The ability to reason independently from one's own goals or beliefs has long been recognised as a key characteristic of the development of formal operational thought. In this article we present the results of a study that examined the correlates of this ability in a group of 10-year-old children ( N = 61). Participants were presented with conditional and relational reasoning items, where the content was manipulated such that the conclusion to the arguments were either congruent, neutral, or incongruent with (...) beliefs, and either logically valid or logically invalid. Participants also received a measure of working memory capacity (the counting span task) and a measure of inhibitory control (the stop signal task). Indices of belief bias and logical reasoning on belief-based problems were predicted independently by both measures. In contrast logical reasoning on belief neutral problems was predicted by working memory alone. The findings suggest that executive functions play a key role in the development of children's ability to decontextualise their thinking. (shrink)

It is the individualistic approach which prevails in previous analysis of the problem of ethics in economy. The problem of the ethical attitude concerns individuals, business people, managers, politicians and economists. The publications about business ethics lack analysis of system circumstances in which individuals and companies act. If capitalism is just the power of capital owners over workers and if, according to Schumpeter, it is “the civilization of inequality and of the family fortune”, than it can be easily judged as (...) a system of predominantly unethical tendencies. Nevertheless, it is worth raising questions about ethical character of various types of capitalism. Participation capitalism is one which ensures (nearly) full employment, a social minimum wage for everyone and the real power of society including workers’ participation in decision processes. The structural conditions of such capitalism force and even encourage ethical behaviour. The capitalism of the protective state was founded by J.M. Keynes, W. Beveridge and Will Hutton with his stakeholder capitalism. Many European countries approach this standard of capitalism. Predacious capitalism (turbo-capitalism) is a maximum-profit-oriented capitalism with no regard to social costs. The nearest example is the post-Reagan American capitalism. Polish capitalism fails to pass muster even in regard to the liberal capitalism. (shrink)

Ryle, the most prominent proponent of anti-intellectualism, and Stanley and Williamson, the most influential intellectualists, both invoke dispositions to explain the ascription of knowledge-how. It is now well known that conditional analyses of disposition suffer from two types of counterexamples: finkish and masked dispositions. If it is the case that dispositions play a role in the analysis of ascription of knowledge-how, and dispositions can be masked and finkish, then an important question arises: Can knowing-how be masked or finkish too? In (...) response to this question, Hawley claims that unlike dispositions, knowledge-how does not seem liable to finkishness, and knowledge-how can be accounted for in terms of counterfactual success. In this paper both claims will be challenged. I seek to show that Hawley’s account faces two problems: an unjustified asymmetry and a puzzle. I also argue that knowledge-how can, intuitively, be finkish and masked, and therefore the counterfactual analysis of knowing-how suggested by Ryle, Stanley and Hawley fails. What is more, I show that the debate on finkish and masked dispositions can shed a new light on the practical component which is necessary for knowing-how. (shrink)

In a response to critiques of his On the Postcolony in a 2006 African Identities article, Achille Mbembe declared that the book was written at a time when the study of Africa was caught in a dramatic analytical gridlock. Traditional critical frameworks and discourses on the condition of postcolonial Africa seemed inadequate and ineffectual. Marxian analysis of colonization and its consequences is specifically isolated as one such impotent tool of critical analysis. As an alternative to these “failed” traditional paradigms, Mbembe (...) launches into a deconstructive experimental hermeneutic that leads him to the explication of colonial alterity in libidinal, representational and semiotically analogous language, as exhibited in On the Postcolony. This article challenges the efficacy of this post-structuralist semiotics and phenomenological extrapolations as the proposed way out of his perceived “cul-de-sac” in African postcolonial self-imagination. In particular, his dismissal of Marxian theory is turned... (shrink)

In this paper an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model, for predicting the category of a tumor was developed and tested. Taking patients’ tests, a number of information gained that influence the classification of the tumor. Such information as age, sex, histologic-type, degree-of-diffe, status of bone, bone-marrow, lung, pleura, peritoneum, liver, brain, skin, neck, supraclavicular, axillar, mediastinum, and abdominal. They were used as input variables for the ANN model. A model based on the Multilayer Perceptron Topology was established and trained using (...) data set which its title is “primary tumor” and was obtained from the University Medical Centre, Institute of Oncology, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia Test data evaluation shows that the ANN model is able to correctly predict the tumor category with 76.67 % accuracy. (shrink)

Recent judicial rulings and changes in federal and state legislation have given for-profit corporations a growing list of rights and constitutional protections, including the right to practice religion free from many types of federal or state restriction. In this paper, we highlight the implications of these developments using Rawls’ Theory of Justice to explore the consequences of for-profit corporate religious freedom for consumers and employees. We identify preliminary principles to spark a discussion as to how expanding religious freedom for businesses (...) and fair access to goods and services can coexist in the for-profit marketplace. (shrink)

The term ‘moral resilience’ has been gaining momentum in the nursing ethics literature. This may be due to it representing a potential response to moral problems such as moral distress. Moral resilience has been conceptualised as a factor that inhibits immoral actions, as a favourable outcome and as an ability to bounce back after a morally distressing situation. In this article, the philosophical analysis of moral resilience is developed by challenging these conceptualisations and highlighting the risks of such limiting perspectives. (...) It is argued that moral resilience is best understood as a virtue with two associated vices, faintheartedness and rigidity. The intellectual virtue of practical wisdom is required to express resilience as a virtue. This understanding leads to recommendations for professional education, for practice and for further research. (shrink)

[First paragraph]: This article is part of a larger project in which I suggest a historically informed philosophy of dance, called “figuration,” consisting of new interpretations of canonical philosophers. Figuration consists of two major parts, comprising (a) four basic concepts, or “moves”—namely, “positure,” “gesture,” “grace,” and “resilience”—and (b) seven types, or “families” of dance—namely, “concert,” “folk,” “societal,” “agonistic,” “animal,” “astronomical,” and “discursive.” This article is devoted to the first of these four moves, as illustrated by both its importance for Aristotle (...) and also its applicability to these seven families of dance. One goal of figuration as a whole, and the central goal of this excerpt from that larger project, is to model and justify a dancing aesthetic education pursuant to psychological and political flourishing. (shrink)

Despite the end of the Cold War and the ascendancy of liberal democracy celebrated by Francis Fukuyama as “the end of history”, a growing number of scholars and political activists point to its inherent shortcomings. However, they have tended to dismiss it on the basis of one or two of its salient weaknesses. While this is a justifiable way to proceed, it denies the searching reader an opportunity to see the broad basis for the growing rejection of liberal democracy among (...) African political theorists. Consequently, in this article, I argue that from an African perspective, the almost hegemonic status of liberal democracy can be challenged on at least five grounds, namely, logical inconsistency, impracticability due to the largely communalistic outlook of many africans, inconsistency between affirmation and action, violation of the right to ethnic identity, and the moral imperative to assert the right to cultural emancipation. -/- I conclude by calling upon African and Africanist political theorists to utilise indigenous African political thought, coupled with emancipatory aspects of political thought from other parts of the world, to design practicable models of democracy for contemporary African states. I further conclude that in order to promote genuine inter-cultural dialogue on democratisation, people from Western cultures ought to acknowledge the equality of all cultures, and to recognise that systems of governance are part and parcel of those cultures. (shrink)

William Beveridge was a key figure in the modernization of British economic and social policy who published widely on unemployment and social security. Among his most notable works and reprinted in this set are, _Full Employment in a Free Society _, and _Pillars of Security_. Beveridge’s Report on social insurance was published in 1942. It proposed that all people of working age should pay a weekly national insurance contribution. In return, benefits would be paid to people who were (...) sick, unemployed, retired or widowed. Beveridge included as one of three fundamental assumptions the fact that there would be a National Health Service of some sort. Beveridge's arguments were widely accepted. He argued that welfare institutions would increase the competitiveness of British industry in the post-war period, not only by shifting labour costs like healthcare and pensions onto the public account but also by producing healthier, wealthier and more productive workers. Beveridge saw full employment as the pivot of the social welfare programme he expressed in the 1942 report. As well as making available some of Beveridge’s key, and in some case, lesser known works, this set includes as its final volume an indispensable overview of Beveridge and his prolific work. (shrink)

Of the many problems of history and culture, the problem of correct understanding and interpretation of universal symbols, as well as their wise use, is very relevant. Since the subject of the study is not individual symbols, and not even symbolic systems, but the outlook component of the transformation of symbols, in the field of research is the interaction of culture and its creator - a person whose change of position leads to a change in the interpretation of symbols, and (...) therefore changes in the symbolism. The main task of the article is to understand the phenomenon of the symbol and its transformation in a single structure of history and culture. (shrink)

One of the most persistent and poignant human experiences is the sensation of longing--a restlessness perhaps best described as the unspoken conviction that something is missing from our lives. In this study, Drew M. Dalton attempts to illuminate this experience by examining the philosophical thought of Emmanuel Levinas on longing, or what Levinas terms "metaphysical desire." Metaphysical desire, according to Levinas, does not stem from any determinate lack within us, nor does it aim at a particular object beyond us, much (...) less promise any eventual satisfaction. Rather, it functions in the realm of the infinite where such distinctions as inside and outside or one and the other are indistinguishable, perhaps even eliminated. As Levinas conceives such longing, it becomes a mediator in our relation to the other--both the human other and the divine Other. -/- Dalton follows the meandering trail of Levinas's thought along a series of dialogues with some of the philosophers within the history of the Western tradition who have most influenced his corpus. By tracing the genealogy of Levinas's notion of metaphysical desire--namely in the works of Plato, Heidegger, Fichte, Schelling, and Otto--the nature of this Levinasian theme is elucidated to reveal that it is not simply an idealism, a "hagiography of desire" detached from actual experience and resulting in a disconnect between his phenomenological account and our own lives. Rather, Levinas's account of metaphysical desire points to a phenomenology of human longing that is both an ethical and religious phenomenon. In the end, human longing is revealed to be one of the most profound ways in which a subject becomes a subject, arising to its "true self," and hearing the call to responsibility placed upon it by the Other. -/- Throughout, Dalton explicates the nuance of a number of key Levinasian terms, many of which have been taken from the Western philosophical tradition and reinscribed with a new meaning. Eros, the "Good beyond being," shame, responsibility, creation, the trace, the il y a, and the holy are discovered to be deeply tied to Levinas's account of metaphysical desire, resulting in a conclusion regarding longing's role in the relationship between the finite and the Infinite.". (shrink)

In this paper, the authors have detected a new effect in the area of geomagnetism, related to the behavior of a magnetic dipole freely floating on water surface. An experiment is described in the present paper in which a magnetic dipole fixed upon a float placed on non- magnetized water surface undergoes displacement along with reorientation caused by fine structure of the earth's magnetic field. This fact can probably be explained by secular decrease of the earth's major dipole moment. Further, (...) a detailed study of the phenomenon may create interesting premises for its practical use, particularly for the analysis of fine structure of geomagnetic field and its time-dependent anomalies. A strange behavior of some sea fish species prior to strong earthquakes may be explained if the fish are assumed as 'live magnetic dipoles'. (shrink)

This edited volume systematically addresses the connection between Wilfrid Sellars and the history of modern philosophy, exploring both the content and method of this relationship. It intends both to analyze Sellars’s position in relation to singular thinkers of the modern tradition, and to inquire into Sellars’s understanding of philosophy as a field in reflective and constructive conversation with its past. The chapters in Part I cover Sellars’s interpretation and use of Descartes, Leibniz, Hume, Kant and Hegel. Part II features essays (...) on his relationship with Peirce, Frege, Carnap, Wittgenstein, American pragmatism, behaviorism and American realism, particularly his father, Roy Wood. Sellars and the History of Modern Philosophy features original contributions by many of the most renowned Sellars scholars throughout the world. It offers an exhaustive survey of Sellars’s views on the historical antecedents and metaphilosophical aspects of his thought. (shrink)

Gyngell and colleagues consider that the recent Nuffield Council report does not go far enough: heritable genome editing is not just justifiable in a few rare cases; instead, there is a moral imperative to undertake it. We agree that there is a moral argument for this, but in the real world it is mitigated by the fact that it is not usually possible to ensure a better life. We suggest that a moral imperative for HGE can currently only be concluded (...) if one first buys into an overly deterministic view of a genome sequence, and the role of variation within in it, in the aetiology of the disease: most diseases cannot simply be attributed to specific genetic variants that we could edit away. Multiple, poorly understood genetic and environmental factors interact to influence the expression of diseases with a genetic component, even well understood ‘monogenic’ disorders. Population-level genome analyses are now demonstrating that many genetic ’mutations' are much less predictive than previously thought 1. Furthermore, HGE might introduce new risks just as it reduces old ones; or remove protections not yet clearly delineated. (shrink)

Science aims to transform the subjectivity of individual observations and ideas into more objective and universal knowledge. Yet if there is any area in which first-person experience holds a particularly special and delicate role, it is the sciences of the mind. According to a widespread view, first-person methods were largely discarded from psychology after the fall of introspectionism a century ago and replaced by more objective behavioral measures, a step that some authors have begun to criticize. To examine whether these (...) views are sufficiently informed by actual scientific practice, we conducted a review of methodological approaches in the cognitive science literature. We found that reports of subjective experience are in fact still widely used in a broad variety of different experimental paradigms, both in studies that focus on subjective experience, and in those that make no explicit reference to it. Across these studies, we documented a diverse collection of approaches that leveraged first-person reports, ranging from button presses to unstructured interviews, while continuing to maximise experimental reproducibility. Common to these studies were subjects acting as sensors, intentionally communicating their experience to the experimenter, which we termed “second-person” methods. We conclude that, despite views to the contrary, first-person experience has always been and is still central to investigations of the mind even if it is not recognized as such. We suggest that the conversation ought to be reframed: instead of debating whether to accept subjects’ first-person knowledge we should discuss how best to do so. (shrink)

The phenomenal overflow thesis states that the content of phenomenally conscious mental states can exceed our capacities of cognitive access. Much of the philosophical and scientific debate about the phenomenal overflow thesis has been focused on vision, attention, and verbal report. My view is that we feel things in our bodies that we don’t always process with the resources of cognitive access. Thinking about the question of phenomenal overflow from the perspective of embodied affect rather than the content of visual (...) experience is the novel contribution of this paper. I argue that we have reason to think that hydranencephalic children are phenomenally conscious but incapable of cognitive access. Further, I claim that we should interpret the reactive behavior of these subjects in terms of a kind of access to content that is distinct from cognitive access, I call this novel form of access ‘affective access.’. (shrink)

Popular imaginings of Tanzania's Serengeti National Park and Ngorongoro Conservation Area are founded on the idea of wilderness preserved, but this conception of the ‘park’ is based in colonial-era race-thinking. Rather than simply a colonial-era manifestation of an apparently universal conservationist ideal, Serengeti and Ngorongoro are instead racial projects that embody the historical and ongoing processes of racial formation. The creation of Serengeti and Ngorongoro enabled a racialisation of nature, a process begun by the British and reinscribed via safari ever (...) since. Recognising this racialisation of nature has larger implications for not only the treatment and perception of those in the Global South, the racialised ‘other’ to the Global North, but also for the realities of white privilege and constructions of whiteness. (shrink)

This paper shows that philosophy and contemplation are integral parts of leisure and of a fully conscious educative experience. Through examination of the concepts of philosophy, the philosopher, and contemplation, it will be proposed that leisure is a necessary condition for philosophy and for education. To conceptually bring together philosophy and education with leisure, the act of teaching as “an overflow of contemplation,” following Yves Simon’s definition, will be considered. Supporting the philosophical view of education as constituting an inward transformation (...) of the individual, from which he or she can better regard the world and his or her place in it, a serious theory of education rooted on leisure is a timely and valuable idea to consider. (shrink)

Despite extensive discussion of naïve realism in the wider philosophical literature, those influenced by the phenomenological movement who work in the philosophy of perception have hardly weighed in on the matter. It is thus interesting to discover that Edmund Husserl’s close philosophical interlocutor and friend, the early twentieth-century phenomenologist Johannes Daubert, held the naive realist view. This article presents Daubert’s views on the fundamental nature of perceptual experience and shows how they differ radically from those of Husserl’s. The author argues, (...) in conclusion, that Daubert’s views are superior to those of Husserl’s specifically in the way that they deal with the phenomenon of perceptual constancy. (shrink)

Geoengineering is commonly defined as ‘the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change’. Technologies which...

This correction reflects that I forgot to cite Stephan Leuenberger's unpublished work in the paragraph beginning "More promising, perhaps, is the orthodox view ..." in Section 5. The overall argument of Section 5 is a development of an argument I gave in footnote 27 of 'No Work for a Theory of Grounding' (Inquiry, 2014). At issue in the relevant sections of 'No Work...' and 'Grounding-based Formulations...' is whether a proponent of Grounding has resources to accommodate strongly emergent phenomena, where strong (...) emergence is understood as contrasting with physicalism. In 'No Work...', after arguing in the text that an account of strong emergence as involving a failure of full Grounding would not accommodate the live possibility that strongly emergent goings-on might be partially but not completely metaphysically dependent on physical goings on, I considered in note 27 whether strong emergence, again understood as contrasting with physicalism, could be characterized by appeal to a Finean notion of partial Grounding, as the view that strongly emergent goings-on are partially but not fully Grounded in physical goings-on, and I argued that assuming that the notion of partial Grounding was taken to be primitive, then (since there were no prospects of defining full Grounding in terms of primitive partial Grounding along lines of defining a general notion of parthood in terms of primitive proper parthood or identity), such an approach would require that full Grounding also be taken as primitive, with possibly yet another primitive connecting partial and full Grounding. -/- I heard Leuenberger's talk 'Emergence and Failures of Supplementation' in May 2015; for purposes of developing my previous argument (as per Section 5 in 'Grounding-based Formulations...') this talk was helpful since Leuenberger correctly argued that there were also no prospects for implementing the partial Grounding-based strategy by taking full Grounding to be primitive and defining partial Grounding in terms of full Grounding, since that would import a weak supplementation structure that might not be present in cases of strong emergence. I wrote to Leuenberger asking for his slides so that I could reference him and his work (which again is presented in the paragraph beginning "More promising, perhaps, is the orthodox view..."), but somehow forgot to include a citation to his talk, for which I sincerely apologize. -/- One last thing: the erratum is a bit misleading about my use of Leuenberger's work. My discussion of whether a primitivist (i.e., 'non-orthodox') understanding of Finean partial Ground serves as a suitable basis for a partial Grounding-based approach to strong emergence stems from footnote 27 of my 2014, not Leuenberger's 2015 talk, and in both 'No Work...' and 'Grounding-based Formulations...' I argue that such an approach would be problematic, not "suitable", since involving two or three primitives. Also worth noting is that I do not claim or argue that the orthodox conception of partial Grounding as defined in supplementary fashion in terms of full Grounding is *incompatible* with strong emergence. Again, at issue in both 'No Work...' and in 'Grounding-based Formulations...' is strong emergence understood as contrasting with physicalism, so the relevant application of a partial Grounding-based strategy, whether or not involving an 'orthodox' account of partial Grounding as definable in terms of full Grounding, is in my papers one according to which strongly emergent goings-on are partially but not fully Grounded in *physical* goings-on. So far as I can tell, there might be cases of strong emergence that *do* obey supplementation, and which would be compatible with a partial Grounding-based account of strong emergence, where the operative notion of partial Grounding is 'orthodox' (non-primitive). For my purposes, what is important is that cases of strong emergence might not obey supplementation. (shrink)

Plato's Republic presents the characters of the philosopher and the tyrant as similar. Strongly focused by indiscriminate erotic motivation, both defy convention and lack familiar emotional responses, which make them appear to be mad. This essay argues that Plato put forward these parallels partly in order to defend Socrates from the charge of corrupting the young, partly to present a possible way to overthrow the current regime and partly to show the ineffectiveness of democracy. The very best leaders may look (...) like tyrants; it is only through proper philosophical education that their true natures can be discerned. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore a possible a/theological response to what Nietzsche called the ‘death of God’—or Hölderlin’s and Heidegger’s ‘flight of the gods’—through a juxtaposition of the Christian-Pauline concept of kenōsis and the ancient Greek-Platonic notion of chōra, and by taking Nishida Kitarō’s appropriations of these concepts as a clue and starting point. Nishida refers to chōra in 1926 to initiate his philosophy of place and then makes reference to kenōsis in 1945 in his final work that culminates—without necessarily (...) completing—his oeuvre. What he had thereby accomplished is an inversion of Platonism resulting in the collapse of the transcendent/immanent—idea/genesis and by implication the Heaven/Earth—dichotomy. I then unpack the ethical implication of this kenotic chōra Nishida has left us with. It suggests from us a certain response to the desacralization or secularization of the world. I shall build upon this suggestion and unfold its implications by drawing from a variety of sources, starting with Nishida but including others, such as Meister Eckhart, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Gianni Vattimo, Reiner Schürmann, Mark Taylor, Jürgen Moltmann, and other philosophical and theological sources. (shrink)

Recent years have seen numerous sociological disagreements devolve into heated debates, with scholars openly accusing their peers of being both empirically wrong and morally misguided. While social scientists routinely reflect on the ethical implications of certain research assumptions and data collection methods, the sociology of knowledge production has said little about how moral debates over scholarship shape subsequent research trajectories. Drawing on the new French pragmatic sociology, this article examines how sociologists respond to criticisms of the moral worth of their (...) research. The article outlines three typical responses: (1) accepting the criticism and changing direction completely; (2) accepting the criticism but changing discursive framing to incorporate existing research without being subject to critique; and (3) navigating through the debate by devising new research directions that do not trigger such criticism. To demonstrate, the article looks at how sociologists of religion responded, in their published scholarship, to criticisms of secularization theory as depreciating religious people and spiritual experience. Across the responses, we show that sociologists have included moral considerations in their empirical investigations, and have switched among several diverse moral justifications to address—and also avoid—criticism. We conclude by demonstrating that this model can be extended to other domains of sociological inquiry, including the study of gender-based wage inequality and methodological nationalism. The article highlights the importance of mapping the moral frameworks sociologists use for the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of morality. (shrink)

El objetivo de este artículo es ofrecer, al hilo de un análisis del texto de la Fenomenologíadel Espíritu que comenta la Antígona de Sófocles, una interpretación del concepto hegeliano de acciónque pone en cuestión la tesis, defendida habitualmente, según la cual Hegel habría pretendido que elconflicto trágico resulta superado por la acción moderna.Ese texto revela que la acción, que comparece ahí como principio absoluto, posee sin embargo unaestructura quebrada y paradójica: necesariamente presupone y niega una instancia en sí, inmediata ysustantiva (...) que, finalmente, oculta la negatividad de la muerte. En la medida en que esa vinculación ala sustancia se demuestra así consustancial a la acción, el trabajo concluye, frente a otras lecturas, que,aun cuando la historia del espíritu haya dejado atrás la “sustancia ética” antigua, la acción nopuede liberarse para Hegel del carácter trágico. Por último, defiende el sentido en el que precisamenteesta condición trágica la determina a la vez como destructiva y productiva, capaz de abrir la historia. (shrink)

Many studies in big data focus on the uses of data available to researchers, leaving without treatment data that is on the servers but of which researchers are unaware. We call this dark data, and in this article, we present and discuss it in the context of high-performance computing facilities. To this end, we provide statistics of a major HPC facility in Europe, the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart. We also propose a new position tailor-made for coping with dark data and (...) general data management. We call it the scientific data officer and we distinguish it from other standard positions in HPC facilities such as chief data officers, system administrators, and security officers. In order to understand the role of the SDO in HPC facilities, we discuss two kinds of responsibilities, namely, technical responsibilities and ethical responsibilities. While the former are intended to characterize the position, the latter raise concerns—and proposes solutions—to the control and authority that the SDO would acquire. (shrink)