The model of mind and body in Tibetan medical practice is based on Buddhist theory, and is neither dualistic in a Cartesian sense, nor monistic. Rather, it represents a genuine alternative to these positions by presenting mind/body interaction as a dynamic process that is situated within the context of the individual’s relationships with others and the environment. Due to the distinctiveness, yet interdependence, of mind and body, the physician’s task is to heal the patient’s mind (blo-gso) as well as body. (...) This in turn emphasizes the central importance of ‘compassion’ in the physician/patient relationship. This article investigates how Tibetan medical practitioners understand and enact the mind/ body and physician/patient relationships, and how this relates to theoretical explications of these relationships in Tibetan medical and Buddhist teachings. Furthermore, Tibetan medicine provides an interesting model for comparison with embodied theories of cognition, which see consciousness, the body and its environment as integral parts of a complex, dynamical cognitive system. (shrink)

In this paper, we contend that the psychology of addiction is similar to the psychology of ordinary, non-addictive temptation in important respects, and explore the ways in which these parallels can illuminate both addiction and ordinary action. The incentive salience account of addiction proposed by Robinson and Berridge (1993; 2001; 2008) entails that addictive desires are not in their nature different from many of the desires had by non-addicts; what is different is rather the way that addictive desires are acquired, (...) which in turn affects their strength. We examine these “incentive salience” desires, both in addicts and non-addicts, contrasting them with more cognitive desires. On this account, the self-control challenge faced by addicted agents is not different in kind from that faced by non-addicted agents – though the two may, of course, differ greatly in degree of difficulty. We explore a general model of self-control for both the addict and the non-addict, stressing that self-control may be employed at three different stages, and examining the ways in which it might be strengthened. This helps elucidate a general model of intentional action. (shrink)

In the svārthānumāna chapter of his Pramāṇavārttika, the Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti presented a defense of his claim that legitimate inference must rest on a metaphysical basis if it is to be immune from the risks ordinarily involved in inducing general principles from a finite number of observations. Even if one repeatedly observes that x occurs with y and never observes y in the absence of x, there is no guarantee, on the basis of observation alone, that one will never observe (...) y in the absence of x at some point in the future. To provide such a guarantee, claims Dharmakīrti, one must know that there is a causal connection between x and y such that there is no possibility of y occurring in the absence of x. In the course of defending this central claim, Dharmakīrti ponders how one can know that there is a causal relationship of the kind necessary to guarantee a proposition of the form “Every y occurs with an x.” He also dismisses an interpretation of his predecessor Dignāga whereby Dignāga would be claiming non-observation of y in the absence of x is sufficient to warrant to the claim that no y occurs without x. The present article consists of a translation of kārikās 11–38 of Pramānavārttikam, svārthānumānaparicchedaḥ along with Dharmakīrti’s own prose commentary. The translators have also provided an English commentary, which includes a detailed introduction to the central issues in the translated text and their history in the literature before Dharmakīrti. (shrink)

Substantial research demonstrates that ethical leaders improve a broad range of outcomes for their employees, but considerably less attention has been devoted to the performance and success of the leaders themselves. The present study explores the extent to which being ethical relates to leaders’ performance and promotability. We address this question by examining ethical leadership from the two ethical perspectives most common in Western traditions—i.e., the “right” and the “good”—and whether one might be more closely associated than the other with (...) performance and promotability evaluations. Results from 117 employee-supervisor-manager triads show that supervisors with a deontological outlook are more likely to be seen as ethical leaders and that utilitarian leaders are more likely to earn higher performance evaluations. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on ethical leadership. (shrink)

While Richard Joyce’s moral skepticism might seem to be an extreme metaethical view, it is actually far more moderate than it might first appear. By articulating four challenges facing his approach to moral skepticism, I argue that Joyce’s moderation is, in fact, a theoretical liability. First, the fact that Joyce is not skeptical about normativity in general makes it possible to develop close approximations to morality, lending support to moderate moral revisionism over moral error theory. Second, Joyce relies on (...) strong, contentious conceptual and empirical claims in support of his views. Third, Joyce’s evolutionary debunking argument threatens to backfire, generalizing to all normative judgments. Finally, Joyce fails to offer an adequate account of the normativity of desire. Each of these four challenges can be either sidestepped or embraced by radicalizing and defending a global form of normative skepticism. There are thus several ways in which global normative skepticism appears to be in a more robust dialectical position than Joyce’s moral skepticism. Furthermore, I argue, Joyce’s arguments against global normative skepticism are unconvincing. While this discussion is framed in terms of Joyce’s work, its arguments will apply to other moral skeptics who are not also global normative skeptics. The result is an invitation for Joyce and other moral skeptics to leave these problems behind and join the radical camp. (shrink)

Evolutionary debunking arguments purport to undercut the justification of our moral judgments by showing why a tendency to make moral judgments would evolve regardless of the truth of those judgments. Machery and Mallon (2010. Evolution of morality. In J.M. Doris and The Moral Psychology Research Group (Eds.), The Moral Psychology Handbook (pp. 3-46). Oxford: Oxford University Press) have recently tried to disarm these arguments by showing that moral cognition – in the sense that is relevant to debunking – is not (...) the product of natural selection. Specifically, they present a barrage of increasingly influential challenges against reciprocity-based approaches to moral nativism. In the present paper I defend the nativist account of moral cognition against these criticisms, thereby bolstering the skeptical conclusions of evolutionary debunking arguments. However, Machery and Mallon's critique does successfully highlight several vulnerabilities in Richard Joyce's approach to debunking, suggesting several ways in which it can be revised toward generating a more robust version of the argument. (shrink)

This encyclopedia article traces the development of Richard J. Bernstein's philosophical work and provide s short biography.

In this reflection I draw out Richard J. Bernstein’s claim that he was a ‘scavenger’ and put it to use in revisiting main themes of his engagements with pragmatism, hermeneutics, Hegel, and critical theory. This piece is included in a memorial issue of Dewey Studies on Bernstein.

In the early days of natural language semantics, Donald Davidson issued a challenge to those, like Richard Montague, who would do semantics in a model-theoretic framework that gives a central role to a model-relative notion of truth. Davidson argued that no theory of this kind can claim to be an account of real truth conditions unless it first makes clear how the relativized notion relates to our ordinary non-relativized notion of truth. In the 1990s, Davidson’s challenge was developed by (...) Etchemendy into an argument against the model-theoretic account of logical consequence, one that also threatens the attempt to capture natural language entailment relations in modeltheoretic terms—one of the central desiderata of semantics. Nevertheless, the modeltheoretic framework has flourished within natural language semantics. But it has flourished without any consensus among semanticists as to how to answer Davidson’s challenge. The aim of this essay is to develop an answer. I argue that model-theoretic semantics is best understood as model-based science: a semantics for a natural language is a scientific model of truth conditions. This makes good sense of the way model-theoretic tools are used in natural language semantics. And it allows us to answer Davidson’s challenge by showing how a theory that employs a relativized notion of truth manages to tell us about ordinary truth conditions. Moreover, I argue that it helps us see how semantics can provide genuine explanations for natural language entailment and other truth-conditional phenomena. (shrink)

The paper shows that contextuals, words such as those discussed by Richard Vallée in his paper, “On local bars and imported beer”, include not only adjectives and nouns but also verbs, prepositions and adverbs. It shows, moreover, contextuals form just one subclass of words whose complements are optional, that is, words analogous to polyadic predicates of predicate logic. Just as different words, when their complements are omitted, give rise to reflexive (to wash), reciprocal (to meet) and indefinite (to eat) (...) construals, so contextuals give rise to an indexical construal. The paper sets out how such optional complements, or polyadic predicates, as it were, can be handled completely with the syntax and semantics of English, without recourse to special pragmatic principles, lexical ambiguity or phonetically null elements. Though not discussed here, the approach nonetheless applies, it seems, to other languages, such as Chinese. (shrink)

Peter Williams complains that Richard Dawkins wraps his naturalism in ‘a fake finery of counterfeit meaning and purpose’. For his part, Williams has wrapped his complaint in an unoriginal and inapt analogy. The weavers in Hans Christian Andersen's fable announce that the Emperor's clothes are invisible to stupid people; almost the whole population pretends to see them for fear of being thought stupid . Fear of being thought stupid does not seem to trouble Richard Dawkins. Moreover, Williams offers (...) no reason to think that such fear motivates any of Dawkins' readers. Perhaps all we are supposed to take from the fable is that Dawkins' naturalism is obviously lacking in meaning and purpose. If that is the intended reading, then by using this analogy, Williams has given himself an unnecessarily difficult task. Surely, it would be achievement enough for him to show that Dawkins' naturalism lacks meaning and purpose. There is no reason for Williams to make the extra claim that it obviously lacks meaning and purpose. After all, there is an obvious difficulty with arguing over several pages that something is obviously the case. (shrink)

Hilbert’s program was an ambitious and wide-ranging project in the philosophy and foundations of mathematics. In order to “dispose of the foundational questions in mathematics once and for all,” Hilbert proposed a two-pronged approach in 1921: first, classical mathematics should be formalized in axiomatic systems; second, using only restricted, “finitary” means, one should give proofs of the consistency of these axiomatic systems. Although Gödel’s incompleteness theorems show that the program as originally conceived cannot be carried out, it had many partial (...) successes, and generated important advances in logical theory and metatheory, both at the time and since. The article discusses the historical background and development of Hilbert’s program, its philosophical underpinnings and consequences, and its subsequent development and influences since the 1930s. (shrink)

Evolutionary fitness threats and rewards are associated with subjectively unpleasant and pleasant sensations, respectively. Initially, these correlations appear explainable via adaptation by natural selection. But here I analyse the major metaphysical perspectives on consciousness – physicalism, dualism, and panpsychism – and conclude that none help to understand the adaptive-seeming correlations via adaptation. I also argue that a recently proposed explanation, the phenomenal powers view, has major problems that mean it cannot explain the adaptive-seeming correlations via adaptation either. So the mystery (...) – call it the evolutionary paradox of consciousness – remains. Some have used this mystery to argue for non-naturalistic (e.g. theistic) explanations. But I propose a naturalistic, non-adaptive explanation of the adaptive-seeming correlations: namely, ‘sensational associative learning’ during development. In this perspective, pairing of particular sensations with unconditioned stimuli – fitness rewards or threats – cause the sensations themselves to come to be interpreted as good or bad, respectively. Sensations, like colours, that are not reliably paired with either fitness rewards or threats remain largely unvalenced. Sensational associative learning also provides explanations for adaptive-seeming structural aspects of sensations, such as the observation that sounds of different pitch are experienced as ordinal in correspondence to their wavelengths while the same is not true of colours of different hue. The sensational associative learning perspective appears compatible with physicalism, panpsychism, and dualism (though not epiphenomenalism). (shrink)

This study reconstructs the relationship between philosophy and politics in the way in which Heidegger's failure as a politician influenced the redevelopment of philosophy in the 1930s. The author also explains how Heidegger's failure influenced the content and direction of his later work.

Logic has pride of place in mathematics and its 20th century offshoot, computer science. Modern symbolic logic was developed, in part, as a way to provide a formal framework for mathematics: Frege, Peano, Whitehead and Russell, as well as Hilbert developed systems of logic to formalize mathematics. These systems were meant to serve either as themselves foundational, or at least as formal analogs of mathematical reasoning amenable to mathematical study, e.g., in Hilbert’s consistency program. Similar efforts continue, but have been (...) expanded by the development of sophisticated methods to study the properties of such systems using proof and model theory. In parallel with this evolution of logical formalisms as tools for articulating mathematical theories (broadly speaking), much progress has been made in the quest for a mechanization of logical inference and the investigation of its theoretical limits, culminating recently in the development of new foundational frameworks for mathematics with sophisticated computer-assisted proof systems. In addition, logical formalisms developed by logicians in mathematical and philosophical contexts have proved immensely useful in describing theories and systems of interest to computer scientists, and to some degree, vice versa. Three examples of the influence of logic in computer science are automated reasoning, computer verification, and type systems for programming languages. (shrink)

The proof theory of many-valued systems has not been investigated to an extent comparable to the work done on axiomatizatbility of many-valued logics. Proof theory requires appropriate formalisms, such as sequent calculus, natural deduction, and tableaux for classical (and intuitionistic) logic. One particular method for systematically obtaining calculi for all finite-valued logics was invented independently by several researchers, with slight variations in design and presentation. The main aim of this report is to develop the proof theory of finite-valued first order (...) logics in a general way, and to present some of the more important results in this area. In Systems covered are the resolution calculus, sequent calculus, tableaux, and natural deduction. This report is actually a template, from which all results can be specialized to particular logics. (shrink)

Methods available for the axiomatization of arbitrary finite-valued logics can be applied to obtain sound and complete intelim rules for all truth-functional connectives of classical logic including the Sheffer stroke and Peirce’s arrow. The restriction to a single conclusion in standard systems of natural deduction requires the introduction of additional rules to make the resulting systems complete; these rules are nevertheless still simple and correspond straightforwardly to the classical absurdity rule. Omitting these rules results in systems for intuitionistic versions of (...) the connectives in question. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Trinitarian Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar: An Introduction by Brendan McInernyEndika MartinezThe Trinitarian Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar: An Introduction by Brendan McInerny (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), 250 pp.Thomas Aquinas affirms that knowledge of the doctrine of the Trinity is useful to think about creation and about the salvation of humanity (Summa theologiae I, q. 32, a. 1, (...) ad 3). Brendan McInerny addresses this challenge by introducing, in a captivating and suggestive way, the Trinitarian theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. This book responds in great detail to the question posed by Balthasar in Razing up the Bastions: What place does the doctrine of the Trinity have in Christian existence? In order to answer this question, the author divides the book into four chapters, preceded by an introduction and followed by a conclusion. The first two chapters are about the immanent Trinity, the third about deification, and the last one about apophaticism.In the introduction, McInerny comments on Balthasar's distinct theological method. This method has been praised by some scholars, such as Lucy Gardner or David Moss, for presenting old mysteries in new configurations; but it has also been criticized by other scholars such as Karl Rahner or Karen Kilby for alleged Gnosticism or presuming a "God's eye view... above Tradition, Scripture or history... against his [Balthasar's] desire to remain epistemologically humble" (6). McInerny reaffirms that Balthasar never belittles the abysmal difference between creatures and God; but rather, he recognizes that alterity is founded on a principle of similarity. Thus, the Thomistic real distinction does not stop the possibility of creatures becoming "sons and daughters of the Father, in the Son, by the Holy Spirit." Instead, difference is the principle of similarity, since it is founded on the "movement of the divine essence... the kenotic outpouring, self-sacrifice, self-gift of the intra-trinitarian difference" (13).Chapter 1, "God is Love: Hans Urs von Balthasar's Theology of the Immanent Trinity," deals with the generation of the Son, the procession of the Holy Spirit, and thus the divine relations. The author explains that Balthasar seeks to affirm a strong unity in the person of the Father as the foundation of divinity or as the core of the mystery of selflessness and pure love. This unity, however, appears in the very difference between the persons in an "intra-mental act of producing distinct persons capable of reciprocal acts—a reciprocity required if God is love" (16). The Father is Father insofar as he eternally gives the entirety of divinity to the Son; and the Son is Son insofar as the groundless "love of the Father finds its expression in the mirror of the Son's own groundless consent to, and thanksgiving for, being [End Page 382] begotten" (26). The Spirit is in-between the Father and the Son as their bond of love so that it seals and maintains "the infinite difference between them"; the Spirit is the "identity of the gift-as-given and the gift-as-received in thanksgiving" (28). In the order of processions, the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son in a miracle of eternal fruitfulness. The author argues in this chapter that there is both an active and passive function in each person of the Trinity due to a real I-Thou relationship that occurs in the divine life. Despite the provisional nature of any concept applied to God, this dialogue can be considered "of reciprocal wonder and worship, of infinite reciprocal gratitude,... the reciprocity of divine love as therefore the reciprocity of divine worship, adoration and prayer" (41).In chapter 2, "A Confluence of Diverse Tendencies: The Sources of Balthasar's Immanent Trinitarian Theology," the author seeks to put Balthasar into context. McInerny highlights the influence of Richard of Saint Victor and Bonaventure in the context of the Franciscan and Thom-istic dispute over whether the Father is Father by generating the Son, or if he generates insofar as he is Father. Balthasar says that "the Father cannot be thought to exist "prior" to his self-surrender. He is the movement of self-giving that... (shrink)

Studies the politics of Heidegger in terms of "thrownness" or "existential contingency". Attempts to think through Heidegger's philosophy in a manner that parallels his own dialogue with other key western thinkers.

Burt's argument relies on a motte-and-bailey fallacy. Burt aims to argue against the value of genetics for social science; instead she argues against certain interpretations of a specific kind of genetics tool, polygenic scores (PGSs). The limitations, previously identified by behavioural geneticists including ourselves, do not negate the value of PGSs, let alone genetics in general, for social science.

The ancient Taoist text that forms the central part of this book was discovered by Wilhelm, who recognized it as essentially a practical guide to the integration of personality. Foreword and Appendix by Carl Jung; illustrations. Translated by Cary F. Baynes.A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book.

Textbook on Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and computability theory, based on the Open Logic Project. Covers recursive function theory, arithmetization of syntax, the first and second incompleteness theorem, models of arithmetic, second-order logic, and the lambda calculus.

"This is an excellent textbook on Neoplatonism which gives the reader a very concise and lucid overview of the basic doctrines and leading thinkers of the last great philosophy to emerge before the Christianization of the Roman Empire. I’ve no doubt that my students next semester will benefit from the analyses contained in the book. The contents of the chapters are very informative and adequately place developments in their socio-cultural context." --Michael B. Simmons, Auburn University at Montgomery.

This paper argues that promises are proposals in joint practical deliberation, the activity of deciding together what to do. More precisely: to promise to ϕ is to propose (in a particular way) to decide together with your addressee(s) that you will ϕ. I defend this deliberative theory by showing that the activity of joint practical deliberation naturally gives rise to a speech act with exactly the same properties as promises. A certain kind of proposal to make a joint decision regarding (...) one's own actions turns out to have the very same normative effects, under the very same conditions, as a promise. I submit that this cannot be a coincidence: we should conclude that promises and the relevant kind of proposals in joint practical deliberation are one and the same. (shrink)

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) makes use of explicit procedures for grading evidence for causal claims. Normally, these procedures categorise evidence of correlation produced by statistical trials as better evidence for a causal claim than evidence of mechanisms produced by other methods. We argue, in contrast, that evidence of mechanisms needs to be viewed as complementary to, rather than inferior to, evidence of correlation. In this paper we first set out the case for treating evidence of mechanisms alongside evidence of correlation in (...) explicit protocols for evaluating evidence. Next we provide case studies which exemplify the ways in which evidence of mechanisms complements evidence of correlation in practice. Finally, we put forward some general considerations as to how the two sorts of evidence can be more closely integrated by EBM. (shrink)

Having visited Ireland regularly during the 1930s, Ludwig Wittgenstein resigned his Cambridge philosophy professorship in 1947 and moved there, living in a fishing village on the Atlantic coast and hotels in Dublin and the Wicklow Mountains. Although Wittgenstein spent some time out of the country, Ireland was effectively his base for three very productive years during which he worked on what would become one of his key books, the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein in Ireland represents the first sustained account (...) of Wittgenstein's time in Ireland, placing it in its historical context. Wall pays a good deal of attention to the representation of the Irish landscape in which the Austrian philosopher found himself able to work; a large part of his writings were produced in the bleak landscapes of Ireland and Norway. (shrink)

Despite their differences in origin, the three influential schools of twentieth-century continental cultural criticism--the Frankfurt School, existentialism, and poststructuralism--have long been treated as an ensemble and with critical hesitancy. Examining these schools as responses to the apparent collapse of Western civilization in the twentieth-century and as formidable intellectual challenges to the cultural legacies of the Enlightenment, this book provides a productive base for criticism and broadens our understanding of their histories and reception.

Recent work in moral philosophy has emphasized the foundational role played by interpersonal accountability in the analysis of moral concepts such as moral right and wrong, moral obligation and duty, blameworthiness, and moral responsibility (Darwall 2006; 2013a; 2013b). Extending this framework to the field of moral psychology, we hypothesize that our moral attitudes, emotions, and motives are also best understood as based in accountability. Drawing on a large body of empirical evidence, we argue that the implicit aim of the central (...) moral motives and emotions is to hold people - whether oneself or others - accountable for compliance with the demands of morality. Moral condemnation is based in a motive to get perpetrators to hold themselves accountable for their wrongdoing, not, as is commonly supposed, a mere retributive motive to make perpetrators suffer (�2). And moral conscience is based in a genuine motive to hold oneself accountable for behaving in accordance with moral demands, not, as is commonly supposed, a mere egoistic motive to appear moral to others (�3). The accountability-based theory of the moral motives and emotions we offer provides better explanations of the extant empirical data than any of the major alternative theories of moral motivation. Moreover, conceiving of moral psychology in this way gives us a new and illuminating perspective on what makes morality distinctive: its essential connection to our practice of holding one another accountable (�4). (shrink)

What accounts for the capacity of ordinary speakers to comprehend utterances of their language? The phenomenology of hearing speech in one’s own language makes it tempting to many epistemologists to look to perception for an answer to this question. That is, just as a visual experience as of a red square is often taken to give the perceiver immediate justification for believing that there is a red square in front of her, perhaps an auditory experience as of the speaker asserting (...) that p gives the competent hearer immediate justification for believing that the speaker has asserted that p. My aim here is to offer reasons for resisting this temptation. I argue that the perceptual model cannot adequately account for the hearer’s justification in many cases. The arguments here also allow us to draw certain further morals about the role of phenomenology in the epistemology of perception. (shrink)

When in the sixth century Dionysius the Areopagite declared beauty to be a name for God, he gave birth to something that had long been gestating in the womb of philosophical and theological thought. In doing so, Dionysius makes one of his most pivotal contributions to Christian theological discourse. It is a contribution that is enthusiastically received by the schoolmen of the Middle Ages, and it comes to permeate the thought of scholasticism in a multitude of ways. But perhaps nowhere (...) is the Dionysian influence more pronounced than in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. This book examines both the historical development of beauty's appropriation as a name for God in Dionysius and Thomas, and the various contours of what it means. The argument that emerges from this study is that given the impact that the divine name theological tradition has within the development of Christian theological discourse, beauty as a divine name indicates the way in which beauty is most fundamentally conceived in the Christian theological tradition as a theological theme. As a phenomenon of inquiry, beauty proves itself to be enigmatic and elusive to even the sharpest intellects in the Greek philosophical tradition. When it is absorbed within the Christian theological synthesis, however, its enigmatic content proves to be a powerful resource for theological reasoning. (shrink)

In the context of transgender health, most people are not comfortable with allowing a twelve‐year‐old child with gender dysphoria to elect to undergo gender reassignment surgery. The likelihood is too high that the child would be unable to fully comprehend the scope of a decision that carries significant, permanent consequences, particularly because the decision to surgically change gender is based upon a conception of gender that can fluctuate during adolescent years. Conversely, however, most people would not contend that this fluidity (...) is reason to wholly deny certain medical care such as hormonal treatments to transgender youth, a demographic with extremely high rates of violent behavior, self‐harm, and suicide. This paper will explore ethical considerations to this emerging debate of what therapeutic options should be offered to transgender children and adolescents.Pediatric endocrinologists have been treating gender dysphoric adolescents with puberty‐suppressing drugs and, to a lesser extent, with cross‐sex hormone therapies for more than twenty years. Clinicians and thought leaders have mentioned ethical components of this emerging practice in the few cohort studies and clinical review articles about the subject. However, ethics have generally been a secondary consideration in the medical academic literature. In this paper, I will provide a brief overview of the practice, summarize the current research on hormone treatment for transgender minors, and provide an ethical analysis of the practice. (shrink)

Philosophy and Kafka is a collection of original essays interrogating the relationship of literature and philosophy. The essays either discuss specific philosophical commentaries on Kafka’s work, consider the possible relevance of certain philosophical outlooks for examining Kafka’s writings, or examine Kafka’s writings in terms of a specific philosophical theme, such as communication and subjectivity, language and meaning, knowledge and truth, the human/animal divide, justice, and freedom.