Early last year, the GenEthics Consortium (GEC) of the Washington Metropolitan Area convened at George Washington University to consider a complex case about genetic testing for Alzheimer disease (AD). The GEC consists of scientists, bioethicists, lawyers, genetic counselors, and consumers from a variety of institutions and affiliations. Four of the 8 co-authors of this paper delivered presentations on the case. Supplemented by additional ethical and legal observations, these presentations form the basis for the following discussion.

The paper is concerned with the idea that the world is the totality of facts, not of things – with what is involved in thinking of the world in that way, and why one might do so. It approaches this issue through a comparison between Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the identity theory of truth proposed by Hornsby and McDowell.The paper’s positive conclusion is that there is a genuine affinity between these two. A negative contention is that the modern identity theory is (...) vulnerable to a complaint of idealism that the Tractatus can deflect. (shrink)

Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, conceives the world as ‘the totality of facts’. Type-stratification threatens that conception : the totality of facts is an obvious example of an illegitimate totality. Wittgenstein’s notion of truthoperation evidently has some role to play in avoiding that threat, allowing propositions, and so facts, to constitute a single type. The paper seeks to explain that role in a way that integrates the ‘philosophical’ and ‘technical’ pressures on the notion of an operation.

0. My aims in this paper are largely expository: I am more interested in presenting the picture theory than deciding its truth. Even so, I hope that the arguments by which I develop the theory will do something to support it, since I believe that what I will present as Wittgenstein's view is indeed the truth. This is not an admission of insanity, though some things that have been thought intrinsic to the picture theory are things it would be insane (...) to believe. So clearly the view I will present, when compared to the most embracing interpretations, is a partial and selective one. It would be another kind of madness, one I am just as eagre to disown, to suppose that my own favoured selection is the only possible one. That is pretty well the last remark in this paper about other commentators. I trust my reticence entitles me to be presumed catholic until proven nonconformist. (shrink)

A way of reading the Tractatus has been proposed which, according to its advocates, is importantly novel and essentially distinct from anything to be found in the work of such previously influential students of the book as Anscombe, Stenius, Hacker or Pears. The point of difference is differently described, but the currently most used description seems to be Goldfarb’s term ‘resolution’ – hence one speaks of ‘the resolute reading’. I’ll shortly ask what resolution is. For now, it is enough that (...) it aims to give full weight to the penultimate section of the Tractatus in which Wittgenstein declares his propositions to be nonsense, where giving full weight to that declaration involves not hearing it as allowing that those ‘nonsensical’ propositions might have another kind of ‘sense’. In that same section Wittgenstein explains that these nonsense propositions, while devoid of meaning, have a use: to make the kind of use of them that their author intends – and so to understand him – requires recognizing that they are nonsense; and through that recognition one ‘surmounts’ these propositions, and is led ‘to see the world aright’. So there is a point to all this nonsense. What point? (shrink)

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.

Quine made it conventional to portray the contradiction that destroyed Frege’s logicism as some kind of act of God, a thunderbolt that descended from a clear blue sky. This portrayal suited the moral Quine was antecedently inclined to draw, that intuition is bankrupt, and that reliance on it must therefore be replaced by a pragmatic methodology. But the portrayal is grossly misleading, and Quine’s moral simply false. In the person of others – Cantor, Dedekind, and Zermelo – intuition was working (...) pretty well. It was in Frege that it suffered a local and temporary blindness. The question to ask, then, is not how Frege was overtaken by the contradiction, but how it is that he didn’t see it coming. The paper offers one kind of answer to that question. Starting from the very close similarity between Frege’s proof of infinity and the reasoning that leads to the contradiction, it asks: given his understanding of the first, why did Frege did not notice the second? The reason is traced, first, to a faulty generalization Frege made from the case of directions and parallel lines; and, through that, to Frege’s having retained, and attempted incoherently to combine with his own, aspects of a pre-Fregean understanding of the generality of logical principles. (shrink)

Chapter 2 explores the PTEV’s response to the contemporary misalignment of higher education through the development of a metaphor, drawn from recent research on cognition, of learning as apprenticeship. The chapter divides undergraduate experience into three “apprenticeships.” The first, or academic apprenticeship describes the formal educational program of courses of study, organized by the faculty. The second, or social apprenticeship refers to the co-curricular programs of clubs, organizations, and activities by which, universities and colleges seek to promote the personal and (...) social development of students. The third apprenticeship concerns the institutions’ efforts to provide students with opportunity to discover and develop a larger direction and purpose for themselves during their collegiate experience and beyond graduation. One such “third apprenticeship” experience, the Senior Keystone for the Business major at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is analyzed for its ability to integrate academic learning with career preparation around the vocation theme that the college’s PTEV program has infused widely in curricular and co-curricular areas of campus life. (shrink)

Sullivan and Kymlicka seek to provide an alternative to post-9/11 pessimism about the ability of serious ethical dialogue to resolve disagreements and conflict across national, religious, and cultural differences. It begins by acknowledging the gravity of the problem: on our tightly interconnected planet, entire populations look for moral guidance to a variety of religious and cultural traditions, and these often stiffen, rather than soften, opposing moral perceptions. How, then, to set minimal standards for the treatment of persons while developing (...) moral bases for coexistence and cooperation across different ethical traditions? The Globalization of Ethics argues for a tempered optimism in approaching these questions. Its distinguished contributors report on some of the most globally influential traditions of ethical thought in order to identify the resources within each tradition for working toward consensus and accommodation among the ethical traditions that shape the contemporary world. (shrink)

This textbook offers a unique and accessible approach to ethical decision-making for practicing pharmacists and student pharmacists. Unlike other texts, it gives clear guidance based on the fundamental principles of moral philosophy, explaining them in simple language and illustrating them with abundant clinical examples and case studies. The strength of this text is in its emphasis on normative ethics and critical thinking, and that there is truly a best answer in the vast majority of cases, no matter how complex. The (...) authors place high trust in a pharmacist’s moral judgment. This teaches the reader how to think, based on ethical principles, not necessarily what to think. This means navigating between the two extremes of overly theoretical and excessively prescriptive. The cogent framework given in this text uses the language of competing duties, identifying the moral principles at stake that create duties for the pharmacist. This is the balancing act of normative ethics, and of deciding which duties should prevail in a given clinical situation. This work presents a clear-cut pathway for resolving ethical dilemmas encountered by pharmacists, based on foundational principles and critical thinking. Presents a clear-cut pathway for resolving the ethical dilemmas encountered by pharmacists, based on foundational principles and critical thinking. Jon E. Sprague, RPh, PhD, Director of Science and Research for the Ohio Attorney General. (shrink)

At the age of 20, and fresh from his undergraduate studies in mathematics, Ramsey set about writing what would be his first substantial publication, his 1923 Critical Notice of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. It is hard for modern students of that book, who negotiate its obscurities with generations of previous commentary to serve as guides, to appreciate the task Ramsey confronted; and, to the extent that one can appreciate it, it is hard not to feel intimidated by the brilliance of his success. (...) His Critical Notice made Ramsey the first of Wittgenstein’s interpreters.1 In my view it makes him, still, the best. I want to illustrate that here by considering what light his remarks cast on a single passage of the book, in which Wittgenstein advances what might be called his theory of judgement. (shrink)

These new studies of Wittgenstein's Tractatus represent a significant step beyond recent polemical debate.

Wittgenstein presents in the Tractatus a variable purporting to capture the general form of proposition. One understanding of what Wittgenstein is doing there, an understanding in line with the ‘new’ reading of his work championed by Diamond, Conant and others, sees it as a deflationary or even an implosive move—a move by which a concept sometimes put by philosophers to distinctively metaphysical use is replaced, in a perspicuous notation, by an innocent device of generalization, thereby dispersing the clouds of philosophy (...) that formerly surrounded the concept. By asking how Wittgenstein supposed his variable to work, and what work he imagined it was fit for, the paper questions the adequacy of that understanding. (shrink)

In a historical moment when cross-cultural communication proves both necessary and difficult, the work of comparative philosophy is timely. Philosophical resources for building a shared future marked by vitality and collaborative meaning-making are in high demand. Taking note of the present global philosophical situation, this collection of essays critically engages the scholarship of Roger T. Ames, who for decades has had a central role in the evolution of comparative and nonwestern philosophy. With a reflective methodology that has produced creative translations (...) of key Chinese philosophical texts, Ames-in conjunction with notable collaborators such as D.C. Lau, David Hall, and Henry Rosemont Jr.-has brought China's philosophical traditions into constructive cross-cultural dialogue on numerous ethical and social issues that we face today. The volume opens with two parts that share overlapping concerns about interpretation and translation of nonwestern texts and traditions. Parts III and IV-"Process Cosmology" and "Epistemological Considerations"-mark the shift in comparative projects from the metaphilosophical and translational stage to the more traditionally philosophical stage. Parts V and VI-"Confucian Role Ethics" and "Classical Daoism"-might best be read as Chinese contributions to philosophical inquiry into living well or "ethics" broadly construed. Lastly, Part VII takes Amesian comparative philosophy in "Critical Social and Political Directions," explicitly drawing out the broader dimensions of social constitution and the ideal of harmony. The contributors-scholars working in philosophy, religious studies, and Asian studies-pursue lines of inquiry opened up by the work of Roger Ames, and their chapters both clarify his ideas and push them in new directions. They survey the field of Chinese philosophy as it is taking shape in the wake of Ames's contributions and as it carries forward a global conversation on the future of humanity. (shrink)

This article argues that there has been a general misunderstanding of the nature of role relations in Confucian role ethics. Recasting constitutive role relations in light of Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity will aid in developing Confucian role ethics as a contemporary vision of human flourishing that can internally accommodate the need for a feminist transformation.

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The paper is concerned with the idea that the world is the totality of facts, not of things – with what is involved in thinking of the world in that way, and why one might do so. It approaches this issue through a comparison between Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the identity theory of truth proposed by Hornsby and McDowell. The paper's positive conclusion is that there is a genuine affinity between these two. A negative contention is that the modern identity theory (...) is vulnerable to a complaint of idealism that the Tractatus can deflect. (shrink)