Ethics & Behavior, Volume 22, Issue 1, Page 42-43, January-February 2012.

Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), now also known as Dissociative Iden- tity Disorder, raises many questions about the nature of persons, the goals of treatment, the suggestibility of patients, and the reliability of defendant reports of their own mental states. These issues become crucial when courts need to decide whether or not to punish a person with MPD who has committed a crime. This paper will explore that issue and propose a test of when people with MPD should be held criminally (...) responsible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 157-159 [Access article in PDF] Constructing Persons:The Psychopathology of Identity Stephen R. L. Clark Keywords identity, legal fictions, materialism, psychopathology. Steve Matthews argues that the criteria proposed by Stephen Behnke and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong for establishing personal identity in cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) are flawed. Neither brain identity nor memory convergence are adequate grounds for ascribing identity, even in (...) the absence of DID. Someone suffering from DID is no less responsible than a drunkard for the crimes she commits when not in her right—or at least her usual—mind, and perhaps no more responsible than someone suffering from some other mental disorder. We may decide to punish someone suffering from DID for her crimes only when she and her presumed alter both share a brain (as obviously they do) and might—at least after therapy—have memories in common, and only when the alternate personality that led to the crime is herself sane. But we should not pretend to ourselves that this judgment rests upon a clear and uncontentious notion of identity.It may be that Matthews still shares too much of his opponents' attitude: namely, that there is some matter of fact about identity, or at least some fact about the central principles by which we ascribe or recognize identity. This, at first sight, is the force of his counterexamples: that the Behnke/Sinnott-Armstrong criteria give counterintuitive results and so cannot exactly map the notion that we have in mind. Just so Socrates was able to prove that Justice did not consist in Paying One's Debts, because we would all at once acknowledge that it was not Just (or Right) to restore his sword to a homicidal maniac (or at least that there were real doubts about who it was that really owned the sword). But neither Socrates' nor Matthews' conclusion need be referred to any simple fact. It would not be sensible to say that the maniac had a right to have his sword, or that its keeper had a duty to return it, because we recognize implicitly that the very point of Justice is to do Good. Correspondingly, maybe the real effect of Matthews's counterexamples is to remind us what the point of Judgment is. Is there any matter of fact about identity, or is identity simply a way of saying who it is that should now be held responsible? Joe is not to be held responsible because he is the same person as the one who committed the crime: he is reckoned the same person because he is the one who is here now to be held responsible. That is what it is to be the same person: to be held responsible for what is personally done. [End Page 157]Someone who is not a person at all is not the same person as anyone (although they may be the same creature). And a person is a creature who holds herself responsible, or can do so: who has memories and anticipations to which she lays claim, appropriates as her own. This in turn is possible because (or so it seems) she has acquired the necessary words and customs: because she sees people being held responsible she can also hold herself responsible—or sometimes disclaim all responsibility. She will not always be allowed to escape all blame or credit, merely because her memories are of a self that no longer makes much sense to her, nor even because she has no memories at all of what was done. But this need not be because she is objectively the very same person as the sometime agent; rather, the person she is taken to be is constructed by the legal and moral attitudes of those who judge her. Those attitudes are not necessarily determinate: how exactly the ordinary rules apply in novel cases may be a matter of decision rather than discovery. The connections that ordinarily ground or specify identity are not robust enough to rely upon in DID patients (that, after all, is the trouble). We have to make... (shrink)

Ethics & Behavior, Volume 21, Issue 3, Page 261-262, May-June 2011.

Undergraduate students with no prior classroom instruction in mathematical logic will benefit from this evenhanded multipart text by one of the centuries greatest authorities on the subject. Part I offers an elementary but thorough overview of mathematical logic of first order. The treatment does not stop with a single method of formulating logic; students receive instruction in a variety of techniques, first learning model theory (truth tables), then Hilbert-type proof theory, and proof theory handled through derived rules. Part II supplements (...) the material covered in Part I and introduces some of the newer ideas and the more profound results of logical research in the twentieth century. Subsequent chapters introduce the study of formal number theory, with surveys of the famous incompleteness and undecidability results of Godel, Church, Turing, and others. The emphasis in the final chapter reverts to logic, with examinations of Godel's completeness theorem, Gentzen's theorem, Skolem's paradox and nonstandard models of arithmetic, and other theorems. Unabridged republication of the edition published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York, 1967. Preface. Bibliography. Theorem and Lemma Numbers: Pages. List of Postulates. Symbols and Notations. Index. (shrink)

Veeraswamy, JD; Gogineni, Babu As part of the Adopt a Dalit Village Project the following awareness programs were organized to help bring the Dalits of Ravulapally out of a life of superstition and to point them to a life of scientific temper. This was done through various activities, all of which were aimed to provide an overall boost to the human development of the community, by involving them in their own growth, in such a manner as to build capacity and (...) capability within the community. (shrink)

This Husserlian transcendental-phenomenological investigation of interkinaesthetic affectivity first clarifies the sense of affectivity that is at stake here, then shows how Husserl’s distinctive approach to kinaesthetic experience provides evidential access to the interkinaesthetic field. After describing several structures of interkinaesthetic-affective experience, I indicate how a Husserlian critique of the presupposition that we are “psychophysical” entities might suggest a more inclusive approach to a biosocial plenum that includes all metabolic life.

This investigation explores the methodological implications of choosing an unusual example for phenomenological description (here, a bodily awareness practice allowing spontaneous bodily shifts to occur at the leading edge of the living present); for example, the matters themselves are not pregiven, but must first be brought into view. Only after preliminary clarifications not only of the practice concerned, but also of the very notions of the “body” and of “protentionality” is it possible to provide both static and genetic descriptions of (...) the phenomena in question, leading to concluding meditations on the differences between an “integrating” consciousness engaged in a project of knowing and an “improvisational” consciousness open to radical transformation. In the end, however, the Urzeitigung in which what is protended is simply “more time” holds good as the invariant governing the deep structure of both of these styles of consciousness. (shrink)

In Return to Reason, Stephen Toulmin argues that the potential for reason to improve our lives has been hampered by a serious imbalance in our pursuit of ...

The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox is a controversial discourse, rich with facts and observations gathered by one of the most erudite minds of our ...

Stephen Toulmin argues that the potential for reason to improve our lives has been hampered by a serious imbalance in our pursuit of knowledge. The centuries-old dominance of rationality has diminished the value of reasonableness. Toulmin issues a powerful call to redress the balance between rationality and reasonableness.

"Biophilia" is the term coined by Edward O. Wilson to describe what he believes is humanity's innate affinity for the natural world. In his landmark book Biophilia, he examined how our tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes might be a biologically based need, integral to our development as individuals and as a species. That idea has caught the imagination of diverse thinkers. The Biophilia Hypothesis brings together the views of some of the most creative scientists of our time, (...) each attempting to amplify and refine the concept of biophilia. The variety of perspectives -- psychological, biological, cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic -- frame the theoretical issues by presenting empirical evidence that supports or refutes the hypothesis. Numerous examples illustrate the idea that biophilia and its converse, biophobia, have a genetic component: fear, and even full-blown phobias of snakes and spiders are quick to develop with very little negative reinforcement, while more threatening modern artifacts -- knives, guns, automobiles -- rarely elicit such a response people find trees that are climbable and have a broad, umbrella-like canopy more attractive than trees without these characteristics people would rather look at water, green vegetation, or flowers than built structures of glass and concrete The biophilia hypothesis, if substantiated, provides a powerful argument for the conservation of biological diversity. More important, it implies serious consequences for our well-being as society becomes further estranged from the natural world. Relentless environmental destruction could have a significant impact on our quality of life, not just materially but psychologically and even spiritually. (shrink)

In this article, from the 2009 Oxford University Press collection Epistemic Value, I criticize existing accounts of epistemic normativity by Alston, Goldman, and Sosa, and then offer a new view.

What does it mean to think of philosophy in the condition of modernism, in which its relation to its past and future has become a relevant problem? This book argues that the writings of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard are best understood as responsive (each in their own way) to such questions. Through detailed analysis of these authors' most influential texts, Stephen Mulhall reorients our sense of the philosophical work each text aims to accomplish, engendering a critical dialogue between them (...) from which the elements of a new conception of philosophy might emerge. (shrink)

Transnational corporations have become actors with significant political power and authority which should entail responsibility and liability, specifically direct liability for complicity in human rights violations. Holding TNCs liable for human rights violations is complicated by the discontinuity between the fragmented legal/political structure of the TNC and its integrated strategic reality and the international state system which privileges sovereignty and non-intervention over the protection of individual rights. However, the post-Westphalian transition—the emergence of multiple authorities, increasing ambiguity of borders and jurisdiction (...) and blurring of the line between the public and private spheres—should facilitate imposing direct responsibility on transnational firms. Mechanisms for imposing direct responsibility on TNCs are considered including voluntary agreements and international law. However, I conclude that a hybrid public-private regime which relies on non-hierarchical compliance mechanisms is likely to be both more effective and consistent with the structure of the emerging transnational order. (shrink)