Throughout, this book questions our accepted definitions and biases, showing the self-reflective nature of scientific activity within society.

An extensive literature about pictorial representation discusses what is involved when a two-dimensional image represents some specific object or type of object. A smaller literature addresses parallel issues in sculptural representation. But little has been said about the role played by the sculptural material itself in determining the meanings of the sculptural work. Appealing to Nelson Goodman and Catherine Elgin’s discussions of literal and metaphorical exemplification, I argue that the material of which a sculpture is constituted plays key roles in (...) what is represented and how it is represented, in part because we have bodily and emotional responses to the real possibilities the sculptural material creates for us. I discuss examples of contemporary artworks by Melvin Edwards, Kara Walker, Willie Cole, Marc Quinn, Ai Weiwei, Janine Antoni, El Anatsui, Zoe Leonard, and others. (shrink)

This essay examines the difficulties faced by the claim that artworks are simple physical objects (or, in the case of non-visual art forms, simple structures of another sort) and examines alternative proposals regarding their ontological nature.

I offer a new interpretation of Heidegger’s analysis of anxiety in Being and Time as an account of the relationship between individual agents and the public normative practices of their communities. According to a prominent recent interpretation, Heidegger’s discussions of anxiety, death and the “call of conscience” together explain how we can respond to the norms of our practices as reasons and subject them to critical reflection. I argue that this is only part of the story. Anxiety is an occasion (...) for Dasein to take responsibility for its ongoing activity of interpreting the possibilities for living and acting made available by the normative practices of its community, which is presupposed and overlooked from the perspective of everyday Dasein. Public normativity underdetermines Dasein’s conception of what it would mean to take up any of the possibilities available in its world as a way of living its own life. (shrink)

The paper proposes a solution to the problem with Odysseus’ kingship in the Odyssey by maintaining that Odysseus is not officially considered dead. Consequently, Telemachus cannot inherit the position of king and Penelope must leave Odysseus’ household before remarrying. After discussing the modern concept of legal death and previous interpretations of the Ithacan situation, the paper focusses on Athena's speech at 1.275–92. A close reading demonstrates that erecting a cenotaph to Odysseus would be tantamount to a modern declaration of death (...) in absentia, since it will render Penelope a widow and Telemachus the head of the household. This legal convention chimes with the Homeric depiction of Hades. (shrink)

In my dissertation I approach the subject of the attributes of God in Spinoza's metaphysics by considering three pivotal and closely linked problems. I discuss the problem of the relation of God to the attributes, the problem of the essence of God, and the problem of the true conception of God. ;I examine three interpretations of God and the attributes in Spinoza: that of Jonathan Bennett, according to which God is the thing that has the attributes and modes as properties, (...) that of Edwin Curley and Alan Donagan, according to which God is the collection of attributes, and that of H. F. Hallett and Steven Parchment, according to which God is the totality of attributes. I examine each stance relative to the three problems. I reveal the weaknesses of each interpretation by making explicit the problems that each interpretation is unable to deal with successfully and by exposing new problems that some of the interpretations create. I then discuss topics in Spinoza that need to be understood in order to arrive at the correct answers to the three problems. For example, I carefully examine 2D2---a definition that commentators on Spinoza generally consider imperative in the discussion of the essence of God. ;I then suggest an interpretation of God and the attributes that is motivated by Spinoza's claim in 1P34 that God's power is God's essence. I claim that an adequate idea of the essence of God is a de re conception of God; and I invoke Michael Della Rocca's account of the opacity of attribute-contexts in order to support my view of de re conceptions of God. I show that, for Spinoza, the essence of a thing is given by the definition of the thing; and I show that 1D6 correlates with his claim in 1P34 that God's power is God's essence. I argue that God's essence is absolutely infinite and eternal power, and that power is what is constituted and expressed by each of the infinite attributes. (shrink)

The culturally pervasive tendency to identify aspects of the body as aesthetically imperfect harms individuals and scaffolds injustice related to disability, race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities, and fatness. But abandoning the notion of imperfection may not respect people’s reasonable understandings of their own bodies. I examine the prospects for a practice of aesthetic assessment grounded in a notion of the body’s function. I argue that functional aesthetic assessment, to be respectful, requires understanding the body’s functions as complex, malleable, and determined by (...) the projects and interests of the person whose body it is. Aesthetically relevant functions, on this account, are determined neither by the body’s status as organism nor by cultural assumptions about how bodies should function or be used. (shrink)

In this book, Dr. Robert J. Levine reviews federal regulations, ethical analysis, and case studies in an attempt to answer these questions.

This paper has three objectives. First, I argue that apprehending an installation artwork is similar to apprehending an artwork for performance: in each case, audiences must recognize a relationship between the performance or display one encounters and the parameters expressed in the underlying work. Second, I consider whether realizations are also artworks in their own right. I argue that, in both installation art and performance, a particular realization is sometimes an artwork in its own right (even as it realizes another (...) work). I offer criteria for determining when this is the case. Application of the criteria yields the verdict that performances are sometimes artworks in their own right, while displays of installation artworks rarely are. This difference, though, is merely contingent on the conventions of the respective art forms. Third, I address ontological concerns about entities that are both abstract and temporal, as many artworks are on my analysis. (shrink)

On several current views, including those of Matthew Kieran, Gary Iseminger, Jerrold Levinson, and Noël Carroll, aesthetic appreciation or experience involves second-order awareness of one’s own mental processes. But what if it turns out that we don’t have introspective access to the processes by which our aesthetic responses are produced? I summarize several problems for introspective accounts that emerge from the psychological literature: aesthetic responses are affected by irrelevant conditions; they fail to be affected by relevant conditions; we are ignorant (...) of their causes and thus confabulate in explaining them; our attempts to offer explanations change our preferences; and the preferences we form after explanation are lower in quality. I suggest that by distinguishing introspective awareness of mental processes from introspective awareness of mental states, we can safeguard a worthwhile concept of aesthetic experience. In addition, we should recognize that theoretical, rather than introspective, understanding of our mental processes may play a valuable role in aesthetic appreciation. (shrink)

The ability of videos to serve as evidence of racial injustice is complex and contested. This essay argues that scrutiny of the Black body has come to play a key role in how videos of police violence are mined for evidence, following a long history of racialized surveillance and attributions of threat and superhuman powers to Black bodies. Using videos to combat injustice requires incorporating humanizing narratives and cultivating resistant modes of looking.

According to a common sense theory, facial expressions signal specific emotions to people of all ages and therefore provide children easy access to the emotions of those around them. The evidence, however, does not support that account. Instead, children’s understanding of facial expressions is poor and changes qualitatively and slowly over the course of development. Initially, children divide facial expressions into two simple categories (feels good, feels bad). These broad categories are then gradually differentiated until an adult system of discrete (...) categories is achieved, likely in the teen years. Children’s understanding of most specific emotions begins not with facial expressions, but with their understanding of the emotion’s antecedents and behavioral consequences. (shrink)

Whereas professional persuasion is a means to an immediate and instrumental end, ethical persuasion must rest on or serve a deeper, morally based final end. Among the moral final ends of journalism, for example, are truth and freedom. There is a very real danger that advertisers and public relations practitioners will play an increasingly dysfunctional role in the communications process if means continue to be confused with ends in professional persuasive communications. Means and ends will continue to be confused unless (...) advertisers and public relations practitioners reach some level of agreement as to the moral end toward which their efforts should be directed. In this article we advance a five-part test that defines this moral end, establishes ethical boundaries that should guide persuasive practices, and serves as a set of action-guiding principles directed toward a moral consequence in professional persuasion. The TARES Test consists of five principles: Truthfulness, Authenticity, Respect, Equity and Social Responsibility. We provide checklists to guide the practitioner in moral reflection and application of TARES Test principles. (shrink)

The first generation of children to grow up with electronic toys and games saw computers as our “nearest neighbors.” They spoke of computers as rational machines and of people as emotional machines, a fragile formulation destined to be challenged. By the mid-1990s, computational creatures, including robots, were presenting themselves as “relational artifacts,” beings with feelings and needs. One consequence of this development is a crisis in authenticity in many quarters. In an increasing number of situations, people behave as though they (...) no longer place value on living things and authentic emotion. This paper examines watershed moments in the history of human–machine interaction, focusing on the pertinence of relational artifacts to our collective perception of aliveness, life’s purposes, and the implications of relational artifacts for relationships. For now, the exploration of human–robot encounters leads us to questions about the morality of creating believable digital companions that are evocative but not authentic. (shrink)

Deduction is important to scientific inquiry because it can extend knowledge efficiently, bypassing the need to investigate everything directly. The existence of closure failure—where one knows the premises and that the premises imply the conclusion but nevertheless does not know the conclusion—is a problem because it threatens this usage. It means that we cannot trust deduction for gaining new knowledge unless we can identify such cases ahead of time so as to avoid them. For philosophically engineered examples we have “inner (...) alarm bells” to detect closure failure, but in scientific investigation we would want to use deduction for extension of our knowledge to matters we don’t already know that we couldn’t know. Through a quantitative treatment of how fast probabilistic sensitivity is lost over steps of deduction, I identify a condition that guarantees that the growth of potential error will be gradual; thus, dramatic closure failure is avoided. Whether the condition is fulfilled is often obvious, but sometimes it requires substantive investigation. I illustrate that not only safe deduction but the discovery of dramatic closure failures can lead to scientific advances. (shrink)

The first generation of children to grow up with electronic toys and games saw computers as our “nearest neighbors.” They spoke of computers as rational machines and of people as emotional machines, a fragile formulation destined to be challenged. By the mid-1990s, computational creatures, including robots, were presenting themselves as “relational artifacts,” beings with feelings and needs. One consequence of this development is a crisis in authenticity in many quarters. In an increasing number of situations, people behave as though they (...) no longer place value on living things and authentic emotion. This paper examines watershed moments in the history of human–machine interaction, focusing on the pertinence of relational artifacts to our collective perception of aliveness, life’s purposes, and the implications of relational artifacts for relationships. For now, the exploration of human–robot encounters leads us to questions about the morality of creating believable digital companions that are evocative but not authentic. (shrink)

Darwin in Argentina -- Conflicting Systems -- Francisco Javier Muniz (1795-1871) -- Hermann Burmeister (1807-1891) -- Francisco P. Moreno (1852-1919) -- Domingo F. Sarmiento (1811-1888) -- Eduardo Holmberg (1852-1937) -- Florentino Ameghino (1854-1911) -- Jose Ingenieros (1877-1925) -- Carlos Octavio Bunge (1875-1918).

Darwin the writer -- Learning to see : Darwin's prophetic apprenticeship on the Beagle voyage -- The prose of On the origin of species -- Surprise and paradox : Darwin's artful legacy -- Darwinian mind and Wildean paradox -- Hardy's Woodlanders and the Darwinian grotesque -- Coda : the comic Darwin.

If Savulescu and Kahane’s Principle of Procreative Beneficence were implemented regarding cognitive enhancement, the result would be highly impoverishing for future children. For, apart from being inadequate to rationality itself, advocates’ accounts of cognitive enhancement sever reason from the input to judgments and decision-making that other faculties provide. When handling desire, supporters of cognitive enhancement frame conflicts between reason and the nonrational in terms of self-governance or akratic failure, depending on which one triumphs. Further, so-called negative emotions are treated as (...) simply deleterious and hostile to the rational. Alliances of the nonrational with reason toward shared ends are hence unthinkable. Having critiqued advocates’ views directly, I amplify my assessment through engagement with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Per Savulescu and Kahane, to know how to direct enhancement endeavors, “we need to form reasonable opinions on difficult questions about the nature of well-being and the good life.” Thus far, however, enhancement supporters have been largely silent on this crucial matter. Because the debate over enhancement is ultimately over what values our views of flourishing embody, it should be recast so that this crux is squarely at the fore. What is more, for our own and our children’s sakes, as we embark on this reframing, we would do well to bear in mind Aristotle’s insights about the nonrational in relation to reason and his unwavering focus on the human “that for the sake of which” (hou heneka) all that we do is, perforce, undertaken. (shrink)

How we assess current calls for vigorous, or “radical”, enhancement through befitting procreative choices depends in part on the plausibility of supporters’ rejecting all substantive ties between their views and earlier eugenics. When denying such connections, today’s advocates of vigorous enhancement routinely emphasize that enhancement decisions would stem from individuals and families, not the state. In a multipronged critique, I show the untenability of transhumanists’ denials.

A selection of speeches and essays from the author's second decade as president of Yale University.

For courses covering professionalism in any nursing or health program offered in colleges or universities, vocational schools, hospitals, high schools, or through on-the-job training. A balanced introduction to the standards and skills needed to succeed in health care Professionalism in Health Care: A Primer for Career Success is a full-color, engaging, conversational text that helps students understand the common professional standards that all healthcare workers need to provide excellent care and service. It brings together complete coverage of these and other (...) crucial soft skills: work ethic, character, relationships, teamwork, communication and etiquette, honesty, cultural competence, personal image, personal health and wellness, and more. (shrink)

Many prescriptions offered in the literature for enhancing creativity and innovation in organizations raise ethical concerns, yet creativity researchers rarely discuss ethics. We identify four categories of behavior proffered as a means for fostering creativity that raise serious ethical issues: breaking rules and standard operating procedures; challenging authority and avoiding tradition; creating conflict, competition and stress; and taking risks. We discuss each category, briefly identifying research supporting these prescriptions for fostering creativity and then we delve into ethical issues associated with (...) engaging in the prescribed behavior. These four rubrics illustrate ethical issues that need to be incorporated into the creativity and innovation literature. Recommendations for how organizations can respond to the ethical issues are offered based on practices of exemplary organizations and theories of organizational ethics. A research agenda for empirically investigating the ethical impact these four categories of behavior have on organizations concludes the article. (shrink)

I consider the question of what moral obligations prospective parents owe to their future children. It is taken as an almost axiomatic premise of a wide range of philosophical arguments that prospective parents have a moral obligation to take such steps as ensuring their own financial stability or waiting until they are emotionally mature before conceiving. This is because it is assumed that parents have a moral obligation to lay the groundwork for their children's lives to go well. While at (...) first glance such a premise seems benign, I will argue that when it is applied to arguments in assisted reproductive technology, as it is in Julian Savulescu's procreative beneficence argument or as it is in Daniel Groll's recent argument for open gamete donation, we see problems with this premise. Problems in Groll's argument also become apparent when it is scrutinized in connection with this premise. (shrink)

Izard (2010) did not seek a descriptive definition of emotion—one that describes the concept as it is used by ordinary folk. Instead, he surveyed scientists’ prescriptive definitions—ones that prescribe how the concept should be used in theories of emotion. That survey showed a lack of agreement today and thus raised doubts about emotion as a useful scientific concept.

This reference essay surveys recent work in the emerging sub-discipline of everyday aesthetics, which builds on the work of John Dewey to resist sharp distinctions between art and non-art domains and argue that aesthetic concepts are properly applied to ordinary domains of experience.

Nursing practice occurs in the context of conversations with healthcare users, other healthcare professionals, and healthcare institutions. This discussion paper draws on symbolic interactionism and Fairclough's method of critical discourse analysis to examine language that nurses use to describe the people in their care and their practice. We discuss how nurses’ use of language constructs meaning about healthcare users and their own work. Through language, nurses are articulating what they believe about healthcare users and nursing practice. We argue that the (...) language nurses use can contribute to viewing their practice as tasks on bodies that must be accomplished efficiently and objectively within the biomedical model, rather than relational and person‐centered. Moreover, the language nurses use can perpetuate a sense of powerlessness within healthcare systems yet paradoxically they are in a position of power over healthcare users. Nurses’ compliance with the efficiency and biomedical model results in a lack of emphasis on the full breadth of nursing work, which could be enacted in relational rather than power‐laden practices. We conclude by positing that careful use of language among nurses in all settings is essential, if we are to begin to articulate what nursing is to ourselves and to others. (shrink)

Nancy is ultimately most concerned about how to determine the relevance of evidence to implementation of evidence-based policy guidelines, in other words, the transferability of study results to a population different from the one that was studied and in which procedures or conditions are not the same as those in the study. And she is concerned about the privileged position Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) are given in the ranking schemes for evidence-based policy, because as she sees it RCTs do not (...) address this question while other methods do. RCTs are highly regarded because of their strength in ruling out confounding variables, but they can be weak on the transferability problem because the manipulations necessary for controlled experiment also guarantee that the setting and population are different from the situation and population targeted for application. However, both of these familiar points are simplifications that can be misleading. Some non-RCT type studies (e.g. soft interventions) can also be very good at ruling out confounding variables.1 And, as I will explain, the problems leading to the transferability problem – interacting variables and a difference between study and target populations – are present in any study, not unique to RCTs. In addition. (shrink)

This article examines baby farming as an urban neighborhood-based system of group child care in Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century and considers the dangers and abuses the practice of baby farming posed for parents, children, and baby farmers. It explores reformers' early efforts to regulate the city's baby farms. Finally, the essay also investigates the ways in which the residents of Philadelphia's poor neighborhoods monitored the child-care establishments in their communities that catered to working mothers.

This data includes information on authorship gender in Leiter Ranked, Unranked, and Interdisciplinary Philosophy Journals between 1900 & 2010.

Advances in machine learning hold promise for corpus analysis: they have the potential to allow for more efficient and less biased analyses of text. This would be a boon for qualitative research, such as the survey research conducted by Academic Philosophy Data and Analysis. In this paper we examine the utility of automated machine learning for select survey questions, with a focus on LDA and VADER. We thus compare human and machine coding on the question of whether underrepresented philosophers are (...) more likely to respond negatively to questions concerning diversity and inclusivity in academic philosophy. Our study has mixed results, revealing instances where automated machine learning can be used to fruitfully support and interrogate more traditional hand-coding techniques, but also instances where we were unable to glean much insight. (Contact authors for draft.). (shrink)

The numbering in the new edition of Wittgenstein's Remarks does not in general correspond to the part and section numbers of the 1956 edition. The following concordance is useful for making cross references between the two editions.