This special issue of the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry focuses on global health and associated bioethical concerns. As a concept, global health broadens the focus from national public health situations to the international sphere and concerns itself with the health of all humans, but particularly those in developing countries who suffer from severe health inequalities. However, there is one sense in which global health is lacking: Its primary focus is on those currently alive and, in some cases, their offspring. But (...) what about future generations, who may suffer from even more pronounced inequalities? In this editorial, we consider the bioethical implications of failing to adopt an intergenerational concept of global health.One of the major strengths of global health is its emphasis on disenfranchised populations who do not enjoy the advantages of the medical systems of developed countries. By drawing attention to the issues that affect billions of disadvantaged people around the world .. (shrink)

“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep” Genesis This article examines the problem of belief as it relates to radical negativity and as such engages with two positions in regard to the Real of the void. The first, drawing from speculative realism seeks to conceptualise this void in positive terms, as something that can be reached and in a sense overcome. The second, Hegelian account, by contrast, situates the void as (...) something inherent to the very coordinates of reality and being itself. As such the following discussion specifically examines the status of objective reality within the continental philosophical paradigm. (shrink)

As scientific discoveries and technological advances continue to modify our perceptions of reality at an unprecedented rate, the traditional frameworks for understanding and organizing our experience of truth and Knowledge have become less and less adequate. David Rich comes to grips with this problem in his innovative study, which shows how both knowledge and truth are conditioned by experience and explores the dynamics of creativity that generate knowledge.

Rich, identified as a freelance writer and the former assistant chief counsel for the state of Arizona, spells out his ideas about the pervasive and detrimental influence of religion on rational thinking and public policy. This is not a scholarly treatise, but rather an extended statement of the author's world view. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

After critiquing chaos, catastrophe, and complexity theories, showing their limitations in the contemporary era, Rich furthers the development of crisis theory ...

[V]isibility is central to the shaping of political, medical, and socioeconomic decisions. Who will be treated—how and where—are the central questions whose answers are often entwined with issues of visibility … [and] the effects that media visibility has on the perception of particular bodies .In a documentary entitled Paris: The Luminous Years , writer Janet Flanner describes the intense friendship of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Both were inspired by Paul Cézanne and his retrospective at the 1907 Salon d’Automne—which, according (...) to Paris: The Luminous Years, marked in Janus-like fashion the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries in art. Flanner tells of the frequent visits between the two painters, where they “talked and talked … two or three months that they just spent gabbling, gabbling.” And from their camaraderie and gabble emerged someth .. (shrink)

The contributions in our contemporary era have been tremendous: atomic energy for generating electricity, jet travel, near-instant communications, great advancements in medicine and treatment of diseases, and advances in education. For all these advancements, there is still poverty, ignorance, bigotry, and the call for a new religious domination. For all the brilliance demonstrated in our era, there are signs of darkness lurking not far away. These are the factors that will bring our era to a close, and another era--perhaps of (...) the darkness of religious domination and intolerance of the past in the form of another Dark Ages to rise in its place The contributions in our contemporary era have been tremendous: atomic energy for generating electricity, jet travel, near-instant communications, great advancements in medicine and treatment of diseases, and advances in education. For all these advancements, there is still poverty, ignorance, bigotry, and the call for a new religious domination. For all the brilliance demonstrated in our era, there are signs of darkness lurking not far away. These are the factors that will bring our era to a close, and another era--perhaps of the darkness of religious domination and intolerance of the past in the form of another Dark Ages to rise in its place. (shrink)

Community food security (CFS) is an incipient movement based on the re-localization of many food system activities in response to values concerning the social, health, economic, and environmental consequences of the globalizing food system. This study examines the salience of these values based on the action agendas and accomplishments emerging from community planning events in six rural counties of New York, and the nature and type of participation and local support. The study finds a high level of agreement between CFS (...) values as articulated by national leaders in this incipient movement and the action agendas. Further evidence of the salience of these themes is seen in the levels and types of activities and accomplishments taking place 8--12 months after the planning events. However, these follow-through activities appear to have been impeded by a variety of government regulations, uneven levels of support from community organizations and agencies, and a policy environment of fiscal austerity, narrow outcome-oriented accountability, and allocation of agency staff toward special-purpose grants and contracts. Many of these constraints are likely to exist in other communities and are beyond the scope of what community volunteers and practitioners can be expected to address on their own. (shrink)

In the first centuries BCE and CE, Roman wall painters frequently placed representations of works of art, especially panel paintings, within their own mural compositions. Nathaniel B. Jones argues that the depiction of panel painting within mural ensembles functioned as a meta-pictorial reflection on the practice and status of painting itself. This phenomenon provides crucial visual evidence for both the reception of Greek culture and the interconnected ethical and aesthetic values of art in the Roman world. Roman meta-pictures, this (...) book reveals, not only navigated social debates on the production and consumption of art, but also created space on the Roman wall for new modes of expression relating to pictorial genres, the role of medium in artistic practice, and the history of painting. Richly illustrated, the volume will be important for anyone interested in the social, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of artworks, in the ancient Mediterranean and beyond. (shrink)

In this article, I compare recent literature on theology of institutions with the ethics of philosopher Avishai Margalit. This article has two tasks. First, it shows that Margalit's understanding of a decent society provides helpful categories for moral and political theology. The second task, by putting theology and Margalit in dialogue, and focusing on the topic of labor and economic institutions, highlights where moral and political theology exposes potential weaknesses within Margalit's thought. Though his account of humiliation and the ‘decent (...) society’ draws upon a rich theological and philosophical tradition, his rejection of a doctrine of creation weakens his claims. (shrink)

Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians is an invaluable resource to educators seeking to bring history alive for students at all levels. Filled with insightful reflections on teaching oral history, it offers practical suggestions for educators seeking to create curricula, engage students, gather community support, and meet educational standards. By the close of the book, readers will be able to successfully incorporate oral history projects in their own classrooms.

Challenging prevailing interpretations of the development of modern philosophy, this book proposes a reinterpretation of the transcendental tradition, as represented primarily by Kant and Husserl, and counters Heidegger's influential reading of these philosophers. Author David Carr defends their subtle and complex transcendental investigations of the self and the life of subjectivity, and seeks to revive an understanding of what Husserl calls "the paradox of subjectivity"--an appreciation for the rich and sometimes contradictory character of experience.

This wide-ranging introduction to the study of philosophy in the ancient world surveys the period's developments and evaluates a comprehensive series of major thinkers, ranging from Pythagoras to Epicurus. Tables, illustrations, and extensive advice on further reading contribute to an ideal book for survey courses on the history of ancient philosophy. It will be an invaluable guide for those interested in the philosophical thought of a rich and formative period.

This book develops some of the most important themes of Sen's works over the last decade. He argues in a rich and subtle approach that we should be concerned with people's capabilities rather than their resources or welfare.

In this paper, I try to make sense of the idea that true knowledge attributions characterize something that is more valuable than true belief and that survives even if, as Contextualism implies, contextual changes make it no longer identifiable by a knowledge attribution. I begin by sketching a familiar, pragmatic picture of assertion that helps us to understand and predict how the words “S knows that P” can be used to draw different epistemic distinctions in different contexts. I then argue (...) that the examples provided by Cohen and DeRose meant to illustrate Contextualism fail to do so, and I construct an example that does. I conclude by considering the response that an objective assessment of skepticism depends, not on what we might use sentences of the form “S knows that P” to say, but on what such sentences themselves say—on their literal, context-invariant meanings. I argue that there is little reason to believe that our words have such context-invariant meanings, and I suggest that the pragmatic picture of assertion can secure a rich enough conception of objectivity to address the skeptic. (shrink)

Charles Dickens began one of his many great works of literature with this seemingly paradoxical, self-contradictory statement. Reflecting on a jury verdict in Northern California in June of 2001, in the context of what has transpired during the decade of the 1990s with regard to the care of dying patients, observations in the genre of Dickens come readily to mind. In 1991, two of the most compelling books on the subject of pain, medicine, and society were published: Eric Cassell's The (...) Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine and David Morris's The Culture of Pain. Both works unflinchingly recognized and explored the implications of the vast clinical literature documenting the failure of modern medicine to respond compassionately and effectively to what had by then become an epidemic of undertreated pain. (shrink)

Social theory is a crucial resource for the social sciences. It provides rich insights into how human beings think and act and how contemporary social life is constructed. But often the key ideas of social theorists are expressed in highly technical and difficult language that can hide more than it reveals. The new edition of this popular book continues to cut to the core of what social theory is about. Covering key themes from the classical thinkers onwards, including Marxism, (...) post-structuralism, phenomenology, feminism and more, the second edition features a new chapter on Actor-Network Theory and enhanced discussion of postcolonial theory. Wide ranging in scope and coverage, the book is concise in presentation and free from jargon. Showing why social theory matters, and why it is of far-reaching social and political importance, the book is ideal for readers seeking a clear, crisp mapping of a complex but very rewarding area. (shrink)

The possibilities and importance of a spiritual dimension to education are subjects receiving increased consideration from educational practitioners, policymakers and philosophers. Spirituality, Philosophy and Education brings together contributions to the debate by a team of renowned philosophers of education. They bring to this subject a depth of scholarly and philosophical sophistication that was previously missing, and between them offer a wide-ranging exploration and analysis of what spiritual values have to offer contemporary education. The contributors address such subjects as what we (...) mean by 'spiritual values'; scholarship and spirituality; spirituality and virtue; spirituality, science and morality; the shaping of character; the value of spiritual learning; spiritual development and the curriculum and many others. All students of the philosophy of education and anyone interested in how spiritual values might play a part in informing education policy and practice will find this stimulating collection a rich source of ideas and a major addition to the thinking on the meaning, role and possibilities of spirituality in education. (shrink)

The Philosophy of David Cronenberg examines Cronenberg's body of work, from his breakthrough Scanners (1981) through his most recognizable films such as The Fly (1986) and more recent works.

Cognitive neuroscientists are turning to an increasingly rich array of neurodynamical systems to explain mental phenomena. In these explanations, cognitive capacities are decomposed into a set of functions, each of which is described mathematically, and then these descriptions are mapped on to corresponding mathematical descriptions of the dynamics of neural systems. In this paper, I outline a novel explanatory schema based on these explanations. I then argue that these explanations present a novel type of dynamicism for the philosophy of (...) mind and neuroscience, componential dynamicism, that focuses on the parts of cognitive systems that fill certain functional roles in producing cognitive phenomena. (shrink)

Discover the truth about sex in the city (and the country). Mapping Desire explores the places and spaces of sexuality from body to community, from the "cottage" to the Barrio, from Boston to Jakarta, from home to cyberspace. Mapping Desire is the first book to explore sexualities from a geographical perspective. The nature of place and notions of space are of increasing centrality to cultural and social theory. Mapping Desires presents the rich and diverse world of contemporary sexuality, exploring (...) how the heterosexed body has been appropriated and resisted on the individual, community and city scales. Editors David Bell and Gill Valentine have brought together contributors with a wealth of approaches to ways in which the spaces of sex and the sexes of space are being mapped out across contemporary culture. Among the many sexual geographies covered are: Lesbians at home and on the streets; gay men on fantasy islands; bisexual identities; The heterosexualization of the workplace; bachelor farmers and spinsters; surveillance and sexuality; prostitution; queer politics; sexual citizenship, and the transformation of intimacy. The book is divided into four sections: cartographies/identities; sexualized spaces: global/local; sexualized spaces: local/global; sites of resistance. Each section is separately introduced. Beyond the bibliography, an annotated guide to further reading is also provided to help the reader map their own way through the literature. Mapping Desire will be a valuable and accessible travelogue of information for anyone interested in social, cultural and political geography, lesbian and gay studies, cultural studies, or simply those who want to find out more about the sexual landscape of contemporary society. Contents: Part I: Cartographies/Identities; Resolving Riddles: The Sexed Body, Julia Cream ; Locating Bisexual Identities: Discourses of Bisexuality and Contemporary Feminist Theory, Clare Hemmings; Of Moffies, Kaffiers and Perverts: Male Homosexuality and the Discourse of Moral Order in the Apartheid State, Glen Elder; Femme on the Streets, Butch in the Sheets (a Play on Whores), Alison Murray; Body Work: The Performance of Gendered and (Hetero)Sexualized Identities in City Workplaces, Linda McDowell; Part II: Sexualized Spaces: Global/Local; Whenever I Lay My Girlfriend That's My Home: The Performance and Surveillance of Lesbian Identities in Domestic Environments, Lynda Johnston and Gill Valentine; The Lesbian Flaneur, Sally Munt; Fantasy Islands: Popular Topographies of Marooned Masculinities, Gregory Woods; Sexuality and Urban Space: A Framework for Analysis, Lawrence Knopp; Part III: Sexualized Spaces: Local/Global; "And She Told Two Friends...": Lesbians Creating Urban Social Space, Tamar Rothenberg; Trading Places: Consumption, Sexuality and the Production of Queer Space, Jon Binnie; Bachelor Farmers and Spinsters: Gay and Lesbian Identities and Communities in Rural North Dakota, Jerry Lee Kramer; (Re)Constructing a Spanish Redlight District: Prostitution, Space and Power, Angie Hart; Part IV: Sites of Resistance; "Surveilliant Gays": HIV, Space and the Construction of Identities, David Woodhead; Sex, Scale and the "New Urban Politics": HIV-Prevention Strategies from Yaletown, Vancouver, Michael Brown; "Boom, Bye, Bye": Jamaican Ragga and Gay Resistance, Tracey Skelton; The Diversity of Queer Politics and the Redefinition of Sexual Identity and Community in Urban Space, Tim Davis; Perverse Dynamics, Sexual Citizenship and the Transformation of Intimacy, David Bell; Guide to Further Reading; Bibliography. (shrink)

This book draws upon the work of Georg Simmel to explore the limits, tensions and dynamism of social life through a close analysis of the works produced in the final years of his life and reveals what they might still offer some 100 years later. Focusing on the relationships between worlds, lives and fragments in these works, David Beer opens up a conceptual toolkit for understanding life as both an individual experience and as a deeply social phenomenon. Taking the (...) reader through artistic and musical forms of inspiration, to the problems of culture and on to the conceptual understanding of lived experience, the book illuminates the richness of Simmel’s ideas and thinking. This sophisticated dialogue with Simmel’s lesser known later works will provide fresh insights for students and scholars of cultural and social theory and pave the way for a reinvigorated engagement with his ideas. (shrink)

DCPS is a connectionist production system interpreter that uses distributed representations. As a connectionist model it consists of many simple, richly interconnected neuron‐like computing units that cooperate to solve problems in parallel. One motivation for constructing DCPS was to demonstrate that connectionist models are capable of representing and using explicit rules. A second motivation was to show how “coarse coding” or “distributed representations” can be used to construct a working memory that requires far fewer units than the number of different (...) facts that can potentially be stored. The simulation we present is intended as a detailed demonstration of the feasibility of certain ideas and should not be viewed as a full implementation of production systems. Our current model only has a few of the many interesting emergent properties that we eventually hope to demonstrate: It is damage‐resistant, it performs matching and variable binding by massively parallel constraint satisfaction, and the capacity of its working memory is dependent on the similarity of the items being stored. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to shed some light on a certain type of sentence, which I call a borderline contradiction. A borderline contradiction is a sentence of the form F a ∧ ¬F a, for some vague predicate F and some borderline case a of F , or a sentence equivalent to such a sentence. For example, if Jackie is a borderline case of ‘rich’, then ‘Jackie is rich and Jackie isn’t rich’ is a borderline (...) contradiction. Many theories of vague language have entailments about borderline contradictions; correctly describing the behavior of borderline contradictions is one of the many tasks facing anyone offering a theory of vague language. Here, I first briefly review claims made by various theorists about these borderline contradictions, attempting to draw out some predictions about the behavior of ordinary speakers. Second, I present an experiment intended to gather relevant data about the behavior of ordinary speakers. Finally, I discuss the experimental results in light of several different theories of vagueness, to see what explanations are available. My conclusions are necessarily tentative; I do not attempt to use the present experiment to demonstrate that any single theory is incontrovertibly true. Rather, I try to sketch the auxiliary hypotheses that would need to be conjoined to several extant theories of vague language to predict the present result, and offer some considerations regarding the plausibility of these various hypotheses. In the end, I conclude that two of the theories I consider are better-positioned to account for the observed data than are the others. But the field of logically-informed research on people’s actual responses to vague predicates is young; surely as more data come in we will learn a great deal more about which (if any) of these theories best accounts for the behavior of ordinary speakers. (shrink)

In the 1990s, the Dutch astronomical community had to choose its next big telescope project. The starting point of their discussions was not a plan in search of support, but a scientific community in search of a plan. Their discussion demonstrates how big science projects are an integral part of the moral and institutional economy of modern astronomy. Large telescopes are unique but not exceptional: big science has become part of “normal science,” both scientifically and institutionally. In retrospect, the discussions (...) anaylized in this paper discussions concern the earliest phase of three major astronomical instruments: the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, the Square Kilometer Array, and the Low Frequency Array. Interestingly, the Dutch astronomers focused on what they called “strategic” arguments, explicitly excluding arguments regarding scientific merit. I demonstrate how this should be understood in the context of the moral economy of the community. This analysis, based on rich archive material and background interviews with key actors, adds to our understanding of big science or “megascience” in the post–Cold War era. (shrink)

The account of the best life for humans - i.e. a happy or flourishing life - and what it might consist of was the central theme of ancient ethics. But what does it take to have a life that, if not happy, is at least worth living, compared with being dead or never having come into life? This question was also much discussed in antiquity, and David Machek's book reconstructs, for the first time, philosophical engagements with the question from (...) Socrates to Plotinus. Machek's comprehensive book explores ancient views on a life worth living against a background of the pessimistic outlook on the human condition which was adopted by the Greek poets, and also shows the continuities and contrasts between the ancient perspective and modern philosophical debates about biomedical ethics and the ethics of procreation. His rich study of this relatively neglected theme offers a fresh and compelling narrative of ancient ethics. (shrink)

In the eyes of many “classical” phenomenologists, Kantianism has seemed to invite individuals to leave the rich, complexly motivated environment of lived experience in favor of a shadowy, formal kingdom of abstract duties and rights. Yet there have been notable attempts within the phenomenological tradition to articulate a richer vision of Kantian moral consciousness and to exhibit, from a first-person perspective, the shape of mental life and the standing dispositions that befit membership in a Kantian kingdom of ends. Here (...) I offer two such competing paradigms of Kantian moral consciousness: on the one hand, the responsive, situational Kantian moral consciousness that recent commentators have reconstructed from Martin Heidegger’s work, and on the other hand, the very different, explicitly cosmopolitan Kantian moral consciousness traced in Hannah Arendt’s conception of an “enlarged mentality.” While each is arguably a legitimately Kantian view, these alternative models of moral consciousness offer considerably different spirits of Kantianism with different benefits and detriments, and each places very different cognitive and moral burdens on agents. (shrink)

This lecture illustrates some of the theoretical richness that emerges from thinking about self-aware agents. It argues that taking self-awareness into account yields a picture of rational belief that is surprising, in a number of different, but interconnected, ways. The complexities it focuses on emerge most clearly in cases that involve so-called “higher-order evidence.”.

Recently, some philosophers have attempted to escape familiar challenges to orthodox nonnaturalist normative realism by abandoning the robust metaphysical commitments of the orthodox view. One such view is the ‘Non-Metaphysical Non-Naturalism’ or ‘Non-Realist Cognitivism’ proposed by Derek Parfit and a few others. The trouble is that, as it stands, Non-Realist Cognitivism seems unable to provide a substantive non-trivial account of the meaning and truth conditions of moral claims. The paper considers various strategies one might use to address the challenge. There (...) is a rich field of views that are cognitivist and non-realist. But the paper is skeptical of the prospects of Non-Realist Cognitivism. (shrink)

Peter Singer has argued that the affluent have very extensive duties to the world’s poor. His argument has some important implications for procreation, most of which have not yet been acknowledged. These implications are explicated in this paper. First, the rich should desist from procreation and instead divert to the poor those resources that would have been used to rear the children that would otherwise have been produced. Second, the poor should desist from procreation because doing so can prevent (...) the very bad things that would otherwise have befallen the children they would have brought into existence. Third, the rich sometimes have a duty to prevent the poor from procreating. Fourth, the rich sometimes have a right to prevent the poor from reproducing. Although these implications may not amount to a categorical prohibition on all procreation, they do significantly restrict the permissibility of procreation. They are, in that sense, anti-natalist. (shrink)

In Section I, I clarify turning point issues in the Phillips and Block debate about whether there is unconscious perception. These include questions about whether uptake of certain visual information is an individual or person level accomplishment, as required for genuine unconscious _perceiving_. Section II takes up a recent reorientation proposed in Block ( 2017 ) towards the question of whether there is unconscious perceiving, where we are to look for the pervasive role of unconscious perceiving in, perhaps especially, the (...) online control of everyday reaching and grasping. I point out that while this may well be a helpfully different approach to explore, it does not evade the central questions and challenges familiar from the prior debate between Phillips and Block. Section III reviews an approach summarized in Dehaene ( 2014 ), drawing from a range of measures of neural activity. Dehaene provides evidence of quite rich non-conscious perceptual system responses, some arguably individual or person level. But in a fairly thin or fragile way, absent taking up, in higher level assessment, the information encoded in initial visual response. Or that is the interpretation I argue for, in relating the Dehaene account to the Phillips and Block debate, in a way that illuminates the Phillips and Block discussions. An Appendix provides an overview of debates in the literature about the Goodale and Milner Two Visual Systems Hypothesis, that Block ( 2017 ) makes central appeal to. (shrink)

The two studies, "Indivisible Magnitudes," and “Aristotle and Epicurus on Voluntary Action,” explain two doctrines in the philosophy of Epicurus, first by a detailed examination of the ancient Greek and Latin texts which describe them, and second by showing how earlier Greek philosophy gave rise to the problems Epicurus tackled. Originally published in 1967. 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)