A disjunctivist conception of acting for reasons is introduced by way of showing that a view of acting for reasons must give a place to knowledge. Two principal claims are made. 1. This conception has a rôle analogous to that of the disjunctive conception that John McDowell recommends in thinking about perception; and when the two disjunctivist conceptions are treated as counterparts, they can be shown to have work to do in combination. 2. This conception of acting for reasons safeguards (...) the connection between considerations that move us to act in particular ways and considerations that favour our acting in particular ways. (shrink)

This chapter replies to arguments, advanced by Gonzalo Rodriguez–Pereyra, for thinking that the intuitions that have inspired theories of truthmaking cannot be accommodated without commitment to truth-making entities. It contains a suggestion about why, even if there are no entities that make propositions true, we should nonetheless be apt to think of truth as grounded. The advocates of truthmakers engage sometimes in a specifically ontological enquiry of a wide-ranging sort, sometimes in the project of understanding truth. Inasmuch as Rodriguez–Pereyra's manner (...) of defending a truthmaker principle makes connections with both of these projects, the objections to his account made in the chapter rebound on them both. (shrink)

There is a puzzle concerning the essences of fundamental entities that arises from considerations about essence, on one hand, and fundamentality, on the other. The Essence-Dependence Link (EDL) says that if x figures in the essence of y, then y is dependent upon x. EDL is prima facie plausible in many cases, especially those involving derivative entities. But consider the property negative charge. A negatively charged object exhibits certain behaviors that a positively charged object does not: it moves away from (...) other negatively charged objects, towards positively charged objects, etc. It is commonly thought that negative charge disposes its bearer to move away from other negatively charged objects, towards positively charged objects, etc. But if negative charge is fundamental, then no other entities—including the property positive charge—can figure in its essence. We thus have a prima facie puzzle: How can we say anything interesting about the essences of fundamental entities without running afoul of EDL? In this paper, I present and discuss the consequences of EDL for the debate between causal essentialists and quidditists about properties, and propose solutions to the puzzle. (shrink)

Properties seem to play an important role in causal relations. But philosophers disagree over whether or not properties play their causal or nomic roles essentially. Causal essentialists say that they do, while quidditists deny it. This article surveys these two views, as well as views that try to find a middle ground.

This book is a concise overview of the relevance and application of moral philosophy to all those involved in business and employment. It is the ideal introduction for beginning students of applied philosophy, business or management ethics.

According to current definitions of civil disobedience, drawn from the work of John Rawls and Carl Cohen, eco-saboteurs are not civil disobedients because their disobedience is not a form of address and/or does not appeal to the public's sense of justice or human welfare. But this definition also excludes disobedience by a wide range of groups, from labor activists to hunt saboteurs, either because they are obstructionist or because they address moral concerns other than justice or the public weal. However (...) earlier definitions of civil disobedience were not so narrow. I review the development of the current definition and the circumstances of its acceptance. I argue that the circumstances which help to explain the attractiveness of the Rawls/Cohen formulations in the 1970s are no longer applicable and that the question of civil disobedience should be revisited. I suggest a wider definition according to which at least some types of eco-sabotage would be civil disobedience. (shrink)

The Federal Trade Commission has an important role to play in the governmental oversight of mobile health apps, ensuring consumer protections from unfair and deceptive trade practices and curtailing anti-competitive methods. The FTC’s consumer protection structure and authority is outlined before reviewing the recent FTC enforcement activities taken on behalf of consumers and against developers of mhealth apps. The article concludes with identification of some challenges for the FTC and modest recommendations for strengthening the consumer protections it provides.

Many analytic philosophers of mind take for granted a certain conception of causality. Assumptions deriving from that conception are in place when they problematize what they call mental causation or argue for physicalism in respect of the mental. I claim that a different conception of causality is needed for understanding many ordinary causal truths about things which act, including truths about human, minded beings — sc. rational beings who lead lives.

Aristotle is traditionally read as dividing animal souls into three parts, while dividing human souls into four parts (a rational part, with theoretical and pr...

Book synopsis: The causal theory of action is widely recognized in the literature of the philosophy of action as the "standard story" of human action and agency—the nearest approximation in the field to a theoretical orthodoxy. This volume brings together leading figures working in action theory today to discuss issues relating to the CTA and its applications, which range from experimental philosophy to moral psychology. Some of the contributors defend the theory while others criticize it; some draw from historical sources (...) while others focus on recent developments; some rely on the tools of analytic philosophy while others cite the latest empirical research on human action. All agree, however, on the centrality of the CTA in the philosophy of action. The contributors first consider metaphysical issues, then reasons-explanations of action, and, finally, new directions for thinking about the CTA. They discuss such topics as the tenability of some alternatives to the CTA; basic causal deviance; the etiology of action ; teleologism and anticausalism; and the compatibility of the CTA with theories of embodied cognition. Two contributors engage in an exchange of views on intentional omissions that stretches over four essays, directly responding to each other in their follow-up essays. As the action -oriented perspective becomes more influential in philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science, this volume offers a long-needed debate over foundational issues. (shrink)

In this introduction to the edited volume, we briefly describe some of the current challenges faced by public mental health initiatives, at both the national and global level. We also include several general remarks on interdisciplinary methodology in public mental health ethics, followed by short descriptions of the chapters included in the volume.

Book synopsis: The essays in this volume explore current work in central areas of philosophy, work unified by attention to salient questions of human action and human agency. They ask what it is for humans to act knowledgeably, to use language, to be friends, to act heroically, to be mortally fortunate, and to produce as well as to appreciate art.

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV.

Relative to gender, race, and class, age relations are undertheorized. Yet age, like gender, is routinely accomplished in daily life. Grandmothers and adult daughters simultaneously do age and gender as they support one another in managing paid work and domestic responsibilities. Drawing on ethnographic data and interviews with 90 single mothers and 30 grandmothers in Russia, I explore intergenerational negotiations for support. Both single mothers and grandmothers are held accountable for doing gendered age, but labor and marriage markets tip the (...) balance in favor of single mothers. Single mothers re-create youth privilege, finding their lives simpler with a babushka. Some grandmothers embrace newer discourses of femininity, challenging assumptions about age and family status that oblige them to perform care work. But most grandmothers do whatever they can to help daughters, feeling more dependent than ever on them because of the uncertainties of capitalism and the state’s retrenchment. I contribute to theories of age and gender intersectionality by making visible both single mothers’ youth privilege and grandmothers’ unpaid, often devalued, care work. (shrink)

Despite the conceptual problems in identifying the placebo effect, an increasing number of multidisciplinary inquiries rest on the assumption that there is a distinct class of effects, placebo effects. In this chapter, I argue against this assumption. I present cases and characterizations of the placebo effect as offered in the literature, and argue that the latter are subject to insurmountable problems. Moreover, I argue that identification of placebo effects as such is not useful for the three main purposes offered in (...) the literature. I then offer suggestions for why it may remain intuitive that some effects are placebo effects and close by noting the potential benefits of ultimately explaining away these intuitions. (shrink)

In his Advertisement to the incomplete first edition of the Treatise, Hume justifies his decision to publish the first two Books separately on the grounds that “the subjects of the understanding and passions make a compleat chain of reasoning by themselves”.1 The Advertisement to Book 3 qualifies its predecessor slightly, stating that Book 3 is “in some measure independent of the other two and requires not that the reader shou’d enter into all the abstract reasonings contain’d in them”. Precisely which (...) abstract lines of reasoning were complete by the end of Book 2, Hume does not say. As many commentators read T 1.4.6, personal identity seems a good candidate.... (shrink)

Because pluralism at its heart is an epistemic problem in philosophy, what is at issue in discussions of philosophical pluralism are the definitions of who counts as a knower and what counts as knowledge. In this philopoetic article, in which philosophic claims are interwoven with poetic and narrative recountings of my own experiences with racist patriarchal violence in the discipline, I argue for an epistemic approach to creating pluralism in philosophy through the satisfaction of seven conditions. These conditions require, at (...) minimum, that we consider the importance of hiring multiply-positioned persons; that we critique patriarchy and white hegemonic discourses; that we rethink assumptions about epistemic credibility; and that we dispense with “perverse dialogues.” Finally, we must encourage “true dialogue” and create a “new dialogic” in philosophy. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to utilize virtue ethics as the appropriate paradigm by which to improve health care delivery to transgender individuals. Health disparities for transgender individuals occur external to the medical environment as well as internal to the medical profession. A commitment to virtue ethics should be undertaken to improve the care to transgender individuals.In this manuscript I call on virtue ethics to address the intersectionality of such environmental structures for the promotion of the good of the (...) patient as per the telos of medicine by Edmund Pellegrino, consistent with the eudaimonia of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Virtue ethics is the appropriate paradigm for which bioethics can address the framework that poses barriers to access to health care and maintenance of health through a lack of competent, knowledgeable and compassionate providers for the transgender population.Further, I pose that ascribing to improving the care to the individual transgender patient involves a call to action to overcome social ecological spheres of influence that are affecting the health of the individual and thereby the population of the transgender individuals as a whole. Through virtue ethics, the virtuous physician improves the health of the transgender individual and the character of themselves and the profession of medicine. (shrink)

In this paper, I write about nurses of colour who have made significant contributions to nursing, yet are actively ignored in traditional nursing textbooks related to colonized thinking. One consequence of this is that when we think about comparing the disparities of the past to the present day, we see that we have not made much of a difference. The disparity is still huge. I call on all of us as nurses to challenge ourselves to think beyond the box of (...) colonized thought to what we know is true. (shrink)

In what follows, I offer some friendly amendments to Potter’s psychotherapeutic model—‘the hinge narrative’ (HN)—designed to help bipolar patients cultivate self-trust. My primary contribution is to suggest an alliance between narrative theory and feminist phenomenological theories of embodiment. I argue that these projects are mutually supporting in both the metaphysical and therapeutic project of constituting a rich moral self, that is, a self who has self-trust and thereby satisfying relationships with others. I also register a slight disagreement with Potter concerning (...) the effect that bipolar illness has on agency. Potter claims that with conventional narratives patients have difficulty perceiving .. (shrink)

The heavy drinking of alcohol remains primarily a hegemonically masculine ritual worldwide. Yet scholarship has undertheorized women’s practices in shaping the boundaries of masculine rituals, including drinking. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 151 interviews with single mothers, married mothers, nonresident fathers, and grandmothers from diverse class backgrounds, I demonstrate that Russian women perform extensive invisible management labor in attempting to produce responsible men. Constrained by a starkly unequal gender division of domestic labor, wives and mothers engage in (...) varied “patriarchal bargains” as they shape men’s drinking practices, co-producing hegemonic masculinity. Whereas in the Soviet period women also managed men’s drinking, today new gender strategies have emerged. More women are held accountable to a collusive femininity involving both accommodation and resistance, upholding men’s drinking privileges only if breadwinning occurs. As women perform invisible labor, they end up reproducing the conditions that demand this labor from them in the first place. Some women embrace an alternative femininity by becoming single mothers and refusing to manage men’s drinking, especially when men fail as breadwinners. Theorizing collusive and alternative femininities, as well as women’s invisible labor, advances our knowledge of how multiple femininities shape, and may in time change, hegemonic masculinity. (shrink)

Drawing upon the concept of thirdspace (Soja 1996), this article extends sociocultural theorizations of space in relation to alternative educational programs: programs designed to re-engage youth who have been pushed out of mainstream schools. Snapshots of educational programs, provided by ethnographic research gathered in the United States, Australia, and Canada, foreground the contradictions inherent in these alternative spaces: on one hand, the possibilities obtained for youth through participation, and on the other, the production of these programs through displacement. Alternative educational (...) programs expose the tensions between a democratic ideal of engaging all young people in excellent and equitable public schools and a neo-liberal economic rationality that currently fuels the ?sorting machine? function of compulsory schooling. (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to show how the science of biology has been influenced by ethical, religious, social, cultural and philosophical beliefs as to the nature of life and our human place in the natural world. It follows that there are accounts of theories and investigations from those of Aristotle to research in molecular biology today. These have been selected to illustrate the theme and there is no intention to present a comprehensive history of biology. It is suggested (...) that ethical beliefs in particular have a greater influence in biology than in other sciences, such as physics and chemistry, and this is because biology includes the study of ourselves and involves us in consideration of the value and purpose of life. Attitudes to non-human life are also coloured by ethical beliefs and though some philosophers, for example Descartes, thought that only human beings were capable of thought and feeling the general view has always been that animals were sentient. Our treatment of animals and our attitudes toward them have also been conditioned by religious views as to the position of humans in relation to the natural world. (shrink)

Describes the life and accomplishments of the scientist whom many scholars believe is both America's greatest philosopher and the father of American psychology.

In this work, Joshua Hochschild presents the semantic principles of Cajetan's understanding of analogy, arguing that they should be understood on their own terms and not as a commentary on Aquinas despite the inevitable comparisons between the two thinkers. In the first three chapters, Hochschild argues convincingly that Cajetan's discussion is aimed to answer specific questions that were occasioned by John Duns Scotus's arguments against analogy and not solely as an attempt to interpret Aquinas. Hochschild summarizes Scotus's arguments as objections (...) to the use of analogy in scientific reasoning, which his opponents thought must be used in order for metaphysics to remain a science . More specifically, Scotus argues that only a univocal treatment of being could preserve such reasoning.In chapter 4, Hochschild argues that Aquinas does not provide an answer to Scotus's challenge, although a Thomistic answer could be formulated based on his writings . Despite this charitable admission, however, Hochschild appears to gainsay any such solution by claiming the following: "The proposed rule that analogy involves a common res significata and diverse modi significandi does not help us explain why some analogical terms can be used in syllogisms without causing the fallacy of equivocation" . As an example, Hochschild cites the analogical use of. (shrink)