"The last third of the twentieth century," Gerard Hauser writes, was marked by "a flurry of intellectual work aimed at theorizing rhetoric in new terms" (2001, 1). The year 1958 was key in this flurry, with five major works appearing on a rhetorically inflected philosophy and theory of argumentation: Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (on the relationship between the vita contemplativa and vita activa); Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge (on the role of tacit knowledge, emotion, and commitment in science); Stephen (...) Toulmin's Uses of Argument (on the use of argument in nonformal contexts); Walter Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (on the history of the .. (shrink)

This introduction to nonviolent movements analyzes fourteen classic and contemporary cases to show how nonviolent strategies can work where violent warfare has failed. Drawing on practitioner knowledge and diverse philosophical and religious texts, Michael K. Duffey offers a multifaceted argument for embracing nonviolent resolutions to conflict.

Some philosophers have recently complained that moral theories almost always portray the distresses of ordinary people in moral predicaments as irrational. In the name of having a minimally realistic picture of ethical thought, these philosophers argue that accounts of morality must allow for strong moral dilemmas, choices involving mutually exclusive all-things-considered requirements or jointly exhaustive all-things-considered prohibitions. In this dissertation I clarify and reject several versions of this argument, which I call the argument from experience. ;In chapters one and two (...) I define strong moral dilemmas as essentially involving conflicts of moral reasons, and reject as premature attempts to reduce questions about strong dilemmas to questions about deontic logic. I accept the goal of representing ordinary experience faithfully, and ask whether a theory will necessarily distort that experience if it employs interpretations of 'ought' and 'prohibited' in ways guaranteeing a priori that there are no strong dilemmas. ;The argument from experience claims that people can have a justifiably high degree of confidence that they are in strong moral dilemmas, and in chapter three I question whether people ever have the needed sorts of confidence about the limits of their abilities, the precise location of their wrongdoing, or the futility of continued moral deliberation. ;In chapter four I reject specific arguments based on regret and guilt. The tendency to feel unavoidable agent-regret or guilt allegedly shows that the agent sees the choice as a strong dilemma, and the appropriateness of such distresses allegedly shows that the agent's way of seeing things is rational. I reply that someone can feel agent-regret without endorsing any moral judgment involving 'ought' or 'prohibited', and that guilt is never unavoidably appropriate. ;In chapter five I trace the failure of the argument from experience to the presence in ordinary thought of a notion of blame which is both conceptually guaranteed always to be avoidable and regarded as an infallible indicator of moral requirement and prohibition. I am led to wonder, finally, why this notion of blame should play a privileged role in philosophical pictures of morality. (shrink)

Presents an overview of ancient Roman literature and philosophy, describing the works and major themes of the most important poets, dramatists, biographers, historians, and philosophers of the Roman empire.

The three faces of Francesco Petrarca -- Erasmus: the man in the middle -- Machiavelli and political realism -- Thomas More: the king's good servant but God's first -- Castiglione: a gentleman in Urbino -- Rabelais and the wisdom of laughter -- Montaigne and the wisdom of experience -- Cervantes: life as literature -- Shakespeare.

As the team in this volume shows through groundbreaking research, surveys, interviews, and vignettes, death awareness has grown strong, and has changed the way ...

Homer and the heroic ideal -- Hesiod, poet of everyday life -- Aeschylus and the institution of justice -- Sophocles, the Theban plays -- Euripides and the twilight of the gods -- The inquiries of Herodotus of Halicarnassus -- Thucydides, power and pathos -- Aristophanes and the serious business of comedy -- Plato, philosophy, and poetry -- Aristotle and the invention of political science.

In this paper, I show that by “Monade” the later Husserl means roughly what he meant by “das reine Bewußtsein” in the period of Ideas I. Of both consciousness and Monade, Husserl claims that objects of perception are immanent to them. I describe this claim as “quasi-representationalist” just because it bears enough similarity to some versions of contemporary representationalism. Since Husserl also claims that perceptual objects are publicly accessible, the inevitable conclusion seems to be that parts of perceptual consciousness must (...) also be publicly accessible. So strong internalist, Cartesian or idealist, interpretations of Husserl must be wrong. By the same token, if perceptual objects are necessarily physical, it then seems Husserl must agree that the physical can be, in some sense, immanent to consciousness. (shrink)

We adopt the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm to test the hypothesis that scalar implicatures are integrated very locally to the utterance of scalar terms. Focusing on the and,or scale, we show that early point-of-disambiguation effects similar to those triggered by the integration of the lexical meaning of and can be triggered by the integration of the exhaustive meaning of or. Some design issues and an independent interpretive asymmetry holding between and and or are discussed as possible explanations for remaining differences between (...) the effects found in the two cases. We conclude that the exclusivity implicature that is associated to sentences containing or seems to be calculated online, rather locally to the utterance of the disjunction. (shrink)

Based in a global array of case studies - Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey, and Islamic education in the United States - this volume shows how the discourse concerning educational technology in the Islamic world has emphasized neoliberal and neofundamentalist themes, and argues that the design and implementation of educational technologies in schools would be better accomplished by taking a culturally grounded approach. This approach would be rooted in the context and local needs of learners, with implications and possible application (...) in the Muslim world and beyond. (shrink)

This paper develops twenty hypotheses concerning the relationships among selected individual differences variables (locus of control, delay of gratification, gender, and race) and five different ethical beliefs. The results of a study of collegians provide support for seventeen out of twenty research hypotheses. As predicted, locus of control, delay of gratification, and race are related to ethical beliefs. Also as predicted, gender is not related to ethical beliefs.

The release of genetically engineered organisms into the shared environment raises scientific, ethical, and societal issues. Using some form of democratic deliberation to provide the public with a voice on the policies that govern these technologies is important, but there has not been enough attention to how we should connect public deliberation to the existing regulatory process. Drawing on lessons from previous public deliberative efforts by U.S. federal agencies, we identify several practical issues that will need to be addressed if (...) relevant federal agencies are to undertake public deliberative activities to inform decision‐making about gene editing in the wild. We argue that, while agencies may have institutional capacity to undertake public deliberative activities, there may not be sufficient political support for them to do so. Advocates of public deliberation need to make a stronger case to Congress about why federal agencies should be encouraged and supported to conduct public deliberations. (shrink)

Introduction : saving liberal democracy from itself -- Individualism versus individuality -- Interference, independence, and what's worth doing -- Autonomy -- Freedom, rights, and conflicts between values -- Ethics and rules -- Exploring consequences -- The ethical point of view -- Objective ethics : the good -- Objective ethics : the right -- Negotiating ethically -- Why think ethically? -- Ethical heroism -- Afterword.

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 5, Page 42-43, September–October 2022.

Since Horn (1972) the notion of conversational implicature proposed by Grice has been put to use to explain certain interpretive differences between expressions in natural language and their counterparts in formal logic. For example, the sentences in (1) seem to convey more than they would be expected to if the natural language disjunction or had the same meaning as the logical disjunction ∨, or if the quantificational determiner some was interpreted as the existential quantifier ∃.

According to contemporary representationalism, phenomenal qualia—of specifically sensory experiences—supervene on representational content. Most arguments for representationalism share a common, phenomenological premise: the so-called “transparency thesis.” According to the transparency thesis, it is difficult—if not impossible—to distinguish the quality or character of experiencing an object from the perceived properties of that object. In this paper, I show that Husserl would react negatively to the transparency thesis; and, consequently, that Husserl would be opposed to at least two versions of contemporary representationalism. First, (...) I show that Husserl would be opposed to strong representationalism, since he believes the cognitive content of a perceptual episode can vary despite constancy of sensory qualia. Second, I then show that Husserl would be opposed to weak representationalism, since he believes that sensory qualia—specifically, the sort that he calls “kinesthetic sensations”—can vary despite constancy in representational content. (shrink)

Bad jokes are not simply non-humorous texts. They are texts that are humorous for someone––their author at least––but not for their audience. Bad jokes thus involve a contextual––pragmatic––dimension that is neglected in the semantic theories of humor. In this paper, we propose an approach to humor based on the Aristotelian notion of surprising enthymemes. Jokes are analyzed as kinds of arguments, whose tacit dimension can be retrieved and justified by considering the “logic” on which it is based. However, jokes are (...) based on specific pragmatic conditions: they are regarded as arguments grounded on a generalization that is at the same time uncommon, retrievable, and acceptable or plausible for the audience. This perspective integrates the “local logic” of jokes within a broader rhetorical theory that ultimately rests on the communicative notion of common ground. (shrink)

In this dissertation I argue for a wider and more robust notion of the modularity of mind thesis. The developmental disorder of autism is the prime analytic tool for developing this approach. I argue that a variety of other approaches are deeply flawed in that they cannot account for the autistic spectrum disorder. I mean by this the autistic profile of deficits such as the lack of social interaction and the avoidance of social contact. I begin with Fodorian modularity. I (...) argue that autism presents us with a case that threatens the division Fodor has between modules and central systems. The autistic disorder exemplifies an area of higher cognition that has many of the properties commonly associated with modular processing. Since Fodor cannot opt for a modular account of theory of mind it must be that his account of central systems is incorrect. I next argue that Baron-Cohen's amended modular architecture cannot explain autism since the autistic deficit cannot be due to a defective module for processing intentional action. Furthermore, his use of modularity threatens to make his view of cognition incoherent. Finally I take up Gopnik and Meltzoff's approach that eschews any type of modularity and instead posits a general learning mechanism. If autism, as they claim, were a general theory-building problem, then one should expect to see other behavioral deficits in other areas of autistic cognition. We do not. I then offer an alternative version of modularity inspired by Karmiloff-Smith . It gives us advantages. On Karmiloff-Smith's account we would expect the autistic deficit to have more perceptually basic components and recent research is bearing this out. Progressive modularity also provides us with a framework in which to understand the ways autistic persons understand the social world. This approach also seeks to unify the cognitive work being done on development with burgeoning work on development in neuroscience. (shrink)

As an incredibly diverse religious system, Buddhism is constantly changing. The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism offers a comprehensive collection of work by leading scholars in the field that tracks these changes up to the present day. Taken together, the book provides a blueprint to understanding Buddhism's past and uses it to explore the ways in which Buddhism has transformed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume contains 41 essays, divided into two sections. The essays in the first section (...) examine the historical development of Buddhist traditions throughout the world. These chapters cover familiar settings like India, Japan, and Tibet as well as the less well-known countries of Vietnam, Bhutan, and the regions of Latin America, Africa, and Oceania. Focusing on changes within countries and transnationally, this section also contains chapters that focus explicitly on globalization, such as Buddhist international organizations and diasporic communities. The second section tracks the relationship between Buddhist traditions and particular themes. These chapters review Buddhist interactions with contemporary topics such as violence and peacebuilding, and ecology, as well as Buddhist influences in areas such as medicine and science. Offering coverage that is both expansive and detailed, The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism delves into some of the most debated and contested areas within Buddhist Studies today. (shrink)

Recently, a number of epistemologists have argued that there are no non-conceptual elements in representational content. On their view, the only sort of non-conceptual elements are components of sub-personal organic hardware that, because they enjoy no veridical role, must be construed epistemologically irrelevant. By reviewing a 35-year-old debate initiated by Dagfinn F.

Since 1980, the number of twin births in the United States has increased 76 percent, and the number of triplets or higher-order multiples has increased over 400 percent. These increases are due in part to increased maternal age, which is associated with spontaneous twinning. But the primary reason for these increases is that more and more people are undergoing fertility treatment. Despite an emerging (but not absolute) consensus in the medical literature that multiples, including twins, should be a far less (...) frequent outcome of fertility treatment, American clinicians currently practice fertility medicine in ways likely to result in twins and, occasionally, triplets-often, they tell us, at the request of their patients. At first blush, one might conclude that these practice patterns show that patients and their doctors have weighed the risks associated with twins against the benefits of swiftly completing their families and decided that the risks are worth taking. That is, their requests for twins must represent their free and informed choices. But there are reasons to be skeptical of this interpretation, including that the preferences of many patients seem to be very strongly shaped, if not sometimes completely constrained, by concerns about costs-costs that mainly result from the routine exclusion of in vitro fertilization from health insurance coverage. It is quite possible, we believe, that these cost concerns actually undermine the autonomy of fertility patients, pushing many of them to take risks with their health and the health of their hoped-for future children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]. (shrink)

The following proposes an interpretation of Husserl's sustained exegetical commentary on Leibniz's metaphysics from 1922 (Hua XIV 298300), with reference to textual and historical resources. The leading historical index for the following interpretation is a minor contribution to Leibniz scholarship from 1917 by Dietrich Mahnke, a work with which Husserl was intimately familiar. Textual references are to works by Husserl which would have been available to Mahnke- i.e., the Logische Untersuchungen and Ideen—I as well as relevant notes and lectures from (...) the period ni question. Husserl's brief manuscript from 1922, I claim, can be read as a critique of the Mahnke interpretation that attempts to provide a more expansive and thorough-going phenomenological explication of Leibniz' doctrine of universal harmony. Thereby, Husserl offers some important clues as to how he himself understands his own uses of the terms "monad" and "monadology." The phenomenological reformation of Leibnizian Monadology must be understood as a methodological reconception with internal reference to Husserl's own theory of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Many biologists assume, as Darwin did, that natural selection acts mainly on late embryonic or postnatal development. This view is consistent with von Baer's observations of morphological divergence at late stages. It is also suggested by the conserved morphology and common molecular genetic mechanisms of pattern formation seen in embryos. I argue here, however, that differences in adult morphology may be generated at a variety of stages. Natural selection may have a major action on developmental mechanisms during the organogenetic period, (...) because this is when many adult traits are specified. Evolutionary changes in these early developmental mechanisms probably include subtle shifts in the timing of gene expression. Changes of this kind have little or no gross effect on the anatomy of the embryo; they are only phenotypically expressed, or readily detected, when amplified at later stages. The phylotypic stage, the developmental hourglass, modularity, and von Baerian divergence are reassessed in terms of these arguments. BioEssays 21:604–613, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Many older people need external support for their daily living. A large minority of older adults with low or modest pension incomes face financial strains from the high cost of illness, and many older people in urban areas live in social isolation. Indeed, population aging has become a policy topic of concern. The policy debate since the end of the twentieth century about the future of public pensions and health and long‐term care programs has increasingly framed the growing numbers of (...) older people in alarmist terms. Unfounded claims about the unaffordability and unsustainability of social policies supporting older people have become common currency, often disguised as concerns about intergenerational justice. Such claims and concerns hinder clear thinking about proper social and fiscal policies, housing, health care, and labor markets to safeguard the well‐being of older people in aging societies. (shrink)

Is it ever fair to limit treatment for diseases like glioblastoma for which prognosis is poor? Because resources are finite and health care spending limits the other possible uses for those resources, limiting access to an intervention that does not generate benefits is ethically sound. Ignoring the balance of benefits and burdens associated with treatment ignores opportunity costs and leads us to treat some lives as more valuable than others. Although it is ethically sound to set limits on medical care, (...) I argue that biological age is a poor criterion for allocating resources. (shrink)

Is it ever fair to limit treatment for diseases like glioblastoma for which prognosis is poor? Because resources are finite and health care spending limits the other possible uses for those resources, limiting access to an intervention that does not generate benefits is ethically sound. Ignoring the balance of benefits and burdens associated with treatment ignores opportunity costs and leads us to treat some lives as more valuable than others. It also ignores evidence that patients and families, when presented with (...) adequate information about the benefits and burdens of aggressive treatment compared with palliative care, often prefer the palliative care option.Should the limitations we set on the availability of care be greater for older people than younger people? Since the 1980s, scholars have called for strong age rationing of medical care in which Medicare would not pay for anything other than palliative care after they have achieved average life expectancy. (shrink)

The original evidence advanced to support the Tensed S Condition (TSC) and the Specified Subject Condition (SSC) in Chomsky's Conditions on Transformations is reconsidered and viable alternatives to these constraints are provided. It is shown that TSC and SSC, in some instances, lead to a loss of linguistically significant generalization. Satisfactory alternatives can account for the relevant range of data and provide a more general account of additional data. Finally, counterevidence to Subjacency and Superiority is adduced, but explicit alternatives to (...) these conditions are not offered. (shrink)