John C. Calhoun was a major actor in the political history of nineteenth-century America. His dramatic career will always be of interest. However, Calhoun is equally important as a political thinker who continues to elicit widespread interest from the most diverse points of the ideological spectrum. The Essential Calhoun is designed to present a full-fledged selection of speeches and writings taken from the entire forty-year span of his public career and from many varieties of occasions, public and private. For the (...) first time, it is possible to appreciate Calhoun fully and to seriously examine his thought within the compass of a single volume. Calhoun is known to posterity as the premier defender of the Old South and slavery and as the theorist of the concurrent majority. His contemporaries knew him as much else, including a political economist and foreign policy authority. As the range of writings shows, he was a valuable and often prophetic commentator who remains as timely as the Budget Crisis of 1990 and the Gulf War. Calhoun's thought testifies to a deep and abiding concern with moral and ethical issues that confront a government resting on the consent of the people. The fundamental question with which he wrestles in all his works is how to achieve and maintain a proper balance between power and liberty in a democratic society. By providing the most representative compendium of his thought, The Essential Calhoun invites the reader to engage in this exercise of applying the moral imagination realistically to the public business in America. Historians, American studies specialists, economists, and political scientists will find this volume indispensable. (shrink)

As conceptual and theoretical discussions on environmental valuation approaches have advanced there is growing interest in the impact that valuation has on decision making. The perceived legitimacy of the outputs of valuation studies is seen as one factor influencing their impact on policy decisions. One element of this is ensuring that participants of valuation processes see the results as legitimate and would be willing to accept decisions based on these findings. Here, we test the perceived legitimacy to participants of two (...) approaches to deliberative monetary valuation, deliberated preferences and Deliberative Democratic Monetary Valuation, in the context of marine planning in the Clyde estuary in Scotland. We compare and contrast deliberated preference and deliberative democratic monetary valuation and track their emergence as responses to critiques of conventional stated preference approaches. We then present the results of our case study where we found that deliberative democratic monetary valuation produced valuations that were perceived as more legitimate that deliberated preference as the basis for decision making by those involved in the valuation process. (shrink)

There is widespread agreement that the most serious and debilitating contemporary social problem in the developed capitalist world is the problem of enforced or involuntary unemployment. The growth in mass unemployment in the 1970s and 80s has produced a renewal of the demand by the labour and trade union movement1 for the implementation of a ‘right to work’; presumably in the belief that the official recognition and legal enforcement of such a right would lead to the increased availability of jobs. (...) This campaigning slogan has sometimes emanated from the most unlikely sources. In his introduction to a published account of the 1971 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders occupation and work-in, entitledThe Right to Work, Mr Harold Wilson (then, significantly, in opposition) declared that ‘what the men of the Clyde proclaimed, and what I went to Clydeside to assert, was “the right to work”. And that principle cannot, and must not, be denied.’. (shrink)

This article examines some of the implications of technological optimism. I first contextualize, historically and culturally, some contemporary variants of techno-optimism in relation to the equally significant contemporary exemplars of techno-pessimism, skepticism and fatalism. I show that this techno-optimism is often instrumentalized in the sense that the optimistic outlook as such is believed to have some influence on the evolving state of affairs. The cogency of this assumption is scrutinized. I argue that in the absence of explicit probabilities, such optimism (...) presupposes some form of retro-causation, where the future is held to somehow have a retroactive effect on the past. This suggests that the underlying mechanism by which techno-optimism is supposed to be instrumental in bringing about the future is fundamentally superstitious. Such superstition, of course, goes against our common understanding of reason and rationality, for adopting rational expectations about the world requires that we avoid the emotional over-determination of our assessments. I show that applied reason is conceptually entangled with this superstitious optimism in the continued successes of technology. The article thus reveals a curious sense in which reason is intrinsically superstitious. I offer an evolutionary explanation for this, showing that the biological origins of reason will by nature tend to produce rational agents which are superstitiously bound to realism and causality, and thus implicitly optimistic about technology’s capacity to overcome contingency. (shrink)

In his book Objective Becoming (Skow 2015), Bradford Skow has offered a rich and systematic treatment of the passage of time. We learn much about what objective passage could and could not amount to from engaging with his careful work. Skow’s overall conclusion is that the ‘block universe’ deflationary theory of passage is stronger than any currently available version of the recently-popular moving spotlight theory of temporal passage. To help establish this conclusion, Skow provides a taxonomy of theories of temporal (...) passage, including some new and unfamiliar theories that he classifies as versions of the moving spotlight view. These new theories are worthy of further study; however, in this commentary I will argue that they suffer from some problems that render them uncongenial to committed believers in temporal passage (Sections 2–5). I’ll also make a few brief remarks about some other arguments in the book, concerning branching time (Section 6), relativistic presentness (Section 7), and temporal experience (Section 8). (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, Volume 31, Issue 2, Page 546-561, April 2022.

Intellectual property typically involves claims of ownership of types, rather than particulars. In this article I argue that this difference in ontology makes an important moral difference. In particular I argue that there cannot be an intrinsic moral right to own intellectual property. I begin by establishing a necessary condition for the justification of intrinsic moral rights claims, which I call the Rights Justification Principle. Briefly, this holds that if we want to claim that there is an intrinsic moral right (...) to φ, we must be able to show that (a) violating this right would typically result in either a wrongful harm or other significant wrong to the holder of the right, and (b) the wrongful harm or other wrong in question is independent of the existence of the intrinsic right we are trying to justify. I then argue that merely creating a new instance of a type is not the kind of action which can wrongfully harm the creator of that type. Insofar as there do seem to be wrongs involved in copying a published poem or computer program, these wrongs presuppose the existence of an intrinsic right to own intellectual property, and so cannot be used to justify it. I conclude that there cannot be an intrinsic right to own intellectual property. (shrink)

How should we respond to cases of disagreement where two epistemic agents have the same evidence but come to different conclusions? Adam Elga has provided a Bayesian framework for addressing this question. In this paper, I shall highlight two unfortunate consequences of this framework, which Elga does not anticipate. Both problems derive from a failure of commutativity between application of the equal weight view and updating in the light of other evidence.

This paper argues that there took place in the eighteenth century a specific, distinctive and essential phase in the emergence of modern science, a phase which can be characterised as “the Great Instauration” in that it witnessed the large-scale realisation of Francis Bacon’s earlier vision—albeit not, for the most part, through the specific means which Bacon had proposed. That claim is exemplified in three fields—the “physico-mathematical sciences,” chemistry and electricity—each of which yielded dramatic and permanent advances in knowledge; and an (...) attempt is then made to render those advances intelligible in terms of specific social and technical themes. The paper proposes that the eighteenth-century Great Instauration arose from the development of an international natural-philosophical community, made possible by new institutions and especially by new publication media. And it suggests that what made this social development epistemologically fruitful was an inherently progressive process which had been anticipated by Bacon, namely what Sophie Weeks has called his “cybernetic” account of knowledge-making—the refinement of both questions and techniques in the light of Nature’s response to investigation. (shrink)

Economic theory assumes that preferences are rational. However, experiments have found small violations of transitivity. This paper develops a model of rationality with preference discovery costs. Introspection is costly. Thus, agents may find it optimal to use less than full effort, even though this raises the risk of making a poor choice. This model could potentially explain the intransitivities observed in the data while retaining rationality and optimization.

Nurses are increasingly realising that they can offer relevant information and participate in decision-making involving ethical issues. However, inter-professional communications are frequently inadequate, and do not permit exchange of opinions. The consequences are often frustrating and upsetting for nurses whose care is affected by others' policies. This paper explores these issues using some clinical examples.

This article shows how funding research on Alzheimer's disease became a priority for the British Medical Research Council in the late 1970s and 1980s, thanks to work that isolated new pathological and biochemical markers, and showed that the disease affected a significant proportion of the elderly population. In contrast to histories that focus on the emergence of new and competing theories of disease causation in this period, I argue that concerns over the use of different assessment methods ensured the MRC's (...) immediate priority was standardising the ways in which researchers identified and recorded symptoms of Alzheimer's disease in potential research subjects. I detail how the rationale behind the development of standard assessment guidelines was less about arriving at a firm diagnosis and more about facilitating research by generating data that could be easily compared across the disciplines and sites that constitute modern biomedicine. Drawing on criticism of specific tests in the MRC's guidelines, which some psychiatrists argued were "middle class biased", I also show that debates over standardisation did not simply reflect concerns specific to the fields or areas of research that the MRC sought to govern. Questions about the validity of standard assessment guidelines for Alzheimer's disease embodied broader concerns about education and social class, which ensured that distinguishing normal from pathological in old age remained a contested and historically contingent process. (shrink)

This study developed an instrument that measures the attitude of Filipino high school students towards mathematics, with reliable predictors and factors. Using the responses of 300 high school students from Zamboanga Sibugay, the validity and reliability of the Mathematics Attitude Scale (MAS) was tested using Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and reliability analyses. The EFA showed that four-factor structures of the instrument, regarding the mathematics attitude for high school students, explained 27.48% of the variance in the pattern of relationships among the (...) items. The Average Variance Extracted (AVE), Composite Reliability, and Cronbach’s Alpha coefficients were reported. They proved that the extracted constructs have obtained and satisfied convergent validity. Thirty-three items remained in the final questionnaire after deleting the twenty-seven items with factor loadings of less than 0.4 (Students’ Perceived Motivation and Support in Learning Mathematics: twelve items; Students’ Perceived Anxiety in Learning Mathematics: ten items; Students’ Perceived Self-Efficacy in Learning Mathematics: six items; and Teachers and Parents’ Influences to Students in Learning Mathematics: five items). This study has confirmed the four-factor structure of the MAS. Educators and researchers can use the MAS to better understand the attitudes of Filipino high school students towards mathematics. (shrink)

We explain how the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) – the founder of semiotics and of the pragmatist tradition in philosophy – contributes an epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical foundation to some key transhumanist ideas, including the following claims: technological cognitive enhancement is not only possible but a present reality; pursuing more sweeping cognitive enhancements is epistemically rational; and current humans should try to evolve themselves into posthumans. On Peirce’s view, the fundamental aim of inquiry is truth, understood in terms (...) of a stage of ideal cognition (what he calls the “final opinion”). As current human cognitive abilities are insufficient to achieve this stage, Peirce’s views on cognition support a variety of ways in which they might be enhanced. Finally, we argue that what Peirce describes as our ethical summum bonum seems remarkably similar to what Bostrom (2005) argues to be the core transhumanist value: “the exploration of the posthuman realm.”. (shrink)

This article takes its point of departure from late Lacan's meditations on the incompatibility of psychoanalysis with Japanese culture due to its non-European linguistic basis. The article argues that this emphasis on language narrowly conceived fails to keep pace with the interconnected, multi-media, all-encompassing nature of the unconscious today. Illustrating this point, the article focuses on the figure of the hikikomori: middle-class Japanese youths who have withdrawn from all conventional social contact to indulge exclusively computer-based interactions. Thanks to the overlap (...) with the related figure of the ‘Bedroom DJ’, the analysis then moves on to the ambient music of Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin. It argues for the validity of the concept of an ‘audio unconscious’ distinct from Lacan's unconscious ‘structured like a language’. The final part of the article, however, examines one of James's music videos and discerns in it modes of jouissance that psychoanalysis can still describe. (shrink)

Historians of modern design and sociology have shown little interest in the leaders of the ever resourceful and influential British Positivist Society. One of the aims of this essay is to show that the Positivist polymath Frederic Harrison (1831–1923) cultivated ideas and practices that are compatible with modernists’ aspirations to improve the lives of the masses. It is accordingly shown that Harrison was an ardent supporter of working-class causes and that on this basis he developed sociological survey methods and produced (...) social programmes to initiate the comprehensive reorganisation of cities. Harrison intended to realise a modern utopia called the “Occidental Republic”, created by Auguste Comte, the Positivist Philosopher who – during the 1830 and 1840s – introduced both sociology and the Religion of Humanity. While many studies pore over the Positivists’ “church” rituals, this essay is the first to argue that the Religion of Humanity and sociology were of equal consequence – and that together they formed the basis of their controversial spatial theory and practice, which was considered the means to realise Comte’s utopia. This vision, it is argued, is central to appreciating how Positivism percolated into the “modern movements” of architecture and planning. (shrink)

Clinical and neuroscientific studies of Buddhist meditation practices are frequent topics in the news media, and have helped certain practices achieve mainstream cultural status. Buddhists have reacted by using these studies in a number of ways. Some deploy the studies to show the compatibility of science and Buddhism, often using the authority of science to lend credence to Buddhism. Other Buddhists use meditation studies to demonstrate the superiority of Buddhism over science. Within inter-Buddhist debates, meditation studies are used to argue (...) for changes in practice or belief, but also sometimes to reinforce certain traditional practices. Benjamin Zeller's threefold categorization of religious groups’ attitudes toward science and José Ignacio Cabezón's three ideal types of relationships between Buddhism and science contribute to analysis of Buddhist uses of scientific studies of meditation. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 3, Page 283-289, March 2022.

Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.

Human nature and cooperation -- Tucson knows all about that -- Featuring interviews with Curtis A., Renø M., and Alanna C. -- Democracy and Sproul Plaza -- The people's library -- Featuring interviews with Zachary L. and Jaime T. -- Barcelona to Greensboro -- Student loan debt -- Featuring an interview with professor George Caffentzis -- Solidarity.

This paper aims to address the difficulties of high school students in bridging their computational understanding with their visualization skills in understanding the notion of the limits in their calculus class. This research used a pre-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design research on 62 grade 10 students enrolled in the Science, Technology, and Engineering Program (STEP) in one of the public high schools in Zamboanga del Sur, Philippines. A series of remedial sessions were given to help them understand the function values, one-sided (...) limits, limits of a function, and its discontinuities with the aid of the GeoGebra. Results revealed that there is a significant improvement in their mathematics performance before and after the remediation, t(61) = -19.99, p<.05. The real-time feedback provided by the drawing interface of GeoGebra has provided the students the insights into how objects behave in geometrical space, bridging their understanding in locating the values shown by the computational algebraic processes. Additionally, the significant difference in the achievement reveals a large effect size (Cohen’s =2.54) which could be accounted for by the remediation using interactive activities in the GeoGebra. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, according to Peirce’s mature account of perception, we directly perceive generals, or "Thirds," in external reality which should be described as physical and not as mental. I argue against three other interpretations of the role of Thirdness in Peirce’s account: (I) we do not directly perceive Thirds, although they are involved in the interpretive and judgmental part of perception; (II) we directly perceive Thirds, but they are imposed on external objects by our minds; and (...) (III) we directly perceive Thirds in external objects, but external reality is comprised of the representations of an objective mind. I address questions about the role of the percept and the percipuum in his account, in what exact sense he thought that perception is interpretive, and how he thought it is even possible to directly perceive generals in the external world. (shrink)

George Boolos, Crispin Wright, and others have demonstrated how most of Frege's treatment of arithmetic can be obtained from a second-order statement that Boolos dubbed ‘Hume's principle’. This note explores the historical evidence that Frege originally planned to develop a philosophical approach to numbers in which Hume's principle is central, but this strategy was abandoned midway through his Grundlagen.

The author of this text attempts to address, discuss and analyze a number of fundamental issues faced by accountants and auditors, in both the private and public sectors.