academician

Posted by Michael Cholbi

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/suicide/

[Revised entry by Michael Cholbi on July 21, 2017.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Throughout history, suicide has evoked an astonishingly wide range of reactions - bafflement, dismissal, heroic glorification, sympathy, anger, moral or religious condemnation - but it is never uncontroversial. Suicide is now an object of multidisciplinary scientific study, with sociology, anthropology, psychology, and psychiatry each providing important insights into suicide. Particularly promising are the significant advances being made in our scientific understanding of the neurological and genetic bases of...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/suicide/

Posted by Antony Duff and Zachary Hoskins

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legal-punishment/

[Revised entry by Antony Duff and Zachary Hoskins on July 18, 2017.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
The question of whether, and how, legal punishment can be justified has long been a central concern of legal, moral, and political philosophy: what could justify a state in using the apparatus of the law to inflict intentionally burdensome treatment on its citizens? Radically different answers to this question are offered by consequentialist and by retributivist theorists - and by those who seek to incorporate consequentialist and retributivist considerations in 'mixed' theories of punishment. Meanwhile, abolitionist...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legal-punishment/

Posted by Philip Goff, William Seager, and Sean Allen-Hermanson

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/

[Revised entry by Philip Goff, William Seager, and Sean Allen-Hermanson on July 18, 2017.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html, supplement.html]
Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. The view has a long and venerable history in philosophical traditions of both East and West, and has recently enjoyed a revival in analytic philosophy. For its proponents panpsychism offers an attractive middle way between physicalism on the one hand and dualism on the other. The worry with dualism - the view that mind and matter are fundamentally different kinds of thing - is that it leaves us with a radically disunified picture...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/

Posted by Lewis Kornhauser

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legal-econanalysis/

[Revised entry by Lewis Kornhauser on July 17, 2017.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography, notes.html]
Economic analysis of law applies the tools of microeconomic theory to the analysis of legal rules and institutions. Ronald Coase [1960] and Guido Calabresi [1961] are generally identified as the seminal articles but Commons [1924] and Hale [1952] among others had brought economic thinking to the study of law in the 1910s and 1920s. Richard Posner [1973] brought economic analysis of law to the...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/legal-econanalysis/

Posted by Katrien Devolder

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cloning/

[Revised entry by Katrien Devolder on July 14, 2017.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from a somatic (body) cell, came into the world innocent as a lamb. However, soon after the announcement of her birth in February 1997 (Wilmut et al., 1997) she caused panic and controversy. An important, and for many people troubling question arose: if the cloning of sheep is possible, will scientists soon start cloning humans as well; and if they did, would this be wrong or unwise?...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cloning/

Posted by Rainer Forst

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/toleration/

[Revised entry by Rainer Forst on July 12, 2017.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
The term "toleration" - from the Latin tolerare: to put up with, countenance or suffer - generally refers to the conditional acceptance of or non-interference with beliefs, actions or practices that one considers to be wrong but still "tolerable," such that they should not be prohibited or constrained. There are many contexts in which we speak of a person or an institution as being tolerant: parents tolerate certain behavior of their children, a friend tolerates the...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/toleration/

Posted by Michael Ridge

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasons-agent/

[Revised entry by Michael Ridge on July 11, 2017.
Changes to: Main text, Bibliography]
The agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction is widely and rightly regarded as a philosophically important one. Unfortunately, the distinction is often drawn in different and mutually incompatible ways. The agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction has historically been drawn three main ways: the 'principle-based distinction', the 'reason-statement-based distinction' and the 'perspective-based distinction'. Each of these approaches has its own distinctive...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasons-agent/