The attack on perfectibilism in T. R. Malthus's Essay on Population (1798) is methodologically hollow. Malthus presents himself as a Newtonian empiricist, yet his analysis of equalitarian society is entirely abstract. Godwinian equality is debunked by means of a thought experiment. Malthus fails to take note of a variety of historical instances of equalitarian social practice (Sparta, the Moravians, and so on), thus undermining his empiricist posture. This deficiency in the critique of equality is remedied, to some degree, in the (...) fifth edition of the Essay (1817), where Malthus finally cites some of the historical evidence relevant to an assessment of equalitarianism. (shrink)

Gilbert Meilaender here offers reflections on the moral life from within the life of faith. Drawing on such diverse sources as E.B. White, Alasdair MacIntyre, Augustine and Felix Salten, the author of Bambi, Meilaender focuses on the particular shape of the Christian life as it pertains to the commitments of believers and to the way in which those commitments form moral vision.

Essays analyze the nature of the human mind, thought, and imagination and explore the connection of thought to teaching.

Category theory and topos theory have been seen as providing a structuralist framework for mathematics autonomous vis-a-vis set theory. It is argued here that these theories require a background logic of relations and substantive assumptions addressing mathematical existence of categories themselves. We propose a synthesis of Bell's many-topoi view and modal-structuralism. Surprisingly, a combination of mereology and plural quantification suffices to describe hypothetical large domains, recovering the Grothendieck method of universes. Both topos theory and set theory can be carried out (...) relative to such domains; puzzles about ‘large categories’ and ‘proper classes’ are handled in a uniform way, by relativization, sustaining insights of Zermelo. (shrink)

"This double issue in the ICA Documents series brings together material which grew out of a major conference held in 1985 on the philosophical dimendions of the postmodernist debate, and three autumn deminars from our French Thinkers series..."--Ed. note.

Preface -- Introduction: dialectics and social thought -- Marx and the dialectic of capital -- Freud and the dialectic of psychology -- Peirce, Mead, Goffman, and interactional social science -- Culture and society -- Critical theories -- Rebellion -- The phenomenologists -- Contemporary social thought: Agamben to Zizek -- Dialectics of contemporary society and the present crisis -- References -- Index.

Crowdsourcing platforms are powerful tools for academic researchers. Proponents claim that crowdsourcing helps researchers quickly and affordably recruit enough human subjects with diverse backgrounds to generate significant statistical power, while critics raise concerns about unreliable data quality, labor exploitation, and unequal power dynamics between researchers and workers. We examine these concerns along three dimensions: methods, fairness, and politics. We find that researchers offer vastly different compensation rates for crowdsourced tasks, and address potential concerns about data validity by using platform-specific tools (...) and user verification methods. Additionally, workers depend upon crowdsourcing platforms for a significant portion of their income, are motivated more by fear of losing access to work than by specific compensation rates, and are frustrated by a lack of transparency and occasional unfair treatment from job requesters. Finally, we discuss critical computing scholars’ proposals to address crowdsourcing’s problems, challenges with implementing these resolutions, and potential avenues for future research. (shrink)

We examine the unique nature of agency problems within publicly traded family firms by investigating the earnings management decision of dominant family owners relative to non-family. To do so, we draw upon literature demonstrating that family owners are loss averse with respect to the family’s socioemotional wealth, or the affective endowment derived from firm ownership and control. Our theory and findings suggest that potential reputational consequences of earnings management lead family principals to engage in less of this practice relative to (...) non-family firms, and that founder family firms are less likely than non-founder family firms to use earnings management. Moreover, the family-firm effect varies with the firm size, the degree of CEO entrenchment, and the firm’s stock structure. We provide important insights regarding differences between family and non-family principals in the use of unethical accounting practices, thereby extending agency theory and advancing an underdeveloped research area. (shrink)

Consider the idea that a natural language like English is in the first instance incorporated into the system of representation one thinks with. This ‘incorporation’ view is compared with a translation or ‘decoding’ view of communication. Compositional semantics makes sense only given the implausible decoding view.

Reflecting upon some problems of the moral life, Gilbert Meilaender considers their difficulties within a vision that accentuates not only the limits, but also the promise, of the Christian story. Created by God as finite beings, we make particular attachments. Redeemed by God for a community transcending nature and history, our love always carries us beyond the special bonds of time and place. We live, therefore, with a sense of permanent tension. If this tension heightens our sense of the (...) perplexities of life, it should not free us from the obligation to probe, clarify, and resolve some of those difficulties. The author holds that theological ethics must clarify the direction for growth and development within the Christian life. He undertakes such analysis, emphasizing throughout the limits of the human condition, the importance of our nature as embodied persons, and the danger and pretension in some of our attempts to take control of and master human life. This Christian vision is developed in chapters that explore a range of moral problems, such as abortion, artificial reproduction, euthanasia, care for defective infants, provision of artificial nutrition and hydration, and marital and political community. These are throughout, however, _theological_ explorations. Taken together they illumine not only particular problems of the moral life but a vision of life—classically Christian in its conception, humane in its care for particular bonds of attachment, and modest in its recognition of moral limits on our ability to seek the good. Meilaender has developed a broad recognition both among scholars and students of ethics and among interested general readers. He has the capacity to throw fresh angles of vision on complex problems so as to help both the sophisticated and the uninitiated reader to think more penetratingly about moral questions. (shrink)

This article examines some of the ways that Muslim and evangelical Christian schools in England and The Netherlands deal with religious education. Various schools take different views about how aspects of religious belief should be taught and how Christian or Muslim belief should be related to the wider curriculum of the school. While some of the schools have attempted to integrate, for example, evangelical Christianity throughout the whole of the curriculum, others have been content to have the religious teaching as (...) a separate component of the curriculum. This paper uses the work of Basil Bernstein to describe and understand the nature of the religious curriculum in these schools. Through a series of case studies of schools and curricula it examines the nature of the curricula and their possible effects on children. (shrink)

Eye movements were recorded during the display of two images of a real-world scene that were inspected to determine whether they were the same or not . In the displays where the pictures were different, one object had been changed, and this object was sometimes taken from another scene and was incongruent with the gist. The experiment established that incongruous objects attract eye fixations earlier than the congruous counterparts, but that this effect is not apparent until the picture has been (...) displayed for several seconds. By controlling the visual saliency of the objects the experiment eliminates the possibility that the incongruency effect is dependent upon the conspicuity of the changed objects. A model of scene perception is suggested whereby attention is unnecessary for the partial recognition of an object that delivers sufficient information about its visual characteristics for the viewer to know that the object is improbable in that particular scene, and in which full identification requires foveal inspection. (shrink)

It is almost commonplace to suggest that what is morally right for one person to do must also be right for anyone else similarly situated. The author suggests that this "universalization requirement" applies to only a limited sphere of the moral life, chiefly to duties of perfect obligation. Extending the requirement beyond this sphere fails to leave room for human freedom in vocation or for a clear recognition of human finitude.

To live the risen life with God is, presumably, to be what we are meant to be. What can we conclude about our duties to the dying from the medieval belief that we join the hosts of heaven as “animated earth”?