Michael Davis, a leading figure in the study of professional ethics, offers here both a compelling exploration of engineering ethics and a philosophical analysis of engineering as a profession. After putting engineering in historical perspective, Davis turns to the Challenger space shuttle disaster to consider the complex relationship between engineering ideals and contemporary engineering practice. Here, Davis examines how social organization and technical requirements define how engineers should (and presumably do) think. Later chapters test his analysis of (...) engineering judgement and autonomy empirically, engaging a range of social science research including a study of how engineers and managers work together in ten different companies. (shrink)

La menzogna è irrinunciabile per vincere in politica? Davi ci spiega quali sono i meccanismi di persuasione a cui ricorrono taluni politici per farsi eleggere e quali le responsabilità di quegli elettori che scelgono comunque di votare chi sostiene anche ciò che non può essere vero. È indubbio che la comunicazione politica si rifaccia al simbolismo e al linguaggio delle favole; non necessariamente per occultare la realtà, ma più direttamente per esprimere con maggiore efficacia il suo messaggio. Alle celebri favole (...) di 'Biancaneve', 'Cenerentola', 'Il brutto anatroccolo' sono ricorsi infatti uomini politici del calibro di Berlusconi, Prodi, Nixon, Carter, Mitterrand e partiti quali la Democrazia Cristiana; l'hanno fatto per conquistare voti ma anche per attivare ampi meccanismi di consenso che attingessero direttamente dall'inconscio collettivo. Le conseguenze - ammonisce l'autore - possono essere molto serie, come nel caso dell'attuale politica americana che ha portato la manipolazione e l'inganno a essere riconosciuti come tratti identitari della presidenza di George W. Bush. (shrink)

This book focuses on the significance of the body in contemporary feminist scholarship. Whether the body is treated as biological bedrock or subversive metaphor, it is implicated in the cultural and historical construction of sexual difference as well as asymmetrical power relations. The contributors to this volume examine the role of the body as socially shaped and historically colonized territory and as the focus of individual womenÆs struggles for autonomy and self-determination. They also analyze its centrality to the feminist critique (...) of male-stream science as dualistic, distanced, and decontextualized. While the body has become a "hot item" in contemporary social theory and research, the renewed interest has received a mixed reaction from feminists. The body may be back, but the "new" body theory often proves to be just as disembodied as it ever was. The body revival seems to be less an attempt to re-embody masculinist science than just another expression of the same condition that evoked the feminist critique in the first place: a flight from femininity and everything that is associated with it in Western culture. Drawing on insights from contemporary feminist theories of gender and power, this book offers a timely critical appraisal of the recent "body revival." Embodied Practices not only sets an agenda for research about the body, but for an embodied perspective on the body as well. It will be a valuable and thought-provoking resource for students of womenÆs studies, social theory, cultural studies, and medical sociology. (shrink)

Humanism offers students a clear and lucid introductory guide to the complexities of Humanism, one of the most contentious and divisive of artistic or literary concepts. Showing how the concept has evolved since the Renaissance period, Davies discusses humanism in the context of the rise of Fascism, the onset of World War II, the Holocaust, and their aftermath. Humanism provides basic definitions and concepts, a critique of the religion of humanity, and necessary background on religious, sexual and political themes of (...) modern life and thought, while enlightening the debate between humanism, modernism and antihumanism through the writings and works of such key figures as Pico Erasmus, Milton, Nietzsche, and Foucault. (shrink)

Western philosophers have traditionally concentrated on theory as the means for expressing knowledge about a variety of phenomena. This absorbing book challenges this fundamental notion by showing how objects themselves, specifically scientific instruments, can express knowledge. As he considers numerous intriguing examples, Davis Baird gives us the tools to "read" the material products of science and technology and to understand their place in culture. Making a provocative and original challenge to our conception of knowledge itself, _Thing Knowledge _demands that (...) we take a new look at theories of science and technology, knowledge, progress, and change. Baird considers a wide range of instruments, including Faraday's first electric motor, eighteenth-century mechanical models of the solar system, the cyclotron, various instruments developed by analytical chemists between 1930 and 1960, spectrometers, and more. (shrink)

One of postmodernism's toughest challenges to Christian thought is its wholesale rejection of metaphysics. This profound book meets the challenge squarely, offering a surer foundation for the idea of being and a new theological perspective of supreme relevance to today's world. In a brilliant turn of postmodern thought itself, Oliver Davies argues for a renewal of metaphysics based on a dynamic new understanding of ontology as narrative and performance. His repairing of the Western metaphysical tradition is grounded both in the (...) divine self-naming in Exodus -- which, for the rabbis, identified God's presence in the world with God's compassionate acts -- and in the compassionate resistance of Etty Hillesum and Edith Stein to the violence of the Holocaust. Building on a new metaphysics of compassion that is attentive to the deepest histories of the contemporary world, Davies offers a renewed systematic theology focused on divine speech and God's compassionate relation to human culture. (shrink)

Inventions of Teaching: A Genealogy is a powerful examination of current metaphors for and synonyms of teaching. It offers an account of the varied and conflicting influences and conceptual commitments that have contributed to contemporary vocabularies--and that are in some ways maintained by those vocabularies, in spite of inconsistencies and incompatibilities among popular terms. The concern that frames the book is how speakers of English invented (in the original sense of the word, "came upon") our current vocabularies for teaching. Conceptually, (...) this book is unique in the educational literature. As a whole, it presents an overview of the major underlying philosophical and ideological concepts and traditions related to knowledge, learning, and teaching in the Western world, concisely introducing readers to the central historical and contemporary discourses that shape current discussions and beliefs in the field. Because the organization of historical, philosophical, theoretical, and etymological information is around key conceptual divergences in Western thought rather than any sort of chronology, this text is not a linear history, but several histories--or, more precisely, it is a genealogy. Specifically, it is developed around breaks in opinion that gave or are giving rise to diverse interpretations of knowledge, learning, and teaching--highlighting historical moments in which vibrant new figurative understandings of teaching emerged and moments at which they froze into literalness. The book is composed of two sorts of chapters, "branching" and "teaching." Branching chapters include an opening treatment of the break in opinion, separate discussions of each branch, and a summary of the common assumptions and shared histories of the two branches. Teaching chapters offer brief etymological histories and some of the practical implications of the terms for teaching that were coined, co-opted, or redefined within the various traditions. Inventions of Teaching: A Genealogy is an essential text for senior undergraduate and graduate courses in curriculum studies and foundations of teaching and is highly relevant as well for students, faculty, and researchers across the field of education. (shrink)

Utilitarianism has an apparent pedigree when it comes to animal welfare. It supports the view that animal welfare matters just as much as human welfare. And many utilitarians support and oppose various practices in line with more mainstream concern over animal welfare, such as that we should not kill animals for food or other uses, and that we ought not to torture animals for fun. This relationship has come under tension from many directions. The aim of this article is to (...) add further considerations in support of that tension. I suggest three ways in which utilitarianism comes significantly apart from mainstream concerns with animal welfare. First, utilitarianism opposes animal cruelty only when it offers an inefficient ratio of pleasure to pain; while this may be true of eating animal products, it is not obviously true of other abuses. Second, utilitarianism faces a familiar problem of the inefficacy of individual decisions; I consider a common response to this worry, and offer further concerns. Finally, the common utilitarian argument against animal cruelty ignores various pleasures that humans may get from the superior status that a structure supporting exploitation confers. (shrink)

Read this excellent collection of informative papers in the field to stimulate your ow the field and readers interested in the nature of the discipline of ...

A COMPANION TO AESTHETICS This second edition of A Companion to Aesthetics examines questions that were among the earliest discussed by ancient philosophers, such as the nature of beauty and the relation between morality and art, while also addressing a host of new issues prompted by recent developments in the arts and in philosophy, including coverage of non-Western art traditions and of everyday and environmental aesthetics. The volume also canvases debates regarding the nature of representation, the relation between art and (...) truth, and the criteria for interpretation, which are among the most hotly discussed topics in contemporary philosophy. In this extensively revised and updated edition, 168 alphabetically arranged articles provide comprehensive treatment of the main topics and writers in aesthetics. Major additions include historical overviews from the prehistoric to the present and a section on the individual arts. A Companion to Aesthetics will serve students of philosophy, literary criticism, and cultural studies - as well as the educated general reader - both as a work of reference and, with its many substantial essays, as a guide to the best thinking about the arts from the ancient Greeks to the dawn of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This article explores various analytical issues involved in conceptualizing the interrelationships of gender, class, race and ethnicity and other social divisions. It compares the debate on these issues that took place in Britain in the 1980s and around the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism. It examines issues such as the relative helpfulness of additive or mutually constitutive models of intersectional social divisions; the different analytical levels at which social divisions need to be studied, their ontological base and their relations (...) to each other. The final section of the article attempts critically to assess a specific intersectional methodological approach for engaging in aid and human rights work in the South. (shrink)

“Public Trust in Expert Knowledge: Narrative, Ethics, and Engagement” examines the social, cultural, and ethical ramifications of changing public trust in the expert biomedical knowledge systems of emergent and complex global societies. This symposium was conceived as an interdisciplinary project, drawing on bioethics, the social sciences, and the medical humanities. We settled on public trust as a topic for our work together because its problematization cuts across our fields and substantive research interests. For us, trust is simultaneously a matter of (...) ethics, social relations, and the cultural organization of meaning. We share a commitment to narrative inquiry across our fields of expertise in the bioethics of transformative health technologies, public communications on health threats, and narrative medicine. The contributions to this symposium have applied, in different ways and with different effects, this interdisciplinary mode of inquiry, supplying new reflections on public trust, expertise, and biomedical knowledge. (shrink)

The De Malo represents some of St. Thomas Aquinas' most mature thinking on goodness, badness, and human agency. Together with the second part of the Summa Theologiae, it is one of his most sustained contributions to moral philosophy and theology. Aquinas examines the full range of questions associated with evil: its origin, its nature, its variety, its relation to good, and its compatibility with the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God. This edition offers the Leonine Commission's authoritative edition of the (...) Latin text with a new, clear, and readable English translation by Richard Regan with an extensive introduction and notes by Brian Davies. (shrink)

Do doctors fix patients? Or do they heal them? For all of modern medicine’s many successes, discontent with the quality of patient care has combined with a host of new developments, from aging populations to the resurgence of infectious diseases, which challenge medicine’s overreliance on narrowly mechanistic and technical methods of explanation and intervention, or “fixing’ patients. The need for a better balance, for more humane “healing” rationales and practices that attend to the social and environmental aspects of health and (...) illness and the experiencing person, is more urgent than ever. Yet, in public health and bioethics, the fields best positioned to offer countervailing values and orientations, the dominant approaches largely extend and reinforce the reductionism and individualism of biomedicine. The collected essays in To Fix or To Heal do more than document the persistence of reductionist approaches and the attendant extension of medicalization to more and more aspects of our lives. The contributors also shed valuable light on why reductionism has persisted and why more holistic models, incorporating social and environmental factors, have gained so little traction. The contributors examine the moral appeal of reductionism, the larger rationalist dream of technological mastery, the growing valuation of health, and the enshrining of individual responsibility as the seemingly non-coercive means of intervention and control. This paradigm-challenging volume advances new lines of criticism of our dominant medical regime, even while proposing ways of bringing medical practice, bioethics, and public health more closely into line with their original goals. Precisely because of the centrality of the biomedical approach to our society, the contributors argue, challenging the reductionist model and its ever-widening effects is perhaps the best way to press for a much-needed renewal of our ethical and political discourse. (shrink)

The work of Thomas Aquinas has always enjoyed a privileged position as a pillar of Catholic theology, but for centuries his standing among western philosophers was less sure. Today, Aquinas's work is recognized as a cornerstone of the western philosophical tradition. This book offers a full-scale introduction to Aquinas's philosophy. Brian Davies has collected in one volume the best recent essays on Aquinas by some of the world's foremost scholars of medieval philosophy. Taken together, they illuminate the entire spectrum of (...) Aquinas's thought: philosophy of nature, logic, metaphysics, natural theology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and ethics. The essays are philosophically solid, readable, informative, critical, and evaluative of the texts of Aquinas. Davies frames the essays with a detailed introduction that provides an account of Aquinas's life and works, as well as of his major philosophical conclusions. (shrink)

Introduction -- The road to imperfection -- Cataloguing irrationality -- Some real life examples -- Science to the rescue -- A deeper look at what's wrong -- Assigning the blame -- Can it be fixed.

This illuminating collection of essays encompasses conceptions of responsibility around the globe, as discussed by leading scholars in the fields of philosophy, ...

The nonvisual self-touch rubber hand paradigm elicits the compelling illusion that one is touching one’s own hand even though the two hands are not in contact. In four experiments, we investigated spatial limits of distance and alignment on the nonvisual self-touch illusion and the well-known visual rubber hand illusion. Common procedures and common assessment methods were used. Subjective experience of the illusion was assessed by agreement ratings for statements on a questionnaire and time of illusion onset. The nonvisual self-touch illusion (...) was diminished though never abolished by distance and alignment manipulations, whereas the visual rubber hand illusion was more robust against these manipulations. We assessed proprioceptive drift, and implications of a double dissociation between subjective experience of the illusion and proprioceptive drift are discussed. (shrink)

This book is the fourth in a series of essay collections on defences in private law. It addresses defences to liability arising in equity. The essays range from those adopting a mainly doctrinal perspective to others that explore the law from a more philosophical perspective. Some essays concentrate on specific defences, while others are concerned with the links between defences, or with how defences relate to the structure of the law of equity generally. One aim of the book is to (...) shed light on equitable doctrines by analysing them through the lens of defences. The essays offer original contributions to this complex, important but neglected field of scholarly investigation. The contributors – judges, practitioners and academics – are all distinguished jurists. The essays are addressed to all of the major common law jurisdictions. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to provide an account of Max Scheler’s notion of history and the growing influence that idealism had on its development. For much of this development, Scheler had sought to chart a middle course between Hegel and Marx, or as he expresses it in his later works, a course between idealism and realism. As my argument demonstrates, idealism comes to have an increasing impact on Scheler’s notion of history when he begins in his later work (...) to reflect on the end of history and in particular when he seeks to articulate a “new cosmopolitanism” and “balancing” of cultures at this end. (shrink)

An increasingly prevalent approach to studying human cognition is to construe the mind as optimally allocating limited cognitive resources among cognitive processes. Under this bounded rationality approach (Icard in Philos Sci 85(1):79–101, 2018; Simon in Utility and probability, Palgrave Macmillan, 1980), it is common to assume that resource-bounded cognitive agents approximate normative solutions to statistical inference problems, and that much of the bias and variability in human performance can be explained in terms of the approximation strategies we employ. In this (...) paper, we argue that this approach restricts itself to an unnecessarily narrow scope of cognitive models, which limits its ability to explain how humans flexibly adapt their representations to novel environments. We argue that more attention should be paid to how we form our cognitive representations in the first place, and advocate for pluralistic framework which jointly optimizes over both representations and algorithms for manipulating them. We identify several fundamental trade-offs that manifest in this joint optimization, and draw on recent work to motivate a unified formal framework for this analysis. We illustrate a simplified version of this analysis with a case study in social cognition, and outline several new directions for research that this approach suggests. (shrink)

Shankara was born in the eighth century on the west coast of south India. After devoting himself to yoga practices and meditation, Shankara wrote commentaries on the Bhagavad Gita, some of the Upanishads and other scriptures, and travelled throughout India declaring the oneness of a supreme reality and refuting erroneous philosophical doctrines. He reorganized the ancient, renunciate swami order and established permanent monastic centres in four regions of India: Sringeri in the south, Puri in the east, Dwaraka in the west, (...) and Badrinath in the Himalayas. Shankara lived during an era when Sanatana Dharma was beginning to be more widely emphasized, authoritative leadership was lacking, and conflicting religious sects were promoting a variety of philosophical opinions. His emphasis on the oneness of a supreme reality and the divinity of each person was a harmonizing influence. Besides expounding his non-dualistic views as presented in Self-Knowledge, he also wrote poems and composed hymns to reverently honour a variety of gods and goddesses to inspire and encourage people in all walks of life to be devoted to right living and spiritual practices. (shrink)

According to telling based views of testimony (TBVs), B has reason to believe that p when A tells B that p because A thereby takes public responsibility for B's subsequent belief that p. Andrew Peet presents a new argument against TBVs. He argues that insofar as A uses context-sensitive expressions to express p, A doesn't take public responsibility for B's belief that p. Since context-sensitivity is widespread, the kind of reason TBVs say we have to believe what we're told, is (...) not widespread. Peet doesn't identify any problem with his own argument though he does attempt to limit its sceptical potential by identifying special contexts in which TBVs stand a chance of success. A more general defence of TBVs can be provided by showing Peet's argument to be unsound. I argue that Peet's argument is unsound because it requires us to wrongly suppose that speakers do far less labour than their audiences in context-sensitive linguistic communication. I aim to show why—in the context of the epistemology of testimony and the philosophy of language—it's important to recognize the labour that speakers can do, and so can can be held responsible for not doing, in episodes of context-sensitive linguistic communication. (shrink)

By a close examination of changes in analytical chemistry between the years 1920 and 1950, I document the case that natural science has undergone and continues to undergo a major revolution. The central feature of this transformation is the rise in importance of scientific instrumentation. Prior to 1920, analytical chemists determined the chemical constitution of some unknown by treating it with a series of known compounds and observing the kind of reactions it underwent. After 1950, analytical chemists determined the chemical (...) constitution of an unknown by using a variety of instruments which allow one to discriminate chemicals in terms of their physical properties. This transformation involved changes in the practice of analytical chemistry. It involved the development of a new family of scientific instrument-making companies, and a new level of capital expenditure necessary to do analytical chemistry. It involved the development of new means to disseminate information about scientific instruments. While I do not document the broader case, these changes have been widespread throughout the natural sciences. It is the rise in the importance of instrumentation which is the key conceptual change in what has been identified as the fourth big scientific revolution. (shrink)