Schumaker (philosophy, science and technology department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) examines how the terms of posture encompass all the major disciplines and investigates a variety of philosophical topics: abstract thought, ...

Ledin and Machin's critique of the use of some current approaches to multimodality for the purposes of critical discourse studies raises some important methodological concerns that need to be addressed. However, both the particular position they develop as well as some of the key points they raise are themselves problematic. In this response, I argue that Ledin and Machin misconstrue some significant aspects of the body of theory they critique and, as a consequence, offer a potentially misleading view of the (...) relevant state of the art in multimodality. I suggest that pursuing closer alignments with theoretically more nuanced accounts of multimodality would allow the account that Ledin and Machin propose to be revised in ways better suited to the task of conducting empirically-driven multimodal critical discourse studies. (shrink)

We studied how people determine when they are in control of objects. In a computer task, participants moved a virtual boat towards a goal using a joystick to investigate how subjective control is shaped by (1) correspondence between motor actions and the visual consequences of those actions, and (2) attainment of higher-level goals. In Experiment 1, random discrepancies from joystick input (noise) decreased judgments of control (JoCs), but discrepancies that brought the boat closer to the goal and increased success (the (...) autopilot) increased JoCs. In Experiment 2, participants raced to the goal against a computer-controlled rival boat while varying levels of noise interfered with each boat. Participants reached the goal more often and rated their own control higher when the computer rival had good control. Subjective control over moving objects depends partly on consistency between motor actions and their effects, but is also modulated by perceived success and competition. -/- Keywords: Control; Action; Feedback; Competition . (shrink)

In this paper we attempt to sharpen and to provide an answer to the question of when human beings first become conscious. Since it is relatively uncontentious that a capacity for raw sensation precedes and underpins all more sophisticated mental capacities, our question is tantamount to asking when human beings first have experiences with sensational content. Two interconnected features of our argument are crucial. First, we argue that experiences with sensational content are supervenient on facts about electrical activity in the (...) cerebral cortex which can be ascertained through EEG readings. Second, we isolate from other notions of a‘functioning brain’that which is required to underpin the view that a cortex is functioning in a way which could give rise to rudimentary conscious experiences. We investigate the development in the human fetus of the anatomical and chemical pathways which underpin cortical activity and the growth and maturation of the electrical circuitry specifically associated with sensational content in adult experience. We conclude that a fetus becomes conscious at about 30 to 35 weeks after conception; an answer based on a careful analysis of EEG readings at various stages of cortical development. Finally, we survey the possible ethical ramifications of our answer. (shrink)

The Vivekacudamani is one of the most important texts in the Advaita tradition and the most popular philosophical work ascribed to the great Indian philosopher, Sankara. This book presents an accessible translation of the entire text and also includes Upanisadic cross-referencing to most of its 580 verses, extensive notes, a lengthy Introduction, list of variant readings, an extensive bibliography, and an index to the verses.

John A Sealey; Religious Education: a component of moral education?, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 17, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 251–254, https:/.

The need to fill three gaps in ethics research in a business context sparked the current study. First, the distinction between the concepts of “ethical” and “legal” needs to be incorporated into theory building and empiricism. Second, a unifying theory is needed that can explain the variables that influence managers to emphasize ethics and legality in their judgments. Third, empirical evidence is needed to confirm the predictive power of the unifying theory, the discernable influence of personal and organizational variables, and (...) the importance of the issue to the managers in determining their emphasis on the ethical and legal values of their judgments. Focused on these needs, the current research combines social identity theory with empirical findings from business ethics research. This theory building initiative framed hypothesis-driven research to investigate the influences on managers’ emphasis on ethical and legal values in making business judgments. An empirical research study was conducted involving 252 practicing managers who judged 12 newsworthy business events. Data was collected on the managers’ individual factors, on the groups that influence their judgments, and on the importance that the managers place on ethics and legality in judging the 12 scenarios. The research findings contribute to theory development (1) By successfully utilizing a blended extension of social identity and issue-contingent theories to understand managers’ judgments, and (2) By providing evidence on the relationships between the perceived importance of an issue and the emphases managers place on ethical and legal values in their judgments. The analysis of the data was extended to provide insights on the needs of employers to tailor management training on legal and ethical decision-making. The participating managers were clustered according to their emphases on Ethical Importance and Legal Importance in judging business situations. Analysis of Variance was then combined with Scheffé Multiple Comparison Tests to assess whether the factors derived from a blended extension of social identity and issue-contingent theories were significantly different across the clusters. The product of this analysis is unique sets of attributes that describe each cluster of managers, and provide an empirical basis for determining training priorities. Finally, the carefully constructed and thoroughly tested 12 research scenarios that form the core of the survey instrument enable their redeployment in subsequent research and their use by practicing executives who wish to compare data provided by their managers to results from the study participants. (shrink)

Emotions, Embodied Cognition and the Adaptive Unconscious argues for the need to consider many other factors, drawn from disciplines such as socio-biology, evolutionary psychology, the study of the emotions, the adaptive unconscious, the senses and conscious deliberation in analysing the complex topography of social action and the making of things. These factors are taken as ecological conditions that shape the contemporary expression of complex societies, not as constraints on human plasticity Without 'foundations', complex society cannot exist nor less evolve. This (...) is the familiar pairing from complexity theory: path dependency and dynamic emergence. Inter-disciplinary and complexity perspectives need to be incorporated into the social sciences. Routinely, sociologists think of social phenomena as a distinct field, expressed in the term: the 'social construction of' without apparent need to refer to other material, biological, psychological, material or ecological conditions or agents. This book shows how the familiar sociological dynamics of identity, solidarity, differentiation and communication are shaped through the persistent interaction of unconscious and affective processing with conscious deliberation in newly emergent contexts. It is this re-expression, not the surpassing, of human characteristics in contemporary social action that needs to re-inform a complex, ecological approach to the theory and methodologies of the social sciences. The book is intended for a postgraduate/research audience and doctoral students to introduce and synthesise inter-disciplinary contributions to research into complexity theory in the social sciences. (shrink)

This essay defines and critiques ‘methodocentrism’, the belief that predetermined research methods are the determining factor in the validity and importance of educational research. By examining research in science studies and posthumanism, the authors explain how this methodocentrism disenables research from taking account of problems and non-human actants that are presumed to be of no importance or value in existing social science research methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative. Building from a critique of these methods as profoundly anthropocentric, the authors examine (...) three crucial problematics in which methodocentrism functions in educational research: the institutionalization of graduate training, a wide-spread privileging of the visual, and the seeming necessity of ‘data’ in social scientific research methodologies. Ultimately, this article does not reject the necessity of particular studies having methods—rigorous, philosophically grounded approaches to problems in the world—but it argues that the belief that methods must be selected from existing options and assembled before approaching the ‘objects’ of study is not only a form of bad science, it is also deeply implicated in anthropocentric and colonialist politics. Instead, what research requires today is a thorough rethinking of the very distinction between subject and object and a renewed questioning of how agency functions in specific research settings. (shrink)

The apparently simple question, ‘Does philosophy of education have a future?’, is without a simple answer. Like so many other questions, it all depends on what we mean, and in this case, what we mean by the expression ‘philosophy of education’. I shall look at it in all of three ways: as a social institution, as an academic activity and as an intellectual pursuit. By doing so, it will become evident that consideration of each of them in turn will give (...) somewhat different answers, which not only adds to the complexity of the question, but also adds to the richness of the answer. From this we, as individuals and as members of a particular community, can begin to reflect on the sort of future philosophy of education might have and what, if anything, we ought to do about it. (shrink)

A fundamental issue concerning the treatment of meaning in context is how to deal with the extremely flexible relationship that appears to hold between descriptions, which are taken as the exchange...

This book offers geographical perspectives on the condition of the United States at the outset of the 21st century. It compares the American ideals of liberty, equality, individual opportunity, and social improvement with the contemporary condition of the regions, states and localities - the ideal American space with its reality as a place. It uses the public standard provided by the official ideology of the United States to see how well things are really going.

Abstract:I argue for taking John Dewey's pluralistic ethics as a starting point, or embedded practice, from and in which technological innovations are conceptualized, critiqued, designed, tested, and eventually implemented. Dewey reconstructs human reason into operational intelligence where all behavior becomes gradually imaginative. I take Dewey's view of moral deliberation as a basis for a responsible process-based methodology combining creative technological design with the training of imaginative prospection. I further use Dewey's conception of technology that holds that implements, but also (...) ideas and concepts are tools, forms of technology. I end by looking at the educational impact for the creative industries. (shrink)

This volume is a state-of-the-art review of the evidence and theory supporting the existence and significance of automatic processes in our daily lives, with chapters by the leading researchers in this field today.

Ernest Gellner was a multilingual polymath who set the agenda in the study of nationalism and the sociology of Islam for an entire generation of academics and students. This definitive biography follows his trajectory from his early years in Prague, Paris and England to international success as a philosopher and public intellectual. Known both for his highly integrated philosophy of modernity and for combining a respect for nationalism with an appreciation for science, Gellner was passionate in his defence of reason (...) against every for of relativism. (shrink)

Embodied cognitive science holds that cognitive processes are deeply and inescapably rooted in our bodily interactions with the world. Our finite, contingent, and mortal embodiment may be not only supportive, but in some cases even constitutive of emotions, thoughts, and experiences. My discussion here will work outward from the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology of the brain to a nervous system which extends to the boundaries of the body. It will extend to nonneural aspects of embodiment and even beyond the boundaries of (...) the body to prosthetics of various kinds, including symbioses with a broad array of cultural artifacts, our symbolic niche, and our relationships with other embodied human beings. While cognition may not always be situated, its origins are embedded in temporally and spatially limited activities. Cognitive work also can be off-loaded to the body and to the environment in service of action, tool use, group cognition, and social coordination. This can blur the boundaries between brain areas, brain and body, and body and environment, transforming our understanding of mind and personhood to provide a different grounding for faith traditions in general, and of the historically dualist Christian tradition in particular. (shrink)

Advance directives such as living wills are attractive in that they give us a sense of control over our futures. But they also tend to obscure conflicts between a patient's competent wishes and later, incompetent interests. They allow caregivers to avoid evaluating quality of life in assessing the best interests of incompetent patients.

Two putative functions of emotion experience ? its roles in intentional action and in social understanding ? were investigated using a group of individuals (repressors) known to have impaired anxiety experience. Repressors, low-anxious, high-anxious, and defensive high-anxious individuals were asked to give a public presentation, and then given the opportunity to avoid the presentation. Repressors were the group most likely to avoid giving the presentation, but were the least likely to give an emotional explanation for their avoidance. By contrast, they (...) were not less likely than other groups to provide negative emotional explanations of another person?s behaviour in a film clip. We concluded that: (1) repressors are impaired in self- but not in other-explanation using emotion, implying that ?simulation? is not the method used by repressors to ground their folk psychology, (2) the intentional avoidance shown by repressors is indicative of some intact first-order phenomenal anxiety experience but that they lack second-order awareness of this anxiety experience. (shrink)

This article examines the role of emotion experience in both rational action and self-knowledge. A key distinction is made between emotion experiences of which we are unaware, and those of which we are aware. The former motivate action and color our view of the world, but they do not do so in a rational way, and their nonreflective nature obscures self-understanding. The article provides arguments and evidence to support the view that emotion experiences contribute to rational action only if one (...) is appropriately aware of them (because only then does one have the capacity to inhibit one's emotional reactions). Furthermore, it is argued that awareness of emotion increases self-knowledge because it is a source of information about our biases. (shrink)

This paper explores research in educational psychology and learning theory in a search for insights to enhance business ethics training Useful educational principles uncovered are then applied to the development of an ethics training initiative for sales professionals. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research to help enrich business ethics training.