Biblical authority is definitive for many Protestants in matters of faith and practice. The question this essay addresses is the deafening silence of this Scriptural authority on the controversial issue of abortion, especially because Christian scholars have argued vehemently against this practice. In particular, Michael Gorman's recent article ‘Why is the New Testament silent about abortion?’ raises many substantive issues with implications for the very meaning of authority, faith, and the life of the community. It is contended that elective (...) abortion poses significant substantive issues with which a woman, or couple, must struggle, and that it is inappropriate (perhaps unfaithful) to make such a profound decision according to unfeeling or out-modeled patriarchal rules. (shrink)

Presents a plethora of approaches to developing human potential in areas not conventionally addressed. Organized in two parts, this international collection of essays provides viable educational alternatives to those currently holding sway in an era of high-stakes accountability.

While some may argue that universities are in a state of crisis, others claim that we are living in a post-university era; a time after universities. If there was a battle for the survival of the institution, it is over and done with. The buildings still stand. Students enrol and may attend lectures, though let’s be clear—most do not. But virtually nothing real remains. What some mistakenly take to be a university is, in actuality, an ‘uncanny’ spectral presence; ‘the nagging (...) presence of an absence … a “spectralized amnesiac modernity with its delusional totalizing systems”’. It is the remains and remnants of the university.[1]Overstatement? Perhaps. We think many if not most administrators, at all levels, will likely dissent. So too will many if not most teachers and students. Trying to determine whether this is correct, or to what extent, by consulting polls and reading opinion pieces in various education journals and professional papers is likely to be of little help. In any case, it is the hypothesis, along with closely related ones, and concerns about what can be done in the circumstances, that have generated this special issue.This special issue highlights and illustrates that most of the contested issues regarding educational theory and practice central to how universities and schools should be, and how they should be run, are first and foremost questions of value rather than fact. They are questions regarding what we want, but more importantly what we should want, from our universities and schools; about what they should be and what students, teachers and administrators should be doing to facilitate this.[1] See Cox and Levine and Boaks, Cox and Levine. (shrink)

One of the most influential analytic philosophers of the late twentieth century, William P. Alston is a leading light in epistemology, philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of language. In this volume, twelve leading philosophers critically discuss the central topics of his work in these areas, including perception, epistemic circularity, justification, the problem of religious diversity, and truth.

One of the most influential analytic philosophers of the late twentieth century, William P. Alston is a leading light in epistemology, philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of language. In this volume, twelve leading philosophers critically discuss the central topics of his work in these areas, including perception, epistemic circularity, justification, the problem of religious diversity, and truth.

Conflicts have arisen between communities and operators of confined animal feeding as farms have become bigger in order to maintain their competitiveness. These conflicts have been difficult to resolve because measuring and allocating the benefits and costs of livestock production is difficult. This papers demonstrates a policy tool for promoting compromise whereby the community gets reduced negative impacts from livestock while at the same time continues to benefit from livestock jobs, taxes, and related economic activity. Public economic benefits and public (...) economic costs of confined animal feeding operations are estimated for every farm and affected house in Craven County, North Carolina. The results show public economic benefits of $5.7 million and public economic costs of $2.2 million, but that the ratio of benefits to costs for individual farm-house pairs varies in important ways across the 26 hog farms in Craven County. (shrink)

In "The Imagination of Disaster," written at or close to the height of the Cold War, Sontag ruminates on what America's interest in, if not preoccupation with, science fiction films tell us about ourselves.1 Their popularity cannot be explained in terms of their entertainment value alone; or if it can, then why audiences found such films entertaining is something that itself needs explanation. Almost all films in the hero genre are also science fiction and are concerned with disasters of one (...) kind or another. What Sontag has to say about disaster in the 1950s can easily be applied to the seemingly insatiable desire for hero films today. Her account is useful in explaining both what our attractions... (shrink)

As John Henry Newman reflected on 'The Idea of a University' more than a century and a half ago, Bradley C. S. Watson brings together some of the nation's most eminent thinkers on higher education to reflect on the nature and purposes of the American university today. Their mordant reflections paint a picture of the American university in crisis. This book is essential reading for thoughtful citizens, scholars, and educational policymakers.

This paper examines ethical issues involved in the mass marketing of securities to individuals. The marketing of products deemed “socially questionable” or “sinful” (like tobacco and alcohol) has long been recognized as posing special ethical challenges (Kotler, P. and S. Levy: 1971, Harvard Business Review 49, 74–80; Davidson, D. K: 1996, Selling Sin: The Marketing of Socially Unacceptable Products (Quorum Press, Westport). We contend that marketers should consider securities (i.e. common stock, options) in a similar vein, as a potentially dangerous (...) product. Given the inherent volatility of equity prices, responsible marketers need to exercise caution and restraint in promoting securities. We evaluate whether the NYSE’s current guidelines adequately encourage ethical marketing practices and deter unethical ones. Using recent examples of controversial brokerage advertisements, we expose weaknesses in the Exchange’s vague injunction that members not “mislead” reasonable people by making “exaggerated claims” in their communications. From a moral perspective, we find it troublesome that intentionality need not be present for a promotion to be considered misleading. Also problematic is the continued invocation of the reasonable person standard to judge the propriety of advertisements. We close with some thoughts on improving the quality of securities marketing. We suggest that the NYSE, in the interests of fostering higher ethical behavior among member marketers, may need to revive a marketing code of conduct prevalent on Wall Street in an earlier era. (shrink)

One new form of liberalism is a doctrine that might be called Constitutional Welfare Liberalism. It stands in some continuity with the varieties of welfare and equality oriented liberalism that emerged in the Nineteenth Century and which found expression in the U.S. in political movements like the New Deal of F.D.R. and the Great Society of L.B.J. Constitutional Welfare Liberalism differs somewhat from earlier versions of Welfare Liberalism in that it claims to be solidly grounded in the fundamentals of the (...) liberal tradition and of the American Constitution. Advocates of Constitutional Welfare Liberalism would replace what they call the “negative-liberties model” of the Constitutional order with a “benefits model.” They rest their case on an analysis of rights that denies the meaningfulness of the common distinction between negative and positive rights. Some advocates of Constitutional Welfare Liberalism also base their claims on the positive empowerments and ends of government as expressed in the Preamble to the Constitution. It is shown here via an analysis of the negative/positive rights distinction that the distinction is indeed meaningful when understood more accurately than Constitutional Welfare Liberalism theorists do. Likewise it is shown that neither the general character of the Constitution as an empowerment of government, nor the particular goals stated in the Preamble imply the benefits model. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explain Hume's account of the way both the scope and the degree of benevolent motivation is limited. I argue that Hume consistently affirms, both in the _Treatise<D> and in the second _Enquiry<D>, (i) that the scope of benevolent motivation is very broad, such that it includes any creature that is conscious and capable of thought, and (ii) that the degree of benevolent motivation is limited, such that a person is naturally inclined to feel (...) benevolence more strongly for one with whom he or she has a 'connexion', e.g., a family member or friend. (shrink)

Le pluralisme aléthique est la conception suivant laquelle il y a plus d’une manière pour des propositions d’être vraies. Cet article étudie trois manières de comprendre cette idée et argumente que chacune a des faiblesses significatives. Je conclus en suggérant une issue au pluraliste qui lui permette de construire une position plus plausible.

An account of the relation between belief and practice is inseparable from a general theory of religion and religious discourse. Rejection of the one time popular, but now more or less defunct, nonrealist position of people such as D. Z. Phillips, Don Cupitt, and indeed Wittgenstein leaves contemporary theo rists in anthropology and the "history of religions" with basically the vastly different "literalist" and "symbolist" analyses of religion from which to choose. This article critically appraises John Skorupksi's influential defense of (...) intellectualism. I argue that his dismissal of symbolist approaches is more theoretically radical than he recog nizes. It rejects outright some of the very foundations and staples of contempo rary anthropology in, for example, Durkheim. His argument for the rejection of the symbolist approach is examined. Skorupski's defense of intellectualism is set in the context of a problematically naive understanding of the nature and function of religion. (shrink)

After he was delivered from the necessity of making provision for the flesh in its concupiscence and after tendering his resignation as a professor of rhetoric, St. Augustine was, in the autumn of 386 a.d., eager to explore his newfound Christian faith and prepare for his reception into the Catholic Church. His conversion, momentous though it was, did not so much entail a repudiation of all that he had learned and studied as it did a transformation of what had brought (...) him to the threshold of religious belief. Chief among the spoils of Augustine’s early education was philosophy, which he understood primarily as an all-encompassing love of wisdom and only secondarily as a confederacy of.. (shrink)

Introduction 1 P. D. Magnus and Jacob Busch 1. Form-driven vs. Content-driven Arguments for Realism 8 Juha Saatsi 2. Optimism about the Pessimistic Induction 29 Sherrilyn Roush 3. Metaphysics between the Sciences and Philosophies of Science 59 Anjan Chakravartty 4. Nominalism and Inductive Generalizations 78 Jessica Pfeifer 5. Models and Scientific Representations 94 Otávio Bueno 6. The Identical Rivals Response to Underdetermination 112 Gregory Frost-Arnold and P. D. Magnus 7. Scientific Representation and the Semiotics of Pictures 131 Laura Perini 8. (...) Philosophy of the Environmental Sciences 155 Jay Odenbaugh 9. Value Judgements and the Estimation of Uncertainty in Climate Modeling 172 Justin Biddle and Eric Winsberg 10. Feminist Standpoint Empiricism: Rethinking the Terrain in Feminist Philosophy of Science 198 Kristen Intemann 11. Naturalism and the Enlightenment Ideal: Rethinking a Central Debate in the Philosophy of Social Science 226 Daniel Steel 12. New Approaches to the Division of Cognitive Labor 250 Michael Weisberg. (shrink)

When there is a conflict between parents and the physician over appropriate care due to an infant whose decision prevails? What standard, if any, should guide such decisions?This article traces the varying standards articulated over the past three decades from the proposal in Duff and Campbell’s 1973 essay that these decisions are best left to the parents to the Baby Doe Regs of the 1980s which required every life that could be salvaged be continued. We conclude with support for the (...) policy articulated in the 2007 guidelines of the American Academy of Pediatrics on non-intervention or withdrawal of intensive care for high-risk newborns. (shrink)

Suppose a computer prints out the following little "poem": The shooting of the hunters she heardBut to pity it moved her not. What can we say about the meaning of this "poem"? We can say that it is ambiguous. It could mean: She heard the hunters shooting at animals, people, etc., but she had no pity for the victims. . . . She heard the hunters being shot but did not pity them. . . . She heard the hunters shooting (...) at someone or something and she heard the hunters being shot but did not pity either. An author could use the above word sequence to convey either , , or . But since we cannot treat the text produced by the computer as anyone's use of the words in question, it would not make sense to decide among its linguistically possible readings, just as it would not make sense to choose among the linguistically possible readings of an ambiguous sentence if it is considered in abstraction from its use by a speaker on a particular occasion. For example, it would not make sense to say of the sentence "He saw the man carrying the suitcase" that it just means "He saw the man who is carrying the suitcase" if we know that and in which what ways the sentence is ambiguous. If someone did say this, we would be inclined to think either that he does not know that the sentence is ambiguous or that he is talking not about the sentence but about an utterance of that sentence by a speaker on some occasion. Hence all we can do in interpreting the computer "poem" is to specify the set of its linguistically possible readings, namely, {, , }. But it would not make sense to select , for example, and say, "That is what the computer poem means, not , nor ." P. D. Juhl is an assistant professor of German at Princeton University. The present essay, in a different form, will appear in his forthcoming book, The Nature of Literary Interpretation. See also: "Against Theory" by Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels in Vol. 8, No. 4. (shrink)

People often choose intuitive rather than equally valid nonintuitive alternatives. The authors suggest that these intuitive biases arise because intuitions often spring to mind with subjective ease, and the subjective ease leads people to hold their intuitions with high confidence. An investigation of predictions against point spreads found that people predicted intuitive options more often than equally valid nonintuitive alternatives. Critically, though, this effect was largely determined by people's confidence in their intuitions. Across naturalistic, expert, and laboratory samples, against personally (...) determined point spreads, and even when intuitive confidence was manipulated by altering irrelevant aspects of the decision context, the authors found that decreasing intuitive confidence reduced or eliminated intuitive biases. These findings indicate that intuitive biases are not inevitable but rather predictably determined by contextual variables that affect intuitive confidence. (shrink)

In recent years, we have seen a new concern with ethics training for research and development professionals. Although ethics training has become more common, the effectiveness of the training being provided is open to question. In the present effort, a new ethics training course was developed that stresses the importance of the strategies people apply to make sense of ethical problems. The effectiveness of this training was assessed in a sample of 59 doctoral students working in the biological and social (...) sciences using a pre-post design with follow-up and a series of ethical decision-making measures serving as the outcome variable. Results showed not only that this training led to sizable gains in ethical decision making but also that these gains were maintained over time. The implications of these findings for ethics training in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

Cet article présente les résultats de l'analyse d'isotopes stables du carbone et de l'azote pratiquée sur des échantillons d'ossements humains issus des fouilles de l'habitat mésohelladique de l'Aspis. L'objectif de l'analyse est de reconstituer le régime alimentaire des habitants de l'Aspis et d'étudier les variations de régime entre des sous-groupes de population définis par des critères d'âge et de sexe et/ou de statut social. Sept échantillons ont été prélevés, dont quatre seulement ont fourni suffisamment de collagène pour être analysés. Les (...) données isotopiques indiquent que les habitants de l'Aspis avaient un régime alimentaire de type terrestre C3 relativement homogène ; toutefois, le seul individu de sexe masculin inhumé dans le cimetière semble avoir consommé plus de protéines animales (viande et/ou produits laitiers). Les ressources marines semblent avoir occupé une place négligeable dans l'alimentation des habitants de l'Aspis. D'une façon générale, le signal isotopique de leur régime alimentaire ne diffère pas fondamentalement de celui qui a été observé pour leurs contemporains de Lerne ou pour le groupe inhumé dans le Cercle Β de Mycènes. (shrink)

Ethical decision making measures are widely applied as the principal dependent variable used in studies of research integrity. However, evidence bearing on the internal and external validity of these measures is not available. In this study, ethical decision making measures were administered to 102 graduate students in the biological, health, and social sciences, along with measures examining exposure to ethical breaches and the severity of punishments recommended. The ethical decision making measure was found to be related to exposure to ethical (...) events and the severity of punishments awarded. The implications of these findings for the application of ethical decision making measures are discussed. (shrink)

It is commonly held that early career experiences influence ethical behavior. One way early career experiences might operate is to influence the decisions people make when presented with problems that raise ethical concerns. To test this proposition, 102 first-year doctoral students were asked to complete a series of measures examining ethical decision making along with a series of measures examining environmental experiences and climate perceptions. Factoring of the environmental measure yielded five dimensions: professional leadership, poor coping, lack of rewards, limited (...) competitive pressure, and poor career direction. Factoring of the climate inventory yielded four dimensions: equity, interpersonal conflict, occupational engagement, and work commitment. When these dimensions were used to predict performance on the ethical decision-making task, it was found that the environmental dimensions were better predictors than the climate dimensions. The implications of these findings for research on ethical conduct are discussed. (shrink)

Institutional review board delays may hinder the successful completion of federally funded research in the U.S. military. When this happens, time-sensitive, mission-relevant questions go unanswered. Research participants face unnecessary burdens and risks if delays squeeze recruitment timelines, resulting in inadequate sample sizes for definitive analyses. More broadly, military members are exposed to untested or undertested interventions, implemented by well-intentioned leaders who bypass the research process altogether. To illustrate, we offer two case examples. We posit that IRB delays often appear in (...) the service of managing institutional risk, rather than protecting research participants. Regulators may see more risk associated with moving quickly than risk related to delay, choosing to err on the side of bureaucracy. The authors of this article, all of whom are military-funded researchers, government stakeholders, and/or human subject protection experts, offer feasible recommendations to improv... (shrink)

Recently, Rueger and Sharp (1996) and Koperski (1998) have been concerned to show that certain procedural accounts of model confirmation are compromised by non-linear dynamics. We suggest that the issues raised are better approached by considering whether chaotic data analysis methods allow for reliable inference from data. We provide a framework and an example of this approach.

Threshold- and signal-detection-based models have dominated theorizing about recognition memory. Building upon these theoretical frameworks, we have argued for a dual-process model in which conscious recollection and familiarity contribute to memory performance. In the current paper we assessed several memory models by examining the effects of levels of processing and the number of presentations on recognition memory receiver operating characteristics . In general, when the ROCs were plotted in probability space they exhibited an inverted U shape; however, when they were (...) plotted inzspace they exhibited a U shape. An examination of the ROCs showed that the dual-process model could account for the observed ROCs, but that models based solely on either threshold or signal-detection processes failed to provide a sufficient account of the data. Furthermore, an examination of subjects' introspective reports using the remember/know procedure showed that subjects were aware of recollection and familiarity and were able to consistently report on their occurrence. The remember/know data were used to accurately predict the shapes of the ROCs, and estimates of recollection and familiarity derived from the ROC data mirrored the subjective reports of these processes. (shrink)

The emotion of anger, when chronic, is especially problematic. Frequent and intense experiences of anger predict quite a few adverse health outcomes and are especially implicated in cardiovascular...