The paper examines important discrepancies between major figures influencing the intellectual development of biosemiotics. It takes its perspective from the work of Gregory Bateson. Unlike C. S. Peirce and J. von Uexküll, Bateson begins with a strong notion of interaction. His early writings were about reciprocity and social exchange, a common topic among anthropologists of the time, but Bateson’s approach was unique. He developed the notion of meta-patterns of exchange, and of the “abduction” of these metapatterns to a variety of (...) other phenomena, in both biology and in game theory. Later, Bateson’s concept of ecology of mind, the product of interactive phenomena, was modified by a non-purposive cybernetics. Biosemiotics has yet to adopt Bateson’s interactive stance, which is absent from Peirce’s approach to communication, of Uexküll’s functional cycles, and of Hoffmeyer’s discussion of the relation between culture and environment. Rather than pursuing notions of appropriate “subjectivity” through changed ethical response to ecological conditions (Hoffmeyer’s discussion of empathy), the paper discusses the advantages of an approach that continues to focus on conditions of paradox and pathology. Specifically, Bateson’s resolution of the relation between culture and environment arises from situations of blocked communication where ecological bonds become binds. (shrink)

'Mass terms', words like water, rice and traffic, have proved very difficult to accommodate in any theory of meaning since, unlike count nouns such as house or dog, they cannot be viewed as part of a logical set and differ in their grammatical properties. In this study, motivated by the need to design a computer program for understanding natural language utterances incorporating mass terms, Harry Bunt provides a thorough analysis of the problem and offers an original and detailed solution. (...) An extension of classical set theory, Ensemble Theory, is defined, and this provides the conceptual basis of a framework for the analysis of natural language meaning which Dr Bunt calls Two-level model-theoretic semantics. The validity of the framework is convincingly demonstrated by the formal analysis of a fragment of English including sentences with quantified and modified mass terms. Separate chapters of the book are devoted to an axiomatic definition of Ensemble Theory and a detailed discussion of its status as a mathematical formalism. (shrink)

Buddhism and its Religious Others: Historical Encounters and Representations, edited by C. V. Jones. Oxford University Press, 2022. 230pp. Hb. £65.00. ISBN-13: 9780197266991.

The theme of the 6th biennial Radical Philosophy Association Conference, held at Howard University in Washington, D.C. in November 2004, was "Philosophy Against Empire." The U.S. imperial project, pursued by both Republican and Democratic administrations, has many dimensions, including military force and the mechanisms for its legitimation; the global economy and flows of money and people across borders; and biopolitics, or the disciplining of bodies through the micro-mechanisms of power apart from traditional forms of sovereignty. These issues are explored in (...) depth in these collected and revised essays from the Conference, along with the forms of subjectivity that can resist and respond to the alienation produced within and by the imperial project, toward the creation of an alternative global order. Authors include Karsten Struhl, Ann Ferguson, Edmund Byrne, David Cormier, Harry Targ, Jo-Ann Pilardi, Lucinda Joy Peach, Devin Zane Shaw, Tzuchien Tho, Eduardo Mendieta, Richard Schmitt, Richard Jones, Richard Peterson, Peter Amato, William McBride, Omar Dahbour, Kory Schaff, David Schweickart, and Carol Gould. (shrink)

This essay argues that fulfilling the promise of participatory democratic theory requires ways for citizens to reconstruct the world, not simply to improve its governance processes. The concept of public work, expressing civic agency, or the capacity of diverse citizens to build a democratic way of life, embodies this shift. It posits citizens as co-creators of the world, not simply deliberators and decision-makers about the world. Public work is a normative, democratizing ideal of citizenship generalized from communal labors of creating (...) the commons, with roots in diverse cultures. Shaped through contention with forces which threaten shared ways of life and their commons, grounded in an understanding of human plurality, public work has political qualities that unmask sentimentalized civic discourses of modern elites. Public work places citizens, not markets or states, as the foundational agents of democracy. It opens a path beyond the political crisis. (shrink)

Being a healthcare professional in both paediatric and adult hospitals will mean being exposed to human tragedies and stressful events involving conflict, misunderstanding, and moral distress. There are a number of different structured approaches to reflection and discussion designed to support healthcare professionals process and make sense of their feelings and experiences and to mitigate against direct and vicarious trauma. In this paper, we draw from our experience in a large children’s hospital and more broadly from the literature to identify (...) and analyse four established approaches to facilitated reflective discussions. Each of the four approaches seeks to acknowledge the stressful nature of health professional work and to support clinicians from all healthcare professions to develop sustainable skills so they continue to grow and thrive as health professionals. Each approach also has the potential to open up feelings of uncertainty, frustration, sorrow, anguish, and moral distress for participants. We argue, therefore, that in order to avoid unintentionally causing harm, a facilitator should have specific skills required to safely lead the discussion and be able to explain the nature, scope, safe application, and limits of each approach. With reference to a hypothetical but realistic clinical case scenario, we discuss the application and key features of each approach, including the goals, underpinning theory, and methods of facilitation. (shrink)

Intolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences of race, color, wealth or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life. Merely legal guarantees of the civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail if the give and take of ideas, facts, experiences, is choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred.Without some kind of oversight, the (...) golem, not God, might emerge from machines … it is naïve to believe that government is competent, let alone in a position to control the development and deployment of robots, self-generating algorithms, and artificial intelligence.... (shrink)

LSJ s.v. πρεσβεω II.3.b recorded, on the strength of Thuc. 5.39.2, the meaning ‘go as ambassador’ for the middle voice, in addition to the well-attested ‘send ambassadors’. The passage, however, does not on inspection support the meaning ; it was deleted from the Supplement to LSJ.

LSJ s.v. πρεσβεω II.3.b recorded, on the strength of Thuc. 5.39.2, the meaning ‘go as ambassador’ for the middle voice, in addition to the well-attested ‘send ambassadors’. The passage, however, does not on inspection support the meaning ; it was deleted from the Supplement to LSJ.

In this essay Harry Boyte and Margaret Finders argue that addressing the “shrinkage” of education and democracy requires acting politically to reclaim and augment Deweyan agency-focused concepts of democracy and education. Looking at agency from the vantage of civic studies, which advances a politics of agency — a citizen politics that is different from ideological politics — and citizens as cocreators of political communities, Boyte and Finders explore the technocratic trends that have eclipsed agency. These disempower educators, students, and (...) communities. Using the case study of the youth empowerment initiative Public Achievement and its translation into the Special Education Program and partnerships of Augsburg College, the authors conclude with an examination of how agentic practices have survived in “shadow spaces” in schools, how such spaces might be turned into “free spaces” for democratic change, and how teacher education needs to prepare “citizen teachers” as well as promoting pedagogies of empowerment. These suggest grounds for a movement of hope and democratic change. (shrink)

Preview: In this essay, drawing on the case of Australia in particular, we develop the argument of “schools for democracy” as part of communities that prioritize developing people’s civic agency for human flourishing. We begin with the concept of social capital – norms, values, and practices of trust and reciprocity essential to vibrant civic life and healthy democratic society – and discuss social capital’s decline in recent years as well as its relationship to what we call public work. Declining social (...) capital and growing demands for politicians and experts to “fix things” turn citizens into spectators, largely devoid of responsibility for addressing public challenges like AI and erode hope for the future. Here, we concentrate mainly on a specific danger related to this dynamic that threatens the cultural and social foundations of democracy and is directly connected to schools and their potential for addressing the danger: In the context of declining community life, social media and other digital platforms shaped by AI can spread an “us-versus-them” mindset that feeds polarization and inflamed divisions, far beyond the formal electoral system. (shrink)

Seit 1923 erscheinen in der Sammlung Tusculum maßgebende Editionen griechischer und lateinischer Werke mit deutscher Übersetzung. Die Originaltexte werden zudem eingeleitet und umfassend kommentiert; nach der neuen Konzeption bieten schließlich thematische Essays tiefere Einblicke in das Werk, seinen historischen Kontext und sein Nachleben. Die hohe wissenschaftliche Qualität der Ausgaben, gepaart mit dem leserfreundlichen Sprachstil der Einführungs- und Kommentarteile, macht jeden Tusculum-Band zu einer fundamentalen Lektüre nicht nur für Studierende, die sich zum ersten Mal einem antiken Autor nähern, und für Wissenschaftler, (...) die spezifische Aspekte eines Werkes vertiefen möchten, sondern für alle, die sich durch vertrauenswürdige Übersetzungen einen Zugang zur Antiken Welt verschaffen wollen. In der Reihe wurden bisher über 270 Titel publiziert, alle erhältlich als Buch und eBook. Dadruch werden bislang vergriffene Titel und Raritäten wieder vollständig verfügbar gemacht. Zusätzlich zu der Buchreihe erscheint bei De Gruyter zum 90-jährigen Jubiläum das eBook-PaketTusculum Online, eine digitale Sammlung aller von 1923 bis 2013 erschienenen Titel -eine gebührende Würdigung eines wichtigen Stücks deutscher Verlagsgeschichte. Mehr Informationen rund um Tusculum erhalten Sie unter: www.degruyter.com/tusculum. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on the issue of aborting abnormal fetuses from the standpoint of the prerogatives and obligations of parents. First, two intuitively‐based models of parenthood are developed. In the Trustee Model, parental authority is grounded in the obligation of parents to promote the interests of children, while the Artisan Model locates parental authority in the intrinsic value of parenthood as a mode of parental self‐expression. Reasons are given for believing that neither of these models, taken individually, contains a (...) complete or adequate picture of parenthood and that both have counterintuitive implications. Under the assumption that there is little hope of developing a master model for parenthood to supplant the two inadequate models, five principles are developed for determining how the two models should be applied in making moral decisions. These principles are then applied to five categories of abnormal fetuses. The conclusion is that abortions are justified in the first three categories (involving severe abnormalities), but not in the fifth category (involving only slight deformities). The fourth category requires parental discretion. Finally, a check on these conclusions is provided by comparing them with a parental action that would generally be considered impermissible, namely the decision of a Jehovah's Witness not to permit a blood transfusion for his or her child in a life‐threatening situation. (shrink)

In response to concerns with existing procedures for measuring strategic control over implicit knowledge in artificial grammar learning , we introduce a more stringent measurement procedure. After two separate training blocks which each consisted of letter strings derived from a different grammar, participants either judged the grammaticality of novel letter strings with respect to only one of these two grammars , or had the target grammar varying randomly from trial to trial which required a higher degree of conscious flexible control. (...) Random variation in the colour and font of letters was introduced to disguise the nature of the rule and reduce explicit learning. Strategic control was observed both in the pure-block and mixed-block conditions, and even among participants who did not realise the rule was based on letter identity. This indicated detailed strategic control in the absence of explicit learning. (shrink)

Abstract: According to certain dispositional accounts of meaning, an agent's meaning is determined by the dispositions that an idealized version of this agent has in optimal conditions. We argue that such attempts cannot properly fix meaning. For even if there is a way to determine which features of an agent should be idealized without appealing to what the agent means, there is no non-circular way to determine how those features should be idealized. We sketch an alternative dispositional account that avoids (...) this problem, according to which an agent's meaning is determined by the dispositions that an abstract version of this agent has in optimal conditions. (shrink)

This essay considers biotrophic cyst and root‐knot nematodes in relation to their biology, host–parasite interactions and molecular genetics. These nematodes have to face the biological consequences of the physical constraints imposed by the soil environment in which they live while their hosts inhabit both above and below ground environments. The two groups of nematodes appear to have adopted radically different solutions to these problems with the result that one group is a host specialist and reproduces sexually while the other has (...) an enormous host range and reproduces by mitotic parthenogenesis. We consider what is known about the modes of parasitism used by these nematodes and how it relates to their host range, including the surprising finding that parasitism genes in both nematode groups have been recruited from bacteria. The nuclear and mitochondrial genomes of these two nematode groups are very different and we consider how these findings relate to the biology of the organisms. BioEssays 30:249–259, 2008. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This paper examines the role which organizational context factors play in individual ethical decision making. Two general propositions are set forth, examining the linkage between ethical work climate and decision making. An agenda for research and the potential implications of the study and practice of managerial ethics are then discussed.

Recognising and responding appropriately to emotions is critical to adaptive psychological functioning. Psychopathic traits (e.g. callous, manipulative, impulsive, antisocial) are related to differences in recognition and response when emotion is conveyed through facial expressions and language. Use of emotional music stimuli represents a promising approach to improve our understanding of the specific emotion processing difficulties underlying psychopathic traits because it decouples recognition of emotion from cues directly conveyed by other people (e.g. facial signals). In Experiment 1, participants listened to clips (...) of emotional music and identified the emotional content (Sample 1, N = 196) or reported on their feelings elicited by the music (Sample 2, N = 197). Participants accurately recognised (t(195) = 32.78, p <.001, d = 4.69) and reported feelings consistent with (t(196) = 7.84, p <.001, d = 1.12) the emotion conveyed in the music. However, psychopathic traits were associated with reduced emotion recognition accuracy (F(1, 191) = 19.39, p <.001) and reduced likelihood of feeling the emotion (F(1, 193) = 35.45, p <.001), particularly for fearful music. In Experiment 2, we replicated findings for broad difficulties with emotion recognition (Sample 3, N = 179) and emotional resonance (Sample 4, N = 199) associated with psychopathic traits. Results offer new insight into emotion recognition and response difficulties that are associated with psychopathic traits. (shrink)

Professional engineering societies which are based in the United States, such as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME, now ASME International) are recognizing that their codes of ethics must apply to engineers working throughout the world. An examination of the ethical code of the ASME International shows that its provisions pose many problems of application, especially in societies outside the United States. In applying the codes effectively in the international environment, two principal issues must be addressed. First, some Culture (...) Transcending Guidelines must be identified and justified. Nine such guidelines are identified. Second, some methods for applying the codes to particular situations must be identified. Three such methods are specification, balancing, and finding a creative middle way. (shrink)

In Norman, Price, and Jones , we argued that the ability to apply two sets of grammar rules flexibly from trial to trial on a “mixed-block” AGL classification task indicated strategic control over knowledge that was less than fully explicit. Jiménez suggested that our results do not in themselves prove that participants learned – and strategically controlled – complex properties of the structures of the grammars, but that they may be accounted for by learning of simple letter frequencies. We (...) first explain why our main conclusions regarding strategic control and conscious awareness are a separable issue to this criticism. We then report additional data which show that our participants’ ability to discriminate between the two grammars was not attributable to differences in simple letter frequencies. (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that individuals in collectivist cultures may be more corrupt than those in individualist cultures when they are interacting with outgroup members. The countries that are least corrupt, according to the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, tend to have horizontal individualist cultures, with Singapore being a prominent counterexample. Can findings at the cultural level of analysis be replicated at the individual level of analysis? To answer this question the authors examined the relationship between deception and cultural orientation (...) in a Singaporean sample. The results indicate that, despite the fact that Singapore is very low in corruption on the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index, vertical collectivism was still able to account for the variance in deception. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)