Abstract: Article: The article examines the idea of multiculturalism in contemporary political philosophy. It considers the variety of justifications for multiculturalism, including communitarian, liberal egalitarian, anti-domination, and historical injustice arguments. It then surveys a number of critiques of multiculturalism. It concludes by discussing concerns about political backlash and retreat from multiculturalism in the Western liberal democratic countries.

Abstract: This article is about the description of all the situations in which clinician find difficult to tell the truth to patients regarding their condition. Moral importance of telling the truth is recognized in both moral theory and in the practical reality of everyday living. However, empirical studies continue to show that health- care professional identify the question of truth-telling and disclosure as a source of moral and psychological discomfort in many situations. Other situation creating difficulties for clinicians are not related directly to the patient's wants or needs regarding their illness but to wider issues such as disclosure of medical error and identifying poor performance in colleagues.

Introduction: This book attempts to deepen common understandings of what considerations are relevant in discussions of bioethics. It is meant to offer a clearer picture of what morally acceptable health care might look like. I argue that a feminist understanding of the social realities of our world is necessary if we are to recognize and develop an adequate analysis of the ethical issues that arise in the context of health care.

Abstract: Following suggestions drawn from both analytic and postmodernist sources, I shall advise revisionist artwriters to follow Fou- cault's caution against conceiving of the artists whose stories are related in arts scholarship as historical persons who originated (that is, were the origins of) their art, and who, consequently, are prior to and separate from it. From this perspective, it is problematic how references to properties external to works of art-properties like gender-function in the kind of artwriting crucial to canonical reform.

Abstract: This essay focuses on Schopenhauer's aesthetics and philosophy of art, areas of his philosophy which have attracted the most philosophical attention in recent years. After discussing the subjective and objective aspects of aesthetic experience on his account, I shall offer interpretations of Schopenhauer's theory of the sublime and solution to the problem of tragedy. In addition, I shall touch upon the liveliest interpretive debates concerning his aesthetic theory: the intelligibility of the 'Platonic Ideas' as the objects of aesthetic experience and the very possibility of aesthetic experience within Schopenhauer's system. Another aim of this essay is to suggest how some of Schopenhauer's aesthetic doctrines may be interpreted in a less metaphysically extravagant way. When understood in this manner, contemporary aestheticians might be inclined to take a closer look at Schopenhauer's aesthetic theory and philosophy of art, for it is distinctive in the tradition of Western philosophical aesthetics in its attempt to highlight and balance the hedonic and cognitive importance of aesthetic experiences; in its sensitivity both to the aesthetic experience of nature as well as of art; in the high value placed on the experience of music ; and in the innovative solution to the problem of tragedy it offers

Abstract: Liberal theorists of justice like John Rawls have long maintained that a theory of justice should apply primarily to the institutional mechanisms of society, and only derivatively to the behavior of individuals within institutions. Institutions of taxation, for example, may be just or unjust by the lights of a theory of justice, but such a theory should deem the behavior of individuals unjust only insofar as that behavior undermines just institutions. As Rawls puts it, 'we are to comply with and to do our share in just institutions when they exist and apply to us, [and] we are to assist in the establishment of just arrangements when they do not exist.'1 Critics of this restricted conception of justice (hereafter RCJ) argue that a theory of justice should judge individual behavior directly, even when that behavior complies with just institutions. These critics have tended to focus on two kinds of behavior that they argue should fall within the subject matter of a theory of justice: the 'market-maximizing' behavior of economic agents who demand incentives to exercise marketable talents in socially beneficial ways, and the 'housework-shirking' behavior of family members who distribute power and labor unequally according to gender. These critics argue that RCJ implausibly places these behaviors beyond the reach of justice. Call this the 'restrictiveness objection' to RCJ. A second objection to RCJ threatens to undermine RCJ from within: this criticism alleges that RCJ is arbitrary, because the theorists who embrace it lack a principled justification for restricting the subject matter of their theories to institutions while exempting the behavior of individuals within those institutions. Call this the 'arbitrariness objection' to RCJ. My project in this article is to defend RCJ against both objections. Along the way, I consider and reject an alternative strategy for defending RCJ, but I use insights gleaned from the inadequacies of this rival strategy to build my own defense against the two objections: working from within the framework of political liberalism, I demonstrate first that a theory of justice can nonarbitrarily be restricted to the basic structure, or the institutional structure by which 'the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation,' and second that such a restriction does not result in an implausibly narrow subject matter of justice. I conclude that neither objection undermines RCJ. I do not defend RCJ as it has typically been understood, however. A crucial premise in my argument is that the delineation of the basic structure is itself a substantive normative task, the performance of which must be responsive to relevant differences among enactments of political power. I argue for a more expansive notion of legitimate political power than either critics or defenders of RCJ have tended to adopt. My defense of RCJ thus occupies a conceptual middle ground within the debate about the subject matter of justice: With defenders of RCJ, I maintain that a theory of justice applies directly only to the basic structure of society, such that a society with just institutions may be fully just even though housework-shirking and market-maximizing occur within it. But I agree with critics of RCJ that market-maximizing and housework-shirking should not be beyond the reach of a theory of justice. I reconcile these convictions by defending a view of political legitimacy according to which housework-shirking and market-maximizing can be targets of legitimate political interventions. While a society is not made less just by the mere occurrence of housework-shirking and market-maximizing, it can be less just for having a basic structure that enables or encourages these behaviors.

Abstract: I begin my discussion by considering how to relate Descartes's more general concern with the conduct of life to the metaphysics and epistemology in the foreground of his philosophical project. I then turn to the texts in which Descartes offers his developed ethical thought and present the case for Descartes as a virtue ethicist. My argument emerges from seeing that Descartes's conception of virtue and the good owes much to Stoic ethics, a school of thought which saw a significant revival in the seventeenth century. It does, however, deviate from classical Stoicism in critical ways. Towards the end of my discussion, I return to the question of the relation between Descartes's ethics and his metaphysics and epistemology, and I suggest that the Discourse on the Method for Rightly Conducting Reason and the Meditations on First Philosophy are invested with the virtue ethical considerations of moral education and the regulation of the passions, respectively.

Abstract: In this article, I develop and defend a prioritarian principle of justice for the distribution of educational resources. I argue that this principle should be conceptualized as directing educators to confer a general benefit, where that benefit need not be mediated by improved academic outcomes. I go on to argue that it should employ a metric of all-things-considered flourishing over the course of the student's lifetime. Finally, I discuss the relationship between my proposed prioritarian principle and the meritocratic principle that it is presumed to supplement

Abstract: Few philosophical debates seem to allow for as little theoretical disparity as that on the subject of Realism or Anti-Realism. That the two antithetical positions uphold the broad structure of a dichotomy may come as no surprise: the question under scrutiny is, after all, one about whether the world and its contents are autonomous of our minds, or whether the world and its contents simply cannot be said to exist independently of our perception and understanding of them. There does not, in other words, seem to be much leeway between the two stances, at least partly because what they capture is a deeply entrenched conceptual divide over what does and does not exist. How, one may ask, could some thing exist but a little?

Abstract: I want to suggest that the notion of the suspension of disbelief cannot coherently be used to explain or account for our reactions to fictional characters and events, and that in any case it is unnecessary to the solution of the alleged paradox. I take fiction here to cover art works in which a story is told, presented or represented, i.e. novels, short stories, plays, certain kinds of painting and sculpture and dance-any works in fact is connection with which it makes sense to speak of characters appearing and events taking place in them.