People frequently gesture when problem-solving, particularly on tasks that require spatial transformation. Gesture often facilitates task performance by interacting with internal mental representations, but how this process works is not well understood. We investigated this question by exploring the case of mental abacus, a technique in which users not only imagine moving beads on an abacus to compute sums, but also produce movements in gestures that accompany the calculations. Because the content of MA is transparent and readily manipulated, the task (...) offers a unique window onto how gestures interface with mental representations. We find that the size and number of MA gestures reflect the length and difficulty of math problems. Also, by selectively interfering with aspects of gesture, we find that participants perform significantly worse on MA under motor interference, but that perceptual feedback is not critical for success on the task. We conclude that premotor processes involved in the planning of gestures are critical to mental representation in MA. (shrink)

The mid-1880s, like the mid-1870s, were a time of considerable turmoil for American workers. Unemployment and wage cuts were widespread and workers responded with strikes, boycotts, union organizing, local labor tickets, and a bewildering variety of reform schemes and ideologies. Perhaps the central event of the 1880s was the Haymarket incident. The bomb and subsequent trial had a broad historical impact, sparking a red scare, blunting the eight-hour movement, establishing the stereotype of anarchists as wildeyed, foreign bombthrowers, and intensifying calls (...) for immigration restriction. (shrink)

This book brings together scholars from a variety of epistemological perspectives to explore the multiple ways in which sexuality does indeed matter in the arena of public education.

Widely hailed as one of the most significant works in modern political philosophy, John Rawls's _Political Liberalism_ defended a powerful vision of society that respects reasonable ways of life, both religious and secular. These core values have never been more critical as anxiety grows over political and religious difference and new restrictions are placed on peaceful protest and individual expression. This anthology of original essays suggests new, groundbreaking applications of Rawls's work in multiple disciplines and contexts. Thom Brooks, Martha (...) Nussbaum, Onora O'Neill, Paul Weithman, Jeremy Waldron, and Frank Michelman explore political liberalism's relevance to the challenges of multiculturalism, the relationship between the state and religion, the struggle for political legitimacy, and the capabilities approach. Extending Rawls's progressive thought to the fields of law, economics, and public reason, this book helps advance the project of a free society that thrives despite disagreements over religious and moral views. (shrink)

Cultural history's recent treatments of Sieyès’ political theory have understood his political writings in their convergences with and divergences from Rousseau's political theory. By sketching a thoroughgoing analogy between the ecclesiological arguments in Malebranche's Entretiens sur la Métaphysique et sur la Religion (1688) and the arguments that Sieyès offers on the floor of the National Assembly concerning the nature of representation, I suggest that we should recontextualize Sieyès’ speeches vis-à-vis the broader discourse of the ‘general will,’ which was theological at (...) its root. That is, the arguments Sieyès offers for the sovereignty of the National Assembly, separately and in combination, appear to have been shaped by a malebranchiste ecclesiology that grew out of the particular context of the Jansenist challenge to the Church. This argument has ramifications not just for our understanding of Sieyès and revolutionary political theory but also for what have been called the “religious origins of the French Revolution.” ☆ I am grateful to Bill Sewell, Dale Van Kley, Michael Sonenscher, Chris Brooke, and Sam James, for their careful readings and insightful comments at various stages of this project. More generally, I am thankful for the thoughts of the participants of the Cambridge conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History (March 2010). Finally, I thank the anonymous reviewers of History of European Ideas for their comments. (shrink)

In this review of Brooke Harrington's edited collection of essays on deception, written by people from different disciplines and giving us a good "status report" on what various disciplines have to say about deception and lying, I reject social psychologist Mark Frank's taxonomy of passive deception, active consensual deception, and active non-consensual deception (active consensual deception is not deception), as well as his definition of deception as "anything that misleads another for some gain" ("for gain" is a reason for (...) engaging in deception, not part of its definition). I also take issue with management professor Guido Mollering's claim that all deception involves a violation of trust. (shrink)

"By combining recent advances in the physical sciences with some of the novel ideas, techniques, and data of modern biology, this book attempts to achieve a new and different kind of evolutionary synthesis. I found it to be challenging, fascinating, infuriating, and provocative, but certainly not dull."--James H, Brown, University of New Mexico "This book is unquestionably mandatory reading not only for every living biologist but for generations of biologists to come."--Jack P. Hailman, Animal Behaviour , review of the first (...) edition "An important contribution to modern evolutionary thinking. It fortifies the place of Evolutionary Theory among the other well-established natural laws."--R.Gessink, TAXON. (shrink)

Punishment is a topic of increasing importance for citizens and policy makers. Why should we punish criminals? Which theory of punishment is most compelling? Is the death penalty ever justified? These questions and many others are addressed in this highly engaging guide. Punishment is a critical introduction to the philosophy of punishment offering a new and refreshing approach that will benefit readers of all backgrounds and interests. This is the first critical guide to examine all leading contemporary theories of punishment, (...) including the communicative theory of punishment, restorative justice, and the unified theory of punishment. There are also several case studies examined in detail including capital punishment, juvenile offending, and domestic abuse. -/- Punishment highlights the problems and prospects of different approaches in order to argue for a more pluralistic and compelling perspective that is novel and groundbreaking. -/- Introduction; Retributivism; Deterrence; Rehabilitation; Restorative Justice; Rawls, Hart, and "mixed" theories; Expressivism; The Unified Theory; Capital Punishment; Juvenile Offending; Domestic Abuse; Sexual Crimes; Conclusion; Index. (shrink)

The punishment of criminals is a topic of long-standing philosophical interest since the ancient Greeks. This interest has focused on several considerations, including the justification of punishment, who should be permitted to punish, and how we might best set punishments for crimes. This entry focuses on the most important contributions in this field. The focus will be on specific theoretical approaches to punishment including both traditional theories of punishment (retributivism, deterrence, rehabilitation) and more contemporary alternatives (expressivism, restorative justice, hybrid theories, (...) unified theories) with an additional section on capital punishment, perhaps the particular form of punishment that has received the most sustained philosophical attention. These theories of punishment address two important questions: first, who should be permitted to punish and, secondly, who should be permitted to be punished. These questions then concern the justification of punishment and its distribution. While the majority today often identifies their theories as retributivist, there is a great diversity of theories defended. This entry will highlight the leading work for each view. (shrink)

Most animals have significant behavioral expertise built in without having to explicitly learn it all from scratch. This expertise is a product of evolution of the organism; it can be viewed as a very long term form of learning which provides a structured system within which individuals might learn more specialized skills or abilities. This paper suggests one possible mechanism for analagous robot evolution by describing a carefully designed series of networks, each one being a strict augmentation of the previous (...) one, which control a six legged walking machine capable of walking over rough terrain and following a person passively sensed in the infrared spectrum. As the completely decentralized networks are augmented. the robot’s performance and behavior repetoire demonstrably improve. The rationale for such demonstrations is that they may provide a hint as to the requirements for automatically building massive networks to carry out complex sensory-motor tasks. The experiments with an actual robot ensure that an essence of reality is maintained and that no critical disabling problems have been ignored. (shrink)

Despite the ubiquity of “levels of organization” in the scientific literature, a nascent “levels skepticism” now claims that the concept of levels is an inherently flawed, misleading, or otherwise inadequate notion for understanding how life scientists produce knowledge about the natural world. However, levels skeptics rely on the maligned “layer-cake” account of levels stemming from Oppenheim and Putnam’s defense of the unity of science for their critical commentary. Recourse to layer-cake levels is understandable, as it is arguably the default conception (...) of levels in philosophy. However, relying on this conception of levels undermines the initial plausibility of general dismissals of the concept, because the problems skeptics identify within the “basic idea” of the concept “levels” are merely ones already widely acknowledged in this conception. I illustrate this “guilt by association” by looking at the embedded role of “levels” in articulating intertheoretical reductionism during the latter part of the 20th century. I conclude by suggesting a methodological framework focusing on local usage patterns as a promising means for future analysis of the levels concept. (shrink)

Consumers are becoming increasingly interested in how their food is produced. Many studies have focused on consumers’ preferences and willingness-to-pay for specific production-related claims on food products. However, few studies have asked consumers to rank the importance of different production claims. In this study, we use a best-worst scaling approach to have consumers rank the importance of seven common production claims used on food products. Rankings are obtained across four product types: beef, milk, chicken, and eggs. Results of the study (...) show that consumers often prefer specific components of more encompassing claims as opposed to the broader, more encompassing claim itself. The majority of preference shares were captured by the top three claims, though the order of these preferences appears to vary for meat and non-meat animals. (shrink)

The concept of 'levels of organization' has come under fire recently as being useless for scientific and philosophical purposes. In this paper, we show that 'levels' is actually a remarkably resilient and constructive conceptual tool that can be, and in fact is, used for a variety of purposes. To this effect, we articulate an account of the importance of the levels concept seen in light of its status as a major organizing concept of biology. We argue that the usefulness of (...) ‘levels’ is best seen in the heuristic contributions the concept makes to treating and structuring scientific problems. We illustrate this with two examples from biological research. (shrink)

A new edition of the first systematic reading of Hegel's political philosophy Elements of the Philosophy of Right is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important works in the history of political philosophy. This is the first book on the subject to take Hegel's system of speculative philosophy seriously as an important component of any robust understanding of this text. Key Features •Sets out the difference between 'systematic' and 'non-systematic' readings of Philosophy of Right •Outlines the unique structure (...) of Hegel's philosophical arguments •Explores key areas of Hegel's political philosophy: his theories of property, punishment, morality, law, monarchy, war, democracy and history This significantly expanded second edition includes: a more detailed explanation of Hegel's philosophical system, two new chapters on his theories of democracy and history and an appendix detailing the implications this work has for future interpretations of Hegel's philosophy. (shrink)

Despite its pervasiveness, the concept of ‘levels of organization’ has received relatively little attention in its own right. I propose here an emerging approach that posits ‘levels’ as a fragmentary concept situated within an interest-relative matrix of operational usage within scientific practice. To this end I propose one important component of meaning, namely the epistemic goal motivating the term’s usage, which recovers a remarkably conserved and sufficiently unifying significance attributable to ‘levels’ across different instances of usage. This epistemic goal, to (...) provide structure to scientific problems, delegates tasks whose execution generates the term’s expressed content in a given instance. This treatment of levels does not diminish the concept’s general importance to science, but rather allows for its use in, and usefulness for, scientific practice to be better contextualized to particular tasks encompassing varying breadths of activity. (shrink)

Children's comprehension of the universal quantifiers all and each was explored in a series of experiments using a picture selection task. The first experiment examined children's ability to restrict a quantifier to the noun phrase it modifies. The second and third experiments examined children's ability to associate collective, distributive, and exhaustive representations with sentences containing universal quantifiers. The collective representation corresponds to the "group" meaning (for All the flowers are in a vase all of the flowers are in the same (...) vase). The distributive representation implies a pairing (e.g., each flower paired with a vase for Each flower is in a vase). The exhaustive representation exhausts both sets (e.g., for The flowers are in the vases all the flowers are in vases and all the vases have flowers in them). Four- to 10-year-olds children had little difficulty restricting the quantifier all to the noun it modified in a task which required them to attend to the group feature of all. In contrast, only 9- and 10-year-olds were able to solve the task when the quantifier was each and the pictures showed entities in partial one-to-one correspondence. Children showed a preference for associating collective pictures with sentences containing all and distributive pictures with sentences containing each. The results suggest that between the ages of 5 and 10 years, children's semantic representations undergo less radical changes than others have proposed. Instead, developmental change may occur gradually as children acquire linguistic cues which map onto existing semantic representations. (shrink)

Exploring the use of nudges and informed consent in medical ethics.

Conditional cash transfers represent an innovation in social assistance policy by conditioning welfare benefits on recipients’ behaviors associated with human capital development. Although social assistance has expanded throughout the developing world in the 21st century, the political logic guiding CCT adoption differs sharply from that of unconditional cash transfers, and from the politics of social insurance development. Striking spatial and temporal correlations in their adoption also raise the specter of policy interdependence. A dynamic logit analysis of social assistance reforms in (...) developing nations from 1990 to 2011 reveals that although CCTs have been impelled by democratization in developing countries, the model is not embraced systematically by the left or the right of the political spectrum. Rather, CCTs are more likely to be adopted in contexts of divided government and where regional neighbors, and more democratic countries in the region, have previously adopted them. (shrink)

Universities have long played an important role in preparing thinkers and leaders who go on to have significant impact around the world. But if the world needs wise thinkers and good leaders, then how might modern universities educate leaders of character, particularly in a pluralistic context where many educators are reluctant to see the university as a site of moral formation? This article shares insights from one specific program, the Oxford Global Leadership Initiative, an extra-curricular program that seeks to help (...) diverse cohorts of graduate students develop the ethical qualities of character needed for leaders to serve the common good. Drawing upon qualitative data collected over three years of program activity to illuminate and illustrate our argument, we address three questions: Can virtues of character necessary for good leadership be cultivated in a university setting among a culturally diverse group of students? How can a character-based leadership program meet the particular developmental needs of “emerging adults”? and How might the program’s impact translate into society and culture? We conclude that a program integrating character and leadership can make valuable contributions to the ethical and professional development of postgraduate students. (shrink)

The future of philosophy is moving towards “global philosophy.” The idea of global philosophy is the view that different philosophical approaches may engage more substantially with each other to solve philosophical problems. Most solutions attempt to use only those available resources located within one philosophical tradition. A more promising approach might be to expand the range of available resources to better assist our ability to offer more compelling solutions. This search for new horizons in order to improve our clarity about (...) philosophical issues is at the heart of global philosophy. The idea of global philosophy encourages us to look beyond our traditions to improve our philosophical problem-solving by our own lights. Global philosophy is a new approach whose time is coming. This essay offers the first account of this approach and an assessment of its future promise. (shrink)

The subject of this edited volume is the idea of levels of organization: roughly, the idea that the natural world is segregated into part-whole relationships of increasing spatiotemporal scale and complexity. The book comprises a collection of essays that raise the idea of levels into its own topic of analysis. Owing to the wide prominence of the idea of levels, the scope of the volume is aimed at theoreticians, philosophers, and practicing researchers of all stripes in the life sciences. The (...) volume’s contributions reflect this diversity, and draw from fields such as developmental biology, evolutionary biology, molecular biology, ecology, cell biology, and neuroscience. The book presents wide-ranging novel insights on causation and levels, the hierarchical structure of evolution, the role of levels in biological theory, and more. (shrink)

This new translation presents the _Analects_ in a revolutionary new format that, for the first time in any language, distinguishes the original words of the Master from the later sayings of his disciples and their followers, enabling readers to experience China's most influential philosophical work in its true historical, social, and political context.

Understanding the relationship between wilderness outings and the resulting experience has been a central theme in resource-based, outdoor recreation research for nearly 50 years. The authors provide a review and synthesis of literature that examines how people, over time, build relationships with wilderness places and express their identities as consequences of multiple, ongoing wilderness engagements (i.e., continued participation). The paper reviews studies of everyday places and those specifically protected for wilderness and backcountry qualities. Beginning with early origins and working through (...) contemporary research the authors synthesize what diverse social scientists have learned about the long-term and continual nature of wilderness participation and its impact on the formation of identity. The thrust of the paper points researchers, planners, and managers in non-traditional directions and reframes goals and objectives for visitor planning and management in wilderness and other protected areas. (shrink)

In the field of history education, researchers and practitioners frequently demonstrate a keen interest in historical empathy. However, very little consensus exists concerning the meaning of the term. In an effort to make sense of the continuing debate, this article explores the competing conceptualizations of historical empathy found in the history education literature of the past decade. Discussion of recent theoretical work is coupled with a review of the numerous empirical studies, which have sought to shed light on the various (...) factors that impact students' development of historical empathy. This article examines the answers that have been posited to the following questions and, in so doing, reveals where further research is needed: What capacity do K-12 students possess for historical empathy? What obstacles hinder them from demonstrating empathic regard? What pedagogical practices promote the development of empathy? How do teachers navigate the decisions they face as they seek to cultivate empathy in their classrooms? (shrink)

Prefrontal cortex is dysregulated in women with restricting anorexia nervosa . It is not known whether appetitive non-conscious stimuli bias cognitive responses in those with RAN. Thirteen women with RAN and 20 healthy controls completed a dorsolateral PFC working memory task and an anterior cingulate cortex conflict task, while masked subliminal food, aversive and neutral images were presented. During the DLPFC task, accuracy was higher in the RAN compared to the HC group, but superior performance was compromised when subliminal food (...) stimuli were presented: errors positively correlated with self-reported trait anxiety in the RAN group. These effects were not observed in the ACC task. Appetitive activation is intact and anxiogenic in women with RAN, and non-consciously interacts with working memory processes associated with the DLPFC. This interaction mechanism may underlie cognitive inhibition of appetitive processes that are anxiety inducing, in people with AN. (shrink)

Moral enhancement techniques modifying brain processes to produce improved moral conduct present us with new challenges for how we grapple with the ethical questions raised. John Shook (2012) argues that we should greet these developments with some measure of skepticism and cynicism regarding their success and desirability. This commentary considers further Shook’s scepticism. It is argued that the issue of “moral enhancement” raises questions about which view(s) may benefit and the problems this poses for societies characterized by the fact of (...) reasonable pluralism. More importantly, it is further argued that moral enhancement runs into greater difficulties where enhancement is thought to contribute to alleviating illegal behavior. This is because law and morality are related imperfectly and, therefore, improved moral sensitivity may not translate into less illegality. Thus, moral enhancement techniques may create moral Frankensteins that (a) may undermine the existence of reasonable pluralism in modern liberal societies and (b) may fail to better achieve lawful behavior. (shrink)

This article presents empirical evidence to address how some visitors build relationships with a wildland place over time. Insights are drawn from qualitative interviews of recreation visitors to the backcountry at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. The article describes relationship to place as the active construction and accumulation of place meanings. The analysis is organized around three themes that describe how people develop relationships to place: time and experience accrued in place, social and physical interactions in and with the (...) setting, and an active reflective process of regulating sense of identity to affirm commitment to place. (shrink)

Perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of Hegel's Philosophy of Right for contemporary interpreters is its discussion of the constitutional monarch. This is true despite the general agreement amongst virtually all interpreters that Hegel's monarch is no more powerful than modern constitutional monarchs and is an institution worthy of little attention or concern. In this article, I will examine whether or not it matters who is the monarch and what domestic and foreign powers he has. I argue against the (...) virtual consensus of recent interpreters that Hegel's monarch is far more powerful than has been understood previously. In part, Hegel's monarch is perhaps even more powerful than Hegel himself may have realized and I will demonstrate certain inconsistencies with some of his claims. My reading represents a distinctive break from the virtual consensus, without endorsing the view that Hegel was a totalitarian. (shrink)

In Book 9 of Plato's Republic we find three proofs for the claim that the just person is happier than the unjust person. Curiously, Socrates does not seem to consider these arguments to be coequal when he announces the third and final proof as ‘the greatest and most decisive of the overthrows’. This remark raises a couple of related questions for the interpreter. Whatever precise sense we give to μέγιστον and κυριώτατον in this passage, Socrates is clearly appealing to an (...) argumentative standard of some kind, and claiming that his final argument alone meets this standard. But what precise standard is Socrates invoking here? And given that the first two arguments of Book 9 fall short of this standard, why does he not simply leap directly to the third, most decisive proof? (shrink)

Perhaps the least controversial area of F.H. Bradley's writings relates to his views on punishment. Commentators universally recognize Bradley's theory of punishment as a retributivist theory of punishment. This article challenges the received wisdom. I argue that Bradley does not endorse retributivism as commonly understood. Instead, he defends the view that punishment is non-retributivist and serves the end of societal maintenance. Moreover, Bradley defends this view consistently from Ethical Studies to later work on punishment. Instead of holding a theory of (...) punishment largely unique amongst British Idealists of his time, Bradley's views on punishment are far more consistent than previously thought. (shrink)

This paper argues that Leif Wenar's theory of reparations is not purely forward-looking and that backward-looking considerations play an important role: if there had never been a past injustice, then reparations for the future cannot be acceptable. Past injustice compose the first part of a two-tiered theory of reparations. We must first discover a past injustice has taken place: reparations are for the repair of previous damage. However, for Wenar, not all past injustices warrant reparations. Once we have first passed (...) the initial test of demonstrating a past injustice has taken place, we then determine whether or not to finally accept reparations based upon forward-looking considerations. What is important to note is that this decision to award reparations is based upon forward-looking considerations, but only after first satisfying the test of a past injustice. Thus, backward-looking considerations make up an important first part of Wenar's two-tiered theory of reparations. It is not my argument that this theory is unsafe and I find Wenar's arguments both novel and highly compelling. However, the view that this theory is forward-looking -- and not backward-looking -- is not entirely accurate. My brief reply corrects this part of an important new theory of reparations in the hope of strengthening its persuasive power. (shrink)

Previous work has found that guiding problem-solvers' movements can have an immediate effect on their ability to solve a problem. Here we explore these processes in a learning paradigm. We ask whether guiding a learner's movements can have a delayed effect on learning, setting the stage for change that comes about only after instruction. Children were taught movements that were either relevant or irrelevant to solving mathematical equivalence problems and were told to produce the movements on a series of problems (...) before they received instruction in mathematical equivalence. Children in the relevant movement condition improved after instruction significantly more than children in the irrelevant movement condition, despite the fact that the children showed no improvement in their understanding of mathematical equivalence on a ratings task or on a paper-and-pencil test taken immediately after the movements but before instruction. Movements of the body can thus be used to sow the seeds of conceptual change. But those seeds do not necessarily come to fruition until after the learner has received explicit instruction in the concept, suggesting a “sleeper effect” of gesture on learning. (shrink)

This study extends experimental tests of (cumulative) prospect theory (PT) over prospects with more than three outcomes and tests second-order stochastic dominance principles (Levy and Levy, Management Science 48:1334–1349, 2002; Baucells and Heukamp, Management Science 52:1409–1423, 2006). It considers choice behavior of people facing prospects of three different types: gain prospects (losing is not possible), loss prospects (gaining is not possible), and mixed prospects (both gaining and losing are possible). The data supports the distinction of risk behavior into these three (...) categories of prospects, Further, probability weighting and diminishing sensitivity of utility as predicted by PT are observed. Loss aversion is, however, less pronounced, except for choices where one prospect is degenerate. The data suggests that the probability of losing may be relevant for loss aversion. (shrink)

The first part of this paper explores the general issues in using Artificial Life techniques to program actual mobile robots. In particular it explores the difficulties inherent in transferring programs evolved in a simulated environment to run on an actual robot. It examines the dual evolution of organism morphology and nervous systems in biology. It proposes techniques to capture some of the search space pruning that dual evolution offers in the domain of robot programming. It explores the relationship between robot (...) morphology and program structure, and techniques for capturing regularities across this mapping. (shrink)