ABSTRACT Prior studies have examined the impacts of sensemaking processes, such as forecasting, on ethical decision making but only a few have considered how aspects of the ethical issue itself, such as social consensus and magnitude of consequences, might interact with sensemaking processes to influence EDM. The present effort examines both forecasting and moral intensity, as well as their interactions, during the EDM process. Participants in this study were given an ethical scenario with either a high or low degree of (...) social consensus as well as a greater or smaller magnitude of consequences. They were then asked to forecast either many or few potential outcomes stemming from their actions before coming up with a final plan of action. Responses were rated for quality of forecasting, use of metacognitive reasoning strategies, perceived moral intensity, and ethicality. Results indicate that social consensus may not be beneficial for EDM if the magnitude of consequences is low or individuals are not engaged in extensive forecasting. Implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

This article explores the question of Barrack Obama's pragmatism. Obama has been labeled pragmatic by many observers and it is my contention that is worth inquiring into what this term means when it is used in various contexts. In particular I am interested in the connection between Obama's pragmatism and the philosophical tradition of pragmatism. In my analysis, Obama exhibits many characteristics of philosophical pragmatism, which provides an opportunity for philosophical pragmatists to join in a broader debate about political discourse.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering ApartheidMark Sanders (bio)What was apartheid? How is it being remembered? Two questions. The first of them, almost at once, encourages a third: what is apartheid? An answer to the first question will be an answer to the third. Knowing what apartheid was, it is implied, we will know what apartheid is. We will know what it is in essence. But if the answer supplied to the first (...) question is the same as that to the second, the question has been begged. This answer and begged question affect not only what we understand apartheid to have been. The essence of what apartheid is has been derived from an activity of remembering that is historically contingent. Is there a way out of this circle? A path to a place where essence will in no way be trammeled by any historical excrescence—where apartheid, stamped with -heid, the Afrikaans suffix for -ness, stands forth intact, unique—where, in a final victory, apartheid's phantasy of separateness will have perfected itself in truth? Supposing that responsibility involves the unstable articulation of essence and contingency, and consequent decision in the "night of non-knowledge," would it be responsible to seek such a way out? Is it possible, on the other hand, not to embark upon, or want to embark upon, such a search?The title "Remembering Apartheid" is to be understood as shorthand for this aporia of certain knowing. It refers in the first place to ways of remembering bound up, in South Africa, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. These have involved not only the collection of facts anchored in recollection, a classically forensic project, but also the admission of acts of grieving and the invitation for others to participate in these acts—a participation to which I will refer, employing the word in the general sense of a mourning-with, as condolence. The word remembrance (echoing the German Gedächtnis, with its folding in of Denken) might more closely approach the inextricable interlinking, before the Commission, of epistemic and mournful practice. Yet, in traversing the aporia provisionally without eliminating it, the title of my essay lays claim to knowledge. It announces: this is apartheid, for this is what apartheid was. It thereby also seeks to acknowledge that, just as forensic evidence assembled by the Commission may be bound up with the grieving of witnesses, no claim about the nature of apartheid can be untouched by the affective demands of those who bear the burden of remembering. The legacy of apartheid of which they speak is of undiscovered bodies, of bodies denied a proper burial. They seek the help of the Commission in rectifying this state of affairs. What we hear when we listen to those witnesses is this: apartheid was a proscription on mourning, specifically of the other. Can we then not say: apartheid is, at least for those who remember the worst deeds committed under it, and who attach to them a particular affect, a proscription on mourning the other? Viewed from a purely forensic point of view, it is far from clear that we possess evidence to impeach this testimony. [End Page 60]Apartheid was/is, in the most general terms, an interdict against the development of a social formation. Although Afrikaner-nationalist politicians and intellectuals sometimes frightened the volk with images of being swamped by the vast black African mass or of being ploughed under as a people [see Louw 1: 505], the nature of that social formation was never outlined in precise terms. Versions of racial degeneration and bastardy were proffered by apartheid theorists, but what the ideology of race purity and the power that hid behind it really entailed was a foreclosure of the other, and thus of any historical possibility of another social formation—of what Breyten Breytenbach, alluding in Dog Heart [69] to the novelist Jan Rabie, calls "other-making" (andersmaak).In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Sigmund Freud offers an account of the social formation that, although standing on the shoulders of conservative nineteenth-century writers such as Gustave le Bon, does not depend upon racial, cultural, linguistic, or other characteristics that, singularly or together, formed the core... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionEthics and Interdisciplinarity in Philosophy and Literary TheoryMark Sanders (bio)Two questions—the first calls for information, the second for justification. What points of contact, if any, are there between the current investment in ethics in literary theory, and the elaboration of ethics in contemporary philosophy? In other words, does an interdisciplinarity exist? Second, what reasons might literary theorists have, or have they had, to be aware and take stock (...) of developments in philosophical ethics? That is to say, what might be gained from interdisciplinary work? A third question emanates from the first two: where a cross-disciplinary engagement with philosophy has taken place, has there occurred any transformation of literary theory? I hope to show in what follows that, when we consider ethics in literary theory, no less than in philosophy, it is necessary to attend both to method within each discipline and to the nature of relations between them.The first of my questions begs the question of what contemporary philosophy is. Literary theorists entering into ethics have tended to draw on the work of Emmanuel Lévinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Luce Irigaray, and more recently that of Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou. If the last has, in a spirit of polemic, professed to displace the "other" in the name of the "Same,"1 the dominant paradigm, when it [End Page 3] comes to ethics, remains one of alterity and difference. There are fundamental reasons why this should be the case: operating in figural language, literature, or the literary, differs from itself in response to an other. To borrow, translate, and adapt an Afrikaans term from the South African poet Breyten Breytenbach,2 literature engages in a process of andersmaak, of other-making or making-other: in making-other and, in so doing, inventing others, it makes itself other. Literature is an other-maker. It is to this activity that literary theory must attend. That is why it is natural for it to turn to ethics—not only the nexus Lévinas-Derrida and the other thinkers mentioned above, but also, for instance, to psychoanalysis: what may have begun as the teasing out of hidden meanings (the received idea is that this is what psychoanalysis and literary criticism share) has, following Lacan's "return to Freud," evolved into a consideration of the ethics of psychoanalysis in the context of reading and listening [see, for example, Felman and Laub].Literature may be an other-maker, and reading may be exemplary in the topoi of current theory for responsibility before the other,3 but it is not clear that literary theorists have been equal to setting this responsibility to work fully when it comes to responding to philosophy. There has been relatively little attention among literary theorists to developments in disciplinary philosophy—where, in recent decades, in North America and the Anglophone world generally, the tendency in ethics has been to bring moral reflection to bear on questions in political theory. The pólis in question is, however, no longer only the nation-state; the politics that engages political thought is transnational and global. Whether or not a given thinker subscribes to the idea of world citizenship, the horizon for thought is cosmopolitan.PhilosophyAlthough thinkers have continued to enter into basic questions in ethics,4 the writings of Charles Taylor, Will Kymlicka, Iris Young, Seyla Benhabib, and others attest to a shift from ethics to politics powerfully influenced by John Rawls (1921-2002)—notably in A Theory of Justice (1971) and Political Liberalism (1993)—and the ensuing criticisms of these works. As the weight of the North American debate has moved from liberal multiculturalism and minority rights [see Taylor et al.; Ackerman; Kymlicka; Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference] toward transnationality and globalization, Rawls's more recent critics have come to view his assumption of the nation-state as the basic context of analysis—even in The Law of Peoples (1999), which is devoted to international relations—as a limitation to his thinking of justice.5 These changes in emphasis are a clear sign of how the effects of globalization have begun to draw a response from political theorists.Links between ethics and political... (shrink)

Ethics and Phenomenology examines the relevance of major phenomenologists and phenomenological concepts to ethical inquiry in general, as well as to a broad range of contemporary ethical issues.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Remembering Richard J. Bernstein (1932–2022)Tara Mastrelli and Mark SandersRemembrance for Richard J. BernsteinMy name is Tara Mastrelli. I am a graduate student at the New School for Social Research.1 Dick Bernstein was my teacher and my friend. I was also the TA for his final seminar on American Pragmatism this past spring, an experience that I want to share with you today.In the months leading up to this (...) seminar, Dick said something shifted for him in the way he understood pragmatism—a sort of awakening on his part. He redesigned his syllabus into two parts—the first, working through the classical pragmatists, namely, Peirce, James, and Dewey, as he had done for sixty-eight years. And then the second half would—in Dewey's words—turn toward "the problems of men" (though Dick would always say human beings), engaging with themes and texts from Black and feminist thinkers. To be clear, for Dick, this was not an expansion of the canon or an exercise in who should or should not count as a pragmatist. Rather his aim was something different altogether—to see if we could begin to understand pragmatism not as a canon at all, but rather as a living, evolving movement.Now the point is not that this was the perfect syllabus—it wasn't. The point is what redesigning his syllabus can tell us about the type of person and teacher that Dick was. At almost 90 years old, teaching a subject he had taught for almost seventy years, he did not sit back and say that he knew everything. He wanted to learn more—from his colleagues, his students, the world around him—to experience more, to challenge his assumptions, to understand more. [End Page 103]Beyond the syllabus, another factor that made this seminar unique was Dick's health. His illness started at the beginning of the semester. He taught our first class from an emergency room in New York City during the Omicron wave of COVID-19. He was wearing a mask and breathing tubes. Machines were beeping all around him. Nurses came in from time to time to check on him. Nonetheless … his enthusiasm was not remotely diminished. Laying out his aims and ambitions for the course, he referred to it as "an exciting adventure"—for him and for us.The syllabus was not perfect, and Dick's health ebbed and flowed throughout, and yet—as the course itself progressed—it evolved into the very thing he was hoping for, which was pragmatism as a living, evolving movement. He read and added new work from a colleague examining Black feminist pragmatism and its relationship to the Movement for Black Lives, adding a full session dedicated to it. On certain days, when his breath was weak, he asked me to lead our discussions, which took on more of an almost jazz-like character—my classmates and I riffing off each other as we tried to wrestle with concepts such as DuBois's color line against the backdrop of gentrification in our own neighborhoods. When I decided to run a progressive stack for our discussions on feminism, Dick replied, "Good for you!" and enthusiastically used the hand-raising function, patiently waiting his turn.At the end of the semester, he seemed to be feeling better—his voice was strong and his eyes were bright during our final session. He conveyed his sense that, despite his recurring lament that we did not have more time (he had always envisioned the course as two semesters, or sometimes two full years), the seminar had achieved what he had wanted to achieve: "Philosophy has come alive." A return to philosophy, "not just as a discipline to master, but something to be caught up in; the excitement of dealing with life—a return to a genuine Socratic conception of philosophy."I am sure many of you may know that Dick wrote his dissertation on Dewey. What you may not know is that he originally wanted to write it on Plato. (Phaedrus was his favorite.) But once he sat down, he realized he did not want to write something about Plato that, as he said... (shrink)

Rortyian Hope This is a paper about Richard Rorty's notion of hope, and the role that it plays in breaking down Rorty's public/private distinction, and connecting philosophy to politics. The argument that philosophy can be engaged in and with the social-political world is one that is coherent with Rorty's position if philosophy is understood as striving towards its goals with a sense of contextualism and fallibilism. Placing Rorty within the tradition of the classic pragmatists, James and Dewey, I will argue (...) that pluralism can and should serve as a contextual foundation for liberalism. Through an examination and analysis of Rorty's liberal ironist and anti-foundationalism, I will explore how Rortyian hope can be understood as socially and politically transformative, transforming our conception of knowledge from one based on certainty to one based on fallibility. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Research examining ethical decision-making has focused on how people engage in EDM, leading many researchers to focus on sensemaking models of EDM. Although the merits of a sensemaking approach with respect to EDM are evident in the literature, less is known about the specific cognitive processes by which sensemaking impacts EDM. This study examines the impact of three late-cycle cognitive processes – idea generation, evaluation, and revision – as well as the timing of these processes on EDM. Results indicate (...) that information gathering early on is critical to EDM; a finding which supports an active sensemaking model over an intuitive one. (shrink)

Performance on working memory (WM) tasks may partially be supported by long-term memory (LTM) processing. Hence, brain activation recently being implicated in WM may actually have been driven by (incidental) LTM formation. We examined which brain regions actually support successful WM processing, rather than being confounded by LTM processes, during the maintenance and probe phase of a WM task. We administered a four-pair (faces and houses) associative delayed-match-to-sample (WM) task using event-related fMRI and a subsequent associative recognition LTM task, using (...) the same stimuli. This enabled us to analyze subsequent memory effects for both the WM and the LTM test by contrasting correctly recognized pairs with incorrect pairs for either task. Critically, with respect to the subsequent WM effect, we computed this analysis exclusively for trials that were forgotten in the subsequent LTM recognition task. Hence, brain activity associated with successful WM processing was less likely to be confounded by incidental LTM formation. The subsequent LTM effect, in contrast, was analyzed exclusively for pairs that previously had been correctly recognized in the WM task, disclosing brain regions involved in successful LTM formation after successful WM processing. Results for the subsequent WM effect showed no significantly activated brain areas for WM maintenance, possibly due to an insensitivity of fMRI to mechanisms underlying active WM maintenance. In contrast, a correct decision at WM probe was linked to activation in the “retrieval success network” (anterior and posterior midline brain structures). The subsequent LTM analyses revealed greater activation in left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex in the early phase of the maintenance stage. No supra-threshold activation was found during the WM probe. Together, we obtained clearer insights in which brain regions support successful WM and LTM without the potential confound of the respective memory system. (shrink)

In an era when truth commissions are at the fulcrum of "transitional justice," soliciting the testimony of victims and commanding that of perpetrators in forums other than criminal trials may achieve a dimension of justice lost in traditional juridical proceedings.

Patient report of functioning is one component of the neurocognitive exam following traumatic brain injury, and standardized patient-reported outcomes measures are useful to track outcomes during rehabilitation. The Traumatic Brain Injury Quality of Life measurement system is a TBI-specific extension of the PROMIS and Neuro-QoL measurement systems that includes 20 item banks across physical, emotional, social, and cognitive domains. Previous research has evaluated the responsiveness of the TBI-QOL measures in community-dwelling individuals and found clinically important change over a 6-month assessment (...) interval in a sample of individuals who were on average 5 years post-injury. In the present study, we report on the responsiveness of the TBI-QOL Cognition–General Concerns and Executive Function item bank scores and the Cognitive Health Composite scores in a recently injured sample over a 1-year study period. Data from 128 participants with complicated mild, moderate, or severe TBI within the previous 6 months were evaluated. The majority of the sample was male, white, and non-Hispanic. The participants were 18–92 years of age and were first evaluated from 0 to 5 months post-injury. Eighty participants completed the 1-year follow-up assessment. Results show acceptable standard response mean values for all measures and minimal detectable change values ranging from 8.2 to 8.8 T-score points for Cognition–General Concerns and Executive Functioning measures. Anchor rating analysis revealed that changes in scores on the Executive Function item bank and the Cognitive Health Composite were meaningfully associated with participant-reported changes in the areas of attention, multitasking, and memory. Evaluation of change score differences by a variety of clinical indicators demonstrated a small but significant difference in the three TBI-QOL change scores by TBI injury severity grouping. These results support the responsiveness of the TBI-QOL cognition measures in newly injured individuals and provides information on the minimal important differences for the TBI-QOL cognition measures, which can be used for score interpretation by clinicians and researchers seeking patient-reported outcome measures of self-reported cognitive QOL after TBI. (shrink)

This article presents a critique of Paulo Freire's philosophical perspective on human nature in the context of a doctoral research study to explore “muchness” or nurses’ subjective experience of well‐being; and demonstrates how this critique has informed the refinement of the theoretical principles used to inform research methodology and methods. Engaging in philosophical groundwork is essential for research coherence and integrity. Through this groundwork, largely informed by Freire's critical pedagogy and his ideas on humanization, I recognized the need to clarify (...) my understanding of the concepts of persons and personhood and how this related to Freire's use of the term human beings. This clarification process is essential to ensure congruence between the theoretical principles that I draw from his work and my beliefs about persons, personhood and person‐centredness. The article begins with a brief introduction to the research, followed by an overview of Freire's philosophical perspectives, and subsequently, the critique process is presented and discussed. This process involved engaging with the vast literature and debates about what it means to be a person, to make sense of the often complex and contradictory arguments. Eventually, three headings emerged that helped me to frame my evolving understanding: Our species: human beings; The kind that we are: human nature; and This person that I am: personhood. Through this process of exploration, I recognized that Freire's perspective on human nature (a) foregrounded cognitive rationality, which presented itself as a limitation when considering my ontological beliefs and the focus of my research, leading me to draw on the work of Mark Johnson and his ideas about embodiment to help me to further develop my theoretical principles; (b) focused on the “collective” rather than individuals, which is a shortcoming in relation to person‐centred research that acknowledges the uniqueness of participants. (shrink)

Pearl opened the door to formally defining actual causation using causal models. His approach rests on two strategies: first, capturing the widespread intuition that X = x causes Y = y iff X = x is a Necessary Element of a Sufficient Set for Y = y, and second, showing that his definition gives intuitive answers on a wide set of problem cases. This inspired dozens of variations of his definition of actual causation, the most prominent of which are (...) due to Halpern & Pearl. Yet all of them ignore Pearl’s first strategy, and the second strategy taken by itself is unable to deliver a consensus. This paper offers a way out by going back to the first strategy: it offers six formal definitions of causal sufficiency and two interpretations of necessity. Combining the two gives twelve new definitions of actual causation. Several interesting results about these definitions and their relation to the various Halpern & Pearl definitions are presented. Afterwards the second strategy is evaluated as well. In order to maximize neutrality, the paper relies mostly on the examples and intuitions of Halpern & Pearl. One definition comes out as being superior to all others, and is therefore suggested as a new definition of actual causation. (shrink)

Chartist historiography is inevitably inflected by the political desires of its authors. This desire, combined with the contingent nature of history, imparts a fictive dimension to Chartist historiography. In support of these claims, this article applies the literary concepts of plot and character to Mark Hovell’s The Chartist Movement. It argues that Hovell’s political desire leads him to construct a tragic and entropic plot for Chartism, which is often contradicted by his own assessment of the movement’s vitality. Similarly, Hovell’s (...) plotting is also driven by his reading of Chartism as a conflict between two characters, a flawed hero and a villain. The article closes with a close reading of Hovell’s characterisation of O’Connor, which demonstrates the skill with which he interweaves fact and interpretation. (shrink)

J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986) was thought by many to be a modern-day equivalent of the Buddha. In fact, he was once even considered to be the second coming of Christ. While many think it wonderful to live and work in close proximity with such a person, it's difficult to understand the depth of what this means and how challenging this might be. In Knocking at the Open Door, author R.E. Mark Lee provides an ordinary person view of what being (...) close-up and working together with such a man means, how it challenges one at every turn, and how it causes one to question ceaselessly, even more deeply than one ordinarily would. Lee offers an insightful, candid, and heartfelt narrative that reveals various unknown facets of the eminent world teacher J. Krishnamurti and highlights his distinctive vision for education worldwide. This comprehensive volume brings alive the practical and everyday interactions Lee had with Krishnamurti during a twenty-year period in India and the United Sates. Knocking at the Open Door shares a clear and honest account that demonstrates the challenges of working with Krishnamurti in running a school that is true to the teaching and yet able to function in the reality of modern parental, student, and educational establishment expectations. (shrink)

There is substantial published evidence showing that countless people enroll each year in ethically deficient clinical trials. Many of the trials are problematic because the quality of the science used to justify their launch may not be sufficiently vetted while many other trials may lack requisite social value. This poses the question: why do people volunteer for them? The answer resides in large part in the fact that informed consent practices have historically masked, rather than disclosed, the information that would (...) alert research candidates to the ethically problematic nature of the trials. The “reasonable person” and “key information” provisions in the revised US Common Rule create the opportunity to correct this historical shortcoming. Two sources are employed to shed light on what the “key information” is that should be disclosed to a “reasonable person”: the original disclosure aims of the Nuremberg Code, as well as an extensive body of meta-research evidence. Those sources jointly support a range of new disclosures in the informed consent process that would unmask the heretofore undisclosed information. The resulting proposed new disclosures pertain to the overall success prospects of clinical trials, the quality of the prior research that both forms the basis of clinical trials and informs assessment of their risks and benefits, the potential social value of clinical trials, and the commercial purposes of clinical trials. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42.3 (2006) 459-461 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Minutes of the Business Meeting Charles Sanders Peirce Society 28 December 2006Following the annual scholarly meeting, with papers by President Vincent Colapietro, "Reflective Acknowledgment and Practical Identity: Kant and Peirce on the Reflexive Stance" and Essay Contest winner Shannon Dea, "'Merely a Veil over the Living Thought': Math and Logic in Peirce's Forgotten Spinoza (...) Review," President Colapietro called the meeting to order shortly after 7 o'clock in Concourse B of the New York Hilton.The minutes of the 2003 and 2004 meetings, published in the Fall, 2004, and Summer 2005 Transactions respectively, were approved.Vincent Colapietro delivered the following report from the President and Executive Committee:André De Tienne's proposal to adopt the address of the Institute for American Thought at IUPUI as the official address of the Peirce Society was accepted.It was agreed that announcements for the Peirce Essay Contest should be placed in the Transactions and in other appropriate publications (e.g. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy and the S.A.A.P. newsletter) by mid-year if possible. It was also agreed that some length limits should be set for submitted essays and that there should be a requirement that essays meet the general standard of a submission for publication in a journal.There was discussion of the desirability of separating the collection of membership dues from subscription to the Transactions. The chief reasons for thinking that this separation might be called for are 1) the increasing availability of the Transactions through university library electronic subscriptions and 2) the higher cost of foreign subscriptions (making membership in the Society far most costly for foreign members). It was decided to revisit this issue in a year or two (after the new arrangement with IU Press has become more settled).Vincent Colapietro, Mark Migotti, and Nathan Houser were appointed to serve as a "meta" committee to form, with the approval of the Executive Committee, a "regular" committee to organize the 2014 Peirce World Congress. They will also recommend a chair for the committee and a location for the congress. Indianapolis was favored by members present.It was agreed that a list of rules and procedures for conducting Society business should be drawn up for the guidance of new Society office holders. These lists will include the rules and procedures for fulfilling the functions of the various offices, for running meetings, time-tables for making decisions, and so on. N. Houser will work on this with André Tienne and Mark Migotti to draft these lists. [End Page 459]It was agreed that the outgoing Chair of the Nominating Committee should communicate with the incoming Chair a list of the candidates who were considered but not nominated, along with the basis for consideration.Peter Hare delivered the following report on the Transactions:Starting with the fall issue, the Transactions is being published by Indiana University Press. Editorial arrangements are unchanged. Although the transition has been time-consuming in the short run, the new publishing arrangements promise in the long run to increase greatly the journal's impact on the world of scholarship. This year has also been difficult because a key staff member in our previous publishing arrangements failed us. In 2005 we had 499 member/subscribers (406 domestic and 93 foreign). The bank balance is $4008.Vincent Colapietro delivered for Mark Migotti a preliminary version of the following financial report :2005 income was $1,713.05 ($1,497 in membership dues and $216.05 in interest). 2005 expenditures were c. $1,987.40: ($500 for the essay contest prize, $550 for travel subvention and dinner for the contest winner; 674.40 for mailings; $128.40 for web-site fees; $75 dues to the Logic and Methodology section of the International Society for the Philosophy of Science, and $60.00 for a subsidized membership for CISPEC).As of December 31, 2005, the Society's assets were: $10,625.92, a decrease of $.274... (shrink)

The challenges public comprehensive universities face today are expanding—they have been challenged to enroll and graduate more students, adopt new technologies that lower cost without sacrificing quality, and align program and curricular offerings with the skills that employers require. While these universities have a long history of adapting to change, today’s environment will likely test the capabilities of even the most adaptive institutions. This volume assembles a team of experts from a variety of disciplines to examine both the history of (...) the comprehensive university and what lies ahead. Overall, the book grapples with such questions as: How do these institutions adapt to serve the growing population of non-traditional students? How well do they prepare graduates for the labor market? Can partnerships between community colleges and comprehensive universities bolster student success? The University Next Door draws much-needed attention to a set of institutions that has historically received little notice, yet play an important role in meeting our new attainment goals and helping the American economy grow. Book Features: Examines the role of comprehensive universities from start to finish—their history and future. Uses empirical analysis to explore complex questions about which students choose these universities and why. Explores how these institutions might struggle under a federal ratings system such as the one proposed by President Obama. Discusses how these institutions can better monitor the needs of the economy and better educate students to fill those needs. Provides recommendations to inform future decisions about higher education policy. (shrink)

Dit artikel neemt de secularisatietheorie van H. van Riessen als leidraad. Het begint met het onderscheid tussen secularisatie als emancipatie en als secularisme uit te werken. Vervolgens toont het de actualiteit van deze theorie door op het punt van het onderscheid tussen emancipatie en secularisme overeenkomsten met hedendaagse denkers aan te wijzen . Via een verbinding tussen emancipatie en modernisering wordt daarna Taylors positie vergeleken met radicalere visies op deze verhouding binnen de traditie van de Vrije Universiteit. In het (...) slotgedeelte staat secularisatie als secularisme centraal. Dit onderdeel begint met een analyse van het leerstuk van de ‘werkzame schijn’. Afgesloten wordt met een eigen visie op secularisme als religie. Een ongetoetste vooronderstelling van veel Reformatorische wijsbegeerte is dat religie altijd in geconcentreerde vorm optreedt. Aan de hand van het voorbeeld van multipele religieuze participatie in China maakt dit artikel aannemelijk dat secularisme ook in diffuse vormen kan optreden. (shrink)

Since America was founded, faith informed its moral genius. From the Declaration of Independence to the work of Martin Luther King Jr., belief in God positively shaped the moral awareness of the nation. This article suggests that political discourse emerging in the middle of the twentieth century, which effectively prohibits the mention of faith in serious political conversation, is having devastating consequences on the moral capacity of contemporary society. It suggests that such faith-less political discourse contradicts America’s founding logic. This (...) article also reasserts the Catholic claim that truth can be known and that in the face of faith-less political discourse, Catholics are morally bound to seek complete truth, which requires faith. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.4 (Winter 2010): 687–693. (shrink)

The most cursory examination of the history of artificial intelligence highlights numerous egregious claims of its researchers, especially in relation to a populist form of ‘strong’ computationalism which holds that any suitably programmed computer instantiates genuine conscious mental states purely in virtue of carrying out a specific series of computations. The argument presented herein is a simple development of that originally presented in Putnam’s monograph, “Representation & Reality”, which if correct, has important implications for turing machine functionalism and the prospect (...) of ‘conscious’ machines. In the paper, instead of seeking to develop Putnam’s claim that, “everything implements every finite state automata”, I will try to establish the weaker result that, “everything implements the specific machine Q on a particular input set ”. Then, equating Q to any putative AI program, I will show that conceding the ‘strong AI’ thesis for Q opens the door to a vicious form of panpsychism whereby all open systems,, must instantiate conscious experience and hence that disembodied minds lurk everywhere. (shrink)

With much talk of President Obama’s pragmatism, there is good reason to explore what this means in terms of his commitments and his policies. When we call Obama a pragmatist, is this merely a way of saying he selects policies and makes decisions that work, quite independent and sometimes against principles he may hold? Or, do we mean to point to something more robust—a kind of pragmatism that emphasizes experimentalism as a cooperative venture, that locates principles in and assesses their (...) worth based on background experiential conditions, that eschews epistemic and practical certainty for fallibilism, that is oriented by a chastened hope, and that is committed to public deliberation as essential to democratic.. (shrink)

Reverse mathematics is a program in the foundations of mathematics founded by Friedman and developed extensively by Simpson and others. The aim of RM is to find the minimal axioms needed to prove a theorem of ordinary, that is, non-set-theoretic, mathematics. As suggested by the title, this paper deals with the study of the topological notions of dimension and paracompactness, inside Kohlenbach’s higher-order RM. As to splittings, there are some examples in RM of theorems A, B, C such that A (...) ↔, that is, A can be split into two independent parts B and C, and the aforementioned topological notions give rise to a number of splittings involving highly natural A, B, C. Nonetheless, the higher-order picture is markedly different from the second-one: in terms of comprehension axioms, the proof in higher-order RM of, for example, the paracompactness of the unit interval requires full second-order arithmetic, while the second-order/countable version of paracompactness of the unit interval is provable in the base theory RCA 0. We obtain similarly “exceptional” results for the Urysohn identity, the Lindelöf lemma, and partitions of unity. We show that our results exhibit a certain robustness, in that they do not depend on the exact definition of cover, even in the absence of the axiom of choice. (shrink)

Connectives and cue phrases are the most prototypical linguistic elements that signal coherence relations, but by limiting our attention to connectives, we are likely missing out on important other cues readers and listeners use when establishing coherence relations. However, defining the role of other types of linguistic elements in the signaling of coherence relations is not straightforward, and it is also not obvious why and how non-connective elements function as signals for coherence relations. In this paper, we aim to develop (...) a systematic way of categorizing segment-internal elements as signals of coherence relations on the basis of a literature review and evidence from parallel corpora. We propose a three-way distinction betweendivision of labor, agreement, andgeneral collocationto categorize the different ways in which elements inside discourse segments interact with connectives in the marking of coherence relations. In each type of interaction, segment-internal elements can function as signals for coherence relations, but the mechanism behind it is slightly different for each type. (shrink)

Security is cultivated and mobilized by enacting exclusionary practices, and exclusion is cultivated and realized on security grounds. This article explores the political dangers that lie in this connection, dangers which open the door to a fascist mobilization in the name of security. To do so the article first asks: what happens to our understanding of fascism if we view it through the lens of security? But then a far more interesting question emerges: what happens to our understanding of (...) security if we view it through the lens of fascism? Out of these questions it is suggested that the central issue might be less a question of "security and exclusion" and much more a question of "security and extermination.". (shrink)

In the last hundred years, the philosophy of natural law has suffered a fate that could hardly have been envisaged by the seventeenth and eighteenth century exponents of its universality and eternity: it has become old-fashioned. The positivists and the Marxists were happy to throw eternal moral ity out of the window, confident that some magic temporal harmony would eventually follow Progress in by the front door. Their hopes may not have been fully realized, but they did succeed in (...) discrediting natural law. What is often not appreciated is the extent to which we have adopted the tenets of the philosophy they despised, borh in the field of politics, and in the field of personal and social ethics, which Barbeyrac called "la science des mreurs" and which the positivists re christened "social science". Consequently, though we live in a world whose freedom, such as it is, is largely a result of the popularization of the philosophy of natural law, and whose conscious and unconscious standards, such as they are, are a result of that philosophy as it became combined with Christianity, the doctrine of natural law is itself for gotten. In view of the oblivion into which it has fallen, natural law is a concept which means little to the average reader. All too often, Montesquieu scholars have traded on this oblivion in order to give an exaggerated picture of his originality. (shrink)

Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism [TRP] presents the fruits of Christopher Hookway’s thinking about the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce since the publication of Peirce in 1985. Unlike the earlier work, this ‘does not pretend to be a general introduction to Peirce’s philosophy [but]... deals [instead] with a range of important and central issues in more detail than was possible in that volume’. As his title indicates, Hookway’s chief aim is to articulate pragmatism’s most promising ideas about the nature of (...) truth and rationality—well, as just noted, for ‘pragmatism’ read ‘Peirce’; but the wording of the title is not inappropriate given the regular use of James and Dewey as foils for interpreting Peirce. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt grasps modernity in terms of crisis and political modernity in terms of the crisis of authority. Because she ties the crisis of authority not simply to liberal political thought but to the entire Western philosophical tradition, Arendt responds to the crisis of authority with a critical modernism, i.e., a modernism that seeks to lay bare the gap between past and future that was covered up by the Roman trilogy of tradition, religion, and authority. This modernism is critical because (...) it intensifies rather than shies away from crisis. With this critical modernism, judgment emerges as the successor to authority, opening the door to a possible overcoming of metaphysics and of the estrangement of doing and thinking. Arendt’s reworking of a parable of Kafka’s dealing with the gap between past and future illustrates her turn to judgment and her attempt to overcome metaphysics. (shrink)

The nature and status of cultural evolution and its connection with biological evolution are controversial in part because of Richard Dawkin’s suggestion that the scientific study of culture should include “memetics,” an analog of genetics in which genes are replaced by “memes”—the hypothetical units of cultural evolution. Memetics takes different forms; I focus on its minimal form, which claims merely that natural selection shapes to some extent the evolution of some aspects of culture. Advocates and critics of memetics disagree about (...) the scientific status of memetics, but they agree that memetics must face the following fundamental problems. Problem 1: Cultural evolution differs too much from biological evolution. Problem 2: Culture is too complex. Problem 3: Memes are too difficult to identify and track. Problem 4: Memetics produces only trivial results. This paper examines these problems in the context of a minimal memetic analysis in one specific context: patented inventions. Technology is a special subset of culture, and patented inventions are a special subset of technology—not least because there is a detailed written record of every patent. I describe four recent empirical results on technological innovation derived from memetic analysis of the patent record. Result 1: Inkjet printing, PCR, and stents are key drivers of technological innovation. Result 2: Patent genealogies are tangled and incestuous. Result 3: Door-opening innovations drive the evolution of technology. Result 4: The evolving content of the drivers of innovation confirms the importance of inkjet printing, PCR, and stents, among other inventions. These results show that minimal memetics can provide a novel and illuminating analysis the evolution of patented technology. Furthermore, this memetic analysis can answer all of the main problems with memetics. Problem 1 can be dismissed because culture and biology can be quite disanalogous, provided that natural selection still operates in both. Problem 2 is a mirage, because memetic analysis of the patented inventions is consistent with the full richness and complexity of the evolution of technology. Problem 3 is easy to solve, because the patent record makes it trivial to identify and track patents and their key traits through lineages. Problem 4 can be fully answered only after memetic analysis becomes widespread, but the results reviewed here shows that minimal memetics does yield scientific results that are nontrivial and interesting. (shrink)

This book consists of the edited proceedings of a debate among Jurgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and Leszek Kolakowski that was held in Warsaw in May of 1995. It includes also commentary from those in attendance, including extensive remarks by Ernest Gellner. The debate marked the fortieth anniversary of the foundation of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and focussed primarily on topics related to historicism and cultural relativism.

He tells everyone in the room to leave except you. The others on your team—the attending, your cointern, and two medical students—all file out quickly. The heavy door closes behind them. The bolt clicks. It's your third month on medicine, your eleventh hour on call. He sits at the edge of the hospital bed with his back to you. His torso is wrapped in a thick spiral of bandages discolored by blood in various stages of drying. "If you want (...) to take a look," he says to you, his voice remote, "you'll have to cut them off yourself."You start cutting the bandages away from his chest. His wife sits in the corner of the room. She wears large, dark sunglasses that obscure much of her bony face. She says nothing. When you're .. (shrink)

Na een ongeluk met hersenletsel wist hij precies hoe de mens zich, eenmaal van God los, zou moeten bevrijden van allerlei mythen en angsten om eindelijk een onafhankelijk individu te worden. Maar de gedachten van deze eigenzinnige Napolitaanse filosoof druisten lijnrecht in tegen de gevestigde orde en stuitten op onbegrip en hoongelach. Want Vico vertrouwde eerder op poëzie, leugens en verbeelding dan op het 'meten is weten' van Descartes.0En niemand kon vermoeden dat juist hij veel later de inspiratie zou worden (...) van denkers als Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Berlin, Said, Eco en Sloterdijk. Zijn adagium 'Ik fabuleer, dus ik ben' zou bovendien naadloos in onze tijd hebben gepast.0Mark Blaisse schreef een uiterst onderhoudend, geromantiseerd portret van deze briljante anarchist, een pechvogel op vrijwel elk gebied. In 'Het orakel van Napels' gidst de eigenzinnige Vico de lezer door barok Napels, langs schilderijen, theaters, castraten, vioolbouwers, verboden boekenkasten, bordelen en literaire salons. Een wereld vol populisme, corruptie en alternatieve feiten: Vico's leven en ideeën blijken verbazingwekkend actueel. (shrink)

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] the very end of his extraordinary philosophical career, Quine used a 1927 Remington typewriter—a machine that was perfectly adapted to his scholarly needs because he had replaced many of its keys with logical symbols. Famously, one of the keys Quine removed was the question mark. Asked about his curious typewriter (...) by an inquisitive reporter, Quine quipped that he did not require a question mark because he dealt in certainties.Quine's Remington graces the cover of this handsome volume of essays, which grew out of a joint Glasgow-Campinas conference held in Glasgow in 2014. The cover photo reveals that Quine sacrificed the question mark for a reversed epsilon ; the volume's essays ‘fill some major gaps in the historical narrative,... (shrink)

James Mark Baldwin left a legacy that has yet to be fully examined, one with profound implications for science and the humanities. In some sense it paralleled that of his friend Charles Sanders Peirce, whose semiotics became understood only a century later. Baldwin was trying to make sense of complex biological and social processes that only now have come into the limelight as biological sciences have re-emerged in psychology. Baldwin's focus on development, based on the observation of his (...) own children and extrapolated to his general theoretical scheme, is fully in line with where contemporary biological sciences are heading. This is exemplified by the bounded flexibility of the work of the genetic system. The general principle of persistent exploration of the environment with the result of creating novelty, which was the core of Baldwin's theoretical system, has since the 1960s become the guiding idea in genetics. Contemporary developmental science is rooted in Baldwin's thinking. In his new introduction, Jaan Valsiner shows that Baldwin's Genetic Theory of Reality demonstrates how human beings are in their nature social beings, establishes an alternative conceptualization of evolutionary theory, and formulates a system of developmental logic, all of which serve as the foundation for developmental psychology as a whole. This is a work of social science rediscovery long overdue. (shrink)

An advanced degree in criminal justice can open doors far outside traditional criminal justice practice, making it a highly in-demand course. This current study aimed to assess the viability of J.H. Cerilles State College to offer a Master of Science in Criminal Justice with Specialization in Criminology (MSCJ) in 2021. A descriptive survey type of research was employed as the methodology for this study. The 215 respondents from students, graduates, and professionals in the field from private and government institutions were (...) chosen via random sampling to answer the online survey questionnaire. Management viability, market viability, operation viability, location viability, and industry viability were all evaluated. There was evidence to suggest that offering MSCJ in the college is doable, provided that the curriculum will be tailored to account for community needs and industry demands. In meeting future demand for this field of study, constant improvements in school facilities, instruction, research, and extension should be made. The methodology utilized in this study can be replicated in a future feasibility assessment, which may also include other areas that were not covered in this study. z. (shrink)

Although Isaiah Berlin's critique of positive liberty has achieved canonical status, its place within his wider political philosophy remains obscure. However, the re-publication of one of his most important philosophical essays, From Hope and Fear Set Free, as part of a new edition of Four Essays on Liberty, simply entitled Liberty, has opened the door to a re-evaluation of Berlin's political project. At the heart of Berlin's argument, which gains its fullest expression in From Hope and Fear Set Free, (...) stands his contention that positive liberty, in its incarnation as self-realisation, conflates liberty with knowledge, which leads to the distortion of our phenomenologically inescapable structure of experience. This transgression against the conceptual framework in terms of which we think, Berlin argues, played its desolate part in linking the ?totalitarian temptation? latent in liberty as self-realisation with the totalitarian politics of the mid-twentieth century. (shrink)

Aan de hand van het werk van de Duitse romancier W.G. Sebald breekt Mark Anderson een lans voor een herwaardering van de melancholie, als enig mogelijke houding om de last van het verleden die we moeten dragen, te kunnen torsen. De kunsten zijn het aangewezen instrument voor deze ‘daad van verzet’ ‘tegen de krachten van vernietiging en vergeten in het menselijk leven’. Het werk van Sebald, achtervolgd door de ‘postmemory’ aan het Duitse oorlogsgeweld dat hij zelf alleen indirect (...) had meegemaakt, is hiervan een veelzeggende illustratie. (shrink)

The post-Civil War American natural history craze spawned a new institution -- the natural history dealer -- that has failed to receive the historical attention it deserves. The individuals who created these enterprises simultaneously helped to promote and hoped to profit from the burgeoning interest in both scientific and popular specimen collecting. At a time when other employment and educational prospects in natural history were severely limited, hundreds of dealers across the nation provided encouragement, specimens, publication outlets, training opportunities, and (...) jobs for naturalists of all motivations and levels of expertise. This paper explores the crucial role that specimen dealers played in the larger natural history community. After briefly examining the development of local taxidermy shops in the mid-nineteenth century, it then traces the history of four large natural history dealerships established in the United States during the latter half of the century: Ward's Natural History Establishment, Frank Blake Webster's Naturalists' Supply Depot, Southwick & Jencks' Natural History Store, and Frank H. Lattin & Co. By the early twentieth century, changing tastes in interior design, the growth of the Audubon movement, and the dramatic expansion of alternate training and job opportunities for naturalists led many specimen dealers either to shift their emphasis or to shut their doors. (shrink)

A claimed benefit of epistemic externalism is that it alone can avoid skepticism. Most epistemic externalists, however, allow a residual amount of internalism in terms of a defeasibility condition. The paper argues that this internal condition is sufficient for skeptics to cast doubt on many claims to justified belief about perceptual matters about the world. Furthermore, the internal defeasibility condition also opens the door to a darker form of skepticism; skeptical dogmatism, which maintains that many of our perceptually based (...) beliefs are probably false. Thus, the claimed benefits of externalism in avoiding skepticism are greatly exaggerated. (shrink)

Wat is vrijheid? Vrij ben je pas als je beseft dat je brein weleens met jou aan de haal gaat. Vrij ben je als je de waarheid niet ontkent. En vrij ben je als er een overheid is die jouw vrijheid waarborgt. Aan vrijheid kleeft verantwoordelijkheid. Vrijheid wordt afgeremd door ons brein, bevorderd door de waarheid, versterkt door solidariteit, verzekerd door de democratie en mogelijk gemaakt door de ethiek.