Books on the topic 'Demarcation problem'

This chapter relates the problem of demarcating the pathological from the non-pathological in psychiatry to the general problem of defining ‘disease’ in the philosophy of medicine. Section 2 revisits three prominent debates in medical nosology: naturalism versus normativism, the three dimensions of illness, sickness, and disease, and the demarcation problem. Sections 3–5 reformulate the demarcation problem in terms of semantic vagueness. ‘Disease’ exhibits vagueness of degree by drawing no sharp line in a continuum and is combinatorially vague because there are several criteria for the term’s use that might fall apart. Combinatorial vagueness explains why the other two debates appear hopeless: Should we construe ‘disease’ in a naturalistic or in a normative way? Neither answer is satisfactory. How should we balance the three dimensions of pathology? We do not have to, because illness, sickness and disease (narrowly conceived) are non-competing criteria for the application of the cluster term ‘disease’.

This book covers major issues of constitutionalism in the American Revolution. It begins with the imperial debate over taxation and representation between the colonists and the British government. That debated climaxed with the Declaration of Independence. Each of the former colonies became republics and drew up written constitutions with several of them including bills of rights. These constitutions established patterns that later influenced the federal Constitution created in 1787, including bicameral legislatures, independent executives, and independent judiciaries. But because the Confederation of the states lacked the power to tax and regulate trade and the state legislatures were abusing their considerable power, the revolutionaries sought to solve both problems with a new federal Constitution in 1787. In addition to having to recognize the equality of each state in the Senate, the Convention faced the problem with slavery. Although most Americans thought that slavery was gradually dying, South Carolina and Georgia wanted to import more slaves and forced the Convention to guarantee twenty more years of slave importations and some protections for slavery in the Constitution. The institution that benefited most from the Revolution was the judiciary. It became very important in monitoring the demarcation between the public and the private realms that emerged from the Revolution.

This chapter argues that the idea of difference and diversity rely to some extent on fixed identity categories, and that they in fact often reify those categories in socially harmful ways. It delves into the possibility of a more subtle approach, first by examining the idea of identity rigidity from a number of angles, and second by reflecting on the ways in which religion can be recognized as a lived phenomenon within which individuals are flexible, sometimes acting in contradictory ways that defy an easy categorization of their religious identities. The chapter posits that focusing on the social construction of diversity and the conditions under which the language of diversity emerges (particularly its demarcation as a problem to be solved) is a useful enterprise. By recovering the non-events of the everyday wherein so-called ordinary people employ strategies to successfully navigate difference, an alternative narrative of religious diversity can be constructed.

Blurred boundaries between the normal and the pathological are a recurrent theme in almost every publication concerned with the classification of mental disorders. However, systematic approaches that take into account the philosophical discussions about vagueness are rare. This is the first volume to systematically draw various lines of philosophical and psychiatric inquiry together–including the debates about categorial versus dimensional approaches in current psychiatric classification systems, the principles of psychiatric classification, the problem of prodromal phases and subthreshold disorders, and the problem of overdiagnosis in psychiatry–and to explore the connections of these debates to philosophical discussions about vagueness. The book consists of an introduction (Part I) followed by three parts. Part II encompasses historical and recent philosophical positions regarding the nature of demarcation problems in nosology. Here the authors discuss the pros and cons of gradualist approaches to health and disease and the relevance of philosophical discussions of vagueness to these debates. Part III narrows the focus to psychiatric nosology. The authors approach the vagueness of psychiatric classification by drawing on contentious medical categories, such as PTSD or schizophrenia, and on the dilemmas of day-to-day diagnostic and therapeutic practice. Against this background, the chapters critically evaluate how current revisions of the ICD classifications and DSM manuals conceptualize mental disorders and how they are applied in various contexts. Part IV is concerned with social, moral, and legal implications that arise when being mentally ill is a matter of degree. Not surprisingly, the law is ill-equipped to deal with these challenges due to its binary logic. Still, the authors show that there are more and less reasonable ways of dealing with blurred boundaries and of arriving at warranted decisions in hard cases.

This is an opinionated survey of some interpretive puzzles in quantum field theory. The problem of inequivalent representations is sketched, including its connections with competing accounts of physical equivalence. The controversy between variant formulations of the theory, algebraic versus Lagrangian, is given a conciliatory resolution. Arguments against particles are addressed, demarcating clearly between different forms of particle interpretation. Field interpretations are then considered, including wavefunctional, spacetime state realist and Heisenberg operator realist interpretations. Ruetsche’s coalesced structure interpretation is presented and juxtaposed with an alternative, more traditional view of the theory’s laws and state space. Finally, the CPT theorem is discussed, together with its implications about the nature of spacetime.

This chapter examines two recent views that have self-consciously been labeled by their authors as “scientism.” Alexander Rosenberg’s scientism is the view that the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything. This view faces many counterexamples, Rosenberg’s arguments in its favor are weak, and the view is self-referentially incoherent. Don Ross, James Ladyman, and David Spurrett’s scientism as propounded in Every Thing Must Go is the view that science is our only guide to the objective features of the world. It includes an institutional criterion that demarcates bona fide science from non-science, a non-positivist form of verificationism, and the notion that scientism is not a thesis but a stance. The chapter argues that this view, too, faces counterexamples. It also points to problems with the institutional demarcation criterion, the proposed verificationism, as well as the notion that scientism is a stance.

The collection Genre in Oriental Literature contains papers by research fellows of a number of educational and academic institutions of Moscow, under the general supervision of the Institute of World Literature, RAS, and discusses the very important and urgent problem of genre attribution of various works of Oriental literature in correlation with the standard concept of genre accepted in European philology. The book’s contributors strive to find both similarities and differences in varying reasons for distinguishing and demarcating genres in the Orient and in Europe, to grasp the diverse approaches to distinguishing genres practiced by representatives of individual Oriental traditions and by European researchers. For a wide range of orientalists, literary theorists, specialists in the comparative study of cultures.

The medieval reception of Aristotle’s theory of animals was rich and multifaceted and included reflection on his psychological theories but also, for instance, his claim that humans are “political animals.” A particular problem for the medievals was demarcating animals, that is, specifying the dividing line between animal and human. This is especially the case given the sophisticated capacities they ascribe to animals, while still retaining a hard and fast distinction between humans as rational and animals as irrational. Authors discussed in this chapter include Albert the Great, Peter Olivi, and Roger Bacon, who are examined for their psychological and metaphysical accounts of animals. It is also asked to what extent these theories affected moral evaluation of animals and what humans owe to them ethically speaking.

This open access collection brings together a team of leading scholars and rising stars to consider what experimental philosophy of medicine is and can be. While experimental philosophy of science is an established field, attempts to tackle issues in philosophy of medicine from an experimental angle are still surprisingly scarce. A team of interdisciplinary scholars demonstrate how we can make progress by integrating a variety of methods from experimental philosophy, including experiments, sociological surveys, simulations, as well as history and philosophy of science, in order to yield meaningful results about the core questions in medicine. They focus on concepts central to philosophy of medicine and medical practice, such as death, pain, disease and disorder, advance directives, medical explanation, disability and informed consent. Presenting empirical findings and providing a crucial foundation for future work in this dynamic field, this collection explores new ways for philosophers to cooperate with scientists and reveals the value of these collaborations for both philosophy and medicine. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the European Research Council Starting Grant. This volume presents a sample of exciting new ‘naturalistic’ work on quasi-perennial topics in the philosophy of medicine, such as the demarcation of disease, life, death, pain and disability. Some chapters engage surveys and vignettes, others use corpus analysis or simulations, while others offer interesting reflections on how such experimental philosophy touches upon other new developments in philosophy (of medicine), such as conceptual engineering. A couple of contributions mainly focus on the limitations of experimental philosophy of medicine, and point out potential problems with its assumptions or goals.

We have long known that the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 “failed” in the sense that it did not prevent the outbreak of World War II. This book investigates not whether the conference succeeded or failed, but the historically specific international system it created. It explores the rules under which that system operated, and the kinds of states and empires that inhabited it. Deepening the dialogue between history and international relations theory makes it possible to think about sovereignty at the conference in new ways. Sovereignty in 1919 was about remaking “the world”—not just determining of answers demarcating the international system, but also the questions. Most histories of the Paris Peace Conference stop with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany on June 28, 1919. This book considers all five treaties produced by the conference as well as the Treaty of Lausanne with Turkey in 1923. It is organized not chronologically or geographically, but according to specific problems of sovereignty. A peace based on “justice” produced a criminalized Great Power in Germany, and a template problematically applied in the other treaties. The conference as sovereign sought to “unmix” lands and peoples in the defeated multinational empires by drawing boundaries and defining ethnicities. It sought less to oppose revolution than to instrumentalize it. The League of Nations, so often taken as the supreme symbol of the conference’s failure, is better considered as a continuation of the laboratory of sovereignty established in Paris.

Unitarianism and Presbyterian Dissent had a complex relationship in the nineteenth century. Neither English Unitarians nor their Presbyterian cousins grew much if at all in the nineteenth century, but elsewhere in the United Kingdom the picture was different. While Unitarians failed to prosper, Presbyterian Dissenting numbers held up in Wales and Ireland and increased in Scotland thanks to the Disruption of the Church of Scotland. Unitarians were never sure whether they would benefit from demarcating themselves from Presbyterians as a denomination. Though they formed the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, its critics preferred to style themselves ‘English Presbyterians’ and Presbyterian identities could be just as confused. In later nineteenth-century Scotland and Ireland, splinter Presbyterian churches eventually came together; in England, it took time before Presbyterians disentangled themselves from Scots to call themselves the Presbyterian Church of England. While Unitarians were tepid about foreign missions, preferring to seek allies in other confessions and religions rather than converts, Presbyterians eagerly spread their church structures in India and China and also felt called to convert Jews. Missions offered Presbyterian women a route to ministry which might otherwise have been denied them. Unitarians liked to think that what was distinctive in their theology was championship of a purified Bible, even though other Christians attacked them as a heterodox bunch of sceptics. Yet their openness to the German higher criticism of the New Testament caused them problems. Some Unitarians exposed to it, such as James Martineau, drifted into reverent scepticism about the historical Jesus, but they were checkmated by inveterate conservatives such as Robert Spears. Presbyterians saw their adherence to the Westminster Confession as a preservative against such disputes, yet the Confession was increasingly interpreted in ways that left latitude for higher criticism. Unitarians started the nineteenth century as radical subversives of a Trinitarian and Tory establishment and were also political leaders of Dissent. They forfeited that leadership over time, but also developed a sophisticated, interventionist attitude to the state, with leaders such as H.W. Crosskey and Joseph Chamberlain championing municipal socialism, while William Shaen and others were staunch defenders of women’s rights and advocates of female emancipation. Their covenanting roots meant that many Presbyterians were at best ‘quasi-Dissenters’, who were slower to embrace religious voluntaryism than many other evangelical Dissenters. Both Unitarians and Presbyterians anguished about how to reconcile industrial, urban capital with the gospel. Wealthy Unitarians from William Roscoe to Henry Tate invested heavily in art galleries and mechanics institutes for the people but were disappointed by the results. By the later nineteenth century they turned to more direct forms of social reform, such as domestic missions and temperance. Scottish Presbyterians also realized the importance of remoulding the urban fabric, with James Begg urging the need to tackle poor housing. Yet neither these initiatives nor the countervailing embrace of revivalism banished fears that Presbyterians were losing their grip on urban Britain. Only in Ireland, where Home Rule partially united the Protestant community in fears for its survival, did divisions of space and class seem a less pressing concern.