An exposition of Spinoza's views of the cause and cure of death. He holds death to be disruption of mind/body which need not involve becoming a corpse; amnesia counts. It follows that his criterion of personal identity includes memory, so Spinozistic immortality is impersonal. The cause of death is always something external, for nothing can destroy itself. (This principle, however, is not universally true; Spinoza was led to it by mistaken physics.) Suicide is irrational. Fear of death is to be (...) overcome by realization that since adequate ideas are eternal, to the extent that they consitute our minds we are eternal also. (But if so, isn't suicide rational after all? And since language depends on memory, the eternal understanding of adequate ideas is non-linguistic and non-symbolic; what then can it be?). (shrink)

Context: Practice-based design research is becoming more widely recognized in academia, including at doctoral level, yet there are arguably limited options for dissemination beyond the traditional conference format of paper-based proceedings, possibly with an exhibition or “demonstrator” component that is often non-archival. Further, the opportunities afforded by the traditional-format paper presentations is at times at odds with practice-based methodologies being presented. Purpose: We provide a first-hand descriptive account of developing and running a new international conference with an experimental format that (...) aims to support more analogously the dissemination of practice-based design research. Method: Our approach herein is broadly interpretative, phenomenological and critically reflective in orientation, to analyze our own experiential insights from the conference conception, through to the event itself and post-conference reflections, alongside the reflections fed back by conference delegates. Results: We have found the roundtable format continues to function well for creating a discursive interactional context. However issues arose around the crucial nature of the session chair’s role in enabling rich and multi-voiced discussion and how presenters’, organizers’ and delegates’ voices were captured and documented, with implications for further developing the conference design. Looking forward, there are also questions raised about: balancing the stringency of a rigorous review process with provision of an encouraging platform for early-career researchers; and balancing the need for clear criteria and formatting standards with the “openness” of the submission template and formatting guidelines and/or writing. This includes designers who are new to research cultures. It should also appeal to those working in interdisciplinary research in collaboration with design practitioners (but who may not be practitioners themselves. The conference aims to foster and support a burgeoning “research through design” academic community and to provide a fitting dissemination platform for this community. We hope that the conference will encourage academic communities to give proper consideration to the concept of design as a knowledge-generating activity. Constructivist content: Knowledge about design research is generated from meaningful interaction between people and artifacts as part of the unfolding conference experience. The organizational features of the conference aim to support knowledge dissemination through dialogical relations between people and things in particular contexts of interaction. (shrink)

Drawing on theoretical arguments from the psychology discipline, we investigate the implications of employee entitlement in organizational settings. Specifically, we utilize workplace engagement theory to suggest that due to their skewed sense of deservingness, employees high in entitlement are less likely to experience workplace engagement. Furthermore, the negative relationship between employee entitlement and workplace engagement is strengthened when ethical leadership is low, yet mitigated when ethical leadership is high. Finally, we predict that under conditions of low ethical leadership, reductions in (...) engagement explain why employee entitlement results in hindered job performance. This mediated effect does not hold when ethical leadership is high. We tested our theoretical model utilizing field data from employees and their direct supervisors in the financial services industry. Our results support our theoretical model. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

This two volume series introduces the fascinating story of philosophy in a lucid, readable style students enjoy reading. Incorporating the most current scholarship, Matson integrates philosophy into the scientific, political, religious, and social context of different periods. The two volumes can be used as a core text or as a supplement to primary source readings.

Accessibly written, this is a book for all who are interested in the foundations of 21st century thought and who wonder where the cracks might be.

1. THRENODY Is it any longer possible to talk seriously about justice and rights? Are these words corrupted and debased beyond redemption? There is no need to multiply examples of how anything that any pressure group has the chutzpah to lay claim to forthwith becomes a right, nemine contradicente. Nor is this Newspeak restricted to the vulgar. The President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association has granted permission to misuse words like rights and justice if you do (...) so in the service of desirable political ends. Our most universally acclaimed theoretician of justice has shown at length that justice is a will perpetual and constant to forcibly take goods from those who have earned them and give them to those who have not; and the leading light of Anglo-American jurisprudence has constructed a “straightforward” argument proving that a citizen's right to equal protection of the laws is fully satisfied if only the bureaucrat denying him or her a public benefit on racial grounds shows “respect and concern” while processing the forms. (shrink)

Part 1: Is -- part 2: Ought -- part 3: Some Greeks -- part 4: Spinoza -- part 5: Academica.

Like Berkeley’s Three Dialogues, David Chalmers’ now celebrated book makes for a good read as it leads us down the garden path. It is written with a like enthusiasm, and for the most part in a clear and forthright style. The author is not afraid of candidly drawing the consequences of his contentions. He takes consciousness seriously, according to his lights. And one must admire his insouciance in printing the Calvin & Hobbes cartoon strip that pulls the rug out from (...) under him. (shrink)

Upshot: We focus on the following issues: our intentions behind establishing the new Research Through Design conference series; epistemological concerns around “research through design”; and how we might find a balance between openness and specificity for the conference series going forward.

Ethics and lexicography would seem, prima facie, to have little to do with each other. Yet Aristotle testifies that Socrates pursued both:Socrates was busying himself about ethical matters and neglecting the world of nature as a whole but seeking the universal in these ethical matters, and fixed thought for the first time on definitions. Socrates occupied himself with the excellences of character, and in connection with them became the first to raise the problem of universal definitions.

1 Strange words to come from the father of materialism, a philosophy that might be self-evidently true if only there were no people. ..

Spinoza has told us that knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of nature is the true and highest good. That union consists in the body’s being the object of the idea constituting the mind; or as stated slightly differently, the mind’s being the idea itself or the knowledge of the human body. If to interpret this cryptic pronouncement we appeal to the definition of idea as “a conception of the mind which the mind forms because (...) it is a thinking thing,” then mind turns out to be a conception which the mind forms of the body. This looks deplorably circular. Let us go at it more obliquely. (shrink)

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

Hegesias (3d c.BC), as hedonist, held that the sage will kill himself. For: One should pursue pleasure and avoid pain. But life is virtually certain to contain more pain than pleasure. Therefore death, which is neither pleasurable nor painful, is better than life. The flaw in the argument lies in the underlying game-theoretical model of life as a game in which play and payoff are distinct. Hegesias's conclusion, that life is not ‘worth living,’ is inescapable by any philosophy so based, (...) including John Rawls's. Why shouldn't his rational persons behind the veil of ignorance opt for prenatal suicide? (shrink)