While most of hume's criticisms of the doctrine of substance are epistemological and theory-Independent, We show that in "treatise" i.Iv.5, Hume develops a metaphysical criticism of the cartesian theory of substance. Using three of pierre bayle's arguments of his own ends, He argues that on an empiricist theory of meaning, The cartesian theory of substance is reduced to absurdity.

In this essay we argue that if the covering-law model of moral justification is correct, Hume's "is"-"ought" paragraph calls the possibility of a justifiable theory of moral obligation in doubt. In the first section we delineate Hume's doubts. In the second section we develop a skeptical solution to those doubts.

Business ethics journals have appeared on a few ranked lists that are specific to this niche discipline. As with more traditional academic disciplines, these rankings are used for academic rewards such as faculty tenure and promotion, along with department and school ratings. Journal ranking has been subject to considerable criticism even as its administrative use persists. Among the criticisms are that journal quality is a poor proxy for article quality, citation rate is an imperfect reflection of article influence, and bias (...) may be introduced into rankings by visibility characteristics such as journal age, size, circulation, and experience of the rater with a journal. This research note studies the effect of journal age and size on the rankings of business ethics journals compiled by Beets, Lewis, and Brower, by Albrecht, Thompson, Hoopes, and Rodrigo, and by Serenko and Bontis. Significant correlation was found for journal age with the administratively derived Beets et al. ranking. No significant correlation was found for size in any ranking study. Results were not significant for the Albrecht et al. and the Serenko and Bontis rankings representing the perspectives from surveys of active researchers or citation analysis. Perhaps sometimes a journal’s reputation precedes it, as perception of journal quality may be biased by journal visibility, either because it has been published and available for a number of years, or because it is well known and likely to be cited. (shrink)

This chapter develops and defends a formal epistemology of conjunctive explanation by determining the conditions under which multiple distinct explanations are better than one. The general approach is to identify an appropriate measure of explanatory goodness that can then be applied to conjunctive explanations. If a conjunctive explanation is to be preferred it needs to have greater explanatory virtue (e.g., power or scope) with respect to the evidence, but this explanatory gain is insufficient on its own. Given a conjunctive explanation’s (...) greater complexity, it also has a cost associated with it and so a balance needs to be struck between the gain and the cost. This is achieved by employing a Bayesian measure proposed by I. J. Good. This chapter explores some properties of this measure and its application to the epistemology of conjunctive explanation. In so doing, it addresses the general question of whether it is desirable to have more informative, less probable hypotheses when seeking good explanations. (shrink)

In this essay, the author describes how he faced institutionalized homophobia during his psychiatric training, and how he later wrote a play inspired by the life of a gay psychiatrist. Despite Freud’s supportive stance, homosexuality aroused the antipathy of American organized psychiatry and psychoanalysis and came to be listed as an illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Dr. John E. Fryer outed himself as “Dr. H Anonymous” at a 1972 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, and the next year (...) homosexuality was removed from the DSM. The 2014 play Doctor Anonymous offers a fictionalized account of this watershed moment in the history of the gay rights movement. The author discusses his own psychotherapeutic work with gay male patients, including those who had previously been treated with conversion therapy, and explores how the play mirrors his own life experience and the experience of his patients. (shrink)

I propose a qualitative Bayesian account of explanatory goodness that is analogous to the Bayesian account of incremental confirmation. This is achieved by means of a complexity criterion according to which an explanation h is good if the reduction in the complexity of the explanandum e brought about by h (the explanatory gain) is greater than the additional complexity introduced by h in the context of e (the explanatory cost). To illustrate the account, I apply it in the context of (...) ad hoc hypotheses. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive translation of the expanded French version of E.F.F. Chladni's Traité d'Acoustique, using Chladni's 1802 Die Akustik for reference and clarification. Chladni's experiments and observations with sound and vibrations profoundly influenced the development of the field of Acoustics. The famous Chladni diagrams along with other observations are contained in Die Akustik, published in German in 1802 and Traité d'Acoustique, a greatly expanded version, published in French in 1809. The present translation was undertaken by Robert T. Beyer, (...) PhD (1920-2008), noted acoustician, Professor of Physics at Brown University, and Gold Medal recipient of the Acoustical Society of America. Along with many other projects completed over the course of his career, Dr. Beyer translated Von Neumann's seminal work, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics from the original German, spent 30 years translating Russian physics treatises and journals, served as editor of the English translation of the Soviet Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, and also authored Sounds of our Times: Two Hundred Years of Acoustics. Represents the first comprehensive English translation of a seminal work in acoustics Translated by a prominent acoustician, and former Gold Medal recipient of the Acoustical Society of America In addition to the classic experiments with glass plates and violin bows, covers topics in music, architecture, and anatomy of human and animal hearing Appeals to a wide audience in physics, acoustics, and history of science. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Exploring the Depth of Dream Experience: The Enactive Framework and Methods for Neurophenomenological Research” by Elizaveta Solomonova & Xin Wei Sha. Upshot: Solomonova and Sha draw inspiration from the work programme that sparked the enactive extension to cognitive science, and propose a framework for dream scientists. This case study for a renewed cognitive science highlights key points that are worth developing, in light of current practices in neuroscience.

Has the diversity of corporate boards of directors improved? Should it? What role does diversity play in reducing corporate wrongdoing? Will diversity result in a more focused board of directors or more board autonomy? Examining the state of Tennessee as a case study, the authors collected data on the board composition of publicly traded corporations and compared those data to an original study conducted in 1995. Data indicate only a modest improvement in board diversity. This article discusses reasons for the (...) scarcity of women on boards and concludes that, to enhance strategic decisions, board membership should reflect the corporation''s consumer population. Thus, women are a critical but overlooked resource. Areas for future research are also considered. (shrink)

An increasing number of people worldwide are living with chronic conditions that have an aspect of bodily fragility as part of the condition or as an effect of treatment. In this article, I explore the temporal experience of bodily fragility and the particularities of consciousness states among people with the chronic condition osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) in Denmark. My aim is threefold. First, my goal is to give an insight into life with OI, a rare and rarely studied condition. Second, I (...) shed light on bodily fragility, a theme that lives in the shadows of other analytical foci in anthropology. Third, I will contribute to the anthropological understanding of the connection among body, physical environment, and consciousness. I argue that the lifeworlds of people with OI are haunted by mental and bodily memories and fearful future scenarios, which makes the past and the future collapse into the present. (shrink)

The article argues against the commonly held 'green glasses' interpretation of Kant's "a priori", where any one's familiar experience must be seen as integrated by space and time and the categories. Such an interpretation does not answer Hume's problem, Which was whether any necessary connection could be found in experience. For the connections of familiar experience are customary and contingent. Passages from Kant are cited to show that he meant by 'objective experience', not familiar experience, but that body of scientific (...) observation which has been connected according to law. The "a priori" turns out to be what the scientist finds necessary for the possibility of such a connected experience. (shrink)

Soon after the discovery of insulin in the early 1920s, the popular press celebrated the miraculous discovery. Although insulin had no curative effect on the chronic state of diabetes, it was frequently heralded as a “cure.” This paper examines how the discovery of insulin intersected with the rise of diabetic technology and the transfer of medical technology to the home setting. By analyzing diabetic manuals written for patients and physicians, letters exchanged between patient and physician, medical journals, magazines and newspapers, (...) I trace how patients learned about insulin and more significantly how patients adopted measurement technologies designed to allow better home administration of insulin. This included acquiring knowledge about nutritional content and scales, maintaining sterile glass syringes, sharpening needles, using chemistry to measure sugar in the urine, and recording various measurements into meaningful text for patient-physician dialogue. As diabetes was re-imagined as a chronic and controllable illness, patients and physicians alike grappled with the promises and limitations of new medical technologies. This historical perspective offers a lens for better understanding the process of implementing diabetic treatment plans that required home testing, measurement, and recording of medical data. Such processes centered the importance of patient-centered work and the value of diabetic technologies. Much of this discourse is outlined in diabetic manuals of the 1920s. (shrink)

Histories of nursing that disregard their linkage to broader historical movements often lead to historically detached versions of nursing identity that omit the perspective of their sources and the ideas of their time. Drawing on materials retrieved through a multilayered research strategy comprising internal and external sources, this article examines the development of a nursing identity in Chile during the period starting in the 1950s through the early 2000s. We analysed the sociopolitical contexts in which the nursing profession grew, the (...) changing direction of its role and how the nursing identity transformed itself. Through the use of historical sources and oral testimonies, we aim to give a nuanced account of how the history of public health and that of the country more broadly changed the object of identification of nurses, creating only relatively recently a sense of nursing community. Processes of identification, fragmentation and integration are highlighted, which challenge usual notions of history as a linear process. (shrink)

The effective-photon hypothesis postulates a photon energy variable with light intensity according to a relation of the form ε=hv/[1−β 0 f(I)]=hv 1 . This hypothesis has been subjected to direct experimental test. A Mach-Zehnder interferometer is illuminated with aQ-spoiled Nd:glass laser and the time history of the interference fringes is recorded with an image converter camera. The experimental results show that indeed the laser pulse is not monochromatic and that a large frequency change occurs with light intensity. In addition, (...) the analysis of the results indicates that the principle of conservation of energy is not in contradiction with the hypothesis of “effective photon,” provided photons can exchange energy among themselves. (shrink)

The concept of a technical frontier in branches of experimental measurement, such as the resolution of the microscope, angular measure and time telling, has been around for more than 60 years. The purpose of this brief paper is to identify the technical frontier operating on the achromatic astronomical telescope, where a limiting factor of the resolution of fine detail was the quality of the optical glass available. The achromatically corrected objective is formed from two kinds of glass, the (...) common crown glass and the heavy clear flint glass or lead glass. This last was difficult to make homogeneous, that is without regions of different density, and therefore different refraction and dispersion. Unusually, optical glass had to pass a second frontier, this time placed on the whole glass industry by the English Government in the form of excise duty, administered with a bureaucratic efficiency that effectively stopped, in around 1800, the making of optical glass suitable for the serious astronomical telescopes. The result of the tax imposition was to delay the English production of improved optical glass for more than 80 years. (shrink)

How do scientific conjectures become laws? Why does proof mean different things in different sciences? Do numbers exist, or were they invented? Why do some laws turn out to be wrong? Experience shows that disentangling scientific knowledge from opinion is harder than one might expect. Full of illuminating examples and quotations, and with a scope ranging from psychology and evolution to quantum theory and mathematics, this book brings alive issues at the heart of all science.

How do scientific conjectures become laws? Why does proof mean different things in different sciences? Do numbers exist, or were they invented? Why do some laws turn out to be wrong? In this wide-ranging book, Brian Davies discusses the basis for scientists' claims to knowledge about the world. He looks at science historically, emphasizing not only the achievements of scientists from Galileo onwards, but also their mistakes. He rejects the claim that all scientific knowledge is provisional, by citing examples from (...) chemistry, biology and geology. A major feature of the book is its defence of the view that mathematics was invented rather than discovered. While experience has shown that disentangling knowledge from opinion and aspiration is a hard task, this book provides a clear guide to the difficulties.Full of illuminating examples and quotations, and with a scope ranging from psychology and evolution to quantum theory and mathematics, this book brings alive issues at the heart of all science. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss the relationships between discrimination, harassment, and the glass ceiling, arguing that many of the factors that preclude women from occupying executive and managerial positions also foster sexual harassment. We suggest that measures designed to increase numbers of women in higher level positions will reduce sexual harassment. We first define and discuss discrimination, harassment, and the glass ceiling, relationships between each, and relevant legislation. We next discuss the relationships between gender and sexual harassment, emphasizing (...) the influence of gender inequality on sexual harassment. We then present recommendations for organizations seeking to reduce sexual harassment, emphasizing the role that women executives may play in such efforts and, importantly, the recursive effects of such efforts on increasing the numbers of women in higher level positions in organizations. (shrink)

Among philosophers as well as linguists the battle is still joined between those who view the correlation between meaning and linguistic form as strictly determined by convention and those who argue for the essential indeterminacy of the relationship between meaning and form.1 Plato's Cratylus aside, the philosphical dialogue that forms the locus classicus of this debate is the following: "You're holding it upside down!" Alice interrupted. "To be sure I was!" Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for (...) him. "I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying. that seems to be done right - though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just now - and that shows that there are three hundred and sixty-four days when you might get un-birthday presents -" "Certainly," said Alice. "And only one for birthday presents, you know. There's glory for you!" "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'" Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't - till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'" "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument,'" Alice objected. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less."2 · 1. This should not be taken as an argument for the indeterminacy of linguistic meaning itself. Quite the contrary; it is because meaning can be stable and determinate despite variations in mental acts and linguistic forms that the relation between form and meaning must be indeterminate on the basis merely of rules and conventions.· 2. Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, chap. 6. E. D. Hirsch, Jr. is Kenan Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Validity in Interpretation and Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism. A second edition of his book on Blake, Innocence and Experience, will appear next year, as will a new book on critical theory. (shrink)

F. H. Bradley has assured us that where all is bad it must be good to know the worst. In the case before us the worst is that Jonathan Edwards, from whatever perspective he is viewed, represents an imposing enigma. I confess at the outset that the enigma is one I am unable entirely to dispel, although I am confident that I can explain what is enigmatic about his thought, his approach, his caste of mind, and that I can do (...) so "not through a glass darkly." The central problem is this: Edwards, on the one hand, accepted totally the tradition established by the Reformers with respect to the absolute primacy and authority of the Bible, and he could approach the biblical writings with that conviction of their inerrancy and literal truth which one usually associates with Protestant fundamentalism. On the other hand, Edwards insisted vigorously on the criteria of reason and experience, and he was without equal on the American scene up to the time of Charles Peirce in his capacity for philosophical analysis, for sustaining a logical argument, and for expressing his conclusions with the most painstaking attention to subtle nuances of meaning and rhetorical effectiveness. Moreover, he insisted on the use of philosophical concepts and principles in considering the "things of religion" and his speculations about creation, his estheticism, and pantheism caused deep anxiety in the minds of traditional Calvinists, whose theology was as literal as their biblical exegesis. This double-barrelled character of his approach has led critics to define him as a reactionary and "medieval" thinker who had lost touch with those currents of thought which would eventually lead to the "modern" point of view. Without pausing to evaluate that charge at this point, one thing at least is clear: in relation to his contemporaries Edwards was alone in his attempt to make the religious tradition intelligible in those philosophical terms first laid down by Augustine and Anselm in their enterprise of "faith seeking understanding.". (shrink)