Shelter Theology offers insight into the worlds of the invisible: individuals experiencing homelessness and those living in extreme poverty. Based on over ten years of chaplaincy in a homeless shelter, Dunlap shares the nuanced theology of people in harsh circumstances and outlines how their beliefs and practices enable survival and resistance.

____The Rejected Body__ argues that feminist theorizing has been skewed toward non-disabled experience, and that the knowledge of people with disabilities must be integrated into feminist ethics, discussions of bodily life, and criticism of the cognitive and social authority of medicine. Among the topics it addresses are who should be identified as disabled; whether disability is biomedical, social or both; what causes disability and what could 'cure' it; and whether scientific efforts to eliminate disabling physical conditions are morally justified. Wendell (...) provides a remarkable look at how cultural attitudes towards the body contribute to the stigma of disability and to widespread unwillingness to accept and provide for the body's inevitable weakness. (shrink)

The concept of "fitness" is a notion of central importance to evolutionary theory. Yet the interpretation of this concept and its role in explanations of evolutionary phenomena have remained obscure. We provide a propensity interpretation of fitness, which we argue captures the intended reference of this term as it is used by evolutionary theorists. Using the propensity interpretation of fitness, we provide a Hempelian reconstruction of explanations of evolutionary phenomena, and we show why charges of circularity which have been levelled (...) against explanations in evolutionary theory are mistaken. Finally, we provide a definition of natural selection which follows from the propensity interpretation of fitness, and which handles all the types of selection discussed by biologists, thus improving on extant definitions. (shrink)

Throughout, the emerging theory of aspect is extensively compared with alternative theories, and the book concludes with general reflections on the semantic ...

The book is an investigation of the semantics of numericals, counting and measuring, and its connection to the mass/count distinction from a theoretical and crosslinguistic perspective. It reviews some recent major linguistic results in these topics, and presents the author's new research including in-depth case studies of a number of typologically unrelated languages.

Leading scholars continue the debate over whether consciousness causes behavior or plays no functional role in it, discussing the question in terms of neuroscience, philosophy, law, and public policy.

Conventional wisdom and commonsense morality tend to take the integrity of persons for granted. But for people in systematically unjust societies, self-respect and human dignity may prove to be impossible dreams.Susan Babbitt explores the implications of this insight, arguing that in the face of systemic injustice, individual and social rationality may require the transformation rather than the realization of deep-seated aims, interests, and values. In particular, under such conditions, she argues, the cultivation and ongoing exercise of moral imagination is (...) necessary to discover and defend a more humane social vision. Impossible Dreams is one of those rare books that fruitfully combines discourses that were previously largely separate: feminist and antiracist political theory, analytic ethics and philosophy of mind, and a wide range of non-philosophical literature on the lives of oppressed peoples around the world. It is both an object lesson in reaching across academic barriers and a demonstration of how the best of feminist philosophy can be in conversation with the best of “mainstream” philosophy—as well as affect the lives of real people. (shrink)

In this book, Sara Monoson challenges the longstanding and widely held view that Plato is a virulent opponent of all things democratic. She does not, however, offer in its place the equally mistaken idea that he is somehow a partisan of democracy. Instead, she argues that we should attend more closely to Plato's suggestion that democracy is horrifying and exciting, and she seeks to explain why he found it morally and politically intriguing.Monoson focuses on Plato's engagement with democracy as he (...) knew it: a cluster of cultural practices that reach into private and public life, as well as a set of governing institutions. She proposes that while Plato charts tensions between the claims of democratic legitimacy and philosophical truth, he also exhibits a striking attraction to four practices central to Athenian democratic politics: intense antityrantism, frank speaking, public funeral oratory, and theater-going. By juxtaposing detailed examination of these aspects of Athenian democracy with analysis of the figurative language, dramatic structure, and arguments of the dialogues, she shows that Plato systematically links democratic ideals and activities to philosophic labor. Monoson finds that Plato's political thought exposes intimate connections between Athenian democratic politics and the practice of philosophy.Situating Plato's political thought in the context of the Athenian democratic imaginary, Monoson develops a new, textured way of thinking of the relationship between Plato's thought and the politics of his city. (shrink)

Is there a theory that explains the essence of consciousness? Or is consciousness itself just an illusion? The "last great mystery of science," consciousness was excluded from serious research for most of the last century but is now a rapidly expanding area of study for students of psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience. Recently the topic has also captured growing popular interest. This groundbreaking book is the first volume to bring together all the major theories of consciousness studies--from those rooted in traditional (...) Western philosophy to those coming out of neuroscience, quantum theory, and Eastern philosophy. Broadly interdisciplinary, Consciousness: An Introduction is divided into nine sections that examine such topics as how subjective experiences arise from objective brain processes, the basic neuroscience and neuropathology of consciousness, altered states of consciousness, mystical experiences and dreams, and the effects of drugs and meditation. It also discusses the nature of self, the possibility of artificial consciousness in robots, and the question of whether or not animals are conscious. Enhanced by numerous illustrations and profiles of important researchers, the book also includes self-assessment questions, further reading suggestions, and practical exercises that help bring the subject to life. (shrink)

How do our personalities and mental processes, our " states of consciousness" , derive from a gray mass of tissue with the consistency of a soft-boiled egg? How can mere molecules constitute an idea or emotion? Some of the most important questions we can ask are about our own consciousness. Our personalities, our individuality, indeed our whole reason for living, lie in the brain and in the elusive phenomenon of consciousness it generates. Thinkers in many disciplines have long struggled with (...) such questions, often in ways that have seemed incompatible, if not downright contradictory. Philosophers have meditated on the subjective experience of consciousness, with little attention to the physical realm, while scientists have sought to establish a causal relation between brain function and mind, often ignoring the qualitative aspects of experience. In Journey to the Centers of the Mind, neuroscientist Susan Greenfield offers an intriguing, unifying theory of consciousness that encompasses both phenomenological mental events and physical aspects of brain function. Using information gathered from clues in animal behavior, human brain damage, computer science, neurobiology, and philosophy, Greenfield offers a " concentric theory" of consciousness, and shows how certain events in the brain correspond to our qualitative experience of the world. Demonstrating the ways in which we can interpret the experience of consciousness in terms of interactions among neurons, she explores how much we can learn by continuing to find the links between our physical and mental inner worlds. (shrink)

Who should decide? In When Doctors Say No, philosopher and bioethicist Rubin examines this controversial issue.

The debate between impartialists and their critics has dominated both moral and political philosophy for over a decade. Characteristically, impartialists argue that any sensible form of impartialism can accommodate the partial concerns we have for others. By contrast, partialists deny that this is so. They see the division as one which runs exceedingly deep and argue that, at the limit, impartialist thinking requires that we marginalise those concerns and commitments that make our lives meaningful. This book attempts to show both (...) that the dispute between impartialists and their critics runs very deep, and that it can nonetheless be resolved. The resolution begins by asking how impartialist political philosophy can defend the priority of justice when it conflicts with people's commitments to their conceptions of the good. It is argued that priority can only defended if political impartialism has a moral foundation, and that moral foundation must not be a foundation in the ideal of equality (as is often thought), but a foundation in the partial concerns we have for others. In short, impartialist moral philosophy must take our partial concerns as central if it is to gain allegiance. However, if it does take our partial concerns as central, then it can generate a defence of political impartialism which shows why justice must take priority, but which also acknowledges that pluralism about the good is permanent. (shrink)

It is known that a number of inference principles can be used to trivialise the axioms of naïve comprehension - the axioms underlying the naïve theory of sets. In this paper we systematise and extend these known results, to provide a number of general classes of axioms responsible for trivialising naïve comprehension.

Human beings are strange animals. Although evolutionary theory has brilliantly accounted for the features we share with other creatures—from the genetic code that directs the construction of our bodies to the details of how our muscles and neurons work—we still stand out in countless ways. Our brains are exceptionally large, we alone have truly grammatical language, and we alone compose symphonies, drive cars, eat spaghetti with a fork and wonder about the origins of the universe.

Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility is an edited collection of new essays by an internationally recognized line-up of contributors. It is aimed at readers who wish to explore the philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism and their implications.

In his paper [6], Greg Restall conjectured that a logic supports a naïve comprehension scheme if and only if it is robustly contraction free, that is, if and only if no contracting connective is definable in terms of the primitive connectives of the logic. In this paper, we present infinitely many counterexamples to Restall''s conjecture, in the form of purely implicational logics which are robustly contraction free, but which trivialize naïve comprehension.

Curry's paradox, sometimes described as a general version of the better known Russell's paradox, has intrigued logicians for some time. This paper examines the paradox in a natural deduction setting and critically examines some proposed restrictions to the logic by Fitch and Prawitz. We then offer a tentative counterexample to a conjecture by Tennant proposing a criterion for what is to count as a genuine paradox.

The prelims comprise: The Significance of Voluntariness Ordinary and Philosophical Notions of Voluntariness Constraint and Compulsion Force and Contrariety in the NE Knowledge and Ignorance The Platonic Asymmetry Thesis Responsibility for Character References Further reading.

The electromagnetic field theory of consciousness proposes that conscious experiences are identical with certain electromagnetic patterns generated by the brain. While the theory has always acknowledged that not all of the electromagnetic patterns generated by brain activity are conscious, until now it has not been able to specify what might distinguish conscious patterns from non-conscious patterns. Here a hypothesis is proposed about the 3D shape of electromagnetic fields that are conscious, as opposed to those that are not conscious. Seven predictions (...) arising from this hypothesis are described. Existing empirical evidence shows that four of these predictions have already been successfully tested. Requirements for experimental testing of the other three are discussed. (shrink)

This book combines the insights of enlightenment thinking and feminist theory to explore the significance of love in modern philosophy. The author argues for the importance of emotion in general, and love in particular, to moral and political philosophy, pointing out that some of the central philosophers of the enlightment were committed to a moralized conception of love. However, she believes that feminism's insights arise not from its attribution of special and distinctive qualities to women, but from its recognition of (...) human vulernability. (shrink)

Consciousness, 'the last great mystery for science', has now become a hot topic. How can a physical brain create our experience of the world? What creates our identity? Do we really have free will? Could consciousness itself be an illusion? -/- Exciting new developments in brain science are opening up debates on these issues, and the field has now expanded to include biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers. This controversial book clarifies the potentially confusing arguments, and the major theories using illustrations, (...) lively cartoons, and experiments.Topics include vision and attention, theories of self and will, experiments on action and awareness, altered states of consciousness, and the effects of brain damage and drugs. (shrink)

The meme is an evolutionary replicator, defined as information copied from person to person by imitation. I suggest that taking memes into account may provide a better understanding of human evolution in the following way. Memes appeared in human evolution when our ancestors became capable of imitation. From this time on two replicators, memes and genes, coevolved. Successful memes changed the selective environment, favouring genes for the ability to copy them. I have called this process memetic drive. Meme-gene coevolution produced (...) a big brain that is especially good at copying certain kinds of memes. This is an example of the more general process in which a replicator and its replication machinery evolve together. The human brain has been designed not just for the benefit of human genes, but for the replication of memes. It is a selective imitation device. (shrink)

Continuing the debate over whether consciousness causes behaviour or plays no functional role in it, leading scholars discuss the question in terms of neuroscience, philosophy, law, and public policy.

This article examines the historical construction of depression over about a hundred years, employing the social life of methods as an explanatory framework. Specifically, it considers how emerging methodologies in the measurement of psychological constructs contributed to changes in epistemological approaches to mental illness and created the conditions of possibility for major shifts in the construction of depression. While depression was once seen as a feature of psychotic personality, measurement technologies made it possible for it to be reconstructed as changeable (...) and treatable. Different types of scaling techniques (Likert versus dichotomous scales) enabled the separation of depressive personality from reactive depression, paving the way for measuring the severity and intensity of emotions. Techniques to test sensitivity to change provided a means of demonstrating the efficacy of new psychoactive drug treatments. Later, more advanced techniques of precision scaling enabled the management of a new measurement problem, clinician unreliability, associated with the growing number of professionals involved in mental health care. Through statistical management of unreliability, the construct of depression has dramatically reduced over this period from hundreds of questionnaire items to potentially just two. Exploring the history of depression through this lens produces an alternative narrative to those that have emerged as a result of medicalisation and the actions of individuals and pressure groups. (shrink)

Literary genre theory and rhetorical genre theory have stopped speaking to each other. Outside the lively trading station named Bakhtin, exchanges between the two fields are rare. Even though literary scholarship has turned from questions of genre identification to broader examinations of relations among genres, and rhetorical genre theory has focused not only on the social functioning of genres but also on their identifying features, each critical practice is cut off from the resources of the other. It is possible to (...) read very widely in genre theory without encountering a single cross-citation.This article argues that both rhetorical and literary genre theory are constrained by a controlling metaphor of .. (shrink)

Variability in the symptom experience in patients diagnosed with chronic conditions may be related to social determinants of health (SDoH). The purpose of this critical review was to (1) summarize the existing literature on SDoH and symptom clusters (i.e., multiple, co‐occurring symptoms) in patients diagnosed with common chronic conditions, (2) evaluate current variables and measures used to represent SDoH, (3) identify gaps in the evidence base, and (4) provide recommendations for the incorporation of SDoH into future symptom cluster research. We (...) identified 118 articles including information on SDoH in chronic condition symptom cluster research. Articles primarily focused on cancer populations. Few articles had the explicit purpose of investigating relationships between SDoH and symptom clusters, and the inclusion of SDoH was often limited to variables used to describe samples. Future studies should be designed to “move beyond Table 1” in their utilization of SDoH as variables and examine relationships between SDoH and symptom clusters. Attention should be paid to the appropriateness of measures being used to collect information on SDoH, and analysis methods that estimate causal connections between variables should be considered. Research regarding the relationship of SDoH with symptom clusters in patients with chronic conditions has the potential to reveal mechanisms of symptom disparities and guide changes to alleviate these disparities. (shrink)

BackgroundThe public and healthcare workers have a high expectation of animal research which they perceive as necessary to predict the safety and efficacy of drugs before testing in clinical trials. However, the expectation is not always realised and there is evidence that the research often fails to stand up to scientific scrutiny and its 'predictive value' is either weak or absent.DiscussionProblems with the use of animals as models of humans arise from a variety of biases and systemic failures including: 1) (...) bias and poor practice in research methodology and data analysis ; 2) lack of transparency in scientific assessment and regulation of the research; 3) long-term denial of weaknesses in cross-species translation; 4) profit-driven motives overriding patient interests; 5) lack of accountability of expenditure on animal research; 6) reductionist-materialism in science which tends to dictate scientific inquiry and control the direction of funding in biomedical research.SummaryBias in animal research needs to be addressed before medical research and healthcare decision-making can be more evidence-based. Research funding may be misdirected on studying 'disease mechanisms' in animals that cannot be replicated outside tightly controlled laboratory conditions, and without sufficient critical evaluation animal research may divert attention away from avenues of research that hold promise for human health. The potential for harm to patients and trial volunteers from reliance on biased animal data1 requires measures to improve its conduct, regulation and analysis. This article draws attention to a few of the many forms of bias in animal research that have come to light in the last decade and offers a strategy incorporating ten recommendations stated at the end of each section on bias. The proposals need development through open debate and subsequent rigorous implementation so that reviewers may determine the value of animal research to human health. The 10Rs + are protected by a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License and therefore may be 'shared, remixed or built on, even commercially, so long as attributed by giving appropriate credit with a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.’. (shrink)

Our urban problem is how to revive the reality of the outside as a dimension of human experience.Richard Sennett.

This book examines how the early Christian elite articulated and cultivated the affective dimensions of compassion in a Roman world that promoted emotional tranquillity as the path to human flourishing. Drawing upon a wide range of early Christians from both east and west, Wessel situates each author in the broader cultural and intellectual context. The reader is introduced to the diverse conditions in which Christians felt and were urged to feel compassion in exemplary ways, and in which warnings were sounded (...) against the possibilities for distortion and exploitation. Wessel argues that the early Christians developed literary methods and rhetorical techniques to bring about appropriate emotional responses to human suffering. Their success in this regard marks the beginning of affective compassion as a Christian virtue. Comparison with early modern and contemporary philosophers and ethicists further demonstrates the intrinsic worth of the early Christian understanding of compassion. (shrink)

Jerome and John Chrysostom explored the disgust and revulsion that people often feel when confronted with the suffering of another human being. Theyattempted morally to reform their listeners by showing them that they were just as vulnerable as those whom they disparaged, and by breaking down false barriers between the self and other. Jerome presented graphic details of one woman’s ministry to the sick and poor, while Chrysostom criticized the aloofspectator who encouraged the sick and poor to perform. Disgust was (...) thereby re-conceived as an inappropriate response to human suffering. (shrink)

Les publications sur le thème de l’histoire de la jeunesse française au xxe siècle sont aujourd’hui nombreuses. Les premières s’intéressaient aux jeunes intellectuels, aux mouvements de jeunesse durant la période d’entre-deux-guerres, et à la jeunesse sous le régime de Vichy, tandis que les plus récentes se sont penchées sur les années après 1945, et plus particulièrement sur les Trente Glorieuses et les années soixante. Ces ouvrages expliquent comment la jeunesse française est devenue la cib...