Die Lebermodelle aus Boğazköy. By An de Vos. Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten, Beiheft 5. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013. Pp. 274, 56 plts. €76.

The Great Seljuk Empire. By A. C. S. Peacock. The Edinburgh History of the Islamic Empires. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Pp. xiii + 378. $135, £90 ; $43.50, £29.99.

The chapter places Kant's discussions of empirical and rational psychology in the context of previous discussions in Germany. It also considers the status of what might be called his "transcendental psychology" as an instance of a special kind of knowledge: transcendental philosophy. It is divided into sections that consider four topics: the refutation of traditional rational psychology in the Paralogisms; the contrast between traditional empirical psychology and the transcendental philosophy of the Deduction; Kant's appeal to an implicit psychology in his (...) taxonomy and theory of cognitive faculties throughout the Critique of Pure Reason; and his new definitions of and support for empirical and rational psychology in the Doctrine of Method. (shrink)

Prior research on ethics codes has suggested, but rarely tested, the effects of code design alternatives on the impact of codes. This study considers whether the presence of explanatory rationales and descriptions of sanctions in ethics codes affects recipients'' responses to a code. Theories of organizational justice and persuasive communication support an expectation that rationales and sanctions will be positively related to code recipients'' recall of code content and perceptions of organizational justice. Content recall is an obvious precondition of code (...) compliance; justice perceptions have multiple implications for the attitudes and actions of organizational members. Results show that explanatory rationales are associated with a statistically significant increase in perceptions of organizational procedural justice, but that rationales and sanctions generally show no relationship to distributive justice perceptions and accurate content recall. These results suggest that common prescriptions regarding ethics code design are of uncertain value apart from further research which unearths the relationships among the intended and perceived purposes of codes, the organizational settings in which they are applied, and a wide variety of code designs. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the notion of color as a property of the surfaces of objects. It considers three positions on what colors are: objectivist, subjectivist, and relationalist. Examination of the arguments of the objectivists will help us understand how they seek to reduce color to a physical property of object surfaces. Subjectivists, by contrast, seek to argue that no such reduction is possible, and hence that color must be wholly subjective. This chapter argues that when functional considerations are taken (...) into account, a relationalist position best accommodates the primary data concerning color perception, and permits a better understanding of the ways in which color is both objective and subjective. The chapter ends with a reconsideration of the notions of objectivity and subjectivity themselves, and a consideration of how modern technology can foster misleading expectations about the specificity of color properties. (shrink)

This paper examines various views—religious, scientific, philosophical—on the meaning and significance of world history. The view it defends is a phenomenological, non-metaphysical one, i.e., it is one that does not seek to understand history in the light of end-states lying beyond time and history but which seeks, rather, to lay bare the logic at work within the contingency of events. Taking as its focus the phenomenon of globalization, the paper seeks to make explicit the global ontology that is implicit in (...) philosophical hermeneutics. The thesis it defends in this regard is that, to the degree that it prevails and by reason of a kind of “functional necessity,” globalization is capable of bringing into being a global ethic of mutuality and reciprocity. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions of psychopathy have been framed primarily in terms of psychopaths' conspicuous moral shortcomings. But despite their vaunted ‘egocentricity’, another prominent trait in the standard psychopathic profile is a characteristic failure to look after themselves; in an important way, psychopaths appear to be as careless of themselves as they are of others. Assuming that the standard profile is largely correct, the question is how these moral and prudential deficits are related. Are they linked in some non‐accidental way? This paper (...) is a sympathetic exploration and articulation of the hypothesis that psychopathy involves an incapacity for critical distance from from one's own impulses and inclinations, an incapacity that would explain the lack of both prudential and moral regard. (shrink)

It is perhaps not coincidental that, at the same time the apparent institutional risks associated with the conduct of human research are increasing, so are the complaints from researchers about research ethics committees. Rather than seeking to implement systems that more efficiently catch wrong-doing, in 2003 Griffith University began implementing an alternative approach. This new approach focused on resourcing the reflective practice of researchers through every stage of their work — well before, and long after, they seek ethical clearance for (...) that work. Institutions have a key role to play in human research ethics, and this can be usefully situated within the broader framework of the institution’s governance framework. This paper summarises the new approach that Griffith University adopted in 2003, the implementation of this ‘model’, the experience to date, and the road ahead. (shrink)

The military operations of 1974 in Cyprus led to the formation of two autonomous areas houding Turkish Cypriots in the north and the Greek Cypriots in the south. The island is divided by the "Green Line", patrolled by U.N. peace keeping forces.Movement is blocked and communication severed. There are multiple and conflicting Cypriot identities and feelings of nationalism ranging from pride in being Cypriots, to feelings of connection to Hellenic heritage, and cultural along with political and economic ties to Greece. (...) A Turkish Cypriot identity linked to a distinct religious and linguistic background co-exists with Turkish settlers living in the independent north yet tied to Turkey. This article examines the division from a communication perspective taking into account language, religion, the visual landscape and the media landscape on each side ofthe "Green Line" along with interlocking media landscapes with Greece or Turkey in order to explore influences shaping collective identity and nationalism. (shrink)

THE GOAL OF THIS PAPER IS TO DEFEND SCIENTIFIC REALISM (OF\nTHE SORT PROPOSED BY WILFRID SELLARS) AGAINST THE ATTACK ON\nIT IMPLICIT IN HUSSERL'S "CRISIS". IN PARTICULAR, I DISCUSS\nTHREE ANTI-REALIST HUSSERLIAN THESES: (1) THAT THE METHOD\nOF SCIENCE IS IN ESSENCE ONE OF THE IDEALIZATION; (2) THAT\nALL SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTS CAN BE TRACED BACK TO OUR\nLIFE-WORLD EXPERIENCE; (3) THAT ANY SCIENTIFIC DESCRIPTION\nOF THE WORLD NECESSARILY OMITS MAJOR DIMENSIONS OF OUR\nLIFE-WORLD EXPERIENCES. I ARGUE THAT EACH OF THESE THESES\nIS INCONSISTENT WITH A CORRECT UNDERSTANDING OF (...) SCIENTIFIC\nMETHODOLOGY. I FURTHER ARGUE THAT THESE THESES DERIVE ONLY\nFROM HUSSERL'S FAULTY EXPLICATION OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD;\nTHERE IS NOTHING IN HUSSERL'S BASIC EPISTEMOLOGICAL\nPOSITION THAT IS INCONSISTENT WITH (A PROPERLY CONSTRUED)\nSCIENTIFIC REALISM. (shrink)

Volume XXIX contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2012-13. The papers feature Plato's Republic and Timaeus , examine Aristotle on generation, analogy and method, and analyze Proclus on first principles.

I recall an old man selling Paul Lafargue’s Right to be Lazy on a busy street in the Latin Quarter in the 1980s. At the time, I was writing then my first book on the history of work time and leisure and felt by seeing this strange and grumpy man so energetically promoting the nearly forgotten work of Marx’s son-in-law somehow vindicated in my efforts. Paul Lafargue’s pamphlet makes an interesting assumption: The “natural” state of human being was relaxation and (...) that only a century or so of propaganda convinced the naïve worker and labor movement to embrace the doctrine of the “right” to work. The industrial revolution had produced the craziness of workers’ overproduction and legions of savants and servants for the small utterly unbusy rich. Once freed from the illusion of the right to work, machines, Lafargue insisted, would liberate us all from the drudgery of labor and let us live as the ancient Greek philosophers had dreamed—but without the dependence upon slaves. Lafargue’s view was hardly unique for its day. Many in the late nineteenth century believed that overwork caused production gluts and the irrational excesses of the rich. Busyness was a false doctrine of modern capitalism that was devoted to endlessly extending and intensifying work. Before and after him, many fought to win freedom from busyness with the reduction of worktime. But Lafargue’s dream that mechanical progress would liberate humanity from labor hardly happened. Instead, the “overproduction” that ceaseless toil created was “absorbed” by mass consumption. Even the “wastefulness” of the rich and their minions came to be seen merely as indifferent contributions to the Gross Domestic Product. So what happened? (shrink)

In this article I consider whether there is a process of repression occurring in definitions of citizenship and frameworks of citizenship education, which involves a forgetting of history. By focusing on recently troubled countries I identify how the force of history comes to play, and from that I consider how, in relatively stable liberal democracies such as England, the repression of history is more complete. I suggest that this repression leads to an impoverished definition of citizenship in terms of values (...) and ethical considerations, resulting in an antiseptic curriculum which fails to address some of the sharper issues that lie deep in the complexity of experience and identity, issues that should be addressed in the pursuit of being-together in a pluralist society. (shrink)

Joseph Morton Ransdell left a record of experimentation with the communicational process of philosophy from 1992 to his passing in 2010. This record includes the Arisbe website and the peirce-l e-forum and its archives, of which the earliest are not on the Internet, but may yet be recovered and made available. Philosophy’s communication process, and the possibility of creating and developing a telecommunity, as Ransdell called it, were among his chief theoretical and practical interests. Such interests were focused in terms (...) of the ideas of Charles S. Peirce, including fallibilism, pragmaticism, and semiotic, in particular the sign’s determination by the represented object, and iconicity in relation especially to.. (shrink)

Sam, your newborn son, has been suffocating in your arms for the past 15 minutes. You’re as certain as you can be that he is going to die in the next 15.

The greatest philosopher of the modern experience, G. W. F. Hegel, was deeply rooted in Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza, and he synthesized the riches of Kantian and post-Kantian idealism. He put dynamic panentheism into play in modern theology, and in some way he inspired nearly every great philosophical idea and movement of the past two centuries. Yet no thinker is as routinely misconstrued as Hegel, partly because his greatest work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, defies categorization and is notoriously hard to (...) understand. In the mid-1790s, while Immanuel Kant was elderly and fading and J. G. Fichte was prominent for amplifying Kant’s subjective ethical idealism, a group of youthful post-Kantian .. (shrink)