In 1931 the mathematical logician Kurt Godel published a revolutionary paper that challenged certain basic assumptions underpinning mathematics and logic. A colleague of Albert Einstein, his theorem proved that mathematics was partly based on propositions not provable within the mathematical system and had radical implications that have echoed throughout many fields. A gripping combination of science and accessibility, Godel’s Proof by Nagel and Newman is for both mathematicians and the idly curious, offering those with a taste for logic and philosophy (...) the chance to satisfy their intellectual curiosity. (shrink)

Tara Smith's book on Rand's ethics is reviewed by Stephen Hicks for *Philosophy in Review.*.

Human-eyelid conditioning was the principal source of information on Pavlovian conditioning, especially human, in the 1950s and 1960s, but it suffered a sharp decline in productivity, beginning in the late 1960s. The present article treats the decline as a case study with potential implications concerning the survival contingencies of research specialties. We make use of questionnaire data from eyelid-conditioning researchers and examine a variety of publication, topic-of-investigation, and institutional data to identify the major factors in the decline of human-eyelid conditioning.

In two chapters of Enn. II.9 [33], Plotinus discusses the Gnostic idea that the creation of the world is due to the ‘decline’ of a principle that he variously calls Soul or Sophia. The identity of Plotinus' Gnostics is notoriously difficult to establish with any degree of precision; I can only note here that the idea of Sophia's ‘decline’ features in a number of extant Gnostic texts, such as those from Nag Hammadi and the Berlin Codex, as a recent survey (...) of the evidence by Poirier has demonstrated. (shrink)

Many religious people are alarmed about features of the current age - violence in the media, a pervasive hedonism, a marginalization of religion, and widespread abortion. These concerns influence politics, but just as there should be a separation between church and state, so should there be a balance between religious commitments and secular arguments calling for social reforms. Robert Audi offers a principle of secular rationale, which does not exclude religious grounds for action but which rules out restricting freedom except (...) on grounds that any rational citizen would accept. The book describes the essential commitments of free democracy, explains how religious and secular moral considerations can be integrated to facilitate co-operation in a world of religious pluralism, and proposes ideals of civic virtue that express the mutual respect on which democracy depends. Audi offers a balanced and sophisticated treatment of the relations between religion and politics in a modern, secular society. (shrink)

Following promulgation of the Nuremberg code in 1947, the ethics of research on human subjects has been a challenging and often contentious topic of debate. Escalation in the use of research participants in low-income countries over recent decades , has intensified the debate on the ethics of international research and led to increasing attention both to exploitation of vulnerable subjects and to considerations of how the 10:90 gap in health and medical research could be narrowed. In 2000, prompted by the (...) discussions over several years that led to the US NIH launching a capacity building programme on research ethics for members of research ethics committees in developing countries, we advanced a ‘new look’ for the ethics of international research.1 Since then progress has been made on several fronts.First, our ideas—considered somewhat radical and impractical at the time—have been provocatively addressed by scholars who have either contested them or advanced similar conceptions of what obligations international researchers have to research participants and communities in low income countries before, during and after clinical trials. Second, those researchers who have been sympathetic to our ideas have either endeavoured to put these into practice or have investigated the feasibility of doing so. Third, the intractability of the 10/90 gap and the escalation of interest in global health have sensitised many to the need to amplify the uptake of these ideas in practice.Here, we briefly review the conceptual and practical developments in international research ethics. While much conceptual progress has been made (and the concepts are now appearing …. (shrink)

Contemporary ideas about caring in welfare states can wreak havoc if applied to one's own life. In this essay, a mother offers a personal commentary on the debate regarding diakonia and caring. She identifies three concepts, popular in contemporary caring discourse, that threaten her ability to genuinely and effectively care for those around her, particularly her family. The first problematic concept is that the state ought to provide care on our behalf. The second is that people have rights to claim, (...) but no one in particular bears the responsibility. The third is that the Church is responsive rather than normative in the social setting. (shrink)

Uses epistemic logic to clarify a number of possible interpretations of the principle, 'if you know you can't be wrong' and the deceptively similar principle 'if you may be wrong you don't know.' shows that on all plausible interpretation sceptical arguments beg the question at issue.

It is shown in the present paper that the transformation relating a parallel transported vector in a Weyl space to the original one is the product of a multiplicative gauge transformation and a proper orthochronous Lorentz transformation. Such a Lorentz transformation admits a spinor representation, which is obtained and used to deduce the transportation properties of a Weyl spinor, which are then expressed in terms of a composite gauge group defined as the product of a multiplicative gauge group and the (...) spinor group. These properties render a spinor amenable to its treatment as a particle coupled to a multidimensional gauge field in the framework of the Kaluza–Klein formulation extended to multidimensional gauge fields. In this framework, a fiber bundle is constructed with a horizontal, base space and a vertical, gauge space, which is a Lie group manifold, termed its structure group. For the present, the base is the Minkowski spacetime and the vertical space is the composite gauge group mentioned above. The fiber bundle is equipped with a Riemannian structure, which is used to obtain the classical description of motion of a spinor. In its classical picture, a Weyl spinor is found to behave as a spinning charged particle in translational motion. The corresponding quantum description is deduced from the Klein–Gordon equation in the Riemann spaces obtained by the methods of path-integration. This equation in the present fiber bundle reduces to the equation for a Weyl spinor, which is close to but differs somewhat from the squared Dirac equation. (shrink)

The ArgumentMichael Polanyi is placed in the ongoing Enlightenment-reform tradition as one of the first twentieth-century scientists to propose a program to correct the gravest internal conflict of the modern Enlightenment project of radical criticism: scientific detachment and moral nihilism in conflict with humanist values. He held that radical criticism leads not to truth but to destructive doubt. Only the inclusion of the “personal element,” the judicial attitude of reasonable doubt and the acknowledgment of belief in the regulative principle of (...) truth can overcome this end. Freedom — to reason, to criticize the method of doubt, and freedom of scientific thinking — is a precondition to reach truth. His epistemology of nonsubjective personal knowledge has redefined scientific knowing and objectivity as grounded in tacit knowing. Debate is continuing on objectivity and freedom versus the social duty of science. Polanyi's Hungarian correspondence highlights his commitment to truth and the contemporary cultural-political situation of Jewish intellectuals. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an approach to clinical practice aiming to resolve the dilemma of choosing between a mechanistic and a phenomenological model. The approach is an extension of Polanyi's epistemology. Michael Polanyi, devised an epistemology of science which overcomes the problem of detachment, inherent in the mechanistic approach, and resolves the problem of subjectivity troubling phenomenologists. His epistemology is known as Personal Knowledge. An extension of this epistemology, a Neo-Polanyian proposal, is offered as a more (...) successful model for clinical practice than previous suggestions addressing the dilemma. (shrink)

This paper seeks to explore the implementation of corporate ethical culture and policies as an adjunct to formal forms of corporate governance. The insurance industry utilises a variety of external governance structures, but is almost unique in that stock companies (which are exposed to an external market for corporate control) and mutual companies (which are owned by a subset of their customers) are in active competition. A questionnaire survey of senior executives in U.K. insurance companies was undertaken to explore the (...) implementation of ethical policies and codes, to investigate ethical attitudes, and to analyze the extent to which these policies and attitudes varied among companies. The results suggest that ethical policies have a higher profile and ethical attitudes and behaviour are more positive in mutual as opposed to stock insurance companies. These findings support the contention that a strong corporate ethical culture may be utilised to enhance formal corporate governance instruments. (shrink)