Although COVID-19 vaccines are free and readily available in the United States, many healthcare workers remain unvaccinated, potentially exposing their patients to a life-threatening pathogen. This paper reviews the ethical and legal factors surrounding patient requests to limit their care teams exclusively to vaccinated providers. Key factors that shape policy in this area include patient autonomy, the rights of healthcare workers, and the duties of healthcare institutions. Hospitals must also balance the rights of interested parties in the context of logistical (...) constraints, equity, and public health considerations. (shrink)

In Plato's dialogues, we find many references to Corybantic rites-rites of initiation performed in honor of the goddess Rhea. But in the dialogue titled Euthydemus, there is more than a mere reference to the rites to be found. Within the context of Socratic dialectic, the ancient rites of the Corybantes are acted out-although veiled and distorted. This is what Carl Levenson argues in his book. Since the Corybantic rites are of the Dionysian/Eleusinian type, Plato gives us a glimpse of (...) the reality of Dionysiac ecstacy. This interesting knowledge of these rites has usually been lost in the academic assertion that the Euthydemus was just a satire on philosophic arguing (in which it is), and hence it has been consigned to a marginal place in Plato's canon. But here Plato is rejecting his abstract theories in favor of intimacy with the reality of the world, of matter and being rather than form. Levenson states that complete immersion in the material substrate of the world is what Plato discovered at the heart of Dionysian ecstacy, and the aim of ecstacy, as Plato said, is to purify the soul of ancient guilt. (shrink)

Principles of legislation.--Principles of the civil code.--Principles of the penal code.

Jeremy Sherman distills Terrence Deacon's breakthrough natural science hypothesis for the emergence of agents and agency, selves and aims in an otherwise aimless universe. The theory cuts a new path through the dualistic spirit vs. mechanism debate, unifying the hard and soft sciences and suggesting new solutions to philosophical mysteries.

We characterize a type of functional explanation that addresses why a homologous trait originating deep in the evolutionary history of a group remains widespread and largely unchanged across the group’s lineages. We argue that biologists regularly provide this type of explanation when they attribute conserved functions to phenotypic and genetic traits. The concept of conserved function applies broadly to many biological domains, and we illustrate its importance using examples of molecular sequence alignments at the intersection of evolution and cell biology. (...) We use these examples to show how the study of conserved functions can integrate knowledge of a trait’s causal effects on fitness and its history of natural selection without invoking adaptation. We also show how conserved function provides a novel basis for addressing objections against evolutionary functions raised by Robert Cummins. (shrink)

Among discrete emotions, basic emotions are the most elemental; most distinct; most continuous across species, time, and place; and most intimately related to survival-critical functions. For an emotion to be afforded basic emotion status it must meet criteria of: (a) distinctness (primarily in behavioral and physiological characteristics), (b) hard-wiredness (circuitry built into the nervous system), and (c) functionality (provides a generalized solution to a particular survival-relevant challenge or opportunity). A set of six emotions that most clearly meet these criteria (enjoyment, (...) anger, disgust, fear, surprise, sadness) and three additional emotions (relief/contentment, interest, love) for which the evidence is not yet quite as strong is described. Empirical approaches that are most and least useful for establishing basic-emotion status are discussed. Basic emotions are thought to have a central organizing mechanism and to have the capacity to influence behavior, thoughts, and other fundamental processes. (shrink)

Although the pedagogy literature indicates significant relationships between cheating intentions and both personal and situational factors, no published research has examined the joint effect of personal moral philosophy and perceived moral intensity components on students’ cheating intentions. Hence, a structural equation model that relates magnitude of consequences, relativism, and idealism to willingness to cheat, is developed and tested. Using data from undergraduate business students, the empirical results provide insight into these relationships and evidence of mediation for magnitude of consequences on (...) idealism and students’ cheating intentions. Implications for educators are offered. (shrink)

In considering the debate about the meaning of ‘disease’, the positions are generally presented as falling into two categories: naturalist, e.g., Boorse, and normativist, e.g., Engelhardt and many others. This division is too coarse, and obscures much of what is going on in this debate. I therefore propose that accounts of the meaning of ‘disease’ be assessed according to Hare’s (1997) taxonomy of evaluative terms. Such an analysis will allow us to better understand both individual positions and their inter-relationships. Most (...) importantly, it will show that it is unlikely that there is a single unique disease-concept at issue. Rather, different authors are, for the most part, considering different concepts. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that free will requires alternative possibilities. Other philosophers deny this. There are plenty of philosophical arguments on both sides of this debate, but here I want to highlight various theological pressures that might push Christians into rejecting the principle of alternative possibilities. In this paper, I explore six cases that might push Christians in that direction: the case of divine foreknowledge, the case of prophecy, the case of the blessed in heaven, the case of Christ's human freedom, (...) the case of Mary's fiat in light of her immaculate conception, and the case of prayers for the past. As I will argue, in each of these cases, given certain other standard theological commitments, it seems that Christians are pushed to admit that the agent in question does indeed act freely but also that he or she did not possess alternative possibilities at the moment of decision. (shrink)

A rigorous, authoritative new anthology which brings together some of the most significant contemporary scholarship on the theory of knowledge Carefully-calibrated and judiciously-curated, this strong and contemporary new anthology builds upon Epistemology: An Anthology, Second Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2008) by drawing a concise and well-balanced selection of higher-level readings from a large, diverse, and evolving body of research. Includes 17 readings that represent a broad and vital part of contemporary epistemology, including articles by female philosophers and emerging thought leaders Organized (...) into seven thoughtful and distinct sections, including virtue epistemology, practical reasons for belief, and epistemic dysfunctions among others Designed to sit alongside the highly-successful anthology of canonical essays, Epistemology: An Anthology, Second Edition (Wiley Blackwell, 2008) Edited by a distinguished editorial team, including Ernie Sosa, one of the most influential active epistemologists Highlights cutting edge methodologies and contemporary topics for advanced students, instructors, and researchers. (shrink)

"Arguing that debates over legitimacy, political violence, freedom, and justice would benefit greatly from cross-tradition theorizing, this book shows how putting analytic and continental political theory in conversation would help us to overcome these intractable problems"--.

The epsilon calculus is a logical formalism developed by David Hilbert in the service of his program in the foundations of mathematics. The epsilon operator is a term-forming operator which replaces quantifiers in ordinary predicate logic. Specifically, in the calculus, a term εx A denotes some x satisfying A(x), if there is one. In Hilbert's Program, the epsilon terms play the role of ideal elements; the aim of Hilbert's finitistic consistency proofs is to give a procedure which removes such terms (...) from a formal proof. The procedures by which this is to be carried out are based on Hilbert's epsilon substitution method. The epsilon calculus, however, has applications in other contexts as well. The first general application of the epsilon calculus was in Hilbert's epsilon theorems, which in turn provide the basis for the first correct proof of Herbrand's theorem. More recently, variants of the epsilon operator have been applied in linguistics and linguistic philosophy to deal with anaphoric pronouns. (shrink)

We have two aims. The main one is to expound the idea of renormalization in quantum field theory, with no technical prerequisites. Our motivation is that renormalization is undoubtedly one of the great ideas—and great successes--of twentieth-century physics. Also it has strongly influenced in diverse ways, how physicists conceive of physical theories. So it is of considerable philosophical interest. Second, we will briefly relate renormalization to Ernest Nagel's account of inter-theoretic relations, especially reduction. One theme will be a contrast between (...) two approaches to renormalization. The old approach, which prevailed from ca. 1945 to 1970, treated renormalizability as a necessary condition for being an acceptable quantum field theory. On this approach, it is a piece of great good fortune that high energy physicists can formulate renormalizable quantum field theories that are so empirically successful. But the new approach to renormalization explains why the phenomena we see, at the energies we can access in our particle accelerators, are described by a renormalizable quantum field theory. For whatever non-renormalizable interactions may occur at yet higher energies, they are insignificant at accessible energies. Thus the new approach explains why our best fundamental theories have a feature, viz. renormalizability, which the old approach treated as a selection principle for theories. That is worth saying since philosophers tend to think of scientific explanation as only explaining an individual event, or perhaps a single law, or at most deducing one theory as a special case of another. Here we see a framework in which there is a space of theories. And this framework is powerful enough to deduce that what seemed “manna from heaven” is to be expected: the good fortune is generic. We also maintain that universality, a concept stressed in renormalization theory, is essentially the familiar philosophical idea of multiple realizability; and that it causes no problems for reductions of a Nagelian kind. (shrink)

This essay develops a framework for understanding what I call the ethics of reflexivity, that is, the norms that govern attitudes and actions with respect to one’s own worth. I distinguish five central aspects of the reflexive commitment to living in accordance with one’s personal ideals: the extent to which and manner in which one regards oneself from an evaluative point of view, the extent to which one cares about receiving the respect of others, the degree to which one interprets (...) one’s personal ideals in an individualistic or collective manner, the degree to which one’s commitment to living in accordance with one’s personal ideals is rigid or flexible, and the worthiness of one’s personal ideals. This framework, I argue, illuminates the nature and moral significance of virtuous and vicious forms of the character trait of pride. (shrink)

One of the most important philosophical topics in the early twentieth century and a topic that was seminal in the emergence of analytic philosophy was the relationship between Kantian philosophy and modern geometry. This paper discusses how this question was tackled by the Neo-Kantian trained philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Surprisingly, Cassirer does not affirm the theses that contemporary philosophers often associate with Kantian philosophy of mathematics. He does not defend the necessary truth of Euclidean geometry but instead develops a kind of (...) logicism modeled on Richard Dedekind's foundations of arithmetic. Further, because he shared with other Neo-Kantians an appreciation of the developmental and historical nature of mathematics, Cassirer developed a philosophical account of the unity and methodology of mathematics over time. With its impressive attention to the detail of contemporary mathematics and its exploration of philosophical questions to which other philosophers paid scant attention, Cassirer's philosophy of mathematics surely deserves a place among the classic works of twentieth century philosophy of mathematics. Though focused on Cassirer's philosophy of geometry, this paper also addresses both Cassirer's general philosophical orientation and his reading of Kant. (shrink)

Two studies tested the hypothesis that certain positive emotions speed recovery from the cardiovascular sequelae of negative emotions. In Study 1, 60 subjects (Ss) viewed an initial fear-eliciting film, and were randomly assigned to view a secondary film that elicited: (a) contentment; (b) amusement; (c) neutrality; or (d) sadness. Compared to Ss who viewed the neutral and sad secondary films, those who viewed the positive films exhibited more rapid returns to pre-film levels of cardiovascular activation. In Study 2, 72 Ss (...) viewed a film known to elicit sadness. Fifty Ss spontaneously smiled at least once while viewing this film. Compared to Ss who did not smile, those who smiled exhibited more rapid returns to pre-film levels of cardiovascular activation. We discuss these findings in terms of emotion theory and possible health-promoting functions of positive emotions. (shrink)

As our civilization careens toward climate breakdown, ecological destruction, and gaping inequality, people are losing their existential moorings. The dominant worldview of disconnection, which tells us we are split between mind and body, separate from each other, and at odds with the natural world, has been invalidated by modern science. Award-winning author, Jeremy Lent, investigates humanity's age-old questions -- Who am I? Why am I? How should I live? -- from a fresh perspective, weaving together findings from modern systems (...) thinking, evolutionary biology, and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism, and Indigenous wisdom. The result is a breathtaking accomplishment: a rich, coherent worldview based on a deep recognition of connectedness within ourselves, between each other, and with the entire natural world. It offers a compelling foundation for a new philosophical framework that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on a flourishing Earth. The Web of Meaning is for everyone looking for deep and coherent answers to the crisis of civilization. -- Amazon. (shrink)

In many evolutionary/functionalist theories, emotions organize the activity of the autonomic nervous system and other physiological systems. Two kinds of patterned activity are discussed: coherence, and specificity. For each kind of patterning, significant methodological obstacles are considered that need to be overcome before empirical studies can adequately test theories and resolve controversies. Finally, links that coherence and specificity have with health and well-being are considered.

Introduction -- Fallibilism -- Contextualism -- Knowledge and reasons -- Justification -- Belief -- The value and importance of knowledge -- Infallibilism or pragmatic encroachment? -- Appendix I: Conflicts with bayesian decision theory? -- Appendix II: Does KJ entail infallibilism?

Quizás sea lícito decir que este Tratado de los Sofismas Políticos es, en alguna medida, el libro síntesis de toda la obra de Jeremías Bentham, porque con demoledora lógica se aplica a mostrar las inconsistencias y falacias de los opositores a la deliberación política, vale decir, al ejercicio de la democracia, en última instancia. Bentham es una figura que espera el reconocimiento de los americanos todos, en la medida en que impulsó con su racionalismo revolucionario (valga la contradicción), la capacidad (...) de todo el continente americano para constituirse como un ámbito de libertad, frente a la opresión colonial europea. Es conocida su correspondencia con grandes figuras de la emancipación americana, y con Bernardino Rivadavia entre nosotros. Todavía no lo hemos ubicado suficientemente en nuestra conciencia ideológica. (shrink)

Physicians place significant weight on the distinction between acts and omissions. Most believe that autonomous refusals for procedures, such as blood transfusions and resuscitation, ought to be respected, but they feel no similar obligation to accede to requests for treatment that will, in the physician’s opinion, harm the patient (e.g., assisted death). Thus, there is an asymmetry. In this paper, we challenge the strength of this distinction by arguing that the ordering of values should be the same in both cases. (...) The reason for respecting refusals is that, in such cases, autonomy outweighs well-being. We argue that the same should be true in request cases, which means that requests should not be denied only due to the treatment being too harmful in the physician’s opinion. Our strategy is to consider and reject a number of arguments for the asymmetrical view, including an appeal to the doing–allowing distinction and positive and negative rights. The duty to respect refusals is still greater than the duty to grant requests on our view, but, by arguing that the ordering of values is the same in both cases, we show that there is less of a distinction in healthcare between requests and refusals than many currently believe. (shrink)

The concept of minimal risk has been used to regulate and limit participation by adolescents in clinical trials. It can be understood as setting an absolute standard of what risks are considered minimal or it can be interpreted as relative to the actual risks faced by members of the host community for the trial. While commentators have almost universally opposed a relative interpretation of the environmental risks faced by potential adolescent trial participants, we argue that the ethical concerns against the (...) relative standard may not be as convincing as these commentators believe. Our aim is to present the case for a relative standard of environmental risk in order to open a debate on this subject. We conclude by discussing how a relative standard of environmental risk could be defended in the specific case of an HIV vaccine trial among adolescents in South Africa. (shrink)

In the ‘analytic tradition’, Hans Sluga wrote thirty years ago in his book Gottlob Frege, there has been a ‘lack of interest in historical questions — even in the question of its own roots. Anti-historicism has been the baggage of the tradition since Frege’ (Sluga, 1980, p. 2). The state of the discussion of Frege among analytic philosophers, Sluga claimed, illustrated well this indifference. Despite the numbers of pages devoted to Frege, there was still, Sluga claimed, little understanding of the (...) sources of Frege’s ideas, his intellectual debts, and the historical circumstances of his thought. Sluga singled out Michael Dummett’s Frege: Philosophy of Language ‘as a paradigm for the failure of analytic philosophers to come to grips with the actual, historical Frege’. In that book, Dummett famously wrote that the logical system that Frege put forward in his 1879 Begriffsschrift ‘is astonishing because it has no predecessors: it appears to have been born from Frege’s brain unfertilized by external influences’ (Dummett, 1981a, p. xxxv) — and Dummett devoted almost none of its 700 pages to the relationship between Frege and his contemporaries. (shrink)

Field Life examines the practice of science in the field in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains of the American West between the 1860s and the 1910s, when the railroad was the dominant form of long-distance transportation. Grounded in approaches from environmental history and the history of technology, it emphasizes the material basis of scientific fieldwork, joining together the human labor that produced knowledge with the natural world in which those practices were embedded. Four distinct modes of field practice, which (...) were shared by different field science disciplines, proliferated during this period—surveys, lay networks, quarries, and stations—and this book explores the dynamics that underpinned each of them. Using two diverse case studies to animate each mode of practice, as well as the making of the field as a place for science, Field Life combines textured analysis of specific examples of field science on the ground with wider discussion of the commonalities in the practices of a diverse array of field sciences, including the earth and physical sciences, the life and agricultural sciences, and the human sciences. By situating science in its regional environmental context, Field Life analyzes the intersection between the cosmopolitan knowledge of science and the experiential knowledge of people living in the field. Examples of field science in the Plains and Rockies range widely: geological surveys and weather observing networks, quarries to uncover dinosaur fossils and archaeological remains, and branch agricultural experiment stations and mountain biological field stations. (shrink)

The first five volumes of the Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham contain over 1,300 letters written both to and from Bentham over a 50-year period, beginning in 1752 (aged three) with his earliest surviving letter to his grandmother, and ending in 1797 with correspondence concerning his attempts to set up a national scheme for the provision of poor relief. Against the background of the debates on the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, to which he made (...) significant contributions, Bentham worked first on producing a complete penal code, which involved him in detailed explorations of fundamental legal ideas, and then on his panopticon prison scheme. Despite developing a host of original and ground-breaking ideas, contained in a mass of manuscripts, he published little during these years, and remained, at the close of this period, a relatively obscure individual. Nevertheless, these volumes reveal how the foundations were laid for the remarkable rise of Benthamite utilitarianism in the early nineteenth century. Bentham’s early life is marked by his extraordinary precociousness, but also family tragedy: by the age of 10 he had lost five infant siblings and his mother. The letters in this volume document his difficult relationship with his father and his increasing attachment to his surviving younger brother Samuel, his education, his interest in chemistry and botany, and his committing himself to a life of philosophy and legal reform. (shrink)

We often hear stories of people in terrible and seemingly intractable situations that are preyed upon by individuals offering empty promises of help. Frequently these cases are condemned as "exploiting the hope" of another. These accusations are made in a range of contexts, including human smuggling, the beauty industry, and unproven medical interventions. This concept is meant to do heavy lifting in public discourse, identifying a specific form of unethical conduct. However, it is poorly understood what is intended to be (...) wrong by exploiting hope, the range of activities that can accurately be captured under this concept, and what should be done about it. Thus, it is an ethical concept that is ripe for extended analysis and discussion. (shrink)

In 1859, Charles Darwin proposed a mechanism for biological evolution in his most famous work, On the Origin of Species. However, Origin makes little mention of humans. Despite this, Darwin thought deeply about humans and in 1871 published The Descent of Man, his influential and controversial book in which he applied evolutionary theory to humans and detailed his theory of sexual selection. February 2021 will mark the 150th anniversay of it's publication. In A Most Interesting Problem, twelve leading anthropologists, biologists, (...) and journalists revisit The Descent. Following the same organization as the first edition of Descent - less the large section on sexual selection -- each author reviews what Darwin wrote in Descent, comparing his words to what we now know now. There are chapters on evidence for human evolution, our place in the family tree, the origins of civilization, human races, intelligence, and sex differences. An introduction by Darwin biolographer and historian Janet Browne provides context for Descent and a conclusion by Science magazine journalist Ann Gibbons looks to the future of the study of human evolution. All the chapters are written with a broad audience in mind. Ultimately, readers learn that Darwin was remarkably prophetic in some of his predictions, such as that the earliest human fossils would be discovered in Africa. But he was wrong in other areas, particularly in regards to variations between the sexes and races. Thus, A Most Interesting Problem is not so much a celebration of Darwin as it is a tribute to how science works, how scientific ideas are tested, and the role of evidence in helping structure narratives of human origins. The reader is left with a view of how far we have come in our quest for understanding human origins, biological variation, behavior, and evolution. (shrink)

v. 1. 1752-76.--v. 2. 1777-80.--v. 3. January 1781 to October 1788.--v. 4. 1788-1793.--v. 5. 1794-1797.--v. 6. January 1798 to December 1801.--v. 7. January 1802 to December 1808.--v. 8. January 1809 to December 1816.--v. 9. January 1817 to June 1820.-- v. 10. July 1820 to December 1821.--v. 11. January 1822 to June 1824.--v. 12. July 1824-June 1828.

This paper argues that, if we are committed to a Pro-choice stance with regard to selective abortion for disability, we will be unable to justify the prohibition of sex-selective abortion (SSA), for two reasons. First, familiar Pro-choice arguments in favour of a woman’s right to select against fetal impairment also support, by parity of reasoning, a right to choose SSA. Second, rejection of the criticisms of selective abortion for disability levelled by disability theorists also disposes, by implication, of the key (...) objections to SSA, as developed, most notably, by feminists. The paper, then, consists of a conditional defence of SSA, under which SSA should be available, and protected by a right, if selective abortion for disability is. Opponents of SSA might respond by conceding additional restrictions on selection against disabled fetuses. It should become clear throughout the paper, however, that any such new restrictions would be unacceptably onerous for women. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: I II III.

Plato is often acknowledged as the first philosophical critic of democracy and his Republic is regularly taken as a paradigm of an anti-democratic work. While it is true that Plato objected to much about the democracy of his own time, Plato’s political theorizing also reveals an interest in improving democratic institutions. This chapter explores three themes in Plato’s thinking about democracy: firstly, Plato's insistence that rulers should be knowledgeable and his claim that most people are politically incompetent (§1); secondly, Plato's (...) criticisms of oratory and the corrupting effects of public rhetoric (§2); thirdly, Plato's use of democratic institutions in the Laws (§3). Once we appreciate these different evaluations of democratic practices, we can see that Plato was not simply ‘anti-democratic’ or ‘pro-democratic’ but thought some democratic practices should be abandoned, some reformed, and some adopted. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to show how William James's thought can help to construct a critical approach to the conceptualization of unexpected destructive events and suggest modes of conceptualization that reduce social injustice. I draw on several interrelated themes in James's thought, including, but not limited to: metaphysical and moral relationalism, the tragedy of choice, and the psychology of selective attention. Specifically, I argue that James provides resources for mounting a criticism of a kind of essentialist thinking (...) about unexpected events; for showing how this essentialism can create social injustice by obfuscating social choices and causing marginalized groups to bear a disproportionate share of social costs; for helping to construct a pluralistic approach to unexpected events that makes transparent the tragic choices laying behind them; and for putting this approach to use in ways that mitigate social injustice. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Of the Principle of Utility Of Principles Adverse to that of Utility Of the Four Sanctions or Sources of Pain and Pleasure Value of a Lot of Pleasure or Pain, How to be Measured Pleasures and Pains, Their Kinds.

This chapter offers an opinionated introduction to higher-order formal languages with an eye towards their applications in metaphysics. A simply relationally typed higher-order language is introduced in four stages: starting with first-order logic, adding first-order predicate abstraction, generalizing to higher-order predicate abstraction, and finally adding higher-order quantification. It is argued that both β-conversion and Universal Instantiation are valid on the intended interpretation of this language. Given these two principles, it is then shown how we can use pure higher-order logic to (...) ask, and begin to answer, metaphysical questions with non-trivial implications. In particular, while we must reject the popular idea that structural differences between sentences correspond to parallel distinctions in the logical structure of extra-linguistic reality, it may still be possible to give a purely logical characterization of objectual aboutness and related notions. (shrink)

Differential privacy (DP) aims to confer data processing systems with inherent privacy guarantees, offering strong protections for personal data. But DP’s approach to privacy carries with it certain assumptions about how mathematical abstractions will be translated into real-world systems, which—if left unexamined and unrealized in practice—could function to shield data collectors from liability and criticism, rather than substantively protect data subjects from privacy harms. This article investigates these assumptions and discusses their implications for using DP to govern data-driven systems. In (...) Parts 1 and 2, we introduce DP as, on one hand, a mathematical framework and, on the other hand, a kind of real-world sociotechnical system, using a hypothetical case study to illustrate how the two can diverge. In Parts 3 and 4, we discuss the way DP frames privacy loss, data processing interventions, and data subject participation, arguing it could exacerbate existing problems in privacy regulation. In part 5, we conclude with a discussion of DP’s potential interactions with the endogeneity of privacy law, and we propose principles for best governing DP systems. In making such assumptions and their consequences explicit, we hope to help DP succeed at realizing its promise for better substantive privacy protections. (shrink)