Toward a New Socialism offers a critical analysis of capitalism's failings and the imminent need for socialism as an alternative form of government. Dr. Richard Schmitt joins with Dr. Anatole Anton to compile a volume of essays exploring the benefits and consequences of a socialist system as an avenue of increased human solidarity and ethical principle.

Constitutions serve to legitimate the exercise of public power. Yet their scope is often subject to reasonable disagreement among citizens in a democracy. As Frank Michelman notes, this points to an understanding of democratic constitutions as a framework for contestation, rather than entrenched set of binding legal constraints. This understanding, however, arguably overlooks the difference between ordinary constitutional norms and those that protect the ‘democratic minimum core’. For the latter, there is far less scope for reasonable disagreement, and greater (...) prudential importance to conceptualizing constitutions as entrenched norms authorized strong-form judicial review. The essay thus explores the idea of a ‘tiered’ approach to constitutional design, which combines elements of strong and weak constitutional entrenchment, and judicial review. In doing so, it further considers the role that transnational norms or practices could play in helping delineate these different constitutional tiers. (shrink)

We give a brief introduction to the Bayesian approach to natural language argumentation, mainly oriented to readers more familiar with classical logic. Subsequently, we summarize the gist of each of the chapters so as to provide readers with an overview of the book&s content.

Frank E. Zachos offers a comprehensive review of one of today's most important and contentious issues in biology: the species problem. After setting the stage with key background information on the topic, the book provides a brief history of species concepts from antiquity to the Modern Synthesis, followed by a discussion of the ontological status of species with a focus on the individuality thesis and potential means of reconciling it with other philosophical approaches. More than 30 different species concepts (...) found in the literature are presented in an annotated list, and the most important ones, including the Biological, Genetic, Evolutionary and different versions of the Phylogenetic Species Concept, are discussed in more detail. Specific questions addressed include the problem of asexual and prokaryotic species, intraspecific categories like subspecies and Evolutionarily Significant Units, and a potential solution to the species problem based on a hierarchical approach that distinguishes between ontological and operational species concepts. A full chapter is dedicated to the challenge of delimiting species by means of a discrete taxonomy in a continuous world of inherently fuzzy boundaries. Further, the book outlines the practical ramifications for ecology and evolutionary biology of how we define the species category, highlighting the danger of an apples and oranges problem if what we subsume under the same name ("species") is in actuality a variety of different entities. A succinct summary chapter, glossary and annotated list of references round out the coverage, making the book essential reading for all biologists looking for an accessible introduction to the historical, philosophical and practical dimensions of the species problem. (shrink)

Introduction -- The Complexity of Resource Curse -- Resource Curse as a Complex Case of Global Justice -- General Theory of Global Justice -- The Robustness of the General Theory -- Conclusion.

The sounds that make up spoken words are heard in a series and must be mapped rapidly onto words in memory because their elements, unlike those of visual words, cannot simultaneously exist or persist in time. Although theories agree that the dynamics of spoken word recognition are important, they differ in how they treat the nature of the competitor set—precisely which words are activated as an auditory word form unfolds in real time. This study used eye tracking to measure the (...) impact over time of word frequency and 2 partially overlapping competitor set definitions: onset density and neighborhood density. Time course measures revealed early and continuous effects of frequency (facilitatory) and on set based similarity (inhibitory). Neighborhood density appears to have early facilitatory effects and late inhibitory effects. The late inhibitory effects are due to differences in the temporal distribution of similarity within neighborhoods. The early facilitatory effects are due to subphonemic cues that inform the listener about word length before the entire word is heard. The results support a new conception of lexical competition neighborhoods in which recognition occurs against a background of activated competitors that changes over time based on fine-grained goodness-of-fit and competition dynamics. (shrink)

The work of Sankary et al. (2022) provides valuable insights into the experiences of participants exiting brain device research. Empirical bioethics research such as this is critical to understandi...

The aim of this paper is to argue that update semantics is a natural framework for contextually restricted quantification, and to illustrate its use in the analysis of anaphoric definite descriptions and certain other anaphoric terms.

A brief review is given of the continuous spontaneous localization (CSL) model, in which a classical field interacts with quantized particles to cause dynamical wavefunction collapse. One of the model's predictions is that particles “spontaneously” gain energy at a slow rate. When applied to the excitation of a nucleon in a Ge nucleus, it is shown how a limit on the relative collapse rates of neutron and proton can be obtained, and a rough estimate is made from data. When applied (...) to the spontaneous excitation of 1s electrons in Ge, by a more detailed analysis of more accurate data than given previously, an updated limit is obtained on the relative collapse rates of the electron and proton, suggesting that the coupling of the field to electrons and nucleons is mass proportional. (shrink)

Scholarship on faculty and student perceptions of plagiarism is plagued by a vast, scattered constellation of perspectives, context, and nuance. Cultural, disciplinary, and institutional subtitles, among others in how plagiarism is defined and perspectives about it tested obfuscate consensus about how students and faculty perceive and understand plagiarism and what can or should be done about those perspectives. However, there is clear consensus that understanding how students and faculty perceive plagiarism is foundational to mitigating and preventing plagiarism. This study takes (...) up the challenge of investigating its own institution’s student and faculty perspectives on plagiarism by testing whether students and instructors differentiate between different kinds or genres of plagiarism, and measuring differences in their perception of seriousness or severity of those genres. Using a device modified from the ‘plagiarism spectrum’ published by Turnitin®, the researchers implemented a campus-wide survey of faculty and student perceptions, and analyzed the data using two different methodologies to ensure results triangulation. This study demonstrates both students and faculty clearly differentiate between kinds of plagiarism, but not on their severity. This study demonstrates both students and faculty clearly differentiate the severity between kinds of plagiarism, but not on the specific rank or order of their severity. Further, this study’s novel methodology is demonstrated as valuable for use by other academic institutions to investigate and understand their cultures of plagiarism. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic created a situation for the implementation of emergency remote learning. This meant that as a lecturer at a traditionalist University of contact sessions, the pandemic forced us to teach remotely through online methods of communication, using online lectures, narrated powerpoints, voice clips, podcasts, interviews and interactive videos. The assessments were conducted online from assignments to multiple choice questions, which forced the lecturers to think differently about the way the assessments were presented, in order to avoid easy access (...) to answers found in a textbook and online. This meant that more application questions of theory to practice were assessed in a more challenging way to prevent cheating and collaboration with peers. Formal assessments completed during emergency remote learning, have become the past practice, as innovative methods have been adopted for learning and for assessment purposes in order to preserve the integrity and attainment of the degree through online modes of learning. The aim of the paper investigates and explores the methods of teaching, together with the results obtained from the students of 2019 and 2020 in their final year relating to two final year modules against the literature relating to learning processes and methodologies. (shrink)

"Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste is essential reading for students and scholars of religion and theology, pastors and church-goers, liturgists, and church musicians and artists."--Jacket.

In 1952, Quine showed that the problem of reducing a propositional formula to a simplest normal equivalent can be solved in two steps, viz., (i) express the given formula, Φ, equivalently as the disjunction of all its prime implicants, and (ii) find all non-redundant disjunctions of the latter that are equivalent to Φ (Quine 1952). However, it seems not generally known that an ingenious form of the same two-step process was published by Hugh McColl in 1878.

Perfect for use at advanced undergraduate and graduate level, this is the first text to offer students a unified narrative regarding the place of the body in Western thinking. The body is simultaneously active and passive, powerful and vulnerable and as such, it fundamentally informs ontological, political, ethical and epistemological issues.

This essay argues that the deontological view of morality is connected to extreme and massive forms of violence through a kind of phenomenological necessity. In the first main section, I examine one family of such violence, which usually comes under the label of “religious violence”. I argue that it is not the religious element but the disqualification of context from the realm of justification which characterizes such violence. In the second main section, I examine the phenomenology of duty to conclude (...) that duty, by definition, denies any normative relevance to context. In the third main section, I use this sketch of a phenomenology of duty to propose a hypothesis about the underpinnings of the connection between mass violence and duty, namely, that the notion of duty carries with it the exclusion of moderation, and places the agent before an impossible situation that can only be resolved by violence. (shrink)

I take the phrase ‘congenital transcendentalism’ from Santayana who defined it as ‘the spontaneous feeling that life is a dream’. ‘The loneliness which is the truth about things’ is a phrase of Virginia Woolf's. The thesis I will advance is that many expressions of doubt or denial of the shareable world are self-misunderstood manifestations of the state indicated by Woolf's expression. But the loneliness of which Woolf speaks must not be construed as the kind of loneliness which can be assuaged (...) by family, friends, lovers or company. Nor is it the loneliness which a convinced solipsist might experience. It is rather the loneliness of ‘that “I” and that “life of mine'” which is ‘untouched whichever way the issue is decided whether the world is or is not’. (shrink)

Der Übergang vom Verhältnisbewußtsein zum Selbstbewußtsein kann unmöglich nur vom Verhältnisbewußtsein aus gedacht werden, weil wir uns eine Welt, in der das Bewubtsein unserer selbst verteilt ist auf die Dimensionen der Handlung vor deren Zentrierung in uns, gar nicht vorstellen können. Jedes Tableau der Handlungsmöglichkeiten, so abstrakt es auch abgefaßt sein mag, ist gebunden an Vorstellungen möglicher Handlungssubjekte, denen wir Handlungsmöglichkeiten zuschreiben. Handlungstheorie ist daher notwendig Reflexion unserer Praxis, in der wir uns selbst als Selbstbewußtsein erfahren, das seinem Verhältnisbewubtsein enthoben (...) ist, ohne dieses dadurch selbst schon aufzuheben zu können. Daß uns Freiheit im Handeln unaufhebbar prekär und problematisch bleiben mub, ist die Grundvoraussetzung dafür, dab wir Handlungstheorien historisch und bereichsbezogen ständig neu entwerfen müssen. Das Verhältnis von Handlungsphilosophie zu Handlungstheorien kann daher so gefaßt werden, daß Handlungsphilosophie die Grundbegrifflichkeit in kritischer Absicht bereitstellt, die den bereichsorientierten, mehr oder weniger deskriptiven Handlungstheorien abgehen muß. Dazu muß die ontologische Differenz von Handlung und Interpretation methodologisch ernst genommen werden. Die radikale Andersheit der hier zu begründenden Konzeption liegt vor allem in der Ansicht, daß Handlungen nicht als isolierbare Ereignis-Entitäten aufgefaßt werden können, die gegenüber der »Welt der Tatsachen des Bewußtseins« eine kausale, d.h. von der Welt des Bewußtseins abgetrennte Rolle übernehmen. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate those extensions of the bimodal provability logic ${\vec CSM}_{0}$ (alias ${\vec PRL}_{1}$ or ${\vec F}^{-})$ which are subframe logics, i.e. whose general frames are closed under a certain type of substructures. Most bimodal provability logics are in this class. The main result states that all finitely axiomatizable subframe logics containing ${\vec CSM}_{0}$ are decidable. We note that, as a rule, interesting systems in this class do not have the finite model property and are not even (...) complete with respect to Kripke semantics. (shrink)

Operators which map subsets of a given set to the set of their minimal elements with respect to some relation R form the basis of a semanticapproach in non-monotonic logic, belief revision, conditional logic and updating. In this paper we investigate operators of this type from an algebraicviewpoint. A representation theorem is proved and various properties of theresulting algebras are investigated. It is shown that they behave quite differently from known algebras related to logics, e.g. modal algebras and Heytingalgebras.

For the past seventy years, a host of scientific and public health bodies in the United States have strongly endorsed the practice of adding fluoride compounds to public water supplies as a prophylactic against dental caries. Throughout that period, a constant undercurrent of skepticism and outright opposition has slowed the adoption of the practice in the United States and limited its spread to just a handful of countries around the world. One of the attractions of water fluoridation is its affordability: (...) the fluoride compounds are sourced from the phosphate and aluminum industries, for whom they would otherwise constitute an annoying toxic waste disposal problem. Despite this, proponents have nonetheless succeeded in shaping a narrative that casts fluoridation as “natural” or at least mimicking nature. I demonstrate how fluoridationists were able to persuasively argue that adding a pollutant to the water supply was safe and natural. In the process, I examine how environmental historians and historians of science approach topics such as fluoridation. I suggest that as a result of the influence of science and technology studies and an ontological turn toward hybridity, the two subdisciplines are becoming increasingly convergent. (shrink)

Review of "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.