The discussions of conatus – force, tendency, effort, and striving – in early modern metaphysics have roots in Aristotle’s understanding of life as an internal experience of living force. This paper examines the ways that Spinoza’s conatus is consonant with Aristotle on effort. By tracking effort from his psychology and ethics to aesthetics, I show there is a conatus at the heart of the activity of the ψυχή that involves an intensification of power in a way which anticipates many of (...) the central insights of early modern and 20th century European philosophy. The first section outlines how Aristotle’s developmental conception of the soul as geometrically ordered lays the foundation for his understanding of effort. The developmental series of powers of the soul are analogous to the series of shapes in mathematics. The second section links the striving of the soul to the gradual acquisition of virtues as a directed activity unifying multiplicity. The third examines the paradigm of self-awareness that Aristotelian effort involves. In the final section I show how ancient Greek theories of music were founded on the experience of striving. The “nature” of music is defined by Aristoxenus, and Theophrastus, in relation to the passion and intentionality of the soul. The geometrical order, as a synthesis of elements in geometry, music, or ethics, is a generative process in which past elements are retained and reintegrated in later stages of development. It requires effort to think geometrically, and the progress of knowledge itself is an integral aspect of all effort. Effort is the lived and self-aware cause which, moving step by step in an orderly and deliberate way, grows and advances upon itself. For both Spinoza and Aristotle, effort is the immanent intelligence which accomplishes what is in the purview of its understanding. Thus, will, in this conception of effort, is not something we already possess innately, but emerges gradually by an effort aimed at improvement. (shrink)

In all probability, future generations will outnumber us by thousands or millions to one. In the aggregate, their interests therefore matter enormously, and anything we can do to steer the future of civilization onto a better trajectory is of tremendous moral importance. This is the guiding thought that defines the philosophy of longtermism. Political science tells us that the practices of most governments are at stark odds with longtermism. But the problems of political short-termism are neither necessary nor inevitable. In (...) principle, the state could serve as a powerful tool for positively shaping the long-term future. In this chapter, we make some suggestions about how to align government incentives with the interests of future generations. First, in Section II, we explain the root causes of political short-termism. Then, in Section III, we propose and defend four institutional reforms that we think would be promising ways to increase the time horizons of governments: 1) government research institutions and archivists; 2) posterity impact assessments; 3) futures assemblies; and 4) legislative houses for future generations. Section IV concludes with five additional reforms that are promising but require further research: to fully resolve the problem of political short-termism we must develop a comprehensive research program on effective longtermist political institutions. (shrink)

Under what conditions are two utterances utterances of the same word? What are words? That these questions have not received much attention is rather surprising: after all, philosophers and linguists frequently appeal to considerations about word and sentence identity in connection with a variety of puzzles and problems that are foundational to the very subject matter of philosophy of language and linguistics.1 Kaplan’s attention to words is thus to be applauded. And there is no doubt that his discussion contains many (...) useful insights. Nevertheless, we find his picture deeply flawed for a variety of crosscutting reasons. Our aim in this paper is to further advance an understanding of the nature of words, both by remedying the problems with Kaplan’s account, and also by achieving a suitable perspective on what the metaphysical investigation of word identity can hope to achieve. Our discussion divides into four parts. In Part One, we examine and critique Kaplan’s discussion of a contrast integral to his own account: that between the type-token and the stage-continuant conceptions of words. In Part Two, we present three constraints on any account of words and two further themes in Kaplan’s discussion central to his conception of words – the role of repetition and the constitutive authority of intentions. While these ideas have laudable motivations, we argue they are far from the best way of making good on the insights that drive them. The final two sections take a skeptical turn. In Part Three, we express doubt about Kaplan’s presumption of the importance of what he calls ‘common currency names’, thus raising a suspicion that he may be in pursuit of chimera. Finally, in Part Four, we express pessimism about whether interesting answers to question above will be forthcoming, and suggest that the legitimacy of our word ontology need not depend on the availability of such answers. Along the way, we tease apart a number of metaphysical questions in the vicinity of the topic of word individuation – questions that are often not disentangled – and consider how the discussion of the previous parts bears on them.. (shrink)

Loneliness in medicine is a serious problem not just for patients, for whom illness is intrinsically isolating, but also for physicians in the contemporary condition of medicine. We explore this problem by investigating the ideal physician-patient relationship, whose analogy with friendship has held enduring normative appeal. Drawing from Talbot Brewer and Nir Ben-Moshe, we argue that this appeal lies in a dynamic form of companionship incompatible with static models of friendship-like physician-patient relationships: a mutual refinement of embodied virtue that draws (...) both persons together. The ideal physician-patient relationship has a dialectical character that fosters each member's improvement of phenomenologically recognizing and embodying moral virtues. A key component of this dynamic is a commitment to the common goal of the patient's health, realized through joint interactivities and conversations over time. The physician's presence to the patient's suffering—understood best as an alienating phenomenological condition for the patient—orients and discloses possibilities for virtuous caregiving by structuring the meanings of the goals, conversations, and joint narrative constitutive of their relationship. Presence to suffering, paradoxically, is perhaps an important prerequisite for this dynamic partnership. These activities dialectically build an interpretive horizon of understanding through which moral goods and character refinement—in and for the other—may become revealed for both persons in their shared being-in-the-world. This analysis of suffering, mood, and revealing of (possible) moral goods has implications for addressing the modern problem of loneliness for patients and physicians, who are increasingly inhibited from building flourishing relationships with each other. (shrink)

Waiting time is widely used in health and social policy to make resource allocation decisions, yet no general account of the moral significance of waiting time exists. We provide such an account. We argue that waiting time is not intrinsically morally significant, and that the first person in a queue for a resource does not ipso facto have a right to receive that resource first. However, waiting time can and sometimes should play a role in justifying allocation decisions. First, there (...) is a duty of fairness prohibiting line-cutting where a sufficiently just queue exists. Second, waiting time has several morally attractive features that can justify its incorporation into allocation schemes. Where candidates are in relevantly similar circumstances, allocating by waiting time is relatively efficient, maximizes distribution equality relative to other Pareto efficient distributions, and treats candidates fairly. The claim that allocation using waiting time is fair is controversial. Some have claimed that formal lotteries are a fairer way to select among equal beneficiaries. We argue that lotteries are no fairer than allocation based on waiting time when it is equiprobable how a prospective queue will be ordered. In practice, lotteries share many of the disadvantages of queues; which is fairer will depend on contingent features of the allocation scenario. The upshot is that first-come, first-served is in fact a just way to allocate resources in many of the cases where it seems pre-theoretically compelling, and waiting time has unique normative properties which frequently justify its incorporation into resource allocation schemes. (shrink)

One widely used method for allocating health care resources involves the use of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) to rank treatments in terms of quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) gained. CEA has been criticized for discriminating against people with disabilities by valuing their lives less than those of non-disabled people. Avoiding discrimination seems to lead to the ’QALY trap’: we cannot value saving lives equally and still value raising quality of life. This paper reviews existing responses to the QALY trap and argues that all (...) are problematic. Instead, we argue that adopting a moderate form of prioritarianism avoids the QALY trap and disability discrimination. (shrink)

Consequentialism is thought to be in significant conflict with animal rights theory because it does not regard activities such as confinement, killing, and exploitation as in principle morally wrong. Proponents of the “Logic of the Larder” argue that consequentialism results in an implausibly pro-exploitation stance, permitting us to eat farmed animals with positive well- being to ensure future such animals exist. Proponents of the “Logic of the Logger” argue that consequentialism results in an implausibly anti-conservationist stance, permitting us to exterminate (...) wild animals with negative well-being to ensure future such animals do not exist. We argue that this conflict is overstated. Once we have properly accounted for indirect effects, such as the role that our policies play in shaping moral attitudes and behavior and the importance of accepting policies that are robust against deviation, we can see that consequentialism may converge with animal rights theory significantly, even if not entirely. (shrink)

Many real-world agents recognise that they impose harms by choosing to emit carbon, e.g., by flying. Yet many do so anyway, and then attempt to make things right by offsetting those harms. Such offsetters typically believe that, by offsetting, they change the deontic status of their behaviour, making an otherwise impermissible action permissible. Do they succeed in practice? Some philosophers have argued that they do, since their offsets appear to reverse the adverse effects of their emissions. But we show that (...) they do not. In practice, standard carbon offsetting does not reverse the harms of the original action, nor does it even benefit the same group as was harmed. Standard moral theories hence deny that such offsetting succeeds. Indeed, we show that any moral theory that allows offsetting in this setting faces a dilemma between allowing any wrong to be offset, no matter how grievous, and recognising an implausibly sharp discontinuity between offsettable actions and non-offsettable actions. The most plausible response is to accept that carbon offsetting fails to right our climate wrongs. (shrink)

Sobre Filosofia clinica e Reflexões sobre o que é o humano.

Recent discussions of how axioms are extrinsically justified have appealed to abductive considerations: on such accounts, axioms are adopted on the basis that they constitute the best explanation of some mathematical data, or phenomena. In the first part of this paper, I set out a potential problem caused by the appeal made to the notion of mathematical explanation and suggest that it can be remedied once it is noted that all the justificatory work is done by appeal to the theoretical (...) virtues. In the second part of the paper, I appeal to the theoretical virtues account of axiom justification to provide an argument that judgements of theoretical virtuousness, and therefore of extrinsic justification, are subjective in a substantive sense. This tells against a recent claim by Penelope Maddy that such justification is “wholly objective”. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss critically Richard Swinburne’s concept of God, which I find to be incoherent, and his understanding of Christianity, which I find to be based on a precritical use of the New Testament.

I am going to argue that it is a cost of libertarianism that it holds our status as agents hostage to theoretical physics, but that claim has met with disagreement. Some libertarians regard it as the cost of doing business, not a philosophical liability. By contrast, Peter van Inwagen has addressed the worry head on. He says that if he were to become convinced that causal determinism were true, he would not change his view that humans are free and morally (...) responsible. Rather, he would give up at least one of the formerly-thought-to-be a priori truths that are elements in his argument for the incompatibility of causal determinism and the relevant sort of freedom. Thus, according to van Inwagen, our status as free and morally responsible agents would not be held hostage to the physicists or hang on a thread I think that van Inwagen’s strategy for securing our freedom and responsibility is unattractive. Somewhat tendentiously, I have called the rejection of an a priori ingredient in the incompatibilist’s argument, contingent upon learning that causal determinism is true, ‘metaphysical fip-flopping.’ -/- And it does seem that van Inwagen’s approach is implausible insofar as he is open to such metaphysical fip-fopping. That he is open to it—that he would fip-fop if he became convinced of the truth of causal determinism—is a problem for his actual philosophical position. Or so I will argue. (shrink)

In the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas states that the “aspect of pastness” involved in memory is a certain kind of cognitive object — i.e., an intention — apprehended by the “estimative power.” All told, however, Aquinas mentions this idea precisely once. In this article, I construct an account of the idea that pastness is an estimative intention by drawing upon texts in which I argue that Aquinas develops this idea, albeit without invoking the terminology of the estimative intention. I conclude (...) that, by identifying the aspect of pastness as an estimative intention, Aquinas neatly synthesizes the Aristotelian and Arabic traditions on memory. (shrink)

In Physics 4.11, Aristotle discusses a sophistical puzzle in which "being Coriscus-in-the-Lyceum is different from being Coriscus-in-the-market-place." I take this puzzle to threaten the persistence of changing entities. Aristotle's answer to the puzzle is that the changing thing "is the same in respect of that, by (means of) being which at any time it is (what it is), S but in definition it is different." That is, Coriscus may be described as either a persisting substrate or as one or more (...) accidental unities. Described as the former, Coriscus persists, but described as the latter, he does not. (shrink)

Scholars of ideology in social-scientific disciplines, including psychology, sociology, and political science, stand to benefit from taking seriously the philosophical contributions of Professor Peter Railton. This is because Railton provides much-needed conceptual precision—and a rare sense of epistemological and moral clarity—to a topic that is notoriously slippery and prone to relativistic musing and the drawing of false equivalences. In an essay entitled “Morality, Ideology, and Reflection: Or, the Duck Sits Yet,” Railton (2000/2003) aptly identified the purpose of ideological analysis as (...) the unmasking of “nonepistemic” interests—that is, interests other than truth-seeking, accuracy, or warrant —that contribute to the development, adoption, and dissemination of political and religious belief systems. (shrink)

Aristotle, though not the first Greek virtue ethicist, was the first to establish virtue ethics as a distinct philosophical discipline. His exposition of the subject in his Nicomachean Ethics set the terms of subsequent debate in the European and Arabic traditions by proposing a set of plausible assumptions from which virtue ethics should proceed. His conception of human well-being and virtue as well as his brand of ethical naturalism were influential from antiquity through the Middle Ages and continue to be (...) influential today. (shrink)

Aristotle recognizes two modes of apprehending time, viz., perceiving time and grasping time intellectually. This chapter clarifies what is and is not involved in these two modes of apprehending time. It also clarifies the way in which they interact, and argues that, according to Aristotle, one’s intellectual grasp of time has an effect on one’s perception of time for those beings who have intellect.

Genes are thought to have evolved from long-lived and multiply-interactive molecules in the early stages of the origins of life. However, at that stage there were no replicators, and the distinction between interactors and replicators did not yet apply. Nevertheless, the process of evolution that proceeded from initial autocatalytic hypercycles to full organisms was a Darwinian process of selection of favourable variants. We distinguish therefore between Neo-Darwinian evolution and the related Weismannian and Central Dogma divisions, on the one hand, and (...) the more generic category of Darwinian evolution on the other. We argue that Hull’s and Dawkins’ replicator/interactor distinction of entities is a sufficient, but not necessary, condition for Darwinian evolution to take place. We conceive the origin of genes as a separation between different types of molecules in a thermodynamic state space, and employ a notion of reproducers. (shrink)

In a well-known footnote in Book 3 of his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume calls William Wollaston's moral theory a "whimsical system" and purports to destroy it with a few brief objections. The first of those objections, although fatally flawed, has hitherto gone unrefuted. To my knowledge, its chief error has escaped attention. In this paper I expose that error; I also show that it has relevance beyond the present subject. It can occur with regard to any moral theory which, (...) like Wollaston's, locates the wrongness of an act in a property that can reside in non-actions no less than in actions. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the problem of speaking past one another due to an asymmetry of the interlocutors' backgrounds. When individuals with different levels of relative privilege interact, the party with relative privilege may fail to engage with what is being communicated. I take up critical Gadamerian hermeneutics to ask how we, as individuals with relative privilege, can 'unstop' our ears so that the burden of explanation does not (unfairly) remain on those we hurt by our mishearing/non-hearing. I offer (...) two methods to achieve this 'unstopping': 'critical self-knowledge' through Quassim Cassam's 'Vice Epistemology' framework and 'critical world-knowledge' through the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (Max Horkheimer and Jürgen Habermas, specifically). I then take up contemporary critical hermeneutics (Lorenzo Simpson) to show how, through the application of the critical methods, one might be able to achieve a useful, cross-cultural dialogue. This is imperative given our inexorably multi-cultural world today. (shrink)

Political short-termism costs the global economy hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars annually, and leads to many millions of deaths from disasters and suboptimal spending. In this paper, I propose a futures assembly explicitly incentivised to promote the interests of future generations as a promising strategy to ameliorate short-termism. The assembly I propose is governed by citizens randomly selected from among the populace, who are rewarded in the future to the extent that they successfully promote the welfare of future (...) generations. The most initially promising such retrospective accountability mechanism is an iterated mechanism, in which each generation of policymakers rewards the previous generation for their policy choices and for their own evaluation of the previous generation. Such an assembly, supplemented with the duties, powers, and tools that I describe, and with appropriate support from archivists and experts, may manage to represent generations many years into the future. (shrink)

Recent debates about mathematical ontology are guided by the view that Platonism's prospects depend on mathematics' explanatory role in science. If mathematics plays an explanatory role, and in the right kind of way, this carries ontological commitment to mathematical objects. Conversely, the assumption goes, if mathematics merely plays a representational role then our world-oriented uses of mathematics fail to commit us to mathematical objects. I argue that it is a mistake to think that mathematical representation is necessarily ontologically innocent and (...) that there is an argument from mathematics' representational capacity to Platonism. Given that it is common ground between the Platonist and nominalist that mathematics plays a representational role in science, this representationalist argument is to be preferred over the explanatory, or enhanced, indispensability argument. (shrink)

commissioned for the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change.

These remarks take up the reflexive problematics of Being and Nothingness and related texts from a metalogical perspective. A mutually illuminating translation is posited between, on the one hand, Sartre’s theory of pure reflection, the linchpin of the works of Sartre’s early period and the site of their greatest difficulties, and, on the other hand, the quasi-formalism of diagonalization, the engine of the classical theorems of Cantor, Gödel, Tarski, Turing, etc. Surprisingly, the dialectic of mathematical logic from its inception through (...) the discovery of the diagonal theorems can be recognized as a particularly clear instance of the drama of reflection according to Sartre, especially in the positing and overcoming of its proper value-ideal, viz. the synthesis of consistency and completeness. Conversely, this translation solves a number of systematic problems about pure reflection’s relations to accessory reflection, phenomenological reflection, pre-reflective self-consciousness, conversion, and value. Negative foundations, the metaphysical position emerging from this translation between existential philosophy and metalogic, concurs by different paths with Badiou’s Being and Event in rejecting both ontotheological foundationalisms and constructivist antifoundationalisms. (shrink)

In this essay, we consider the formal and ontological implications of one specific and intensely contested dialectical context from which Deleuze’s thinking about structural ideal genesis visibly arises. This is the formal/ontological dualism between the principles, ἀρχαί, of the One (ἕν) and the Indefinite/Unlimited Dyad (ἀόριστος δυάς), which is arguably the culminating achievement of the later Plato’s development of a mathematical dialectic.3 Following commentators including Lautman, Oskar Becker, and Kenneth M. Sayre, we argue that the duality of the One and (...) the Indefinite Dyad provides, in the later Plato, a unitary theoretical formalism accounting, by means of an iterated mixing without synthesis, for the structural origin and genesis of both supersensible Ideas and the sensible particulars which participate in them. As these commentators also argue, this duality furthermore provides a maximally general answer to the problem of temporal becoming that runs through Plato’s corpus: that of the relationship of the flux of sensory experiences to the fixity and order of what is thinkable in itself. Additionally, it provides a basis for understanding some of the famously puzzling claims about forms, numbers, and the principled genesis of both attributed to Plato by Aristotle in the Metaphysics, and plausibly underlies the late Plato’s deep considerations of the structural paradoxes of temporal change and becoming in the Parmenides, the Sophist, and the Philebus. After extracting this structure of duality and developing some of its formal, ontological, and metalogical features, we consider some of its specific implications for a thinking of time and ideality that follows Deleuze in a formally unitary genetic understanding of structural difference. These implications of Plato’s duality include not only those of the constitution of specific theoretical domains and problematics, but also implicate the reflexive problematic of the ideal determinants of the form of a unitary theory as such. We argue that the consequences of the underlying duality on the level of content are ultimately such as to raise, on the level of form, the broader reflexive problem of the basis for its own formal or meta-theoretical employment. We conclude by arguing for the decisive and substantive presence of a proper “Platonism” of the Idea in Deleuze, and weighing the potential for a substantive recuperation of Plato’s duality in the context of a dialectical affirmation of what Deleuze recognizes as the “only” ontological proposition that has ever been uttered. This is the proposition of the univocity of Being, whereby “being is said in the same sense, everywhere and always,” but is said (both problematically and decisively) of difference itself. (shrink)

From my ongoing "Metalogical Plato" project. The aim of the diagram is to make reasonably intuitive how the Socratic elenchos (the logic of refutation applied to candidate formulations of virtues or ruling knowledges) looks and works as a whole structure. This is my starting point in the project, in part because of its great familiarity and arguable claim to being the inauguration of western philosophy; getting this point less wrong would have broad and deep consequences, including for philosophy’s self-understanding. -/- (...) (i.) is the first pass at elenchos in which the Socratic interlocutor does not reflect on knowledge being the crux of the problem. (ii.) is the second, rarer, reflective pass in which they are, making the investigation explicitly about knowledge. Its centrality in the Charmides makes that neglected dialogue of superlative importance. This structure is also the gateway through which the discussion/dialectic crosses into the Agathology (discussion of the form of the good) at Republic 505. -/- The problem of elenchos, then, grasped as a whole structure, is that it seems that knowledge can neither satisfactorily be included in nor excluded from its own scope. The development of the ti esti (“what is ---?”) question leads to the introduction of knowledge into its own scope (i. implicitly, as goodness contrasted with blind rule-following ii. explicitly qua knowledge) while the development of the dual peri tinos (“----about what?) question leads to K’s elimination from its own scope. The introductions are motivated to avoid contradiction, but produce regress; the eliminations are motivated to avoid regress, but produce contradiction. In scholarship, and in the history of philosophy, the ti esti question is universally recognized, to the point of being identified with philosophy’s origin and essence; the peri tinos question is neglected textually and never recognized as the equal dual to the ti esti. This, I claim, has blocked the development of a nontrivial logical appreciation of what Plato's Socrates is up to. (One rather disastrous effect of this neglect is taking Aristotle as the beginning of the development of logic, rather than, correctly, for the beginning of logic’s fatal separation from mathematics and dialectic.) -/- Further, because of this monopticism of the ti esti, the function of consistency in the elenchos has not been understood, even with respect to the ti esti. The ti esti is actually in search of completeness, given a norm of consistency; the peri tinos is in search of consistency, given a norm of completeness. Only appreciating the two questions as dual allows space in the structure to clarify these different orientations relative to consistency. (And, dually, to completeness, whose function in the elenchos is generally entirely missed by scholars and relegated to discussions of eros; it's not out of place there, of course, but its significance is secured here.) Recognizing the duality of the ti esti and peri tinos questions is thus the royal road, in the Socratic-Platonic context, to catching sight of what we post-Cantorians can recognize as the metalogical duality of consistency and completeness. (The salutary disruptive effects of this Plato-Cantor proximity have, of course, been traced in complementary ways by Badiou.) -/- Note that the diagram is supposed to provide a relatively accessible orientation, not to stand on its own, and certainly not to be the last word on any subject. An important qualification (telegraphed in the previous paragraph) is that what elenchos shows is not finally circular or paradoxical, though the problem first presents as such (stubbornly, obdurately, as "difficult" Plato's Socrates always says with characteristic understatement). What is depicted here is meant, at a first pass, to be the shape of that first presentation, the form of the problem of elenchos, rather than of its solution. It's not an accident that this problem strongly resembles "Russell's paradox" (not Russell's not a paradox.) Problem is to solution as RP is to the diagonal theorems. (shrink)

This paper offers a new interpretation of Aristotle’s identification, in De Anima 2.5, of αἴσθησις with an ἀλλοίωσίς τις that is not ‘a kind of destruction of something by its contrary’. Drawing on a passage from Metaphysics Iota 5, it argues that when so described, what is referred to as an ἀλλοίωσίς τις is not a uniquely perceptual alteration.

I objected that the defeasibility theory of knowledge prohibits you from knowing that you know that p if your knowledge that p is a posteriori. Rodrigo Borges claims that Peter Klein has already satisfactorily answered a version of my objection. He attempts to defend Klein’s reply and argues that my objection fails because a principle on which it is based is false.I will show that my objection is not a version of the old one that Klein attempts (unsuccessfully) to address, (...) that Borges’ defence of Klein’s reply fails and that his argument against my new objection leaves it untouched. (shrink)

At De Anima II 5, 417b17, Aristotle says, ‘The first transition (πρώτη μεταβολή) in that which can perceive is brought about by the parent, and when it is born it already has [the faculty of] sense-perception in the same way as it has knowledge. Actual sense-perception is so spoken of in the same way as contemplation.’ The purpose of this paper is to determine the nature of first transitions.

We need to understand, and on a philosophical level, our consumer mentality. For ours is a consumer society. Yet (pace environmental philosophers) philosophers have had almost nothing to say. This paper is a start toward a normative philosophy of consumption. It explores a distinction which, if viable, has far-reaching implications — the distinction between ownership and what I call “possession.” This distinction marks two different senses in which a good or service can be mine. I argue that an approach to (...) consumption oriented around possession rather than ownership would support the conclusion that there are prudential or self-interested, not only moral or environmental, limits to rational consumption. That would be a very desirable conclusion given that we often exceed these other limits of rational consumption. (shrink)

This contribution offers an interpretation of the last half of chapter 1 of book 5 of Aristotle’s Physics in the form of a commentary. Among other things, it attempts an explanation of why Aristotle calls the termini of changes ‘something underlying’ (ὑποκείμενον) and ‘something not underlying’ (μὴ ὑποκείμενον). It also provides an analysis of Aristotle’s argument for the claim that what is not simpliciter does not change in the light of this interpretation.

Bu yazı organ nakli ile ilgili şu soruyu ele almaktadır: Doktorlar sağlıklı bir kişinin organlarını alarak organ nakline gereksinim duyan birden fazla kişinin yaşamını kurtarırlarsa ahlaksal açıdan yanlış bir şey yapmış olurlar mı? Her ne kadar sağlıklı bir insanın organlarını alarak onun ölümüne neden olmak kabul edilemez görünse de bunu yapmamanın daha çok sayıda kişinin ölümüne neden olacağı düşünülürse ortada araştırılmaya değer bir soru olduğu görülür.

ABSTRACT. This essay addresses the interpretation of Descartes’ understanding of the mind-body relationship as a substantial union in light of a statement he makes in the Passions de l’âme regarding the role of the blood and vital heat. Here, it seems Descartes cites these corporeal properties as the essential dispositions responsible for accommodating the soul into the human fetus. I argue that this statement should be read in the context of certain medical texts with which Descartes was familiar, namely those (...) of Jean Fernel and William Harvey. Reviewing Fernel’s comments on substantial union, one finds that the soul joins the body on the basis of a celestial spirit that not only bears the vital heat, it also directs the generation of the body. Similar to Harvey, Descartes locates these properties in the blood itself, although, in contrast to Harvey, Descartes reduces these processes to matter and motion. Finally, I highlight the role this heat plays in Descartes’ embryological writing, contrasting it with that of Fernel. I conclude that although Descartes makes various comments supporting a reading of the mind-body relation as a substantial union, his physiological writings on generation and his idea of ‘life’ contradict this interpretation. -/- . (shrink)

Scientists and philosophers routinely talk about phenomena, and the ways in which they relate to explanation, theory and practice in science. However, there are very few definitions of the term, which is often used synonymously with "data'', "model'' and in older literature, "hypothesis''. In this paper I will attempt to clarify how phenomena are recognized, categorized and the role they play in scientific epistemology. I conclude that phenomena are not necessarily theory-based commitments, but that they are what explanations are called (...) to account for, which are not presently explained. (shrink)

For all their differences, the “pro-choice” and the “pro-life” views of abortion are largely in agreement about one aspect of abortion decisions: where an abortion is morally legitimate, the pregnant woman should be permitted to decide whether or not to have an abortion. But I argue in this paper that if the man who will become the father of the fetus is known, if he believes that he will not be able (or permitted) to simply walk away from his biological (...) offspring, and if he does not think it would be a good idea for him to a) become a parent, b) with this woman, or c) at this time, then the woman should have an abortion. Given the life-altering moral obligations involved in raising a child, a woman should not decide to make her (sexual) partner a father without his full consent. (shrink)

In this paper we prove the completeness of three logical systems I LI, IL2 and IL3. IL1 deals solely with identities {a = b), and its deductions are the direct deductions constructed with the three traditional rules: (T) from a = b and b = c infer a = c, (S) from a = b infer b = a and (A) infer a = a(from anything). IL2 deals solely with identities and inidentities {a ± b) and its deductions include both (...) the direct and the indirect deductions constructed with the three traditional rules. IL3 is a hybrid of IL1 and IL2: its deductions are all direct as in IL1 but it deals with identities and inidentities as in IL2. IL1 and IL2 have a high degree of naturalness. Although the hybrid system IL3 was constructed as an artifact useful in the mathematical study of IL1 and IL2, it nevertheless has some intrinsically interesting aspects. The main motivation for describing and studying such simple systems is pedagogical. In teaching beginning logic one would like to present a system of logic which has the following properties. First, it exemplifies the main ideas of logic: implication, deduction, non-implication, counterargument(or countermodel), logical truth, self-contradiction, consistency,satisfiability, etc. Second, it exemplifies the usual general metaprinciples of logic: contraposition and transitivity of implication, cut laws, completeness,soundness, etc. Third, it is simple enough to be thoroughly grasped by beginners. Fourth, it is obvious enough so that its rules do not appear to be arbitrary or purely conventional. Fifth, it does not invite confusions which must be unlearned later. Sixth, it involves a minimum of presuppositions which are no longer accepted in mainstream contemporary logic. (shrink)

The new philosophy of superdeterminism is a specific approach to answering fundamental questions about existence, knowledge, and morality based on a single scientific fact about the universe, namely that cause and effect in physics are not real. Although the notion that cause and effect are not real has a long history in philosophy, recently a Swedish theoretical physicist, Dr. Johan Hansson published a physics proof that our universe is superdeterministic meaning a predetermined static block universe without cause and effect in (...) physics. A new philosophy of superdeterminism based on this scientific discovery that cause and effect are not real has many important implications for human beings, but three especially important implications are a disproof of libertarian free will, existentialism and moral evolution. Libertarian free will is impossible in the absence of cause and effect in physics. Existentialism is impossible in a predetermined universe. And one can infer that a Creator God endorsed objective Christian morality for all time disproving moral evolution. (shrink)

It is often noted that if someone has a tertiary degree in a scientific field who promotes an anti-science-establishment, antiscience, or pseudoscience agenda, they are very often engineers, dentists, surgeons or medical practitioners. While this does not mean that all members of these professions or disciplines are antiscience, of course, the higher frequency of pseudoscience among them is indicative of what I call the “deductivist mindset” regarding science itself. Opposing this is the “inductivist mindset”, a view that has been deprecated (...) among philosophers since Popper. Roughly, the deductivist mindset tends to see problems as questions that can be resolved by deduction from known theory or principle, while the inductivist sees problems as questions to be resolved by discovery. These form cognitive poles, which nobody ever purely instantiates, but a cognitive tendency to be a deductivist may explain why some people find results that conflict with prior theoretical commitments, whether scientific or not, unacceptable. The deductivist tends to be a cognitive conservative, where the inductivist tends to be a cognitive progressive, and the conservative mindset leads to a ressentiment about modernism, and hence about certain scientific results, more often, or so I shall argue in this chapter. (shrink)

The most common approach to the problem of requests for futile treatment – the hospital futility policy – rests on the assumption that demands for futile treatment are both intractable and irrational. But there is another approach to the futility problem, an approach that would be dialogic, piecemeal, and case-by-case. This is the only approach that attempts to deal with both the hospital’s problem and the patient’s or family’s problem that motivates the request/demand for futile treatments. As such, it holds (...) the promise of resolving the problem of demands for futile treatment in a way that does not generate anger and ill will at the hospital staff for what will inevitably strike patients and their families as a blatant assertion of the hospital’s power. (shrink)

In his essay “Literary Vocation as Occupational Idealism: The Example of Emerson’s ‘American Scholar,’” Rob Wilson compares Ralph Waldo Emerson’s scholar with the present literary intellectual in American society. According to Wilson, rather than becoming the intellectual beacon of hope Emerson envisioned, the American (literary) scholar has become trapped in a kind of intellectual bondage by the very act of writing. That is, Wilson believes that the American scholar, because of the effect of Emersonian idealism, has been subjected to repeating (...) Emersonian moral symbols and aesthetic tropes, which has resulted in the alienation of the critic from American society (Wilson 84). However, as will be seen, Wilson’s .. (shrink)

What are laws, and do they necessarily have any basis in morality? The present work argues that laws are governmental assurances of protections of rights and that concepts of law and legal obligation must therefore be understood in moral terms. There are, of course, many immoral laws. But once certain basic truths are taken into account – in particular, that moral principles have a “dimension of weight”, to use an expression of Ronald Dworkin’s, and also that principled relations are not (...) always expressed by perfect statistical concomitances – the existence of iniquitous laws poses no significant threat to a moralistic analysis of law. Special attention is paid to the debate between Ronald Dworkin and H.L.A. Hart. Dworkin’s over-all position is argued to be correct, but issue is taken with his argument for that position. Hart’s analysis is found to be vitiated by an impoverished conception of morality and also of the nature of government. Our analysis of law enables us to answer three questions that, at this juncture of history, are of special importance: Are there international laws? If not, could such laws exist? And if they could exist, would their existence necessarily be desirable? The answers to these questions are, respectively: “no”, “yes”, and “no.” Our analysis of law enables us to hold onto the presumption that so-called legal interpretation is a principled endeavor, and that some legal interpretations are truer to existing laws than others. At the same time, it accommodates the obvious fact that the sense in which a physicist interprets meter-readings, or in which a physician interprets a patient’s symptoms, is different from the sense in which judges interpret the law. So our analysis of law enables us to avoid the extreme views that have thus far dominated debates concerning the nature of legal interpretation. On the one hand, it becomes possible to avoid the cynical view (held by the so-called “legal realists”) that legal interpretation is mere legislation and that no legal interpretation is more correct than any other. On the other hand, it becomes possible to avoid Blackstone’s view (rightly descried by Austin as a “childish fiction”) that judges merely discover, and do not create, the law. (shrink)

Placebo-trials on HIV-infected pregnant women in developing countries like Thailand and Uganda have provoked recent controversy. Such experiments aim to find a treatment that will cut the rate of vertical transmission more efficiently than existing treatments like zidovudine. This scenario is first stated as generally as possible, before three ethical principles found in the Belmont Report, itself a sharpening of the Helsinki Declaration, are stated. These three principles are the Principle of Utility, the Principle of Autonomy and the Principle of (...) Justice. These are taken as voices of moral imperative. But although each has intuitive appeal, it can be shown that there are possible scenarios in which they give conflicting prescriptions. To achieve consistency, one must be subordinate to the others. The voice of utility is taken as subordinate to those of justice and autonomy and it is shown that given plausible assumptions about the level of poverty and education in the developing country targeted, the experiment is ruled morally wrong in the name of both justice and autonomy. Moreover, it is argued that no justification can be found for the inclusion of a placebo group, when strictly defined. By contrast, a ‘no- treatment’ control arm might be justified, but only when the demands of autonomy are satisfied, demands that are more stringent than they might appear. A utilitarian defence of the experiment is examined, namely that the would-be participants are in a no-loss situation, and it is shown that this defence is seriously flawed. Finally, it is concluded that there is no justification for amending the Declaration of Helsinki. (shrink)

Advocates of communal living often urge that life in a commune provides the framework for a deeper knowledge of other people. I believe this is clearly true and because it is true, communal living is also instrumental in promoting self knowledge. The dialogue that is part of the life of a commune enables one to incorporate the insights of the other members into his understanding of himself and his world.