A review article on Bruce Anderson and Philip McShane, Beyond Establishment Economics: No Thank-You Mankiw (Nova Scotia: Axial Press, 2002).

Background To determine whether fetal care paediatric and maternal–fetal medicine specialists harbour differing attitudes about pregnancy termination for congenital fetal conditions, their perceived responsibilities to pregnant women and fetuses, and the fetus as a patient and whether self-perceived primary responsibilities to fetuses and women and views about the fetus as a patient are associated with attitudes about clinical care.Methods Mail survey of 434 MFM and FCP specialists .Results MFMs were more likely than FCPs to disagree with these statements : ‘the (...) presence of a fetal abnormality is not an appropriate reason for a couple to consider pregnancy termination’ ; ‘the effects that a child born with disabilities might have on marital and family relationships is not an appropriate reason for a couple to consider pregnancy termination’ ; and ‘the cost of healthcare for the future child is not an appropriate reason for a couple to consider pregnancy termination’ . 65% MFMs versus 47% FCPs disagreed that their professional responsibility is to focus primarily on fetal well-being . Specialists did not differ regarding the fetus as a separate patient. Responses about self-perceived responsibility to focus on fetal well-being were associated with clinical practice attitudes.Conclusions Independent of demographic and sociopolitical characteristics, FCPs and MFMs possess divergent ethical sensitivities regarding pregnancy termination, pregnant women and fetuses, which may influence clinical care. (shrink)

The field of neuroimaging has reached a watershed. Brain imaging research has been the source of many advances in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive science over the last decade, but recent critiques and emerging trends are raising foundational issues of methodology, measurement, and theory. Indeed, concerns over interpretation of brain maps have created serious controversies in social neuroscience, and, more important, point to a larger set of issues that lie at the heart of the entire brain mapping enterprise. In this volume, (...) leading scholars -- neuroimagers and philosophers of mind -- reexamine these central issues and explore current controversies that have arisen in cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, computer science, and signal processing. The contributors address both statistical and dynamical analysis and modeling of neuroimaging data and interpretation, discussing localization, modularity, and neuroimagers' tacit assumptions about how these two phenomena are related; controversies over correlation of fMRI data and social attributions ; and the standard inferential design approach in neuroimaging. Finally, the contributors take a more philosophical perspective, considering the nature of measurement in brain imaging, and offer a framework for novel neuroimaging data structures. Contributors: William Bechtel, Bharat Biswal, Matthew Brett, Martin Bunzl, Max Coltheart, Karl J. Friston, Joy J. Geng, Clark Glymour, Kalanit Grill-Spector, Stephen José Hanson, Trevor Harley, Gilbert Harman, James V. Haxby, Rik N. Henson, Nancy Kanwisher, Colin Klein, Richard Loosemore, Sébastien Meriaux, Chris Mole, Jeanette A. Mumford, Russell A. Poldrack, Jean-Baptiste Poline, Richard C. Richardson, Alexis Roche, Adina L. Roskies, Pia Rotshtein, Rebecca Saxe, Philipp Sterzer, Bertrand Thirion, Edward Vul The hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket. (shrink)

Nanomedicine is yielding new and improved treatments and diagnostics for a range of diseases and disorders. Nanomedicine applications incorporate materials and components with nanoscale dimensions where novel physiochemical properties emerge as a result of size-dependent phenomena and high surface-to-mass ratio. Nanotherapeutics and in vivo nanodiagnostics are a subset of nanomedicine products that enter the human body. These include drugs, biological products, implantable medical devices, and combination products that are designed to function in the body in ways unachievable at larger scales. (...) Nanotherapeutics andin vivonanodiagnostics incorporate materials that are engineered at the nanoscale to express novel properties that are medicinally useful. These nanomedicine applications can also contain nanomaterials that are biologically active, producing interactions that depend on biological triggers. Examples include nanoscale formulations of insoluble drugs to improve bioavailability and pharmacokinetics, drugs encapsulated in hollow nanoparticles with the ability to target and cross cellular and tissue membranes and to release their payload at a specific time or location, imaging agents that demonstrate novel optical properties to aid in locating micrometastases, and antimicrobial and drug-eluting components or coatings of implantable medical devices such as stents. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dr. Jacques L. and Martin Hide-a-Guerre: The Subject of New HistoricismStephen Bretzius (bio)Joel Fineman. The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. [SW]Stephen Greenblatt. Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge, 1990.Stephen Greenblatt. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.The word ‘theory’ stems (...) from the Greek verb theorein. The noun belonging to it is theoria. Peculiar to these words is a lofty and mysterious meaning. The verb theorein grew out of the coalescing of two root words, thea and horao. Thea (cf. theater) is the outward look, the aspect, in which something shows itself.... The second root word in theorein, horao, means: to look at something attentively, to look it over, to view it closely. Thus it follows that theorein is thean horan, to look attentively on the outward appearance wherein what presences becomes visible and, through such sight—seeing—to linger with it.—Martin Heidegger, “Science and Reflection”Hamlet: ‘Sblood, there is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out. A flourish.Guildenstern: There are the players.—Hamlet 2.2.366–681In setting forth Shakespeare’s unique role within an important institutional appropriation of the early modern theater by the postmodern university, together with a corresponding postmodern theory already shaping the early modern theater, a highly stylized early play like Romeo and Juliet is a good place to begin. For here, and from the beginning, the play unfolds outside (and therefore inside) the “deconstructed” binarisms characteristic of a certain poststructural literary theory generally—womb-tomb, light-dark, female-male, Capulet-Montague, waking-sleeping, all-nothing, lark-nightingale, love-hate, late-early, vice-virtue, poison-remedy, mercy-murder, wedding-funeral, dove-raven, fiend-angel, wolf-lamb, miss-mend, stand-stir, haste-destiny, and so on. 1 Here the nonbinary language [End Page 73] of the theater anticipates the “unlimited semiosis” of postmodern literary and cultural theory precisely by extending that nonbinary language to the opposition theater-theory, which the play also undermines. To cite only one particularly central example, literary criticism’s ongoing concerns with the cultural and ritualistic origins of tragedy are not just explored but explained—theorized—by the play’s self-conscious identification of Juliet as both “dove” (“So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows” [1.5.48]) and “lamb” (“Juliet! Fast, I warrant her, she. / Why, lamb! Why, lady!” [4.5.1–2]). The theatrical experience of the play’s “poor sacrifices” [5.3.318] is further related to the Catholic mass, out of which Shakespeare’s own tragic theater significantly evolves, by “Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen” [1.3.17] (Lammas [hlammas] hlaf ‘loaf, bread,’ maesse ‘mass’) and “God’s bread, it makes me mad!” [3.5.176]. 2 Redoubling this Christian context for sacrifice, a seasonal parallel in the myth of Persephone stolen away by Pluto shows through “Death lies on her like an untimely frost / Upon the sweetest flower of all the field” [4.5.28–29] and “O son, the night before thy wedding-day / Hath Death lain with thy wife” [35–36]. Within the same ongoing theorization of the play’s own theater, the “pomegranate tree” in Juliet’s “It was the nightingale, and not the lark... / Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree” [3.5.2–4] further joins Juliet to Persephone, Lady Capulet to Ceres, and “love-devouring death” [2.6.7] to Hades.From the play to the theory, then, influential critiques of performative discourse and its ritualistic origins in postsubjective (post-Lacanian) sacrifice are generated not only by the postmodern university, but also, in Romeo and Juliet, by the early modern theater. For the play, and not simply the theory, is already about the play—and autobiographical, from Montague’s “Away from light steals home my heavy son, / And private in his chamber pens himself” [1.1.137–38] through Juliet’s “Was ever book containing such vile matter / So fairly bound” [3.2.83–84] to Romeo’s frantic “get me ink and paper... (shrink)

Comments on L. T. Hoshmand & J. Martin's (see record 1995-28533-001) proposal for providing unity in psychological science. Hoshmand and Martin suggest that psychology may derive its own naturalized epistemology by studying and describing the activities in which psychologists are currently engaged, find successful, and how it is that they historically arrived at these practices. While Hoshmand and Martin's notion that an historico-descriptive analysis may be helpful for the study of psychology is not rejected, it is argued (...) that a critical examination of the theoretical bases of psychological research programs, as well as the theoretical assumptions of the historico-descriptive method itself, must precede its employment. (shrink)

Responds to the reply by L. T. Hoshmand and J. Martin to S. C. Yanchar and K. B. Kristensen's comments on Hoshmand and Martin's proposal for a naturalistic epistemological approach to psychological science. Hoshmand and Martin argue that in Yanchar and Kristensen's stance toward some aspects of their proposal, they have attributed to Hoshmand and Martin a relationship between theory, method, and data that they do not hold. According to Hoshmand and Martin, in making their (...) case Yanchar and Kristensen have objected to empirical means of evaluation, and essentially undermined their own argument. The authors clarify their position by responding to these claims. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Introduction : death, metaphysics, and morality / John Martin Fischer Death knocks / Woody Allen Rationality and the fear of death / Jeffrie G. Murphy Death / Thomas Nagel The Makropulos case : reflections on the tedium of immortality / Bernard Williams The evil of death / Harry S. Silverstein How to be dead and not care : a defense of Epicurus / Stephen E. Rosenbaum The dead / Palle Yourgrau The misfortunes of the dead / George Pitcher (...) Harm to others / Joel Feinberg Reasons and persons / Derek Parfit Why is death bad? / Anthony L. Brueckner and John Martin Fischer Death and the value of life / Jeff McMahan Annihilation / Steven Luper-Foy Epicurus and annihilation / Stephen E. Rosenbaum Some puzzles about the evil of death / Fred Feldman Well-being and time / J. David Velleman. (shrink)

The result is nothing less than a fundamental reorientation of moral theory that enables it at last to account for morality's supreme authority--an account that ...

S. 39: "My project in this paper is to develop the initial distinction which I have drawn between recognition and appraisal respect into a more detailed and specific account of each. These accounts will not merely be of intrinsic interest. Ultimately I will use them to illuminate the puzzles with which this paper began and to understand the idea of self-respect." 42 " Thus, insofar as respect within such a pursuit will depend on an appraisal of the participant from the (...) perspective of whatever standards are held to be appropriate to the pursuit, such respect will depend on a judgement to which excellences of character are thought relevant. Note that exactly what aspect of the person's character is thought to be relevant in this instance is his recognition respect (or lack of it) for the standards of the pursuit." 44 "This attitude fails of being appraisal respect in that my having it toward the person is conditional on those traits being such as to make him server a particular purpose that I happen to have" 44 - 45 "To sum up: Appraisal respect is an attitude of positibe appraisal of a person either judged as a person or as engaged in some more specific pursuit. In the first case, the appropriate grounds are features of the person's character: dispositions to act for particular reasons or a higher-level disposition to act for the best reasons. In the second case, though features of character do not exhaust the appropriate grounds for appraisal respect, some such character traits will be relevant (recognition respect for the standards of a particular pursuit). Also, the other features which constitute the appoprate excellences of the pursuit must be related to traits of character in the way specified. In both cases, the positive appraisal of the person, and of his traits, must be categorical. It cannot depend on the fact that the person, because of his traits, serves an interest or purpose of one's own." 45 "To have recognition respect for someone as a person is to give appropriate weight to the fact that he or she is a person by being willing to constrain one's behaviour in ways required by that fact." 45 "This is rather different from having an attitude of appraisal respect for someone as a person. The latter is a positive appraisal oif an individual made with regard ti those features which are excellences of persons. As such, it is not owed to everone, for it may or may not be merited. When it is, what is merited is just the positive appraisal itself." 47 "Second, the only beings who are approriate objects of appraisal respect are those who are capable of acting for reasons and hence capable of conceiving of various facts as meriting more or less consideration in deliberation.". (shrink)

My aim in what follows is to sketch with a broad brush fundamental changes involving the concept of obligation in British ethics of the early modern period, as it developed in the direction of the view that obligatory force is a species of motivational force – an idea that deeply informs present thought. I shall also suggest, although I can hardly demonstrate it conclusively here, that one important source for this view was a doctrine which we associate with Kant, and (...) which it may seem surprising to find in British ethics, especially of the early modern period, viz., that rational agents are obligated by motives available through a form of practical thinking necessary for rational autonomy. (shrink)

In these essays Stephen White examines the forms of psychological integration that give rise to self-knowable and self-conscious individuals who are responsible, concerned for the future, and capable of moral commitment. The essays cover a wide range of basic issues in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, moral psychology, and political philosophy, providing a coherent, sophisticated, and forcefully argued view of the nature of the self. Beginning with mental content and ending with Rawls and utilitarianism, each essay argues a distinctive line. (...) Together they are a unified and powerful philosophical position of considerable scope, one that provides a unique vision of the mind, consciousness, personhood, and morality. White argues that the unity of the self revealed in personal identity and moral responsibility is best understood in normative terms. Basic to such features of the self are the patterns of self-concern in which they are characteristically displayed and the internal justification that supports such concern. The treatment of intentionality and consciousness that grounds this account emphasizes privileged selfknowledge and practical rationality and their corresponding contributions to the unity of the self. A final source of unity emerges from the analysis of our fundamental commitments, an analysis that ensures a central place in moral theory for the notion of the self. (shrink)

In this paper I distinguish three alternatives to the functionalist account of qualitative states such as pain. The physicalist-functionalist holds that (1) there could be subjects functionally equivalent to us whose mental states differed in their qualitative character from ours, (2) there could be subjects functionally equivalent to us whose mental states lacked qualitative character altogether and (3) there could not be subjects like us in all objective respects whose qualitative states differed from ours. The physicalist-functionalist holds (1) and (3) (...) but denies (2). The transcendentalist holds (1) and (2) and denies (3). I argue that both versions of physicalist-functionalism inherit the problem of property dualism which originally helped to motivate functionalist theories of mind. I also argue that neither version of physicalist-functionalism can distinguish in a principled way between those neurophysiological properties of a subject which are relevant to the qualitative character of that subject's mental states and those which are not. I conclude that the only alternative to a functionalist account of qualitative states is a transcendentalist account and that this alternative is not likely to appeal to the critics of functionalism. (shrink)

What are ethical judgments about? And what is their relation to practice? How can ethical judgment aspire to objectivity? The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in metaethics, placing questions such as these about the nature and status of ethical judgment at the very center of contemporary moral philosophy. Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches is a unique anthology which collects important recent work, much of which is not easily available elsewhere, on core metaethical issues. Reinvigorated (...) naturalist moral realism and the various versions of moral realism, as well as irrealist, expressivist, and neo-Kantian constructivist theories are all represented in this fine collection, constituting a rich array of approaches to contemporary moral philosophy's most fundamental debates. An extensive introduction by Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton is also included, making this volume the most comprehensive and up-to-date work of its kind. Moral Discourse is ideally suited for use in courses in contemporary ethics, ethical theory, and metaethics. (shrink)

This chapter defends the property dualism argument. The term “semantic premise” mentioned is used to refers to an assumption identified by Brian Loar that antiphysicalist arguments, such as the property dualism argument, tacitly assume that a statement of property identity that links conceptually independent concepts is true only if at least one concept picks out the property it refers to by connoting a contingent property of that property. It is argued that, the property that does the work in explaining the (...) possibility of a posteriori identities need not be a first-order property of the referent in question. On his view, the property dualism argument requires only a weaker semantic premise, which allows that the property in question be a higher order property. A refined version of the property dualism argument is formulated, which uses the weaker premise, and defends the argument against various objections. (shrink)

Why is ethics part of philosophy? Stephen Darwall's Philosophical Ethics introduces students to ethics from a distinctively philosophical perspective, one that weaves together central ethical questions such as "What has value?" and "What are our moral obligations?" with fundamental philosophical issues such as "What is value?" and "What can a moral obligation consist in?"With one eye on contemporary discussions and another on classical texts,Philosophical Ethics shows how Hobbes, Mill, Kant, Aristotle, and Nietzsche all did ethical philosophy how, for example, (...) they sought to gain insight into what has value through understanding what value itself is. After an introductory section, and one on main approaches to metaethics, chapters discuss "modern" philosophical moralists Hobbes, Mill, and Kant and pre- and postmodern philosophical approaches to ethics in Aristotle, Nietzsche, and the ethics of care. Throughout, the reader is invited to do rather than just read about philosophical ethics and, in doing so, to think through questions that face all thoughtful human beings. Themes include the nature of value and moral obligation, freedom and choice, human flourishing, excellence and merit, radical critiques of morality, and the importance of relationships for human life. (shrink)

This book is a major work in the history of ethics, and provides the first study of early modern British philosophy in several decades. Professor Darwall discerns two distinct traditions feeding into the moral philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, there is the empirical, naturalist tradition, comprising Hobbes, Locke, Cumberland, Hutcheson, and Hume, which argues that obligation is the practical force that empirical discoveries acquire in the process of deliberation. On the other hand, there is (...) a group including Cudworth, Shaftesbury, Butler, and in some moments Locke, which views obligation as inconceivable without autonomy and which seeks to develop a theory of the will as self-determining. (shrink)

Elizabeth Anscombe famously argued that "modern moral philosophy" centrally involved unsupported notions of obligation and culpability. Modern Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to Kant exhibits, for the first time, resources that modern moral philosophers had to respond to Anscombe's challenge, also enhancing our own philosophical grasp of morality and its foundations.

James Madison is the thinker most responsible for laying the groundwork of the American commercial republic. But he did not anticipate that the propertied class on which he relied would become extraordinarily politically powerful at the same time as its interests narrowed. This and other flaws, argues Stephen L. Elkin, have undermined the delicately balanced system he constructed. In Reconstructing the Commercial Republic , Elkin critiques the Madisonian system, revealing which of its aspects have withstood the test of time (...) and which have not. The deficiencies Elkin points out provide the starting point for his own constitutional theory of the republic—a theory that, unlike Madison’s, lays out a substantive conception of the public interest that emphasizes the power of institutions to shape our political, economic, and civic lives. Elkin argues that his theory should guide us toward building a commercial republic that is rooted in a politics of the public interest and the self-interest of the middle class. He then recommends specific reforms to create this kind of republic, asserting that Americans today can still have the lives a commercial republic is intended to promote: lives with real opportunities for economic prosperity, republican political self-government, and individual liberty. (shrink)

In a world where every person is exposed daily through the mass media to images of violence and suffering, as most dramatically exemplified in recent years by the ongoing tragedy in Darfur, the question naturally arises: What responsibilities do we, as bystanders to such social injustice, bear in holding accountable those who have created the conditions for this suffering? And what is our own complicity in the continuance of such violence—indeed, how do we contribute to and benefit from it? How (...) is our responsibility as individuals connected to our collective responsibility as members of a society? Such questions underlie Stephen Esquith’s investigation in this book. For Esquith, being responsible means holding ourselves accountable as a people for the institutions we have built or tolerated and the choices we have made individually and collectively within these institutional constraints. It is thus more than just acknowledgment; it involves settling accounts as well as recognizing our own complicity even as bystanders. (shrink)

Two characterizations are given of those structural consequence operations on a propositional language which can be defined via proofs from a finite number of polynomial rules.

Between the later views of Wittgenstein and those of connectionism 1 on the subject of the mastery of language there is an impressively large number of similarities. The task of establishing this claim is carried out in the second section of this paper.

Consequentialism collects, for the first time, both the main classical sources and the central contemporary expressions of this important position. Edited and introduced by Stephen Darwall, these readings are essential for anyone interested in normative ethics.

have come in for increasing attention and controversy. A good example would be recent debates about moral realism where question of the relation between ethics (or ethical judgment) and the will has come to loom large.' Unfortunately, however, the range of positions labelled internalist in ethical writing is bewilderingly large, and only infrequently are important distinctions kept clear.2 Sometimes writers have in mind the view that sincere assent to a moral (or, more generally, an ethical) judgment concerning what one should (...) do is necessarily connected to motivation (actual or dispositional).s This necessity may be conceptual, or perhaps metaphysical, the thought being.. (shrink)

Evidence from molecular genetics bolsters the claim that color is not a perceptuolinguistic and behavioral universal. Neurobiology continues to fill in many details about the flow of color information from photon reception to central processing in the brain. Humans have the most acute color vision in the biosphere because of natural selection and adaptation, not coincidence.