What role, if any, should the government perform in a society? Two very different answers to this question have been provided by John Rawls and Robert Nozick. For Rawls, the government plays an important role in ensuring that the principles of justice are realized in the workings of society. For Nozick, the role of government is limited to that of providing protection. The debate over these two views has led to the questioning of the entire liberal doctrine, a questioning that (...) has taken place not only within intellectual circles, but also within the society at large. (shrink)

In this article, we analyze the grammatical incorporation of demonstratives in a tactile language, emerging in communities of DeafBlind signers in the US who communicate via reciprocal, tactile channels—a practice known as “protactile.” In the first part of the paper, we report on a synchronic analysis of recent data, identifying four types of “taps,” which have taken on different functions in protacitle language and communication. In the second part of the paper, we report on a diachronic analysis of data collected (...) over the past 8 years. This analysis reveals the emergence of a new kind of “propriotactic” tap, which has been co-opted by the emerging phonological system of protactile language. We link the emergence of this unit to both demonstrative taps, and backchanneling taps, both of which emerged earlier. We show how these forms are all undergirded by an attention-modulation function, more or less backgrounded, and operating across different semiotic systems. In doing so, we contribute not only to what is known about demonstratives in tactile languages, but also to what is known about the role of demonstratives in the emergence of new languages. (shrink)

Based on responses from 1078 human resource (HR) professionals, this study concludes that there is not an ethical crisis in the work place. Seven of 37 situations were rated as serious problems by more than 25% of the respondents. HR reported that their organizations are serious about uncovering and disciplining ethical misconduct, top management has a commitment to ethical business conduct, personal principles are not compromised to conform to company expectations, and performance pressures do not lead to unethical conduct.

The purpose of this text is to draw attention to eight forgotten heroes: William C. Bagley, Charles DeGarmo, David Felmley, William Torrey Harris, Isaac L. Kandel, Charles McMurry, William C. Ruediger, and Edward Austin Sheldon. They have been marginalized from our profession, and drawing upon their legacy is the best hope for restoring the profession of teaching today. This work also includes a chapter at the end of the book entitled "John Dewey's Forgotten Essays." The audience for this book includes: (...) 1) classroom teachers, 2) school administrators, 3) teacher educators, 4) deans and other university administrators, 5) college and university presidents, 6) legislators, 7) historians of education, 8) curriculum specialists, 9) specialists in teacher training, and 10) the general public. (shrink)

What is truth? What role does truth play in the connections between language and the world? What is the relationship between truth and being? Douglas Edwards tackles these questions and develops a distinctive metaphysical worldview. He argues that in some domains language responds to the world, whereas in others language generates the world.

Dr Edwards' stimulating and provocative book advances the thesis that the appropriate axiomatic basis for inductive inference is not that of probability, with its addition axiom, but rather likelihood - the concept introduced by Fisher as a measure of relative support amongst different hypotheses. Starting from the simplest considerations and assuming no more than a modest acquaintance with probability theory, the author sets out to reconstruct nothing less than a consistent theory of statistical inference in science.

In an era of political, economic and epistemological uncertainty, this book provides an accessible, critical and thorough analysis of the difficulties that beset teacher education. The authors draw on philosophical, psychological and sociological perspectives and illustrate their points with a detailed mix of international examples.

Giving an account of the relation between evolution and consciousness is painted as posing a dilemma between panpsychism, with minimal consciousness in every grain of matter, and radical emergence, with consciousness appearing as from nowhere in living structures. Panpsychism has been seen as suffering from a combination problem and radical emergence as unjustified in physics. The underpinning of physics now lies in field theory, which may provide a way out on both sides. Only, and always, in a field theory account (...) do influences at different points in spacetime combine in the same indivisible event. Radical emergence is also inherent to field theory. Moreover, by providing rich patterns of influence involving both discrete identities and quantitative values, field theory might provide a basis for sensed propositional meaning with subjects and predicates. Ordered condensed matter within living tissue may support unusual emergent dynamic units uniquely suited to building representations of the world with sensed meaning. The evolution of consciousness may then be seen as a tractable biological problem centred on increasingly sophisticated ways for external world dynamics to be mirrored by internal representations with semantic content, based in field relations within condensed matter with genetically encoded complex order. (shrink)

For the first time Truth: A Contemporary Reader brings together essays that have shaped two aspects of a fundamental philosophical topic: the nature of truth and the value of truth. -/- Featuring 22 essays, this up-to-date reader includes seminal work by leading figures in contemporary analytic philosophy. It charts the development of the central 'grand proposals' about the nature of truth, and subsequently how their influence gradually diminished in face of new theories developed in the 20th and 21st-centuries. The reader (...) also demonstrates how truth is often taken to be valuable in various ways, in particular as the norm of correctness for belief and assertion, and the relationship between truth and other epistemic values. -/- With introductory overviews to each group of related papers complemented by guides to further reading, this reader introduces the central debates, familiarizes students with the most important work in the field and covers pivotal theories of truth including: -/- - correspondence theories - coherentism, pragmatism, verificationism - deflationary, primitivist, and pluralist theories -/- Moreover, by showing how thoughts about truth and value bear heavily on one another, Truth: A Contemporary Reader provides new opportunities for understanding and advancing the link between these central topics. This is an essential collection for anyone studying or working in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language today. (shrink)

This textbook in Medical Ethics covers most of the standard issues. Each chapter begins with detailed comments by the editors, followed by the best available articles on each topic covered.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was trained as a philosopher and steeped in the thought of Hegel and German idealism, but turned away from philosophy in his mid-twenties towards politics, economics and history. It is for his these subjects Marx is best known and in which his work and ideas shaped the very nature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, Marx's engagement with philosophy runs through most of his work, especially in his philosophy of history and in moral and political philosophy. (...) In this outstanding introduction to Marx's philosophy Jaime Edwards and Brian Leiter begin with an overview of Marx's life and intellectual development, before examining and assessing the following important topics: Marx's theory of history: Hegel, dialectics, teleology, materialism functionalism and the causal explanation of historical change economics, history and the transition from communism to capitalism ideology, morality and religion human nature, alienation and the good life for human beings Marx's legacy and influence, including Western Marxism and the Frankfurt School. The addition of chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary of technical terms make this an indispensable introduction to Marx's philosophy. It will also be useful to those in related disciplines such as politics, sociology, history and economics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response 4: The Summer of Our DiscontentCaroline EdwardsI write this response on the eve of another wave of industrial action in the UK in November 2022—the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) “UCU Rising” campaign, the latest in a series of regular disputes over pay and working conditions, the gender and ethnicities pay gap, and casualisation that has been ongoing since 2018. In 2022’s “summer of discontent,” we’ve seen our (...) rail, maritime and transport workers, airport staff, bus drivers, telecommunications workers, postal workers, nurses, refuse workers, and higher and further education staff engage in ongoing industrial disputes with intractable bosses. Even criminal barristers continue with an indefinite, uninterrupted strike after years of government cuts and chronic underinvestment. Everywhere you look, there is a palpable sense of a country on its knees. It’s nearly 100 years since the last General Strike of 1926 and in the UK it’s looking increasingly likely that we will have another General Strike on our hands soon. In “Two Cheers for Blueprints, or, Negative Reasons for Positive Utopianism” Antonis Balasopoulos contextualizes this within the longer economic durée of the shift from Fordist production to so-called flexible accumulation after 1972, writing in this issue that “the turn of capital to the faster and higher [End Page 554] profits involved in financialization rather than infrastructural and industrial investment, form much of the objective, structural ground for what can only be described as the rapid rise of a dystopian structure of feeling in western societies since the early 1970s.” Antonis’s brilliant summary reminds us of the monumental scale of the challenges facing utopian thought and praxis in our current moment. Make no mistake—the “crisis ordinariness” of everyday life under late capitalism that Lauren Berlant identified in Cruel Optimism (2011) has intensified in the years following the Global Financial Crisis (2007–8), the wave of Occupy protests in 2011, and, more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–). “For some time now,” as Antonis writes, the utopian goals of “happiness, fulfilment, [and] emancipation... have been out of the question altogether.”It’s hard not to agree with this assessment, given the current chaos of life in the UK. Adam Stock’s roundtable contribution “Funding Utopia: Utopian Studies and the Discourse of Academic Excellence” focuses on the academy’s complicity with the neoliberal financialization of what were previously protected as public goods (education, our health service, transport infrastructure, and so on) over the past three decades. As Adam notes, the rhetoric of “excellence” that has come to dominate all areas of university life—teaching, research, public engagement, and the quantifiable “impact” of university research beyond the academy—is really just another way of using competition to mask the market logic of scarcity. Swingeing cuts to publicly funded research have led to a scarcity of resources in scholarly knowledge production, which is legitimated through the discourse of “excellence” and “prestige.” Only a handful of elite research leaders are granted awards and the value of all research becomes judged by its proximity to this distribution (concentration) of wealth within a small number of institutions. Defending education as a public good has long given way to the desperate, existential struggle for survival at UK universities. Numerous institutions are on the brink of bankruptcy, which was the goal all along for the ideologically driven Office for Students (OfS). Market exit, as they euphemistically term it, proves market efficiency.At my own institution, Birkbeck, University of London, the challenge to utopian thinking is all too violently clear. Birkbeck has a special place in the UK higher education system—a university founded nearly 200 years ago in the Crown and Anchor Tavern on the Strand (it was called the London Mechanics’ Institution back then) to offer education to working-class Londoners that [End Page 555] fitted around their busy working lives. As my colleague Joanna Bourke writes in Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People (2022), life expectancy in the poorest parts of London was just twenty-nine years; cholera, typhoid, and typhus were major killers; and illiteracy was widespread. At Birkbeck, we are the only university to teach evening classes and offer the requisite support... (shrink)

In this paper the authors argue that research ethics committees should not be paternalistic by rejecting research that poses risk to people competent to decide for themselves. However it is important they help to ensure valid consent is sought from potential recruits and protect vulnerable people who cannot look after their own best interests. The authors first describe the tragic deaths of Jesse Gelsinger and Ellen Roche. They then discuss the following claims to support their case: competent individuals are epistemologically (...) and ethically in the best position to say which risks are reasonable for them, so RECs should be no more restrictive than the “normal” constraints on people taking risks with themselves; RECs do not judge individual competence ; individual liberty is mostly limited by what serves the public interest, and RECs do not determine public interest; RECs may have a paternalistic role in preventing exploitation of competent people vulnerable to the use of incentives, and in protecting the interests of incompetent people; however, the moral and political authority of RECs has not been established in this respect. (shrink)

This paper has three main aims. The first is to provide a critical assessment of two rival concepts of suffering, that proposed by Cassell and that proposed in this journal by van Hooft. The second aim of the paper is to sketch a more plausible concept of suffering, one which derives from a Wittgensteinian view of linguistic meaning. This more plausible concept is labeled an ‘intuitive concept’. The third aim is to assess the prospects for scientific understanding of suffering.

Indirect complaint sequences are examined in a corpus of everyday domestic telephone conversations. The analysis focuses on how a speaker/complainer displays and manages their subjective investment in the complaint. Four features are picked out: announcements, in which an upcoming complaint is projected in ways that signal the complainer’s stance or attitude; laughter accompanying the complaint announcement, and its delivery and receipt; displacement, where the speaker complains about something incidental to what would be expected to be the main offence; and uses (...) of lexical descriptions such as ‘moan’ and ‘whinge’ that formulate subjectivity, investment, and a disposition to complain, and are generally used to counter a complaint’s evidential basis or objectivity. Laughter and irony provide complaint recipients with response cues, and are used in ways that can strengthen as well as undermine a complaint’s factual basis and seriousness. (shrink)

IN HIS CRITICAL METAPHYSICS OF MORALS, Kant insists on keeping the purely rational concepts, laws, and principles of moral philosophy strictly separate from the empirical elements of practical anthropology. This is not to say that he treats the a priori part of the doctrine of morals in isolation from empirical psychological concepts and observations about the special nature of human beings. He allows that such elements are necessarily brought into the formulation of the system of pure morality. Still, he maintains (...) that their integration with this system cannot detract from the purity of the highest principles and fundamental a priori concepts of morality themselves, or cast any doubt on the a priori origin of all practical laws in pure reason alone. Within the system of the metaphysics of morals, the pure part of moral philosophy must therefore be logically dissociated from any particular theory of human nature that includes the principles of a specifically human moral psychology. This measure is mandatory if moral philosophy is not to rely on species-dependent presuppositions when, on the basis of its pure part, it plays its distinctive legislative role for humans as rational beings. As Kant states in the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten of 1785, “all moral philosophy rests wholly upon its pure part, and, when applied to the human being, it borrows not the least thing from the knowledge of that being, but rather gives to the human being, as a rational being, laws a priori.” Accordingly, the foundational task of the metaphysical theory of morals must be to investigate the “ideas and the principles of a possible pure will, and not the actions and conditions of human willing [Wollen] as such, which for the most part are drawn from psychology.”. (shrink)

Conference Report: Towards a Science of Consciousness, Helsinki 2015.

The anchoring focus of this paper is a cluster of complaints that have been raised against reference-based approaches to semantics, in particular against the view defended by Scott Soames (2002). I am going to lump the complaints that I have in mind under the heading of the Threat of Collapse (or the Threat, for short). At the heart of the Threat of Collapse is the accusation that various moves referentialists make in dealing with well-known problems end up undercutting the motivations (...) for a reference-based semantics in the first place. (shrink)

This work examines the evolution of law and legal method, and challenges the law's claim to neutrality by examining its role in creating and reproducing inequality between the sexes. It considers many of the current debates, and in each, the law is stated with reference to recent developments in statute and judicial decisions in the UK and other jurisdictions. The author illustrates how each issue is shaped by the current political climate and, where relevant, by the European Court. Reference is (...) also made to US and Australian case law. The book should be of interest to students studying women and the law, family law, criminal law and jurisprudcence, as well as those on criminology and sociology courses. It should also be useful to family and criminal practitioners. (shrink)

In this article we examine ethical aspects of the involvement of children in clinical research, specifically those who are incapable of giving informed consent to participate. The topic is, of course, not a new one in medical ethics but there are some tensions in current guidelines that, in our view, need to be made explicit and which need to be responded to by the relevant official bodies. In particular, we focus on tensions between the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki, (...) and the guidance offered by the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health , and the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences. We conclude with a call for these organisations to make their guidance explicit in relation to the World Medical Association Declaration. (shrink)

A new understanding of Kant’s theory of a priori knowledge and his natural philosophy emerges from Jeffrey Edwards’s mature and penetrating study. In the Third Analogy of Experience, Kant argues for the existence of a dynamical plenum in space. This argument against empty space demonstrates that the dynamical plenum furnishes an a priori necessary condition for our experience and knowledge of an objective world. Such an a priori existence proof, however, transgresses the limits Kant otherwise places on transcendental arguments (...) in the _Critique of Pure Reason_ because it establishes a _material_ transcendental condition of possible experience. This finding motivates Edwards to examine the broader context of Kant’s views about matter, substance, causal influence, and physical aether in connection with the developmental history of his theory of transcendental idealism. Against the backdrop of early modern metaphysics and contemporaneous physical theory, Edwards explicates the origins of the Third Analogy in Kant’s early work on the metaphysics of nature. The argument against empty space presented in the Third Analogy reveals a central aspect of Kant’s transcendental theory of experience that Edwards explains lucidly. By clarifying the epistemological standpoint at issue in the Third Analogy, he shows that the fundamental revisions to which Kant subjects his theory of knowledge in the _Opus postumum_ not only originate in his precritical metaphysics of nature but are developments of an argument central to the _Critique of Pure Reason_ itself. Edwards’s work is important to scholars working in the history of philosophy and the history and philosophy of science, as well as to Kant specialists. (shrink)

This paper examines one particular justification for the screening and termination of embryos/fetuses which possess genetic features known to cause disability. The particular case is that put forward in several places by John Harris. He argues that the obligation to prevent needless suffering justifies the prevention of the births of disabled neonates. The paper begins by rehearsing Harris's case. Then, drawing upon claims advanced in a recent paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics, it is subjected to critical scrutiny, focusing (...) on Harris's “suffering claim” .1 It is argued that the suffering claim must be false if understood as an empirical claim. And, even if understood as a conceptual truth, it mistakenly assimilates the concepts of harm and suffering. Finally, again focusing on Harris's recent work in this area, his characterisation of disability as a “harmed condition” is shown not to apply in the case of at least some moderate forms of intellectual disability. (shrink)

Jansen and Wall suggest a new way of defending hard paternalism in clinical research. They argue that non-therapeutic research exposing people to more than minimal risk should be banned on egalitarian grounds: in preventing poor decision-makers from making bad decisions, we will promote equality of welfare. We argue that their proposal is flawed for four reasons.First, the idea of poor decision-makers is much more problematic than Jansen and Wall allow. Second, pace Jansen and Wall, it may be practicable for regulators (...) to uncover the values that a potential research participant holds when agreeing to enter a research project, so their claim that we must ban such research projects for all if we are to ban them for poor decision-makers looks to be unmotivated. Third, there seem to be cases where the liberty to enter the sort of research project Jansen and Wall discuss is morally weighty, and arguably should outweigh concerns of egalitarian distribution. Fourth, banning certain types of research, which seem on the face of it to offer an unfavourable risk-benefit ratio, would have unwelcome consequences for all clinical research, which Jansen and Wall do not recognize. (shrink)