Philosophy, science, and common sense all refer to propositions--things we believe and say, and things which are true or false. But there is no consensus on what sorts of things these entities are. Jeffrey C. King, Scott Soames, and Jeff Speaks argue that commitment to propositions is indispensable, and each defend their own views on the debate.

On August 30, 2013, the American Political Science Association sponsored a roundtable on political epistemology as part of its annual meetings. Co-chairing the roundtable were Jeffrey Friedman, Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin; and Hélène Landemore, Department of Political Science, Yale University. The other participants were Scott Althaus, Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Mark Bevir, Department of Political Science, University of California at Berkeley; Rogers Smith, Department of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania; (...) and Susan Stokes, Department of Political Science, Yale University. We thank the participants for permission to republish their remarks, which they subsequently edited for clarity. (shrink)

This article seeks to develop theoretical convergences between the science of nostalgia and the science of heroism. We take four approaches in forging a conceptual relationship between these two phenomena. First, we examine the definitions of nostalgia and heroism from scholars, laypeople, and across cultures, noting how the history of defining the two phenomena has shaped current conceptualizations. Second, we demonstrate how nostalgic experiences consist of reminiscences about our own personal heroism and about cultural role models and heroes. A review (...) of heroism research, moreover, shows also that our recall of our heroes and of heroism is tinged with nostalgia. Third, we make linkages between heroism and nostalgia research focusing on functions, inspiration, sociality, and motivation. Nostalgia researchers have illuminated the functions of nostalgia implicating the self, existential concerns, goal pursuit, and sociality. Our review shows that heroism researchers invoke similar categories of hero functionality. Finally, we propose three areas of future research that can profit from the merging of nostalgia and heroism science, involving the mechanisms by which heroism can fuel nostalgia, nostalgia can promote heroic action, and wisdom results from nostalgic reverie. (shrink)

Exercise psychology encompasses the disciplines of psychiatry, clinical and counseling psychology, health promotion, and the movement sciences. This emerging field involves diverse mental health issues, theories, and general information related to physical activity and exercise. Numerous research investigations across the past 20 years have shown both physical and psychological benefits from physical activity and exercise. Exercise psychology offers many opportunities for growth while positively influencing the mental and physical health of individuals, communities, and society. However, the exercise psychology literature has (...) not addressed ethical issues or dilemmas faced by mental health professionals providing exercise psychology services. This initial discussion of ethical issues in exercise psychology is an important step in continuing to move the field forward. Specifically, this article will address the emergence of exercise psychology and current health behaviors and offer an overview of ethics and ethical issues, education/training and professional competency, cultural and ethnic diversity, multiple-role relationships and conflicts of interest, dependency issues, confidentiality and recording keeping, and advertisement and self-promotion. (shrink)

Derek Allen, Richard Boyd, and Alan Gilbert have suggested that Marx’s normative political views should be reconstructed as a sophisticated version of moral consequentialism. This paper investigates whether Marx’s ostensible anti-moralism differs in any interesting way from Mill’s sophisticated utilitarianism plus some Marxist social science. I present an account of the social meaning and implications of moral language and argument, based on Marx’s description of morality as a social practice based on distinctive motives, emotions and sanctions, to explain why Marx (...) would reject moral consequentialism. This account will explain how Marx can consistently reject morality yet retain a normative basis for his social criticism. (shrink)

Peer review is a widely accepted instrument for raising the quality of science. Peer review limits the enormous unstructured influx of information and the sheer amount of dubious data, which in its absence would plunge science into chaos. In particular, peer review offers the benefit of eliminating papers that suffer from poor craftsmanship or methodological shortcomings, especially in the experimental sciences. However, we believe that peer review is not always appropriate for the evaluation of controversial hypothetical science. We argue that (...) the process of peer review can be prone to bias towards ideas that affirm the prior convictions of reviewers and against innovation and radical new ideas. Innovative hypotheses are thus highly vulnerable to being “filtered out” or made to accord with conventional wisdom by the peer review process. Consequently, having introduced peer review, the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses may be unable to continue its tradition as a radical journal allowing discussion of improbable or unconventional ideas. Hence we conclude by asking the publisher to consider re-introducing the system of editorial review to Medical Hypotheses. (shrink)

Background 300 million operations and procedures are performed annually across the world, all of which require a patient’s informed consent. No standardised measure of the consent process exists in current clinical practice. We aimed to define a core outcome set for informed consent for therapy. Methods The core outcome set was developed in accordance with a predefined research protocol and the Core OutcoMes in Effectiveness Trials methodology comprising systematic review, qualitative semi structured interviews, a modified Delphi process and consensus webinars (...) to ratify outcomes for inclusion in the final core outcome set.. Participants from all key stakeholder groups took part in the process, including patients and the public, healthcare practitioners and consent researchers. Results 36 outcome domains were synthesised through systematic review and organised into a consent taxonomy. 41 semi-structured interviews were performed with all consent stakeholders groups. 164 participants from all stakeholder groups across 8 countries completed Delphi Round 1 and 125 completed Round 2. 11 outcomes met the ‘consensus in’ criteria. 6 met ‘consensus in’ all stakeholder groups and were included directly in the final core outcome set. 5 remaining outcomes meeting ‘consensus in’ were ratified over two consensus webinars. 9 core outcomes were included in the final core outcome set: Satisfaction with the quality and amount of information, Patient feeling that there was a choice, Patient feeling that the decision to consent was their own, Confidence in the decision made, Satisfaction with communication, Trust in the clinician, Patient satisfaction with the consent process, Patient rated adequacy of time and opportunity to ask questions. Conclusion This international mixed-methods qualitative study is the first of its kind to define a core outcome set for informed consent for intervention. It defines what outcomes are of importance to key stakeholders in the consent process and is a forward step towards standardising future consent research. (shrink)

There is one critical way we honor great tragedies: by never forgetting. Collective remembrance is as old as human society itself, serving as an important source of social cohesion, yet as Jeffrey Andrew Barash shows in this book, it has served novel roles in a modern era otherwise characterized by discontinuity and dislocation. Drawing on recent theoretical explorations of collective memory, he elaborates an important new philosophical basis for it, one that unveils profound limitations to its scope in relation (...) to the historical past. Crucial to Barash’s analysis is a look at the radical transformations that symbolic configurations of collective memory have undergone with the rise of new technologies of mass communication. He provocatively demonstrates how such technologies’ capacity to simulate direct experience—especially via the image—actually makes more palpable collective memory’s limitations and the opacity of the historical past, which always lies beyond the reach of living memory. Thwarting skepticism, however, he eventually looks to literature—specifically writers such as Walter Scott, Marcel Proust, and W. G. Sebald—to uncover subtle nuances of temporality that might offer inconspicuous emblems of a past historical reality. (shrink)

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the frequency (...) of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

In a recent essay Robert Adams attempted to define a form of divine command ethics that would meet the typical philosophical criticisms of such an ethics. More recently, responding to new criticisms of the theory of meaning assumed in this essay and some details of the system he described there, Adams has redefined his position using the causal theory of meaning. The present essay examines Adam's fundamental position and the main lines of Jeffrey Stout's critique of it, then attempts (...) to assess the success of Adams' latest redefinition of divine command ethics. (shrink)

This paper is a rejoinder to papers by Sabina Lovibond, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Sumner B. Twiss, G. Scott Davis, M. Cathleen Kaveny, and John Kelsay on the author's recent book "Democracy and Tradition". The argument covers a host of topics, ranging from epistemology and methodology to human rights, the common law, and Islamic ethics.

Scott McQuire _Visions of Modernity_ London: Sage Publications, 1998 ISBN 0-7619-5301-9 270 pp.

This article is an examination of the moral complexity of the act of whistleblowing in the context of corporate corruption. Whistleblowing may be a morally admirable act underataken by morally ambiguous agents, but can only be fully understood in context. Using German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s essay “What Does It Mean to Tell the Truth?” This essay will examine how the kind of deception sometimes necessary in whistleblowing cases can be testimony to a larger and more profound truth.

Though he maintained a significant interest in theoretical aspects of measurement, Henry E. Kyburg, Jr. was critical of the representational theory that in many ways has come to dominate discussions concerning the foundations of measurement. In particular, Kyburg (in Savage and Ehrlich (eds) Philosophical and foundational issues in measurement theory, 1992 ) asserts that the representational theory of measurement, as introduced in (Scott and Suppes, Journal of Symbolic Logic, 23:113–128, 1958 ) and developed in (Krantz et al., Foundations of (...) measurment: additive and polynomial representations. Academic Press, 1971 ), cannot account for the measurement of error. The present work examines and responds to this charge. (shrink)

In claiming that 'nature speaks', authors such as Scott Friskics and David Abram implicitly agree that language use is linked to moral considerability, adding only that we need to extend our conception of language to see that non-humans too use it. I argue that the ethical significance of language use derives from its role in dialogue, in which speakers make truth-claims, question and potentially criticise the claims of others, and provide justifications for the claims they raise themselves. Non-human entities (...) (as a contingent matter) seem not to engage in dialogue in this sense, and none of the examples Friskics and Abram offer suggest that they do. Thus the conception of language such authors employ is too weak to support the ethical conclusions they implicitly wish to defend. (shrink)

PC Wars: Politics and Theory in the Academy addresses the very issue of political correctness and the current skirmishes in the culture wars. It includes statements from many of our leading contemporary public intellectuals, including Joan Wallach Scott, Michael Be;rube;, Bruce Robbins, Henry Giroux, and Gerald Graff. The collection marks a watershed in the debate about "pc" in that it presents serious considerations and analyses of the factors, causes, and consequences of the culture wars. Carefully examining the construction of (...) "pc," PC Wars analyses political correctness by focusing on the mass media, class politics, and the ideology of managerial democracy. It places the disputes around "pc" in the context of contemporary developments in critical and cultural theory and the current backlash against theory, manifested in the recent attacks on Marxism, feminism and deconstruction. The book also scrutinizes the undercurrents of anti-intellectualism and anti-professionalism which have tended to create a fertile ground for the "pc" hysteria. Offering much more than slogans and slinging arrows, PC Wars provides a spirited and critical look at the reaction, ideology, and political forces that have coalesced around the term. Contributors: Michael Be;rube;, Reed Way Dasenbrock, Frank Farmer, Henry Giroux, Gerald Graff, Darlene Hantzis and Devoney Looser, John S. Howard and James M. Lang, Tom Lewis, James Neilson, Christopher Newfield, Richard Ohmann, Burce Robbins, Barry Sarchett, Joan W. Scott, Michael Sprinker, Jeffrey Williams. (shrink)

Jeffrey S. Longacre 'After Photography: Deconstructing the Era of the Image' _Film-Philosophy_, vol. 6 no. 39, November 2002.

Sorry that he is no longer here to read it, I consider in this paper Scott Cameron’s discussion of my views questioning the value of the concept of “nature” for environmental philosophy. Scott had suggested, based on arguments from hermeneutics, that although we never have access to a nature independent of our interpretations of it, still the existence of such a nature is necessarily presupposed by all such interpretations. I claim in response that if we replace the (idealist) (...) notion of interpretation by the (materialist) one of practice, that presupposition is no longer necessary: the independence required is built into the notion of practice itself, and need not be seen as a characteristic of the world “outside” of us. (shrink)

Sorry that he is no longer here to read it, I consider in this paper Scott Cameron’s discussion of my views questioning the value of the concept of “nature” for environmental philosophy. Scott had suggested, based on arguments from hermeneutics, that although we never have access to a nature independent of our interpretations of it, still the existence of such a nature is necessarily presupposed by all such interpretations. I claim in response that if we replace the (idealist) (...) notion of interpretation by the (materialist) one of practice, that presupposition is no longer necessary: the independence required is built into the notion of practice itself, and need not be seen as a characteristic of the world “outside” of us. (shrink)

Jeffrey Stout's "Democracy and Tradition" puts forward a complex argument in favor of American democracy as a healthy and legitimate moral and political tradition in itself. Stout does not dwell on the place of his own work in the "pragmatic" approach to the study of religion in the last thirty years. This paper attempts to situate Stout's work in the approach to religion identified with Mary Douglas and Wayne Proudfoot and to suggest some of the consequences for comparative religious (...) ethics of his making that "pragmatic turn.". (shrink)

The late twentieth century has provided both reasons and occasions for reassessing just war theory as an organizing framework for the moral analysis of war. Books by G. Scott Davis, James T. Johnson, and John Kelsay, together with essays by Jeffrey Stout, Charles Butterworth, David Little, Bruce Lawrence, Courtney Campbell, and Tamara Sonn, signal a remarkable shift in war studies as they enlarge the cultural lens through which the interests and forces at play in political violence are identified (...) and evaluated. In his review of the contribution made by these texts, the author focuses on the cohesion of just war theory, the asymmetry between Christian and Islamic attitudes toward holy war, and the need to develop just war theory into a tool adequate to assist in the moral evaluation of violent conflicts within, not just between, nation-states. (shrink)

The late twentieth century has provided both reasons and occasions for reassessing just war theory as an organizing framework for the moral analysis of war. Books by G. Scott Davis, James T. Johnson, and John Kelsay, together with essays by Jeffrey Stout, Charles Butterworth, David Little, Bruce Lawrence, Courtney Campbell, and Tamara Sonn, signal a remarkable shift in war studies as they enlarge the cultural lens through which the interests and forces at play in political violence are identified (...) and evaluated. In his review of the contribution made by these texts, the author focuses on the cohesion of just war theory, the asymmetry between Christian and Islamic attitudes toward holy war, and the need to develop just war theory into a tool adequate to assist in the moral evaluation of violent conflicts within, not just between, nation-states. (shrink)

Molly Farneth’s Hegel’s Social Ethics hearkens back to the tradition of Josiah Royce, which has continued in the work of Richard Bernstein and Jeffrey Stout. At the same time, it reflects the impact of three decades of interpretive work which has offered an alternative to the 19th and early 20th century reading of Hegel as a metaphysical systematizer. In this new reading he was from the beginning a social critic and political theorist who looked to lay the groundwork for (...) post‐Enlightenment vision of the social world as evolving toward one of social cooperation based on mutual recognition. Farneth has developed this reading of Hegel into one of powerful resources for democratic pluralism. (shrink)

Many have written about trope ontology, but relatively few have considered its implications for some of the ontological conditions needed for us to have knowledge. I explore the resources of trope ontology to meet those conditions. With J. P. Moreland, I argue that, being simple, we can eliminate tropes’ qualitative contents without ontological loss, resulting in bare individuators. Then I extend Moreland’s argument, arguing that tropes undermine some of the needed ontological conditions for knowledge. Yet, we do know many things, (...) and trope nominalists presuppose that too. Therefore, I consider three counter-arguments, starting with David Lewis’s rebuttal based on appeal to brute facts. Second, I explore Jeffrey Brower’s recent proposal as a possible solution. Last, I consider Robert Garcia’s recent distinction between module and modifier tropes, to see if it can be of assistance. I conclude, however, that trope nominalism cannot preserve some of the needed ontology to have knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Modern Biblical Criticism as a Tool of Statecraft (1700–1900) by Scott W. Hahn and Jeffrey L. MorrowSteven C. SmithModern Biblical Criticism as a Tool of Statecraft (1700–1900) by Scott W. Hahn and Jeffrey L. Morrow (Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Academic, 2020), 312 pp.Almost anyone who has suffered through a course in biblical studies at a secular (or, increasingly so, Christian) university, read a book, or (...) heard a lecture from one of its scholarly progenies is acquainted with the litany of hermeneutical absolutes. Among the factum historicum are the following certainties: the Enlightenment rescued the Bible from the Dark Ages; the Old Testament was shaped out of the mythical clay of Hellenism; Israel's priesthood was a lamentable development that hijacked an earlier, socially oriented love-of-neighbor religion, replacing it with its bloodthirsty, sacrificial cult; the Documentary Hypothesis is not merely a theory, but the scientific truth of how the Pentateuch emerged; one must separate the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith; Peter and Paul clashed over their dueling Christianities; and above all, historical criticism is the only reliable lens by which the Bible is to be studied.In Modern Biblical Criticism as a Tool of Statecraft (1700–1900), Hahn and Morrow expose such positivisms as the outflow of Europe's secularized universities over these centuries. Not only did politically motivated institutions seek to diminish the theological truths of Scripture (and sadly, were often successful at it), but they eventually repurposed the Bible as "a work of historical fiction," such that the Sacred Page was "to be studied like other ancient myths and fairy tales; it is one fairy tale among many" (24). The authors present a thoroughly researched and meticulously detailed study of the period, and throughout the book amply demonstrate that the aforementioned tropes (and numerous others), no matter how often or how confidently recited, are merely one slant on "the story of biblical criticism" in the modern age.Taking their lead from the lead of Pope Benedict XVI, Hahn and Morrow provide a much-needed critique of historical biblical exegesis and its "appearance of quasi-scientific certainty."1 These salient words of the biblical-theologian Pope, articulated in a variety of contexts (e.g., Verbum Domini), provide the jumping-off point for this robust three-hundred-page voyage. And it is a journey through a divided and secularized Europe, with notable stops in England, France, and above all, Germany. This "divided" Europe, the authors explain, was not a result of the Protestant [End Page 985] Reformation, nor of the so-called "war of religions" that sprang from it—no. The divisions run much deeper still. Drawing upon Andrew Jones's important Before Church and State, Hahn and Morrow rightly lament the societal competition that developed within late medieval Christendom between church and state.2Building upon Jones's work, the authors rightly stress that there indeed existed "a unified medieval worldview wherein what we might think of as temporal authorities and spiritual authorities were united in a single purpose—the extension of the kingdom of God—and this was the background that unified Christendom" (3). As Jones point out, this earlier period of European history "was a world not of the religious and the secular, but of the New Testament and the Old, of virtue and vice, grace and law.... It was an integral vision which included all of societal reality."3 Sadly, the reality of "sacramental kingdoms," in which there lived a reciprocal respect and vision of unity between throne and alter, was torn asunder long before the 1700s, the time at which the present volume commences. Over time, this formerly unified European world gave way to the very complicated, deeply skeptical, and highly politicized world of nation-states. And biblical criticism (along with many other worthy and creative endeavors), became deeply mired in "statecraft."Here, it is worth mentioning that the book should be approached as the rightful heir to an earlier volume (which involved one of its authors, Hahn), Politicizing the Bible.4 While Modern Biblical Criticism may be intelligently read upon its own merits, the reader would do well to pick up the earlier... (shrink)