This is a critical examination of Quine's "Two Dogmas" that leaves nothing much of Quine's paper still standing. It concludes with a short study of a bit of bad work in philosophy that results from following the doctrines of "Two Dogmas".

At the 5th International Conference on Priorities in Health Care in Wellington, New Zealand, 2004, one resonating theme was that for priority setting to be effective, it has to include clinicians in both decision making and the enforcement of those decisions. There was, however, a disturbing undertone to this theme, namely that doctors, in particular, were unjustifiably thwarting good systems of prioritising scarce healthcare resources. This undertone seems unfair precisely because doctors may, and in some cases do, feel obligated by (...) their professional ethics to remain uninvolved either in deciding priorities and in some cases in enforcing them. I will argue that the professional role of a doctor ought not be considered inconsistent with the role of a priority setter or enforcer, as long as one crucial element is in place, a rationally coherent and broadly justifiable regime for prioritising healthcare. Given this I conclude both that prioritisation and doctoring are not incompatible under certain conditions, and that the education of healthcare professionals ought to include material on distributive justice in healthcare. (shrink)

Describes six basic value systems, explains why ethical questions become complicated, and stresses the importance of a personal system of values.

First published in 1984, Cultural Analysis is a systematic examination of the theories of culture contained in the writings of four contemporary social theorists: Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas. This study of their work clarifies their contributions to the analysis of culture and shows the converging assumptions that the authors believe are laying the foundation for a new approach to the study of culture. The focus is specifically on culture, a concept that remains subject to (...) ambiguities of treatment, and concentrates on questions concerning the definition and content of culture, its construction, its relations with social conditions, and the manner in which it may be changing. The books demonstrates how these writers have made strides towards defining culture as an objective element of social interaction which can be subjected to critical investigation. (shrink)

This article attempts to think through the logic and distinctiveness of the early Royal Society's position as a metropolitan knowledge community and chartered corporation, and the links between these aspects of its being. Among the knowledge communities of Restoration London it is one of the best known and most studied, but also one of the least typical and in many respects one of the least coherent. It was also quite unlike the chartered corporations of the City of London, exercising almost (...) none of their ordinary functions and being granted very limited power and few responsibilities. I explore the society's imaginative and material engagements with longer-established corporate bodies, institutions and knowledge communities, and show how those encounters repeatedly reshaped the early society's internal organization, outward conduct and self-understanding. Building on fundamental work by Michael Hunter, Adrian Johns, Lisa Jardine and Jim Bennett, and new archival evidence, I examine the importance of the city to the society's foundational rhetoric and the shifting orientation of its search for patronage, the development of its charter, and how it learned to interpret the limits and possibilities of its privileges through its encounters with other chartered bodies, emphasizing the contingent nature of its early development. (shrink)

To approach philosophy as a way of working on the self means to begin not with the experience it clarifies and the subject it discovers, but with the acts of self‐transformation it requires and the subjectivity it seeks to fashion. Commenting on the variety of spiritual exercises to be found in the ancient schools, Pierre Hadot remarks that: Some, like Plutarch’s ethismoi, designed to curb curiosity, anger or gossip, were only practices intended to ensure good moral habits. Others, particularly the (...) meditations of the Platonic tradition, demanded a high degree of mental concentration. Some, like the contemplation of nature as practiced in all philosophical schools, turned the soul toward the cosmos, while still others—rare and exceptional—led to a transfiguration of the personality, as in the experiences of Plotinus. We also saw that the emotional tone and notional content of these exercises varied widely from one philosophical school to another: from the mobilization of energy and consent to destiny of the Stoics, to the relaxation and detachment of the Epicureans, to the mental concentration and renunciation of the sensible world among the Platonists.1 While successfully applied to ancient philosophy,2 this approach has not been widely exploited in the history of philosophy more broadly. There is, however, at least one study of medieval metaphysics in these terms,3 and there are some important discussions of early modern Stoicism and Epicureanism.4 And a recent study of Hume shows the fruitfulness of the approach for Enlightenment philosophy.5 It is all the more surprising then that there seems to have been no serious attempt to approach Kant’s moral philosophy in this way. (shrink)

It is well-established that the experience of nature produces an array of positive benefits to mental well-being. Much less is known about the specific attributes of green space which produce these effects. In the absence of translational research that links theory with application, it is challenging to design urban green space for its greatest restorative potential. This translational research provides a method for identifying which specific physical attributes of an environmental setting are most likely to influence preference and restoration responses. (...) Attribute identification was based on a triangulation process invoking environmental psychology and aesthetics theories, principles of design founded in mathematics and aesthetics, and empirical research on the role of specific physical attributes of the environment in preference or restoration responses. From this integration emerged a list of physical attributes defining aspects of spatial structure and environmental content found to be most relevant to the perceptions involved with preference and restoration. The physical attribute list offers a starting point for deciphering which scene stimuli dominate or collaborate in preference and restoration responses. To support this, functional definitions and metrics—efficient methods for attribute quantification are presented. Use of these research products and the process for defining place-based metrics can provide (a) greater control in the selection and interpretation of the scenes/images used in tests of preference and restoration and (b) an expanded evidence base for well-being designers of the built environment. (shrink)

Sensitivity to the extra-linguistic context, as exhibited by indexical and demonstrative expressions, and sensitivity to the linguistic context, as exhibited by, for example, anaphoric uses of third person pronouns, are regularly regarded as different and independent phenomena. The data on indexicals, demonstratives, and third person pronouns, however, call for a more unified notion of context and of context sensitivity. This paper aims to develop such a unified picture by generalizing the notion of anaphora to encompass extra-linguistic context dependency and generalizing (...) the notion of a structured discourse context so that contexts contain antecedents for expressions that refer to entities in the extra-linguistic context. (shrink)

Rather than a history of seventeenth-century natural law, then, this chapter offers an outline of several different contextual uses of the language of natural law, as it was used in formulating the intellectual architecture for rival constructions of political and religious authority.

Contemporary philosophy of mind has tended to make the believer disappear. In response, Matt Boyle and Pamela Hieronymi have argued that believing is an act or activity, not a mental state. I argue that this response fails to fully critique contemporary accounts of believing. Such accounts assume that states of believing are particulars; with semantic properties; that we attend to in reflection and act on in inference; and with a rich causal life of their own. Together, these assumptions leave no (...) room for the believer in an account of believing. But these assumptions are not entailed by the idea that believing is a mental state. Careful reflection on other kinds of states helps us see how to put the believer back in the heart of our account of believing. (shrink)

Whether there is a general moral obligation to obey the law, often referred to as ‘political obligation’, is an enduring question in contemporary legal and political philosophy. Theories are continually being formulated, criticized, and reformulated as theorists attempt to settle this issue. However, there yet remains no general consensus as to whether any theory successfully answers this question in either the affirmative or the negative. I propose the legal doctrine of quasi-contract as a candidate for making sense of this persistent (...) issue. While the duty to reciprocate and the principle of reasonable expectations each falls short when independently advanced as a theory of political obligation, quasi-contract, which combines reciprocity, reasonable expectations, and additional moral considerations, is able to establish a satisfactory account of political obligation. (shrink)

This paper discusses Marcel Mauss's paper on body techniques. It argues that Mauss's account of the acquisition of bodily capacities and deportments makes it unnecessary to think of the body as any kind of unity, for example, by opposing it to 'mind' or 'spirit', which have their own techniques.

In _Confucius Beyond the_ Analects, Michael Hunter challenges the standard view of the _Analects_ as the earliest and most authoritative source of the teachings.

Im ersten Teil dieses Aufsatzes versuche ich, die fundamentalen Irrtiimer in der heutigen Leibnizliteratur, die zu einer fatalistischen Auslegung der Leibnizschen Theorie der Essentia geführt haben, aufzuspüren. Der zweite Teil enthält eine genauere Darstellung der Wesenslehre. Sie wird am Schluß gegen zwei zunachst plausibel erscheinende Einwände verteidigt.

In his paper ‘Gesture Projection and Cosuppositions,’ Philippe Schlenker argues that co-verbal gestures convey not at-issue content by default and in particular, that they trigger conditional presuppositions. In this commentary, I take issue with both of these claims. Conditional presuppositions do not supply a systematic means for capturing the semantic contribution of a co-verbal gesture. Some gestures appear to contribute content inside of a negation when their associated speech content is likewise embedded; in other cases, co-verbal gestures arguably contribute unconditional (...) content to the global level. When this happens, we can infer what might look like a conditional presupposition, but this inference follows naturally from general principles already at work in purely verbal discourse and does not justify the claim that gesture content is contributed to a conditional presupposition. Problems exposed in the discussion of conditional presuppositions show that we are not yet in a position to make a general claim about the at-issue status of co-verbal gestures. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmotions influence cognitive processes involved in memory. While some research has suggested that cognitive scope is determined by affective valence, recent models of emotion–cognition interactions suggest that motivational intensity, rather than valence, influences these processes. The present research was designed to clarify how negative affects differing in motivational intensity impact memory for centrally or peripherally presented information. Experiments 1 & 2 found that, relative to a neutral condition, high intensity negative affect enhances memory for centrally presented information. Experiment 3 replicated (...) this effect using another high intensity negative affect. Experiment 4 extended this by finding that, relative to a neutral condition, low intensity negative affect enhanced memory for peripherally presented information. Finally, in Experiment 5, the effects of sadness and threat on scope of memory were directly compared, finding that threat narrowed scope of... (shrink)

New genetic technologies can not only be used to ‘cure’ many significant healthcare conditions, but at least potentially they can be used in ways that either change the user’s identity significantly and/or cause a different person to come into existence. It might be argued that these technologies present a challenge for Luck Egalitarians – the essence of this challenge being the claim that, given a commitment towards luck neutralisation, a Luck Egalitarian ought to be committed to equalisation of talent using (...) this technology, which appears repugnant. In the present contribution I will argue that this challenge is not as powerful as it appears, and that Luck Egalitarianism has sufficient resources to resist a commitment to equalisation of talent of a repugnant kind. Furthermore it provides us a useful framework to consider the introduction of technologies of this nature. (shrink)

Authorship has proven a magnetic topic for literary studies and is now identified as an index of the current state of literary history and theory. The significance of this topic stems from a characteristic that literary criticism shared with the other human sciences: its drive to adopt a reflexive and self-critical posture towards its own central objects and concepts. By reflecting on authorship, criticism aspires not just to describe a literary phenomenon; it also wishes to bring to light the conditions (...) that make this phenomenon possible and thinkable.At the heart of recent studies of authorship, no matter how historical their aspiration, we find a certain quasi-philosophical dialectic or play between authorship and its material conditions, between the author as an exemplary consciousness and the unconscious determinations that bring this consciousness into being and speak through it. The thematic name for this play is the ‘formation of the subject.’. Our purpose is to provide a historical and theoretical argument against this conception of authorship and to outline an alternative approach. David Saunders and Ian Hunter teach in the Division of the Humanities, Griffith University, in Brisbane, Australia. Saunders is the author of Law and Authorship , and is coauthor with Hunter and Dugald Williamson of Book Sex: Obscenity Law and the Policing of Pornography . Hunter is the author of Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education . His current project is a study of aesthetics as an ethos or way of life. (shrink)

While not an explicit claim of Hegel’s, this paper aims to use his analysis of ‘Conscience’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit to demonstrate that the conflict betweendifferent moral judgments is morally necessary. That is, rather than being the unfortunate result of ‘hard’ cases, I argue that moral conflict is a necessary condition for the possibility of duty. Grasping the moral ground of moral conflict, I contend, allows us to understand why such conflicts arise, how and why they become entrenched into (...) ‘moral issues’ and what our duties are in such cases. Thus, I aim to articulate both the moral necessity and dutiful resolution of seemingly intractable moral conflicts. (shrink)

For more than 60 years, Jim Lambek has been a profoundly inspirational mathematician, with groundbreaking contributions to algebra, category theory, linguistics, theoretical physics, logic and proof theory. This Festschrift was put together on the occasion of his 90th birthday. The papers in it give a good picture of the multiple research areas where the impact of Jim Lambek's work can be felt. The volume includes contributions by prominent researchers and by their students, showing how Jim Lambek's ideas keep inspiring upcoming (...) generations of scholars. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the usefulness of pragmatism as a framework within which to develop the theological application of emergentist theory. I consider some philosophical issues relevant to the recent revival of interest, across various disciplines, in the concept of emergence and clarify some of the conceptual issues at stake in the attempts to formulate the philosophical position of emergentism and to apply it theologically. After highlighting some major problems arising from the main existing ways of formulating emergentism, (...) I build on the work of Sami Pihlström, outlining a less problematic, alternative proposal. I attempt to show that the philosophical problems can be circumvented by an appeal to the pragmatist tradition, which is a useful philosophical framework within which to develop an emergentist theory fit for theological application. (shrink)

In a famous passage of the third book of the Georgics Vergil describes two bulls fighting over a formosa iuuenca; the bull which is at first beaten goes off to recover and prepare, returning to attack again its arrogant opponent. The description of the bull's training blends the toughness of early man, the playfulness of a young animal, the suffering of the exclusus amator and the preparations of a human athlete: ergo omni cura uiris exercet et inter dura iacet pernox (...) instrato saxa cubili frondibus hirsutis et carice pastus acuta, 230 et temptat sese atque irasci in cornua discit arboris obnixus trunco, uentosque lacessit ictibus, et sparsa ad pugnam proludit harena. (shrink)

With an estimated one billion smartphones producing over 5 petabytes of data a day, the spatially aware mobile device has become a near ubiquitous presence in daily life. Cogent, excellent research in a variety of fields has explored what the spatial data these devices produce can reveal of society, such as analysis of Foursquare check-ins to reveal patterns of mobility for groups through a city. In such studies, the individual intentions, motivations, and desires behind the production of said data can (...) become lost through computational aggregation and analysis. In this commentary, I argue for a rethinking of the epistemological leap from individual to data point through a seating of the reflexive, self-eliciting subject as an object for spatial big data research. To do so, I first situate current research on spatial big data within a computational turn in social sciences that relies overly on the data produced as a stand-in for the subject producing said data. Second, I argue that a recent shift within geography and cognate disciplines toward viewing spatial big data as a form of spatial media allows for study of the sociotechnical processes that produce modern assemblages of data and society. As spatial media, the spatial big data created through mobile device use can be understood as the data of everyday life and as part of the sociotechnical processes that produce individuals, data, and space. Ultimately, to understand the data of everyday life, researchers must write thick descriptions of the stories we tell ourselves about the data we give off to others. (shrink)

A number of philosophers in recent times have employed arguments to show that there is no morally relevant difference between killing a patient and allowing that patient to die in those circumstances where the outcome is virtually identical and where death is preventable, at least for a significant time. From his perspective as both a philosopher and a clinician, Grant Gillett has rejected such general and abstract arguments in the light of the intuitions and moral perceptions available to clinicians and (...) those who care for the terminally ill. I argue that his strategy fails, is massively question‐begging, and that his appeal to the notion of ‘moral particularism’, far from being an alternative to cogent philosophical argument, actually supports the very position he has attempted to discredit. (shrink)

Along some trails in the Adirondack Mountains are stone cairns created by hikers who, as they walk by, add a stone to the pile. In some places the stones are artfully placed and in others they seem...

This paper presents the origin, development and trajectory of our modes of experiencing beings as presented in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy. It begins by detailing the historical development of our subjective experience of beings leading up to its current arrangement within the modern, technological worldview, and then proceeds to grapple with Heidegger’s recommended pathway out of our technological mode of experience into a more primordial one. I close with some critical reflections on Heidegger’s leap out of technological ‘lived-experience’ (Erleben) into (...) a more authentic ‘experience’(Erfahren) of beings. (shrink)

This paper presents the origin, development and trajectory of our modes of experiencing beings as presented in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy. It begins by detailing the historical development of our subjective experience of beings leading up to its current arrangement within the modern, technological worldview, and then proceeds to grapple with Heidegger’s recommended pathway out of our technological mode of experience into a more primordial one. I close with some critical reflections on Heidegger’s leap out of technological ‘lived-experience’ (Erleben) into (...) a more authentic ‘experience’(Erfahren) of beings. (shrink)

Hegel famously identifies Protestant conscience and its corresponding state as reflecting the unity of ethical and religious principles, thereby bringing into actuality the truth of human spirit. However, he also reminds us that it is vital to free states that the Church remain divided, rather than unifying into one sect. Thus, he affirms a secular state above religious conflict, but explicitly takes sides in one such conflict, out of the interest philosophy has in the development of the Protestant nation-state. In (...) this paper, I resolve this tension by articulating Hegel’s account of philosophy’s interest in historical movements in general, and of the historical relationship between religion and the state in particular. Focusing on his account of the contemporary struggle between Catholicism and Lutheranism,I then develop an account of philosophy’s interest in religious conflict. I close with some schematic remarks on the ‘Hegelianism’ of some recent Catholic movements. (shrink)

Hegel famously identifies Protestant conscience and its corresponding state as reflecting the unity of ethical and religious principles, thereby bringing into actuality the truth of human spirit. However, he also reminds us that it is vital to free states that the Church remain divided, rather than unifying into one sect. Thus, he affirms a secular state above religious conflict, but explicitly takes sides in one such conflict, out of the interest philosophy has in the development of the Protestant nation-state. In (...) this paper, I resolve this tension by articulating Hegel’s account of philosophy’s interest in historical movements in general, and of the historical relationship between religion and the state in particular. Focusing on his account of the contemporary struggle between Catholicism and Lutheranism,I then develop an account of philosophy’s interest in religious conflict. I close with some schematic remarks on the ‘Hegelianism’ of some recent Catholic movements. (shrink)