Each contributor to this book has used personal experience as the basis from which to frame his individual sociological perspectives. Because they have personalized their work, their accounts are real, and recognizable as having come from 'real' persons, about 'real' experiences. There are no objectively-distanced disembodied third person entities in these accounts. These writers are actual people whose stories will make you laugh, cry, think, and want to know more.

Forms of Artificial Intelligence (AI) are already being deployed into clinical settings and research into its future healthcare uses is accelerating. Despite this trajectory, more research is needed regarding the impacts on patients of increasing AI decision making. In particular, the impersonal nature of AI means that its deployment in highly sensitive contexts-of-use, such as in healthcare, raises issues associated with patients’ perceptions of (un) dignified treatment. We explore this issue through an experimental vignette study comparing individuals’ perceptions of being (...) treated in a dignified and respectful way in various healthcare decision contexts. Participants were subject to a 2 (human or AI decision maker) x 2 (positive or negative decision outcome) x 2 (diagnostic or resource allocation healthcare scenario) factorial design. We found evidence of a “human bias” (i.e., a preference for human over AI decision makers) and an “outcome bias” (i.e., a preference for positive over negative outcomes). However, we found that for perceptions of respectful and dignified interpersonal treatment, it matters more who makes the decisions in diagnostic cases and it matters more what the outcomes are for resource allocation cases. We also found that humans were consistently viewed as appropriate decision makers and AI was viewed as dehumanizing, and that participants perceived they were treated better when subject to diagnostic as opposed to resource allocation decisions. Thematic coding of open-ended text responses supported these results. We also outline the theoretical and practical implications of these findings. (shrink)

Personal space is the distance that people tend to maintain from others during daily life in a largely unconscious manner. For humans, personal space-related behaviors represent one form of non-verbal social communication, similar to facial expressions and eye contact. Given that the changes in social behavior and experiences that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, including “social distancing” and widespread social isolation, may have altered personal space preferences, we investigated this possibility in two independent samples. First, we compared the size of (...) personal space measured before the onset of the pandemic to its size during the pandemic in separate groups of subjects. Personal space size was significantly larger in those assessed during the onset of the pandemic. Lastly, we found that the practice of social distancing and perceived risk of being infected with COVID-19 were linked to this personal space enlargement during the pandemic. Taken together, these findings suggest that personal space boundaries expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic independent of actual infection risk level. As the day-to-day effects of the pandemic subside, personal space preferences may provide one index of recovery from the psychological effects of this crisis. (shrink)

Agricultural modernisation is a longstanding goal of China’s Party-state. Since the early 2000s, it has pursued this goal through policies designed to facilitate land consolidation and support the expansion of large agricultural enterprises – ‘New Agricultural Operators’ (NAOs). In this paper we explore the effect of these policies on the livelihoods of a cohort of smallholder orange growers in the mountainous regions of Hubei province and the local political economy. An analysis of data from a 2019 survey of 266 households (...) and interviews with villagers, agribusiness executives, cooperative leaders, and government officials, we find smallholder farmers are earning good incomes as independent commodity producers, withstanding attempts by local officials at land consolidation, and bypassing NAOs to self-determine their own modes of production and exchange. Our results speak to the ongoing debate about the future of smallholder farming in China, identify the strengths and limitations of recent state-centric analyses of agrarian transition, and re-iterate the pitfalls of the central government’s agricultural modernisation agenda. (shrink)

Human communication is often thought about in terms of transmitted messages in a conventional code like a language. But communication requires a specialized interactive intelligence. Senders have to be able to perform recipient design, while receivers need to be able to do intention recognition, knowing that recipient design has taken place. To study this interactive intelligence in the lab, we developed a new task that taps directly into the underlying abilities to communicate in the absence of a conventional code. We (...) show that subjects are remarkably successful communicators under these conditions, especially when senders get feedback from receivers. Signaling is accomplished by the manner in which an instrumental action is performed, such that instrumentally dysfunctional components of an action are used to convey communicative intentions. The findings have important implications for the nature of the human communicative infrastructure, and the task opens up a line of experimentation on human communication. (shrink)

Human communication is often thought about in terms of transmitted messages in a conventional code like a language. But communication requires a specialized interactive intelligence. Senders have to be able to perform recipient design, while receivers need to be able to do intention recognition, knowing that recipient design has taken place. To study this interactive intelligence in the lab, we developed a new task that taps directly into the underlying abilities to communicate in the absence of a conventional code. We (...) show that subjects are remarkably successful communicators under these conditions, especially when senders get feedback from receivers. Signaling is accomplished by the manner in which an instrumental action is performed, such that instrumentally dysfunctional components of an action are used to convey communicative intentions. The findings have important implications for the nature of the human communicative infrastructure, and the task opens up a line of experimentation on human communication. (shrink)

IntroductionCognitive impairment is a highly prevalent non-motor feature of Parkinson’s disease. A better understanding of the underlying pathophysiology may help in identifying therapeutic targets to prevent or treat dementia. This study sought to identify metabolic alterations in the prefrontal cortex, a key region for cognitive functioning that has been implicated in cognitive dysfunction in PD.MethodsProton Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy was used to investigate metabolic changes in the PFC of a cohort of cognitively normal individuals without PD, as well as PD participants (...) with either normal cognition, mild cognitive impairment, or dementia. Ratios to Creatine resonance were obtained for glutamate, glutamine and glutamate combined, N-acetylaspartate, myoinositol, and total choline, and correlated with cognitive scores across multiple domains administered to the PD participants only.ResultsWhen individuals retain cognitive capabilities, the presence of Parkinson’s disease does not create metabolic disturbances in the PFC. However, when cognitive symptoms are present, PFC Glu/Cre ratios decrease with significant differences between the PD-NC and PPD groups. In addition, Glu/Cre ratios and memory scores were marginally associated, but not after Bonferroni correction.ConclusionThese preliminary findings indicate that fluctuations in prefrontal glutamate may constitute a biomarker for the progression of cognitive impairments in PD. We caution for larger MRS investigations of carefully defined PD groups. (shrink)

A Pulitzer Prize–winning dance critic teaches us to appreciate—and enact—grace in every dimension, from the physical to the emotional. Grace has long been taught as essential to civilized living. The Three Graces—goddesses of charm, beauty, and creativity—exemplify ease and harmony with one another and the world around them. But what has happened to this simple, marvelous concept of being at ease in the world? With warmth, humor, and an ever-perceptive eye, Sarah L. Kaufman sifts the graceful from the graceless, (...) celebrating heart-catching moments of physical elegance in sports, movies, dance, fashion, and music; rare sightings of celebrity grace; the secrets of gracious hosts; and grace found unexpectedly, in the kitchen of a high-end restaurant and among strippers in a basement bar. Kaufman’s thought-provoking reflections on these physical and social acts of grace offer hope for even the clumsiest, most awkward among us. Guided by the muse of Cary Grant (with further inspiration from Smokey Robinson, Roger Federer, Nelson Mandela, Margot Fonteyn, Amy Purdy, Beyoncé, and others), Kaufman illuminates the importance of grace in the small moments of everyday life. In The Art of Grace, she inspires us to walk taller, spend time on unnecessary kindnesses, and celebrate the grace notes in our lives and those of others. (shrink)

[John Rogers retired as Editor of the BJHP in March 2011. We are delighted to publish this specially commissioned appreciation of John's work by Sarah Hutton, who has been on the Editorial Board since the founding of the journal in 1993 and who was Chair of the British Society for the History of Philosophy from 1998 to 2004. (Ed.)].

John Rogers (G.A.J. Rogers) died on 26th November 2022 at the age of 84. Professor Emeritus at the University of Keele and a specialist in the history of seventeenth-century philosophy, John was on...

In this article we review Western discourse on the relationship between Daoism and anarchist political theory. In particular, we focus on the anarchist reading of Daoism given by Roger Ames, and the more recent contrasting argument against reading Daoism as an anarchism by Alex Feldt. Centering our discussion on the Daodejing 道德經, we argue that, on the one hand, Laozi’s 老子 political theory is less easily reconcilable with anarchist thinking than Ames suggests. On the other hand, we dispute Feldt’s argument (...) that Laozi’s sage-ruler must, of necessity, maintain the capacity for coercive control. Counter to both Ames and Feldt, we suggest that Laozi’s sage-ruler is better framed as a maternal overseer, in contrast to other more paternalistic extrapolations of Daoist thinking, such as that offered in the Hanfeizi 韓非子. In reading Laozi’s thinking as a form of state “maternalism,” we aim to give a more distinctive voice to the nuances of early Daoist political theory. (shrink)

John Cottingham In the anglophone philosophical world, there has, for some time, been a curious relationship between the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophical - quiry. Many philosophers working today virtually ignore the history of their s- ject, apparently regarding it as an antiquarian pursuit with little relevance to their “cutting-edge” research. Conversely, there are historians of philosophy who seldom if ever concern themselves with the intricate technical debates that ll the journals devoted to modern analytic philosophy. Both sides are (...) surely the poorer for this strange bifurcation. For philosophy, like all parts of our intellectual culture, did not come into existence out of nowhere, but was shaped and nurtured by a long tradition; in uncovering the roots of that tradition we begin see current philoso- ical problems in a broader context and thereby enrich our understanding of their signi cance. This is surely part of the justi cation for the practice, in almost every university, of including elements from the history of philosophy as a basic part of the undergraduate curriculum. But understanding is enriched by looking forwards as well as backwards, which is why a good historian of philosophy will not just be c- cerned with uncovering ancient ideas, but will be constantly alert to how those ideas pre gure and anticipate later developments. (shrink)

A Comment on Roger Ames’s Confucian Role Ethics: A Philosophical Vocabulary, in Author Meets Critics Book Symposium.

International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, Vol. 196. -/- Introduction, S. Hutton; Nicholas of Cusa : Platonism at the Dawn of Modernity, D. Moran; At Variance: Marsilio Ficino Platonism And Heresy, M.J.B. Allen; Going Naked into the Shrine:Herbert, Plotinus and the Consructive Metaphor, S.R.L.Clark; Commenius, Light Metaphysics and Educational Reform, J. Rohls ; Robert Fludd’s Kabbalistic Cosmos, W. Schmidt-Biggeman; Reconciling Theory and Fact:The Problem of ‘Other Faiths’ in Lord Herbert and the Cambridge Platonists, D. (...) Pailin; Trinity, Community and Love: Cudworth’s Platonism and the Idea of God, L. Armour; Chaos and Order in Cudworth’s Thought, J-L. Breteau; Cudworth, Prior and Passmore on the Autonomy of Ethics, R. Attfield; Substituting Aristotle: Platonic Themes In Dutch Cartesianism, H. van Ruler; Soul, Body, And World: Plato’s Timaeus And Descartes’ Meditations, C. Wilson ; Locke, Plato and Platonism, G.A.J. Rogers; Reflections on Locke’s Platonism, V. Nuovo; The Platonism at the Core of Leibniz’s Philosophy, C. Mercer; Leibniz and Berkeley: Platonic Metaphysics and ‘The Mechanical Philosophy’, S. Brown; Which Platonism for which Modernity? A Note on Shaftesbury’s Socratic Sea-Cards, L. Jaffro; Platonism, Aesthetics and the Sublime at the Origins Of Modernity, D. Hedley. (shrink)

Roger Scruton has taken on a monumental task in his most recent book, The Aesthetics of Music. As one can see from the title, he has not attempted to work on one aspect of musical aesthetics, but takes it on all at once. Although he breaks the subject matter down into 15 separate sections, through these he attempts to get at the most fundamental questions in musical aesthetics. These are: the relation between sound and tone, the analysis of musical meaning, (...) and the nature of the purely musical experience. According to Scruton these questions have never been properly addressed in analytic aesthetics and it is his stated task in this book to do so. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is to be explained by appeal to the externalist distinction between concepts and conceptions. If concepts are determined by non-conceptual relations to objective properties rather than by associated conceptions (whether individual or communal), then topic preservation through semantic change will be possible. The requisite level of objectivity is guaranteed by the possibility of collective error and does not depend on a stronger level of objectivity, such as mind-independence or independence from linguistic or social practice more generally. This means (...) that the requisite level of objectivity is exhibited not only by natural kinds, but also by a wide range of philosophical kinds, social kinds and artefactual kinds. The alternative externalist accounts of conceptual engineering offered by Herman Cappelen and Derek Ball fall back into a kind of descriptivism which is antithetical to externalism and fails to recognise this basic level of objectivity. (shrink)

Introduction: Conversion and the practice of transformation -- The philosophical structure of Jonathan Edwards's religious affections -- Habit, habit change, and conversion in C.S. Peirce -- Reconstructing faith : religious overcoming in Dewey's pragmatism -- Transforming obligation in William James -- Dwelling in absence: the reflective origin of conversion -- Creative transformation : the work of conversion -- The evasion of conversion in recent American philosophy.

We sometimes strive to achieve difficult goals when our evidence suggests that success is unlikely – not just because it will require strength of will, but because we are targets of prejudice and discrimination or because success will require unusual ability. Optimism about one’s prospects can be useful for persevering in these cases. That said, excessive optimism can be dangerous; when our evidence is unfavourable, we should be at most agnostic about whether we will succeed. This paper explores the nature (...) and rational significance of agnostic practical commitments. Most importantly, the rationality of striving against the odds can depend on investing in a plan for failure: a plan B. I aim to make headway on an account of what backup plans are, how they are related to primary plans, and whether the standard norms of plan rationality apply to our agnostic commitments. (shrink)

Many of our most important goals require months or even years of effort to achieve, and some never get achieved at all. As social psychologists have lately emphasized, success in pursuing such goals requires the capacity for perseverance, or "grit." Philosophers have had little to say about grit, however, insofar as it differs from more familiar notions of willpower or continence. This leaves us ill-equipped to assess the social and moral implications of promoting grit. We propose that grit has an (...) important epistemic component, in that failures of perseverance are often caused by a significant loss of confidence that one will succeed if one continues to try. Correspondingly, successful exercises of grit often involve a kind of epistemic resilience in the face of failure, injury, rejection, and other setbacks that constitute genuine evidence that success is not forthcoming. Given this, we discuss whether and to what extent displays of grit can be epistemically as well as practically rational. We conclude that they can be (although many are not), and that the rationality of grit will depend partly on features of the context the agent normally finds herself in. In particular, grit-friendly norms of deliberation might be irrational to use in contexts of severe material scarcity or oppression. (shrink)

Ducks lay eggs' is a true sentence, and `ducks are female' is a false one. Similarly, `mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus' is obviously true, whereas `mosquitoes don't carry the West Nile virus' is patently false. This is so despite the egg-laying ducks' being a subset of the female ones and despite the number of mosquitoes that don't carry the virus being ninety-nine times the number that do. Puzzling facts such as these have made generic sentences defy adequate semantic treatment. (...) However complex the truth conditions of generics appear to be, though, young children grasp generics more quickly and readily than seemingly simpler quantifiers such as `all' and `some'. I present an account of generics that not only illuminates the strange truth conditions of generics, but also explains how young children find them so comparatively easy to acquire. I then argue that generics give voice to our most cognitively primitive generalizations and that this hypothesis accounts for a variety of facts ranging from acquisition patterns to cross-linguistic data concerning the phonological articulation of operators. I go on to develop an account of the nature of these cognitively fundamental generalizations and argue that this account explains the strange truth-conditional behavior of generics. (shrink)

The increasing workplace use of artificially intelligent (AI) technologies has implications for the experience of meaningful human work. Meaningful work refers to the perception that one’s work has worth, significance, or a higher purpose. The development and organisational deployment of AI is accelerating, but the ways in which this will support or diminish opportunities for meaningful work and the ethical implications of these changes remain under-explored. This conceptual paper is positioned at the intersection of the meaningful work and ethical AI (...) literatures and offers a detailed assessment of the ways in which the deployment of AI can enhance or diminish employees’ experiences of meaningful work. We first outline the nature of meaningful work and draw on philosophical and business ethics accounts to establish its ethical importance. We then explore the impacts of three paths of AI deployment (replacing some tasks, ‘tending the machine’, and amplifying human skills) across five dimensions constituting a holistic account of meaningful work, and finally assess the ethical implications. In doing so we help to contextualise the meaningful work literature for the era of AI, extend the ethical AI literature into the workplace, and conclude with a range of practical implications and future research directions. (shrink)

In recent years, scholars have come to understand emotions as dynamic and socially constructed—the product of interdependent cultural, relational, situational, and biological influences. While researchers have called for a multilevel theory of emotion construction, any progress toward such a theory must overcome the fragmentation of relevant research across various disciplines and theoretical frameworks. We present affect control theory as a launching point for cross-disciplinary collaboration because of its empirically grounded conceptualization of social mechanisms operating at the interaction, relationship, and cultural (...) levels, and its specification of processes linking social and individual aspects of emotion. After introducing the theory, we illustrate its correspondence with major theories of emotion construction framed at each of four analytical levels: cultural, interactional, individual, and neural. (shrink)

Some omissions seem to be causes. For example, suppose Barry promises to water Alice’s plant, doesn’t water it, and that the plant then dries up and dies. Barry’s not watering the plant – his omitting to water the plant – caused its death. But there is reason to believe that if omissions are ever causes, then there is far more causation by omission than we ordinarily think. In other words, there is reason to think the following thesis true.

Clinical research under the usual regulatory constraints may be difficult or even impossible in a public health emergency. Regulators must seek to strike a good balance in granting as wide therapeutic access to new drugs as possible at the same time as gathering sound evidence of safety and effectiveness. To inform current policy, I reexamine the philosophical rationale for restricting new medicines to clinical trials, at any stage and for any population of patients (which resides in the precautionary principle), to (...) show that its objective to protect public health, now or in the future, could soon be defeated in a pandemic. Providing wider therapeutic access and coordinating observations and natural experiments, including service delivery by cluster (wedged cluster trials), may provide such a balance. However, there are important questions of fairness to resolve before any such research can proceed. (shrink)

Traditionally, discussions of moral participation – and in particular moral agency – have focused on fully formed human actors. There has been some interest in the development of morality in humans, as well as interest in cultural differences when it comes to moral practices, commitments, and actions. However, until relatively recently, there has been little focus on the possibility that nonhuman animals have any role to play in morality, save being the objects of moral concern. Moreover, when nonhuman cases are (...) considered as evidence of moral agency or subjecthood, there has been an anthropocentric tendency to focus on those behaviors that inform our attributions of moral agency to humans. For example, some argue that the ability to evaluate the principles upon which a moral norm is grounded is required for full moral agency. Certainly, if a moral agent must understand what makes an action right or wrong, then most nonhuman animals would not qualify (and perhaps some humans too). However, if we are to understand the evolution of moral psychology and moral practice, we need to turn our attention to the foundations of full moral agency. We must first pay attention to the more broadly normative practices of other animals. Here, we begin that project by considering evidence that great apes and cetaceans participate in normative practices. (shrink)

The prospect of using genome technologies to modify the human germline has raised profound moral disagreement but also emphasizes the need for wide-ranging discussion and a well-informed policy response. The Hinxton Group brought together scientists, ethicists, policymakers, and journal editors for an international, interdisciplinary meeting on this subject. This consensus statement formulated by the group calls for support of genome editing research and the development of a scientific roadmap for safety and efficacy; recognizes the ethical challenges involved in clinical reproductive (...) applications of genome editing but, importantly, rejects the idea that human reproductive germline modification is necessarily morally unacceptable; and highlights the importance of meaningful engagement in discussions of genome editing and the development of regulation and oversight mechanisms to govern future uses of such technologies. (shrink)

This chapter offers a sustained analysis of the two major feminist critiques of analytic philosophy of religion: Grace Jantzen’s Becoming Divine and Pamela Sue Anderson’s A Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Jantzen’s project draws on Lacan’s and Irigaray’s account of psycholinguistics to insist that analytic philosophy of religion is thoroughgoingly “phallocentric” and “necrophiliac;” a new “feminine imaginary” is needed to replace its “masculinist” obsession with empirical demonstration and epistemic realism. Anderson’s book mounts a similar critique of the analytic school but is (...) more concerned to expand the understanding of “rationality” found there by means of a revised, feminist Kantianism than it is to reject the discourse altogether. I criticize Jantzen for a “sectarian” epistemology that ironically reinstates the gender binary she seeks to up end; and Anderson for a less than coherent account of “standpoint epistemology” which appears to undo her own original appeal to “gender.” I argue, instead, that recent trends in analytic philosophy of religion have already suggested an implicit “turn to gender” which, if made more explicit, can enable a fruitful interaction with feminist thought. (shrink)

Argues that the only way to understand the Confucian vision of the consummate moral life is to take the tradition on its own terms.

The first major publication in English on the bamboo slips excavated from a late fourth century B.C. Chu-state tomb at Guodian, Hubei, in 1993. The slip texts include both Daoist and Confucian works, many previously unknown. Thie monograph is a full account of the international conference held on these texts, at which leading scholars from China, the United States, Europe, and Japan analyzed the Laozi materials and a previously unknown cosmological text. In addition, the contents include nine essays on topics (...) such as the archaeological background of the discovery, conservation of the slip-texts, and the relation of the Guodian Laozi materials to the received Laozi text. An annotated edition of the Guodian Laozi materials and the cosmological text are included, as well as a critical bibliography with summary of Chinese scholarship on the Guodian texts in the year following the conference. (shrink)

Since Mill's seminal work On Liberty, philosophers and political theorists have accepted that we should respect the decisions of individual agents when those decisions affect no one other than themselves. Indeed, to respect autonomy is often understood to be the chief way to bear witness to the intrinsic value of persons. In this book, Sarah Conly rejects the idea of autonomy as inviolable. Drawing on sources from behavioural economics and social psychology, she argues that we are so often irrational (...) in making our decisions that our autonomous choices often undercut the achievement of our own goals. Thus in many cases it would advance our goals more effectively if government were to prevent us from acting in accordance with our decisions. Her argument challenges widely held views of moral agency, democratic values and the public/private distinction, and will interest readers in ethics, political philosophy, political theory and philosophy of law. (shrink)