Treating such issues as animal sex, species politics, environmental justice, lesbian space and "gay" ghettos, AIDS literatures, and queer nationalities, this lively collection asks important questions at the intersections of sexuality and environmental studies. Contributors from a wide range of disciplines present a focused engagement with the critical, philosophical, and political dimensions of sex and nature. These discussions are particularly relevant to current debates in many disciplines, including environmental studies, queer theory, critical race theory, philosophy, literary criticism, and politics. As (...) a whole, Queer Ecologies stands as a powerful corrective to views that equate "natural" with "straight" while "queer" is held to be against nature. (shrink)

Drawing on a range of queer and ecological theories rather a single orthodox perspective, the thirteen essays in Queer Ecologies develop a strong argument for queering environmentalisms and greening queer theory, in three steps: challenging the heteronormativity of investigations into the 'sexuality' of nature, exploring the intersections between queer and ecological inflections of bio/politics (including spatial politics), and ultimately queering environmental affect, ethics, and desire. Clearly, notions of sexuality have shaped social constructions of nature, as seen in the familiar concepts (...) and creation of wilderness, national and urban parks, and car camping. As the first book-length volume to establish the intersections of queer theory and environmentalisms at such depth, Queer Ecologies covers a broad range of topics—gay cruising in the parks, lesbian rural retreats, transgressive sexual behaviors among diverse species, literary and cultural narratives of queer/nature. It also establishes topics for future development, i.e., exploring the intersection of speciesism and heterosexism in queer ecologies, and developing a focus on the constitution of the non-white queer subject. (shrink)

Since the introduction of mathematical population genetics, its machinery has shaped our fundamental understanding of natural selection. Selection is taken to occur when differential fitnesses produce differential rates of reproductive success, where fitnesses are understood as parameters in a population genetics model. To understand selection is to understand what these parameter values measure and how differences in them lead to frequency changes. I argue that this traditional view is mistaken. The descriptions of natural selection rendered by population genetics models are (...) in general neither predictive nor explanatory and introduce avoidable conceptual confusions. I conclude that a correct understanding of natural selection requires explicitly causal models of reproductive success. *Received May 2006; revised December 2006. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Kansas State University, 201 Dickens Hall, Manhattan, KS 66506; e‐mail: [email protected] . (shrink)

Written for the general reader and the student of moral philosophy, this book provides a clear and unified treatment of Kant's theory of morals. Bruce Aune takes into account all of Kant's principal writings on morality and presents them in a contemporary idiom. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important (...) books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Here is the Florida website for Bill 0837 Full text of the bill, Web, pdf Tallahassee Democrat stories on Bill 0837: Council approves 'academic freedom' (April 20, 2005) 'Academic freedom' bill dead - but not forgotten (April 21, 2005) Rep. Dennis K. Baxley, Ocala (sponsor of Bill 0837).

Keith Thomas: Gerald Edward Aylmer, 1926-2000 Adrian Hollis: William Spencer Barrett, 1914-2001 Bruce Williams: Charles Frederick Carter, 1919-2002 Malcolm Mackintosh: John Erickson, 1929-2002 J. H .R. Davis: Raymond William Firth, 1901-2002 F. M. L. Thompson: Hrothgar John Habakkuk, 1915-2002 A. W. Price: Richard Mervyn Hare, 1919-2002 Hugh Lloyd-Jones: Geoffrey Stephen Kirk, 1921-2003 Michael Lapidge and Peter Matthews: Vivien Anne Law, 1954-2002 Ann Moss: John Lough, 1913-2000 Terence Cave: Ian Dalrymple McFarlane, 1915-2002 Ludwig Paul: David Neil MacKenzie, 1926-2001 Peter (...) Birks: John Kieran Barry Moylan Nicholas, 1919-2002 Jonathan Shepard: Dimitri Dimitrievich Obolensky, 1918-2001 David Cannadine: John Harold Plumb, 1911-2001 Daniel Waley: Nicolai Rubinstein, 1911-2002 Ian Wood: John Michael Wallace-Hadrill, 1916-1985 R. G. M. Nisbet: William Smith Watt, 1913-2002 G. W. Bernard: Richard Bruce Wernham, 1906-1999. (shrink)

The migration of texts and traditions assumes that philosophy is in some way linked to its places. But this is an assumption that has not been held by the majority of philosophers. For most, philosophy is by definition placeless, concerned with ideas, and not with the circumstances of their generation. However, this version of philosophy does not take into account the lived history of philosophers themselves. Philosophers have had much to say about place, but little about their place.

William Simkulet has recently criticised Colgrove et al’s defence against what they have called inconsistency arguments—arguments that claim opponents of abortion (OAs) act in ways inconsistent with their underlying beliefs about human fetuses (eg, that human fetuses are persons at conception). Colgrove et al presented three objections to inconsistency arguments, which Simkulet argues are unconvincing. Further, he maintains that OAs who hold that the fetus is a person at conception fail to act on important issues such as the plight of (...) frozen embryos, poverty and spontaneous abortion. Thus, they are morally negligent. In response, we argue that Simkulet has targeted a very narrow group of OAs, and so his criticisms are inapplicable to most OAs. We then explain why his responses to each of Colgrove et al’s objections do not succeed, even for this restricted group. Finally, we note that Simkulet fails to provide evidence for his claims regarding OAs’ supposed failures to act, and we show that OAs veritably do invest resources into these important issues. We conclude that Colgrove et al’s reasons for rejecting inconsistency arguments (en masse) remain intact. (shrink)

The paper investigates what is meant by "good science" and "bad science" and how these differ as between the natural (physical and biological) sciences on the one hand and social sciences on the other. We conclude on the basis of historical evidence that the natural science are much more heavily constrained by evidence and observation than by theory while the social sciences are constrained by prior theory and hardly at all by direct evidence. Current examples of the latter proposition are (...) taken from recent issues of leading social science journals. We argue that agent based social simulations can be used as a tool to constrain the development of a new social science by direct (what economists dismiss as anecdotal) evidence and that to do so would make social science relevant to the understanding and influencing of social processes. We argue that such a development is both possible and desirable. We do not argue that it is likely. (shrink)

We consider here issues of open access to social simulations, with a particular focus on software licences, though also briefly discussing documentation and archiving. Without any specific software licence, the default arrangements are stipulated by the Berne Convention (for those countries adopting it), and are unsuitable for software to be used as part of the scientific process (i.e. simulation software used to generate conclusions that are to be considered part of the scientific domain of discourse). Without stipulating any specific software (...) licence, we suggest rights that should be provided by any candidate licence for social simulation software, and provide in an appendix an evaluation of some popularly used licences against these criteria. (shrink)

This paper examines interwoven ethical and epistemological issues raised by attempts to promote responsive childcare practices based on neuroscience evidence on the developmental effects of early stress. The first section presents this “neuroscience argument for responsive early childcare”. The second section introduces some evidential challenges posed by the use of evidence from developmental neuroscience as grounds for parental practice recommendations and then advances a set of observations about the limitations of the evidence typically cited. Section three highlights the ethical implications (...) of the neuroscience argument for responsive early childcare. It argues that the neuroscience argument, first, fuels unwarranted parental anxiety by unduly raising the stakes of families’ early childcare choices and, second, threatens public confidence in developmental science’s potential to inform childcare practices and policy that enhance children’s health and well being. (shrink)

The SDML programming language which is optimized for modelling multi-agent interaction within articulated social structures such as organizations is described with several examples of its functionality. SDML is a strictly declarative modelling language which has object-oriented features and corresponds to a fragment of strongly grounded autoepistemic logic. The virtues of SDML include the ease of building complex models and the facility for representing agents flexibly as models of cognition as well as modularity and code reusability.

Biomedical ethics is an essential part of the medical curriculum because it is thought to enrich moral reflection and conduce to ethical decisionmaking and ethical behavior. In recent years, however, the received idea that competency in moral reasoning leads to moral responsibility “in the field” has been the subject of sustained attention. Today, moral education and development research widely recognize moral reasoning as being but one among at least four distinguishable dimensions of psychological moral functioning alongside moral motivation, moral character, (...) and moral sensitivity. In a reflection of this framework, medical educators and curriculum planners repeatedly advance the idea that educators should be concerned with supporting empathy, and this, very often, as a means of improving on and broadening medical ethics education’s traditional focus on moral reasoning. (shrink)

The Two-Envelope Paradox is classically presented as a problem in decision theory that turns on the use of probabilities in calculating expected utilities. I formulate a Maximin Version of the paradox, one that is decision-theoretic but omits considerations of probability. I investigate the source of the error in this new argument, and apply the insights thereby gained to the analysis of the classical version.

Michael Almeida, in his book "Freedom, God, and Worlds" (OUP 2012) argues that (C) Necessarily, God has available an infallible method, Unrestricted Actualization, by which God can bring about whatever undetermined events God chooses, except those which it is metaphysically or accidentally necessary that God does not bring about. I argue that we have no reason to believe either of the two premises of Almeida's main argument for (C).

When I lectured on Lonergan’s economic writings at Boston College, Fordham, or Woodstock, people asked the same questions: What’s the big deal about Lonergan’s economics? How does it differ from mainstream economics? What’s Lonergan’s solution to poverty? This paper is a move towards answering those questions.

According to Blanshard, the aim of philosophy is to understand the world. This understanding is achieved, he thinks, only when we can offer a special kind of answer to the question Why? as it may be directed to any thing or event that puzzles us. The answer given will provide an explanation of the puzzling thing or event. The relevant kind of explanation is "logical," and the answer given must be "ultimate," that is, self-evidently true or such that it can (...) be seen to follow from something that is self-evident. (shrink)

Recently in this journal Marilyn Gaye Piety argued both that the critique of Kierkegaardian choice Alasdair MacIntyre offers in After Virtue misconstrues Kierkegaard and that a reformulated version of Kierkegaardian choice offers an important gain for philosophy. I argue that Piety has underestimated the power of the Maclntyrean critique of Kierkegaard, that consequently an adequate account of rational choice remains unavailable from that quarter, and that at crucial points MacIntyre’s own socially teleological approach to choice offers a superior account.