Contemporary philosophers interested in value theory appear to be largely concerned with questions of the following sort:What is value?What is the meaning of the word ‘good’?Does the attribution of value to an object have a cognitive, or merely an emotive, significance?The first question is metaphysical; to ask it is analogous to asking in physics:What is matter?What is electricity?The others are generally treated as semantical questions; to ask them is analogous to asking in statistics:What is the meaning of the word ‘probable’?Does (...) an attribution of probability express an objective fact, or merely a subjective attitude? (shrink)

When certain formal symbol systems (e.g., computer programs) are implemented as dynamic physical symbol systems (e.g., when they are run on a computer) their activity can be interpreted at higher levels (e.g., binary code can be interpreted as LISP, LISP code can be interpreted as English, and English can be interpreted as a meaningful conversation). These higher levels of interpretability are called "virtual" systems. If such a virtual system is interpretable as if it had a mind, is such a "virtual (...) mind" real? This is the question addressed in this "virtual" symposium, originally conducted electronically among four cognitive scientists: Donald Perlis, a computer scientist, argues that according to the computationalist thesis, virtual minds are real and hence Searle's Chinese Room Argument fails, because if Searle memorized and executed a program that could pass the Turing Test in Chinese he would have a second, virtual, Chinese-understanding mind of which he was unaware (as in multiple personality). Stevan Harnad, a psychologist, argues that Searle's Argument is valid, virtual minds are just hermeneutic overinterpretations, and symbols must be grounded in the real world of objects, not just the virtual world of interpretations. Computer scientist Patrick Hayes argues that Searle's Argument fails, but because Searle does not really implement the program: A real implementation must not be homuncular but mindless and mechanical, like a computer. Only then can it give rise to a mind at the virtual level. Philosopher Ned Block suggests that there is no reason a mindful implementation would not be a real one. (shrink)

PREVIOUS WORK Theoretical discussion of the interval measurement of utility based upon theories of decision making under conditions of risk has been voluminous and will not be reviewed here. Those interested will find extensive ...

Since the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and on the Pentagon in the United States, concerns over security issues have been at an all-time high in this country. Both state and federal governments continue to discuss legislation on these issues amid much controversy. One key concern of both employers and employees is the extent that employers, espousing a "need to know" mentality, continue to expand their capability and implementation of surveillance of employees in the workplace. With (...) the technology typically growing faster than the speed of legislation, protective or permissive, the management and legal issues involved in electronic monitoring of employee communications in the workplace, are and well should be on the agenda for discussion of every management and legal team in American business today. Companies have a legitimate right to protect their trade secrets from disclosure by disgruntled employees. Similarly, companies also have a duty to protect their good names and reputations from unauthorized employee communications with outside parties, and even other employees, that may damage them. It is also a prime duty of management to ensure, in their direction of their workforces, that the employees execute their responsibilities by working full time on their stated objectives. In this regard, any management that fails to oversee its workforce to ensure that employees are not expending valuable company time, for which they are being compensated, on personal business, including unauthorized communications, is remiss in its responsibilities to its shareholders. The company may see a reduction of the price of its shares in the marketplace if it does not protect the economic interests of its shareholders. (shrink)

Employee reporting dishonesty is a significant area of concern for firms. In this study, we investigate how providing information about their prosocial actions, such as organizational citizenship behaviors, affects the extent of employee reporting dishonesty. We distinguish prosocial actions whose welfare effects are mutually beneficial (i.e., that help others and the employee), which are common in business practice, from those that are selfless in nature (i.e., that help others at a personal cost to the employee). In addition to examining the (...) effect of the type of prosocial action on the extent of employee reporting dishonesty, we also examine the effect of construal (the manner in which individuals perceive and interpret the action). Using an experiment, we find that participants with high moral identity are less dishonest when they describe their selfless prosocial actions than when they describe their mutually beneficial prosocial actions, but only when they abstractly construe this information. However, we do not find evidence that the reporting dishonesty of participants with low moral identity is influenced by the type of prosocial action they provide information about or the construal of that information. We discuss implications of these results for theory and practice. (shrink)

This co-edited volume compares Chinese and Western experiences of engineering, technology, and development. In doing so, it builds a bridge between the East and West and advances a dialogue in the philosophy of engineering. Divided into three parts, the book starts with studies on epistemological and ontological issues, with a special focus on engineering design, creativity, management, feasibility, and sustainability. Part II considers relationships between the history and philosophy of engineering, and includes a general argument for the necessity of dialogue (...) between history and philosophy. It continues with a general introduction to traditional Chinese attitudes toward engineering and technology, and philosophical case studies of the Chinese steel industry, railroads, and cybernetics in the Soviet Union. Part III focuses on engineering, ethics, and society, with chapters on engineering education and practice in China and the West. The book’s analyses of the interactions of science, engineering, ethics, politics, and policy in different societal contexts are of special interest. The volume as a whole marks a new stage in the emergence of the philosophy of engineering as a new regionalization of philosophy. This carefully edited interdisciplinary volume grew out of an international conference on the philosophy of engineering hosted by the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. It includes 30 contributions by leading philosophers, social scientists, and engineers from Australia, China, Europe, and the United States. (shrink)

Preparing the Next Generation of Oral Historians is an invaluable resource to educators seeking to bring history alive for students at all levels. Filled with insightful reflections on teaching oral history, it offers practical suggestions for educators seeking to create curricula, engage students, gather community support, and meet educational standards. By the close of the book, readers will be able to successfully incorporate oral history projects in their own classrooms.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 197-201 [Access article in PDF] An Interview with Donald Mitchell and James Wiseman The 2002 Fred Streng Book Award has been given to Donald W. Mitchell and James Wiseman for their edited collection, The Gethsemani Encounter: A Dialogue on the Spiritual Life by Buddhist and Christian Monastics. Donald W. Mitchell is professor of comparative philosophy at Purdue University and a member of (...) the editorial advisory board of Buddhist-Christian Studies. James Wiseman is a member of the Benedictine community of St. Anselm's Abbey in Washington, D.C., and is an associate professor of theology at the Catholic University of America. Following is an edited interview with both.DONALD MITCHELL How long have Buddhist and Christian monastics been in dialogue? In 1978 the Benedictine Confederation founded what is now named the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (MID) in order to develop intermonastic dialogue, especially with Buddhism. MID has been in dialogue with Buddhism in Europe, Asia, Australia, and North America. Numerous MID spiritual exchanges and hospitality programs have taken place between Buddhist and Christian monastics over the years. How did the Dalai Lama get involved? His Holiness the Dalai Lama met with Thomas Merton in 1968, and from then on has been interested in Christian monasticism. He first got involved with MID when several of their members spoke with him at an East-West conference at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in 1981. This was the beginning of a series of intermonastic hospitality exchanges, with Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns visiting Christian monasteries in the United States and Christian monastics being hosted at Tibetan Buddhist sites in India. Years later, at the Parliament of World's Religions in 1993, MID hosted a Buddhist-Christian dialogue on "Emptiness and Kenosis." The Dalai Lama took part in the dialogue and afterward told MID that he felt its dialogue with Buddhism had matured to the point [where] it would be helpful to have a weeklong retreat dialogue on the spiritual life in Buddhism and Christianity. Where did Gethsemani enter the picture? The Dalai Lama asked if it would be possible to hold the spiritual dialogue at Gethsemani Abbey, home of his friend Thomas Merton. In 1994 MID sent a delegation [End Page 197] to Dharamsala to discuss the proposal in more depth with the Dalai Lama. An agreement was reached to hold a retreat dialogue at Gethsemani Abbey with Buddhist and Christian teachers of spirituality coming from around the world. You're not a monk. How did you get involved? Good question. A year later, Sister Mary Margaret Funk, executive director of MID, met with me to request that I help organize the encounter as a lay advisor to MID. MID had used my book, Spirituality and Emptiness: The Dynamics of Spiritual Life in Buddhism and Christianity, to prepare for the Parliament dialogue on kenosis and emptiness. I agreed to help with inviting the Buddhist participants, crafting the program, and editing the proceedings. What developments in the dialogue have you seen occurring over the years? Many developments. As you can imagine, the Gethsemani Encounter in 1996 was itself a spiritual experience. As Ewert Cousins put it, there seemed to be two treasure boxes—Buddhism and Christianity—set before us in a spiritual atmosphere that enabled us to appreciate the gems of spiritual living shared by the participants. So the encounter itself brought the dialogue to a new stage of trust, understanding, and appreciation. This development can be seen in the fact that Buddhist participants suggested a project be undertaken to produce a Buddhist commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict. The result is Benedict's Dharma: Buddhists Reflect on the Rule of Saint Benedict, edited by Patrick Henry and published by Riverhead Books in 2001. What else? A small group of American Buddhist leaders and MID members met in 1999 to discuss the possibility of holding a Gethsemani Encounter II. It was decided to bring the dialogue ahead by focusing on one of the major topics that came up again and again at Gethsemani I—namely, the... (shrink)

In the last few years, annexins have been discovered in several nematodes and other parasites, and distinct differences between the parasite annexins and those of the hosts make them potentially attractive targets for anti‐parasite therapeutics. Annexins are ubiquitous proteins found in almost all organisms across all kingdoms. Here, we present an overview of novel annexins from parasitic organisms, and summarize their phylogenetic and biochemical properties, with a view to using them as drug or vaccine targets. Building on structural and biological (...) information that has been accumulated for mammalian and plant annexins, we describe a predicted additional secondary structure element found in many parasite annexins that may confer unique functional properties, and present a specific antigenic epitope for use as a vaccine. (shrink)

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Of Literary Universals:Ninety-Five ThesesPatrick Colm Hogan1. There is no such thing as human culture or human cultural difference without human universality.1 (A parallel point about understanding human cultural difference was made by Donald Davidson.2) Alternatively, cultural difference is variation on human universality.2. It follows that every area of a culture manifests human universality. (Otherwise, those cultural areas would not exist.) It does not follow that all areas of (...) culture are found in all cultures. The empirical study of literature, an area of some cultures, would not exist if it did not manifest human universality. It does not follow that the empirical study of literature exists in all cultures.3. The presence of verbal art in any given culture—thus the determination of whether verbal art is found in all cultures—is dependent on the investigator's definition of the term "verbal art," not on the presence or absence of a parallel term in the culture being investigated. "Verbal art" is no different from any other term or phrase in this respect. We would not conclude that there is no color orange in a place that does not have a word parallel to "orange" or that there is no astigmatism in societies without ophthalmology—or that the English do not experience ennui or Schadenfreude.On Communicative Speech4. To understand or even isolate verbal art, we must first understand the general purposes and properties of communicative speech.5. Communicative speech aims at producing some mental alteration in an addressee. That change commonly has some direct or indirect action as its desired outcome. For example, suppose I am building [End Page 145] a house with Wittgenstein and I say "Plank!" My aim is to produce a mental change in Wittgenstein that will result in him retrieving a plank and bringing it to me.6. Action commonly involves a set of generative principles for bodily motion or mental deliberation, a set of regulative principles for adjusting the motion or deliberation, and a set of motives for initiating the motion or deliberation.7. Communicative speech, then, commonly aims at fostering emotions and ideas or representations that, in combination, activate and specify generative principles for action in an addressee. (The emotion may be very weak—for example, a mild aversion to being uncooperative.) It may involve regulative principles as well.8. Verbal art—as I am using the phrase—also aims at producing a mental alteration in an addressee. However, that mental alteration is not, in the first place, governed by the overarching goal of effecting a particular actional outcome. Thus it is not designed to engage generative rules for action or to trigger emotions that motivate such action.9. Rather, verbal art is commonly designed to communicate regulative principles for action and to inspire emotions that do not have direct actional outcomes in the case at hand.10. There are two sorts of regulative principles that figure prominently in both ordinary life and verbal art—ethical and prudential. They constitute the thematic or didactic aspect of verbal art, an aspect noted in every major tradition of literary theory—European, South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern/North African.311. Here and in other cases, individual works of verbal art need not share all universal properties or share them all in the same degree.Rather, all cultural traditions have a body of works of verbal art that, as a whole, have these properties.On Emotion12. Any sort of emotion may occur in verbal art. Indeed, verbal art involves all varieties of emotion.13. However, verbal art is not about the addressee himself or herself. Therefore a literary work does not inspire narrowly egocentric emotions in its audience. It inspires empathic emotions.14. Empathic emotion may be a function of situational particularity or of group identity. In situational empathy, we share a person's or character's emotion insofar as we have been in a parallel situation. [End Page 146] The shared feeling is based on emotional memories. In group-identity empathy, we share a person's or character's feelings because we tacitly understand him or her as sharing our identity. This shared feeling is, then... (shrink)

The greatest satisfaction a scholar can know is to have his work intelligently appreciated by the most competent judges. I am therefore delighted when Professor Donald Rutherford, the author of that superb book, Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature, generously describes my Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence: Justice as the Charity of the Wise as “a wonderful achievement.” I am especially pleased that he thinks I made a respectable case for Leibniz’ anti-Hobbesian, Christian-Platonist definition of justice as caritas sapientis seu (...) benevolentia universalis, “the charity of the wise, that is, universal benevolence.” For, as I said in my Conclusion, “Obviously a social world fully and completely governed by the Leibnizian principle of justice as ‘wise charity’ would be a good one, and certainly better than our present social world... Who can doubt that the world would be better if Leibnizian universal jurisprudence were in place—if every rational substance in the universe not only refrained from harm [the neminem laedere of Roman law] but rejoiced in the ‘perfection’ of others?... Only an ungenerous heart would fail to be moved by so generous a moral vision.” That generous moral vision, I suggested, comes out most eloquently in La véritable piété of 1710. (shrink)

MacDonald and Kreitman (1991) propose a test of the neutral mutationrandom drift (NM-RD) hypothesis, the central claim of the neutral theory of molecular evolution. The test involves generating predictions from the NM-RD hypothesis about patterns of molecular substitutions. Alternative selection hypotheses predict that the data will deviate from the predictions of the NM-RD hypothesis in specifiable ways. To conduct the test Mac- Donald and Kreitman examine the evolutionary dynamics of the alcohol dehydrogenase (Adh) gene in three species of Drosophila. (...) The test compares the number of DNA sequence changes between species and within species. The number of DNA differences is an indicator of the evolutionary rate of the Adh gene. Based on the test they conclude that there is strong evidence for adaptive protein evolution at particular sites in the gene. Understanding the test requires some basic knowledge about molecular terms and the predictions of neutral theory. The two important terms are fixed differences and polymorphisms. These are determined by comparing DNA sequences made up of thousands of individual nucleotide sites. A site that is unchanged within a species but different from a related species counts as a fixed difference. These are mutations that occur in some common ancestor of the lineage such that all descendants inherit the change. A site that differs within a species counts as a polymorphism. Determining the number of fixed differences and polymorphisms requires placing 1 each individual gene sequence onto a phylogenetic tree. A coalescent tree charts the ancestral relationships for a set of individual gene sequences. Sequences sampled from within a species form a within-species tree. The common ancestors of each within-species tree form a between-species tree. A detected difference counts as a polymorphism or a fixed difference depending on where it occurs in the phylogenetic tree (cf. Table 1). The test uses the numbers of polymorphisms and fixed differences as indicators of evolutionary rates.. (shrink)

Arthur O. Lovejoy conceived of the history of ideas as an interdisciplinary study, encompassing a variety of fields, including literary history, comparative literature, the history of folklore and ethnography, the history of language and the history of religious beliefs. This volume gathers together some of the most significant articles concerning the theory and practice of intellectual history, by Lovejoy himself and other scholars. Contributors: DONALD R. KELLEY, ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY, FREDERICK J. TEGGART, LEO SPITZER, THEODORE SPENCER, ABRAHAM EDEL, PAUL (...) O. KRISTELLER, PHILIP P. WIENER, JOSEPH A. MAZZEO, LEONARD KRIEGER, DANIEL J. WILSON, EDWARD P. MAHONEY, FRANCIS OAKLEY,JOHANN HUIZINGA, JOSEPH KATZ, CALVIN G. RAND, NILS B. KVASTAD, LESTER G. CROCKER and PATRICK H. HUTTON. (shrink)

Marx launched a revolution in social thought that has been largely ignored. We locate this revolution in the context of two major reassessments of modern philosophy, Heidegger’s Being and Time and Donald Davidson’s new anti-subjectivism. We argue that the philosophical significance of Marx’s critique of the capitalist mode of production—his critique of the bourgeois horizon—has been overlooked. The paper exposes the bourgeois mindset that runs through political economy, “traditional” Marxism, and much of modern and postmodern philosophy. Bourgeois thinking is (...) marked by a series of “purist splits,” conceptual distinctions that are mishandled as actual separations: conceptual vs. empirical, conceptual scheme vs. thing in itself, individual vs. society, production vs. distribution, preference vs. the preferred object, and subjective vs. objective. Marx shows how capitalist social forms that produce the notion of “value added” inculcate the purist, bifurcating bourgeois horizon. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Pluralistic Philosophy of Stephen CraneDonald PizerThe Pluralistic Philosophy of Stephen Crane, by Patrick K. Dooley; xxvi & 212 pp. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993, $34.95 cloth, 17.95 paper.Dooley’s study of Crane’s work and ideas is a brave and on the whole successful venture into the often murky waters of the possible philosophical system underlying the nonphilosophical discourse of a creative writer. Dooley is not content, (...) as have been most critics of Crane, to concentrate on the philosophical cast of ideas in a specific Crane work. Rather, he is inclusive in that he deals with the full range of Crane’s writing—from prose to fiction to poetry, and from early to late expression—and he is systematic in that he finds a close similarity between Crane’s basic beliefs and the formal philosophical system of William James.To the reader well-traveled in Crane criticism, much in Dooley’s account of this similarity has a familiar ring. Crane, like James, posits the absence of God in any traditional sense of a supreme being and therefore the uncertainty of ascertaining truth. We live in a world of multiple realities and distinctive perspectives in which, however, the individual, despite the flux of both experience and perception, can still assert the humanistic values of compassion and fraternity. The value of Dooley’s reading lies less in its freshness than in the range and rigor of his demonstration of its centrality and pervasiveness in Crane’s work. What was before a body of suggestive insights into this or that work by a wide range of critics is here, in Dooley’s perceptive exploration of every nook and cranny of Crane’s writing and belief, brought into clear and persuasive focus.This is not to say that The Pluralistic Philosophy of Stephen Crane is the last word on Crane’s ideas. Dooley’s method of dividing his discussion of Crane’s belief into the traditional philosophical categories of metaphysics, epistemology, and so on produces an impression of uniformity in Crane’s expression of his ideas, whereas there is in fact great variety. Some of Crane’s writing achieves its approximation of Jamesian belief more cogently and with greater literary success than other works containing similar ideas. And Crane’s early work often differs significantly from his later writing in the kind of ideas it engages and in its degree of commitment to specific beliefs. Dooley’s argument that Crane had a coherent system of belief, in other words, tends to obscure the distinctive form which his beliefs took in particular works. But this criticism aside, Dooley, with his judicious review of previous discussions of Crane’s ideas (his notes are especially rich in this regard), his carefully modulated responsiveness to the philosophical implications of fictional scene and action, and his sympathetic identification with James’s beliefs, has made a major contribution both to Crane studies and to an understanding of the dimensions of late nineteenth-century American modes of thought.Donald PizerTulane UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Donald R. Gregory has recently argued that the monk Gaunilo's response to St Anselm's ontological argument succeeds in showing what is fundamentally wrong with any ontological argument, including modern modal versions. He holds that the Gaunilo strategy in fact demonstrates what it alleges, that reasoning which parallels the form and intent ofAnselm's reductio argument can ‘prove’ a priori the existence of quite unacceptable entities.

Contents: LEGAL THEORY 1. Reflections on law in context / William Twining -- 2. Are omissions less culpable? / Tony Honore -- 3. Scandinavian legal realism in the law of contract / Jan Hellner -- 4. Statutes and contracts as founts of formal reasoning / Robert S. Summers -- 5. Conceptions of public policy / John Bell LEGAL HISTORY 6. Aftermath / Paul D. Carrington -- 7. The role of the judiciary: lessons from the end of empire / Robert Stevens (...) -- 8. The Origins of futures trading in the Liverpool Cotton Market COMMON LAW 9.payment undertakings / Roy Goode -- 10. Pre-contractual duties of disclosure / S.M. Waddams -- 11. Three problems with the new product liability / Jane Stapleton -- 12. Evaluating the goals of personal injury law: some empirical evidence / Donald Harris -- 13. Negligence and economic loss / John Dwyer -- 14. Libel and constitutional free speech / John Fleming -- 15. The basis of tortious liability / Peter Cane. (shrink)

Think of the last thing someone did to you to seriously harm or offend you. And now imagine, so far as you can, becoming fully aware of the fact that his or her action was the causally inevitable result of a plan set into motion before he or she was ever even born, a plan that had no chance of failing. Should you continue to regard him or her as being morally responsible—blameworthy, in this case—for what he or she did? (...) Many have thought that, intuitively, you should not. Recently, Alfred Mele has employed this line of thought to mount what many have taken to be a powerful argument for incompatibilism: the “Zygote Argument”. However, in interesting new papers, John Martin Fischer and Stephen Kearns have each independently argued that the Zygote Argument fails. As I see it, the criticisms of Fischer and Kearns reveal some important questions about how the argument is meant to be—or how it would best be—understood. Once we make a slight (but important) modification to the argument, however, I think we will be able to see that the criticisms of Fischer and Kearns do not detract from its substantial force. (shrink)

The almost 300 articles contain not only historical accounts but also some indication of the state of present day study in classical philosophy.