as well as facts about others’ emotional states, and evaluative facts. In arguing for this, I will deploy a notion of non‐inferential perceptual belief or judgement according to which the belief or judgement is arrived at non‐inferentially in the phenomenological sense and yet is inferential in the epistemic sense. The ability to (...) arrive at these kinds of beliefs and judgements is part of virtue, and is also part of what it is to grasp thick ethical concepts in an engaged way. When we come to thinner evaluative and deontic facts and thinner ethical concepts, however, the requirements for non‐inferential perceptual belief and judgement are less easily met. Seeing what is the kind thing to do is one matter; seeing what is the right thing to do is another. (shrink)

Grief is not a kind of feeling, or a kind of judgement, or a kind of perception, or any kind of mental state or event the identity of which can be adequately captured at a moment in time. Instead, grief is a kind of process; more specifically, it is a complex pattern of activity and passivity, inner and outer, which unfolds over time, and the unfolding pattern over time is explanatorily prior to what is the case at any particular time. (...) The pattern of a particular grieving is best understood and explained through a narrative account, and not merely through a causal account, for narrative accounts in such cases have powerful explanatory, revelatory, and expressive powers which causal accounts lack. Although I will not argue for it here, I believe that this view of grief can be generalised to other kinds of emotion. If this is so, then many philosophical accounts of emotion are at fault in identifying emotion with a kind of mental state or event. (shrink)

This article focuses on three themes concerning determinism and indeterminism. The first theme is observational equivalence between deterministic and indeterministic models. Here I discuss several results about observational equivalence and present an argument on how to choose between deterministic and indeterministic models involving indirect evidence. The second theme is whether Newtonian physics is indeterministic. I argue that the answer depends on what one takes Newtonian mechanics to be, and I highlight how contemporary debates on this issue differ from those in (...) the nineteenth century. The third major theme is how the method of arbitrary functions can be used to make sense of deterministic probabilities. I discuss various ways of interpreting the initial probability distributions and argue that they are best understood as physical, biological etc. quantities characterising the particular situation at hand. Also, I emphasise that the method of arbitrary functions deserves more attention than it has received so far. (shrink)

Garrett Cullity contends that fairness is appropriate impartiality (See Cullity (2004) Chapters 8 and 10 and Cullity (2008)). Cullity deploys his account of fairness as a means of limiting the extreme moral demand to make sacrifices in order to aid others that was posed by Peter Singer in his seminal article ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’. My paper is founded upon the combination of (1) the observation that the idea that fairness consists in appropriate impartiality is very vague and (2) the (...) fact that psychological studies show the self-serving bias is especially likely to infect one’s judgements when the ideas involved are vague. I argue that Cullity’s solution to extreme moral demandingness is threatened by these findings. I then comment on whether some other theories of fairness are vulnerable to the same objection. (shrink)

Animals do a wide range of work in our society, but they are rarely recognized as workers or accorded any labour rights, and their working conditions are often oppressive and exploitative. Drawing on law, ethics, and labour studies, the essays in this volume explore the potential and dangers of animal labour.

Narrative thinking -- Narrative thinking about one's past -- Grief : a case study -- Narrative thinking about one's future -- Self-forgiveness : a case study -- The narrative sense of self -- Narrative, truth, life, and fiction.

I argue that emotional feelings are not just bodily feelings, but also feelings directed towards things in the world beyond the bounds of the body, and that these feelings (feelings towards) are bound up with the way we take in the world in emotional experience.

Although it is clear in Schelling's Freiheitsschrift that he takes an agent's atemporal choice between good and evil to be central to understanding human freedom, there is no consensus in the literature and no adequate account of how to understand this choice. Further, the literature fails to render intelligible how existential freedom is possible in the light of this atemporal choice. I demonstrate that, despite their differences, the dominant accounts in the literature are all guilty of these failings and argue (...) that this is due to their misunderstanding of Schelling's conception of the relationship between essence and form. After outlining what I take Schelling's account of this relationship to be, I return to the Freiheitsschrift to demonstrate that with this account in mind we can make intelligible Schelling's claims about the agent's atemporal act, and the possibility of existential freedom on his account. (shrink)

ABSTRACT When does a state of affairs constitute a harm to someone? Comparative accounts say that being worse off constitutes harm. The temporal version of the comparative account is seldom taken seriously, due to apparently fatal counterexamples. I defend the temporal version against these counterexamples, and show that it is in fact more plausible than the prominent counterfactual version of the account. Non-comparative accounts say that being badly off constitutes harm. However, neither the temporal comparative account nor the non-comparative account (...) can correctly classify all harms. I argue that we should combine them into a hybrid account of harm. The hybrid account is extensionally adequate and presents a unified view on the nature of harm. (shrink)

'Man being born...to perfect freedom...hath by nature a power...to preserve his property, that is, his life, liberty and estate.'Locke's Second Treatise of Government is one of the great classics of political philosophy, widely regarded as the foundational text of modern liberalism. In it Locke insists on majority rule, and regards no government as legitimate unless it has the consent of the people. He sets aside people's ethnicities, religions, and cultures and envisages political societies which command our assent because they meet (...) our elemental needs simply as humans. His work helped to entrench ideas of a social contract, human rights, and protection of property as the guiding principles for just actions and just societies.Published in the same year, A Letter Concerning Toleration aimed to end Christianity's wars of religion and called for the separation of church and state so that everyone could enjoy freedom of conscience. In this edition of these two major works, Mark Goldie considers the contested nature of Locke's reputation, which is often appropriated by opposing political and religious ideologies. (shrink)

In this paper I sketch a virtue theory of art, analogous to a virtue theory of ethics along Aristotelian lines. What this involves is looking beyond a parochial conception of art understood as work of art, as product, to include intentions, motives, skills, traits, and feelings, all of which can be expressed in artistic activity. The clusters of traits that go to make up the particular virtues of art production and of art appreciation are indeed virtues in part because, when (...) they are expressed in artistic activity, that activity is chosen for its own sake, ‘under the concept of art’; and also they are virtues in part because, when they are so expressed, the activities are themselves partly constitutive of human well-being, along with other activities, including leading an ethical life, and what Aristotle called contemplation. With a virtue theory of art before us, we can begin to see the point of art, to see why art matters to us as human beings. (shrink)

Eric Cassell famously defined suffering as a person’s severe distress at a threat to their personal integrity. This article draws attention to some problems with the concept of distress in this theory. In particular, I argue that Cassell’s theory turns on distress but does not define it, which, in light of the complexity of distress, problematizes suffering in three ways: first, suffering becomes too equivocal to apply in at least some cases that Cassell nevertheless identifies as suffering; second, Cassell’s account (...) does not explain what sort of experience suffering is, resulting in theoretical and practical difficulties in distinguishing it from other medical conditions; third, there is good reason to believe that, in medical contexts, ‘distress’ just means ‘suffering’ or some cognate concept not yet distinguished from it, rendering Cassell’s theory circular. I consider a rebuttal to my objections and reply, concluding that Cassell’s theory of suffering needs a definition of distress to settle what the nature of suffering really is. (shrink)

As part of the debate between theory‐theorists and simulation‐theorists in the philosophy of mind, there is the question of how we think about the emotions of other people. It is the aim of this paper to distinguish and clarify some of the ways in which we do this. In particular five notions are discussed: understanding and explaining others’ emotions, emotional contagion, empathy, in‐his‐shoes imagining, and sympathy. I argue that understanding and explanation cannot be achieved by any of the other four (...) notions. So far as concerns prediction of other people’s emotional responses, I argue that simulationists have tended to concentrate on empathy and in‐his‐ shoes imagining to explain how this is done, and that more prominence should be given to other means of prediction through imagination which do not involve imagining events from the other’s point of view; roughly, imagining how she would feel need not involve imagining feeling how she would feel. But prediction in these other ways, like understanding and explanation, are achieved without losing sight of the fact that the other person has a point of view, and in this respect I argue that this approach is essentially distinct from the approach of the theory‐theorist of a functionalist persuasion. (shrink)

The question is how to explain expressions of emotion. It is argued that not all expressions of emotion are open to the same sort of explanation. Those expressions which are actions can be explained, like other sorts of action, by reference to a belief and a desire; however, no genuine expression of emotion is done as a means to some further end. Certain expressions of emotion which are actions can also be given a deeper explanation as being expressive of a (...) wish. Expressions of emotion which are not actions cannot be given a belief-desire explanation: no belief is involved, and a desire is involved only in an honorific sense of 'desire'. The distinction amongst expressions of emotion between those which are actions and those which are not is not a precise one, and the paper concludes with some speculative remarks about borderline cases such as jumping for joy. (shrink)

What is the point of art, and why does it matter to us human beings? The answer that I will give in this paper, following on from an earlier paper on the same subject, is that art matters because our being actively engaged with art, either in its production or in its appreciation, is part of what it is to live well. The focus in the paper will be on the dispositions—the virtues of art production and of art appreciation—that are (...) necessary for this kind of active engagement with art. To begin with, I will argue that these dispositions really are virtues and not mere skills. Then I will show how the virtues of art, and their exercise in artistic activity, interweave with the other kinds of virtue which are exercised in ethical and contemplative activity. And finally, I will argue that artistic activity affords, in a special way, a certain kind of emotional sharing that binds us together with other human beings. (shrink)