One of the most intuitive views about the metaphysics of laws of nature is Tim Maudlin's idea of a Fundamental Law of Temporal Evolution. So-called FLOTEs are primitive elements of the universe that produce later states from earlier states. While FLOTEs are at home in traditional Newtonian and non-relativistic quantum mechanical theories (not to mention our pre-theoretic conception of the world), I consider here whether they can be made to work with relativity. In particular, shifting to relativistic spacetimes poses two (...) threats to FLOTEs. First, the lack of a privileged spacelike hypersurface in relativistic spacetime makes it unclear how to understand what produces what. A survey of several conceptions of the nomic production relation compatible with relativity reveals all of them to be lacking. Second, relativity motivates a four-dimensional block universe conception of time, according to which all events that will ever occur already exist. On such a view, it's unclear what work there is to be done by FLOTEs. I consider how a proponent of FLOTEs might respond, but conclude that these combined threats seriously undermine the prospects of a productive conception of laws. In short, if spacetime is relativistic, laws are not productive. (shrink)

Over the past twenty-five years, or so, considerable advances have been made in understanding how learning occurs in the brain, though much of this research is still to make its way into education. One contribution it should be making is to furnish the philosophical critique of past and current theory with supporting empirical evidence. For example, motivation theory and its cognate expectancy-value theory continue to be taught in teacher education, even though their rational cognitivist foundations are philosophically shaky, and their (...) shared representational notion of the mind is incompatible with what is now known about the learning brain. Furthermore, the central claim of motivation theory that children need to be motivated in order to learn is educationally problematic, not least because it incorporates a deficit model of the child as learner. This paper provides a philosophical and educational critique of motivation and expectancy-value theories and begins to sketch out an alternative dynamic systems approach, which argues that value is deeply embedded in the learning process, not only in the value students may or may not attach to their learning, but also neurobiologically. In opposition to motivation and its notion of the learner this paper argues that every student is equipped with a brain that is value-orientated towards learning and will learn, when nested in suitably affordant learning environments. In place of expectancy-value, we argue for value-embedded learning, which provides a non-reductive and biologically plausible account of how value and emotional salience are dynamically interwoven in the learning process. (shrink)

Although universities have undergone changes since the dawn of their existence, the speed of change started to accelerate remarkably in the 1960s. Spectacular growth in the number of students and faculty was immediately followed by administrative reforms aimed at managing this growth and managing the demands of students for democratic reform and societal relevance. Since the 1980s, however, an entirely different wind has been blowing along the academic corridors. The fiscal crisis of the welfare states and the neoliberal course of (...) the Reagan and Thatcher governments made the battle against budget deficits and against government spending into a political priority. Education, together with social security and health care, were targeted directly. As the eighties went on, the neoliberal agenda became more radical—smaller state and bigger market—attacking the public sector itself through efforts to systematically reduce public expenditure by privatizing public services and introducing market incentives. At the same time the societal relevance of the universities demanded by critical students was turned on its head to become economic relevance to business and industry in the knowledge society. (shrink)

Is it ethical to market complementary and alternative medicines? Complementary and alternative medicines are medical products and services outside the mainstream of medical practice. But they are not just medicines offered and provided for the prevention and treatment of illness. They are also products and services – things offered for sale in the marketplace. Most discussion of the ethics of CAM has focused on bioethical issues – issues having to do with therapeutic value, and the relationship between patients and those (...) purveyors of CAM. This article aims instead to consider CAM from the perspective of commercial ethics. That is, we consider the ethics not of prescribing or administering CAM but the ethics of selling CAM. (shrink)

More often than not, notes are conceptualized as a technology for helping students stay focused on and attentive to subject matter deemed educationally valuable. This article concerns itself, however, with how notes may interrupt and render inoperative this learning function. To probe the question of attention and distraction, the authors devised an experiment in note taking. Our question is whether or not these forms of rendering the learning function of notes inoperative have any educational value. In conclusion, we suggest that (...) such activities, while divorced from official, outcomes-based learning, do indeed have educational meaning: they make present the potentiality for thinking and acting without forcing such potentiality into measurable forms. What remains is the notes themselves, and the notational effects they in turn generated and continue to generate. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore briefly the "secular priesthood" metaphor often applied to bioethicists. I next ask: if, despite our discomfort with the metaphor, we were to embrace the best aspects of the priesthood(s) ? which I identify as the missionaries' willingness to work among sinners and lepers, at their own peril ? would we be able to live up to that standard of bravery? I then draw a parallel with the fears of contagion currently be voiced (by Carl Elliott (...) and others), with regard to bioethicists working in or near corporate settings. I argue that such fears may themselves have a number of deleterious effects, and I suggest several possible positive steps in response to that fear. (shrink)

We respond to Moses Pava’s defense of the “Triple Bottom Line” (3BL) concept against our earlier criticisms. We argue that, pacePava, the multiplicity of measures (and units of measure) that go into evaluating ethical performance cannot reasonably be compared to the handful of standard methods for evaluating financial performance. We also question Pava’s claim that usage of the term “3BL” is somehow intended to be ironical or subversive.

A "good" arguer is like an architect with a penchant for civil and civic engineering. Such an arguer can design and present their reasons artfully about a variety of topics, as good architects do with a plenitude of structures and in various environments. Failures in this are rarely hidden for long, as poor constructions reveal themselves, often spectacularly, so collaboration among civical engineers can be seen as a virtue. Our logical virtues should be analogous. When our arguments fail due to (...) being uncivil and demagogic, since we inhabit the arguments we build, we are all crushed beneath our flawed reasoning. This mixed metaphor takes us to a self-referential analysis of argumentation, analogy, and humor. I argue that good argumentation strives to collaboratively convince rather than belligerently persuade. A convincing means toward this end is through humorous analogical arguments, whether the matter at hand is ethical, logical, theological, phenomenological, epistemological, metaphysical, political, or about baseball. (shrink)

This paper considers whether individual companies have an ethical obligation to label their Genetically Modified (GM) foods. GM foods and ingredients pervade grocery store shelves, despite the fact that a majority of North Americans have worries about eating those products. The market as whole has largely failed to respond to consumer preference in this regard, as have North American governments. A number of consumer groups, NGO’s, and activist organizations have urged corporations to label their GM products. This paper asks whether, (...) in such a situation, individual corporations can be ethically required to take such unilateral action. We argue that they cannot. Given the lack of solid evidence for any risk to human health, and the serious market disadvantage almost surely associated with costly unilateral action, no individual company has an ethical obligation to label its GM foods. (shrink)

Narrativism, as represented by Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit, can fruitfully be analyzed as an inversion of two brands of positivism. First, narrativist epistemology can be regarded as an inversion of empiricism. Its thesis that narratives function as metaphors which do not possess a cognitive content is built on an empiricist, "picture view" of knowledge. Moreover, all the non-cognitive aspects attributed to narrative as such are dependent on this picture theory of knowledge and a picture theory of representation. Most of (...) the epistemological characteristics that White and Ankersmit attribute to historical narratives therefore share the problems of this picture theory.The article's second thesis is that the theories of narrative explanation can also fruitfully be analyzed as inversions of positivist covering-law theory. Ankersmit's brand of narrativism is the most radical in this respect because it posits an opposition between narrative and causal modes of comprehension while simultaneously eliminating causality from narrativist historical understanding. White's brand of narrativism is more of a hybrid than is Ankersmit's as far as its theory of explanation is concerned; nevertheless, it can also be fruitfully interpreted as an inversion of covering-law theory, replacing it by an indefinite multitude of explanatory strategies.Most of the striking characteristics of both White's and Ankersmit's narrativism presuppose positivism in these two senses, especially their claim that historical narratives have a metaphorical structure and therefore no truth-value. These claims are hard to reconcile with the factual characteristics of debates by historians; this problem can be tracked down to the absence in "metaphorical" narrativism of a conceptual connection between historical narratives and historical research. (shrink)

This paper explores the managerial context surrounding fairness promotion using a multi-method examination that employs interviews and a survey of practicing managers. The results of these examinations describe how managers tend to focus their efforts to promote fairness on fairly allocating rewards and responsibilities, accurately and consistently applying organizational policies and providing representation and understanding to their subordinates around key organizational issues. Analyses of the interview and survey data show how managers’ efforts to promote employee development, enact managerial propriety, and (...) demonstrate moral leadership mediate relationships between their fundamental desires to develop positive working relationships with their subordinates and the efforts they make to promote fairness. This paper concludes with a discussion about how this work refines and extends research on how and why managers promote fairness. (shrink)

While earlier work has emphasized Kant’s philosophy of religion as thinly disguised morality, this timely and original reappraisal of Kant’s philosophy of religion incorporates recent scholarship. In this volume, Chris L. Firestone, Stephen R. Palmquist, and the other contributors make a strong case for more specific focus on religious topics in the Kantian corpus. Main themes include the relationship between Kant’s philosophy of religion and his philosophy as a whole, the contemporary relevance of specific issues arising out of Kant’s (...) philosophical theology, and the relationship of Kant’s philosophy to Christian theology. As a whole, this book capitalizes on contemporary movements in Kant studies by looking at Kant not as an anti-metaphysician, but as a genuine seeker of spirituality in the human experience. (shrink)

Creating a space for recovery‐focused psychiatric nursing care Within contemporary mental health‐care, power relationships are regularly played out between psychiatric nurses and service users. These power relationships are often imperceptible to the practicing nurse. For instance, in times of distress, service users often turn to or/and ‘construct’ discourses, beliefs and knowledge that are at odds with those which psychiatric nurses rely on to inform them of the mental status of the service user. The psychiatric nurse is in the position to (...) impose knowledge onto service users, usually in concurrence with ‘traditional or bio‐psychiatry’, without realizing or failing to acknowledge that the service user may have an alternative explanation of his/her mental health problems/experiences. In this paper, practice examples, based on the experiences of the four authors (from within and outside of services), are used to illustrate this ‘hidden’ power relationship. The authors use Foucault's ideas about: (i) government; (ii) the knowledge/power nexus and resistance; (iii) and his analytic tool of genealogy to help unravel this paradox within psychiatric nursing practice. The authors also use the emerging discourse of recovery as an alternative (and challenge) to ‘traditional bio‐psychiatry’ and consider the implications for psychiatric nursing practice. (shrink)

Le mot «milieu» est précieux pour souligner que les installations humaines – l’architecture, la ville – tiennent compte de leur environnement, naturel ou bâti. Avant de configurer «un monde», l’art humain configure un lieu et même l’élit et le transfigure en le métamorphosant, faisant de milieux donnés des «lieux» habitables voire mémorables aux multiples formes de délimitations, d’échanges et de devenir. La notion de milieu habité est mise en perspective et pensée en termes de limites, passages, liens et métamorphoses.

The concept of argumentation in AI is based almost exclusively on the use of formal, abstract representations. Despite their appealing computational properties, these abstractions become increasingly divorced from their real world counterparts, and, crucially, lose the ability to express the rich gamut of natural argument forms required for creating effective text. In this paper, the demands that socially situated argumentation places on knowledge representation are explored, and the various problems with existing formalisations are discussed. Insights from argumentation theory and social (...) psychology are then adduced as key contributions to a notion of social context which is both computationally tractable and suitably expressive for handling the complexities of argumentation found in natural language. (shrink)

Fundamental movement skill proficiency does not develop solely due to maturation, but also via diverse perceptual-motor experiences across childhood. Practicing gymnastics has been shown to improve postural control. The purpose of the present study was to examine potential changes to postural control of children following a course of educational gymnastics. Two groups of children both completed 20 × 45-min physical education lessons; one group completed educational gymnastics lessons in school delivered by a professional coach, the other group completed their typical (...) PE classes. Unipedal balancing performance was assessed by calculating the percentage of successful trials made. Postural sway dynamics were explored by calculating center-of-pressure sample entropy, 95% ellipse sway area and sway velocity. Measurements were taken before the lessons began and immediately after the lessons were completed. The gymnastics group performed better than the typical PE group at unipedal balancing. Females outperformed males in both groups. Males made different changes to postural control compared to females across 3 months. Educational gymnastics enabled children in a critical period of development to make more rapid improvements to postural performance and control. Novel movement experiences, like those offered by educational gymnastics, may have a positive influence on postural control and importantly, physical literacy. Future work should examine how sex effects the development of postural control strategies in young children. (shrink)

Introduction to the translation of “De beteekenis van de wijsbegeerte der wetsidee voor de theorie der menschelijke samenleving” by Herman Dooyeweerd, Philosophia Reformata 2, pp. 99–116.

In recent decades, care has played an increasingly crucial role in the self-understanding of the human being in the West. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of confusion and uncertainty surrounding the notion of care. One of the focal points of critics is the normativity of care. To what extent does care have an obligatory character? Only when the objective normative basis of care is sufficiently clarified, care practices can be evaluated and optimised from an ethical perspective. In this contribution (...) we explain how the anthropology of personalism could bring us closer to the normative core of care. The paper starts with a general overview of the contribution of care ethics in healthcare and the problems in relation to the normativity of care. Thereafter, we set the viewpoints of the Louvain tradition of personalism apart en show that this view on the human person is in keeping with a few basic principles of care ethics. Next, we describe how a personalist approach to care ethics can indeed indicate in which direction action must be taken so that human action may be considered ethically sound. (shrink)

_The Responsive University_ puts forward the proposition that the societal legitimacy of universities depends on whether and how they respond to societal challenges. This issue is exemplified in South Africa, one of the most unequal countries in the world.

This research note identifies for the first time the principium on book I of the Sentences by the prolific polymath Henry of Langenstein. This discovery, when combined with the four principia of the Augustinian Denis of Modena, provides the evidence necessary to demonstrate that Langenstein lectured on the Sentences at Paris in 1371-1372. The note also establishes the identity of the other eight bachelors of theology who participated in the principial debates that year.

Genetic studies in the social sciences could be augmented through the additional consideration of functional (transcriptome, methylome, metabolome) and/or multimodal genetic data when attempting to understand the genetics of social phenomena. Understanding the biological pathways linking genetics and the environment will allow scientists to better evaluate the functional importance of polygenic scores.

We contribute to the literature on intentions to report wrongdoing by examining whether Chinese internal auditors make consistent judgments when an ethical dilemma is presented in English and when the same dilemma is presented in Chinese. We invoke cultural frame switching theory, and our findings, which are based on a randomized experiment using between-subjects and within-subject mixed design, support the hypothesis that Chinese internal auditors are more likely to report wrongdoing when the ethical dilemma is presented in English than when (...) it is presented in Chinese. Our results, which demonstrate that internal auditors make inconsistent ethical judgments in English and Chinese, point to language-triggered cognitive bias resulting from cultural mindsets. We suggest practical interventions and language strategies to improve audit quality. (shrink)

The story of the Vox Populi embodies conflict theory, one popular interpretation of Marx's ideas, portraying a bloody revolution that loses sight of its ideals, turns anarchistic, and becomes the new oppressor. In Columbia, Zachary Hale Comstock and Jeremiah Fink illustrate the way the bourgeoisie may come to create and control the means of production. As the friction builds between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, historical processes contribute to the inevitable collapse of capitalism. In BioShock Infinite, the simmering friction between (...) the upper and lower classes boils over into the rise of the Vox Populi. The functionalist perspective often casts religion as a social structure that keeps society together despite any negative costs it may have for any particular group. In order for the bourgeoisie to own the means of production and keep the working class oppressed, it uses propaganda and indoctrination as powerful agents of control. (shrink)

Draws on the traditions of the martial arts to ask whether playing violent videogames actually transform gamers into better people.

The paper is concerned with the existence and asymptotic character of the nonlinear boundary value problemdG/dt=F ¦ –¦dF/dt=gG =k 1,G=k 2 as ¦– ¦ o+ The discussion is related to the problem of particle-number fluctuations in the theory of cosmic radiation andG andF denote respectively the probability generating functions for the electron distribution in an electron-initiated and a photon-initiated shower.A solution of the system satisfying the boundary conditions is constructed so that specified limiting conditions are fulfilled.