bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
All Simultaneous Time is the Same
Authors: Coope Ursula
Published: February 2006

This chapter discusses Aristotle’s claim that there is one and the same time for all simultaneous changes. Aristotle thinks that changes are simultaneous just in case they are bounded by one and the same pair of nows. He does not give a reductive account of simultaneity (that is, he does not explain in virtue of what different changes are bounded by the same pair of nows), but he does insist that any one now divides all the changes that are going on at it. It is argued that he insists on this because he has a certain view about time’s universality: he thinks that time must be an order within which any change, or change part, is related to any other. Aristotle draws a comparison between the fact that the same time is the time of many different changes, and the fact that the same number is the number of different groups (for instance, of seven dogs and seven horses). Based on an earlier account of Aristotle’s definition of time, the comparison he is drawing here is explained.
Being in Time
Authors: Coope Ursula
Published: February 2006

Aristotle believes that some things are not in time; that the things that are in time are all and only those things that last for a finite length of time. This raises a puzzle. Everlasting things are (on this view) not in time. However, Aristotle thinks that some of the things that last forever move. This chapter presents a solution to this puzzle. It argues that everlasting movements are part of the temporal order: they have parts that are simultaneous with, or before or after, other changes. However, there is a sense in which things that last forever are not in time. Time does not cause them to grow older or decay. Aristotle’s view of being in time is compared to a view that can be found in Plato. The sense in which (on Aristotle’s account) time is a cause is explained.
1 Why be a Stoic?
Authors: Brennan Tad
Published: February 2006

This chapter opens the discussion with the questions: what is it to be a Stoic and why would one would want to live like a Stoic? It offers answers to this question — answers that are considered incomplete, misleading, false, or completely hopeless — in an effort to provide contrast, thus painting a clearer picture of the view of Stoicism presented in the succeeding chapters. The answers were derived from miscellaneous popular notions of what it is to be Stoic, or what it is to be stoical about something.
3 The Ancient Philosophical Background
Authors: Brennan Tad
Published: February 2006

This chapter presents a philosophical background of Stoic ethics. Stoic ethics arose as the last of the distinctive ethical outlooks developed in ancient Greece. Socrates had the greatest influence on the Stoics. A summary of the philosophical content of Socrates’ contribution to the Stoic background is presented. Similarities between the ancient and contemporary concepts of ethics are discussed.
7 Impulses and Emotions
Authors: Brennan Tad
Published: February 2006

This chapter examines the Stoics’ views on impulses and emotions. Impulse is defined as an assent to an impression of a certain kind, i.e. an impression that attributes a certain kind of value to the agent’s own potential action. The relation between the three main kinds of impulse: emotions (desire, fear, pleasure, and pain), eupatheiai (joy, volition, and caution), and selections (selection, disselection), are discussed.
8 Goods and Indifferents
Authors: Brennan Tad
Published: February 2006

Stoics claim that only virtue is good, only vice is bad, and the rest are indifferents of various sorts. The strategies employed Stoics to argue for this claim, and why they should be believed are analysed. Cicero’s discussion on the fourth book of his treatise de Finibus (On Ends) is examined. It is argued that the Stoic account of human good must be met on the grounds of physics and metaphysics, with a competing account of human nature.
9 Final Ends
Authors: Brennan Tad
Published: February 2006

This chapter discusses the Stoic theory of the final end. It considers the various formulations of the Stoic end to impose some order on the multiplicity. The problem of ‘living consistently’ is shown to be a bad translation of an uninformative formulation. Ancient and anti-Stoic allegations of incoherence, unoriginality, and other problems with the Stoic end are reviewed. Finally, some Stoics’ responses to these charges, and other texts in which they offer discussions of their end and how these were formulated are presented.
13 Discovering the Befitting: A Better Model
Authors: Brennan Tad
Published: February 2006

This chapter examines the problems of the Indifferents-Only model. This model was replaced by a Naturalness-Only model, while the Salva Virtute model was replaced by the No Shoving model. The two new models are deliberately equivalent — yielding the same principles in the same circumstances — as a result of the bridging principles between acting contrary to what is just, and acting contrary to nature. Both have integral roles of considerations of what is just, arising from the welfare, advantages, and property rights for other agents, and the needs of the agent’s country or human community. The role of virtue in deliberation is discussed.
16 The Lazy Argument
Authors: Brennan Tad
Published: February 2006

The Lazy Argument attempts to steer one away from Stoicism. It attacks determinism by showing that it makes nonsense of planning, deliberation, and effort. The Stoic response is to reject the soundness of the argument. The Lazy Argument does not show the incompatibility of Fate and ordinary goal-directed behaviour, thus, one need not choose between them. This chapter examines this argument, Chrysippus’ reply, and then discusses what the argument succeeds in showing.
Introduction
Authors: Crouch Colin , Voelzkow Helmut
Published: February 2006

The main aim of this book is to determine the national patterns of local production systems, particularly those involving small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in France, Germany, Italy, and the UK. This chapter lays down the theoretical foundations for this volume then explains the methodologies used for the selection and analysis of case studies. An overview of the case studies is then presented.
Collective Goods in the Local Economy: The Packaging Machinery Cluster in Bologna
Authors: Farrell Henry , Holten Louise
Published: February 2006

This chapter examines the packaging machinery cluster in Bologna. It focuses on the mix of governance institutions affecting the industrial district of packaging machine producers, and the ‘Emilian model’ as a whole — the state, associations, and relations among firms. It argues that local collective competition goods determine the success or failure of industrial districts.
Machine Tooling in the United Kingdom
Authors: Crouch Colin , Mahoney Joen
Published: February 2006

This chapter examines the decline of the machine-tool industry in the UK. This decline is partially attributed to globalization and the British tradition of a low-cost strategy, short-term investment patterns, and general neglect of manufacturing. It argues that the institutions that can support industrial networks remain weak, despite evidence to the contrary.
The Reconstruction of Declining Local Economies in Europe
Authors: Voelzkow Helmut
Published: February 2006

This chapter explains the theoretical foundations for the four case studies presented in chapters nine to twelve. The decline of the European steel industry, and European steel and regional policies are discussed. The focus of analysis of the case studies is described.
Industrial Decline and Local Development Policies in the Steel Area of Piombino
Authors: Tonarelli Annalisa
Published: February 2006

This chapter examines the efforts to revitalize the Piombino area following the decline of the steel industry. The strategies and actors involved in managing the decline are discussed. It is shown that revitalization strategies succeeded due to the early attention given by the local political class to the initial signs of crisis in the steel sector, and the acceptance of financial opportunities offered by the EU and other institutions.
The Biopharmaceutical Cluster in Oxford
Authors: Proudfoot Neill
Published: February 2006

This chapter examines two hypotheses on the biopharmaceutical cluster in Oxford. First, that dedicated pharmaceutical firms can be expected to co-locate where they can reduce transaction costs in the market for ideas, where they can exploit untraded localized knowledge externalities, and/or where they can economize on start-up costs. Second, that pure market mechanisms provide inadequate investment in start-up resources because information asymmetries that encourage entrepreneurship will discourage investors. The findings for Oxford are compared to the governance of local collective competition goods in other established or embryonic clusters of biopharmaceutical activity in the UK.
Between Cities and Districts: Local Software Systems in Italy
Authors: Biagiotti Andrea , Burroni Luigi
Published: February 2006

This chapter examines the Italian software industry, highlighting its unique features. It argues that high-tech activity tends to concentrate in certain locations due to the presence of specific local external economies. It outlines the differences between local systems of software production and other local product systems.
1 Introduction
Authors: Davis Wayne A.
Published: February 2006

This chapter provides an introduction to the book. Part I briefly sets out the expression theory of meaning, and then extends it to four categories of terms with nondescriptive meaning. The expression theory realizes Grice’s program of defining word meaning in terms of speaker meaning, and speaker meaning in terms of intention. Part II provides an analysis of reference, defining speaker reference in terms of expression and intention, and examines the relationship between word meaning and word reference. Part III presents the expression theory’s account of proper names.
2 Thoughts
Authors: Davis Wayne A.
Published: February 2006

This chapter introduces the cogitative sense of thought, comparing and contrasting it with belief. It distinguishes thoughts from sentences, identifies propositions with one type of thought, and establishes that thoughts have constituents including sub-propositional constituents. Thoughts are cognitively and motivationally neutral, abstract, generatively constructed representations with truth values and sentence-like constituent structures.
Reference and Intention
Authors: Davis Wayne A.
Published: February 2006

This chapter shows that the intentionalist definition of reference presented in chapter 7 is superior to alternative analyses. It defends the implication that speakers can refer to non-existent objects, arguing for the intentionality of speaker reference and against the wide-spread assumption that it is a relation. It enumerates many defects in the theory that reference is a species of causal relation, and defends the thesis that speaker reference is determined by intention against twin earth arguments.
9 Meaning and Reference
Authors: Davis Wayne A.
Published: February 2006

This chapter focuses on word reference, and shows that the meaning of an expression cannot be identified with its reference to things in the world, rather than its expression of ideas in the mind. It looks at extensionalist versions of the referential theory that focus on objects in the actual world and sets thereof, as well as intensionalist versions that consider other possible worlds and/or properties and relations. It examines the Davidsonian theory, which used a Tarski-style axiomatization for languages to describe the compositionality of language. Truth-theoretic properties can be systematized in an ideational theory using a generative theory of thought, with phrase structure rules and Tarskian reference rules.
Formal Semantics
Authors: Davis Wayne A.
Published: February 2006

This chapter shows that the treatment of names as having nondescriptive, indefinable senses does not preclude a powerful formal semantics; that the referential properties of names can be treated formally without identifying the meaning of a name with its reference; and that names can be handled within an ideational semantics, or by situation and possible worlds semantics. The key to avoiding both Russell’s and Frege’s problems is to drop the assumption that the elements of the ordered n-tuples representing situations, or the values of intension functions representing meanings, are the referents of the terms whose meanings are being represented, and to rely on the formal character of formal semantics.
15 Rigidity and Identity
Authors: Davis Wayne A.
Published: February 2006

This chapter shows that the principle of the necessity of identity, which precludes proper treatment of names in standard possible worlds semantics, fails for logical and epistemic necessity. Model structures allow contingent identities as long as the co-representation relation is non-transitive. It is shown that there is no sound argument from the rigidity of names to the necessity of identity, and that other well known arguments for this principle are either invalid or question begging. The rigidity of names extends to worlds that are mere logical or epistemological possibilities, and is intensional.
1 Emotions as Judgements
Authors: Robinson Jenefer
Published: February 2006

The most widely accepted theory of emotion is probably the ‘judgement’ theory, i.e., that emotions are or entail evaluative judgements such as ‘I have been offended’ (anger) or ‘I have suffered a loss’ (grief), but it seems as if one can make the judgement appropriate to a particular emotion without actually experiencing that emotion or indeed without getting emotional at all. Some have tried to modify the judgement theory by arguing that the ‘judgements’ in the judgement theory are better thought of as ‘points of view’ or ‘ways of seeing’ the environment.
2 Boiling of the Blood
Authors: Robinson Jenefer
Published: February 2006

William James argued that bodily changes are essential to an emotion; they are what put the ‘emotionality’ into emotion. There is good empirical evidence that some bodily responses are universal for particular emotions. Paul Ekman has demonstrated that there are universal spontaneous facial expressions for the ‘basic’ emotions of fear, anger, surprise, disgust, sadness, happiness, and contempt. There is also evidence that many emotional responses are inbuilt or very easily acquired, such as the human fear of snakes. Robert Zajonc's research shows that some emotional responses happen too fast for ‘higher’ cognitive processes to be involved.
4 The Importance of Being Emotional
Authors: Robinson Jenefer
Published: February 2006

Emotional reactions to great works of (especially realistic) literature can be indispensable to a proper understanding of the work. Unless we laugh and cry in the right places, we haven't really understood what we're reading. This theme is developed specifically in relation to understanding characters, which is a sine qua non of understanding a novel. Understanding characters in great realistic novels such as Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is relevantly like understanding real people and understanding real people requires emotional understanding, not just a dispassionate grasp of their character and motives.
5 Puzzles and Paradoxes
Authors: Robinson Jenefer
Published: February 2006

The argument of Chapter 4 is defended against a number of objections: that not all novels require emotional involvement (true), that we do not in fact react to novels in a bodily way (false), that I ignore authorial manipulation (I don't ), that some emotional responses are inappropriate (they are), and that according to the so-called ‘paradox of fiction’, it is irrational to respond emotionally to fictional characters when we are perfectly aware that they are fictional. The answer to the paradox of fiction is that we process novels both cognitively and affectively. Our instinctive affective appraisal system is indifferent to whether or not stimulus for emotion exists or not. Persons can get emotionally worked up by imagined and remembered events and people as well as by actual people right in front of them.
6 A Sentimental Education
Authors: Robinson Jenefer
Published: February 2006

The emotional experience of reading a novel is itself educational, teaching us about life and morality. However, emotional learning is not just a matter of making reflective judgements or acquiring beliefs about the characters and events portrayed, but of making affective appraisals of important events, having our attention focused on these events in a bodily way, and reflecting upon them after the fact. This chapter contains a detailed reading of Edith Wharton's The Reef, in which these themes are explored and illustrated. It also defends the version of ‘reader-response theory’ that underpins the discussion.
7 Formal Devices as Coping Mechanisms
Authors: Robinson Jenefer
Published: February 2006

Formal devices are the means by which a literary work guides and manages our emotional experience of the work. It is suggested that formal devices in literature play the role of coping mechanisms as described by the psychologist Richard Lazarus. In particular, formal devices help us to cope with difficult or painful material, such as we encounter in The Reef, in Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, and in Shakespeare's Sonnet ‘That time of year thou mayst in me behold’. Using these examples, different modes of coping are illustrated, from ‘distancing oneself’ intellectually from the difficult material to confronting and coming to terms with it.
8 Pouring Forth the Soul
Authors: Robinson Jenefer
Published: February 2006

R. G. Collingwood defended a Romantic theory of art as the expression of emotion, which was so effectively criticized by the philosopher Alan Tormey in 1971 that Collingwood's theory was left for dead. This chapter rehabilitates Collingwood's views, not as a theory of art in general, but as a theory of expression in the arts. Collingwood's idea that the expression of emotion in literature, painting, and so on is the articulation and elucidation of emotion is clarified by reference to the theory of emotion worked out in Part One. Expression should be thought of as a special kind of cognitive monitoring and as part of the emotion process.
12 Listening with Emotion: How Our Emotions Help Us to Understand Music
Authors: Robinson Jenefer
Published: February 2006

Leonard Meyer thinks that when we listen to tonal music, it is entirely appropriate to respond with emotion to the unfolding structure of a piece. Indeed, if we are surprised by the sudden key change, bewildered by the way the music lingers in keys distant from the tonic, and relieved when the tonic finally reappears, we are thereby evincing understanding of the musical development. It is argued that we may well also be able to detect the expressive features of music by having our emotions aroused appropriately. An experiment by psychologist Carol Krumhansl seems to confirm that having one's emotions aroused by music serves to help the listener grasp both the structure and the expressiveness of music. This chapter parallels Chapter 4, which made the case that having one's emotions aroused is often crucial to understanding literature.
13 Feeling the Music
Authors: Robinson Jenefer
Published: February 2006

There is a great deal of evidence that music does arouse the ‘garden-variety’ emotions such as joy and sadness, serenity and nervousness. But because these states lack specific objects, they may turn out to be more like moods than emotions. When music works on our moods, we become sadder, happier, or more calm or nervous. Depending on the contexts we bring to the music, we then interpret these affective states in somewhat different ways. There is no reason to feel sad just because music is playing — I haven't suffered a loss, and nothing bad has occurred — so we label our state in a way that makes sense, given the contexts we bring to the music: I feel ‘nostalgic’ because the music reminds me of my homeland, and you feel ‘melancholy’ because melancholy events are more readily remembered when melancholy music is playing. ‘Labeling’ our emotions is one form that ‘cognitive monitoring’ of our affective appraisals and reactions can take.
14 Epilogue
Authors: Robinson Jenefer
Published: February 2006

The book aims to marry the scientific with the humanistic. It gives an account of emotion that is grounded in empirical psychology and neuroscience, but uses it to illuminate the way emotion functions in the experience of great works of art. There are a number of sub-texts. First is that the philosophical study of the arts is more fruitful if it is based on empirical work in the cognitive sciences. Second is that we should wrest the study of music away from those who pay attention only to the quasi-mathematical analysis of structure, and hand it over to those who are just as interested in the humanistic implications of music. Third is that post-modernism has seduced academic critics of literature into highly cognitive modes of criticism that have sometimes lost touch with what ordinary readers find most compelling about literature: the way they appeal to our emotions and the way they teach through appealing to our emotions.
Political Parties and the Rhetoric and Realities of Democratization
Authors: Kittilson Miki Caul , Scarrow Susan E.
Published: February 2006

This chapter considers how political parties may be contributing to changes in the relationships between citizens and the democratic process in established industrial democracies. Parties may promote democratizing reforms through their rhetoric as well as through the culture they nurture within their own organizational domains. The changes in the values that parties have proclaimed in their election platforms are first examined. The changes they have made in their selection procedures, and in the inclusion of interest groups on parties’ decision-making bodies are then assessed. The investigation finds that while few parties in these countries have given top priority to campaigning on democratic themes, many have nevertheless embraced an internal agenda of democratization, altering party rules to offer party members a greater say in party decisions.
Reforming the Administrative State
Authors: Ansell Christopher , Gingrich Jane
Published: February 2006

This chapter investigates reforms that arguably produce more direct forms of accountability and citizen participation in administrative agencies. A first type of reform is part of a larger trend to decentralize aspects of administrative accountability, which includes New Public Management reforms designed to make agencies more responsive to their “customers.” A second type of reform, increasingly widespread, involves the creation of legal frameworks for pursuing grievances and ensuring representation, such as ombudsman systems and administrative procedure laws. Finally, a third type involves direct attempts to increase deliberation, using informal strategies of collaborative governance between public agencies and stakeholders particularly. These are particularly common at the local level. A wide of variety of other new techniques designed to enhance participation and democratic deliberation — such as citizen juries and consensus conferences — are increasingly popular, though they remain largely experimental.
Participation, Representative Democracy, and the Courts
Authors: Cichowski Rachel A. , Sweet Alec Stone
Published: February 2006

This analysis examines the relationship between representative democracy and courts. In particular, it asks to what extent can citizens activate judicial institutions to pursue more diffuse public policy issues and whether this use has grown over time? To assess this change, cross-national variations in three institutional variables: separation of powers, judicially enforceable rights, and rules governing standing to sue state authorities, are examined. The findings reveal increasing levels of public interest litigation around the globe that has led to a creeping judicialization of policy-making.
Basics of treatment effect analysis
Authors: Lee Myoung-Jae
Published: February 2006

For a treatment and a response variable, the ‘causal effects’ of the former on the latter is of interest. This chapter introduces causality based on ‘potential-treated and untreated-responses’, and examines what type of treatment effects are identified. The basic way to identify treatment effect is to compare the average difference between the treatment and control (i.e., untreated) groups. For this to work, the treatment should determine which potential response is realized, but should otherwise be unrelated to the potential responses. Biases can result if this condition is not met due to some observed and unobserved variables affecting both the treatment and response. Avoiding such biases is one of the main tasks in causal analysis with observational data. The treatment effect framework has been used in statistics and medicine, has appeared in econometrics under the name ‘switching regression’, and is closely linked to ‘structural form equations’ in econometrics. Causality using potential responses gives a new look to the old workhorse ‘regression analysis’, enabling the interpretation of the regression parameters as causal parameters.
Matching
Authors: Lee Myoung-Jae
Published: February 2006

If the treatment (T) and control (C) groups are different in observed variables x, then the difference in outcome y cannot be attributed to the difference in the treatment. The obvious solution is to compare only those subjects with the same (or similar) value of x across the two groups. Selecting subjects similar in x across the T and C groups is ‘matching’. Treatment-effect estimators with matching (or simply matching estimators) are introduced first, assuming that the matching has been done already; then how to do matching in practice is discussed. If x is high-dimensional, it is hard to find matched subjects, but there is a simple way to avoid the dimension problem, called ‘propensity score matching’. Matching also can be done to control for unobservables, e.g., using identical twins controls for genes. Combining before-after design with matching yields the popular ‘difference-in-differences’ design, which can be generalized to ‘difference in differences in differences’. These difference-based designs can deal with unobserved confounders to some extent; it is thus fitting that they are examined in the second half of this chapter before hidden bias is dealt with in the following chapters. This chapter employs terms used in medical science and epidemiology: a treated subject is called a ’case’, and a control subject a ‘control’.
Multiple and dynamic treatments*
Authors: Lee Myoung-Jae
Published: February 2006

This chapter generalizes binary treatments to multiple treatments, which can occur at a given time. Multiple treatments can occur over time, as well at each given time point having a binary treatment. The latter aspect leads to dynamic treatment effect, which is an important and evolving area of research. When a binary treatment is given consecutively over time, its duration can be handled as a single ‘cross-section’ cardinal treatment if the covariates are time-constant. Otherwise, if some covariates are time-variant, a ‘hazard-based’ causal framework may be used. The most difficult case in dynamic treatment effect arises when interim responses that are controlled for are affected by the earlier treatments, and affect future treatments; the ‘G algorithm’ is introduced for this case.
7 Hartley, Tucker, Priestley
Authors: Harris James A.
Published: February 2006

David Hartley ends the first part of his Observations on Man with an argument for necessitarianism that emphasises the obvious influence of motives upon choice, and that straightforwardly, and unusually, denies that we experience ourselves as free in our choices. Hartley’s style of philosophizing is taken up by Abraham Tucker and Joseph Priestley. Priestley deploys the rhetoric of Newtonian natural philosophy in his writings on free will, and seeks to establish that necessitarianism is the only position compatible with a ‘scientific’ approach to human action.
Understanding Eating Disorders
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: February 2006

Understanding Eating Disorders is an original contribution to the field of healthcare ethics. It develops a new theory concerning the moral basis of eating disorders, and places such disorders for the first time at the centre of philosophical discourse. The book explores the relationship that people have with food and their own body by looking at genetics and neuro-physiology, sociology and family studies, clinical psychology and psychiatry, and frames abnormal eating at the extreme of a spectrum of normal behaviours, directed by moral values. Giordano argues that abnormal eating is not a psycho-pathological phenomenon, but the coherent implementation of ordinary moral values with a long tradition in Western culture. The book also contains a detailed analysis of UK legislation, accompanied by a timely critique of the law on treatment of mental disorders in general and of eating disorders in particular.
Eating Disorders: Anorexia and Bulimia Nervosa
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: February 2006

This chapter uses case histories to illustrate the reality of eating disorders and provides a detailed clinical description of the condition. It explains what eating disorders are, how they manifest, whom they affect, and what somatic effects they have. It discusses distortion of body image, which is thought to affect eating disorder sufferers. Family and social issues relating to eating disorders are introduced. The effects of abnormal eating on the endocrine system, the heart, and the gastrointestinal apparatus are reported in detail and in accessible language. This chapter also introduces ethical issues surrounding care and treatment of people with eating disorders.
Paternalism v. Respect for Autonomy
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: February 2006

This chapter discusses the ethical issues that arise for people dealing with someone in the grip of an eating disorder, and articulates a theory of justifiable paternalism. Eating-disordered behaviour is often dangerous and self-harming, and the person with eating disorders is typically intelligent and defends her eating habits. This chapter answers the question: can we rightly prevent people from harming themselves, if this is what they want? It argues that sometimes paternalism may be ethical, but only when certain conditions are met (when the behaviour to be restrained lacks autonomy in some relevant way). The theory of paternalism articulated in this chapter takes into account various philosophical and ethical notions, which are explained in plain language.
Is Pathological Behaviour Caused by Mental Illness
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: February 2006

This chapter considers a widespread argument that behaviour classified as psychopathological is caused by the mental illness. It is common to believe, for example, that patients hear voices because they suffer from paranoid schizophrenia; or that they lose interest in life because they suffer from depression; or that they binge and fast because they suffer from bulimia and so on. It seems to follow that the autonomy of the person with a mental illness is diminished, and therefore paternalism towards mentally ill people can be justified precisely on the grounds that they have a mental illness. This chapter argues that a mental illness does not cause the experiences and behaviours that are regarded as pathological. It shows that it is fallacious to contend that abnormal experiences and behaviours are the result of an underlying mental illness. This has important ethical implications — paternalism cannot be claimed as ethical because the person has a mental illness.
Scientific Understanding of Eating Disorder
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: February 2006

This chapter explores the organic basis of eating disorders, and discusses whether eating disorders are a form of addiction. Gene variations seem to be involved in both anorexia and bulimia nervosa. However, it is unclear what these variations are and how they may interact with environmental stressors to determine the onset of the disorders. Moreover, though there is clear evidence that physiological abnormalities are linked to eating disorders, variations are generally corrected as abnormal eating patterns are abandoned. The relationship between these abnormalities and the onset of eating disorders is thus unclear. This has important ethical implications: it cannot be claimed that eating disorders are caused by organic causes, or that organic dysfunctions diminish the sufferers’ autonomy.
Lightness and Eating Disorders
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: February 2006

This chapter draws on literary and artistic sources (Kundera, Dickinson, Giacometti, Modigliani, Sartre) to explain the value of lightness. It shows that the pursuit of lightness is not a contemporary phenomenon, contrary to what many people believe. Victorian literature is replete with slim and aerial heroines. Slimness and lightness symbolize values that are part of Western morality. It argues that the value of lightness is moral in nature, and that the pursuit of thinness is not the result of an aesthetic choice, but reveals adhesion to a cluster of moral values.
The Value of Lightness
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: February 2006

Lightness and fasting are often associated with positive feelings and with beauty. Arts, music, and literature testify the value that is attached to lightness in Western culture. Lightness and food restriction are also thought to be morally valuable, as an instrument to asceticism and spirituality. This chapter discusses the body-mind split and its repercussions on the value of lightness. It traces the origins of this split in ancient Greece, and looks at how such metaphysics of the human person spreads in the Latin world and in Western religion and philosophy. It shows that food restriction becomes valuable in the light of this metaphysics and of the ethics that follow from it. Food restriction corporealizes self-government, self-discipline, willpower and control, all of which are praised within such an ideology. The body is corrupted and corruptible, and needs to be controlled and transcended. Lightness and slenderness are the emblem of the person’s self-control and discipline. Concomitant denigration of fat reflects the low conception of the body, which is found in all eras in Western culture. Lightness and thinness are normative, moral ideals that reflect the body/mind juxtaposition and the idea that the body is inferior to the spirit or mind.
The Role of Expectations in the Genesis of Eating Disorders
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: February 2006

This chapter explores family dynamics recurrent in families with an eating disordered person. According to clinical studies, these families present similar traits. Clinical studies agree that in these families, expectations of the person who will develop eating disorders are too high and unrealistic. This seems to lead the future eating disordered person to find a way to gain control over her life. The struggle for control over eating seems to be a defence against excessive expectations.
Autonomy and Control in Eating Disorders
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: February 2006

This chapter considers whether eating disordered behaviour is autonomous. This would have important ethical implications, as there is a prima facie ethical obligation to respect autonomous behaviour. It shows that eating disordered behaviour seems undermined by some defects in autonomy, such as defects in perception of hunger and satiety, defects in the ability to apply knowledge about food to self, false beliefs relating, for example, to food and its assimilation. These defects in autonomy seem to provide a prima facie justification for paternalism. However, this chapter shows that some elements specific to eating disorders weaken the strength of paternalism. Although there seem to be defects in autonomy, these do not provide clear justification for paternalism towards people with eating disordered.
Anorexia Nervosa and Refusal of Life‐Saving Interventions
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: February 2006

This chapter considers the case in which the anorexic patient refuses naso-gastric feeding. It argues the principle of autonomy seems prima facie to dictate that the patient’s decision not to be fed should be respected, if the decision appears to be autonomous. However, this chapter shows that the principle of autonomy is not a sufficient ground for accepting the sufferer’s decision to die, in the case of anorexia nervosa. The decision to omit or withdraw life-saving treatment for anorexia necessarily has to rest on the capacity to identify with the suffering of the patient, and on the willingness to end the pains of the sufferer. In short, on one’s compassion. The death of the anorexic can be prevented and the effects of abnormal eating are completely reversible. The refusal of artificial feeding and hydration may therefore be profoundly devastating for carers, possibly more devastating than the refusal of therapy in cases of untreatable degenerative or mortal illnesses. This is humanly understandable and ethically relevant, and seems to weaken the normative strength of the principle of respect for people’s competent decisions.
Conclusions: The Need for Change
Authors: Giordano Simona
Published: February 2006

This conclusive chapter summarises the content of each chapter. It argues that helping people with eating disorders means questioning ordinary moral values and beliefs. The focus should shift from the person with eating disorders, from her eating habits, and from what happens in her mind to shared moral assumptions about what is good and right, and their repercussions. Eating (normal or abnormal) is not important per se. Eating is important as an expression of people’s moral beliefs, and it is these beliefs that need to be unmasked and discussed.
Pragmatism
Authors: Misak C. J.
Published: February 2006

This chapter argues that Peirce did not want to disqualify certain important kinds of pragmatism from the category of the legitimate. He provided the resources for a plausible, if not precise, moderate empiricist criterion of legitimacy. Once articulated, it can be employed in constructing an account of truth. Peirce’s construct of truth is not an analytic definition of truth, but a distinctively pragmatic elucidation of truth. It is an account of the relationship between truth and inquiry.
Inquiry: The Fixation of Belief
Authors: Misak C. J.
Published: February 2006

This chapter argues that Peirce’s account of inquiry has a sane empiricism at its core: inquirers aim to get beliefs that fit with experience, broadly construed. When a belief, which has come into doubt, is replaced, the new belief is probably better. However, it may eventually be overthrown and shown to be false. When there are beliefs that would forever withstand the tests of experience and argument, what is the point of refusing to confer upon them the title ‘true’. According to the pragmatist, there is no point at all — only a spurious desire for transcendental metaphysics.
Supporting unemployed people: income protection and activation
Authors: Clasen Jochen
Published: February 2006

The chapter discusses three periods of policy change in the field of social protection for unemployed people. It explains basic parameters of unemployment protection systems, contrasting contemporary systems with those which existed in the late 1970s. Making use of several indicators, it assess the scale and profile of change in each country. The different reform profiles are identified and their genesis discussed in the context of major legislative changes. It argues that the specific links between unemployment protection systems and respective national political economy structures have impacted strongly on the emerging reform profiles. Dynamic power relations within and across government parties, as well as contextual changes impeded or facilitated policies, thus explaining cross-national variations in the pace and profile of reform.
Family policy: charting new waters
Authors: Clasen Jochen
Published: February 2006

The chapter discusses three periods of policy change in the field of family policy. Concentrating on basic aspects of family support, such benefits and tax allowances for families, as well as pension credits and parental leave programmes, the chapter contrasts current policy provision with the one which existed in the late 1970s. Using a number of indicators, it assess the scale and profile of change in each country. The chapter argues that both countries have traditionally favoured the male breadwinner families and been rather modest in the support for families per se, albeit for different reasons. However, family support has expanded in both countries, particularly since the 1990s, for several reasons. The ‘paid work’ oriented rationale for policy expansion has become a major driving force in the UK and, more recently, in Germany. Institutionally less embedded than the other two policy areas, national family policy profiles have evolved more dynamically.
Neurons and Neonates: Reflections on the Molyneux Problem
Authors: Gallagher Shaun
Published: February 2006

This chapter looks at problems and solutions involved in Molyneux’s famous question to John Locke — whether a person born blind, if they were given sight, would be able to recognize shapes learned by touch. Traditional empiricist answers to this question are based on principles of perception that can be challenged by recent research in developmental psychology and neuroscience. A new answer to the Molyneux problem is proposed, along with a new set of principles.
From Community to Diverse Union
Authors: Majone Giandomenico
Published: February 2006

Since the Treaty on European Union, it has become clear that the process of European integration moves along several paths, of which the Community path is the best known, but not necessarily the most important one. The flexibility that appears in several forms in the TEU signaled an emergent strategy for achieving progress in politically sensitive areas, even at the price of a loss of overall coherence. The aim of greater flexibility was given official recognition by the Amsterdam and Nice Treaties. The drafters of the Constitutional Treaty also acknowledged the impossibility of forcing the integration process into a single institutional framework. In a Union where national preferences are becoming much more varied, the temptation to form smaller, more homogeneous groupings may well become irresistible.
5 Institutional Balance Versus Institutional Innovation
Authors: Majone Giandomenico
Published: February 2006

This chapter discusses the delegation of implementing powers by the Council (or by the Council and the EP) to the Commission or to European agencies. While delegation to the Commission may involve wide discretionary powers, European agencies are denied the regulatory powers which national agencies normally have. The Commission uses the principle of institutional balance to impede institutional developments which would reduce its own role, but would enhance the credibility of European policies. The division of roles between the Commission and the agencies aggravates an already serious accountability problem.
6 Policy Dilemmas
Authors: Majone Giandomenico
Published: February 2006

Under the Community method, policy is largely the by-product of actions undertaken to advance the integration process or to preserve institutional balance, rather than to solve concrete problems efficiently. The policy that eventually emerges is all too often the best bargain that can be negotiated politically. This chapter discusses some clear-cut cases of policy failure, such as the common fisheries and agricultural policies. EU environmental policy is shown to lack a clear rationale, and highly uncertain in its actual results. Risk regulation is a particularly interesting case. The central tenet of EU risk policy — the precautionary principle — is logically defective, tends to distort, rather than clarify regulatory priorities, and has isolated the EU internationally on several occasions.
Beyond Intergovernmentalism
Authors: Majone Giandomenico
Published: February 2006

Member states are increasingly willing to commit themselves to common tasks, but wish to act outside the Community method. How credible are such commitments? It is easy to find cases where the national governments did not take their commitments seriously, but it is also the case that significant results have been achieved outside the traditional framework. There are in fact effective strategies of commitment that do not involve delegation of powers to third parties. In an information-rich environment, where national leaders are quite aware of the preferences and constraints of their colleagues, delegation to centralized institutions is less important than it was in the early stages of integration.
International Economic Integration, the Nation‐State, and Democracy: An Impossible Trinity?
Authors: Majone Giandomenico
Published: February 2006

Critics of globalization argue that economic integration threatens democracy and national sovereignty by restricting the range of public goods political leaders can offer to their voters. However, the experience of the EU shows that it is possible to integrate economically without eliminating either national sovereignty or the welfare state. This is not to say that the welfare state is not facing serious challenges, but these are largely endogeneous (unfavorable demographic trends, growing popular resistance to high levels of taxation, etc.). In the EU, the problem is not a diminution of democracy at the national level, but a democratic deficit at the supranational level. Representative democracy can only flourish at national level, but supranational institutions can improve its quality by disciplining the discretion of national governments.
10 The Future of the Union: Montesquieu Versus Madison
Authors: Majone Giandomenico
Published: February 2006

A European federation of states deeply divided along cultural, social, institutional and economic lines would be unable to provide the variety of public goods, including income redistribution, that citizens of modern welfare states take for granted; hence, it could not attract or retain sufficient popular support. Democratic life would continue to develop in the framework of the nation-state while the federation, far from correcting the democratic deficit of the present EU as federalists hope, would actually make it worse. In turn, this lack of legitimacy would prevent the would-be federal government from acting energetically, even in areas where the nation-states need to pool their sovereignty in order to play a more incisive role on the international scene. The confederal option seems to offer the only feasible solution to this dilemma.
Tracking Truth
Authors: Roush Sherrilyn
Published: February 2006

This book develops and defends a new externalist, reliabilist theory of knowledge and evidence, and develops a new view about scientific realism. Knowledge is viewed as a tracking theory that has a conditional probability rather than counterfactual formulation, and the property of closure under known implication is imposed on knowledge. It is argued that the tracking theory of evidence is best formulated and defended as a confirmation theory based on the Likelihood Ratio. These tracking theories of knowledge and evidence fit together to provide a deep explanation of why having better evidence makes one more likely to know. The new tracking theory of knowledge is argued to be superior to all currently known externalist rivals. It provides a distinctive explanation of why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief, and explains why knowledge is power in the Baconian sense. Finally, the book argues that confirmation theory is relevant to debates about scientific realism, and defends a position intermediate between realism and anti-realism based on a view about what having evidence requires.