The Modes of Scepticism is one of the most important and influential of all ancient philosophical texts. The texts made an enormous impact on Western thought when they were rediscovered in the 16th century and they have shaped the whole future course of Western philosophy. Despite their importance, the Modes have been little discussed in recent times. This book translates the texts and supplies them with a discursive commentary, concentrating on philosophical issues but also including historical material. The book will (...) be of interest to professional scholars and philosophers but its clear and non-technical style makes it intelligible to beginners and the interested layman. (shrink)

This study examined cancer patients’ perceived emotional and informational support from a variety of interpersonal and media sources. We recruited patients from cancer patient association websites and online cancer forums and asked them to report to what extent they received support from interpersonal and media sources. Patients rated professional sources and personal sources as nearly equal sources of emotional support; however, professional sources were rated as significantly greater sources of informational support. Although family and oncologists were the most mentioned interpersonal (...) sources of support, they were also the most mentioned disappointing sources. Of the media sources, online interaction sources were rated as nearly equivalent sources of emotional support as interpersonal sources. That patients perceived emotional support, not only informational support, from various media sources is promising since interpersonal sources can be disappointing to some patients. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on sentimentalism – the view that morality is based on sentiment – in particular, the sentiment of sympathy. Sentimentalism was historically articulated in opposition to two positions: Hobbesian egoism, in which morality is based on self-interest; and Moral Rationalism, which held that morality is based on reason alone. The Sentimentalists challenged both views, arguing that there is more to what motivates human beings than simple self-interest and that reason alone is insufficient to motivate our actions, including our (...) moral actions. The philosophies of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith are considered. The discussion then turns to sympathy, moral realism, moral virtue, and psychological realism. (shrink)

This essay is a rejoinder to comments on Uneasy Virtue made by Onora O'Neill, John Skorupski, and Michael Slote in this issue. In Uneasy Virtue I presented criticisms of traditional virtue theory. I also presented an alternative – a consequentialist account of virtue, one which is a form of ‘pure evaluational externalism’. This type of theory holds that the moral quality of character traits is determined by factors external to agency (e.g. consequences). All three commentators took exception to this account. (...) Therefore, the bulk of my response focuses on defending the externalist account of virtue presented in the final chapters of Uneasy Virtue. (shrink)

This is the text of the Lindley Lecture for 2015 given by Julia Annas, an American philosopher.

Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST), an influential life-span theory, suggests that older adults prefer persuasive messages that appeal to emotionally-meaningful goals over messages that appeal to knowledge-related goals, whereas younger adults do not show this preference. A mixed-factorial experiment was conducted to test whether older adults (≥65 years) differ from younger adults (25–45 years) in their preference for emotionally-meaningful appeals over knowledge-related appeals, when appeals are clearly developed in line with SST. For older adults we found the expected preference for emotionally-meaningful (...) appeals for cancer centers but not for grocery stores and travel organizations. As expected, in most cases, younger adults did not show a preference. Implications for SST-based communication research and for practice are discussed. (shrink)

Evidence from a University of Zimbabwe oral history project suggests that many rural women in colonial Rhodesia played an active role in undermining patriarchal customs which they experienced as oppressive. These women defied family norms by choosing their own marriage partners, prioritizing the formal education of their daughters and finding ways to generate income to secure greater degrees of autonomy. This study compliments other research which depicts women's primary form of resistance to be moving from rural to urban areas, by (...) showing what options some women exercised while remaining within rural society. (shrink)

As the term "family values" achieves prominence in the rhetoric of political debate, the social issues at the heart of today's political controversies deserve to be studied in depth. This volume brings together a group of philosophers, political scientists, and legal scholars to explore a wide range of specific topics dealing with the legal, ethical, and political dimensions of familial relationships. Topics addressed include the rights of unwed fathers, the nature of children's autonomy, children's rights to divorce their parents, parental (...) rights with respect to medical treatment and religious education of children, surrogate parenting, same-sex parenting, and single-parent families. Collectively, the essays point out that many contemporary issues pertaining to the having and raising of children pose genuinely hard choices for public policy makers, for those who make and enforce the laws, and for citizens who would like to engage in informed and critical democratic debate on these issues. (shrink)

This paper focuses on an underappreciated issue that dreams raise for moral evaluation: is immorality possible in dreams? The evaluatiotial internalist is committed to answering ‘yes.’ This is because the internalist account of moral evaluation holds that the moral quality of a person's actions, what a person does, her agency in any given case is completely determined by factors that are internal to that agency, such as the person's motives and/or intentions. Actual production of either good or bad effects is (...) completely irrelevant to the moral evaluation of that agency. Since agency can be expressed in a dream, the internalist is committed to dream immorality. Some may take this as a reductio of evaluational internalism, but whether or not this is the case the issue reveals what such a theory is committed to. In this paper I explore the significance of dreams to morality, and argue that the absurdity of dream immorality supports an account of moral evaluation with an externalist component, rather than a purely internalist account of moral evaluation. (shrink)

In the Stoics we find a combination of two perspectives which are commonly thought to conflict: the embedded perspective from within one's social context, and the universal perspective of the member of the moral community of rational beings. I argue that the Stoics do have a unified theory, one which avoids problems that trouble some modern theories which try to unite these perspectives.

This article seeks to discern how, in spite of our fallenness, we can come to desire what is good. Judging desire and vision to be inter­dependent faculties, it finds that human reason alone is incapable of generating ‘good’ desire. Rather, desire must be transformed gradually and in relation to human vision. To this end, and drawing on James Alison and Iris Murdoch, particular practices are offered whose strength lies in focusing less on altering the objects than the quality of human (...) vision and desire. (shrink)

Este trabajo aborda algunos de los últimos registros de Rubén Darío, para señalar cómo su obra socava la modernidad latinoamericana, más allá de cómo se ha entendido y se ha practicado tradicionalmente, incluso por él mismo, suturando mundos que seguimos sin consolidar.

The Evrazijstvo movement was an intellectual current which recognized the Revolution of 1917 as a fateful event and conceived itself as a third way for Russia between individualism and Soviet Communism. At the philosophical level Evrazijstvo was an extension of the Russian Idea. Basing himself on the principle of All-Unity Karsavin put his concept of the symphonic personality to work in critically referring to the philosophical concepts and methodological approaches then current in Europe. The Evrazijstvo idea was later to be (...) reduced to the idea of the political power of ideocracy, an ideology of dictatorship and power, which raised sympathies for the strong state of the Soviet dictatorship, thus failing to provide a real alternative to the latter. (shrink)

This article analyzes the similarity of the revolutions of 1917–1918 with earlier revolutions in Russia and Germany. Several common characteristics are noted: “theatricality”, the connection of politics with Bohemianism, and politics’ concealed connection with art. The revolution presents a theatre stage on which representatives of the Boheme play their dreams out in politics. Furthermore, the article investigates methodological pluralism, which constitutes the philosophical foundation of Bohemianism. Finally, the author distinguishes two types of Bohemian politicians: the first type, a “fantasist, dreamer, (...) poet,” is represented by Kurt Eisner, whereas the other type, that of a “multi-souled artist” is represented by Fyodor Stepun. (shrink)

IntroductionThe assisted reproductive technology field deals with consistent and predictable gaps in knowledge. Expressing lack of knowledge with a sentence like “I don’t know” can be challenging for doctors. This study examined physicians’ negative epistemic disclaimer “non lo so” in Italian ART doctor-couple interactions. In particular, it aimed to reveal specific features of “non lo so”: function, topic, temporality, responsibility, and interactional aspects.MethodsThis was a video-based observational study. We used microanalysis of face-to-face dialogue to analyze 20 purposively selected triadic consultations (...) from a corpus of 85. This inductive analysis focused on the function, the content and some selected interactional aspects of the “non lo so”, quantifying and capturing the interaction between these qualitative features.ResultsWe found 82 doctors’ “non lo so” in the corpus. We discovered three main functions of this expression: propositional, relational, discursive. The most frequent topics raising doctors’ “non lo so” were costs, treatment-related aspects, and timing issues. In more than half of the cases, present issues emerged. The majority of “non lo so” was framed using the “I,” with doctors’ taking personal responsibility. Patients played a role in these expressions from doctors: Patients initiated more than one third of them, and in one fourth of the cases, patients followed up immediately.ConclusionOur findings may be related to characteristics of the specific field of ART. Doctors in this setting must frequently express a direct lack of knowledge to their patients, and when they do, they mean it literally. Patients contribute to such disclosures, and their responses suggest that they find them acceptable, showing that they may expect limitations in their potential to conceive. (shrink)

He tried to look into her face, to find out what she thought, but she was smelling the lilac and the lilies of the valley and did not know herself what she was thinking—what she ought to say or do.OblomovMuch of modern and contemporary philosophy of mind in the ‘analytic’ tradition has presupposed, since Descartes, what might be called a realist view about the mind and the mental. According to this view there are independently existing, determinate items that are the (...) truth-conferrers of our ascriptions of mental predicates. The view is also a cognitivist one insofar as it holds that when we correctly ascribe such a predicate to an individual the correctness consists in the discovery of a determinate fact of the matter about the state the individual is in—a state which is somehow cognized by the ascriber. Disputes have arisen about the nature of the truth-conferrers and about the status and the nature of the individual's own authority about the state he is in. A dissenting position in philosophy of mind would have to be handled carefully. It would, most importantly, need to allow for the objectivity of ascriptions of mental predicates at least insofar as it made sense to reject some and accept others on appropriate grounds. Perhaps such a position in the philosophy of mind can be likened in at least one way to what David Wiggins has characterized as a doctrine of ‘cognitive underdetermination’ about moral or practical judgments. (shrink)

Definitions of disability are useful for different purposes and carry normative significance. However, defining disability has proven a difficult task. Communities with different theoretical backgrounds and practical aims disagree about how to define disability. Recently, Chong‐Ming Lim (2018) has attempted to define disability in a manner accommodating of the different interests and theoretical commitments of the disability and the medical communities. His account aims at broadening Elizabeth Barnes' (2016) definition of disability, which is not sufficiently inclusive of the interests of (...) the medical community and leaves out cases other than physical disabilities. Under the most plausible interpretation of his account, however, the account becomes more restrictive than that of Barnes. In this paper, I propose instead two kinds of accounts: a disjunctive one based on a reinterpretation of Lim's, and a cluster concept account of disability. Both accounts can avoid the restrictiveness problem faced by Lim's and Barnes' original accounts. (shrink)

An interesting pattern emerges in the Early Modern Era of women taking control of their lives and bodies through the use of material culture, and men being terrified of this fact. Women often lacked agency in a world with ever-changing perceptions of not only femininity, but also of the female form. Clothing was then one of the few ways that these women who lacked power could control their body and their spheres. To those living in the Early Modern Era, clothing (...) held far more meaning than it does in the modern day. The exchange of clothing among women was founded on and fundamental to the connections between them. It was transferred from “masters and mistresses to servants, from aunts to nieces, from sisters and brothers to younger siblings” in a “routine rotation” that was the life of a garment. Men and women alike understood the innate power of clothing in the Early Modern period and its ability to “transnature” the body it was on. Clothing had the power to “mold and shape” women into anything. Because of its transformative nature, for many women clothing was one of the few places where they could exert their control: through purchasing power, shaping their public presentation and—for lower class women—even manufacturing or selling. Busks and stays are one item which was targeted by masculinity in the early modern period because of their connection to both women and sexuality more specifically. (shrink)

Estudios exegéticos de los últimos años coinciden en retomar las contra-conductas para pensar la articulación del gobierno y la ética en los planteos de Michel Foucault entre fines de la década del setenta y principios de los ochenta. Enmarcándonos en esta línea, nos proponemos reconstruir el entendimiento estratégico que el pensador francés esboza de la voluntad como una clave para: 1. repensar las relaciones entre sujeción y subjetivación desde la “obligación de verdad”; 2. clarificar que la relación reflexiva consigo mismo (...) no constituye un reducto aislado de las relaciones de gobierno, y 3. considerar la recreación del lazo omnes et singulatim a partir de la idea de “espiritualidad política” que Foucault vincula con la emergencia de una voluntad colectiva. A través de estos puntos, intentaremos exponer cómo las prácticas de libertad involucran operaciones complejas de aceptación y rechazo que las hacen contra-estratégicas más que anti-estratégicas frente al gobierno. (shrink)

Developmental models that account for the metabolic effect of temperature variability on poikilotherms, such as degree-day models, have been widely used to study organism emergence, range and development, particularly in agricultural and vector-borne disease contexts. Though simple and easy to use, structural and parametric issues can influence the outputs of such models, often substantially. Because the underlying assumptions and limitations of these models have rarely been considered, this paper reviews the structural, parametric, and experimental issues that arise when using degree-day (...) models, including the implications of particular structural or parametric choices, as well as assumptions that underlie commonly used models. Linear and non-linear developmental functions are compared, as are common methods used to incorporate temperature thresholds and calculate daily degree-days. Substantial differences in predicted emergence time arose when using linear versus non-linear developmental functions to model the emergence time in a model organism. The optimal method for calculating degree-days depends upon where key temperature threshold parameters fall relative to the daily minimum and maximum temperatures, as well as the shape of the daily temperature curve. No method is shown to be universally superior, though one commonly used method, the daily average method, consistently provides accurate results. The sensitivity of model projections to these methodological issues highlights the need to make structural and parametric selections based on a careful consideration of the specific biological response of the organism under study, and the specific temperature conditions of the geographic regions of interest. When degree-day model limitations are considered and model assumptions met, the models can be a powerful tool for studying temperature-dependent development. (shrink)

Amy Olberding's book The Wrong of Rudeness is eye-opening and informative, while at the same time difficult to read, especially the first three chapters. To be clear, the difficulty does not lie in the prose or the concepts. The prose is accessible, examples relevant, and argument clear and cogent. My students recently made the comment that the women philosophers we read are clearer writers and provide more relatable examples than the male philosophers. These students would appreciate Olberding's book.Nevertheless, the book (...) is difficult for me personally because of the extreme discomfort experienced upon discovering that people in the United States actually wish death upon each other or purposely take out their... (shrink)

O artigo está contextualizado no âmbito do debate da filosofia política acerca do cosmopolitismo, isto é, de uma orientação politico-filosófica que considera que teorias de justiça devem ir além das fronteiras nacionais em suas abordagens. Propostas normativas liberais (tais como as de Thomas Pogge e Charles Beitz) recolocaram como foco central da preocupação com a justiça a esfera global e ocuparam o protagonismo dos debates no âmbito da filosofia política no final da década de noventa. Já no campo crítico-discursivo, o (...) ideal cosmopolita foi tematizado de forma menos sistemática, com exceções, como Seyla Benhabib e Jurgen Habermas. Mais recentemente Brian Milstein (2015), efetua o resgate do ideal cosmopolita e estabelece de que forma a teoria crítica com um ponto de vista cosmopolita é central para se pensar possibilidades emancipatórias. Neste texto irei apresentar as principais discussões e desafios que as teorias cosmopolitas enfrentaram e demonstrarei os elementos centrais da proposta de Milstein tendo como objetivo central sustentar que o projeto cosmopolita não deve ser descartado, ao contrário, trata-se de perspectiva urgente para pensarmos os principais desafios de justiça de nosso tempo. (shrink)

Measures of visual cortical development in children demonstrate high variability and inconsistency throughout the literature. This is partly due to the specificity of the visual system in processing certain features. It may then be advantageous to activate multiple cortical pathways in order to observe maturation of coinciding networks. Visual stimuli eliciting the percept of apparent motion and shape change is designed to simultaneously activate both dorsal and ventral visual streams. However, research has shown that such stimuli also elicit variable visual (...) evoked potential (VEP) morphology in children. The aim of this study was to describe developmental changes in VEPs, including morphological patterns, and underlying visual cortical generators, elicited by apparent motion and shape change in school-aged children. Forty-one typically developing children underwent high-density EEG recordings in response to a continuously morphing, radially modulated, circle-star grating. VEPs were then compared across the age groups of 5-7, 8-10, and 11-15 years according to latency and amplitude. Current density reconstructions were performed on VEP data in order to observe activated cortical regions. It was found that two distinct VEP morphological patterns occurred in each age group. However, there were no major developmental differences between the age groups according to each pattern. Current density reconstructions further demonstrated consistent visual generators across age and pattern. These results describe two novel VEP morphological patterns in typically developing children, but with similar underlying cortical sources. The importance of these morphological patterns is discussed in terms of future studies and the investigation of a relationship to visual cognitive performance. (shrink)

Este estudio de la idea de Dios en la fenomenología de Husserl, intenta, a modo de propedéutica, ordenar, según cuatro enfoques, textos husserlianos en que se hace referencia a Dios. En primer lugar, se trata de Dios considerado como un objeto de cuya constitución hay que dar razón. En segundo lugar, se reúnen las referencias a Dios "usado" para destacar la universalidad de los rasgos de las operaciones constitutivas. A continuación se estudian textos referidos a la experiencia religiosa, el lugar (...) que da Husserl a la experiencia mística, a la creencia y la plegaria. Para terminar, se considera la idea de Dios en relación con las preguntas y hechos "últimos", las notas de la divinidad y el método que autoriza al filósofo a referirse a ella. (shrink)