An analysis of student learning with the LISP tutor indicates that while LISP is complex, learning it is simple. The key to factoring out the complexity of LISP is to monitor the learning of the 500 productions in the LISP tutor which describe the programming skill. The learning of these productions follows the power‐law learning curve typical of skill acquisition. There is transfer from other programming experience to the extent that this programming experience involves the same productions. Subjects appear to (...) differ only on the general dimensions of how well they acquire the productions and how well they retain the productions. Instructional manipulations such as remediation, content of feedback, and timing of feedback are effective to the extent they give students more practice programming, and explain to students why correct solutions work. (shrink)

It is well known that John Henry Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine contains strong autobiographical elements. Equally, the essay is an important 19th century contribution to the development of the history of theology. Another fact is lesswell known: in the case of Newman, biography and the history of ideas go hand in hand. This article aims to explain how Newman’s personal search for a spiritual home influenced his conception of the development of Christian thought. This is (...) done by analysing Newman’s own writing as well as looking at the critical appraisal of Newman’s thought by Rowan Williams. Both authors share an interest in the development of theological ideas but differ in their opinion on the necessity of continuity in this development. (shrink)

Philosophical theories of fairness propose to divide a good that several individuals have a claim to in proportion to the strength of their respective claims. We suggest that currently, these theories face a dilemma when dealing with a good that is indivisible. On the one hand, theories of fairness that use weighted lotteries are either of limited applicability or fall prey to an objection by Brad Hooker. On the other hand, accounts that do without weighted lotteries fall prey to three (...) fairness paradoxes. We demonstrate that division methods from apportionment theory, which has hitherto been ignored by philosophical theories of fairness, can be used to provide fair division for indivisible goods without weighted lotteries and without fairness paradoxes. (shrink)

In contrast to the views put forth by Stein & Glasier, we support the use of inbred strains of rodents in studies of the immunobiology of neural transplants. Inbred strains demonstrate homology of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). Virtually all experimental work in transplantation immunology is performed using inbred strains, yet very few published studies of immune rejection in intracerebral grafts have used inbred animals.

Under the sumptuous immensity of the sky, the snow covered the endless forests, the frozen rivers, the plains of an immense country, obliterating the landmarks, the accidents of the ground, levelling everything under its uniform whiteness, like a monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history.Increased interest in the experience of space in literature in recent decades has resulted in numerous commentaries on such topics as colonial space, geographical space, gendered space, liminal space, psychic space, and signifying space. (...) In fact, Con Coroneos suggests that Homi Bhabha’s “DissemiNation”1 considers as many as forty different types of space.2Conrad studies have not been silent during this... (shrink)

This book offers a sustained engagement with the writings of the increasingly influential French philosopher and writer on literature, Gilles Deleuze, offering an introduction to his fascinating body of work and emphasizing its multiple possibilities for literary study. Deleuze offers a 'philosophy of becoming' whose many aspects are gaining increasing importance in a variety of disciplines both on the Continent and in Anglo-American circles. Accordingly, the first part of the book stresses the distinctiveness of Deleuze's work, setting out its provenance (...) and recurrent concerns, and developing an account of its relevance for literary theory and literary criticism. The second part of the book provides, in these latter contexts, close readings of several late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works of fiction by Hardy, Gissing, Conrad and Woolf. Above all, Deleuze's work opens up ways of reading that enable an articulation of fundamental ethical and effective issues explored and staged within literary texts. (shrink)

This article examined the story of the beheading of John the Baptist according to the Gospel of Mark (6:14–29) and drew lessons for the situation of politically motivated violence perpetrated by the youth in Zimbabwe. Politically motivated violence in Zimbabwe is a well-documented problem that negatively impacts on human rights. The article used the historical-critical method in its re-reading of the text in question and the ‘youth bulge theory’ as theoretical framework. Documentary analysis was employed to solicit data from (...) various reports, documents and the Internet. Results showed that it was mostly the poor and unemployed youth who engaged in acts of politically motivated violence and did so on behalf of political parties and leaders. Based on these findings, it is argued that just as both Herod and Herodias abused their power by manipulating the daughter of Herodias in their plot to eliminate John the Baptist, so did powerful Zimbabwean politicians and leaders manipulate economically and socially vulnerable youth for their own political expediency. Contribution: Drawing from Mark 6:14–29, this article presents an application of the New Testament text of Mark 6:14–29 to the politically motivated violence in Zimbabwe in order to promote responsible leadership for a peaceful and tolerant Zimbabwean society. It also contributes to the argument that New Testament texts are intrinsically political documents, which scholars should try to unpack. (shrink)

We present the first comprehensive theory of fairness that conceives of fairness as having two dimensions: a comparative and an absolute one. The comparative dimension of fairness has traditionally been the main interest of Broomean fairness theories. It has been analysed as satisfying competing individual claims in proportion to their respective strengths. And yet, many key contributors to Broomean fairness agree that ‘absolute’ fairness is important as well. We make this concern precise by introducing the Fairness formula and the absolute (...) priority rule and analyse their implications for comparative fairness. (shrink)

_The Literary Wittgenstein_ is a stellar collection of articles relating the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to core problems in the theory and philosophy of literature. Amid growing recognition that Wittgenstein's philosophy has important implications for literary studies, this book brings together twenty-one articles by the most prominent figures in the field. Eighteen of the articles are published here for the first time. _The Literary Wittgenstein_ applies the approach of Wittgenstein to core areas of literary theory, including poetry, deconstruction, the ethical (...) value of literature, and the nature and logic of fictional discourse. The literary dimension of Wittgenstein's own writings is also explored, such as the authorial strategy of the _Tractatus_, and writing and method in the _Philosophical Investigations_. Major literary figures discussed in the book include William Faulkner, Joseph Conrad, and Friedrich Hölderlin. By mapping out the foundations of a new approach to literature, _The Literary Wittgenstein_ is essential reading for anyone interested in the relevance and application of Wittgenstein's thought to literary theory, aesthetics, and the philosophy of language and logic. (shrink)

The most striking aspect of Dr. Demetracopoulos’ contribution is the evidence for how unoriginal was Scholarios’ Aristotelian scholarship. The chief source of Scholarios’ commentary on the Parva naturalia was Theodore Metochites, whose ultimate source in turn was Michael of Ephesus. So once the Aldine Press had published the text of Michael of Ephesus’ commentary in 1527 and once Conrad Gesner’s Latin translation of Michael of Ephesus’s commentary was printed in 1541 and Gentian Hervet’s translation of Theodore Metochites’ commentary in (...) 1559, the Renaissance had rendered Scholarios’ commentary otiose. (shrink)

Why was the road to EMBL 'more difficult than anticipated', as Francois Jacob put it? The standard account, advanced by scientists, is that it was because molecular biology did not require big, complex and expensive equipment like high-energy physics. European governments therefore lacked the incentive to pool their efforts and to build together a supranational laboratory 'modeled on CERN'. This account is one-sided. It overlooks the fact that many scientists themselves were less than enthusiastic about building a European molecular biology (...) laboratory in the early 1960s. Taking John Kendrew and Conrad Waddington as representative of two different and opposing views on how best to promote molecular biology in Europe at this time, I argue that a supranational laboratory project could only come to fruition once the field had been entrenched in national institutional niches (or after determined efforts to do so had failed). Until that time, the usual fear that a European laboratory would drain essential human and financial resources away from incipient or planned programmes in universities and national research centres dominated the horizons of most molecular biologists in Europe. Hence their preference to first establish EMBO to coordinate existing activities and only later to set up a supranational laboratory. (shrink)

Albert Einstein read philosophy. It was not an affectation of a celebrity-physicist trying to show his adoring public that he was no mere technician, but a cultured thinker. It was an interest in evidence from the start. In 1902, Einstein was a poorly paid patent examiner in Bern seeking to make a few extra Francs by offering tutorials in physics. Maurice Solovine answered the advertisement. The tutorials quickly vanished when they discovered their common fascinations in reading and talking. They were (...) soon joined in their raucous meetings by Conrad Habicht, completing what they dubbed their “Olympia Academy.” Their explorations where wide-ranging, devouring texts and sausages with gusto. They read the philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists of the day, including Pearson, Mach, Hill, Hume, Spinoza, Avenarius, Cifford and Poincaré. (shrink)

This article considers the capacity of the military body to appropriate various modes of power, personnel and material, in terms of the tache. In particular we examine the (post)colonial military body, especially in Southeast Asia, and its intimate relations to the detachment of the colonial state from the colonial body and attachment to the global regimes of Cold War and neo-liberal post Cold War processes. We do so through a wide range of ‘texts’– including a Conrad novella, a Singaporean (...) documentary series, transformers (toys), and international money laundering – in which the defining logic that the (post)colonial military body deploys is its capacity to attach and detach at will. A series of related and homologous attachments and detachments proceed from this capacity: the power of sovereignty, the generation and circulation of capital, and the transformation of the colonial military body into the postcolonial military body. However, it is also the logic of this empowering connectivity that imposes intractable limits on the desire for ultimate control, as the tache always indicates something beyond the corpus, something outside the locus of control. (shrink)

Medieval discussions on rights. Bonaventure -- Godfrey of Fontaines -- Peter John Olivi -- Hervaeus Natalis -- William Ockham -- Richard Fitzralph -- Jean Gerson -- Antoninus of Florence -- The right of the individual. Right as power -- Right as dominion -- Right as a relation -- The species of dominion. The six-fold dominion -- Natural dominion -- Property rights. Justification of private property -- The rights of use (usus) and usufruct (usufructus) -- Ownership (proprietas) and possession (possessio).

C .H. Waddington was one of the founders of the Theoretical Biology Club at Cambridge in the 1930s whose members advanced a philosophy of biology, “organicism,” that would offer an alternative to the reductionism of mechanistic materialism and the obscurity of vitalism in coming to terms with the dynamic, interdependent, and purposeful character of life. This view was embraced in one form or another by E. S. Russell, John Scott Haldane, C. Lloyd Morgan, Lawrence J. Henderson, C. D. Broad, (...) and Alfred North Whitehead. Waddington, in particular, was devoted to the integration of genetics, development, and evolution within the context of theoretical biology. This article explains the influence of Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy of organism on C. H. Waddington's work. (shrink)

Conrad Gessner was town physician and lecturer at the Zwinglian reformed lectorium in Zurich. His approach towards the world and mankind was centred on his preoccupation with the human soul, an object of study that had challenged classical writers such as Aristotle and Galen, and which remained as important in post-Reformation debate. Writing commentaries on Aristotles De Anima was part of early-modern natural philosophy education at university and formed the preparatory step for studying medicine. This article uses the case (...) study of Gessners commentary on De Anima to explore how Gessners readers prioritised De Animas information. Gessners intention was to provide the students of philosophy and medicine with the most current and comprehensive thinking. His readers responses raise questions about evolving discussions in natural philosophy and medicine that concerned the foundations of preventive healthcare on the one hand, and of anatomically specified pathological medicine on the other, and Gessners part in helping these develop. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Preliminary remarksSince John Capistran is among the most relevant figures of the fifteenth century, not only for the Franciscan Order but more generally for political and religious life , the very substantial corpus of his correspondence has a long history as well as a long historiography. The approximately seven hundred letters he sent or received beginning in 1418 until his death in 1456, were discovered and studied one (...) at a time over the centuries, for quite different reasons and with different aims.Certainly the gradual process of discovering and studying these documents is marked by some milestones. For example, there is the celebration of his canonization process in 1623 , as well as the works of the so-called Capistran Commission. This commission was a team established in 1952 in Rome by the leadership of the Franciscan Order , which was located first in Grottaferrata, College of Quaracchi, then in the Antonianum, and was managed by friars Ottokar Bonmann and Paulis Bédrune.The research archive of Capistrano materials that is housed at the Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure University was brought together through the efforts of Gedeon Gál, OFM. Gedeon had been heading up work on the critical edition of the theological and philosophical writings of William of Ockham at the Institute. His interest in John Capistran came from the fact that he was a member of the Hungarian Franciscan Province of St. John Capistran. The greater part of the material came from the research files of Ottokar Bonmann who died before being able to start any actual editing work for an edition of Capistran. Knowing of Bonmann's work Gedeon asked Conrad Harkins, O.F.M., then director of the Franciscan Institute, to request that Bonmann's research be shipped to the Institute from Rome where it was being stored. Also while Conrad was on sabbatical in Italy, Gedeon asked him to photocopy the manuscript of Capistran's letters copied in the 1600s by Antonio Sessa of Palermo that resides in the library of the Basilica di Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome. That being done the copies were sent to the Franciscan Institute and joined with the Bonmann materials to form the archive. It is a heritage that deserves to be retrieved by scholars, in order to accomplish the work according to modern criteria, where accomplish means to create a final edition.Bonmann was very familiar with the earlier research on these letters and his work reinforces the fact that the edition was an obstacle course. This is the case not only because scholars' sensibilities regarding these kinds of documents changed throughout the centuries, previously viewed as a relic of a saint or an attestation of his sainthood, and – more recently – as a precious source about European history in the first half of the fifteenth century. Despite scholarly interest in the correspondence, it remains unpublished.In fact, the first to have the intention to publish all of the correspondence was Lucas Wadding, who received some materials about these letters at St. Isidore College in Rome, but he could not complete his project although he mentions it in his Annales Minorum. After Wadding many scholars tried to work on the same project but using criteria that – in several cases – are no longer helpful because their methods are out-of-date.For example, as we will soon see, collections such as those provided by Antonio Sessa in the seventeenth or by Atanasio Masci in the eighteenth century, are inspired by hagiographical criteria or, at least, not philological criteria. All of these collections were acquired by the Capistran Commission and then by Ottokar Bonmann who wrote an article on the subject in which.. (shrink)

My basic supposition is that the destruction of the little Jew's face and hands in Vandover and the Brute images the irruption of mere materiality within the scene of writing-that instead of Crane's double process of eliciting and repressing that materiality, what is figured in the shipwreck scene is a single, unstoppable process of materialization, involving both the act of representation and the marking tool and actual page , the result of which can only be the defeat of the very (...) possibility of writing .Here it might be objected that such a reading derives whatever plausibility it has from the comparison with Crane, and in a sense this is true: my claim is precisely that it's only against the background of Crane's seemingly bizarre but, in this regard, normative or centric enterprise that the wider problematic of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary "impressionism" can be made out. In another sense, however, the comparison with Crane involves an appeal to issues—notably that of materialism—which have long been basic to Norris criticism and which the recent work of Walter Benn Michaels has brought to a new level of conceptual sophistication and historical refinement. Specifically, the title essay in Michaels's book, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, interprets both McTeague and Vandover and the Brute in terms of a conflict between materiality and representation that found contemporary expression both in the debates over the gold and silver standards versus paper money and in the vogue for trompe l'oeil painting ." In this regard a crucial moment in Vandover's regression from man to beast is his discovery that, as a painter, he has lost the ability to represent nature three-dimensionally; Michaels treats this development as equivalent to "replac[ing] the painting with nature itself" , and goes on to remark: "But this ... is ultimately a distinction without a difference. Vandover the artist can so easily devolve into Vandover the brute precisely because both artist and brute are already committed to a naturalist ontology—in money, to precious metals; in art, to three-dimensionality. The moral of Vandover's regression, from this standpoint, is that it can only take place because . . . it has already taken place. Discovering that man is a brute, Norris repeats the discovery that paper money is just paper and that a painting of paper money is just paint" . My reading of the shipwreck passage would thus be consistent with what Michaels calls Norris's "trompe l'oeil materialism" , though the nearly sadomasochistic violence of that passage may be taken to imply that materialism's consequences for writing threaten to be even more disastrous than they are for painting. But rather than analyze the role of writing as such in Vandover, which would involve an intricate discussion not just of that novel and McTeague but also of Michaels's essay, I want to turn to another, lesser-known book by Norris, in which a thematic of writing plays a conspicuous and more nearly univocal role: A Man's Woman . Michael Fried is J. R. Herbert Boone Professor of Humanities and director of the Humanities Center at the Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book is Courbet's Realism . He is currently at work on a book to be titled Manet's Modernism. (shrink)

The inaugural title in the new, Open Access series BSPS Open, The Material Theory of Induction will initiate a new tradition in the analysis of inductive inference. The fundamental burden of a theory of inductive inference is to determine which are the good inductive inferences or relations of inductive support and why it is that they are so. The traditional approach is modeled on that taken in accounts of deductive inference. It seeks universally applicable schemas or rules or a single (...) formal device, such as the probability calculus. After millennia of halting efforts, none of these approaches has been unequivocally successful and debates between approaches persist. The Material Theory of Induction identifies the source of these enduring problems in the assumption taken at the outset: that inductive inference can be accommodated by a single formal account with universal applicability. Instead, it argues that that there is no single, universally applicable formal account. Rather, each domain has an inductive logic native to it. Which that is, and its extent, is determined by the facts prevailing in that domain. Paying close attention to how inductive inference is conducted in science and copiously illustrated with real-world examples, The Material Theory of Induction will initiate a new tradition in the analysis of inductive inference. (shrink)

This special issue grew out of a small conference The Known & the Unknown: Exploring Twelfth-Century Philosophy, which was funded by the Carlsberg Foundation, hosted by the Saxo Institute, and held at the University of Copenhagen in April 2018. Its central topic was the many, mostly unexplored, commentaries on Aristotle, Boethius, and Porphyry that constitute the key textual evidence for a fascinating phenomenon that, although it played a pivotal role in the philosophical revival of Western Europe, remains frustratingly underexplored to (...) this day: the logical schools of the twelfth century. The present introduction has two parts. In the first part, John Marenbon lays out the background to this special issue of Vivarium as a whole, explaining both what the philosophical project pursued by twelfth-century logicians was and how, and how far, the historical project of understanding it has progressed over the last two hundred years. In the second part, Heine Hansen briefly presents the issue and its contents. (shrink)

Propositions are (generally taken to be) the semantic values of declarative sentences in context. There is a long history of thinking that an important reason for taking propositions to be structured stems from the fact that the semantic values of such sentences are (typically) compositionally determined. In this paper, I argue that compositionality does not entail, nor provide good evidence for, the claim that propositions are structured. I go on to argue that there is no additional feature of declarative sentences—for (...) example, that they are true or false—that, in conjunction with compositionality, entails or provides good evidence for the claim that the semantic values of those sentences are complex. (shrink)

The so-called paradox of dogmatism has it that it seems that one is both entitled and not entitled to ignore evidence against what one knows. By knowing something, one knows it to be true, and one also knows that there can be no non-misleading evidence against what is true. But to ignore evidence against what one believes – and, surely, one believes what one knows – is to be dogmatic, something one should not be. I argue that there is no (...) genuine paradox here. One's attitude to evidence is governed not by what one knows but by what one thinks one knows. Thinking that one knows something does not entail that it is true. Knowing this, one knows that there may be non-misleading evidence against what one thinks one knows and should be open to examining what purports to be evidence against it. (shrink)

Few outstanding questions in the human behavioral sciences are timelier or more urgently debated than the evolutionary source of religious behaviors and beliefs. Byproduct theorists locate the origins of religion in evolved cognitive defaults and transmission biases. Others have argued that cultural evolutionary processes integrated non-adaptive cognitive byproducts into coherent networks of supernatural beliefs and ritual that encouraged in-group cooperativeness, while adaptationist models assert that the cognitive and behavioral foundations of religion have been selected for at more basic levels. Here, (...) we survey these differing approaches, noting their respective strengths and weaknesses. We then advance a novel model that centers on the ability of language to generate alternative worlds independent of immediate empirical facts, and thus highlight the similarities between religious belief and the modes of cognition that underlie institutions in general. The institutional cognition model of religion accounts for some of the shortcomings of extant approaches and draws attention to the human ability to create non-empirical worlds; that is, worlds that are imaginary. Both religious beliefs and institutional facts—such as jurisdictional borders—are non-empirical assertions, yet they are socially accepted as truths and reified through ritual and behavior. One type of non-empirical, linguistically generated belief—supernatural agent belief—is particularly effective for stabilizing systems of arbitrary norms by rooting them in deontic rather than utilitarian reasoning. The evolutionary roots and continued persistence of religion are thus functions of the capacity for humans to generate cognitive alternatives to empirical reality, and the need to stably coordinate those alternative conceptions. (shrink)

In this anthology, distinguished scholars--Thomas Nagel, T.M. Scanlon, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Samuela Scheffler, Conrad D. Johnson, Bernard Williams, Peter Railton, Amartya Sen, Philippa Foot, and Derek Parfit-- debate arguments for and against the moral doctrine of consequentialism to present a complete view of this important topic in moral philosophy.

This article offers an analysis of the role humor plays in the philosophy of Diogenes of Sinope. It argues that the Cynicism authored by Diogenes is a philosophy premised on a number of doctrines, and that among these doctrines humor holds the central place. The Cynical humor of Diogenes is characterized as more than just a feature of his personality or a method through which he communicates his real message, but as the actual state of mind that he intends to (...) impart to his students. (shrink)

The author reviews and summarizes, in as jargon-free way as he is capable of, the form of anti-platonist anti-nominalism he has previously developed in works since the 1980s, and considers what additions and amendments are called for in the light of such recently much-discussed views on the existence and nature of mathematical objects as those known as hyperintensional metaphysics, natural language ontology, and mathematical structuralism.

In this paper I examine the ethics of street photography. I firstly discuss the close-up ‘in-your-face’ style street photography made famous by American photographer, Bruce Gilden. In close-up street photography, the proximity of the camera to the subject and the element of surprise work in tandem to produce a striking and evocative picture. Close-up street photography is shown to be ethically contentious on wellbeing-related and autonomy-related grounds. I next examine the more orthodox ‘respectable distance’ kind of street photography. In orthodox (...) street photography, the photographer positions the camera some distance away from a nonconsenting subject that may or may not be aware a picture is to be taken. The main ethical problem with this form of street photography relates to the subject’s vanity and sense of self. When street photographers produce and publish images without the consent of subjects, they express their own creative freedom at the expense of the subject’s right to editorial control. I discuss the scope and potentially demanding practical implications of a right to editorial control. To conclude, I offer a workable solution to the ethical dilemma facing street photographers and discuss the implications of smart phones and photo-sharing social media platforms. (shrink)

The resurrection of the classical Marxian ecological critique in the context of the current planetary emergency has led to the return of the concept of the dialectics of nature, associated with the work of Frederick Engels in particular. In the century following the deaths of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, the dialectics-of-nature conception played a formative role in the development of the modern ecological critique within science, notably in Britain, and helped inspire the contemporary environmentalist movement. Nevertheless, all of this (...) occurred outside the dominant streams of Marxian thought and practice, where a great chasm had arisen in this area. Whereas official Marxism in the Soviet Union reduced the dialectics of nature to a fixed dogma, Western Marxism rejected it altogether. In the current Anthropocene Epoch in the geological time scale – and in what is referred to here as the Capitalinian Age of the Anthropocene – a new historical-materialist synthesis constructed on classical foundations, reintegrating the dialectics of nature, so as to address the immense ecological challenges confronting humanity, is seen as objectively (and subjectively) necessary. (shrink)

One hundred years ago, in his lecture Science as a Vocation, Max Weber prefigured a transition from science as a calling to science as bureaucratically organized work. He argued that a calling for science is critical for sustaining scientific work. Using Weber’s arguments for science as a vocation as a lens, in this paper, we discuss whether a calling for science may become difficult to maintain in increasingly bureaucratized scientific work—and also whether such a calling is necessary for the advance (...) of science. We present empirical evidence for this bureaucratization of scientific work and further develop Weber’s discussion of science by contrasting it with the views of other theorists of science and innovation. Finally, we discuss the implications of these theories, develop a set of policy recommendations, and outline a research agenda designed to develop science policies and a sociology of science that match this shift from vocation to bureaucracy in scientific work. (shrink)

There is more responsibility on heaven and earth than dreamt of in most philosophy. This dissertation explores three debates in three sub-fields of philosophy, highlighting in each responsibilities agents find themselves with whether they like it or not. In the chapter "Trust Logic, Not Tortoises", I propose an answer to Wright’s Justification Question – to what extent are we justified in our knowledge of logic? – arguing early knowledge of logic is a species of know-how underwritten by dispositions to infer (...) that are themselves often refined into more sophisticated dispositions to infer as we develop. Given how foundational such know-how is to our understanding of the world, we find ourselves responsible for cultivating more sophisticated reasoning, whatever its provenance. In the chapter Ties that Undermine, I argue attributions to an agent of moral responsibility are largely influenced by the perceived rareness of that agent's ability to provide aid or prevent harm, degree of aid provided or harm prevented, and cost to that agent in providing aid or preventing harm. Voluntary adoption of such moral responsibility is not necessary for an agent to be morally responsible. I generalize this result to the epistemic domain in the chapter Speak No Evil: Understanding Hermeneutical (In)justice, arguing attributions to an agent of epistemic responsibility are also influenced by the perceived rareness of that agent's ability to generate true beliefs in themselves and others, extent of benefit provided and harm prevented by having such true beliefs, and cost to that agent in generating such true beliefs. Here, we see voluntary adoption of such epistemic responsibility is not necessary for an agent to be epistemically responsible. By exploring the relevance of such responsibility to three distinct debates in three distinct sub-fields of philosophy, this dissertation highlights how pervasive responsibility is to the lives of agents, and the work of philosophers. (shrink)

This article examines the impact of female leadership on corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices in publicly traded corporations. Our analysis finds that female leadership matters. For example, female leadership at the board level increases the likelihood of having a female CEO and the overall percentage of women executives in firms. The study measures CSR practices using the Thomson Reuters corporate responsibility ratings (TRCRR) from the Thomson Reuters ASSET4 database for 1242 firms over a 7-year period, from 2009 to 2015. Panel (...) regression estimates indicate that board gender diversity (BGD) has a positive impact on CSR, while two other measures of female leadership (presence of female CEO and percentage of female executives) were largely insignificant. We perform our analysis in the context of upper echelons theory and expand on recent studies of the impact of female leadership on CSR practices by using a different and a larger data set than previous research studies. (shrink)