In this consensus report by a diverse group of academics who conduct and/or are concerned about social and behavioral genomics (SBG) research, the authors recount the often‐ugly history of scientific attempts to understand the genetic contributions to human behaviors and social outcomes. They then describe what the current science—including genomewide association studies and polygenic indexes—can and cannot tell us, as well as its risks and potential benefits. They conclude with a discussion of responsible behavior in the context of SBG research. (...) SBG research that compares individuals within a group according to a “sensitive” phenotype requires extra attention to responsible conduct and to responsible communication about the research and its findings. SBG research (1) on sensitive phenotypes that (2) compares two or more groups defined by (a) race, (b) ethnicity, or (c) genetic ancestry (where genetic ancestry could easily be misunderstood as race or ethnicity) requires a compelling justification to be conducted, funded, or published. All authors agree that this justification at least requires a convincing argument that a study's design could yield scientifically valid results; some authors would additionally require the study to have a socially favorable risk‐benefit profile. (shrink)

For centuries psychologists have been trying to explain how a man or an animal could perceive space. They have thought of space as having three dimensions and the difficulty was how an observer could see the third dimension. For depth, as Bishop Berkeley asserted at the outset of the New Theory of Vision (1709), “is a line endwise to the eye which projects only one point in the fund of the eye.” Space was its dimensions. It was empty save for (...) a collection of objects or bodies. For an observer, the objects were in different directions at various distances and the question was how these distances could be detected. For two hundred and fifty years we have tried to answer this question and failed. The explanations have been controversial, contradictory, and confused. (shrink)

In Sensations of History, James J. Hodge argues that animation in new media art transforms historical experience in the digital age. Combining close textual analysis of experimental new media artworks with discussion of key phenomenological texts, Sensations of History argues for the broad critical significance of animation as we shift from analog to digital technologies. Hodge looks closely at animation aesthetics, which allow for a clear grasp of the ways digital technologies transform our sense of historical experience.

In his monograph, Ryan Patrick Hanley offers a revisionist interpretation of the political philosophy of François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai. A series of Enlightenment commentators and their progeny have hailed Fénelon as a political subversive who boldly attacked the injustices of the reign of Louis XIV and who prepared the arrival of an egalitarian society with socialist and pacifist traits. Hanley, however, argues that Fénelon actually defended a more moderate and realistic model of political society than (...) his Enlightenment exegetes have suggested. Like earlier commentators, Hanley attempts to prove his argument primarily through an analysis of... (shrink)

This is a book about how we see: the environment around us (its surfaces, their layout, and their colors and textures); where we are in the environment; whether or not we are moving and, if we are, where we are going; what things are good for; how to do things (to thread a needle or drive an automobile); or why things look as they do.The basic assumption is that vision depends on the eye which is connected to the brain. The (...) author suggests that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system. When no constraints are put on the visual system, people look around, walk up to something interesting and move around it so as to see it from all sides, and go from one vista to another. That is natural vision—and what this book is about. (shrink)

Principles-based biomedical ethics has been a dominant paradigm for the teaching and practice of biomedical ethics for over three decades. Attractive in its conceptual and linguistic simplicity, it has also been criticized for its lack of moral content and justification and its lack of attention to relationships. This book identifies the modernist and postmodernist worldviews and philosophical roots of principlism that ground the moral minimalism of its common morality premise. Building on previous work by prominent Christian bioethicists, an alternative covenantal (...) ethical framework is presented in our contemporary context. Relationships constitute the core of medicine, and understanding the ethical meaning of those relationships is important in providing competent and empathic care. While the notion of covenant is articulated through the richness of meaning taught in the Christian Scriptures, covenantal commitment is also appreciated in Islamic, Jewish, and even pagan traditions as well. In a world of increasing medical knowledge and consequent complexity of care, such commitment can help to resist enticements toward the pursuit of self-interest. It can also improve relationships among caregivers, each of whose specific expertise must be woven into a matrix of care that constitutes optimal medical practice for each vulnerable and needy patient. (shrink)

The job of philosophy -- Truth: a very deceptive subject -- Epistemology: how do you know? -- Philosophy of religion: does God exist? -- Metaphysics: what is real? -- Moral and ethical theory: between right and wrong -- Social and political theory: freedom, politics, and society.

Thomas Jefferson and Philosophy: Essays on the Philosophical Cast of Jefferson’s Writings is a collection of essays on topics that relate to philosophical aspects of Jefferson’s thinking over the years. Much historical insight is given to ground the various philosophical strands in Jefferson’s thought and writing on topics such as political philosophy, moral philosophy, slavery, republicanism, wall of separation, liberty, educational philosophy, and architecture.

The Scottish Enlightenment provided the fledgling United States of America and its emerging universities with a philosophical orientation. For a hundred years or more, Scottish philosophers were both taught and emulated by professors at Princeton, Harvard and Yale, as well as newly founded colleges stretching from Rhode Island to Texas. This volume in the Library of Scottish Philosophy demonstrates the remarkable extent of this philosophical influence. Selections from William Smith, John Witherspoon, Samuel Stanhope Smith, Archibald Alexander, Alexander Campbell, W.E. Channing, (...) James McCosh, and C.S. Peirce, together with the editor's introductory and explanatory material, provide the modern reader with unprecedented access to this period of intellectual formation. (shrink)

Written for everyone in business who remains uninspired by run-of-the-mill management books, Corporate Compassion provides an honest and humane perspective of the contemporary workplace.

This essay is, first, a theoretical and historical study of some classical scientific ways of studying human being in the world. The more readily accessible and more commonly discussed "models" of being human were chosen for review here, but structuralism is included because I believe it will have ,the same impact in America as it has had in France, and I hope that American readers might be forewarned about what may be ideologically at stake before the technical, and fruitful, aspects (...) of the movement become an academic fad in the United States. The subjects included are mainline experimental psychology from Wundt to Skinner, with its relatively shortlived functionalist and Watsonian-behaviorist formulations; holistic psychology from Brentano through Stumpf, Husserl, and Goldstein to Maslow, Rogers, and contemporary "third force" psychology; and the psychoanalytic model, for which the only paradigm is Freud himself. Preeminence is given to psychological paradigms, since their subject matter lies closest to the classical philosophical tradition from which "philosophical anthropology" emerged. (This book is, in the final analysis, a prolegomenon to an articulated philosophical anthropo logy. ) Sociological models are also considered: the "classical" tradition from Comte to the present, and Marxist anthropology from the manu scripts of 1844 to the present. The structuralist model, from Durkheim to Chomsky, is also considered, since it cuts across and gives new dimensions to all the foregoing models. The essay is, second, a phenomenological critique of these historico theoretical considerations. (shrink)

Speakers often do not state requests directly but employ innuendos such as Would you like to see my etchings? Though such indirectness seems puzzlingly inefficient, it can be explained by a theory of the strategic speaker, who seeks plausible deniability when he or she is uncertain of whether the hearer is cooperative or antagonistic. A paradigm case is bribing a policeman who may be corrupt or honest: A veiled bribe may be accepted by the former and ignored by the latter. (...) Everyday social interactions can have a similar payoff structure (with emotional rather than legal penalties) whenever a request is implicitly forbidden by the relational model holding between speaker and hearer (e.g., bribing an honest maitre d’, where the reciprocity of the bribe clashes with his authority). Even when a hearer’s willingness is known, indirect speech offers higher-order plausible deniability by preempting certainty, gossip, and common knowledge of the request. In supporting experiments, participants judged the intentions and reactions of characters in scenarios that involved fraught requests varying in politeness and directness. (shrink)

The overall conclusion which emerges from this study is that there is no sound defense for the view that indifference to others constitutes a reasonable policy of action. ;The purpose of the work is to advance a defense of the duty of the initial equal consideration of persons . Such a duty involves these things: that an agent is obligated to consider the likely ends of those persons directly affected by his action to the limits of his abilities; that he (...) is obligated initially to rank these ends on a par with his own; and, that he is obligated to use this consideration as a basis for his action. I seek to ground the defense of this duty upon a foundation suggested by examining the ethical theories of Hume, Kant, and the twentieth century personalist, Peter A. Bertocci. (shrink)

Review of: Wood, Allen W., Kant and Religion, Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 2020, 250 pp. ISBN: 978-0521799980.

Not a day passes over society where the immediate expressions of violence are not widely propagated and subsequently witnessed through cultural or political mediums. Such depictions, accounts, scenes, have been uniquely framed as a lexis of ‘subjective violence’; reactions or evident illustrations of descent in physical form. Amidst their over-representation is a lapse of measured attention given to the pretext amounting to said outbursts. Seldom is the objective, if at all, contextualized as a catalytic toward the subjective. The following work (...) suggests that a violence exists amidst society that goes substantively under-analyzed thereby negating an ability to specifically address and, therefore, challenge its causality. While recognizing the importance of such research, a movement beyond affectual approaches of theorizing violence is needed through a complimentarily mapping of how distal relations of power influence, impact, and sustain enmity. What makes this discussion further dynamic is the ironic transparency of causation. Rather than a phenomenon of concealment, conventional dynamics of authority and influence exert control through, what could be argued to be, an invisibility of visibility. Supporting an addendum to theorizing violence may, then, enable a more holistic recognition that can assist an articulate response toward both subjective and objective expressions of violence. (shrink)