America's research universities, approximately 125 in number,play important roles in the nation's research system, and help toset the tone for all institutions of research and higherlearning. As the research universities have formed closer linkswith industry, new problems have arisen that have precipitated amajor debate. The academic medical centres and related lifescience departments present some of the most challenging newissues, which are analysed in this paper within the framework ofthe biomedical research system that has evolved in the UnitedStates since the Second (...) World War. (shrink)

This essay explores the role of informal logicand its application in the context of currentdebates regarding evidence-based medicine. This aim is achieved through a discussion ofthe goals and objectives of evidence-basedmedicine and a review of the criticisms raisedagainst evidence-based medicine. Thecontributions to informal logic by StephenToulmin and Douglas Walton are explicated andtheir relevance for evidence-based medicine isdiscussed in relation to a common clinicalscenario: hypertension management. This essayconcludes with a discussion on the relationshipbetween clinical reasoning, rationality, andevidence. It is argued that (...) informal logic hasthe virtue of bringing explicitness to the roleof evidence in clinical reasoning, and bringssensitivity to understanding the role ofdialogical context in the need for evidence inclinical decision making. (shrink)

For forty years, Harvey Mansfield has been worth reading. Whether plumbing the depths of MachiavelliOs Discourses or explaining what was at stake in Bill ClintonOs impeachment, MansfieldOs work in political philosophy and political science has set the standard. In Educating the Prince, twenty-one of his students, themselves distinguished scholars, try to live up to that standard. Their essays offer penetrating analyses of Machiavellianism, liberalism, and America., all of them informed by MansfieldOs own work. The volume also includes a bibliography of (...) MansfieldOs writings. (shrink)

In this chapter, Kit Fine and Errol Martin provide a formal account of non-circular reasoning, i.e. of reasoning in which the conclusion of an argument is not somehow presupposed in its premises. Martin (along with R. Meyer) had previously shown that the implicational system P-W\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\textbf{P}\!\mathbf {-W}$$\end{document} does not contain any theorems of the form A→A\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$A \rightarrow A$$\end{document}. Fine and Martin then extend (...) this result to systems that also contain conjunction. (shrink)

The death of Geoffrey Mure is a greater loss to the world of scholarship than the present-day philosophical community is likely to recognize. He was one of the very few Oxford philosophers who had the courage and steadfastness to stick to his staunch belief in speculative Idealism when the explosion of Logical Positivism and the successive shock-waves of Empiricism and Ordinary Language Philosophy overwhelmed the Oxford schools. Mure’s philosophy was, therefore, not congenial to his colleagues. Nevertheless, throughout the hey-day of (...) the Rylian Empire, Mure remained at Oxford as the Warden of Merton, exerting what influence he could to keep alive the tradition of F.H. Bradley, Harold Joachim and R.G. Collingwood. Had he been appointed to the White’s Chair of Moral Philosophy or the Wykeham Professorship of Logic, the history of recent British philosophy would have been different, but that was hardly to be expected in the philosophical climate of the time. The force of the current against which Mure swam can be judged from the story told in the 1950s that as they walked down the High, students would point him out in incredulous wonder as the sole surviving Hegelian in Oxford. (shrink)

1 My first teacher of philosophy, at what is now Rhodes University in South Africa, was Arthur R. Lord, a man who deserves to be well known, though today few people will ever have heard of him. He was himself a pupil of J.A. Smith and E.F. Carritt at Oxford in the early years of this century, during the heyday of British Idealism. In 1911 he won the Green Moral Philosophy Prize with a voluminous dissertation on the passions, which I (...) read in typescript when I was a student, but which was never published and disappeared after his death in 1940. (shrink)

1 My first teacher of philosophy, at what is now Rhodes University in South Africa, was Arthur R. Lord, a man who deserves to be well known, though today few people will ever have heard of him. He was himself a pupil of J.A. Smith and E.F. Carritt at Oxford in the early years of this century, during the heyday of British Idealism. In 1911 he won the Green Moral Philosophy Prize with a voluminous dissertation on the passions, which I (...) read in typescript when I was a student, but which was never published and disappeared after his death in 1940. (shrink)

Few philosophers today know much about Charles Peirce’s metaphysics, although a great many know something about his epistemology, philosophy of science, and logic. Indeed, few Peirce experts have written much on his metaphysics or made it the focus of their research. To an extent, this is understandable. Peirce’s writings were left in a disastrously disorganized state (mostly unpublished), and the crucial papers on metaphysics from his later years have not yet been republished in the first-rate chronological edition, the incomplete Writings (...) of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition , edited at Indianapolis by my friends. And then there is Peirce’s writing: an awkward, abrasive, arrogant, eclectic style that demands technical knowledge in diverse fields, especially logic, mathematics, and the natural sciences. His worst personality traits manifested themselves in his highly technical metaphysics—with its idiosyncratic, anti-Cantorian conception of continua, a pecularly mathematical phenomenology, and elaborate views on Darwinian and non-Darwinian evolution, for example. Finally, there is what might appear to be the bizarreness of the theory itself, as we shall see. Peirce was a kind of philosophical swashbuckler, a bold, courageous speculator on philosophical questions beyond most of our temperaments even to ponder. Ours is not the philosophical age of Errol Flynn but the minimalist age of Harrison Ford, with no grand gestures or speeches, just a series of small, no-nonsense gestures: we typically like our philosophy short, neat, "science-like," and isolated from other philosophical issues. (shrink)

Robert R. Williams’s last book, Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God (Oxford University Press, 2017) undertakes to reconnect with and revive the largely forgotten “centrist” interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy from the early 1840s, associated especially with the work of Karl Michelet. An immediate consequence of this move is to direct renewed attention to the connection between Hegel’s Logic and his philosophy of religion. Taking this connection seriously appears to entail a re-interpretation of the absolute idea, adding an (...) explicit level of theological significance to it in retrospect which would not appear to be required when the Logic is read on its own. And yet the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion unambiguously seem to require such a re-reading of the Logic. Such a development may appear to raise questions about the possibility of a “presuppositionless” reading of the Logic, along with questions about how the truth claims of the Realphilosophie can be justified. A possible resolution of such questions could be found if one takes seriously George di Giovanni’s suggestion that the Logic must be regarded both as the first element of Hegel’s system, and also the final one. The appropriateness of such a second reading appears to be strongly supported by Errol Harris’s interpretation of the Logic. The additional layers of meaning, the theological interpretation, can be read into the Logic as the final element of the system, without affecting a “presuppositionless” reading of it as the first element. (shrink)

Robert R. Williams’s last book, Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God undertakes to reconnect with and revive the largely forgotten “centrist” interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy from the early 1840s, associated especially with the work of Karl Michelet. An immediate consequence of this move is to direct renewed attention to the connection between Hegel’s Logic and his philosophy of religion. Taking this connection seriously appears to entail a re-interpretation of the absolute idea, adding an explicit level of theological (...) significance to it in retrospect which would not appear to be required when the Logic is read on its own. And yet the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion unambiguously seem to require such a re-reading of the Logic. Such a development may appear to raise questions about the possibility of a “presuppositionless” reading of the Logic, along with questions about how the truth claims of the Realphilosophie can be justified. A possible resolution of such questions could be found if one takes seriously George di Giovanni’s suggestion that the Logic must be regarded both as the first element of Hegel’s system, and also the final one. The appropriateness of such a second reading appears to be strongly supported by Errol Harris’s interpretation of the Logic. The additional layers of meaning, the theological interpretation, can be read into the Logic as the final element of the system, without affecting a “presuppositionless” reading of it as the first element. (shrink)

Ethics support staff help others to deal with moral challenges. However, they themselves can also experience moral challenges such as issues regarding (breaching) confidentiality when practicing ethics support. Currently there is no insight in these confidentiality issues and also no professional guidance for dealing with them. To gain insight into moral challenges related to Moral Case Deliberation (MCD), we studied a) beliefs and experiences of MCD facilitators regarding breaching confidentiality, b) considerations for (not) breaching confidentiality, and c) needs for an (...) ethics support tool. Data collection consisted of qualitative research methods: six semi-structured interviews; analyses of a) two recorded MCD sessions, and b) a focus group with MCD facilitators. Findings: MCD facilitators mention different conceptions and interpretations of confidentiality and various moral challenges. Questions concerning confidentiality ultimately cause reflections on roles and responsibilities of facilitators. Needs for ethics support vary from seeking advice to procedural and sometimes normative guidance for MCD facilitators. Education for MCD facilitators should focus on developing a concrete tool that stimulates awareness and reflection(skills). (shrink)

What is conscientious objection? -- Should conscientious objectors be accommodated? -- Assessing objectors' beliefs and reasons -- Accommodation and conscientious provision.

Approximately 50 years have passed since Judith Jarvis Thomson wrote A Defense of Abortion (1971). Her article has significantly shaped the philosophical literature on abortion. In this paper, I will summarize some of the interesting and important work done on the topic since Thomson's article. I will highlight Thomson as a defender of the claim that abortion is morally permissible and Don Marquis as an influential opponent of that claim. I will start by articulating Thomson's case, focusing on the violinist (...) analogy. I will underscore key questions, concepts, and objections the analogy raises. I will then examine briefly how philosophers have addressed some of these issues. Next, I will outline Marquis’ work, provide a similar commentary on it, and discuss some of its main responses. I will then survey other philosophers who have addressed abortion beyond the scope of providing specific replies to Thomson or Marquis. I will close by highlighting significant points of agreement and disagreement in the literature, as well as crucial gaps in the current research. The paper is not an attempt to address every work on the topic over the last five decades, nor is it aimed at taking a position on the moral permissibility of abortion. My goal is to provide an overview of the dialectic. (shrink)

Under the present judicial interpretation of federal securities law, an individual is prohibited from trading on non-public information that has been misappropriated in contravention of a fiduciary duty. Trades made using non-pubIic information that has not been misappropriated are not prohibited by Rule 10b-5, promulgated under the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934. The current requirement of misappropriation to trigger Rule 10b-5 liability creates a gap that permits transactions that are both ethically and economically undesirable. Judicial or legislative reforms are (...) recommended to close the gap and help ensure the fairness and efficiency of securities markets. (shrink)

This book assesses and defends Kant's Critical epistemology, and the rich yet neglected resources it provides for understanding and resolving fundamental issues regarding human experience, perceptual judgment, empirical knowledge and cognitive sciences. Kenneth Westphal first examines Kant's methods and strategies for examining human sensory-perceptual experience, and then examines Kant's central, proper, and subtle attention to judgment, and so to the humanly possible valid use of concepts and principles to judge particulars we confront. This provides a comprehensive account of Kant's anti-Cartesianism, (...) the integrity of his three principles of causal judgment, and Kant's account of disciminatory perceptual-motor behaviour, including both sensory reafference and perceptual affordances. Westphal then defends the significance of Kant's subtle and illuminating account of causal judgment for three main philosophical domains: history and philosophy of science, theory of action and human freedom, and philosophy of mind. Kant's Critical Epistemology will appeal to researchers and advanced students interested in Kant and the relations of his thought to contemporary philosophical debates and to the sciences of the mind. (shrink)

Bio-heteronormative conceptions of the family have long reinforced a nuclear ideal of the family as a heterosexual marriage, with children who are the genetic progeny of that union. This ideal, however, has also long been resisted in light of recent social developments, exhibited through the increased incidence and acceptance of step-families, donor-conceived families, and so forth. Although to this end some might claim that the bio-heteronormative ideal is not necessary for a social unit to count as a family, a more (...) systematic conceptualization of the family—the kind of family that matters morally—is relatively underexplored in the philosophical literature. This paper makes a start at developing and defending an account of the family that is normatively attractive and in line with the growing prevalence of non-conventional families and methods of family-formation. Our account, which we call a constitutive-affirmative model of the family, takes the family to be constituted by an ongoing process of relevant affective and affirmative relations between the putative family members. (shrink)

Keisha Ray and Jane Falls Cooper’s article “Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments” seeks to give environmental concerns greater p...

In this article, we focus on a particular kind of emotional impact of the pandemic, namely the phenomenology of the experience of moral injury in healthcare professionals. Drawing on Weber's reflections in his lecture Politics as a Vocation and data from the Experiences of Social Distancing during the COVID-19 Pandemic Survey, we analyse responses from healthcare professionals which show the experiences of burnout, sense of frustration and impotence, and how these affect clinicians’ emotional state. We argue that this may relate (...) to the ethical conflicts they experience when they are forced to make clinical decisions where there are no optimal outcomes, and how in turn that impacts on their own emotional state. We then further examine the notion of ‘burnout’ and the phenomenology of ‘moral injury’. Our argument is that these experiences of moral injury across a range of clinicians during the pandemic may be more prevalent and long-standing in psychiatry and mental health than in other areas of healthcare, where ethically difficult decisions and resource constraints are common outside times of crisis. Hence, in these clinical arenas, moral injury and the phenomenology of emotional changes may be independent of the pandemic. The insights gained during the pandemic may provide wider insights into the challenges of developing services and training the workforce to provide appropriate mental health care. (shrink)

Deception sometimes results in nonconsensual sex. A recent body of literature diagnoses such violations as invalidating consent: the agreement is not morally transformative, which is why the sexual contact is a rights violation. We pursue a different explanation for the wrongs in question: there is valid consent, but it is not consent to the sex act that happened. Semantic conventions play a key role in distinguishing deceptions that result in nonconsensual sex (like stealth condom removal) from those that don’t (like (...) white lies). Our framework is also applicable to more controversial cases, like those implicated in so-called “gender fraud” complaints. (shrink)

The odds of encountering a senior citizen selling on the street have increased. The claim that they have no choice but to work and sell on the street, despite the dangers, illnesses, and psychological issues they may face, to provide for their family’s needs is very evident. Therefore, this study explores the quality of life, lived experiences, challenges, and coping mechanisms of senior citizen street vendors in Bulacan, Philippines. The study employed Heideggerian Phenomenology and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Moreover, the (...) following themes arise (1) Golden years, (2) Socially connected, and (3) Unknown journey. These themes highlighted the experiences and challenges faced by the participants. Moreover, it is highly suggested that local government agencies enhance and strictly monitor the existing program that alleviates mental and physical health concerns and senior citizens' safety and financial assistance. (shrink)

We present a mathematical approach to defeasible reasoning based on arguments. This approach integrates the notion of specificity introduced by Poole and the theory of warrant presented by Pollock. The main contribution of this paper is a precise, well-defined system which exhibits correct behavior when applied to the benchmark examples in the literature. It aims for usability rather than novelty. We prove that an order relation can be introduced among equivalence classes of arguments under the equi-specificity relation. We also prove (...) a theorem that ensures the termination of the process of finding the justified facts. Two more lemmas define a reduced search space for checking specificity. In order to implement the theoretical ideas, the language is restricted to Horn clauses for the evidential context. The language used to represent defeasible rules has been restricted in a similar way. The authors intend this work to unify the various existing approaches to argument-based defeasible reasoning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Uttering the Unutterable: Aristotle, Religion, and Literature by Louis GroarkeJay R. ElliottGROARKE, Louis. Uttering the Unutterable: Aristotle, Religion, and Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023. 336 pp. Cloth, $120.00Louis Groarke’s Uttering the Unutterable is an extraordinarily ambitious book. Its aims include: to provide a definition of literature; to argue that literature must be morally good; to argue that literature is necessarily concerned with an “utterable” transcendent reality; to (...) advance a version of Aristotelian realism in metaphysics and epistemology; to defend the Western “tradition” in literature and philosophy; to criticize the entire enterprise of structuralist and poststructuralist literary theory; to criticize the entire enterprise of analytic philosophy of language; to resurrect the Chicago School of literary criticism associated with figures such as R. S. Crane and Richard McKeon; to relitigate the mid-twentieth-century battles between the Chicago School and “New Criticism”; and to offer an homage to Groarke’s former teacher, the Chicago-trained Bernard Suits.At the center of Groarke’s project is his aspiration to formulate an Aristotelian literary theory and to defend it against a wide variety of alternative perspectives. But as the above list of Groarke’s ambitions suggests, he carries out this aspiration in a highly unusual way. For Groarke, questions of literary theory are not to be debated exclusively— or even primarily—through discussion of literature. This book contains very few examples of literary works, and none of them is discussed in depth. Indeed, for Groarke, matters of literary theory are not even to be [End Page 719] discussed primarily in terms of literary theory. Rather, Groarke’s central conviction is that we can approach literature properly only by situating it within the context of certain fundamental questions in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and religion. Readers who pick up this work expecting a discussion of Aristotle’s Poetics will be sorely disappointed. Groarke barely mentions this seminal work of Aristotelian literary criticism. Rather, his project begins from a diagnosis of what ails contemporary literary criticism: that it suffers, not so much from a false view of literature, as from a false view of truth, goodness, and reality. He accordingly undertakes to provide a better view of those fundamental matters, one that he derives from aspects of Aristotle’s thought. According to Groarke, it is these aspects of Aristotle that have the most to offer literary theorists today.Groarke draws his most important Aristotelian inspiration from Aristotle’s discussion of theōria in Nicomachean Ethics 10.7–8. In Groarke’s view, Aristotelian theōria is a truthful vision of a supreme reality that transcends human life and pervades the universe. This vision, for Groarke, is what literature is (or should be) about. On this basis, he critiques forms of literary criticism that see literature as concerned only with politics, or with class distinctions, or with entertainment, or with language itself. As Groarke sums up his argument: “[L]iterature supplies opportunities for intelligence gathered up in an artful and superlative moment of beholding of what is fundamental, real, meaningful, and true. Literature provides an avenue for contemplation (theōria), facilitating a divine-like gaze upon the world.” For Groarke, Aristotelian theōria allows us to behold what is “fundamental, real, meaningful, and true.” It is especially valuable because it affirms the essential unity of these attributes. Like Aristotle’s god, Groarke’s transcendent reality is simultaneously the highest reality and the summation of all value. For Groarke, to engage in theōria is thus to affirm that the universe is suffused with moral significance. It is this stance that Groarke thinks literature should promote.I have a great deal of sympathy both for Groarke’s reading of Aristotle and for his sense that these aspects of his thought are relevant to fundamental questions about literature. But I found the experience of reading this book challenging. The bulk of Groarke’s work is not devoted to developing his Aristotelian conception, applying it to literary case studies, or considering any problems it might raise. Rather, Groarke applies most of his time and energy to attacking what he perceives to be the myriad enemies of his Aristotelian outlook in the... (shrink)

From roughly 1965 to 1995, Columbia University's Department of Sociology was a leading center for social study of science, both nationally and internationally. It was often referred to as the Merton School or Columbia School, and four scholars paved its way : Robert K. Merton, Harriet Zuckerman, Stephen Cole, and Jonathan Cole. The goal of the Columbia School was to create and legitimate a new sociological specialty focusing on the scientific community and the growth of scientific knowledge and they did (...) this by exploring the norms, values, and structure of science. The core values of the scientific and university system and the norms attached to them consisted of deeply held beliefs as well as principles that determined how individuals would act. They were organizing principles designed to support the institution in meeting its goals and mission. They influenced the types of social structures that developed to carry out the activities of scientists. Edited by Jonathan R. Cole, this collection of individually and co-authored papers and essays by Cole represents some of the work produced by Cole and his close collaborators over the past 50 years. the essays are contextualized with an introduction by Cole. The pieces in this volume represent the major concerns on the Columbia School, whose focus of attention was not on the production of individual pieces of knowledge, but on the social systems that made that production possible. (shrink)

This article confronts the challenges and opportunities presented by medical-legal partnerships (MLPs) representing families impacted by the family regulation system. Based on the authors’ experience developing a collaboration between a medical-legal partnership, interdisciplinary law school clinic and nurse home visiting program focused on clients impacted by the family regulation system, the article challenges traditional conceptions of the MLP model and proposes an expanded vision for MLPs to address systemic injustice and improve outcomes for families.

Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim (1493–1541), colloquially known as Paracelsus, emerges as a pivotal figure in the transition from medieval to early modern scientific paradigms. Within the realm...

As self-conscious curators and critics of moral history, the early Confucians are relevant to the contemporary debate over the fate of memorials dedicated to morally flawed individuals. They provide us with a pragmatic justification that is distinct from those utilized in the current debate, and in many respects superior to the alternatives. In addition to supplying this curative philosophic resource, the early Confucian practices of ancestral memorialization suggest preventative measures we might adopt to minimize the chances of establishing divisive and (...) oppressive memorials in the future. (shrink)

In this essay an engineer and a philosopher, after many conversations, develop an argument for why the Aristotelian version of virtue ethics is the most promising way to develop what we call artificial moral, social agents, i.e. robots. This, evidently, applies to humans as well. There are several claims: first, that humans are not born moral, they are socialized into morality; second, that morality involves affect, emotion, feeling, before it engages reason; third, that how a moral being feels is related (...) to some narrative, whether moral or not; and finally, that narrativity is what builds a sense of a “moral” I, namely an authorial moral self. (shrink)

The wave function of quantum mechanics can be understood in terms of the dispositional role it plays in the dynamics of a distribution of matter in three-dimensional space (or four-dimensional spacetime). There is more than one way, however, of specifying its dispositional role. This paper considers Suárez’s theory of ‘Bohmian dispositionalism’, in which the particles are endowed with their own ‘Bohmian dispositions’, and Simpson’s theory of ‘Cosmic Hylomorphism’, in which the particle configuration comprises a hylomorphic substance which has an intrinsic (...) power. I argue that Bohmian dispositionalism fails to capture intuitively correct counterfactuals about what would happen in Small Worlds which have only a small number of particles, but that this problem is avoided by Cosmic Hylomorphism, in which the cosmic power manifests a teleological process. (shrink)

In his seminal article “How to Derive ‘Ought’ from ‘Is’,” which was published in 1964, John R. Searle offered a counterexample to Hume’s law. Here, Searle reconstructs the historical context in which that article appeared, when the task of moral philosophers—especially in the Anglophone world—was supposed to be metaethics, which aims to describe the use of ethical terms and their logical behavior. Searle stands by the validity of his derivation, and in light of his subsequent philosophical developments—notably his social ontology (...) and philosophy of action—he explains why his derivation is valid and why it is relevant, not only for metaethics but also for moral philosophy strictly understood. (shrink)