Dan O'brien

At the start of Hume’s Dialogues Philo feigns to agree with Demea that he believes that God exists, and both Philo and Demea claim that we cannot come to have knowledge of the nature of God. In §1, however, I turn to Cleanthes’ ‘Newtonian Theism’ in which science is seen as serving theology, with a central role played by the argument from design. We can infer ‘that the Author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man’ (D, 2.5). §2 turns to the various critiques of this argument put forward by Philo and we find that his alliance with Demea is a ruse. Philo rejects the theism of both Cleanthes and Demea. §3 focuses on part 12 of the Dialogues where Philo appears to take a more conciliatory line towards belief in God. Various interpreters take Philo to be committed to a thin form of deism or theism. I reject such interpretations and argue that part 12 does not diverge from the atheistic message of the Dialogues.

The 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 ground-track repeat time, just ahead of the EOS Aqua platform. It will carry a single instrument that incorporates three bore-sighted high-resolution spectrometers designed to measure reflected sunlight in the 0.76-μm O 2 A-band and in the CO2 bands at 1.61 and 2.06 μm. Soundings recorded in these three bands will be used to retrieve the column-averaged CO2 dry air mole fraction. A comprehensive validation program was included in the mission to ensure that the space-based XCO2 measurements have precisions of ∼0.3% on regional scales. OCO measurements will be used in global synthesis inversion and data assimilation models to quantify CO2 sources and sinks. While OCO will have a nominal lifetime of only 2 years, it will serve as a pathfinder for future long-term CO2 monitoring missions. © 2004 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

_An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, 2nd Edition_ guides the reader through the key issues and debates in contemporary epistemology. Lucid, comprehensive and accessible, it is an ideal textbook for students who are new to the subject and for university undergraduates. The book is divided into five parts. Part I discusses the concept of knowledge and distinguishes between different types of knowledge. Part II surveys the sources of knowledge, considering both a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Parts III and IV provide an in-depth discussion of justification and scepticism. The final part of the book examines our alleged knowledge of the past, other minds, morality and God. In this extensively revised second edition there are expanded sections on epistemic luck, social epistemology and contextualism, and there are new sections on the contemporary debates concerning the lottery paradox, pragmatic encroachment, peer disagreement, safety, sensitivity and virtue epistemology. Engaging examples are used throughout the book, many taken from literature and the cinema. Complex issues, such as those concerning the private language argument, non-conceptual content, and the new riddle of induction, are explained in a clear and accessible way. This textbook is an invaluable guide to contemporary epistemology.

According to the reductionist interpretation of Hume on testimony, we come to believe what others tell us for the same kind of reason as we come to believe that the sun will rise tomorrow—both beliefs grounded in our experience of the respective regularities of testifiers and planetary motion. Hume's epistemology is explained in terms of one master mechanism—that is, causal or probabilistic inference, as this plays the role of an all‐purpose reliability detector. However, this way of thinking of Hume's epistemology obscures an important distinction between two ways that we come to acquire beliefs. Such probabilistic assessment is only carried out against a background of testimonial beliefs that do not have their source in causal inference and that are acquired via sympathy. These beliefs are of various kinds, and they include beliefs about the virtues and vices others take us to have, what is seen as virtuous in the societies in which we live, and all the various beliefs we as children and adults uncritically imbibe from those around us and from the testimony of history. In fact, sympathy has a good claim to the title of the master mechanism in that it integrates our capacity for causal reasoning with our evolving socially constructed selves and wider social and moral lives.

An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge, 2nd Edition guides the reader through the key issues and debates in contemporary epistemology. Lucid, comprehensive and accessible, it is an ideal textbook for students who are new to the subject and for university undergraduates. The book is divided into five parts. Part I discusses the concept of knowledge and distinguishes between different types of knowledge. Part II surveys the sources of knowledge, considering both a priori and a posteriori knowledge. Parts III and IV provide an in-depth discussion of justification and scepticism. The final part of the book examines our alleged knowledge of the past, other minds, morality and God. In this extensively revised second edition there are expanded sections on epistemic luck, social epistemology and contextualism, and there are new sections on the contemporary debates concerning the lottery paradox, pragmatic encroachment, peer disagreement, safety, sensitivity and virtue epistemology. Engaging examples are used throughout the book, many taken from literature and the cinema. Complex issues, such as those concerning the private language argument, non-conceptual content, and the new riddle of induction, are explained in a clear and accessible way. This textbook is an invaluable guide to contemporary epistemology.

Philosophical discourse on learning, or on any other human activity, may give but a generic human who is a no-body. But this idea of a human is only ever a part truth, for every thought is a kind of exposition of a particular human face. In the case of a philosopher like Ivan Illich the particular human face is at the critical centre of the work. Illich questions the validity and benign heuristic value of theoretical, technical, or institutional devices for the focal practice of human learning. It could be said that his position is his attempt to be obedient to "presence" prefaced by the word "real." ;Illich is ultimately proposing that the confusion and contradictions of contemporary life are the expression of a misplaced faith in rationalism, technology, and an accompanying disfiguring of human nature. Simply stated, Illich does not believe in educational, technological, and institutional solutions or the capacity of calculative rationality to bring fitting and human learning. Illich argues that education and the technological character of contemporary life mask, pervert, and manipulate the somatic gravity of human encounters. ;Illich attends to the dilemmas posed by modernity because he wishes to remain loyal to an image of humanity as a somatic presence that is not defined by either modern atomistic individualism or systematic collectivism. He seeks a spiritual austerity that conserves traditions of dependence and communion in communities of locally and somatically felt conviviality. These local communities of friendship may take new forms, but they remain continuous with traditions that honour the wisdom of past practices over the novelty of any "postmodern" devices. To move beyond the despair Illich's critique may inspire, this thesis sees hope for learning in sanctuaries for real human presence. In or outside educational institutions, sanctuaries must be found or be founded that encourage learning built upon the virtues of friendship and in resistance to the values implicit in institutionalized and technically defined education Bianchi, Borgmann, Orr, Berry, and Vanier give some clues for the founding and finding of sanctuary. The image of sanctuary is a modest constructive proposal appreciative of Illich's foundational critique.

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 considers the phenomenological work of Emmanuel Levinas in arguing that these differences may limit the force of the ethical summons a provider would otherwise experience before the face of a patient. The diminishment of this signal therapeutic experience may engender vocational as well as clinical consequences, which should be weighed against the practical benefits of the virtual visit as we consider whether our enthusiasm for this mode of practice should continue.

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 relevance to the economic turmoil of the world, and switched to economics, graduating in 1934 with a First. He left Cambridge in 1934 and registered as an occasional student at the London School of Economics. This chapter presents a biography of Hutchison and also narrates his trips to Germany, Iraq, and India, as well as his stints at the University of Hull, LSE, and the University of Birmingham.

Robert 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 professionalization of economics. Black was the well-merited recipient of many honours. In 1974 he was elected both a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He became an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin in 1982; President of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland over the years 1983 to 1986; acted as President of Section F of the British Association in 1984–5; was elected a Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society in 1987; and in 1988, Queen's University bestowed upon him an Hon. D.Sc. Econ.

This book brings together a team of international scholars to attempt to understand David Hume’s conception of the self. The standard interpretation is that he holds a no-self view: we are just bundles of conscious experiences, thoughts and emotions. There is nothing deeper to us, no core, no essence, no soul. In the Appendix to A Treatise of Human Nature, though, Hume admits to being dissatisfied with such an account and Part One of this book explores why this might be so. Part Two turns to Books 2 and 3 of the Treatise, where Hume moves away from the ‘fiction’ of a simple self, to the complex idea we have of our flesh and blood selves, those with emotional lives, practical goals, and social relations with others. In Part Three connections are traced between Hume and Madhyamaka Buddhism, Husserl and the phenomenological tradition, and contemporary cognitive science.

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 moral debate. This incoherence implicates principlist conceptions of bioethics. Medical ethics as practiced, though, is partially in keeping with teleological alternatives to principlism. Nonetheless, the hegemony of principlism threatens to harm the practice of good medicine whenever it is used to provide justification for the sanction or prohibition of practices, despite not being equipped to grant moral authority to such justifications. An example of this failure and its resulting harm is expressed in the growing obsolescence of living donor liver transplantation.

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 catalysts for artistic-philosophical investigation, thus revitalizing the idea of universities embodying ongoing and open-ended conversations.

A contemporary debate concerning the epistemology of testimony is portrayed by its protagonists as having its origins in the eighteenth century and the respective views of David Hume and Thomas Reid. Hume is characterized as a reductionist and Reid as an anti-reductionist. This terminology has been widely adopted and the reductive approach has become synonymous with Hume. In Sect. 1 I spell out the reductionist interpretation of Hume in which the justification possessed by testimonially-acquired beliefs is reducible to the epistemic properties of perception, memory and inductive inference. This account of testimony is taken to be found in the section ‘On Miracles’ of Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. In Sect. 2 I introduce the distinction between global and local reductionism, and Coady’s interpretation of Hume as a global reductionist. He takes Hume’s position to be untenable. The rest of the paper explores alternative interpretations of Hume. Section 3 develops a local reductionist interpretation of Hume on testimony. It is argued, though, that such an approach is unstable and, in response, Sect. 4 turns to anti-reductionism in its contemporary forms and in Reid’s teleological account. In Sect. 5 I argue for an anti-reductionist account of Hume, one drawn from his discussion of the testimony of history in the Treatise of Human Nature, thus moving away from the usually exclusive focus upon the discussion of miracles in the first Enquiry, upon which the reductionist interpretation is based. Given the standard meaning of ‘Humeanism’ in the current debate, my interpretation amounts to the claim that Hume is not a Humean with respect to testimony.

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, predominantly consists of killers, victims or socially inept characters. The term I give for this particular trait in cinema is hap-tech narration, which is inspired by Laura Marks’ concept of haptic cinema. Unlike Marks’ understanding of haptic which focuses upon sensual beauty, hap-tech narration considers phenomenological uncomfortableness which is considered through Don Ihde’s philosophy of technology. This paper incorporates Ihde’s framework of postphenomenology, which considers how experientiality is changed and filtered through technological devices (which in this analysis will be the technology of the camera and the frame of the screen). Using Ihde’s postphenomenological understanding of human−technology relationships (which this work explores in detail), I consider a range of narrative films that utilise POV camerawork, including: Delmer Daves’ _Dark Passage_ (1947), Michael Powell’s _Peeping Tom_ (1960) and Julian Schnabel’s _Le Scaphandre et le Papillon_ (_The Diving Bell and Butterfly_, 2007). Each of these titles present events through the subjective gaze of a killer, victim or socially damaged character. This paper offers a rationale as to why this is the case by addressing POV through the philosophy of Ihde, enabling an understanding of hap-tech narration to be unpacked, in which viewers are placed into corrupted and damaged corporeality through the technological power of the camera.

"The main and original contribution of this volume is to offer a discussion of teleology through the prism of religion, philosophy and history. The goal is to incorporate teleology within discussions across these three disciplines rather than restrict it to one as is customarily the case. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, from individual teleologies to collective ones; ideas put forward by the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau and the Scottish philosopher David Hume, by the Anglican theologian and founder of Methodism, John Wesley, and the English naturalist Charles Darwin; it criss-crosses intellectually and conceptually from a discussion of morality to that of the sacralisation of politics"--

There are various forms of teleological thinking central to debates in the early modern and modern periods, debates in which David Hume (1711–1776) is a key figure. In the first section, we shall introduce three levels at which teleological considerations have been incorporated into philosophical accounts of man and nature, and sketch Hume’s criticisms of these approaches. In the second section, we turn to Hume’s non-teleological ‘science of man’. In the third section, we show how Hume has an account of human flourishing that is not dependent on teleology. In the fourth section, we shall speculate as to the relation between Hume’s account of human nature and contemporary evolutionary accounts of morality and reasoning.

Ethicist Dan O’Brien explores the biblical and historical roots of the Catholic Church’s belief that both spiritual and physical healing are integral to its mission. To understand the Church’s commitment, he explains, we must start with the Incarnation – the Church’s foundational belief that God assumed our human nature and thereby forever transforms our relationship not only with God but with each other. Nowhere is this illustrated more than in the healing stories and parables of the Gospels. O’Brien explores one such healing story, to show how Jesus touched individuals in all their dimensions – physical, spiritual, emotional and social – a hallmark of palliative care. He then explores the parable of the Good Samaritan, which illustrates how Jesus taught that we are called to comfort and heal all people – to be a neighbor to those in distress – including our enemies and those who do not share our beliefs. O’Brien then examines how healing was viewed by the early Church. Early Christianity was clearly understood by both insiders and outsiders as a healing religion – not just a religion of private faith. This is one of the many reasons it was so subversive to those in civil authority, and explains, in large part, its rapid spread. Love for God and neighbor is key not only to understanding the early Church’s commitment to healing the sick and caring for poor and vulnerable persons, but for understanding the Church’s continued commitment today to the ministry of healing, including its ready adoption of palliative care for the chronically ill and dying.