This commentary draws out themes from the narrative symposium on “living with the label “disability”” from the perspective of auto/biography and critical disability studies in the humanities. It notes the disconnect between the experiences discussed in the stories and the preoccupations of bioethicists. Referencing Rosemarie Garland-Thompson’s recent work, it suggests that life stories by people usually described as “disabled” offer narrative, epistemic and ethical resources for bioethics. The commentary suggests that the symposium offers valuable conceptual tools and critiques of taken-for-granted (...) terms like “dependency”. It notes that these narrators do not un–problematically embrace the term “disability”, but emphasize the need to redefine, strategically deploy or reject this term. Some accounts are explicitly critical of medical practitioners while others redefine health and wellbeing, emphasizing the need for reciprocity and respect for the knowledge of people with disability, including knowledge from their experience of “the variant body” (Leach Scully, 2008). (shrink)

What is it like to live with the label “Disability?” NIB editorial staff and narrative symposium editors, Jeffery Bishop and Naomi Sunderland developed a call for stories, which was sent to several list serves, shared with the 1000 Voices Project community and posted on Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics ’ website. The request for personal stories from people who identify with the label “disabled” asked them to: consider how the label “disability” interacts with other aspects of their life in health care (...) settings; does the term “disability” reflect their actual embodied experiences of impairment or does it fail to do justice to their particular experience of impairment; describe the kind of experiences that are possible because of the impairment(s); discuss how the label has affected their “authentic voice”; and many other concepts about what effects the label has on their lives. These authors share deeply personal experiences that will help readers understand their world, challenges, and joys. Thirteen stories are found in the print version of the journal and an additional five supplemental stories are published online only through Project MUSE. The stories are complemented by four commentary articles by Elizabeth R. Schiltz; Lorna Hallahan; Nicole Matthews, Kathleen Ellem, and Lesley Chenoweth; and Jeffery Bishop, Rachelle Barina, and Devan Stahl. These scholars come from the disciplines of law, social work, media studies, medicine, and bioethics from Australia and the United States. Together, the symposium’s storytellers and commentators offer striking and informative insights into the everydayness of living with disabilities. (shrink)

This book explores the scope and limits of the concept of personDS a vexed question in contemporary philosophy. The author begins by questioning the methodology of thought-experimentation, arguing that it engenders inconclusive and unconvincing results, and that truth is stranger than fiction. She then examines an assortment of real-life conditions, including infancy, insanity andx dementia, dissociated states, and split brains. The popular faith in continuity of consciousness, and the unity of the person is subjected to sustained criticism. The author concludes (...) with a look at different views of the person found in Homer, Aristotle, the post-Cartesians, and contemporary cognitive science. (shrink)

The paper discusses the utility of the notion of consciousness for the behavioural and brain sciences. It describes four distinctively different senses of 'conscious', and argues that to cope with the heterogeneous phenomena loosely indicated thereby, these sciences not only do not but should not discuss them in terms of 'consciousness'. It is thus suggested that 'the problem' allegedly posed to scientists by consciousness is unreal; one need neither adopt a realist stance with respect to it, nor include the term (...) and its cognates in the sciences' conceptual apparatus. The paper briefly examines Nagel's [1974] article, since this presents the strongest counter to the thesis proposed. (shrink)

The primary aim of this study is to dissolve the mind-body problem. It shows how the ‘problem’ separates into two distinct sets of issues, concerning ontology on the one hand, and explanation on the other, and argues that explanation – whether or not human behaviour can be explained in physical terms – is the more crucial. The author contends that a functionalist methodology in psychology and neurophysiology will prove adequate to explain human behaviour. Defence of this thesis requires: an examination (...) of the mental/physical dichotomy, and its rejection in favour of a distinction between psychological and physical terms; a description and discussion of functionalism in psychology and neurophysiology, showing how the notorious problem of the necessary intensionality of psychological terms may be circumvented; an examination of the role of computer simulation in psycho-physical research; and an explanation of how the phenomena of sentience fit the functional framework. The book concludes that the thesis presented is in all essentials that of Aristotle; Aristotle had no ‘mind-body problem’, and were it not for a subsequent over-obsession with Cartesian scepticism, we need not have had one either. (shrink)

Anonymity is a form of nonidentifiability which I define as noncoordinatability of traits in a given respect. This definition broadens the concept, freeing it from its primary association with naming. I analyze different ways anonymity can be realized. I also discuss some ethical issues, such as privacy, accountability and other values which anonymity may serve or undermine. My theory can also conceptualize anonymity in information systems where, for example, privacy and accountability are at issue.

Commissurotomy surgery has lately attracted considerable philosophical attention. It has seemed to some that the surgical scalpel that bisects the brain bisects consciousness and the mind as well; and that the ordinary concept of a person is thereby most seriously threatened. I shall assess the extent of the threat, arguing that it is overestimated. The argument begins with section III; section II, which describes the operation and its effects, should be omitted by those already familiar with these facts.

Recent work in the philosophy of science has been debunking theory and acclaiming practice. Recent work in philosophical psychology has been neglecting practice and emphasizing theory, suggesting that common?sense psychology is in all essential respects like any scientific theory. The marriage of these two strands of thought would serve to make science and common sense virtually indistinguishable. My paper resists this conflation. The main target is the attempt to assimilate everyday psychology to a scientific theory; I argue that this is (...) badly mistaken, and does a disservice both to scientific and to common?sense psychology. A secondary aim is to argue that some of the new pragmatism in the philosophy of science is overstated. The suggested conflation would have interesting implications, as would its denial; in a concluding section, some of these implications are briefly explored. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between common-sense psychology (CSP) and scientific psychology (SP) — which we could call the mind-mind problem. CSP has come under much attack recently, most of which is thought to be unjust or misguided. This paper's first section examines the many differences between the aims, interests, explananda, explanantia, methodology, conceptual frameworks, and relationships to the neurosciences, that divide CSP and SP. Each of the two is valid within its own territory, and there is no competition between (...) them — primarily because CSP is not, and has no interest in being, a scientific theory. In the second section some implications are drawn. First, neither CSP nor SP has the mind-body problem in its familiar form. Second, CSP, for excellent reasons, is not equipped to handle irrational or non-rational behaviour; there are some grounds for believing that this can and should be the task of SP. Third, philosophical psychology, or armchair theories of action, perception, etc., are doomed to failure. And, fourth, the realm of the psychological is so heterogeneous that no single model for either CSP or SP is likely to succeed. (shrink)

It is notorious that Aristotle gives two distinct and seemingly irreconcilable versions of man's eudaimonia in the Nicomachean Ethics. These offer conflicting accounts not only of what the good man should do, but also of what it is good for a man to do. This paper discusses the incompatibility of these two pictures of eudaimonia, and explores the extent to which the notions of 'the life of a good man' and 'the life good for a man' can be successfully united (...) in a single concept of eudaimonia. (shrink)

This paper argues that there were women involved with philosophy on a fairly constant basis throughout Greek antiquity. It does so by tracing the lives and where extant the writings of these women. However, since the sources, both ancient and modern, from which we derive our knowledge about these women are so sexist and easily distort our view of these women and their accomplishments, the paper also discusses the manner in which their histories come down to us as well as (...) the histories themselves. It discusses in detail the following women: the Pythagorean women philosophers of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C., Aspasia and Diotima of the 5th century B.C., Arete, Hipparchia, Pamphile and the women Epicureans-all from the 4th century B.C. the five logician daughters of a famous Stoic philosopher of the 3rd century B.C., and finally Hypatia who lived in the 4th century A.D. (shrink)

This article finds little to disagree with in Neurophilosophy The sole area of disagreement is with Professor Churchland's attitude to common?sense psychology. Unfortunately, though, the author has already attempted to describe what should be the proper view of common?sense psychology in an earlier article in this very journal. Therefore the present article tries to build on the earlier one, advocating an instrumentalist constraal of many ordinary?language mental terms ? a construal with which Professor Churchland is unlikely to agree, but which, (...) if she did agree, would give her further ammunition with which to beat her opponents. The other main strand of this article suggests that Aristotle has anticipated Professor Churchland (and also most other theoreticians of psychology and physiology), and so, willy?nilly, we are ? correctly ? returning to an Aristotelian picture of human capacity and activity. (shrink)

The U.S. Supreme Court held, in American Manufacturers Mutual Insurance Co. v. Sullivan, 119 S. Ct. 988, that state workers’ compensation system insurers cannot be sued for withholding health care benefits for work-related injuries while they decide whether the treatment is “reasonable” and “necessary.” The respondents, ten employees and two organizations representing employees who received medical benefits under the Workers’ Compensation Act, brought a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 action against state officials, the Pennsylvania State Workers’ Insurance Fund, private insurers, and (...) the school district, alleging that their due process rights were violated by provisions of the Pennsylvania Workers’ Compensation Act, 77 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. § 1 et seq.. The Act permits suspension of benefits without notice or opportunity to be heard pursuant to a “utilization review” process.To control costs, Pennsylvania amended its workers’ compensation system in 1993. Under the Act, an employer or its insurer must pay for all reasonable and necessary medical treatment. (shrink)

This article defends psychology and psychoanalysis against the accusation that their use of anthropomorphism in descriptions of brain and mind reintroduces the 'little man in the brain' and generates a viciously circular analysis. It queries the clarity of the concept 'anthropomorphic', And argues that many predicates which are allegedly 'characteristically human' are freely and literally attributable to machines, Parts of the brain, Etc.; this merely points out the unsurprising fact that non-Humans often perform tasks which humans can also perform. It (...) does not make these non-Humans into intelligent man-Analogues. (shrink)

In Being and Nothingness Jean-Paul Sartre contends that the self's fundamental relation with the other is one of inescapable conflict. I argue that the research of the last few decades on the ability of infants - even newborns - to imitate the facial expressions and gestures of adults provides counter-evidence to Sartre's claim. Sartre is not wrong that the look of the other may be a source of self-alienation, but that is not how it functions in the first instance. An (...) earlier and more primary form of looking with and at the other is a source of self-discovery. In early imitation, the infant and adult each see the other not as objects of experience but as subjects of action. Such looking is necessary for the infant to realize its own potential as a self-conscious, goal-directed subject of perception and action. (shrink)

A traditional association of judgment with "reason" has drawn upon and reinforced an opposition between reason and emotion. This, in turn, has led to a restricted view of the nature of moral judgment and of the subject as moral agent. The alternative, I suggest, is to abandon the traditional categories and to develop a new theory of judgment. I argue that the theory of judgment developed by Justus Buchler constitutes a robust alternative which does not prejudice the case against emotion. (...) Drawing on this theory I then develop how to conceptualize the ways in which feeling and emotion can be (or be components of) moral judgments. (shrink)

The answer to the title question which I want to defend in this paper is ‘none’. That is: I doubt strongly that the notion of ‘a self’ has any use whatsoever as part of an explanans for the explanandum ‘person’.Put another way: I shall argue that the question itself is misguided, pointing the inquirer in quite the wrong direction by suggesting that the term ‘self’ points to something which can sustain a philosophically interesting or important degree of reification.

The burden of this article is that although the idea of `the self'which Galen Strawson decribes in his target article is initially very attractive, it eventually doesn't work. There is a lot of competition for a `pole position'notion -- `human', `person', psuche, `soul', even `sake'-- and the idea of `self'does not seem to deserve the prize. What Strawson wants to do with the notion of a `self'can be done equally well, and more economically, by the first-person pronoun. A question raised (...) repeatedly is: `What is a self worth wanting?'Perhaps the greatest area of disagreement with Strawson's article is with his idea that `the self'needs to have little or nothing to do with time-related plans and emotions: guilt and remorse; pride; hope and expectation; career choices . . . even such apparently mundane things as pension-plans -- in fact, any long-term forward- or backward-looking psychological phenomena. The question of realism is pressed. (shrink)

Porter and Kramer are very clear that shared value is not corporate social responsibility. Not only do they criticize the four principles on which CSR rests: moral obligation, sustainability, license to operate, and reputation, as ineffective and vague, they maintain that the only reason for companies to engage in sustainability projects is to decrease costs and thus increase profits, not because they have a corporate responsibility to help protect the environment the people who dwell in it. Because social problems cause (...) extra costs for companies and thus decrease profits, they say that companies should have strategies that might appear to be socially responsible, but are not because the intent is to improve profits. This paper will describe the current definitions and focus of CSR, explain shared value, and then propose ways that commitment to CSR can be made public by leaders and their businesses, such as using social license to operate, third-party assessors, and new business structures. (shrink)

What surfaces first when one examines the philosophy of mind of Sartre and Spinoza are the differences between them. For Spinoza a human mind is a mode of the divine mind. That view is a far cry from Sartre’s view of human consciousness as a desire never achieved: the desire to be god, to be the foundation of one’s own existence. How could two philosophers, one a determinist and the other who grounds human freedom in the nature of consciousness itself, (...) be seen as having any commonalities worth exploring? How could the noted user of the deductive method and one of the most important phenomenologists of the twentieth century share any philosophical ground at all? I will argue in this paper that despite the very real differences between their two philosophies, there are striking similarities between Sartre’s view of consciousness and Spinoza’s view of the mind. They become apparent when one examines each one’s analysis of the nature of mind and its relationship to itself, the body, and the world. Both are heir to a kind of Aristotelian naturalism. This commonality between them derives from their mutual rejection of Descartes’ substance dualism. I first explore the consequences of that rejection on how each one conceives of the relationship between the mind and its objects. Next I examine their view of the mind’s relation to itself and finally I look at how each one understood the mind’s relationship to the body and the world. The examination of their two views reveals how much they anticipate and support theories of mind defended by contemporary analytic philosophers of mind. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article:Carol Rovan, The Bounds of Agency.

Santayana gives a rich account of the self which is simultaneously bound by material conditions and circumstances and able to transcend those boundaries if not in material fact, at least in the life of spirit. In this essay I pursue the question, whether and how Santayana’s view of "spirit" can be reconciled with his materialism. There is a tension between two of Santayana’s claims about spirit: its inefficacy (required by his materialism) and its role in transforming human life from merely (...) physical organic life to conscious, feeling life. What seems problematic to me is the account of "material" efficacy which Santayana commits himself to, and this problem in turn, I argue, has its origins in a limited notion of relation. (shrink)

The signal functions of infant crying cannot be understood properly without due attention to their ontogenetic development. Based on our own research on the development of infant cries, we argue that the controversies in cry literature will not be solved by static models, but that progress will made only when considering ontogenetic changes in interpreting cry data.

The stormy development of vocal production during the first postnatal weeks is generally underestimated. Our longitudinal studies revealed an amazingly fast unfolding and combinatorial complexification of pre-speech melodies. We argue that relying on “melody” could provide for the immature brain a kind of filter to extract life-relevant information from the complex speech stream.

The generalized Bayes’ rule (GBR) can be used to conduct ‘quasi-Bayesian’ analyses when prior beliefs are represented by imprecise probability models. We describe a procedure for deriving coherent imprecise probability models when the event space consists of a finite set of mutually exclusive and exhaustive events. The procedure is based on Walley’s theory of upper and lower prevision and employs simple linear programming models. We then describe how these models can be updated using Cozman’s linear programming formulation of the GBR. (...) Examples are provided to demonstrate how the GBR can be applied in practice. These examples also illustrate the effects of prior imprecision and prior-data conflict on the precision of the posterior probability distribution. (shrink)