Abstractabstract:This article examines Harold Ramis’s 2005 noir comedy The Ice Harvest as the critically dystopian counter-panel to his beloved 1993 film Groundhog Day, a film frequently discussed within the paradigm of utopia. While starkly different in genre, tone, and reception, the two films comprise a dialectical dyad that registers the historical transition from the utopian cultural effervescence of the early 1990s to the tragic foreclosure of imaginative horizons and the dystopian transformation of economic, political, and social landscapes in the new (...) millennium. In The Ice Harvest, the author argues, this is achieved through a strategic reactivation of film noir as a variant of the critical dystopia. (shrink)

Here is a thoroughly updated edition of a classic in palliative medicine. Two new chapters have been added to the 1991 edition, along with a new preface summarizing where progress has been made and where it has not in the area of pain management. This book addresses the timely issue of doctor-patient relationships arguing that the patient, not the disease, should be the central focus of medicine. Included are a number of compelling patient narratives. Praise for the first edition "Well (...) written. . .should be read by everyone in medical practice or considering a career in medicine."---JAMA. "Memorable passages, important ideas, and critical analysis. This is a book that clinicians and educators should read."---New England Journal of Medicine. (shrink)

" Dr. Cassell discusses the world of the sick, the healing connection and healer's battle, the role of omnipotence in the healer's art, illness and disease, and ...

An enduring question in the philosophy of science is the question of whether a scientific theory deserves more credit for its successful predictions than it does for accommodating data that was already known when the theory was developed. In The Paradox of Predictivism, Eric Barnes argues that the successful prediction of evidence testifies to the general credibility of the predictor in a way that evidence does not when the evidence is used in the process of endorsing the theory. He (...) illustrates his argument with an important episode from nineteenth-century chemistry, Mendeleev's Periodic Law and its successful predictions of the existence of various elements. The consequences of this account of predictivism for the realist/anti-realist debate are considerable, and strengthen the status of the 'no miracle' argument for scientific realism. Barnes's important and original contribution to the debate will interest a wide range of readers in philosophy of science. (shrink)

In What Is Thought? Eric Baum proposes a computational explanation of thought.

An enduring question in the philosophy of science is the question of whether a scientific theory deserves more credit for its successful predictions than it does for accommodating data that was already known when the theory was developed. In The Paradox of Predictivism, Eric Barnes argues that the successful prediction of evidence testifies to the general credibility of the predictor in a way that evidence does not when the evidence is used in the process of endorsing the theory. He (...) illustrates his argument with an important episode from nineteenth-century chemistry, Mendeleev's Periodic Law and its successful predictions of the existence of various elements. The consequences of this account of predictivism for the realist/anti-realist debate are considerable, and strengthen the status of the 'no miracle' argument for scientific realism. Barnes's important and original contribution to the debate will interest a wide range of readers in philosophy of science. (shrink)

This is the first complete, one-volume English translation of the ancient Chinese text Xunzi, one of the most extensive, sophisticated, and elegant works in the tradition of Confucian thought. Through essays, poetry, dialogues, and anecdotes, the Xunzi articulates a Confucian perspective on ethics, politics, warfare, language, psychology, human nature, ritual, and music, among other topics. Aimed at general readers and students of Chinese thought, Eric Hutton's translation makes the full text of this important work more accessible in English than (...) ever before. Named for its purported author, the Xunzi has long been neglected compared to works such as the Analects of Confucius and the Mencius. Yet interest in the Xunzi has grown in recent decades, and the text presents a much more systematic vision of the Confucian ideal than the fragmented sayings of Confucius and Mencius. In one famous, explicit contrast to them, the Xunzi argues that human nature is bad. However, it also allows that people can become good through rituals and institutions established by earlier sages. Indeed, the main purpose of the Xunzi is to urge people to become as good as possible, both for their own sakes and for the sake of peace and order in the world. In this edition, key terms are consistently translated to aid understanding and line numbers are provided for easy reference. Other features include a concise introduction, a timeline of early Chinese history, a list of important names and terms, cross-references, brief explanatory notes, a bibliography, and an index. (shrink)

Standard animalists are committed to a stringent form of restricted composition, thereby denying the existence of brains, hands, and other proper parts of an organism . One reason for positing this near-nihilistic ontology comes from various challenges to animalism such as the Thinking Parts Argument, the Unity Argument, and the Argument from the Problem of the Many. In this paper, I show that these putatively distinct arguments are all instances of a more general problem, which I call the ‘Too Many (...) Candidates Problem’ . Given my formulation of the problem, it is evident that standard animalists are mistaken in believing that restricting composition is the only solution. I show that there is another option for solving the TMC. The advantage of such a position, which I call ‘unrestricted animalism’, is that it is compatible with unrestricted composition and the existence of brains and other proper parts of an organism. I conclude by sketching several strategies one can take regarding this latter solution to the TMC. (shrink)

Uncertainty and affect are fundamental and interrelated aspects of the human condition. Uncertainty is often associated with negative affect, but in some circumstances it is associated with positive affect. In this paper, we review different explanations for the varying relationship between uncertainty and affect. We identify “mental simulation” as a key process that links uncertainty to affective states. We suggest that people have a propensity to simulate negative outcomes, which results in a propensity towards negative affective responses to uncertainty. We (...) also propose the existence of several important moderators of this process, including context and individual differences such as uncertainty tolerance, as well as emotion regulation strategies. Finally, we highlight important knowledge gaps and promising areas for future research, both empirical and conceptual, to further elucidate the relationship between uncertainty and affect. (shrink)

In trying to establish the view that there are no non-living macrophysical objects, Trenton Merricks has produced an influential argument—the Overdetermination Argument—against the causal efficacy of composite objects. A serious problem for the Overdetermination Argument is the ambiguity in the notion of overdetermination that is being employed, which is due to the fact that Merricks does not provide any theory of causation to support his claims. Once we adopt a plausible theory of causation, viz. interventionism, problems with the Overdetermination will (...) become evident. After laying out the Overdetermination Argument and examining one extant objection to it, I will explicate the relevant aspects of an interventionist theory of causation and provide a characterization of overdetermination that follows from such an account. From this, I will argue that the Causal Principle that undergirds the Overdetermination Argument is false and hence the argument is invalid; and I claim that the only other available characterization of overdetermination would render a key premise in the argument false. Thus, the Overdetermination Argument fails to provide us with any reason to deny the causal efficacy of macrophysical objects, and therefore provides no reason to doubt their existence. (shrink)

The historical debate on representation in cognitive science and neuroscience construes representations as theoretical posits and discusses the degree to which we have reason to posit them. We reject the premise of that debate. We argue that experimental neuroscientists routinely observe and manipulate neural representations in their laboratory. Therefore, neural representations are as real as neurons, action potentials, or any other well-established entities in our ontology.

This paper develops a compositional, type-driven constraint semantic theory for a fragment of the language of subjective uncertainty. In the particular application explored here, the interpretation function of constraint semantics yields not propositions but constraints on credal states as the semantic values of declarative sentences. Constraints are richer than propositions in that constraints can straightforwardly represent assessments of the probability that the world is one way rather than another. The richness of constraints helps us model communicative acts in essentially the (...) same way that we model agents’ credences. Moreover, supplementing familiar truth-conditional theories of epistemic modals with constraint semantics helps capture contrasts between strong necessity and possibility modals, on the one hand, and weak necessity modals, on the other. (shrink)

In some recent works, Crupi and Iacona have outlined an analysis of ‘if’ based on Chrysippus’ idea that a conditional holds whenever the negation of its consequent is incompatible with its antecedent. This paper presents a sound and complete system of conditional logic that accommodates their analysis. The soundness and completeness proofs that will be provided rely on a general method elaborated by Raidl, which applies to a wide range of systems of conditional logic.

New communication technologies such as the microcomputer, videotex/teletext systems, the videocassette recorder, and satellite receiving dishes have been available to farmers since the early 1980s. This longitudinal study examines ethical issues associated with the impact that differential patterns of adoption and use of these technologies have had on inequalities among farmers from 1982 to 1989. The results demonstrate a strong adoption and use bias toward larger scale farmers who already have well-developed skills for handling information. This bias is especially strong (...) for microcomputer and videotex/teletext systems, and it isincreasing over time. Although the same farmers are not adopting all communication innovations, there is a strong tendency toward the already information-rich making the most use of the innovations they adopt. The article concludes with several recommendations that would help minimize some of these information inequalities. (shrink)

Social Phenomenology offers an account of collective intentionality informed by the tradition of Husserlian phenomenology.

Bellʼs 1964 theorem causes a severe problem for the notion that correlations require explanation, encapsulated in Reichenbachʼs principle of common cause. Despite being a hallmark of scientific thought, dropping the principle has been widely regarded as much less bitter medicine than the perceived alternative—dropping relativistic causality. Recently, however, some authors have proposed that modified forms of Reichenbachʼs principle could be maintained even with relativistic causality. Here we break down Reichenbachʼs principle into two independent assumptions—the principle of common cause proper and (...) factorization of probabilities. We show how Bellʼs theorem can be derived from these two assumptions plus relativistic causality and the law of total probability for actual events, and we review proposals to drop each of these assumptions in light of the theorem. In particular, we show that the non-commutative common causes of Hofer-Szabó and Vecsernyés fail to have an analogue of the notion that the common causes can explain the observed correlations. Moreover, we show that their definition can be satisfied trivially by any quantum product state for any quantum correlations. We also discuss how the conditional states approach of Leifer and Spekkens fares in this regard. (shrink)

According to Eric Olson, the Thinking Animal Argument (TAA) is the best reason to accept animalism, the view that we are identical to animals. A novel criticism has been advanced against TAA, suggesting that it implicitly employs a dubious epistemological principle. I will argue that other epistemological principles can do the trick of saving the TAA, principles that appeal to recent issues regarding disagreement with peers and experts. I conclude with some remarks about the consequence of accepting these modified (...) principles, drawing out some general morals in defending animalism. (shrink)

The theory of explanatory unification was first proposed by Friedman (1974) and developed by Kitcher (1981, 1989). The primary motivation for this theory, it seems to me, is the argument that this account of explanation is the only account that correctly describes the genesis of scientific understanding. Despite the apparent plausibility of Friedman's argument to this effect, however, I argue here that the unificationist thesis of understanding is false. The theory of explanatory unification as articulated by Friedman and Kitcher thus (...) emerges as fundamentally misconceived. (shrink)

The core of this book is a novel theory of distributive justice premised on the fundamental moral equality of persons. In the light of this theory, Rakowski considers three types of problems which urgently require solutions-- the distribution of resources, property rights, and the saving of life--and provides challenging and unconventional answers. Further, he criticizes the economic analysis of law as a normative theory, and develops an alternative account of tort and property law.

I aim to show that one way of testing the mettle of a theory of scientific explanation is to inquire what that theory entails about the status of brute facts. Here I consider the nature of brute facts, and survey several contemporary accounts of explanation vis a vis this subject. One problem with these accounts is that they seem to entail that brute facts represent a gap in scientific understanding. I argue that brute facts are non-mysterious and indeed are even (...) explainable by the lights of Salmon's ontic conception of explanation. The plausibility of various models of explanation, I suggest, depends to some extent on the tendency of their proponents to focus on certain examples of explananda - I ponder brute facts qua explananda here as a way of helping us to recognize this dependency. (shrink)

There is much to admire in this book. It is written in a pleasingly straightforward style, and offers insight on a wide range of important issues.

By considering carefully Socrates' invocations of 'compulsion' in Plato's Republic, I seek to explain how both justice and compulsion are crucial to the philosophers' decision to rule in Kallipolis, so that this decision does not contradict Socrates' central thesis that it is always in one's interests to act justly. On my account, the compulsion is provided by a law, made by the city's lawgivers, that requires people raised to be philosophers take turns ruling. Justice by itself does not require the (...) philosophers to rule, but it does require them to obey just laws. I also consider the implications of this view for Plato's politics. (shrink)

A recent solution to the Body-Minus problem, which is a problem of material constitution, claims that ordinary proper parts (such as left feet) exist, but the complements of these objects (such as left-foot complements) do not exist. In this paper, I examine a defense of this solution from the worry of arbitrariness and from its ineffectiveness against a revised version of the problem that focuses on the head, and I show that this defense fails.

The Moral Foundations of Trust seeks to explain why people place their faith in strangers, and why doing so matters. Trust is a moral value that does not depend upon personal experience or on interacting with people in civic groups or informal socializing. Instead, we learn to trust from our parents, and trust is stable over long periods of time. Trust depends on an optimistic world view: the world is a good place and we can make it better. Trusting people (...) are more likely to give through charity and volunteering. Trusting societies are more likely to redistribute resources from the rich to the poor. Trust has been in decline in the United States for over 30 years. The roots of this decline are traceable to declining optimism and increasing economic inequality, which Uslaner supports by aggregate time series in the United States and cross-sectional data across market economies. (shrink)

A successful theory of the language of subjective uncertainty would meet several important constraints. First, it would explain how use of the language of subjective uncertainty affects addressees’ states of subjective uncertainty. Second, it would explain how such use affects what possibilities are treated as live for purposes of conversation. Third, it would accommodate 'quantifying in' to the scope of epistemic modals. Fourth, it would explain the norms governing the language of subjective uncertainty, and the differences between them and the (...) norms governing the language of subjective certainty. Neither truth conditional nor traditional force modfier theories of the language of subjective uncertainty look adequate to the task of satisfying all four of these constraints. (shrink)

Taking as the focus of enquiry the engagements of Félix Guattari with Marcel Duchamp, namely, those rare passages in Schizoanalytic Cartographies and Chaosmosis, the question of the encounter is posed in the field of the sign, but of a sign ‘destructured’ (as Duchamp du signe), in the sense also that Guattari started by destructuring Lacan (from Psychoanalysis and Transversality to Anti-Oedipus). Introduced by the relationships between Guattari and Foucault to better play in between the early and the late Guattari, Guattari’s (...) key insight into the Bottle Rack readymade as an existential function is critically discussed from a reopening to enunciation through the ‘Duchamp effect’. If the latter seems to privilege language contrary to Guattari’s own semiotics, it is to derail it as a machinic unconscious. Duchamp’s writings on his readymades and other machinations are analysed, with the role of Raymond Roussel for Duchamp (and Deleuze-Guattari via Foucault), as well as the implications of a trans-Duchamp, his alter-ego Rrose Sélavy, as an opening to a machinic alterity undoing and queering gender binarity and phallic centricity, recovering the singularity of the bachelor machine and its rupture of subjectivation. The article shows how it could be transversally returned to the very middle of the Guattarian trajectory. (shrink)

The variably strict analysis of conditionals does not only largely dominate the philosophical literature, since its invention by Stalnaker and Lewis, it also found its way into linguistics and psychology. Yet, the shortcomings of Lewis–Stalnaker’s account initiated a plethora of modifications, such as non-vacuist conditionals, presuppositional indicatives, perfect conditionals, or other conditional constructions, for example: reason relations, difference-making conditionals, counterfactual dependency, or probabilistic relevance. Many of these new connectives can be treated as strengthened or weakened conditionals. They are definable conditionals. (...) This article develops a technique to infer the logic for such definable conditionals from the known logic of the underlying defining conditional. The technique is applied to central examples. The results show that a large part of the zoo of conditionals arises from a basic conditional—a constant nucleus of the different contextual and conceptual variations of variably strict conditionals. (shrink)

This review of 122 research reports (184 independent samples, 14,900 subjects) found average r ϭ .274 for prediction of behavioral, judgment, and physiological measures by Implicit Association Test (IAT) measures. Parallel explicit (i.e., self-report) measures, available in 156 of these samples (13,068 subjects), also predicted effectively (average r ϭ .361), but with much greater variability of effect size. Predictive validity of self-report was impaired for socially sensitive topics, for which impression..

There has been a growing interest in casuistry since the ground breaking work of Jonsen and Toulmin. Casuistry, in their view, offers the possibility of securing the moral agreement that policy makers desire but which has proved elusive to theory driven approaches to ethics. However, their account of casuistry is dependent upon the exercise of phronesis. As recent discussions of phronesis make clear, this requires attention not only to the particulars of the case, but also to the substantive goods at (...) stake in the case. Without agreement on these goods attention to cases is unlikely to secure the productive consensus that Jonson and Toulmin seek. (shrink)

Aristotle's treatment of the choice between the political and contemplative lives (in EN I 5 and X 7-8) can seem awkward. To offer one explanation of this, I argue that when he invokes self-sufficience (autarkeia) as a criterion for this choice, he appeals to two different and incompatible specifications of "lacking nothing." On one specification, suitable to a human being living as a political animal and thus seeking to realize his end as an engaged citizen of a polis, a person (...) lacks nothing by possessing a wide range of goods that directly require other people. On the other, more suitable to a god or a beast, a person lacks nothing by having no need of goods that directly require other people. The ambiguity of this criterion renders the choice between the political and contemplative lives difficult. (shrink)

This paper investigates the implicative conditional, a connective intended to describe the logical behavior of an empirically defined class of natural language conditionals, also named implicative conditionals, which excludes concessive and some other conditionals. The implicative conditional strengthens the strict conditional with the possibility of the antecedent and of the contradictory of the consequent. $${p\Rightarrow q}$$ p ⇒ q is thus defined as $${\lnot } \Diamond {(p \wedge \lnot q) \wedge } \Diamond {p \wedge } \Diamond {\lnot q}$$ ¬ ◊ (...) ( p ∧ ¬ q ) ∧ ◊ p ∧ ◊ ¬ q. We explore the logical properties of this conditional in a reflexive normal Kripke semantics, provide an axiomatic system and prove it to be sound and complete for our semantics. The implicative conditional validates transitivity and contraposition, which we take to be integral parts of reasoning and communication. But it only validates restricted versions of strengthening the antecedent, right weakening, simplification, and rational monotonicity. Apparent counterexamples to some of these properties are explained as due to contextual factors. Finally, the implicative conditional avoids the paradoxes of material and strict implication, and validates some connexive principles such as Aristotle’s theses and weak Boethius’ thesis, as well as some highly entrenched principles of conditionals, such as conjunction of consequents, disjunction of antecedents, modus ponens, cautious monotonicity and cut. (shrink)

This article discusses some of the ways in which natural language can express modal information – information which is, to a first approximation, about what could be or must be the case, as opposed to being about what actually is the case. It motivates, explains, and raises problems for Angelika Kratzer's influential theory of modal auxiliaries, and introduces a new approach to one important debate about the relationships between modality, evidentiality, context change, and imperative force.

The subject of this two-part article is the bearing of Søren Kierkegaard’s writings, and of their reception, upon the development of Religionswissenschaft or the comparative study of religion. This first part opens by taking account of Kierkegaard’s own awareness of, and relationship to, “non-Christian” religions, including his late reading of Schopenhauer; then considers Kierkegaard in juxtaposition with his contemporary F. Max Müller, the Sanskritist and foundational pioneer of comparative religion, and the two men’s contrasting relations to F.W.J. Schelling; and finally (...) examines the interest taken in Kierkegaard by William James, Max Weber, and Gerardus van der Leeuw as early twentieth-century contributors through three different disciplines to the study of comparative religion. (shrink)

Standard conditionals $\varphi > \psi$, by which I roughly mean variably strict conditionals à la Stalnaker and Lewis, are trivially true for impossible antecedents. This article investigates three modifications in a doxastic setting. For the neutral conditional, all impossible-antecedent conditionals are false, for the doxastic conditional they are only true if the consequent is absolutely necessary, and for the metaphysical conditional only if the consequent is ‘model-implied’ by the antecedent. I motivate these conditionals logically, and also doxastically by properties of (...) conditional belief and belief revision. For this I show that the Lewisian hierarchy of conditional logics can be reproduced within ranking semantics, provided we slightly stretch the notion of a ranking function. Given this, acceptance of a conditional can be interpreted as a conditional belief. The epistemic and the neutral conditional deviate from Lewis’ weakest system $V$, in that ID or even CN are dropped, and new axioms appear. The logic of the metaphysical conditional is completely axiomatised by $V$ to which we add the known Kripke axioms T5 for the outer modality. Related completeness results for variations of the ranking semantics are obtained as corollaries. (shrink)

This chapter surveys the origins and development in Greek philosophy of the thought that living well requires living as a citizen of the world.

At least since Sachs' well-known essay, readers of Plato's Republic have worried that there is a gap between the challenge posed to Socrates--to show that it is always in one's interest to act justly--and his response--to show that it is always in one's interest to have a just soul. The most popular response has been that Socrates fills this gap in Books Five through Seven by supposing that knowledge of the Forms motivates those with just souls to act justly. I (...) offer some complaints about this gap-filling strategy and offer an alternative account, according to which there was never a gap. On my account, Socrates assumes that no one can have a just soul unless they have been raised well and that anyone who is raised well will act justly. On this view, the account of moral education in Books Two through Four is the key to understanding the connection between psychological and practical justice. I argue that this account makes better sense of what the Republic says, and that it attributes to Plato a more plausible moral psychology. (shrink)

From Clouds to Corsair: Kierkegaard, Aristophanes, and Socrates -- The pure fool and the knight of faith: Wolfram's Parzival and the stages of existence -- From romantic aesthete to Christian analogue: Don Quixote's sallies in Kierkegaard's authorship -- Saying not quite "everything just as it is": Shakespeare on life's way -- "Sorrow's changeling": irony, humor, and laughter in Kierkegaard and Carlyle.