Thomas More’s Utopia is an iridescent and enigmatic work which evades a consistent interpretation. Throughout the entire dialogue, many contradictory positions are argued for, and More’s play with telling names makes it difficult to determine which person’s position we should embrace. In order to evade these problems, the paper suggests reading More’s work as a philosophical dialogue with the reader, in which More invites us to evaluate the different positions contained in the work against our own back- ground. In (...) this sense, More’s Utopia is a proper piece of philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on Paul of Venice’s plurality of forms and souls, i.e., his “two total souls” theory. I argue that this specific theory is a result of Paul’s reception of various positions originating from fourteenth-century Parisian philosophers like John of Jandun, the Anonymous Patar, Nicole Oresme, John Duns Scotus, and Walter Burley. By receiving these positions and by making use of merely parts of their doctrines, Paul creates a theory of the hylomorphic compound that fits well within (...) an Aristotelian framework of an Averroistic flavor. Although his position is not Averroistic in any strict sense, it mirrors quite well the growing interest in an Averroistic interpretation of Aristotle in Padua at his time. By looking at some of his successors, such as Gaetano da Thiene, Nicoletto Vernia, and Agostino Nifo, I show that Paul is on the borderline between a traditional, scholastic philosophical psychology or hylomorphism of Parisian origin and an Averroist reading of philosophical psychology or hylomorphism, which had its promoters in fifteenth-century Padua. (shrink)

This book sheds light on the 13th/14th-century debate about whether beatitude is a reflexive act. It reconstructs this discussion on the basis of the original sources. Furthermore it investigates into hermeneutical matters of medieval text interpretation.

Practices and techniques of imparting competency and knowledge are always essential for any mediation- or transfer process. Based on the distinctive master-disciple relationship, this volume examines individual ways of life, social contexts and institutional requirements as well as discursive practices and epistemological implications of this key relationship bequeathing culturally conveyed proficiencies and culturally encoded knowledge.

When making decisions, humans can observe many kinds of information about others' activities, but their effects on performance are not well understood. We investigated social learning strategies using a simple problem-solving task in which participants search a complex space, and each can view and imitate others' solutions. Results showed that participants combined multiple sources of information to guide learning, including payoffs of peers' solutions, popularity of solution elements among peers, similarity of peers' solutions to their own, and relative payoffs from (...) individual exploration. Furthermore, performance was positively associated with imitation rates at both the individual and group levels. When peers' payoffs were hidden, popularity and similarity biases reversed, participants searched more broadly and randomly, and both quality and equity of exploration suffered. We conclude that when peers' solutions can be effectively compared, imitation does not simply permit scrounging, but it can also facilitate propagation of good solutions for further cumulative exploration. (shrink)

Species spreading beyond their native ranges are important study objects in ecology and environmental sciences and research on biological invasions is thriving. Along with an increase in the number of publications, the research field is experiencing an increase in the diversity of methods applied and questions asked. This development has facilitated an upsurge in information on invasions, but it also creates conceptual and practical challenges. To provide more transparency on which kind of research is actually done in the field, the (...) distinction between invasion science, encompassing the full spectrum of studies on biological invasions and the sub-field of invasion biology, studying patterns and mechanisms of species invasions with a focus on biological research questions, can be useful. Although covering a smaller range of topics, invasion biology today still is the driving force in invasion science and we discuss challenges stemming from its embeddedness in the social context. Invasion biology consists of the building blocks 'theory', 'case studies' and 'application', where theory takes the form of conceptual frameworks, major hypotheses and statistical generalisations. Referencing recent work in philosophy of science, we argue that invasion biology, like other biological or ecological disciplines, does not rely on the development of an all-encompassing theory in order to be efficient. We suggest, however, that theory development is nonetheless necessary and propose improvements. Recent advances in data visualisation, machine learning and semantic modelling are providing opportunities for enhancing knowledge management and presentation and we suggest that invasion science should use these to transform its ways of publishing, archiving and visualising research. Along with a stronger focus on studies going beyond purely biological questions, this would facilitate the efficient prevention and management of biological invasions. (shrink)

Digitalization has become a cornerstone of competitiveness in the industrial arena, especially in the cases of small lot sizes with many variants in the goods produced. Managers of industrial facilities have to handle the complexity that comes along with Industry 4.0 in diverse dimensions to leverage the potentials of digitalization for their sites. This article describes major drivers of this complexity in current industrial automation to outline the environment of today’s challenges for managers of this technical transition—and shows how managed (...) industrial security services can contribute to stabilize the industrial system. An outlook is given to future automation scenarios as well as the major concepts involved in their protection. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION Although the writings of Thomas Reid are very fertile and interesting, his life is biographically barren in comparison to such seventeenth - and ...

THE NATURE OF ART is a collection of 29 seminal, historically-organized readings that are focused on a basic philosophical question: What is Art? Including writings from the Western tradition'both Continental and Analytic traditions'as well as non-Western, minority, and feminist writings, this volume provides students with a rich set of resources to explore this matter both broadly and deeply. Introductions to each reading situate the selection amidst each respective thinker's body of work and the greater philosophical context in which the remarks (...) arose. Reading questions accompany each selection, drawing students' attention to key points to be encountered. Hailed by reviewers and adopters for its clarity and rigor, Wartenberg's THE NATURE OF ART offers a lively and engaging introduction to the philosophy of art. (shrink)

The newly updated Right and Wrong 2nd Edition is an accessible introduction to the major traditions in western philosophical ethics, written in a lively and engaging style. It is designed for entry-level ethics courses and includes real-life ethical scenarios chosen to appeal directly to students. Greatly expanded and improved, this successful text introduces students to the major ethical traditions, and provides a simple methodology for resolving ethical dilemmas Treats teleological and deontological approaches to ethics as the two most important traditions, (...) but now includes chapters on virtue ethics and the ethics of care The very accessible writing style speaks directly to students’ own experience Draws examples from three types of real-life ethical scenarios submitted by students: academic dishonesty, partying, and personal relationships Provides a concise treatment of this notoriously complex subject, perfect for entry-level ethics and applied ethics courses. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Personhood: A Start Are Dolphins Persons? Language and the Hand Personhood Redefined Conclusion: What Kind of Beings Are Dolphins?

David Ekdahl (2023), in a constructive and thoughtful commentary, outlines both points of agreement with and suggestions for further research arising from our paper ‘Crossing the Fictional Line: Moral Graveness, the Gamer’s Dilemma, and the Paradox of Fictionally Going Too Far’ (Montefiore & Formosa, 2023).

According to a widely held view, a Kantian intuition functions like a singular term. I argue that this view is false. Its apparent plausibility, both textual and philosophical, rests on attributing to Kant a Fregean conception of judgment. I show that Kant does not hold a Fregean conception of judgment and argue that, as a consequence, intuition cannot be understood on analogy with singular terms.

In this book Thomas Wren uncovers and assesses the largely hidden philosophical assumptions about human motivation that have shaped contemporary psychological ...

This interdisciplinary volume questions one of the most fundamental tenets of social theory by focusing on detachment, an important but neglected aspect of social life. Going against the grain of recent theoretical celebrations of engagement, this book challenges us to re-think the relational basis of social theory. In so, doing it brings to light the productive aspects of disconnection, distance and detachment. Rather than treating detachment simply as the moral inversion of compassion and engagement, the volume brings together empirical studies (...) and theoretical comments by leading anthropologists, sociologists and science studies scholars. Taken together, these illustrate the range of contexts within which distance and disconnection can offer meaningful frameworks for action. Positioned at the cutting edge of social theory, this landmark volume will be of great interest to students and academics across the social sciences and humanities. (shrink)

Big Ideas for Little Kids includes everything a teacher, a parent, or a college student needs to teach philosophy to elementary school children from picture books. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book explains why it is important to allow young children access to philosophy during primary-school education. Wartenberg also gives advice on how to construct a "learner-centered" classroom, in which children discuss philosophical issues with one another as they respond to open-ended questions by saying whether they agree (...) or disagree with what others have said. (shrink)

Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness—those that take there to be (...) absolute goodness—are comparatively rich: they offer grounds for judging some types of things better than others because they have more absolute goodness. Moorean accounts, for example, can tell us that humans and human experiences are superior to bees and blades of grass. But such theories tend to be descriptively poor: they struggle to tell us in virtue of what this is so. In this essay we motivate and flesh out a view that splits the difference between accounts of goodness as relative and accounts of goodness as absolute. Such a view holds promise only if the mechanics of this kind of metaphysics of goodness can be worked out. Here we present a view on which the paradigm for absolute goodness is God and the paradigm for each kind of relative goodness is a divine idea. (shrink)

Proceedings of a conference held in Apr. 2008 in Washington, D.C.

It is somewhat misleading to think of the Franciscans as forming a “school” in ethics, since there was a fair bit of diversity among Franciscans. Nonetheless, one can identify certain characteristic tendencies of Franciscan moral thought, and certain “celebrity” Franciscans whose views in ethics and moral psychology are particularly noteworthy. I shall first offer an overview of the general character of Franciscan moral thought in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and then turn to a more detailed examination of (...) the thought of John Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308) and William Ockham (c. 1288-1347) on three central matters of debate: the nature of the virtues, the relationship between intellect and will, and the relationship between moral requirements and the divine will. (shrink)

Father Williams explains how the conscience is formed through our training and experiences and informed by the Holy Spirit, making it an essential tool for daily living. He uses familiar and surprising characters to illustrate the positive choices conscience can direct--and the disaster that results when a conscience is undeveloped or ignored. Questions he tackles include "Is it more important to be smart or good?""Is there a morally right thing to do in every situation?" and "Is the Christian moral life (...) an exciting adventure, or a necessary burden?" Rich, provocative, and practical for everyday decision making, KNOWING RIGHT FROM WRONG is a must-read for all who hunger for personal holiness. (shrink)

The reaction to Darwin's Origin of Species varied in many countries according to the roles played by national scientific institutions and traditions and the attitudes of religious and political groups. The contributors to this volume, including M. J. S. Hodge, David Hull, and Roberto Moreno, gathered in 1972 at an international conference on the comparative reception of Darwinism. Their essays look at early pro- and anti-Darwinism arguments, and three additional comparative essays and appendices add a larger perspective. For this paperback (...) edition, Thomas F. Glick has added a new preface commenting on recent research. (shrink)

This paper is going to explore the adverse effects of exposure to combat death on medics’ holistic well-being, which, if ignored could decrease individual readiness and negatively impact the mission. We rely on the experience of United States Air Force Special Operation Surgical Teams (AF SOST) whose exposure to mass casualty scenarios in austere environments could serve as approximations of conditions of future battlefields. Over the past two decades, the ability to deliver advanced medical care on and off the battlefield (...) along with a rapid casualty evacuation platform has allowed for unprecedented survival rates exceeding 90%. While laudable, these medical achievements have also set up a casualty management paradigm in which medical decision-making singularly focuses on life-saving care. Confronting peer-peer adversaries in large scale combat operations (LSCO) on a multi-domain battlefield will make casualty management frighteningly more complex by introducing major infrastructural, personnel, and resource constraints. When considering the high number of casualties expected in LSCO alongside enormous limitations in medical resource and resupply capability, the current casualty management paradigm will not be sustainable. The resource constrained environment in LSCO will shift medical decision-making away from a singular focus on life-saving care to triage, which hinges on the ability to determine futile medical interventions—a skill that has been lost in the past two generation of combat medics. As such, a broad ethical challenge that arises in preparation for LSCO is the need to set new expectations concerning dying and death. However, medical decision-making focused on death and dying has not been explicitly addressed in military medical training, research, or policy. Relying on a body of literature known as terror management theory (TMT) and ethnographic data from our study with AF SOST medics, we are going to argue that it is important to expose medics to death in mass casualty and triage training. (shrink)

For courses in Business Ethics A fresh approach to the assumptions that underlie business practices Two recent events — the 2008 economic meltdown and the ongoing concentration of the nation's wealth in the hands of a very small percentage of the population — have led many people to question a number of basic assumptions about business, corporations, and the workings of contemporary free-market capitalism in a global economy. Written as a dialogue between Socrates and a hypothetical contemporary CEO,Socrates Comes to (...) Wall Street leads students to think critically about perspectives and practices that are taken as “givens” in most American business schools and corporations. Employing this original and provocative approach, author Thomas White seeks to encourage the next generation of business leaders to be more astute about the implications of their actions, and to act more prudently and more fairly than we have seen in the recent past. (shrink)

Shrek! focuses on an issue in the philosophy of language, a relatively new area of philosophical investigation that first emerged during the twentieth century. Some philosophers disagree with the claim that you cannot separate the descriptive and evaluative elements of linguistic statements. This is because they take descriptive statements to be the basic elements of language, to which our subjective attitudes get attached later in a contingent manner. At its most basic level language presents a symbolic picture of facts in (...) the world. Shrek! presents what philosophers call a thought experiment that purports to show that the descriptive and evaluative contents of sentences are really distinct. The chapter ends by suggesting how to discuss the philosophy of language with children. (shrink)

In Daniel Manus Pinkwater's quirkily illustrated book, The Big Orange Splot, a strange accident leads a man to change his life. The book presents an important claim that the existentialists and other philosophers have embraced: That the life of conformity is one that people ought to avoid, despite its attractiveness. Instead of living a life just like everyone else and fulfilling expectations that others have for us, our lives should resemble the transformed facades of all the homes on Mr. Plumbean's (...) street: reflections of our own, individual dreams. (shrink)

The chapter talks about Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree, which is a favorite of many children, adults, and teachers. The story of a relationship between a boy and a tree is charming for, despite the vicissitudes of the relationship, the two end up together at the end, with the boy — now an old man — sitting contentedly on the tree — itself reduced to a mere stump. The book raises an important issue in the field of environmental ethics. It (...) asks us to recognize that between childhood and old age, people operating within the Western tradition of ethics are not mindful of the value that the non‐human beings in their environment have for them as well as for future generations. Harkening to such warnings, environmental ethicists have attempted to raise important issues about our relationship with the other beings that make up our world. (shrink)

Margaret Wise Brown's The Important Book, which is a childrens' picture book, provides an excellent opportunity to discuss metaphysics. The book opens up for our reflection the viability of a certain metaphysical account of the nature of objects. In making a distinction between the important feature or property of an object and all the others that it simply is or has, The Important Book operates with the assumption that all objects have what metaphysicians call an essential property. As the book (...) has it, while there are many things that are true of any object, only one is essential to it. These other things are accidents or non‐essential properties of the object. Essentialism is the metaphysical view that objects have one property — their essential property — that cannot change while the object remains the same thing. (shrink)

Robert Mursch's picture book, The Paper Bag Princess, inverts many of the gender roles traditionally found in fairy tales: It's a prince (Roland) who gets abducted in this story, not a princess, though it's the princess (Elizabeth) who must come to the rescue and save him. Although these reversals are a source of the book's humor, they also underscore claims made in feminist philosophy, the specific branch of social and political philosophy considered in this chapter. Feminist philosophers and literary scholars (...) have pointed out that happy endings reassert harmful gender norms. Elizabeth's rejection of Roland marks her as a truly feminist hero, for she won't let him treat her in a demeaning manner even though she has staked her own life on saving him. With this story, you can hopefully steer children into a discussion of gender bias and oppression, and how traditional stories function to support it. (shrink)

The Sneetches by Theodor Geisel (otherwise known as Dr Seuss) is a satirical story that targets illicit discrimination. The book presents its parable about discrimination by depicting a society in which one group discriminates against another group because of an easily perceptible difference between them. The real irrationality of discrimination in both The Sneetches and real life is that it is based on the false claim that members of the discriminated‐against group are inferior to members of the discriminating group. The (...) book ends with all of the Sneetches playing with one another, paying no attention to the presence or absence of stars on their bellies. The lesson that children draw from The Sneetches is clear: Discriminating against people in a different social group is wrong. (shrink)