The Grandview Medical Center Bioethics Consultation Service Perspective on the Peril of Isolated and Vulnerable Individuals due to COVID-19.Jeffrey Kaufhold,Sharon Merryman,Leland Cancilla &NicholasSalupo -2021 -Asian Bioethics Review 13 (4):463-471.detailsWe present the perspective of a Bioethics Consultation Service operating in an urban hospital in Dayton, Ohio, USA, as it adapted to treating Sars-CoV-2 patients throughout 2020. Since the first case of COVID-19 was reported in Ohio on 9 March 2020, until 1 January 2021, the Bioethics Consultation Service was consulted 60 times, a 22.5% increase from the same period of 2019. The most common diagnoses requiring consultation included end-stage renal disease requiring dialysis, out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, and sepsis. Only 10% (...) of consultations were for patients hospitalized with COVID-19. This is a qualitative analysis of the cases we saw and a discussion of factors that affected our service while adapting to COVID-19 standards of care. (shrink)
Lexical meaning in context: a web of words.Nicholas Asher -2011 - New York: Cambridge University Press.detailsThis is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the ...
Evaluating assessment tools of the quality of clinical ethics consultations: a systematic scoping review from 1992 to 2019.Nicholas Yue Shuen Yoon,Yun Ting Ong,Hong Wei Yap,Kuang Teck Tay,Elijah Gin Lim,Clarissa Wei Shuen Cheong,Wei Qiang Lim,Annelissa Mien Chew Chin,Ying Pin Toh,Min Chiam,Stephen Mason &Lalit Kumar Radha Krishna -2020 -BMC Medical Ethics 21 (1):1-11.detailsBackgroundAmidst expanding roles in education and policy making, questions have been raised about the ability of Clinical Ethics Committees (CEC) s to carry out effective ethics consultations (CECons). However recent reviews of CECs suggest that there is no uniformity to CECons and no effective means of assessing the quality of CECons. To address this gap a systematic scoping review of prevailing tools used to assess CECons was performed to foreground and guide the design of a tool to evaluate the quality (...) of CECons.MethodsGuided by Levac et al’s (2010) methodological framework for conducting scoping reviews, the research team performed independent literature reviews of accounts of assessments of CECons published in six databases. The included articles were independently analyzed using content and thematic analysis to enhance the validity of the findings.ResultsNine thousand sixty-six abstracts were identified, 617 full-text articles were reviewed, 104 articles were analyzed and four themes were identified – the purpose of the CECons evaluation, the various domains assessed, the methods of assessment used and the long-term impact of these evaluations.ConclusionThis review found prevailing assessments of CECons to be piecemeal due to variable goals, contextual factors and practical limitations. The diversity in domains assessed and tools used foregrounds the lack of minimum standards upheld to ensure baseline efficacy.To advance a contextually appropriate, culturally sensitive, program specific assessment tool to assess CECons, clear structural and competency guidelines must be established in the curation of CECons programs, to evaluate their true efficacy and maintain clinical, legal and ethical standards. (shrink)
Russell’s Idealist Apprenticeship.Nicholas Griffin -1991 - Oxford, GB: Clarendon Press.detailsBased mainly on unpublished papers this is the first detailed study of the early, neo-Hegelian period of Bertrand Russell's career. It covers his philosophical education at Cambridge, his conversion to neo-Hegelianism, his ambitious plans for a neo-Hegelian dialectic of the sciences and the problems which ultimately led him to reject it.
Civic nationalism: Oxymoron?Nicholas Xenos -1996 -Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 10 (2):213-231.detailsRecent attempts to distinguish a normatively acceptable “civic nationalism"—as distinct from an irrationally tainted “ethnic nationalism"—have failed to take seriously the implications of the transition from the city as the immediate spatial unit of the patria to the more abstract national state that replaced it. The nation‐state has required a mythologizing naturalism to legitimate it, thus blurring the distinction between “civic” and “ethnic.” The urban political experience of the patria is lost to us; cosmopolitan intellectuals should resist the comforting temptation (...) to recover it in the nation, and should recognize civic nationalism for the oxymoron it is. (shrink)
Why is it possible to enhance moral status and why doing so is wrong?Nicholas Agar -2013 -Journal of Medical Ethics 39 (2):67-74.detailsThis paper presents arguments for two claims. First, post-persons, beings with a moral status superior to that of mere persons, are possible. Second, it would be bad to create such beings. Actions that risk bringing them into existence should be avoided. According to Allen Buchanan, it is possible to enhance moral status up to the level of personhood. But attempts to improve status beyond that fail for want of a target - there is no category of moral status superior to (...) that of personhood. Buchanan presents personhood as a threshold. He allows that persons may succeed in enhancing their cognitive and physical powers but insists that they cannot enhance their moral status. I argue that it is an implication of accounts that make a cognitive capacity, or collection of such capacities, constitutive of moral status, that those who do not satisfy the criteria for a given status find these criteria impossible to adequately describe. This obstacle notwithstanding, I offer an inductive argument for the existence of moral statuses superior to personhood, moral statuses that are necessarily beyond human expressive powers. The second part of this paper presents an argument that it is wrong to risk producing beings with moral status higher than persons. We should look upon moral status enhancement as creating especially morally needy beings. We are subject to no obligation to create them in the first place. We avoid creating their needs by avoiding creating them. (shrink)
Belief in discourse representation theory.Nicholas Asher -1986 -Journal of Philosophical Logic 15 (2):127 - 189.detailsI hope I have convinced the reader that DR theory offers at least some exciting potential when applied to the semantics of belief reports. It differs considerably from other approaches, and it makes intuitively acceptable predictions that other theories do not. The theory also provides a novel approach to the semantics of other propsitional attitude reports. Further, DR theory enables one to approach the topic of anaphora within belief and other propositional attitude contexts in a novel way, thus combining the (...) semantics developed here with one of the theory's original motivations (Kamp, 1981a). However, these are unfortunately topics that I must reserve for another time. (shrink)
Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim That God Speaks.Nicholas Wolterstorff -1995 - Cambridge University Press.detailsProminent in the canonical texts and traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is the claim that God speaks.Nicholas Wolterstorff argues that contemporary speech-action theory, when appropriately expanded, offers us a fascinating way of interpreting this claim and showing its intelligibility. He develops an innovative theory of double-hermeneutics - along the way opposing the current near-consensus led by Ricoeur and Derrida that there is something wrong-headed about interpreting a text to find out what its author said. Wolterstorff argues that (...) at least some of us are entitled to believe that God has spoken. Philosophers have never before, in any sustained fashion, reflected on these matters, mainly because they have mistakenly treated speech as revelation. (shrink)
A question about defining moral bioenhancement.Nicholas Agar -2014 -Journal of Medical Ethics 40 (6):369-370.detailsDavid DeGrazia1 offers, to my mind, a decisive response to the bioconservative suggestion that moral bioenhancement threatens human freedom or undermines its value. In this brief commentary, I take issue with DeGrazia's way of defining MB. A different concept of MB exposes a danger missed by his analysis.Two ways to define MBDeGrazia presents MB as a form of enhancement directed at moral capacities. There are, in the philosophical literature, two broad approaches to defining human enhancement. Simplifying somewhat, one account identifies (...) enhancement with improvement. DeGrazia joins other advocates of MB in preferring this type of account, defining a human enhancement as ‘any deliberate intervention that aims to improve an existing capacity, select for a desired capacity, or create a new capacity in a human being.’1An alternative approach relativises enhancement to human norms.2 ,3 In this view, improvements up to levels of functioning properly considered normal for humans are therapy, not enhancement. Improvements beyond those levels are enhancements. The injection of synthetic erythropoietin by someone suffering from anaemia is therapy. When healthy Tour de France competitors inject EPO, it is enhancement.We can minimise philosophical disputes about word meanings by endorsing a conceptual pluralism that acknowledges the need for more than one concept of human enhancement to address the hugely varied ways in which technology may alter humans. In the debate about biomedical moral improvements there would be enhancement as improvement and enhancement beyond human norms.DeGrazia effectively deploys the concept of enhancement as improvement to …. (shrink)
Questions in dialogue.Nicholas Asher &Alex Lascarides -1998 -Linguistics and Philosophy 21 (3):237-309.detailsIn this paper we explore how compositional semantics, discourse structure, and the cognitive states of participants all contribute to pragmatic constraints on answers to questions in dialogue. We synthesise formal semantic theories on questions and answers with techniques for discourse interpretation familiar from computational linguistics, and show how this provides richer constraints on responses in dialogue than either component can achieve alone.
What Sort of Epistemological Realist was Thomas Reid?Nicholas Wolterstorff -2006 -Journal of Scottish Philosophy 4 (2):111-124.detailsReid's theory of perception has long been cited as a paradigmatic example of direct realism; and the term “direct” undoubtedly carries the connotation that external objects are items in “the manifold of intuition.” There are important ways in which perception, on Reid's analysis, undoubtedly is immediate and direct. Nonetheless, this paper contends that, with the exception of his account of our perception of visible fi gure, Reid's theory is not an example of direct realism, if a condition of a theory (...) of percep- tion's being a direct realist theory is that it hold that perception yields acquaintance with external objects, so that those objects are present to consciousness. The defense given in Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology of the no-acquaintance interpretation of Reid's theory occurred in the context of a comprehensive account of Reid's theory of perception, and was accordingly brief. This essay places that interpretation in the center of attention so as to offer a more adequate defense, developing somewhat more fully the arguments briefly presented in the book, and adding some additional considerations. (shrink)
Bridging.Nicholas Asher &Alex Lascarides -1998 -Journal of Semantics 15 (1):83-113.detailsIn this paper, we offer a novel analysis of bridging, paying particular attention to definite descriptions. We argue that extant theories don't do justice to the way different knowledge resources interact. In line with Hobbs (1979), we claim that the rhetorical connections between the propositions introduced in the text play an important part. But our work is distinct from his in that we model how this source of information interacts with compositional and lexical semantics. We formalize bridging in a framework (...) known as SDRT (Asher 1993). We demonstrate that this provides a richer, more accurate interpretation of definite descriptions than has been offered so far. (shrink)
Questioning patriotism: Rejoinder to Viroli.Nicholas Xenos -1998 -Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 12 (1-2):197-201.detailsThe tradition of republican patriotism articulated by Maurizio Viroli only seems to avoid the naturalizing dangers inherent in the discourse of nationalism, whether in its so‐called civic or ethnic modes. Rousseau's comment that he wishes the patrie to be experienced as “la mere commune des citoyens” reflects the republican patriot's desire to find a home in the patria. This sentiment originated in Rome and comes down to us primarily in texts written in the immediate aftermath of the Republic's demise, a (...) period characterized by widespread physical uprooting. The sentiment of republican patriotism can thus be seen as a nostalgic reaction to a sense of personal and political deracination and loss. In their yearning for a political home, at least, republican patriots like Rousseau share the rhetoric and desire of nationalists, and that similarity should cause us concern. (shrink)
Prima facie obligation.Nicholas Asher &Daniel Bonevac -1996 -Studia Logica 57 (1):19-45.detailsThis paper presents a nonmonotonic deontic logic based on commonsense entailment. It establishes criteria a successful account of obligation should satisfy, and develops a theory that satisfies them. The theory includes two conditional notions of prima facie obligation. One is constitutive; the other is epistemic, and follows nonmonotonically from the constitutive notion. The paper defines unconditional notions of prima facie obligation in terms of the conditional notions.
Portraits of American Philosophy.Nicholas Wolterstorff,J. B. Schneewind,Judith Jarvis Thomson,Ruth Barcan Marcus,Richard J. Bernstein &Harry Frankfurt -2013 - Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.detailsIn Portraits of American Philosophy, eight of America's most prominent philosophers offer autobiographical narratives that remind us that the life of a scholar is both a tale of personal struggle and an adventure in ideas.
Response to Helm, Quinn, and Westphal.Nicholas Wolterstorff -2001 -Religious Studies 37 (3):293-306.detailsBefore beginning my response, let me express the honour I feel in having these three friends and distinguished philosophical colleagues comment so thoughtfully on my ideas in Divine Discourse. I warmly thank them for their ‘labours’. I propose mirroring the general structure of the book itself in my response. First, I'll consider what Helm says about my delineation of the topic, second, what Quinn says about my discussion of God speaking; third, what Westphal says about my discussion of interpreting for (...) God's speech; and last, what Quinn says about my discussion of the epistemology of believing that God speaks. (shrink)
Reply to Kevin Carnahan and Erik A. Anderson.Nicholas Wolterstorff -2013 -Philosophia 41 (2):429-435.detailsIn my response to Kevin Carnahan, I explain the concept of religion that I have been working with in my writings on the place of religious reasons in public political discourse. While acknowledging that religion is often privatized, my concern has been with religion as a way of life. It is religion so understood that raises the most serious issues concerning the role of religion in public discourse. In my response to Erik A. Anderson, I go beyond what I have (...) previously said about the role of religious reasons in public discourse. As an alternative to Rawlsian public reason, I argue that the essence of liberal democracy is that every citizen is to have equal political voice. I go on to consider what it is to exercise one’s equal political voice as a moral engagement. (shrink)
Reply to Levine.Nicholas Wolterstorff -1998 -Religious Studies 34 (1):17-23.detailsThe aim of this paper is to show that, though Levine frequently states that "Divine Discourse" is full of fundamental errors, he does little by way of proving his point. In particular, I defend the claim in "Divine Discourse" that divine speech is not a species of revelation. I rebut Levine's account of the significance of Biblical scholarship, defend my interpretation of Ricoeur and my remarks on entitlement.
The Reformed Tradition.Nicholas Wolterstorff -1997 - In Charles Taliaferro & Philip L. Quinn,A Companion to Philosophy of Religion. Cambridge, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 204–209.detailsThis chapter contains sections titled: Works cited.
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Acting Liturgically: Philosophical Reflections on Religious Practice.Nicholas Wolterstorff -2018 - Oxford University Press.detailsParticipation in religious liturgies and rituals is a pervasive and complex human activity. This book discusses the nature of liturgical activity and the various dimensions of such activity.Nicholas Wolterstorff focuses on understanding what liturgical agents actually do and shows religious practice as a rich area for philosophical reflection.
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Classical logic, conditionals and “nonmonotonic” reasoning.Nicholas Allott &Hiroyuki Uchida -2009 -Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (1):85-85.detailsReasoning with conditionals is often thought to be non-monotonic, but there is no incompatibility with classical logic, and no need to formalise inference itself as probabilistic. When the addition of a new premise leads to abandonment of a previously compelling conclusion reached by modus ponens, for example, this is generally because it is hard to think of a model in which the conditional and the new premise are true.
The Cambridge companion to Bertrand Russell.Nicholas Griffin (ed.) -2003 - New York: Cambridge University Press.detailsBertrand Russell ranks as one of the giants of 20th century philosophy. This Companion focuses on Russell's contributions to modern philosophy and, therefore, concentrates on the early part of his career. Through his books, journalism, correspondence and political activity he exerted a profound influence on modern thought. New readers will find this the most convenient and accessible guide to Russell available. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Russell.
Strategic Conversations Under Imperfect Information: Epistemic Message Exchange Games.Nicholas Asher &Soumya Paul -2018 -Journal of Logic, Language and Information 27 (4):343-385.detailsThis paper refines the game theoretic analysis of conversations in Asher et al. by adding epistemic concepts to make explicit the intuitive idea that conversationalists typically conceive of conversational strategies in a situation of imperfect information. This ‘epistemic’ turn has important ramifications for linguistic analysis, and we illustrate our approach with a detailed treatment of linguistic examples.
Ray Kurzweil and Uploading: Just Say No!Nicholas Agar -2011 -Journal of Evolution and Technology 22 (1):23-36.detailsThere is a debate about the possibility of mind-uploading – a process that purportedly transfers human minds and therefore human identities into computers. This paper bypasses the debate about the metaphysics of mind-uploading to address the rationality of submitting yourself to it. I argue that an ineliminable risk that mind-uploading will fail makes it prudentially irrational for humans to undergo it.
Wittgenstein, Universals and Family Resemblances.Nicholas Griffin -1974 -Canadian Journal of Philosophy 3 (4):635 - 651.detailsWittgenstein expounds his notion of a family resemblance in two important passages. The first is from The Blue Book:This craving for generality is the resultant of a number of tendencies connected with particular philosophical confusions. There is— The tendency to look for something common to entities which we commonly subsume under a general term. We are inclined to think that there must be something common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general (...) term “game” to the various games; whereas the games form a family the members of which have family likenesses …. There is a tendency rooted in our usual forms of expression, to think that a man who has learnt to understand a general term, say, the term “leaf,” has thereby come to possess a kind of general picture of a leaf, as opposed to pictures of particular leaves …. This again is connected with the idea that the meaning of a word is an image, or a thing correlated with the word. (shrink)
Imperialism, Globalization and Resistance.Nicholas Vrousalis -2016 -Global Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric 9 (1).detailsImperialism is the domination of one state by another. This paper sketches a nonrepublican account of domination that buttresses this definition of imperialism. It then defends the following claims. First, there is a useful and defensible distinction between colonial and liberal imperialism, which maps on to a distinction between what I will call coercive and liberal domination. Second, the main institutions of contemporary globalization, such as the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, etc., are largely the instruments of liberal imperialism; (...) they are a reincarnation of what Karl Kautsky once called ‘ultraimperialism’. Third, resistance to imperialism can no longer be founded on a fundamental right to national self-determination. Such a right is conditional upon and derivative of a more general right to resist domination. (shrink)
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Brandom and the brutes.Nicholas Griffin -2018 -Synthese 195 (12):5521-5547.detailsBrandom’s inferentialism offers, in many ways, a radically new approach to old issues in semantics and the theory of intentionality. But, in one respect at least, it clings tenaciously to the mainstream philosophical tradition of the middle years of the twentieth century. Against the theory’s natural tendencies, Brandom aligns it with the ’linguistic turn’ that philosophy took in the middle of the last century by insisting, in the face of considerable opposing evidence, that intentionality is the preserve of those who (...) can offer and ask for reasons and thus of language users alone. In this paper, I argue that there is no good reason for giving inferentialism a linguistic twist, and that, in doing so, Brandom is forced to make claims which are implausible in themselves and lead him, in the attempt to mitigate them, to a number of doubtful expedients. (shrink)
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Russell's Critique of Meinong's Theory of Objects.Nicholas Griffin -1985 -Grazer Philosophische Studien 25 (1):375-401.detailsRussell brought three arguments forward against Meinong's theory of objects. None of them depend upon a misinterpretation of the theory as is often claimed. In particular, only one is based upon a clash between Meinong's theory and Russell's theory of descriptions, and that did not involve Russell's attributing to Meinong his own ontological assumption. The other two arguments were attempts to find internal inconsistencies in Meinong's theory. But neither was sufficient to refute the theory, though they do require some revisions, (...) viz. a trade-off between freedom of assumption and unhmited characterization. Meinong himself worked out the essentials of the required revisions. (shrink)