REVIEW (1): "Jeff Kochan’s book offers both an original reading of Martin Heidegger’s early writings on science and a powerful defense of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) research program. Science as Social Existence weaves together a compelling argument for the thesis that SSK and Heidegger’s existential phenomenology should be thought of as mutually supporting research programs." (Julian Kiverstein, in Isis) ---- REVIEW (2): "I cannot in the space of this review do justice to the richness and range of (...) Kochan's discussion [...]. There is a great deal in this foundational portion of Kochan's discussion that I find tremendously interesting and engaging [...]." (David R. Cerbone, in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science) ---- REVIEW (3): "Science as Social Existence will be of interest not only to Heidegger scholars but to anyone engaged in science and technology studies. [...] This is an informative and original book. Kochan should be praised for his clear, pleasant-to-read prose." (Michael Butler, in CHOICE). (shrink)

Rational Pavelka logic extends Lukasiewicz infinitely valued logic by adding truth constants r̄ for rationals in [0, 1]. We show that this is a conservative extension. We note that this shows that provability degree can be defined in Lukasiewicz logic. We also give a counterexample to a soundness theorem of Belluce and Chang published in 1963.

Part guide and part spiritual journey, this visually stunning book celebrates America's statewide system of historic back country roads. It takes armchair travelers on a richly illustrated journey thorough the most beautiful landscapes of one of the nation's most geographically diverse states, and serves as a guide for those who decide to embark on an actual trip over these charming lanes. The project began when photographer Bob Rashid undertook a two year odyssey to preserve the remarkable sights along the 67 (...) official Rustic Roads in Wisconsin. Wisconsin's Rustic Roads, in the images of Rashid and the words of five of Wisconsin's most recognized and cherished authors, is a testiment to places where the efficiency of a road is not measured by its speed, nor its purpose necessarily defined by a destination, and which beckons the reader to linger. (shrink)

Author's response to: Raphael Sassower, 'Heidegger and the Sociologists: A Forced Marriage?,' Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 5 (2018): 30-32. -- Part of a book-review symposium on: Jeff Kochan (2017), Science as Social Existence: Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge UK: Open Book Publishers).

There is a nonabsolute or “contingent” form of pacifism that claims that war in contemporary conditions inevitably involves the killing of innocent people on a scale that is too great to be justified. Some contingent pacifists argue that war always involves a risk that virtually everyone that one might kill is innocent – either because one can never be sure that one’s cause is just or because even most of those who fight in wars that lack a just cause are (...) nevertheless not culpable and are therefore innocent in the relevant sense. Others argue that there is no just cause for war that is sufficiently important to justify the large-scale killing of innocent civilians that is unavoidable in war. I seek to refute contingent pacifism by arguing that its theoretical presuppositions are untenable. (shrink)

This volume brings together a range of interdisciplinary perspectives on a topic of central importance, but which has otherwise tended to be approached from within just one or another disciplinary framework. Most of the essays contained here incorporate some degree of interdisciplinarity in their own approach, but the volume nevertheless divides into three main sections: Philosophical considerations; Humanities approaches; Legal, medical, and therapeutic contexts. The volume includes essays by philosophers, medical practitioners and researchers, historians, lawyers, literary, Classical, and Judaic scholars. (...) The essays are united by a common concern with the question of the human character of suffering, and the demands that suffering, and the recognition of suffering, make upon us. (shrink)

A great deal has been written over the past decade defending ‘higher-level’ causes by arguing that overdetermination is more complex than many philosophers initially thought. Although two shooters overdetermine the death of a firing squad victim, a baseball and its parts do not overdetermine the breaking of a window. But while these analyses of overdetermination have no doubt been fruitful, the focus on overdetermination—while ignoring other varieties of causal relation—has limited the discussion. Many of the cases of interest resemble joint (...) causes or a cause necessitating a simultaneous epiphenomenon as much as they resemble overdeterminers. If we are to fully understand higher-level causation, we need to distinguish it from these causal relations as well. This paper is dedicated to the task, focusing especially on the ‘threat’ that higher-level causes are epiphenomena necessitated by lower-level causes. (shrink)

Final instalment of a book-review symposium on: Jeff Kochan (2017), Science as Social Existence: Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge UK: Open Book Publishers). -- Author's response to: Paolo Palladino (2018), 'Heidegger Today: On Jeff Kochan’s Science and Social Existence,' Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7(8): 41-46; and Adam Riggio (2018), 'The Very Being of a Conceptual Scheme: Disciplinary and Conceptual Critiques,' Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7(11): 53-59.

Author's response to: Pablo Schyfter, 'Inaccurate Ambitions and Missing Methodologies: Thoughts on Jeff Kochan and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge,' Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7, no. 8 (2018): 8-14. -- Part of a book-review symposium on: Jeff Kochan (2017), Science as Social Existence: Heidegger and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (Cambridge UK: Open Book Publishers).

Heidegger scholars consider the philosopher's recently published notebooks, including the issues of Heidegger's Nazism and anti-Semitism. For more than forty years, the philosopher Martin Heidegger logged ideas and opinions in a series of notebooks, known as the “Black Notebooks” after the black oilcloth booklets into which he first transcribed his thoughts. In 2014, the notebooks from 1931 to 1941 were published, sparking immediate controversy. It has long been acknowledged that Heidegger was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party in the (...) early 1930s. But the notebooks contain a number of anti-Semitic passages—often referring to the stereotype of “World-Jewry”—written even after Heidegger became disenchanted with the Nazis themselves. Reactions from the scholarly community have ranged from dismissal of the significance of these passages to claims that the anti-Semitism in them contaminates all of Heidegger's work. This volume offers the first collection of responses by Heidegger scholars to the publication of the notebooks. In essays commissioned especially for the book, the contributors offer a wide range of views, addressing not only the issues of anti-Semitism and Nazism but also the broader questions that the notebooks raise. Contributors Babette Babich, Andrew Bowie, Steven Crowell, Fred Dallmayr, Donatella Di Cesare, Michael Fagenblat, Ingo Farin, Gregory Fried, Jean Grondin, Karsten Harries, Laurence Paul Hemming, Jeff Malpas, Thomas Rohkrämer, Tracy B. Strong, Peter Trawny, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Nancy A. Weston, Holger Zaborowski. (shrink)

This article addresses the pressing issue of what process courts should use to identify those questions whose resolution lies beyond their appropriate capacity and legitimacy. The search for such a process is a basic constitutional problem that has defied a clear answer for well over a hundred years. The chequered history of earlier attempts illustrates why commentators have once again begun to gravitate towards institutional approaches. The general features of institutional approaches include emphasis on uncertainty, judicial fallibility, systemic impact, collaboration (...) between branches of government and incrementalism in judging. These features, however, are relied upon in support of two conflicting views of the role of judges in public law adjudication. One is restrictive, and advocates sharp limitations to the ambit of judicial review. The other is contextual, and, in stark contrast, it proposes to expand the ambit of review in reliance on the idea of using principles of restraint to structure the exercise of judicial discretion. While this article does not take sides between them, it nonetheless seeks to refine the contextual institutional approach by outlining a general framework for reasoning with principles of restraint, and by addressing some of the key difficulties such a reasoning process would face. (shrink)

In his most distinctly political book, The Public and Its Problems, John Dewey describes a never-ending process of achieving democratic governance, in which obstacles to such governance inevitably emerge, and are progressively overcome. However, even in that evidently political work, Dewey still emphasizes that there is a “distinction between democracy as a social idea and political democracy as a system of government. . . . The idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea than can be exemplified in the (...) state even at its best” (143). The typical political bodies that exercise legislative, executive, administrative, and judicial power are not the only institutions that significantly impact how individuals live .. (shrink)

Ethics research literature often uses Rest’s Four Component Model of ethical behavior as a framework to teach business and accounting ethics. Moral motivation, including resolve to have moral courage, is the third component of the model and is the least-tested component in ethics research. Using a quasi-experimental design with pretest and posttest measurements, we compare the effectiveness of several methods (traditional, exhortation, reflection, moral exemplar) for developing resolve to have moral courage in 211 accounting students during one semester. Results show (...) that traditional, reflection, moral exemplar methods increased resolve to have moral courage, and that the reflection and moral exemplar methods were more effective than the other methods. (shrink)

Increasingly, beginning in the 1970’s and 1980’s, many philosophers of language found themselves in a difficult situation. On the one hand, many came to believe that, in order to do semantics properly, as well as to give an adequate treatment of the attitudes, one needed to posit certain entities — propositions — which could be the meanings of sentences (relative to contexts), the contents of mental states, and the primary bearers of truth and falsity. However, many — largely due to (...) the arguments of Scott Soames1 — also came to distrust the standard theoretical account of the nature of propositions, which treated them as sets of worlds, and came to think of them instead as structured entities of some sort. (shrink)

Media use is a pervasive aspect of children’s home experiences but is often not considered in studies of the home learning environment. Media use could be detrimental to children’s language and literacy skills because it may displace other literacy-enhancing activities like shared reading and decrease the quantity and quality of caregiver-child interaction. Thus, the current study asked whether media use is associated with gains in children’s language and literacy skills both at a single time point and across a school year (...) and whether age moderates any association. Children (N = 1583) were from preschool through third grade classrooms and language and literacy skills were measured in the fall and spring of the school year. Parents reported how much time their child spends using media on a typical school day. Regression analyses showed that using 4 hours or more of media was related to lower literacy gains, but not to language gains. Multilevel models conducted as a robustness check showed that this effect did not hold when accounting for classroom. In neither set of models was there an interaction between age and media use. Single-time-point models did show some associations that did not manifest in more stringent models, highlighting the limitations of correlational designs that do not have measures of children’s skills over time. Given the concern and popular press coverage around children’s media use, it is important to acknowledge nonsignificant effects in this domain. These nonsignificant associations suggest that societal fears around children’s media use may be exaggerated. Notably, however, characteristics of children’s media use, like educational content or adult co-use, may moderate any effects. The relation between media use and language and literacy growth did not differ across the age range investigated suggesting that, within this range, younger children are not more vulnerable to detrimental effects. (shrink)

In his seminal reflection on the badness of death, Nagel links it to the permanent loss “of whatever good there is in living.” I will argue, following McMurtry, that “whatever good there is in living” is defined by the life-value of resources, institutions, experiences, and activities. Enjoyed expressions of the human capacities to experience the world, to form relationships, and to act as creative agents are intrinsically life-valuable, the reason why anyone would desire to go on living indefinitely. As Nagel (...) argues, “the fact that we will eventually die in a few score years cannot by itself imply that it would not be good to live longer. If there is no limit to the amount of life that it would be good to have, then it may be that a bad end is in store for all of us.” In this paper I want to question whether in fact there is no limit to the amount of life it would be good to have. My general conclusion will be that it is not the case that the eternal or even indefinite prolongation of any particular individual life necessarily increases life-value. Were death thus somehow removed as an inescapable limiting frame on human life, overall reductions of life-value would be the consequence. Individual and collective life would lose those forms of moral and material life-value that form the bases of life’s being meaningful and purposive. (shrink)

This article addresses the intersections, even blurrings, of two “homes” and two “aways” – the personal, ‹private’ home and the corporate ‹public’ ‹away’, and the national home country and corporate base and the transnational work away. Drawing on 40 semi-structured interviews with women and men top and middle managers in seven multinational corporations located in Finland, we examine the complex relations among transnational managerial work, corporate careers and personal, marriage and family-type relations, and their differences for women and men managers. (...) This shows the very different personal and social worlds inhabited by senior women and men managers, and how transnational processes can make those differences even greater. (shrink)

Predictive modeling in education draws on data from past courses to forecast the effectiveness of future courses. The present effort sought to identify such a model of instructional effectiveness in scientific ethics. Drawing on data from 235 courses in the responsible conduct of research, structural equation modeling techniques were used to test a predictive model of RCR course effectiveness. Fit statistics indicated the model fit the data well, with the instructional characteristics included in the model explaining approximately 85% of the (...) variance in RCR instructional effectiveness. Implications for using the model to develop and improve future RCR courses are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXII, Number 1, April 1996, pp. 193-202 Why Hume Wasn't an Atheist: A Reply to Andre BERYL LOGAN In a recent issue of Hume Studies,1 Shane Andre argues that, as Hume's position on theism can be read primarily from Philo's position in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and since Philo's position in the Dialogues is one of "limited theism," Hume was also a "limited theist" (...) and therefore not an atheist. According to Andre, a "limited theist" is one like Epicurus, "who denied, not that the Gods exist, but that they intervene in human affairs" and, he continues, "...at least in philosophical circles, the term 'atheist' is generally restricted to people who disbelieve any form of theism, and this is the sense in which I propose to enquire whether Hume was an atheist" (142). Andre's claim then is that Hume is not an atheist in this latter sense, but is a limited theist in the former sense. This is shown in "three major objections to standard theism" in the Dialogues: those addressing the Argument from Design and the problem of evil, as well as the lack of debate on whether or not God exists. Philo's criticisms of the Argument from Design amount to the claim that, "not that there is no God, but that, if there is a God," empirical evidence cannot show that God has any of the traditional characteristics of wisdom, power or goodness. The "proper conclusion" of Philo's argument from evil does not concern God's existence, but establishes that God is "limited in some important respect." Philo's "limited theism" is expressed in his ambivalent attitude toward Cleanthes' Argument from Design in Part 12 ("that the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human Beryl Logan is at the Department of Philosophy, Scarborough College, University of Toronto, 1265 Military Trail, Scarborough, Ontario MlC 1A4, Canada, email: logan@lake.'scar.utoronto.ca 194 Beryl Logan intelligence"). In sum, Philo and Cleanthes never debate God's existence, and they accept a limited Deity, therefore they hold positions of limited theism, therefore Philo is not an atheist. While I agree with Andre's conclusion that Hume is not an atheist, I will show in this paper first, that the interpretation which provides his means for arriving at this conclusion is not consistent with the text and faces a number of difficulties, and second, that the sense in which Hume is a limited theist has to do with the limitations of human reason and experience, and not with God's limited nature. My criticisms of Andre's position will be directed at three points in his argument: (1) his claim for Philo's theism based on Philo's lack of scepticism about God's existence; (2) what he regards to be the "proper conclusion" (153) to the problem of evil, as this directly influences his view of Philo's scepticism and the nature of the Deity; and (3) his view that Philo's theism is to be found in his acceptance of the Argument from Design (Philo's limited theism). My arguments will centre upon the "suspense of judgement," and where and how this.mental stance is used by Hume in the arguments of the Dialogues.2 Scepticism about God's Existence Andre claims that the arguments in the Dialogues are directed only to God's nature and do not address God's existence in spite of the fact that Cleanthes concludes his Argument from Design by claiming that the data in the world provide conclusive analogical support for the existence and (human-like) intelligence of the (traditional) Deity.3 Cleanthes' anthropomorphic Argument from Design purports to "prove" that the world has an intelligent divine designer just like machines have intelligent human designers and the only difference between the causes based on the effects is one of degree and not one of kind: the designer of the world is far grander than the designer of a computer because the world is more complex than a computer. I would urge, though, that Philo's scepticism is directed at both aspects of the Argument... (shrink)