To Live Until We Say Good‐bye. By Elisabeth Kübler‐Ross.

To Live Until We Say Good‐bye. By Elisabeth Kübler‐Ross.

I. Introduction. In his recent book, On What There Must Be, Ross Harrison presents two arguments designed to show that in all possible worlds there are objects which exist unperceived. The modality of these two “refutations of idealism” makes them especially interesting. A philosopher might, after all, believe that there is more to this world than immaterial minds and their sensations and yet believe that a world of such entities is still possible.

We argue that Koch’s postulates are best understood within an interventionist account of causation, in the sense described in Woodward. We show how this treatment helps to resolve interpretive puzzles associated with Koch’s work and how it clarifies the different roles the postulates play in providing useful, yet not universal criteria for disease causation. Our paper is an effort at rational reconstruction; we attempt to show how Koch’s postulates and reasoning make sense and are normatively justified within an interventionist framework (...) and more difficult to understand within alternative frameworks for thinking about causation. (shrink)

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

analogy, the similarity along with difference, among meanings, among sorts of thinking, and among realities. Analogy theory ori­ginated with *Aristotle in its three main parts: analogy of meaning, analogous thinking, and analogy of being. There were some ante­cedents in *Plato, where the names of Forms and of participating things are the same but differ in meaning, and the notion of ‘being’ is said to differ with what we are talking about, for example Forms versus physical things (Sophist). Systematic use of (...) the three elem­ents to unify philosophy and to resolve problems is, however, Aristotle's invention along with the idea that *metaphor is a species of analogy. Aristotle distinguished what were later called analogies of attribution, based on causation, signs, symptoms, and represen­tations (medical skill, medical supplies; hat/head cover, hat/in pic­ture), from analogy based on proportionality, A: B :: C : D; where the common implicit predicate is related in meaning (supplied food. (shrink)

Plato: Symposium, translated by B. Jowett. Phaedo, translated by B. Jowett. Sophist, translated by B. Jowett.--Aristotle: De anima, translated by R. D. Hicks. Metaphysics (selections) translated by H. Tredennick. Nichomachean ethics (selections) translated by H. Rackham.--R. Descartes: Meditations, translated by E. S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross.--G. Berkeley: Three dialogues between Hylas and Philonus.--D. Hume: Dialogues concerning natural religion.--I. Kant: Prolegomena to every future, translated by C. J. Friedrich. Metaphysical foundations of morals, translated by C. J. Friedrich.

I examine the metaphysical issue of the nature of color. I argue that there are two distinct ranges of colors, namely, physical colors, which are disjunctive monadic physical properties of physical objects, and mental colors, which are properties of neural processes. ;A pair of claims provide the motivation for subjectivist and dispositionalist proposals about the nature of color, proposals which I reject. The first claim holds that a description of colors according to our ordinary experience of color provides a specification (...) of some aspects of the nature of color. The second holds that our ordinary experience of color provides access to the nature of color. ;In chapter 1, I argue that visual experiences have mental colors, neural properties which importantly determine our color categories. However, I reject C. L. Hardin's and James A. McGilvray's arguments for the subjectivist claim that the colors we attribute to physical objects are mental colors. ;In chapter 2, I show that Paul A. Boghossian and J. David Velleman's arguments in support of subjectivism rely on the assumption that visual experience provides unqualified access to the nature of color. I argue, however, that objections to their projectivism about color perception provide strong reasons to reject subjectivism as well as their assumption that visual experience provides unqualified access to the nature of color. ;In chapters 3 and 4, I examine Mark Johnston's and Christopher Peacocke's dispositionalist proposals about the nature of physical colors, which are founded on the claim that ordinary visual experience provides access to an aspect of the nature of color. I undercut dispositionalism by rejecting their arguments for the claim that ordinary visual experience provides such access. ;In chapter 5, I show that Evan Thompson's proposal that the colors of objects are relations between properties of perceivers and objects assumes that a description of color according to our ordinary experience specifies some aspects of the nature of color. I reject this assumption by distinguishing between mental color and physical color. I conclude that rather than specifying the nature of color, descriptions of colors according to our ordinary experience merely serve to fix the reference of color terms. (shrink)

Integrated Information Theory (IIT) identifies consciousness with having a maximum amount of integrated information. But a thing’s having the maximum amount of anything cannot be intrinsic to it, for that depends on how that thing compares to certain other things. IIT’s consciousness, then, is not intrinsic. A mereological argument elaborates this consequence: IIT implies that one physical system can be conscious while a physical duplicate of it is not conscious. Thus, by a common and reasonable conception of intrinsicality, IIT’s consciousness (...) is not intrinsic. It is then argued that to avoid the implication that consciousness is not intrinsic, IIT must abandon its Exclusion Postulate, which prohibits overlapping conscious systems. Indeed, theories of consciousness that attribute consciousness to physical systems, should embrace the view that some conscious systems overlap. A discussion of the admittedly counterintuitive nature of this solution, along with some medical and neuroscientific realities that would seem to support it, is included. (shrink)

Addresses the ethical traditions of the profession of arms, the potential conflict of overlapping professional obligations when doctors and lawyers don military ...

The paper discusses various concepts of 'species equality' and 'species superiority' and the assumptions concerning intrinsic value on which they depend. I investigate what philosophers from the traditional deontological (Taylor and Lombardi) and utilitarian (Singer and Attfield) perspectives have meant by their claims for species equality. I attempt to provide a framework of intrinsic values that justifies one sense in which members of a species can be said to be superior to members of another species.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ and _Philosophical Investigations_ are among the most influential philosophical books of the twentieth century, and also among the most perplexing. Wittgenstein warned again and again that he was not and would not be understood. Moreover, Wittgenstein's work seems to have little relevance to the way philosophy is done today. In _Wittgenstein in Exile_, James Klagge proposes a new way of looking at Wittgenstein -- as an exile -- that helps make sense of this. Wittgenstein's exile (...) was not, despite his wanderings from Vienna to Cambridge to Norway to Ireland, strictly geographical; rather, Klagge argues, Wittgenstein was never at home in the twentieth century. He was in exile from an earlier era -- Oswald Spengler's culture of the early nineteenth century. Klagge draws on the full range of evidence, including Wittgenstein's published work, the complete Nachlaß, correspondence, lectures, and conversations. He places Wittgenstein's work in a broad context, along a trajectory of thought that includes Job, Goethe, and Dostoyevsky. Yet Klagge also writes from an analytic philosophical perspective, discussing such topics as essentialism, private experience, relativism, causation, and eliminativism. Once we see Wittgenstein's exile, Klagge argues, we will gain a better appreciation of the difficulty of understanding Wittgenstein and his work. (shrink)

Posterior parietal cortex has traditionally been considered to be a sensory association area in which higher-order processing and intermodal integration of incoming sensory information occurs. In this paper, evidence from clinical reports and from lesion and behavioral-electrophysiological experiments using monkeys is reviewed and discussed in relation to the overall functional organization of posterior parietal association cortex, and particularly with respect to a proposed posterior parietal mechanism concerned with the initiation and control of certain classes of eye and limb movements. Preliminary (...) data from studies of the effects of posterior parietal lesions on oculomotor control in monkeys are reported.The behavioral effects of lesions of posterior parietal cortex in monkeys have been found to be similar to those which follow analogous damage of the minor hemisphere in humans, while behavioral-electrophysiological experiments have disclosed classes of neurons in this area which have functional properties closely related to the behavioral acts that are disrupted by lesions of the area. On the basis of current data from these areas of study, it is proposed that the sensory association model of posterior parietal function is inadequate to account for the complexities of the present evidence. Instead, it now appears that many diverse neural mechanisms are locatedin partin parietal cortex, that some of these mechanisms are involved in sensory processing and perceptual functions, but that others participate in motor control, and that still others are involved in attentional, motivational, or emotional processes. It is further proposed that the elementary units of these various neural mechanisms are distributed within posterior parietal cortex according to the columnar hypothesis of Mountcastle. (shrink)

A timely and accessible synthesis of the strengths, weaknesses and reality of science through the eyes of a practicing scientist.

In his book, Earth and Other Ethics, Christopher Stone attempts to account for the moral dimension of our lives insofar as it extends to nonhuman animals, plants, species, ecosystems, and even inanimate objects. In his effort to do this, he introduces a technical notion, the moral plane. Moral planes are defined both by the ontological commitments they make and by the governance mIes that pertain to the sorts of entities included in the plane. By introducing these planes, Stone is left (...) with a set of problems. Do the planes provide anything more objective than a set of alternative ways of looking at moral problems? How can one resolve apparent conflicts between the recommendations forthcoming from distinct planes? Why do certain entities constitute moral planes; and how do we decide which planes to “buy into?” Stone’s answers to these questions endorse aseries of concessions to moral relativism. In this paper I outline an alternative to Stone’s moral planes which, while sympathetic to his ethical concerns, comes down squarelyon the side of moral realism. (shrink)

Is “good” a family-resemblance concept? Wittgenstein holds it is, since cases of goodness may not have anything in common, but there may be a continuous transition from some cases to others. Von Wright and Hacker argue it is not. They hold that family-resemblance concepts satisfy two conditions that goodness does not satisfy. I assess their arguments and then present a constitutivist account of goodness that Wittgenstein seems to endorse. The constitutivist account is what one would expect if goodness was a (...) family-resemblance concept. Finally, I note that Wittgenstein's nod towards non-descriptivism in the Investigations is paralleled by Stevenson's ethical emotivism. (shrink)

Voluntarism is the view that it is from our intimate awareness of the exercise of our wills in performing actions that we arrive at our concept of causality. This view has generally been thought to be indefensible since Hume attacked it in the Treatise and Enquiry. A variant of the position is stated and defended. The views of Castaiieda, and psychologists such as Maine de Biran, Michotte, and Piaget add clarity and enhance the plausibility of the view.

Voluntarism is the view that it is from our intimate awareness of the exercise of our wills in performing actions that we arrive at our concept of causality. This view has generally been thought to be indefensible since Hume attacked it in the Treatise and Enquiry. A variant of the position is stated and defended. The views of Castaiieda, and psychologists such as Maine de Biran, Michotte, and Piaget add clarity and enhance the plausibility of the view.

In his book, Earth and Other Ethics, Christopher Stone attempts to account for the moral dimension of our lives insofar as it extends to nonhuman animals, plants, species, ecosystems, and even inanimate objects. In his effort to do this, he introduces a technical notion, the moral plane. Moral planes are defined both by the ontological commitments they make and by the governance mIes (moral maxims) that pertain to the sorts of entities included in the plane. By introducing these planes, Stone (...) is left with a set of problems. (1) Do the planes provide anything more objective than a set of alternative ways of looking at moral problems? (2) How can one resolve apparent conflicts between the recommendations forthcoming from distinct planes? (3) Why do certain entities constitute moral planes; and how do we decide which planes to “buy into?” Stone’s answers to these questions endorse aseries of concessions to moral relativism. In this paper I outline an alternative to Stone’s moral planes which, while sympathetic to his ethical concerns, comes down squarelyon the side of moral realism. (shrink)

In this book, he also demonstrates a skill shared by the greatest radical thinkers: to reveal positions we've been taught to think of as extremism to be emanations of simple human decency and common sense.

Victor and Cullen (1988) identified several dimensions of ethical climate that exist in organizations and organizational subunits. We tested the relationship between these dimensions of ethical climate and ethical behavior at different levels of analysis. Using Within and Between Analysis (WABA) (cf. Dansereau, Alutto and Yammarino, 1984), partial support was found for a relationship between dimensions of ethical climate and ethical behavior.

From Soul to Self takes us on a fascinating journey through philosophy, theology, religious studies and physiological sciences. The contributors explore the relationship between a variety of ideas that have arisen in philosophy, religion and science, each idea seeking to explain why we think we are somehow unique and distinct.

"Proceedings of an International Symposium on Measuring Economic Freedom, held July 28-30, 1988, in Vancouver, British Columbia"--T.p. verso. Includes bibliographical references (p. [174]-175).