Browsing Philosophic Exchange by Title
Now showing items 248-267 of 273
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Unconscious Actions Emanating From the Human Cerebral CortexThis paper presents some recent work of Roger Sperry and his associates on “split-brain cases.” The remarkable finding is that, after surgery, the actions that are programmed from one side of the cerebral cortex are not recognized by the other side of the cerebral cortex as belonging to the subject.
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Understanding the Human World: Structure, Instruction and DeconstructionThis paper offers an account of the emergence of the human from the natural, for the species and for the individual. I show how human sciences are possible, and suggest some strategies for change based on the understanding that the human sciences provide.
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Virtue and Flourishing in Our Interpersonal RelationshipsThe eudaimonistic thesis claims that being virtuous is a necessary aspect of the development of some important kind of happiness. To be true, it must be the case that virtue is associated with a kind of happiness that is clearly recognizable as something that we want, that we can appreciate as a good state for us to be in, that we can identify as a state of our own well-being. So here is the empirical question: in our ordinary experiences, is it the case that virtue is necessary to developing this kind of state? This is a very large, and very important, question. In this paper, I chip away at one piece of this question by exploring virtue’s role in mediating our relationships with others. Caring about others and treating them well is clearly part of being virtuous (no matter how we construe the virtues) and I think it is also one aspect of being virtuous that we can see to be an important part of our happiness—at least, in our non-skeptical moments.
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Vision and Dream in the CinemaThere are many ways in which filmgoing is like dreaming. The space and time of the film experience are distorted and illusory. For instance, one has the sense of being spatially present on the filmed scene. However, if we really accepted a change in the camera viewpoint as a change in our own position, rapid intercutting between different viewpoints would be intolerable. This suggests that in film our sense of space is somehow bracketed or held in suspense. Likewise, we take what we see in the film to be happening in the present, yet we tolerate jumps backward and forward in time. On reflection, these peculiarities of the film experience are extremely odd. Our ability to enjoy them testifies to the mind’s tendency to smooth things over, interpreting whatever confronts it in terms of the simplest pattern.
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Weitz on the Coinage of ManThe events in Shakespeare’s King Lear are not represented as typical, nor are the judgments made in the play represented as wise or reliable. This complicates any attempt to interpret the play as making the sorts of claims that Professor Weitz attributes to it.
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When Doctors Kill Patients: Vital Organ TransplantsThis paper attempts to discern exactly what is happening in some medical situations involving patients who are, in different ways, near death. In order to arrive at a correct moral evaluation of these practices, it is necessary to begin with a careful analysis of exactly what is happening, and then proceed to moral evaluation. This paper argues that declarations of death in many vital organ transplants are unjustified. Thus, probably there are killings occurring in these cases. However, there is no reason to think that these killings are morally unacceptable.
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Where is the Woman in Feminist Theory? The Case of AestheticsThis paper argues that feminism, as a theory, is a pattern of thinking that is not fundamentally about women, although it begins with a gendered perspective. It is, rather, an alternative way of theorizing about a host of topics that include but are not limited to women.
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Whose Patient Am I, Anyway? How New Economic Threats to Continuity of Care Can Undermine the Doctor / Patient RelationshipNew structures for the financing and delivery of health care and serious efforts to control costs all create tensions in the relationship between doctors and patients and heighten the need for clarification of that relationship. We all want to maintain the traditional sense of a personal, caring, trusting relationship between doctor and patient. However, economic incursions into that relationship threaten to make it a thing of the past. This paper explores these issues.
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Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?Postmodernism is a celebration of relativism. It is a movement that has actively embraced the collapse of standards that it takes this to imply. This paper examines the debate between postmodernists and their opponents, approaching it through the debate over Alan Sokal’s famous hoax.
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Why Care about Liberty?This is the age of the welfare state. The general assumption is that something is amiss if governments do not provide benefits to its people. Since these benefits are funded by coercive taxation, this implies that those who are taxed are morally required to pay for benefits for others. This paper argues that this assumption is mistaken. Like the founders of the American republic, I argue that government should protect individual liberty, not provide benefits to the needy.
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Why Obey the Laws of Logic?The status of the law of noncontradiction is the ultimate battleground on which the traditional forces of rationalism and anti-rationalism have met. This conflict is the topic of this essay. People who reject the law of noncontradiction obliterate any significant difference between speech acts of asserting and denying. In doing so, they deprive themselves of the significant use of their own speech acts. Thus they are self-silencers. This is Aristotle’s “negative demonstration” of the law of noncontradiction, and I find it entirely persuasive.