The application of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in healthcare have immense potential to improve the care of patients. While there are some emerging practices surro...

Quantum mechanics tells us that states involving indistinguishable fermions must be antisymmetrized. This is often taken to mean that indistinguishable fermions are always entangled. We consider several notions of entanglement and argue that on the best of them, indistinguishable fermions are not always entangled. We also present a simple but unconventional way of representing fermionic states that allows us to maintain a link between entanglement and non-factorizability.

Lindquist et al. provide a compelling summary of the brain bases of the onset of emotion. Their conclusions, however, are constrained by typical fMRI techniques that do not assess a key ingredient in emotional experience – timing. We discuss the importance of timing in theories of emotion as well as the implications of neural temporal dynamics for psychological constructionism.

Developing a Center for Teaching Excellence: A Case Study Using the Integrated Readiness Matrix builds on the 2015 text, Integrating Pedagogy and Technology: Improving Teaching and Learning in Higher Education with a focus on teaching in higher education. Developing a Center for Teaching Excellence is premised on our contention in the first book that, while individual faculty members can independently begin to use the IRM to improve their pedagogical and technological skills in their content areas, an organizational structure is needed (...) to sustain ongoing improvement. In addition, while the first book provided a primer on learning theory as it relates to pedagogy, Developing a Center for Teaching Excellence plumbs this topic more deeply from the perspective of the college instructor. Further, the second book is dedicated to demonstrating how the IRM can be institutionalized as the foundation for providing the structure and support to faculty and how they can help shape centers for teaching excellence by becoming more familiar with relevant learning theories and related pedagogical and technological approaches. (shrink)

(2001). Commerce, Character and Civil Society: Critiques of Capitalism during the Early Industrial Period. The European Legacy: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 251-264.

In discussions of the probabilistic argument from evil, some defenders of theism have recently argued that evil has no evidential force against theism. They base their argument on the claim that there is no reason to think that we should be able to discern morally sufficient reasons which God presumably has for permitting the evil which occurs. In this paper I try to counter this argument by discussing factors which suggest that we should generally be able to discern why God (...) permits evil events. I close by suggesting that the theist use the evidential force which evil does have as a reason to question her understanding of the divine attributes. (shrink)

While the literature in business ethics abounds with philosophical analyses, perspectives from religious thinkers are curiously underrepresented. What religious analysis has occured has often been moralistic in tone, more fit to the pulpit than the classroom or the boardroom. In the three essays that follow, presented originally at a panel at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion in 1989, ethicists from the Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Jewish traditions analyze a case study familiar to many who teach and (...) research in business ethics — the Consolidated Foods Case. Each author shows how a particular religious tradition might react to the case. The authors show how insights from their traditions would affect corporation's moral deliberations about policy. Specific policy recommendations are offered to CEO John Bryan. (shrink)

In a recent issue of Faith and Philosophy, Stephen Davis argues that it is rational for supernaturalists, though not for naturalists, to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ in (roughly) the sense of an event which happened to Jesus in which Jesus, though he had truly died, was restored to life and consciousness and after which his living body left the tomb. After making some clarifications regarding supernaturalism and the concept of a miracle, I argue that Davis has not (...) shown this. My case against Davis rests essentially on two claims: (1) we cannot today reconstruct what the resurrection involved because there is no clear, historically reliable account of what the resurrection was thought to be by those who directly experienced the Easter event; and (2) we do not have sufficient evidence to make it rational to believe that the resurrection is part of a pattern of nonnatural events in which God has acted for similar ends, yet belief that there is such a pattern is needed if belief in the resurrection in Davis’ sense is to be rational. (shrink)

To approach the many challenges involved in the notion of engineering concepts, it is important to have a clear idea of the starting point – the concepts that people use in their everyday lives, in conversations and in expressing beliefs, desires, intentions and so forth. The first Section of this chapter introduces evidence that I have accumulated over the last many years concerning the flexibility, context-dependence, and vagueness of such common concepts. The concept engineer needs to understand the structure of (...) the “raw material” with which she is working. In Section 2, I summarise some results concerning the amount of individual variation that exists within a single relatively homogenous population of individuals, both in what examples are considered most typical of a category, and in what properties are considered most central to a category (Hampton & Passanisi, 2016). The demonstration of a significant degree of reliable variation in responses to these questions, that is stable over time, illustrates the potential for conceptual engineering interventions to affect individuals’ concepts. Concepts are rarely fixed or uniformly understood in the same way. I then discuss the different ways in which concepts track the world, and I speculate about how different conceptual domains are governed by different criteria of validity or acceptability. This reflection will lead to Section 3 in which I summarise some results from recent research (Thorne, Quilty-Dunn, Smortchova, Shea, & Hampton, 2021), investigating for the first time how people view the value of different familiar concepts. Knowing how people appraise concepts will be a key to developing ideas for improving the reliability and validity of the concepts that they commonly use. A final section contains some (largely speculative) discussion about the implications of work in psychology of concepts for the project of conceptual engineering. (shrink)

I delineate four problems of evil encountered by Christian traditional theists (those who believe that God is all good, all knowing, and all powerful), and I present reasons for thinking that they have no good responses to these problems. Then I delineate important features of process metaphysics and discuss how this metaphysics solves the problems of evil. As conceived by process theists, God is all‐good and all‐knowing and has the greatest power any one being could have, but is not all‐powerful. (...) This God is related to the universe in such a way that the features of the world that generate the problems of evil are features to be expected rather than anomalies that require explanation, as they are for traditional theists. I also point out other features of the world that are anomalies for Christian traditional theists, but entirely to be expected by process theists. (shrink)

Introduction: image ethics -- Harnessing the visual: from illustration to ekphrasis -- From visible to invisible: Spenser's Aprill and messianic ethics -- Looking for ethics in Spenser's Faerie queene -- "To look, but with another's eyes": translating vision in A midsummer night's dream -- The ethics of temporality in Measure for measure -- "Ocular proof" and the dangers of the perceptual faith -- "Disliken the truth of your own seeming": visual and ethical truth in The winter's tale.

Realism about computation is the view that whether or not a particular physical system is performing a particular computation is at least sometimes a mindindependent feature of reality. The caveat ’at least sometimes’ is necessary here because a realist about computation need not believe that all instances of computation should be realistically construed. The computational theory of mind presupposes realism about computation. If whether or not the human nervous system implements particular computations is not a natural fact about the world (...) that is independent of whether we represent it as doing so, then the computational theory of mind fails to naturalise the mind. Realism about computation is also presupposed by attempts to use computational principles such as Landauer’s Principle to dispel Maxwell’s Demon. Realism about computation has been challenged by Hilary Putnam and John Searle among others. Various arguments have been put forward purporting to show that any physical system of sufficient complexity trivially implements all computations. Ladyman et al. offer a precisification and general proof Landauer’s Principle. In order to do this they present an analysis of what it is for a physical process to implement a logical transformation. In this paper, their analysis is explained and its implications for realism about computation and the use of Landauer’s Principle in foundational debates is assessed. (shrink)

In 1975 the Clarendon Press at Oxford published Peter Nidditch's edition of John Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding. In his Introduction Nidditch says that his edition “offers a text that is directly derived, without modernization, from the early published versions; it notes the provenance of all its adopted readings ; and it aims at recording all relevant differences between these versions”. As Nidditch goes on to acknowledge, the “relevant differences” were many, “requiring several thousand registrations both in the case (...) of material variants and in the case of formal variants ”. The textual history of Locke's Essay is extremely complicated. While there is no manuscript of the first edition of the book, there were four editions in Locke's lifetime, each new one containing extensive and significant revisions, as well as a posthumous edition published shortly after the author's death. There was a translation into French made with Locke's cooperation and published in 1700, and a Latin translation came out a year later. Nevertheless, Nidditch managed to record all the material variants in footnotes to the text, in a way that makes it fairly easy to track the changes that Locke made to successive editions of the book, and to locate points at which judgements had to be made as a critical text was established on the basis of the chosen copy text. Sometimes a critical edition succeeds in completely changing the way that a text is read. Peter Laslett's 1960 edition of Locke's Two Treatises of Government is a good example. Nidditch's edition of the Essay did not have that kind of very dramatic effect on Locke scholarship. Rather, it made it possible for those without direct access to all the early editions to engage in careful, historically sensitive studies of Locke's account of human understanding. The result was a slow revolution in Locke studies that continues to shed new light on even the most familiar aspects of the Lockean philosophy. (shrink)

A detailed account of certain traits of intellectual character—the epistemic virtues—and of their relation to the responsibility for one's beliefs.

Truth-talk exhibits certain features that render it philosophically suspect and motivate a deflationary account. I offer a new formulation of deflationism that explains truth-talk in terms of semantic pretense. This amounts to a fictionalist account of truth-talk but avoids an error-theoretic interpretation and its resulting incoherence. The pretense analysis fits especially well with deflationism’s central commitment, and it handles truth-talk’s unusual features effectively. In particular, this approach suggests an interesting strategy for dealing with the Liar paradox. This version of deflationism (...) has advantages over the formulations currently available in the literature, mainly because it offers a more satisfying account of the generalizing role deflationary views take as truth-talk’s central function. Explaining the notion of truth in terms of pretense generates some special concerns, but none we cannot address through careful consideration of how pretense operates in truth-talk and of the attitudes instances of pretending involve. (shrink)

What big questions and large‐scale narratives give coherence to the history of science? From the late 1970s onward, the field has been transformed through a stress on practice and fresh perspectives from gender studies, the sociology of knowledge, and work on a greatly expanded range of practitioners and cultures. Yet these developments, although long overdue and clearly beneficial, have been accompanied by fragmentation and loss of direction. This essay suggests that the narrative frameworks used by historians of science need to (...) come to terms with diversity by understanding science as a form of communication. The centrality of processes of movement, translation, and transmission is already emerging in studies of topics ranging from ethnographic encounters to the history of reading. Not only does this approach offer opportunities for crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline that are all too easily taken for granted; it also has the potential for creating a more effective dialogue with other historians and the wider public. (shrink)

Nietzsche criticizes Stoicism for overstating the significance of its ethical ideal of rational self-sufficiency and for undervaluing pain and passion when pursuing an unconditional acceptance of fate. Apparent affinities between Stoicism and Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially his celebration of self-mastery and his pursuit of amor fati, lead some scholars to conclude that Nietzsche cannot advance these criticisms without contradicting himself. In this article, I narrow the target and scope of Nietzsche’s complaints against Stoicism before showing how they follow from his other (...) philosophic commitments. I suggest that the first line of criticism follows from his denial of teleology and his skepticism toward moral values’ descriptive objectivity. I then suggest that the second line of criticism follows from Nietzsche’s account of overcoming as bestowing contributory value upon pain and suffering. Explaining Nietzsche’s criticisms of Stoicism in this way substantially qualifies similarities between his philosophy and that of Stoicism while absolving him of the charge of inconsistency. (shrink)

What big questions and large‐scale narratives give coherence to the history of science? From the late 1970s onward, the field has been transformed through a stress on practice and fresh perspectives from gender studies, the sociology of knowledge, and work on a greatly expanded range of practitioners and cultures. Yet these developments, although long overdue and clearly beneficial, have been accompanied by fragmentation and loss of direction. This essay suggests that the narrative frameworks used by historians of science need to (...) come to terms with diversity by understanding science as a form of communication. The centrality of processes of movement, translation, and transmission is already emerging in studies of topics ranging from ethnographic encounters to the history of reading. Not only does this approach offer opportunities for crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline that are all too easily taken for granted; it also has the potential for creating a more effective dialogue with other historians and the wider public. (shrink)

As an alternative to using the concepts of emotion, fear, anger, and the like as scientific tools, this article advocates an approach based on the concepts of core affect and psychological construction, expanding the domain of inquiry beyond “emotion”. Core affect is a neurophysiological state that underlies simply feeling good or bad, drowsy or energised. Psychological construction is not one process but an umbrella term for the various processes that produce: (a) a particular emotional episode's “components” (such as facial movement, (...) vocal tone, peripheral nervous system change, appraisal, attribution, behaviour, subjective experience, and emotion regulation); (b) associations among the components; and (c) the categorisation of the pattern of components as a specific emotion. (shrink)

A definitive and authoritative guide to a vibrant and growing discipline in current philosophy, The Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Philosophy of Medicine presents an overview of the issues facing contemporary philosophy of medicine, the research methods required to understand them and a trajectory for the discipline's future. -/- Written by world leaders in the discipline, this companion addresses the ontological, epistemic, and methodological challenges facing philosophers of medicine today, from the debate between evidence-based and person-centered medicine, medical humanism, and gender (...) medicine, to traditional issues such as disease, health, and clinical reasoning and decision-making. Practical and forward-looking, it also includes a detailed guide to research sources, a glossary of key terms, and an annotated bibliography, as well as an introductory survey of research methods and discussion of new research directions emerging in response to the rapid changes in modern medicine. -/- “Philosophy needs medicine', Hillel Braude argues, 'to become more relevant'. By showing how modern medicine provides philosophers with a rich source of material for investigating issues facing contemporary society, The Bloomsbury Companion to Contemporary Philosophy of Medicine introduces the opportunities medicine offers philosophers together with the resources and skills required to contribute to contemporary debates and discussions. (shrink)

It has been claimed that (1) computer professionals should be held responsible for an undisclosed list of “undesirable events” associated with their work and (2) most if not all computer disasters can be avoided by truly understanding responsibility. Programmers, software developers, and other computer professionals should be defended against such vague, counterproductive, and impossible ideals because these imply the mandatory satisfaction of social needs and the equation of ethics with a kind of altruism. The concept of social needs is debatable (...) with no one possessing the authority to impose their version of them. Similarly, the notion of “positive responsibility” is difficult to apply, does not effectively change computing practice, and confuses good (i.e., efficient) computer engineering with good (i.e. moral) computer engineering. (shrink)

Based on the results of open ended interviews with managers in a variety of organizational positions, moral questions encountered in everyday managerial life are described. These involve transactions with employees, peers and superiors, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. It is suggested that managers identify transactions as involving personal moral concern when they believe that a moral standard has a bearing on the situation and when they experience themselves as having the power to affect the transaction. This is the first in (...) a research series of three papers. (shrink)

When HMS Beagle made its first landfall in January 1832, the twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin set about taking detailed notes on geology. He was soon planning a volume on the geological structure of the places visited, and letters to his sisters confirm that he identified himself as a ‘geologist’. For a young gentleman of his class and income, this was a remarkable thing to do. Darwin's conversion to evolution by selection has been examined so intensively that it is easy to forget (...) that the most extraordinary decision he ever made was to devote his life to the study of the natural world by becoming a geologist. It is only slightly less astonishing that he should have decided to align his work with Charles Lyell's controversial programme of geological reform, which had almost no followers in England. (shrink)

This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the entire career of one of Britain's greatest men of letters. It sets in biographical and historical context all of Hume's works, from A Treatise of Human Nature to The History of England, bringing to light the major influences on the course of Hume's intellectual development, and paying careful attention to the differences between the wide variety of literary genres with which Hume experimented. The major events in Hume's life (...) are fully described, but the main focus is on Hume's intentions as a philosophical analyst of human nature, politics, commerce, English history, and religion. Careful attention is paid to Hume's intellectual relations with his contemporaries. The goal is to reveal Hume as a man intensely concerned with the realization of an ideal of open-minded, objective, rigorous, dispassionate dialogue about all the principal questions faced by his age. (shrink)