Technology's impact on and implications for the social, ethical, political, and cultural dimensions of our world must be seriously considered and addressed. Philosophy of Technology is a clear introduction to one of philosophy's newest issues. Don Ihde critically examines the impact of technological developments on various cultures throughout history-from the earliest feats of engineering and architecture to the cutting-edge developments in artificial intelligence- with an aim to understanding the human implications within a world technological culture. Using a wide variety of (...) concrete examples and illustrations, including artificial intelligence, robotics, and nuclear energy, the author looks at both the current situation and future directions. In a final chapter, he takes the position that the foundational concern for the twenty-first century is the global environment, followed closely by multiculturality and its effect on technoculture, the future of warfare, and the distribution of wealth in a world economy. Special Features Provides an introduction to the best and most recent literature on the subject Places the philosophy of technology within the overall project of philosophy Provides a clear and comprehensive overview of the main issue in the field Promotes understanding of the special role of philosophical criticism Contains a wealth of often humorous and highly imaginative examples that have become the hallmark of this author. (shrink)

Donald Davidson once suggested that a liar ?must intend to represent himself as believing what he does not?. In this paper I argue that, while Davidson was mistaken about lying in a few important respects, his main insight yields a very attractive definition of lying. Namely, you lie if and only if you say something that you do not believe and you intend to represent yourself as believing what you say. Moreover, I show that this Davidsonian definition can handle counter-examples (...) that undercut four prominent definitions of lying: viz., the traditional intend-to-deceive definition, Thomas Carson's definition, Don Fallis's definition, and Andreas Stokke's definition. (shrink)

The three major classical accounts of the morality of abortion are all subject to at least one major problem. Can we do better? This article aims to discuss three accounts that purport to be superior to the classical accounts. First, it discusses the future of value argument for the immorality of abortion. It defends the claim that the future of value argument is superior to all three of the classical accounts. It then goes on to discuss Warren's attempt to fix (...) up her personhood account and David Boonin's attempt to fix up Tooley's desire account. Warren claims that her updated version of a personhood account is superior to any potentiality account, such as the future of value account. The article evaluates her claim. Boonin argues that his improved desire view both deals adequately with the apparent counterexamples to Tooley's original account and also is superior to the future of value account. The article evaluates his views as well. (shrink)

Solidarity corresponds to virtuous social behavior, including personal freedom and responsibility, civic friendship, benevolence, reciprocity, and cooperation. These attributes are fundamentally good for individual persons and communities of work. Solidarity is therefore vitally important to the practice of humanistic management. This paper aims to provide management insights into the cultivation of solidarity. The paper begins by developing a theoretical framework to understand solidarity in business context, with attention to philosophical and theological connotations. An empirical research model is presented in the (...) form of a survey instrument to test for indications of solidarity in the workplace, and this measure is used to test several hypotheses regarding the positive associations of solidarity with validated measures of workplace engagement. Research results show that it is possible to identify and analyze workplace behaviors associated with solidarity. Data analysis confirms the validity of the model and demonstrates the positive associations of the hypotheses, based on empirical study of 40 workplaces and 399 employees. Moreover, the condition of whether the workplace was a public or private organization was found to affect the main relationship between solidarity and workplace engagement. The paper concludes with suggestions for practicable, tangible workplace behaviors based on the model, offering guidance in the pursuit of humanistic management. (shrink)

Spinoza's guiding commitment to the thesis that nothing exists or occurs outside of the scope of nature and its necessary laws makes him one of the great seventeenth-century exemplars of both philosophical naturalism and explanatory rationalism. Nature and Necessity in Spinoza's Philosophy brings together for the first time eighteen of Don Garrett's articles on Spinoza's philosophy, ranging over the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and political philosophy. Taken together, these influential articles provide a comprehensive interpretation of that (...) philosophy, including Spinoza's theories of substance, thought and extension, causation, truth, knowledge, individuation, representation, consciousness, conatus, teleology, emotion, freedom, responsibility, virtue, contract, the state, and eternity-and the deep interrelations among them. Each article aims to resolve significant problems in the understanding of Spinoza's philosophy in such a way as to make evident both his reasons for his views and the enduring value of his ideas. At the same time, Garrett's articles elucidate the relations between his philosophy and those of predecessors and contemporaries like Aristotle, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, and Leibniz. Lastly, the volume offers important and substantial replies to leading critics on four crucial topics: the necessary existence of God (Nature), substance monism, necessitarianism, and consciousness. (shrink)

Prior studies suggest that firms headquartered in areas with strong religious social norms have higher ethical standards. In this study, we examine whether the ethical standards associated with local religious norms influence the M&A announcement returns. We document that the M&A announcement returns of acquirer firms increase with the strength of religious social norms in the area surrounding firms’ headquarters. We also document that the relationship is attenuated when acquirer firms have strong corporate social responsibility credentials, is amplified when public (...) trust that firms act in the best interest of stakeholders suffers a negative shock and when the M&A deal has greater economic significance for the acquirer, and manifests predominantly in the lower tail of the distribution of M&A returns. Our findings are consistent with investor assessments of firms’ ethical standards driving the relationship between local religious social norms and M&A announcement returns. We find no evidence for the competing explanation—that investor assessments of firms’ risk preferences drive the documented relationship. (shrink)

The ad baculum is not a fallacy in an argument, but is offered instead of an argument to put an end to further argument. This claim is the basis for criticizing Michael Wreen's "neo-traditionalism," which yields misreadings of supposed cases of the ad baculum because of its rejection of any consideration of what the person using the ad baculum, or someone who refers to that use as an "argument," is doing. The paper concludes with reflections on the values that should (...) inform talk of a fallacy in an argument such as the one that Wreen is giving. (shrink)

This article presents an approach to understanding human spatial competence that focuses on the representations and processes of spatial cognition and how they are integrated with cognition more generally. The foundational theoretical argument for this research is that spatial information processing is central to cognition more generally, in the sense that it is brought to bear ubiquitously to improve the adaptivity and effectiveness of perception, cognitive processing, and motor action. We describe research spanning multiple levels of complexity to understand both (...) the detailed mechanisms of spatial cognition, and how they are utilized in complex, naturalistic tasks. In the process, we discuss the critical role of cognitive architectures in developing a consistent account that spans this breadth, and we note some areas in which the current version of a popular architecture, ACT-R, may need to be augmented. Finally, we suggest a framework for understanding the representations and processes of spatial competence and their role in human cognition generally. (shrink)

In this exciting new study, Don Dombowsky proposes that the foundation of Nietzsche's political thought is the aristocratic liberal critique of democratic society. But he claims that Nietzsche radicalizes this critique through a Machiavellian conversion, based on a reading of The Prince , adapting Machiavellian virtbliog— (the shaping capacity of the legislator), and immoralism (the techniques applied in political rule), and that, consequently, Nietzsche is better understood in relation to the political ideology of the neo-Machiavellian elite theorists of his own (...) generation. (shrink)

Don Adams - Plato's Lysis - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.2 321-322 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Don Adams Central Connecticut State University Terry Penner and Christopher Rowe. Plato's Lysis. Cambridge Studies in the Dialogues of Plato. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 366. Cloth, $60.00. Part I of this book is a running commentary on Plato's Lysis. Part II is an explanation and defense of (...) the authors' theory that the dialogue "provides a systematic and coherent, if incomplete, account of a special theory about, and special explanation of, human desire and action." The authors include their own translation of the dialogue that is quite good. This book is an important contribution to Plato scholarship and will.. (shrink)

대화이론의 개념하에서 근대형법의 도덕성을 새롭게 해명, 형법의 임무.명확성 이론을 다각적으로 검토한 저서.

This collection of new essays by eleven distinguished environmental philosophers addresses two main questions: first, whether environmental philosophy and ethics should be seen as a form of applied philosophy or as something else, perhaps best called practical philosophy; and second, how environmental philosophy is practiced in human life, especially in the lives of academics.

This article seeks to draw out the links between systems thinking and the philosophy of John Macmurray. In fact, while systems theory is a growing trend in a number of disciplines, including counselling and psychotherapy, the narrative describes its ancient roots. Macmurray’s insistence that humans exist as interdependent rather than independent beings is supported by systems theory. Moreover, Macmurray’s critique of institutionalized religion and his favouring of inclusive religious community is akin to a model of spirituality that, in positive psychology, (...) is conceived of as an open system. (shrink)

As regimes move from illiberal to liberal, post-transition justice methodology has been employed to engender truth and reconciliation. These normative concepts have evolved into a policy of creating truth and reconciliation commissions that trade civil and criminal amnesty with applicants in exchange for information. This bargained-for exchange can be analyzed as an imperfect information game, where the commission attempts to maximize information while the applicant seeks amnesty for the lowest possible price. Using game-theoretic analysis, the authors model the truth-amnesty game (...) and predict the optimal commission strategy. The analysis leads to the recommendation that future transitional justice commissions employ various specific lexicographic ordering strategies to minimize dead weight loss in the transaction. (shrink)

In the war on terrorism, the imprisonment of suspected terrorists by the United States has raised a host of issues,1 among them that of indefinite detention. Over the years, there has been a great...

At Epistles 2.2.87–9 Horace introduces an argument against writing poetry based on the unpleasant mutual admiration required in poetic society with an anecdote about an orator and a jurisconsult: †frater erat Romae† consulti rhetor, ut alter alterius sermone meros audiret honores, Gracchus ut hic illi, foret huic ut Mucius ille.

Ainslie insightfully refines the concept of willpower by emphasizing low-effort applications of resolve. However, he gives undue weight to intertemporal discounting as the problem that willpower is needed to overcome. Nonhumans typically don't encounter choices that differ only in the time of consumption. Humans learn to transform uncertainty into problems they can solve using culturally evolved mechanisms for quantifying risk.

Mastering the Art of Meditation is an instructional guide to various forms of meditation, representing several spiritual traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Shamanism. Readers are led through the three aspects of meditation: Concentrative, Receptive, and Expressive. Techniques include: Breathing, Imaging, Icon, Mandala, Shamanic Nature Gazing, Music, Mantra, Sacred Words, Centering Prayer, Body Awareness, Movement, Koans, Compassion, Samatha, Vipassana, Zazen, Tapas, Kundalini, Chi, and Tonglen. Dr. Don Giles, the author, spent over a decade learning these practices from a variety of (...) masters from around the world. Dr. Giles, a Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, has been teaching students both in and outside of the classroom for over 25 years. (shrink)

Written at the end of the 1960s, this book introduces a whole series of themes. problems and perplexities which have come to obsess Don Cupitt permanently. However at that stage he was still ready to align himself with that mainstream of theological writing which almost identifies orthodox faith with the quest for objectivity, whereas now he is not. In the case of God the considerations that were leading him to question received assumptions had to do with the problem of analogy (...) and the dynamics of the spiritual life. In the case of Christ they had to do with the resurrection. Above all it was hard to take a realist view of the 'Christ' of present experience. `Somehow I felt that the notion that faith is a matter of intuitive acquaintance with an invisible person, inside one's head or behind the scenes, is epistemologically and psychologically deeply wrong. No satisfactory sense can be made of it. In fact I think it has only developed since the seventeenth century and is an aberration, the chief symptom of modern Christianity's dangerous slide into irrationalism and the cult mentality. This book fires the opening shots in a struggle to check that slide and restore rationality to the spiritual life.' Don Cupitt is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. (shrink)

If new Platos or Buddhas were to appear today, what would they say about the nature of reality, the human condition and the way to happiness?The period 800-200 b.c.e. the so-called Axial Age was the time when Old World pioneering philosophers and religious teachers laid down the basic ideas by which people have been living ever since. Today those great religious and cultural traditions are coming to an end. We are entering a new Axial Age.Don Cupitt observes that this second (...) Axial Age is one of communication. Everything is accessible to everyone, and everyone can make a contribution. The world is therefore made and remade not by the individual genius, but by a change in the general consensus. Cupitt describes the emergent religion and philosophy of the new Axial Period in clear and accessible language. He predicts that, while it may seem very strange at first, we will learn to love it. (shrink)

Beginning with an overview of Hume's life and work, Don Garrett introduces in clear and accessible style the central aspects of Hume's thought. These include Hume's lifelong exploration of the human mind; his theories of inductive inference and causation; skepticism and personal identity; moral and political philosophy; aesthetics; and philosophy of religion. The final chapter considers the influence and legacy of Hume's thought today. Throughout, Garrett draws on and explains many of Hume's central works, including his Treatise of Human Nature (...) , Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding , and Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion . Hume is essential reading not only for students of philosophy, but anyone in the humanities and social sciences and beyond seeking an introduction to Hume's thought. (shrink)

"... Dr. Ihde brings an enlightening and deeply humanistic perspective to major technological developments, both past and present." —Science Books & Films "Don Ihde is a pleasure to read.... The material is full of nice suggestions and details, empirical materials, fun variations which engage the reader in the work... the overall points almost sneak up on you, they are so gently and gradually offered." —John Compton "A sophisticated celebration of cultural diversity and of its enabling technologies.... perhaps the best single (...) volume relating the philosophical tradition to the broad issues raised by contemporary technologies." —Choice "... important and challenging... " —Review of Metaphysics "... a range of rich historical, cultural, philosophical, and psychological insights, woven together in an intriguing and clear exposition... The book is really a pleasure to read, for its style, immense learning and sanity." —Teaching Philosophy The role of tools and instruments in our relation to the earth and the ways in which technologies are culturally embedded provide the foci of this thought-provoking book. (shrink)

This paper is a criticism of full-information theories of welfare. Such theories unsuccessfully attempt to accommodate an internalist intuition (that one's good depends in some way on one's desires or hypothetical desire) with a rationalist intuition (that only fully-informed desires are relevant to one's good).