The Axiology of Theism The existential question about God asks whether God exists, but the axiology of theism addresses the question of what value-impact, if any, God’s existence does have on our world and its inhabitants. There are two prominent answers to the axiological question about God. Pro-theism is the view that God’s … Continue reading The Axiology of Theism →.

In this paper, I seek to contribute to post-phenomenological descriptions of human-technological relations and the intentionalities exhibited in them by focusingon the intentionality exhibited in the use of a cochlear implant. To do so, I will use concepts developed by Don Ihde and further extended by Peter-Paul Verbeek to show that while post-phenomenological categories illuminate the intentional relationship of a cochlear implant wearer to her world, this relationship defies easy categorization. An examination of successful functioning with a cochlear implant will (...) reveal a distinct form of technological embodiment and intentionality that confirms and extends previous post-phenomenological analyses. (shrink)

In my comments, I address two issues that are important but not central to the paper under review here. First, I present a reading of the postphenomenological concept of multistability by going back to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the primacy of perception. I conclude that assertions affirming the multistability of technologies should not be seen as merely empirical. Second, I address the adequacy of using the language of ‘empirical’ and ‘transcendental’ as a means to categorize exclusionary approaches in philosophy of technology.

A growing number of healthcare practices implicate serious moral concerns for growing numbers of healthcare providers. Social, legal, and medical developments, including abortion, contraception, euthanasia, withdrawal of feeding, blood transfusions, organ transplants, and routine autopsies, have put healthcare providers in the vortex of some of society's most controversial moral dilemmas.

BackgroundIn December 2014, China announced that only voluntarily donated organs from citizens would be used for transplantation after January 1, 2015. Many medical professionals worldwide believe that China has stopped using organs from death-row prisoners.DiscussionIn the present article, we briefly review the historical development of organ procurement from death-row prisoners in China and comprehensively analyze the social-political background and the legal basis of the announcement. The announcement was not accompanied by any change in organ sourcing legislations or regulations. As a (...) fact, the use of prisoner organs remains legal in China. Even after January 2015, key Chinese transplant officials have repeatedly stated that death-row prisoners have the same right as regular citizens to “voluntarily donate” organs. This perpetuates an unethical organ procurement system in ongoing violation of international standards.ConclusionsOrgan sourcing from death-row prisoners has not stopped in China. The 2014 announcement refers to the intention to stop the use of organs illegally harvested without the consent of the prisoners. Prisoner organs procured with “consent” are now simply labelled as “voluntarily donations from citizens”. The semantic switch may whitewash sourcing from both death-row prisoners and prisoners of conscience. China can gain credibility only by enacting new legislation prohibiting use of prisoner organs and by making its organ sourcing system open to international inspections. Until international ethical standards are transparently met, sanctions should remain. (shrink)

This paper examines, on the basis of a longitudinal corpus of 50 early modern authors, how change at the aggregate level of the community interacts with variation and change at the micro-level of the individual language user. In doing so, this study aims to address the methodological gap between collective change and entrenchment, that is, the gap between language as a social phenomenon and the cognitive processes responsible for the continuous reorganization of linguistic knowledge in individual speakers. Taking up the (...) case of the prepositional passive, this study documents a strong community-wide increase in use that is accompanied by increasing schematicity. A comparison of the 50 authors reveals that regularities arising at the macro-level conceal highly complex and variable individual behavior, aspects of which may be explained by studying the larger (social) context in which these individuals operate (e. g., age cohorts, community of practice, biographical insights). Further analysis, focusing on how authors use the prepositional passive in unique and similar ways, elucidates the role of small individual biases in long-term change. Overall, it is demonstrated that language change is an emergent phenomenon that results from the complex interaction between individual speakers, who themselves may change their linguistic behavior to varying degrees. (shrink)

. Undoubtedly, multinational corporations must play a significant role in the advancement of global ecological ethics. Our research offers a glimpse into the process of how goals of ecological sustainability in one multinational corporation can trickle down through the organization via the sustainability support behaviors of supervisors. We asked the question “How do supervisors in a multinational corporation internalize their corporation’s commitment to ecological sustainability and, in turn, behave in ways that convey this commitment to their subordinates?” In response, we (...) created a theoretical framework for supervisor sustainability support behavior based on Stern et al., Human Ecology Review 6(2), 81-97 (1999) value-belief-norm (VBN) theory. We then tested our framework by performing a survey-based field study of supervisors in a multinational pharmaceutical company that has publicly professed a goal of ecological sustainability. (shrink)

What is a human person, and what is the relation between a person and his or her body? In her third book on the philosophy of mind, Lynne Rudder Baker investigates what she terms the person/body problem and offers a detailed account of the relation between human persons and their bodies. Baker's argument is based on the 'Constitution View' of persons and bodies, which aims to show what distinguishes persons from all other beings and to show how we can (...) be fully material beings without being identical to our bodies. The Constitution View yields answers to the questions 'What am I most fundamentally?', 'What is a person?', and 'What is the relation between human persons and their bodies'? Baker argues that the complex mental property of first-person perspective enables one to conceive of one's body and mental states as one's own. (shrink)

For a long time, linguists more or less denied the existence of individual differences in grammatical knowledge. While recent years have seen an explosion of research on individual differences, most usage-based research has failed to address this issue and has remained reluctant to study the synergy between individual and community grammars. This paper focuses on individual differences in linguistic knowledge and processing, and examines how these differences can be integrated into a more comprehensive constructionist theory of grammar. The examination is (...) guided by the various challenges and opportunities that may be extracted from scattered research that exists across disciplines touching on these matters, while also presenting some new data that illustrate how differentiation between individuals can improve models of long-term language change. The paper also serves as the introduction to this special issue of Cognitive Linguistics, which collects seven contributions from various linguistic disciplines focusing on key aspects of individuals’ grammars. (shrink)

Holobionts are multicellular eukaryotes with multiple species of persistent symbionts. They are not individuals in the genetic sense— composed of and regulated by the same genome—but they are anatomical, physiological, developmental, immunological, and evolutionary units, evolved from a shared relationship between different species. We argue that many of the interactions between human and microbiota symbionts and the reproductive process of a new holobiont are best understood as instances of reciprocal scaffolding of developmental processes and mutual construction of developmental, ecological, and (...) evolutionary niches. Our examples show that mother, fetus, and different symbiotic microbial communities induce or constitute conditions for the development and reproduction of one another. These include the direct induction of maternal or fetus physiological changes, the restructuring of ecological relations between communities, and evolutionary selection against undesirable competitors. The mutual scaffolding and niche constructing processes start early—prior to amniotic rupture. We are evolutionarily, physiologically, and developmentally integrated holobiont systems, strung together through mutual reliance and mutual construction. Bringing the processes of niche construction and developmental scaffolding together to interpret holobiont birth conceptually scaffolds two new directions for research: in niche construction, identifying the evolutionary implications of organisms actively constructing multiple overlapping niches and scaffolds, and in Evolutionary Developmental Biology, characterizing evolutionary and ecological processes as developmental causes. (shrink)

Among the entities that can be mentally or linguistically represented are mental and linguistic representations themselves. That is, we can think and talk about speech and thought. This phenomenon is known as metarepresentation. An example is "Authors believe that people read books." -/- In this book François Recanati discusses the structure of metarepresentation from a variety of perspectives. According to him, metarepresentations have a dual structure: their content includes the content of the object-representation (people reading books) as well as the (...) "meta" part (the authors' belief). Rejecting the view that the object representation is mentioned rather than used, Recanati claims that since metarepresentations carry the content of the object representation, they must be about whatever the object representation is about. Metarepresentations are fundamentally transparent because they work by simulating the representation they are about. -/- Topics covered in this wide-ranging work include the analysis of belief reports and talk about fiction, world shifting, opacity and substitutivity, quotation, the relation between direct and indirect discourse, context shifting, semantic pretense, and deference in language and thought. (shrink)

Persons and Bodies develops and defends an account of persons and of the relation between human persons and their bodies. Human persons are constituted by bodies, without being identical to the bodies that constitute them—just as, I argue, statues are constituted by pieces of bronze, say, without being identical to the pieces of bronze that constitute them. The relation of constitution, therefore, is not peculiar to persons and their bodies, but is pervasive in the natural world.

Understanding, shared meaning, and mutual trust lie at the heart of the therapeutic nurse–patient relationship. This article introduces the concept of clinical intimacy by applying the interpersonal process model of intimacy to the nurse–patient relationship. The distinction between complementary and reciprocal behaviours, and between intimate interactions and intimate relationships, addresses background concerns about the appropriateness of intimacy in nursing relationships. The mutual construction of meaning in the interactive process between nurses and patients is seen to lie at the heart of (...) clinical intimacy as a hermeneutic enterprise. Intimacy is distinguished from empathy based on intentionality and the status and location of meaning. Reasons for continued investigation into clinical intimacy as an explanatory model for nursing as a hermeneutic practice are presented. (shrink)

This work provides a text and an extended study of those fragments of Heraclitus' philosophical utterances whose subject is the world as a whole rather than man and his part in it. Professor Kirk discusses fully the fragments which he finds genuine and treats in passing others that were generally accepted as genuine but here considered paraphrased or spurious. In securing his text, Professor Kirk has taken into account all the ancient testimonies, and in his critical work he (...) attached particular importance to the context in which each fragment is set. To each he gives a selective apparatus, a literal translation and and an extended commentary in which problems of textual and philosophical criticism are discussed. Ancient accounts of Heraclitus were inadequate and misleading, and as Kirk wrote, understanding was often hindered by excessive dogmatism and a selective use of the fragments. Professor Kirk's method is critical and objective, and his 1954 work marks a significant advance in the study of Presocratic thought. (shrink)

The upcoming U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has the potential to eliminate or severely restrict access to legal abortion care in the United States. We a...

J. S. Mill's role in the Indian education controversy is well known, but scarcely well understood. That he drafted, in 1836, a despatch sharply critical of Macaulay's infamous Minute on Indian Education, is general knowledge now. That in drafting the despatch Mill drew upon the ideas of H. H. Wilson, a noted Orientalist and sharp critic of Macaulay and the Anglicists, has been adequately demonstrated. That the despatch was never sent to India, because of the objections of the President of (...) the Board of Trade, John Hobhouse, a Whig with some utilitarian connections, has been common knowledge for several decades. (shrink)

There is currently a great debate about whether the holobiont, i.e. a multicellular host and its residential microorganisms, constitutes a biological individual. We propose that resident microorganisms have a general and important role in the individuality of the host organism, not the holobiont. Drawing upon the Equilibrium Model of Immunity, we argue that microorganisms are scaffolds of immune capacities and processes that determine the constituency and persistence of the host organism. A scaffolding perspective accommodates the contingency and heterogeneity of resident (...) microorganisms while accounting for their necessity and unifying contributions to host individuality. In our symbiotic view of life, holobionts may not be organisms or units of selection, but macroorganisms cannot persist nor function as individuals without their scaffolding microorganisms. (shrink)

A longitudinal study of 308 white -collar U.S. employees revealed that feelings of hope and gratitude increase concern for corporate social responsibility. In particular, employees with stronger hope and gratitude were found to have a greater sense of responsibility toward employee and societal issues; interestingly, employee hope and gratitude did not affect sense of responsibility toward economic and safety/quality issues. These findings offer an extension of research by Giacalone, Paul, and Jurkiewicz.

Lynne Rudder Baker presents and defends a unique account of the material world: the Constitution View. In contrast to leading metaphysical views that take everyday things to be either non-existent or reducible to micro-objects, the Constitution View construes familiar things as irreducible parts of reality. Although they are ultimately constituted by microphysical particles, everyday objects are neither identical to, nor reducible to, the aggregates of microphysical particles that constitute them. The result is genuine ontological diversity: people, bacteria, donkeys, mountains (...) and microscopes are fundamentally different kinds of things - all constituted by, but not identical to, aggregates of particles. Baker supports her account with discussions of non-reductive causation, vagueness, mereology, artefacts, three-dimensionalism, ontological novelty, ontological levels and emergence. The upshot is a unified ontological theory of the entire material world that irreducibly contains people, as well as non-human living things and inanimate objects. (shrink)

There is a growing call for greater public involvement in establishing science and technology policy, in line with democratic ideals. A variety of public participation procedures exist that aim to consult and involve the public, ranging from the public hearing to the consensus conference. Unfortunately, a general lack of empirical consideration of the quality of these methods arises from confusion as to the appropriate benchmarks for evaluation. Given that the quality of the output of any participation exercise is difficult to (...) determine, the authors suggest the need to consider which aspects of the process are desirable and then to measure the presence or quality of these process aspects. To this end, a number of theoretical evaluation criteria that are essential for effective public participation are specified. These comprise two types: acceptance criteria, which concern features of a method that make it acceptable to the wider public, and process criteria, which concern features of the process that are liable to ensure that it takes place in an effective manner. Future research needs to develop instruments to measure these criteria more precisely and identify the contextual and environmental factors that will mediate the effectiveness of the different participation methods. (shrink)

Imprecise definition of key terms in the “public participation” domain have hindered the conduct of good research and militated against the development and implementation of effective participation practices. In this article, we define key concepts in the domain: public communication, public consultation, and public participation. These concepts are differentiated according to the nature and flow of information between exercise sponsors and participants. According to such an information flow perspective, an exercise’s effectiveness may be ascertained by the efficiency with which full, (...) relevant information is elicited from all appropriate sources, transferred to all appropriate recipients, and combined to give an aggregate/consensual response. Key variables that may theoretically affect effectiveness—and on which engagement mechanisms differ—are identified and used to develop a typology of mechanisms. The resultant typology reveals four communication, six consultation, and four participation mechanism classes. Limitations to the typology are discussed, and future research needs identified. (shrink)

History is composed of a web of innumerable interacting causal chains, many of which are composed of millions of discrete events. The complexity of history puts us in a position of having knowledge of only a minuscule portion of the consequences of any event, actual or proposed. Our almost complete lack of knowledge of the data necessary to know if an event is gratuitous makes it very likely that we would be mistaken about a very large number of events. The (...) complexity of history, therefore, poses a significant challenge to certain types of evidential arguments from evil that begin with our observations of evils that appear to be gratuitous. (shrink)

Scholars have proposed a number of courses and programs intended to improve the ethical behavior of scientists in an attempt to maintain the integrity of the scientific enterprise. In the present study, we conducted a quantitative meta-analysis based on 26 previous ethics program evaluation efforts, and the results showed that the overall effectiveness of ethics instruction was modest. The effects of ethics instruction, however, were related to a number of instructional program factors, such as course content and delivery methods, in (...) addition to factors of the evaluation study itself, such as the field of investigator and criterion measure utilized. An examination of the characteristics contributing to the relative effectiveness of instructional programs revealed that more successful programs were conducted as seminars separate from the standard curricula rather than being embedded in existing courses. Furthermore, more successful programs were case based and interactive, and they allowed participants to learn and practice the application of real-world ethical decision-making skills. The implications of these findings for future course development and evaluation are discussed. (shrink)

This article breaks fresh ground on the probabilistic problem of evil, contesting its first premise (probably, if God exists, gratuitous evil does not exist) instead of the commonly contested second premise (probably, gratuitous evil exists). In so doing, it presents a rehabilitated version of Leibniz’s argument for the irrelevance of gratuitous evil vis-à-vis the existence of God, according to which it is logically impossible for any world God might create to be devoid of pointless evil. Accordingly, my argument provides theists (...) a more fruitful strategy for dealing with evil than asking skeptics to deny their intuitive recognition of pointless suffering. (shrink)

In this paper, I pursue a postphenomenological analysis of navigating with GPS in an automobile. I argue that GPS use is essentially different from navigating with a map insofar as one need not establish nor maintain orientation and directionality. Also, GPS provides a disembodied, omniscient navigational perspective. These aspects stem from the fact that GPS relies on earth-orbiting satellites, thereby reinforcing the modern view of the space/place relation that privileges abstract space over concrete, lived places. Following a postphenomenological thesis that (...) technologies are non-neutral mediators of human experience, I examine some important qualitative aspects of traveling with GPS. (shrink)

Americans cherish the idea that good eventually triumphs over evil. After briefly arguing that a proper understanding of the moral harm of cruelty calls into question the credibility of popular American idioms of redemption, I argue that the epistemic dynamics of horror help account for the commanding grip of this rhetoric on the popular imagination, and I suggest that this idiom has morally problematic features that warrant the attention of feminists.

The topic of the sublime is making a return to contemporary discourse on aesthetics and cognition. In Sublime Understanding, Kirk Pillow makes sublimity the center of an alternative conception of aesthetic response and interpretation. He draws an aesthetics of sublimity from Kant's Critique of Judgment, bolsters it with help from Hegel, and establishes its place in a broadened conception of human understanding. He argues that sublime reflection provides a model for an interpretive response to the uncanny Other outside our (...) conceptual grasp; it advances our sense-making pursuits but eschews unified, conceptual determination. Thus "sublime understanding" is the always partial, indeterminate grasping of contextual wholes through which we make sense of the uncanny particular in both art and the lived world.The book is divided into three parts. In the first two parts, Pillow presents insightful reinterpretations of Kant's and Hegel's aesthetics. In the third part he develops his own model of an aestheticized understanding, which illuminates contemporary discussions of metaphor and interpretation, while bridging Anglo-American and continental treatments of these issues. The presentation is a model of clear and well-crafted exposition, exemplifying the practice of aesthetically reflective sublime understanding that it articulates. (shrink)

Within emotion-focused therapy, the client’s ability to express and reflect on core emotional experiences is seen as fundamental to constructing the self and to entering into a change process. For this study, we 1) examine storytelling contexts in which clients do not disclose the emotional impact of their narrative, and 2) identify the interactional practices through which EFT therapists subsequently call attention to what the client may have felt. In doing so, we examine client stories drawn from video-taped individual psychotherapy (...) sessions involving clinically depressed clients. Client stories and therapists’ responses to these stories were analysed using conversation analytic methods. Three different therapist response types were identified: eliciting, naming and illustrating the emotional impact of the client’s prior narrative. These responses also were found to differ in terms of how effectively they could display empathy and secure affiliation with clients. The implications of this work for therapeutic practice are discussed. (shrink)

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Science and its philosophical companion, Naturalism, represent reality in wholly nonpersonal terms. How, if at all, can a nonpersonal scheme accommodate the first-person perspective that we all enjoy? In this volume, Lynne Rudder Baker explores that question by considering both reductive and eliminative approaches to the first-person perspective. After finding both approaches wanting, she mounts an original constructive argument to show that a non-Cartesian first-person perspective belongs in the basic inventory of what exists. That is, the world that contains (...) us persons is irreducibly personal.After arguing for the irreducibilty and ineliminability of the first-person perspective, Baker develops a theory of this perspective. The first-person perspective has two stages, rudimentary and robust. Human infants and nonhuman animals with consciousness and intentionality have rudimentary first-person perspectives. In learning a language, a person acquires a robust first-person perspective: the capacity to conceive of oneself as oneself, in the first person. By developing an account of personal identity, Baker argues that her theory is coherent, and she shows various ways in which first-person perspectives contribute to reality. (shrink)

This stimulating book critically examines a wide range of physicalistic conceptions of mind in the works of Jerry A. Fodor, Stephen P. Stich, Paul M. Churchland, Daniel C. Dennett, and others. Part I argues that intentional concepts cannot be reduced to nonintentional concepts; Part II argues that intentional concepts are nevertheless indispensable to our cognitive enterprises and thus need no foundation in physicalism. As a sustained challenge to the prevailing interpretation of cognitive science, this timely book fills a large gap (...) in the philosophical literature. It is sure to spark controversy, yet its clarity makes it attractive as a text in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Saving Belief should be read by philosophers, psychologists, and others interested in the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Several philosophers and theologians have attempted to formulate monergistic, soft libertarian accounts of salvation. These accounts hold that the sinner has the ability to either resist or to do nothing at all with God’s universally given saving grace, in which latter case God will save her. However, I wonder with Cyr and Flummer whether these accounts go far enough because the nonresistant sinner voluntarily remains quiescent and is therefore arguably praiseworthy. I aim to remedy this alleged weakness by formulating a (...) possible account on which it never crosses the nonresistant sinner’s mind to resist, making her quiescence an involuntary omission. For all sinners whose minds it crosses to resist, they, on the proposed account, freely choose to resist. Combining Molinism with the scriptural notion of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, I proceed to explain why it may cross the mind of some sinners and not others to resist. (shrink)

The journey of the Wycliffe Global Alliance is an example of how some paradigm shifts are influencing leading in mission. Since Christianity is both an agent and product of globalization, its beliefs have spread from one source to another, crossing religious, linguistic and cultural contexts. As a result, there are polycentric or multiple centres of influence since Christianity has homes within a diversity of contexts. This carries with it various implications including how partnering in mission needs to be deconceptualized through (...) greater emphasis on friendship. In order for this to happen as a missiological principle, third spaces may need to be created. Viewed against the backdrop of church and mission agency leadership, structures may be ‘stuck in the Industrial Era’. Therefore, the stage is set for exploring how these and other themes influence leadership in God’s mission. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show that human persons belong, ontologically, in social ontology. After setting out my views on ontology, I turn to persons and argue that they have first-person perspectives in two stages (rudimentary and robust) essentially. Then I argue that the robust stage of the first-person persective is social, in that it requires a language, and languages require linguistic communities. Then I extend the argument to cover the rudimentary stage of the first-person perspective as well. (...) I conclude by enumerating ways in which human persons differ from nonhuman animals. (shrink)