In its comprehensive overview of Alain Locke's pragmatist philosophy this book captures the radical implications of Locke's approach within pragmatism, the critical temper embedded in Locke's works, the central role of power and empowerment of the oppressed and the concept of broad democracy Locke employed.
In this 1921 opus, Wittgenstein defined the object of philosophy as the logical clarification of thoughts and proposed the solution to most philosophic problems by means of a critical method of linguistic analysis. Beginning with the principles of symbolism, the author applies his theories to traditional philosophy, examines the logical structure of propositions and the nature of logical inference, and much more. Definitive translation. Introduction by Bertrand Russell.
Since the BBS article in which Premack and Woodruff (1978) asked “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?,” it has been repeatedly claimed that there is observational and experimental evidence that apes have mental state concepts, such as “want” and “know.” Unlike research on the development of theory of mind in childhood, however, no substantial progress has been made through this work with nonhuman primates. A survey of empirical studies of imitation, self-recognition, social relationships, deception, role-taking, and perspective-taking suggests (...) that in every case where nonhuman primate behavior has been interpreted as a sign of theory of mind, it could instead have occurred by chance or as a product of nonmentalistic processes such as associative learning or inferences based on nonmental categories. Arguments to the effect that, in spite of this, the theory of mind hypothesis should be accepted because it is more parsimonious than alternatives or because it is supported by convergent evidence are not compelling. Such arguments are based on unsupportable assumptions about the role of parsimony in science and either ignore the requirement that convergent evidence proceed from independent assumptions, or fail to show that it supports the theory of mind hypothesis over nonmentalist alternatives. Progress in research on theory of mind requires experimental procedures that can distinguish the theory of mind hypothesis from nonmentalist alternatives. A procedure that may have this potential is proposed. It uses conditional discrimination training and transfer tests to determine whether chimpanzees have the concept “see.” Commentators are invited to identify flaws in the procedure and to suggest alternatives. Key Words: apes; associative learning; concepts; convergence; deception; evolution of intelligence; folk psychology; imitation; mental state attribution; monkeys; parsimony; perspective-taking; primates; role-taking; self-recognition; social cognition; social intelligence; theory of mind. (shrink)
Sleep onset is associated with marked changes in behavioral, physiological, and subjective phenomena. In daily life though subjective experience is the main criterion in terms of which we identify it. But very few studies have focused on these experiences. This study seeks to identify the subjective variables that reflect sleep onset. Twenty young subjects took an afternoon nap in the laboratory while polysomnographic recordings were made. They were awakened four times in order to assess subjective experiences that correlate with the (...) (1) appearance of slow eye movement, (2) initiation of stage 1 sleep, (3) initiation of stage 2 sleep, and (4) 5 min after the start of stage 2 sleep. A logistic regression identified control over and logic of thought as the two variables that predict the perception of having fallen asleep. For sleep perception, these two variables accurately classified 91.7% of the cases; for the waking state, 84.1%. (shrink)
Features include a comprehensive review of existing material, combined with new perspectives to equip students for the challenges in the work environment; chapter overviews and student learning objectives offer a solid and useful framework in which to organise study; diagrams and charts present overviews and contexts for the subject to act as useful revision aids; effective pedagogy including a review of the arguments considered, a menu of seminar topics, and questions in every chapter, serving as an ideal basis for seminar (...) study; and additional open-ended simulations to allow students to work through unfolding scenarios. (shrink)
Theories of truth and vagueness are closely connected; in this article, I draw another connection between these areas of research. Gupta and Belnap’s Revision Theory of Truth is converted into an approach to vagueness. I show how revision sequences from a general theory of definitions can be used to understand the nature of vague predicates. The revision sequences show how the meaning of vague predicates are interconnected with each other. The approach is contrasted with the similar supervaluationist approach.
In E.N. I. c. 5 Aristotle is considering divers views as to what constitutes Eudaimonia. He told us in c. 4, 2–3 that there are many conflicting opinions on the subject. The Many identify Happiness with some palpable good, such as pleasure, wealth, honour, but the Wise identify it with something beyond the Many, while [Plato] denied it to be any specific good at all. Of all these views we should consider such as have many adherents or are considered to (...) be reasonable. Accordingly, the Universal Good is considered in c. 6 after consideration in c. 5 of five particular goods—pleasure in the form of bodily pleasure, honour, wealth, virtue [and, implied in the theoretic Life, wisdom]. These five goods are brought into relation with four Lives—viz. pleasure with the apolaustic; honour and virtue with the political; [wisdom] with the theoretic; wealth with the business or money-making Life; and the first three Lives are called προέχοντες. There is nothing in this introduction of the Lives to astonish us; for, as Aristotle himself tells us, τò ληθς ν τοȋς πρακτικοȋς κ τν ργων κα τοû βίου κρίνεται . But there is much difference of opinion as to the argument he draws from the Lives. According to the view now submitted for consideration, the argument is that when a specific good, which some suppose to be Eudaimonia, is also the end of a ‘pre-eminent’ Life, then there is some prima facie probability in the view that that specific good is Eudaimonia. (shrink)
Most liberals agree that governments should protect certain basic liberties, such as freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of the person. Liberals disagree, however, about whether free market rights should also be protected. By “free market rights,” we mean those rights typically associated with laissez-faire economic systems such as freedom of contract, a right to market returns, and claims to privately own the means of production.We do not use the phrase “economic liberties,” as Tomasi does, because it does (...) not distinguish between the “economic rights” defended by classical liberal and those defended by socialists. Those on the right often see such freedoms as core liberal commitments, while those on the left argue that an economic system should be organized to protect the interests of the less advantaged members of society. If free market rights should be protected, then most existing societies are unjust. These societies fail the liberal standard in the same ways as th .. (shrink)
Background If trials of therapeutic interventions are to serve society's interests, they must be of high methodological quality and must satisfy moral commitments to human subjects. The authors set out to develop a clinical - trials compendium in which standards for the ethical treatment of human subjects are integrated with standards for research methods. Methods The authors rank-ordered the world's nations and chose the 31 with >700 active trials as of 24 July 2008. Governmental and other authoritative entities of the (...) 31 countries were searched, and 1004 English-language documents containing ethical and/or methodological standards for clinical trials were identified. The authors extracted standards from 144 of those: 50 designated as ‘core’, 39 addressing trials of invasive procedures and a 5% sample of the remainder. As the integrating framework for the standards we developed a coherent taxonomy encompassing all elements of a trial's stages. Findings Review of the 144 documents yielded nearly 15 000 discrete standards. After duplicates were removed, 5903 substantive standards remained, distributed in the taxonomy as follows: initiation, 1401 standards, 8 divisions; design, 1869 standards, 16 divisions; conduct, 1473 standards, 8 divisions; analysing and reporting results, 997 standards, four divisions; and post-trial standards, 168 standards, 5 divisions. Conclusions The overwhelming number of source documents and standards uncovered in this study was not anticipated beforehand and confirms the extraordinary complexity of the clinical trials enterprise. This taxonomy of multinational ethical and methodological standards may help trialists and overseers improve the quality of clinical trials, particularly given the globalisation of clinical research. (shrink)
In The Tyranny of the Ideal, Gerald Gaus gives an extended argument on behalf of the “Open Society.” Instead of claiming that it is uniquely best from some privileged moral perspective, he argues for the Open Society by showing why it is acceptable to many perspectives. In this way, Gaus argues for a liberal market-based society in a way that treats deep diversity as a fundamental feature of social life. However, the argument falters at four important points. When taken together, (...) these four problems significantly limit the significance of Gaus’s conclusions. (shrink)
I argue that acknowledging Hume as a doxastic naturalist about belief in a deity allows an elegant, holistic reading of his Dialogues. It supports a reading in which Hume's spokesperson is Philo throughout, and enlightens many of the interpretive difficulties of the work. In arguing this, I perform a comprehensive survey of evidence for and against Philo as Hume's voice, bringing new evidence to bear against the interpretation of Hume as Cleanthes and against the amalgamation view while correcting several standard (...) mistakes. I ultimately isolate the interpretation of Philo's Reversal at the end of the Dialogues as of paramount importance, and show how my naturalistic interpretation makes this, and other notoriously difficult passages, unproblematic. (shrink)
In this paper I present a range of substructural logics for a conditional connective ↦. This connective was original introduced semantically via restriction on the ternary accessibility relation R for a relevant conditional. I give sound and complete proof systems for a number of variations of this semantic definition. The completeness result in this paper proceeds by step-by-step improvements of models, rather than by the one-step canonical model method. This gradual technique allows for the additional control, lacking in the canonical (...) model method, that is required. (shrink)
Most criticism and exposition of John Rawls’s political theory has focused on his account of distributive justice rather than on his support for liberalism. Because of this, much of his argument for protecting the basic liberties remains under explained. Specifically, Rawls claims that representative citizens would agree to guarantee those social conditions necessary for the exercise and development of the two moral powers, but he does not adequately explain why protecting the basic liberties would guarantee these social conditions. This gap (...) in his argument leads to two problems. First, the Rawlsian argument for the priority of liberty would fail if the gap could not be filled. His argument would still support the protection of individual freedoms, but these freedoms would be treated like other primary goods and regulated by the difference principle. Second, without a full argument, there is not sufficient reason to favor Rawls’s left-liberal conception of the basic liberties over a more right-leaning conception that would prioritize the protection of free-market rights. To address these two problems, this paper fills in the gap in order to better explain Rawls’s full argument for egalitarian liberalism. (shrink)
In his own writings, Rawls purposively used only a loose characterization of the basic structure, but two prominent misinterpretations highlight the current need for a more detailed account. First, G.A. Cohen argues that the Rawlsian focus on the basic structure is arbitrary due to the Rawlsian appeal to profound effects. Second, some theorists conflate the justification of coercion with the assessment of a basic structure by defining the basic structure as the coercive structure. Both misinterpretations can be corrected by carefully (...) specifying what social institutions are and explaining which social institutions come together to form the basic structure of society. (shrink)
A common adage runs that, given a theory manifesting symmetries, the syntax of that theory should be modified in order to construct a new theory, from which symmetry-variant structure of the original theory has been excised. Call this strategy for explicating the underlying ontology of symmetry-related models reduction. Recently, Dewar has proposed an alternative to reduction as a means of articulating the ontology of symmetry-related models—what he calls sophistication, in which the semantics of the original theory is modified, and symmetry-related (...) models of that theory are treated as if they are isomorphic. In this paper, we undertake a critical evaluation of sophistication about symmetries—we find the programme underdeveloped in a number of regards. In addition, we clarify the interplay between sophistication about symmetries, and a separate debate to which Dewar has contributed—viz., that between interpretational versus motivational approaches to symmetry transformations. (shrink)
The dominant conventionalist view explains the wrong of breaking a promise as failing to do our fair share in supporting the practice of promise-keeping. Yet, this account fails to explain any unique moral standing that a promisee has to demand that the promisor keep the promise. In this paper, I provide a conventionalist response to this problem. In any cooperative practice, participants stand as both beneficiary and contributor. As a beneficiary, they are morally required to follow the rules of the (...) practice. As a contributor, they have claims on other participants to follow the rules. According to the rules of promise-keeping, a promisee has a unique claim on the promisor, and the personal wrong of breaking a promise should be understood as the violation of this unique and practice-dependent claim. (shrink)
Recent evaluation of the practice of euthanasia and related medical decisions at the end of life in the Netherlands has shown a slight decrease in the frequency of physician-assisted death since the enactment of the Euthanasia Law in 2002. This paper focuses on the absence of euthanasia cases concerning patients with dementia and a written advance euthanasia directive, despite the fact that the only real innovation of the Euthanasia Law consisted precisely in allowing physicians to act upon such directives. The (...) author discusses two principal reasons for this absence. One relates to the uncertainty about whether patients with advanced dementia truly experience the suffering they formerly feared. There is reason to assume that they don’t, as a consequence of psychological adaptation and progressive unawareness (anosognosia). The second, more fundamental reason touches upon the ethical relevance of shared understanding and reciprocity. The author argues that, next to autonomy and mercifulness, “reciprocity” is a condition sine qua non for euthanasia. The absence thereof in advanced dementia renders euthanasia morally inconceivable, even if there are signs of suffering and notwithstanding the presence of an advance euthanasia directive. This does not mean, however, that advance euthanasia directives of patients with dementia are worthless. They might very well have a role in the earlier stages of certain subtypes of the disease. To illustrate this point the author presents a case in which the advance directive helped to create a window of opportunity for reciprocity and shared decision-making. (shrink)