This essay considers the recuperation of beauty as a productive critical strategy in discussions of African American dance. I argue that black performance in general, and African American concert dance in particular, seeks to create aesthetic sites that allow black Americans to participate in discourses of recognition and appreciation to include concepts of beauty. In this, I suggest that beauty may indeed produce social change for its attendant audiences. I also propose that interrogating the notion of beauty may allow for (...) social change among audiences that include dance theorists and philosophers. Through a case-study consideration of work by three African American choreographers, Donald Byrd (b. 1949), Ulysses Dove (1947 – 1996), and Abdel Salaam (b. 1949), I ultimately hope to suggest critical possibilities aligning dance performance with particular aesthetic theory relevant to its documentation and interpretation. (shrink)

Introduction IN RECENT YEARS there has developed in the West considerable interest in the philosophy of Hua-yen Buddhism, a holistic, Unitarian approach to ...

Carneades is an open source argument mapping application and a programming library for building argumentation support tools. In this paper, Carneades’ support for argument reconstruction, evaluation and visualization is illustrated by modeling most of the factual and legal arguments in Popov v Hayashi.

While pragmatic arguments for numerical probability axioms have received much attention, justifications for axioms of qualitative probability have been less discussed. We offer an argument for the requirement that an agent’s qualitative judgments be probabilistically representable, inspired by, but importantly different from, the Money Pump argument for transitivity of preference and Dutch book arguments for quantitative coherence. The argument is supported by a theorem, to the effect that a subject is systematically susceptible to dominance given her preferred acts, if and (...) only if the subject’s comparative judgments preclude representation by a standard probability measure. (shrink)

Authors of books on business ethics and corporate social responsibility fall into two general approaches when they answer the question: Why should a business firm, which represents private property, have greater obligations to the local community than an ordinary citizen? Authors generally subscribe to a rights approach or to a power model. This paper will present four rights approaches and three power models which are used to describe the relationship of the firm to society. Introducing these different approaches and models (...) will be two brief expositions which provide the setting for determining the relationship of a firm to society. The first traces two lines to the development of the contemporary American corporation. The second views the business corporation as a quasi-public institution. (shrink)

Understanding the development and practice of power based on an in-depth observation of human psychology has been a part of traditional Chinese thought for thousands of years and is considered a prerequisite for mastering the arts of strategy and leadership. "Thunder in the Sky" presents two secret classics of this ancient Chinese tradition. The commentary by Thomas Cleary the renowned translator of dozens of Asian classics highlights the contemporary application of these teachings.

Liberal articulations of the right to die generally focus on balancing individual rights against state interests, but this approach does not take full advantage of the disruptive potential of this contested right. This article develops an alternative to the liberal approach to the right to die by engaging the seemingly discordant philosophical perspectives of Michel Foucault and Thomas Hobbes. Despite Foucault’s objections, a rapprochement between these perspectives is established by focusing on their shared emphasis on the role that death (...) plays in the order of modernity. After the article has established the complementarity of Foucault and Hobbes, Hobbes’ unique stance toward suicide is first viewed in the context of the early-modern hostility toward suicide, and then contrasted with Foucault’s Stoic-inspired affirmation of suicide. This comparison of these two philosophers’ positions on suicide opens to contestation dimensions of modern subjects that remain undisturbed by liberal approaches to the right to die Key Words: bio-power • Michel Foucault • governmentality • Thomas Hobbes • liberalism • right to die • self-preservation • Seneca • Stoicism • suicide. (shrink)

Existing research suggests that people's judgments of actual causation can be influenced by the degree to which they regard certain events as normal. We develop an explanation for this phenomenon that draws on standard tools from the literature on graphical causal models and, in particular, on the idea of probabilistic sampling. Using these tools, we propose a new measure of actual causal strength. This measure accurately captures three effects of normality on causal judgment that have been observed in existing studies. (...) More importantly, the measure predicts a new effect ("abnormal deflation"). Two studies show that people's judgments do, in fact, show this new effect. Taken together, the patterns of people's causal judgments thereby provide support for the proposed explanation. (shrink)

This book review outlines and critiques Robert Allinson's book _Global Disasters: Inquiries into Management Ethics_ (New York: Prentice Hall, 1993). The reviewer first outlines the structure of the book and then moves on to discussing the main arguments of the book, including but not limited to the distinctions between "monocausality" and "multi-causality" and "scapegoating" and "multiple responsibility" that Allinson highlights. Central to Allinson's argument is the thesis that problems in management (and the disasters that often result from them) are conceptual (...) problems first of all. The review concludes by praising the bold and timely contribution of this volume. (shrink)

We present a formal, mathematical model of argument structure and evaluation, taking seriously the procedural and dialogical aspects of argumentation. The model applies proof standards to determine the acceptability of statements on an issue-by-issue basis. The model uses different types of premises (ordinary premises, assumptions and exceptions) and information about the dialectical status of statements (stated, questioned, accepted or rejected) to allow the burden of proof to be allocated to the proponent or the respondent, as appropriate, for each premise separately. (...) Our approach allows the burden of proof for a premise to be assigned to a different party than the one who has the burden of proving the conclusion of the argument, and also to change the burden of proof or applicable proof standard as the dialogue progresses from stage to stage. Useful for modeling legal dialogues, the burden of production and burden of persuasion can be handled separately, with a different responsible party and applicable proof standard for each. Carneades enables critical questions of argumentation schemes to be modeled as additional premises, using premise types to capture the varying effect on the burden of proof of different kinds of questions. (shrink)

To judge people's true character, pay careful attention to what they do, not to what they say; to develop human resources successfully, first develop your own skills and resources; be exacting without being needlessly demanding; and don't dwell on the present but always look to future goals. These are just a few of the insights revealed in this basic course on how to recognize, organize, and develop human resources. Drawing on essential sources - such as Confucius, Lao Tzu, Sun Tzu, (...) and the I Ching - Thomas Cleary shows what today's business executives, personnel managers, and political leaders can learn from these ancient Asian traditions about the inner dynamics of human interaction. Among the selections are passages from an important but less well-known work, The Thirty-six Strategies, which summarizes the powerful techniques of the Asian "art of advantage". Also provided are short, accessible introductions to Confucianism, Taoism, The Art of War, and the I Ching, along with lists of resources for further reading. (shrink)

Theories of rational decision making often abstract away from computational and other resource limitations faced by real agents. An alternative approach known as resource rationality puts such matters front and center, grounding choice and decision in the rational use of finite resources. Anticipated by earlier work in economics and in computer science, this approach has recently seen rapid development and application in the cognitive sciences. Here, the theory of rationality plays a dual role, both as a framework for normative assessment (...) and as a source of scientific hypotheses about how mental processes in fact work. The latter project, often called rational analysis, depends for its success on a fine-grained characterization of the computational problem facing a decision maker, which may in turn depend on realistic assumptions about what the relevant agent is like. As a consequence, resource rationality involves a delicate, but often fruitful interplay between the normative and the descriptive. (shrink)

This collection of eminently practical advice from the likes of Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, Pythagoras, and Aristotle covers subjects as diverse as money, child-raising, politics, philosophy, law, and relationships--all aspects of life and how to live it. Thomas Cleary has translated these sayings and aphorisms from the Arabic sources that preserved Greek thought throughout the Middle Ages. Many of the texts no longer exist in the original Greek. Included in the book is an appendix that presents resonant sayings and fragments (...) from Buddhist, Taoist, and Muslim sources, demonstrating the universal quality of the teachings of the Greek sages and hinting at the interaction between Western and Eastern cultures. (shrink)

The vulnerability of participants in Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) programs is a consequence of the illnesses that they are experiencing; ethical guarantees must be in place that ensure the dignity of the persons involved in such programs. Dignity is more than an individual concern; it has individual, institutional, and societal dimensions. An ethical framework is proposed that involves the interrelated vulnerabilities and needs of individuals and communities and our societal response to them. Among the issues given (...) particular attention are individual and community stigmatization, target population involvement in program planning, balance with regard to confidentiality and privacy, the place of proportionality grounded in a rich sense of community as a guiding ethical principle, and guidelines for SAMHSA programs. (shrink)

An accessible volume of writings on Taoist approaches to the dynamic between individuals and society includes famous prose and verse entries from a variety of ...

In Pietroski ( 2018 ) a simple representation language called SMPL is introduced, construed as a hypothesis about core conceptual structure. The present work is a study of this system from a logical perspective. In addition to establishing a completeness result and a complexity characterization for reasoning in the system, we also pinpoint its expressive limits, in particular showing that the fourth corner in the square of opposition (“ Some_not ”) eludes expression. We then study a seemingly small extension, called (...) SMPL +, which allows for a minimal predicate-binding operator. Perhaps surprisingly, the resulting system is shown to encode precisely the concepts expressible in first-order logic. However, unlike the latter class, the class of SMPL + expressions admits a simple procedural (context-free) characterization. Our contribution brings together research strands in logic—including natural logic, modal logic, description logic, and hybrid logic—with recent advances in semantics and philosophy of language. (shrink)

We present a high-level declarative programming language for representing argumentation schemes, where schemes represented in this language can be easily validated by domain experts, including developers of argumentation schemes in informal logic and philosophy, and serve as executable specifications for automatically constructing arguments, when applied to a set of assumptions. This new rule language for representing argumentation schemes is validated by using it to represent twenty representative argumentation schemes.

The concept of "ecological niche" is frequently employed in sociocultural anthropology, but there have been few systematic applications of it. This paper examines the utility of the concept for the analysis of social interaction and change, with special reference to complex societies. In a small agricultural valley of northern California, competition between two status groups over a scarce resource--land--has led to displacement and changing patterns of resource use. "Niche" describes the aggregate outcome of underlying processes of competition on the individual (...) level. (shrink)

'The majority of the chapters deal with the reception accorded Darwin's work in specific countries: England, the United States, Germany, France, Russia, the Netherlands, Spain, Mexico, and the Arab countries. Several chapters, however, also investigate the response to Darwinism made by specific social circles--such as social scientists in Russia and the United States.

While Bayesian models have been applied to an impressive range of cognitive phenomena, methodological challenges have been leveled concerning their role in the program of rational analysis. The focus of the current article is on computational impediments to probabilistic inference and related puzzles about empirical confirmation of these models. The proposal is to rethink the role of Bayesian methods in rational analysis, to adopt an independently motivated notion of rationality appropriate for computationally bounded agents, and to explore broad conditions under (...) which Bayesian agents would be rational. The proposal is illustrated with a characterization of costs inspired by thermodynamics. (shrink)

Abstract:Historicist criticism makes more sense as an aesthetic stance than as a discipline for producing knowledge. I examine Galen Strawson's essay "Against Narrativity" and Ian McEwan's novel Saturday to account for historicism's distinct aesthetic. Strawson distinguishes between Diachronic and Episodic orientations toward time, and both writers work to validate the Episodic perspective against the claim that Diachronicity is psychologically and ethically normative. Because historicist criticism privileges singular epiphanic encounters with the past that would transcend or preclude narrativization, historicists appear as (...) unhappy Diachronics, seeking an Episodic fulfillment that their prior commitment to totalizing narratives of power renders elusive. (shrink)

This groundbreaking work was the first to propose an inquiry into the forms, dynamics, and constructs of educational policy. This fine book remains the only treatment of educational policy incorporating an account of the differences between various kinds of educational goods. Professor Green explored the nature of policy and prospects for the future, and it is a rare treat that we can now (more than fifteen years later) revisit the text to discover his uncanny accuracy.

Interactions between humans and bots are increasingly common online, prompting some legislators to pass laws that require bots to disclose their identity. The Turing test is a classic thought experiment testing humans’ ability to distinguish a bot impostor from a real human from exchanging text messages. In the current study, we propose a minimal Turing test that avoids natural language, thus allowing us to study the foundations of human communication. In particular, we investigate the relative roles of conventions and reciprocal (...) interaction in determining successful communication. Participants in our task could communicate only by moving an abstract shape in a 2D space. We asked participants to categorize their online social interaction as being with a human partner or a bot impostor. The main hypotheses were that access to the interaction history of a pair would make a bot impostor more deceptive and interrupt the formation of novel conventions between the human participants. Copying their previous interactions prevents humans from successfully communicating through repeating what already worked before. By comparing bots that imitate behavior from the same or a different dyad, we find that impostors are harder to detect when they copy the participants’ own partners, leading to less conventional interactions. We also show that reciprocity is beneficial for communicative success when the bot impostor prevents conventionality. We conclude that machine impostors can avoid detection and interrupt the formation of stable conventions by imitating past interactions, and that both reciprocity and conventionality are adaptive strategies under the right circumstances. Our results provide new insights into the emergence of communication and suggest that online bots mining personal information, for example, on social media, might become indistinguishable from humans more easily. (shrink)

This article develops the affirmative biopolitics that Roberto Esposito intimates in his trilogy – Communitas, Immunitas and Bı´os. The key to this affirmative biopolitics lies in the relationship between the munus, a form of gift that is the root of communitas and immunitas, and the gift discourse that developed throughout the 20th century. The article expands upon Esposito’s interpretation of four theoretical sources that are crucial to his biopolitical perspective: Mauss and the gift-exchange tradition; Hobbes’s social contract theory, which Esposito (...) presents as the anti-gift that founded modernity’s thanatopolitical ‘immunization paradigm’; Bataille’s dangerous concept of sacrifice, which gestures toward an affirmative biopolitical community; and, finally, Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay, L’Intrus, which reflects on the near-decade Nancy lived as the recipient of the gift of a transplanted heart. This discussion of Mauss, Hobbes and Bataille is used to further develop Esposito’s interpretation of L’Intrus in a manner that supports his conception of an affirmative biopolitics ‘of, not over, life’. (shrink)