Results for 'Donald W. Mertz'

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  1. The Real World Failure of Evidence-Based Medicine.Donald W. Miller & Clifford Miller - 2011 - International Journal of Person Centered Medicine 1 (2):295-300.
    As a way to make medical decisions, Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) has failed. EBM's failure arises from not being founded on real-world decision-making. EBM aspires to a scientific standard for the best way to treat a disease and determine its cause, but it fails to recognise that the scientific method is inapplicable to medical and other real-world decision-making. EBM also wrongly assumes that evidence can be marshaled and applied according to an hierarchy that is determined in an argument by authority to (...)
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  2. On Evidence, Medical and Legal.Donald W. Miller & Clifford Miller - 2005 - Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons 10 (3):70-75.
    Medicine, like law, is a pragmatic, probabilistic activity. Both require that decisions be made on the basis of available evidence, within a limited time. In contrast to law, medicine, particularly evidence-based medicine as it is currently practiced, aspires to a scientific standard of proof, one that is more certain than the standards of proof courts apply in civil and criminal proceedings. But medicine, as Dr. William Osler put it, is an "art of probabilities," or at best, a "science of uncertainty." (...)
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  3. Medicine is not science.Clifford Miller & Donald W. Miller - 2014 - European Journal for Person Centered Healthcare 2 (2):144-153.
    ABSTRACT: Abstract Most modern knowledge is not science. The physical sciences have successfully validated theories to infer they can be used universally to predict in previously unexperienced circumstances. According to the conventional conception of science such inferences are falsified by a single irregular outcome. And verification is by the scientific method which requires strict regularity of outcome and establishes cause and effect. -/- Medicine, medical research and many “soft” sciences are concerned with individual people in complex heterogeneous populations. These populations (...)
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  4. Late-Binding Scholarship in the Age of AI.Bill Tomlinson, Andrew W. Torrance, Rebecca W. Black & Donald J. Patterson - 2023 - Arxiv.
    Scholarly processes play a pivotal role in discovering, challenging, improving, advancing, synthesizing, codifying, and disseminating knowledge. Since the 17th Century, both the quality and quantity of knowledge that scholarship has produced has increased tremendously, granting academic research a pivotal role in ensuring material and social progress. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to enable a new leap in the creation of scholarly content. New forms of engagement with AI systems, such as collaborations with large language models like GPT-3, offer affordances that (...)
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  5. Promoting coherent minimum reporting guidelines for biological and biomedical investigations: the MIBBI project.Chris F. Taylor, Dawn Field, Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Jan Aerts, Rolf Apweiler, Michael Ashburner, Catherine A. Ball, Pierre-Alain Binz, Molly Bogue, Tim Booth, Alvis Brazma, Ryan R. Brinkman, Adam Michael Clark, Eric W. Deutsch, Oliver Fiehn, Jennifer Fostel, Peter Ghazal, Frank Gibson, Tanya Gray, Graeme Grimes, John M. Hancock, Nigel W. Hardy, Henning Hermjakob, Randall K. Julian, Matthew Kane, Carsten Kettner, Christopher Kinsinger, Eugene Kolker, Martin Kuiper, Nicolas Le Novere, Jim Leebens-Mack, Suzanna E. Lewis, Phillip Lord, Ann-Marie Mallon, Nishanth Marthandan, Hiroshi Masuya, Ruth McNally, Alexander Mehrle, Norman Morrison, Sandra Orchard, John Quackenbush, James M. Reecy, Donald G. Robertson, Philippe Rocca-Serra, Henry Rodriguez, Heiko Rosenfelder, Javier Santoyo-Lopez, Richard H. Scheuermann, Daniel Schober, Barry Smith & Jason Snape - 2008 - Nature Biotechnology 26 (8):889-896.
    Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...)
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  6. Moderate Realism and its Logic by D.W. Mertz[REVIEW]Louis Caruana - 1997 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 5 (2):342 – 343.
    Classical physics was inspired primarily by a metaphysical background concerned with substance and properties. Atoms were conceived according to the billiard ball model. Between these atoms, physical properties and relations existed in a secondary, dependent sense. This metaphysical background has problems that have defeated resolution for centuries. Is a more effective background conceivable?
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  7. The History and Prehistory of Natural-Language Semantics.Daniel W. Harris - 2017 - In Sandra Lapointe & Christopher Pincock (eds.), Innovations in the History of Analytical Philosophy. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 149--194.
    Contemporary natural-language semantics began with the assumption that the meaning of a sentence could be modeled by a single truth condition, or by an entity with a truth-condition. But with the recent explosion of dynamic semantics and pragmatics and of work on non- truth-conditional dimensions of linguistic meaning, we are now in the midst of a shift away from a truth-condition-centric view and toward the idea that a sentence’s meaning must be spelled out in terms of its various roles in (...)
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  8. Consequentialism and Coordination Problems.Douglas W. Portmore - manuscript
    Imagine both that (1) S1 is deliberating at t about whether or not to x at t' and that (2) although S1’s x-ing at t' would not itself have good consequences, good consequences would ensue if both S1 x's at t' and S2 y's at t", where S1 may or may not be identical to S2 and where t < t' ≤ t". In this paper, I consider how consequentialists should treat S2 and the possibility that S2 will y at (...)
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  9. Distinguishing WV Quine and Donald Davidson.James Pearson - 2011 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 1 (1):1-22.
    Given W.V. Quine’s and Donald Davidson’s extensive agreement about much of the philosophy of language and mind, and the obvious methodological parallels between Quine’s radical translation and Davidson’s radical interpretation, many—including Quine and Davidson—are puzzled by their occasional disagreements. I argue for the importance of attending to these disagreements, not just because doing so deepens our understanding of these influential thinkers, but because they are in fact the shadows thrown from two distinct conceptions of philosophical inquiry: Quine’s “naturalism” and (...)
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  10. Ograniczanie konfliktów w Nigerii i Indonezji. Hybrydowy model power-sharing.Krzysztof Trzcinski - 2019 - Warszawa: Elipsa.
    Monografia ta traktuje o ograniczaniu konfliktów w relacjach między segmentami społecznymi (takimi jak grupy etniczne, wspólnoty religijne), w których członkostwo opiera się na podstawach askryptywnych i kulturowych, a także między nimi a władzą centralną w Nigerii i Indonezji. Państwa te mają burzliwą historię niepodległego bytu, ogromne wieloetniczne i wieloreligijne populacje, duże gospodarki oraz zasoby surowców energetycznych. Jak wskazują liczne raporty, będą wkrótce należeć do najważniejszych w świecie. W Nigerii i Indonezji funkcjonują systemy polityczne oparte na tzw. power-sharing (współrządzeniu), tj. takie, (...)
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  11. Process structural realism, instance ontology, and societal order.Joseph Earley - 2008 - In Franz Riffert and Hans-Joachim Sander (ed.), Rearching with Whitehead: System and Adventure. Alber. pp. 190-211.
    Whitehead’s cosmology centers on the self-creation of actual occasions that perish as they come to be, but somehow do combine to constitute societies that are persistent agents and/or patients. “Instance Ontology” developed by D.W. Mertz concerns unification of relata into facts of relatedness by specific intensions. These two conceptual systems are similar in that they both avoid the substance-property distinction: they differ in their understanding of how basic units combine to constitute complex unities. “Process Structural Realism” (PSR) draws from (...)
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  12. Writing Conversationalists into History.James Pearson - 2022 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 10 (6).
    Burton Dreben taught a generation of scholars the value of closely attending to the recent philosophical past. But the few papers he authored do little to capture his philosophical voice. In this article, I turn instead to an unpublished transcript of Dreben in conversation with his contemporaries. In addition to yielding insights into a transitional period in W.V. Quine’s and Donald Davidson’s thought, I argue that this document showcases Dreben in his element, revealing the way that he shaped the (...)
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  13. Davidson, Analyticity, and Theory Confirmation.Nathaniel Jason Goldberg - 2003 - Dissertation, Georgetown University
    In this dissertation, I explore the work of Donald Davidson, reveal an inconsistency in it, and resolve that inconsistency in a way that complements a debate in philosophy of science. In Part One, I explicate Davidson's extensional account of meaning; though not defending Davidson from all objections, I nonetheless present his seemingly disparate views as a coherent whole. In Part Two, I explicate Davidson's views on the dualism between conceptual schemes and empirical content, isolating four seemingly different arguments that (...)
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  14. Is Socrates A Predicate?Richard Brian Davis - 2006 - Metaphysica 7 (2).
    In his Moderate Realism and Its Logic (Yale, 1996), Donald Mertz argues that the traditional ontology of nonpredicable substances and predicable universals is beset by “intractable problems,” “harbors an insidious error,” and constitutes a “stumbling block” for the ontologist. By contrast, a onecategory ontology consisting of relation instances (and combinations thereof) is sustainable, and indeed the only way of avoiding commitment to bare particulars. The success of the project turns on Mertz’s claim that every relation instance has (...)
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  15. The Root of the Third Dogma of Empiricism: Davidson vs. Quine on Factualism.Ali Hossein Khani - 2023 - Acta Analytica 38 (1):161-183.
    Davidson has famously argued that conceptual relativism, which, for him, is based on the content-scheme dualism, or the “third dogma” of empiricism, is either unintelligible or philosophically uninteresting and has accused Quine of holding onto such a dogma. For Davidson, there can be found no intelligible ground for the claim that there may exist untranslatable languages: all languages, if they are languages, are in principle inter-translatable and uttered sentences, if identifiable as utterances, are interpretable. Davidson has also endorsed the Quinean (...)
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  16. Translating Evaluative Discourse: the Semantics of Thick and Thin Concepts.Ranganathan Shyam - 2007 - Dissertation, York University
    According to the philosophical tradition, translation is successful when one has substituted words and sentences from one language with those from another by cross-linguistic synonymy. Moreover, according to the orthodox view, the meaning of expressions and sentences of languages are determined by their basic or systematic role in a language. This makes translating normative and evaluative discourse puzzling for two reasons. First, as languages are syntactically and semantically different because of their peculiar cultural and historical influences, and as values and (...)
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  17. A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism.Lajos Brons - 2022 - Earth: punctum.
    In the early twentieth century, Uchiyama Gudō, Seno’o Girō, Lin Qiuwu, and others advocated a Buddhism that was radical in two respects. Firstly, they adopted a more or less naturalist stance with respect to Buddhist doctrine and related matters, rejecting karma or other supernatural beliefs. And secondly, they held political and economic views that were radically anti-hegemonic, anti-capitalist, and revolutionary. Taking the idea of such a “radical Buddhism” seriously, A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism asks (...)
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  18. Elements of Literature: Essay, Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Film.Robert Scholes, Carl H. Klaus, Nancy R. Comley & Michael Silverman (eds.) - 1991 - Oxford University Press USA.
    Providing the most thorough coverage available in one volume, this comprehensive, broadly based collection offers a wide variety of selections in four major genres, and also includes a section on film. Each of the five sections contains a detailed critical introduction to each form, brief biographies of the authors, and a clear, concise editorial apparatus. Updated and revised throughout, the new Fourth Edition adds essays by Margaret Mead, Russell Baker, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, and Alice Walker; fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, (...)
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    Measuring the mental.Garris Rogonyan - 2016 - Epistemology and Philosophy of Science 50 (4):168-186.
    The article considers pros and cons for a theoretic-measurement analogy, proposed by some philosophers as an illustration of semantic indeterminacy. Within this analogy ascribing of meanings to a certain linguistic expressions is compared with attribution of numbers according to a certain theory of measurement. Donald Davidson used this analogy in order to extend W.V.O. Quine's thesis of indeterminacy of translation to the interpretation of all human behavior. In other words, not only linguistic meanings, but all mental states are considered (...)
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  20. História da Sociologia: O desenvolvimento da sociologia brasileira.Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva - manuscript
    HISTÓRIA DA SOCIOLOGIA: O DESENVOLVIMENTO DA SOCIOLOGIA I -/- A SOCIOLOGIA BRASILEIRA -/- HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY: THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOCIOLOGY I -/- THE BRAZILIAN SOCIOLOGY -/- Emanuel Isaque Cordeiro da Silva – IFPE-BJ, CAP-UFPE e UFRPE. E-mails: [email protected] e [email protected] WhatsApp: (82)9.8143-8399. -/- PREMISSA -/- Como na França de Émile Durkheim, os primeiros passos da Sociologia no Brasil, em termos institucionais, ocorreram a partir de iniciativas para a inclusão dessa disciplina no ensino secundário (hoje, ensino médio). A primeira tentativa ocorreu (...)
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  21. „Demokracja o niskiej jakości” (low-quality democracy) – zasadność stosowania pojęcia i Horowitzowska egzemplifikacja na przykładzie Indonezji.Krzysztof Trzcinski - 2016 - Studia Polityczne 44 (4/2016):167-189.
    ‘Low-Quality Democracy’ - The Validity of the Notion and D.L. Horowitz’s Exemplification: The Case of Indonesia. This article discusses problems relating to terms used to define former authoritarian states, which are already called democratic, although some undemocratic features still characterize them. The latest English language literature on political science relating to this subject uses three terms that seem similar in meaning: ‘illiberal democracy,’ ‘flawed democracy,’ and ‘low-quality democracy.’ They have not been conceptualized so far. This means that there has been (...)
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  22. ¿Empirismo sin dogmas?David Villena Saldaña - 2006 - Solar 2 (2):51-71.
    This papers assesses the possibility of an empiricism without dogmas. It advances an argument against Quine's conceptions regarding philosophy of language and tries to expand the Davidsonian semantics and epistemic program.
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  23. The Indeterminacy of Translation and Radical Interpretation.Ali Hossein Khani - 2021 - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The Indeterminacy of Translation and Radical Interpretation The indeterminacy of translation is the thesis that translation, meaning, and reference are all indeterminate: there are always alternative translations of a sentence and a term, and nothing objective in the world can decide which translation is the right one. This is a skeptical conclusion because what it … Continue reading The Indeterminacy of Translation and Radical Interpretation →.
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  24. The “ethnophilosophy” problem: How the idea of “social imaginaries” may remedy it.Donald Mark C. Ude - 2024 - Philosophical Forum 55 (1):71-86.
    The work argues that engaging Africa's cultural and epistemic resources as social imaginaries, and not as metaphysical or ontological “essences,” could help practitioners of African philosophy overcome the cluster of shortcomings and undesirable features associated with “ethnophilosophy.” A number of points are outlined to buttress this claim. First, the framework of social imaginaries does not operate with the false assumption that Africa's cultural forms and epistemic resources are static and immutable. Second, this framework does not lend itself to sweeping generalizations (...)
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  25. Quine and First-Person Authority.Ali Hossein Khani - 2023 - Logos and Episteme 14 (2):141-161.
    Blackburn and Searle have argued that Quine‘s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation results in a denial of the sort of first-person authority that we commonly concede we have over our mental and semantical content. For, the indeterminacy thesis implies that there is no determinate meaning to know at all. And, according to Quine, the indeterminacy holds at home too. For Blackburn, Quine must constrain the domain of indeterminacy to the case of translation only. Searle believes that Quine has no (...)
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  26. Kantian Conceptual Geography.Nathaniel Jason Goldberg - 2015 - New York, US: Oxford University Press.
    This is a work in Kantian conceptual geography. It explores issues in analytic epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics by appealing to theses drawn from Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
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  27. Identity, Discernibility, and Composition.Donald L. M. Baxter - 2014 - In Aaron J. Cotnoir & Donald L. M. Baxter (eds.), Composition as Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press USA. pp. 244-253.
    There is more than one way to say that composition is identity. Yi has distinguished the Weak Composition thesis from the Strong Composition thesis and attributed the former to David Lewis while noting that Lewis associates something like the latter with me. Weak Composition is the thesis that the relation between the parts collectively and their whole is closely analogous to identity. Strong Composition is the thesis that the relation between the parts collectively and their whole is identity. Yi is (...)
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  28. Hume on Abstraction and Identity.Donald L. M. Baxter - 2017 - In Stefano Di Bella & Tad M. Schmaltz (eds.), The Problem of Universals in Early Modern Philosophy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 285-304.
    Hume’s critique of traditional abstraction entails a result that undercuts his account of the idea of identity. To save his account of identity, Hume would have to accept abstraction as well. What links these two discussions is (1) Hume’s widely shared assumption that traditional abstraction is separating in the mind what are inseparable in reality, (2) his principle that what are different are mentally separable, and (3) his principle that we cannot conceive of the impossible. Given these, it will turn (...)
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  29. What Metaphors Mean.Donald Davidson - 1978 - Critical Inquiry 5 (1):31-47.
    The concept of metaphor as primarily a vehicle for conveying ideas, even if unusual ones, seems to me as wrong as the parent idea that a metaphor has a special meaning. I agree with the view that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, but I think this is not because metaphors say something too novel for literal expression but because there is nothing there to paraphrase. Paraphrase, whether possible or not, inappropriate to what is said: we try, in paraphrase, to say it (...)
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  30. Mereology without weak supplementation.Donald Smith - 2009 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 87 (3):505 – 511.
    According to the Weak Supplementation Principle (WSP)—a widely received principle of mereology—an object with a proper part, p , has another distinct proper part that doesn't overlap p . In a recent article in this journal, Nikk Effingham and Jon Robson employ WSP in an objection to endurantism. I defend endurantism in a way that bears on mereology in general. First, I argue that denying WSP can be motivated apart from the truth of endurantism. I then go on to offer (...)
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  31. "On Zimmerman's 'The Providential Usefulness of Simple Foreknowledge'".Donald Smith - 2012 - In Kelly James Clark & Michael Rea (eds.), Reason, Metaphysics, and Mind: New Essays on the Philosophy of Alvin Plantinga. , US: Oup Usa. pp. 197-202.
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  32. Many-one identity.Donald L. M. Baxter - 1988 - Philosophical Papers 17 (3):193-216.
    Two things become one thing, something having parts, and something becoming something else, are cases of many things being identical with one thing. This apparent contradiction introduces others concerning transitivity of identity, discernibility of identicals, existence, and vague existence. I resolve the contradictions with a theory that identity, number, and existence are relative to standards for counting. What are many on some standard are one and the same on another. The theory gives an account of the discernibility of identicals using (...)
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  33. Identity in the loose and popular sense.Donald L. M. Baxter - 1988 - Mind 97 (388):575-582.
    This essay interprets Butler’s distinction between identity in the loose and popular sense and in the strict and philosophical sense. Suppose there are different standards for counting the same things. Then what are two distinct things counting strictly may be one and the same thing counting loosely. Within a given standard identity is one-one. But across standards it is many-one. An alternative interpretation using the parts-whole relation fails, because that relation should be understood as many-one identity. Another alternative making identity (...)
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  34. The Moral Justification of Benefit/Cost Analysis.Donald C. Hubin - 1994 - Economics and Philosophy 10 (2):169-194.
    Benefit/cost analysis is a technique for evaluating programs, procedures, and actions; it is not a moral theory. There is significant controversy over the moral justification of benefit/cost analysis. When a procedure for evaluating social policy is challenged on moral grounds, defenders frequently seek a justification by construing the procedure as the practical embodiment of a correct moral theory. This has the apparent advantage of avoiding difficult empirical questions concerning such matters as the consequences of using the procedure. So, for example, (...)
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  35. The second person.Donald Davidson - 1992 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 17 (1):255-267.
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  36. The vagueness argument for mereological universalism.Donald Smith - 2006 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (3):357–368.
    In this paper, I critically discuss one of the more influential arguments for mereological universalism, what I will call ‘the Vagueness Argument’. I argue that a premise of the Vagueness Argument is not well supported and that there are at least two good reasons for thinking that the premise in question is false.
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  37. Oneness, Aspects, and the Neo-Confucians.Donald L. M. Baxter - 2018 - In Philip J. Ivanhoe, Owen Flanagan, Victoria S. Harrison, Hagop Sarkissian & Eric Schwitzgebel (eds.), The Oneness Hypothesis: Beyond the Boundary of Self. New York, NY, USA: Columbia University Press.
    Confucius gave counsel that is notoriously hard to follow: "What you do not wish for yourself, do not impose on others" (Huang 1997: 15.24). People tend to be concerned with themselves and to be indifferent to most others. We are distinct from others so our self-concern does not include them, or so it seems. Were we to realize this distinctness is merely apparent--that our true self includes others--Confucius's counsel would be easier to follow. Concern for our true self would extend (...)
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  38. Instantiation as partial identity.Donald L. M. Baxter - 2001 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (4):449 – 464.
    Construing the instantiation of a universal by a particular in terms of my theory of aspects resolves the basic mystery of this "non-relational tie", and gives theoretical unity to the four characteristics of instantiation discerned by Armstrong. Taking aspects as distinct in a way akin to Scotus's formal distinction, I suggest that instantiation is the sharing of an aspect by a universal and a particular--a kind of partial identity. This approach allows me to address Plato's multiple location and One over (...)
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  39. Enactment or Exploration: Two Roles for Philosophy in the Novel of Ideas.Donald Nordberg - 2023 - Philosophy and Literature 47 (1):108-127.
    Abstract:I examine the often-denigrated concept of the novel of ideas from its inception and critical decline to its relatively recent revival. Using a variant of the exploitation-exploration dilemma in psychology, I suggest that early usage referred to works that exploit philosophical principles—or better, enact them—by setting philosophical positions in conflict. By contrast, use of the concept for more recent works sees characters and plots exploring philosophical stances. The shift corresponds with the greater attention paid to complexity and ambiguity that are (...)
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  40. Vague Singulars, Semantic Indecision, and the Metaphysics of Persons.Donald P. Smith - 2007 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 74 (3):569-585.
    Composite materialism, as I will understand it, is the view that human persons are composite material objects. This paper develops and investigates an argument, The Vague Singulars Argument, for the falsity of composite materialism. We shall see that cogent or not, the Vague Singulars Argument has philosophically significant ramifications.
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  41. Self‐Differing, Aspects, and Leibniz's Law.Donald L. M. Baxter - 2018 - Noûs 52:900-920.
    I argue that an individual has aspects numerically identical with it and each other that nonetheless qualitatively differ from it and each other. This discernibility of identicals does not violate Leibniz's Law, however, which concerns only individuals and is silent about their aspects. They are not in its domain of quantification. To argue that there are aspects I will appeal to the internal conflicts of conscious beings. I do not mean to imply that aspects are confined to such cases, but (...)
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  42. Respecting equality in economic option appraisal: valuing the time of your life.Donald Franklin - 2022 - Economics and Philosophy 38 (3):416-449.
    Even where willingness-to-pay as a measure of welfare impact is adjusted for diminishing marginal utility, welfare economics is shown to favour policies that add to the life expectancy or that enhance the quality of life of persons who are already better-off. I propose an alternative, Equal Respect methodology, under an axiomatic claim that at the point of decision the prospective life years of all individuals are of equal intrinsic social value. This justifies equal valuation of risk mitigation across all persons; (...)
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  43. Coloniality, Epistemic Imbalance, and Africa’s Emigration Crisis.Donald Mark C. Ude - 2022 - Theory, Culture and Society 39 (6):3-19.
    The paper has two complementary objectives. First, it sustains an analysis of the concept of ‘coloniality’ that accounts for the epistemic imbalance in the modern world, demonstrating precisely how Africa is adversely affected, having been caught up in the throes of coloniality and its epistemic implications. Second – and complementarily – the paper attempts to bring this very concept of ‘coloniality’ into the discourse on Africa’s emigration crisis, arguing that Africa’s emigration crisis is traceable, inter alia, to the epistemic imbalance (...)
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  44. Aspects and the Alteration of Temporal Simples.Donald L. M. Baxter - 2016 - Manuscrito 39 (4):169-181.
    ABSTRACT According to David Lewis, alteration is "qualitative difference between temporal parts of something." It follows that moments, since they are simple and lack temporal parts, cannot alter from future to present to past. Here then is another way to put McTaggart's paradox about change in tense. I will appeal to my theory of Aspects to rebut the thought behind this rendition of McTaggart. On my theory, it is possible that qualitatively differing things be numerically identical. I call these differing, (...)
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  45. Hypothetical motivation.Donald C. Hubin - 1996 - Noûs 30 (1):31-54.
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  46. Irrational desires.Donald C. Hubin - 1991 - Philosophical Studies 62 (1):23 - 44.
    Many believe that the rational evaluation of actions depends on the rational evaluation of even basic desires. Hume, though, viewed desires as "original existences" which cannot be contrary to either truth or reason. Contemporary critics of Hume, including Norman, Brandt and Parfit, have sought a basis for the rational evaluation of desires that would deny some basic desires reason-giving force. I side with Hume against these modern critics. Hume's concept of rational evaluation is admittedly too narrow; even basic desires are, (...)
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  47. What’s Special about Humeanism.Donald C. Hubin - 1999 - Noûs 33 (1):30-45.
    One of the attractions of the Humean instrumentalist theory of practical rationality is that it appears to offer a special connection between an agent's reasons and her motivation. The assumption that Humeanism is able to assert a strong connection between reason and motivation has been challenged, most notably by Christine Korsgaard. She argues that Humeanism is not special in the connection it allows to motivation. On the contrary, Humean theories of practical rationality do connect reasons and motivation in a unique (...)
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  48. Murder and Violence in Kantian Ethics.Donald Wilson - 2018 - In Violetta L. Waibel, Margit Ruffing & David Wagner (eds.), Natur und Freiheit. Akten des XII. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses. De Gruyter. pp. 2257-2264.
    Acts of violence and murder have historically proved difficult to accommodate in standard accounts of the formula of universal law (FUL) version of Kant’s Categorical Imperative (CI). In “Murder and Mayhem,” Barbara Herman offers a distinctive account of the status of these acts that is intended to be appropriately didactic in comparison to accounts like the practical contradiction model. I argue that while Herman’s account is a promising one, the distinction she makes between coercive and non-coercive violence and her response (...)
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  49. Desires, Whims and Values.Donald C. Hubin - 2003 - The Journal of Ethics 7 (3):315-335.
    Neo-Humean instrumentalists hold that anagent's reasons for acting are grounded in theagent's desires. Numerous objections have beenleveled against this view, but the mostcompelling concerns the problem of ``aliendesires'' – desires with which the agent doesnot identify. The standard version ofneo-Humeanism holds that these desires, likeany others, generate reasons for acting. Avariant of neo-Humeanism that grounds anagent's reasons on her values, rather than allof her desires, avoids this implication, but atthe cost of denying that we have reasons to acton innocent whims. (...)
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  50. The groundless normativity of instrumental rationality.Donald C. Hubin - 2001 - Journal of Philosophy 98 (9):445-468.
    Neo-Humean instrumentalist theories of reasons for acting have been presented with a dilemma: either they are normatively trivial and, hence, inadequate as a normative theory or they covertly commit themselves to a noninstrumentalist normative principle. The claimed result is that no purely instrumentalist theory of reasons for acting can be normatively adequate. This dilemma dissolves when we understand what question neo-Humean instrumentalists are addressing. The dilemma presupposes that neo-Humeans are attempting to address the question of how to act, 'simpliciter'. Instead, (...)
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