Over the past 15 years, medical schools have paid some attention to the importance of developing students' communication skills as part of their medical education. Over the past decade, medical ethics has been added to the curriculum of most U.S. medical schools, at least on paper. More recently, there has been growing discussion of the importance of professionalism in medical education. Yet, the nature and content of these fields and their relationship to one another remains confused and vague, and that (...) lack of clarity, in turn, impairs the effectiveness of medical education. This ambiguity invites serious contention over who should design and teach the curriculum as well as when, where, and how it should be taught. (shrink)

We propose that scientific representation is a special case of a more general notion of representation, and that the relatively well worked-out and plausible theories of the latter are directly applicable to the scientific special case.

This paper defends the view that standards, which are typically social in nature, play a role in determining whether a subject has knowledge. While the argument focuses on standards that pertain to reasoning, I also consider whether there are similar standards for memory and perception.Ultimately, I argue that the standards are context sensitive and, as such, we must view attributions of knowledge as indexical. I exploit similarities between this view and a version of the relevant alternatives reply to skepticism in (...) order to defend this reply against the objection that it is ad hoc. (shrink)

A core, constitutive norm of science is to remove or remedy the artefacts in one’s data. Here, we consider examples of artefacts from many fields of science (for example, astronomy, economics, electrophysiology, psychology, and systems neuroscience) and discuss their contribution to a more general evidential selection problem at the heart of the epistemology of evidence. Synthesizing and building on previously disparate discussions in many areas of the philosophy of science, we provide a novel, causal–pragmatic account that fits the examples and (...) clarifies the practices by which artefacts are discovered and remedied. (shrink)

In these essays, we are concerned with virtue in journalism and the media but are mindful of the tension between the commercial foundations of publishing and broadcasting, on the one hand, and journalism's democratic obligations on the other. Adam outlines, first, a moral vision of journalism focusing on individualistic concepts of authorship and craft. Next, Craft attempts to bridge individual and organizational concerns by examining the obligations of organizations to the individuals working within them. Finally, Cohen discusses the importance (...) of resisting the powerful corporate logic that pervades the news media in the United States and calls on journalists to be courageous. (shrink)

This is an investigation of Aristotle's conception of accidental compounds (or "kooky objects," as Gareth Matthews has called them)—entities such as the pale man and the musical man. I begin with Matthews's pioneering work into kooky objects, and argue that they are not so far removed from our ordinary thinking as is commonly supposed. I go on to assess their utility in solving some familiar puzzles involving substitutivity in epistemic contexts, and compare the kooky object approach to more modern approaches (...) involving the notion of referential opacity. I conclude by proposing that Aristotle provides an implicit role for kooky objects in such metaphysical contexts as the Categories and Metaphysics. (shrink)

An introduction to the ethical and ontological import of Levinas' philosophy.

Some evidence suggests that IVF and other reproductive technologies create serious illness and disorders in a small but significant proportion of children who are born of them. If these technologies were found to do so, it would be wrong to forge ahead with their use.

This paper explores the outlines of a framework for evaluating arguments. Among the factors to take into account are the strength of the arguers' inferences, the level of their engagement with objections raised by other interlocutors, and their effectiveness in rationally persuading their target audiences. Some connections among these can be understood only in the context of meta-argumentation and meta-rationality. The Principle of Meta-Rationality (PMR)--that reasoning rationally includes reasoning about rationality-is used to explain why it can be rational to resist (...) dialectically satisfying arguments or accept logically flawed ones. (shrink)

This rich collection will introduce students of philosophy and politics to the contemporary critical literature on the classical social contract political thinkers Thomas Hobbes , John Locke , and Jean-Jacques Rousseau . A dozen essays and book excerpts have been selected to guide students through the texts and to introduce them to current scholarly controversies surrounding the contractarian political theories of these three thinkers.

The usual representation of quantum algorithms is limited to the process of solving the problem. We extend it to the process of setting the problem. Bob, the problem setter, selects a problem-setting by the initial measurement. Alice, the problem solver, unitarily computes the corresponding solution and reads it by the final measurement. This simple extension creates a new perspective from which to see the quantum algorithm. First, it highlights the relevance of time-symmetric quantum mechanics to quantum computation: the problem-setting and (...) problem solution, in their quantum version, constitute pre- and post-selection, hence the process as a whole is bound to be affected by both boundary conditions. Second, it forces us to enter into relational quantum mechanics. There must be a representation of the quantum algorithm with respect to Bob, and another one with respect to Alice, from whom the outcome of the initial measurement, specifying the setting and thus the solution of the problem, must be concealed. Time-symmetrizing the quantum algorithm to take into account both boundary conditions leaves the representation to Bob unaltered. It shows that the representation to Alice is a sum over histories in each of which she remains shielded from the information coming to her from the initial measurement, not from that coming to her backwards in time from the final measurement. In retrospect, all is as if she knew in advance, before performing her problem-solving action, half of the information that specifies the solution of the problem she will read in the future and could use this information to reach the solution with fewer computation steps. This elucidates the quantum computational speedup in all the quantum algorithms examined. (shrink)

Quantum distribution functions for spin-1/2 systems are derived for various characteristic functions corresponding to different operator orderings.

The characteristic focus, intensity and hopefulness of Noam Chomsky's political writings reflect a set of more fundamental views about human nature, justice and social order that are not simple matters of fact. This chapter explores these more fundamental ideas, the central elements in Chomsky's social thought. Chomsky's own conception of human nature draws together a romantic emphasis on the distinctive human capacity for creative expression and a rationalist contention that there is an intrinsic and determinate structure to the human mind. (...) According to Chomsky, the “fundamental fact about the normal use of language” is its “creative aspect’. The linguistic knowledge expressed in such creativity is acquired by virtually all human beings in a short period of time, and in the face of unstructured and impoverished inputs from the environment. The chapter examines his libertarian social ideals and views on social stability and social evolution, both of which are animated by this conception of our nature. (shrink)

Identification of those who have the potential to become knowledgeable, skilled, and compassionate physicians, and determining how best to prepare them for medical education has been an on ongoing challenge since the mid-1800s (Ludmerer 1985). When medical education was almost exclusively proprietary, the primary consideration for admission was having adequate financial resources. However, in the late 1800s, two men became the driving forces for structuring medical and premedical education in the United States. Daniel Coit Gilman, of Yale and the University (...) of California, later the founding President of Johns Hopkins University, and Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard, articulated two radical objectives that .. (shrink)

The shared circuits model (SCM) is a bold attempt to explain how humans make sense of action, at different levels. In this commentary we single out five concerns: (1) the lack of a developmental account, (2) the absence of double-dissociation evidence, (3) the neglect of joint attention and joint action, (4) the inability to explain discrete emotion perception, and (5) the lack of predictive power or testability of the model. We conclude that Hurley's model requires further work before it could (...) be seen as an improvement over earlier models. (shrink)

'Ética, sustentabilidade e sociedade - desafios da nossa era' reúne estudos de diferentes áreas do conhecimento - Filosofia, Administração, Geografia - que tem em comum o foco nas questões éticas, como a corrupção no meio político e a crise ambiental planetária. Entre a violação à ética na política brasileira e o desafio de sobrevivência do planeta, variados temas são discutidos. Os pesquisadores também se defrontam com outras vertentes comportamentais, como as relacionadas ao ambiente e ao consumo sustentável.

The Wigner distribution has proven to be a useful tool in many quantum problems requiring a joint distribution of position and momentum. In the present paper we develop a joint distribution for spin components within the spirit of the Wigner distribution. This distribution provides an insight into the quantum theory of measurement. We also discuss how one may write joint distributions for two arbitrary noncommuting operators.

The various cosmological proposals by Einsteinian relativists seek to show the structure of the world as a consequence of the basic notions of relativity. In particular, the irrelevance of the state of motion of an observer to his description of the fundamental laws of nature is to be maintained. Furthermore, gravity is understood as being a description of the fact that particles move along certain minimal paths in non-Euclidean space. In this theory, the effect of one material particle on another (...) particle in the old-fashioned sense of gravitational attraction becomes indirect; that is, a particle moves on a minimal path in a space having a degree of curvature dependent on the material entities which exist in it, rather than having its path bent by the attraction between it and other material bodies, all of them existing in an absolute or receptacle-like space. (shrink)

This paper addresses the tactical question of how we ought to proceed in teachingbusiness ethics, taking as a starting point that business ethics should be concerned with cooperative,mutually beneficial outcomes, and in particular with fostering behavior that contributes to thoseoutcomes. This paper suggests that focus on moral reasoning as a tactical outcome—as a way ofachieving behavior in support of cooperative outcomes—is misplaced. Instead, we ought to focuson cultivating empathetic experiences. Intuitively, the problem we need to address in business ethicsis not (...) that our students (and that we ourselves) sometimes reason poorly, or that moral decisionmakingis subject to characteristic kinds of errors. The problem is that our students (and—again—we ourselves) do not always care enough, we do not modify our behavior consistently enough. (shrink)

It is erudite, broad-ranging, respectful of the actors involved, sympathetic, and nuanced. This is the first book of its kind."--Ronen Palan, University of Birmingham "I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.

I raise several objections to Sosa’s account of knowledge as aptness. I argue that aptness is neither necessary nor sufficient for knowledge. I also raise some objection to Sosa’s treatment of dreaming skepticism.

(2013). Freedom of Expression v. Social Responsibility: Holocaust Denial in Canada. Journal of Mass Media Ethics: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 42-56. doi: 10.1080/08900523.2012.746119.

These essays, with one exception originally published in Philosophy & Public Affairs, consider the moral problems associated with improving the social and economic position of disadvantaged groups.

The following essay seeks to deploy, from Husserl to Levinas, the centrality of the problem of temporality. In truth, the understanding of temporality constitutes, properly said, that which identifies and differentiates all the authors of the phenomenological tradition. Which means: temporality is that from which all phenomenological breakthroughs are signified and given their very possibility. Our task is thus, through a reading of Husserl, Heidegger and Levinas, to reveal how temporality is reassessed in the history of phenomenology as well as (...) to show how the philosophy of E. Levinas opens, beyond Husserl and Heidegger but by rendering justice to them both, to a novel and unedited temporality: an irreducible temporality of alterity from whence 'presence' is suspended by another source of meaning than the intentional constitution of phenomenality. (shrink)