Reminiscing about the death of logical empiricism after prolonged attacks, Frederick Suppe concludes, “Suddenly we knew the war had been won, and the Symposium became an energized exploration of where to go now.” It is a similar feeling, but in logical empiricism’s favor and without the bloodshed, that I get from Thomas Uebel and Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau’s The Routledge Handbook of Logical Empiricism. The historical entries present logical empiricism as a rich resource to be explored, and the entries on the theses (...) of logical empiricism treat them as topics of current interest, with most of the latter decidedly upbeat about logical empiricism’s contribution and promise. Some entries are still presented as corrections of popular misconceptions about logical empiricism, but the majority can simply present their topic, often based on decades of research. (shrink)

Logical Empiricism and the Physical Sciences: From Philosophy of Nature to Philosophy of Physics introduces us to the philosophy of physics of logical empiricism. However, here the expression “philosophy of physics” does not refer to a consolidated area of philosophy but to the set of concepts, methods, and analyses relating to general relativity, quantum mechanics, and other physical theories that were developed by the members of the logical empiricist movement. Because of the thoroughness with which it treats an issue so (...) unjustly disregarded in the literature, Logical Empiricism and the Physical Sciences is an essential work not only for HOPOS readers interested in the intellectual origins of recent philosophy of physics but also for those interested in general philosophy of science. The main aim of this book is to overturn many of the inherited prejudices about how the logical empiricists—Carnap, Reichenbach, Frank, Neurath, and Feigl, among others—related philosophically to the physics of their time. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Klaudios Ptolemaios: Handbuch der Geographie, Griechisch-DeutschAlexander JonesAlfred Stückelberger and Gerd Grasshoff, eds. Klaudios Ptolemaios: Handbuch der Geographie, Griechisch-Deutsch. Vol. 1: Einleitung und Buch 1-4. Vol. 2. Buch 5-8 und Indices. With contributions from Florian Mittenhuber, Renate Burri, Klaus Geus, Gerhard Winkler, Susanne Ziegler, Judith Hindermann, Lutz Koch, and Kurt Keller. Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2006. 1018 pp. 24 color and black-and-white ills. 29 maps. 1 CD-RO M. Cloth, (...) €170.Ptolemy's Geography is at the same time the only survivor of the ancient Greek literature devoted to the topic of drawing maps of the world and is the most extensive ancient list that we possess of names and locations of communities and physical features in the known parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. It may seem astonishing that a document of exceptional importance for ancient history, geography, and the history of science should have had to wait until now for a complete critical edition. In fact the last complete edition, by C. F. A. Nobbe (1843–45), presents an indiscriminate text with no apparatus beyond a skimpy eighteen-page "Index Criticus" at the end. Two other editions, by F. W. Wilberg and C. H. F. Grashof (1838–45) and by C. Müller and C. T. Fischer (1883–1901), though furnished with apparatus, were vitiated by defective knowledge of the main lines of the textual tradition and besides were never completed. The twentieth century saw major progress in the sorting out of the Geography's manuscripts, with important contributions by (among others) Joseph Fischer, Otto Cuntz, Aubrey Diller, and above all by Paul Schnabel, whose monograph on the subject was meant as a mere harbinger of an edition that he did not live to produce. Meanwhile, scholars in need of a reliable text have had to make do with a patchwork of intentionally partial editions limited to sections of Ptolemy's geographical catalogue covering specific regions.The biggest obstacle in the way of restoring the Geography arises from one of Ptolemy's profoundest insights, that a graphical object such as a world map can be reproduced more accurately if its contents are translated into a collection of numerical coordinates representing each significant point of the drawing, in effect, a digitization. About two thirds of the Geography is thus dedicated to a list of some eight-thousand place names with the longitudes and latitudes of the corresponding localities expressed in degrees and fractions of a degree, ordered [End Page 128] so that one can reconstruct the map by plotting from point to point on a suitable grid of parallels and meridians. Ptolemy thus got rid of the analogue distortions inherent in the process of copying a picture, but he proposed no measures to protect the copying of the text and numerals of his list from errors giving rise to "noise" progressively obscuring the picture. Unfortunately, Greek alphabetic numerals, notations for common fractions, and exotic place names—many of them attested in no other document—were all liable to frequent misreading in ancient and medieval manuscripts. In such material, copying errors are difficult to detect and generally impossible to undo. The modern scholar, working with an abundance of manuscript copies (none older than the late thirteenth century), is incessantly confronted by variant readings of which at least one must be wrong but for which no rational basis for discriminating exists. To complicate matters further, many of the manuscripts contain maps, and the origin of these maps and their relation to the textual history are controversial questions for which the usual resources of textual criticism are inadequate. It is not surprising if editors' appetites have been sated with modest helpings of the Geography.Now at last we have a complete and reliable critical edition of Ptolemy's book, an accomplishment made possible in the first instance by a division of labor among a competent and well-organized team, and secondly by judicious choices about what the edition should and should not attempt to do. The team, the "Ptolemaios-Forschungsstelle," affiliated with the Institute for Classical Philology of the University of Berne, comprises more than a dozen scholars led by a philologist, Alfred... (shrink)

The dominant view of women has changed radically during the last century. These changes have had an important impact on the way of life of women in general and, undoubtedly, on women as patients. So far, gender differences have received little attention when developing healthcare services. Stroke hits a great number of elderly women. Wyller et al. found that women seemed to be harder hit by stroke than men; they achieved lower scores in tests of motor, cognitive and ADL functions, (...) both in the acute phase and 1 year after stroke. It is reasonable to expect that differences in outcome among male and female sufferers may in part be explained by the fact that rehabilitation services are designed primarily to meet the needs of men. de Beauvoir's feminist theory maintains that one's body is fundamental in creating the person, which is a lifelong process. Traditionally, the female body has been exposed to alienation and oppression through life. This has led women to develop a life in immanence. This we feel can be of significance in connection with rehabilitation after a stroke, particularly for elderly women. In this article we will discuss how de Beauvoir's theory can throw new light on the experiences and rehabilitation of elderly women and point to ways of improving the process of rehabilitation. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Appley and Stoutenburg present two new objections to Explanationist Evidentialism : the Regress Objection and the Threshold Objection. In this paper, I develop a version of EE that is independently plausible and empirically grounded, and show that it can meet Appley and Stoutenburg’s objections.

In our age of globalization, we need a theory of global management consistent with our common human nature. The place to begin in developing such a theory is the philosophy of traditional cultures. The article focuses on African philosophy and its fruitfulness for contributing to a theory of management consistent with African traditional cultures. It also looks briefly at the Confucian and Platonic-Aristotelian traditions and notes points of agreement with African traditions. It concludes that the needed theory of global management (...) should regard the firm as a community, not a collection of individuals, and should understand the purpose of management as promoting the common good. (shrink)

The capacity to stabilize the content of attention over time varies among individuals, and its impairment is a hallmark of several mental illnesses. Impairments in sustained attention in patients with attention disorders have been associated with increased trial-to-trial variability in reaction time and event-related potential deficits during attention tasks. At present, it is unclear whether the ability to sustain attention and its underlying brain circuitry are transformable through training. Here, we show, with dichotic listening task performance and electroencephalography, that training (...) attention, as cultivated by meditation, can improve the ability to sustain atten- tion. Three months of intensive meditation training reduced variability in attentional processing of target tones, as indicated by both enhanced theta-band phase consistency of oscillatory neural responses over anterior brain areas and reduced reaction time variability. Furthermore, those individuals who showed the greatest increase in neural response consistency showed the largest decrease in behav- ioral response variability. Notably, we also observed reduced variability in neural processing, in particular in low-frequency bands, regardless of whether the deviant tone was attended or unattended. Focused attention meditation may thus affect both distracter and target processing, perhaps by enhancing entrainment of neuronal oscillations to sensory input rhythms, a mechanism important for controlling the content of attention. These novel findings highlight the mechanisms underlying focused attention meditation and support the notion that mental training can significantly affect attention and brain function. (shrink)

PLoS ONE 3(3): e1897. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.

The debate between critics of syntactic and semantic approaches to the formalization of scientific theories has been going on for over 50 years. I structure the debate in light of a recent exchange between Hans Halvorson, Clark Glymour, and Bas van Fraassen and argue that the only remaining disagreement concerns the alleged difference in the dependence of syntactic and semantic approaches on languages of predicate logic. This difference turns out to be illusory.

While previous studies have analyzed mean neurophysiological responses to musical stimuli, the current study aimed to identify specific time courses of electroencephalography (EEG) oscillations, which are associated with dynamic changes in the acoustic features of the musical stimulus. In addition, we were interested in whether these time courses change during a repeated presentation of the same musical piece. A total of 16 subjects repeatedly listened to the well-known aria “Nessun dorma,” sung by Paul Potts, while continuous 128-channel EEG and heart (...) rate, as well as electrodermal responses, were recorded. The time courses for the EEG oscillations were calculated using a time resolution of 1 second for several frequency bands, on the basis of individual alpha-peak frequencies (theta, low alpha-1, low alpha-2, upper alpha, and beta). For all frequency bands, we identified a more or less continuous increase in power relative to a baseline period, indicating strong event-related synchronization (ERS) during music listening. The ERS time courses, however, did not correlate strongly with the time courses of the acoustic features of the aria. In addition, we did not observe changes in EEG oscillations after repeated presentation of the same musical piece. Aside from this distinctive feature, we identified a remarkable variability in EEG oscillations, both within and between the repeated presentations of the aria. We interpret the continuous increase in ERS observed in all frequency bands during music listening as an indicator of a particular neurophysiological and psychological state evoked by music listening. We suggest that this state is characterized by increased internal attention (accompanied by reduced external attention), increased inhibition of brain networks not involved in the generation of this internal state, the maintenance of a particular level of general alertness, and a type of brain state that can be described as “mind wandering.” The overall state can be categorized as a psychological process that may be seen as a “drawing in” to the musical piece. However, this state is not stable and varies considerably throughout the music listening session and across subjects. Most important, however, is the finding that the neurophysiological activations occurring during music listening are dynamic and not stationary. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The extant literature on cross-national differences in approaches to corporate social responsibility (CSR) has mostly focused on developed countries. Instead, we offer two inter-related studies into corporate codes of conduct issued by developing country multinational enterprises (DMNEs). First, we analyse code adoption rates and code content through a mixed methods design. Second, we use multilevel analyses to examine country-level drivers of differences in code content—specifically, elements of a country’s National Business System (NBS). We find that DMNEs are much more likely (...) to adopt a code of conduct than their domestic counterparts; however, this does not translate into greater code comprehensiveness. We also find support for the ‘substitute view’ of CSR in developing countries, i.e. that MNEs from poorer countries and from countries with lower governance effectiveness tend to express more comprehensive commitments. However, this dynamic does not extend to a country’s labour system; instead, CSR appears here to match the efficiency of a country’s labour market, thus reflecting the ‘mirror view’ of CSR. (shrink)

Ralph Cudworth's (1617-1688) True Intellectual System of the Universe is considered the high point of philosophical production by the Cambridge Platonists. In this work, Cudworth compresses all of his era's core problems in natural philosophy and theology and attempts to find a comprehensive solution to broadly explain how God acts in nature. For the first time, the present work presents the complete story of how Cudworth developed his Neoplatonic system using a compatible combination of text form and content, and along (...) the way, it also unfolds a panoramic view of ancient classical philosophy. (shrink)

Narrative is increasingly being recognised as an important tool both to manage and understand organisations. In particular, narrative is recognised to have an important influence on the perception of environmental issues in business, a particularly contested area of modern management. Management literature is, however, only beginning to develop a framework for evaluating the quality and legitimacy of narratives. Due to the highly fluid nature of narratives, the traditional notion of truth as reflecting ' objective reality' is not useful here. In (...) this article, an alternative approach that evaluates a narrative in two stages is developed. First, a horizontal reading investigates the surface of the narrative, its textual features, instrumental devices and its integrity as a text, to assess the quality of a narrative. Second, a more philosophical or vertical reading makes explicit the underlying value assumptions that author and reader bring to the writing and reading of the narrative to assess the narrative's claim to legitimacy. The framework is then tested against a narrative on the relationship between business and environment as espoused by a supply chain manager of a UK-based manufacturing company. (shrink)

Error theorists hold that, although our first-order moral thought and discourse commits us to the existence of moral truths, there are no such truths. Holding this position in metaethics puts the error theorist in an uncomfortable position regarding first-order morality. When it comes to our pre-theoretic moral commitments, what should the error theorist think? What should she say? What should she do? I call this the ‘Now What’ Problem for error theory. This paper suggests a framework for evaluating different approaches (...) to the ‘Now What’ Problem, and goes on to evaluate the three most common responses to this problem. All three are found to have noteworthy problems. Finally, I present my own solution, and argue that it presents the most appealing solution to the ‘Now What’ Problem. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide a novel explanationist framework for thinking about peer disagreement that solves many of the puzzles regarding disagreement that have troubled epistemologists over the last two decades. Explanationism is the view that a subject is justified in believing a proposition just in case that proposition is part of the best explanation of that subject’s total evidence. Applying explanationism to the problem of peer disagreement yields the following principle: in cases of peer disagreement, the thing that the (...) subjects ought to believe is the thing that is the best explanation of their total evidence, where part of their evidence is the fact that they happen to find themselves in disagreement with an epistemic peer. In what follows, I show how to understand and apply this core idea. (shrink)

Attention to internal body sensations is practiced in most meditation traditions. Many traditions state that this practice results in increased awareness of internal body sensations, but scientific studies evaluating this claim are lacking. We predicted that experienced meditators would display performance superior to that of nonmeditators on heartbeat detection, a standard noninvasive measure of resting interoceptive awareness. We compared two groups of meditators (Tibetan Buddhist and Kundalini) to an age- and body mass index-matched group of nonmeditators. Contrary to our prediction, (...) we found no evidence that meditators were superior to nonmeditators in the heartbeat detection task, across several sessions and respiratory modulation conditions. Compared to nonmeditators, however, meditators consistently rated their interoceptive performance as superior and the difficulty of the task as easier. These results provide evidence against the notion that practicing attention to internal body sensations, a core feature of meditation, enhances the ability to sense the heartbeat at rest. (shrink)

Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Imagerie Ce´re´brale (LENA), Hoˆpital de La Salpeˆtrie`re, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS).

Our examination of the controversy surrounding the intentionalist conception of textual interpretation shows that the critics of this approach to questions of meaning and interpretation have so far failed to prove their case. The standard objections to intentionalism, on grounds of logical or empirical fallacy, cannot be maintained. We reconstruct the objections which have been raised in the literature against the intentional conception and discuss them as criticism of a conception hold to be inadequate with respect to the problem of (...) literary interpretation. In our evaluation of the intentional conception we conclude that it represents a perfectly ‘normal’ conception of meaning and interpretation, of a kind by no means inferior to other approaches adopted by the various disciplines concerned with interpreting texts. (shrink)

In recent years, the full text of papers are increasingly available electronically which opens up the possibility of quantitatively investigating citation contexts in more detail. In this study, we introduce a new form of citation analysis, which we call citation concept analysis (CCA). CCA is intended to reveal the cognitive impact certain concepts—published in a highly-cited landmark publication—have on the citing authors. It counts the number of times the concepts are mentioned (cited) in the citation context of citing publications. We (...) demonstrate the method using three classical highly cited books: (1) The structure of scientific revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn, (2) The logic of scientific discovery—Logik der Forschung: Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft in German—, and (3) Conjectures and refutations: the growth of scientific knowledge by Karl R. Popper. It is not surprising—as our results show—that Kuhn’s “paradigm” concept seems to have had a significant impact. What is surprising is that our results indicate a much larger impact of the concept “paradigm” than Kuhn’s other concepts, e.g., “scientific revolution”. The paradigm concept accounts for about 40% of the concept-related citations to Kuhn’s work, and its impact is resilient across all disciplines and over time. With respect to Popper, “falsification” is the most used concept derived from his books. Falsification is the cornerstone of Popper’s critical rationalism. (shrink)

Syntactic approaches in the philosophy of science, which are based on formalizations in predicate logic, are often considered in principle inferior to semantic approaches, which are based on formalizations with the help of structures. To compare the two kinds of approach, I identify some ambiguities in common semantic accounts and explicate the concept of a structure in a way that avoids hidden references to a specific vocabulary. From there, I argue that contrary to common opinion (i) unintended models do not (...) pose a significant problem for syntactic approaches to scientific theories, (ii) syntactic approaches can be at least as language-independent as semantic ones, and (iii) in syntactic approaches, scientific theories can be as well connected to the world as in semantic ones. Based on these results, I argue that syntactic and semantic approaches fare equally well when it comes to (iv) ease of application, (v) accommodating the use of models in the sciences, and (vi) capturing the theory-observation relation. (shrink)

This article deals with the question of new domestic servants. It sets out to describe a ‘new’ phenomenon manifesting itself all over Europe, that is the comeback of domestic workers and carers for children and the elderly in many households. It then proceeds to explain the establishment of an informal labour market in the private sector, which arises amid today's revolution of information technology. Research sources on the current situation are scarce compared to historical studies. This is particularly true for (...) Germany and even more for the Netherlands. The present situation differs from its earlier appearance mainly in that domestic workers today are migrant women from Eastern Europe, from Asia or South America. The article aims to show how studying this phenomenon raises relevant questions both on an empirical and a theoretical level for gender studies as well as for migration studies. It pleads in favour of an intersectional analysis by taking into account class, gender and ethnic differences within the context of globalized labour markets and transnational migration movements. (shrink)