Birth Control and the state: a plea and a forecast by C P Blacker A discussion of the arguments for and against Birth Control, considered from the personal, social and international aspects and its bearings upon the future. Halcyon, or the Future of Monogamy by Vera Brittain Examines the institution of monogamous marriage in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, through the eyes of a fictional Professor Huxterwin. Hymen, or the Future of Marriage by Norman Haire This candid survey (...) examines why many marriages today seem to be so unsatisfactory and finds the answer in the sexual ethic of our society which is ill adapted to our social and economic needs. The problems of morality, sex-education, prostitution, birth-control and polygamy are all touched upon. (shrink)

In her dedicated promotion of feminism and pacifism, especially during the 1930s, Vera Brittain (1893–1970) was strongly influenced by Ber­trand Russell’s writings, especially Marriage and Morals (1929) and Which Way to Peace? (1936). Both were members of the Peace Pledge Union, and she continued as a sponsor after Russell abandoned his pac­ifism soon after the beginning of the Second World War. She admired his political and social activism in the aftermath of that war, endorsing it as much as (...) her family situation allowed; and, as chairman of the Peace News board, Brittain intervened in Russell’s support when a dispute broke out between him and the editor. Although their rela­tionship was personally limited, Russell’s influence on her opinions and actions was profound. (shrink)

'ground-breaking anthology... wide array of perspectives on WW1, from both sides of the fighting' -B. Adler, Choice 'a very fine anthology' -Times Literary SupplementThe First World War inspired a huge outpouring of writing that, until recently, was thought to be almost the exclusive preserve of men. Yet the war also acted as a catalyst which enabled women writers to find a literary and political voice. This anthology bears witness to the great variety and scope of women's writing about the war. (...) Covering the years 1914-1930, the book brings together little-known writing from across the world, drawing on a wide spectrum of genres from letters and diary entries to essays, novels, and short stories. Among the celebrated writers featured in this anthology are: Radclyffe Hall, Sylvia Pankhurst, Maud Gonne, Rebecca West, May Sinclair, Olive Schreiner, Colette, Vera Brittain, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield, HD, and Virginia Woolf. (shrink)

_Dawn_ is the most recent volume to appear in the first complete, critical, and annotated English edition of all of Nietzsche's work. The edition, organized originally by Ernst Behler and Bernd Magnus, is a translation of the celebrated _Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden_ edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. The book is the first to appear under the editorial direction of Alan D. Schrift, Keith Ansell-Pearson, and Duncan Large, and to incorporate subsequent corrections to the 1980 edition. Continuing the (...) positivistic turn of _Human, All Too Human_, _Dawn_ is the second installment in the free spirit trilogy that culminated in _The Joyful Science_. One of Nietzsche's "yes-saying" books, it marks his first significant confrontation with morality and offers glimpses of many of the signature themes in his mature works. _Dawn_ has come to be admired in recent years for its ethical naturalism, psychological observations, and therapeutic insights. Presented in Nietzsche's aphoristic style, it is a text with hidden riches, one that must be read between the lines and one that the discerning reader will admire and cherish. (shrink)

Not a day passes over society where the immediate expressions of violence are not widely propagated and subsequently witnessed through cultural or political mediums. Such depictions, accounts, scenes, have been uniquely framed as a lexis of ‘subjective violence’; reactions or evident illustrations of descent in physical form. Amidst their over-representation is a lapse of measured attention given to the pretext amounting to said outbursts. Seldom is the objective, if at all, contextualized as a catalytic toward the subjective. The following work (...) suggests that a violence exists amidst society that goes substantively under-analyzed thereby negating an ability to specifically address and, therefore, challenge its causality. While recognizing the importance of such research, a movement beyond affectual approaches of theorizing violence is needed through a complimentarily mapping of how distal relations of power influence, impact, and sustain enmity. What makes this discussion further dynamic is the ironic transparency of causation. Rather than a phenomenon of concealment, conventional dynamics of authority and influence exert control through, what could be argued to be, an invisibility of visibility. Supporting an addendum to theorizing violence may, then, enable a more holistic recognition that can assist an articulate response toward both subjective and objective expressions of violence. (shrink)

Plato's account of the tripartite soul is a memorable feature of dialogues like the Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus: it is one of his most famous and influential yet least understood theories. It presents human nature as both essentially multiple and diverse - and yet somehow also one - divided into a fully human 'rational' part, a lion-like 'spirited part' and an 'appetitive' part likened to a many-headed beast. How these parts interact, how exactly each shapes our agency and how they (...) are affected by phenomena like erôs and education is complicated and controversial. The essays in this book investigate how the theory evolves over the whole of Plato's work, including the Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus, and how it was developed further by important Platonists such as Galen, Plutarch and Plotinus. They will be of interest to a wide audience in philosophy and classics. (shrink)

This is the first book-length study of Philo, the principal philosophical teacher of Cicero. Charles Brittain reconstructs the Platonic Academy's gradual rejection of scepticism under Philo's leadership, which prepared the way for the revival of Platonism in the first century AD. The Appendix contains a full collection of the testimonia and 'fragments' of Philo.

Seneca’s Letters sketch a theory of attentive action according to which distraction is caused by inconsistent beliefs about values, such that the degree of an agent’s attention to an endorsed action is proportionate to the consistency of her beliefs about value, i. e. her proximity to virtue. The agent’s activity of attentive action is co-ordinated with a state of alertness to her interests, which accordingly triggers switches in attention that sustain the endorsed action in single-minded agents or cause distraction if (...) the new interest is irrelevant to it. Seneca’s theory reflects the older Stoic conception of the tensional mental strength of the virtuous agent, which Chrysippus identified as the causal factor over and above virtue that ensures her successful performance of right action. (shrink)

This essay explores the use of the concept of the messianic by Giorgio Agamben and Theodor Adorno. Throughout his work, Agamben consistently presents his reading of the messianic as an alternative to what he considers to be the ‘pessimistic’ negative dialectics of Adorno, which he argues ‘is an absolutely non-messianic form of thought’. For Agamben, the messianic brings dialectics to a ‘standstill’. This essay analyzes this deployment of the ‘messianic’ in his thought, and contrasts it with the perspective of Adorno. (...) Agamben’s interpretation of Walter Benjamin is challenged with reference to a debate between Adorno and Benjamin over theology, dialectics, and politics. (shrink)

Assuming that every set is constructible, we find a${\text{\Pi }}_1^1 $maximal cofinitary group of permutations of$\mathbb{N}$which is indestructible by Cohen forcing. Thus we show that the existence of such groups is consistent with arbitrarily large continuum. Our method also gives a new proof, inspired by the forcing method, of Kastermans’ result that there exists a${\text{\Pi }}_1^1 $maximal cofinitary group inL.

Most courts around the world have been refusing wrongful life actions. The main argument invoked is that the supposed compensable injury cannot be classified as such, since life is always a blessing no matter how hard and painful it is.In opposition to mainstream scholars and the dominant case law, this article sustains that life must be distinguished from living conditions, the former being the real injury at stake, since some living conditions are so intolerable that in themselves they justify a (...) compensation within wrongful life actions. (shrink)

One dimension of cognitive success concerns getting it right: having many true beliefs and no false ones. Another dimension of cognitive success concerns using the right concepts. For example, using a concept of a person that systematically excludes people of certain demographics from its extension is a sort of cognitive deficiency. This view, if correct, tasks inquirers with critically examining the concepts they are using and perhaps replacing those concepts with new and better ones. This task is often referred to (...) as “conceptual engineering”. However, so far it is unclear what exactly happens in cases of conceptual engineering. How does language change when we engineer a concept? This article offers an answer. I propose a view on which, when speakers assess the truth of propositions, they often rely on assumptions with regard to what is required for their truth. For example, when speakers assess whether unborn fetuses are people, they rely on assumptions with regard to what is required to be a person. Based on this idea, I develop a model of conceptual engineering according to which speakers “engineer concepts” when they change how they assess the truth of propositions. For example, speakers engineer the concept of a person when they change how they assess the truth of the proposition that unborn fetuses are people. (shrink)

Do numbers exist? Carnap (1956 [1950]) famously argues that this question can be understood in an “internal” and in an “external” sense, and calls “external” questions “non-cognitive”. Carnap also says that external questions are raised “only by philosophers” (p. 207), which means that, in his view, philosophers raise ”non-cognitive” questions. However, it is not clear how the internal/external distinction and Carnap’s related views about philosophy should be understood. This paper provides a new interpretation. I draw attention to Carnap’s distinction between (...) purely external statements, which are independent from all frameworks, and pragmatic external statements, which concern which framework one should adopt, and argue that the latter express noncognitive mental states. Specifically, I argue that “frameworks” are systems of rules for the assessment of statements, which are utterances of ordinary language sentences. Pragmatic external statements express noncognitive dispositions to follow only certain rules of assessment. For instance, “numbers exist” understood as a pragmatic external statement expresses a noncognitive disposition to use only rules of assessment according to which numbers do exist. Carnap can thereby be understood as proposing a distinctive form of noncognitivism about ontology that is in some respects analogous to norm-expressivism in metaethics. (shrink)

We show that in the Maxwell–Lorentz theory of classical electrodynamics most initial values for fields and particles lead to an ill-defined dynamics, as they exhibit singularities or discontinuities along light-cones. This phenomenon suggests that the Maxwell equations and the Lorentz force law ought rather to be read as a system of delay differential equations, that is, differential equations that relate a function and its derivatives at different times. This mathematical reformulation, however, leads to physical and philosophical consequences for the ontological (...) status of the electromagnetic field. In particular, fields cannot be taken as independent degrees of freedom, which suggests that one should not add them to the ontology. (shrink)

Many arguments have been made against gene editing. This paper addresses the commonly invoked argument that gene editing violates human dignity and is ultimately a subversion of human nature. There are several drawbacks to this argument. Above all, the concept of what human dignity means is unclear. It is not possible to condemn a practice that violates human dignity if we do not know exactly what is being violated. The argument’s entire reasoning is thus undermined. Analyses of the arguments involved (...) in this discussion have often led to the conclusion that gene editing contravenes the principle of genetic identity (genetic immutability) thereby subverting a requisite of human dignity and ultimately threatening human nature. This paper refutes these arguments and shows that any opposition to gene editing cannot rely on the human dignity argument. (shrink)

According to the doctrine of Super-Humeanism, the world’s mosaic consists only of permanent matter points and changing spatial relations, while all the other entities and features figuring in scientific theories are nomological parameters, whose role is merely to build the best law system. In this paper, I develop an argument against Super-Humeanism by pointing out that it is vulnerable to and does not have the resources to solve the well-known problem of immanent comparisons. Firstly, I show that it cannot endorse (...) a fundamentalist solution à la Lewis, since its two pillars—a minimalist ontology and a best system account of lawhood—would generate, together, a tedious problem of internal coherence. Secondly, I consider anti-fundamentalist strategies, proposed within Humeanism, and find them inapplicable to the Super-Humean doctrine. The concern is that, since it is impossible to choose the best law system within Super-Humeanism, this doctrine may be charged with incoherence. (shrink)

Although Chinese law imposes informed consent for medical treatments, the Chinese understanding of this requirement is very different from the European one, mostly due to the influence of Confucianism. Chinese doctors and relatives are primarily interested in protecting the patient, even from the truth; thus, patients are commonly uninformed of their medical conditions, often at the family’s request. The family plays an important role in health care decisions, even substituting their decisions for the patient’s. Accordingly, instead of personal informed consent, (...) what actually exists is ‘family informed consent’. From a Western perspective, these features of Chinese law and Chinese culture might seem strange, contradicting our understanding of doctor-patient relationship and even the very essence of self-determination and fundamental rights. However, we cannot forget the huge influence of cultural factors in these domains, and that ‘Western’ informed consent is grounded on the individualistic nature of Western culture. This article will underline the differences between the Western and the Chinese perspectives, clarifying how each of them must be understood in its own cultural environment. But, while still respecting Chinese particularities, this paper advocates that China adopt patient individual informed consent because this is the only solution compatible with human dignity and human rights. (shrink)

A review of Catherine Conybeare, The Irrational Augustine, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2006.

The main target of this study is to make a comparative analysis between the presence or absence of historical thinking competencies in the official curricula of Gymnasieskola (Sweden) and Bachillerato (Spain). To reach this goal, a mixed instrument was designed, both qualitative and quantitative, to analyze the offical documents. The results show a great presence of “historical consciousness” in the case of Sweden and the use of historical sources and evidences in the case of Spain.

A definition of a property P is impredicative if it quantifies over a domain to which P belongs. Due to influential arguments by Ramsey and Gödel, impredicative mathematics is often thought to possess special metaphysical commitments. It seems that an impredicative definition of a property P does not have the intended meaning unless P already exists, suggesting that the existence of P cannot depend on its explicit definition. Carnap (1937 [1934], p. 164) argues, however, that accepting impredicative definitions amounts to (...) choosing a "form of language" and is free from metaphysical implications. This paper explains this view in its historical context. I discuss the development of Carnap’s thought on the foundations of mathematics from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, concluding with an account of Carnap’s (1937 [1934]) non-Platonistic defense of impredicativity. This discussion is also important for understanding Carnap’s influential views on ontology more generally, since Carnap’s (1937 [1934]) view, according to which accepting impredicative definitions amounts to choosing a "form of language", is an early precursor of the view Carnap presents in "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology" (1956 [1950]), according to which referring to abstract entities amounts to accepting a "linguistic framework". (shrink)

Easy Ontologists, most notably Thomasson (2015), argue that ontological questions are shallow. They think that these questions can either be answered by using our ordinary conceptual competence—of course tables exist!—or are meaningless, or else should be answered through conceptual re-engineering. Ontology thus is “easy”, requiring no distinctively metaphysical investigation. This paper raises a two-stage objection to Easy Ontology. We first argue that questions concerning which entities exist are inextricably bound up with “ontological category questions”, which are questions concerning the identity (...) of and differences between kinds of entities. We then argue that ontological category questions do not have trivial answers, are meaningful, and cannot be answered through conceptual re-engineering. Easy Ontology hence does not constitute a comprehensive ontological methodology. While some of ontology might be easy, category questions form a central part of ontology and are not answered easily. (shrink)

Ontological expressivism is the view that ontological existence claims express non-cognitive mental states. I develop a version of ontological expressivism that is modeled after Gibbard’s (2003) norm-expressivism. I argue that, when speakers assess whether, say, composite objects exist, they rely on assumptions with regard to what is required for composition to occur. These assumptions guide their assessment, similar to how norms may guide the assessment of normative propositions. Against this backdrop, I argue that “some objects have parts”, uttered in the (...) context of an ontological disagreement, expresses a noncognitive disposition to assess the truth of propositions by using only rules of assessment according to which the proposition that some objects have parts is to be evaluated as true. (shrink)

In introducing the present issue, I clarify in which sense knowledge and philosophy can discriminate and marginalize some individuals. In the first part, I focus on the traditional exclusion of women from philosophy and explore some feminist projects of re-reading the philosophical canon. In my analysis, I pay particular attention to the gender gap in philosophy and the so-called “demographic problem” in academia. In the second part, I examine the best practices for remedying these forms of injustice and promoting diversity (...) in philosophy. (shrink)

Following ideas of Ch. S. Peirce on continuity of mind (synechism) and universality of semiotic processes (pansemiotism) as well as development of the understanding of manipulative abduction in works of L. Magnani the thesis of possibility of abductive reasoning in non-human animal minds is defended. The animal capacity to form explanatory hypotheses is demonstrated by instances of grasping regularities in environment, behavior of conspecifics and even self-knowledge. In the framework of debate on instinctual or rather inferential nature of abductive capacity (...) questions of innate and acquired mechanisms of learning, the role of language in development of explanations and priority of inner (emotional) or outer (referential) perspectives in genesis of first explanatory hypotheses are considered. (shrink)

MARK LOŠONC, PREDRAG KRSTIĆ, HOLOKAUST I FILOZOFIJA, INSTITUT ZA FILOZOFIJU I DRUŠTVENU TEORIJU, BEOGRAD, 2018.Vera Mevorah.

In a time marked by the development of innovative treatments in healthcare and the need for health professionals to deal with resulting ethical dilemmas in clinical practice, this study was developed to determine the influence of the bioethics teaching on the moral competence of medical and nursing students. The authors conduct a longitudinal study using the Moral Competence Test extended version before and after attending the ethics curricular unit, in three nursing schools and three medical schools of Portugal. In this (...) questionnaire the participant is confronted with three ethical dilemmas and asked to evaluate arguments for and against the attitude of the main character. For both nursing and medical students, C-score was lower after the attendance of the ethics curricular units, with a statistically significant decrease in the total score for nursing students and a decrease not statistically significant for medical students. A multivariate analysis did not find any association between this decrease and gender, course, or age. The phenomenon of moral segmentation was observed, with better performance in the worker and judge dilemma, than in the doctor dilemma. These results highlight the need to reflect on the curricular strategies that can be implemented for health professionals to better develop moral competence and decision-making, allowing for the provision of humanized health care. (shrink)

Im Beitrag werden Veränderungen der Kommunikation durch digitale Medien, ihre psychischen Bedeutungen und Folgen, u. a. anhand von empirischen Befunden zu Social-Media-Praktiken von Jugendlichen und von Eltern thematisiert. Bezugsrahmen der Analyse sind dabei kulturelle Wandlungen sowie soziale und psychische Bedeutungen von Aufmerksamkeit: geteilte Aufmerksamkeit als ein Kern der Kommunikation, aber auch die für psychische Entwicklung notwendige geschenkte, für den anderen oder für anderes offene Aufmerksamkeit als ein wesentliches Moment der Zuwendung, Empathie und Bezogenheit – im Gegensatz zu selbstbezogener Aufmerksamkeit und (...) instrumenteller Aufmerksamkeitslenkung. Überdies werden Folgen fragmentierter Aufmerksamkeit, wie sie aus der Überlagerung von Online- und Offline-Kommunikation resultiert, für psychische Entwicklungen betrachtet. (shrink)

Non è detto che ogni essere femminile sia una donna. Donna non si nasce, lo si diventa.Simone de Beauvoir, Il Secondo Sesso 1. Introduzione L’incredibile storia di Thomas Beatie, transessuale uomo ma con un sistema riproduttivo femminile, sembra mettere fortemente in discussione uno dei modi in cui convenzionalmente distinguiamo donne e uomini. Nato femmina, Thomas decide in età adulta di cambiare sesso e di sottoporsi a un intervento per la rimozione del seno e a una terapia ormonale. Volend...