This work is the first to demonstrate the differences and similarities between Plato's myths and the traditional kind of which he was critical. It also actively demonstrates the extent to which his own myths support or undermine the philosophical ideas of the dialogues in which they are set. It offers new arguments and criticism on point of detail concerning modern interpretations.

Herein I address and extend the sparse literature on deception in sports, specifically, Kathleen Pearson’s Deception, Sportsmanship, and Ethics and Mark J. Hamilton’s There’s No Lying in Baseball. On a Kantian foundation, I argue that attempts to deceive officials, such as framing pitches in baseball, are morally unacceptable because they necessarily regard others as incompetent and as a mere means to one’s own self-interested ends. More dramatically I argue, contrary to Pearson and Hamilton, that some forms of competitor-to-competitor deception are (...) similarly unacceptable. Specifically, I offer a ‘principle of caustic deceit’ according to which any strategic deception that divorces a game from its constitutive skills is morally untoward and ought to be met with negative social pressure at least, and/or legislated out of existence. The problem with these forms of strategic deception is that they treat one’s opponents, again in the Kantian sense, as a mere means to one’s own self-interested ends. (shrink)

My objective in this project is to explore the concept of moral luck as it relates to sports. I am especially interested in constitutive luck. As a foundation I draw from both Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel’s classic handling of moral luck, generally. Within the philosophy of sport are similar explorations of this nexus by Robert Simon and David Carr that also factor into the present work. My intent is to put a new lens in front of a puzzle drawn (...) from Torbjörn Tännsjö’s well-known article ‘Is Our Admiration of Sports Heroes Facistoid?’ Specifically, the idea that we might admire an athlete who excels without having worked hard for it. If we may call this puzzle ‘the talent problem,’ the questions driving the present work are as follows: what is the relationship between moral luck and the talent problem, and can this relationship provide a prescription for morally assessing the talent problem? The thesis that this exploratory work suggests that more complex games (and... (shrink)

The role of animals in the realm of sport is the focus of this special issue which delves into the nuanced intersections of sport, animals, and ethics. For millennia, humans have forged multifacete...

Evidence is currently mixed regarding the way in which cognitive conflict modulates the effect of emotion on task performance. The present study aimed to address methodological differences across previous studies and investigate the conditions under which interference from emotional stimuli can either be elicited or eliminated under high cognitive conflict. Four behavioural experiments were conducted with a university sample using a gender-discrimination stimulus-response compatibility task. In line with our previous findings, Experiment 1 found that when emotion and cognitive conflict conditions (...) were blocked, emotional faces increased reaction time interference during response compatible trials (low conflict) but not response incompatible trials (high conflict). However, when conflict and emotion conditions were randomised in different configurations across Experiments 2 (all trials randomised), 3 (emotion blocked, compatibility randomised) and 4 (compatibility blocked, emotion randomised), emotion interfered with task performance across both high and low conflict trials. These results suggest that predictability of both compatibility and emotion is required in order to obtain reduced emotional interference under high cognitive conflict. Consistent with prior reports, a top–down anticipatory control mechanism seems to be engaged in the presence of negative emotion when there are incompatible stimulus-response mappings. (shrink)

Comparative study on Śaṅkarācārya and F.H. (Francis Herbert) Bradley, 1846-1924.

Incompletely understood medical texts, like other kinds of technical writing, pose problems that require a multi-disciplinary approach. In addition, the etymological writings of ancient commentators hint at their own cultures priorities and limitations. Progress today, therefore, also depends partly upon how well we can harmonize our own thinking with the beliefs and practices of an alien culture, whose medicine may overlap with culinary and other social uses. A puzzling word may have been reshaped to reflect the supposed properties of the (...) entity denoted or the use made of it. Plant names, which figure strongly in such texts, are particularly liable to be passed from language to language as ‘culture borrowings’ and are thus especially vulnerable to this false rationalization process, commonly known as ‘folk etymology’. In a personal exploration I analyse some modern vocabulary and identify several varieties of the process and then illustrate its effects by means of toponyms and medicinal plant names from mediaeval Italy and ancient Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Greece and Italy. Since no known language seems immune from etymologizing, the generic points that emerge are offered as a contribution to the decipherers craft. (shrink)

We point out that, when the dimension of the Hilbert space is greater than two, Bell’s operators entering the Bell-CHSH inequality do exhibit inequivalent unitary matrix representations. Although the Bell-CHSH inequality turns out to be violated, the size of the violation is different for different representations, the maximum violation being given by Tsirelson’s bound. The feature relies on a pairing mechanism between the modes of the Hilbert space of the system.

Even though integrity is widely considered to be an essential aspect of research, there is an ongoing debate on what actually constitutes research integrity. The understanding of integrity ranges from the minimal, only considering falsification, fabrication and plagiarism, to the maximum, blending into science ethics. Underneath these obvious contrasts, there are more subtle differences that are not as immediately evident. The debate about integrity is usually presented as a single, universal discussion, with shared concerns for researchers, policymakers and ‘the public’. (...) In this article, we show that it is not. There are substantial differences between the language of research integrity in the scientific arena and in the public domain. Notably, scientists and policymakers adopt different approaches to research integrity. Scientists tend to present integrity as a virtue that must be kindled, while policy documents and newspapers stress norm enforcement. Rather than performing a conceptual analysis through philosophical reasoning and discussion, we aimed to clarify the discourse of ‘scientific integrity’ by studying its usage in written documents. To this end, large numbers of scientific publications, policy documents and newspaper articles were analysed by means of scientometric and content analysis techniques. The texts were analysed on their usage of the term ‘integrity’ and of frequently co-occurring terms and concepts. A comparison was made between the usage in the various media, as well as between different periods in which they were published through co-word analysis, mapping co-occurrence networks of significant terms and themes. (shrink)

Applying Bernard Suits’s conceptual definition of game-playing, and his outline of a conceptual definition of sport, I ask and answer the following question: can hunting be a sport? An affirmative answer is substantiated via the following logic. Premise one, all sports are games. Premise two, a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Premise three, fair-chase hunters voluntarily accept unnecessary obstacles. Conclusion one: fair-chase hunting is a game. Premise four, a sport can be defined as a game that (...) requires the exercise of physical skill, has a wide following, and institutional stability. Premise five, some fair-chase hunts require physical skill, have a wide following, and have institutional stability. Conclusion two: fair-chase hunting that requires physical skill, has a wide following, and institutional stability is a sport. After substantiating each premise and conclusion I consider and refute several important objections. Primarily, that hunting lacks constitutive rules and that hunting lacks volitional engagement and thus cannot be a game or sport. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments RAILING AGAINST REALISM: PHILOSOPHY AND TO THE LIGHTHOUSE by S. P. ROSENBAUM The argument of Graheim Parkes's "Imagining Reality in To the Lighthouse" is described by its author as "a railing against the realist position" (p. 35) as he understands it primarily in my article "The Philosophical Reedism ofVirginia Woolf." ' Apart from the question of whemer railing is a useful way of conducting an inquiry (...) into literature and philosophy, Parkes's discussion raises several important issues about these connections. The way diey are raised, however, involves various mistedces and muddles that make a brief reply to his eurticle difficult. To begin with a small reveeding example, Parkes asserts that I miss the irony in Virginia Woolfs use of die letters P, Q, and R to describe Mr. Ramsay's problems of diought (p. 41). Here is what I wrote: "By representing Mr. Ramsay 's thinking as proceeding in die very genered form of conventional logical symbols, Virginia Woolf is wittily extending the standard letters used to symbolize die conditional type of argument, If P men Cf (p. 339, with italics added this time). Parkes's misreading of my text does not inspire confidence when he turns to Virginia Woolfs fiction or G. E. Moore's philosophy. On a more significant issue, Parkes complains that I boggle his mind by saying diat philosophically, Moore influenced Virginia Woolf more man anyone else, whereas Platonic ideas abound in her books (p. 35). Of course they do, but not very much in her epistemology, which was the subject of my eurticle.2 What Peirkes does not mention is that Plato was also a profound influence on Moore's philosophy. One of die reasons Moore's influence on Bloomsbury was so strong is that he reinterpreted Plato for them. In her images and ideas Virginia Woolf was influenced direcdy dirough her reading of Plato etnd also indirectly through the work of Plotinus and Moore. These influences are not easily sepeurated, which is why studies of Platonic emd Neoplatonic influences in her work that ignore Moore's significance are so incomplete. 89 90Philosophy and Literature Peirkes claims mat die evidence of Moore's influence on Virginia Woolf is slight (p. 34), and then he concerns himself with the putative influences of German philosophers for whom mere is no evidence at all. In the fifteen years since I wrote my article, the biographical evidence for Moore's influence has continued to accumulate as Virginia Woolfs letters, memoirs, emd dieiries were published. From her first novel, in which Principia Etnica is quoted emd briefly discussed, down to die recently discovered revised version of her last memoir, in which she reaffirms her deep respect for Moore,3 the indications of Moore's significance for Virginia Woolf ought to convince any disinterested reader. It cannot be dismissed with a sneer about "the voguish fascination of the Bloomsbury Group..." (p. 34), especially from someone proposing to study yet again the depth psychology of her fiction via Nietzsche and Heidegger (P- 44). Nothing I say here, of course, will persuade Parkes of the value of philosophical realism for understanding To the Lighthouse because diat philosophy, as he conceives of it in his article, consists of straw. To tedce just one exeimple, Peirkes appeeurs to believe Moore's epistemology etrgues "diat things and persons are what they are independently of human consciousness" (p. 37). There is no space here to explain philosophical realism again to Parkes, odier than to note that it is not inconsistent with the veirious concerns (to use Peurkes's terminology) about "transpersonal imagination" or "participation in phenomena" that he finds so interesting in the novel. But what about die novel? For readers indifferent to whether Moore or Russell, Nietzsche or Heidegger are to be found in To the Lighthouse, the relevant question is what such philosophical interpretations medce of it. To them I ceui only say, reread the novel and then ask yourselves if an account of it diat says nothing about die value of art and almost nodiing about the value oflove bears much resemblance to your reading experience. Parkes thinks the portrait of Mr. Ramsay is unsympathetic because he is criticized emd mocked... (shrink)

Threshold- and signal-detection-based models have dominated theorizing about recognition memory. Building upon these theoretical frameworks, we have argued for a dual-process model in which conscious recollection and familiarity contribute to memory performance. In the current paper we assessed several memory models by examining the effects of levels of processing and the number of presentations on recognition memory receiver operating characteristics . In general, when the ROCs were plotted in probability space they exhibited an inverted U shape; however, when they were (...) plotted inzspace they exhibited a U shape. An examination of the ROCs showed that the dual-process model could account for the observed ROCs, but that models based solely on either threshold or signal-detection processes failed to provide a sufficient account of the data. Furthermore, an examination of subjects' introspective reports using the remember/know procedure showed that subjects were aware of recollection and familiarity and were able to consistently report on their occurrence. The remember/know data were used to accurately predict the shapes of the ROCs, and estimates of recollection and familiarity derived from the ROC data mirrored the subjective reports of these processes. (shrink)

The two-part thesis of this work is that Native mascots are morally wrong but that they do not warrant proscription. They are wrong because they propagate false or misleading beliefs about others and contribute to disrespectful misrelationships. This moral wrong lacks the weight to warrant proscription because of the countervailing weight of free-expression and the fact that Native mascots are mere offensive nuisances rather than profound offenses. Because Native mascots are morally wrong they ought to be challenged and resisted, but (...) without recourse to legislature. (shrink)