In the 1706 third edition of her Reflections upon Marriage, Mary Astell alludes to John Locke’s definition of slavery in her descriptions of marriage. She describes the state of married women as being ‘subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, Arbitrary Will of another Man’ (Locke, Two Treatises, II.22). Recent scholars maintain that Astell does not seriously regard marriage as a form of slavery in the Lockean sense. In this paper, I defend the contrary position: I argue that Astell does seriously (...) regard marriage as a form of slavery for women and that she condemns this state of affairs as morally wrong. I also show that, far from criticizing Locke, Astell draws on key passages in his Thoughts concerning Education to urge that women be educated to retain their liberty. (shrink)

According to some scholars, Mary Astell’s feminist programme is severely limited by its focus on self-improvement rather than wider social change. In response, I highlight the role of ‘virtuous friendship’ in Astell’s 1694 work, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Building on classical ideals and traditional Christian principles, Astell promotes the morally transformative power of virtuous friendship among women. By examining the significance of such friendship to Astell’s feminism, we can see that she did in fact aim to bring about (...) reformation of society and not just the individual. (shrink)

In The Women of Grub Street (1998), Paula McDowell highlighted the fact that the overwhelming majority of women’s texts in early modern England were polemical or religio-political in nature rather than literary in content. Since that time, the study of early modern women’s political ideas has dramatically increased, and there have been a number of recent anthologies, modern editions, and critical analyses of female political writings. As a result of Patricia Springborg’s research, Mary Astell (1668-1731) has risen to prominence as (...) one of the most astute female political commentators of her day. Springborg argues for Astell’s importance as one of the first systematic critics of the philosopher John Locke, and she interprets Astell’s political thought as a reaction to Lockean Whig politics in the early reign of Queen Anne. But some scholars claim that it is a mistake to think that Astell was chiefly preoccupied with Locke, and others suggest that reading Astell in relation to Locke alone can distort our understanding of her larger political theory. In this chapter, I argue that a more accurate picture of Astell’s political outlook emerges by examining a little studied essay, ‘A Prefatory Discourse to Dr D’Aveanant’ in her 1704 work Moderation Truly Stated. In this critique of Charles Davenant’s Essays upon Peace at Home, and War Abroad (1704), Astell provides a commentary on the political ruthlessness of Niccolo Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy. Astell’s comments reveal that, in an age in which the political vocabulary was turning to the language of rights, property, and liberty, she still subscribed to the ancient world view, and the ethical-political language of virtue and the good. My intention is to show that these ethical dimensions of Astell’s political thought are consonant with her wider philosophy. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the English philosopher Mary Astell’s marginalia in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s personal copy of the 1704 edition of Pierre Bayle’s Pensées diverses sur le comète (first published in 1682). I argue that Astell’s annotations provide good reasons for thinking that Bayle is biased toward atheism in this work. Recent scholars maintain that Bayle can be interpreted as an Academic Sceptic: as someone who honestly and impartially follows a dialectical method of argument in order to obtain the (...) goal of intellectual integrity. In her commentary, however, Astell suggests that: (i) if Bayle were honest and impartial in his inquiries, then he would not have pretended to attack popular superstition, only to undermine generally-held religious beliefs; and (ii) if Bayle valued intellectual integrity, then his argument for a society of virtuous atheists would not have relied upon a deceptive equivocation in terms. I conclude that the rediscovery of this marginalia is valuable for enhancing our appreciation of Astell as an astute reader of one of her most enigmatic contemporaries. (shrink)

Some scholars have identified a puzzle in the writings of Mary Astell (1666–1731), a deeply religious feminist thinker of the early modern period. On the one hand, Astell strongly urges her fellow women to preserve their independence of judgement from men; yet, on the other, she insists upon those same women maintaining a submissive deference to the Anglican church. These two positions appear to be incompatible. In this paper, I propose a historical-contextualist solution to the puzzle: I argue that the (...) seeming inconsistency can be dispelled through a close examination of (i) the concepts of selfhood and self-government in Anglican women’s devotional texts of the period, and of (ii) the role that these concepts play in Astell’s feminist arguments. (shrink)

Against the backdrop of the English reception of Locke’s Essay, stands a little-known philosophical dispute between two seventeenth-century women writers: Mary Astell (1666-1731) and Damaris Cudworth Masham (1659-1708). On the basis of their brief but heated exchange, Astell and Masham are typically regarded as philosophical adversaries: Astell a disciple of the occasionalist John Norris, and Masham a devout Lockean. In this paper, I argue that although there are many respects in which Astell and Masham are radically opposed, the two women (...) also have a surprising amount in common. Rather than interpret their ideas solely in relation to the ‘canonical’ philosophies of the time – Lockean empiricism and Malebranchean occasionalism – I examine the ways in which Astell and Masham are influenced by the metaphysical theories of the Cambridge Platonists, Ralph Cudworth and Henry More. On this basis, I argue that a remarkably similar theological approach underlies the metaphysical and feminist arguments of Astell and Masham. (shrink)

Our modern ideals about liberty were forged in the great political and philosophical debates of the 17th and 18th centuries, but we seldom hear about women's contributions to those debates. This paper examines the ideas of early modern English women – namely Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell, Mary Overton, ‘Eugenia’, Sarah Chapone and the civil war women petitioners – with respect to the classic political concepts of negative, positive and republican liberty. The author suggests that these writers' woman-centred concerns provide a (...) unique historical perspective on these much-discussed ideals of freedom from external interference, freedom as self-determination and freedom from domination. (shrink)

In his De la recherche de la vérité (The Search after Truth) of 1674-75, Nicolas Malebranche makes a number of apparently contradictory remarks about women and their capacity for pure intellectual thought. On the one hand, he seems to espouse a negative biological determinism about women’s minds, and on the other, he suggests that women have the free capacity to attain truth and happiness, regardless of their physiology. In the early eighteenth-century, four English women thinkers – Anne Docwra (c. 1624-1710), (...) Mary Astell (1666-1731), Damaris Masham (1659-1708), and Mary Chudleigh (1656-1710) – engaged with Malebranche’s ideas. Their writings reveal how we might dispel the apparent contradictions in Malebranche’s thinking about women, and reaffirm the liberating potential of Cartesian philosophy for women in the early modern period. (shrink)

In this article, I explain why stabilizing constructs is important to the success of the Research Domain Criteria Project and identify one measure for facilitating such stability.

This paper is a response to a commentary by Walter Glannon (2016, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience) on my paper "Stabilizing Constructs Across Research Fields as a Way to Foster the Integrative Approach of the Research Domain Criteria Project".

Against those who dismiss Kant's project in the "Religion" because it provides a Pelagian understanding of salvation, this paper offers an analysis of the deep structure of Kant's views on divine justice and grace showing them not to conflict with an authentically Christian understanding of these concepts. The first part of the paper argues that Kant's analysis of these concepts helps us to understand the necessary conditions of the Christian understanding of grace: unfolding them uncovers intrinsic relations holding between God's (...) justice and grace. Parts two and three provide an analysis of two concepts of grace used by Kant. Getting clear on their differences is the key to understanding why Kant's account is not Pelagian. (shrink)

In this context, the study explored the relationship between organizational climate and employee innovative work behaviour among food manufacturing industries in Malaysia. The study is a descriptive correlational survey research design where data is sourced out from a total of randomly sampled 260 employees. Results revealed that a favourable organizational climate on innovation, proactivity, and risk-taking is prevailing among the companies. A very high level of innovative work behaviour is emanating among the employees on idea exploration, generation, championing, and implementation. (...) Test of differences showed that employee gender, position, unit, and years of service spelt significant differences in the perception of the employees on organizational climate and innovative work behaviour. A meaningful relationship surfaced between organizational climate and employee innovative work behaviour, suggesting that for food manufacturing industries to sustain innovative and competitive advantages, there is a need to promote a nurturing and encouraging entrepreneurial organizational climate. Finally, a congruency among the domains of organizational climate and employee innovative work behaviour emerged. It suggests that when higher positive organizational climate surfaces, the more likely the employee's manifest innovation work behaviour. This study addressed the gap by providing organizational climate and employee innovative work behaviour among food manufacturing industries in Malaysia. (shrink)

Public health care interventions—regarding vaccination, obesity, and HIV, for example—standardly take the form of information dissemination across a community. But information networks can vary importantly between different ethnic communities, as can levels of trust in information from different sources. We use data from the Greater Pittsburgh Random Household Health Survey to construct models of information networks for White and Black communities--models which reflect the degree of information contact between individuals, with degrees of trust in information from various sources correlated with (...) positions in that social network. With simple assumptions regarding belief change and social reinforcement, we use those modeled networks to build dynamic agent-based models of how information can be expected to flow and how beliefs can be expected to change across each community. With contrasting information from governmental and religious sources, the results show importantly different dynamic patterns of belief polarization within the two communities. (shrink)

Descriptive accounts of the nature of explanation in neuroscience and the global goals of such explanation have recently proliferated in the philosophy of neuroscience and with them new understandings of the experimental practices of neuroscientists have emerged. In this paper, I consider two models of such practices; one that takes them to be reductive; another that takes them to be integrative. I investigate those areas of the neuroscience of learning and memory from which the examples used to substantiate these models (...) are culled, and argue that the multiplicity of experimental protocols used in these research areas presents specific challenges for both models. In my view, these challenges have been overlooked largely because philosophers have hitherto failed to pay sufficient attention to fundamental features of experimental practice. I demonstrate that when we do pay attention to such features, evidence for reduction and integrative unity in neuroscience is simply not borne out. I end by suggesting some new directions for the philosophy of neuroscience that pertain to taking a closer look at the nature of neuroscientific experiments. (shrink)

The past decade has witnessed a growing awareness of conceptual and methodological hurdles within psychology and neuroscience that must be addressed for taxonomic and explanatory progress in understanding psychological functions to be possible. In this paper, I evaluate several recent knowledge-building initiatives aimed at overcoming these obstacles. I argue that while each initiative offers important insights about how to facilitate taxonomic and explanatory progress in psychology and neuroscience, only a “coordinated pluralism” that incorporates positive aspects of each initiative will have (...) the potential for success. (shrink)

Academic institutions migrated to modular teaching-learning amid the COVID-19 pandemic. To ensure the quality of the pedagogical innovations employed, the study determined the students’ evaluation of the faculty prepared instructional modules for the courses they enrolled in during the first and second semesters of Academic Year 2020-2021. Employing a descriptive-correlational research design, the study was participated by 644 students from three colleges who were then available during the data gathering. Data gathered through online surveys were then analyzed using descriptive statistics (...) and Spearman's rank correlation coefficient utilizing jamovi software. Results revealed that the faculty-prepared instructional modules were acceptable and satisfactory to the students. Besides, the students' evaluation of the instructional modules was positively related to their level of satisfaction. Still, the students recommended that a review of the modules be done before sending the modules; a more extended time allotment is considered, and sufficient concrete examples are given in the modules. With this, the faculty concerned are encouraged to review the phases involved in the design, development, and distribution of the instructional modules to make them highly acceptable and very satisfactory to the students while maintaining the quality of both the content and aesthetics of the learning materials. Considering the study’s limitations, further endeavors may be carried out to validate this pedagogical innovation. (shrink)

One might be inclined to assume, given the mouse donning its cover, that the behavior of interest in Nicole Nelson's book Model Behavior (2018) is that of organisms like mice that are widely used as “stand-ins” for investigating the causes of human behavior. Instead, Nelson's ethnographic study focuses on the strategies adopted by a community of rodent behavioral researchers to identify and respond to epistemic challenges they face in using mice as models to understand the causes of disordered human behaviors (...) associated with mental illness. Although Nelson never explicitly describes the knowledge production activities in which her behavioral geneticist research subjects engage as “exemplary”, the question of whether or not these activities constitute “model behavior(s)”—generalizable norms for engaging in scientific research—is one of the many thought-provoking questions raised by her book. As a philosopher of science interested in this question, I take it up here. (shrink)

What role does the concept of representation play in the contexts of experimentation and explanation in cognitive neurobiology? In this article, a distinction is drawn between minimal and substantive roles for representation. It is argued by appeal to a case study that representation currently plays a role in cognitive neurobiology somewhere in between minimal and substantive and that this is problematic given the ultimate explanatory goals of cognitive neurobiological research. It is suggested that what is needed is for representation to (...) instead play a more substantive role. (shrink)

There is a tendency in contemporary jurisprudence to regard political authority and, more particularly, legal intervention in human affairs as having no justification unless it can be defended by what Laing calls the principle of modern liberal autonomy (MLA). According to this principle, if consenting adults want to do something, unless it does specific harm to others here and now, the law has no business intervening. Harm to the self and general harm to society can constitute no justification for legal (...) regulation or prohibition. So pervasive is this understanding of legal intervention in human affairs, that it is common now to encounter arguments in favour of permissive laws on, for example, private drug use, pornography, sexual and reproductive choice, based on the idea that to intervene in these areas would constitute a breach of the liberal ideal. The only alternative to modern liberal autonomy is assumed to be radical oppression, in which the State intervenes in the individual’s life to impose unwarranted measures designed to further its own ends. The legacy of Stalin, Hitler and other modern tyrants has undermined conceptual appeals to the common good. So widespread is this liberal assumption in the Western, English-speaking world that critics of the outlook embodied by MLA are customarily regarded with suspicion and charged with paternalism, narrow-mindedness and intolerance. Laing highlights contradictions inherent in the modern liberal tradition. She argues that there is a certain reliance on the notion of the common good within the natural law tradition that is instructive. According to this view, the common good constitutes a mean between two extremes: on the one hand, contemporary liberalism’s over-insistence on radical individual autonomy and, on the other hand, totalitarianism’s over-emphasis on collective social benefit. There is, I will argue, substantial terrain between the conceptual excesses of modern liberalism and oppressive tyranny that needs to be acknowledged and discussed. (shrink)

This paper examines the concept of liberty at the heart of Sarah Chapone’s 1735 work, The Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives. In this work, Chapone (1699-1764) advocates an ideal of freedom from domination that closely resembles the republican ideal in seventeenth and eighteenth- century England. This is the idea that an agent is free provided that no-one else has the power to dispose of that agent’s property—her “life, liberty, and limb” and her material possessions—according to his (...) arbitrary will and pleasure, without being accountable to the law. This paper shows how Chapone uses this ideal to ground her arguments against those laws that put married women in a worse condition than slavery, and to call for the establishment of reasonable and just safeguards for a woman’s personal property and property in her children. More than this, it is argued, in this text Chapone articulates a feminist ideal that is both negative freedom from domination and positive freedom to be one’s own master or arbiter. Her work thus occupies a unique—and hitherto unrecognized—place in the history of feminist philosophy. (shrink)

Some scholars suggest that John Locke’s revisions to the chapter “Of Power” for the 1694 second edition of his Essay concerning Human Understanding may be indebted to the Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth. Their claims rest on evidence that Locke may have had access to Cudworth’s unpublished manuscript treatises on free will. In this paper, I examine an alternative suggestion – the claim that Cudworth’s daughter, Damaris Cudworth Masham, and not Cudworth himself, may have exerted an influence on Locke’s revisions. I (...) discuss the plausibility of this claim in light of the relevant historical and textual evidence. (shrink)

This paper proposes a philosophically informed decision-making methodology, inspired by Aristotle, that encourages constructive discussions amongst employers and employees; is directed towards shared higher-level goals; is consistent with planning frameworks already in place in many businesses; can be amended over time without disruptive disputes; and accounts for the particularities of each industry, enterprise, workplace, and job. It seeks to establish a more fundamental basis for discussions about remote vs. in-person office work: specifically, the purpose and nature of the work of (...) those affected. If these matters can be decided, then subsequent discussions might be focused more upon the shared outcomes to which stakeholders are committed and less upon individual preferences and ‘hunches.’. (shrink)

Gaston Bachelard is one of the indespensable figures in the history of 20th-century ideas. The broad scope of his work has had a lasting impact in several fields - notable philosophy, architecture and literature.

The use of neuroscientific evidence in criminal trials has been steadily increasing. Despite progress made in recent decades in understanding the mechanisms of psychological and behavioral functioning, neuroscience is still in an early stage of development and its potential for influencing legal decision-making is highly contentious. Scholars disagree about whether or how neuroscientific evidence might impact prescriptions of criminal culpability, particularly in instances in which evidence of an accused’s history of mental illness or brain abnormality is offered to support a (...) plea of not criminally responsible. In the context of these debates, philosophers and legal scholars have identified numerous problems with admitting neuroscientific evidence in legal contexts. To date, however, less has been said about the challenges of evaluating the evidence upon which integrative mechanistic explanations that bring together evidence from different areas of neuroscience are based. As we explain, current criteria for evaluating such evidence to determine its admissibility in legal contexts are inadequate. Appealing to literature in the philosophy of scientific experimentation and theoretical work in the social, cognitive and behavioral sciences, we lay the groundwork for reforming these criteria and identify some of the implications of modifying them. (shrink)

In 2007, ten world-renowned neuroscientists proposed “A Decade of the Mind Initiative.” The contention was that, despite the successes of the Decade of the Brain, “a fundamental understanding of how the brain gives rise to the mind [was] still lacking” (2007, 1321). The primary aims of the decade of the mind were “to build on the progress of the recent Decade of the Brain (1990-99)” by focusing on “four broad but intertwined areas” of research, including: healing and protecting, understanding, enriching, (...) and modeling the mind. These four aims were to be the result of “transdisciplinary and multiagency” research spanning “across disparate fields, such as cognitive science, medicine, neuroscience, psychology, mathematics, engineering, and computer science.” The proposal for a decade of the mind prompted many questions (See Spitzer 2008). In this chapter, I address three of them: (1) How do proponents of this new decade conceive of the mind? (2) Why should a decade be devoted to understanding it? (3) What should this decade look like? (shrink)

Aworkshop was held August 26–28, 2015, by the Earth- Life Science Institute (ELSI) Origins Network (EON, see Appendix I) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. This meeting gathered a diverse group of around 40 scholars researching the origins of life (OoL) from various perspectives with the intent to find common ground, identify key questions and investigations for progress, and guide EON by suggesting a roadmap of activities. Specific challenges that the attendees were encouraged to address included the following: What key (...) questions, ideas, and investigations should the OoL research community address in the near and long term? How can this community better organize itself and prioritize its efforts? What roles can particular subfields play, and what can ELSI and EON do to facilitate research progress? (See also Appendix II.) The present document is a product of that workshop; a white paper that serves as a record of the discussion that took place and a guide and stimulus to the solution of the most urgent and important issues in the study of the OoL. This paper is not intended to be comprehensive or a balanced representation of the opinions of the entire OoL research community. It is intended to present a number of important position statements that contain many aspirational goals and suggestions as to how progress can be made in understanding the OoL. The key role played in the field by current societies and recurring meetings over the past many decades is fully acknowledged, including the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) and its official journal Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, as well as the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL). (shrink)

Debate about the nature of time has been dominated by discussion of two issues: the reality of absolute time and the reality of A-series. We argue that Aristotle adopts a form of the A-theory entailing a denial of the reality of absolute time. Furthermore, Aristotle's denial of absolute time is linked to a denial of the reality of pure temporal becoming, namely, the idea that the now moves through a fixed continuum along which events are arranged in chronological order. We (...) show that the puzzles discussed by Aristotle in IV:10 of the Physics are generated by this view of time and that Aristotle's own theory of time, according to which changes are used to measure one another, avoids these problems. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of Rudolph Otto's understanding of the structures of human consciousness making possible the appropriation of revelation. Already in his dissertation on Luther's understanding of the Holy Spirit, Otto was preoccupied with how the " outer " of revelation could be united to these inner structures. Later, in his groundbreaking Idea of the Holy, Otto would explore the category of the numinous, an element of religious experience tied to the irrational element of the holy. This paper (...) first provides a brief account of Otto's account of the holy, especially its numinous, irrational elements. Second, the paper analyzes Otto's understanding of the structures of consciousness grounding the experience of the numinous and allowing the irrational element to be " schematized " by the rational element. Otto's exposition of these structures is heavily influenced by his reception of Kant's analysis of the two stems of human cognition, namely understanding and sensibility, and their possible relation to a common root, which Otto identified with what the mystics called the ground of the soul. Yet it is in Otto's reception of Kant's Critique of Judgment that all of these ideas find their completion, and it is here where we must look to understand the relation between the religious a priori and Otto's category of the numinous. Kant's aesthetic idea is a singular representation given in intuition; it is infinitely saturated and as such intimates the ideas of God, the soul, and the world as a whole. I show how Otto appropriates Kant's aesthetic idea and its relation to ideas of reason in order to make sense of how an empirically given revelation, for instance, an experience of the numinous, can connect with the inner structures of consciousness and thereby have the singular import that it does. (shrink)

Two things are often said about Aristotle's treatment of time in the Physics. First, that Aristotle's considered view of time is intrinsically tied to a language of temporal passage heavily dependent on the A-series. As such Aristotle's understanding of time is plagued with the perplexities that the A-series generates. Second, that the series of puzzles that Aristotle treats in IV.10, leading to the conclusion that time is non-existent, are left unanswered by Aristotle. Instead after presenting the puzzles having to do (...) with whether time is, Aristotle cannot move fast enough to his treatment of what time is, leaving the puzzles unresolved. This paper looks at these two issues together. The thesis is that the puzzles about the existence of time discussed by Aristotle at IV.10 are generated by a particularly naive version of the A-theory. Further, although Aristotle's answer to what time is incorporates elements of an A-theory of time, it manages to avoid just those particular puzzles discussed in IV.10 leading to the conclusion of time's non-existence. (shrink)

Review of Eric Reitan's Is God a Delusion.

In her book, Moral Status, Mary Anne Warren defends a comprehensive theory of the moral status of various entities. Under this theory, she argues that animals may have some moral rights but that their rights are much weaker in strength than the rights of humans, who have rights in the fullest, strongest sense. Subsequently, Warren believes that our duties to animals are far weaker than our duties to other humans. This weakness is especially evident from the fact that Warren believes (...) that it is frequently permissible for humans to kill animals for food. Warren’s argument for her view consists primarily in the belief that we have inevitable practical conflicts with animals that make it impossible to grant them equal rights without sacrificing basic human interests. However, her arguments fail to justify her conclusions. In particular, Warren fails to justify her beliefs that animals do not have an equal right to life and that it is permissible for humans to kill animals for food. (shrink)

This article explores André-Marie Ampère's autobiography in order to analyse the dynamics of science in early 19th century French institutions. According to recent works that have emphasised the value of biographies in the history of science, this study examines Ampère's public self-representation to show the cultural transformations of a life dedicated to science in post-revolutionary French society. With this aim, I have interpreted this manuscript as an outstanding example of the scientific rhetoric flourishing in early 19th century French Romanticism, which (...) celebrated the life and works of men of science by means of biographies. Following this approach, Ampère's account has been analysed in relation to certain commonplaces shared with other autobiographies of that time, such as his traumatic experience linked to the French Revolution. Finally, this article discusses Ampère's autobiography as revealing an emerging model of scientific personae, i.e. a new collective way of thinking, feeling and perceiving, which announced the category of the modern scientist. (shrink)

This is the fourth chapter of Transformation of the Self. In it I explore Schleiermacher's reception of Leibniz in the Monologen.

The story of Miss Mary Mitchell Slessor is not a story of a clairvoyant legend who existed in an abstract world but a historical reality that worked around the then Old Calabar estuary and died on the 15th of January, 1915 at Ikot Oku Use, near Ikot Obong in the present day Akwa Ibom State and was buried at “Udi Mbakara” (Whiteman’s grave) in Calabar, Cross River State. Mary was one of those early missionaries that went to villages in the (...) then Old Calabar where few missionaries dared to go in order to bring hope and light to the people that were in darkness. Through her evangelistic efforts, schools and hospitals were erected on her initiative, babies and twins saved from death, barbaric rites and customs stopped because of her undaunted love and passion for God and the people. After a centenary of death, one can easily conclude that what immortalizes a person is not what he does for himself but what he does for others. Mary Slessor’s name, work and care for twins can never be forgotten even in another century to come. The tripartite purpose of this paper is to first examine the stepping out of Mary Slessor from her comfort zone to Calabar (her initial struggle), her passion for the people of Old Calabar and her relational method of evangelism that endeared her to the heart of the people. (shrink)

This paper explores two themes—Schleiermacher’s realism and his perspectivalism—and their significance for a theory of religion. I show that Schleiermacher's theory offers an account of human subjectivity and epistemological modesty that at the same time allows us to affirm the reality of the Absolute.

In the contemporary biomedical literature, every disease is considered genetic. This extension of the concept of genetic disease is usually interpreted either in a trivial or genocentrist sense, but it is never taken seriously as the expression of a genetic theory of disease. However, a group of French researchers defend the idea of a genetic theory of infectious diseases. By identifying four common genetic mechanisms (Mendelian predisposition to multiple infections, Mendelian predisposition to one infection, and major gene and polygenic predispositions), (...) they attempt to unify infectious diseases from a genetic point of view. In this article, I analyze this explicit example of a genetic theory, which relies on mechanisms and is applied only to a specific category of diseases, what we call “a regional genetic theory.” I have three aims: to prove that a genetic theory of disease can be devoid of genocentrism, to consider the possibility of a genetic theory applied to every disease, and to introduce two hypotheses about the form that such a genetic theory could take by distinguishing between a genetic theory of diseases and a genetic theory of Disease. Finally, I suggest that network medicine could be an interesting framework for a genetic theory of Disease. (shrink)

Priority setting in health care is ubiquitous and health authorities are increasingly recognising the need for priority setting guidelines to ensure efficient, fair, and equitable resource allocation. While cost-effectiveness concerns seem to dominate many policies, the tension between utilitarian and deontological concerns is salient to many, and various severity criteria appear to fill this gap. Severity, then, must be subjected to rigorous ethical and philosophical analysis. Here we first give a brief history of the path to today’s severity criteria in (...) Norway and Sweden. The Scandinavian perspective on severity might be conducive to the international discussion, given its long-standing use as a priority setting criterion, despite having reached rather different conclusions so far. We then argue that severity can be viewed as a multidimensional concept, drawing on accounts of need, urgency, fairness, duty to save lives, and human dignity. Such concerns will often be relative to local mores, and the weighting placed on the various dimensions cannot be expected to be fixed. Thirdly, we present what we think are the most pertinent questions to answer about severity in order to facilitate decision making in the coming years of increased scarcity, and to further the understanding of underlying assumptions and values that go into these decisions. We conclude that severity is poorly understood, and that the topic needs substantial further inquiry; thus we hope this article may set a challenging and important research agenda. (shrink)

This paper offers a critique of an account of explanatory integration that claims that explanations of cognitive capacities by functional analyses and mechanistic explanations can be seamlessly integrated. It is shown that achieving such explanatory integration requires that the terms designating cognitive capacities in the two forms of explanation are stable but that experimental practice in the mind-brain sciences currently is not directed at achieving such stability. A positive proposal for changing experimental practice so as to promote such stability is (...) put forward and its implications for explanatory integration are briefly considered. (shrink)

An extensive review of Michael Friedman's recent book.

The Morris water maze has been put forward in the philosophy of neuroscience as an example of an experimental arrangement that may be used to delineate the cognitive faculty of spatial memory (e.g., Craver and Darden, Theory and method in the neurosciences, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2001; Craver, Explaining the brain: Mechanisms and the mosaic unity of neuroscience, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007). However, in the experimental and review literature on the water maze throughout the history of its use, (...) we encounter numerous responses to the question of “what” phenomenon it circumscribes ranging from cognitive functions (e.g., “spatial learning”, “spatial navigation”), to representational changes (e.g., “cognitive map formation”) to terms that appear to refer exclusively to observable changes in behavior (e.g., “water maze performance”). To date philosophical analyses of the water maze have not been directed at sorting out what phenomenon the device delineates nor the sources of the different answers to the question of what. I undertake both of these tasks in this paper. I begin with an analysis of Morris’s first published research study using the water maze and demonstrate that he emerged from it with an experimental learning paradigm that at best circumscribed a discrete set of observable changes in behavior. However, it delineated neither a discrete set of representational changes nor a discrete cognitive function. I cite this in combination with a reductionist-oriented research agenda in cellular and molecular neurobiology dating back to the 1980s as two sources of the lack of consistency across the history of the experimental and review literature as to what is under study in the water maze. (shrink)

"The enterprise initiative is probably the most significant political and cultural influence to have affected Western and Eastern Europe in the last decade. In this book, academics from a range of disciplines debate Mary Douglas's distinctive Grid Group cultural theory and examine how it allows us to analyse the complex relation between the culture of enterprise and its institutions. Mary Douglas, Britain's leading cultural anthropologist, contributes several chapters."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Optogenetic techniques are described as “revolutionary” for the unprecedented causal control they allow neuroscientists to exert over neural activity in awake behaving animals. In this paper, I demonstrate by means of a case study that optogenetic techniques will only illuminate causal links between the brain and behavior to the extent that their error characteristics are known and, further, that determining these error characteristics requires comparison of optogenetic techniques with techniques having well known error characteristics and consideration of the broader neural (...) and behavioral context in which the targets of optogenetic interventions are situated. (shrink)

This paper explores Kant's concept of the highest good and the postulate of the existence of God arising from it. Kant has two concepts of the highest good standing in tension with one another, an immanent and a transcendent one. I provide a systematic exposition of the constituents of both variants and show how Kant’s arguments are prone to confusion through a conflation of both concepts. I argue that once these confusions are sorted out Kant’s claim regarding the need to (...) postulate God’s existence from a moral point of view makes much more sense. (shrink)

In this volume, leading philosophers of psychiatry examine psychiatric classification systems, including the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, asking whether current systems are sufficient for effective diagnosis, treatment, and research. Doing so, they take up the question of whether mental disorders are natural kinds, grounded in something in the outside world. Psychiatric categories based on natural kinds should group phenomena in such a way that they are subject to the same type of causal explanations and respond similarly to (...) the same type of causal interventions. When these categories do not evince such groupings, there is reason to revise existing classifications. The contributors all question current psychiatric classifications systems and the assumptions on which they are based. They differ, however, as to why and to what extent the categories are inadequate and how to address the problem. Topics discussed include taxometric methods for identifying natural kinds, the error and bias inherent in DSM categories, and the complexities involved in classifying such specific mental disorders as "oppositional defiance disorder" and pathological gambling. -/- Contributors George Graham, Nick Haslam, Allan Horwitz, Harold Kincaid, Dominic Murphy, Jeffrey Poland, Nancy Nyquist Potter, Don Ross, Dan Stein, Jacqueline Sullivan, Serife Tekin, Peter Zachar. (shrink)

The common account of the analog vs digital distinction is based on features of physical systems, being related to the usage of continuous vs discrete supports respectively. It is proposed here to alternatively characterize the concepts of analog and digital as related to coding systems, of which a formal definition is given, by suggesting that the distinction refers to the strategy adopted to define the coding function: extensional in digital systems, isomorphic intensional in analog systems. This thesis is supported by (...) examples, in particular of analog systems exploiting discrete supports, and is discussed to explain why digital coding is currently so widespread in technological and social practice. (shrink)

Neuroscience is a laboratory-based science that spans multiple levels of analysis from molecular genetics to behavior. At every level of analysis experiments are designed in order to answer empirical questions about phenomena of interest. Understanding the nature and structure of experimentation in neuroscience is fundamental for assessing the quality of the evidence produced by such experiments and the kinds of claims that are warranted by the data. This article provides a general conceptual framework for thinking about evidence and experimentation in (...) neuroscience with a particular focus on two research areas: cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neurobiology. (shrink)

Crime is a serious social problem, but its causes are not exclusively social. There is growing consensus that explaining and preventing it requires interdisciplinary research efforts. Indeed, the landscape of contemporary criminology includes a variety of theoretical models that incorporate psychological, biological and sociological factors. These multi-disciplinary approaches, however, have yet to radically advance scientific understandings of crime and shed light on how to manage it. In this paper, using conceptual tools on offer in the philosophy of science in combination (...) with theoretical work represented in this special volume of Psychology, Crime and Law, I provide some perspective on why explanatory progress in criminology has remained elusive and evaluate some positive proposals for attaining it. -/- . (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that scientific practice in the neurosciences of cognition is not conducive to the discovery of natural kinds of cognitive capacities. The “neurosciences of cognition” include cognitive neuroscience and cognitive neurobiology, two research areas that aim to understand how the brain gives rise to cognition and behavior. Some philosophers of neuroscience have claimed that explanatory progress in these research areas ultimately will result in the discovery of the underlying mechanisms of cognitive capacities. Once such mechanistic understanding (...) is achieved, cognitive capacities purportedly will be relegated into natural kind categories that correspond to real divisions in the causal structure of the world. I provide reasons here, however, in support of the claim that the neurosciences of cognition currently are not on a trajectory for discovering natural kinds. As I explain, this has to do with how mechanistic explanations of cognitive capacities are developed. Mechanistic explanations and the kinds they explain are abstract representational byproducts of the conceptual, experimental and integrative practices of neuroscientists. If these practices are not coordinated towards developing mechanistic explanations that mirror the causal structure of the world, then natural kinds of cognitive capacities will not be discovered. I provide reasons to think that such coordination is currently lacking in the neurosciences of cognition and indicate where changes in these practices appropriate to the natural kinds ideal would be required if achieving this ideal is indeed the goal. However, I suggest that an evaluation of current practices in these research areas is suggestive that discovering natural kinds of cognitive capacities is not the goal. (shrink)

Different sort of people are interested in personal identity. Philosophers frequently ask what it takes to remain oneself. Caregivers imagine their patients’ experience. But both philosophers and caregivers think from the armchair: they can only make assumptions about what it would be like to wake up with massive bodily changes. Patients with a locked-in syndrome (LIS) suffer a full body paralysis without cognitive impairment. They can tell us what it is like. Forty-four chronic LIS patients and 20 age-matched healthy medical (...) professionals answered a 15-items questionnaire targeting: (A) global evaluation of identity, (B) body representation and (C) experienced meaning in life. In patients, selfreported identity was correlated with B and C. Patients differed with controls in C. These results suggest that the paralyzed body remains a strong component of patients’ experienced identity, that patients can adjust to objectives changes perceived as meaningful and that caregivers fail in predicting patients’ experience. (shrink)