We believe that clinical ethics consultants (CECs) should offer advice, options, and recommendations to attending physicians and their teams. In their article in this issue of The Journal of Clinical Ethics, however, Kornfeld and Prager give CECs a somewhat different role. The CEC they describe may at times be more aptly understood as a medical interventionist who appropriates the roles of the attending physician and the medical team than as a traditional CEC. In these remarks, we distinguish the role of (...) the CEC from that of the physician, in contrast to some of these authors’ recommendations, which confuse the two roles. (shrink)

The main conclusion drawn in this text is that Piaget's accounts of the construction of necessary knowledge continue to have an intelligible and respectable bases.

A special issue on the state of the field in Chinese philosophy, including work by: Stephen Angle, Roger Ames, Bryan Van Norden, Justin Tiwald, Manyul Im, David Wong, Hugh Benson, Leslie Francis, and Amy Olberding.

We argue that generic generalizations about racial groups are pernicious in what they communicate (both to members of that racial group and to members of other racial groups), and may be central to the construction of social categories like racial groups. We then consider how we should change and challenge uses of generic generalizations about racial groups.

In “Meeting the Moment: Bioethics in the Time of Black Lives Matter,” Camisha Russell calls for transforming “bioethics-as-usual” with help from “outsiders”. Prior scholars agree...

Hugh H. Benson explores Plato's answer to Clitophon's challenge, the question of how one can acquire the knowledge Socrates argues is essential to human flourishing-knowledge we all seem to lack. Plato suggests two methods by which this knowledge may be gained: the first is learning from those who already have the knowledge one seeks, and the second is discovering the knowledge one seeks on one's own. The book begins with a brief look at some of the Socratic dialogues where (...) Plato appears to recommend the former approach while simultaneously indicating various difficulties in pursuing it. The remainder of the book focuses on Plato's recommendation in some of his most important and central dialogues-the Meno, Phaedo, and Republic-for carrying out the second approach: de novo inquiry. The book turns first to the famous paradox concerning the possibility of such an inquiry and explores Plato's apparent solution. Having defended the possibility of de novo inquiry as a response to Clitophon's challenge, Plato explains the method or procedure by which such inquiry is to be carried out. The book defends the controversial thesis that the method of hypothesis, as described and practiced in the Meno, Phaedo, and Republic, is, when practiced correctly, Plato's recommended method of acquiring on one's own the essential knowledge we lack. The method of hypothesis when practiced correctly is, then, Platonic dialectic, and this is Plato's response to Clitophon's challenge. (shrink)

This discussion originally took place as part of the Sounding the Land exhibition curated by Simon Gush, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, Craig Paterson and Gary Minkley at the virtual National Arts Festival that ran from 25 June 5 July 2020. Sounding the Land intended to use the bicentennial of the so called 1820 settlers' arrival as a critical platform from which to discuss the legacies of the settler colonial project, the ways in which it is commemorated, and to reassess the historical understandings (...) of the 1820 settler moment in South African history. In the following discussion, which took place via Zoom Video Communication and was originally recorded on 2 June 2020, between Leslie Witz in Cape Town and Helena Pohlandt-McCormick in San Francisco they talk about the cyclical and accumulative power of anniversary and commemoration, the ways they set in place temporal certainties that align past, present and future, and how configurations of memorial space through visual technologies are authoritative mechanisms in establishing the time and times of history. They discuss strategies of resisting such memorial power and whether the simple inversion of historical figures and events may inadvertently serve to reinforce anniversary histories of founding. By linking the contemporary moments of the interview the COVID-19 pandemic, the postponement of settler commemorations, the virtual National Festival, and the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis they consider dystopian futures as inaugurating the possibilities of disruptive memorial time that constantly exposes the fractures of racial violence and colonial dispossession rather than masking it through either the commemoration or the inversion of the anniversary. (shrink)

Books reviewed:Mark Munn, The School of History: Athens in the Age of SocratesKathryn Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to PlatoMary Margaret McCabe, Plato and his Predecessors: The Dramatization of ReasonJohannes M. van Ophuijsen, Plato and Platonism.Nicholas D. Smith and Paul B. Woodruff, Reason and Religion in Socratic PhilosophyAndrew Gregory, Plato's Philosophy of ScienceHugh H. Benson, Socratic Wisdom: The Model of Knowledge in Plato's Early DialoguesAngela Hobbs, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal GoodMelissa Lane, Plato's (...) Progeny: How Plato and Socrates still Captivate the Modern MindAlan G. Gross and Arthur E. Walzer, Rereading Aristotle's RhetoricEdward Grant, God and Reason in the Middle AgesJohn Marenbon and Giovanni Orlandi, Peter Abelard’s Collationes.Terence Penelhum, Themes in Hume: The Self, the Will, ReligionStephan R. Palmquist, Kant's Critical ReligionJohn Lippitt, Humour and Irony in Kierkegaard's ThoughtDavid B. Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Genealogy of MoralsMaurice Blondel, The Idealist Illusion and Other EssaysDaniel O. Dahlstrom, Heidegger's Concept of TruthLawrence J. Hatab, Ethics and Finitude: Heideggerian Contributions to Moral PhilosophyMichel Foucault, L’Herméneutique du sujet: Cours au Collège de France W. W. Meissner, Freud and PsychoanalysisScott Sturgeon, Matters of Mind: Consciousness, Reason and NatureDavid Jopling, Self–Knowledge and the SelfDouglas C. Langston, Conscience and Other Virtues: From Bonaventure to MacIntyreMartin Rhonheimer, Natural Law and Practical Reason: A Thomist View of Moral AutonomyPhilippa Foot, Natural GoodnessJohn Leslie, Infinite Minds. A Philosophical CosmologyBerys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, The Routledge Companion to AestheticsPaul Kurtz, Embracing the Power of HumanismJohn Gray, Two Faces of LiberalismDonald A. Hay and Alan Kreider, Christianity and the Culture of Economics.Marcia Bunge, The Child in Christian ThoughtDean Hoge, Willian Dinges, Mary Johnson and Juan Gonzales, Young Adult CatholicsStephan C. Barton, Life Together: Family, Sexuality and Community in the New Testament and TodayColin E. Gunton, Stephen R. Holmes and Murray A. Rae, The Practice of Theology: A ReaderDavid Jobling, Tina Pippin and Ronald Schleifer, The Postmodern Bible ReaderThomas L. Martin, Reading the Classics with C. S. Lewis. (shrink)

Previous research has examined growing globalized divisions in domestic labor through the perspective of poor migrant women who perform care work in advanced industrialized societies. This article explores this global trend in reverse, focusing on first-world women who migrate into developing countries and engage with local dynamics of care through volunteer work. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Helping Hands, an organization of expatriate wives that assisted a local state-run orphanage in Beijing, China, I argue that gendered processes (...) of privileged migration caused women to develop a “logic of care” that equated good care solely with maternal nurturance and emotional connection. This logic permeated their volunteer efforts, causing conflicts with Chinese state caregivers who prioritized the performance of reproductive tasks. This case demonstrates the socially constructed nature of logics that underlie care practices and their relationship to increasingly transnational configurations of privilege and inequality. When applied to first-world women’s charitable activities in developing countries, unquestioned gendered logics can reinforce larger global disparities of power through the stratified provision of care. (shrink)

Intended both for undergraduate students and for general readers, this introduction to the philosophy of science uses case studies, anecdotes and personal comment to portray many heroes and villains from the field of science through the ages.

Preston's (2011) challenge to the moral presumption against geoengineering is applied to carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) in Scotland, United Kingdom. Qualitative data is analysed to assess if and how Preston's arguments play out in practice. We argue that the concepts of 'lesser evil' and prioritising human well-being over non-interference in natural processes do bring different value positions together in support of CCS, but that not all people see short-term carbon abatement as the 'least worst' option or a suitable (...) way to prioritise human well-being. (shrink)

The pioneering ideas of Glenn D. Paige for a paradigm shift from killing to nonkilling are highlighted. The relevance of anthropology for this paradigm is advanced. The accumulating scientific evidence proves that nonviolent and peaceful societies not only exist, but are actually the norm throughout human prehistory and history. This scientific fact is elucidated through a historical inventory of the most important documentation. Ethnographic cases are summarized of the Semai as a nonviolent society, the transition from killing to nonkilling of (...) the Waorani, and the critiques of the representation of the Yanomami as a killing society. Several of the most important cross-cultural studies are discussed. The assertions of some of the most vocal opponents to this paradigm are refuted. The systemic cultural and ideological bias privileging violence and war over nonviolence and peace is documented. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMost scholars agree that meaning and intelligibility are central to Heidegger’s account of Dasein and Being-in-the-world, but there is some confusion about the nature of this intelligibility. In his debate with McDowell, Dreyfus draws on phenomenologists like Heidegger to argue that there are two kinds of intelligibility: a basic, nonconceptual, practical intelligibility found in practical comportment and a conceptual, discursive intelligibility. I explore two possible ways that Dreyfus might ground this twofold account of intelligibility in Heidegger: first in the distinction (...) between the hermeneutic and apophantic “as”, and second in the presence and absence of the as-structure. I argue that neither approach succeeds because practical intelligibility is always already discursive and discursive articulation is a condition of practical comportment. (shrink)

The first section of this paper is concerned with the intrinsic properties of elementary monadic logic (EM), and characterizations in the spirit of Lindström [2] are given. His proofs do not apply to monadic logic since relations are used, and intrinsic properties of EM turn out to differ in certain ways from those of the elementary logic of relations (i.e., the predicate calculus), which we shall call EL. In the second section we investigate connections between higher-order monadic and polyadic logics.EM (...) is the subsystem of EL which results by the restriction to one-place predicate letters. We omit constants (for simplicity) but take EM to contain identity. Let atypebe any finite sequence (possibly empty) of one-place predicate letters. A modelMof typehas a nonempty universe ∣M∣ and assigns to each predicate letterPofa subsetPMof ∣M∣.Let us take a monadic logicLto be any collection of classes of models, calledL-classes, satisfying the following:1. All models in a givenL-class are of the same type (called the type of the class).2. Isomorphic models lie in the sameL-classes.3. IfandareL-classes of the same type, thenandareL-classes. (shrink)

The case and commentaries below were developed as part of a project, Graduate Research Ethics Education, undertaken by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF Grant No. SBR 9421897 and NSF Grant No. 9817880). The project aims at training graduate students in research ethics and building a community of scientists and engineers who are interested in and capable of teaching research ethics. As part of the project, each graduate student participant develops a (...) case for use in teaching and writes a commentary to go with the case, and then a staff member is asked to write additional commentary on the case. The case below was written in the second year of the project and was published in Research Ethics: Cases and Commentaries edited by B. Schrag, Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, Bloomington, Indiana, Vol. II (1998). Publication of these cases and commentaries will be a recurring feature of Science and Engineering Ethics. (shrink)

The present stage in the development of our society is marked by serious changes in social morality. The building of communism is entering a new stage. The man of the communist future is taking shape and being perfected before our eyes. Under these conditions, the Party - and this was emphasized at its Twenty-Fourth Congress - requires of a worker in the arts a thorough examination of contemporary life and of its hero to the full extent of his talent, and (...) demands that his ethical convictions and awareness of spirit be developed. Since this is the case, it is natural that literary criticism faces new, lofty tasks: tasks of analyzing literature in connection with those economic, societal, and moral processes which characterize social existence today. This was stated clearly both at the Party Congress and in the Resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU "On Criticism in Literature and the Arts" [O literaturno-khudozhestvennoi kritiki]. (shrink)

The notion of experience plays a deeply ambiguous role in philosophical thinking. In ordinary discourse we say that applicants for employment as joiner, farmhand or nanny should have some previous experience with carpentry, livestock or children. Such uses of the word clearly presuppose the existence of the relevant objects of experience. In other usages the focus is more on the mental effect on the subject, as when someone says that they have had several unpleasant experiences that day–a wetting in a (...) thunderstorm, an altercation with a traffic warden, and a long wait at the station. (shrink)

We are morally perplexed about nuclear weapons. Popular debate oscillates tediously between an apparently impractical idealism which would have nothing to do with the things, and a military and political realism which insists that we have to use such means to attain our legitimate ends. The choice, it too often seems, is between laying down our nuclear arms–thus avoiding the moral odium of resting our defence policies on threats to vaporize millions of civilians–but leaving ourselves open to domination by those (...) who do not feel such scruples, and on the other hand, retaining such weapons as long as our potential enemies possess them, constantly maintaining parity with the other side–in other words, proceeding with the arms race. The respective proponents of principle and of prudence typically fail to understand how others can possibly neglect the considerations which loom so large in their own minds. Each has at bottom a deeply held ethical view–that certain means may not be used for any end, or that certain ends are so important that they justify the use of almost any means. The disagreement is so irreconcilable that it spills out from TV studios and newspaper editorial pages on to the streets and the missile bases, and into the courts and the prisons. (shrink)

A fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and of the Royal Society, William Clifford made his reputation in applied mathematics, but his interests ranged far more widely, encompassing ethics, evolution, metaphysics and philosophy of mind. This posthumously collected two-volume work, first published in 1879, bears witness to the dexterity and eclecticism of this Victorian thinker, whose commitment to the most abstract principles of mathematics and the most concrete details of human experience resulted in vivid and often unexpected arguments. Volume 1 includes (...) a detailed biographical introduction by Clifford's colleague, Frederick Pollock, who situates his close friend's interests in Darwin and Spinoza within a larger, life-long devotion to the principles of scientific enquiry and experiment. This volume also features two important essays, 'On Some of the Conditions of Mental Development', his first public lecture delivered at the Royal Institute in London, and 'The Philosophy of the Pure Sciences'. (shrink)

A fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and of the Royal Society, William Clifford made his reputation in applied mathematics, but his interests ranged far more widely, encompassing ethics, evolution, metaphysics and philosophy of mind. This posthumously collected two-volume work, first published in 1879, bears witness to the dexterity and eclecticism of this Victorian thinker, whose commitment to the most abstract principles of mathematics and the most concrete details of human experience resulted in vivid and often unexpected arguments. Volume 2 shows (...) Clifford's thorough engagement with scientific thought as a method for illuminating ethical and moral questions. Essays such as 'Body and Mind', 'On the Scientific Basis of Morals' and 'The Ethics of Belief' all variously demonstrate Clifford's core tenet: that beliefs - whether they guide human action or scientific enquiry - 'can never suffer from investigation'. (shrink)