We present a series of arguments for logical nativism, focusing mainly on the meaning of disjunction in human languages. We propose that all human languages are logical in the sense that the meaning of linguistic expressions corresponding to disjunction (e.g. English or , Chinese huozhe, Japanese ka ) conform to the meaning of the logical operator in classical logic, inclusive- or . It is highly implausible, we argue, that children acquire the (logical) meaning of disjunction by observing how adults use (...) disjunction. Findings from studies of child language acquisition and from cross-linguistic research invite the conclusion that children do not learn to be logical—it comes naturally to them. (shrink)

Do foreign direct investment (FDI) and international business ventures promote positive social and economic development in emerging nations? This question will always prove contentious. First, the impacts differ according to context. Second, the social consequences and spillover effects of knowledge diffusion and technology-sharing may be limited and hard to measure. Third, contributions to enhancing social responsibility and improving living standards in host countries are delayed in effect, causally complex, and also hard to measure. Outcomes often critically depend on collaboration of (...) governments, international institutions, the business world, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Research in this area is challenging and requires interdisciplinary collaboration between economists, financial experts, sociologists, ethicists, and other specialists. This paper explores: (1) the evidence to support the proposition that FDI and international business improve social conditions in less-developed countries, and: (2) how these improvements are linked to strategies of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ethical business practice. The paper draws insights from development, FDI, poverty alleviation, and bottom-of-the-pyramid (BOP) literature. Applications are demonstrated using examples from poverty-stricken areas of Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper attempts not only to argue theoretically but also to provide practical evidence. The approach is simultaneously descriptive, analytical, and prescriptive in order to address a wide audience. It also highlights issues and trends for further academic research and presents the viewpoint that some limitations lie in the nature of ethics frameworks widely referenced in business and that these often fail to consider the compatibility of ethical constructs with relevant incentives. In this vein, we explore the application of Homann’s framework for advantage and incentive-based ethics. (shrink)

Subjects and Simulations presents essays focused on suffering and sublimity, representation and subjectivity, and the relation of truth and appearance through engagement with the legacies of Jean Baudrillard and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

This article examines the distinction that Russell drew between his work as a philosopher and his work as a journalist. It explains why, when warning against the threat posed by a nuclear arms race, Russell thought it better to write as a journalist (speaking on behalf of common sense) rather than as a philosopher. It is argued that to put aside philosophy in favour of common sense is, in this instance, a mistake.

At his point of entry into practical philosophy, Kant remarked that just as theoretical philosophy must be grounded in a critical investigation of theoretical reason, practical philosophy must be grounded in a critical investigation of practical reason. He added, however, that the latter investigation must also exhibit practical reason’s “unity” with theoretical “in a common principle,” because “in the end there can be only one and the same reason, which must be distinguished merely in the application” (G, 4: 391). Soon (...) thereafter Kant published his critical investigation of practical reason, and in that work he drew comparisons between theoretical and practical reason and considered their relation to one another. […] But this problem presupposes the identity of reason. Only under the supposition that one and the same reason is at work in two applications could an apparent conflict between theoretical and practical reason pose a threat to unity. So before pressing forward to questions relating to unity, it may serve us well to ensure that we sufficiently comprehend reason’s identity. Kant’s fruitful insight that consciousness of the identity of the I think can yield recognition of the unity of the understanding encourages the anticipation that reflection on reason’s identity may similarly illuminate the unity of reason. (shrink)

Barbara Stephen studied history at Girton College, Cambridge from 1891 to 1894. This history of the college, first published in 1933, drew on her previous publication Emily Davies and Girton College as well as on college reports, letters to and from the founders, and information obtained from staff of the college. The college was established on 16th October 1869 by Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon, and was the first Cambridge college for women students. Women were not admitted to (...) full degrees at Cambridge until 1948, after Stephen's death, though Oxford had awarded degrees to women since 1920. The author probably never imagined that Girton would admit male undergraduates, as it has from 1979. Stephen's informative short history of the college's first sixty years is an intriguing document for those interested in the history of the University of Cambridge or of women's education. (shrink)

Roger Swyneshed, in his treatise on insolubles, dating from the early 1330s, drew three notorious corollaries from his solution. The third states that there is a contradictory pair of propositions both of which are false. This appears to contradict what Whitaker, in his iconoclastic reading of Aristotle’s De Interpretatione, dubbed “The Rule of Contradictory Pairs”, which requires that in every such pair, one must be true and the other false. Whitaker argued that, immediately after defining the notion of a (...) contradictory pair, in which one statement affirms what the other denies of the same thing, Aristotle himself gave counterexamples to the rule. This gives some credence to Swyneshed’s claim that his solution to the logical paradoxes is not contrary to Aristotle’s teaching, as many of Swyneshed’s contemporaries claimed. Insolubles are false, he said, because they falsify themselves; and their contradictories are false because they falsely deny that the insoluble itself is false. Swyneshed’s solution depends crucially on the revision he makes to the acount of truth and falsehood, brought out in his first thesis: that a false proposition can signify as it is, or as Paul of Venice, who took up and developed Swyneshed’s solution some sixty years later, puts it, a false proposition can have a true significate. Swyneshed gave a further counterexample to when he claimed that some insolubles, like future contingents, are neither true nor false. Dialetheism, the contemporary claim that some propositions are both true and false, is wedded to the Rule, and in consequence divorces denial from the assertion of the contradictory negation. Consequently, Swyneshed’s logical heresy is very different from that found in dialetheism. (shrink)

This chapter shows even tighter textual and conceptual connections between these philosophers, delineating how Spinoza drew from Avicenna on the definition of essence and the essence/existence distinction. Spinoza departs from Avicenna, potentially regarding the tendency of essences for existence and especially regarding their universality and particularity. Multiple doses of Avicennianism likely made their way into Spinoza's bloodstream. Avicenna's Najāt and the IP are the most likely sources for Maimonides's own knowledge of Avicenna. In medieval philosophy, including Avicenna accidents are (...) real beings and are isomorphic to Spinoza's modes. As may already be clear and is well‐attested, Avicenna and Spinoza agree that the essence/existence distinction only holds for things other than God. Spinoza's apparent insistence on essence as particular in itself seems to a more fundamental contrast with Avicenna and a more obviously modern/late medieval innovation than Spinoza's utilization of God's nominal essence in an ontological proof. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to describe some of John Stuart Mill’s views about property rights in land and some implications he drew for public policy. While Mill defends private ownership of land, he emphasizes the ways in which ownership of land is an anomaly that does not fit neatly into the usual views about private ownership. While most of MiII’s discussion assumes the importance of maximizing the productivity of land, he anticipates contemporary environmentalists by also expressing concerns (...) about excessive exploitation of land for productive use. I extrapolate from these remarks to suggest changes that Mill might have favored regarding ownership rights ina world in which people aimed to decrease productivity. And, I suggest, it is a virtue of utilitarianism that it so readily supports changes in important principles when circumstances change significantly. (shrink)

It has been suggested that our experiences of embodiment in general appear to constitute an experiential ground for dualist philosophy and that this is particularly so with experiences of dissociation, in which one feels estranged from one’s body. Thus, Drew Leder argues that these play “a crucial role in encouraging and supporting Cartesian dualism” as they “seem to support the doctrine of an immaterial mind trapped inside an alien body”. In this paper I argue that as dualism does not (...) capture the character of such experiences there is not even an apparent separation of self and body revealed here and that one’s body is experienced as uncanny rather than alien. The general relationship between our philosophical theorizing and the phenomenology of lived experience is also considered. (shrink)

Spinoza’s employment of essence and existence is well-known. Though there are precursors to Avicenna for the essence/existence distinction, it is Avicenna who firmly establishes it and many of the surrounding arguments for the rest of the Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions. Although there are myriad possible links, it is worth considering how Avicenna himself factors into Spinoza’s views since he is the major source for this tradition. I aim to show even tighter textual and conceptual connections between these philosophers, delineating (...) how Spinoza drew from Avicenna (directly or indirectly) on the definition of essence and the essence/existence distinction. Nevertheless, Spinoza departs from Avicenna, potentially regarding the tendency of essences for existence and especially regarding their universality and particularity. (shrink)

This special issue arose from a joint conference of the History of Education Society, UK and the Australian and New Zealand History of Education Society, held in Malvern in Worcestershire, England in 2016 on the theme ‘sight, sound and text in the history of education’. The conference drew together media and educational historians, as well as archivists and museum professionals, to examine both methodological issues and a range of examples of sensory and textual histories. The three-day event, as well (...) as being enriching for its international character, proved that although much work has already been done in this area, there is so much more to consider and exploit when it comes to the study of the ‘new’ sonic and visual sources and their intertextual relationship with the documentary, as well as traditional understandings of ‘text’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 122.1 (2001) 87-106 [Access article in PDF] Homo Fandi Dulcissimus: The Role of Favorinus in the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius Stephen M. Beall ONE OF THE INDIRECT BENEFITS of reading the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius is that he offers us a glimpse of the "smart set" of Antonine Rome. Many chapters are cast as anecdotes featuring Gellius' mentors and acquaintances, among whom (...) he counted such illustrious figures as Herodes Atticus, Marcus Fronto, and the grammarian known as Domitius "the Insane." But the "star" of the work is clearly Favorinus of Arles, a flamboyant orator who described his life in three paradoxes: he was a native of Gaul who spoke Greek, a eunuch who was accused of adultery, 1 and a citizen who quarreled with an emperor and lived (Philostratus, VS 489). To Gellius, he was "Favorinus noster," and the twenty-seven anecdotes involving him indicate that the two were on fairly intimate terms. 2We are left to wonder, however, how someone as eccentric as Favorinus should have become the special friend and mentor of a "fairly conservative, practically minded Roman" such as Gellius. 3 Perhaps, following Polemo, we can attribute the attraction to Favorinus' skill in the black arts. 4 It is more likely, however, that he possessed qualities that could be adapted to Gellius' intellectual program but which have not been fully elucidated by scholarship. 5 These can best be expounded, I believe, as three additional paradoxes: Favorinus was a polymath who passed for a philosopher, a philhellene who studied Roman culture, and [End Page 87] a Greek "Asianist" with ties to Latin archaism. All three paradoxes, as we shall see, relate to thematic issues in the Attic Nights and may help us to account for the paradoxical nature of the work as a whole. 1. Favorinus: The Miscellaneous Philosopher Favorinus' professional status was open to question even in antiquity. Philostratus describes him as a "philosopher" who "was called a sophist" by dint of his charm as a speaker (VS 489). The Suda puts the case less charitably, saying that "he was full of philosophy, but more devoted to rhetoric" (Phi 4). Lucian's Demonax found him too effeminate in style and appearance to wear the mantle (Demonax 12-13). When Favorinus claimed a philosopher's exemption from public service, the emperor Hadrian was prepared to rule against him (Philostratus, VS 490). Favorinus averted this disaster by accepting the priesthood in question, claiming that he had been advised to do so in a dream.The question of Favorinus' calling is further complicated by the mixed character of his published work, little of which survives. 6 He wrote treatises on philosophical skepticism, including the celebrated Pyrrhonian Tropes (Phil. VS 491; cf. Gellius, 11.5.5). 7 He did not, however, restrict himself to writing of a technical kind. He also produced two miscellanies, the Memorabilia and Omnigena Historia, which seem to have combined philosophical anecdotes with other sorts of trivia, including etymologies and wonder tales. 8 His oratorical remains likewise indicate a versatile and playful intellect. Two speeches preserved in the corpus of Dio Chrysostom (37, 64), and a third on a recently discovered papyrus, are notable for their witty use of stock themes and exempla. He declaimed on "absurd" themes, such as the virtues of Thersites and the advantages of the quartan fever (Gellius, NA 17.12). Indeed, he was so adept at sophistic role-playing that Gellius could not tell when he was speaking in earnest (14.1.2). Philostratus reports that he drew crowds with a highly musical style of speaking, at times almost like singing, which won applause even from people who could not understand Greek (VS 491).In the anecdotes of the Attic Nights, we find a similarly ambiguous [End Page 88] characterization. Although Gellius regularly honors his mentor with the epithet philosophus, 9 he praises him chiefly for the "sweetness of his diction," which, he says, held him captive for entire days (16.3.1; cf. 14.1.32). Elsewhere he lauds him... (shrink)

The aesthetic sense we inherited from our successful ancestors drew them toward conditions that made for survival and reproductive success and repelled them away from conditions that impacted negatively on longevity and fertility. But for them, as for us, those desirable outcomes were incidental and uncalculated. Their search was for the beautiful and sublime. Aesthetic behaviours are apparent in our forerunner species about 400,000 years ago. They sometimes made symmetrical hand axes that were then not used. We can take (...) an aesthetic interest in more or less anything, but the aesthetic responses that are rooted in our biology include those to landscapes and environments, to non-human animals, and to the appearance and behaviour of our fellow humans. (shrink)

The incompleteness of the task of integrating the influences made upon Jonathan Edwards by Calvinism and the moral sense leaves open a great many questions central to identifying his ethical position with any detail. This should worry ethicists, theologians, and church historians alike. For the puzzle of what Edwards meant by virtue is at the heart not only of his ethics but of a great many strands of his thought. It must be pieced together from diverse sources; and there are (...) multiple meanings to be sifted through. But it is nevertheless possible to bring the concepts made available by the diverse moral traditions upon which Edwards drew into a generally coherent counterpoise. Such a counterpoise is not merely of antiquarian interest. Lacking a precise account of Edwards's ethical position, it is awkward to talk about applying it to the problems of the twenty-first, or any, century. (shrink)

John Dee’s mathematical interests have principally been studied through his Mathematicall praeface to Henry Billingsley’s 1570 translation of Euclid’s Elements. The focus here is broadened to include the notes he added to Books X–XIII of the Elements. I argue that this additional material drew on a manuscript text, the Tyrocinium mathematicum, that Dee wrote a decade earlier, probably as tutor to the youthful Thomas Digges. Using new evidence for this now-lost work, as well as his notes on Euclid, makes (...) it possible to clarify Dee’s approach to geometry. The contrasting positions adopted by his Parisian acquaintance Petrus Ramus also illuminate Dee’s geometrical choices and values. Unlike Ramus, Dee was not a pugnacious advocate of radical reform, yet he did look beyond the limits of Euclid’s geometry towards deeper disciplinary visions of knowledge. The first published work of his pupil Thomas Digges not only suggests how Dee shaped the younger man’s work but also reflects fresh light back on Dee’s own programme for a ‘more general art Mathematical.’. (shrink)

The 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury drew on the naturalism of Locke to open up a naturalistic reading of experience conceived as a matter of reality revealing pattern perception that was lost to view in the impact of subsequent idealist readings of Locke's epistemology offered by Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753) and David Hume (1711–1776). This essay recovers and explicates Shaftesbury's alternative to idealist conceptions of pattern making.

This study investigated personal perceptions and comprehensions of self-ascribed paranormal abilities. Twelve participants with supposed supernatural powers took part in semi-structured interviews exploring the origin, phenomenology, and nature of their powers. Interview transcripts were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, a qualitative method that identifies patterns within data. Four major themes expressed meanings and representations held by participants: Formative Influences, Subjective Paranormal Experience, Embodied Processes, and Perception of Reality. Consideration of themes identified an inextricable link between perception, interpretation, and belief in (...) ability. Within narratives, interviewees outlined, contextualised, and established the validity of their powers. They drew upon supporting autobiographical evidence from their life histories and obfuscated and/or discounted conventional explanations. Generally, accounts reflected individual attempts to comprehend and justify the nature and experience of professed abilities. The authors discuss these processes and suggest ways to extend and develop ensuing research. (shrink)

My argument here is principally that the ubiquity of epistemics is evident in the ways in which knowledge claims and attributions of knowledge to self and other are embedded in turns and sequences, inform the design of turns at talk, are amended in the corrections that speakers sometimes make, to change from one epistemic stance to another, and are contested, in the occasional ‘struggles’ between participants, as to which of them has epistemic primacy. I show that these cannot be understood (...) in cognitive terms; furthermore, I show that epistemics – again the attribution of knowledge to self and other – is ‘real’ for participants. That is, in these four practices and aspects of interaction it is evident that participants orient to their states of knowledge relative to one another, on a moment-by-moment, turn-by-turn basis. (shrink)

Much previous work in artificial intelligence has neglected representing time in all its complexity. In particular, it has neglected continuous change and the indeterminacy of the future. To rectify this, I have developed a first‐order temporal logic, in which it is possible to name and prove things about facts, events, plans, and world histories. In particular, the logic provides analyses of causality, continuous change in quantities, the persistence of facts (the frame problem), and the relationship between tasks and actions. It (...) may be possible to implement a temporal‐inference machine based on this logic, which keeps track of several “maps” of a time line, one per possible history. (shrink)

Data science is characterized by engaging heterogeneous data to tackle real world questions and problems. But data science has no data of its own and must seek it within real world domains. We call this search for data “prospecting” and argue that the dynamics of prospecting are pervasive in, even characteristic of, data science. Prospecting aims to render the data, knowledge, expertise, and practices of worldly domains available and tractable to data science method and epistemology. Prospecting precedes data synthesis, analysis, (...) or visualization, and is constituted by the upstream work of discovering disordered or inaccessible data resources, thereafter to be ordered and rendered available for computation. Through this work, data science positions itself in the middle of all things—capable of engaging this, that, or any domain—and thus prospecting is a key driver of data science’s ongoing formation as a universal science. (shrink)

The making of music has been sufficiently deep and widespread diachronically and geographically to suggest a genetic imperative. C.G. Jung's 'Collective Unconscious' and the accompanying archetypes suggest that music is a psychic necessity because it is part of the brain structure. Therefore, the present view of aesthetics may need drastic revision, particularly on views of music as pleasure, ideas of disinterest, differences between so-called high and low art, cultural identity, cultural conditioning, and art-for-art's sake.All cultures, past and present, show evidence (...) of music making. Music qua music has been a part of human expression for at least some forty-thousand years and it could well be speculated that the making of music accompanied the arrival of the first human beings. As Curt Sachs states, "However far back we tracemankind, we fail to see the springing-up of music. Even the most primitive tribes are musically beyond the first attempts".Why do humans continuahy create music and include it as an integral part of culture? What is music's driving force? Why do cultures endow music with extraordinary powers? Why do human beings, individuahy and as societies, exercise preferences for specific works and genres of music? In probing these questions, I chose one aspect of Jungian psychology, that of the Collective Unconscious with its accompanying archetypes, as the basis upon which to speculate a world aesthetics of music. Once we dispense with the mechanistic and designer idea of human origins, we have only the investigations of the human psyche to mine for data that could explain the myriad forms of artistic activity found the world over. An examination of human beings, I believe, must lead one ultimately to the study of human behavior and motivations, in short, to the psychology of human ethos. This study wih take the following course: first, a discussion of consciousness and the Collective Unconscious, plus a discussion of archetypes; then, a description of musical archetypal substance; and finally, what I beheve is implied to form a world aesthetics of music.By comparison to Jung, Freud gives us little in the way of understanding artistic substance because for him, all artistic subject matter stems purely from the personal experiences of the artist. In comparing Freud and Jung, Stephen Larsen states that "Where Freud was deterministic, Jung was teleological; where Freud was historical, Jung was mythological". Jung drew on a much wider cross-cultural experiential and intellectual base than Freud. His interests in so-cahed primitive peoples led him to Tunis, the Saharan Desert, sub-Saharan Africa, and New Mexico in the United States to visit the Pueblo Indians; visits to India and Ceylon and studies of Chinese culture all contributed to his vast knowledge of human experience. Jung constructed the cohective unconscious as a major part of the psyche with the deepest sense of tradition and myth from around the world. He was criticized because of his interests in alchemy, astrology, divination, telepathy and clairvoyance, yoga, spiritualism, mediums and seances, fortunetelling, flying saucers, religious symbolism, visions, and dreams. But he approached these subjects as a scientist, investigating the human psyche and what these subjects revealed about mental process, particularly what might be learned about the collective unconsciousness. Jung's ideation, in my view, is sufficiently comprehensive to support the probe of a world aesthetics of music. (shrink)

A Special Issue of this journal, edited by Lynch et al., was published critiquing research in conversation analysis on epistemics and on oh. It would be more accurate to say that the articles in that Special Issue critique the work of Heritage on epistemics and oh. Their principal criticism is that Heritage’s analyses of epistemics and oh are cognitivist. Other criticisms are that his analysis of each of these phenomena is not sequential, that it does not attend to the details (...) of turn design, and that his analyses are not truly conversation analytic – indeed that he does not comprehend CA, that his analyses are false and unwarranted, that he has adopted an ‘informationist’ perspective of knowledge transfer, and that epistemics represents some ‘hidden order’ invisible at the surface of conversation. Underlying these criticisms is their contention that Heritage has not adhered to the ‘radical’ agenda of ethnomethodology which, they claim, underlies the origins of CA. In this Introduction, I outline some of the principal reasons for regarding the criticisms in The epistemics of Epistemics to be misguided, inaccurate and scurrilous. In doing so, I am setting out in very broad outline the arguments made by the contributors to this Special Issue rebutting those criticisms of Heritage’s work, and of CA more generally. (shrink)

The analysis of data from electronic health records aspires to facilitate healthcare efficiencies and biomedical innovation. There are also ethical, legal and social implications from the handling of sensitive patient information. The paper explores the concerns, expectations and implications of the National Health Service England care.data programme: a national data sharing initiative of linked electronic health records for healthcare and other research purposes. Using Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity of privacy framework through a critical Science and Technology Studies lens, it examines the (...) way technologies and policies are developed to promote sustainability, governance and economic growth as the de facto social values, while reducing privacy to an individualistic preference. The state, acting as a new, central data broker reappropriates public ownership rights and establishes those information flows and transmission principles that facilitate the assetisation of NHS datasets for the knowledge economy. Various actors and processes from other contexts attempt to erode the public healthcare sector and privilege new information recipients. However, such data sharing initiatives in healthcare will be resisted if we continue to focus only on the monetary and scientific values of these datasets and keep ignoring their equally important social and ethical values. (shrink)

Pain is far more than an aversive sensation. Chronic pain, in particular, involves the sufferer in a complex experience filled with ambiguity and paradox. The tensions thereby established, the unknowns, pressures, and oscillations, form a significant part of the painfulness of pain. This paper uses a phenomenological method to examine nine such paradoxes. For example, pain can be both immediate sensation and mediated by complex interpretations. It is a certainty for the experiencer, yet highly uncertain in character. It pulls one (...) to the present but also projects one outward to a feared or desired future. Chronic pain can seem located in the body and/or mind; interior to the self, or an alien other; confined to a particular point and/or radiating everywhere. Such fundamental paradoxes, existential and epistemological, can challenge those living with long-term pain. (shrink)

Why is sport so important among participants and spectators when its goals seem so pointless? Stephen Mumford's book introduces the reader to a host of philosophical topics found in sport, and argues that sports activities reflect diverse human experiences - including important values that we continue to contest. The author explores physicality, competition, how sport is best defined, ethics in sport, and issues of inclusion such as disability sports, the gender divide, and transgender athletes. His book is written for (...) anyone who is thoughtful, a sports enthusiast, or both, and will deepen our understanding of sport and its place in our lives. This new series offers short and personal perspectives by expert thinkers on topics that we all encounter in our everyday lives. (shrink)

This is the first volume to systematically explore the range of contemporary thought concerning the body and draw out its crucial implications for medicine.

This article gauges the progress that sociologists of gender and sexuality have made in employing the insights of queer theory by examining four recent monographs that have utilized aspects of queer theory in their empirical work: Rupp and Taylor, Seidman, Bettie, and Schippers. The article uses the insights of queer theory to push the monographs in an even “queerer” theoretical direction. This direction involves taking more seriously the nonnormative alignments of sex, gender, sexuality, resisting the tendency to essentialize identity or (...) conflate it with the broad range of gender and sexual expression and treating the construction of intersectional subjectivities as both performed and performative in nature. The analysis of these texts also insists that a queer sociological theory situate its emphasis on discursive power more firmly in economic, political, and other institutional processes. Ethnographic methods are proposed as the most useful way of combining queer theory with sociological analysis. (shrink)

While the ethical use of deception has been discussed in literature, the ethics and acceptability of nursing deception has yet to be studied. The current study examined nurses’ and nursing students’ ratings of the ethics and acceptability of nursing deception. We predicted that nurses and nursing students would rate a truthful vignette as more ethical than a deceptive vignette. We also predicted that participants would rate nursing deception as unethical and unacceptable. A mixed design was used to examine ethics scores (...) as a within-subjects factor and order as a between-groups design factor. A total of 131 nurses and nursing students were recruited from university nursing programs and hospitals in Texas. Participants were provided with a truthful vignette and deceptive vignette and used the Multidimensional Ethics Scale-Revised 1 to rate each vignette. Participants also completed the Lies in Nursing Ethics Questionnaire. The truthful nursing vignette was rated as more ethical than the deceptive vignette. Results indicated that most participants rated nursing deception as unethical, unacceptable, and a violation of the ANA ethical code. Some participants deemed that nursing deception may be acceptable within some cases. Age and years of experience were not related to the perceived ethics and acceptability of nursing deception. Nurses and nursing students believe that using deception with patients is unethical and unacceptable. However, some participants believed that deception may be warranted within some cases. These findings may reflect nurses’ placing the patient at the core of their values and viewing honesty as important for the nurse-patient relationship. Further implications and directions are discussed. (shrink)

The option of being ‘spiritual but not religious’ deserves much more philosophical attention. That is the aim here, taking the work of Robert Solomon as a starting point, with focus on the particular issues around viewing life as gift. This requires analysis of ‘existential gratitude’ to show that there can be gratitude for things without gratitude to someone for providing things, and also closer attention to the role that metaphor plays in cognition. I consider two main concerns with gift and (...) gratitude thinking, that the nonreligious justification is too instrumentalist in its approach and that viewing life as gift, whether in a religious or nonreligious way, is simply too optimistic. (shrink)

This article critiques the idea that, by establishing a general framework within which research must be conducted, philosophical argument can ‘take the lead’ in relation to research. It develops Holmwood’s work in this area by examining the ontological arguments put forward by critical realists, which attempt to establish the fundamental characteristics of the social realm prior to the production of empirically successful research in that realm. The article draws on a contrast with ontological argument in the natural sciences to demonstrate (...) the illegitimacy of this manoeuvre, showing that ontological claims can be given some justification, but only when they are derived from research that is widely held to be empirically successful. Realist ontological claims in the social sciences do not have this basis, and it is argued that Bhaskar’s alternative mode of justification for these claims is unconvincing. Archer’s view is also criticized that critical realist arguments should be given a strong regulatory role in relation to research, illustrating the problems with this by critiquing Cruickshank’s ontologically driven analysis of unemployment and the underclass. The article concludes that social scientific research should be conducted without philosophical legislation. (shrink)

A new theory of problem solving is presented, which embeds problem solving in the theory of action; in this theory, a problem is just a difficult action. Making this work requires a sophisticated language for‐talking about plans and their execution. This language allows a broad range of types of action, and can also be used to express rules for choosing and scheduling plans. To ensure flexibility, the problem solver consists of an interpreter driven by a theorem prover which actually manipulates (...) formulas of the language. Many examples of the use of the system six given. including an extended treatment of the world of blocks. Limitations and extensions of the system are discussed at length. It is concluded that a rule‐based problem solver is necessary and feasible, but that much more work remains to be done on the underlying theory of planning and acting. (shrink)

This book explains how to read Plato, emphasizing the philosophic importance of the dramatic aspects of the dialogues, and showing that Plato is an ironic thinker and that his irony is deeply rooted in his philosophy.

This paper suggests that the paradigm of the lived-body developed by Straus, Merleau-Ponty and others has important implications for medical practice and theory. Certain recognized flaws in modern medicine, such as its reductionist tendencies and lack of emphasis on preventive measures are shown to be related to the exclusive use of a Cartesian notion of embodiment. Increased attention to the paradigm of the lived-body emphasizing its unity, purposiveness and "enworldment" could help to beneficially reorient practice. Moreover, this portrayal of the (...) body as an intentional entity may provide a better tool than the traditional view for conceptualizing the psychological and psychosocial components of disease etiology, as well as some newly developed modes of treatment. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Recent studies of naturalistic face‐to‐face communication have demonstrated coordination patterns such as the temporal matching of verbal and non‐verbal behavior, which provides evidence for the proposal that verbal and non‐verbal communicative control derives from one system. In this study, we argue that the observed relationship between verbal and non‐verbal behaviors depends on the level of analysis. In a reanalysis of a corpus of naturalistic multimodal communication (Louwerse, Dale, Bard, & Jeuniaux, ), we focus on measuring the temporal patterns of specific (...) communicative behaviors in terms of their burstiness. We examined burstiness estimates across different roles of the speaker and different communicative modalities. We observed more burstiness for verbal versus non‐verbal channels, and for more versus less informative language subchannels. Using this new method for analyzing temporal patterns in communicative behaviors, we show that there is a complex relationship between verbal and non‐verbal channels. We propose a “temporal heterogeneity” hypothesis to explain how the language system adapts to the demands of dialog. (shrink)

Critics of survival research often claim that the survival hypothesis is conceptually problematic at best, and literally incoherent at worst. The guiding intuition behind their skepticism is that there’s an essential link between the concept of a person (or personality or experience) and physical embodiment. Thus (they argue), since by hypothesis postmortem individuals such as ostensible mediumistic communicators have no physical body, there’s something wrong with the very idea of a postmortem person, personality or experience. However, critics can’t simply beg (...) the question and assert that physical embodiment is essential to personhood, personality, or experience, because the evidence suggesting survival is a prima facie challenge to the contrary. On the other hand, defenders of ostensible mediumistic communication need to explain how postmortem awareness and knowledge of the current physical world can occur without a physical body that experiences the world and represents it accurately enough to ground veridical postmortem reports. This paper will fi rst consider why survivalists face potentially serious problems in trying to make sense of apparent postmortem perception. Then it will consider a plausible—and arguably the only—way to deal with the issues. However, that solution turns out to be a double-edged sword. Ironically, the best way to deal with the problem of perspectival postmortem awareness may render the survival hypothesis gratuitous. (shrink)

The failure to consider the Sokal affair in light of other, related episodes has contributed to a wholesale misreading of its significance. The episode has often been offered as evidence for the bankruptcy of a broad and diverse collection offields, variously referred to as cultural studies of science, sociology of science, history of science, and science and technology studies. However, when viewed in context, the Sokal affair illustrates pre cisely why social scientific and humanistic studies of science are necessary. To (...) develop this argument, the author explicitly compares Alan Sokal's experiment with a similar experiment, performed by William M. Epstein and published in this very journal. Comparing the research questions, methods, ethics, and reception of these two experi ments not only reveals the limitations of Sokal's critique but also shows that Sokal has unwittingly endorsed one of the central lines of research in science and technology studies. (shrink)