Definitions of terms that are central to a theoretical understanding of the Royal Government of Bhutan's policy of Gross National Happiness.

A semiotic phenomenology of the scission point boundary condi-tion between Karl Jaspers’s concepts of existence and Existenz reveal them as fundamental distinctions that can manifest in healthy or pathological forms of communication, including the “inner action” of the competing “voices” “heard” by the patient undergoing treatment. My analysis illustrates that the mind, for Jaspers, represents how communicability as truth involves us in a natural rhetorical (tropic) relationship with a society. In this analysis, I frame the problematic boundary between existence and (...) Existenz in the language of Husserl. To provide context, I introduce Jaspers’s semiotics and explicate his theory of communication. Lastly, I connect what we have learned from the scission boundary condition between existence and Existenz to the competing voices of the patient. We discover that for Jaspers, our “selves” are cyphers, striving for communicability in a world of others. (shrink)

Much more than just an anthology, this survey of humanity's search for the meaning of life includes the latest contributions to the debate, a judicious selection of key canonical essays, and insightful commentary by internationally respected philosophers.

This article introduces a special issue of Philosophical Papers devoted to the topic of meaning in life. In the paper, I engage with articles by Robert Audi, David Velleman, John Martin Fischer, Laurence Thomas, Berit Brogaard, Barry Smith and Larry James, laying out their central views, criticizing them, and suggesting ways they could be developed.

The point of psychotherapy has occasionally been associated with talk of ‘life’s meaning’. However, the literature on meaning in life written by contemporary philosophers has yet to be systematically applied to literature on the point of psychotherapy. My broad aim in this chapter is to indicate some plausible ways to merge these two tracks of material that have run in parallel up to now. More specifically, my hunch is that the connection between meaning as philosophers understand it and therapy as (...) psychotherapists ought to practice it is much closer than is suggested by the field of existential psychotherapy, which expressly addresses the topic of life’s meaning and appeals to ideas from classic philosophers such Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and the like. I instead proffer the claim that psychodynamic and humanistic therapy, clinical psychology, and counselling psychology as such, not a particular branch of them, are best understood as enterprises in search of meaning in life, in the way many present-day philosophers understand this phrase. In this chapter, I spell out what I mean by this bold hypothesis and provide some good reason to take it seriously. (shrink)

Since its inception as a professional field in the 1960s or so, African ethics has been neglected not only by virtue ethicists, but also by international scholars in moral philosophy generally. This is unfortunate, since sub-Saharan normative perspectives are characteristically virtue-centred, and, furthermore, are both different from traditional Western forms and just as worth taking seriously as they are. In my contribution, I spell out the two major respects in which virtue is a salient theme in African ethics, and critically (...) appraise them in relation to some dominant Western conceptions. (shrink)

I seek to advance enquiry into the philosophical question of in virtue of what human beings have a dignity of the sort that grounds human rights. I first draw on values salient in sub-Saharan African moral thought to construct two theoretically promising conceptions of human dignity, one grounded on vitality, or liveliness, and the other on our communal nature. I then argue that the vitality conception cannot account for several human rights that we intuitively have, while the community conception can (...) do so. I conclude that, of plausible theories of human dignity with an African pedigree, the field ought to favour a community-based view and critically compare it in future work with the Kantian, autonomy-based view that dominates Western thinking about dignity. (shrink)

In this article, I consider whether there are values intrinsic to development theory and practice that are dubious in light of a characteristically African ethic. In particular, I focus on what a certain philosophical interpretation of the sub-Saharan value of communion entails for appraising development, drawing two major conclusions. One is that a majority of the criticisms that have been made of development by those sympathetic to African values are weak; I argue that, given the value of communion, development should (...) not be rejected because it is essentially, say, overly materialistic and scientistic, or insufficiently spiritual and local. The second conclusion, however, is that three criticisms of development are strong from the perspective of Afro-communalism and are particularly powerful when set in that context. I argue that development theory and practice are characteristically anthropocentric, individualist and technocratic, and that a reading of the sub-Saharan value of communion provides a unitary foundation for rejecting these features and for grounding an alternative, more relational approach to social progress and to what justice demands from the West in relation to Africa. (shrink)

Through the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the United States expanded its size by over 800,000 square miles. But neither President Thomas Jefferson nor Congress knew exactly what they had bought until 1806, when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark returned from their famous expedition. One of the most significant contributions of the Expedition was a better perception of the geography of the Northwest. Lewis and Clark prepared approximately 140 maps and filled in the main outlines of the previously blank map of (...) the northwestern United States. Robert I. Field has done much the same for the vast territory of U.S. health care regulation.On the front cover of Fields new book, Health Care Regulation in America: Complexity, Confrontation, and Compromise, is a picture of a giant three-dimensional labyrinth. Rarely is cover art so perfectly appropriate. (shrink)

Reprint of an article first appearing in Educational Philosophy and Theory (2018).

An idea salient in the African and East Asian philosophical traditions is that the right sort of socio-political interaction would be similar to the intuitive ways that family members ought to relate to each other. Applying this perspective to economic and ecological inequalities, I articulate some principles implicit in healthy familial relationships, show what they entail for certain aspects of distributive justice at the national level, and contend that the implications are plausible relative to competing theories such as utilitarianism, Rawlsianism, (...) and the Capabilities Approach. Specifically, I maintain that reflection on familial norms suggests that an array of objective goods, particularly ones pertaining to relationality, the development of talents, and life, should be central to what the state distributes, an account that rivals subjective well-being, primary goods, or democratically chosen capabilities. When it comes to how much the state should ideally ensure each citizen has, reflection on familial norms supports a new, balancing approach, according to which all have a comparable share of resources needed for objective goodness, but more go to those with great ability or great disability, an approach that differs, and plausibly so, from maximizing, prioritizing the worst off, equalizing, or providing a sufficient minimum. (shrink)

Zur Klärung ihrer Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede.

The current informal practice of pharmacometrics as a combination art and science makes it hard to appreciate the role that informatics can and should play in the future of the discipline and to comprehend the gaps that exist because of its absence. The development of pharmacometric informatics has important implications for expediting decision making and for improving the reliability of decisions made in model-based development. We argue that well-defined informatics for pharmacometrics can lead to much needed improvements in the efficiency, (...) effectiveness, and reliability of the pharmacometrics process. The purpose of this paper is to provide a description of the pervasive yet often poorly appreciated role of informatics in improving the process of data assembly, a critical task in the delivery of pharmacometric analysis results. First, we provide a brief description of the pharmacometric analysis process. Second, we describe the business processes required to create analysis-ready data sets for the pharmacometrician. Third, we describe selected informatic elements required to support the pharmacometrics and data assembly processes. Finally, we offer specific suggestions for performing a systematic analysis of existing challenges as an approach to defi ning the next generation of pharmacometric informatics. (shrink)

Online reprint of part of an encyclopedia entry (from the Encyclopaedia of Quality of Life and Well-being Research 2014).

For the more than a decade, I have advanced an account of what makes persons, animals, and other beings entitled to moral treatment for their own sake that is informed by characteristically African ideas about dignity, a great chain of being, and community. Roughly according to this account, a being has a greater moral status, the more it is capable of communing (as a subject) or of us communing with it (as an object). I have mainly argued that this characteristically (...) African and relational approach to moral status is a better account than salient Western approaches, especially individualist views associated with utilitarianism and Kantianism. Over the years, several commentators have raised criticisms of my approach, including that it objectionably: entails that we may rightly dominate mentally incapacitated human beings; prioritizes mentally incapacitated human beings over animals with similar cognitive abilities without sufficient justification; entails that intelligent aliens lack moral status; cannot make sense of our duties towards the dead; and is unable to account for the standing of species as distinct from their members. In this chapter I provide a comprehensive response to these and related objections, defending the initial account as an attractive way to understand what makes a being matter morally for non-instrumental reasons. For many animals to have a moral status would have important implications for the practice of agriculture, for instance farming animals for food and expanding crops. (shrink)

'The Meaningful and the Worthwhile' (Philosophical Forum 2012) translated into German by Markus Rüther.

Shortened version of an article that first appeared in Philosophical Papers (2017).

A chapter composed largely for undergraduate and postgraduate students that considers whether general facts about morality and our ability to make moral judgements count in favor of either theism or atheism.

It is with good reason that the name Rutherford is closely linked with the early history of the alpha particle. He discovered them, determined their nature, and from 1909 used them to probe the structure of the atom. From 1898 to 1902 Rutherford construed alpha radiation as a type of non-particulate Röntgen radiation. On his theory of the locomotion of radioactive particles Rutherford proposed that alpha radiation consisted of negatively charged particles. During 1902 he confirmed the particulate nature of alpha (...) radiation but discovered that these alpha particles were positively charged. Although Rutherford suspected from 1903 that these alpha particles were related somehow with helium, the proof required six long years of investigation. By mid-1908 it seemed certain that the alpha particle possessed two units of the elementary charge. Since the e/m ratio had already been determined for alpha particles, this evidence enhanced the suspected connection with helium. However, this gain and loss of charge was still construed as an ionization effect. Since as late as 1908 gaseous ionization was assumed to involve the gain or loss of a single unit of charge, Rutherford's alleged case of doubly ionized alpha particles was presumably an exception. Yet helium was known to be an inert gas and thus hardly a likely candidate for such exceptional ionization behaviour. To establish the connection, therefore, Rutherford resorted to a spectroscopic test. He collected spent alpha particles shot into a thin glass tube and gradually observed the spectrum of helium. Rutherford had thus been correct in his assumption, but a proper explanation was possible only after the confirmation of the nuclear structure of the atom. (shrink)

In this chapter I systematically distinguish a variety of ways to relationalize economics, and focus on a certain approach to relationalizing normative economics in the light of communal values salient in the African philosophical tradition. I start by distinguishing four major ways to relationalize empirical economics, viz., in terms of its ontologies, methods, explanations, and predictions, and also three major ways to relationalize normative economics, in regards to means taken towards ends, decision-procedures used to specify ends, and ends themselves. Then, (...) in the rest of the chapter I address what would be involved in relationalizing the ends of economic choices, given certain ideals of communal relationship characteristically prized by sub-Saharan philosophers, particularly southern African adherents to ubuntu. I advance communal answers to the two large questions of what an economy should distribute and how to engage with stakeholders, and suggest that the implications will be found plausible by many open-minded enquirers around the world. Although this chapter is a work of ethical philosophy, it is meant to be of broad interest to scholars in economics. (shrink)

Reprint of an article that first appeared in a special issue of the South African Journal of Philosophy devoted to life's meaning in the African tradition.

A large swathe of the indigenous African ethical tradition is frequently encapsulated in the maxim, “A person is a person through other persons.” This phrasing is an overly literal translation of some sayings that are prominent in the southern and central regions of Africa, but that resonate with most indigenous sub-Saharan cultures. This chapter articulates and motivates a philosophical interpretation of the maxim for an international readership interested in virtue. According to the initial formulation, one should strive to become a (...) real person, which one can do insofar as one prizes other persons’ capacity to relate harmoniously, where harmony consists of identifying with and exhibiting solidarity toward them. The chapter also explores ways of revising this theory to respond to some powerful criticisms, such as that virtue is not purely relational, but also includes some self-regarding dispositions, and that virtue can be manifested by relating to parts of the natural world, particularly to some non-human animals. (shrink)

Reply to six contributions to a special issue of _Social Theory and Practice_ that are devoted to _A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and Beyond the Continent_.

Reply to six critical discussions of _A Relational Moral Theory_ as part of a special issue of _Ethical Theory and Moral Practice_. Theoretical issues include the individualism/relationalism distinction, including as it bears on Confucian theory in comparison to African thought. Applied topics include the implications of a communal principle of right action for issues pertaining to business, biotechnological enhancements, environmentalism, and corrective justice.

Harmony as a basic value is neglected in internationally influential philosophical discussions about rights, power, and other facets of public policy; it is not prominent in articles that appear in widely read journals or in books published by presses with a global reach. Of particular interest, political philosophers and policy makers remain ignorant of the similarities and differences between various harmony-oriented approaches to institutional choice from around the world. In this chapter, I begin to rectify these deficiencies by critically discussing (...) the way harmony has figured into political philosophies from three major traditions in the Global South, namely, African ubuntu, East Asian Confucianism, and South American buen vivir. I point out that, although harmony is at the core of all three political philosophies, it is conceived in different ways, entailing incompatible prescriptions about things such as who should make laws and which sorts of beings have rights against the state. Such contrasting views call for rigorous cross-cultural dialogue amongst theorists of harmony, beyond mounting challenges to more individualist approaches that have been salient in modern Western political thought. (shrink)

A guest edited volume of the Journal of Applied Philosophy devoted to topics regarding the ethics of nudges, particularly those that have received little or no treatment up to now. Since the publication of Nudge in 2008, nudges have become widely used tools in policymakers' toolbox. Concurrently, ethicists have discussed which conditions, if any, ensure the fair and ethically legitimate implementation of such untraditional policy techniques. The debates have focused primarily on the alleged intrusiveness of nudges and their lack of (...) factual transparency. The special issue is intended to enrich the debate in the conviction that the clarity of the terms adopted within the debate could be improved and that some relevant ethical perspectives have been left out in assessing the morality of nudges. Specifically, the aims of this special issue are twofold, normative and conceptual. On the one side, we delve into the concepts on which the evaluation of nudging hinges, such as "preferences", "resistibility", and "libertarianism". Since the meanings assigned to such concepts drive our evaluation of nudging, their comprehension is critical. On the other side, the acceptability of nudges has been extensively assessed in the light of ethical theories developed within Western philosophy, and not with alternative but promising ethical frameworks from the Global South. Relatedly, some values implicated in nudging, such as the ethics of nudging vulnerable populations, have been overshadowed by scholars' attention to decisional autonomy. The special issue gives these themes the attention they deserve. (shrink)

Reprint of an article that initially appeared in the South African Journal of Philosophy (2016).

Mildly revised reprint of material extracted from an article appearing in Human Rights Review (2012).

A collection of several articles on African moral and political philosophy by Thaddeus Metz, translated into French by Emmanuel Fopa, and edited and introduced by Pius Mosima of the University of Bamenda, Cameroon.

In Revering God, author and scholar Thaddeus Williams bridges the gap between abstract theology and awe-inspired devotion, helping readers better understand God and drawing them into a deeper state of joy and reverence for their Creator.

This narrative provides insight into medical education for Black physicians in South Carolina in the 1960s, during the civil rights movement. It also discusses the many rewards and challenges of being a physician of color, describes what has been done to develop programs that benefit minority communities, and argues that more such programs are needed.

When we hear the word logic, we tend to think of arguments, premises and conclusions, claims and evidence for claims. But this is only half of it. Arguments are made of words, and words are symbols or signs of concepts, the building blocks of human thought. The study of the concept, the most fundamental aspect of logic, was once an essential part of liberal education, and to aid in its recovery is the goal of this book. This is a must-have (...) for any introductory logic course. (shrink)

Chinese (simplified character) translation of _A Relational Moral Theory_ by Nan Zhang.

In this article I draw on resources from the African philosophical tradition to construct a theory of human rights grounded on dignity that presents a challenge to the globally dominant, autonomy-based approach. Whereas the latter conceives of human rights violations as degradations of our rational nature, the former does so in terms of degradations of our relational nature, specifically, our capacity to be party to harmonious or friendly relationships. Although I have in the past presented the basics of the Afro-relational (...) approach, in this article I defend it from objections and also go on the offensive by arguing that understanding the human rights violations of torture and rape to be (roughly) behavior that treats innocent parties in an extremely discordant or unfriendly way is, if not more plausible than standard Kantian understandings, then at least a promising alternative to them. (shrink)

Reprint of an article that first appeared in Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics (2017).

I critically examine the South African university student and worker protests of 2015/2016 in light of moral principles governing the use of force that are largely uncontested in both the contemporary Western and African philosophies of just war, violence and threats. Amongst these principles are: “discrimination”, according to which force should be directed not towards innocent bystanders but instead should target those particularly responsible for injustice; “likely success”, meaning that, instead of being counter-productive, the use of force must be reasonably (...) expected to advance a just cause; and “last resort”, which entails that only the least force necessary to rebut injustice should be employed. I invoke these and related principles to appraise a wide array of types of student/worker protests, noting which of them accorded with the principles and which did not. I also reply to defences that some South Africans have recently made of protesting with coercion and destruction. (shrink)

When people lose capacity to make a medical decision, the standard is to assess what their preferences would have been and try to honor their wishes. Dementia raises a special case in such situations, given its long, progressive trajectory during which others must make substituted judgments. The question of how to help surrogates make better‐informed decisions has led to the development of dementia‐specific advance directives, in which people are given tools to help them communicate what their preferences are while they (...) are still able. Such directives allow the perspective of the person to play a clearer role in guiding decisions about their care. Dementia directives can never serve as rigid algorithms. Rather, they can be used to help inform conversations, to help surrogates make decisions that are better aligned with the preferences the person would have had. This essay lays out the proposed utility of dementia‐specific directives and addresses some of the criticisms raised about them. (shrink)

Part of the Elements Philosophy of Religion series, this short book focuses on the spiritual dimensions of life’s meaning as they have been discussed in the recent English and mainly analytic philosophical literature. The overarching philosophical question that this literature has addressed is about the extent to which, and respects in which, spiritual realities such as God or a soul would confer meaning on our lives. There have been four broad answers to the question, namely: God or a soul is (...) necessary for meaning in our lives; they are not necessary for it; one or both would enhance the meaning in our lives; and they would detract from it. These views have been largely advanced in chronological order through the history of Western philosophy, with the view that life would be meaningless without God and a soul having been most prominent in the medieval period, the rejection of this claim having arisen in the modern era, and then sophisticated positions about enhancement or reduction having appeared in earnest only in the past 20 years. This book addresses all four positions, paying particular attention to the more recent views. Beyond familiarizing readers with these positions, it presents prima facie objections to them, points out gaps in research agendas, and suggests argumentative strategies that merit development. (shrink)

A new working hypothesis of sleep-wake cycle mechanisms is proposed, based on ontogeny and functional/anatomic compression of two stochastic neuronal models of information coding that complement each other in a key/lock fashion: the axonal arbor patterns (AAP – “hardware”) and the neuronal spike interval inequality patterns (SIIP – “software”). [Hobson et al.; Nielsen; Revonsuo; Solms; Vertes & Eastman].

In the first part of the article I show how Descartes employs the sceptical theist strategy as part of his response to the problem of evil in Meditation Four. However, Descartes's use of this strategy seems to raise a serious challenge to his whole project: if Descartes is ignorant of God's purposes, then how can he be sure that God doesn't have some morally sufficient reason for creating him with unreliable clear and distinct perceptions? Drawing on related objections from Mersenne (...) and Hobbes, I show in the second half of the article how Descartes can sidestep this objection. (shrink)

One aim of this chapter is to acquaint a reader unfamiliar with African philosophy with some of its more prominent ethical perspectives, especially those pertaining to ubuntu, as they bear on work. However, I undertake this discussion with some sympathy towards these implications, such that another aim is to point out that the prescriptions for the workplace that moral philosophers working in the African tradition have made (or would sensibly make given their more basic commitments) are worth taking seriously regardless (...) of the reader’s background. The vitalist and communalist strains of ethical thought prominent amongst African philosophers are relatively unknown in globally influential discourses, but are revealing in the context of work. Central topics include: what the point of work is; how to distribute jobs; why there might be a right to work; and how to organize the production process. For each question, I emphasize respects in which African ethical thought offers answers that are both different from and plausible relative to what is dominant in English-speaking theory or practice. (shrink)