In a recent article in this journal I presented a sceptical argument about the current prominence of virtue ethics in nursing ethics. Daniel Putman has responded with a defence of the relevance of virtue in nursing. The present article continues this discussion by clarifying, defending, and expanding the sceptical argument. I start by emphasizing some features of the sceptical case, including assumptions about the nature of sceptical arguments, and about the character of both virtue ethics and nursing ethics. Then I (...) respond to objections of Putman's such as that, according to virtue ethics, virtue is relevant to the whole of a human life, including one's behaviour in a professional context; and that eudaimonia should be central in explaining and motivating a nurse's decision to enter the profession. Having argued that these objections are not compelling, I go on to discuss an interesting recent attempt to reassert the role of virtue ethics in the ethics of professions, including nursing. This centres on whether role‐specific obligations – e.g. the obligations that arise for a moral agent qua lawyer or mother – can be accommodated in a virtue ethics approach. Sean Cordell has argued that the difficulty of accommodating role‐specific obligations results in an ‘institution‐shaped gap’ in virtue ethics. He suggests a way of meeting this difficulty that appeals to the ergon of institutions. I endorse the negative point that role‐specific obligations elude virtue ethics, but argue that the appeal to the ergon of institutions is unsuccessful. The upshot is further support for scepticism about the virtue ethics approach to nursing ethics. I end by gesturing to some of the advantages of a sceptical view of virtue ethics in nursing ethics. (shrink)

Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons have recently presented a series of papers in which they argue against what has come to be called the ‘new wave’ moral realism and moral semantics of David Brink, Richard Boyd, Peter Railton, and a number of other philosophers. The central idea behind Horgan and Timmons’s criticism of these ‘new wave’ theories has been extended by Sean Holland to include the sort of realism that drops out of response-dependent accounts that make use of (...) an analogy between moral properties and secondary qualities. This paper argues that Holland’s extension depends crucially on the fact that his target is a direct response-dependent account of moral value. His argument does not work against such accounts of more basic normative notions such as ‘harm’ or ‘benefit’. And these more basic notions may then serve as the basic normative building blocks for an indirectly response-dependent moral theory. (shrink)

Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap and Herbert Feig are the most prominent of the positivists to formulate views on the mind-body problem (aside from Hempel’s one-off treatment in 1935). While their views differed from each other and changed over time they were all committed to some form of scientific physicalism, though a linguistic or conceptual rather than ontological form of it. In focus here are their views during the heyday of logical positivism and its immediate aftermath, though some initial scene-setting of (...) Schlick’s and Carnap’s pre-positivist views will help to understand the final opposing positions of Carnap and Feigl. (shrink)

The identity theory’s rise to prominence in analytic philosophy of mind during the late 1950s and early 1960s is widely seen as a watershed in the development of physicalism, in the sense that whereas logical behaviourism proposed analytic and a priori ascertainable identities between the meanings of mental and physical-behavioural concepts, the identity theory proposed synthetic and a posteriori knowable identities between mental and physical properties. While this watershed does exist, the standard account of it is misleading, as it is (...) founded in erroneous intensional misreadings of the logical positivists’—especially Carnap’s—extensional notions of translation and meaning, as well as misinterpretations of the positivists’ shift from the strong thesis of translation-physicalism to the weaker and more liberal notion of reduction-physicalism that occurred in the Unity of Science programme. After setting the historical record straight, the essay traces the first truly modern identity theory to Schlick’s pre-positivist views circa 1920 and goes on to explore its further development in Feigl, arguing that the fundamental difference between the Schlick-Feigl identity theory and the more familiar and influential Place-Smart-Armstrong identity theory has resurfaced in the deep and seemingly unbridgeable gulf in contemporary philosophy of consciousness between inflationary mentalism and deflationary physicalism. (shrink)

Public reason liberals claim that legitimate rules must be justifiable to diverse perspectives. This Public Justification Principle threatens that failing to justify rules to reprehensible agents makes those rules illegitimate. Although public reason liberals have replies to this objection, they cannot avoid the challenge of powerful deceivers. Powerful deceivers trick people who are purportedly owed public justification into considering otherwise good rules to be unjustified. Avoiding this challenge requires discounting some failures of justification, according to what caused people’s beliefs. I (...) offer a conception of public justification that accommodates these externalist considerations while positioning Public Reason Liberalism to provide insight into real cases of deception. (shrink)

The Public Justification Principle requires that coercive institutions be justified to all who live under them. I argue that this principle often cannot be satisfied without persons depending on the pure informative testimony of others, even under realistically idealized situations. Two main results follow. First, the sense of justification relevant to this principle has a strongly externalist component. Second, normative expectations of trust are essential to public justification. On the view I propose, whether the Public Justification Principle is satisfied depends (...) on the features of the network of testifiers in which persons are embedded. I consider several such networks to show which features are plausibly relevant. The importance of testimony for public justification ultimately suggests that we should moderate our expectations about the kind of conciliation we can achieve with the social order in which we live. (shrink)

The Pneumatist school of medicine has the distinction of being the only medical school in antiquity named for a belief in a part of a human being. Unlike the Herophileans or the Asclepiadeans, their name does not pick out the founder of the school. Unlike the Dogmatists, Empiricists, or Methodists, their name does not pick out a specific approach to medicine. Instead, the name picks out a belief: the fact that pneuma is of paramount importance, both for explaining health and (...) disease, and for determining treatments for the healthy and sick. In this paper, we re-examine what our sources say about the pneuma of the Pneumatists in order to understand what these physicians thought it was and how it shaped their views on physiology, diagnosis and treatment. (shrink)

A body of work in ethics and epistemology has advanced a collectivist view of virtues. Collectivism holds that some social groups can be subjects in themselves which can possess attributes such as agency or responsibility. Collectivism about virtues holds that virtues are among those attributes. By focusing on two different accounts, I argue that the collectivist virtue project has limited prospects. On one such interpretation of institutional virtues, virtue-like features of the social collective are explained by particular group-oriented features of (...) individual role-bearers that are elicited by institutional structures or goals. On another account of groups as moral agents unbound by formal institutional constraints, to the extent that group characteristics meet the collectivist requirement, they fail to stand up as virtues in the substantive sense of a character trait. These two positions’ respective drawbacks and insights support a non-collectivist conclusion: Where there is a substantive virtue of some social group, it consists only in certain group-specific attitudes and motives of individuals qua members of that group. I end by outlining some risks in adopting collectivism about virtues as an explanatory or normative doctrine, and suggesting that we can abandon it without embracing an equally undesirable individualism in virtue theory. (shrink)

Athenaeus of Attalia distinguishes two types of exercise or training (γυμνασία) that are required at each stage of life: training of the body and training of the soul. He says that training of the body includes activities like physical exercises, eating, drinking, bathing and sleep. Training of the soul, on the other hand, consists of thinking, education, and emotional regulation (in other words, 'philosophy'). The notion of 'training of the soul' and the contrast between 'bodily' and 'psychic' exercise is common (...) in the Academic and Stoic traditions Athenaeus is drawing from; however, he is the earliest extant medical author to distinguish these kinds of training and to treat them as equally important aspects of regimen. In this paper, I propose some reasons why he found this distinction useful, and I examine how he justified incorporating it into his writings on regimen, namely by attributing Plato's beliefs about regimen to Hippocrates, a strategy Galen would adopt well over a century later. (shrink)

Bhaskar's "Spiritual turn" : logical and conceptual problems -- Meta-reality, critical realism, and Marxism -- Secularism, agnosticism, and theism -- Critical realism, transcendence, and God -- Humanism, spiritualism, and critical theory.

We prove covering theorems for K, where K is the core model below the sharp for a strong cardinal, and give an application to stationary set reflection.

Prominent defenders of the Enlightenment, like Jürgen Habermas, are beginning to recognize that the characterization of human beings in entirely rational and secular terms leaves out something important. Religion, they admit, plays an important role in human existence. But the return to a traditional monotheistic religion seems sociologically difficult after the death of God. We argue that Homeric polytheism retains a phenomenologically rich account of the sacred, and a similarly rich understanding of human existence in its midst. By opening ourselves (...) up to the moods of wonder and gratitude at the root of Homer's sense of the sacred, we can re-appropriate a polytheistic understanding of the sacred that allows us to recover and revive the intensity and meaningfulness that Homer's polytheists enjoyed. (shrink)

The received view in the history of the philosophy of psychology is that the logical positivists—Carnap and Hempel in particular—endorsed the position commonly known as “logical” or “analytical” behaviourism, according to which the relations between psychological statements and the physical-behavioural statements intended to give their meaning are analytic and knowable a priori. This chapter argues that this is sheer legend: most, if not all, such relations were viewed by the logical positivists as synthetic and knowable only a posteriori. It then (...) traces the origins of the legend to the logical positivists’ idiosyncratic extensional or at best weakly intensional use of what are now considered crucially strongly intensional semantic notions, such as “translation,” “meaning” and their cognates, focussing on a particular instance of this latter phenomenon, arguing that a conflation of explicit definition and analyticity may be the chief source of the legend. (shrink)

If [Formula: see text] is regular and [Formula: see text], then the existence of a weakly presaturated ideal on [Formula: see text] implies [Formula: see text]. This partially answers a question of Foreman and Magidor about the approachability ideal on [Formula: see text]. As a corollary, we show that if there is a presaturated ideal [Formula: see text] on [Formula: see text] such that [Formula: see text] is semiproper, then CH holds. We also show some barriers to getting the tree (...) property and a saturated ideal simultaneously on a successor cardinal from conventional forcing methods. (shrink)

This paper is about the history of a question in ancient Greek philosophy and medicine: what holds the parts of a whole together? The idea that there is a single cause responsible for cohesion is usually associated with the Stoics. They refer to it as the synectic cause (αἴτιον συνεκτικόν), a term variously translated as ‘cohesive cause,’ ‘containing cause’ or ‘sustaining cause.’ The Stoics, however, are neither the first nor the only thinkers to raise this question or to propose a (...) single answer. Many earlier thinkers offer their own candidates for what actively binds parts together, with differing implications not only for why we are wholes rather than heaps, but also why our bodies inevitably become diseased and fall apart. This paper assembles, up to the time of the Stoics, one part of the history of such a cause: what is called ‘the synechon’ (τὸ συνέχον) – that which holds things together. Starting with our earliest evidence from Anaximenes (sixth century BCE), the paper looks at different candidates and especially the models and metaphors for thinking about causes of cohesion which were proposed by different philosophers and doctors including Empedocles, early Greek doctors, Diogenes of Apollonia, Plato and Aristotle. My goal is to explore why these candidates and models were proposed and how later philosophical objections to them led to changes in how causes of cohesion were understood. (shrink)

The ontological and analytical status of Marxian social theory has been a matter of fierce controversy since Marx’s death, both within and without Marxist circles. A particular source of contention has been over whether Marxism should be construed as an objective science of the capitalist mode of production or as an ethico-philosophical critique of bourgeois society. This is paralleled by the dispute over whether Marxism ought to be considered a humanism or a structuralism. This article addresses both sides of this (...) debate. The argument is that, rather than Marx’s own social thought being split into incompatible poles, giving rise to ‘two Marxisms’, it forms a coherent unity. Marx’s social theory is neither humanist philosophy, nor structural science, but is in fact realist science, which synthesizes these apparent antinomies, and thereby transcends both. (shrink)

Genetics researchers often work with distinct communities. To take moral account of how their research affects these communities, they need a richer conception of justice and they need to make those communities equal participants in decision‐making about how the research is conducted and what is produced and published out of it.

Growing expectation that research addresses problems in the context of application has spurred theorization about a ‘‘new mode’’ of production, Mode 2, which contrasts with Mode 1 or discipline-based research production in terms of animating questions, organization, and evaluation criteria. This article examines how the proposed Mode 2 form of research production and the practical role of the intellectual that it promotes align with the career trajectories and identities of academics who simultaneously engage in Mode 1 work. It focuses on (...) a setting that is particularly susceptible to global shifts in knowledge production: a developing country and longtime object of external intervention, Malawi. Numerous contradictions are found between Mode 1 and 2 production as well as impediments to the conversion of products generated in Mode 2 into scholarly contributions to Mode 1 development. The evidence draws from 42 interviews conducted with academics and independent researchers in Malawi during 2003 and 2004 as well as historical documents. (shrink)

The article discusses the characteristics of virtuous persons in relation to their social role(s). It explores the key features of the neo-Aristotelian account of right action and some problems for this account in the context of a certain social role. The problem can be characterized as a dilemma. When evaluating an action in some role, one view is that the obligations and requirements of roles could be taken as something already given by social or professional role descriptions, such that the (...) virtuous person must respond to these demands in the right way. Alternatively, the virtuous person could evaluate the role itself in terms of what the “good parent, teacher, doctor” and so on should be like. Using two different neo-Aristotelian approaches to the ethics of professional roles as examples I argue that neither strategy is, as it stands, satisfactory. ‘Internalism’ about role demands takes institutionally specified role requirements in a way that is too strongly determinate for a virtue ethical analysis. On the other side, ‘externalism’ is all too indeterminate in bypassing or failing to accommodate the institutionally determined demands of social or professional roles. These shortcomings contour an “institution shaped gap” in virtue ethics such that it needs to attend to the qualities of social institutions as well as the character and actions of individuals. In response I suggest that there is a distinctly Aristotelian way in which the virtue ethicist can address it, by appeal to the distinctive function or “characteristic activity”— ergon—of the institution. (shrink)

Collective procedural memory is a group’s memory of how to do things, as opposed to a group’s memory of facts. It enables groups to mount effective responses to periodic events (e.g., natural hazards) and to sustain collective projects (e.g., combatting climate change). This article presents an account of collective procedural memory called the Ability Conception. The Ability Conception has various advantages over other accounts of collective procedural memory, such as those appealing to collective know-how and collective identity. It also demonstrates (...) new applications for collective procedural memory. I develop three in this article: to social epistemology, to the ethics of memorialization, and to a pattern of group vulnerability to recurring hazardous events that I call the saeculum effect. (shrink)

The question of ontological commitment in Plato’s Hippias Major has been important in disputes over the dialogue’s place in the corpus, its meaning, and its authenticity. But this question seems to have been settled—the Hippias Major is not committed to the ‘forms.’ Such an ontological conclusion has been vigorously defended, but its defenses rest on a problematic meta-ontological framework. This paper suggests a more adequate framework and brings more evidence to the evaluation of the question of ontological commitment in the (...) Hippias Major. It concludes that the dialogue is indeed committed to some kind of form. (shrink)

Two epistemic principles are Knowledge Exclusion and Belief Exclusion. Knowledge Exclusion says that it is necessarily the case that if an agent knows that p, then she does not believe that ∼p, and Belief Exclusion says that it is necessarily the case that if an agent believes that q, then she does not believe that ∼q. Many epistemologists find it reasonable to reject the latter principle and accept the former. I argue that this is in fact not reasonable by proposing (...) a case in which an agent can use that she has contradictory beliefs towards a proposition as decisive evidence for that proposition. A natural response is that this case conflicts with common assumptions about the relation between knowledge, contradictory beliefs and rationality. I reply by drawing ideas from Lasonen-Aarnio’s remarks on unreasonable knowledge to explain why these common assumptions do not threaten my argument. (shrink)

This paper is about the actual and potential development of an ethics that is appropriate to the practices and institutions of biobanking, the question being how best to develop a framework within which the relevant ethical questions are first identified and then addressed in the right ways. It begins with ways in which a standard approach in bioethics – namely upholding a principle of individual autonomy via the practice of gaining donors’ informed consent – is an inadequate ethical framework for (...) biobanking. In donating material to a biobank, the individual donor relinquishes a degree of control and knowledge over the way their material is used in large-scale and typically open ended projects; and the identifying nature of genetic material means that third parties have rights and interests which must be taken into account as well as those of the individual donor. After discussing the problems for informed consent in the biobanking context, the paper then considers three emerging alternative approaches which, broadly speaking, conceptualize the subject of biobanking ethics in communal or co-operative terms: one version sees participants in biobanking research as ‘shareholders’ whilst the other expands on the notion of participation to include the wider public beneficiaries of biobanking as ‘stakeholders’. It concludes by outlining a third view, on which the biobanking institution itself is conceived as an ethical subject whose defining function can do useful normative work in guiding and evaluating its activities. (shrink)

This dissertation is a collection of essays exploring the role of metaphor in Aristotle’s scientific method. Aristotle often appeals to metaphors in his scientific practice; but in the Posterior Analytics, he suggests that their use is inimical to science. Why, then, does he use them in natural science? And what does his use of metaphor in science reveal about the nature of his scientific investigations? I approach these questions by investigating the epistemic status of metaphor in Aristotelian science. In the (...) first essay, I defend an interpretation of metaphor as a type of heuristic reasoning: I claim that Aristotle uses metaphor to express conditions an explanation in natural science must meet if it is to explain regular, ordered change. These conditions specify the kinds of causes—particularly unmoved efficient causes—which the inquirer into nature is seeking. In the second essay, I look to Aristotle’s use of certain endoxa or common beliefs as explanatory principles in science, and show that his use of these principles is similar to his use of metaphor. In the final essay, I present a historical study of the analogy of art and nature, and I suggest that by looking to how the Greeks understood the role of inquiry in the arts, we can shed some light on Aristotle’s views concerning the method of inquiry he thinks the natural scientist should adopt. (shrink)

This article examines whether vision in Plato’s Timaeus can realize its primary function of permitting humans to stabilize their misaligned orbits of intelligence by getting to know the universe’s orbits as revealed through the heavenly bodies’ movements. I consider a concern that Timaeus, while seemingly requiring nocturnal vision for this purpose, appears to preclude its possibility, thereby threatening the dialogue’s internal coherence. I then argue that Timaeus has the resources to overcome this worry and to provide a philosophically cogent account (...) of nocturnal vision. (shrink)

The geometrical structures implicit in the de Broglie waves associated with a relativistic charged scalar quantum mechanical particle in an external field are analyzed by employing the ray concept of the causal interpretation. It is shown how an osculating Finslerian metric tensor, a torsion tensor, and a tetrad field define respectively the strain, the dislocation density, and the Burgers vector in the “natural state” of the wave, which is a non-Riemannian space of distant parallelism. A quantum torque determined by the (...) quantum potential is introduced and the example of a screw dislocated wave is discussed. (shrink)

The theory of object-dependent singular thought is outlined and the central motivation for it, turning on the connection between thought content and truth conditions, is discussed. Some of its consequences for the epistemology of thought are noted and connections are drawn to the general doctrine of externalism about thought content. Some of the main criticisms of the object-dependent view of singular thought are outlined. Rival conceptions of singular thought are also sketched and their problems noted.

The theory of object-dependent singular thought is outlined and the central motivation for it, turning on the connection between thought content and truth conditions, is discussed. Some of its consequences for the epistemology of thought are noted and connections are drawn to the general doctrine of externalism about thought content. Some of the main criticisms of the object-dependent view of singular thought are outlined. Rival conceptions of singular thought are also sketched and their problems noted.

In this paper I attempt to discover the object of Aristotle’s God’s νόησις in Metαphysics Λ.9. In Section I, I catalogue existing interpretations and mention the two key concepts of (i) God’s substancehood and (ii) his metaphysical simplicity. In Section II, I explore the first two aporiae of Λ.9 – namely (1) what God’s οὐσία is and (2) what God intelligizes. In Section III, I show how Aristotle solves these aporiae by contending that God’s οὐσία is actually intelligizing, and being (...) determined to do so by himself, and that the object of his νόησις is himself, such that he intelligizes his own οὐσία, and I explain what this means. In Section IV, I present the second pair of aporiae in Λ.9 and show how, by solving these, Aristotle clarifies the position arrived at in Section III. Lastly, in Section V, I present the final aporia and its solution, and conclude that Aristotle’s God is a radically-unified Narcissus-God who intelligizes his own οὐσία. (shrink)

The modern lawyer operates within a conception of law as a body of rules. To confront the law of contract, of torts, or of property, is to familiarize oneself with an intricate set of rules. Such familiarity is not yet legal scholarship, much less legal practice. For in order to use the rules as lawyers use them, the rules must be contemplated and considered, and the relationship between the different rules must be understood. Because the intellectual processes involved in handling (...) the rules exhibit a high degree of sophistication, those intellectual processes may themselves become the subject matter of philosophical argument. Thus we may regard jurisprudential theories as embodying differing understandings of the processes of handling legal rules; and we may conceive of legal theory as the attempt to grasp the moral significance of rules as a foundation for social order. This essay shall offer some thoughts on the relationship between the rule of law, considered as a moral ideal, and the notion of rules as the principal means by which legal order is manifested. (shrink)

A number of traditional roles that propositions are supposed to play are outlined. Philosophical theories of the nature of propositions are then surveyed, together with considerations for and against, with an eye on the question whether any single notion of a proposition is suited to play all or any of these roles. Approaches discussed include: (1) the structureless possible-worlds theory; (2) the structured Russellian theory; and (3) the structured Fregean theory. It is noted that it is often unclear whether these (...) are accounts of what propositions are, ontologically speaking, or whether they are accounts of how propositions are best represented in a formal semantic theory. (shrink)

It is known that the Schrödinger equation may be derived from a hydrodynamic model in which the Lagrangian position coordinates of a continuum of particles represent the quantum state. Using Routh’s method of ignorable coordinates it is shown that the quantum potential energy of particle interaction that represents quantum effects in this model may be regarded as the kinetic energy of additional ‘concealed’ freedoms. The method brings an alternative perspective to Planck’s constant, which plays the role of a hidden variable, (...) and to the canonical quantization procedure, since what is termed ‘kinetic energy’ in quantum mechanics may be regarded literally as energy due to motion. (shrink)

It is not only the physical digital media that pile waste upon waste in an era of built-in obsolescence driven by over-production attempting to balance the falling rate of profit. Energy used in the manufacture, employment and recycling of devices belongs to a system where waste is not merely accidental but integral to the operation of cognitive capitalism. Oil and gas, uranium and hydroelectricity all prey disproportionately on indigenous peoples, who are turned into economic externalities along with their lands. A (...) parallel is drawn between the waste of power in generation and transmission, and the exploitation of human energy as excess under a cyborg capital that increasingly treats all humanity as external. (shrink)

1. Although there has been renewed interest in Anne Conway’s (1631–1679) sole published philosophical treatise, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, scholars have so far largel...

Scholarship on Aristotle’s theory of visual perception has traditionally held that Aristotle had a single, static, conception of light and that he believed that illumination occurred prior to and independent of the actions of colours. I contend that this view precludes the medium from becoming actually transparent, thus making vision impossible. I here offer an alternative to the traditional interpretation, using contemporary conceptual tools to make good philosophical sense of Aristotle’s position. I call my view the ‘ecological’ interpretation. It postulates (...) two conceptions of light: non-visible mobile propagated light and visible static illumination produced by the interaction of propagated light with the environment’s coloured textured surfaces. I argue that these contemporary conceptual tools can find a foothold in and consistently enrich Aristotle’s extant position and that, with their aid, we can restore coherence to his theories of light and vision. (shrink)

The essay considers whether there are necessary truths about rights. The existence of rights is contingent, but our practices involving rights rest upon fundamental conceptual assumptions necessary to their coherence. Hohfeld's analysis is proffered as the embodiment of those assumptions. An examination of the concept of necessity shows how those assumptions can be necessary truths about rights without being logically necessary.