Philosophy Scholarly Works

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Reframing the Opioid Epidemic into its Proper Context: With results from survey taken in March 2018
(2018-06-18) Lamb, Maxx P.
In this essay I will address the imperative nature of relieving pain due to its physiological consequences. I will also reference sources that illustrate comprehensively how to do this. I also recommend measure that can be taken to reduce the diversion (particularly by theft, which is responsible for most prescription drugs that end up on the black market) substantially and effectively without reducing patient access to them. I will also elucidate the differences between dependence and addiction, and explain why opioids are essential for the management of severe (or intractable) pain. The American Society of Interventional Pain Physicians (ASIPP) are by far the most recent, comprehensive, detailed, thorough, and useful guidelines formulated on opioid prescribing in light of the national crisis of overdose deaths. Utilizing the ASIPP guidelines in place of the older, and far less comprehensive CDC guidelines would be advisable, and beneficial to millions suffering from chronic pain, and steps that can be taken to reduce the number of deaths resulting from illicit fentanyl analogues such as carfentanil that are driving these deaths. Taking “high dose” –an arbitrary distinction (Kroenke and Cheville, 2017)–opioids off of the market will only cause suffering and death at worst, and inconvenience and suffering at best without reducing overdose deaths. This is especially true when one considers how the vast majority of “overdose” deaths involved illicit carfentanil and its analogues, not drugs prescribed by doctors, and as such there is no rational reason to remove these lifesaving drugs from the market or restrict access in any other manner as has been proposed by the FDA, and enacted via the CDC’s guidelines for opioid prescribing (2016), which have indisputably resulted in a great deal of pain and suffering (Kline and Lamb, 2017) The gaps and inconsistencies left in the management of pain have been profound; in every state in the U.S. since the implementation of the VA Department of Defense guidelines and the CDC guidelines, patients have been expressing disturbing amounts of suicidal ideation on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and on comment threads of news articles. Their complaints and reasons for expressing such sentiments are always in relation to inadequate pain relief, typically because their doctors forcefully, involuntarily, tapered them, a practice with no research showing benefit, and plenty of research showing profound harms, as well as an abundance of testimonials.
Women Philosophers Throughout History: An Open Collection
(University of Kansas Libraries, 2020) Lascano, Marcy; Watson, Kevin; Martins, Rafael
This is collection of four philosophical texts written exclusively by women. It contemplates in chronological order The Dialogue by Catherine of Siena, The Interior Castle by Teresa of Avila, An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex by Judith Drake, and An Enquiry into the Evidence of the Christian Religion by Susanna Newcome. As such, the collection includes works in value theory, practical reason, theology, metaphysics, and epistemology. It encompasses eminently philosophical topics such as self-knowledge, prudence vs. morality, the pursuit of perfection, the cosmological argument, Cartesianism, the psychology of religious experience, reason vs. faith, and an array of topics in Early Modern feminism.
Why There is no General Solution to the Problem of Software Verification
(Springer, 2019-06-03) Symons, John; Horner, Jack J.
How can we be certain that software is reliable? Is there any method that can verify the correctness of software for all cases of interest? Computer scientists and software engineers have informally assumed that there is no fully general solution to the verification problem. In this paper, we survey approaches to the problem of software verification and offer a new proof for why there can be no general solution.
Can we trust Big Data? Applying philosophy of science to software
(SAGE Publications, 2016-09-02) Symons, John; Alvarado, Ramón
We address some of the epistemological challenges highlighted by the Critical Data Studies literature by reference to some of the key debates in the philosophy of science concerning computational modeling and simulation. We provide a brief overview of these debates focusing particularly on what Paul Humphreys calls epistemic opacity. We argue that debates in Critical Data Studies and philosophy of science have neglected the problem of error management and error detection. This is an especially important feature of the epistemology of Big Data. In “Error” section we explain the main characteristics of error detection and correction along with the relationship between error and path complexity in software. In this section we provide an overview of conventional statistical methods for error detection and review their limitations when faced with the high degree of conditionality inherent to modern software systems.
Classics in Moral & Political Philosophy: An Open Collection
(University of Kansas Libraries, 2018-02) Martins, Rafael
This is a collection of classics in moral and political philosophy containing only public domain and fair-use material. The primary role of this collection is to provide instructors, students, and researchers with a set of free materials. It unites in chronological order the most indispensible historical texts for an introduction to value theory, broadly construed. As such, the collection includes foundational works in intrinsic value theory, practical reason, normative ethics, metaethics, political theory, and political economy. It encompasses the most perennial topics in political philosophy such as justifications of the right to rule (governmental authority, political legitimacy) and the duty to obey (political obligation), competing conceptions of human nature, the significance of individual liberty, the point of equality, assessments of private and common property systems, and the nature of a just distribution of goods.
Moral Distinctiveness and Moral Inquiry
(University of Chicago Press, 2016-04) Dorsey, Dale
Actions can be moral or immoral, surely, but can also be prudent or imprudent, rude or polite, sportsmanlike or unsportsmanlike, and so on. The fact that diverse methods of evaluating action exist seems to give rise to a further question: what distinguishes moral evaluation in particular? In this article, my concern is methodological. I argue that any account of the distinctiveness of morality cannot be prior to substantive inquiry into the content of moral reasons, requirements, and concerns. The genuine distinctiveness of morality will become clear only after we have determined what those very reasons, requirements, and concerns really are.
The Significance of a Life’s Shape
(The University of Chicago Press, 2015-01) Dorsey, Dale
The shape of a life hypothesis holds, very roughly, that lives are better when they have an upward, rather than downward, slope in terms of momentary well-being. This hypothesis is plausible and has been thought to cause problems for traditional principles of prudential value/rationality. In this article, I conduct an inquiry into the shape of a life hypothesis that addresses two crucial questions. The first question is: what is the most plausible underlying explanation of the significance of a life’s shape? The second question is: given its most plausible explanation, what does the shape of a life hypothesis teach us about the nature of prudential value?
Objectivity and Perfection in Hume's Hedonism
(John Hopkins University Press, 2015-04) Dorsey, Dale
In this paper, I investigate David Hume’s theory of well-being or prudential value. That Hume was some sort of hedonist is typically taken for granted in discussions of his value theory, but I argue that Hume was a hedonist of pathbreaking sophistication. His hedonism intriguingly blends traditional hedonism with a form of perfectionism yielding a version of qualitative hedonism that not only solves puzzles surrounding Hume’s moral theory, but is interesting and important in its own right.
The brain’s cutting-room floor: segmentation of narrative cinema
(Frontiers Media, 2010-10-01) Zacks, Jeffrey M.; Speer, Nicole K.; Swallow, Khena M.; Maley, Corey John
Observers segment ongoing activity into meaningful events. Segmentation is a core component of perception that helps determine memory and guide planning. The current study tested the hypotheses that event segmentation is an automatic component of the perception of extended naturalistic activity, and that the identification of event boundaries in such activities results in part from processing changes in the perceived situation. Observers may identify boundaries between events as a result of processing changes in the observed situation. To test this hypothesis and study this potential mechanism, we measured brain activity while participants viewed an extended narrative film. Large transient responses were observed when the activity was segmented, and these responses were mediated by changes in the observed activity, including characters and their interactions, interactions with objects, spatial location, goals, and causes. These results support accounts that propose event segmentation is automatic and depends on processing meaningful changes in the perceived situation; they are the first to show such effects for extended naturalistic human activity.
Changes in Events Alter How People Remember Recent Information
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2011-05) Swallow, Khena M.; Barch, Deanna M.; Head, Denise; Maley, Corey John; Holder, Derek; Zacks, Jeffrey M.
Observers spontaneously segment larger activities into smaller events. For example, “washing a car” might be segmented into “scrubbing,” “rinsing,” and “drying” the car. This process, called event segmentation, separates “what is happening now” from “what just happened.” In this study, we show that event segmentation predicts activity in the hippocampus when people access recent information. Participants watched narrative film and occasionally attempted to retrieve from memory objects that recently appeared in the film. The delay between object presentation and test was always 5 sec. Critically, for some of the objects, the event changed during the delay whereas for others the event continued. Using fMRI, we examined whether retrieval-related brain activity differed when the event changed during the delay. Brain regions involved in remembering past experiences over long periods, including the hippocampus, were more active during retrieval when the event changed during the delay. Thus, the way an object encountered just 5 sec ago is retrieved from memory appears to depend in part on what happened in those 5 sec. These data strongly suggest that the segmentation of ongoing activity into events is a control process that regulates when memory for events is updated.
Letter knowledge in parent–child conversations: differences between families differing in socio-economic status
(Frontiers, 2014-06-24) Robins, Sarah; Ghosh, Dina; Rosales, Nicole; Treiman, Rebecca
When formal literacy instruction begins, around the age of 5 or 6, children from families low in socioeconomic status (SES) tend to be less prepared than children from families of higher SES. The goal of our study is to explore one route through which SES may influence children's early literacy skills: informal conversations about letters. The study builds on previous studies (Robins and Treiman, 2009; Robins et al., 2012, 2014) of parent–child conversations that show how U. S. parents and their young children talk about writing and provide preliminary evidence about similarities and differences in parent–child conversations as a function of SES. Focusing on parents and children aged three to five, we conducted five separate analyses of these conversations, asking whether and how family SES influences the previously established patterns. Although we found talk about letters in both upper and lower SES families, there were differences in the nature of these conversations. The proportion of letter talk utterances that were questions was lower in lower SES families and, of all the letter names that lower SES families talked about, more of them were uttered in isolation rather than in sequences. Lower SES families were especially likely to associate letters with the child's name, and they placed more emphasis on sequences in alphabetic order. We found no SES differences in the factors that influenced use of particular letter names (monograms), but there were SES differences in two-letter sequences (digrams). Focusing on the alphabet and on associations between the child's name and the letters within it may help to interest the child in literacy activities, but they many not be very informative about the relationship between letters and words in general. Understanding the patterns in parent–child conversations about letters is an important first step for exploring their contribution to children's early literacy skills and school readiness.
Mindreading and Tacit Knowledge
(Elsevier, 2014-01) Robins, Sarah
Debate over the nature of mindreading proceeds on the assumption that theory and simulation offer distinct characterizations of this ability. The threat of collapse objection questions this assumption, suggesting that simulation collapses into theory because both are committed to mindreading as tacit knowledge. Although both sides dismiss this objection, I argue that the threat is real. Theory and simulation are both accounts of mindreading as tacit knowledge and so the debate between them collapses.
Harming the Dead
(University of Chicago Press, 1985-10-01) Marquis, Don
No abstract is available for this item.
Contemplation, the Noble, and the Mean: The Standard of Moral Virtue in Aristotle's Ethics
(De Gruyter, 1995-12-01) Tuozzo, Thomas
No abstract is available for this item.
Selection, Drift, and Independent Contrasts: Defending the Methodological Foundations of the FIC
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2013-02-01) Schulz, Armin W.
Felsenstein’s method of independent contrasts (FIC) is one of the most widely used approaches to the study of correlated evolution. However, it is also quite controversial: numerous researchers have called various aspects of the method into question. Among these objections, there is one that, for two reasons, stands out from the rest: first, it is rather philosophical in nature; and second, it has received very little attention in the literature thus far. This objection concerns Sober’s charge that the FIC is methodologically flawed due to its (seemingly) resting on the assumption that the traits it studies evolved by drift—and thus ruling out selective hypotheses from the start. In this article, I try to rebut this charge. To do this, I first consider a preliminary conceptual worry—the question of how it is even possible for two drift-driven traits to be evolutionarily correlated—and show that it can be answered by noting that the FIC can be seen as being concerned with the investigation of the modularity of the relevant traits. Given this, I then show that Sober’s methodological charge can at least be mitigated by noting that the assumptions behind the FIC do not in fact preclude it from investigating selective hypotheses. I end by pointing out that making this clearer is not just relevant for defending the cogency of the FIC, but also for developing a deeper understanding of correlated evolution in general.
Duties and Ideals in Leonard Nelson's Ethics
(De Gruyter, 1960) DeGeorge, Richard T.
What's Wrong with These Cities? The Social Dimension of sophrosune in Plato's Charmides
(John Hopkins University Press, 2001-07) Tuozzo, Thomas
The General Account of Pleasure in Plato's Philebus
(John Hopkins University Press, 1996-10) Tuozzo, Thomas
Conceptualized and Unconceptualized Desire in Aristotle
(John Hopkins University Press, 1994-10) Tuozzo, Thomas
Emergence and Reflexive Downward Causation
(Principa, 2002) Symons, John
This paper responds to Jaegwon Kim's powerful objection to the very possibility of genuinely novel emergent properties. Kim argues that the incoherence of reflexive downward causation means that the causal power of an emergent phenomenon is ultimately reducible to the causal powers of its constituents. I offer a simple argument showing how to characterize emergent properties m terms of the effects of structural relations an the causal powers of that. constituents

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