After cataloguing various ‘improper’ sense of only, those which are taken with restricted scope (‘no more than [within a fixed domain]’) as opposed to the purely exclusive ‘proper’ sense, Ockham (1980:137) remarks that These are the senses, then, in which the exclusive expression can be taken improperly. And perhaps there are still other senses in which it can be taken improperly. But since they are not as widely used as the ones we have dealt with, I will leave them to (...) the specialists. Larry Horn: “A glorious picture indeed: monasteries crammed to the spires with specialists on only, laboring away on the fine points of the semantics of exclusive propositions. Those were the days!” (Horn 1996: 26-27). (shrink)

Irresponsible research practices damaging the value of science has been an increasing concern among researchers, but previous work failed to estimate the prevalence of all forms of irresponsible research behavior. Additionally, these analyses have not included articles published in the last decade from 2011 to 2020. This meta-analysis provides an updated meta-analysis that calculates the pooled estimates of research misconduct and questionable research practices, and explores the factors associated with the prevalence of these issues. The estimates, committing RM concern at (...) least 1 of FFP and QRPs concern 1 or more QRPs, were 2.9% and 12.5%, respectively. In addition, 15.5% of researchers witnessed others who had committed at least 1 RM, while 39.7% were aware of others who had used at least 1 QRP. The results document that response proportion, limited recall period, career level, disciplinary background and locations all affect significantly the prevalence of these issues. This meta-analysis addresses a gap in existing meta-analyses and estimates the prevalence of all forms of RM and QRPs, thus providing a better understanding of irresponsible research behaviors. (shrink)

* This work has been evolving for a while now. Some parts trace back to the few pages on the context-dependency of quantifiers in my dissertation. Reading Recanati’s paper on domains of discourse made me rethink some of my earlier conclusions without in the end actually changing them much. Other parts formed the material for several discussions in my seminar on context-dependency at MIT in the fall of 1995, which included several sessions exploring the issues raised in an early version (...) of Kratzer. Connecting the choice function approach to indefinites with a general analysis of contextual domain restriction was an idea that I considered then without however working out any details. Conversations with Lisa Matthewson and studying her paper inspired me to tackle the problem again. Connections to questions about the context-dependency of conditional sentences also tickled my fancy, since I have been working on conditionals for a while now. Having the opportunity to present this material at the Vilem Mathesius Series provided the impetus to flesh out some of my vague thoughts. Major influences come from the work done in recent years at MIT by Lisa Matthewson, Philippe Schlenker, Julie Legate, and Uli Sauerland. I thank Irene Heim, Lisa Matthewson, Orin Percus, Philippe Schlenker, and Jason Stanley for illuminating discussions about this material. At this point, I see this talk as a report on the state of the art, exploring an intriguing possible connection, but I do not claim substantial intellectual property rights. Mistakes are certainly mine, achievements are probably not. (shrink)

Every member of the club was convinced that if a (particular) friend of his from Texas had died in the fire, he would have inherited a fortune.

which he calls general indicatives, are correctly analysed as open indicative conditionals prefixed by universal quantifiers. So they are both analysed as (∀x)(if x gets a chance, x bungee-jumps), where x ranges over girls. This analysis is attributed to Geach.2 Barker then shows that this syntactic analysis, together with other premises, entails that the open conditional occurring under the universal quantifier has to be analysed as having the import of material implication.

SETTING: Medical ethics education has become common, and the integrated ethics curriculum has been recommended in Western countries. It should be questioned whether there is one, universal method of teaching ethics applicable worldwide to medical schools, especially those in non-Western developing countries. OBJECTIVE: To characterise the medical ethics curricula at Asian medical schools. DESIGN: Mailed survey of 206 medical schools in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Mongolia, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Australia and New Zealand. PARTICIPANTS: A total (...) of 100 medical schools responded, a response rate of 49%, ranging from 23%-100% by country. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: The degree of integration of the ethics programme into the formal medical curriculum was measured by lecture time; whether compulsory or elective; whether separate courses or unit of other courses; number of courses; schedule; total length, and diversity of teachers' specialties. RESULTS: A total of 89 medical schools (89%) reported offering some courses in which ethical topics were taught. Separate medical ethics courses were mostly offered in all countries, and the structure of vertical integration was divided into four patterns. Most deans reported that physicians' obligations and patients' rights were the most important topics for their students. However, the evaluation was diverse for more concrete topics. CONCLUSION: Offering formal medical ethics education is a widespread feature of medical curricula throughout the study area. However, the kinds of programmes, especially with regard to integration into clinical teaching, were greatly diverse. (shrink)

What is time? Is time real, or a mere illusion? We seem to feel the passage of time in our consciousness but are doomed to encounter great difficulty when trying to get a deeper grip on the nature of time. As Augustine famously remarked, "if no one asks me about what time is, I know what it is, but if I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know". The present essay does not aim so much (...) at giving a complete answer to this intricate and difficult question as to focus on Zhuangzi to excavate the idea of time inherent in his philosophical writings. A second aim is to show how it relates to some of the contemporary concerns about time. More specifically, our concern is not about... (shrink)

Media guidelines on safe suicide-related reporting are within the suicide prevention armamentarium. However, implementation issues beleaguer real-world practice. This study evaluated the perspectives of the Malaysian media community, persons with lived experience of suicidal behavior, and mental health professionals on suicide-related reporting in terms of the impact, strategies, challenges, and the implementation of guidelines on safe reporting. Three focus group discussions of purposively sampled Malaysian media practitioners, PLE, and MHP were audio-recorded, transcribed, coded and thematically analyzed. Inclusion criteria were: English (...) fluency, no clinical depression or suicidal ideation, no recent previous suicide attempts or suicide bereavement. Three major themes emerged: Unsafe Reporting; Impact; and Safe Reporting. Most described current reporting as unsafe by being potentially triggering to media users and may contribute to contagion effect. Positive impacts identified included raised awareness toward suicide and its prevention. Unsafe reporting was attributed to inadequate awareness, knowledge, and guidance, lack of empathy and accountability, job-related factors, popularity-seeking, lack of monitoring and governance, and information source with unsafe content. Majority agreed on how suicide stories should be framed to produce a safe report. The media community diverged on how detailed a suicide story should be. Safe reporting challenges included difficulties in balancing beneficial versus harmful details, social media ubiquity and its citizen reporters. Participants suggested these safe reporting strategies: stakeholder engagement, educational approaches, improving governance and surveillance, and guidelines revision. Most acknowledged the relevance of guidelines but were unaware of the existence of local guidelines. Implementation challenges included the dilemma in balancing media industry needs vis-à-vis safe reporting requirements, stakeholder engagement difficulties and social media regulation. There is poor awareness regarding safe suicide-related reporting across all groups. PLE and MHP were negatively impacted by current unsafe messaging which aggravated trauma and grief reactions. Postvention support gaps for mental health professionals were highlighted. Safe reporting promotion strategies should include stakeholder engagement to increase awareness on minimizing Werther and maximizing Papageno effects. Strategic re-examination and dissemination of local media guidelines to address new media issues, and effective surveillance mechanisms, are crucial in sustainable improvement of safe reporting practices. (shrink)

The compositional analysis of sentences like “Tony has been happy since he’s been taking Prozac” becomes feasible through a combination of a maximal informativeness semantics for definite descriptions and an elided second “since” inside the “since”-clause.

Razdel 1. F. Nit︠s︡she i russkai︠a︡ myslʹ Serebri︠a︡nogo veka -- Razdel 2. Religii︠a︡ Serebri︠a︡nogo veka -- Razdel 3. Russkai︠a︡ germenevtika -- Razdel 4. Filosofii︠a︡ imeni v Rossii.

If philosophy has anything to do with wisdom there's certainly not a grain of that in Mind, & quite often a grain of that in the detective stories.This special issue of Philosophy East and West is dedicated to the topic of wisdom. It might appear to be a paradoxical endeavor to think about wisdom on the pages of an academic journal. As Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out a long time ago in his somewhat peculiar, quixotic style, philosophers in the setting of (...) modern academia are not necessarily in the best position to make meaningful contributions to the question of what it means to be wise. We do not really know what was going on in Plato's academy, or whether the conversations there had much, if anything, to do with... (shrink)

In the current study, the orthographic knowledge required for writing Chinese characters was assessed among participants with L1 Vietnamese background who learn Chinese as a foreign language. A total of 42 undergraduates were recruited. They were invited to participate in a delayed Chinese character copying task consisting of 32 characters. Their Chinese character reading abilities were also obtained using a character naming task. All the tests were conducted online during the pandemic in 2021. Results indicated that the participants’ accuracy in (...) the copying task was affected by the familiarity of the characters and the number of strokes of the characters. These effects minimized as reading performance increased. In the inter-stroke interval analysis, results indicated a significant boundary effect where ISIs between orthographic units were longer than ISIs within orthographic units, showing the participants’ tendency to chunk Chinese characters into functional units when they write. Only high achievers in the reading task demonstrated the use of both large and small grain-size units in writing, while the low achievers only used small grain-size units in their writing. We suggest that the delayed copying task incorporated with handwriting measures is an effective method to assess orthographic knowledge of L2 Chinese learners. (shrink)

Considers the future of conservation and its connection to the human sciences. This volume brings together the findings from a five-year research project that seeks to reimagine the relationship between conservation knowledge and the humanistic study of the material world. The project, "Cultures of Conservation," was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and included events, seminars, and an artist-in-residence. The effort to conserve things amid change is part of the human struggle with the nature of matter. For as long (...) as people have made things and kept things, they have also cared for and repaired them. Today, conservators use a variety of tools and categories developed over the last one hundred and fifty years to do this work, but in the coming decades, new kinds of materials and a new scale of change will pose unprecedented challenges. Looking ahead to this moment from the perspectives of history, philosophy, materials science, and anthropology, this volume explores new possibilities for both conservation and the humanities in the rethinking of active matter. (shrink)

I thought the paper by Kai-yee Wong and Chris Fraser was fascinating and insightful. Two things I especially appreciated are the clarity with which they summarize my views. I think they are quite fair and accurate. Second, I appreciate their suggestion that the way to deal with the practical problem of weakness of will has much to do with the role of the Background in shaping our actions. I think they are especially on the right track when they say that (...) the improvement of Background skills may actually narrow the range of real options for action, (p. 21) nonetheless, they do not decrease freedom. As they say, “It is a process of strengthening the self, and the agent is likely to experience the concomitant restriction of ‘live’ options not as a limitation but as strength of character.” (p. 21). That seems to me very much on the right track. What they are suggesting, and it is a powerful addition to my own writings, is that we should not just think of the Background as facilitating languages, games and social practices generally, but for morality as well (p. 23). (shrink)

- uneducated in the field authors who defend a consensus they are being TOLD when they enter offices of Ed-Sci, teaching and writing works on learning-theory - but never checked the facts, PART I and PART II.

Metaphilosophy is itself philosophy about philosophy. It is not something before or independent of philosophy. Both Kai Nielsen and Richard Rorty are deeply concerned (someone might say obsessively preoccupied) with metaphilosophy. They both are thoroughly historicist and contextualist resolutely rejecting any form of a transcendental or metaphysical turn. They argue against claims to absolute validity (as well as against absolutism in any form) and a natural order of reasons: some 'Reason' to which any rational agent must be committed. They both (...) see philosophy as a transitional genre first (historically speaking) from religion then metaphysics and more latterly from scientistic conceptions of the world. But they differ about what philosophy is transitional to. For Rorty it is historical narrative and utopian proposals; for Nielsen it is critical theory. Rorty claims this, Nielsen's intentions to the contrary notwithstanding, commits him to enlightenment rationalism. Nielsen replies that his form of critical theory is deeply historicist and contextual without being resolutely atheoretical. This plays out in political orientation to Nielsen's being a socialist while Rorty is a social democrat. (shrink)

This article re-examines the role of the brain in self-recognition. It reconsiders the idea that the frontal and cortical midline structures are important for self-specific experience in light of several recent reviews of neuroscience literature. The findings suggests that the frontal cortex and the cortical midline structure are not the only areas involved in self-related tasks and that these areas may be involved not because the tasks are self-specific, but because they are tasks that involve a specific kind of cognitive (...) operation, specifically reflective evaluation. (shrink)

Kai Nielsen is one of Canada's most distinguished political philosophers. In a career spanning over 40 years, he has published more than 400 papers in political philosophy, ethics, meta-philosophy, and philosophy of religion. Pessimism of the Intellect presents a thoughtful collection of Nielsen's essays complemented by an extended reflective interview with Nielsen. This collection allows the reader to grasp the systematic scope of his thought and methodology.

In 'A Constitution of Many Minds' Cass Sunstein argues that the three major approaches to constitutional interpretation – Traditionalism, Populism and Cosmopolitanism – all rely on some variation of a ‘many-minds’ argument. Here we assess each of these claims through the lens of the Condorcet Jury Theorem. In regard to the first two approaches we explore the implications of sequential influence among courts (past and foreign, respectively). In regard to the Populist approach, we consider the influence of opinion leaders.

This festschrift includes a dozen essays on issues that have been at the focus of Kai Nielsen's research, mainly issues in ethics and political philosophy. Among these are four essays on socialism and Marxism. There are also essays on philosophy of religion, epistemology, and meta-philosophy.

In §93 of The Principles of Mathematics, Bertrand Russell observes that “the variable is a very complicated logical entity, by no means easy to analyze correctly”. This assessment is borne out by the fact that even now we have no fully satisfactory understanding of the role of variables in a compositional semantics for first-order logic. In standard Tarskian semantics, variables are treated as meaning-bearing entities; moreover, they serve as the basic building blocks of all meanings, which are constructed out of (...) variable assignments. But this has disquieting consequences, including Fine’s antinomy of the variable and an undue dependence of meanings on language. Here I develop an alternative, Fregean version of predicate logic that uses the traditional quantifier–variable apparatus for the expression of generality, possesses a fully compositional, non-representational semantics, and is not subject to the antinomy of the variable. The advantages of Fregean over Tarskian predicate logic are due to the former’s treating variables not as meaningful lexical items, but as mere marks of punctuation, similar to parentheses. I submit that this is indeed how the variables of predicate logic should be construed. (shrink)

The objective of this editorial is to help authors better understand how to contribute to discourse on corporate sustainability and business ethics. We do this in two ways. First, we clarify our expectations for publication in the “Corporate Sustainability and Business Ethics” section at the Journal of Business Ethics (JBE). As section editors at the journal, we want to make explicit the criteria we apply in our decisions to accept or reject a submission. We argue that authors should explicitly reflect (...) upon what corporate sustainability means in the context of their research. We also stress that publishing in JBE requires an explicit central focus on ethics. We do not take a position on how authors must do either of these two, only that it should be done. In short, there are good business ethics papers that do not add to corporate sustainability theory building or practice, and there are good corporate sustainability papers that are not framed in a business ethics discourse. For the “Corporate Sustainability and Business Ethics” section, we expect authors to strive for both. Second, we provide several illustrations of how corporate sustainability research can be framed from a business ethics perspective around three central sustainability constructs: objective function, carrying capacity, and generational sustainability. These examples are not intended to be comprehensive or to bound the range of acceptable research for JBE’s “Corporate Sustainability and Business Ethics” section. Rather, we aim to provide representative examples of potentially publishable research on business ethics and corporate sustainability to spur innovative thinking and constructive discussion. We hope this editorial will help authors better understand what we expect from submissions to the “Corporate Sustainability and Business Ethics” at JBE. (shrink)

_ Group Duties: Their Existence and Their Implications for Individuals _, by CollinsStephanie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. vii + 218.

Many companies offer their customers voluntary carbon ‘offset’ certificates to compensate for greenhouse gas emissions. Voluntary offset certificates are cheap because the demand for them is low, allowing consumers to compensate for their emissions without significant sacrifices. Regarding the distribution of emission reduction responsibilities I argue that excess emissions are permissible if they are offset properly. However, if individuals buy offsets only because they are cheap, they fail to be robustly motivated to choose a permissible course of action.This suspected lack (...) of robust motivation raises both pragmatic questions about the functioning of offsetting schemes and moral questions about the worth of such unstable motives. The analysis provided here also has wider implications for the normative analysis of partial compliance and ‘many hands’ problems, especially for those cases where compliance levels and costs interact. (shrink)

Currently, the repetition of a critical way of speaking results in a stagnating tendency in educational debates. This had led to the endeavour of developing a ‘post-critical pedagogy’. This paper employs Rortyan and Latourian language in order to tackle the question of how such a post-critical pedagogy should deal with critique. It argues that if one takes critique as what Latour calls a debunking activity, then post-critical pedagogy should leave critique behind. If however critique means simply to say how something (...) should not be, then post-critical pedagogy should remain critical. In addition, however, there is a need for enriching the critical vocabulary with more affirmative language. For accomplishing this need, in contrast to recent suggestions to go back to ontology, the paper suggests that new propositions developed by literary theorists like Sedgwick and Felski are more promising. All these arguments are framed by Rorty’s notion of philosophy as cultural politics. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue on impact investing applies the attractive nuisance notion to impact investing. Social sector actors ‘trespassing’ on the playing field of conventional investment markets may not appreciate the risks. We apply the framework of essentially contested concepts to foster fruitful diverse research in this emerging research field. We advance six dimensions, which we propose allow to describe different sub-clusters of how the term is used in research and practice. For each dimension we identify risks and (...) opportunities stemming from the contested nature and highlight an ambitious research agenda for how future business ethics scholars can help address and foster impact investing. We conclude by illustrating how the papers in this special issue address these challenges. (shrink)

The subjective experience of time is a fundamental constituent of human consciousness and can be disturbed under conditions of mental disorders such as schizophrenia or affective disorders. Besides the scientific domain of psychiatry, time consciousness is a topic that has been extensively studied both by theoretical philosophy and cognitive neuroscience. It can be shown that both approaches exemplified by the philosophical analysis of time consciousness and the neuroscientific theory of cross-temporal contingencies as the neurophysiological basis of human consciousness implemented in (...) the prefrontal cortex converge in 2 respects. Firstly, a tripartite conception of consciousness divides human cognition in 3 different temporal domains comprising retention, presentation, and protention and the past, the present, and the future corresponding to working memory, interference control, and preparatory set. Secondly, both concepts refer to the present as an extended duration that integrates information from the recent past and the future. We propose that the integration of phenomenological and neuroscientific approaches can stimulate the development of enriched pathophysiological concepts of mental disorders. This approach appears to be particularly fruitful with respect to schizophrenia that is interpreted as a structural disturbance of time consciousness. (shrink)

Handfield and Bird claim that dispositionalists such as Martin and Heil appeal to antidotes and finks to explain why and how a conditional analysis of dispositions falls to Kripke's criticisms, but fail. The main reason is that some antidotes and finks are unavoidably intrinsic and relatively permanent in an agent, in which case the ascription of a rule-following disposition to the agent is false. In this paper, I contend that the presence of intrinsic and relatively permanent finks or antidotes does (...) not imply the absence of a rule-following disposition; some additional condition is needed for this implication to go through, but remains wanting. I end the paper with a discussion of where the real challenge lies for realist dispositionalism. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's conception of logical and conceptual truth is often thought to rival that of the logical positivists. This paper argues that there are important respects in which these conceptions complement each other. Analyticity, in the positivists' sense, coincides, not with Wittgenstein's notion of a grammatical proposition, but rather with his notion of a tautology. Grammatical propositions can usually be construed as analyticity postulates in Carnap's sense of the term. This account of grammatical and analytic propositions will be illustrated by appeal (...) to logical, conceptual and arithmetic truths. Its consequences for an analysis of corresponding modal notions will be indicated. (shrink)

Many find the prospect of death distressing at least partly because they believe that death deprives its subject of life’s benefits. Properly qualified, the belief is surely true. But should its truth lead us to conclude that there is something dreadful or awful about death, something that merits distress?

The starting point of this chapter is the uncontroversial assumption that the right to defend the innocent against unjust aggression is limited to the infliction of necessary harm and is further limited to the infliction of proportionate harm. The aim of the chapter is to shed light on the nature and location of those limits. The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first section it is argued that both unnecessary and disproportionate defense infringe upon the rights of an (...) unjust aggressor. The final two sections address, respectively, the questions of where the boundary between necessary and unnecessary defense is located and of where the boundary between proportionate and disproportionate defense is located. Those questions turn out to be more complicated than is often noticed, and the answers reached in these sections are novel ones. (shrink)

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) challenges political theorists to think about data ownership and policymakers to regulate the collection and use of public data. AI producers benefit from free public data for training their systems while retaining the profits. We argue against the view that the use of public data must be free. The proponents of unconstrained use point out that consuming data does not diminish its quality and that information is in ample supply. Therefore, they suggest, publicly available (...) data should be free. We present two objections. First, allowing free data use promotes unwanted inequality. Second, contributors of information did not and could not anticipate that their contribution would be used to train AI systems. Therefore, charging for extensive data use is pro tanto permissible and desirable. We discuss policy implications and propose a progressive data use tax to counter the inequality arising. (shrink)

This study examined lexical bundles (LBs) used differently by Chinese and American PhD students of linguistics in their dissertation abstracts. Two corpora were built, with each having 700 dissertation abstracts produced by Chinese and American PhD students of linguistics, respectively. The study then used lexical analysis software to retrieve frequently used three-word LBs, from which LBs having different frequencies at a significant level across the two corpora were identified and termed as bundles used differently (BUDs). BUDs were then categorized and (...) analyzed manually in terms of structure, function, and distribution in rhetorical moves. The major findings were: (1) 57.14% of the frequently used LBs were BUDs, of which 90.67% had occurrences in both corpora. The BUDs distributed inequivalently across categories and moves, with the text-oriented category and the move of Result having the most BUDs; and (2) BUDs exhibited two major patterns: the Chinese and American students filled different constituents into structurally and functionally similar constructions, and used LBs of dissimilar functions to fulfill the same communicative purposes. These findings indicate that variations in LB use have a high pedagogic value and confirm the need for using corpora to identify and teach core genre-specific vocabularies to second/foreign language learners. (shrink)