This is the third of four volumes presenting all of Francis Ellingwood Abbot's major published articles. Any scholar or library interested in American philosophy, religious thought, and social and intellectual history should find this edition of his essays a useful addition to the collection. Francis E. Abbot was a noted American philosopher and champion of Free Religion. He was a member of C.S. Peirce's Metaphysical Club, the first American philosopher to support Charles Darwin, the founding editor of The (...) Index, a founder of the Free Religious Association, and the founding President of the National Liberal League of America. In addition to over six hundred articles, he was the author of Scientific Theism (1885), The Way Out of Agnosticism, Or The Philosophy of Free Religion (1890), and The Syllogistic Philosophy, or Prolegomena to Science (1906). (shrink)

This article suggests evidence for and reasons why prior acquisition may either facilitate or inhibit acquisition of a new construction. It investigates acquisition of the German passive and future constructions which contain a lexical verb with either the auxiliary sein “to be” or werden “to become”, and are related through these to potential supporting constructions. We predicted that a supported construction should be acquired earlier, faster, and unusually rapidly. An inhibited construction should show an extended depressed usage. We analyzed a (...) dense corpus of a German boy between 2;0 and 5;0. He acquired the sein- before the werden-passive. The former was supported by his prior acquisition of the sein copula, whereas the werden-passive itself supported one werden copula construction. He acquired the werden-future extremely slowly due to the hindrance of a semantically identical construction. These results fit with an emergentist approach in which apparently “sudden” acquisition is still due to gradual learning mechanisms. (shrink)

We prove a definable analogue to Brouwer's Fixed Point Theorem for o-minimal structures of real closed field expansions: A continuous definable function mapping from the unit simplex into itself admits a fixed point, even though the underlying space is not necessarily topologically complete. Our proof is direct and elementary; it uses a triangulation technique for o-minimal functions, with an application of Sperner's Lemma.

This paper argues against the continued practice of Confucian familism, even in its moderate form, in East Asian hospitals. According to moderate familism, a physician acting in concert with the patient's family may withhold diagnostic information from the patient, and may give it to the patient's family members without her prior approval. There are two main approaches to defend moderate familism: one argues that it can uphold patient's autonomy and protect her best interests; the other appeals to cultural relativism by (...) construing the principle of ‘family autonomy’ to be incommensurable with that of individual autonomy. We respond to the first approach by explaining how the familist arguments either depend on some unreasonable assumptions or simply fail to articulate. The critique of the second approach is based on our recent survey showing that there is no dichotomy of relevant values between the East and the West: we believe that the result can effectively block the familist's reliance on certain traditional or cultural values to explain their resistance to the incorporation of pluralist values. Despite our disagreement with familism, we consider the Eastern emphasis on the family to be conducive to the communication between patient, family members and medical personnel, which is indispensible to the patient's well being and autonomy. We conclude that respect for patient autonomy is perfectly consistent with the involvement of the family in making medical decision as long as the family plays a merely consultant role. (shrink)

Recent challenges to Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus thesis for language acquisition suggest that children's primary data may carry “indirect evidence” about linguistic constructions despite containing no instances of them. Indirect evidence is claimed to suffice for grammar acquisition, without need for innate knowledge. This article reports experiments based on those of, who demonstrated that a simple bigram language model can induce the correct form of auxiliary inversion in certain complex questions. This article investigates the nature of the indirect evidence (...) that supports this learning, and assesses how reliably it is available. Results confirm the original finding for one specific sentence type but show that the model's success is highly circumscribed. It performs poorly on inversion in related constructions in English and Dutch. Because other, more powerful statistical models have so far been shown to succeed only on the same limited subset of cases as the bigram model, it remains to be seen whether stimulus richness can be substantiated more generally. (shrink)

Influential or frequently cited business ethics research does not appear in a vacuum; our study reveals its predominant sources and contributors by discipline. By examining citations from articles published in three top business ethics journals (Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics Quarterly and Business Ethics: A European Review) over the period 2004–2008, we document that the preponderance of influential business ethics research comes primarily from the management faculty. In addition, management journals and management books are the predominant sources for influential (...) business ethics research. Further, among the management fields, organizational behavior and organizational structure predominate leadership and strategy as the major subject areas for influential business ethics research, suggesting that this influential body of research is focused on a micro rather than on a macro context. These empirical results lend credence to the perception that there is a silo effect in influential business ethics research and suggest that business ethics research in a micro context might have permeated to the teaching of business ethics. (shrink)

Zaller's model of public-opinion formation portrays the average citizen as an automaton who responds unthinkingly to elite cues. That is, once people have received information from political elites, they tend to abide by whatever their respective cue-givers dictate, since rejecting information is more cognitively costly than simply accepting it. Empirical research in psychology on priming supports this view of the citizen as a passive receiver of information. For example, people are likely to be unconsciously influenced by subtle cues and they (...) tend to base their opinions on the accessibility of information in memory. However, some citizens, under certain conditions, may be ?active processors? of information: actively interpreting it, elaborating on its implications, and negotiating its meaning. Whether or not Zaller's model is an accurate representation of the process of public-opinion formation depends substantially upon the inclusiveness of the researcher's views about what constitutes public opinion and how to study its determinants. (shrink)

Keeping a conversation going is the social glue of friendships. The DSM criteria for autism list difficulties with back-and-forth conversation but does not necessitate that all autistic children will be equally impacted. We carried out three studies (two pre-registered) with verbally-fluent school children (age 5-9 years) to investigate how autistic and neurotypical children maintain a conversation topic. We also investigated within-group relationships between conversational ability and cognitive and socio-cognitive predictors. Study 1 found autistic children were more likely than neurotypical controls (...) to give off-topic and generic minimal responses (e.g. ‘mm’, ‘oh’) and were less likely to give non-verbal responses (e.g. nodding or use of facial affect to respond). Nonetheless, the autistic group provided topic-supporting responses 62% of the time, indicating some aspects of conversation topic maintenance are a relative strength. Studies 2 and 3 found large individual differences in topic-supporting conversational responding amongst both neurotypical and autistic children. These were positively related to theory of mind ability and age in both groups. Conversational skills lie on a continuum for the general population and differences by diagnostic group are a matter of degree. Given the importance for peer relationships, we suggest a whole-classroom approach to supporting conversation skills in all children. (shrink)

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Background: Studies have found that children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are more likely to make errors in appropriately producing referring expressions (‘the dog’ vs. ‘the black dog’) than are controls but comprehend them with equal facility. We tested whether this anomaly arises because comprehension studies have focused on manipulating perspective-taking at a ‘generic speaker’ level. Method: We compared 24 autistic eight- to eleven-year-olds with 24 well-matched neuro-typical controls. Children interpreted requests (e.g. ‘Can I have that ball?’) in contexts which (...) would be ambiguous (i.e. because the child can see two balls) if perspective-taking were not utilized. In the interlocutor-specific perspective-taking condition, the target was the particular object which was new for the speaker. Children needed to take into account what the speaker had played with before and the fact that they were now expressing excitement about something new. In two control ‘speaker-generic’ conditions we tested children’s ability to take the visual perspective of the speaker (where any speaker who stood behind a particular barrier would have the same perspective). Results: The autistic group were significantly less likely to select the target and significantly more likely to request clarification in the ‘interlocutor-specific’ condition. Performance in the ‘interlocutor-generic’ (visual) perspective taking conditions did not differ between groups. Conclusion: Autistic children, even those who are not intellectually-impaired, tend to have more difficulty than neuro-typical peers in comprehending referring expressions when this requires understanding that people comment on what is new for them. (shrink)

This article seeks to explain the correspondence between human intelligibility and that of the physical world by synthesizing the contributions of Jean Ladrière. Ladrière shows that the objectification function of formal symbolism in mathematics as an artificial language has operative power acquired through algorithm to represent physical reality. In physical theories, mathematics relates to observations through theoretic and empirical languages mutually interacting in a methodological circle, and nonmathematical anticipatory intention guides mathematical algorithmic exploration. Ladrière reasons that mathematics can make the (...) physical world comprehensible because of the presence of a rational principle in both kinds of intelligibility. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Politics Is a Mushroom: Worldly Sources of Rule and Exception in Carl Schmitt and Walter BenjaminKam Shapiro (bio)Life is not a mushroom growing out of death.—Carl Schmitt, The Visibility of the ChurchTo isolate death from life, not leaving the one intimately woven in the other, and each one entering into the other’s midst—this is what one must never do.—Jean-Luc Nancy, L’intrus1Carl Schmitt’s theory of the exception was bound up (...) with a thoroughgoing critique of philosophies of immanence, materialism, and “atheism,” which he treated as interchangeable. In his early writings, he adopted the Christian perspective according to which postlapsarian nature cannot by itself yield a juridical order, or in his poetic phrase, “life is not a mushroom growing out of death.” Yet—in accord with Catholic doctrine—he also found sources of life, or law, in this world. While he repudiated theories of collective self-legislation, he embraced a popular sovereign empowered to impose form on a chaotic society. In Political Theology (1922), he compared the form-giving power of the sovereign to an act of divine intervention. Law, he argued, can only function in a lawful or “normal” situation that precedes formalization, and the sovereign “produces and guarantees the situation in its totality” [13]. In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923) Schmitt retained his theological terms: “A scientific study of democracy must begin with a particular aspect that I have called political theology” [32]. In the modern age, democratic constituent power (pouvoir constituant) replaces the will of God as the transcendent source of a substantial order, namely democratic homogeneity. Democratic will-formation thereby becomes an act prior to its subject, or as Schmitt wrote, “[...] only political power, which should come from the people’s will, can form the people’s will in the first place” [Crisis 28]. A variety of democratic theorists dwell on the paradoxical character of democratic sovereignty, sometimes tracing it back to Rousseau’s well-known formulations [see esp. Connolly and Honig]. They highlight the gap between a transcendent (ideal or fictive) will in whose name political power acts, and the bounded, material consensus it forms, ostensibly rendering the latter vulnerable to challenge. As I argue, however, a closer look at Rousseau’s discussion of democratic founding in On the Social Contract reveals instead a dynamic relay between dispersed substantial or immanent sources of affiliation, on the one hand, and various agents and techniques of political power that draw on and combine them in a collective will, on the other, or what I call the virtual and the virtuosic.2 After briefly exploring this dynamic in Rousseau’s [End Page 121] On the Social Contract, I will highlight similar dynamics at work in Schmitt’s Weimar writings, examining three instances: the complexio oppositorum (1923), national myth (1923), and the polemical opposition of friend and enemy (1927), focusing especially on the first. Contrary to familiar readings of Schmitt’s metaphysical “exceptionalism,” I argue that for Schmitt, as for Rousseau, political power does not create a normative order from a vacuum, and the apparent transcendence of sovereign authority has a variety of worldly sources.3 Finally, I consider what I call “democratic virtuosity,” or virtuosity from below, focusing on Walter Benjamin’s repudiation of sovereign acts of lawmaking or law preserving in favor of ongoing collective habit-formation. As I argue, Benjamin returns spiritual force to the material world not only to shatter human authorities, but also to democratize creation.Rousseau—Anticipating the PeopleIn the Social Contract, Rousseau formulated the paradox of democratic founding to which so many, including Schmitt, would return. “In order for an emerging people to appreciate the healthy maxims of politics, and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit, which should be the result of the institution, would have to preside over the founding of the institution itself; and men would have to be prior to laws what they ought to become by means of laws” [Rousseau 69]. As Rousseau argues, a constitution can form a general will only if it commands the loyalty of the people, that is, if there is... (shrink)

In the study of Pali metres, abundant research has been conducted on the establishment of rules and taxonomy, and scanning of unscanned verses. In comparison, the stylistic aspects of metres have been somewhat neglected. When the audiences listen to verses with their ears only set for metrical rules but not also the interplay of various rhythmic patterns, they fail to fully capture the aesthetic beauty and the very philosophical messages embedded in them. Taking the verses in the Dasanipata of the (...) Theragatha as examples, this article focuses on the stylistic interplay of rhythmic uniformity and change in the expression of core messages in a Pali poem. It aims to unveil the poets’ strategies in the use of various types of metres and prosodic elements (opening, trimetre break, caesura and cadence) to create the narrative style of each poem and draw the audiences’ attention to the Buddha’s key teachings in the verses. (shrink)

Résumé Avec La Source aux fleurs de pêchers, et d’autres œuvres poétiques écrites par Tao Qian au V e siècle, est née une vision de l’utopie qui reste à tout jamais gravée dans l’imaginaire collectif chinois. Treize siècles plus tard, Cao Xueqin s’en inspirera pour donner forme au « Jardin aux sites grandioses », univers aux traits foncièrement féminins et l’un des noyaux de l’intrigue de L’histoire de la pierre, chef d’œuvre de la fiction romanesque chinoise également connu sous le (...) titre « Rêves au pavillon rouge ». Une lecture des deux œuvres en parallèle, tant au sens figuré que littéral, met en lumière le message du Dao De Jing selon lequel l’utopie ne se planifie pas, ne s’impose pas. Elle émerge au contraire d’un esprit de disponibilité, d’une attitude d’attente, d’une écoute affûtée. Cette intuition conduit à une réflexion sur la différence, fondée sur le rêve du Papillon de Tchouang Tseu. (shrink)

With Peach Blossom Spring and other poetical works written by Tao Qian in the 5th century, there was born a vision of utopia that remains forever etched into the Chinese collective imaginary. Thirteen centuries later, Cao Xueqin drew inspiration from it when he gave form to the ‘Grandview Garden’, a universe with fundamentally female characteristics and one of the centres for the plot of The Story of the Stone, a masterpiece of Chinese romantic fiction also known as ‘Dream of the (...) Red Chamber/Mansions’. Reading the two works in parallel, in both the figurative and the literal sense, points up the message of the Daodejing that utopia cannot be planned or imposed. In fact it emerges from a spirit of openness, an attitude of patient waiting, listening with the ear of the other. This intuition leads to reflection on difference, based on Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream. (shrink)

This study provides a global perspective on citations of articles published in ten business ethics journals between 1999 and 2012 and establishes three findings. First, the results indicate that Journal of Business Ethics and Business and Society are the two top business ethics journals based on the distribution of normalized citations received. Second, although North America, particularly the US, remains the top producer of business ethics research, it has been surpassed by Europe in terms of weighted normalized research citations received (...) in 2012, implying a potential diminishing global role of US influence in business ethics research over time. Third, the top-ranked US institutions have reduced their business ethics research impact in recent years, while the European institutions have sharply increased theirs. (shrink)

Recent research has shown that mind wandering recruits executive resources away from the external task towards inner thoughts. No studies however have determined whether executive functions are drawn away in a unitary manner during mind wandering episodes, or whether there is variation in specific functions impacted. Accordingly, we examined whether mind wandering differentially modulates three core executive functions—response inhibition, updating of working memory, and mental set shifting. In three experiments, participants performed one of these three executive function tasks and reported (...) their attentional state as either on-task or mind wandering at random intervals. We found that mind wandering led to poorer performance in the response inhibition and working memory tasks, but not the set-shifting task. These findings suggest that mind wandering does not recruit executive functions in a monolithic manner. Rather, it appears to selectively engage certain executive functions, which may reflect the adaptive maintenance of ongoing task performance. (shrink)

This paper argues against the continued practice of Confucian familism, even in its moderate form, in East Asian hospitals. According to moderate familism, a physician acting in concert with the patient's family may withhold diagnostic information from the patient, and may give it to the patient's family members without her prior approval. There are two main approaches to defend moderate familism: one argues that it can uphold patient's autonomy and protect her best interests; the other appeals to cultural relativism by (...) construing the principle of ‘family autonomy’ to be incommensurable with that of individual autonomy. We respond to the first approach by explaining how the familist arguments either depend on some unreasonable assumptions or simply fail to articulate. The critique of the second approach is based on our recent survey showing that there is no dichotomy of relevant values between the East and the West: we believe that the result can effectively block the familist's reliance on certain traditional or cultural values to explain their resistance to the incorporation of pluralist values. Despite our disagreement with familism, we consider the Eastern emphasis on the family to be conducive to the communication between patient, family members and medical personnel, which is indispensible to the patient's well being and autonomy. We conclude that respect for patient autonomy is perfectly consistent with the involvement of the family in making medical decision as long as the family plays a merely consultant role. (shrink)

My dissertation concerns the question of how our desires and beliefs explain our bodily movements. This study aims to show that the solutions given to this question by both token physicalists, including Donald Davidson, Jerry Fodor, and Fred Dretske, and a proponent of a commonsense approach, Lynne Rudder Baker, are unsatisfactory. Finally, I discuss Daniel Dennett and argue that his theory is the only choice we have. ;All of the five philosophers claim that reasons cause actions. Davidson's theory fails to (...) answer the question at issue because, on his account, the intentional properties of reasons are causally inefficacious in producing bodily behavior. Although Dretske's and Fodor's theories do not have this problem, their accounts receive the challenge from externalists, who argue that our intentional properties are determined not only by intrinsic physicial properties, but also by our relation to the environment. Since our intrinsic physical properties determines our bodily behavior, intentional properties seem irrelevant to the production of bodily movements. In response to externalism, both Dretske and Fodor attempt to provide an account of intentionality. However, I argue that their accounts are unsatisfactory. A fortiori, they fail to show content has any explanatory role. ;Then I switch to Baker's commonsense approach. She rejects the Standard View of the physicalists, i.e., that to have a propositional attitude is to have a brain state that has propositional content, and endorses her 'Practical Realism.' I, however, contend that her rejection of the Standard View is not successful and that Practical Realism, being compatible with the Standard View, fails to provide any new insight into intentional explanation. So the question at issue is still unanswered. ;At the end, I discuss Dennett's theory, which also rejects the Standard View. According to Dennett, there is no ontological difference between our beliefs and the beliefs of a machine, a nation, and evolution, provided that their behavior can be interpreted from the intentional stance. Therefore, instead of providing an account of the intentional , Dennett attempts to dissolve our urge for such an account by "demystifying" our intentionality. (shrink)

The corpse of a high-ranking male official was unearthed in the 1975, and important archaeologic discoveries were claimed. The exact year of his funeral was 167 BC. Autopsy revealed that the man had peptic ulcer disease. His naked body exposing genitalia and post-dissection stitches, with the dissected-out intestines and brain lying alongside, is now exhibited in a formalin-impregnated viewing glass tank in a museum .Meanwhile a 2000-year-old clothed female corpse is on display in another museum. In 1971, workers in ….

Personal autonomy presupposes the notion of rationality. What is not so clear is whether, and how, a compromise of rationality to various degrees will diminish a person's autonomy. In bioethical literature, three major types of threat to the rationality of a patient's medical decision are identified: insufficient information, irrational beliefs/desires, and influence of different framing effects. To overcome the first problem, it is suggested that patients be provided with information about their diseases and treatment choices according to the objective standard. (...) I shall explain how this should be finessed. Regarding the negative impact of irrational beliefs/desires, some philosophers have argued that holding irrational beliefs can still be an expression of autonomy. I reject this argument because the degree of autonomy of a decision depends on the degree of rationality of the beliefs or desires on which the decision is based. Hence, to promote patient autonomy, we need to eliminate irrational beliefs by the provision of evidence and good arguments. Finally, I argue that the way to smooth out the framing effects is to present the same information in different perspectives: it is too often assumed that medical information can always be given in a complete and unadorned manner. This article concludes with a cautionary note that the protection of patient autonomy requires much more time and effort than the current practice usually allows. (shrink)

This essay takes the performance artworks of Tehching Hsieh as instructive allegories for a global ethics as theorized by a variety of left academics who ground universalism in a singularity that escapes the predicates of identity. Hsieh's projects, I argue, also place universal estrangement in the service of liberation for particular marginalized groups whose lives confound our fantasies of recognition. At the same time, they illustrate some of the challenges facing attempts to treat particular struggles as embodiments of universal conflicts.

Why Be Moral? Learning from the Neo-Confucian Cheng Brothers by Yong Huang is a work of comparative philosophy with an original approach. It is a careful and learned study of two important philosophers in Chinese philosophy, but at the same time it is an interesting and stimulating alternative introduction to fundamental philosophical problems.Huang explains: "My interest is not in exploring the similarities and differences between Confucianism and virtue ethics in the West …, but in seeking the possible contributions Confucianism can (...) make to contemporary virtue ethics". I think Huang is able to deliver very well the goods he has set out to deliver. The topics discussed are all living issues in contemporary... (shrink)

This paper argues that product and advertisement are neither completely dependent nor completely independent. The advertisement of a bad product cannot be good. The advertisement of a good product is not necessarily good. In the case where consumer sovereignty cannot be assumed, the goodness of an advertisement depends solely on the goodness of the product. In the case where consumer sovereignty can be assumed, the goodness of an advertisement depends first on whether the product is good, and if so, whether (...) the advertisement preserves individual autonomy. (shrink)