An odd dissensus between confident metaphysicians and neopragmatist antimetaphysicians pervades early twenty-first century analytic philosophy. Each faction is convinced their side has won the day, but both are mistaken about the philosophical legacy of the twentieth century. More historical awareness is needed to overcome the current dissensus. Lewis and his possible-world system are lionised by metaphysicians; Quine’s pragmatist scruples about heavy-duty metaphysics inspire antimetaphysicians. But Lewis developed his system under the influence of his teacher Quine, inheriting from him his empiricism, (...) his physicalism, his metaontology, and, I will show in this paper, also his Humeanism. Using published as well as never-before-seen unpublished sources, I will make apparent that both heavy-duty metaphysicians and neopragmatist antimetaphysicians are wrong about the roles Quine and Lewis played in the development of twentieth-century philosophy. The two are much more alike than is commonly supposed, and Quine much more instrumental to the pedigree of current metaphysics. (shrink)

The use of coercive measures in the care for the addicted has changed over the past 20 years. Laws that have adopted the “dangerousness” criterion in order to secure patients’ rights to non-intervention are increasingly subjected to critique as many authors plead for wider dangerousness criteria. One of the most salient moral issues at stake is whether addicts who are at risk of causing danger to themselves should be involuntarily admitted and/or treated. In this article, it is argued that the (...) dilemma between coercion on the one hand and abandonment on the other cannot be analysed without differentiated perspectives on the key notions that are used in these debates. The ambiguity these notions carry within care practice indicates that the conflict between the prevention of danger and respect for autonomy is not as sharp as the legal systems seem to imply. Some coercive measures need not be interpreted as an infringement of autonomy—rather, they should be interpreted as a way to provide good care. (shrink)

W.V. Quine, a champion of philosophical naturalism and pioneer of mathematical logic, was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. This volume provides a full picture of the development of Quine's views on structure and how it permeates and shapes his attitude to a range of philosophical questions.

How do people interleave attention when multitasking? One dominant account is that the completion of a subtask serves as a cue to switch tasks. But what happens if switching solely at subtask boundaries led to poor performance? We report a study in which participants manually dialed a UK-style telephone number while driving a simulated vehicle. If the driver were to exclusively return his or her attention to driving after completing a subtask (i.e., using the single break in the xxxxx-xxxxxx representational (...) structure of the number), then we would expect to see a relatively poor driving performance. In contrast, our results show that drivers choose to return attention to steering control before the natural subtask boundary. A computational modeling analysis shows that drivers had to adopt this strategy to meet the required performance objective of maintaining an acceptable lateral position in the road while dialing. Taken together these results support the idea that people can strategically control the allocation of attention in multitask settings to meet specific performance criteria. (shrink)

Post-anarchism poses a profound challenge to the fundamental tenets of traditional anarchism, particularly its veneration of science and reason, its overarching narrative of human emancipation, and its reliance on a sanguine conception of innate human goodness. However, this challenge inadvertently erodes the utopian aspirations inherent in traditional anarchism, leaving a conspicuous absence of a tangible alternative. Yet, a sense of utopia remains integral to the impetus for political engagement. This article seeks to address the implicit quandary of political engagement within (...) post-anarchism by examining the works of Max Stirner through the lens of existentialism. By juxtaposing Stirner's notions of involuntary egoism, ownness, the un-man, and insurrection with the philosophical perspectives of Sartre, Camus, and De Beauvoir, we discover that, despite its anti-political inclination, post-anarchism finds solace in the tragic and ceaseless nomadic pursuit of societal amelioration. (shrink)

In September 2002 the President of the United States issued a new National Security Strategy. Under the impact of 9/11 the authors of this NSS argue that the United States needs to pre-emptively attack rogue states that try to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and have links to terrorists who might use these WMDs against the United States or its allies. This article analyzes this so-called ?Bush doctrine? asking about its legality, justice and feasibility in the present world order. (...) Furthermore, it attempts to show which underlying tacit assumptions the authors of the NSS must make to give their argument for a right to forcible regime change plausibility. To do so the NSS is being contrasted with a realistic utopian concept of an idealized international order in which preventive defense and regime change might seem justifiable. (shrink)

The feminist movement was from its start in the 19th century involved in the struggle for better health care for women. The first feminists aimed at better information on birth control and sexuality. The second feminist wave focused on the unequal division of power roles between men and women. A lot of the problems women experienced could be seen as a consequence of their subordinate role in society. At the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s, the discipline women (...) and health or women and medicine was developed. In this introduction to the theme, the developments in this discipline are described. The starting points of the new discipline followed the principles of ‘women’s health care’. These principles can be summarized as the emphasis on control and autonomy by the patient, demedicalization, the importance of the psychosocial context of complaints, empowerment of women and good information and communication. The central issue of the article is: what is the actual scientific state of the art and what important changes have been made on the subject gender and health? The article ends with ideas for future research. (shrink)

Jules Janssens a construit une œuvre importante, qui, pour de nombreux chercheurs, a ouvert des perspectives de recherches nouvelles et fécondes. Ses travaux ont fait date. Ils portent principalement sur la philosophie d'Avicenne, ses sources, ses rapports avec la pensée musulmane, son influence sur la théologie ash'arite (al-Ghazālī, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī) et sa réception dans le monde latin. Pour lui rendre hommage, quatorze collègues et amis de renommée internationale se sont réunis pour poursuivre ses réflexions sur ces thèmes. L'ouvrage qui (...) en est issu offre un état des lieux de la recherche contemporaine sur Avicenne et sa postérité arabo-latine. (shrink)

In a sample of 615 Belgians a model for fair trade buying behaviour was developed. The impact of fair trade knowledge, general attitudes towards fair trade, attitudes towards fair trade products, and the perception of the quality and quantity of fair trade information on the reported amount of money spent on fair trade products were assessed. Fair trade knowledge, overall concern and scepticism towards fair trade, and the perception of the perceived quantity and quality of fair trade information, influence buying (...) behaviour directly and indirectly through product attitudes. Interest in fair trade products, price acceptability and product liking have a significant impact on fair trade buying behaviour. Product interest is the most important variable influencing buying behaviour. Implications for the campaigns of governments and for the marketing strategy of fair trade organisations are offered. (shrink)

It is often believed that attentional bias for food is a stable trait of certain groups, like restrained eaters. However, empirical evidence from this domain is inconsistent. High-calorie foods are double-faceted, as they are both a source of reward and of weight/health concern. Their meaning might depend on the food-related context, which in turn could affect AB for food. This study primed 85 females with hedonic, healthy, and neutral contexts successively and examined whether food-related context affected AB for food and (...) if effects were moderated by dietary restraint. Both the mean tendencies of AB for food and variability of AB for food were assessed in a food dot-probe task with a recording of both reaction times and eye movements. Contrary to our hypotheses, AB for food was not significantly affected by either context or the interaction between context and dietary restraint. Instead, liking of the presented food stimuli was related to longer initial fixations and longer dwell time on the food stimuli. In addition, in line with prior research, body mass index was correlated with variability of AB for food instead of mean AB for food. In conclusion, this study did not find any support that AB for food is dependent on food-related context, but interestingly, reaction time-based variability of AB for food seems to relate to BMI, and eye movement-based mean AB seems to relate to appetitive motivation. (shrink)

Si l’héroïsme médiéval s’élabore avant tout, dans sa composante guerrière, au masculin singulier, la tradition narrative française prévoit néanmoins quelques espaces à l’expression de la prouesse féminine. Du xiie au xve siècle, les romans illustrent plusieurs figures d’amazones ou de veuves viriles. Cependant, cette promotion à l’héroïsme semble difficile à concevoir dans le cas de personnages féminins assumant le rôle d’épouse ou d’amante. Pour vérifier cette constatation, l’enquête se tourne vers les romans idylliques qui ont connu un certain succès au (...) Moyen Age. La relation d’amour réciproque et relativement égalitaire pourrait nous laisser croire que les jeunes amants sont susceptibles de partager le renom de leurs aventures. L’analyse de plusieurs romans montre qu’il n’en est rien. Une exception cependant permet de distinguer le Roman de Floriant et Florete et surtout sa source directe, Erec et Enide de Chrétien de Troyes comme ferment possible d’un héroïsme de l’épouse. (shrink)

We argue that Lewis would have rejected recent appeals to the notions of ‘metaphysical dependency’, ‘grounding’ and ‘ontological priority’, because he would have held that they’re not needed and they’re not intelligible. We argue our case by drawing upon Lewis’s views on supervenience, the metaphysics of singletons and the dubiousness of Kripke’s essentialism.

In this paper, we present a prenex form theorem for a version of Independence Friendly logic, a logic with imperfect information. Lifting classical results to such logics turns out not to be straightforward, because independence conditions make the formulas sensitive to signalling phenomena. In particular, nested quantification over the same variable is shown to cause problems. For instance, renaming of bound variables may change the interpretations of a formula, there are only restricted quantifier extraction theorems, and slashed connectives cannot be (...) so easily removed. Thus we correct some claims from Hintikka [8], Caicedo & Krynicki [3] and Hodges [11]. We refine definitions, in particular the notion of equivalence, and sharpen preconditions, allowing us to restore those claims, including the prenex form theorem of Caicedo & Krynicki [3], and, as a side result, we obtain an application to Skolem forms of classical formulas. It is a known fact that a complete calculus for IF-logic is impossible, but with our results we establish several quantifier rules that form a partial calculus of equivalence for a general version of IF-logic reflecting general properties of information flow in games. (shrink)

Ce volume offre l'édition critique de la traduction latine médiévale (partielle) de la troisième partie de la Physique du Shif?' d'Avicenne. Pour l'édition de la peine première partie traduite à Tolède, qui couvre le prologue et le début du premier chapitre, les mêmes principes ont été maintenus que pour l'édition du second traité. Quant à l'édition de la majeure partie, qui fut traduite à Burgos quasiment un siècle après la tolédane et qui n'a été conservée que dans un seul témoin, (...) les cas où la traduction latine ne correspond pas à la lecture du texte arabe sont analysés de façon particulière et, autant que possible, expliqués sur la base de considérations philologiques et/ou doctrinales. En outre, dans la mesure du possible, les sources historiques des doctrines évoquées par Avicenne dans l'ensemble de ces chapitres ont été précisés. (shrink)

A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation Hans Kamp. INTRODUCTION Two conceptions of meaning have dominated formal semantics of natural language. ...

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 104-106.

In ‘Putnam’s Paradox’, Lewis defended global descriptivism and reference magnetism. According to Schwarz [2014], Lewis didn’t mean what he said there, and really held neither position. We present evidence from Lewis’s correspondence and publications which shows conclusively that Lewis endorsed both.

Efforts to include women in the canon have long been beset by reactionary gatekeeping, typified by the charge “That's not philosophy.” That charge doesn't apply to early and mid‐analytic female philosophers—Welby, Ladd‐Franklin, Bryant, Jones, de Laguna, Stebbing, Ambrose, MacDonald—with job titles like lecturer in logic and professor of philosophy and publications in Mind, the Journal of Philosophy, and Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. It's hopeless to dismiss their work as “not philosophy.” But comparable reactionary gatekeeping affects them, this paper argues, (...) typified by the labels “bad philosophy” and “derivative philosophy.” Virtue and vice epistemology help explain why these women have been neglected and why their own approaches are epistemically virtuous. Their contemporaries and historians are deficient in scholarly virtues in labelling these women's work “bad” or derived from male mentors with no or specious justification. Their disparaged qualities—intellectual humility, modesty, critical self‐reflection, disclosing biases—are often epistemic virtues. (shrink)

Susan Stebbing (1885–1943), the UK’s first female professor of philosophy, was a key figure in the development of analytic philosophy. Stebbing wrote the world’s first accessible book on the new polyadic logic and its philosophy. She made major contributions to the philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophical logic, critical thinking, and applied philosophy. Nonetheless she has remained largely neglected by historians of analytic philosophy. This Element provides a thorough yet accessible overview of Stebbing’s positive, original contributions, including her solution to the (...) paradox of analysis, her account of the relation of sense-data to physical objects, and her anti-idealist interpretation of the new Einsteinian physics. Stebbing’s innovative work in these and other areas helped move analytic philosophy from its early phase to its middle period. (shrink)

In his book, Physical Relativity, Harvey Brown challenges the orthodox view that special relativity is preferable to those parts of Lorentz's classical ether theory it replaced because it revealed various phenomena that were given a dynamical explanation in Lorentz's theory to be purely kinematical. I want to defend this orthodoxy. The phenomena most commonly discussed in this context in the philosophical literature are length contraction and time dilation. I consider three other phenomena of this kind that played a role in (...) the early reception of special relativity in the physics literature: the Fresnel drag effect in the Fizeau experiment, the velocity dependence of electron mass in beta-ray deflection experiments by Kaufmann and others, and the delicately balanced torques on a moving charged capacitor in the Trouton-Noble experiment. I offer historical sketches of how Lorentz's dynamical explanations of these phenomena came to be replaced by their now standard kinematical explanations. I then take up the philosophical challenge posed by the work of Harvey Brown and Oliver Pooley and clarify how those kinematical explanations work. (shrink)

Broad genome-wide testing is increasingly finding its way to the public through the online direct-to-consumer marketing of so-called personal genome tests. Personal genome tests estimate genetic susceptibilities to multiple diseases and other phenotypic traits simultaneously. Providers commonly make use of Terms of Service agreements rather than informed consent procedures. However, to protect consumers from the potential physical, psychological and social harms associated with personal genome testing and to promote autonomous decision-making with regard to the testing offer, we argue that current (...) practices of information provision are insufficient and that there is a place – and a need – for informed consent in personal genome testing, also when it is offered commercially. The increasing quantity, complexity and diversity of most testing offers, however, pose challenges for information provision and informed consent. Both specific and generic models for informed consent fail to meet its moral aims when applied to personal genome testing. Consumers should be enabled to know the limitations, risks and implications of personal genome testing and should be given control over the genetic information they do or do not wish to obtain. We present the outline of a new model for informed consent which can meet both the norm of providing sufficient information and the norm of providing understandable information. The model can be used for personal genome testing, but will also be applicable to other, future forms of broad genetic testing or screening in commercial and clinical settings. (shrink)

Personal data use is increasingly permeating our everyday life. Informed consent for personal data use is a central instrument for ensuring the protection of personal data. However, current informed consent practices often fail to actually inform data subjects about the use of personal data. This article presents the results of a requirements analysis for informed consent from both a legal and usability perspective, considering the application context of educational assessment. The requirements analysis is based on European Union law and a (...) review of current practices. As the main outcome, the article presents a blueprint which will be the basis for the development of an informed consent template that supports data controllers in establishing an effective and efficient informed consent form. Because the blueprint, and subsequently, the template, distinguishes between legal and usability requirements, it also provides the basis for the mapping of legal requirements in other contexts. (shrink)

Detection of genetic aberrations in prenatal samples, obtained through amniocentesis or chorion villus biopsy, is increasingly performed using chromosomal microarray, a technique that can uncover both aneuploidies and copy number variants throughout the genome. Despite the obvious benefits of CMA, the decision on implementing the technology is complicated by ethical issues concerning variant interpretation and reporting. In Belgium, uniform guidelines were composed and a shared database for prenatal CMA findings was established. This Belgian approach sparks discussion: it is evidence-based, prevents (...) inconsistencies and avoids parental anxiety, but can be considered paternalistic. Here, we reflect on the cultural and moral bases of the Belgian reporting system of prenatally detected variants. (shrink)

IntroductionAcademic integrity policy that is inaccessible, ambiguous or confusing is likely to result in inconsistent policy enactment. Additionally, policy analysis and development are often undertaken as top down processes requiring passive acceptance by users of policy that has been developed outside the context in which it is enacted. Both these factors can result in poor policy uptake, particularly where policy users are overworked, intellectually critical and capable, not prone to passive acceptance and hold valuable grass roots intelligence about policy enactment.Case (...) descriptionThe case study presented in this paper describes the actions of a community of practice at a regional Australian university to deconstruct and translate ambiguous academic integrity policy into a suite of accessible academic integrity resources that were intelligible to staff and students, and which assisted academic staff to consistently enact policy. The paper narrates the formation of the CoP, the tangible and intangible value it created, the social learning practices enacted by its members, its grassroots policy work and the material resources produced from that work.Discussion and evaluationAn evaluation of the CoP was conducted using a value creation framework to explore its immediate value, potential value, applied value, realised value, and reframing value. These values were considered at each stages of the CoP’s lifespan. The evaluation was a useful process that demonstrated the wide-ranging value created by the CoP. Six insights were drawn from the evaluation which promote understanding of the value created for a university by a CoP, particularly in contributing to academic integrity culture over a sustained period of time.ConclusionsThis paper contributes to a research gap on specific examples of discretion within rule-based systems. It illustrates how academics and members of the CoP used their discretion to interpret and enact academic integrity policy within a higher education setting. Drawing from the evaluation of the CoP we argue for greater understanding of the grass-roots contribution of academic and professional staff to academic integrity policy translation and enactment. (shrink)

A priori reflection, common sense and intuition have proved unreliable sources of information about the world outside of us. So the justification for a theory of the categories must derive from the empirical support of the scientific theories whose descriptions it unifies and clarifies. We don’t have reliable information about the de re modal profiles of external things either because the overwhelming proportion of our knowledge of the external world is theoretical—knowledge by description rather than knowledge by acquaintance. This undermines (...) the traditional idea that to be an object of category C is to be an object with such- and-such characteristic possibilities of combination. But this is no loss because de re modal thought lacks utility for creatures like us. (shrink)

While women philosophers are beginning to be rediscovered in the Early Modern period, they are conspicuously missing from later nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century histories of philosophy...

Research and engineering in the quantum domain involve long chains of activity involving theory development, hypothesis formation, experimentation, device prototyping, device testing, and many more. At each stage multiple paths become possible, and of the paths pursued, the majority will lead nowhere. Our quantum metascience approach provides a strategy which enables all stakeholders to gain an overview of those developments along these tracks, that are relevant to their specific concerns. It provides a controlled vocabulary, built out of terms that are (...) designed to be maximally comprehensible to all groups of stakeholders and across all the sub-fields of the quantum domain. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Analytic philosophy in the mid-twentieth century underwent a major change of direction when a prior consensus in favour of extensionalism and descriptivism made way for approaches using direct reference, the necessity of identity, and modal logic. All three were first defended, in the analytic tradition, by one woman, Ruth Barcan Marcus. But analytic philosophers now tend to credit them to Kripke, or Kripke and Carnap. I argue that seeing Barcan Marcus in her historical context – one dominated by extensionalism (...) and descriptivism – allows us to see how revolutionary she was, in her work and influence on others. I focus on her debate with Quine, who found himself retreating to softened, and more viable, versions of his anti-modal arguments as a result. I make the case that Barcan's formal logic was philosophically well-motivated, connected to her views on reference, and well-matched to her overall views on ontology. Her nominalism led her to reject posits which could not be directly observed and named, such as possibilia. She conceived of modal calculi as facilitating counterfactual discourse about actual existents. I conclude that her contributions ought to be recognized as the first of their kind. Barcan Marcus must be awarded a central place in the canon of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Broad genome‐wide testing is increasingly finding its way to the public through the online direct‐to‐consumer marketing of so‐called personal genome tests. Personal genome tests estimate genetic susceptibilities to multiple diseases and other phenotypic traits simultaneously. Providers commonly make use of Terms of Service agreements rather than informed consent procedures. However, to protect consumers from the potential physical, psychological and social harms associated with personal genome testing and to promote autonomous decision‐making with regard to the testing offer, we argue that current (...) practices of information provision are insufficient and that there is a place – and a need – for informed consent in personal genome testing, also when it is offered commercially. The increasing quantity, complexity and diversity of most testing offers, however, pose challenges for information provision and informed consent. Both specific and generic models for informed consent fail to meet its moral aims when applied to personal genome testing. Consumers should be enabled to know the limitations, risks and implications of personal genome testing and should be given control over the genetic information they do or do not wish to obtain. We present the outline of a new model for informed consent which can meet both the norm of providing sufficient information and the norm of providing understandable information. The model can be used for personal genome testing, but will also be applicable to other, future forms of broad genetic testing or screening in commercial and clinical settings. (shrink)

In early 1927, Pascual Jordan published his version of what came to be known as the Dirac-Jordan statistical transformation theory. Later that year and partly in response to Jordan, John von Neumann published the modern Hilbert space formalism of quantum mechanics. Central to both formalisms are expressions for conditional probabilities of finding some value for one quantity given the value of another. Beyond that Jordan and von Neumann had very different views about the appropriate formulation of problems in the new (...) theory. For Jordan, unable to let go of the analogy to classical mechanics, the solution of such problems required the identification of sets of canonically conjugate variables, i.e., p’s and q’s. Jordan ran into serious difficulties when he tried to extend his approach from quantities with fully continuous spectra to those with wholly or partly discrete spectra. For von Neumann, not constrained by the analogy to classical physics and aware of the daunting mathematical difficulties facing the approach of Jordan ), the solution of a problem in the new quantum mechanics required only the identification of a maximal set of commuting operators with simultaneous eigenstates. He had no need for p’s and q’s. Related to their disagreement about the appropriate general formalism for the new theory, Jordan and von Neumann stated the characteristic new rules for probabilities in quantum mechanics somewhat differently. Jordan was the first to state those rules in full generality, von Neumann rephrased them and then sought to derive them from more basic considerations. In this paper we reconstruct the central arguments of these 1927 papers by Jordan and von Neumann and of a paper on Jordan’s approach by Hilbert, von Neumann, and Nordheim. We highlight those elements in these papers that bring out the gradual loosening of the ties between the new quantum formalism and classical mechanics. (shrink)