In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Titles, Labels, and Names:A House of MirrorsGreg Petersen (bio)An EducationAmong the harshest critiques ever received during my doctoral coursework came from a professor who was noticeably perturbed that I had researched and written a paper on an artwork without considering the title in the interpretation and analysis of the work. The professor insisted that the title is necessary to understand the piece. As a diligent student, the lesson (...) was learned, and the following semester I wrote a different paper for a different professor including the title as part of the interpretation and analysis. The professor's response asserted that the sections of the paper discussing the title should be deleted to improve the paper because a title is a name only—a linguistic referent to speak and write about the work that has no other relationship to the work. The discussions that followed with the two professors evolved into a permanent interest in the relationship between appellations and the works they represent. The debate of whether titles are or are not important is not a two-sided argument but rather a maze. This article is not a specialized theoretical argument but an explication of this maze of disjointed relationships among images, their appellations, and the theories espoused by various artists, art critics, art historians, and philosophers. Nevertheless, the clearest exits from the maze are found by treating the appellations as literature and applying literary theory to them.Between Text and ImageMuch of the world we live in is visual and linguistic in nature: visual to the extent that seeing is associated with knowing, and linguistic to the extent that we can communicate through the use of words and letters. For thousands [End Page 29] of years there has been a close relationship between images and language. Both are commonly represented through the use of pigments on a two-dimensional surface. While we know of no literary relationships in early paintings, it is extremely rare today to find paintings without a literary appellation attached. Today we study paintings through words, but only on the most elementary levels do we study words through paintings. It appears that literate cultures give dominance to textual symbols over those in paintings, while illiterate cultures reverse these relationships. The problem is that words have culturally agreed upon meanings, often more so than visual images. We read and listen and then write and speak about those things we have read and heard. Historically, it may be that the relationship between language and images has reversed itself, and perhaps even reverses itself in our own educational process as we begin teaching children letters and words through the use of pictures. After all, which came first: image or language?There has been little written on the use of word associations with iconographic images during the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, it is clear that identification characteristics other than linguistic ones existed. Hazard Adams is one of the few to raise this issue in his essay on titles: "Before I turn to literary titles it might be well to ask whether... I am correct in assuming that there has never been a nonverbal title of a literary work or of anything else for that matter, the word-objects relation of a title being irreversible. There are certainly nonverbal labels like coats of arms and crowns that imply title in a related sense."1 It may be true that titles are typically thought of as word associations identifying objects, but it may also be possible that medieval imagery was at least as communicatively accurate as our present textual system. For example, a man with arrows fixed in his flesh would still be recognized by a medieval illiterate as St. Sebastian, yet most of the depictions of this Catholic saint are simply titled St. Sebastian. Would hanging the text St. Sebastian next to these depictions have created more meaning or a deeper understanding to a medieval Catholic? Often sacred personages and other important visual images have their own identifying characteristics that make a correlative text unnecessary. These identifying characteristics, to those familiar with them, remain very effective nonverbal symbols that conjure the stories they represent.Furthermore, during the medieval... (shrink)

It is widely agreed that obsessive-compulsive disorder involves irrationality. But where in the complex of states and processes that constitutes OCD should this irrationality be located? A pervasive assumption in both the psychiatric and philosophical literature is that the seat of irrationality is located in the obsessive thoughts characteristic of OCD. Building on a puzzle about insight into OCD (Taylor 2022), we challenge this pervasive assumption, and argue instead that the irrationality of OCD is located in the emotions that are (...) characteristic of OCD, such as anxiety or fear. In particular, we propose to understand the irrationality of OCD as a matter of harboring recalcitrant emotions. We argue that this account not only solves the puzzle about insight, but also makes better sense of how OCD sufferers experience and describe their condition and helps explain some otherwise puzzling features of compulsive behavior. (shrink)

Contemporary philosopher Alvin Plantinga is best known for tackling the problem of evil and rationality of belief in God from a Calvinist perspective. Welty provides a Reformed intro and analysis.

In a recent paper in this journal, Carter and Peterson raise two distinctly epistemological puzzles that arise for anyone aspiring to defend the precautionary principle. The first puzzle trades on an application of epistemic contextualism to the precautionary principle; the second puzzle concerns the compatibility of the precautionary principle with the de minimis rule. In this note, I argue that neither puzzle should worry defenders of the precautionary principle. The first puzzle can be shown to be an instance of the (...) familiar but conceptually harmless challenge of adjudicating between relevant interests to reach assessments of threats when applying the precautionary principle. The second puzzle can be shown to rely on a subtle but crucial misrepresentation of the relevant probabilities at play when applying the precautionary principle. (shrink)

Standard epistemology takes it for granted that there is a special kind of value: epistemic value. This claim does not seem to sit well with act utilitarianism, however, since it holds that only welfare is of real value. I first develop a particularly utilitarian sense of “epistemic value”, according to which it is closely analogous to the nature of financial value. I then demonstrate the promise this approach has for two current puzzles in the intersection of epistemology and value theory: (...) first, the problem of why knowledge is better than mere true belief, and second, the relation between epistemic justification and responsibility. (shrink)

Most of us want to have children. We want them to be healthy and have a good start in life. One way to achieve this goal is to use preimplantation genetic diagnosis . PGD enables people engaged in the process of in vitro fertilisation to acquire information about the genetic constitution of an early embryo. On the basis of this information, a decision can be made to transfer embryos without genetic defects to the uterus and terminate those with genetic defects.1However, (...) is it morally acceptable to use PGD to reduce the probability of children with severe genetic diseases being born? Is the current routine use of PGD in public healthcare services to select against severe genetic diseases like anencephaly, spina bifida, cystic fibrosis and Down’s syndrome morally acceptable?These are complex questions involving a range of difficult ethical issues—for instance, critical discussions about the morality of embryo research and embryo termination.2 They also involve awkward conceptual issues concerning such matters as the meaning of words such as “disability”3 and “severe” in “severe genetic diseases”,4 which will not be discussed here.In this paper I examine an argument which aims to show that efforts to prevent the birth of severely disabled children using PGD are morally unacceptable. Essentially, this argument appeals to our concern for disabled people and the belief that PGD, through a slippery slope process, will have bad consequences for them. I conclude that the argument is problematic for a number of reasons. But before I examine the argument itself, it will be helpful to separate two types of slippery slope argument since these involve different kinds of reasoning.TWO TYPES OF ARGUMENTMany of the arguments against PGD point to the bad consequences it can be expected to have for disabled people. Central to all these …. (shrink)

Frames, i.e., recursive attribute-value structures, are a general format for the decomposition of lexical concepts. Attributes assign unique values to objects and thus describe functional relations. Concepts can be classified into four groups: sortal, individual, relational and functional concepts. The classification is reflected by different grammatical roles of the corresponding nouns. The paper aims at a cognitively adequate decomposition, particularly, of sortal concepts by means of frames. Using typed feature structures, an explicit formalism for the characterization of cognitive frames is (...) developed. The frame model can be extended to account for typicality effects. Applying the paradigm of object-related neural synchronization, furthermore, a biologically motivated model for the cortical implementation of frames is developed. Cortically distributed synchronization patterns may be regarded as the fingerprints of concepts. (shrink)

Body checking, characterized by the repeated visual or physical inspection of particular parts of one’s own body (e.g. thighs, waist, or upper arms) is one of the most prominent behaviors associated with eating disorders, particularly Anorexia Nervosa (AN). In this paper, we explore the explanatory potential of the Recalcitrant Fear Model of AN (RFM) in relation to body checking. We argue that RFM, when combined with certain plausible auxiliary hypotheses about the cognitive and epistemic roles of emotions, is able to (...) explain key characteristics of body checking, including how body checking behavior becomes habitual and compulsive. (shrink)

In the near future developments in non-invasive prenatal testing may soon provide couples with the opportunity to test for and diagnose a much broader range of heritable and congenital conditions than has previously been possible. Inevitably, this has prompted much ethical debate on the possible implications of NIPT for providing couples with opportunities for reproductive choice by way of routine prenatal screening. In view of the possibility to test for a significantly broader range of genetic conditions with NIPT, the European (...) Society of Human Genetics and American Society of Human Genetics recommend that, pending further debate, prenatal screening for reproductive choice should only be offered where concerning serious congenital conditions and childhood disorders. In support of this recommendation, the ESHG and ASHG discuss a number of ethical issues on which they prompt further debate: the informational privacy of the future child, the trivialization of abortion, the risk of information overload, and issues of distributive justice. This paper responds to this call with further reflection on each ethical issue and how it relates to the moral justification of providing couples with opportunities for meaningful reproductive choice. The paper concludes that whilst there may be good reasons for qualifying the scope of any unsolicited prenatal screening offer to serious congenital conditions and childhood disorders, if prenatal screening is justified for providing couples with opportunities for meaningful reproductive choice, then health services may have obligations to empower couples with the same opportunity where concerning other conditions. (shrink)

Inquiry is an aim-directed activity, and as such governed by instrumental normativity. If you have reason to figure out a question, you have reason to take means to figuring it out. Beliefs are governed by epistemic normativity. On a certain pervasive understanding, this means that you are permitted – maybe required – to believe what you have sufficient evidence for. The norms of inquiry and epistemic norms both govern us as agents in pursuit of knowledge and understanding, and, on the (...) surface, they do so in harmony. Recently, however, Jane Friedman (2020) has pointed out that they are in tension with each other. In this paper, I aim to resolve this tension by showing that reasons for acts of inquiry – zetetic reasons – and epistemic reasons for belief can both be understood as flowing from the same general normative principle: the transmission principle for instrumental reasons. The resulting account is a version of epistemic instrumentalism that offers an attractive unity between zetetic and epistemic normativity. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 6, June 2020, Page 22-24.

Developments in Non-Invasive Prenatal Testing (NIPT) and cell-free fetal DNA analysis raise the possibility that antenatal services may soon be able to support couples in non-invasively testing for, and diagnosing, an unprecedented range of genetic disorders and traits coded within their unborn child’s genome. Inevitably, this has prompted debate within the bioethics literature about what screening options should be offered to couples for the purpose of reproductive choice. In relation to this problem, the European Society of Human Genetics (ESHG) and (...) American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) tentatively recommend that any expansion of this type of screening, as facilitated by NIPT, should be limited to serious congenital and childhood disorders. In support of this recommendation, the ESHG and ASHG cite considerations of distribution justice. Notably, however, an account of justice in the organization and provision of this type of screening which might substantiate this recommendation has yet to be developed. This paper attempts to redress this oversight through an investigation of Norman Daniels’ theory of Just health: meeting health needs fairly. In line with this aim, the paper examines what special moral importance (for Just health) screening for the purpose of reproductive choice might have where concerning serious congenital and childhood disorders in particular. The paper concludes that screening for reproductive choice where concerning serious congenital and childhood disorders may be important for providing women with fair opportunity to protect their health (by either having or not having an affected child). (shrink)

In early 2017, Nevada amended its Uniform Determination of Death Act, in order to clarify the neurologic criteria for the determination of death. The amendments stipulate that a determination of death is a clinical decision that does not require familial consent and that the appropriate standard for determining neurologic death is the American Academy of Neurology’s guidelines. Once a physician makes such a determination of death, the Nevada amendments require the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment within twenty-four hours with limited exceptions. (...) Neurologists have generally supported Nevada’s amendments for clarifying the diagnostic standard and limiting the ability of family members to challenge it. However, it is more appropriate to view the Nevada amendments with concern. Even though the primary purpose of the UDDA is to ensure that all functions of a person’s entire brain have ceased, the AAN guidelines do not accurately assess this. In addition, by characterizing the determination of death as solely a clinical decision, the Nevada legislature has improperly ignored the doctrine of informed consent, as well as the beliefs of particular faiths and cultures that reject brain death. Rather than resolving controversies regarding brain death determinations, the Nevada amendments may instead instigate numerous constitutional challenges. (shrink)

Technological progress may eventually produce sophisticated robots with human-like traits that result in humans forming meaningful relationships with them. Such relationships would likely lead to a demand for human–artificial intelligence matrimony. U.S. Supreme Court decisions that expanded the definition of marriage to include interracial and same-sex couples, as well as those that have not extended marriage to polygamous relationships, provide guidance regarding the criteria that human–AI would have to meet to successfully assert a right to marry. Ultimately, robots will have (...) to possess certain characteristics of personhood to marry, including the capacity to contract and to engage in an intimate relationship. Alternatively, if AIs can simulate these abilities sufficiently, we may believe that they have these capacities. Even if AIs genuinely possess the capabilities necessary to enter into a marriage, it is social acceptance of intelligent non-humans as life partners that will likely influence legal development is this realm rather than personhood criteria. However, AIs are likely to face bias due to their “artificial” rather than biological nature. Yet, Peter Singer’s influential argument regarding speciesism in the context of animal rights implies that AIs with specific human-like qualities cannot be justifiably denied certain rights. (shrink)

The alien invasive Red King Crab in the Barents Sea represents both a threat, via ecosystem impacts, and a gain as a revenue source from food sales. Uncertainties exist regarding the ecological impacts but debate in Norway has also emphasised the economic benefits to marginalised fisher communities. This paper reports on a Q-methodology study involving key stakeholders to probe the extent to which divisions exist between different groups. While divisions are indeed found and two groupings identified, these are not as (...) clear as suggested by the lines typically portrayed in the media and elsewhere -, i.e. economic gains versus ecological preservation. Stakeholder groups reported here generally agreed that biodiversity concerns should be central and that further invasion was undesirable due to potential impacts on ecosystem services. (shrink)

In an attempt to address the theoretical gap between linguistics and philosophy, a group of semanticists, calling itself the Generic Group, has worked to develop a common view of genericity. Their research has resulted in this book, which consists of a substantive introduction and eleven original articles on important aspects of the interpretation of generic expressions. The introduction provides a clear overview of the issues and synthesizes the major analytical approaches to them. Taken together, the papers that follow reflect the (...) current state of the art in the semantics of generics, and afford insight into various generic phenomena. (shrink)

Does transparency in doxastic deliberation entail a constitutive norm of correctness governing belief, as Shah and Velleman argue? No, because this presupposes an implausibly strong relation between normative judgements and motivation from such judgements, ignores our interest in truth, and cannot explain why we pay different attention to how much justification we have for our beliefs in different contexts. An alternative account of transparency is available: transparency can be explained by the aim one necessarily adopts in deliberating about whether to (...) believe that p. To show this, I reconsider the role of the concept of belief in doxastic deliberation, and I defuse 'the teleologian's dilemma'. (shrink)

Epistemic instrumentalists seek to understand the normativity of epistemic norms on the model practical instrumental norms governing the relation between aims and means. Non-instrumentalists often object that this commits instrumentalists to implausible epistemic assessments. I argue that this objection presupposes an implausibly strong interpretation of epistemic norms. Once we realize that epistemic norms should be understood in terms of permissibility rather than obligation, and that evidence only occasionally provide normative reasons for belief, an instrumentalist account becomes available that delivers the (...) correct epistemic verdicts. On this account, epistemic permissibility can be understood on the model of the wide-scope instrumental norm for instrumental rationality, while normative evidential reasons for belief can be understood in terms of instrumental transmission. (shrink)

The theory of belief, according to which believing that p essentially involves having as an aim or purpose to believe that p truly, has recently been criticised on the grounds that the putative aim of belief does not interact with the wider aims of believers in the ways we should expect of genuine aims. I argue that this objection to the aim theory fails. When we consider a wider range of deliberative contexts concerning beliefs, it becomes obvious that the aim (...) of belief can interact with and be weighed against the wider aims of agents in the ways required for it to be a genuine aim. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a teleological account of epistemic reasons. In recent years, the main challenge for any such account has been to explicate a sense in which epistemic reasons depend on the value of epistemic properties. I argue that while epistemic reasons do not directly depend on the value of epistemic properties, they depend on a different class of reasons which are value based in a direct sense, namely reasons to form beliefs about certain propositions or subject matters. (...) In short, S has an epistemic reason to believe that p if and only if S is such that if S has reason to form a belief about p, then S ought to believe that p. I then propose a teleological explanation of this relationship. It is also shown how the proposal can avoid various subsidiary objections commonly thought to riddle the teleological account. (shrink)

When we read On the Origin of Species, we cannot help but hear echoes of the Wealth of Nations. Darwin’s “economy of nature” features a “division of labour” that leads to complexity and productivity. We should not, however, analyze Darwin’s ethics through this lens. Darwin did not draw his economic ideas from Smith, nor did he base his ethics on an economic foundation. Darwin’s ethics rest on Smith’s notion—from the Theory of Moral Sentiments—of an innate human faculty of sympathy. Darwin (...) gave this notion an evolutionary interpretation, concluding that any species of social animals that develops a high enough level of intelligence will evolve moral principles. But the specific moral principles evolved by any particular species will vary, depending on that species’ particular evolutionary history. Darwin’s theory of moral sentiments thus diverged profoundly from Smith’s, while remaining in the same intellectual lineage. Although my reading of Darwin’s ethics departs from the dominant trend, it is not without precedent. A century ago, William James propounded a similar interpretation of Darwin. James’s interpretation has been largely forgotten, but he had Darwin right. It seems that James then developed his own moral philosophy on what he saw as a Darwinian foundation. It may be that James read Darwin’s evolutionary ethics through a pragmatic lens and so refashioned it, in his turn, into something again profoundly different from what Darwin had conceived, but again remaining in the same intellectual lineage. (shrink)

It is argued that the English bare plural (an NP with plural head that lacks a determiner), in spite of its apparently diverse possibilities of interpretation, is optimally represented in the grammar as a unified phenomenon. The chief distinction to be dealt with is that between the generic use of the bare plural (as in Dogs bark) and its existential or indefinite plural use (as in He threw oranges at Alice). The difference between these uses is not to be accounted (...) for by an ambiguity in the NP itself, but rather by explicating how the context of the sentence acts on the bare plural to give rise to this distinction. A brief analysis is sketched in which bare plurals are treated in all instances as proper names of kinds of things. A subsidiary argument is that the null determiner is not to be regarded as the plural of the indefinite article a. (shrink)

A popular account of epistemic justification holds that justification, in essence, aims at truth. An influential objection against this account points out that it is committed to holding that only true beliefs could be justified, which most epistemologists regard as sufficient reason to reject the account. In this paper I defend the view that epistemic justification aims at truth, not by denying that it is committed to epistemic justification being factive, but by showing that, when we focus on the relevant (...) sense of ‘justification’, it isn’t in fact possible for a belief to be at once justified and false. To this end, I consider and reject three popular intuitions speaking in favor of the possibility of justified false beliefs, and show that a factive account of epistemic justification is less detrimental to our normal belief forming practices than often supposed. (shrink)

When one has both epistemic and practical reasons for or against some belief, how do these reasons combine into an all-things-considered reason for or against that belief? The question might seem to presuppose the existence of practical reasons for belief. But we can rid the question of this presupposition. Once we do, a highly general ‘Combinatorial Problem’ emerges. The problem has been thought to be intractable due to certain differences in the combinatorial properties of epistemic and practical reasons. Here we (...) bring good news: if we accept an independently motivated version of epistemic instrumentalism—the view that epistemic reasons are a species of instrumental reasons—we can reduce The Combinatorial Problem to the relatively benign problem of how to weigh different instrumental reasons against each other. As an added benefit, the instrumentalist account can explain the apparent intractability of The Combinatorial Problem in terms of a common tendency to think and talk about epistemic reasons in an elliptical manner. (shrink)

A popular account of luck, with a firm basis in common sense, holds that a necessary condition for an event to be lucky, is that it was suitably improbable. It has recently been proposed that this improbability condition is best understood in epistemic terms. Two different versions of this proposal have been advanced. According to my own proposal :361–377, 2010), whether an event is lucky for some agent depends on whether the agent was in a position to know that the (...) event would occur. And according to Stoutenburg :319–334, 2015, Synthese, 1–15, 2018), whether an event is lucky for an agent depends on whether the event was guaranteed or certain to occur in light of the agent’s evidence. In this paper, I argue that we should prefer the account in terms of knowledge over that in terms of evidential certainty. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mild Cognitive Impairment Is RelevantRonald C. Petersen (bio)Keywordsaging, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, mild cognitive impairment, pharmaceutical industryGraham and Ritchie (2006) have contributed a scholarly document that implores us to reexamine nosological categories and certain diagnostic outcomes. They have chosen mild cognitive impairment (MCI) as the target of their scrutiny and have raised several interesting issues. I would like to comment on their approach and suggest that MCI is a (...) useful clinical entity that does serve a practical function and hopefully will lead to a better quality of life for aging persons.There are several clarifications concerning the construct of MCI that need to be emphasized. Graham and Ritchie have asserted that all persons with MCI eventually evolve to Alzheimer's disease (AD) and have claimed that this is the inevitable outcome of the disorder. Although it is true that many of the early studies on MCI focused on the amnestic subtype as a precursor to AD (Bennett et al. 2002; Ganguli, Dodge, Shen, and DeKosky 2004; Lopez et al. 2003; Petersen et al. 1999), subsequent work has expanded the construct to include prodromal forms of other disorders (Petersen 2004; Winblad et al. 2004). As such, the construct of MCI has become flexible in recent years to account for alternative types of intermediate cognitive impairment.The authors state that MCI addresses those individuals speculated to have an inevitable dementia. Certainly, we do not presume that dementia is inevitable in the aging process; rather, we posit that if certain criteria are fulfilled in persons who are aging, the likelihood of a person progressing to a certain type of dementia is quite high. As such, this is an important precondition about which to learn, because interventional strategies may be available.Graham and Ritchie argue that some cognitive changes with aging are "normal" and trying to classify these individuals as "abnormal" is performing a disservice to much of the aging population. We draw an important distinction between the cognitive changes of normal aging, as they are recognized to exist, and what we feel constitutes the pathologic changes of MCI. We believe that the abnormal cognitive function found in MCI has a high probability of progressing to a greater degree of cognitive dysfunction in a relatively short period of time and these behavioral changes are accompanied by pathologic brain changes that are manifested on magnetic resonance imaging scans, positron emission tomography scans, cerebrospinal fluid biomarkers, and autopsy studies (Hampel et al. 2004; Jack et al. 1999; Markesbery et al. [End Page 45] 2006; Petersen et al. 2006). This type of progression is in contradistinction to other individuals who are experiencing cognitive changes of normal aging. These individuals do not progress rapidly to greater degrees of impairment and autopsy studies reveal that their brains do not harbor the pathologic changes found in the MCI population (Knopman et al. 2003).The cognitive and behavioral changes accompanying persons with MCI are devastating and cannot be ascribed to "senility" or "He is just getting old." It is a mistake to imply that by labeling people with a condition such as MCI we are doing them a disservice. Most of these individuals are seeking medical attention for their perceived difficulties. Consequently, addressing these concerns and educating the individuals on the implications of their symptoms are important services. Although we may not have adequate therapies at present, this does not imply that we should ignore the symptoms.We cannot treat many conditions at present, yet we do not avoid the opportunity to characterize the condition and make a diagnosis. Even if this were part of the aging process, this does not mean that we should ignore the disability and refuse to treat it. Most individuals develop an inflexibility of their optical lenses as they age, yet corrective lenses of one type or another are believed to be extremely beneficial at alleviating this disability associated with the aging phenomenon. No one would argue that it is inappropriate to treat this condition because it is "just a part of aging."It should be noted that I have stressed the situation in which individuals are seeking medical attention for their cognitive concerns. It is quite a different situation if an... (shrink)

In barely the space of one generation, Athens was transformed from a conventional city-state into something completely new--a region-state on a scale previously unthinkable. This book sets out to answer a seemingly simple question: How and when did the Athenian state attain the anomalous size that gave it such influence in Greek politics and culture in the classical period? Many scholars argue that Athens's incorporation of Attica was a gradual development, largely completed some two hundred years before the classical era. (...) Anderson, however, suggests that it is not until the late sixth century that we see the first systematic attempts by the Athenian polis to integrate all of Attica. Anderson first takes issue with the prevailing view of Cleisthenes' landmark political reforms of 508-7 b.c., arguing that they were animated by a more comprehensive vision of regional political community in Attica. The Athenians' strengthened the state by establishing institutional mechanisms that would allow inhabitants of the Attic periphery to participate as never before in the life of the center. The creation of a suitable physical setting for the new order was accompanied by religious, military, and symbolic innovations. Regional participation in Athenian affairs was stimulated by encouraging the Attic populace to imagine themselves, for the first time ever, as members of a single, like-minded, self-governing political community. Greg Anderson is Assistant Professor of Classics and History, University of Illinois at Chicago. (shrink)

Should organ transplants be given to patients who have waited the longest, or need it most urgently, or those whose survival prospects are the best? The rationing of health care is universal and inevitable, taking place in poor and affluent countries, in publicly funded and private health care systems. Someone must budget for as well as dispense health care whilst aging populations severely stretch the availability of resources. The Ethics of Health Care Rationing is a clear and much-needed introduction to (...) this increasingly important topic, considering and assessing the major ethical problems and dilemmas about the allocation, scarcity and rationing of health care. Beginning with a helpful overview of why rationing is an ethical problem, the authors examine the following key topics: What is the value of health? How can it be measured? What does it mean that a treatment is "good value for money"? What sort of distributive principles - utilitarian, egalitarian or prioritarian - should we rely on when thinking about health care rationing? Does rationing health care unfairly discriminate against the elderly and people with disabilities? Should patients be held responsible for their health? Why does the debate on responsibility for health lead to issues about socioeconomic status and social inequality? Throughout the book, examples from the US, UK and other countries are used to illustrate the ethical issues at stake. Additional features such as chapter summaries, annotated further reading and discussion questions make this an ideal starting point for students new to the subject, not only in philosophy but also in closely related fields such as politics, health economics, public health, medicine, nursing and social work. (shrink)

Combining phenomenological insights from Brentano and Sartre, but also drawing on recent work on consciousness by analytic philosophers, this book defends the view that conscious states are reflexive, and necessarily so, i.e., that they have a built-in, implicit awareness of their own occurrence, such that the subject of a conscious state has an immediate, non-objectual acquaintance with it. As part of this investigation, the book also explores the relationship between reflexivity and the phenomenal, or what-it-is-like, dimension of conscious experience, defending (...) the innovative thesis that phenomenal character is constituted by the implicit self-awareness built into every conscious state. This account stands in marked contrast to most influential extant theories of phenomenal character, including qualia theories, according to which phenomenal character is a matter of having phenomenal sensations, and representationalism, according to which phenomenal character is constituted by representational content. (shrink)

In this paper, we wish to propose a notion Kunstangst [Danish for art anxiety] as a designation for the destabilising and transformative state that art can impose on its spectator. To this day, art discourse and curation continue to be shaped by Enlightenment ideals. This legacy urges us to dispose of our individuality, either by putting ourselves in someone else’s place or by striving towards objectivity and repeatability. We regard this as highly problematic, and to question the scientific, rational, and (...) disinterested approaches, we have chosen to investigate a more personal, intimate relation between artwork and spectator. The notion Kunstangst derives from the existentialist concept of anxiety, which originates in the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. We hope that the transfer of this existentialist concept will provide us with a new aesthetic tool that can enable us to undo the chains of Enlightenment thought and help us approximate the intensity at the heart of aesthetic experience. Aiding us in the appropriation of such an abstract philosophical concept and its application to aesthetics, we incorporate the research of psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski. He claims that external conflicts can evoke anxiety, which can – if properly engaged with – become transformative experiences. Following this line of reasoning in an aesthetic context, we believe that this is how the art experience can have transformative potential. (shrink)

Horizontal gene transfer in the form of long DNA fragments has changed our view of bacterial evolution. Recently, we discovered that such processes may also occur with the massive amounts of short and damaged DNA in the environment, and even with truly ancient DNA. Although it presently remains unclear how often it takes place in nature, horizontal gene transfer of short and damaged DNA opens up the possibility for genetic exchange across distinct species in both time and space. In this (...) essay, we speculate on the potential evolutionary consequences of this phenomenon. We argue that it may challenge basic assumptions in evolutionary theory; that it may have distant origins in life's history; and that horizontal gene transfer should be viewed as an evolutionary strategy not only preceding but causally underpinning the evolution of sexual reproduction. (shrink)

The idea that humans should abandon their individuality and use technology to bind themselves together into hivemind societies seems both farfetched and frightening – something that is redolent of the worst dystopias from science fiction. In this article, we argue that these common reactions to the ideal of a hivemind society are mistaken. The idea that humans could form hiveminds is sufficiently plausible for its axiological consequences to be taken seriously. Furthermore, far from being a dystopian nightmare, the hivemind society (...) could be desirable and could enable a form of sentient flourishing. Consequently, we should not be so quick to deny it. We provide two arguments in support of this claim – the axiological openness argument and the desirability argument – and then defend it against three major objections. (shrink)

Many philosophers have argued that an event is lucky for an agent only if it was suitably improbable, but there is considerable disagreement about how to understand this improbability condition. This paper argues for a hitherto overlooked construal of the improbability condition in terms of the lucky agent’s epistemic situation. According to the proposed account, an event is lucky for an agent only if the agent was not in a position to know that the event would occur. It is also (...) explored whether this new account threatens the anti- luck program in epistemology. It is argued that although not detrimental to the anti- luck program, the epistemic account of luck sets certain important limits to its scope and feasibility. (shrink)

Nishi Shah has recently argued that transparency in doxastic deliberation supports a strict version of evidentialism about epistemic reasons. I argue that Shah's argument relies on a principle that is incompatible with the strict version of evidentialism Shah wishes to advocate.

Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss argue that any truth norm for belief, linking the correctness of believing p with the truth of p, is bound to be uninformative, since applying the norm to determine the correctness of a belief as to whether p, would itself require forming such a belief. I argue that this conflates the condition under which the norm deems beliefs correct, with the psychological state an agent must be in to apply the norm. I also show that (...) since the truth norm conflicts with other possible norms that clearly are informative, the truth norm must itself be informative. (shrink)

In a recent article, I criticized Kathrin Glüer and Åsa Wikforss's so-called “no guidance argument” against the truth norm for belief, for conflating the conditions under which that norm recommends belief with the psychological state one must be in to apply the norm. In response, Glüer and Wikforss have offered a new formulation of the no guidance argument, which makes it apparent that no such conflation is made. However, their new formulation of the argument presupposes a much too narrow understanding (...) of what it takes for a norm to influence behaviour, and betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of the truth norm. Once this is taken into account, it becomes clear that the no guidance argument fails. (shrink)

Everyone knows what noise is. Or do they? Can we in fact say that one man's noise is another teenager's music? Is noise in fact only an auditory phenomenon or does it extend far beyond this realm? If our common definitions of noise are necessarily subjective and noise is not just unpleasant sound, then it merits a closer look (or listen). Greg Hainge sets out to define noise in this way, to find within it a series of operations common (...) across its multiple manifestations that allow us to apprehend it as something other than a highly subjective term that tells us very little. Examining a wide range of texts, including Sartre's novel Nausea and David Lynch's iconic films Eraserhead and Inland Empire, Hainge investigates some of the Twentieth Century's most infamous noisemongers to suggest that they're not that noisy after all; and it finds true noise in some surprising places. The result is a thrilling and illuminating study of sound and culture. (shrink)

The DSM‐5 highlights two essential psychological features of anorexia nervosa (AN): recalcitrant fear of gaining weight and body image disturbance. Prominent accounts grant false beliefs about body weight and shape a central role in the explanation of AN behavior. In this article, we propose a stronger emphasis on recalcitrant fear. We show that such fear can explain AN behavior without the intermediary of a false belief, and thus without the associated explanatory burdens and conceptual difficulties. We illustrate how shifting the (...) emphasis from false belief to recalcitrant fear can supplement a number of different non‐doxastic models of AN. (shrink)

This book introduces an important group of logics that have come to be known under the umbrella term 'susbstructural'. Substructural logics have independently led to significant developments in philosophy, computing and linguistics. _An Introduction to Substrucural Logics_ is the first book to systematically survey the new results and the significant impact that this class of logics has had on a wide range of fields.The following topics are covered: * Proof Theory * Propositional Structures * Frames * Decidability * Coda Both (...) students and professors of philosophy, computing, linguistics, and mathematics will find this to be an important addition to their reading. (shrink)

The predominant view in developmental psychology is that young children are able to reason with the concept of desire prior to being able to reason with the concept of belief. We propose an explanation of this phenomenon that focuses on the cognitive tasks that competence with the belief and desire concepts enable young children to perform. We show that cognitive tasks that are typically considered fundamental to our competence with the belief and desire concepts can be performed with the concept (...) of desire in the absence of competence with the concept of belief, whereas the reverse is considerably less feasible. (shrink)

While many philosophers have agreed that evidence of disagreement is a kind of higher-order evidence, this has not yet resulted in formally precise higher-order approaches to the problem of disagreement. In this paper, we outline a simple formal framework for determining the epistemic significance of a body of higher-order evidence, and use this framework to motivate a novel interpretation of the popular “equal weight view” of peer disagreement—we call it the Variably Equal Weight View (VEW). We show that VEW differs (...) from the standard Split the Difference (SD) interpretation of the equal weight view in almost all cases of peer disagreement, and use our formal framework to explain why SD has seemed attractive but is in fact misguided. A desirable feature of VEW, we argue, is that it gives rise to plausible instances of synergy—an effect whereby the parties to a disagreement should become more (or less) confident in the disputed proposition than any of them were prior to disagreement. Lastly, we show how VEW may be generalized to cases of non-peer disagreement. (shrink)

According to the thesis of pragmatic encroachment, practical circumstances can affect whether someone is in a position to know or rationally believe a proposition. For example, whether it is epistemically rational for a person to believe that the bank will be open on Saturdays, can depend not only on the strength of the person’s evidence, but also on how practically important it is for the person not to be wrong about the bank being open on Saturdays. In recent years, philosophers (...) have argued that moral considerations can also affect the epistemic rationality of belief, thus giving rise to moral encroachment. In previous work (Steglich-Petersen, forthcoming a), I have developed an explanation of pragmatic encroachment grounded in an instrumentalist theory of epistemic reasons. Here, I argue that this explanation extends to moral encroachment as well, including so-called “radical” moral encroachment. I also show how this explanation dispels the worry raised by Gerken (2019), that pragmatic encroachment might give rise to morally adverse consequences in the form of epistemic injustice. (shrink)