-
25Palliative Care and Catholic Health Care : Two Millennia of Caring for the Whole Person (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2019.This book offers a comprehensive overview of the compatibility of palliative care with the vision of human dignity in the Catholic moral and theological traditions. The unique value of this book is that it presents expert analysis of the major domains of palliative care and how they are compatible with, and enhanced by, the holistic vision of the human person in Catholic health care. This volume will serve as a critically important ethical and theological resource on palliative care, including c…Read more
-
23Engineered Knowledge, Fragility and Virtue EpistemologyPhilosophia 47 (3): 757-774. 2019.There is a clean image of knowledge transmission between thinkers that involves sincere and reliable speakers, and hearers who carefully assess the epistemic credentials of the testimony that they hear. There is, however, a murkier side to testimonial exchange where deception and lies hold sway. Such mendacity leads to sceptical worries and to discussion of epistemic vice. Here, though, I explore cases where deceit and lies are involved in knowledge transmission. This may sound surprising or eve…Read more
-
21Art, Empathy and the DivineHeythrop Journal 61 (3): 412-423. 2020.Religious art can reconfigure our conception of God’s omniscience. This should be seen in terms of divine understanding, with empathy and love required for God’s understanding of human beings. §I surveys reasons to think that God can empathize with us. §II and §III consider different ways that religious art has attempted to represent such empathetic relations. There are images of Christ’s suffering that elicit empathy in the viewer, and there are depictions of God’s empathetic understanding of h…Read more
-
20Managing the Urban CommonsHuman Nature 23 (4): 467-489. 2012.All communities have common resources that are vulnerable to selfish motives. The current paper explores this challenge in the specific case of the urban commons, defined as the public spaces and scenery of city neighborhoods. A theoretical model differentiates between individual incentives and social incentives for caring for the commons. The quality of a commons is defined as the level of physical (e.g., loose garbage) and social (e.g., public disturbances) disorder. A first study compared lev…Read more
-
19David Hume–a timelineIn Alan Bailey & Dan O'Brien (eds.), The Continuum Companion to Hume, Continuum. 2012.
-
19Medical Ethics as Taught and as Practiced: Principlism, Narrative Ethics, and the Case of Living Donor Liver TransplantationJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 47 (1): 95-116. 2022.The dominant model for bioethical inquiry taught in medical schools is that of principlism. The heritage of this methodology can be traced to the Enlightenment project of generating a universalizable justification for normative morality arising from within the individual, rational agent. This project has been criticized by Alasdair MacIntyre who suggests that its failure has resulted in a fragmented and incoherent contemporary ethical framework characterized by fundamental intractability in mora…Read more
-
19John Marmysz (2017) Cinematic Nihilism: Encounters, Confrontations, OvercomingsFilm-Philosophy 23 (1): 98-101. 2019.
-
19Gullible Yet IntelligibleAbstracta 3 (1): 46-73. 2006.In this paper I describe the imaginary community of Gullible. Gulliblians are led by moral pressures to believe whatever they are told and, in the scenario that I sketch, this leads to them having widespread contradictory beliefs. This community is nevertheless intelligible to us given what we know about their situation and their moral code. Davidson, however, holds there to be what I call a logicist constraint on interpretation: thinkers can only be interpreted if a good proportion of their bel…Read more
-
19Pathways to Knowledge: Private and Public By Alvin I. Goldman Oxford University Press, 2002. ix + 224 pp., £25 (review)Philosophy 78 (2): 289-307. 2003.
-
18Approaches to Implementing the Olmstead ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) RulingJournal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 31 (S4): 47-48. 2003.The Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights enforces Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. OCR works through complaint investigations and compliance reviews, as well as outreach, technical assistance, and public education to promote voluntary compliance. In the Olmstead decision of June 1999, the Supreme Court held that the ADA’s “integration regulation” requires state and local government to administer services, …Read more
-
18Philosophy and the visual arts: Illustration and performanceHuman Affairs 31 (4): 496-507. 2021.In this paper I distinguish between illustrative and performative uses of artworks in the teaching and communication of philosophy, drawing examples from the history of art and my own practice. The former are where works are used merely to illustrate and communicate a philosophical idea or argument, the latter are where the artist or teacher philosophizes through the creation of art. I hope to promote future collaboration between philosophers, art historians and artists, with artworks becoming c…Read more
-
12Cultivating Our GardenIn Fritz Allhoff & Dan O'Brien (eds.), Gardening ‐ Philosophy for Everyone, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010-09-24.This chapter contains sections titled: Candide Hume and Common Life Gardens and Tranquility Notes.
-
12Terence Wilmot Hutchison 1912-2007In O'Brien D. P. (ed.), Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 161, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows, VIII, . pp. 179. 2009.Terence Wilmot Hutchison, a Fellow of the British Academy, was a historian of economics, methodologist, and acerbic critic of hubris and pretension amongst economists. He was born at Bournemouth and grew up in London. Hutchison's father was the flamboyant and much married Robert Langton Douglas, while his mother was Grace Hutchison. It was as a classicist that he went to the University of Cambridge in 1931. But Hutchison quickly lost interest in a subject that seemed to him to have little releva…Read more
-
12Shakespeare and the Analysis of KnowledgeDiscourse: Learning and Teaching in Philosophical and Religious Studies 4 (1): 57-70. 2004.
-
11Planting the SeedIn Fritz Allhoff & Dan O'Brien (eds.), Gardening ‐ Philosophy for Everyone, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010-09-24.
-
9The Phenomenology of the Face-to-Facetime: A Levinasian Critique of the Virtual ClinicJournal of Medicine and Philosophy. forthcoming.In order to promote social distancing during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, physicians and healthcare systems have made efforts to replace in-person with virtual clinic visits when feasible. While these efforts have been well received and seem compatible with sound clinical practice, they do not perfectly replicate the experience of a face-to-face exchange between doctor and patient. This essay attempts to describe features of the virtual visit that distinguish it from its face-to-face analog and…Read more
-
8Robert Denis Collison Black was internationally recognized as the authority on Jevons, and in particular on the centrally important elements of Benthamite Utilitarianism in Jevons' thought. Jevons' Theory Political Economy was, Black argued, a Benthamite exercise, not a systematic treatise on value and distribution. This in turn explained why Jevons' theory of production was essentially classical, and why he had no theory of aggregate distribution. Black's work on Jevons also threw light on the …Read more
-
6Hume and the Intellectual VirtuesDiscipline Filosofiche 22 (2): 153-172. 2012.For Hume virtues are character traits that are useful and agreeable to ourselves and to others. Such traits are wide-ranging, from moral virtues such as benevolence to intellectual virtues such as courage of mind and penetration. This paper focuses on Hume’s account of the latter. I argue that Hume is a virtue epistemologist, principally interested in the role that intellectual character traits play in social interactions rather than in the justifiedness of particular beliefs. I shall argue that…Read more
-
6The Orbiting Carbon Observatory mission will make the first global, space-based measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide with the precision, resolution, and coverage needed to characterize CO2 sources and sinks on regional scales. The measurement approach and instrument specifications were determined through an analysis of existing carbon cycle data and a series of observing system simulation experiments. During its 2-year mission, OCO will fly in a 1:15 PM sun-synchronous orbit with a 16-day …Read more
-
4Hap-Tech Narration and the Postphenomenological FilmPhilosophies 4 (3): 47. 2019.Within this paper, I explore the look and feel of the subjective point-of-view (POV) shot in narrative cinema and how it presents an awkward and uncomfortable space for the viewer to inhabit. It considers what David Bordwell has called the surrogate body: the concept in which viewers step into the role of an offscreen protagonist. In numerous films, this style invites the spectator to see and feel through the eyes and movement of a particular type of surrogate character, which as I argue, predom…Read more
-
2Robert J. Fogelin, A Defense of Hume on Miracles Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 24 (2): 100-102. 2004.
-
Palliative Care and the Catholic Healing Ministry: Biblical and Historical RootsIn Dan O’Brien & Peter Cataldo (eds.), Palliative Care and Catholic Health Care, Springer Verlag. 2019.