As improvements in neuroscience have enabled a better understanding of disorders of consciousness as well as methods to treat them, a hurdle that has become all too prevalent is the denial of coverage for treatment and rehabilitation services. In 2011, a settlement emerged from a Vermont District Court case, Jimmo v. Sebelius, which was brought to stop the use of an “improvement standard” that required tangible progress over an identifiable period of time for Medicare coverage of services. While the use (...) of this standard can have deleterious effects on those with many chronic conditions, it is especially burdensome for those in the minimally conscious state, where improvements are unpredictable and often not manifested through repeatable overt behaviors. Though the focus of this paper is on the challenges of brain injury and the minimally conscious state, which an estimated 100,000 to 200,000 individuals suffer from in the United States, the post-Jimmo arguments presented can and should have a broad impact as envisioned by the plaintiffs who brought the case on behalf of multiple advocacy groups representing patients with a range of chronic care conditions. (shrink)

In this essay, we suggest practical ways to shift the framing of crisis standards of care toward disability justice. We elaborate on the vision statement provided in the 2010 Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) “Summary of Guidance for Establishing Crisis Standards of Care for Use in Disaster Situations,” which emphasizes fairness; equitable processes; community and provider engagement, education, and communication; and the rule of law. We argue that interpreting these elements through disability justice entails a commitment to both (...) distributive and recognitive justice. The disability rights movement's demand “Nothing about us, without us” requires substantive inclusion of disabled people in decision‐making related to their interests, including in crisis planning before, during, and after a pandemic like Covid‐19. (shrink)

(2004). Toward a Critical Deliberative Strategy for Addressing Ideology in Educational Policy Processes. Educational Studies: Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. null.

A comprehensive study on the various benefits and traits of living with a Biblical worldview.

This research explored the feasibility of using multidimensional scaling (MDS) analysis in novel combination with other techniques to study comprehension of epistemic adverbs expressing doubt and certainty (e.g., evidently, obviously, probably ) as they relate to health communication in clinical settings. In Study 1, Australian English speakers performed a dissimilarity-rating task with sentence pairs containing the target stimuli, presented as “doctors' opinions.” Ratings were analyzed using a combination of cultural consensus analysis (factor analysis across participants), weighted-data classical-MDS, and cluster analysis. (...) Analyses revealed strong within-community consistency for a 3-dimensional semantic space solution that took into account individual differences, strong statistical acceptability of the MDS results in terms of stress and explained variance, and semantic configurations that were interpretable in terms of linguistic analyses of the target adverbs. The results confirmed the feasibility of using MDS in this context. Study 2 replicated the results with Canadian English speakers on the same task. Semantic analyses and stress decomposition analysis were performed on the Australian and Canadian data sets, revealing similarities and differences between the two groups. Overall, the results support using MDS to study comprehension of words critical for health communication, including in future studies, for example, second language speaking patients and/or practitioners. More broadly, the results indicate that the techniques described should be promising for comprehension studies in many communicative domains, in both clinical settings and beyond, and including those targeting other aspects of language and focusing on comparisons across different speech communities. (shrink)

It may seem obvious that causing disability in another person is morally problematic in a way that removing or preventing a disability is not. This suggests that there is a moral asymmetry between causing disability and causing non-disability. This chapter investigates whether there are any differences between these two types of actions that might explain the existence of a general moral asymmetry. After setting aside the possibility that having a disability is almost always bad or harmful for a person (a (...) view that we have critiqued at length elsewhere), seven putative differences are considered. Ultimately, it is concluded that none of these seven factors can ground a general moral asymmetry between causing disability and causing non-disability, though each factor can provide some moral reason to avoid causing disability in certain particular cases. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The main cause of the crisis was the behavior of the banks—largely a result of misguided incentives unrestrained by good regulation. Conservative ideology, along with unrealistic economic models of perfect information, perfect competition, and perfect markets, fostered lax regulation, and campaign contributions helped the political process along. The banks misjudged risk, wildly overleveraged, and paid their executives handsomely for being short‐sighted; lax regulation let them get away with it—putting at risk the entire economy. The mortgage brokers neglected due diligence, (...) since they would not bear the risk of default once their mortgages had been securitized and sold to others. Others can be blamed: the ratings agencies that judged subprime securities as investment grade; the Fed, which contributed low interest rates; the Bush administration, whose Iraq war and tax cuts for the rich made low interest rates necessary. But low interest rates can be a boon; it was the financial institutions that turned them into a bust. (shrink)

S-R theorists formulate psychological laws in terms of the relationship between external events and observed behavior. The state of the organism delimits the applicability of the law. Dynamic theorists formulate psychological laws in terms of the relationship between the initial state of the organism O a and its subsequent state On. The significance of the stimulus is determined by .Oa and the principle of equifinality implies the equivalence of a wide range of behaviors by which On may be reached. It (...) is maintained that regardless of the methodological difficulties inherent in a theory which is based on variables that cannot be observed directly, dynamic theory is testable in principle and in practice. It is suggested that recent neurophysiological theory is incompatible with an S-R approach. (shrink)

The unifying idea of Gramsci's famous Prison Notebooks is the concept of hegemony. In his study of these fragmentary writings, now published in paperback for the first time, Dr Femia elucidates the precise character of this concept, explores its basic philosophical assumptions, and sets out its implications for Gramsci's explanation of social stability and his vision of the revolutionary process. A number of prevalent and often contradictory myths are demolished, and, moreover, certain neglected aspects of his thought are stressed, including (...) the predominant role he attributed to economic factors, the importance he gave to 'contradictory consciousness', and the close connection between his political thinking and his fundamental philosophical premises. The author concludes by critically examining Gramsci's novel solutions to three long-standing problems for Marxist theory: why has the Western working class not carried out its revolutionary mission; what is the appropriate strategy for a Marxist party working within an advanced capitalist framework; and what are the reasons behind the failure of existing socialist states in their task of liberation. (shrink)

Most philosophical defences of the state’s right to exclude immigrants derive their strength from the normative importance of self-determination. If nation-states are taken to be the political institutions of a people, then the state’s right to exclude is the people’s right to exclude – and a denial of this right constitutes an abridgement of self-determination. In this paper, I argue that this view of self-determination does not cohere with a group-agency view of nation-states. On the group-agency view that I defend, (...) a nation-state is the kind of group-agent that does not supervene on the intentionality of member/citizens. If we think that a nation-state is an intentional group-agent in its own right, then we should think that self-determination resides with the institutions of the state rather than with the citizens. If nation-states do not supervene on the intentionality of citizens, then it is unclear why citizens might have the right to control membership in the state as a feature of self-determination. (shrink)

This article considers the question of how much weight the infringement of children's right to bodily integrity should be given compared with competing considerations. It utilises the example of circumcision to explore this question, taking as given this practice's opponents' view of circumcision's harmfulness. The article argues that the child's claim against being subjected to circumcision is neither a mere interest nor a right so strong that it trumps all competing interests. Instead, it is a right of moderate strength. Indeed, (...) even the aggregate strength of children's rights against the practice of circumcision as a whole is not so weighty so as to always trump competing interests. The harms are not sufficiently serious to justify such a status. And the expressive wrongs associated with non-negligently benevolent harming are much less serious than those associated with intentional harming. The debate over banning circumcision thus cannot be conducted only in terms of competing rights. Competing interests, such as those that would be set back by the departure of religious citizens, should be considered as well and might plausibly justify allowing even a rights-infringing practice to continue. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's question about agency in Philosophical Investigations §621 provides a fresh way of addressing the analysis of the distinction between physical nature and human culture, featuring the artifactual, hybrid, second-natured, enlanguaged and encultured transformation of the members of Homo sapiens into selves; and a third model of the cultural between the hermeneutic and the reductive: including the cultural "penetration" of the physical, internal and external Bildung, the sui generis features of the culturally emergent, and the new unity of the human (...) and natural sciences. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to illustrate the significance of hope (elpis, elpizein) in Plato’s Philebus and to indicate topics under this heading that invite further investigation. Even though there is some scholarship treating the issue of hope in the Philebus, there is no study solely devoted to this topic. By providing such a study I intend to fill this lacuna and to show that examining this topic is valuable because it develops our understanding of the good life. In (...) this essay I maintain that the Philebus defines hope as (1) a pleasure of the soul that (2) anticipates pleasure as certain, (3) may be true or false, (4) may be pure or impure, and (5) involves memory. I proceed chronologically through the Philebus’s discussions of hope and make every effort to treat each of the aforementioned components of the definition separately. In so doing I explain why certain topics, such as the relationship between pure intellectual hope and philosophical activity, invite further investigation. (shrink)

Both a Popper biography and an autobiography, Agassi's "A Philosopher's Apprentice" tells the riveting story of his intellectual formation in 1950s London, a young brilliant philosopher struggling with an intellectual giant - father, mentor, and rival, all at the same time. His subsequent rebellion and declaration of independence leads to a painful break, never to be completely healed. No other writer has Agassi's psychological insight into Popper, and no other book captures like this one the intellectual excitement around the Popper (...) circle in the 1950s and the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s - personal, academic, political, all important philosophically. Agassi's Popper - whether one agrees with it or not - is an enormous contribution to scholarship. This second revised edition includes also Popper's and Agassi's last correspondence and, in a postscript it shows Agassi leafing through Popper's archives, reaching a sort of reconciliation, an appropriate ending to the drama. A must read. Malachi Hacohen, Duke University. (shrink)

The changes from the original version are relatively minor, but enough to make it necessary to treat the present version as a distinct text for purposes of exact reference. Since there is no normal pagination on a web page, I assign in lieu of that paragraph numbers, included in brackets and placed flush right, just above the paragraph, for purposes of scholarly reference.

Gary Gutting argues, in his recent book What Philosophers Know, that analytic philosophy provides a sizable collection of exemplary arguments that effectively yield a “disciplinary body of philosophical knowledge”—“metaphilosophy,” he names it—that is, specimens that define in a notably perspicuous way what we should understand as philosophical knowledge itself. He concedes weaknesses in the best-known specimens, and he admits that, generally, even the best specimens do not provide answers to the usual grand questions. I admire his treatment of the matter (...) but argue that the metaphilosophical issues are, normally, of a much grander gauge than that of his sort of specimen; that they require a much more open, informal sort of inquiry and exchange than that of the distinctive rigor of the classic specimens themselves; that analytic philosophy, not uncharacteristically, tends to ignore the metaphilosophical issue or takes the validity of its method of argument for granted; and that the issue itself invites an appraisal of competing second-order conceptions of how philosophical argument proves fruitful. I proceed by way of the examination of cases drawn from Quine and Kripke. (shrink)

In this paper, the author argues that within the current philosophical debate, pragmatism has a distinct advantage over its rivals—on the one hand, Anglo-American analytic philosophy and, on the other hand, continental philosophy. By refusing to succumb to ‘naturalizing’ tendencies, pragmatism is able to overcome scientistic tendencies in contemporary analytic philosophy. At the same time, by emphasizing the ‘natural’, pragmatism provides a helpful correction to metaphysical tendencies in continental philosophy.

D. Hume's analysis of causation is critically analyzed in light of certain assumptions that he made regarding the classical Aristotelian causes. Using his widely cited analysis of billiard balls colliding and moving about as an example of how efficient causation is supposedly learned, the argument is made that Hume has overlooked the functioning of final causation in this learning. Thus, in order to understand how a learner might reason back from the presumed "effect" to the "cause" in efficient causation, we (...) must appreciate that the learner is actually employing a final-cause process of predication-that is, of reasoning "for the sake of" precedents extending sequaciously to targets. As final causation underwrites telic description, it is concluded that there is an unrecognized teleology in Hume's analysis of causation. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

That people do wrong would appear to be a moral datum: a moral realm without wrongdoing may not be coherent. Thus, an adequate philosophic theory of morality ought to allow for it. But such a theory ought also to explain wrongdoing, both axiologically and causally. This is so if we take such a theory to have practical significance. Indeed, insofar as moral philosophy and its cognate areas have practical significance, explaining wrongdoing is arguably the most pressing practical issue for theory (...) construction in this domain. For a philosophical theory of morality to have practical significance, and, further, to have influence on behavior, it must be psychologically relevant to the organisms that it ranges over. That is, the concepts that the theory purports to explain must be plausibly realized within the psychology of the creatures for which the theory is intended. Any theory satisfying this constraint would then be in a position to illuminate those psychological features that are explanatory of blameworthy behavior. The argument presented here is that moral realism and its underlying moral psychology, cognitivism, face serious difficulties allowing for and explaining, both metaphysically and psychologically, such behavior. Moral cognitivism and realism fail to adequately account for this most fundamental of moral phenomena. Hence, a comprehensive understanding of moral experience is impossible within the cognitivist/realist perspective. (shrink)