This chapter contains sections titled: Institutionalized Philosophy Philosophy Before Apartheid Philosophy During Apartheid African Philosophy in South Africa Philosophy in Post‐Apartheid South Africa Conclusion.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Question of Violence in South Africa Albert Luthuli Nelson Mandela Steve Biko Conclusion.

How should black people, indeed any other group of people in general, respond when they are grouped together and oppressed on the basis of the contingency of their physical characteristics? Questions of liberation from oppression involve questions about the means to overcome that oppression. Throughout the ages of struggle against racial oppression, for example, collective black identity and solidarity has been one of the favourite responses and rallying call for racial justice and liberation. In South Africa this response has recently (...) emerged through the formation of a number of highly controversial groups such as: The Native Club, The African Forum, and The Forum for Black Journalists. Critics of these formations think that such black solidarity, divisive, irrational, morally objectionable and, above all, racist. This paper defends the emancipatory racial solidarity tradition, examplified by The Native Club and similar constituted organisations, against such serious charges and critiques mounted by contemporary leading thinkers on identity. The tools for such a defense are primarily derived from Jean-Paul Sartre's conception of group formation in his Critique Of Dialectical Reason. I argue that since anti-black racist consciousness always operates at the level of collectives, it is therefore impossible to fight such racism as an individual; that collective black solidarity is a necessary condition for racial emancipation. (shrink)

This is the first book-length work to focus on the philosophical and anthropological contribution of Mabogo More, a prominent and influential black South African existentialist thinker.

Exploring the implications of Sartre’s existentialism for the problem of racism, a prominent African philosopher provides the ontological basis for understanding the situation of a black person in an antiblack world.

In this important new book, leading Black philosopher Mabogo More reflects on his life and career in apartheid South African. The book explores Africana existentialism in relation to issues of race, identity, liberation, freedom, alienation, responsibility and bad faith and includes key essays from More's corpus alongside his philosophical memoir.

Biko was not only considered a 'brilliant political theorist', he is also considered a formidable and articulate philosopher; an important Africana existential philosopher. From Biko's writings, speeches and interviews, Mabogo More's view is that philosophy is not a disembodied system of ideas nor is it a mechanical reflection about the world; rather, it is a way of existing and acting. What Biko himself describes as 'a way of life'. This important perspective on Biko would be of value to (...) many African philosophers, political and social thinkers, social scientists, psychologists, cultural critics, political activists, students, critical race theorists and anyone interested in the ideas that Biko presents. (shrink)

Pascal’s wager uses decision theory to argue that it is rational to attempt to nurture belief in God, based on the expected utility of believing (infinite happiness) compared to not believing (at best, only finite happiness). A belief in an eternal conscious torment in hell (infinite suffering) for non-believers makes the differences in expected utility even more apparent, strengthening the argument. Similar reasoning can also be used to calculate the expected moral value of actions, including procreation. Under theism, if (...) possible future children might suffer eternal conscious torment, the expected moral value of procreation is extremely negative. This implies that theists have a moral obligation not to procreate, which for most theists, entails a moral obligation to be celibate or to undergo sterilisation surgery. (shrink)

We posit and find evidence consistent with a new mechanism of intra-firm enforcement spillovers: the leakage of scarce compliance resources across facilities within a firm. Using a facility-level panel data set of Clean Air Act (CAA) enforcement actions from 2005 to 2017, we find a facility is more likely to violate the CAA following penalties on its same-industry-same-state siblings. In contrast, there is no significant spillover across firms. We show that the intra-firm spillover is not due to changes in (...) regulatory attention or production shifting. Instead, our results suggest it may result from the redeployment of scarce compliance resources across siblings. Consistent with this mechanism, we find compliance leakage only occurs at privately held firms and facilities that lack the resources to invest in pollution prevention. The findings contribute to understanding the efficacy of environmental enforcement and have important implications for intra-firm management of environmental performance and regulatory enforcement approaches. (shrink)

In Political Liberalism John Rawls argues that “the reasonable” and “the rational” are “two distinct and independent” ideas. This differentiation is essential to the viability of Rawls' conception of political liberalism insofar as it facilitates the recognition and subsequent voluntary acceptance of the need for a public conception of justice that requires all individuals to forsake the unfettered pursuit of their personal ambitions. However, the soundness of Rawls' argument is premised upon a number of questionable claims that, in effect, render (...) his proposed distinction between the reasonable and the rational more chimerical than real, and in so doing critically undermine the ability of his conception of justice to secure the type of voluntary public consensus he deems necessary to establish and sustain a just and stable liberal democracy. It is concluded that the only way one can be assured of generating the sought after conditions is to develop a regulatory framework that publicly supports and protects the principles embodied in Rawls' conception of reasonableness, rather than relying upon the reasonableness of individuals to secure and nourish the required conditions. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.24(4) 2005: 308-320. (shrink)

We propose a qualitatively new kind of governance for the emerging need to efficiently guide the densely interconnected, ever more complex world development, which is based on explicit and openly presented problem solutions and their interactive implementation practice within the versatile, but unified professional analysis of complex real-world dynamics, involving both the powerful central units and the attached creative worldwide network of professional representatives. We provide fundamental and rigorous scientific arguments in favour of introduction of just that kind of (...) governance at the modern development stage, after the complexity threshold in the real world dynamics evolution (sometimes intuitively designated as "globalisation"), where the traditional spontaneous-empirical kind of development and related administrative governance lose dramatically and inevitably their efficiency and the necessity of explicit consistent understanding and guidance of complex real-world dynamics becomes evident. (shrink)

This is a multi-disciplinary exploration of the history of understanding of the human mind or soul and its relationship to the body, through the course of more than two thousand years. Thirteen specially commissioned chapters, each written by a recognized expert, discuss such figures as the doctors Hippocrates and Galen, the theologians St Paul, Augustine, and Aquinas, and philosophers from Plato to Leibniz.

It is well established that single crystals of B2-structured Fe-Al change from paramagnetic to ferromagnetic upon plastic deformation. This strain-induced ferromagnetism arises mostly from Fe atoms which have three or more like nearest neighbours in antiphase-boundary tubes. Such Fe atoms carry magnetic moments according to their local environment. In this study, the saturation magnetizations, M S , of cold-rolled Fe-34 at.% Al, Fe-40 at.% Al and Fe-43 at.% Al single crystals were measured in a vibrating-sample magnetometer from 77 K (...) to room temperature and transmission electron microscopy was used to confirm the presence of APB tubes. After magnetic measurements, rolled single crystals were heated in a differential scanning calorimeter at 20 K min m 1 to 973 K and the enthalpy associated with the removal of the APB tubes measured. From the enthalpy measurement, the APB tube density and the number of Fe NNs were estimated. Hence, the M S values at 0 K were calculated. These were in good agreement with the experimentally determined values. (shrink)

Despite the relative ease and regularity with which it is used by policymakers and the functional role that it often plays in the policy development process, the concept of reasonableness has essentially been overlooked by public policy scholars in their analysis of the factors influencing the development of public policy. However, the maintenance of the analytical status quo is likely to prove increasingly difficult. As the issues that governments must address become increasingly complicated and controversial and it becomes correspondingly (...) class='Hi'>more difficult to identify easily or clearly the most appropriate response to associated problems, policymakers will inevitably be forced to place greater reliance on the concept of reasonableness as the final court of appeal when seeking to determine the attractiveness and acceptability of policy decisions. Accordingly, it seems ‘reasonable’ to suggest that greater, explicit consideration be given to the concept of reasonableness and the role it does and should play in the development of public policy. This article simultaneously offers both a brief overview of the current situation with respect to the meaningful consideration of the concept of reasonableness by public policy scholars and practitioners and a preliminary argument for a reconsideration of the analytical status quo. (shrink)

BackgroundKnowledge development depends on an unbiased representation of the available evidence. Selective citation may distort this representation. Recently, some controversy emerged regarding the possible impact of swimming on childhood asthma, raising the question about the role of selective citation in this field. Our objective was to assess the occurrence and determinants of selective citation in scientific publications on the relationship between swimming in chlorinated pools and childhood asthma.MethodsWe identified scientific journal articles on this relationship via a systematic literature search. The (...) following factors were taken into account: study outcome (authors’ conclusion, data-based conclusion), other content-related article characteristics (article type, sample size, research quality, specificity), content-unrelated article characteristics (language, publication title, funding source, number of authors, number of affiliations, number of references, journal impact factor), author characteristics (gender, country, affiliation), and citation characteristics (time to citation, authority, self-citation). To assess the impact of these factors on citation, we performed a series of univariate and adjusted random-effects logistic regressions, with potential citation path as unit of analysis.ResultsThirty-six articles were identified in this network, consisting of 570 potential citation paths of which 191 (34%) were realized. There was strong evidence that articles with at least one author in common, cited each other more often than articles that had no common authors (odds ratio (OR) 5.2, 95% confidence interval (CI) 3.1–8.8). Similarly, the chance of being cited was higher for articles that were empirical rather than narrative (OR 4.2, CI 2.6–6.7), that reported a large sample size (OR 5.8, CI 2.9–11.6), and that were written by authors with a high authority within the network (OR 4.1, CI 2.1–8.0). Further, there was some evidence for citation bias: articles that confirmed the relation between swimming and asthma were cited more often (OR 1.8, CI 1.1–2.9), but this finding was not robust.ConclusionsThere is clear evidence of selective citation in this research field, but the evidence for citation bias is not very strong. (shrink)

Getting a graduate education is one of the most important parts of a professional in a field. It allows them to climb higher in the professional rankings or even get higher pay for their academic work. All graduate students are adults and self-directed due to their past experiences in work or practice. However, when the pandemic hit the world, these self-directed learners were not spared from shutting of schools. In the Philippines, most graduate schools deliver their lessons through the traditional (...) mode or face-to-face until the pandemic that they shifted in the emerging online learning modality. Using the mixed method of quantitative and qualitative type of study the researchers were able to gather 419 graduate students from various regions of the archipelago to take part in the study. The researchers found out that upon experiencing the benefits of online learning, graduate students want to continue this modality even in the future. More than a third of the respondents also claimed that they want the blended or hybrid type of graduate studies as opposed to going back to the more traditional face-to-face classes. The reasons for these can vary on each learner’s situation. (shrink)

Drawing on William F. Ogburn's cultural lag thesis, an inherent conflict is proposed between the rapid speed of modern technological advances and the slower speed by which ethical guidelines for utilization of new technologies are developed. Ogburn's cultural lag thesis proposes that material culture advances more rapidly than non-material culture. Technology is viewed as part of material culture and ethical guidelines for technology utilization are viewed as an adaptive aspect of non-material culture. Cultural lag is seen as a critical (...) ethical issue because failure to develop broad social consensus on appropriate applications of modern technology may lead to breakdowns in social solidarity and the rise of social conflict. Reasons for cultural lag between technology and ethics include the social structural and market conditions under which each are developed. The thesis is illustrated by reviews of technological trends involving computer-telecommunications electronics and bio- genetic engineering, and the implications of these and other technologies for privacy rights, electronic commerce, control of essential resources and social definitions of life are discussed. (shrink)

“The great powers of the world may have done wonders in giving the world an industrial look, but the great gift still has to come from Africa—giving the world a more human face.”—Steve BikoUndersta...

The considerable attention to financial interests in clinical research has focused mostly on academic medical centers, even though the majority of clinical research is conducted in community practice settings. To fill this gap, this article maps the practices and policies in 73 community hospitals and several hundred specialized facilities around the country for reviewing clinical investigators’ financial relationships with research sponsors. Community hospitals face a substantially different mix of issues than academic medical centers do because their physician researchers are usually (...) not employees, and more of their studies are later-phase, multicenter trials. Accordingly, community physicians stand to benefit personally from per capita payments, but they tend to have less direct influence over research findings when compared with their academic peers. These and other contrasts require separate guidance for community-based organizations that takes into account their particular needs, circumstances, and institutional capacities. (shrink)

The once popular thesis that non-Christians who are inculpably ignorant of the gospel can be saved through ‘implicit faith’ in Christ has fallen on hard times. In this paper, we consider objections raised against this position by a range of Catholic critics including Thomas Crean, Augustine DiNoia, Gavin D’Costa, and Stephen Bullivant. In our judgment, criticisms of ‘implicit faith’ often suffer from a lack of clarity about the nature of such faith, although admittedly this ambiguity was present even in original (...) Scholastic uses of the term. However, in the past few decades analytic philosophers have explored many forms of belief which one might call ‘implicit’. Accordingly, we draw on both Scholastic and analytic epistemology to arrive at a more attractive characterisation of implicit faith. We argue that once implicit faith is understood in this way, recent objections to the claim that non-Christians can be saved through implicit faith are soluble. `. (shrink)

"What culture war? Abortion, gay marriage, school prayer, gun control. Is the nation really polarized on these hot-button moral, religious, and cultural issues? Should we believe the media pundits and politicians who tell us that Americans are deeply divided? No, says Morris Fiorina. At a time when the rift between the "red" and the "blue" states can seem deeper than ever, Fiorina debunks the assumption that Americans are deeply split over national issues. He presents quite a contrary picture -- that (...) most Americans stand in the middle of the political landscape and are in general agreement even on those issues thought to be most divisive. Poking holes in the concept of a "culture war," Fiorina explains that the majority of Americans are both moderate and tolerant, and that their greatest concerns are leadership and security, not moral values. Fiorina supports this position with newly released data from the 2004 election and a variety of other recent surveys. According to Fiorina, the view of a divided America is simply false. By recognizing our common ground, we have a basis for creating a more unified and moderate approach to government and politics in the near future."--. (shrink)

Past research has demonstrated that employees’ perceptions of abusive supervision are positively associated with the enactment of bullying behaviors. However, an investigation of the factors influencing employees’ decision to bully others at work has yet to be completed. In this study, we propose that the relationship between perceptions of abusive supervision and the enactment of bullying behaviors is mediated by state self-regulation, and that active coping moderates the relationship between state self-regulation and bullying. Further, we analyze how the situational context (...) affects employees’ levels of self-regulatory resource depletion and ultimately, the extent to which they engage in bullying behaviors. A moderated mediation analysis using time-separated data provided support for our hypotheses, suggesting that employees’ state self-regulation helps explain why abusive supervision is associated with bullying and that active coping helps to reduce bullying behaviors. Further, the results suggest that negative environments are associated with more bullying. Contributions, practical implications, and future research directions are discussed. (shrink)

The use of remember–know judgments to assess subjective experience associated with memory retrieval, or as measures of recollection and familiarity processes, has been controversial. In the current study we had participants think aloud during study and provide verbal reports at test for remember–know and confidence judgments. Results indicated that the vast majority of remember judgments for studied items were associated with recollection from study , but this correspondence was less likely for high-confidence judgments . Instead, high-confidence judgments were more (...) likely than remember judgments to be associated with incorrect recollection and a lack of recollection. Know judgments were typically associated with a lack of recollection , but still included recollection from the study context . Thus, although remember judgments provided fairly accurate assessments of retrieval including contextual details, know judgments did not provide accurate assessments of retrieval lacking contextual details. (shrink)

Courts and jurors sometimes refuse to assign liability to defendants on the basis of statistics alone, despite their apparent reliability. I argue that this refusal is best understood as a recognition of defendants’ right to security. Understood as a robust good in Philip Pettit’s sense, security requires that someone risking harm to others’ protected interests adopt a disposition of concern that controls against wrongfully harming them. Since trials risk harm, the state must adopt such a disposition. Statistics leave open the (...) possibility of innocence and so wrongful harm in a way that the state cannot ignore; if it does use such statistics, it makes defendants wrongfully insecure. This explanation of the problem of bare statistical evidence is especially apt because security grounds the right to a fair trial and judicial procedural rights more generally. (shrink)

This article discusses successive positions of the Frankfurt School, contrasts them to the unfolding ideas of Castoriadis and argues for a critical theory centred on a concept of autonomy, but aware of the obstacles and complications inherent in social–historical reality and its modern configuration. To clarify this perspective, we need a concept of society that distances itself from the Parsonian paradigm, more so than recent theorists of the Frankfurt School have done. The critique of over-integrated images of society, developed (...) by various sociologists in the 1970s and 1980s but not properly assimilated by the mainstream of the discipline and never taken on board by Frankfurt theorists, is an important source of reference, and it can be taken further in the light of Castoriadis’s reflections on the social–historical. The result is a definition of autonomy as a capacity of explicit and unlimited interrogation, confronted with its own hubristic temptations in the context of a multidimensional social world. (shrink)

Quality improvement mechanisms increasingly use outcome measures to evaluate health care providers. This move toward outcome measures is a radical departure from the traditional focus on process measures. More radical still is the proposal to shift from relatively simple and proximal measures of outcome, such as mortality, to complex outcomes, such as quality of life. While the practical, scientific, and ethical issues associated with the use of outcomes such as mortality and morbidity to compare health care providers have been (...) well rehearsed, the specific concerns associated with the use of quality of life measures in quality of care research have received little attention. As with much research on quality of life there is a tendency to assume that the disadvantages are outweighed by the general virtue of “listening” to patients. In this paper we disagree with this assumption and argue that quality of life is a process, not an outcome. (shrink)

We critically analyze Alexander Rosenberg’s argument based on the multiple realizability of biological properties that there are no biological laws. The argument is intuitive and suggestive. Nevertheless, a closer analysis reveals that the argument rests on dubious assumptions about the nature of natural selection, laws of nature, and multiple realizability. We also argue that the argument is limited in scope, since it applies to an outmoded account of laws and the applicability of the argument to other more promising accounts (...) of laws is questionable. Another concern of ours is that the relation between multiple realizability and natural selection is more complex than Rosenberg acknowledges. Finally, we claim that an explanation for why Rosenberg’s argument appears persuasive and appealing is that the argument is based on an inflated concept of multiple realizability that rests on unreliable intuitions concerning what counts as a different realization of the same property. Consequently, we argue that the argument is at best inconclusive and at worst false insofar as its implications for the existence of biological laws are concerned. (shrink)

Is Leo Strauss truly an intellectual forebear of neoconservatism and a powerful force in shaping Bush administration foreign policy? _The Truth about Leo Strauss_ puts this question to rest, revealing for the first time how the popular media came to perpetuate an oversimplified view of a complex and wide-ranging philosopher. In doing so, it corrects our perception of Strauss, providing the best general introduction available to the political thought of this misunderstood figure. Catherine and Michael Zuckert—both former students of Strauss—guide (...) readers here to a nuanced understanding of how Strauss’s political thought fits into his broader philosophy. Challenging the ideas that Strauss was an inflexible conservative who followed in the footsteps of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt, the Zuckerts contend that Strauss’s signature idea was the need for a return to the ancients. Through their work, they conclude that Strauss was a sober defender of liberal democracy, aware of both its strengths and its weaknesses. Balanced and accessible, _The Truth about Leo Strauss_ is a must-read for anyone who wants to more fully comprehend this enigmatic philosopher and his much-disputed legacy. “_The Truth about Leo Strauss_ is the most balanced and insightful book yet written about Strauss’s thought, students, and political influence. It dispels myths promulgated by both friends and foes and persuasively traces the conflicting paths that American thinkers indebted to Strauss have taken.”—William Galston, Brookings Institution. (shrink)

The experience of having to suffer debilitating pain is far too common in the United States, and many patients continue to be inadequately treated by their doctors. Although many physicians freely admit that their pain management practices may have been somewhat lacking, many more express concern that the prescribing of heightened levels of opioid analgesics may result in closer regulatory scrutiny, criminal investigation, or even criminal prosecution.Although several researchers have examined the regulatory environment and the threat of sanction or (...) harm it poses to physicians and patients, few have examined the likelihood of investigation or prosecution stemming from the aggressive use of opioids in physician-directed pain management. Accordingly, in an effort to assess whether the fear of prosecution is realistic and, if so, what factors contribute to its likelihood, we surveyed chief prosecutors in four states about their knowledge, opinions, and attitudes concerning opioids and the prosecution of physicians stemming from the treatment of patients who were either terminally ill or suffering from chronic noncancer pain. (shrink)

Recent instances of corporate misconduct and examples of blatant leader self-serving behavior have rekindled interest in leader personality traits as antecedents of negative leader behavior. The current research builds upon that work, and examines the relationship between leader psychopathy and leader self-serving behavior. Moreover, we investigate whether follower self-esteem affects the occurrence of self-serving behavior in leaders with psychopathic tendencies. We predict that self-serving behaviors by psychopathic leaders are more likely to occur in the interaction with followers low in (...) self-esteem. We first conducted an experimental study (N = 156), in which we manipulated follower self-esteem, measured leader psychopathy, and assessed their combined effect on leader self-serving behavior using an ultimatum game. We then conducted a multi-source field study (N = 124 leader-follower dyads) using questionnaires to assess leader psychopathy, follower self-esteem, and perceived leader self-serving behavior. Across both studies, we found that leader psychopathy was positively related to their self-serving behavior, but only when followers had low rather than high self-esteem. As expected, our studies showed that the degree to which (perceived) psychopathic traits of leaders are reflected in their behavior depends on the characteristics of their followers. Apparently, the behavioral expression of negative leader traits is not only a matter of the trait strength, but instead is the result of the interplay between leader and follower in a certain context. (shrink)

In this interview Samuel Weber proposes a rethinking of the relation of secrecy to transparency and outlines some of the forms it takes, while considering certain of its implications for current social, political and epistemological contexts. He begins by questioning the opposition itself, suggesting that we will have to learn to be more at home with the secret and that the demand for transparency must be radically rethought and complicated. He argues that the demand for absolute transparency can only (...) promote and obscure the process by which the ‘secret’ is placed in the service of private appropriation. As the emotional experience of the relation between transparency and secrecy reflects the historically specific traditions that constitute the sense of self, then it is that sense that should be ‘opened up to its irreducible heterogeneity’. (shrink)

The research addressed the issue of symbolic walls that divide, segregate, preserve and institutionalise. The way in which institutions and especially the Faculty of Theology at the University of Pretoria facilitated symbolic ‘walls’ was discussed in the overview of the Department of Science of Religion and Missiology in the first century of the Faculty of Theology. The concepts of ‘gatekeepers’ and ‘traders’ were then applied because walls, paradoxically, need gates to facilitate control, movement and, eventually, life. Gatekeepers were described as (...) the guardians of the status quo, and traders as agents who, in one way or another, facilitate movement, trade, flow and life in the midst of the shadows of walls. Missionaries are, by the very nature of the missionary enterprise, more traders than gatekeepers. Here, the work of Bosch – specifically his ground-breaking work on mission as contextualisation – provides an explanation of the art of mission as breaking down walls, opening gates and empowering traders. That is precisely why Missiology is particularly well suited to assist the church and theology in the art of breaking down walls. The theological imperative of contextualisation means that the life of the church, theology, and thus theological training, cannot do without Missiology. The concept of ‘deep contextualisation’ was discussed as a particularly relevant approach to include a post-anthropomorphic discourse in Missiology. It can assist with the reorientation of the history of mission on the whole of history and, thus, also deep history. The concept also provides a way to address the discourses on colonialisation and includes a reorientation on the future and embracing hope. (shrink)

The growing literature on Environmental Ethics has ballooned into a separate sub-field within philosophy, involving ethical studies concerning the value of other species, of ecosystems, and of the environment of all living things as a whole. Some consider Environmental Ethics to be a revolution in ethics which will completely change the human-centered orientation of morals and reorient it to include all species, ecosystems or the larger biosphere. This volume explores pragmatist approaches to ethics that can be used for environmental issues. (...) Pragmatism may provide both a more defensible theory of non-anthropomorphic and intrinsic value than other ethical schools, and, more generally, supply an alternative model of what environmental philosophy could be. The holism of pragmatists constitutes a challenge to value and ethics centered in the individual, and a useful ground for more holistic theories of value which, some have argued, is more suitable to an environmental, as opposed to a humane, ethic. The authors of this bookOCOs chapters defend their understandings of pragmatism in the course of explaining contemporary ways to reconstruct central foundations to environmental ethics.". (shrink)

Abstract:Gene editors such as CRISPR could be used to create stronger, faster, or more resilient nonhuman animals. This is of keen interest to people who breed, train, race, and profit off the millions of animals used in sport that contribute billions of dollars to legal and illegal economies across the globe. People have tried for millennia to perfect sport animals; CRISPR proposes to do in one generation what might have taken decades previously. Moreover, gene editing may facilitate enhancing animals’ (...) capacities beyond their typical limits. This paper describes the state of animal use and engineering for sport, examines the moral status of animals, and analyzes current and future ethical issues at the intersection of animal use, gene editing, and sports. We argue that animal sport enthusiasts and animal welfarists alike should be concerned about the inevitable use of CRISPR in sport animals. Though in principle CRISPR could be used to improve sport animals’ well-being, we think it is unlikely in practice to do so. (shrink)

Background: Recent research demonstrates that people sometimes make different medical decisions for others than they would make for themselves. This finding is particularly relevant to end-of-life decisions, which are often made by surrogates and require a trade-off between prolonging life and maintaining quality of life. We examine the impact of decision role, patient age, decision maker age and multiple individual differences on these treatment decisions. Methods: Participants read a scenario about a terminally ill cancer patient faced with a choice between (...) an aggressive chemotherapy regimen that will extend life by two years and palliative treatments to control discomfort for one remaining month. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three decision roles (patient, physician, or an abstract other) and the scenario randomly varied whether the patient was described as 25 or 65-years old. Results: When deciding for a 65-year old patient, approximately 60% of participants selected aggressive chemotherapy regardless of decision role. When deciding for a 25-year old patient, however, participants were more likely to select chemotherapy for a patient (physician role) or another person (abstract other) than for themselves (70%, 67%, and 59%, respectively). In addition, confidence that powerful others (eg, physicians) control one’s health, as well as respondents’ age and race, consistently predicted treatment choices. Conclusions: Patient age appears to influence medical decisions made for others but not those that we make for ourselves. These findings may help to explain the discord that often occurs when younger cancer patients refuse life-extending treatments. (shrink)

One might expect that, in pure coordination games, coordination would become less frequent as the number of options increases. Contrary to this expectation, we report an experiment which found more frequent coordination when the option set was unrestricted than when it was restricted. To try to explain this result, we develop a method for eliciting the general rules that subjects use to identify salient options in restricted and unrestricted sets. We find that each such rule, if used by all (...) subjects, would generate greater coordination in restricted sets. However, subjects tend to apply different rules to restricted and unrestricted sets. (shrink)

The first beginning logic text to employ the tree method--a complete formal system of first-order logic that is remarkably easy to understand and use--this text allows students to take control of the nuts and bolts of formal logic quickly, and to move on to more complex and abstract problems. The tree method is elaborated in manageable steps over five chapters, in each of which its adequacy is reviewed; soundness and completeness proofs are extended at each step, and the decidability (...) proof is extended at the step from truth functions to the logic of nonoverlapping quantifiers with a single variable, after which undecidability is demonstrated by example. The first three chapters are bilingual, with arguments presented twice, in logical notation and in English. The last three chapters consider the discoveries defining the scope and limits of formal methods that marked logic’s coming of age in the 20th century: Godel’s completeness and incompleteness theorems for first and second-order logic, and the Church-Turing theorem on the undecidability of first-order logic. This new edition provides additional problems, solutions to selected problems, and two new Supplements: Truth-Functional Equivalence reinstates material on that topic from the second edition that was omitted in the third, and Variant Methods, in which John Burgess provides a proof regarding the possibility of modifying the tree method so that it will always find a finite model when there is one, and another, which shows that a different modification—once contemplated by Jeffrey--can result in a dramatic speed--up of certain proofs. (shrink)

In 1958, economist A. W. Phillips published an article describing what he observed to be the inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment; subsequently, the "Phillips curve" became a central concept in macroeconomic analysis and policymaking. But today's Phillips curve is not the same as the original one from fifty years ago; the economy, our understanding of price setting behavior, the determinants of inflation, and the role of monetary policy have evolved significantly since then. In this book, some of the top (...) economists working today reexamine the theoretical and empirical validity of the Phillips curve in its more recent specifications. The contributors consider such questions as what economists have learned about price and wage setting and inflation expectations that would improve the way we use and formulate the Phillips curve, what the Phillips curve approach can teach us about inflation dynamics, and how these lessons can be applied to improving the conduct of monetary policy. ContributorsLawrence Ball, Ben Bernanke, Oliver Blanchard, V. V. Chari, William T. Dickens, Stanley Fischer, Jeff Fuhrer, Jordi Gali, Michael T. Kiley, Robert G. King, Donald L. Kohn, Yolanda K. Kodrzycki, Jane Sneddon Little, Bartisz Mackowiak, N. Gregory Mankiw, Virgiliu Midrigan, Giovanni P. Olivei, Athanasios Orphanides, Adrian R. Pagan, Christopher A. Pissarides, Lucrezia Reichlin, Paul A. Samuelson, Christopher A. Sims, Frank R. Smets, Robert M. Solow, Jürgen Stark, James H. Stock, Lars E. O. Svensson, John B. Taylor, Mark W. Watson. (shrink)

The ability to reason about how things were made is a pervasive aspect of how humans make sense of physical objects. Such reasoning is useful for a range of everyday tasks, from assembling a piece of furniture to making a sandwich and knitting a sweater. What enables people to reason in this way even about novel objects, and how do people draw upon prior experience with an object to continually refine their understanding of how to create it? To explore these (...) questions, we developed a virtual task environment to investigate how people come up with step‐by‐step procedures for recreating block towers whose composition was not readily apparent, and analyzed how the procedures they used to build them changed across repeated attempts. Specifically, participants (N = 105) viewed 2D silhouettes of eight unique block towers in a virtual environment simulating rigid‐body physics, and aimed to reconstruct each one in less than 60 s. We found that people built each tower more accurately and quickly across repeated attempts, and that this improvement reflected both group‐level convergence upon a tiny fraction of all possible viable procedures, as well as error‐dependent updating across successive attempts by the same individual. Taken together, our study presents a scalable approach to measuring consistency and variation in how people infer solutions to physical assembly problems. (shrink)

On the whole, the church of Matthew is characterized more by the portrait of the disciple community provided in the Sermon on the Mount than by charismatic activity itself. Nevertheless, the center for Matthew is neither charismatic action nor ethical concern, but Jesus Christ.

In the latest edition of Liddell and Scott's Lexicon appears the entry, —, fantastic, Gloss.’’ No more information is given. Gloss, refers to the Corpus Glossariorum Latirtorum edited by G. Loewe, G. Goetz, and F. Schoell.. If one consults that work, however, one finds that does not appear in it. Nor does it appear in Liddell and Scott's Lexicon before the new, revised edition of 1925.

I heartily thank Chiara Destri (2015) for these generous, thoughtful and erudite criticisms of my article on Rousseau’s treatment of the Roman Republic in the Social Contract (McCormick 2007). More...