A large portion of mathematics education centers heavily around imitative reasoning and rote learning, raising concerns about students’ lack of deeper and conceptual understanding of mathematics. To address these concerns, there has been a growing focus on students learning and teachers teaching methods that aim to enhance conceptual understanding and problem-solving skills. One suggestion is allowing students to construct their own solution methods using creative mathematical reasoning, a method that in previous studies has been contrasted against algorithmic reasoning with positive (...) effects on test tasks. Although previous studies have evaluated the effects of CMR, they have ignored if and to what extent intrinsic cognitive motivation play a role. This study investigated the effects of intrinsic cognitive motivation to engage in cognitive strenuous mathematical tasks, operationalized through Need for Cognition, and working memory capacity. Two independent groups, consisting of upper secondary students, practiced non-routine mathematical problem solving with CMR and AR tasks and were tested 1 week later. An initial t-test confirmed that the CMR group outperformed the AR group. Structural equation modeling revealed that NFC was a significant predictor of math performance for the CMR group but not for the AR group. The results also showed that WMC was a strong predictor of math performance independent of group. These results are discussed in terms of allowing for time and opportunities for struggle with constructing own solution methods using CMR, thereby enhancing students conceptual understanding. (shrink)

Sentences containing predicates of personal taste exhibit two striking features: whether they are true seems to lie in the eye of the beholder and whether they are true can be—and often is—subject to disagreement. In the last decade, there has been a lively debate about how to account for these two features. In this paper, I shall argue for two claims: first, I shall show that even the most promising approaches so far offered by proponents of so-called indexical contextualism fail (...) to account for the disagreement feature. They might be able to account for some disagreement data, but they have trouble accounting for two kinds of disagreement data that caused the estrangement from indexical contextualism and the migration to relativism in the first place: the denial and the retraction data. Second, I shall show that we still do not have to abandon indexical contextualism, because what I shall call the superiority approach—a new pragmatically extended version of indexical contextualism—can very well account for the data. (shrink)

Many people follow Grice in thinking that all conversational implicatures are cancellable. And often enough, they use this insight as a test for conversational implicatures. If you want to find out whether something is a conversational implicature, the test has it, you should ask yourself whether the thing in question is cancellable; if you find that it is not cancellable, you can infer that it is not a conversational implicature. If you find that it is cancellable, you can infer that (...) it might well be a conversational implicature and that you should now do further testing. Various philosophers and linguists have questioned the test however. Some have held that Grice's cancellability claim is subject to counterexamples and that the test is not reliable. Others have argued that even though Grice's claim can be defended against the examples in question, the test is not as informative as people have hoped. This article provides an overview of the recent discussion on the cancellability test and suggests a way forward. (shrink)

This paper investigates the norm of presupposition, as one pervasive type of indirect speech act. It argues against the view that sees presuppositions as an indirect counterpart of the direct speech act of assertion and proposes instead that they are much more similar to the direct speech act of assumption. More concretely, it suggests that the norm that governs presuppositions is not an epistemic or doxastic attitude such as knowledge, justified belief, or mere belief; it's a practical attitude, most plausibly (...) the attitude of rational acceptance. This view has important ramifications well beyond debates in philosophy of language and linguistics. It affects not only our view of which speech act sequences are fine and which are off; it bears on whether presuppositions can function as testimony, whether they can be lies, and whether they are ontologically committal, thus addressing central topics in epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics. (shrink)

People disagree frequently, about both objective and subjective matters. But while at least one party must be wrong in a disagreement about objective matters, it seems that both parties can be right when it comes to subjective ones: it seems that there can be faultless disagreements. But how is this possible? How can people disagree with one another if they are both right? And why should they? In recent years, a number of philosophers and linguists have argued that we must (...) become relativists about truth to understand faultless disagreements. This book shows that we can dispense with relativism. It combines a more standard semantics with a novel pragmatic theory to develop a superior approach. The book discusses both classic and recent literature in philosophy and linguistics. It provides a general introduction to the debate about the semantics and pragmatics of perspectival expressions, as well as an original contribution to the contemporary discussion. (shrink)

Julia Annas here offers a fundamental reexamination of Plato's ethical thought by investigating the Middle Platonist perspective, which emerged at the end of Plato's own school, the Academy. She highlights the differences between ancient and modern assumptions about Plato's ethics--and stresses the need to be more critical about our own. One of these modern assumptions is the notion that the dialogues record the development of Plato's thought. Annas shows how the Middle Platonists, by contrast, viewed the dialogues as multiple (...) presentations of a single Platonic ethical philosophy, differing in form and purpose but ultimately coherent. They also read Plato's ethics as consistently defending the view that virtue is sufficient for happiness, and see it as converging in its main points with the ethics of the Stoics. Annas goes on to explore the Platonic idea that humankind's final end is "becoming like God"--an idea that is well known among the ancients but virtually ignored in modern interpretations. She also maintains that modern interpretations, beginning in the nineteenth century, have placed undue emphasis on the Republic, and have treated it too much as a political work, whereas the ancients rightly saw it as a continuation of Plato's ethical writings. (shrink)

Outlines of Scepticism, by the Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus, is a work of major importance for the history of Greek philosophy. It is the fullest extant account of ancient scepticism, and it is also one of our most copious sources of information about the other Hellenistic philosophies. Its first part contains an elaborate exposition of the Pyrrhonian variety of scepticism; its second and third parts are critical and destructive, arguing against 'dogmatism' in logic, epistemology, science and ethics - an approach (...) that revolutionized the study of philosophy when Sextus' works were rediscovered and published in the sixteenth century. This volume presents the accurate and readable translation which was first published in 1994, together with a substantial new historical and philosophical introduction by Jonathan Barnes. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that there are two kinds of indicative conditionals that do not contain conditional 'then.' There are hypothetical conditionals such as 'If Mary has done the groceries, there is beer in the fridge' and there are biscuit conditionals such as 'If you are thirsty, there is beer in the fridge.' There is also broad consensus that we cannot find an analogous distinction between hypothetical and biscuit conditionals within indicative conditionals that do feature 'then.' Conditionals containing 'then,' it (...) is assumed, are uniformly read as hypothetical conditionals. In this article, I shall argue that there are biscuit conditionals featuring 'then.' This result, I take it, is not only interesting on its own. It also puts pressure on the popular view that conditional 'then' triggers the presupposition that in some situations in which the conditional's antecedent is not true, its consequent is not true either. (shrink)

Author Julia Annas Aristotle made ​​the German Asia-mile out and fortunately Fuk The arguments related point, and the role of external good fortune Fook in the problems caused. And text analysis and dialectical Happy Stoic school and school for good moral behavior and external point of view. Author argues, Aristotle on the German sub-km behavior regardless of the state with the fortunate Fook, reflecting the hope臘human ethics ideological consensus, and he left to posterity to resolve the discovery. Aristotle on (...) the German sub-km conduct the test volume and fortunately Fook to take the views of ordinary people, and thus for long-term development. We take this to understand the Stoic school and get away with school, behavior and fortunately for Germany Fuk related views and noted against the intentions are. Julia Annas presents Aristotle's view of the relation of virtue and happiness, and the resulting problem of the role of the external goods in happiness. The Stoics and Peripatetic views on virtue and external goods have been analyzed and argued. The writer suggests what Aristotle says about virtue and happiness reflects common sense of Greek ethical thought and leaves the issue. Aristotle's account of virtue and happiness takes ordinary thought on the matter and develops it far. We can see what the Stoics and Peripatetics are going to say on this matter and the opposing tendencies in this article. (shrink)

"Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind" is an elegant survey of Stoic and Epicurean ideas about the soul an introduction to two ancient schools whose belief in the soul's physicality offer compelling parallels to modern approaches in the ...

Studies of linguistic synaesthesias in English have shown a range of fine-grained language mechanisms governing the associations between colours on the one hand, and graphemes, phonemes and words on the other. However, virtually nothing is known about how synaesthetic colouring might operate in non-alphabetic systems. The current study shows how synaesthetic speakers of Mandarin Chinese come to colour the logographic units of their language. Both native and non-native Chinese speakers experienced synaesthetic colours for characters, and for words spelled in the (...) Chinese spelling systems of Pinyin and Bopomo. We assessed the influences of lexical tone and Pinyin/Bopomo spelling and showed that synaesthetic colours are assigned to Chinese words in a non-random fashion. Our data show that Chinese-speaking synaesthetes with very different native languages can exhibit both differences and similarities in the ways in which they come to colour their Chinese words. (shrink)

This article explores the scope and limits of the model of “polis religion” as one of the most powerful interpretative concepts in current scholarship in the field. It examines the notion of the ‘embeddedness’ of ancient Greek religion in the polis as well as the unity and diversity of Greek religious beliefs and practices, and discusses in how far the model is able to capture developments beyond the Classical period. The article looks at religious phenomena and forms of religious organization (...) above and below the polis level. I argue that the strengths of the model lie in its capacity to explain an important structuring principle of ancient Greek religion. The weaknesses of the model are due to the fact that it is focused too narrowly on the polis as the primary discourse of power relevant for the study of ancient Greek religion. (shrink)

Although the literature on organizational justice enactment is becoming richer, our understanding of the role of the deontic justice motive remains limited. In this article, we review and discuss theoretical approaches to and evidence of the deontic justice motive and deontic justice enactment. While the prevalent understanding of deontic justice enactment focuses on compliance, we argue that this conceptualization is insufficient to explain behaviors that go beyond the call of duty. We thus consider two further forms of deontic behavior: humanistic (...) and supererogatory behavior. Drawing on the concepts of situation strength and person strength, we further argue that the reduced variance in behavior across morally challenging situations makes deontic justice enactment visible. We thus observe deontic justice enactment when an actor’s deontic justice motive collides with strong situational cues or constraints that guide the actor to behave differently. We formulate propositions and develop a theoretical model that links the deontic justice motive to moral maturation and deontic justice enactment. (shrink)

Después del proceso de secularización propio de la modernidad, podemos sospechar que, quizás, estemos asistiendo a una época de post-secularización debido al creciente interés por la espiritualidad y por la mística. En este contexto, el presente estudio sobre lo místico y su vinculación con la ética tiene por objetivo fundamental conocer qué aportaciones al ámbito de la acción moral pueden surgir del estudio de la experiencia mística. Para ello, profundizaremos en el conocimiento del propio ser humano desde una perspectiva que (...) contemple su dimensión trascendente y espiritual, a fin de valorar la contribución que puede suponer el estudio de la mística al ámbito de la educación en valores, en pos de un nuevo paradigma antropológico, social y cultural que responda a las eternas inquietudes del ser humano. (shrink)

According to orthodox semantics, a given sentence as used at a given situation expresses at most one content. In the last decade, this view has been challenged with several objections. Many of them have been addressed in the literature. But one has gone almost unheeded. It stems from sentences that are used to address several people individually, like ‘Jesus loves you!’ as uttered by a priest at a sermon. Cappelen :23–46, 2008), Egan :251–279, 2009), López de Sa :241–253, 2014), and (...) MacFarlane claim that, to account for such cases, one has to adopt a pluralist semantics, according to which the sentences in question express more than one content. In this paper, I shall counter this objection. Exploiting different so far underappreciated features of singular and plural ‘you,’ I argue, orthodox semantics can very well account for the cases in question. (shrink)

Julia Weber's book demonstrates how Aristotle's understanding of virtual forces as undetectable but nonetheless effective has shaped philosophical discourse up until the modern age. It traces developments from philosophical debate about the existence of virtual forces in antiquity and the Middle Ages to the emergence of virtual spaces in the early modern period, and the appearance of virtual worlds in 18th-century literature. In this way, it reveals the seldom traced continuities and shifts between ancient philosophical discussion of forces and (...) contemporary virtual realities. (shrink)

Is Aristotle right when he says that Plato believed in a class ofentities which are "intermediate" between physical objects and Forms? It may seem unrewarding to ask this question again. Scholars divide into two groups over the answer, and it may well seem impossible by now for either side to make any point that will convince the other. If the issues are well understood, and the lines of the controversy drawn already, can it be worthwhile to reconsider the problem? In (...) this paper I shall try to reconsider this issue from a somewhat different angle. It may be that, while the traditional question cannot be conclusively answered as so stated, the problem can nevertheless be fruitfully investigated by first considering a related question,the answer to which has implications for the way in which the traditional question should be answered. (shrink)

In the Acts of the Apostles, Paul twice evokes his rights as a Roman citizen. When he crosses from the jurisdiction of the Jewish to that of the Roman court, Paul in effect completes his definitive mapping of Jewish law as a local affair whose peculiar practices must be subsumed and refigured by the universal order promised by the Messiah to all nations. Paul's real and epistolary journeys to Rome effect a symbolic translation westward of Jewish civic themes, linking the (...) destiny of the Jews to the European political tradition. Yet Paul does so by evacuating the central mark of membership in Israel, namely the covenant of circumcision, of its continued validity. Rather than either salvaging Paul's universalism as the basis of modern democracy or critiquing his cultural politics, I use the concept of citizenship to begin calculating the consequences of Paul's multiple memberships in three distinct juridical orders: the Hellenistic city‐state, the nation of Israel, and the Roman Empire. My goal is not to re‐localize or de‐legitimate Paul's universalism in the name of individual cultures, but rather to recall the integral dream of universalism to its dialogue with diverse citizenship protocols, including Jewish ones, as well as to disclose the universal dimension of seemingly local civic rituals and routines. (shrink)

Spatial visualization as a key variable in sex-related differences in mathematical problem solving and spatial aspects of geometry is traced to the 1960s. More recent relevant data are presented. The variability debate is traced to the latter part of the nineteenth century and an explanation for it is suggested. An idea is presented for further research to clarify sex-related brain laterality differences in solving spatial problems.

This paper uses the proxy evidence of relic inventories and labels to explore the role of relics in medieval Christianity. By means of an examination of their material nature, it argues that their primary characteristics were their fragmentary and often amorphous nature; their lack of intrinsic identification; and their easy portability. By emphasising that relic collecting was a habit that contributed to establishing religious identities and affiliations, the paper clarifies relics' role in relocating knowledge of Christian history into the homes (...) and churches of medieval Europe. Finally, having noted that their dissemination followed established networks of travel and communication, it emphasises that relics rendered the essentials of Christianity tangible and portable. (shrink)

El escrito continúa una discusión mantenida por Macarena Marey, María Julia Bertomeu y Nuria Sánchez Madrid en torno a la capacidad de los principios del republicanismo kantiano para transformar el espacio social en un ámbito en el que la autosuficiencia material constituya una de las condiciones fundamentales para que la igualdad formal ante la ley y la libertad política puedan actualizarse. En estas coordenadas se manifiestan también algunas discrepancias en lo concerniente a la percepción kantiana de las injusticias sociales (...) y políticas propias de su tiempo, si bien se alcanza el acuerdo de que el diseño institucional del republicanismo kantiano constituye un dispositivo conceptual suficiente para eliminar la desigualdad económica que comporta pasividad civil y política. (shrink)

Bilder in Kunst und Wissenschaft sind Orte des Denkens und Forschens.

The present study evaluated the relationship between job satisfaction and unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB), directly as well as indirectly, through organizational commitment. Multidimensional constructs were utilized for job satisfaction and organizational commitment to provide a granular understanding of how these constructs can motivate employees to engage in UPB, which can threaten organizations' success and diminish the public's confidence in organizations. In order to test these relationships, a diverse sample of 617 participants was recruited through the online survey distribution platform Amazon (...) Mechanical Turk (MTurk®) to test the theoretical model using structural equation modeling (SEM). The results indicated that identification, affiliation, and exchange commitment served as intervening variables between growth satisfaction and UPB, while no significant indirect effect of internal work motivation on UPB was found. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Julia Annas ACTION AND CHARACTER IN DOSTOYEVSKY'S NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND Notes from Underground was written with a specific purpose in mind: to answer Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?1 And many features of Dostoyevsky's work can only be understood when we bear in mind its specifically Russian setting. The narrator is a romantic idealist of the forties transformed into something rather different by 1864, and no doubt (...) we lose much if we do not bear in mind that Dostoyevsky is looking back across the gulf of imprisonment and suffering at his own idealistic youth.2 But the intense and radically peculiar nature of Dostoyevsky's writing takes us to a level of the work which is accessible to those without knowledge of the local conditions of the work's production. As Mochulsky says, "the author steadily emerges beyond the confines of the Russian intellectual... the underground man's paradoxes are not the whims of some half-mad eccentric, but a new revelation of man about man." The book is "the philosophical preface to the cycle of the great novels" (p. 245). Even though Dostoyevsky's passionate and extreme temperament made him quite incapable of constructing a piece of precise philosophical argument, there is much of genuine philosophical interest in part I. It is not just a particular moral and political theory, like Chernyshevsky's, which is to be discredited, but something deeper, the presuppositions of a whole type of moral theory. In this article I shall examine the implications of what Dostoyevsky says for the philosophy of action and thence for ethics. I shall argue that he challenges a very basic model of human action, which is both intuitively plausible and basic to many moral theories. I shall also argue that as the work stands, there is a lack of continuity between parts I and II on the philosophical as well as on the literary level. In concentrating on the consequences for moral theory, I shall be ignoring the social and political aspects of the work. It may well be urged that such a division of the moral from the political is unrealistic in treating 257 258Philosophy and Literature a Russian writer. In defense I can only say that this narrowing of focus brings out in a sharper and more tractable way the philosophical issue which is my main concern. I Tell me, who was it who first declared, proclaiming it to the whole world, that a man does evil only because he does not know his real interests, and if he is enlightened and has his eyes opened to his own best and normal interests, man will cease to do evil and at once become virtuous and noble, because when he is enlightened and understands what will really benefit him he will see his own best interest in virtue, and since it is well known that no man can knowingly act against his best interests, consequently he will inevitably, so to speak, begin to do good. Oh, what a baby! Oh, what a pure innocent child! (part I section 7; all quotations are from the translation by Jessie Coulson [London: Penguin, 1972]). What exactly is the target here of the Underground Man?3 Every moral theory presupposes some theory of human action, although this may not be explicit; since moral philosophy is concerned with human actions, it must presuppose some account of what it is for a human action to be performed. One very influential tradition thinks of the paradigm of action as essentially aimed at some good: "Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good" is the opening sentence of Aristotle's Ethics.4 What is it for every action to aim at some good? We have the assumption here that every action is purposive and rational; purposive in that there is some goal which the agent sees as a good and rational in that performing the action is believed by the agent to be an appropriate means or way of bringing about the desired goal. This model of action is developed very fully in Aristotle, but it is not conceptually linked to... (shrink)