I know about you only from your valuable books and from the little that was communicated to me by telephone in Moscow in September. Nevertheless, we share a warm interest in Greek culture generally and philosophy in particular.

How physicians approach patients and the problems they present is much influenced by the conceptual models around which their knowledge is organized. In this paper the implications of the biopsychosocial model for the study and care of a patient with an acute myocardial infarction are presented and contrasted with approaches used by adherents of the more traditional biomedical model. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

"Translating Key Terms Terms in Lu Cheng's Records in the Chuan xi lu: Some Preliminary Considerations" Draft paper for the 2024 Conference on [Wang] Yangming's Learning of Mind, Shaoxing, Zhejiang. Updated October 4, 2024. The final version will appear in the conference volume. -/- Criticism and suggestions welcome. Please do email.

Ethical theory in business ethics texts lacks sufficient specificity to be used as a tool of analysis. The result is that business faculty do not see the course in business ethics as helpful to their students, and the students do not see the course as helpful in their careers.A further difficulty is the inclusion of material which is not seen by business faculty, as appropriate or germane to the practice of decision-making. Issues such as the legitimacy of the corporation, or (...) capitalism versus Marxism, are of Iittle interest or help to the person in business.Finally, the text cases are too often of a policy nature, and do not deal with issues faced by a majority of those in business. The result is the lack of engaging the moral imagination of the students.Unless the course is redesigned so that it is seen by business faculty as more relevant, it will continue to be required by only a small number of business programs. (shrink)

Nie Bao 聶豹 (1487–1563) was a Neo-Confucian philosopher and scholar-official of sixteenthcentury Ming China. In his Ming ru xue an 明儒學案 (Case studies of Ming Confucians), Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲 placed him in the Jiangxi (Jiangyou 江右) group of Wang Yangming followers. Nie Bao met the influential founder of the Ming School of Mind in 1526 and was inspired by his teaching of the innate knowing (liangzhi 良知). However, he differed from other followers in his quietist approach to realizing and extending (...) this knowledge. While developing his ideas over the course of two decades, as a holder of the highest civil service examination degree, Nie Bao also held a series of impactful official positions, and earned a reputation for effectiveness and integrity. However, he was also the unwitting victim of factionalism at the Ming court, which led to his imprisonment in 1548. The goal of this article is to provide a sketch of Nie Bao’s political trajectory and intellectual development from his early years until his imprisonment, as well as translation of significant passages pertaining to that trajectory and development. By the time of his imprisonment, Nie Bao had articulated the essential elements of his philosophy of returning to the root (by which he meant silence), and attaining centeredness and, with that, his unique interpretation of his teacher’s central tenet. (shrink)

Agency is the human capacity to freely choose one’s thoughts, motivations and actions without undue internal or external influences; it is distinguished from decisional capacity. Four well-known conditions that can deeply affect agency are depression, demoralization, existential distress, and family dysfunction. The study reviews how they may diminish agency in persons whose circumstances may lead them to consider or request euthanasia or assisted suicide. Since agency has been a relatively neglected dimension of autonomous choice at the end of life, it (...) is argued that to respect the autonomy of individuals, it is essential to establish their agency. (shrink)

Semën [Simon] Liudvigovich Frank was born in Moscow, the son of a doctor. He studied law at Moscow University, joined a student Marxist group headed by P.B. Struve, and as a result was barred by the Russian authorities from living in any of the Russian “university cities.” He continued his university education at the Universities of Berlin and Munich. His first published work was a critique of Marx’s theory of value. Between 1902 and 1905 he divided his time among Berlin, (...) Munich, and Moscow. In 1902 he published his first philosophical essay, on Nietzsche’s doctrine of Fernstenliebe. He was a contributor—along with Nicolas Berdyaev, S.N. Bulgakov, and Struve—to three influential symposium volumes: Problemy idealizma [Problems of idealism], Vekhi [Signposts], and Iz glubiny [De profundis]. This last work was printed but its release was blocked by Soviet censorship. All of these works were originally published in Moscow; all of them have, in the past three or four years, been republished in Moscow, but for more than seventy years they were banned in the Soviet Union and could be reprinted only abroad. (shrink)

An examination of ninety-nine syllabi for undergraduate courses in business ethics, collected by the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College, reveals that half the courses are offered to freshmen and sophomores. Because of the fact that these students will have minimal knowledge of the functional areas of business firms, and because these courses rely heavily on case analysis, it is likely that the students in these courses are not able to deal effectively with the material in the course. Therefore, (...) any expectation that the business ethics course will raise the students' ethical sensitivity when considering business problems or decisions is unrealistic. (shrink)

Holyoak and Cheng 's account of Wason's selection task was evaluated by testing participants' recognition memory for the rule. To accommodate the finding that participants' selections are systematically influenced by manipulating their perspective on the rule to be tested, Holyoak and Cheng put forward a development of Pragmatic Reasoning Schema theory, according to which the rule being tested is mapped onto different schematic rules depending on the perspective taken. The instantiated schema then becomes the basis for reasoning, and the different (...) schemas encourage the selection of different cases. We hypothesised that if participants interpret the rule by instantiating a particular schema, then they should falsely recognise a sentence corresponding to the instantiated schema a short time after performing the task. An experimental test provided limited support for this hypothesis. (shrink)

This article examines the impact of the reading assessment, DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills), on literacy education through the Habermasian lens. It argues that DIBELS, along with other systemic forces, has surged beyond its domain as a mere assessment and colonized the lifeworld of literacy education by distorting the meaning of the teaching and learning of literacy.This article calls for a critical reflection on the systemized practices in literacy education and for a return to a lifeworld where (...) literacy is considered more than a testable skill. (shrink)

Long prone to dogmatic disagreement, the question of value in Marx’s thought—what value is, the purpose it serves, its application to real-world capitalism—requires renewal if Marx’s work is to remain vibrant. In _Value in Marx_, George Henderson offers a lucid rereading of Marx that strips value of its turgid theoretical reduction and reframes it as an investigation into the tensions between social relations and forms as they are rather than as what they could otherwise become. Drawing on Marx’s _Capital_ (...) and _Grundrisse_, Henderson shows how these volumes do not harbor a single theory of value that equates value to capital. Instead, these books experimentally compose and recompose value for a world that is more than capitalist. At stake is how Marx conceives of human freedom, of balanced social arrangements, and of control over the things people produce. Henderson finds that the limits on social becoming, including the tendency toward alienated existence, haunt Marx even as he looks beyond the critique of capital to an emancipated society to come. Can these limits be confronted in a creative, even joyful, way? Can they become aspects of what we desire, rather than being silenced and denied? As long as we persist in interpreting value broadly, following it as an active and not a shut-down, predetermined feature of Marx’s texts, Henderson ultimately views Marx as responding positively to these challenges and employing value as a powerful tool of the political imaginary. (shrink)

The course in business ethics is required by an increasing number of business programs. Accordingly, it seems appropriate to evaluate the text materials used from the perspective of the business student.Relative to early criticisms, recent texts represent considerable improvements in their use of case materials and in the manner by which they involve the student in decision-making situations. However, there are two distortions present in all of the texts examined. First, they concentrate too heavily on cases of a policy, or (...) general management, nature. The result is an inadequate coverage of the functional areas of the firm in which graduates begin their employment. Second, they concentrate too heavily on manufacturing firms, and thus do not introduce students to the ethical problems found where they are most likely to work, in service firms. (shrink)

Current psychological research on causal inference is dominated by two basic approaches: the covariation approach and the mechanism approach. This article reviews these two approaches, evaluates the contributions and limitations of each approach, and suggests how these approaches might be integrated into a more comprehensive framework. Covariation theorists assume that cognizers infer causal relations from conditional probabilities computed over samples of multiple events, but they do not provide an adequate account of how cognizers constrain their search for candidate causes and (...) relevant evidence. Mechanism theorists assume that cognizers use their knowledge of potential mechanisms to infer the causes of individual events, but they do not account for the origins of this kind of knowledge. Theorists might integrate these approaches into a framework that overcomes these limitations by (1) examining important relations between cognizers' beliefs about the nature of causality, the logic of causal inference, and the processes cognizers use to make causal inferences, and (2) providing a more complete account of cognizers' conceptions of causality and the origins of those conceptions. (shrink)

Während der letzten zehn Jahre wurde viel über den ‘Humanismus’ des jungen Marx gesprochen. Osteuropäische Marxisten, die bemüht sind, ihren Anti-Stalinismus durch Berufung auf die Autorität von ‘Marx selbst’ zu untermauern, gebrauchen den Ausdruck ‘Humanismus’ in einem ungenauen Sinn, etwa gleichbedeutend mit ‘Anthropozentrismus’. Aber wenn man sagt, daß Marx’ Haltung anthropozentrisch sei, so sind damit die Hauptfragen erst gestellt, nicht schon gelöst.‘Humanismus’ mag etwa soviel wie ‘Säkularismus’ bedeuten — der Mensch, nicht Gott, wird als im Mittelpunkt stehend gedacht. Die anthropozentrische (...) Haltung kann verschiedene Formen annehmen, vor allem die Formen, die man als ‘Humanismus der Ideale’ und als ‘Humanismus der Prinzipien’ bezeichnen könnte. Der Humanismus der Ideale ist ausdrücklich an derZukunft orientiert, der Humanismus der Prinzipien aber an derGegenwart. Nur ein Humanismus der Prinzipien, dem es darum geht, den Eigenwert existierender Individuen zu behaupten und zu verteidigen, verdient es, ‘ethischer Humanismus’ genannt zu werden. Marx, sogar der jüngste Marx, war kein ethischer Humanist in diesem Sinn. Und nur ein Humanismus in diesem strengen Sinn würde einen philosophischen Standort bieten, von dem aus man den Stalinismus oder Neo-Stalinismus angreifen könnte.Marx war ein Säkularist, und er entwarf ein humanistisches Ideal für die Zukunft, aber humanistische Prinzipien für die Gegenwart lehnte er ab. Er betonte, daß nur dem nicht entfremdeten, produktiven Individuum der kommunistischen Zukunft ein eigener Wert zukomme. Bis dahin haben Individuen nur einen geschichtlich instrumentalen Wert: jene, die an der Verwirklichung der kommunistischen Gesellschaft arbeiten, sind zu respektieren; diejenigen, welche dabei Widerstand leisten oder versagen, müssen ausschließlich als Hindernisse auf dem Wege des geschichtlichen Fortschritts behandelt werden.In diesem Sinn ist der Leninismus und sogar der Stalinismus und Neo-Stalinismus in dem zukunftsorientierten Humanismus der Ideale des jungen Marx einbegriffen, oder zumindest davon nicht ausgeschlossen. Selbst der jüngste Marx machte sich den Modeirrtum des 19. Jahrhunderts zu eigen — den Irrtum des ‘aufgeschobenen Wertes’ oder des ‘zeitlich verstellten Wertes’ und nahm damit eine mit dem ethischen Humanismus grundsätzlich unvereinbare Position ein. (shrink)

Criticism and recommendations are very much welcome. Please don't hesitate to contact me with them. -/- .