Natural selection is commonly interpreted as the fundamental mechanism of evolution. Questions about how selection theory can claim to be the all-sufficient explanation of evolution often go unanswered by today's neo-Darwinists, perhaps for fear that any criticism of the evolutionary paradigm will encourage creationists and proponents of intelligent design.In Biological Emergences, Robert Reid argues that natural selection is not the cause of evolution. He writes that the causes of variations, which he refers to as natural experiments, are independent of (...) natural selection; indeed, he suggests, natural selection may get in the way of evolution. Reid proposes an alternative theory to explain how emergent novelties are generated and under what conditions they can overcome the resistance of natural selection. He suggests that what causes innovative variation causes evolution, and that these phenomena are environmental as well as organismal.After an extended critique of selectionism, Reid constructs an emergence theory of evolution, first examining the evidence in three causal arenas of emergent evolution: symbiosis/association, evolutionary physiology/behavior, and developmental evolution. Based on this evidence of causation, he proposes some working hypotheses, examining mechanisms and processes common to all three arenas, and arrives at a theoretical framework that accounts for generative mechanisms and emergent qualities. Without selectionism, Reid argues, evolutionary innovation can more easily be integrated into a general thesis. Finally, Reid proposes a biological synthesis of rapid emergent evolutionary phases and the prolonged, dynamically stable, non-evolutionary phases imposed by natural selection. (shrink)

The ontological status of sport: Weiss, P. Records and the man. Schacht, R. L. On Weiss on records, athletic activity, and the athlete. Fraleigh, W. P. On Weiss on records and on the significance of athletic records. Stone, R. E. Assumptions about the nature of movement. Suits, B. The elements of sport. Kretchmar, S. Ontological possibilities: sport as play. Morgan, W. An existential phenomenological analysis of sport as a religious experience. Fraleigh, W. P. The moving "I." Fraleigh, W. P. Some (...) meanings of the human experience of freedom and necessity in sport. Keenan, F. W. The concept of doing.--The ethical status of sport: Keating, J. W. The ethics of competition and its relation to some moral problems in ahtletics. Sadler, W. A., Jr. A contextual approach to an understanding of competition: a response to Keating's philosophy of athletics. Osterhoudt, R. G. On Keating on the competitive motif in athletics and playful activity. Suits, B. The grasshopper: a thesis concerning the moral idea of man. Broekhoff, J. Sport and ethics in the context of culture. Zeigler, E. F. The pragmatic (experimentalistic) ethic as it relates to sport and physical education. Roberts, T. J. and Galasso, P. J. The fiction of morally indifferent acts in sport. Osterhoudt, R. G. The Kantian ethic as a principle of moral conduct in sport and athletics. Thomas, C. E. Do you "wanna" bet: an examination of player betting and the integrity of the sporting event.--The aesthetic status of sport: Kuntz, P. G. The aesthetics of sport. Keenan, F. W. The athletic contest as a "tragic" form of art. Osterhoudt, R. G. An Hegelian interpretation of art, sport, and athletics. (shrink)

How do thought and language manage to be 'about' aspects of the world? J. Robert G. Williams investigates how representation arises out of a fundamentally non-representational world, showing the explanatory relations between the representational properties of language, of thought, and of perception and intention.

The post-Darwinian double-aspect theory that Professor Robert Kunzendorf's introduces in On the Evolution of Conscious Sensation, Conscious Imagination, and Consciousness of Self points to evolutionary functions of certain sensations, youngling vivid images, and self-consciousness.

Much more than an obligation to protect our clients' rights, ethics is better understood as the very fabric that underpins and supports our most basic efforts in working with clients and interacting with others in our everyday lives. Robert Lee brings together a diverse group of voices in the Gestalt field to demonstrate the interrelations between the ethics of the therapeutic endeavor and the Gestalt tradition, from theory to practice to extensions beyond the analytic setting.

The six essays in this volume discuss philosophical thought on scientific theory including: a call for a realist, rather than instrumentalist interpretation of science; a critique of one of the core ideas of positivism concerning the relation between observational and theoretical languages; using aerodynamics to discuss the representational aspect of scientific theories and their isomorphic qualities; the relationship between the reliability of common sense and the authenticity of the world view of science; removing long-held ambiguities on the theory of inductive (...) logic; and the relationship between the actuality of conceptual revolutions in the history of science and traditional philosophical pictures of scientific theory-building. (shrink)

The WIMP (weakly interacting dark matter) is currently the leading candidate for what is thought to be dark matter, the cosmological material claimed to make up almost 99% of the matter of the universe and which is indiscernible by means of electromagnetic radiation. There are many research groups dedicated to experimentally isolating WIMPs, and in this paper we describe the work of three of these groups, the Saclay group, DAMA and UKDM. This exploration into the recent history of astroparticle physics (...) serves to illuminate two philosophical issues. First, is confirmatory evidence more compelling if it coordinates results gleaned from independent experimental investigations? And secondly, in justifying experimental conclusions, how strong must this justification be? Are the high standards set by philosophers, in the spirit of Descartes, relevant to experimental research? (shrink)

The principles of the 3Rs—replacement, refinement, and reduction—strongly shape discussion of methods for performing more humane animal research and the regulation of this contested area of technoscience. This special issue looks back to the origins of the 3Rs principles through five papers that explore how it is enacted and challenged in practice and that develop critical considerations about its future. Three themes connect the papers in this special issue. These are the multiplicity of roles enacted by those who use and (...) care for animals in research, the distribution of “feelings that matter” across species and spaces of laboratory animal practice, and the growing importance of “cultures of care” in animal research. (shrink)

Starting with the Greeks, philosophers have been prone to demand certainty in their subject. As we know, this was not a local demand; the prevailing view was that all knowledge, scientific as well as philosophic, must be certain. The demand for philosophic certainty was thus the result of a more general view about knowledge and, equally important, the conviction that philosophy and science are one or, at least, continuous. Eventually, however, although there was agreement on the ideal, disagreement on virtually (...) everything else of importance bred skepticism about philosophic knowledge itself. The heirs to this skepticism in the present century were the logical positivists. -/- As they saw the matter, philosophy is discontinuous with science and, once shorn of its nonsense, contains only logical analyses or clarifications of meanings and not, as had been thought, claims about real existences. Philosophic certainty was retained in principle, although, given the controversial nature of their other claims, it was not emphasized. Science also came down a notch or two. The certainty of mathematics was reaffirmed, but it too was relegated to the realm of meanings; on the other hand, empirical science, since it rests on observation and experiment, was demoted to the level of high probability. -/- In all, the boldness and rigor of the positivist position are unmatched in the present century. Nevertheless, I think it is mistaken. In the present paper, I will argue that, because of difficulties with verificationism and the analytic-synthetic distinction, there is no reason to think that philosophic statements differ in kind from factual claims. The result, I think, is a partial vindication of the long-standing conception that philosophy is continuous with science. As for the other feature of the traditional view of philosophy, viz. certainty, I shall say little. However, if the account I defend here is correct, it should be clear that certainty in philosophy is unattainable. (shrink)

Theoretical explication of a growing body of empirical data on consciousness-related anomalous phenomena is unlikely to be achieved in terms of known physical processes. Rather, it will first be necessary to formulate the basic role of consciousness in the definition of reality before such anomalous experience can adequately be represented. This paper takes the position that reality is constituted only in the interaction of consciousness with its environment, and therefore that any scheme of conceptual organization developed to represent that reality (...) must reflect the processes of consciousness as well as those of its environment. In this spirit, the concepts and formalisms of elementary quantum mechanics, as originally proposed to explain anomalous atomic-scale physical phenomena, are appropriated via metaphor to represent the general characteristics of consciousness interacting with any environment. More specifically, if consciousness is represented by a quantum mechanical wave function, and its environment by an appropriate potential profile, Schrödinger wave mechanics defines eigenfunctions and eigenvalues that can be associated with the cognitive and emotional experiences of that consciousness in that environment. To articulate this metaphor it is necessary to associate certain aspects of the formalism, such as the coordinate system, the quantum numbers, and even the metric itself, with various impressionistic descriptors of consciousness, such as its intensity, perspective, approach/avoidance attitude, balance between cognitive and emotional activity, and receptive/assertive disposition. With these established, a number of the generic features of quantum mechanics, such as the wave/particle duality, and the uncertainty, indistinguishability, and exclusion principles, display metaphoric relevance to familiar individual and collective experiences. Similarly, such traditional quantum theoretic exercises as the central force field and atomic structure, covalent molecular bonds, barrier penetration, and quantum statistical collective behavior become useful analogies for representation of a variety of consciousness experiences, both normal and anomalous, and for the design of experiments to study these systematically. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, leaders are facing an ethical dilemma and a tense tradeoff between employees’ health and economic performance. From the perspective of employees’ perceptions of the work situation, this study examines the way ethical leadership enhances employee creativity during the COVID-19 pandemic by using leader-member exchange and organizational ethical climate as mediators. The sample included 308 supervisor-employee pairs from 20 high-tech companies in eight provincial regions of China. Structural equation modeling was used to test (...) the proposed hypotheses. Results indicate that ethical leadership can significantly enhance employee creativity through the fully mediating roles of employees’ perceptions of leader-member exchange and organizational ethical climate. Moreover, leader-member exchange affects employee creativity directly as well as indirectly through the mediating role of organizational ethical climate. This study offers insights into the process linking ethical leadership to employee creativity and provides practical suggestions on ways of enhancing employee creativity in situations like the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. (shrink)

Seeking a scientific basis for understanding and treating mental illness, and inspired by the work of Ivan Pavlov, American physiologists, psychiatrists and psychologists in the 1920s turned to nonhuman animals. This paper examines how new constructs such as “experimental neurosis” emerged as tools to enable psychiatric comparison across species. From 1923 to 1962, the Cornell “Behavior Farm” was a leading interdisciplinary research center pioneering novel techniques to experimentally study nonhuman psychopathology. Led by the psychobiologist Howard Liddell, work at the Behavior (...) Farm formed part of an ambitious program to develop new preventative and therapeutic techniques and bring psychiatry into closer relations with physiology and medicine. At the heart of Liddell’s activities were a range of nonhuman animals, including pigs, sheep, goats and dogs, each serving as a proxy for human patients. We examine how Pavlov’s conceptualization of ‘experimental neurosis’ was used by Liddell to facilitate comparison across species and communication between researchers and clinicians. Our close reading of his experimental system demonstrates how unexpected animal behaviors and emotions were transformed into experimental virtues. However, to successfully translate such behaviors from the animal laboratory into the field of human psychopathology, Liddell increasingly reached beyond, and, in effect, redefined, the Pavlovian method to make it compatible and compliant with an ethological approach to the animal laboratory. We show how the resultant Behavior Farm served as a productive “hybrid” place, containing elements of experiment and observation, laboratory and field. It was through the building of close and more naturalistic relationships with animals over extended periods of time, both normal and pathological, and within and outside of the experimental space, that Liddell could understand, manage, and make useful the myriad behavioral complexities that emerged from the life histories of experimental animals, the researchers who worked with them, and their shared relationships to the wider physical and social environments. (shrink)

This volume centers on philosophical issues of the life sciences, particularly genetics and psychology, and the relevance of statistical data as the foundation for inductive reasoning in areas such as vaccination testing, population genetics, evolutionary theory, and natural selection. Also discussed is the role of psychology in defining thought processes, experiences, and behaviors and their subsequent relation to scientific discovery, and advancing knowledge of the human condition and human potential.

Introduction -- Reconstructing Nīsābūrī's early education -- Nīsābūrī's early scientific thought -- Nīsābūrī's early religious thought -- Astrology motivating inductions about God's power -- Nīsābūrī's later scientific thought -- The impact of science on Nīsābūrī's religious thought -- The limits of science's influence on Nīsābūrī's religious thought -- Conclusion.

Enormous and significant progress has been made in the important areas of entanglement, quantum computing and harnessing energy from the vacuum, which includes a sound theoretical basis, using the Einstein-Sachs theories to develop an anti-symmetric general relativity (AGR) approach to a higher topology O(3) electrodynamics. These developments also lead to the application of the Aharonov-Bohm effect and the Yang-Mills theory to the higher topology O(3) electrodynamics, as well as a deeper understanding and appreciation of these effects and their impact on (...) modern physics. The door is now open for the further development and unification of physics, including the gravitational, electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces, using the AGR approach. (shrink)

Concise and clearly written, this volume surveys the doctrines of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, presenting major issues in metaphysics and the relationship between philosophy and science, and examining Cartesian rationalism and other theories of knowledge. It considers moral responsibilities and problems in ethics, discusses the philosophy of religion, and reviews some arguments for the existence of God. It concludes with an exploration of trends in twentieth-century philosophy, including pragmatism, analytical philosophy, logical positivism, and existentialism. An excellent introduction, (...) this volume provides the necessary perspective and critical insight to pursue further readings in philosophy, and will prove equally valuable in and out of the classroom. (shrink)

This book describes and explores six current approaches to the study of mind: the neuroscientific, the behavioral, the competence approach, the ecological, the phenomenological, and the computational. No other book in cognitive science covers such a broad range of research programs and topics in such a balanced fashion. The first chapter is a mini-history and philosophy of psychology which reviews some of the scientific developments and philosophical arguments behind these six different approaches. Each subsequent chapter presents work that is on (...) the frontiers of research in its field. (shrink)