In this paper, I present a detailed interpretation of Peirce’s cosmogony about the origin of the universe and its evolutionary development. This involves bringing together and making sense of Peirce’s disconnected statements on cosmology, which are scattered throughout his writings and which sometimes employ different terminologies. Furthermore, it shall involve identifying the categories of firstness, secondness, and thirdness that govern its conceptual structure, and ultimately the metaphysical structure of the universe to which it refers. Attending to the categories at play (...) here reveals the basic “logic” of Peirce’s theory from which its rational coherence is discernable. As such, it may be argued that given.. (shrink)

This volume sets out to reverse the neglect.

Following previous work that shows engineering students possess different levels of understanding of ethics—implicit and explicit—this study focuses on how students’ implicit understanding of engineering ethics influences their team discussion process, in cases where there is significant divergence between their explicit and implicit understanding. We observed student teams during group discussions of the ethical issues involved in their engineering design projects. Through the micro-scale discourse analysis based on cognitive ethnography, we found two possible ways in which implicit understanding influenced the (...) discussion. In one case, implicit understanding played the role of intuitive ethics—an intuitive judgment followed by reasoning. In the other case, implicit understanding played the role of ethical insight, emotionally guiding the direction of the discussion. In either case, however, implicit understanding did not have a strong influence, and the conclusion of the discussion reflected students’ explicit understanding. Because students’ implicit understanding represented broader social implication of engineering design in both cases, we suggest to take account of students’ relevant implicit understanding in engineering education, to help students become more socially responsible engineers. (shrink)

This study explores how peer advising affects student project teams’ discussions of engineering ethics. Peer ethics advisors from non-engineering disciplines are expected to provide diverse perspectives and to help engineering student teams engage and sustain ethics discussions. To investigate how peer advising helps engineering student teams’ ethics discussions, three student teams in different peer advising conditions were closely observed: without any advisor, with a single volunteer advisor, and with an advising team working on the ethics advising project. Micro-scale discourse analysis (...) based on cognitive ethnography was conducted to find each team’s cultural model of understanding of engineering ethics. Cultural-historical activity theory analysis was also conducted to see what influenced each team’s cultural model. In cultural model, the engineering team with an ethics advising team showed broader understanding in social implications of engineering. The results of CHAT analysis indicated that differences in rules, community, and division of labor among three teams influenced the teams’ cultural models. The CHAT analysis also indicated that the peer advisors working on the ethics advising project and the engineering team working on engineering design project created a collaborative environment. The findings indicated that collaborative environment supported peer ethics advising to facilitate team discussions of engineering ethics. (shrink)

The purpose of this valuable book is to consider recent cultural trends in bioethics from a Catholic perspective. Bioethics is intended for a lay audience interested in understanding bioethical issues from a Catholic perspective.

Unlike natural agents, artificial agents are, to varying extent, designed according to sets of principles or assumptions. We argue that the designers philosophical position on truth, belief and knowledge has far reaching implications for the design and performance of the resulting agents. Of the many sources of design information and background we believe philosophical theories are under-rated as valuable influences on the design process. To explore this idea we have implemented some computer-based agents with their control algorithms inspired by two (...) strongly contrasting philosophical positions. A series of experiments on these agents shows that, despite having common tasks and goals, the behaviour of the agents is markedly different and this can be attributed to their individual approaches to belief and knowledge. We discuss these findings and their support for the view that epistemological theories have a particular relevance for artificial agent design. (shrink)

Attention Restoration Theory proposes that exposure to natural environments helps to restore attention. For sustained attention—the ongoing application of focus to a task, the effect appears to be modest, and the underlying mechanisms of attention restoration remain unclear. Exposure to nature may improve attention performance through many means: modulation of alertness and one’s connection to nature were investigated here, in two separate studies. In both studies, participants performed the Sustained Attention to Response Task before and immediately after viewing a meadow, (...) ocean, or urban image for 40 s, and then completed the Perceived Restorativeness Scale. In Study 1, an eye-tracker recorded the participants’ tonic pupil diameter during the SARTs, providing a measure of alertness. In Study 2, the effects of connectedness to nature on SART performance and perceived restoration were studied. In both studies, the image viewed was not associated with participants’ sustained attention performance; both nature images were perceived as equally restorative, and more restorative than the urban image. The image viewed was not associated with changes in alertness. Connectedness to nature was not associated with sustained attention performance, but it did moderate the relation between viewing the natural images and perceived restorativeness; participants reporting a higher connection to nature also reported feeling more restored after viewing the nature, but not the urban, images. Dissociation was found between the physiological and behavioral measures and the perceived restorativeness of the images. The results suggest that restoration associated with nature exposure is not associated with modulation of alertness but is associated with connectedness with nature. (shrink)

This volume centers on debates about how far moral judgments bind across traditions and epochs. Nowadays such debates appear especially volatile, both in popular culture and intellectual discourse: although there is increasing agreement that the moral and political criteria invoked in human rights documents possess cross-cultural force, many modern and postmodern developments erode confidence in moral appeals that go beyond a local consensus or apply outside a particular community. Often the point of departure for discussion is the Enlightenment paradigm of (...) a common morality, in which it is assumed that certain unchanging beliefs inhere in the structure of human reason. Whereas some thinkers continue to defend this paradigm, others modify it in diverse ways without abandoning entirely the attempt to address a universal audience, and still others jettison virtually all of its distinguishing features. Exhibiting a range of positions Western participants take in these debates, this volume seeks to advance the substance of the debates themselves without prejudging the outcome. Rival assessments of the Enlightenment paradigm are offered from various philosophical and theological points of view. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Robert Merrihew Adams, Annette C. Baier, Alan Donagan, Margaret A. Farley, Alan Gewirth, David Little, Richard Rorty, Jeffrey Stout, and Lee H. Yearley. (shrink)

Through close examination of the texts, the author shows how 15th-century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa developed an understanding of uncertainty that opened the way for human intelligence, despite its inherent weaknesses, to find out more about ourselves, the world, and what lies beyond.

This cluster of essays by Julia E. Judish, John P. Reeder Jr., Donald K. Swearer, and Lee H. Yearley considers benevolence as a virtue construed in various ways in different traditions. The essays explore: the roots of benevolence or caring, especially towards strangers; the normative issue of the relation between universal love and concern for particular others in special relations; and the question of possessions, in particular the ideal of voluntary poverty. A theme that runs throughout the essays is (...) the relation of benevolence to religiously interpreted transformations of the self. (shrink)

Was the emperor as sovereign allowed to seize the property of his subjects? Was this handled differently in late medieval Roman law and in the practice and theory of zabt in Mughal India? How is political sovereignty relating to the church's powers and to trade? How about maritime sovereignty after Grotius? How was the East India Company as a 'corporation' interacting with an Indian Nawab? How was the Shogunate and the emperor negotiating 'sovereignty' in early modern Japan? The volume addresses (...) such questions through thoroughly researched historical case studies, covering the disciplines of History, Political Sciences, and Law. Contributors include: Kenneth Pennington, Fabrice Micallef, Philippe Denis, Sylvio Hermann De Franceschi, Joshua Freed, David Dyzenhaus, Michael P. Breen, Daniel Lee, Andrew Fitzmaurice and Kajo Kubala, Nicholas Abbott, Tiraana Bains, Cornel Zwierlein, Mark Ravina. (shrink)

In the last decade there arose a debate between William P. Alston and Nicholas Wolterstorff on the subject of Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of analogia—that is, the position that perfection terms, when properly predicated of God and of creatures, are distinct, yet related in meaning. Whereas Alston interprets Aquinas to hold this well-known position before criticizing it, Wolterstorff argues that Aquinas actually did not hold the position as it is usually presented. In this paper, I show why Alston’s “orthodox” interpretation (...) is more faithful to the letter of Aquinas’s text than is Wolterstorff’s “heterodoxy” and attempt to defuse Alston’s criticisms. (shrink)

This book, based on the prestigious Oxford Amnesty Lecture series, focuses on human rights abuses, and the ways in which they are interpreted. The collection includes contributions by Tzvetan Todorov, Michael Ignatieff, Peter Singer, Gitta Sereny, Susan Sontag, and Eva Hoffman, with commentaries on their essays by Niall Fergusson, Timothy Garton Ash, John Broome, Hermione Lee and others.

Pragmatic Scientific Realism (PSR) urges us to take up the realist aim or the goal of truth although we have good reason to think that the goal can neither be attained nor approximated. While Newton-Smith thinks that pursuing what we know we cannot achieve is clearly irrational, Rescher disagrees and contends that pursuing an unreachable goal can be rational on pragmatic grounds—if in pursuing the unreachable goal one can get indirect benefits. I have blocked this attempt at providing a pragmatic (...) justification for the realist aim of PSR on precisely the same pragmatic grounds—since there is a competing alternative to PSR, and the alternative can provide whatever indirect benefits PSR can offer while being less risky than it is, prudential reasoning favours the alternative to PSR. This undermines the pragmatic case for the realist aim of science since the instrumentalist alternative does not aim at the truth. (shrink)

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 2, Page 325-326, March 2022.

This volume commemorates the 6th centennial of the birth of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), a Renaissance polymath whose interests included law, politics, metaphysics, epistemology, theology, mysticism and relations between Christians and non-Christian peoples. The contributors to this volume reflect Cusanus' multiple interests; and, by doing so they commemorate three deceased luminaries of the American Cusanus Society: F. Edward Cranz, Thomas P. McTighe and Charles Trinkaus. Contributors include: Christopher M. Bellitto, H. Lawrence Bond, Elizabeth Brient, Louis Dupré, Wilhelm Dupré, Walter (...) Andreas Euler, Lawrence Hundersmarck, Thomas M. Izbicki, Dennis D. Martin, Yelena Matusevich, Bernard McGinn, Clyde Lee Miller, Thomas E. Morrissey, Brian A. Pavlac, and Morimichi Watanabe. Publications by Charles Trinkaus: - Edited by C. Trinkaus and H.A. Oberman, The pursuit of holiness in late medieval and renaissance religion, ISBN: 978 90 04 03791 5 (Out of print). (shrink)

Nicholas Agar offers a more nuanced view of the transformative potential of genetic and cybernetic technologies, making a case for moderate human enhancement—improvements to attributes and abilities that do not significantly exceed what ...

How do words and images function hermeneutically? How does hermeneutic practice work? Answering these questions and more, Nicholas Davey develops the hermeneutical foundations of creative practice. In doing so, he not only uncovers the significance of philosophical hermeneutics for the arts and the humanities, but defends the humanities as a whole from the current scepticism inspired by deconstruction and post-structuralism. Taking Gadamer's language ontology as its cue, this pioneering volume not only addresses certain weaknesses that Davey observes in Gadamer's (...) thought but further takes Gadamerian thinking beyond Gadamer himself. In particular, Davey investigates the productive value of negativity that is central to hermeneutics and to wider spheres of creative learning. Advocating a renewed confidence in hermeneutics and the humanities, Negative Hermeneutics and the Question of Practice reveals how hermeneutical thinking provides a map of the dynamics within creative practice, eliminating the need for an externally imposed 'theory' of the arts. (shrink)

도덕(morality)의 기원(origins)과 본성(nature)에 관한 철학적 탐구의 역사는 장구하다. 플라톤의 『프로타고라스』(Protagoras)에서 전개된 신화적(mythical) 설명은 홉스의 신화적 설명을 거쳐 흄의 자연주의적 설명과 칸트의 형이상학적 설명으로 발전하여 적어도 19세기까지 도덕철학의 영역을 굳건하게 지켜왔다. 하지만 20세기에 와서 과학(사회생물학, 도덕심리학, 신경과학)의 놀라운 연구성과는 도덕의 기원과 본성에 관한 전통철학의 설명방식에 대해 깊은 회의와 불신을 불러일으켰다. 전통철학의 입장이 ‘위로부터의 도덕(morality from above)’을 이야기하는데 반해서 새로운 과학적 입장은 ‘아래로부터의 도덕(morality from below)’을 주창한다. 도덕의 기원과 본성에 관한 전통철학과 현대과학의 탐구성과는 이제 분명해진 것 같다. 인간의 도덕을 신의 명령(divine command)이나 (...) 도덕원리(moral principles) 같은 저 높은 곳에서 초월적으로 존재하는 것이 아니라 인간존재 자체에서 진화한 결과물이라고 보는 것이 객관적으로 타당한 견해인 것 같다. 인간은 선한 본성(good nature)을 키워왔고, 도덕법칙과 종교적 교리는 인간의 이러한 본성에 따라 뒤에 만들어진 것이다. 인간은 스스로 도덕성(morality)을 갖추어 왔으며, 이 도덕성은 우리의 이성(reason)과 의지(will)에 따라 더 높은 차원으로 발달할 수 있는 것이다. 도덕은 ‘위로부터 내려온(come from above)’것이 아니라 ‘아래로부터 올라온(come from below)’것이다. 도덕은 인간의 진화의 역사에서 탄생한 발명품(invention)이다. (shrink)