The principles for universal reading models proposed by Frost correspond to developmental theories, in which neurocognitive constraints and cultural experiences shape development. We question his contention that Hebrew word identification is fundamentally about roots, excluding verbal and nominal word-pattern morphemes; and we propose that readers use all information available in stimuli, adjusting for volume and usefulness.

This collection of essays is presented as offering the first real philosophical and legal treatment of the Principle of Non-Combatant Immunity . Primoratz's own essay serves as a useful summary of some of the most influential attempts to rule in all, but only, combatants as legitimate military targets. However, this will feel like very familiar territory to those already working in Just War Theory, as will Uwe Steinhoff's essay, which surveys the same positions . Several of the essays are expositional (...) rather than analytical in nature, tracing the historical roots of the PNI. Whilst providing an undeniably interesting journey through early Just War thought, these parts of the volume might feel less than gripping to those looking for engaging philosophical argument.However, the collection is certainly not without such argument. Seamus Miller's essay offers a thorough and thought-provoking account of why certain groups of civilians should not be granted immunity from military force. Using the model of the forced …. (shrink)

This collection of essays is presented as offering the first real philosophical and legal treatment of the Principle of Non-Combatant Immunity. Primoratz's own essay serves as a useful summary of some of the most influential attempts to rule in all, but only, combatants as legitimate military targets. However, this will feel like very familiar territory to those already working in Just War Theory, as will Uwe Steinhoff's essay, which surveys the same positions. Several of the essays are expositional rather than (...) analytical in nature, tracing the historical roots of the PNI. Whilst providing an undeniably interesting journey through early Just War thought, these parts of the volume might feel less than gripping to those looking for engaging philosophical argument.However, the collection is certainly not without such argument. Seamus Miller's essay offers a thorough and thought-provoking account of why certain groups of civilians should not be granted immunity from military force. Using the model of the forced …. (shrink)

The concept of bribery is important to our thinking about ethics, especially in professional contexts. This is in no small part due to the thought that, as Seamus Miller has put it, bribery is “a paradigm of corruption”. Business persons and corporate entities are often evaluated by how well they remain free from, root out, and punish corruption – especially in democratic societies. It is a common thought, for example, that a democratic institution ought to be free from (...) corruption. Since bribery is often thought a form – perhaps the paradigmatic form – of corruption, bribery, too, serves as a central concept in our evaluations of business persons and corporate entities. This article will lay out three common elements which together are characteristics of bribery (payment, intention, and wrongdoing), and then briefly illustrate how this conjunction of elements allows for distinguishing between bribery and two other questionable acts often examined in the context of business (grease payment and extortion). (shrink)

Relatively few authors attempt to assess individuals’ moral responsibility for collective action within organizations. I draw on fairly technical recent work by Seamus Miller, Christopher Kutz, and Tracy Isaacs in the field of collective responsibility to see what normative lessons can be prepared for people considering entry into large hierarchical, compartmentalized organizations like businesses or the military. I will defend a view shared by Isaacs that group members’ responsibility for collective action depends on intentions to contribute to particular (...) collective actions, against Miller and Kutz’s more inculpating standards. Miller and Kutz fail to achieve their goal of articulating a variable standard for measuring individual responsibility within organizations, for reasons suggesting we might not be able to do better with their theoretical commitments than a threshold warning for all potential entrants to be wary of the groups they enter. Isaacs sketches an approach that is more successful at creating a variable standard for assessing high echelon actors; I build on and refine her theory to argue that organization members can be held responsible for their unique interpretations of the organization mission and unique contributions to their role duties. High echelon actors may share personal responsibility for their subordinates’ behavior when they have created the conditions for those actions through their unique orders. (shrink)

In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a large portion of the world into quarantine, leading to an extensive period of stress making it necessary to explore regulatory techniques that are effective at stimulating long-lasting positive emotion. Previous research has demonstrated that anticipating positive events produces increases in positive emotion during discrete stressors. We hypothesized that state and trait positive anticipation during the COVID-19 pandemic would be associated with increased positive emotions. We assessed how often participants thought about a future (...) positive/negative/neutral event, activity, or goal through a daily reconstruction method that represented a “day in the life” of people in the United States during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results of multi-level modeling and mediational analyses demonstrated that higher optimism, one form of trait positive anticipation, was related to higher state positive anticipation, which was in turn related to higher positive emotions during the current episode, which persisted to the next episode. In addition, both optimism and state positive anticipation were related to adaptive responses to the pandemic. These findings suggest that anticipation of future emotional experiences and hopefulness for the future can be a powerful predictor of positive emotions during global pandemics and perhaps other similar chronic stressors. (shrink)

Eric C. Ip has recently argued that seriously anorexic service users ought to be assumed to be legally incapacitous to refuse life‐saving artificial nutrition unless they can demonstrate otherwise, reversing the ordinary legal presumption in place to protect patients’ liberty and values. In this response, I argue against this proposal on two grounds. Firstly, the proposal is wrongfully discriminatory; it would expose service users to serious harm, and wrong them in numerous ways, on the basis of their diagnosis alone, without (...) significantly benefitting them in any way relative to the status quo. Secondly, he is unable to show that a large majority of such service users actually are incapacitous to refuse life‐saving artificial nutrition. This means that his proposal would likely involve declaring a large number of actually capacitous patients to be incapacitous, without even the requirement of a formal assessment, and burdening them with the responsibility of proving their clinical team wrong if they wish to avoid deprivation of liberty and/or compelled treatment. Given this, his proposal is indefensible. (shrink)

When is war just? What does justice require? If we lack a commonly-accepted understanding of justice – and thus of just war – what answers can we find in the intellectual history of just war? Miller argues that just war thinking should be understood as unfolding in three traditions: the Augustinian, the Westphalian, and the Liberal, each resting on distinct understandings of natural law, justice, and sovereignty. The central ideas of the Augustinian tradition can and should be recovered and (...) worked into the Liberal tradition, for which human rights serves the same function. In this reconstructed Augustinian Liberal vision, the violent disruption of ordered liberty is the injury in response to which force may be used and war may be justly waged. Justice requires the vindication and restoration of ordered liberty in, through, and after warfare. (shrink)

Through close examination of the texts, the author shows how 15th-century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa developed an understanding of uncertainty that opened the way for human intelligence, despite its inherent weaknesses, to find out more about ourselves, the world, and what lies beyond.

This book sheds light on the social imagination of nature and environment in contemporary China. It demonstrates how the urgent debate on how to create an ecologically sustainable future for the world's most populous country is shaped by its complex engagement with religious traditions, competing visions of modernity and globalization, and by engagement with minority nationalities who live in areas of outstanding natural beauty on China's physical and social margins. The book develops a comprehensive understanding of contemporary China that goes (...) beyond the tradition/ modernity dichotomy, and illuminates the diversity of narratives and worldviews that inform contemporary Chinese understandings of and engagements with nature and environment. (shrink)

This paper examines workplace surveillance and monitoring. It is argued that privacy is a moral right, and while such surveillance and monitoring can be justified in some circumstances, there is a presumption against the infringement of privacy. An account of privacy precedes consideration of various arguments frequently given for the surveillance and monitoring of employees, arguments which look at the benefits, or supposed benefits, to employees as well as to employers. The paper examines the general monitoring of work, and the (...) monitoring of email, listservers and the World Wide Web. It is argued that many of the common justifications given for this surveillance and monitoring do not stand up to close scrutiny. (shrink)

This Element is about the social dimensions of scientific knowledge. The first section asks in what ways scientific knowledge is social. The second section develops a conception of scientific knowledge that accommodates the insights of the first section, and is consonant with mainstream thinking about knowledge in analytic epistemology. The third section asks under what conditions we can tell, in the real world, that a consensus in a scientific community amounts to shared scientific knowledge, as characterized in the second section, (...) and how to deal with scientific dissent. The fourth section reviews the ways epistemic and social elements mutually interact to coproduce scientific knowledge. This Element engages with literature from philosophy of science and social epistemology, especially social epistemology of science, as well as Science, Technology, and Society (STS), and analytic epistemology. The Element focuses on themes and debates that date from the start of the second millennium. (shrink)

Excavates the experiential structure of Habermas’s communicative action.

THE MORAL SCEPTIC IS ONE WHO BELIEVES MORALITY CANNOT BE\nJUSTIFIED AND THEREFORE THERE ARE GOOD REASONS FOR BEING\nSUSPICIOUS OF IT, AND FURTHER, THAT ONE WHO CONTINUES TO\nMAINTAIN A MORAL POSITION IS BEING UNREASONABLE. THE AUTHOR\nMAINTAINS THAT EVEN THOUGH THE CONCEPT OF JUSTIFICATION\nDOES NOT APPLY, THE SCEPTIC IS MISTAKEN IN DRAWING THE\nCONCLUSIONS HE DOES. THE SCEPTIC CONTENDS THAT IN THE\nABSENCE OF REASONS, IT IS UNREASONABLE TO BELIEVE. IT IS\nCONCLUDED THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO REASON US FROM MORALITY\nINTO SCEPTICISM. (STAFF).

Reparations is an idea whose time has come. From civilian victims of war in Iraq and South America to descendents of slaves in the US to citizens of colonized nations in Africa and south Asia to indigenous peoples around the world--these groups and their advocates are increasingly arguing for the importance of addressing historical injustices that have long been either ignored or denied. This volume contributes to these debates by focusing the attention of a group of highly distinguished international experts (...) on the ways that reparations claims figure in contemporary political and social justice movements. Four broad types of reparations claims are examined, those involving indigenous peoples, the legacy of slavery in the United States, victims of war and conflict, and colonialism. In each instance, scholars and activists argue about the character of the injustice for which reparations are owed, why it is important to take these demands seriously, and what form redress should take. The aim is not consensus but to exhibit better the complexity of the issues involved--a goal which the interdisciplinary nature of the volume furthers--as well as the importance of taking seriously both conceptual issues and the actual politics of reparations. (shrink)

This article argues for the importance of distinguishing the form of a theory of happiness from its content. It applies this distinction to ancient ethics, to show that almost all ancient philosophers subscribed to the same basic form or conception of happiness while differing over the details or content of happiness.

A plausible desideratum for an account of the nature of objects, at, and across time, is that it accommodate the phenomenon of vagueness without locating vagueness in the world. A series of arguments have attempted to show that while universalist perdurantism – which combines a perdurantist account of persistence with an unrestricted mereological account of composition – meets this desideratum, endurantist accounts do not. If endurantists reject unrestricted composition then they must hold that vagueness is ontological. But if they embrace (...) unrestricted composition they are faced with the problem of the many, and cannot plausibly accommodate vagueness. This paper disambiguates two related sub-problems of the problem of the many, and argues that universalist perdurantism is not superior to universalist endurantism with respect to either of these. (shrink)

In section one, I briefly review the Harman/Doris argument and outline the most promising response. Then in section two I develop what I take the real challenge to virtue ethics to be. The final section of the chapter suggests two strategies for beginning to address this challenge.

In this paper we show that it is consistent with ZFC that for any set of reals of cardinality the continuum, there is a continuous map from that set onto the closed unit interval. In fact, this holds in the iterated perfect set model. We also show that in this model every set of reals which is always of first category has cardinality less than or equal to ω 1.

America is experiencing a cultural malaise. As art historians Arthur Pontynen and Rod Miller show in this penetrating new book, our current cultural struggles result from repeated attempts to deny the qualitative foundation for culture that distinguishes civilization from barbarism. Tracing American art, science, and philosophy from the colonial era to the present, Western Culture at the American Crossroads reveals how a distinctively American culture emerged and where it went wrong. Culture cannot be merely a matter of personal or (...) group preferences; it must be dedicated to the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. But as Pontynen and Miller skillfully chronicle, modernism and postmodernism have developed dangerously limited understandings of science and reason that do not simply limit art but actually lead to bitter conflict and violence. The authors discuss dozens of works of art and architecture -- many of them featured in this beautifully illustrated work. But Western Culture at the American Crossroads in no mere art history treatise; it connects many dots in American intellectual history, demonstrating how what a culture believes relates to how it acts and what art it produces. Standing athwart trends that reduce culture to a matter of lifestyle and "taste," Western Culture at the American Crossroads makes a powerful case that the free and responsible pursuit of wisdom desperately needs to be renewed. Pontynen and Miller ultimately reveal the emerging threats not only to American and Western culture but to the very possibility of culture itself. - Publisher. (shrink)

This paper connects work in psychology on the Big Five Model to the recent debate in philosophy on the empirical adequacy of virtue ethics and virtue epistemology.

A volume of essays by leading photography writers and critics, published to benefit Amnesty International, cites such examples as the work of Susan Sontag to question whether photography of disturbing images stirs empathy or voyeurism in its viewers, outlining how to look at photographs to become contextually informed. Original.

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been increasing interest in the global dimensions of a host of public policy issues - issues involving war and peace, terrorism, international law, regulation of commerce, environmental protection, and disparities of wealth, income, and access to medical care. Especially pressing is the question of whether it is possible to formulate principles of justice that are valid not merely within a single society but across national borders. The thirteen essays in this volume (...) explore a range of issues that are central to contemporary discussions of global politics. Written by prominent philosophers, political scientists, economists, and legal theorists, they offer valuable contributions to current debates over the nature of justice and its implications for the development of international law and international institutions. (shrink)

The story -- Everyone has a story: worldview and flourishing -- Poor stories: worldview and poverty -- The transforming story: the story that brings flourishing -- The king -- God is a person: the universe is relational -- God is rational: the universe is intelligible -- God is good: the universe is moral -- His kingdom -- Creation's open system: expanding the boundaries -- Creation's laws: following the instructions -- His stewards -- Rebel servants: the nature of people -- One (...) yet many: the nature of community -- The task -- Stewardship: creating and managing bounty -- Lifework: reconnecting vocation to the transforming story -- History makers: obeying all he has commanded. (shrink)

This article assays Paul Ramsey's influential attempt to conceive possible nuclear deterrents within the confines of just war tenets. I look first at Ramsey's construction of just war ideas according to a protection paradigm, one in which agape is deontically defined. I also note a subtle sub-theme in Ramsey's construction of just war ideas, what I call a preservation motif. I then assess Ramsey's discussion of nuclear deterrence, closing with a critique of his treatments of intention and proportionality. I conclude (...) by arguing that Ramsey's argument falters, and that the weaknesses of his argument can be rendered intelligible by noting how the full implications of the protection paradigm are attenuated by the preservation motif. (shrink)