In his overlooked 1955 book, The Phenomenology of Moral Experience, Maurice Mandelbaum presented a nuanced moral phenomenology, on the basis of which he defended a kind of moral objectivism, specifically moral realism, against the sorts of non-objectivist views in ethics that were popular in analytic philosophy in the 1940s and early 1950s. A central feature of Mandelbaum's moral phenom-enology...

‘Subjective probability: the real thing’ is the last book written by the late Richard Jeffrey, a key proponent of the Bayesian interpretation of probability. Bayesians hold that probability is a mental notion: saying that the probability of rain is 0.7 is just saying that you believe it will rain to degree 0.7. Degrees of belief are themselves cashed out in terms of bets—in this case you consid...

Primary quality theories of color claim that colors are intrinsic, objective, mind-independent properties of external objects — that colors, like size and shape, are examples of the sort of properties moderns such as Boyle and Locke called primary qualities of body. Primary quality theories have long been seen as one of the main philosophical options for understanding the nature of color. Howev...

DURING THE LAST several decades something of a renewal in natural law and rights theorizing has emerged in political philosophy. Until around 1970 the dominant theme in contemporary moral and political philosophy was noncognitivism, notably variations of evotivism, the view that when we judge some act or institution morally right or wrong, what we are doing is giving expression to our feelings ...

Cases and case method instruction are claimed by some to be a form of history instruction. This point is disputed because case method theory rests on the philosophy of pragmatism and the theory of progressive education, both of which are anti-history in theory and in practice. Consequently, case method instruction is anti-history; in fact, it is the opposite of history. Further, pragmatism, pro...

When I turned my focus from debates on the philosophy of science to the philosophy of biology and life sciences in the mid-1980s, one of the most interesting things that struck me was that the results of these debates failed to penetrate any biological discipline. Yet biological disciplines have methods, methodological discussions, and a scientific history with developmental stages. Like all ot...

Truth telling is one of the most fundamental tenets, not only of forensic psychiatry, but also of life in general. Within bioethics, deontological principles espouse truth telling, and in consequentialist approaches, truth telling is thought to foster respect and autonomy and ultimately to promote the greater social good. Paul Appelbaum writes of it as the first pillar of forensic ethics. Intui...

Instructionism refers to educational practices that are teacher-focused, skill-based, productoriented, non-interactive, and highly prescribed. Constructivism refers to educational practices that are student-focused, meaning-based, process-oriented, interactive, and responsive to student interest. There is disagreement regarding which curricular orientation best serves the educational needs of c...

Everyday explanations of behavior that one way or another appeal to emotions are ubiquitous and there appear almost always to be three components to them. First, there is a reference to some significant event in the environment or in the person (a source of danger in the environment or the sight of an angry person). The second component refers to the effects in the mind, brain, and body of the ...