|
|
Creator | Title | Description | Subject | Date |
151 |
|
Battin, Margaret P. | False dichotomy versus genuine choice the argument over physician-assisted dying | Despite a growing consensus that palliative care should be a core part of the treatment offered to all severely ill patients who potentially face death,1 challenging questions remain. How broad a choice should patients have in guiding the course of their own dying? What limitations should be placed ... | | 2004 |
152 |
|
Battin, Margaret P. | Coping with methuselah the impact of molecular biology on medicine and society | The prospect of extra-long life spawns a bloom of ethical issues, among them how to achieve intergenerational equity; how to balance health care entitlements with rising costs for the elderly; how to divide years of life between work and retirement; how to assign the responsibilities of young family... | | 2004 |
153 |
|
Francis, Leslie | Legitimate expectations, unreasonable beliefs, and legally mandated coverage of experimental therapy | Photographs of patients seeking contributions for expensive bone marrow transplants are an everyday image on supermarket checkout stands. Benefit concerts, newspaper stories, and community fundraisers pitch in to help patients who cannot otherwise afford expensive medical interventions. Patients wit... | Experimental therapy; Mandated coverage; Off-label drug uses | 2004 |
154 |
|
Millgram, Elijah | Ontological meta-argument (and the ontological argument for the actuality of the world) | Would the Ontological Argument Greater Than Which None Can Be Conceived prove the existence of God? Might an ontological argument prove the actuality of the world (as Robert Nozick once suggested)? Should you believe that you're actual, even if you're not? And what happens if we attempt to answer t... | Meta-argument; Proof of God; Philosophical proofs | 2004 |
155 |
|
Andreou, Chrisoula | Instrumentally rational myopic planning | I challenge the view that, in cases where time for deliberation is not an issue, instrumental rationality precludes myopic planning. 1 show where there is room for instrumentally rational myopic planning, and then argue that such planning is possible not only in theory, it is something human beings ... | Rationality; Practical reason; Motivations | 2004 |
156 |
|
Newman, Lex | Rocking the foundations of cartesian knowledge: critical notice of Janet Broughton, descartes's method of doubt | Janet Broughton's Descartes's Method of Doubt†1 is a systematic study of the role of doubt in Descartes's epistemology. The book has two parts. Part 1 focuses on the development of doubt in the First Meditation, exploring such topics as the motivation behind methodic doubt; the targeted audience... | Super-indubitables; Canonical circularity; Clear and distinct truths' | 2004-01 |
157 |
|
Downes, Stephen M. | Heredity and heritability | Philosophical discussions of heredity have focused on the sustainability of heritability analyses and more recently on the units of heredity. Here I introduce the concept of heritability and the problems associated with it. Next the units of heredity discussion is introduced. Here I consider alterna... | DNA; Heredity; Heritability | 2004-07-15 |
158 |
|
Thalos, Mariam G. | From paradox to judgment: an essay on the metaphysics of expression | The Liar sentence is a singularly important piece of philosophical evidence. It is an instrument for investigating the metaphysics of expressing truths and falsehoods. And an instrument too for investigating the varieties of conflict that can give rise to paradox. It shall serve as perhaps the most ... | Liar sentence; Metaphysics; Paradox; Human Nature; Truth; Falsehood | 2005 |
159 |
|
Francis, Leslie | Competitive sports, disability, and problems of justice in sports | A "level playing field" is a stock metaphor for equality. Despite its status as a near-cliché, however, the metaphor has been given limited theoretical attention. Deliberately tilting the field so that one set of contestants must consistently run uphill while their opponents get a downhill ride is... | Level playing field; Competitive sports | 2005 |
160 |
|
Battin, Margaret P. | July 4, 1826: explaining the same-day deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson | John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, July 4, 1826. Both were old men--Adams was 90, and Jefferson was 83--and both were ill, though Adams had been in comparatively robust health until just a few months earlier and Jefferson had been ill for an extended period. They had been rivals,... | Coincidence; Synchrony; Bioethics; Euthanasia; Suicide | 2005 |
161 |
|
Thalos, Mariam G. | From paradox to judgment: towards a metaphysics of expression | The Liar sentence is a singularly important piece of philosophical evidence. It is an instrument for investigating the metaphysics of expressing truths and falsehoods. And an instrument too for investigating the varieties of conflict that can give rise to paradox. It shall serve as perhaps the most ... | Language; Sentences; Semantic | 2005 |
162 |
|
Crowe, Benjamin D. | Heidegger and the prospect of a phenomenology of prayer | An attempt to contribute to a "phenomenology of prayer" ought to begin with the recognition that the word "phenomenology" means many different things to many different people. Moreover, it must be recognized that none of these usages has any obvious claim to being the normative one. Given these ines... | | 2005 |
163 |
|
Andreou, Chrisoula | On natural goodness by Philippa Foot | In her 1972 paper 'Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives', Philippa Foot boldly challenged the common assumption that viciousness is a form of irrationality and embraced a picture of practical rationality according to which an agent's reasons for action are grounded in nothing other th... | Irrationality; Evaluation; Natural defect | 2005 |
164 |
|
Newman, Lex | Descartes' epistemology | René Descartes (1596-1650) is widely regarded as the father of modern Philosophy;. His noteworthy contributions extend to mathematics and physics. This entry focuses on his philosophical contributions in the theory of knowledge. Specifically, the focus is on the epistemological project of Descartes... | Descartes; Philosophy;; Epistemology | 2005-04-14 |
165 |
|
Millgram, Elijah | Practical reason and the structure of actions | A wave of recent philosophical work on practical rationality is organized by the following implicit argument: Practical reasoning is figuring out what to do; to do is to act; so the forms of practical inference can be derived from the structure or features of action. Now it is not as though earlier ... | Practical reasoning; Inference; Philosophy | 2005-08-24 |
166 |
|
Francis, Leslie | Justice through trust: disability and the Outlier problem in Social Contract Theory | The article focuses on the flaws of the social contract theory. It explores how hostile the social contract as a bargaining process has been thought to distance disabled people from contract-based justice. It analyzes the argument that the history of social contract theory exclude the people with di... | Consensus, social sciences; Discrimination; Social contract; Social ethics; Sociology of disability | 2005-10 |
167 |
|
Haber, Matthew | On probability and systematics: possibility, probability, and phylogenetic inference | In phylogenetic systematics, an ongoing debate has revolved around the appropriate choice of methodology for the construction of phylogenetic trees and inference of ancestral states. A recent paper by Mark Siddall and Arnold Kluge (Siddall and Kluge, 1997) advocates a privileged status for parsimon... | Phylogentic systematics; Probability; Possibility; Frequency; Propensity | 2005-10-01 |
168 |
|
Haber, Matthew | Coherence, consistency, and cohesion: Clade selection in Okasha and beyond | Samir Okasha argues that clade selection is an incoherent concept, because the relation that constitutes clades is such that it renders parent-offspring (reproduction) relations between clades impossible. He reasons that since clades cannot reproduce, it is not coherent to speak of natural selection... | Biological classification; Cladistics; Taxonomy | 2005-12 |
169 |
|
Plutynski, Anya | Explanation in classical population genetics | The recent literature in Philosophy; of biology has drawn attention to the different sorts of explanations proffered in the biological sciences--we have molecular, biomedical, and evolutionary explanations. Do these explanations all have a common structure or relation that they seek to capture? This... | Biology, Philosophy;; Explanation; Genetics; Life sciences; Population genetics; Science | 2005-12 |
170 |
|
Haber, Matthew | Poverty of the Linnaean Hierarchy: a philosophical study of biological taxonomy (book review) | The article reviews the book "The Poverty of the Linnaean Hierarchy: A Philosophical Study of Biological Taxonomy," by Marc Ereshefsky. | Biology, classification; Books, reviews; Nonficiton | 2005-12-15 |
171 |
|
Andreou, Chrisoula | Getting on in a varied world | Are greed and ruthlessness contrary to reason? Is immorality a form of irrationality? Much of contemporary ethical theory is a debate between Kantians, who argue that the dictates of morality are dictates of reason, and Humeans, who argue that reason is neutral between morality and immorality. T... | Kantians; Humeans; Immorality | 2006 |
172 |
|
Mallon, Ronald | 'Race': normative, not metaphysical or semantic | In recent years, there has been a flurry of work on the metaphysics of race. While it is now widely accepted that races do not share robust, biobehavioral essences, opinions differ over what, if anything, race is. Recent work has been divided between three apparently quite different answers. A varie... | | 2006 |
173 |
|
Mallon, Ronald | Innateness as closed process invariance | Although we are enthusiastic about a Darwinian approach to culture, we argue that the overview presented in the target article does not sufficiently emphasize the crucial explanatory role that psychology plays in the study of culture. We use a number of examples to illustrate the variety of ways by... | | 2006 |
174 |
|
Plutynski, Anya | Strategies of model building in population genetics | In 1966, Richard Levins argued that there are different strategies in model building in population biology. In this paper, I reply to Orzack and Sober's (1993) critiques of Levins and argue that his view on modeling strategies apply also in the context of evolutionary genetics. In particular, I arg... | | 2006 |
175 |
|
Mallon, Ronald | Role of psychology in the study of culture | Although we are enthusiastic about a Darwinian approach to culture, we argue that the overview presented in the target article does not sufficiently emphasize the crucial explanatory role that psychology plays in the study of culture. We use a number of examples to illustrate the variety of ways by... | | 2006 |