The “lone” clinical bioethicist working in a large, multisite hospital faces considerable challenges. While attempting to build ethics capacity and sustain a demanding range of responsibilities, he or she must also achieve an acceptable level of integration, sustainability, and accountability within a complex organisational structure. In an effort to address such inherent demands and to create a platform towards better evaluation and effectiveness, the Clinical Ethics Group at the Joint Centre for Bioethics at the University of Toronto is implementing the (...) Hub and Spokes Strategy at seven hospitals. The goal of the Hub and Spokes Strategy is to foster an ethical climate and strengthen ethics capacity broadly throughout healthcare settings as well as create models in clinical bioethics that are excellent and effective. (shrink)

This book offers a bold new theoretical understanding of the current ecological crisis via the Frankfurt School. Focusing on key notions of dialectics, natural history, and materialism, a critical theory of nature is outlined in favor of a more traditional Marxist theory of nature, albeit one which still builds on Marxist concepts to confirm humanity's centrality in manufacturing environmental misery. Pre-eminent thinkers including Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, and Theodor Adorno are highlighted for their potential to diagnose the interpenetration of capitalism (...) and nature in a way that neither absolutizes nor obliterates the boundary between the social and natural. (shrink)

The idea that cheaters cannot (really) win in sports persists among philosophers, mainly due to the lingering influence of Bernard Suits’ logical incompatibility thesis. In this article I explain why the thesis does not apply to sports. I argue that the question whether cheating can be prohibited in sports is empirical rather than analytic, as is the case for games subject to the thesis. Thus, sports rules do not make cheating impossible and since game officials cannot always detect cheating and (...) punish cheaters, cheating is a part of sports and cheaters sometimes win. Even if advances in technology made it impossible for cheaters to evade detection, since in-game officials will never know whether their attempts to provide restorative justice to those victimized by acts of cheating are successful, and since cheaters exploit this fact, it follows that not only is cheating a part of sports, but it always will be. (shrink)

Jung has never pursued the "psychology of religion" apart from general psychology. The unique importance of his work lies rather in his discovery and treatment of religious, or potentially religious, factors in his investigation into the unconscious as a whole and in his general therapeutic practice. In Answer to Job , first published in Zurich in 1952, Jung employs the familiar language of theological discourse. Such terms as "God," "wisdom," and "evil" are the touchstones of his argument. And yet, Answer (...) to Job , perhaps Jung's most controversial work, is not an essay in theology as much as it is an examination of the symbolic role that theological concepts play in a person's psychic life. (shrink)

Longtermists have argued that humanity should significantly increase its efforts to prevent catastrophes like nuclear wars, pandemics, and AI disasters. But one prominent longtermist argument overshoots this conclusion: the argument also implies that humanity should reduce the risk of existential catastrophe even at extreme cost to the present generation. This overshoot means that democratic governments cannot use the longtermist argument to guide their catastrophe policy. In this paper, we show that the case for preventing catastrophe does not depend on longtermism. (...) Standard cost-benefit analysis implies that governments should spend much more on reducing catastrophic risk. We argue that a government catastrophe policy guided by cost-benefit analysis should be the goal of longtermists in the political sphere. This policy would be democratically acceptable, and it would reduce existential risk by almost as much as a strong longtermist policy. (shrink)

Carl Craver investigates what we are doing when we sue neuroscience to explain what's going on in the brain.

Under what conditions are people responsible for their choices and the outcomes of those choices? How could such conditions be fostered by liberal societies? Should what people are due as a matter of justice depend on what they are responsible for? For example, how far should healthcare provision depend on patients' past choices? What values would be realized and which hampered by making justice sensitive to responsibility? Would it give people what they deserve? Would it advance or hinder equality? The (...) explosion of philosophical interest in such questions has been fuelled by increased focus on individual responsibility in political debates. Political philosophers, especially egalitarians, have responded to such developments by attempting to map out the proper place for responsibility in theories of justice. This book both reflects on these recent developments in normative political theory and moves the debate forwards. (shrink)

Discrimination, understood as differential treatment of individuals on the basis of their respective group memberships, is widely considered to be morally wrong. This moral judgment is backed in many jurisdictions with the passage of equality of opportunity legislation, which aims to ensure that racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, sexual-orientation, disability and other groups are not subjected to discrimination. This chapter explores the conceptual underpinnings of discrimination and equality of opportunity using the tools of analytical moral and political philosophy.

Carl F. Craver investigates what we are doing when we use neuroscience to explain what's going on in the brain. When does an explanation succeed and when does it fail? Craver offers explicit standards for successful explanation of the workings of the brain, on the basis of a systematic view about what neuroscientific explanations are.

Written three years before his death, The Undiscovered Self combines acuity with concision in masterly fashion and is Jung at his very best. Offering clear and crisp insights into some of his major theories, such as the duality of human nature, the unconscious, human instinct and spirituality, Jung warns against the threats of totalitarianism and political and social propaganda to the free-thinking individual. As timely now as when it was first written, Jung's vision is a salutary reminder of why we (...) should not become passive members of the herd. With a new foreword by Sonu Shamdasani. (shrink)

In this systematic introduction to the philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, the author focuses on four of Peirce's fundamental conceptions: pragmatism and Peirce's development of it into what he called 'pragmaticism'; his theory of signs; his phenomenology; and his theory that continuity is of prime importance for philosophy. He argues that at the centre of Peirce's philosophical project is a unique form of metaphysical realism, whereby continuity and evolutionary change are both necessary for our understanding of experience. In his final (...) chapter Professor Hausman applies this version of realism to contemporary controversies between anti-realists and anti-idealists. Peirce's views are compared to those of such contemporary figures as Davidson, Putnam, and Rorty. The book will be of particular interest to philosophers concerned with American philosophy and current debates on realism as well as linguists working in semiotics. (shrink)

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the recent debate about responsibility and distributive justice. It traces the recent philosophical focus on distributive justice to John Rawls and examines two arguments in his work which might be taken to contain the seeds of the focus on responsibility in later theories of distributive justice. It examines Ronald Dworkin's ‘equality of resources’, the ‘luck egalitarianism’ of Richard Arneson and G. A. Cohen, as well as the criticisms of their work put forward by (...) Elizabeth Anderson, Marc Fleurbaey, Susan Hurley, and Jonathan Wolff. Key concepts such as responsibility (individual and collective), luck (thin and thick; brute and option), control, desert, and equality of opportunity are delineated, and the implementation of responsibility-sensitive accounts of justice is considered. The chapters of this book are positioned in relation to the wider literature on responsibility and distributive justice, and a brief outline of the chapters is provided. (shrink)

Written three years before his death, The Undiscovered Self combines acuity with concision in masterly fashion and is Jung at his very best. Offering clear and crisp insights into some of his major theories, such as the duality of human nature, the unconscious, human instinct and spirituality, Jung warns against the threats of totalitarianism and political and social propaganda to the free-thinking individual. As timely now as when it was first written, Jung's vision is a salutary reminder of why we (...) should not become passive members of the herd. With a new foreword by Sonu Shamdasani. (shrink)

This chapter identifies three contrasts between responsibility-sensitive justice and desert-sensitive justice. First, while responsibility may be appraised on prudential or moral grounds, it is argued that desert is necessarily moral. As moral appraisal is much more plausible, responsibility-sensitive justice is only attractive in one of its two formulations. Second, strict responsibility sensitivity does not compensate for all forms of bad brute luck, and forms of responsibility-sensitive justice like luck egalitarianism that provide such compensation do so by appealing to independent moral (...) concerns such as equality. Desert-sensitive justice can deliver the appropriate compensation without relying on external moral resources. Finally, while responsibility-sensitive justice harshly refuses to provide for those whose basic needs are unsatisfied due to their own negligent actions, this result can be averted by desert-sensitive justice as it can take into account responsibility-independent considerations. In sum, desert-sensitive justice appears to offer a tighter fit with considered judgments about justice. (shrink)

One of the most significant political philosophers of the twentieth century, Carl Schmitt is a deeply controversial figure who has been labeled both Nazi sympathizer and modern-day Thomas Hobbes. First published in 1938, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes used the Enlightenment philosopher’s enduring symbol of the protective Leviathan to address the nature of modern statehood. A work that predicted the demise of the Third Reich and that still holds relevance in today’s security-obsessed society, this volume (...) will be essential reading for students and scholars of political science. “Carl Schmitt is surely the most controversial German political and legal philosopher of this century. . . . We deal with Schmitt, against all odds, because history stubbornly persists in proving many of his tenets right.”— Perspectives on Political Science “[A] significant contribution. . . . The relation between Hobbes and Schmitt is one of the most important questions surrounding Schmitt: it includes a distinct, though occasionally vacillating, personal identification as well as an association of ideas.”— Telos. (shrink)

With a characteristically broad and provocative treatment, Dahlhaus examines a single music-aesthetical idea from various historical and philosophical viewpoints. "Essential reading for anyone interested in the larger intellectual framework in which Romantic music found its place, a framework that to a remarkable degree has continued to shape our image of music."--Robert P. Morgan, Yale University Carl Dahlhaus (1928-1989) is the author of a highly influential body of works on the foundations of music history and aesthetics.

This work presents a dialogue between classical and contemporary Indian and postmodern thinkers. Juxtaposing the diverse perspectives of Indian philosophers and philosophies, including Buddhism, Sankara, and Radhakrishnan, and western postmodern thinkers such as Lacan and Derrida, Olson addresses topics such as desire, suffering, the self, and identity.

Regional planning for improved agricultural capacity to supply produce, legumes, and whole grains has the potential to improve population health as well as the local food economy. This case study of Waterloo Region (WR), Canada, had two objectives. First, we estimate the quantity of locally grown vegetables, fruits, legumes, and whole grains needed to help meet the Region of Waterloo population’s optimal nutritional requirements currently and in 2026. Secondly, we estimate how much of these healthy food requirements for the WR (...) population could realistically be produced through local agriculture by the year 2026. Results show that a shift of approximately 10% of currently cropped hectares to the production of key nutritious foods would be both agriculturally feasible and nutritionally significant to the growing population. We supplement our findings with some agronomic considerations and community-level strategies that would inform and support such change. The methodology of this study could be applied to other regions: more such analyses would create a broader picture of the diverse qualitative and quantitative agricultural shifts that could synchronize optimal land use with dietary recommendations, thus informing coordinated policy and planning. (shrink)

According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of scientific (...) explanation. In C. G. Hempel (Ed.), Aspects of scientific explanation (pp. 331–496). New York: Free Press; Kitcher (1989); Machamer, P., Darden, L., & Craver, C. F. (2000). Thinking about mechanisms. Philosophy of Science, 67(1), 1–25). My concern is with the minimal suggestion that an adequate philosophical theory of scientific explanation can limit its attention to the format or structure with which theories are represented. The representational subsumption view is a plausible hypothesis about the psychology of understanding. It is also a plausible claim about how scientists present their knowledge to the world. However, one cannot address the central questions for a philosophical theory of scientific explanation without turning one’s attention from the structure of representations to the basic commitments about the worldly structures that plausibly count as explanatory. A philosophical theory of scientific explanation should achieve two goals. The first is explanatory demarcation. It should show how explanation relates with other scientific achievements, such as control, description, measurement, prediction, and taxonomy. The second is explanatory normativity. It should say when putative explanations succeed and fail. One cannot achieve these goals without undertaking commitments about the kinds of ontic structures that plausibly count as explanatory. Representations convey explanatory information about a phenomenon when and only when they describe the ontic explanations for those phenomena. (shrink)

Deep ethical interpretivism has been the standard view of the nature of sport in the philosophy of sport for the past seventeen years or so. On this account excellence assumes the role of the foundational, ethical goal that justice assumes in Ronald Dworkin’s interpretivist model of law. However, since excellence in sports is not an ethical value, and since it should not be regarded as an ultimate goal, the case for the traditional account fails. It should be replaced by the (...) shallow interpretivist model that I begin to sketch out and defend here. (shrink)

Previous research has demonstrated that self-involvement enhances the memorability of information encountered in the past. The emergence of this effect, however, is dependent on guided evaluative processing and the explicit association of items with self. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether self-memory effects would emerge in task contexts characterized by incidental-encoding and minimal self-involvement. Integrating insights from work on source monitoring and action recognition, we hypothesized that the effects of self-involvement on memory function may be moderated by the extent (...) to which encoding experiences entail volitional processing. The results of three experiments supported this prediction. Despite the adoption of an incidental task context and stimulus materials that were inconsequential to participants, the act of selection enhanced the memorability and accessibility of information. The implications of these findings for contemporary treatments of self are considered. (shrink)

A core, constitutive norm of science is to remove or remedy the artefacts in one’s data. Here, we consider examples of artefacts from many fields of science (for example, astronomy, economics, electrophysiology, psychology, and systems neuroscience) and discuss their contribution to a more general evidential selection problem at the heart of the epistemology of evidence. Synthesizing and building on previously disparate discussions in many areas of the philosophy of science, we provide a novel, causal–pragmatic account that fits the examples and (...) clarifies the practices by which artefacts are discovered and remedied. (shrink)

The Proliferation of Rights explores how the assertion of rights has expanded dramatically since World War II. Carl Wellman illuminates for the reader the historical developments in each of the major categories of rights, including human rights, civil rights, women’s rights, patient rights, and animal rights. He concludes by assessing where this proliferation has been legitimate and helpful, cases where it has been illusory and unproductive, and alternatives to the appeal to rights.

_Black Intellectual Thought in Education_ celebrates the exceptional academic contributions of African-American education scholars Anna Julia Cooper, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Leroy Locke to the causes of social science, education, and democracy in America. By focusing on the lives and projects of these three figures specifically, it offers a powerful counter-narrative to the dominant, established discourse in education and critical social theory--helping to better serve the population that critical theory seeks to advocate. Rather than attempting to "rescue" a few (...) African American scholars from obscurity or marginalization, this powerful volume instead highlights ideas that must be probed and critically examined in order to deal with prevailing contemporary educational issues. Cooper, Woodson, and Locke’s history of engagement with race, democracy, education, gender and life is a dynamic, demanding, and authentic narrative for those engaged with these important issues. (shrink)

This remarkable book presents a rich and up-to-date view of evolution that explores the far-reaching implications of Darwin's theory and emphasizes the power, significance, and relevance of evolution to our lives today. After all, we ourselves are the product of evolution, and we can tackle many of our gravest challenges -- from lethal resurgence of antiobiotic-resistant diseases to the wave of extinctions that looms before us -- with a sound understanding of the science.

BackgroundThere are numerous ethical challenges that can impact patients and families in the health care setting. This paper reports on the results of a study conducted with a panel of clinical bioethicists in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the purpose of which was to identify the top ethical challenges facing patients and their families in health care. A modified Delphi study was conducted with twelve clinical bioethicist members of the Clinical Ethics Group of the University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics. The (...) panel was asked the question, what do you think are the top ten ethical challenges that Canadians may face in health care? The panel was asked to rank the top ten ethical challenges throughout the Delphi process and consensus was reached after three rounds.DiscussionThe top challenge ranked by the group was disagreement between patients/families and health care professionals about treatment decisions. The second highest ranked challenge was waiting lists. The third ranked challenge was access to needed resources for the aged, chronically ill, and mentally ill.SummaryAlthough many of the challenges listed by the panel have received significant public attention, there has been very little attention paid to the top ranked challenge. We propose several steps that can be taken to help address this key challenge. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on an explanation of the neglect of investigating and understanding emotional response to films. It argues that the kind of emotional experience a film offers is a proper target of ideological investigation. This chapter aims to suggest how emotions should be understood in ideological criticism. There is characterization of spectator emotion with a view toward conceptual clarification. This chapter examines two families of screen emotions: sentiment and sentimentality, and the emotions which accompany screen violence. Drawing on work (...) in both cognitive science and recent philosophy of mind, the chapter argues that a cognitive approach to the emotions offers a way of taking the role of emotions more seriously than it has been taken in most contemporary film theory. The chapter's usage of ‘cognitivism’ is distinctive by virtue of its challenge to the traditional distinction between reason and passion. (shrink)

We argue that intelligible appeals to interlevel causes (top-down and bottom-up) can be understood, without remainder, as appeals to mechanistically mediated effects. Mechanistically mediated effects are hybrids of causal and constitutive relations, where the causal relations are exclusively intralevel. The idea of causation would have to stretch to the breaking point to accommodate interlevel causes. The notion of a mechanistically mediated effect is preferable because it can do all of the required work without appealing to mysterious interlevel causes. When interlevel (...) causes can be translated into mechanistically mediated effects, the posited relationship is intelligible and should raise no special philosophical objections. When they cannot, they are suspect. (shrink)

Recent discussions on the use of metaphor have centered on how it may be used in a way that has been said to require mandatory attention to the fact that it is metaphorical, resulting in what has come to be known as deliberate metaphor (CitationSteen, 2008). While metaphor deliberateness and conventionality/novelty are conceptually distinct, associations are likely to exist in practice. This article focuses on the deliberate use of conventional metaphor in images, by way of examining the use of animate (...) and anthropomorphic metaphors in an instance of corporate branding discourse (i.e., the prospectuses of Singapore's corporatized universities). Through our analysis, we show that deliberate conventional metaphor serves to reinforce particular conceptualizations rather than effect radical conceptual change. Moreover, we discuss visual and multimodal metaphor as deliberate if used in carefully crafted texts and draw on the notion of an image's connotative meaning to point out how such deliberateness can be further accentuated. The article concludes by discussing some implications for how the degree of conventionality is likely to have an effect on how deliberate metaphor achieves its key objective of changing addressees’ concepts of a particular Target. (shrink)

ABSTRACTBernard Suits and other formalists endorse both the logical incompatibility thesis and the view that rule-breakings resulting in penalties can be a legitimate part of a game. This is what Fred D’Agostino calls ‘the problem of penalties’. In this paper, I reject both Suits’ and D’Agostino’s responses to the problem and argue instead that the solution is to abandon Suits’ view that the constitutive rules of all games are alike. Whereas the logical incompatibility thesis applies to games in which players’ (...) actions are perfectly controlled, it does not apply to sports. This insight not only justifies the rejection of formalism as a theory about the nature of sport but it also helps explain the greater normative complexity of sports, which in turn leads to the idea that in sports ‘cheating’ should be interpreted as a genus. (shrink)

It is often taken for granted that notions of health and disease are generally applicable across the biological world, in that they are not restricted to contemporary human beings, and can be unproblematically applied to a variety of organisms both past and present. In the historical sciences it is also common to normatively contrast health states of individuals and populations from different times and places: e.g., to say that due to nutrition or pathogen load, some lived healthier lives than others. (...) However, health concepts in contemporary philosophy of medicine have not been developed with such cross-lineage, non-human, or diachronic uses in mind, and this generates what I call the ‘new normal’ problem. I argue that the new normal problem shows that current naturalistic approaches to health are worryingly incomplete. Using examples drawn from evolutionary archaeology and the human fossil record, I outline an alternative, function-based strategy for naturalizing health that might help address the new normal problem. Interestingly, this might also reconstruct a certain uniqueness for humans in the philosophy and science of health, due to the deep history of obligate enculturation and cultural adaptation that archaeology demonstrates. (shrink)