Children with specific language impairment show a significant deficit in spoken language that cannot be attributed to neurological damage, hearing impairment, or intellectual disability. More prevalent than autism and at least as prevalent as dyslexia, SLI affects approximately seven percent of all children; it is longstanding, with adverse effects on academic, social, and economic standing. The first edition of this work established _Children with Specific Language Impairment_ as the landmark reference on this condition, considering not only the disorder's history, possible (...) origins, and treatment but also what SLI might tell us about language organization and development in general. This second edition offers a complete update of the earlier volume. Much of the second edition is completely new, reflecting findings and interpretations based on the hundreds of studies that have appeared since the publication of the first edition in 1997. Topics include linguistic details, word and sentence processing findings, genetics, neurobiology, treatment, and comparisons to such conditions as autism spectrum disorders, ADHD, and dyslexia. The book covers SLI in children who speak a wide range of languages, and, although the emphasis is on children, it also includes studies of adults who were diagnosed with SLI as children or are the parents of children with SLI. Written by a leading scholar in the field, Children with Specific Language Impairment offers the most comprehensive, balanced, and unified treatment of SLI available. (shrink)

Say that mereological harmony is the view that there is at least some mirroring between the mereological structure of material objects and the mereological structure of their locations: each, in some way, mirrors the other. As it turns out, there is a confusing array of systems of harmony available to the substantivalist. In this paper, I attempt to bring some order to these systems. I explore some systems found in the literature, as well as some natural systems which haven’t been (...) discussed. Along the way, I explore a number of metaphysical consequences of the different systems of harmony. The paper ends with a roadmap of possible views for the substantivalist. (shrink)

This release includes the code and supplementary information mentioned in: Malaterre, Christophe & Martin Léonard. 2023. "Charting the Territories of Epistemic Concepts in the Practice of Science: A Text-Mining Approach", British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

The first reader to offer a comprehensive view of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work, this selection collects in one volume the foundational essays necessary for understanding the core of this critical twentieth-century philosopher’s thought. Arranged chronologically, the essays are grouped in three sections corresponding to the major periods of Merleau-Ponty’s work: First, the years prior to his appointment to the Sorbonne in 1949, the early, existentialist period during which he wrote important works on the phenomenology of perception and the primacy of perception; (...) second, the years of his work as professor of child psychology and pedagogy at the Sorbonne, a period especially concerned with language; and finally, his years as chair of modern philosophy at the Collège de France, a time devoted to the articulation of a new ontology and philosophy of nature. The editors, who provide an interpretive introduction, also include previously unpublished working notes found in Merleau-Ponty’s papers after his death. Translations of all selections have been updated and several appear here in English for the first time. By contextualizing Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the philosophy of art and politics within the overall development of his thought, this volume allows readers to see both the breadth of his contribution to twentieth-century philosophy and the convergence of the various strands of his reflection. (shrink)

I saggi di questo testo gravitano attorno a due fuochi: una diagnosi della soggettività contemporanea e il tentativo di sviluppare una critica all'altezza della sua vocazione emancipativa. Ciò che viene descritto è un processo di tendenziale emersione in superficie della relazione tra soggettività e politica; nessuna utopia col torcicollo, nessun nostalgismo, nessuna lamentela sulla superficialità della politica o paternale sulla superficialità dei soggetti. La scommessa, piuttosto, è quella di prendere le apparenze sul serio e quindi rinunciare a ogni forma di (...) ventriloquismo teorico, restituendo ai soggetti la parola senza per questo rinunciare alle ambizioni emancipative di una teoria sociale capace di fotografare, tracciare, scandagliare le trasformazioni della soggettività contemporanea e contemporaneamente le sue potenzialità e le sue contraddizioni. (shrink)

The annual cost of healthcare in the United States reached $2.5 trillion in 2009 (about 17.6% of GDP) with projections to 2019 of about $4.5 trillion (about 20% of likely GDP).

Einfühlung wird ideengeschichtlich an das Konzept der Selbstperfektionierung geknüpft und insofern im Modus der Defizienz verhandelt. Dabei fungieren antike und mittelalterliche Diskurse um Gotteserkenntnis als historisch-konzeptionelle Vorläufer neuzeitlichmoderner Erklärungsfolien zwischenmenschlicher Alterität, mithin als semantische Vorform der zeitgenössischen Einfühlungs-Idee. In diesem Kontext ist eine ethisch-epistemologische Asymmetrie zu konstatieren, die Gott einerseits als den All-Empathischen beschreibt und zugleich die Erkenntnisbemühungen des Menschen als unabgeschlossen und prozessual vorstellt. Einfühlung produziert sich als regulative Idee im doppelten Sinne: Während Gott als empathische Transzendenz erscheint, bedarf (...) es unendlicher Annäherungsbewegungen, damit der Mensch sich in einem Akt transzendenter Empathie in Gott einfühlen kann. Durch die Etablierung dieser Vorstellungsverbindung hat das Innenleben des Anderen eine transzendente Aufladung erfahren. Das Fremdpsychische wurde zum modernen Mysterium. (shrink)

This manuscript uses competitive college football as a lens into the complexities of decision-making amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Pulling together what is known about the decision-makers, the decision-making processes, the social and political context, the risks and benefits, and the underlying obligations of institutions to these athletes, we conduct an ethical analysis of the decisions surrounding the 2020 fall football season. Based on this ethical analysis, we provide key recommendations to improve similar decision processes moving forward.

Abstract:The American College of Physicians in its ethics manual endorsed the idea that physicians ought to improve their ability to provide care to their patients more parsimoniously. This elicited a critical backlash; critics essentially claimed that what was being endorsed was a renamed form of rationing. In a recent article, Tilburt and Cassel argued that parsimonious care and rationing are ethically distinct practices. In this essay I critically assess that claim. I argue that in practice there is considerable overlap between (...) what they term parsimonious care and what they define as rationing. The same is true of the Choosing Wisely campaign endorsed by the American Board of Internal Medicine. In both cases, if the goal is to control healthcare costs by reducing the use of marginally beneficial care that is not cost effective, then a public conversation about the justness of specific choices is essential. (shrink)

_Explores the continuities and discontinuities in the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze._.

I agree with Professor ter Meulen that there is no need to make a forced choice between “justice” and “solidarity” when it comes to determining what should count as fair access to needed health care. But he also asserts that solidarity is more fundamental than justice. That claim needs critical assessment. Ter Meulen recognizes that the concept of solidarity has been criticized for being excessively vague. He addresses this criticism by introducing the more precise notion of “humanitarian solidarity.” However, I (...) argue that these notions are still not precise enough and are in need of behavioral translation, especially in relation to the problem of fair health care rationing. More specifically, I argue that translation ought to take the form of a well-ordered process of rational democratic deliberation, which I describe and defend in this essay. Such a process is what is required to construct a working model of just solidarity as opposed to a merely abstract idealization of just solidarity. (shrink)

At the turn of the last century, paleontologists wagered that they could find the missing link between lobe-finned fish and early terrestrial vertebrates. Given how these evolutionary relatives are distributed in the fossil record, Daeschler et al. predicted that some transitional form awaited discovery in late Devonian outcrops of the Canadian Arctic. It was there that they won their bet: the team soon found Tiktaalik roseae, a “fishopod” with a mix of aquatic and terrestrial traits. Tiktaalik’s discovery now stands as (...) paleontologists’ textbook case of scientific reasoning done right. (shrink)

Organisms leave a variety of traces in the fossil record. Among these traces, vertebrate and invertebrate paleontologists conventionally recognize a distinction between the remains of an organism’s phenotype and the remains of an organism’s life activities. The same convention recognizes body fossils as biological structures and trace fossils as geological objects. This convention explains some curious practices in the classification, as with the distinction between taxa for trace fossils and for tracemakers. I consider the distinction between “parallel taxonomies,” or parataxonomies, (...) which privileges some kinds of fossil taxa as “natural” and others as “artificial.” The motivations for and consequences of this practice are inconsistent. By comparison, I examine an alternative system of classification used by paleobotanists that regards all fossil taxa as “artificially” split. While this system has the potential to inflate the number of taxa with which paleontologists work, the system offers greater consistency than conventional practices. Weighing the strengths and weaknesses of each system, I recommend that paleontologists should adopt the paleobotanical system more broadly. (shrink)

This article probes the relationship among constitutionalism, extra-legal prerogative power, and citizen judgment. While much has been written about the nature of Lockean prerogative, and while his theory serves as a direct inspiration for contemporary "normative extra-legalists," key participants in the debate over emergency powers, less attention has been paid to how the people judge prerogative. Attention to this issue is useful because an examination of the process of political judgment of extra-legalism in Locke leads to a complication of the (...) current extra-legalist vision of democratic mechanisms of accountability. The author argues that the extra-legal approach is right to consider the role of democratic publics in potentially constraining the exercise of emergency powers but wrong to formulate that role as one extra-constitutional power checking another extra-constitutional power. The author situates both prerogative power and citizen judgment of it at the threshold of the constitutional order. (shrink)

The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon is a reference tool that provides clear and incisive definitions and descriptions of all of Foucault's major terms and influences, including history, knowledge, language, philosophy and power. It also includes entries on philosophers about whom Foucault wrote and who influenced Foucault's thinking, such as Deleuze, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Canguilhem. The entries are written by scholars of Foucault from a variety of disciplines such as philosophy, gender studies, political science and history. Together, they shed light on concepts (...) key to Foucault and to ongoing discussions of his work today. (shrink)

Developments in genetic engineering may soon allow biologists to clone organisms from extinct species. The process, dubbed “de-extinction,” has been publicized as a means to bring extinct species back to life. For theorists and philosophers of biology, the process also suggests a thought experiment for the ongoing “species problem”: given a species concept, would a clone be classified in the extinct species? Previous analyses have answered this question in the context of specific de-extinction technologies or particular species concepts. The thought (...) experiment is given more comprehensive treatment here. Given the products of three de-extinction technologies, twenty-two species concepts are “tested” to see which are consistent with the idea that species may be resurrected. The ensuing discussion considers whether or not de-extinction is a conceptually coherent research program and, if so, whether or not its development may contribute to a resolution of the species problem. Ultimately, theorists must face a choice: they may revise their commitments to species concepts or they may recognize de-extinction as a means to make progress in the species problem. (shrink)

Building on recent formal work by Aleks Knoks, we explore how the idea that certain epistemic norms may be indeterminate could be implemented in a default logic.

This book is an exploration of interrelationships among culture, language, and the individual unconscious (the "dark matter of the mind”), how these feed into a sense of self, and implications for the notion of "human nature.” The first part of the book is concerned with perceptual and cultural bases of dark matter and the effect of dark matter on perception (especially vision) and the interpretation of discourse. The second part is concerned with the contribution of dark matter to language--with language (...) viewed as a combination of speech and gesture, and including issues related to translation. In the final part Everett addresses implications of his account, summarizing and extending arguments for replacing an instinct-based account of human nature with a culturally-based, dark matter view of the "constructed self.” Everett makes a powerful argument for the influence of culture on unconscious forces that underlie human behavior and the individual’s sense of self, with much of the power of the argument coming from the deep insights he gained from living and working with the Pirahãs of the Amazon. This is an important book that sits at the intersection of anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and it is enriched by a combination of the author’s knowledge of these fields and his cross-cultural perspective. The book will make an important contribution to newly emerging directions taken by cognitive science. After decades of a field derailed by ethnocentric, instinct-based views of language and the mind, the cognitive sciences need such informed analyses of the relationship between culture, cognition, and language, as embodied in speech and gesture. (shrink)

Scientific method interests the linguist not only as it interests every scientific worker, but also in a special way, because the scientist, as part of his method, utters certain very peculiar speech-forms. The linguist naturally divides scientific activity into two phases: the scientist performs “handling” actions and utters speech. The speech-forms which the scientist utters are peculiar both in their form and in their effect upon hearers.

If we accept the premise that some sort of rationing of access to health care resources is necessary to contain escalating health care costs effectively, then we need to ask how that rationing might be accomplished most fairly. Calabresi and Bobbitt have argued in their book Tragic Choices that there is no 'perfectly fair' or even 'reasonably fair' way to bring this about.

Eleonore Stump has recently argued that the Aristotelian foundations of Aquinas’s virtue theory have not only been exaggerated but are mistaken. She does not dispute Aquinas’s familiarity with and dependence on Aristotle’s moral theory. Instead, she argues that Aquinas’s ethics must be seen as essentially second-personal, where the central relationship is between the moral agent and the Holy Spirit, specifically the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the theological virtues. Her argument for displacing Aristotle, however, advances on at least two (...) questionable fronts. On the one hand, she claims that the acquired, Aristotelian moral virtues are, for Aquinas, not real virtues at all. Only the infused moral virtues are real. On the other hand, she argues that the pro-Aristotelian character of many descriptions of Aquinas’s moral theory over-emphasizes the role of reason in Aquinas’s ethics. Against this prevailing view, Stump contends that Aquinas is, in a limited way, closer to Hume in privileging the passions over reason. I challenge Stump’s attempted displacement of Aristotle by questioning her on both of these fronts. (shrink)

I have never doubted that the problem of inequalities in health status and access to needed care is a difficult ethical and political challenge. After reading the essays in Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice: New Conversations across the Disciplines, edited by Mara Buchbinder, Michele Rivkin-Fish, and Rebecca Walker, I concluded that despair was the only suitable response in the face of daunting ethical and political complexity. The editors of this volume have three questions in mind that they asked contributors to (...) address. How do scholars from various disciplines approach relations between health inequalities and ideals of justice? Social scientists want to offer empirical descriptions of inequalities in health status across a range of social groups, but there are numerous ways of offering such descriptions. Are they all “correct”? Philosophers and medical ethicists want to make normative judgments regarding which inequalities matter, ethically speaking. So do we need to know when considerations of justice are relevant to assessing health inequalities and which considerations of justice are most relevant in specific contexts? Ultimately, the question is which of these scholarly approaches is most useful for improving health policy. (shrink)

What does it mean to be a “just” and “caring” society in meeting the health care needs of the terminally ill when we have only limited resources to meet virtually unlimited health care needs? This is the question that will be the focus of this essay. Another way of asking our question would be the following: Relative to all the other health care needs in our society, especially the need for lifesaving or life-prolonging health care, how high a priority ought (...) the health care needs of persons who are terminally ill have? Should any of the health care needs of the terminally ill be assigned very low priority? Or should all their health care needs be assigned the highest priority? If we reflect a bit, we will find ourselves greatly internally conflicted. On the one hand, the “caring” side of our moral self might see terminally ill individuals as being among the “medically least well off,” and therefore, deserving virtually any medical resources that will yield any degree of good for them. (shrink)

This personal narrative tugs at the heart strings. However, personal narratives are not sufficient to justify public funding for any screening policy. We have to take seriously the ‘just caring’ problem. We have only limited resources to meet virtually unlimited health care needs. No doubt, screening tests often save lives. The author wants public funding for prostate-specific antigen screening for prostate cancer. However, why only prostate cancer? Numerous cancers at various stages can be screened for. Are all of them equally (...) deserving of public funding? What about screening for a very long list of other life-threatening medical disorders? There is nothing ethically special about cancer. Where does the money come from to pay for all these screening tests? Do we reduce expensive life-prolonging care for patients in late-stage diseases? Ultimately, a balance must be struck between saving statistical lives through screening and saving identifiable lives in the intensive care unit. Achieving a just balance requires rational democratic deliberation as justification for these choices, not personal narratives. (shrink)

The prelims comprise: The Scope of Public Health: Challenges and Choices Health Care Justice and Public Health: When Is Enough Enough? Setting Public Health Priorities Justly: The Limits of Moral Theory References.

Warwick Heale has recently defended the notion of individualized and personalized Quality-Adjusted Life Years in connection with health care resource allocation decisions. Ordinarily, QALYs are used to make allocation decisions at the population level. If a health care intervention costs £100,000 and generally yields only two years of survival, the cost per QALY gained will be £50,000, far in excess of the £30,000 limit per QALY judged an acceptable use of resources within the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. (...) However, if we know with medical certainty that a patient will gain four extra years of life from that intervention, the cost per QALY will be £25,000. Heale argues fairness and social utility require such a patient to receive that treatment, even though all others in the cohort of that patient might be denied that treatment. Likewise, Heale argues that personal commitments of an individual, that determine how they value a life-year with some medical intervention, ought to be used to determine the value of a QALY for them. I argue that if Heale’s proposals were put into practice, the result would often be greater injustice. In brief, requirements for the just allocation of health care resources are more complex than pure cost-effectiveness analysis would allow. (shrink)

In this essay, I examine Derrida’s deconstruction (or critique) of the death penalty in his first set of lectures (The Death Penalty, Volume 1). The essay has two parts. First, I reconstruct this deconstruction. I show that the deconstruction depends on the difference between the calculable instant and the incalculable instant. Then, in the second part I show how this difference is based on the deconstruction of temporalization Derrida produced in his 1967 Voice and Phenomenon. The deconstruction of temporalization shows (...) that the calculated instant is impossible, and the future, including the instant of my death, remains incalculable. In the essay’s conclusion, I show that the pardon from the death penalty is only a gift of time, only more time or extra time. The pardon can pardon someone from the condemnation to death, but it cannot pardon anyone from the condemnation to die. The pardon can give only a finite survival. (shrink)