Commercial video games are popular entertainment media and part of students’ media reality. While commercial video games’ main purpose is not learning, they nonetheless could and should serve as objects of reflection in formal educational settings. Teachers could guide student learning and reflection as well as motivate students with commercial video games, but more evidence from formal educational settings is required. We conducted two mixed methods case studies to investigate students’ reflection processes using commercial video games in regular (...) formal high school teaching. In a double lesson, 29 students of a 10th-grade biology course and 17 students of a 12th-grade advanced course on history played and discussed a commercial video game related to the current curricular topic. We examined the reflection processes of students in terms of their reactions to the teachers’ game-related statements and questions. Regarding teachers’ statements, students discussed several topics related to game enjoyment and the games’ representation of topic-related content. Regarding teachers’ questions, students discussed multiple goals in each game, how the games represented topic-related content, and how the games could be appropriate for learning. In Study 2, students additionally discussed emotions, stereotypes, violence, and the narrative related to the digital history game. We found that the discussions provided students opportunities to reflect on their game experiences and the current curricular topic as well as to practice media criticism. We further provide quantitative results on students’ perceived topic knowledge, on several facets of their learning motivation, and on their acceptance of video games. Overall, our findings illustrate the educational value of using commercial video games as objects of reflection. (shrink)

Taking the pragmatic insistence on the primacy of practice seriously, this book argues for the fruitfulness of a pragmatic philosophy of religion by bringing it to bear on a number of classical topics within the philosophy of religion: miracles, religious diversity, and what it is to be religiously mistaken.

This paper describes a structured approach to the selection of an analytic strategy for cross-case analysis and a method for data display. To this end, criteria will be developed addressing both, aspects of scientific rigor as well as the practicability of application and the application of the decision process will be demonstrated.

This article examines stakeholder involvement and influence as part of voluntary environmental agreements between regulatory agencies and companies. Ten pilot projects that were part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Project XL were examined to evaluate process goals and outcome goals. The ten case studies encompass a range of businesses, locations, and ideas for regulatory “reinvention” projects, and they span a spectrum of stakeholder participation processes and outcomes. Although results point to numerous problems in implementation, they also indicate (...) that in several cases, stake holder groups significantly affected the final project agreement and enforceable permit. The evidence suggests that companies can work collaboratively and constructively with residents of local communities, members of national environmental organizations and other interest groups, and government regulatory officials to craft voluntary environmental agreements that are cooperative and environmentally beneficial. (shrink)

This paper argues that individuating practices are produced through iterative processes of community and agent-level interactions. This claim will be demonstrated by using three case studies from biology: The structuring of data categories for data collection tables and models; establishing spatial and temporal threshold markers or limits; and the comparative use of phenomenal characteristics as cues for object identification. By drawing from examples of data classification and comparative analysis in the biological sciences, I offer a view about ‘individuation’ (...) as double-barreled according to the method of co-constitutive conceptual analysis. Specifically, the capacity—i.e., the _ability_ to individuate—is co-constituted by community level choices and agent applications: Individuation’s evidential role is generated, revised, and refined by scientific communities and their members through an iterative process of community and agent-level interactions. (shrink)

This open access collection of AI ethics case studies is the first book to present real-life case studies combined with commentaries and strategies for overcoming ethical challenges. Case studies are one of the best ways to learn about ethical dilemmas and to achieve insights into various complexities and stakeholder perspectives. Given the omnipresence of AI ethics in academic, policy and media debates, the book will be suitable for a wide range of audiences, from scholars (...) of different disciplines (e.g. AI science, ethics, politics, philosophy, economics) to policy-makers, lobbying NGOs, teachers and the educated public. (shrink)

Despite having paved the way for face, womb and penis transplants, hand transplantation today remains a small hybrid of reconstructive microsurgery and transplant immunology. An exceptionally limited patient population internationally complicates medical researchers’ efforts to parse outcomes “objectively.” Presumed functional and psychosocial benefits of gaining a transplant hand must be weighed in both patient decisions and bioethical discussions against the difficulty of adhering to post-transplant medications, the physical demands of hand transplant recovery on the patient, and the serious long-term health (...) risks of immunosuppressant drugs. This paper relates five narratives of hand transplantation drawn from an oral history project to show how narrative methods can and should inform ethical evaluations and the clinical process of hand transplantation. The interviews with patients and their partners analyzed here lead us to suggest that qualitative accounts of patient experiences should be used to complement clinical case studies reported in medical journals and to help develop instruments to assess outcomes more systematically. (shrink)

An increase in Academic Integrity (AI) breaches has resulted in higher education institutions implementing solutions to improve AI competence. It has been argued that to improve students’ AI understanding, concepts and skills should be taught at the classroom level and contextual factors should be considered. This article presents an investigation on how AI is taught at the classroom level across a range of disciplines, how contextual factors inform approaches to AI education, and how the approaches align with evidence-based recommendations. Purposeful (...) sampling procedures were employed to select units of study from disciplines at two Australian universities. Qualitative data collection methods were used to capture ways AI education was approached and the collected data were analysed through grounded theory methods. The findings show that AI was primarily taught through explicit instruction and personal storytelling and assessed through summative assessment. Such approaches appear to be influenced by personal philosophies, institutional mandates and student backgrounds. While the approaches align with the notion that best practice includes an educative approach, other facets of best practice that have been promoted to combat the rise in AI breaches such as collusion, assessment outsourcing and cheating in exams were not evident. (shrink)

This book showcases the history and theory of pragmatism and its alignment to the sensibilities of contemporary analytic philosophy. It does this not only by describing its mode of operation and explaining its legitimating rationale, but also by substantiating its claims by a series of instructive case studies. The unifying insight of this approach is that the natural criterion of merit within any goal-oriented enterprise—be its orientation practical or cognitive—pivots on its contribution to the effective and efficient realization (...) of the aims at issue. The aim of this volume is to describe and illustrate this broadened conception of pragmatism as a far-reaching and many-sided approach to philosophical inquiry. Theoretical considering apart, it offers a variety of case studies to illustrate the range and fertility of this approach. Nicholas Rescher has published extensively on the history and theory of pragmatism and on its alignment to the sensibilities of contemporary analytic philosophy over the last 30 years. (shrink)

The debate on concept possession in animals has moved at a very abstract level, with scant detailed consideration of case studies in animal behaviour. In this paper, we go against this trend by examining a specific prey defence mechanism, thanatosis or death-feigning, in order to determine what it can tell us about the minds of the predators it targets. We argue that thanatosis gives us evidence of conceptual abilities in predators. In particular, we defend that the best available (...) explanation for the evolution of thanatosis comes from positing that the predators whose cognition acted as selection pressure and shaped thanatosis displays satisfy the concept possession requirements of distance, inferentiality, aspectuality, generality, and a minimal semantic net. Moreover, we argue that the semantic content of the concept targeted by thanatosis likely corresponds to a minimal concept of death. We end on a methodological note, by showing how the consideration of case studies can help move this philosophical debate forward, while also generating concrete empirical predictions that can be put to the test, thus favouring interdisciplinary collaborations. (shrink)

Meaning, Anthropology, Christianity Matt Tomlinson & Matthew Engelke The Uses of Meaning As Stanley Tambiah once said, "the various ways 'meaning' is ...

C a s e studies have a wide variety of uses in ethics courses,from increasing ethical sensitivity to developing moral reasoning skills. This article focuses on ways to avoid 2 potential pitfalls of using typical case studies: lack of theoretical background and lackof suficient detail. Thefirst part explains how a personal ethics experience can be discussed as early as thefirst day of class in a way that sets the tone and expectations of an ethics course despite students' (...) lack of exposure to ethical principles. Second, is an explanation of how a film can be used as an extended case that is rich enough in detail to sustain discussions about ethical theory over several weeks. (shrink)

“What characterizes the act of justice is not resort to a court and to judges; it is not the intervention of magistrates (even if they had to be simple mediators or arbitrators). What characterizes the juridical act, the process or the procedure in the broad sense, is the regulated development of a dispute. And the intervention of judges, their opinion or decision, is only ever an episode in this development. What defines the juridical order is the way in which one (...) confronts one another, the way in which one struggles. The rule and the struggle, the rule in the struggle, this is the juridical.” - Michel Foucault Penal Theories and Institutions is the title Michel Foucault gave to the lectures he delivered at the Collège de France from November 1971 to March 1972. In these lectures Michel Foucault presents for the first time his approach to the question of power that will be the focus of his research up to the writing of Discipline and Punish (1975) and beyond. His analysis starts with a detailed account of Richelieu’s repression of the Nu-pieds revolt (1639-1640) and then goes on to show how the apparatus of power developed by the monarchy on this occasion breaks with the system of juridical and judicial institutions of the Middle Ages and opens out onto a “judicial State apparatus”, a “repressive system”, whose function is focused on the confinement of those who challenge its order. Michel Foucault systemizes the approach of a history of truth on the basis of the study of “juridico-political matrices” that he had begun in the previous year’s lectures (Lectures on the Will to Know) and which is at the heart of the notion of “knowledge-power”. In these lectures Foucault develops his theory of justice and penal law. The appearance of this volume marks the end of the publication of the series Foucault’s courses at the Collège de France (the first volume of which was published in 1997). (shrink)

Philosophers of science diverge on the question what drives the growth of scientific knowledge. Most of the twentieth century was dominated by the notion that theories propel that growth whereas experiments play secondary roles of operating within the theoretical framework or testing theoretical predictions. New experimentalism, a school of thought pioneered by Ian Hacking in the early 1980s, challenged this view by arguing that theory-free exploratory experimentation may in many cases effectively probe nature and potentially spawn higher evidence-based theories. Because (...) theories are often powerless to envisage workings of complex biological systems, theory-independent experimentation is common in the life sciences. Some such experiments are triggered by compelling observation, others are prompted by innovative techniques or instruments, whereas different investigations query big data to identify regularities and underlying organizing principles. A distinct fourth type of experiments is motivated by a major question. Here I describe two question-guided experimental discoveries in biochemistry: the cyclic adenosine monophosphate mediator of hormone action and the ubiquitin-mediated system of protein degradation. Lacking underlying theories, antecedent data bases, or new techniques, the sole guides of the two discoveries were respective substantial questions. Both research projects were similarly instigated by theory-free exploratory experimentation and continued in alternating phases of results-based interim working hypotheses, their examination by experiment, provisional hypotheses again, and so on. These two cases designate theory-free, question-guided, stepwise biochemical investigations as a distinct subtype of the new experimentalism mode of scientific enquiry. (shrink)

Four detailed cases of delusions of misidentification (DM) are presented: two cases of misidentification of the reflected self, one of reverse intermetamorphosis, and one of reduplicative paramnesia. The cases are discussed in the context of three levels of interpretation: neurological, cognitive and phenomenological. The findings are compared to previous work with DM patients, particularly the work of Ellis and Young (1990; Young, 1998) who found that loss of the normal affective response to familiar faces was a contributing factor in the (...) Capgras delusion. The four cases presented suggest that this particular deficit is not a critical factor in the development of other forms of DM. (shrink)

Packed with real-life examples of business decisions gone awry, the 8th Edition of BUSINESS ETHICS: CASE STUDIES AND SELECTED READINGS explores the complex issues of business ethics from the leaders' perspectives. This best-selling text offers a rare collection of readings which examines the business decision-making processes of many types of leaders, while revealing some of the common factors that push them over ethical lines they might not otherwise cross. A combination of short and long cases, readings, hypothetical situations, (...) and current ethical dilemmas, BUSINESS ETHICS: CASE STUDIES AND SELECTED READINGS provides a stimulating and thorough basis for evaluating business ethics, and encourages stronger values in future business leaders. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version. (shrink)

More than thirty-five years ago, a longitudinal study was established to research the health and well-being of older people living in an English city. Self and Meaning in the Lives of Older People provides a unique set of portraits of forty members of this group who were interviewed in depth from their later seventies onwards. Focusing on sense of self-esteem and, especially, of continued meaning in life following the loss of a spouse and onset of frailty, this book sensitively illustrates (...) these persons' efforts to maintain independence, to continue to have a sense of belonging and to contribute to the lives of others. It examines both the psychological and the social resources needed to flourish in later life and draws attention to this generation's ability to benefit from strong family support and from belonging to a faith community. In conclusion, it questions whether future generations will be as resilient. (shrink)

Objections to the use of historical case studies for philosophical ends fall into two categories. Methodological objections claim that historical accounts and their uses by philosophers are subject to various biases. We argue that these challenges are not special; they also apply to other epistemic practices. Metaphysical objections, on the other hand, claim that historical case studies are intrinsically unsuited to serve as evidence for philosophical claims, even when carefully constructed and used, and so constitute a (...) distinct class of challenge. We show that attention to what makes for a canonical case can address these problems. A case study is canonical with respect to a particular philosophical aim when the features relevant to that aim provide a reasonably complete causal account of the results of the historical process under investigation. We show how to establish canonicity by evaluating relevant contingencies using two prominent examples from the history of science: Eddington’s confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity using his data from the 1919 eclipse and Watson and Crick’s determination of the structure of DNA. (shrink)

These last years, the development of AI robots for agriculture, livestock farming and food processing industries is rapidly increasing. These robots are expected to help produce and deliver food more efficiently for a growing human population, but they also raise societal and ethical questions. As the type of questions raised by these AI robots in society have been rarely empirically explored, we engaged in four case studies focussing on four types of AI robots for agri-food ‘in the making’: (...) manure collectors, weeding robots, harvesting robots and food processing robots which select and package fruits, vegetables and meats. Based on qualitative interviews with 33 experts engaged in the development or implementation of these four types of robots, this article provides a broad and varied exploration of the values that play a role in their evaluation and the ethical questions that they raise. Compared to the recently published literature reviews mapping the ethical questions related to AI robots in agri-food, we conclude that stakeholders in our case studies primarily adopt a relational perspective to the value of AI robots and to finding a solution to the ethical questions. Building on our findings we suggest it is best to seek a distribution of tasks between human beings and robots in agri-food, which helps to realize the most acceptable, good or just collaboration between them in food production or processing that contributes to realizing societal goals and help to respond to the 21 century challenges. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to detailed analysis of the notion of goal in games. It is argued that Suits’ analysis which provides a distinction between prelusory goal and lusory goal is insufficient, and thus introduction of a third kind of goal is necessary. I suggest to call this third kind of goal institutional goal. The paper discusses the definition of this kind of goal as well as its relations to other kinds of goals in games and other elements of game-playing. (...) These three goals create the goal triad, a conceptual map of all possible goal-related situations. Both Venn diagrams and Euler diagrams are used to represent this triad. Various fields of these diagrams, which represent a spectrum of specific situations that occur in games, are illustrated by case-studies, taken mainly (although not exclusively) from the history of association football (soccer).El artículo plantea un análisis detallado de la noción de objetivo de los juegos. Se argumenta que el análisis de los juegos de Suits, que ofrece una distinción entre objetivo lúdico y meta pre-lúdica, es insuficiente, por lo que es necesaria la introducción de un tercer objetivo. A este tercer objetivo sugiero llamarlo meta institucional. El artículo analiza la definición de este tipo de objetivo, así como sus relaciones con los otros tipos de objetivos y elementos del juego. Estos tres objetivos constituyen la tríada de objetivos, un mapa conceptual de todas las relaciones posibles entre objetivos. Para representar la tríada se emplean los diagramas de Venn y de Euler. Varios campos de estos diagramas, que representan un espectro de situaciones específicas que suceden en los juegos, se ilustran con estudios de casos, tomados principalmente (aunque no exclusivamente) de la historia del fútbol. (shrink)

Has the rise of data-intensive science, or ‘big data’, revolutionized our ability to predict? Does it imply a new priority for prediction over causal understanding, and a diminished role for theory and human experts? I examine four important cases where prediction is desirable: political elections, the weather, GDP, and the results of interventions suggested by economic experiments. These cases suggest caution. Although big data methods are indeed very useful sometimes, in this paper’s cases they improve predictions either limitedly or not (...) at all, and their prospects of doing so in the future are limited too. (shrink)

_Engaging Bioethics: An Introduction with Case Studies_ draws students into this rapidly changing field, helping them to actively untangle the many issues at the intersection of medicine and moral concern. Presuming readers start with no background in philosophy, it offers balanced, philosophically based, and rigorous inquiry for undergraduates throughout the humanities and social sciences as well as for health care professionals-in-training, including students in medical school, pre-medicine, nursing, public health, and those studying to assist physicians in various capacities. Written (...) by an author team with more than three decades of combined experience teaching bioethics, this book offers Flexibility to the instructor, with chapters that can be read independently and in an order that fits the course structure Up-to-date coverage of current controversies on topics such as vaccination, access to health care, new reproductive technologies, genetics, biomedical research on human and animal subjects, medically assisted death, abortion, medical confidentiality, and disclosure Attention to issues of gender, race, cultural diversity, and justice in health care Integration with case studies and primary sources Pedagogical features to help instructors and students, including Chapter learning objectives Text boxes and figures to explain important terms, concepts, and cases End-of-chapter summaries, key words, and annotated further readings Discussion cases and questions Appendices on moral reasoning and the history of ethical issues at the end and beginning of life An index of cases discussed in the book and extensive glossary/index A companion website with a virtual anthology linking to key primary sources, a test bank, topics for papers, and PowerPoints for lectures and class discussion. (shrink)

The interaction between philosophy and mathematics has a long and well articulated history. The purpose of this note is to sketch three historical case studies that highlight and further illustrate some details concerning the relationship between the two: the interplay between mathematical and philosophical methods in ancient Greek thought; vagueness and the relation between mathematical logic and ordinary language; and the study of the notion of continuity.