A brilliant and comprehensive history of the creation of the modern Western mind. Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept—the mind—emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine, but fully neither. In this groundbreaking work, award-winning historian George Makari shows (...) how writers, philosophers, physicians, and anatomists worked to construct notions of the mind as not an ethereal thing, but a natural one. From the ascent of Oliver Cromwell to the fall of Napoleon, seminal thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, and Kant worked alongside often-forgotten brain specialists, physiologists, and alienists in the hopes of mapping the inner world. Conducted in a cauldron of political turmoil, these frequently shocking, always embattled efforts would give rise to psychiatry, mind sciences such as phrenology, and radically new visions of the self. Further, they would be crucial to the establishment of secular ethics and political liberalism. Boldly original, wide-ranging, and brilliantly synthetic, Soul Machine gives us a masterful, new account of the making of the modern Western mind. (shrink)

A combination of “environmental factors” in the U.S. has led to an increased demand for health care professionals. However, there has been a significant decrease in the number of U.S. medical graduates selecting careers in family medicine and general internal medicine, thus driving demand for international medical graduates. At the heart of our national workforce policy needs to be good domestic and foreign policies, such as self-sufficiency approaches that include strategies to incentivize rural and underserved practice for U.S. medical graduates.

Health care depends on people. It is the health workforce — doctors, nurses, pharmacists, lab technicians, and nursing assistants, to mention a few — that, in large measure, determine the quality and effectiveness of any health enterprise. The nature of the health workforce was integral to the health care reform debates of the early 1990s and will surely be central in proposals to improve the quality, accessibility, and cost of U.S. health care in the future. Therefore, as we enter a (...) new period of health reform deliberations and as we face the inevitability of an aging population, it is important to consider the problems and potential remediation necessary for the health workforce of the future. This article focuses particularly on physicians and nurses while recognizing the importance and frequently parallel concerns that arise across all health care disciplines. Understanding how the composition, capacity, and activities of a health care workforce must change as part of health reform requires an understanding of the context in which health professionals practice. What are the factors that govern health care today, and what are their impact on the health workforce? (shrink)

The question of whether or not to partition data for the purposes of inferring phylogenetic hypotheses remains controversial. Opinions have been especially divided since Kluge's (1989, Systematic Zoology 38, 7–25) claim that data partitioning violates the requirement of total evidence (RTE). Unfortunately, advocacy for or against the RTE has not been based on accurate portrayals of the requirement. The RTE is a basic maxim for non-deductive inference, stipulating that evidence must be considered if it has relevance to an inference. Evidence (...) is relevant if it has a positive or negative effect on a given conclusion. In the case of ℈partitioned’ phylogenetic inferences, the RTE is violated, and the basis for rational belief in any conclusion is compromised, unless it is shown that the partitions are evidentially irrelevant to one another. The goal of phylogenetic systematics is to hypothesize past causal conditions to account for observed shared similarities among two or more species. Such inferences are non-deductive, necessitating consideration of the RTE. Some phylogeneticists claim the parsimony criterion as justification for the RTE. There is no relation between the two – parsimony is a relation between a hypothesis and causal question(s). Parsimony does not dictate the content of premises prior to an inference. ℈Taxonomic congruence,’ ℈supertrees,’ and ℈conditional combination’ methods violate the RTE. Taxonomic congruence and supertree methods also fail to achieve the intended goal of phylogenetic inference, such that ℈consensus trees’ and ℈supertrees’ lack an empirical basis. ℈Conditional combination’ is problematic because hypotheses derived from partitioned data cannot be compared – a causal hypothesis inferred to account for a set of effects only has relevance to those effects, not any comparative relevance to other causal hypotheses. A similar problem arises in the comparisons of hypotheses derived from different causal theories. (shrink)

The formal definition of species as explanatory hypotheses presented by Fitzhugh is emended. A species is an explanatory account of the occurrences of the same character among gonochoristic or cross-fertilizing hermaphroditic individuals by way of character origin and subsequent fixation during tokogeny. In addition to species, biological systematics also employs hypotheses that are ontogenetic, tokogenetic, intraspecific, and phylogenetic, each of which provides explanatory hypotheses for distinctly different classes of causal questions. It is suggested that species hypotheses can not be (...) applied to organisms with obligate asexual, parthenogenetic, and self-fertilizing modes of reproduction. Hypotheses explaining shared characters among such organisms are, instead, strictly phylogenetic. Several implications of this emended definition are examined, especially the relations between species, intraspecific, and phylogenetic hypotheses, as well as the limitations of species names to be applied to temporally different characters within populations. (shrink)

Written in the 1960s, TRUTH AND METHOD is Gadamer's magnum opus.

Framing systematics as a field consistent with scientific inquiry entails that inferences of phylogenetic hypotheses have the goal of producing accounts of past causal events that explain differentially shared characters among organisms. Linking observations of characters to inferences occurs by way of why-questions implied by data matrices. Because of their form, why-questions require the use of common-cause theories. Such theories in phylogenetic inferences include natural selection and genetic drift. Selection or drift can explain ‘morphological’ characters but selection cannot be causally (...) applied to sequences since fitness differences cannot be directly associated with individual nucleotides or amino acids. The relation of selection to sequence data is by way of downward or top-down causation from those phenotypes upon which selection occurs. The application of phylogenetic inference to explain sequence data is thus restricted to instances where drift is the relevant theory; those nucleotides or amino acids that can be explained via downward causation are precluded from inclusion in the data matrix. The restrictions on the inclusion of sequence data in phylogenetic inferences equally apply to species hypotheses, precluding the more restrictive approach known as DNA barcoding. Not being able to discern drift and selection as relevant causal mechanisms can severely constrain the inclusion and explanations of sequence data. Implications of such exclusion are discussed in relation to the requirement of total evidence. (shrink)

Three competing ‘methods’ have been endorsed for inferring phylogenetic hypotheses: parsimony, likelihood, and Bayesianism. The latter two have been claimed superior because they take into account rates of sequence substitution. Can rates of substitution be justified on its own accord in inferences of explanatory hypotheses? Answering this question requires addressing four issues: (1) the aim of scientific inquiry, (2) the nature of why-questions, (3) explanatory hypotheses as answers to why-questions, and (4) acknowledging that neither parsimony, likelihood, nor Bayesianism are inferential (...) actions leading to explanatory hypotheses. The aim of scientific inquiry is to acquire causal understanding of effects. Observation statements of organismal characters lead to implicit or explicit why-questions. Those questions, conveyed in data matrices, assume the truth of observation statements, which is contrary to subsequently invoking substitution rates within inferences to phylogenetic hypotheses. Inferences of explanatory hypotheses are abductive in form, such that some version of an evolutionary theory(ies) is/are included or implied. If rates of sequence evolution are to be considered, it must be done prior to, rather than within abduction, which requires renaming those putatively-shared nucleotides subject to substitution rates. There are, however, no epistemic grounds for renaming characters to accommodate rates, calling into question the legitimacy of causally accounting for sequence data. (shrink)

Throughout The Blessed and Boundless God, he proves his doctrine by demonstrating God's incomparableness in His being, attributes, works, and words. Swinnock is a pastor-theologian who views theology as the means by which we grow in acquaintance with God and, consequently, in godliness.

George Herbert Mead (1863-1931) had a powerful influence on the development of American pragmatism in the twentieth century. He also had a strong impact on the social sciences. This classic book represents Mead's philosophy of experience, so central to his outlook. The present as unique experience is the focus of this deep analysis of the basic structure of temporality and consciousness. Mead emphasizes the novel character of both the present and the past. Though science is predicated on the assumption (...) that the present is predictable based on a thorough knowledge of the past, the experience of the present, says Mead, is an utterly unique moment comparable to no other, and when it is past the novel character of that unique experience is irrevocable. The emergence of novelty within the perceived rational order of reality is the crux of the problem that Mead explores. The present, in his words, is "the emergent event . . . something which is more than the processes that have led up to it and which by its change, continuance, or disappearance, adds to later passages a content they would not otherwise have possessed." The present as "the seat of reality" heavily conditions our retrospective view of the past as much as it helps to shape the future. The novelty of every present experience causes us to reconstruct our preceding experiences to make sense of the past, which is naturally assumed to be the main cause of what we presently experience. Our perspective on reality is thus relative to the conditioning of each new event and it changes continuously as the effects of the present shift our view of the past and future. This emphasis on the integrative, holistic nature of reality, in which everything past, present, and future is a condition of everything else, makes Mead's philosophy highly relevant to today's scientific picture of a quantum universe, where chance and probability play a role in the emergence of reality. Also of great interest is the way in which he extends his basic analysis of temporal-spatial reality to the emergence of mind and consciousness as a natural development of the evolutionary process. This stimulating and provocative work attests to John Dewey's praise of Mead as "the most original mind in philosophy in America" of his generation. (shrink)

touch 27 Thirrdly, the straining of the eye 28 The occasions which suggest distance have in their own nature no relation to it 29 A difficult case proposed by Dr. Barrow as repugnant to all the known theories 30 This case contradicts a ...

Idealist philosopher Georg Hegel defied the traditional epistemological distinction of objective from subjective and developed his own dialectical alternative. Remarkable for its breadth and profundity, this work combines aspects of psychology, logic, moral philosophy, and history to form a comprehensive view that encompasses all forms of civilization. Its three divisions consist of the subjective mind (dealing with anthropology and psychology), the objective mind (concerning philosophical issues of law and morals), and the absolute mind (covering fine arts, religion, and philosophy). Wide-ranging (...) in its influence, this survey of the evolution of consciousness is essential reading for all students of philosophy and history. (shrink)

The realities and myths of long-term care and the challenges it poses for the ethics of autonomy are analyzed in this perceptive work. The book defends the concept of autonomy, but argues that the standard view of autonomy as non-interference and independence has only a limited applicability for long term care. The treatment of actual autonomy stresses the developmental and social nature of human persons and the priority of identification over autonomous choice. The work balances analysis of the ethical concepts (...) associated with autonomy with discussion of the implications of the ethical analysis for long term care. A central chapter involves a phenomenological analysis of four general features of everyday experience (space, time, communication, and affectivity) and explores their practical implications for long term care. This work concludes with a discussion of the advantages associated with a phenomenologically-inspired treatment of actual autonomy for the ethics of long-term care. (shrink)

But the charged personal encounter between master and disciple is precisely what interests George Steiner in this book, a sustained reflection on the infinitely ...

Respecting the autonomy of disabled people is an important ethical issue for providers of long-term care. In this influential book, George Agich abandons comfortable abstractions to reveal the concrete threats to personal autonomy in this setting, where ethical conflict, dilemma and tragedy are inescapable. He argues that liberal accounts of autonomy and individual rights are insufficient, and offers an account of autonomy that matches the realities of long-term care. The book therefore offers a framework for carers to develop an (...) ethic of long-term care within the complex environment in which many dependent and aged people find themselves. Previously published as Autonomy and Long-term Care, this revised edition, in paperback for the first time, takes account of recent work and develops the author's views of what autonomy means in the real world. It will have wide appeal among bioethicists and health care professionals. (shrink)

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is the superstar of Irish Philosophy. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1700 and became a fellow in 1707. In 1724 he resigned his Fellowship to become Dean of Derry, and in 1734 he was made Bishop of Cloyne. He settled in Oxford in 1752 and died the following year. The work of George Berkeley is marked by its diversity and range. His writings take in such topics as mathematics, psychology, politics, health, economics, deism and (...) education, as well as that with which he is most associated - philosophy. Whatever topic he dealt with, his grasp of the subject matter was always impressive and his criticisms of his contemporaries often acute. Among the most noteable of the British Empiricists, he took his starting point from Locke's new 'way of ideas', but he rejected abstract ideas and the possibility of real existence outside perception. It is for this doctrine that he is most known - that there is no such thing as matter, and that things are collections of ideas which can exist only in our minds and only for so long as they are perceived. This philosophy, summed up in his phrase 'to be is to be perceived', he termed 'immaterialism'. A.C. Fraser's collection includes a series of what were previously unpublished notes by Berkeley on all the main topics of his philosophy. This, the 1901 edition, was the first complete edition of his works. (shrink)

The spiritual geography of Russian cosmism. General characteristics ; Recent definitions of cosmism -- Forerunners of Russian cosmism. Vasily Nazarovich Karazin (1773-1842) ; Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802) ; Poets: Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, (1711-1765) and Gavriila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816) ; Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky (1803-1869) ; Aleksander Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) -- The Russian philosophical context. Philosophy as a passion ; The destiny of Russia ; Thought as a call for action ; The totalitarian cast of mind -- The religious and spiritual (...) context. The kingdom of god on earth ; Hesychasm: two great Russian saints ; The Third Rome ; Pre-Christian antecedents -- The Russian esoteric context. Early searches for "deep wisdom" ; Popular magic ; Higher magic in the time of Peter the Great ; Esotericism after Peter the Great ; Theosophy and anthroposophy -- Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903), the philosopher of the common task ; The one idea ; The unacknowledged prince ; The village teacher ; First disciple: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ; The Moscow librarian ; Last years: Askhabad: the only portrait -- The "common task" ; Esoteric dimensions of the "common task" ; Fedorov's legacy: projectivism, delo, regulation -- The religious cosmists. Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853-1900) ; Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871-1944) ; Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) ; Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) -- The scientific cosmists. Konstantin Edouardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) ; Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) ; Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964) ; Vasily Feofilovich Kuprevich (1897-1969) -- Promethean theurgy. Life-creation ; Cultural immortalism ; God-building ; Re-aiming the arrows of Eros ; Technological utopianism ; Occultism -- Fedorov's twentieth century followers. Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson (1844-1919) and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozhevnikov (1852-1917) ; Svyatogor and the biocosmists ; New wine and the universal task ; Alexander Konstantinovich Gorsky (1886-1943) and Nikolai Alexandrovich Setnitsky (1888-1937) ; Valerian Nikolaevich Muravyov (1885-1932) ; Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (1897-1922) -- Cosmism and its offshoots today. The N.F. Fedorov museum-library ; The Tsiolkovsky museum and Chizhevsky center ; ISRICA - Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology ; Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912-1992) and neo-eurasianism ; The hyperboreans ; Scientific immortalism: Igor Vishev, Danila Medvedev ; Conclusions about the Russian cosmists. (shrink)

"This book is a sorely needed corrective. Animal Spirits is an important--maybe even a decisive--contribution at a difficult juncture in macroeconomic theory.

Most authors who discuss willpower assume that everyone knows what it is, but our assumptions differ to such an extent that we talk past each other. We agree that willpower is the psychological function that resists temptations – variously known as impulses, addictions, or bad habits; that it operates simultaneously with temptations, without prior commitment; and that use of it is limited by its cost, commonly called effort, as well as by the person's skill at executive functioning. However, accounts are (...) usually not clear about how motivation functions during the application of willpower, or how motivation is related to effort. Some accounts depict willpower as the perceiving or formation of motivational contingencies that outweigh the temptation, and some depict it as a continuous use of mechanisms that interfere with re-weighing the temptation. Some others now suggest that impulse control can bypass motivation altogether, although they refer to this route as habit rather than willpower.It is argued here that willpower should be recognized as either or both of two distinct functions, which can be calledresolveandsuppression. Resolve is based on interpretation of a current choice as a test case for a broader set of future choices, which puts at stake more than the outcome of the current choice. Suppression is inhibiting valuation of (modulating) and/or keeping attention from (filtering) immediate alternatives to a current intention. Perception of current choices as test cases for broader outcomes may result in reliable preference for these outcomes, which is experienced as an effortlesshabit– a successful result of resolve, not an alternative method of self-control. Some possible brain imaging correlates are reviewed. (shrink)

Modal intuitions are not only the primary source of modal knowledge but also the primary source of modal error. An explanation of how modal error arises — and, in particular, how erroneous modal intuitions arise — is an essential part of a comprehensive theory of knowledge and evidence. This chapter begins with a summary of certain preliminaries: the phenomenology of intuitions, their fallibility, the nature of concept-understanding and its relationship to the reliability of intuitions, and so forth. It then identifies (...) two sources of modal error: the first has to do with the failure to distinguish between metaphysical possibility and various kinds of epistemic possibility; the second, with the local misunderstanding of one's concepts. The first source of error is widely misunderstood; the second source has not been discussed in philosophical literature. This source of modal error, and the potential to overcome it, has wide-ranging implications for philosophical method. The failure to understand these sources of modal error has recently led to sceptical accounts of intuition and modal error, which are, ultimately self-defeating. (shrink)

American healthcare -- Bioterror and bioart -- State of emergency -- Licensed to torture -- Hunger strikes -- War -- Cancer -- Drug dealing -- Toxic tinkering -- Abortion -- Culture of death -- Patient safety -- Global health -- Statue of security -- Pandemic fear -- Bioidentifiers -- Genetic genocide.

This important new work surveys the source and ramifications of the famed Nuremburg Code -- recognized around the world as one of the cornerstones of modern bioethics.

This paper constructs a model of metaphysical indeterminacy that can accommodate a kind of ‘deep’ worldly indeterminacy that arguably arises in quantum mechanics via the Kochen-Specker theorem, and that is incompatible with prominent theories of metaphysical indeterminacy such as that in Barnes and Williams (2011). We construct a variant of Barnes and Williams's theory that avoids this problem. Our version builds on situation semantics and uses incomplete, local situations rather than possible worlds to build a model. We evaluate the resulting (...) theory and contrast it with similar alternatives, concluding that our model successfully captures deep indeterminacy. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 1, February 2020, Page 105-107.

The topic of a priori knowledge is approached through the theory of evidence. A shortcoming in traditional formulations of moderate rationalism and moderate empiricism is that they fail to explain why rational intuition and phenomenal experience count as basic sources of evidence. This explanatory gap is filled by modal reliabilism -- the theory that there is a qualified modal tie between basic sources of evidence and the truth. This tie to the truth is then explained by the theory of concept (...) possession: this tie is a consequence of what, by definition, it is to possess (i.e., to understand) one’s concepts. A corollary of the overall account is that the a priori disciplines (logic, mathematics, philosophy) can be largely autonomous from the empirical sciences. (shrink)

Recent philosophical attention to the language of disease has focused primarily on the question of its value-neutrality or non-neutrality. Proponents of the value-neutrality thesis symbolically combine political and other criticisms of medicine in an attack on what they see as value-infected uses of disease language. The present essay argues against two theses associated with this view: a methodological thesis which tends to divorce the analysis of disease language from the context of the practice of medicine and a substantive thesis which (...) holds that disease language is evaluatively neutral. In particular, the essay critically focuses on the value neutral position adopted by Christopher Boorse, which he terms a functional theory of disease. The argument concerns whether or not one can have value neutral description of disease states or whether disease language essentially involves values. (shrink)

RECENT PHILOSOPHICAL ATTENTION TO THE LANGUAGE OF DISEASE HAS FOCUSED PRIMARILY ON THE QUESTION OF ITS VALUE-NEUTRALITY OR NON-NEUTRALITY. PROPONENTS OF THE VALUE-NEUTRALITY THESIS SYMBOLICALLY COMBINE POLITICAL AND OTHER CRITICISMS OF MEDICINE IN AN ATTACK ON WHAT THEY SEE AS VALUE-INFECTED USES OF DISEASE LANGUAGE. THE PRESENT ESSAY ARGUES AGAINST TWO THESES ASSOCIATED WITH THIS VIEW: A METHODOLOGICAL THESIS WHICH TENDS TO DIVORCE THE ANALYSIS OF DISEASE LANGUAGE FROM THE CONTEXT OF THE PRACTICE OF MEDICINE AND A SUBSTANTIVE THESIS WHICH (...) HOLDS THAT DISEASE LANGUAGE IS EVALUATIVELY NEUTRAL. IN PARTICULAR, THE ESSAY CRITICALLY FOCUSES ON THE VALUE NEUTRAL POSITION ADOPTED BY CHRISTOPHER BOORSE, WHICH HE TERMS A FUNCTIONAL THEORY OF DISEASE. THE ARGUMENT CONCERNS WHETHER OR NOT ONE CAN HAVE VALUE NEUTRAL DESCRIPTION OF DISEASE STATES OR WHETHER DISEASE LANGUAGE ESSENTIALLY INVOLVES VALUES. (shrink)

Georg Aerni is a photographic artist with a particular interest in architecture. Educated as an architect himself, he has been working with the camera on this subject with great precision and consistence for the past fifteen years. Paris, Barcelona, Hon.

Value pluralism is the idea, most prominently endorsed by Isaiah Berlin, that fundamental human values are universal, plural, conflicting, and incommensurable with one another. Incommensurability is the key component of pluralism, undermining familiar monist philosophies such as utilitarianism. But if values are incommensurable, how do we decide between them when they conflict? George Crowder assesses a range of responses to this problem proposed by Berlin and developed by his successors. Three broad approaches are especially important: universalism, contextualism, and conceptualism. (...) Crowder argues that the conceptual approach is the most fruitful, yielding norms of value diversity, personal autonomy, and inclusive democracy. Historical context must also be taken into account. Together these approaches indicate a liberal politics of redistribution, multiculturalism, and constitutionalism, and a public policy in which basic values are carefully balanced. The Problem of Value Pluralism: Isaiah Berlin and Beyond is a uniquely comprehensive survey of the political theory of value pluralism and also an original contribution by a leading voice in the pluralist literature. Scholars and researchers interested in the work of Berlin, liberalism, value pluralism, and related ideas will find this a stimulating and valuable source. (shrink)

George Berkeley (1685-1753) is the superstar of Irish Philosophy. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1700 and became a fellow in 1707. In 1724 he resigned his Fellowship to become Dean of Derry, and in 1734 he was made Bishop of Cloyne. He settled in Oxford in 1752 and died the following year. The work of George Berkeley is marked by its diversity and range. His writings take in such topics as mathematics, psychology, politics, health, economics, deism and (...) education, as well as that with which he is most associated - philosophy. Whatever topic he dealt with, his grasp of the subject matter was always impressive and his criticisms of his contemporaries often acute. Among the most noteable of the British Empiricists, he took his starting point from Locke's new 'way of ideas', but he rejected abstract ideas and the possibility of real existence outside perception. It is for this doctrine that he is most known - that there is no such thing as matter, and that things are collections of ideas which can exist only in our minds and only for so long as they are perceived. This philosophy, summed up in his phrase 'to be is to be perceived', he termed 'immaterialism'. A.C. Fraser's collection includes a series of what were previously unpublished notes by Berkeley on all the main topics of his philosophy. This, the 1901 edition, was the first complete edition of his works. (shrink)

This book uncovers Kant s hidden theory of cosmopolitan education within the framework of his overall practical philosophy. The Kant brought out here turns out to be very different from current mainstream appropriations, which erroneously consider him one of the founding fathers of the new cosmopolitanism. Kant s Embedded Cosmopolitanism is a valuable source for students of political philosophy, cosmopolitanism, and Kant s ethics.".

This handbook is a comprehensive treatment of business ethics from a philosophical approach.