Ethical decision-making is central to the practice of construction engineering and management. This is no more evident than in the twenty-first century, when the construction industry must function in very diverse organizational contexts. Whilst construction companies pursue projects in international markets, many investors are buying or forming joint ventures with domestic companies. New and varied professional attitudes have recently arrived in western markets such as the United States and Australia because construction companies are increasingly employing managers from developing nations to (...) undertake commercial and infrastructure engineering projects. In many developing countries the construction industry is vulnerable to unethical behavior or corruption – vulnerability in part because of differences in culture and managerial systems across countries; and this diversity is manifest in the different perspectives of professional ethics and professional practice. Importantly, professionals in construction engineering must be aware of these differences; however current ethics education for engineering professionals generally lacks global components. In this chapter, emphasis is placed upon professional registration, including mandatory awareness of professional ethics, as an imperative for the welfare of world citizens; discussion on the nature of the construction industry and globalized trends emphasizes why ethics and professional education must be integrated within civil and construction engineering and management curricula. Only then we can anticipate an appropriate educational foundation for professional registration of the international engineer. (shrink)

At the dawn of Europe, an extraordinary Greek philosopher-engineer--biologist named Aristotle strove to develop a code that the good person could live by. Aristotle's concepts have much resonance with us today. Although there are differences in the way in which we perceive things, basically we all share the same aspirations and needs.This new edition will be of value to the globally-focused engineer and scientist; it includes case studies from both developed and developing nations to help students and practitioners unravel the (...) complexities of ethical practice in the 21st Century. It is testament to the global and indefatigable nature of our scientific community that 2,300 years after Aristotle, we might derive the same conclusions as he did. (shrink)

Lists of species underpin many fields of human endeavour, but there are currently no universally accepted principles for deciding which biological species should be accepted when there are alternative taxonomic treatments (and, by extension, which scientific names should be applied to those species). As improvements in information technology make it easier to communicate, access, and aggregate biodiversity information, there is a need for a framework that helps taxonomists and the users of taxonomy decide which taxa and names should be used (...) by society whilst continuing to encourage taxonomic research that leads to new species discoveries, new knowledge of species relationships, and the refinement of existing species concepts. Here, we present 10 principles that can underpin such a governance framework, namely (i) the species list must be based on science and free from nontaxonomic considerations and interference, (ii) governance of the species list must aim for community support and use, (iii) all decisions about list composition must be transparent, (iv) the governance of validated lists of species is separate from the governance of the names of taxa, (v) governance of lists of accepted species must not constrain academic freedom, (vi) the set of criteria considered sufficient to recognise species boundaries may appropriately vary between different taxonomic groups but should be consistent when possible, (vii) a global list must balance conflicting needs for currency and stability by having archived versions, (viii) contributors need appropriate recognition, (ix) list content should be traceable, and (x) a global listing process needs both to encompass global diversity and to accommodate local knowledge of that diversity. We conclude by outlining issues that must be resolved if such a system of taxonomic list governance and a unified list of accepted scientific names generated are to be universally adopted. (shrink)

Sir John Eccles, a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner who has devoted his scientific life to the study of the mammalian brain, tells the story of how we came to be, not only as animals at the end of the hominid evolutionary line, but also as human persons possessed of reflective consciousness.

In a world plagued by disagreement and conflict one might expect that the exact sciences of logic and mathematics would provide a safe harbor. In fact these disciplines are rife with internal divisions between different, often incompatible, systems. Do these disagreements admit of resolution? Can such resolution be achieved without disturbing assumptions that the theorems of logic and mathematics state objective truths about the real world? In this original and historically rich book John Woods explores apparently intractable disagreements in (...) logic and the foundations of mathematics and sets out conflict resolution strategies that evade or disarm these stalemates. An important sub-theme of the book is the extent to which pluralism in logic and the philosophy of mathematics undermines realist assumptions. This book makes an important contribution to such areas of philosophy as logic, philosophy of language and argumentation theory. It will also be of interest to mathematicians and computer scientists. (shrink)

John Coggon argues that the important question for analysts in the fields of public health law and ethics is 'what makes health public?' He offers a conceptual and analytic scrutiny of the salient issues raised by this question, outlines the concepts entailed in, or denoted by, the term 'public health' and argues why and how normative analyses in public health are inquiries in political theory. The arguments expose and explain the political claims inherent in key works in public health (...) ethics. Coggon then develops and defends a particular understanding of political liberalism, describing its implications for critical study of public health policies and practices. Covering important works from legal, moral, and political theory, public health, public health law and ethics, and bioethics, this is a foundational text for scholars, practitioners and policy bodies interested in freedoms, rights and responsibilities relating to health. (shrink)

Several psychological experiments have suggested that concepts can influence perceived color (e.g., Delk and Fillenbaum in Am J Psychol 78(2):290–293, 1965, Hansen et al. in Nat Neurosci 9(11):1367–1368, 2006, Olkkonen et al. in J Vis 8(5):1–16, 2008). Observers tend to assign typical colors to objects even when the objects do not have those colors. Recently, these findings were used to argue that perceptual experience is cognitively penetrable (Macpherson 2012). This interpretation of the experiments has far-reaching consequences: it implies that the (...) way we think of objects determines how we see them, thus threatening the role of perception in justifying beliefs. In this paper, I show that the psychological findings can be accounted for without admitting cognitive penetrability. An underestimated but key feature of the experiments is that observers had to judge colors in borderline cases, in conditions of reduced acuity, or on the basis of color-concepts instead of matching. Such judgments are sensitive to the form of bias that Tversky and Kahneman (Science 185:1124–1131, 1974) have termed ‘anchoring’. Adopting a suggestion from Raffman (Philos Rev 103(1):41–74, 1994), I argue that the way subjects in the experiments think of the objects could affect their color judgments without altering their color experiences. (shrink)

_A major theoretical statement by a distinguished political scholar explains why a policy of liberal hegemony is doomed to fail_ In this major statement, the renowned international-relations scholar John Mearsheimer argues that liberal hegemony, the foreign policy pursued by the United States since the Cold War ended, is doomed to fail. It makes far more sense, he maintains, for Washington to adopt a more restrained foreign policy based on a sound understanding of how nationalism and realism constrain great powers (...) abroad. It is widely believed in the West that the United States should spread liberal democracy across the world, foster an open international economy, and build institutions. This policy of remaking the world in America’s image is supposed to protect human rights, promote peace, and make the world safe for democracy. But this is not what has happened. Instead, the United States has ended up as a highly militarized state fighting wars that undermine peace, harm human rights, and threaten liberal values at home. Mearsheimer tells us why this has happened. (shrink)

This book, first published in 1990, takes a critical look at the major assumptions which support critical thinking programs and discovers many unresolved questions which threaten their viability. John McPeck argues that some of these assumptions are incoherent or run counter to common sense, while others are unsupported by the available empirical evidence. This title will be of interest to students of the philosophy of education.

Kant -- drawing on his eighteenth-century predecessors -- provided a discerning and powerful characterization of what biologists had to explain in organic form. His difference from the rest is that he opined that was impossible to explain it. Its ’inscrutability’ was intrinsic. The third ’Critique’ essentially proposed the reduction of biology to a kind of prescientific descriptivism, doomed never to attain authentic scientificity. By contrast, for Locke, and ’a fortiori’ for Buffon and his followers, ’intrinsic purposiveness’ was a fact of (...) the matter about concrete biological phenomena; the features of internal self-regulation were hypotheses arising out of actual research practice. The difference comes most vividly to light once we recognize Kant’s distinction of the concept of organism from the concept of life. (edited). (shrink)

The great biologist Louis Pasteur suppressed 'awkward' data because it didn't support the case he was making. John Snow, the 'first epidemiologist' was doing nothing others had not done before. Gregor Mendel, the supposed 'founder of genetics' never grasped the fundamental principles of 'Mendelian' genetics. Joseph Lister's famously clean hospital wards were actually notorious dirty. And Einstein's general relativity was only 'confirmed' in 1919 because an eminent British scientist cooked his figures. These are just some of the revelations explored (...) in this book. Drawing on current history of science scholarship, Fabulous Science shows that many of our greatest heroes of science were less than honest about their experimental data and not above using friends in high places to help get their ideas accepted. It also reveals that the alleged revolutionaries of the history of science were often nothing of the sort. Prodigiously able they may have been, but the epithet of the 'man before his time' usually obscures vital contributions made their unsung contemporaries and the intrinsic merits of ideas they overturned. These distortions of the historical record mostly arise from our tendency to read the present back into the past. But in many cases, scientists owe their immortality to a combination of astonishing effrontery and their skills as self-promoters. (shrink)

Nowadays, science is treated an instrument of policy, serving the material interests of government and commerce. Traditionally, however, it also has important non-instrumental social functions, such as the creation of critical scenarios and world pictures, the stimulation of rational attitudes, and the production of enlightened practitioners and independent experts. The transition from academic to ‘post-academic’ science threatens the performance of these functions, which are inconsistent with strictly instrumental modes of knowledge production. In particular, expert objectivity is negated by entanglement with (...) political and commercial interests. We cannot go back to the old academic model for science, but need to consider how to maintain its vital non-instrumental roles. (shrink)

A passage on the origin of property in Grotius, De iure praedae , pp. 226-230 [Note 1] seems to contain echoes of the controversy between pope John XXII and William of Ockham on Franciscan poverty. Grotius's note (b) on p. 227 refers to the decretals..

Discussing the relations between logic and probability, this book compares classical 17th- and 18th-century theories of probability with contemporary theories, explores recent logical theories of probability, and offers a new account of probability as a part of logic.

This thesis investigates how children ought to be influenced with respect to religion. To answer this question, I develop a theory of cognitive curriculum content and apply it to the teaching of religious beliefs and beliefs about religions. By ‘a theory of cognitive curriculum content,’ I mean a theory that determines which truth-claims belong on the curriculum, and whether or not teachers ought to promote students’ belief of those claims. I extend this theory to help educators to decide which attitudes (...) address on the curriculum and whether or not to promote them. I then apply this to the case of religious attitudes and attitudes about religions. I argue that where having or failing to have a certain attitude makes a significant difference to students’ lives, it ought to be addressed by curricula. Where failing to have the attitude is irrational, this failure ought to be remedied; where having the attitude is irrational, that attitude ought to be discouraged; and where neither having nor failing to have the attitude is irrational, that attitude ought to be introduced and discussed without encouragement or discouragement. In so far as is practicable, educators should aim to acquaint students with arguments for and against having these attitudes and initiate them into the practice of assessing their soundness. The implications of this theory for extra-curricular influence, such as upbringing in the home, are also explored. (shrink)

The presence of a kinship link between nuclear families is the strongest predictor of interhousehold sharing in an indigenous, predominantly Dolgan food-sharing network in northern Russia. Attributes such as the summed number of hunters in paired households also account for much of the variation in sharing between nuclear families. Differences in the number of hunters in partner households, as well as proximity and producer/consumer ratios of households, were investigated with regard to cost-benefit models. The subset of households involved in reciprocal (...) meal sharing is 26 of 84 household host-guest pairs. The frequency of reciprocal meal sharing between families in this subset is positively correlated with average household relatedness. The evolution of cooperation through clustering may illuminate the relationship between kinship and reciprocity at this most intimate level of food sharing. (shrink)

Research scientists are trained to produce specialised bricks of knowledge, but not to look at the whole building. Increasing public concern about the social role of science is forcing science students to think about what they are actually learning to do. What sort of knowledge will they be producing, and how will it be used? Science education now requires serious consideration of these philosophical and ethical questions. But the many different forms of knowledge produced by modern science cannot be covered (...) by any single philosophical principle. Sociology and cognitive psychology are also needed to understand what the sciences have in common and the significance of what they generate. Again, traditional modes of ethical analysis cannot deal adequately with the values, norms and interests activated by present-day technoscience without reference to its sociological, political and economic dimensions. (shrink)

This volume of the collected writings of John Sallis presents his lecture courses on Immanuel Kant. Each course takes up one of Kant's three Critiques, and thus the text as a whole treats the entirety of the Kantian critical project. Sallis displays here, as he does in all of his lecture courses, an uncanny ability to open up dense philosophical texts. Sallis patiently and successfully lays out the issues-theoretical, practical, aesthetic, and philosophical-and his critical approach to them. For students (...) and seasoned scholars who require a step-by-step interpretation of Kant, these texts by Sallis are attuned to the spirit, structure, and principle of these foundational works. (shrink)

It is based on extensive use of the twelve volumes of Ortega's Obras completas, the eighty microfilm reels of his archive in the Library of Congress, and his private library of fifteen hundred volumes in Madrid.

To define and explore contemporary philosophical critiques of Christian belief is the purpose of this book, which arises out of a conference held at Princeton Theological Seminary. In a frank and extensive confrontation, outstanding philosophers and theologians met to search for greater clarity on some important issues in the philosophy of religion. The book contains the papers written for the conference, the prepared criticism, and excerpts from the debates. The discussions revolved around the experiential grounds of religious belief; the question (...) as to what conclusions may legitimately be drawn from religious experience; the "emptiness" or otherwise of Christian belief and ethic in the modern world; the Freudian explanation of faith; and the Barthian defense of Christianity. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, George Santayana, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead: each of these individuals is an original and historically important thinker; each is an essential contributor to the period, perspective, and tradition of classical American philosophy; and each speaks directly, imaginatively, critically, and wisely to our contemporary global society, its distant possibilities for improvement, and its massive, pressing problems. From the initiative of pragmatism in approximately 1870 to Dewey's final work after World War II, (...) classical American philosophy has come to represent the critical articulation of attitudes, outlooks, and forms of life imbedded in the culture from which it arose. John Stuhr brings together the works of these foremost thinkers to present a comprehensive collection in American philosophy. Extensive introductory essays, written especially for this volume by leading scholars of the subject, provide not only the bibliographical and cultural contexts necessary to a full appreciation of each thinker, but also original critical and interpretive philosophical observations. (shrink)

In Faithful Reason, the noted Catholic philosopher John Haldane explores various aspects of intellectual and practical life from a perspective inspired by Catholic thought and informed by his distinctive philosophical approach: "Analytical Thomism." Haldane's discussions of ethics, politics, education, art, social philosophy and other themes explain why Catholic thought is still relevant in today's world, and show how the legacy of Thomas Aquinas can benefit modern philosophy in its efforts to answer fundamental questions about humanity and its place within (...) nature. Drawing on a Catholic philosophical tradition that is committed to concepts of the world's intrinsic intelligibility and the objectivity of truth, Faithful Reason's bold and insightful perspectives provide rich matter for debate, and food for further thought. (shrink)

This is a translation of the chapter on perception of Kumarilabhatta's magnum opus, the Slokavarttika, one of the central texts of the Hindu response to the criticism of the logical-epistemological school of Buddhist thought. In an extensive commentary, the author explains the course of the argument from verse to verse and alludes to other theories of classical Indian philosophy and other technical matters. Notes to the translation and commentary go further into the historical and philosophical background of Kumarila's ideas. The (...) book provides an introduction to the history and the development of Indian epistemology, a synopsis of Kumarila's work and an analysis of its argument. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to sketch the evolution of type theory from its beginnings early in the last century to the present day. Central to the development of the type concept has been its close relationship with set theory to begin with and later its even more intimate relationship with category theory. Since it is effectively impossible to describe these relationships (especially in regard to the latter) with any pretensions to completeness within the space of a comparatively short article, (...) I have elected to offer detailed technical presentations of just a few important instances. (shrink)

A comprehensive exploration of pragmatic themes emerging from neuroscientific research,illustrating why neurophilosophy should take this advancing pragmatist direction seriously.

This volume in the St Andrews series contains a collection of essays from leading authors regarding the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, in particular issues in mind and metaphysics, and can be considered a partner work to 2016's The Moral Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe.

Does strolling through an art museum, admiring the old masters, improve us morally and spiritually? Would government subsidies of "high art" (such as big-city opera houses) be better spent on local community art projects? In What Good are the Arts? John Carey--one of Britain's most respected literary critics--offers a delightfully skeptical look at the nature of art. In particular, he cuts through the cant surrounding the fine arts, debunking claims that the arts make us better people or that judgements (...) about art are anything more than personal opinion. Indeed, Carey argues that there are no absolute values in the arts and that we cannot call other people's aesthetic choices "mistaken" or "incorrect," however much we dislike them. Along the way, Carey reveals the flaws in the aesthetic theories of everyone from Emanuel Kant to Arthur C. Danto, and he skewers the claims of "high-art advocates" such as Jeannette Winterson. But Carey does argue strongly for the value of art as an activity and for the superiority of one art in particular: literature. Literature, he contends, is the only art capable of reasoning, and the only art that can criticize. Language is the medium that we use to convey ideas, and the usual ingredients of other arts--objects, noises, light effects--cannot replicate this function. Literature has the ability to inspire the mind and the heart towards practical ends far better than any work of conceptual art. Here then is a lively and stimulating invitation to debate the value of art, a provocative book that will pique the interest of anyone who loves painting, music, or literature. (shrink)

IN A PREVIOUS study entitled, "Time, Times and the 'Right Time': Chronos and Kairos," I explored the distinction between these two aspects of time and their relations to each other. I wish to return to the topic in this paper, building on my previous discussion but bringing in some new dimensions that were unknown to me earlier on. I did not know, for example, that kairos, although it has metaphysical, historical, ethical and esthetic applications, is a concept whose original home, (...) so to speak, was in the ancient rhetorical traditions. A recent study is aimed at recovering this important idea in the present situation. It is not insignificant that, while kairos has important philosophical implications, students of rhetoric have not been alone in neglecting it as can be seen from the fact that it is not listed in the four volume Dictionary of the History of Ideas, edited by Philip Wiener, nor is it to be found in The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon, edited by Mortimer Adler. One reason for the omission is no doubt the absence of any cognate word in English for kairos whereas its partner, chronos, appears in a host of forms throughout any English dictionary. The only exception that occurs to me is the quite rare word 'Kairotic' which is listed only in the most complete dictionaries. The loss of the concept of kairos is doubly unfortunate for, on the one hand, the idea has been of enormous significance in the past figuring essentially, for instance, in the religious traditions of the West, and, on the other hand, it expresses a most important feature of temporal process which, despite exceptions here and there, is not expressed in the concept of chronos. It is with these facts in mind that I am attempting to rehabilitate, as it were, the kairos aspect of time and to show its philosophical importance. (shrink)

This comprehensive collection, bringing together significant essays by leading philosophers of the twentieth century, represents one prominent school of American thought philosophic naturalism. Naturalism holds that nature is objective and can be studied to gain knowledge that is not determined by methodology, perspective, belief, or theory. For the naturalist, "nature" is an all-encompassing concept; nothing is other than natural and any notion of a supernatural realm is rejected. Naturalism, however, cannot be equated with materialistic reductionism or strict determinism. Certain nonmaterial (...) aspects of human existence thoughts, feelings, meanings, values, beliefs, ideals, and free will are included within the scope of the naturalist's approach. (shrink)

This study is the first modern account of the development of philosophy during the Carolingian Renaissance. In the late eighth century, Dr Marenbon argues, theologians were led by their enthusiasm for logic to pose themselves truly philosophical questions. The central themes of ninth-century philosophy - essence, the Aristotelian Categories, the problem of Universals - were to preoccupy thinkers throughout the Middle Ages. The earliest period of medieval philosophy was thus a formative one. This work is based on a fresh study (...) of the manuscript sources. The thoughts of scholars such as Alcuin, Candidus, Fredegisus, Ratramnus of Corbie, John Scottus Eriugena and Heiric of Auxerre is examined in detail and compared with their sources; and a wide variety of evidence is used to throw light on the milieu in which these thinkers flourished. Full critical editions of an important body of early medieval philosophical material, much of it never before published, are included. (shrink)

We present several new studies focusing on “salience effects”—the decreased tendency to attribute knowledge to someone when an unrealized possibility of error has been made salient in a given conversational context. These studies suggest a complicated picture of epistemic universalism: there may be structural universals, universal epistemic parameters that influence epistemic intuitions, but that these parameters vary in such a way that epistemic intuitions, in either their strength or propositional content, can display patterns of genuine cross-cultural diversity.

Finance Ethics is not just a moral critique of the finance paradigm, arguing that self-interested profit making must be constrained by ethics. Rather, it is a critique from within that paradigm, in which truth becomes a rational mechanism to enforce contracts, and virtuous behavior is shown to make the most business sense.

selves than we care about others, so we are more likely to attend to and interpret our own activities than we are likely to attend to and interpret the activities of others. Yet, it is also a common notion that a person has the least knowledge of his or her own biases or prejudices, and that it is often a naive observer, who can better interpret the meaning of someone's actions when such biases are involved.