Anthony Everett gives a philosophical defence of the common-sense view that there are no such things as fictional people, places, and things. He argues that our talk and thought about such fictional objects takes place within the scope of a pretense, and that we gain little but lose much by accepting fictional realism.

Recent research has begun treating the perennial philosophical question, “what makes a person the same over time?” as an empirical question. A long tradition in philosophy holds that psychological continuity and connectedness of memories are at the heart of personal identity. More recent experimental work, following Strohminger & Nichols (2014), has suggested that persistence of moral character, more than memories, is perceived as essential for personal identity. While there is a growing body of evidence supporting these findings, a critique by (...) Starmans & Bloom (2018) suggests that this research program conflates personal identity with mere similarity. To address this criticism, we explore how loss of someone’s morality or memories influence perceptions of identity change, and perceptions of moral duties towards the target of the change. We present participants with a classic ‘body switch’ thought experiment and after assessing perceptions of identity persistence, we present a moral dilemma, asking participants to imagine that one of the patients must die (Study 1) or be left alone in a care home for the rest of their life (Study 2). Our results highlight the importance of the continuity of moral character, suggesting lay intuitions are tracking (something like) personal identity, not just mere similarity. (shrink)

Through an example of the prohibition against dating in a technical school in southwest China in 1978, this article analyzes how three intersecting forces - the ideology of socialist collectivism, the structure of the work unit system and the socialist sovereign ownership of the body - account for sexual repression in the Maoist period in China. Rather than being an ahistorical, essential component of Maoist socialism, sexual repression (psychic and social) was a historically specific and complex phenomenon. The transformation of (...) sexual repression at a historical moment took the form of an assemblage of the return of love discourse and an emergent desire-centered subjectivity in the great transformation from Maoist socialism to the post-Mao reform period. (shrink)

Through an example of the prohibition against dating in a technical school in southwest China in 1978, this article analyzes how three intersecting forces - the ideology of socialist collectivism, the structure of the work unit system and the socialist sovereign ownership of the body - account for sexual repression in the Maoist period in China. Rather than being an ahistorical, essential component of Maoist socialism, sexual repression (psychic and social) was a historically specific and complex phenomenon. The transformation of (...) sexual repression at a historical moment took the form of an assemblage of the return of love discourse and an emergent desire-centered subjectivity in the great transformation from Maoist socialism to the post-Mao reform period. (shrink)

In two recent papers, Michael Della Rocca accuses Descartes of reasoning circularly in the Fourth Meditation. This alleged new circle is distinct from, and more vicious than, the traditional Cartesian Circle arising in the Third Meditation. We explain Della Rocca’s reasons for this accusation, showing that his argument is invalid.

SynopsisThe response to physics and chemistry which characterized mid-nineteenth century physiology took two major directions. One, found most prominently among the German physiologists, developed explanatory models which had as their fundamental assumption the ultimate reducibility of all biological phenomena to the laws of physics and chemistry. The other, characteristic of the French school of physiology, recognized that physics and chemistry provided potent analytical tools for the exploration of physiological activities, but assumed in the construction of explanatory models that the organism (...) involved special levels of organization and that there must, in consequence, be special biological laws.The roots of this argument about concept formation in physiology are explored in the works of Theodor Schwann, Johannes Müller, François Magendie and Claude Bernard among others. (shrink)

This is a slightly revised version of a paper delivered at the General Assembly of Sapporo Cool Seminar in American Studies, Japan 1981. Reprinted with the permission of the author and the publisher of the lectures in Japan.

When you and I seriously argue over whether a man of seventy is old enough to count as an "old man", it seems that we are appealing neither to our own separate standards of oldness nor to a common standard that is already fixed in the language. Instead, it seems that both of us implicitly invoke an ideal, shared standard that has yet to be agreed upon: the place where we ought to draw the line. As with other normative standards, (...) it is hard to know whether such borderlines exist prior to our coming to agree on where they are. But epistemicists plausibly argue that they must exist whether we ever agree on them or not, as this provides the only logically acceptable response to the sorites paradox. This paper argues that such boundaries do typically exist as hypothetical ideals, but not as determinate features of the present actual world. There is in fact no general solution to the paradox, but attention to practice in resolving vague disagreements shows that its instances can be dealt with separately, as they arise, in many reasonable ways. (shrink)

This MA thesis engages in an interpretative debate over Kant’s general aims in the first Critique. I argue that a defense of the rational legitimacy of religious faith is at the very center of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Moreover, I argue that Kant’s defense of faith is inextricably bound up with his views on the legitimacy of science. On my account, Kant’s Critique not only demonstrates that science is fully consistent with religious faith, but also that science, when properly (...) understood, actually favors religious belief over non-belief. (shrink)

Recent research has relied on trolley-type sacrificial moral dilemmas to study utilitarian versus nonutili- tarian modes of moral decision-making. This research has generated important insights into people’s attitudes toward instrumental harm—that is, the sacrifice of an individual to save a greater number. But this approach also has serious limitations. Most notably, it ignores the positive, altruistic core of utilitarianism, which is characterized by impartial concern for the well-being of everyone, whether near or far. Here, we develop, refine, and validate a (...) new scale—the Oxford Utilitarianism Scale—to dissociate individual differences in the ‘negative’ (permissive attitude toward instrumental harm) and ‘positive’ (impartial concern for the greater good) dimensions of utilitarian thinking as manifested in the general population. We show that these are two independent dimensions of proto-utilitarian tendencies in the lay population, each exhibiting a distinct psychological profile. Empathic concern, identification with the whole of humanity, and concern for future generations were positively associated with impartial beneficence but negatively associated with instrumental harm; and although instrumental harm was associated with subclinical psychopathy, impartial beneficence was associated with higher religiosity. Importantly, although these two dimensions were independent in the lay population, they were closely associated in a sample of moral philosophers. Acknowledging this dissociation between the instrumental harm and impartial beneficence components of utilitarian thinking in ordinary people can clarify existing debates about the nature of moral psychology and its relation to moral philosophy as well as generate fruitful avenues for further research. (shrink)

The explosion of the first atomic bomb at the Alamagordo Bombing Range, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, was the start of a new era, the dawn of the atomic age. The preliminary work on atomic fission was done before the last world war, and as military leaders visioned its great destructive possibilities, several countries entered the race to be the first to harness atomic fission for military purposes. Our own country gambled two billion dollars, and with the aid of (...) certain European scientists and in collaboration with England and Canada, succeeded in developing a fission chain reaction that made possible the atomic bomb. (shrink)

Arabic and English on opposing pages in Kitåab section; introd., commentary, bibliography, and indices in English and romanized Arabic and Greek.

This paper raises an underappreciated paradox for classical theism. Love seems to be an inherently biased and partial relation. Justice seems to require the opposite, detached impartiality (think of the attributes of the just judge). But if these are conceptual facts, then classical theism is guilty of ascribing inconsistent attributes to God: perfect love and perfect justice. I resolve this paradox in a manner that weighs in favor of the principle of divine simplicity.

In this article, we contribute to a conversation in global Christianity. Majority World pastors want access to training so they can more effectively care for their communities. But how? In this article, we create a context for spiritual formation rooted in virtue theory. We offer a humility-based, cross-cultural, relationally oriented model for training indigenous leaders while they are rooted within their locales, communities, and ministry contexts. We highlight a method that we believe to be culturally, educationally, and psychologically hearty. We (...) explore the non-formal training model and curriculum of Training Leaders International as a test case. TLI provides a structured program of training in spiritual growth and hermeneutical and communication skills to Christian leaders in the Majority World within their indigenous contexts. But it develops and delivers this training in a manner that causes two key factors to rise to prominence that are widely applicable in the cross-cultural development of Christian leaders: cultural humility and Christian-adapted virtue development, both relationally oriented. This article is meant to inspire and enable other ministries. (shrink)

There are two parts to this present article. First, I consider the applied problem of assessing changes in a congregation—how often to assess, why assess, what changes are looked for, what interventions are assessed, why look to the components of interventions, and how to avoid problems interpreting your data. Brief assessments are mandatory. Pastors and lay leaders can make simple but sound assessments of their spiritual formation programs using item response theory, goal attainment scales, single items, parceling single items, or (...) narrative responses as five alternatives. I describe dangers in interpreting the findings such as not knowing the base rate of change and mistaking the assessment for the mission. In the second part of the article, I briefly describe a program labeled a deep dive into humility. I summarize the assessments that were done, which gives a practical example of the technical recommendations I made earlier in the article. (shrink)

In 1939, just before graduating from high school in the small town of Ridgeway in northeast Iowa, Everett Kuntz spent his entire savings of $12.50 on a 35mm Argus AF camera. He made a camera case from a worn-out boot, scraps from a tin can, and a clasp from his mother’s purse. For the next several years, especially during the summers when he worked on his parents’ dairy farm, he clicked the shutter of his trusty Argus all around the (...) quiet town. Everett bought movie reel film in bulk from a mail-order house, rolled his own film, and developed it in a closet at home, but he never had the money to print his photographs. More than two thousand negatives stayed in a box while he married, raised a family, and worked as an electrical engineer in the Twin Cities. When he became ill with cancer in the fall of 2002—sixty years after he had developed the last of his bulk film—Everett opened his time capsule and printed the images from his youth. He died in 2003, having brought his childhood town back to life just as he was leaving it. A sense of peace radiates from these images. Whether skinny-dipping in the Turkey River, wheelbarrow-racing, threshing oats, milking cows, visiting with relatives after church, or hanging out at the drugstore or the movies, Ridgeway’s hardworking citizens are modest and trusting and luminous in their graceful harmony and their unguarded affection for each other. Visiting the town in 2006 as he was writing the text to accompany these photographs, Jim Heynen crafted vignettes that perfectly complement these rediscovered images by blending fact and fiction to give context and voice to Ridgeway’s citizens. (shrink)

Background Physicians face competing values of truth-telling and beneficence when deception may be employed in patient care. The purposes of this study were to assess resident physicians' attitudes towards lying, explore lie types and reported reasons for lying. Method After obtaining institutional review board review and receiving exempt status, posts written by Loma Linda University resident physicians in response to forum questions in required online courses were collected from 2002 to 2007. Responses were blinded and manually coded by two investigators (...) using NVivo software. Qualitative and quantitative analyses of the data were performed with links to various attributes. A 95% binomial proportion CI was used to analyse the attribute data. Results The study found that the majority of residents would disclose the truth about medical errors. Similarly, many residents would disclose the truth regarding unanticipated events, especially if the error was serious enough to result in a malpractice suit. However, many residents would not reveal a near miss event because they believe it has no impact on patient health. Some residents would deceive the insurance company for additional patient benefits. Of those willing to lie, only a small group gave self-serving reasons. Conclusions This study demonstrates that the ethical issues related to deception that trouble attending physicians also exist at the resident physician level. Residents primarily lie for altruistic reasons and rarely for egoistic or self-serving purposes that may or may not result in harm to patients, insurance companies and/or physicians themselves. (shrink)

There is considerable evidence for the existence of a form of publicly recognized and institutionalized effeminacy or transvestism among males in pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabian society. Unlike other men, these effeminates or mukhannarhiin were permitted to associate freely with women, on the assumption that they had no sexual interest in them, and often acted as marriage brokers, or, less legitimately, as go-betweens. They also played an important role in the development of Arabic music in Umayyad Mecca and, especially, Medina, (...) where they were numbered among the most celebrated singers and instrumentalists. Although they were subject to periodic persecution by the state, such measures were not based on any conclusions about their own sexual status – they were not assumed to be homosexual, although a few were – but on their activities as musicians and go-betweens, which were seen as corrupting the morals of society and especially of women. A particularly severe repression under the caliph Sulayman put an end to the mukhannarhiin's prominence in music and society, although not to their existence. (shrink)

The philosophy of biology should move to the center of the philosophy of science - a place it has not been accorded since the time of Mach. Physics was the paradigm of science, and its shadow falls across con temporary philosophy of biology as well, in a variety of contexts: reduction, organization and system, biochemical mechanism, and the models of law and explanation which derive from the Duhem-Popper Hempel tradition. This volume, we think, offers ample evidence of how good contempo (...) rary work in the philosophical understanding of biology has become. Marjorie Grene and Everett Mendelsohn aptly combine a deep philo sophical appreciation of conceptual issues in biology with an historical understanding of the radical changes in the science of biology since the 19th century. In this book, they present essays which probe such historical and methodological questions as reducibility, levels of organization, function and teleology, and the range of issues emerging from evolution ary theory and the species problem. In conjunction with Professor Grene's collection of essays on the philosophy of biology, The Under standing of Nature (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. XXIII) and the occasional essays on these topics which we have published in other volumes (listed below), this volume contributes to bringing biology to the center of philosophical attention. Everett Mendelsohn, 'Explanation in Nineteenth Century Biology' (Boston Studies, Vol. II, 1965). David Hawkins, 'Taxonomy and Information', (Boston Studies, Vol. III, 1967). (shrink)

The ArgumentIn Merton's early work in the sociology of science three theses are identified: economic and military influence in shaping early modern science; the “Puritan spur” to scientific activity; the critical role of a democratic social order for the support of science. These themes are located in the contemporary economic crisis of the 1930s, the rise of Nazism and fascism, and the emerging radical and Marxist political activism of scientists in the United States and the United Kingdom. Merton's interaction with (...) this context is critical for understanding his choice of problems and issues for the nascent sociology of science. The enunciation of the four-part normative structure of science is closely identified with the political ideals of this context. Merton's transition from an interest in problems of science in society to his postwar concern with the social and organizational structures of science and the social behavior of scientists is framed against the anticommunist and anti-Marxist thrust of immediate postwar politics in the United States. The implications of this change for the paradigms of the sociology of science are noted. (shrink)

Philosophers and theorists have long been puzzled by humans' ability to talk about things that do not exist, or to talk about things that they think exist but, in fact, do not. _Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence_ is a collection of 13 new works concerning the semantic and metaphysical issues arising from empty names, non-existence, and the nature of fiction. The contributors include some of the most important researchers working in these fields. Some of the papers develop (...) and defend new positions on these matters, while others offer important new perspectives and criticisms of the existing approaches. The volume contains a comprehensive introductory essay by the editors, which provides a survey of the philosophical issues concerning empty names, the various responses to these issues, and the literature on the subject to date. (shrink)

Why is science so rare and faith so common in human history? Traditional cultures persist because it is subjectively rational for each maturing child to defer to the unanimous beliefs of his elders, regardless of any personal doubts. Science is possible only when individuals promote new theories (which will probably be proven false) and forgo the epistemic advantages of accepting established views (which are more likely to be true). Hence, progressive science must rely upon the epistemic altruism of experimental thinkers, (...) while traditions of faith depend on the epistemic self-interest of their followers. (shrink)

Some linguists have argued that sentences should not be studied in isolation. They argue, rather, that the structure of sentences is largely the result of constraints imposed upon them by the discourses they are embedded in. I want to argue that this approach is misguided and that sentence-level syntax and discourse structure constitute distinct domains of study, at least in part because grammar is underdetermined by function. Moreover, I argue that discourse and sentence structures illustrate two types of cognition, dynamic (...) vs. static, and thai these necessarily involve different theoretical constructs for their explanation. That is, they constitute distinct epistemological domains. An important conclu-sion of this study is that principles of sentence grammar cannot be discovered by studies of discourse, but only by careful, theory-guided examination of individual sentences. Because it draws on multiple cognitive domains, discourse itself is inherently resistant to analysis by any single theoretical framework or discipline. Sentence grammar, on the other hand, is amenable to study by a single discipline, i.e., linguistics. These ideas are explored partially here via a review of the book Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility. It is argued that the studies in this collection have little light to shed on syntactic studies, other than the fact that discourse can exploit independently available syntactic structures. (shrink)

A collection of essays on the development of science and the history of ideas.

This paper investigates temporal interpretations in Pirahâ, a Muran language spoken in the Brazilian Amazon basin. The analysis assumes the neoReichen-bachian model of tense syntax proposed in Hornstein and argues that this model provides an elegant account of tense-related facts in Pirahâ, iff it is parametrized. Whereas Hornstein predicts that all tense systems will have a temporal reference point, this paper argues that languages may be parametrized as [+R] or [-R] and that this has important implications for their temporal syntax. (...) Moreover, the paper also argues that it is no coincidence that the Pirahâ place little importance on precision time statements, or that the Pirahâ have difficulty translating such statements, since their language does not draw temporal distinctions based on R. The parametrization of R among the Pirahâ is argued to offer anew source of support for Sapir's linguistic relativity hypothesis. (shrink)

This paper aims to determine whether we can locate temporal passage in a non-dynamical (block universe) world. In particular, we seek to determine both whether temporal passage can be located somewhere in our world if it is non-dynamical, and also to home in on where in such a world temporal passage can be located, if it can be located anywhere. We investigate this question by seeking to determine, across three experiments, whether the folk concept of temporal passage can be satisfied (...) in our world if it is non-dynamical, and, if it can, what sort of thing in our world satisfies that concept. In particular, we focus on the question of whether that concept (if satisfied) is satisfied by something mind-dependent or something mind-independent. In other words, we ask, is temporal passage something that is at least partially in the mind, or is it entirely external to the mind? We find, contrary to what is often assumed by dynamists and non-dynamists alike, that the folk concept of temporal passage is satisfied in our world conditional on it being non-dynamical, and that the concept is satisfied by something mind-independent. This provides further ammunition for recent deflationary accounts of temporal passage that attempt to locate passage somewhere in our non-dynamical world. (shrink)

Eleven original essays discuss a range of puzzling philosophical questions about fictional characters, and more generally about fictional objects. For example, they ask questions like the following: Do they really exist? What would fictional objects be like if they existed? Do they exist eternally? Are they created? Who by? When and how? Can they be destroyed? If so, how? Are they abstract or concrete? Are they actual? Are they complete objects? Are they possible objects? How many fictional objects are there? (...) What are their identity conditions? What kinds of attitudes can we have towards them? This volume will be a landmark in the philosophical debate about fictional objects, and will influence higher-level debates within metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

I IN WHAT SENSE CAN VALUE BE ANALYSED? THE present essay is meant to be an instance of philosophical analysis. ...

The essays in this volume have been selected for their contribution to Everett W. Hall's mature philosophical position, which was grounded in careful linguistic analysis and directed toward philosophically clarifying the major areas of culture. He emerges as skillful, meticulous, and patient in his exploration of language as a means of interpreting the categorial structure of the world. Originally published in 1964. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make (...) available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value. (shrink)

An integrated overview of history The volume in this series are arranged topically to cover biography, literature, doctrines, practices, institutions, worship, missions, and daily life. Archaeology and art as well as writings are drawn on to illuminate the Christian movement in its early centuries. Ample attention is also given to the relation of Christianity to pagan thought and life, to the Roman state, to Judaism, and to doctrines and practices that came to be judged as heretical or schismatic. Introductions to (...) each volume tie the articles together for an integrated understanding of the history. Offers insights and understanding The aim of the collection is to give balanced and comprehensive coverage, selected on the basis of the following criteria: original and excellent research and writing; subject matter of use to teachers and students; groundbreaking importance for the history of research; background information for issues and opinions. Understanding the development of early Christianity and its impact on Western history and thought offers valuable insights into the modern world and the present state of Christiantiy. It also provides perspective on comparable developments in other periods of history and reveals human nature in its religious dimension. (shrink)