Reverence is an ancient virtue that survives among us in half-forgotten patterns of civility and moments of inarticulate awe. Reverence gives meaning to much that we do, yet the word has almost passed out of our vocabulary.Reverence, says philosopher and classicist Paul Woodruff, begins in an understanding of human limitations. From this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside our control -- God, truth, justice, nature, even death. It is a quality of character (...) that is especially important in leadership and in teaching, although it figures in virtually every human relationship. It transcends religious boundaries and can be found outside religion altogether.Woodruff draws on thinking about this lost virtue in ancient Greek and Chinese traditions and applies lessons from these highly reverent cultures to today's world. The book covers reverence in a variety of contexts -- the arts, leadership, teaching, warfare, and the home -- and shows how essential a quality it is to a well-functioning society.First published by Oxford University Press in 2001, this new edition of Reverence is revised and expanded. It contains a foreword by Betty Sue Flowers, Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, a new preface, two new chapters -- one on the sacred and one on compassion -- and an epilogue focused on renewing reverence in our own lives. (shrink)

The book provides an analysis of a key notion in our lives, causation: what its nature is; how we should characterise it in language, how it relates to laws of nature, how causes differ from their effects and why they tend to occur earlier than their effects.

The Gamer’s Dilemma challenges us to justify the moral difference between enacting virtual murder and virtual child molestation in video games. The Dilemma relies for its argumentative force on the claim that there is an intuitive moral difference between these acts, with the former intuited as morally acceptable and the latter as morally unacceptable. However, there has been no empirical investigation of these claims. To explore these issues, we developed an experimental survey study in which participants were asked to reflect (...) on imaginary video game scenarios as part of a 2 (undertake virtual murder or molestation) X 2 (against an adult or child) X 2 (in a high or low realism virtual environment) factorial design. We found that there was a significant difference between people’s views about virtual murder and virtual molestation. Whether the virtual act was performed against an adult or child was non-significant in most conditions, whereas whether it was performed in a high or low realism virtual environment was significant in most conditions. Gender did not impact these results, whereas perceived gaming experience, hours of video game play per week, and integrity did. These results provide an empirical grounding for future discussions of the Gamer's Dilemma. (shrink)

This undergraduate textbook introduces some fundamental issues in philosophy of science for students of philosophy and science students. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 deals with knowledge and values. Chap. 1 presents the classical conception of knowledge as initiated by the ancient Greeks and elaborated during the development of science, introducing the central concepts of truth, belief and justification. Aspects of the quest for objectivity are taken up in the following two chapters. Moral issues are broached in (...) Chap. 4, which discusses some aspects of the use and abuse of science, taking up the responsibilities of scientists in properly conducting their business and decision-makers in their concerns with the import of science for society. Part 2 contrasts the view of scientific progress as the rejecting of old hypotheses and theories and replacing them with new ones, represented by Karl Popper, with the conception of progress as accumulating knowledge, saving as much as possible from older theories, represented by Pierre Duhem. A concluding chapter defends the natural attitude of taking the theories of modern science to be literally true, i.e. realism, in the face of arguments drawn partly from the history of scientific progress in criticism of this stance. (shrink)

It is well-known that the entangled quantum state of a composite object cannot be reduced to the states of its parts. This quantum holism provides a peculiar challenge to formulate an appropriate mereological model: When a system is in an entangled state, which objects are there on the micro and macro level, and which of the objects carries which properties? This paper chooses a modeling approach to answer these questions: It proceeds from a systematic overview of consistent mereological models for (...) entangled systems and discusses which of them is compatible with the quantum mechanical evidence (where quantum states are understood realistically). It reveals that entangled quantum systems neither describe undivided wholes nor objects that stand in irreducible relations. The appropriate model assumes that the entangled property is an irreducible non-relational plural property carried collectively by the micro objects, while there is no macro object. In this sense, quantum holism is an instance of property holism, not of object holism. (shrink)

Health Humanities draws upon the multiple and expanding fields of enquiry that link health and social care disciplines with the arts and humanities. It aims to encourage innovation and novel cross-disciplinary explorations of how the arts and humanities can inform and transform healthcare, health and wellbeing among researchers, practitioners and the public. It foregrounds a range of scholarship and innovative practice in this field. Through the development of critique and critical theory, it enables readers to question not only current practice (...) in medical and health humanities but also foundational assumptions of healthcare, health and wellbeing. Suitable for students and scholars working in this exciting interdisciplinary field, this book sets out the context for an emergent and innovative field. (shrink)

De Marco and colleagues claim that the standard account of invasiveness as commonly encountered ‘…does not capture all uses of the term in relation to medical interventions1 ’. This is open to challenge. Their first example is ‘non-invasive prenatal testing’. Because it involves puncturing the skin to obtain blood, De Marco et al take this as an example of how an incision or insertion is not sufficient to make an intervention invasive; here is a procedure that involves an incision, but (...) it is regarded as non-invasive. However, this ignores the context, and the term should really be understood in reference to the fetus. It is hard to believe healthcare professionals regard taking blood to measure, for example, ferritin levels as invasive but taking blood to look for fragments of fetal DNA as not. If anyone uses the term thinking it is not invasive to the mother, the solution would be to call it invasive, not redefine what is invasive. De Marco and colleagues’ second example is describing electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) as invasive. However, this is not borne out by their referenced papers. The first cited source is about non-invasive brain stimulation2 and only contains a single sentence about ECT. This sentence may suggest that their view is that ECT …. (shrink)

My argument here is principally that the ubiquity of epistemics is evident in the ways in which knowledge claims and attributions of knowledge to self and other are embedded in turns and sequences, inform the design of turns at talk, are amended in the corrections that speakers sometimes make, to change from one epistemic stance to another, and are contested, in the occasional ‘struggles’ between participants, as to which of them has epistemic primacy. I show that these cannot be understood (...) in cognitive terms; furthermore, I show that epistemics – again the attribution of knowledge to self and other – is ‘real’ for participants. That is, in these four practices and aspects of interaction it is evident that participants orient to their states of knowledge relative to one another, on a moment-by-moment, turn-by-turn basis. (shrink)

This paper develops a trivalent semantics for the truth conditions and the probability of the natural language indicative conditional. Our framework rests on trivalent truth conditions first proposed by Cooper (1968) and Belnap (1973) and it yields two logics of conditional reasoning: (i) a logic C of certainty-preserving inference; and (ii) a logic U for uncertain reasoning that preserves the probability of the premises. We show systematic correspondences between trivalent and probabilistic representations of inferences in either framework, and we use (...) the distinction between the two systems to cast light on the validity of inferences such as Modus Ponens, Or-To-If, and Conditional Excluded Middle. Specifically, the conditional behaves monotonically in C, but non-monotonically in U; Modus Ponens is valid in C, but valid in U only for non-nested conditionals. The result is a unified account of the semantics and epistemology of indicative conditionals that can be fruitfully applied to analyzing the validity of conditional inferences. (shrink)

This paper develops a trivalent semantics for indicative conditionals and extends it to a probabilistic theory of valid inference and inductive learning with conditionals. On this account, (i) all complex conditionals can be rephrased as simple conditionals, connecting our account to Adams's theory of p-valid inference; (ii) we obtain Stalnaker's Thesis as a theorem while avoiding the well-known triviality results; (iii) we generalize Bayesian conditionalization to an updating principle for conditional sentences. The final result is a unified semantic and probabilistic (...) theory of conditionals with attractive results and predictions. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of imagistic violence by focusing—by means of a phenomenology open to dialogue with neighboring disciplines, from historiography to semiotics—on the particular case of photographs depicting atrocities, examples of photojournalism or images captured at crime scenes by forensic agents and presented as evidence during trials. To this end, I will implement a three-step analysis. First, I will seek to clarify the meanings associated with photography presented as evidence by adopting Husserl’s (...) phenomenological framework and by following a historiographical and juridical approach while verifying the grounds for the opposition that appears to be emerging between a paradigm of resemblance and a model of indirect, conjectural knowledge. Second, I will focus on how photography’s capacity to sustain a maximum degree of the reproduction of the real is problematized when the pictorial object is a violent scene that suspends, contradicts, and dismantles the order of the viewer’s experience. Finally, I will conclude by offering a hypothesis on the act of “seeing-with-other” and its phenomenological implications for the case of imagistic violence as evidence. Specifically, I will argue that we are more likely to understand imagistic violence at the level of a collective seeing than through a solitary gaze. (shrink)

In their article ’Is Pregnancy a Disease? A Normative Approach’, Anna Smajdor and Joona Räsänen contend that, on several of the most prominent accounts of disease, pregnancy should be considered a disease. More specifically, of the five accounts they discuss, each renders pregnancy a disease or suffers serious conceptual problems otherwise. They take issue specifically with the dysfunction account of disease and argue that it suffers several theoretical difficulties. In this response, we focus on defending the dysfunction account against their (...) main objections and show why a version of the dysfunction account is viable on account of the indispensability of normativity in biology and medicine. After disarming their main objections to the dysfunction account, we briefly respond to their treatment of the normality of pregnancy and then draw a distinction between adverse symptoms and underlying causes to show why even though pregnancy may have ’disease-like’ features, it is not a disease. (shrink)

Translation of Paul Guyer's "Kant’s Deductions of the Principles of Right".

에서 선험적 규정은 의지와도 인식과도 관련되지 않는다. 그것은 판단 자체를 다룬다. 그것은 어떻게 무언가가 판단되어야 하는가를 확립한다. 미적 판단은 유쾌함과 불쾌함을 다룬다. 유쾌함은 단순한 감각이 아니라 감정이다. 미적 판단은 나의 본성과 관련되는 판단이지 오성이나 의지와 관련된 것이 전혀 아니다. 그것들은 나로부터 나오는 것이지 자연 자체로부터 나오는 것이 아니다. 그것들은 나로부터 나오지만 유비적인 것들이다. 나는 그것들을 구상하지만 이 일은 마치 나의 자연(본성)을 누군가가 구성하기라도 한 것처럼, 자연이 그것을 구상할 수 있었기라도 한 것처럼 일어난다. 그런 이유로 그 판단들은 반성적인 것이지 규정적인 것이 (...) 아니다. 이 글에서 나는 두 문제를 제기할 것이다. 하나는 단순한 반성으로서의 미적 판단이 어떻게 또한 규정적이고 선험적일 수 있는가? 다른 하나는 단순한 규정적 판단들이 문제가 되든, 아니면 반성적 판단들과 규정적 판단들 사이의 구분이 문제되든, ‘비판’이라는 말은 동일한 의미를 가지는가? 하는 것이다. 나는 과 사이에 칸트 철학의 구조적인 변화가 있다는 것을 보여줄 것이다. (shrink)

The discussion of the recently derived quantum Hamilton equations for a spinning particle is extended to spin measurement in a Stern–Gerlach experiment. We show that this theory predicts a continuously changing orientation of the particles magnetic moment over the course of its motion across the Stern–Gerlach apparatus. The final measurement results agree with experiment and with predictions of the Pauli equation. Furthermore, the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen–Bohm thought experiment is investigated, and the violation of Bells’s inequalities is reproduced within this stochastic mechanics approach. (...) The origin of the violation of Bell’s inequalities is traced to the the non-local nature of the velocity fields for an entangled state in the stochastic formalism, which is a result of a non-separable probability distribution of the considered particles. (shrink)

Davidson’s account of singular causal statements as expressing relations between events together with his views on event identity lead to inferences involving causal statements which many of his critics find counterintuitive. These are sometimes said to be avoided on Kim’s view of events, in terms of which this line of criticism is often formulated. It is argued that neither Davidson nor Kim offer a satisfactory account of events - an essential prerequisit for the relational theory - and an account of (...) singular causal statements in terms of a modal sentential connective is advocated in place of the relational view. Such an account suffices to block the counter-intuitive inferences without needing to resort to a theory of events. It is suggested that a theory of events might be built upon a connective account of singular causal statements, but no such theory is presented here. (shrink)

Broadly speaking, this is a book about truth and the criteria thereof. Thus it is, in a sense, a book about justification and rationality. But it does not purport to be about the notion of justification or the notion of rationality. For the assumption that there is just one notion of justification, or just one notion of rationality, is, as the book explains, very misleading. Justification and rationality come in various kinds. And to that extent, at least, we should recognize (...) a variety of notions of justification and rationality. This, at any rate, is one of the morals of Chapter VI. This book, in Chapters I-V, is mainly concerned with the kind of justification and rationality characteristic of a truth-seeker, specifically a seeker of truth about the world impinging upon the senses: the so-called empirical world. Hence the book's title. But since the prominent contemporary approaches to empirical justification are many and varied, so also are the epistemological issues taken up in the following chapters. For instance, there will be questions about so-called coherence and its role, if any, in empirical justification. And there will be questions about social consensus (whatever it is) and its significance, or the lack thereof, to empirical justification. Furthermore, the perennial question of whether, and if so how, empirical knowledge has so-called founda­ tions will be given special attention. (shrink)

Genome editing enables very accurate alterations to DNA. It promises profound and potentially disruptive changes in healthcare, agriculture, industry, and the environment. This paper presents a multidisciplinary analysis of the contemporary development of genome editing and the tension between continuity and change. It draws on the idea that actors involved in innovation are guided by “sociotechnical regimes” composed of practices, institutions, norms, and cultural beliefs. The analysis focuses on how genome editing is emerging in different domains and whether this marks (...) continuity or disruption of the established biotechnology regime. In conclusion, it will be argued that genome editing is best understood as a technology platform that is being powerfully shaped by this existing regime but is starting to disrupt the governance of biotechnology. In the longer term is it set to converge with other powerful technology platforms, which together will fundamentally transform the capacity to engineer life. (shrink)

How can the Biblical God be the Lord and King who, being typically unseen and even self-veiled at times, authoritatively leads people for divine purposes? This article’s main thesis is that the answer is in divine moral leading via human moral experience of God (of a kind to be clarified). The Hebrew Bible speaks of God as ‘king,’ including for a time prior to the Jewish human monarchy. Ancient Judaism, as Martin Buber has observed, acknowledged direct and indirect forms of (...) divine rule and thus of theocracy. This article explores the importance of divine rule as divine direct leading, particularly in moral matters, without reliance on indirect theocracy supervised by humans. It thus considers a role for God as Über-King superior to any human king, maintaining a direct moral theocracy without a need for indirect theocracy. The divine goal, in this perspective, is a universal commonwealth in righteousness, while allowing for variation in political structure. The article identifies the importance in the Hebrew Bible of letting God be God as an Über-King who, although self-veiled at times, leads willing people directly and thereby rules over them uncoercively. It also clarifies a purpose for divine self-veiling neglected by Buber and many others, and it offers a morally sensitive test for unveiled authenticity in divine moral leading. (shrink)

In his posthumously published Journals and Papers,, Kierkegaard boldly claimed, "Oh, once I am dead, Fear and Trembling alone will be enough for an imperishable name as an author. Then it will be read, translated into foreign languages as well. The reader will almost shrink from the frightful pathos in the book." Certainly, Fear and Trembling has been translated into foreign languages, and its fame has ensured Kierkegaard's place in the pantheon of Western philosophy. Today, however, most shrink from the (...) book not because of its frightful pathos but because of its fearsome impenetrability. In this first volume of a Reading Kierkegaard miniseries, Martens carefully unfolds the form and content of Kierkegaard's celebrated pseudonymous text, guiding and inviting the reader to embrace the challenge of wrestling with it to the end. Throughout, Martens demonstrates that Fear and Trembling is not merely a book that contains frightful pathos; it is also an entree into Kierkegaard's vibrant and polyphonic corpus that is nearly as restless as the faith it commends. (Publisher). (shrink)

A Time for Wisdom is for a beleaguered audience that wants to cultivate this virtue and elevate themselves above the noise and toxicity of the modern world. Written by a pair of psychologists, it unpacks the research that has been conducted on the subject in recent years but that hasn't been communicated to readers in a relevant way. What's more, the book takes our current scientific understanding and integrates it with timeless concepts of wisdom that have, for millennia, guided men (...) and women through life's troubles. With this as their foundation, the authors lay out four practices to pursue wisdom in our daily lives. These include receiving knowledge; practicing detachment; experiencing tranquility, and cultivating transcendence. These are profound and spiritual ideas that can quiet the shallow cacophony of the crowd and bring us inner peace. The authors make these practices clear and accessible and show us the immense satisfaction we can enjoy by aspiring to live by them. A Time for Wisdom is an invitation to step outside the circus of contemporary life, to break free from its fanfare of foolishness. It commends a course of action towards the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, towards calm and clear moral reasoning. And it gives us a recipe for self-transcendence so that we-like the great sages and scientists before us-can rise above the immediacy of the moment and a taste of the numinous and the infinite. (shrink)

This book discusses ethical behavior through the genocidal stages of the Holocaust. Paul E. Wilson first looks at the antisemitism in Germany and Europe beginning in the decades preceding the Nazis reign of terror, and goes on to discuss the ethical decisions made in the initial stages that moved society toward genocide. The author maintains that the stages of genocide represent subtle changes that can be happening within a society in response to the moral choices made by actors. By (...) giving attention to the stages of genocide in the Holocaust, this book contributes to the overall understanding of how the Holocaust was possible, and encourages the moral community to join the watch for the development of genocide in the modern world. (shrink)

Gilbertson, Savulescu, Oakley and Wilkinson propose extending the availability of terminal sedation (TS) to patients with intractable pain and/or suffering who are expected to live more than 2 weeks (hence the designation of extended TS (ETS)) and to patients whose values are known but who do not have decision-making capacity.1 Their plan is worthy of serious consideration: it is, after all, based on the fundamental and well-recognised medical ethical values of patient autonomy and beneficence. But, even when restricted to jurisdictions (...) that allow assisted dying, the ETS proposal raises three important issues. When the authors speak of ‘assisted dying’ and of ‘Voluntary Assisted Dying (VAS)’, they refer specifically to the laws in Australia and similar ones in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Spain and Canada that permit clinicians either to provide patients with lethal medications for self-administration (formerly called physician-assisted suicide) or to administer lethal medications themselves (voluntary euthanasia). First, the authors distinguish—as do many patients and the public—between sedation to unconsciousness and death. Indeed, as the authors point out, the difference seems obvious: unconsciousness can be reversed, death cannot. Yet in the case of TS, this may be …. (shrink)

The Franciscan William of Ockham was an English medieval philosopher, theologian, and political theorist. Along with Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, he is regarded as one of the three main figures in medieval philosophy after around 1150. Ockham is important not only in the history of philosophy and theology, but also in the development of early modern science and of modern notions of property rights and church-state relations. This volume offers a full discussion of all significant aspects of Ockham's thought: (...) logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics and natural philosophy, epistemology, ethics, action theory, political thought and theology. It is the first study of Ockham in any language to make full use of the new critical editions of his works, and to consider recent discoveries concerning his life, education, and influences. (shrink)

Marcus Willaschek’s new book Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics: The Dialectic of Pure Reason is a penetrating analysis of the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In his comments, the author first raises some questions concerning the structure of the Transcendental Dialectic and then proposes that looking at the second Critique and continuing on into the third Critique will reveal more roles for the idea of God in Kant’s reconstruction of traditional metaphysics than Willaschek’s treatment suggests.

Allgemeine Pädagogik in Leitsätzen zu akademischen Vorlesungen. --Pestalozzis Pädagogik.--Über Philosophie als Grundwissenschaft der Pädagogik.