Late in 1990, the Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions at Illinois Institute of Technology (lIT) received a grant of more than $200,000 from the National Science Foundation to try a campus-wide approach to integrating professional ethics into its technical curriculum.! Enough has now been accomplished to draw some tentative conclusions. I am the grant's principal investigator. In this paper, I shall describe what we at lIT did, what we learned, and what others, especially philosophers, can learn (...) from us. We set out to develop an approach that others could profitably adopt. I believe that we succeeded. (shrink)

Will appeal to thoughtful readers who ponder the "big question" of the meaning of life. It explores the question both in a philosophical way and through using classical and contemporary Jewish texts. Both philosophy and Judaism run into ineliminable doubt. This shared circumstance can promote honest dialogue.

This is a “bottom-up” paper in the sense that it draws lessons in defining disciplinary categories under study from a series of empirical studies of interdisciplinarity. In particular, we are in the process of studying the interchange of research-based knowledge between Cognitive Science and Educational Research. This has posed a set of design decisions that we believe warrant consideration as others study cross-disciplinary research processes.

The concept of projection from one space to another, with a consequent loss of information, can be seen in the relationships of gene to protein and language description to real situation. Such a transformation can only be reversed if extra external information is re-supplied. The genetic algorithm embodying this idea is now used in applied mathematics for exploring a configuration space. Such a dialectic – transformation back and forth between two kinds of description – extends the traditional Hegelian concept used (...) by Engels and others of change as resulting from a resolution of the conflict of two opposing tendencies and provides for evolution of the joint system. (shrink)

An interfaith perspective on meditation discusses such aspects of the practice as its spiritual foundations, the benefits of energy-building exercises and affirmations, techniques for effective prayer, and ways to measure inner practice.

We live in an age beset by religiously inspired violence. Terms such as "holy war" are the stock-in-trade of the evening news. But what is the relationship between holiness and violence? Can acts such as murder ever truly be described as holy? In Does Judaism Condone Violence?, Alan Mittleman offers a searching philosophical investigation of such questions in the Jewish tradition. Jewish texts feature episodes of divinely inspired violence, and the position of the Jews as God's chosen people has (...) been invoked to justify violent acts today. Are these justifications valid? Or does our understanding of the holy entail an ethic that argues against violence?Reconstructing the concept of the holy through a philosophical examination of biblical texts, Mittleman finds that the holy and the good are inextricably linked, and that our experience of holiness is authenticated through its moral consequences. Our understanding of the holy develops through reflection on God's creation of the natural world, and our values emerge through our relations with that world. Ultimately, Mittleman concludes, religious justifications for violence cannot be sustained. (shrink)

This mixed methods study examines how college students’ perceptions and experiences affect their understanding of academic integrity. Using qualitative and quantitative responses from the Personal and Social Responsibility Institutional Inventory, both quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that while campuses may see a reduction in overall levels of cheating when punitive academic integrity policies are present, students may develop higher levels of personal and academic integrity through the use of more holistic and community-focused practices.

A major use of medical ontologies is to support coding systems for use in electronic healthcare records and messages. A key task is to define which codes are to be used where – to bind the terminol...

Ethics in the axial age -- Some aspects of rabbinic ethics -- Medieval philosophical ethics -- Medieval rabbinic and kabbalistic ethics -- Modern Jewish ethics.

Elie Wiesel, plucked from the ashes of the Holocaust, became a Nobel Peace laureate, an activist on behalf of the oppressed, a teacher, an award-winning novelist, and a renowned humanist. He moved easily among world leaders but was equally at home among the disenfranchised. Following his Nobel Prize, Wiesel established the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity; one of their early initiatives was the founding of the Elie Wiesel Ethics Essay Contest. The reflections in this volume come from judges of the (...) contest. They share their personal and professional experiences working with and learning from Wiesel, providing a glimpse of the person behind the public figure. At a time when the future seems ominous and chaotic at best, these reflections hold on to the promise of an ethically and morally robust possibility. The students whose essays prompt this sense of hope are remarkable for their insight and dedication. The messages embedded in the judges’ reflections mirror Wiesel’s convictions about the importance of friendship, the need to interrogate (without abandoning) God, and the power of remembrance in order to fight indifference. (shrink)

Eustathios, in his commentary to Homer's Iliad 768.20–2 preserves two elements of Attic speech which could derive originally from comedy. Although neither of them appears as so much as a conjecture in standard collections, a possibility that they are quotations from a lost comedy merits testing. They may, as it turns out, even be fragments of a comedy by Kratinos. The argument for this possibility rests on a manner Eustathios has of presenting evidence to support his general observations. The pattern (...) is as follows: He will say that such-and-such a usage can be observed among the ancients, and then he will cite an ancient author in whose work he has observed such a phenomenon. A good, simple, short example of this presentation can be found at Eustathios' Commentary to Homer's Odyssey 1419.50–4; λλ κα πλλαξ ξ ο κα παλλακή κα παλλκια δ κατ Aλιν Διονσιον ο παλλήκια ο παδες, στιν ερεν παρ τος παλαιος ο δικαστήριον στοροσιν πνυµον τς Παλλδος. 'Aριστοφνης κων κτεν σε τκνον. δ'πεκρνατο π Παλλαδωι κτλ. (shrink)

This article focuses on the association between the beliefs of small business owners and managers and their support for the community. Qualitative and quantitative data are utilized in an exploratory examination of two rationales for socially responsible behavior and of two kinds of support. Analyses show that the belief in strengthening the community as an important strategy for business success is positively associated with the provision of nonrisky and risky support. Risky support may threaten short-term business success. However, the belief (...) that a good public image is important for business success is negatively or not significantly associated with either risky or nonrisky support for the community. Findings uphold the position that there are significant variations in enlightened self-interest rationales that are differentially associated with business social performance among small business operators and demonstrate the usefulness of disaggregating social performance into risky and nonrisky variations. (shrink)

Much research has examined the positive effects of legitimacy spillover. However, negative events may reduce the extent of legitimacy, which may in turn spillover to affect the legitimacy of important stakeholders including alliance partners. This study examines incidents of regulative legitimacy violation and focuses on the effect such incidents have on the alliance partners of the perpetrating organizations. We specifically examine three types of such violations—administrative law, criminal law, and civil law—to show that the loss of regulative legitimacy negatively influences (...) the stock market performance of alliance partners. More interestingly, not all corrective actions and repair efforts are equally impactful. We show that the effect of repair efforts by the perpetrating firm on the alliance partner differ depending on the nature of those violating incidents. (shrink)

This paper argues that Hegel has much to say to modern mathematical philosophy, although the Hegelian perspective needs to be substantially developed to incorporate within it the extensive advances in post-Hegelian mathematics and its logic. Key to that perspective is the self-referential character of the fundamental concepts of philosophy. The Hegelian approach provides a framework for answering the philosophical problems, discussed by Kurt Gödel in his paper on Bertrand Russell, which arise out of the existence in mathematics of self-referential, non-constructive (...) concepts (such as class). (shrink)

A biography of the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher who created an intellectual universe though he spent his life in a limited environment.

There is at present no intelligible account of what the statements of pure mathematics are about. The philosophy of mathematics is in a mess! Marvin J. Greenberg.

A brief biography of the Chinese teacher and sage whose teachings, though largely ignored during his lifetime, influenced all aspects of Chinese life for many centuries after his death.

Summary Since at least the time of Helmholtz, the process of visual perception has been regarded as a two-stage affair consisting of an initial sensory stage corresponding to the proximal stimulus and a subsequent cognitive stage corresponding to the distal object. This construction amounts to an awkward mind body dualism wherein part of perception is done by the body and the other part is done by the mind. Gestalt theory rejected both raw sensations and their cognitive interpretation, offering a single (...) unified perceptual process that responds to an extended pattern of stimulation. They proposed organizational rules that describe how objects arise from the indifferent retinal mosaic. The same grouping principles by which objects are segmented also function to segregate regions of uniform illumination. Lightness values can then be computed by comparing luminance values within each such framework of illumination, with no need for the mystical concept of taking the illumination into account. (shrink)

This article extends Lemieux’s concern for the interdisciplinary tension between philosophy and sociology to the intradisciplinary tension within psychology between approaches to the study of children focusing on universal principles and approaches adopting a contextual lens. This tension arises both in how development is defined and in the methods chosen for its study. This tension is exemplified in terms of the recent American preoccupation with the Word Gap (WG), a supposed difference of 30 million words heard by socioeconomically diverse children (...) by the age of 4 that is blamed for educational disparities throughout the school years. The article discusses the political implications of WG discourse as it gives rise to the erasure of language practices of diverse Americans and obscures the role that the educational system plays in fostering a ‘one-size-fits-all’ instructional model. The article concludes with a discussion of attempts to combat the deficit model that the WG discourse reproduces. (shrink)