Frank A. Lewis presents a close study of book Zeta of Aristotle's Metaphysics, one of his most dense and controversial texts, commonly understood to contain his deepest thoughts on the definition of substance and related metaphysical issues. Lewis argues that Aristotle returns to the causal view of primary substance from his Posterior Analytics.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

Medieval theology had an important influence on later philosophy which is visible in the empiricisms of Russell, Carnap, and Quine. Other thinkers, including McDowell, Kripke, and Dennett, show how we can overcome the distorting effects of that theological ecosystem on our accounts of the nature of reality and our relationship to it. In a different philosophical tradition, Hegel uses a secularized version of Christianity to argue for a kind of human knowledge that overcomes the influences of late-medieval voluntarism, and some (...) twentieth-century thinkers, including Benjamin and Derrida, instead defend a Jewish-influenced notion of the religious sublime. Frank B. Farrell analyzes and connects philosophers of different eras and traditions to show that modern philosophy has developed its practices on a terrain marked out by earlier theological and religious ideas, and considers how different philosophers have both embraced, and tried to escape from, those deep-seated patterns of thought. (shrink)

Social sustainability plays a prominent role in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, but a proper analysis of the concept is still lacking. According to a widespread conception, a system is sustainable when it is preserved or developed in a robust manner. I argue, however, that social sustainability is best understood in explicitly normative terms. Formulating suitable development goals requires a conception of the kind of society that is worth sustaining. I propose that, for a system to be socially sustainable (...) is for it to secure a range of values, including justice. Furthermore, I argue that social sustainability is first and foremost a property of institutions. I go on to ask what it takes for an institution to secure values and why justice is so important for institutions. The answers culminate in a social sustainability framework, which explains why making institutions more sustainable is so challenging. (shrink)

Contemporary health care often lacks generosity of spirit, even when treatment is most efficient. Too many patients are left unhappy with how they are treated, and too many medical professionals feel estranged from the calling that drew them to medicine. Arthur W. Frank tells the stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who are restoring generosity to medicine--generosity toward others and to themselves. The Renewal of Generosity evokes medicine as the face-to-face encounter that comes before and after diagnostics, pharmaceuticals, (...) and surgeries. Frank calls upon the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin to reflect on stories of ill people, doctors, and nurses who transform demoralized medicine into caring relationships. He presents their stories as a source of consolation for both ill and professional alike and as an impetus to changing medical systems. Frank shows how generosity is being renewed through dialogue that is more than the exchange of information. Dialogue is an ethic and an ideal for people on both sides of the medical encounter who want to offer more to those they meet and who want their own lives enriched in the process. The Renewal of Generosity views illness and medical work with grace and compassion, making an invaluable contribution to expanding our vision of suffering and healing. (shrink)

We have developed a process model that learns in multiple ways while finding faults in a simple control panel device. The model predicts human participants' learning through its own learning. The model's performance was systematically compared to human learning data, including the time course and specific sequence of learned behaviors. These comparisons show that the model accounts very well for measures such as problem‐solving strategy, the relative difficulty of faults, and average fault‐finding time. More important, because the model learns and (...) transfers its learning across problems, it also accounts for the faster problem‐solving times due to learning when examined across participants, across faults, and across the series of 20 trials on an individual participant basis. The model shows how learning while problem solving can lead to more recognition‐based performance, and helps explain how the shape of the learning curve can arise through learning and be modified by differential transfer. Overall, the quality of the correspondence appears to have arisen from procedural, declarative, and episodic learning all taking place within individual problem‐solving episodes. (shrink)

At the most general level I am interested in how we come to make sense of the world around us. Much of this research involves asking how intuitive explanations and understandings emerge in development and how they are related to notions of cause, mechanism and agency. These relations are linked to broader questions of what concepts are, how they change with development and increasing expertise and how they are structured in adults.

The role and ethics of professionals in business and economics have been questioned, especially after the financial crisis of 2008. Some suggest a reorientation using concepts such as craftsmanship. In this article, I will explore professional practices within the context of behavioural theory and business ethics. I suggest that scholars of behavioural theory need a strategy to deal with normative questions to meet their ambition of practical relevance. Evidence-based management (EBMgt), a recent behavioural approach, may assist business ethics scholars in (...) understanding how professionals infer ‘evidence’ to make decisions. For a professional, ethical issues are an integral part of decision-making at critical moments. As reflective practitioners, they develop insights related to ethical concerns when collecting and assessing evidence within decision-making processes. (shrink)

Summary Structured interviews were carried out with 176 secondary school teachers to elicit their views/opinions about their initial professional training and their later practical experience, with particular reference to classroom behaviour management. The results showed that the vast majority of teachers believe classroom management skills to be of major importance to them professionally. Nearly three?quarters of them were dissatisfied with the preparation in this area of professional skills provided by their initial training courses. Many thought that their colleagues spent too (...) much time on matters of order and control and 38% thought that they, themselves, did also. Generally, they showed an interest in attending training courses in classroom behaviour management. Many felt that such training could reduce stress among teachers and might help to reduce troublesome behaviour among their pupils. Nearly all of them thought that it would be of benefit to their younger colleagues who were just beginning their careers. (shrink)

The division of cognitive labor is fundamental to all cultures. Adults have a strong sense of how knowledge is clustered in the world around them and use that sense to access additional information, defer to relevant experts, and ground their own incomplete understandings. One prominent way of clustering knowledge is by disciplines similar to those that comprise the natural and social sciences. Seven studies explored an emerging sense of these discipline‐based ways of clustering of knowledge. Even 5‐year‐olds could cluster knowledge (...) in a manner roughly corresponding to the departments of natural and social sciences in a university, doing so without any explicit awareness of those academic disciplines. But this awareness is fragile early on and competes with other ways of clustering knowledge. Over the next few years, children come to see discipline‐based clusters as having a privileged status, one that may be linked to increasingly sophisticated assumptions about essences for natural kinds. Possible mechanisms for this developmental shift are examined. (shrink)

Colours are as objective as shapes. Representationalism about perceptual experiences – the view that perceptual experiences represent that things are thus and so, and that their doing so is at least part of what makes them the kinds of experiences they are – tells us this, and also how to defend the position against the most potent objection to it, the argument from the variability of colour vision.

This article aims to clarify how these two thinkers interacted philosophically to develop, challenge and enrich each other's thinking. To this end, the article employs a chronological order, tighter than Perry's, of six periods of interaction: Royce's pre-Harvard period, four at Harvard, and one after James's death. Pertinent to the genesis of James's will-to-believe doctrine, in his "Principles of Psychology" James credited Royce's account of the psychology of belief as the clearest he knew. When James later compared Bradley's "Appearance and (...) Reality" with Royce's self-confessedly "hasty and unsound" "Conception of God", James's suspicions about Royce's argument for the "absolute" were further aroused. (shrink)

Wang (_Philosophy & Technology_ 35, 2022) introduces a Foucauldian power account of algorithmic transparency. This short commentary explores when this power account is appropriate. It is first observed that the power account is a constructionist one, and that such accounts often come with both factual and evaluative claims. In an instance of Hume’s law, the evaluative claims do not follow from the factual claims, leaving open the question of how much constructionist commitment (Hacking, 1999) one should have. The concept of (...) acts in equilibrium (Nozick, 1981) is then used to explain how different individuals reading Wang can end up with different evaluative attitudes towards algorithmic transparency, despite factual agreement. The commentary concludes by situating constructionist commitment inside a larger question of how much to think of our actions, identifying conflicting arguments. (shrink)

John Dewey's Experience and Education is an important book, but first-time readers of Dewey's philosophy can find it challenging and not meaningfully related to the contemporary landscape of education. Jeff Frank's Teaching in the Now aims to reanimate Dewey's text--for first-time readers and anyone who teaches the text or is interested in appreciating Dewey's continuing significance--by focusing on Dewey's thinking on preparation. Frank, through close readings of Dewey, asks readers to wonder: How much of what we justify as (...) preparation in education is actually necessary? That is, every time we catch ourselves telling a student--you need to learn this in order to do something else--we need to stop and reflect. We need to reflect, because when we always justify the present moment of a student's education in terms of what will happen in the future, we may lose out on the ability to engage students' attention and interest now, when it matters. Dewey asks his readers to trust that the best way to prepare students for an engaging and productive future is to create the most engaging and productive present experience for students. We learn to live fully in the future, only by practicing living fully in the present. Although it can feel scary to stop thinking of the work of education in terms of preparation, when educators reclaim the present for students, new opportunities--for teachers, students, schools, democracy, and education--emerge. Teaching in the Now explores these opportunities in impassioned and engaging prose that makes Experience and Education come alive for readers new to Dewey or who have taught and read him for many years. (shrink)

Recent experiments in moral psychology have been taken to imply that moral reasoning only serves to reaffirm prior moral intuitions. More specifically, Jonathan Haidt concludes from his moral dumbfounding experiments, in which people condemn other people’s behavior, that moral reasoning is biased and ineffective, as it rarely makes people change their mind. I present complementary evidence pertaining to self-directed reasoning about what to do. More specifically, Albert Bandura’s experiments concerning moral disengagement reveal that moral reasoning often does contribute effectively to (...) the formation of moral judgments. And such reasoning need not be biased. Once this evidence is taken into account, it becomes clear that both cognition and affect can play a destructive as well as a constructive role in the formation of moral judgments. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a significant increase in stakeholder pressure on firms to be not only economically sustainable but also from an environmental and social perspective. Besides operational changes in practices and products companies have reacted toward this increased pressure from a strategic perspective through structural changes of their top management team. A recent addition to the TMT has been the appointment of the chief officer of corporate social responsibility. In this paper, we take a behavioral perspective and investigate how (...) the employment of a chief officer of CSR to the TMT impact on firm performance. Specifically, we explore how certain characteristics of the newly appointed chief executive of CSR impact on a firm’s financial performance. We collected secondary, longitudinal data of listed companies in the United States. Results indicate that appointing a chief executive of CSR does under certain conditions and characteristics result in financial performance benefits. Furthermore, the greatest financial performance benefits can be achieved if the appointee is female and has a CSR functional background. (shrink)

Corporate responsibility requires a conception of collective agency on which collective agents are able to form moral judgments and act on them. In spite of claims to the contrary, existing accounts of collective agency fall short of this kind of corporate autonomy, as they fail to explain how collective agents might be responsive to moral reasons. I discuss how a recently proposed conception of shared valuing can be used for developing a solution to this problem. Although the resulting conception of (...) corporate autonomy is useful for making sense of corporate responsibility, it also gives rise to what I call ‘the Corporate Autonomy Problem’. Autonomous collective agents are in principle entitled to the same rights as autonomous individual agents. However, at least some individual rights, such as the right to vote, the right to life, and the right not to be enslaved cannot plausibly be attributed to collective agents. This intuition is supported by normative individualism, the position according to which corporate agents are not entitled to non-derivative rights at all. I argue that without a proper solution to this problem—I sketch the available options—saving corporate responsibility requires giving up on normative individualism. (shrink)

In this paper we present some concepts and their relations that are necessary for modeling autonomous agents in an environment that is governed by some (social) norms. We divide the norms over three levels: the private level the contract level and the convention level. We show how deontic logic can be used to model the concepts and how the theory of speech acts can be used to model the generation of (some of) the norms. Finally we give some idea about (...) an agent architecture incorporating the social norms based on a BDI framework. (shrink)

Authority arguments generate support for claims by appealing to an agent’s authority status, rather than to reasons independent of it. With few exceptions, the current literature on argument schemes acknowledges two basic authority types. The _epistemic_ type grounds in knowledge, the_ deontic_ type grounds in power. We review how historically earlier scholarship acknowledged an_ attractiveness-based_ and a _majority-based_ authority type as equally basic type. Crossing these with basic speech act types thus yields authority argument sub-schemes. Focusing on the_ epistemic-assertive_ sub-scheme (...) (‘an epistemic authority _A_ _E_ asserts a proposition _P_’), we apply a meta-level approach to specifying critical questions. Results improve the evaluation of this sub-scheme and show how similar improvements are obtainable for other schemes. (shrink)

Structured interviews were carried out with 176 secondary school teachers to elicit their views/opinions about their initial professional training and their later practical experience, with particular reference to classroom behaviour management. The results showed that the vast majority of teachers believe classroom management skills to be of major importance to them professionally. Nearly three‐quarters of them were dissatisfied with the preparation in this area of professional skills provided by their initial training courses. Many thought that their colleagues spent too much (...) time on matters of order and control and 38% thought that they, themselves, did also. Generally, they showed an interest in attending training courses in classroom behaviour management. Many felt that such training could reduce stress among teachers and might help to reduce troublesome behaviour among their pupils. Nearly all of them thought that it would be of benefit to their younger colleagues who were just beginning their careers. (shrink)

This paper discusses the different, often competing, even conflicting, truth-claims that are heard around the personal narratives of marginalized, stigmatized and culturally muted people?in this case people with intellectual disabilities. Since people with intellectual disabilities began speaking up in the 1980s, tensions have emerged as to whose voice is authentic, whose story can be believed. This matters because we see the consequences of failure to believe those stories in scandals of abuse in settings, such as Winterbourne View (England) in 2011. (...) The article looks to ethical theory to help understand what lies behind the failure to believe, and argues that researchers who seek to facilitate the articulation of the voices of the powerless, need to be aware of the ethical groundings of competing truth claims. My personal background for doing this is over 40 years of professional engagement in the field of special education and social work with people with learning disabilities. During most of these years, I have been actively engaged as a supporter and partner in the movements of self-advocacy and self-organization by people with intellectual disabilities. (shrink)

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)

In this book, I make use of an idea from economics to suggest how noble human tendencies might not only have survived the ruthless pressures of the material world, but actually have been nurtured by them.

The present article examines the philosophical temperaments of James and Royce, as well as the kind and development of their philosophical styles. After surveying their stances toward the universe, attitudes toward the more, and their openness to other philosophers’ ideas and critiques, this article focuses on the streams of philosophical thought from which James and Royce chose to “drink”-British, German, Asian, and the work of logicians. Some evidence is drawn from their correspondence and places of study. Their philosophical styles, despite (...) many common traits, differed in ageric tone, use of dichotomies, and frequency of reduplicative expressions, here called “double-barreled shotgun expressions.” Clearly, this research constitutes only one piece in the full mosaic of the increasingly studied James-Royce relationship. (shrink)

This essay examines how being-historical thinking is enacted through specific motifs, which prompts an Auseinandersetzung with the modem age of machination. The earth is one such motif that arises in Contributions to Philosophy, calling for a nuanced language to enact being-historical thinking, on the one hand, and, on the other, marking a sharp divergence from the objectifying discourse of modern science and technicity. It is shown that Heidegger’s appeal to the earth not only yields a deeper meaning of what it (...) means to dwell in harmony with nature, but also that the proprietorship of dwelling provides a hint to reestablish the place of the political outside the rule of technicity. (shrink)

Intuitions about intentional action have turned out to be sensitive to normative factors: most people say that an indifferent agent brings about an effect of her action intentionally when it is harmful, but unintentionally when it is beneficial. Joshua Knobe explains this asymmetry, which is known as ‘the Knobe effect’, in terms of the moral valence of the effect, arguing that this explanation generalizes to other asymmetries concerning notions as diverse as deciding and being free. I present an alternative explanation (...) of the Knobe effect in terms of normative reasons. This explanation generalizes to other folk psychological notions such as deciding, but not to such notions as being free. I go on to argue, against Knobe, that offering a unified explanation of all the asymmetries he discusses is in fact undesirable. (shrink)

Socratic Moments: How the Socratic Method Engenders Authentic Educational Encounters explicates how educators learn to implement the Socratic Method in various teaching and learning situations. The author investigates ways teachers leverage this instructional strategy to enhance critical thinking, learning styles, leadership, and social and emotional learning for today’s students.

The ethics of telling stories about other people become questionable as soon as humans learn to talk. But the stakes get higher when health care professionals tell stories about those whom they serve. But for all the problems that come with such stories, I do not believe it is either practical or desirable for bioethicists to attempt to legislate an end to this storytelling. What we need instead is narrative nuance. We need to understand how to tell respectful stories in (...) which the patients are fully acknowledged fellow participants, not one‐dimensional objects of a knowing gaze. The problem is not narration itself but a particular version of narrational privilege, and getting rid of that would have benefits far beyond practices of writing case studies. In this essay, I first offer four considerations that I have found either omitted or underemphasized in discussions of the ethics of telling stories about patients. I then sketch a model of medical storytelling that might be the basis for shifting the ethical question from whether to how. (shrink)

The present study seeks to lay out the most basic elements of the ontology of classical Aš‘arite theology. In several cases this requires a careful examination of the traditional and the formal lexicography of certain key expressions. The topics primarily treated are: how they understood “Being/ existence” and “being/existent” and essential natures; the systematic exploitation of the equivocities of certain expressions within a general context in which other than words there are no universals proves to be elegant as well as (...) insightful; the basic categories of primary entities: independant beings and nonindependant beings, created and uncreated, the equivocity of “being/existent” as predicated of contingent entities on the one hand and of God and His attributes on the other, and certain problems that arise because of the rigid application of the system's underlying analytic principles. Nous essayons ici de presenter les éléments fondamentaux de l'ontologie de l'aš‘arisme classique. Pour quelques expressions, il a fallu examiner la lexicographie et ordinaire et technique pour bien comprendre leur emploi et leur signification. Les sujets examinés sont: le sens de “Etre/existence” et de “être/existant” et le concept de réalité essentielle; l'emploi nuancé des équivocités de quelques expressions dans un contexte où les seuls universaux sont des mots, emploi qui se révèle philosophiquement élégant; les catégories fondamentales des êtres: êtres indépendants et êtres non-indépendants, soit créés soit incréés, l'équivocité de “être/existant” dit des êtres contingents d'une part, de Dieu et ses attributs d'autre part, et enfin quelques difficultiés qui résultent de l'application rigide des principes analytiques du système. (shrink)

In this work, we evaluate the status of both theory and empirical evidence in the field of experimental rest-break research based on a framework that combines mental-chronometry and psychometric-measurement theory. To this end, we provide a taxonomy of rest breaks according to which empirical studies can be classified. Then, we evaluate the theorizing in both the basic and applied fields of research and explain how popular concepts relate to each other in contemporary theoretical debates. Here, we highlight differences between all (...) these models in the light of two symbolic categories, termed the resource-based and satiation-based model, including aspects related to the dynamics and the control mechanisms at work. Based on a critical assessment of existing methodological and theoretical approaches, we finally provide a set of guidelines for both theory building and future empirical approaches to the experimental study of rest breaks. We conclude that a psychometrically advanced and theoretically focused research of rest and recovery has the potential to finally provide a sound scientific basis to eventually mitigate the adverse effects of ever increasing task demands on performance and well-being in a multitasking world at work and leisure. (shrink)

In criminal law, foresight betrays a guilty mind as much as intent does: both reveal that the agent is not properly motivated to avoid an illegal state of affairs. This commonality warrants our judgment that the state is brought about intentionally, even when unintended. In contrast to Knobe, I thus retain the idea that acting intentionally is acting with a certain frame of mind.

Our aim in this article is to show how the theory of conceptual spaces can be useful in describing diachronic changes to conceptual frameworks, and thus useful in understanding conceptual change in the empirical sciences. We also compare the conceptual space approach to Moulines’s typology of intertheoretical relations in the structuralist tradition. Unlike structuralist reconstructions, those based on conceptual spaces yield a natural way of modeling the changes of a conceptual framework, including noncumulative changes, by tracing the changes to the (...) dimensions that reconstitute a conceptual framework. As a consequence, the incommensurability of empirical theories need not be viewed as a matter of conceptual representation. (shrink)

The General Formal Ontology (GFO) is a top-level ontology that is being developed at the University of Leipzig since 1999. Besides introducing some of the basic principles of the ontology, we expound axiomatic fragments of its formalization and present ontological models of several use cases. GFO is a top-level ontology that integrates objects and processes into a unified framework, in a way that differs significantly from other ontologies. Another unique selling feature of GFO is its meta-ontological architecture, which includes set (...) theory into ontology and which accounts for its specific role in common representation approaches. The second level of that architecture starts from the distinction of categories and individuals, which forms the backbone of the world’s structure. Furthermore, GFO comprises several kinds of categories, among them universals and concepts, and it considers several ontological regions and levels. In the context of this special issue paper, we study five pre-determined use cases from the perspective of GFO. The results of these analyses yield insights into how the ontology treats several important notions. Very abridged, this covers material objects and their composition; roles and social entities; properties with their relations to objects and processes, and their changing; changes of processes, including a functional perspective; and, eventually, the nature and changing of concepts as well as terminology. A final part summarizes application projects that use GFO in various contexts. (shrink)

Beginning with Ken Wilber's framework for the evolution of human consciousness, this essay investigates the critical threshold crossed around the year 500 B.C.E., when human consciousness in the Western world transformed from a predominantly oral and tribal framework to a largely written and abstract one. This transformation has been called the birth of the mental-ego-the birth of an autonomous, willful, and uniquely individual consciousness. Yet, in the Western world this birth was inextricably influenced by a completely novel literary invention-the Greek (...) version of the alphabet. Living at the precise moment when this new invention was rapidly proliferating throughout ancient Greece, the Western world's most famous philosopher, Plato, posited his ontology of human disconnection from the sensory world. For Plato, the "real world" is the abstract world of transcendent Ideas, of which our sensory, human world is only a pale reflection. The following essay asks, then: is it just a mere coincidence that the world's most abstract literacy tool (the Greek alphabet) and the world's most abstract and disembodied philosophy (Plato's theory of Ideas) just happened to flourish in ancient Greece at exactly the same time in history? (shrink)

How is what an agent ought to do at time t related to what they ought to do over a period of time that includes t? I revisit an example that sheds light on this question, taking account of issues to do with the agent's intentions and the distinction between subjective and objective obligation.

I survey recent work on mental causation. The discussion is conducted under the twin presumptions that mental states, including especially what subjects believe and desire, causally explain what subjects do, and that the physical sciences can in principle give a complete explanation for each and every bodily movement. I start with sceptical discussions of various views that hold that, in some strong sense, the causal explanations offered by psychology are autonomous with respect to those offered by the physical sciences. I (...) then proceed to views that see the problem of mental causation as that of identifying where in the physical story about us and our world lie the parts that in effect tell us abut mental causation - the kind of position that is pretty much standard in the cognitive science community - and consider issues raised by various forms of functionalism and externalism. The general thrust of my discussion is sympathetic to the story about mental causation suggested by those type-type versions of the mind-brain identity theory that allow for the possiblity of multiple realisability. I include a brief discussion of how a map-system account of belief, by contrast with a language of thought one, should understand explanations of behaviour in terms of what a subject believes. (shrink)

When clinician‐patient relationships go wrong, the problem may not be merely that one person is knowingly mistreating the other. More likely, they are caught up in different stories, and animated by different moral visions. The task is for each to see the point of the other's story.