Packed with examples pulled straight from recent headlines, ENGINEERING ETHICS, Sixth Edition, helps engineers understand the importance of their conduct as professionals as well as reflect on how their actions can affect the health, safety and welfare of the public and the environment. Numerous case studies give readers plenty of hands-on experience grappling with modern-day ethical dilemmas, while the book's proven and structured method for analysis walks readers step by step through ethical problem-solving techniques. It also offers practical application of (...) the Engineering Code of Ethics and thorough coverage of critical moral reasoning, effective organizational communication, sustainability and economic development, risk management, ethical responsibilities, globalized standards for engineering and emerging challenges relating to evolving technology. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version. (shrink)

It is the purpose of this paper to review the present status of discussion concerning the concept of probability. The exposition will consist of six sections: A brief statement of the most important traditional views of the concept of probability: subjective and objective; A brief criticism of two traditionally important conceptions: a priori probability and the Principle of Indifference; A criticism of an outstanding example of the subjective theory of probability, the theory of F. P. Ramsey; A criticism of the (...) most widely known of the objective logical theories of probability, the theory of J. M. Keynes; Some remarks concerning the results of the recent work of Reichenbach and von Mises with particular reference to clarification of the concept of probability; A summary of the case for the frequency interpretation of probability, revealing its basic importance in the light of present evidence. (shrink)

We show that the implicational fragment of intuitionism is the weakest logic with a non-trivial probabilistic semantics which satisfies the thesis that the probabilities of conditionals are conditional probabilities. We also show that several logics between intuitionism and classical logic also admit non-trivial probability functions which satisfy that thesis. On the other hand, we also prove that very weak assumptions concerning negation added to the core probability conditions with the restriction that probabilities of conditionals are conditional probabilities are sufficient to (...) trivialize the semantics. (shrink)

This article explores the prevailing assumption of instrumentalism in negotiation and argues that contrary to the popular conception in negotiation scholarship, negotiators need not be assumed to be ontologically individualistic or purely self-interested in their motivation and action. We show the contribution that can be made to the field by an approach to negotiation that does not presume a strong and inevitable self-interest as the fundamental starting point of any account of negotiation behavior and we offer ideas for an alternative (...) starting point, which we call the agentic-relational model. (shrink)

This collection of essays on themes in the work of John Locke , George Berkeley , and David Hume , provides a deepened understanding of major issues raised in the Empiricist tradition. In exploring their shared belief in the experiential nature of mental constructs, The Empiricists illuminates the different methodologies of these great Enlightenment philosophers and introduces students to important metaphysical and epistemological issues including the theory of ideas, personal identity, and skepticism. It will be especially useful in courses devoted (...) to the history of modern philosophy. (shrink)

As the expansion of the Internet and the digital formatting of all kinds of creative works move us further into the information age, intellectual property issues have become paramount. Computer programs costing thousands of research dollars are now copied in an instant. People who would recoil at the thought of stealing cars, computers, or VCRs regularly steal software or copy their favorite music from a friend's CD. Since the Web has no national boundaries, these issues are international concerns. The contributors-philosophers, (...) legal theorists, and business scholars, among others-address questions such as: Can abstract ideas be owned? How does the violation of intellectual property rights compare to the violation of physical property rights? Can computer software and other digital information be protected? And how should legal systems accommodate the ownership of intellectual property in an information age? Intellectual Property is a lively examination of these and other issues, and an invaluable resource for librarians, lawyers, businesspeople, and scholars. (shrink)

The claim that is examined in this chapter is that, as is bivalent logic, trivalent logic occupies a place in the field of logic. A trivalent logic is a three-value logical system, and a bivalent logic is a two-value logical system. As part of advancing this claim, the chapter uses the examples of trivalent logic in Charles Sanders Peirce’s thought, the trivalent logic of Janus, the Aymará trivalent logical system, and African trivalent logic. Using the example of ancestorhood, where (...) characteristically an ancestor, as a living dead, is both a spiritual and physical entity or is considered neither a spiritual nor physical being, the overarching view or thesis that is defended and advanced is that African trivalent logic mirrors a trivalent African metaphysics or ontology. (shrink)

Purpose in American philosophy.--Radical empiricism.--Three types and two dogmas of empiricism.--William James as philosophical psychologist.--Charles S. Peirce: community and reality.--The contemporary significance of Royce's theory of the self.--The course of American philosophy.--The philosophy of religion in America.

It ‘seems altogether inconceivable', says Hume, that this ‘new relation' ought ‘can be a deduction' from others ‘which are entirely different from it' The idea that you can't derive an Ought from an Is, moral conclusions from non-moral premises, has proved enormously influential. But what did Hume mean by this famous dictum? Was he correct? How does it fit in with the rest of his philosophy? And what does this suggest about the nature of moral judgements? This collection, the first (...) on this topic for forty years, assembles a distinguished cast of international scholars to discuss these questions. The book combines, historical scholarship, meta-ethics and cutting-edge research in philosophical logic. It includes three distinct attempts to reformulate and prove No-Ought-From-Is in the face of Prior's famous counterexamples. -/- Contributors: A.N. Prior, Gerhard Schurz, Charles Pigden, J.M.Shorter, Annette.C.Baier, Wade Robison, Adrian Heathcote, Alan Musgrave, Norva Y.S. Lo, Gillian Russell, Hakan Salwén, Greg Restall, Peter Vranas, Edwin Mares, Stephen Maitzen. (shrink)

This chapter both explains the origins of emotivism in C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, R. B. Braithwaite, Austin Duncan-Jones, A. J. Ayer and Charles Stevenson (along with the endorsement by Frank P. Ramsey, and the summary of C. D. Broad), and looks at MacIntyre's criticisms of emotivism as the inevitable result of Moore's attack on naturalistic ethics and his ushering in the fact/value, which was a historical product of the Enlightenment.

This collection presents some of the most vital and original recent writings on Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, the three greatest rationalists of the early modern period. Their work offered brilliant and distinct integrations of science, morals, metaphysics, and religion, which today remain at the center of philosophical discussion. The essays written especially for this volume explore how these three philosophical systems treated matter, substance, human freedom, natural necessity, knowledge, mind, and consciousness. The contributors include some of the most prominent writers (...) in the field, including Jonathan Bennett, Michael Della Rocca, Jan A. Cover, Catherine Wilson, Stephen Voss, Edwin Curley, Don Garrett, and Margaret D. Wilson. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:William Wordsworth and the Hermeneutics of IncarnationEdwin SteinWilliam Wordsworth and the Hermeneutics of Incarnation, by David P. Haney; xiii & 269 pp. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993, $35.00.To the English Romantic poets, David Haney notes, the world seemed to have died at the hands of Enlightenment rationalism by being made merely a referent of transpicuous representational sign-systems. One of their fundamental projects was to reanimate it, (...) and Wordsworth committed himself to an animating poetics, incarnational in concept. Haney quotes the Wordsworthian incarnational locus classicus, the third “Essay Upon Epitaphs”: “If words be not... an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift;... Language, if it do not uphold, and feed,... is a counter-spirit unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve” (p. 1). He conjoins Wordsworth’s statement in a note to “The Thorn” that words should seize us “not as symbols of the passion, but as things, active and efficient, which are themselves part of the passion” (p. 24). “Incarnational” is not further defined directly, though we are told that it characterizes a poetic practice, “a philosophically and theologically important concept embedded [in our cultural] heritage,” and a theoretical orientation that acts “against the very idea of a ‘theory’” (p. 4). Haney draws principally from Gadamer, Lévinas, Cavell, Geoffrey Hartman, and Charles Taylor to explore through philosophical argumentation the ways in which Wordsworth incorporated, elaborated, problematized, and even betrayed these aspects of the incarnational process in his work.One of Haney’s concerns is to show how reading through the lens of incarnational poetics helps us see that Wordsworth incorporated historicity rather than suppressing it, as he is often accused of doing these days. Another is to demonstrate that deconstructive analysis, new-historical critique, and the secularized-Protestantism approach of M. H. Abrams are each inadequate to account for the hermenuetics of this poetics, because it resists and finesses the drive to create the transparent representational structures on which these critics focus. In his incarnational mode, his poetic thought aims not at realizing allegorized abstract truth but at presenting kerygmatically what is instantiated by incarnation as event; thought becomes materially existent without being changed into something else. Incarnational poetics thus acts to counter the binary oppositions (presence/absence, body/spirit, divine/human, etc.) on which both Enlightenment and Romantic discourse relied (the latter reversing the values), and defeats the binarism-dependent drive toward pure self-consciousness that always gets entangled in solipsism and semiological webs. Incarnating thought opens it to the historical process in the sense of Gadamer’s wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein: incarnation is not embodiment or an “ideal effacement of the difference between word and referent, but rather a process of spirit becoming event”; and words thereby become “things and events... which must enter the realm of mortality” (p. 19). [End Page 138]Haney links this confrontation of mortality to both Cavell’s idea of skeptical acknowledgment of the mortal other replacing knowledge and Lévinas’ conception of a preontological “saying” that dialogically makes us responsible for the other but must die into the “said” to be understood. These connections allow him to enlarge brilliantly our understanding of The Prelude, Book 5, and the “Lucy poems.” Here words achieve visionary power not by a symbolic link to transcendence but “by allowing themselves to be interrupted by that which is absolutely other, and therefore ‘infinite’ in Levinas’ sense” (p. 87). Haney extends this and related insights in a chapter on the final books of The Prelude that shows, among other things, how its figural structures for the autobiographical self begin to break down and are replaced by tropological performatives. These lead away from a systematic code of representation but allow recuperation through the “dialogue” with Coleridge, a non-totalizing process of closure that by linking the autobiographical self to the extratextual self opens the poem to a “range of projective sympathies” (Charles Altieri, quoted in Haney, p. 137).Haney also explores how the incarnational hermeneutic works to close the widening gap between epistemology and ethics fostered by the Enlightenment’s commitment... (shrink)

Contributors: Steven Barbone, Laurent Bove, Edwin Curley, Valérie Debuiche, Michael Della Rocca, Simon B. Duffy, Daniel Garber, Pascale Gillot, Céline Hervet, Jonathan Israel, Chantal Jaquet, Mogens Lærke, Jacqueline Lagrée, Martin Lin, Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Pierre-François Moreau, Steven Nadler, Knox Peden, Alison Peterman, Charles Ramond, Michael A. Rosenthal, Pascal Sévérac, Hasana Sharp, Jack Stetter, Ariel Suhamy, Lorenzo Vinciguerra.

John E. Smith has contributed to contemporary philosophy in primarily four distinct capacities; first, as a philosopher of religion and God; second, as an indefatigable defender of philosophical reflection in its classical sense ( a sense inclusive of, but not limited to, metaphysics); third, as a participant in the reconstruction of experience and reason so boldly inaugurated by Hegel then redically transformed by the classical American pragmatists, and significantly augmented by such thinkers as Josiah Royce, william Earnest Hocking, and Alfred (...) North Whitehead; fourth, as an interpreter of philosophical texts and traditions (Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche no less than Charles Peirce, WIlliam James and John Dewey; German idealism as well as American; the Augustinian tradition no less than the pragmatic). Reason, Experience, and God provides an important and comprehensive look at the work of John E. Smith by collected essays which each address aspects of his life-long work. A response by John E. Smith himself draws a line of continuity between the pieces. (shrink)

The economist Paul Samuelson acknowledged that he was a disciple of Edwin Bidwell Wilson (1879–1964), an American polymath who was a protégé of Josiah Willard Gibbs. Wilson’s influence on the development of sciences in America has been relatively neglected, as he mostly acted behind the scenes of academia at the organizational and pedagogical fronts. At the basis of his activism were original ideas about the foundations of mathematics and science. This essay reconstructs Wilson’s career and foundational discussions, which evolved (...) as he reacted to David Hilbert’s mathematics, Bertrand Russell’s logic, Henri Poincaré’s conventionalism, Karl Pearson’s statistics, Charles Sanders Peirce’s inference theory, and Lawrence Henderson’s work in social sciences. In brief, after having started his professional life as a mathematician at Yale University (1902–1907), Wilson marginalized himself from mathematics and joined other academic communities and fields, working in mathematical physics at MIT (1907–1922) and in statistics, social science, and economics at Harvard University (1922–retirement). He defined mathematics as a language, meaning by this that mathematics and science were reciprocally indispensable, with the former providing structure and the latter meaning. In an American exceptionalist spirit, Wilson also meant to suggest that homegrown mathematical and scientific traditions should prevail over European ones. (shrink)

A new understanding of political philosophy from one of its leading thinkers What is political philosophy? What are its fundamental problems? And how should it be distinguished from moral philosophy? In this book, Charles Larmore redefines the distinctive aims of political philosophy, reformulating in this light the basis of a liberal understanding of politics. Because political life is characterized by deep and enduring conflict between rival interests and differing moral ideals, the core problems of political philosophy are the regulation (...) of conflict and the conditions under which the members of society may thus be made subject to political authority. We cannot assume that reason will lead to unanimity about these matters because individuals hold different moral convictions. Larmore therefore analyzes the concept of reasonable disagreement and investigates the ways we can adjudicate conflicts among people who reasonably disagree about the nature of the human good and the proper basis of political society. Challenging both the classical liberalism of Locke, Kant, and Mill, and more recent theories of political realism proposed by Bernard Williams and others, Larmore argues for a version of political liberalism that is centered on political legitimacy rather than on social justice, and that aims to be well suited to our times rather than universally valid. Forceful and thorough yet concise, What Is Political Philosophy? proposes a new definition of political philosophy and demonstrates the profound implications of that definition. The result is a compelling and distinctive intervention from a major political philosopher. (shrink)

Approaches to paraconsistency can be arranged on a spectrum similar to the way in which approaches to vagueness are often understood. On the left are the metaphysical realists; those who think that there are real contradictory facts, that are mind and language independent. On the right are those who think that although we can have inconsistent beliefs and inconsistent theories — and we need a paraconsistent logic to deal with them — the world itself is perfectly consistent. In the middle (...) are the semantic dialetheists, who claim that there are true contradictions, but that these come about because of particular features of our use of language. This chapter outlines a particular version of semantic dialetheism based on a four-valued logic. It contends that although we need such a logic to deal with our current language, we could regiment our uses of predicates (and other expressions) to eliminate all true contradictions. (shrink)

The American thinker Charles Sanders Peirce, best known as the founder of pragmatism, has been influential not only in the pragmatic tradition but more recently in the philosophy of science and the study of semiotics, or sign theory. Strands of System provides an accessible overview of Peirce's systematic philosophy for those who are beginning to explore his thinking and its import for more recent trends in philosophy.

Charles Landesman deals with the philosophical problems of perception and with the status of color properties and he comes to the surprising conclusion that nothing at all has any color, that colors do not exist. In making the case for his "color skepticism," Landesman discusses and rejects historically influential accounts of the nature of secondary qualities-such as those of Locke, Reid, Galileo, and Hobbes-as well as the more recent work of Kripke, Grice, and others.Philosophers have debated whether colors are (...) real qualities of bodies, merely dispositional properties, or mental entities caused by the impact of light upon the visual system. The author argues that none of these alternatives can be adequately defended and that they all assume that a correct theory of color must preserve, to some extent, our commonsense beliefs. Instead, Landesman defends a view called color skepticism, that nothing has any color, neither bodies nor appearances. Since this view is based upon an argument that includes certain empirical premises, he distinguishes it from the radical skepticisms about the external world identified with the thought of Descartes and Hume.Color and Consciousness treats an area of philosophy that is currently of great interest to those concerned with the theory of knowledge, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the psychological theory of perception. Author note: Charles Landesman is Professor of Philosophy at Hunter College and at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. (shrink)

Originally published in 1995, Creation-Evolution Debates is the second volume in the series, Creationism in Twentieth Century America, reissued in 2021. The volume comprises eight debates from the early 1920s and 1930s between prominent evolutionists and creationists of the time. The original sources detail debates that took place either orally or in print, as well as active debates between creationists over the true meaning of Genesis I. The essays in this volume feature prominent discussions between the likes of Edwin (...) Grant Conklin, Henry Fairfield Osbourne and William Jennings Bryan, John Roach Francis and Charles Francis Potter, George McCready Price and Joseph McCabe and William Bell Riley versus Charles Smith, amongst many others. The collection will be of especial interest to natural historians, and theologians as well as academics of philosophy, and history. (shrink)

Much current theorizing about literature involves efforts to renew our sense of aesthetic values in reading. Such is the case with new formalism as well as recent appeals to the notion of “surface reading.” While sympathetic to these efforts, Charles Altieri believes they ultimately fall short because too often they fail to account for the values that engage literary texts in the social world. In Reckoning with the Imagination, Altieri argues for a reconsideration of the Kantian tradition of Idealist (...) ethics, which he believes can restore much of the power of the arguments for the role of aesthetics in art. Altieri finds a perspective for that restoration in a reading of Wittgenstein’s later work that stresses Wittgenstein’s parallel criticisms of the spirit of empiricism. Altieri begins by offering a phenomenology of imagination, because we cannot fully honor art if we do not link it to a distinctive, socially productive force. That force emerges in two quite different but equally powerful realizations in his reading of John Ashbery’s “Instruction Manual,” which explicitly establishes a model for a postromantic view of imagination, and William Butler Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.” He then turns to Wittgenstein with chapters on the role of display as critique of Enlightenment thinking, the honoring of qualities like sensitivity and the ability to attune to the actions of others, the role of expression in the building of models, and the contrast between ethical and confessional modes of judgment. Finally, Altieri produces his own model of aesthetic experience as participatory valuation and makes an extended argument for the social significance of appreciation as a way to escape the patterns of resentment fundamental to our current mode of politics. A masterful work by one of our foremost literary and philosophical theorists, Reckoning with the Imagination will breathe new life into ongoing debates over the value of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

How do we teach medical students to protect patients? My initial reaction to the question posed by Taylor and Goodwin was like first glimpsing ‘Jaws’: we’re going to need a bigger boat. The authors’ answer makes two important claims: first, that safety should be ethically sourced by better integration between teaching of safety and ethics; second, that teaching should encourage students to think about organisational failure rather than focusing on individual blame and personal responsibility to whistleblow.1 On the first, they (...) highlight how ethics teaching often sits apart from that on safety. For the second, they use the concept normalisation of deviance, with its contained idea of structural secrecy, to depict organisational failure that is argued as largely immune to whistleblowing. Why wouldn’t these challenges warrant a bigger boat? On their first claim: it is not just for safety, but throughout the curriculum that ethics teaching needs to be integral. Given coming challenges, it should become the cake rather than the icing. Consider, for example, that artificial intelligence stands to transform many knowledge-based professions, medicine among them. Tomorrow’s doctors will have a surfeit of data and automated decision aids at their fingertips. So, as far as they remain necessary, doctors will …. (shrink)

In this article, I shall argue that being a lie disqualifies something from being a literary work. If something is a lie then it is not a literary work of any kind, and if something is a literary work of any kind then it is not a lie. Being a literary work, and being a lie, are mutually exclusive categories.

Kindness and its kindred concepts, compassion and empathy, are strongly valued in healthcare. But at the same time, health systems all too often treat people unfairly and cause harm. Is it possible that kindness actually contributes to these unkind outcomes? Here, I argue that, despite its attractive qualities, kindness can pose and perpetuate systemic problems in healthcare. By being discretionary, it can interfere with justice and non-maleficence. It can be problematic for autonomy too. Using the principalist lens allows us to (...) visualise kindness more clearly and to dissect out its key qualities. Ideally, kindness should be not just beneficent but also respectful of the person, fair and non-maleficent. I use examples to illustrate the adverse impacts when kindness runs short on each. Finally, I propose that we can improve on this, by diversifying our approach to inclusion. Outgroups should be more included, as a way to mitigate discrimination wrought by discretionary kindness. But we can do better. Ingroup health professionals too often sit ‘above the fray’. They should also be more included, but now as research subjects, so we can understand together how they benefit from discretionary kindness and deftly make it work for them and theirs. (shrink)

The Writings of Charles De Koninck, Volume 1, introduces a projected three-volume series that presents the first English edition of the collected works of the Catholic Thomist philosopher Charles De Koninck. Ralph McInerny is the project editor and has prepared the excellent translations. The first volume contains writings ranging from De Koninck's 1934 dissertation at the University of Louvain on the philosophy of Sir Arthur Eddington, to two remarkable early essays on indeterminism and the unpublished book "The Cosmos." (...) The short essay "Are the Experimental Sciences Distinct from the Philosophy of Nature?" is also included and demonstrates for the first time De Koninck's distinctive view on the relation between philosophy of nature and the experimental sciences. A comprehensive introductory essay by Leslie Armour outlines the structure and themes of De Koninck's philosophy. The volume begins with a biographical essay by De Koninck's son, Thomas. "Charles De Koninck, perhaps because of his untimely death, is not as well known to English-speaking readers as Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, but his work belongs to that same world-class scholarship as his notable contemporaries. It is almost an understatement to say that his contribution to the philosophy of science remains timely. Readers are fortunate that his former student, Ralph McInerny, has seen fit to collect and to translate, where necessary, some of De Koninck's most important work for this volume." --Jude P. Dougherty, The Catholic University of America "Ralph McInerny is doing us the incalculable good of making available to a general public the writings of Charles De Koninck. This volume, the first of many to come, begins a chronological presentation of the books, articles, essays, and addresses of one of the strongest and most penetrating thinkers of the last century, who was at once an extraordinary philosopher and theologian, with the profound and simple faith of the proverbial peasant. May we continue now to learn from the great De Koninck, and include in our prayers the intentions of his gracious disciple, who is so felicitously discharging the office of piety to a revered and unforgettable master." --Ronald P. Mc Arthur, President Emeritus, Thomas Aquinas College. (shrink)