Deductive Irrationality examines and critiques economic rationalism by assessing the work of influential political philosophers and economic theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Gunnar Myrdal, and John F. Muth. It is one of the first serious attempts to investigate the dominant sub-fields in economic theory through the lens of political philosophy.

Arguments strong enough to justify skeptical theism will be strong enough to justify the position that every claim about God is empirically unfalsifiable. This fact is problematic because that position licenses further arguments which are clearly unreasonable, but which the skeptical theist cannot consistently accept as such. Avoiding this result while still achieving the theoretical objectives looked for in skeptical theism appears to demand an impossibly nuanced position.

he design-based approach is a methodology for investigating mechanisms capable of generating mental phenomena, whether introspectively or externally observed, and whether they occur in humans, other animals or robots. The study of designs satisfying requirements for autonomous agency can provide new deep theoretical insights at the information processing level of description of mental mechanisms. Designs for working systems (whether on paper or implemented on computers) can systematically explicate old explanatory concepts and generate new concepts that allow new and richer interpretations (...) of human phenomena. To illustrate this, some aspects of human grief are analysed in terms of a particular information processing architecture being explored in our research group. We do not claim that this architecture is part of the causal structure of the human mind; rather, it represents an early stage in the iterative search for a deeper and more general architecture, capable of explaining more phenomena. However even the current early design provides an interpretative ground for some familiar phenomena, including characteristic features of certain emotional episodes, particularly the phenomenon of perturbance (a partial or total loss of control of attention). The paper attempts to expound and illustrate the design-based approach to cognitive science and philosophy, to demonstrate the potential effectiveness of the approach in generating interpretative possibilities, and to provide first steps towards an information processing account of `perturbant', emotional episodes. (shrink)

This paper concerns the attempt to formulate an empirical version of the problem of evil, and the attempt to counter this version by what is known as ‘sceptical theism’. My concern is to assess what is actually achieved in these attempts. To this end I consider the debate between them against the backdrop of William Rowe's distinction between expanded standard theism and restricted standard theism (which I label E and R respectively). My claim is that the empirical version significantly fails (...) to challenge E in the way that a workable logical version would; and that sceptical theism significantly fails to defend R in the way that a workable theodicy would. My conclusion is that sceptical theism and the empirical argument play a significantly more limited role in the debate over evil than the arguments they are supposed to replace. (Published Online August 11 2004). (shrink)

The rejection of behaviorism in the 1950s and 1960s led to the view, due mainly to Noam Chomsky, that language must be studied by looking at the mind and not just at behavior. It is an understatement to say that Chomskyan linguistics dominates the field. Despite being the overwhelming majority view, it has not gone unchallenged, and the challenges have focused on different aspects of the theory. What is almost universally accepted, however, is Chomsky’s view that understanding language demands a (...) theory that posits mental states that represent rules of language. Call this claim, following Cowie (1999), Representationalism or (R). According to (R), ‘‘[e]xplaining language mastery and acquisition requires the postulation of contentful mental states and processes involving their manipulation’’ (Cowie, 1999, p. 154). Although (R) is nothing more than the general assumption on which cognitive psychology is founded applied to the case of language, even it has had its detractors. Critics have argued that linguistic competence should not in fact be thought of as based on the possession of a body of linguistic knowledge but should be thought of, rather, as a kind of skill. This is an important challenge because one might be inclined to think that no recognizable form of Chomskyan linguistics could withstand the falsification of (R). In this paper we attempt to show that in fact (R) could be false without doing much damage to Chomskyan linguistics at all. Indeed, it is possible that the Chomskyan position could be made more coherent by adopting the view we will sketch. Our claim, therefore, is that critics of (R) might be right, but that this does not obviously make them serious critics of the Chomskyan program. (shrink)

In exploring corporate perceptions of the business case for supplier diversity, this paper reports on a cross-national study of large purchasing organisations that had introduced, or were in the process of introducing, purchasing initiatives aimed at ethnic minority businesses. The research investigates how LPOs portray the benefits of this form of socially responsible purchasing and suggests a business case construct based on four component elements. It also highlights a number of contextual factors that appear to have shaped business case rationales. (...) The paper concludes with a discussion of issues of cost and contingent influences affecting SD programmes and points to possible areas for future research. (shrink)

This article scrutinizes James Baldwin's reflections on film and film-going, mainly as set out in the relatively late essays-cum-memoir entitled The Devil Finds Work. The paper considers Baldwin's experiences and reflections with an idea to how black and white are felt and described as asymmetrically oppositional forces, on the one hand, that nonetheless are subject to occasional and startling crossovers, especially in his early viewing of films, white, mixed-race, and all-black cast. Baldwin argues against an ontology of race, even as (...) he feels the full force of discrimination based on the putative absolutes of black and white. (shrink)

Analyse van de aan de wetenschap ontleende terminologie die de Amerikaanse dichter (1885-1972) in zijn literair-kritisch werk gebruikte.

This chapter contains sections titled: Ten thousand years of change Environmental history: a realist narrative The idealist narrative Connected ideas Free‐floating thought Coherence and fragmentation Crooked timber.

The idea that claims about the physical world might be arrived through a priori reasoning has a long history in physics. But it is clear that empiricist notions of the nature of science, and in particular the empirical nature of physics, have held sway in this century. Yet, in the idea of thought experiments in science, we might find the survival of earlier a priori reasoning to the truth of claims about the physical world. This paper challenges the notion that (...) science can be understood as a purely empirical endeavor and points out what reforms would be necessary for teaching the image of science to our young. (shrink)

Navigating tragic circumstances in pediatrics requires consideration of parental grief responses. We meet parents where they are, not where we might want them to be. Different parents grieve differ...

Caruso Brown brings forward an argument that clinicians and ethicists have a duty to consider decision-makers marginalized by hierarchical structures. The author presents a pragmatic approac...

SummaryThis paper argues that the Tacitean passage (Annales 2.53.3) referring to an actual foedus between Rome and Athens should be accepted, and that the date for this treaty may be assigned to 191 BC.

Health economists claim to use market economics combined with the microeconomic concepts of opportunity cost and the margin to advise on priority setting. However, they are advising on setting priorities through a macro-economic analysis using the costs of the supplier, thus prioritising the producer and not the consumer as the dynamic of economic activity. For health economists any contention within priority setting is due to lack of data not their confusion over fundamental concepts.

White Lotus Rebels and South China Pirates: Crisis and Reform in the Qing Empire. By Wensheng Wang. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. Pp. 252. $42.

Contemporary psychologists seem to pull in two theoretical directions, namely the reduction of mind to brain and the dissolution of mind in society. Against these dominant trends, this article employs the tools of critical realism to argue for the resuscitation in the discipline, psychology, of an ontologically distinct, psychological concept of mind. This ‘mind’ is conceived here as a real, ontologically emergent property. Its distinctive property is consciousness, generated in the first instance by unconscious, non-conscious and conscious psychological mechanisms. Nonetheless, (...) it is emergent not only from psychological mechanisms, but also biological and social mechanisms, all of which act together in open systems. The article builds on various accounts of the hierarchy of the sciences and their objects to suggest that there is such a real psychological object. It seeks to refute trends in psychological theory that reduce mind either to neuro-physiological and neurobiological properties on the one hand or to social relational and discursive properties on the other. (shrink)