Rather than offering a mere lifeless summary of Aristotle's views, J.L. Ackrill aims in this book to convey the force and excitement of Aristotle's philosophical investigations, and show why contemporary philosophers still draw from him and return to him.

Suppose that the ultimate point of ethics is to make the world a better place. If it is, we must face the question: better in what respect? If the good is prior to the right — that is, if the rationale for all requirements of the right is that they serve to further the good in one way or another — then what is this good? Is there a single fundamental value capable of underlying and unifying all of our moral (...) categories? If so, how might it defeat the claims of rival candidates for this role? If not, is there instead a plurality of basic goods, each irreducible to any of the others? In that case, how do they fit together into a unified picture of the moral life? These are the questions I wish to address, in a necessarily limited way. To many the questions will seem hopelessly old-fashioned or misguided. Some deontologists will wish to reverse my ordering of the good and the right, holding that the right constrains acceptable conceptions of the good. For many contractarians, neither the good nor the right will seem normatively basic, since both are to be derived from a prior conception of rationality. Finally, some theorists will reject the classification of moral theories in terms of their basic normative categories, arguing that the whole foundationalist enterprise in ethics should be abandoned. In the face of these challenges to the priority of the good, and in light of the many current varieties of moral skepticism and relativism, I cannot provide a very convincing justification for raising the questions I intend to discuss. (shrink)

Clinical decision making is a challenging task that requires practical wisdom—the practised ability to help patients choose wisely among available diagnostic and treatment options. But practical wisdom is not a concept one typically hears mentioned in medical training and practice. Instead, emphasis is placed on clinical judgement. The author draws from Aristotle and Aquinas to describe the virtue of practical wisdom and compare it with clinical judgement. From this comparison, the author suggests that a more complete understanding of clinical judgement (...) requires its explicit integration with goals of care and ethical values. Although clinicians may be justified in assuming that goals of care and ethical values are implicit in routine decision making, it remains important for training purposes to encourage habits of clinical judgement that are consciously goal-directed and ethically informed. By connecting clinical judgement to patients' goals and values, clinical decisions are more likely to stay focused on the particular interests of individual patients. To cultivate wise clinical judgement among trainees, educational efforts should aim at the integration of clinical judgement, communication with patients about goals of care, and ethical reasoning. But ultimately, training in wise clinical judgement will take years of practice in the company of experienced clinicians who are able to demonstrate practical wisdom by example. By helping trainees develop clinical judgement that incorporates patients' goals of care and ethical reasoning, we may help lessen the risk that ‘clinical judgement’ will merely express ‘the clinician's judgement.’. (shrink)

This study considers freedom of speech and the rules of engagement in the public sphere; good government, civic responsibility, and public education; and the foundations of religion and society, as seen through the eyes of seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher, Spinoza.

This paper provides a series of reflections on making the case to senior leaders for the introduction of clinical ethics support services within a UK hospital Trust at a time when clinical ethics committees are dwindling in the UK. The paper provides key considerations for those building a case for clinical ethics support within hospitals by drawing upon published academic literature, and key reports from governmental and professional bodies. We also include extracts from documents relating to, and annual reports of, (...) existing clinical ethics support within UK hospitals, as well as extracts from our own proposal submitted to the Trust Board. We aim for this paper to support other ethicists and/or health care staff contemplating introducing clinical ethics support into hospitals, to facilitate the process of making the case for clinical ethics support, and to contribute to the key debates in the literature around clinical ethics support. We conclude that there is a real need for investment in clinical ethics in the UK in order to build the evidence base required to support the wider introduction of clinical ethics support into UK hospitals. Furthermore, our perceptions of the purpose of, and perceived needs met through, clinical ethics support needs to shift to one of hospitals investing in their staff. Finally, we raise concerns over the optional nature of clinical ethics support available to practitioners within UK hospitals. (shrink)

Thomas Carson offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date investigation of moral and conceptual questions about lying and deception. Part I addresses conceptual questions and offers definitions of lying, deception, and related concepts such as withholding information, "keeping someone in the dark," and "half truths." Part II deals with questions in ethical theory. Carson argues that standard debates about lying and deception between act-utilitarians and their critics are inconclusive because they rest on appeals to disputed moral intuitions. He defends a version (...) of the golden rule and a theory of moral reasoning. His theory implies that there is a moral presumption against lying and deception that causes harm — a presumption at least as strong as that endorsed by act-utilitarianism. He uses this theory to justify his claims about the issues he addresses in Part III: deception and withholding information in sales, deception in advertising, bluffing in negotiations, the duties of professionals to inform clients, lying and deception by leaders as a pretext for fighting wars, and lying and deception about history, and cases of distorting the historical record by telling half-truths. The book concludes with a qualified defence of the view that honesty is a virtue.Readership: Scholars and advanced students of philosophy, as well as historians and students of history. (shrink)

A commitment to truth requires that you are open to receiving new evidence, even if that evidence contradicts your current beliefs. You should be open to changing your mind. However, this truism gives rise to the paradox of empathy. The paradox arises with the possibility of mental corruption through transformative change, and has consequences for how we should understand tolerance, disagreement, and the ability to have an open mind. I close with a discussion of how understanding this paradox provides a (...) new explanation for a certain kind of standoff between the believer and the skeptic with regard to religious belief. (shrink)

The total irrelevance of absolute space to scientific observation and experiment led him early to a most radical conclusion: experience cannot teach us anything about the true structure of space; consequently, the choice of a geometry for the ...

Summary of Transformative Experience by L.A. Paul and replies to symposiasts. Discussion of undefined values, preference change, authenticity, experiential value, collective minds, mind control.

This article is about Gilles Deleuze's book Le Pli. Leibniz et le Baroque from 1988. It shows how Deleuze's notion of folding captures some basic intuitions in Leibniz and how they relate to each other. To this purpose, I propose five figures, all referring to the same basic fold, all illustrating how the consideration of such figures allows developing central elements of Leibniz's monadology. These figures can help, I hope, alleviate some of the fundamental difficulties in understanding Deleuze's approach to (...) the Monadology from the non-Deleuzian perspective of contemporary Leibniz scholarship and give a sense of the synthetic, explanatory force that Deleuze's notion of folding has in relation to Leibniz's monadological metaphysics. (shrink)

Isaac Newton's Scientific Method examines Newton's argument for universal gravity and his application of it to resolve the problem of deciding between geocentric and heliocentric world systems by measuring masses of the sun and planets. William L. Harper suggests that Newton's inferences from phenomena realize an ideal of empirical success that is richer than prediction. Any theory that can achieve this rich sort of empirical success must not only be able to predict the phenomena it purports to explain, but also (...) have those phenomena accurately measure the parameters which explain them. Harper explores the ways in which Newton's method aims to turn theoretical questions into ones which can be answered empirically, by measurement from phenomena, and to establish that propositions inferred from phenomena are provisionally accepted as guides to further research. This methodology, guided by its rich ideal of empirical success, supports a conception of scientific progress that does not require construing it as progress toward Laplace's ideal limit of a final theory of everything, and is not threatened by the classic argument against convergent realism. Newton's method endorses the radical theoretical transformation from his theory to Einstein's. Harper argues that it is strikingly realized in the development and application of testing frameworks for relativistic theories of gravity, and very much at work in cosmology today. (shrink)

Although the two volumes of _Logic, Language, and Meaning _can be used independently of one another, together they provide a comprehensive overview of modern logic as it is used as a tool in the analysis of natural language. Both volumes provide exercises and their solutions.

Ever since medical assistance in dying (MAID) became legal in Canada in 2016, controversy has enveloped the refusal by many faith‐based institutions to allow this service on their premises. In a recent article in this journal, Philip and Joshua Shadd have proposed ‘changing the conversation’ on this issue, reframing it as an exercise not of conscience but of an institutional right of self‐governance. This reframing, they claim, will serve to show how health‐care institutions may be justified in refusing to provide (...) MAID on moral or religious grounds. I argue that it will not make it easier to justify institutional refusal, and is likely to make it harder. (shrink)

this paper offers a critical discussion of Martial Gueroult's philosophical conception of the history of philosophy as a discipline. Gueroult was among the most influential French historians of philosophy in the twentieth century and the author of a long list of monographs on a host of modern philosophers. Gueroult's first book, on Maimon, was published in 1929, quickly followed in 1930 by a monograph on Fichte. In the English-speaking world, he is probably best known for his two-volume Descartes selon l'ordre (...) des raisons and the volumes on parts I and II of Spinoza's... (shrink)

When Amartya Sen defends his capability theory of well-being he contrasts it with the utility theory advocated by the classical utilitarians, including John Stuart Mill. Yet a closer examination of the two theories reveals that they are much more similar than they appear. Each theory can be interpreted in either a subjective or an objective way. When both are interpreted subjectively the differences between them are slight, and likewise for the objective interpretations. Finally, whatever differences may remain are less important (...) than they might seem, since the two theories are developed by Sen and Mill for different purposes and are in that sense not genuine rivals. (shrink)

Background and objective: Code status discussions may fail to address patients’ treatment-related goals and their knowledge of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). This study aimed to investigate patients’ resuscitation preferences, knowledge of CPR and goals of care. Design, setting, patients and measurements: 135 adults were interviewed within 48 h of admission to a general medical service in an academic medical centre, querying code status preferences, knowledge about CPR and its outcome probabilities and goals of care. Medical records were reviewed for clinical information (...) and code status documentation. Results: 41 (30.4%) patients had discussed CPR with their doctor, 116 (85.9%) patients preferred full code status and 11 (8.1%) patients expressed code status preferences different from the code status documented in their medical record. When queried about seven possible goals of care, patients affirmed an average of 4.9 goals; their single most important goals were broadly distributed, ranging from being cured (n = 36; 26.7%) to being comfortable (n = 8; 5.9%). Patients’ mean estimate of survival to discharge after CPR was 60.4%. Most patients believed it was helpful to discuss goals of care (n = 95; 70.4%) and the chances of surviving inhospital CPR (n = 112; 83.0%). Some patients expressed a desire to change their code status after receiving information about survival following inhospital CPR (n = 11; 8.1%) or after discussing goals of care (n = 2; 1.5%). Conclusions: Doctors need to address patients’ knowledge about CPR and take steps to avoid discrepancies between treatment orders and patients’ preferences. Addressing CPR outcome probabilities and goals of care during code status discussions may improve patients’ knowledge and influence their preferences. (shrink)

In this aricle, I argue that Descartes can be seen as a occupying a distinct middle ground between ancient music theory, which was being revived in the Renaissance, and eighteenth-century aestheticians. Descartes’ approach to music had its roots in humanist thought but, even from the start, it wasn’t simply another humanist theory of music. The views Descartes begins to develop in his early years, in the Compendium musicae (1618), is continuous with the views he articulates near the end of his (...) life in the Passions of the Soul (1649). And the position on the effects of music is an interesting and important one, bridging humanist thought with the new philosophy. Unlike the humanists, Descartes will be unwilling to identify particular musical proportions as intrinsically connected with pleasure or other affects, but he will nevertheless develop an objective account of aesthetic value. (shrink)

In our view, the way of thinking involved in insight problem solving is very close to the process involved in the understanding of an utterance, when a misunderstanding occurs. In this case, a more appropriate meaning has to be selected to resolve the misunderstanding , the default interpretation has to be dropped in order to “restructure”, to grasp another meaning which appears more relevant to the context and the speaker's intention. A new conception of unconscious, implicit thought emerges, informed by (...) relevance. In this article we support our view with experimental evidence, focusing on how a misunderstanding is formed. We have explored two problems, in which a trivial arithmetical task is represented as an insight problem and vice versa. Studying how an insight problem is formed, and not just how it is solved, may well become an important topic in the contemporary debate on thought. (shrink)

No one who cares about equal opportunity can derive much comfort from the present occupational distribution of working women. In the various industrial societies of the West, women comprise between one quarter and one-half of the national labor force. However, they tend to clustered in employment sectors – especially clerical, sales, and service J occupations – which rank relatively low in remuneration, status, autonomy, and other perquisites. Meanwhile, the more prestigious and rewarding managerial and professional positions, as well as the (...) major categories of blue-collar labor, remain largely a male preserve. In the same societies the average income earned by full-time female workers is one-half to two- J thirds that of their male counterparts. Although this disparity owes much to i other factors, including lower pay for work similar or even identical to that r standardly done by men, much of it can be explained only by the concentration of working women in traditional female job ghettos. (shrink)

Suppose libertarians could prove that durable, unqualified private property rights could be created through 'original acquisition' of unowned resources in a state of nature. Such a proof would cast serious doubt on the legitimacy of the modern state. It could also render the approach to property rights that I favour irrelevant. I argue here that none of the familiar Lockean-libertarian arguments for a strong natural right to acquisition succeed, and that any successful argument for grounding a right to acquire would (...) have to use my favoured approach to property rights - the 'vector-sum' approach. I conclude with some doubts about original acquisition theory and natural property rights. (shrink)