The material in this book is philosophically (as opposed to theologically or religiously) oriented, stressing the problem of God as a logical and philosophical problem. The perspective is critically analytic in the Naturalistic-Humanistic tradition. The basic approach is an issues or problems approach, but this is set in a historical context with quotations from Greek philosophy, the Church Fathers, the Medieval period, and from modern philosophers. The aim is to enable students to see what is being said and has been (...) said about God and thereby fits this into a better framework in the light of present knowledge and society. It is hoped that students will develop an awareness and appreciation of the philosophical problems in the concept of God, that they will acquire the ability to engage in intelligent evaluation and exchange of ideas, and that they will display these qualities in their everyday thought. This volume is by no means exhaustive of all the themes in the Philosophy of Religion. The most fundamental ones about God's existence are covered thoroughly. The book is a starting point for more intensive work in the subject. It lays down the basic groundwork for an easy transition to other topics and to more sophisticated thought-patterns. The writing has been kept as concise and elementary as possible with short sections on a variety of topics. (shrink)

Essays on atheism by Kurt Baier, John Dewey, Paul Edwards, Antony Flew, Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm, Sidney Hook, Walter Kaufmann, Corliss Lamont, Wallace I. Matson, H.J. McCloskey, Ernest Nagel, Kai Nielsen, Richard Robinson, Bertrand Russell, and Michael Scriven.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume’s Dialogues and Paradise LostPeter DendleDiscussions of the background of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) tend to focus more on scientific, philosophical, and theological sources than on literary ones, which is only natural given that the work is a philosophical dialogue. Yet the epistolary-dialogue form, a departure from Hume’s usual expository philosophical style, encourages exploring the Dialogues as a work of literature independently of its contribution to the (...) history of philosophy. 1 Newton, Clarke, and the French skeptics are crucial background figures in understanding the importance of Hume’s criticism of natural theology, and the influence of classical writers such as Cicero and Lucretius is equally obvious; but it is not sufficiently appreciated that more recent literary figures such as Milton, Dryden, and Pope also inform the Dialogues. Their influence is not as great as that of those others named, perhaps, but it represents a significant substratum, illuminating in many ways Hume’s conceptualization of the cosmological and philosophical principles to which he responds. The Restoration and Augustan poets, essayists, and even novelists contribute images evoked and examples raised by the disputants in Hume’s dialogue, and an understanding of how these images are used in the Dialogues contributes toward a broader understanding of the conceptual foundations of Hume’s philosophy in relation to the intellectual mainstream of the Enlightenment in general.Among the various works Hume quotes in the Dialogues, including those of Dryden, Lord Bacon, and Lucretius, Paradise Lost provides the longest quotation and is the only source quoted more than once. In the opening pages of the Dialogues (D 134) Philo quotes five lines from Book 2 of Paradise Lost (PL, 565–69), in which the fallen angels, emerging from their great pandemonic council, [End Page 257] take to philosophical speculation. 2 He cites the passage out of context, to demonstrate that skepticism, if forced, is not meaningless and that “Vain Wisdom all and false Philosophy” may yet “charm Pain” and “arm the obdurate breast / With stubborn Patience.” Thus Philo defends against Cleanthes’ charge that skepticism amounts to empty raillery and can have no practical consequences in one’s behavior. The image of the demonic council, confounded in meandering speculation, is an appropriate lead-in for the work as a whole: like the characters in the Dialogues, Milton’s devils “reasoned high.... And found no end, in wandering mazes lost” (PL, 2.558–61).The second of the three quotations from Paradise Lost occurs a third of the way through the Dialogues, when Philo notes in Part V, “The two great sexes of male and female, says MILTON, animate the world” (D, 168; PL, 8.151). Here the innocent adage of Edenic proliferation becomes twisted into an impertinent analogy concerning the sexuality of deities: “Why must this circumstance [sexual reproduction], so universal, so essential, be excluded from those numerous and limited Deities?” (D, 168). 3 It is among the insolent analogies that Philo claims must follow from Cleanthes’ principles. In Part X (D, 195–96) Demea offers a third quotation from Paradise Lost, the longest in the Dialogues, in his attempt to portray the misery of the human condition in this world. The nine lines from Book 11 of Paradise Lost he cites express the wretchedness of the human condition rather morbidly. 4 Thus, the three quotations from Paradise Lost are either distorted for an insalutary effect or are unwholesome to begin with, and they loosely mark the beginning, middle, and latter part of the Dialogues (just as they are taken from the beginning, middle, and latter part of Paradise Lost).The world of Paradise Lost is very much one of counsel and debate, discourse and dialogue: the heavenly and hellish councils of books 2 and 3 give way to the more pastoral conversations within the garden, where Adam and Eve struggle to understand their condition, Raphael and Michael offer wisdom, and Satan tempts. Although the backdrop is the entire cosmos rather than Cleanthes’ library, Milton’s epic no less than Hume’s Dialogues progresses through its stages by the primary vehicle of dialogue rather than action. Paradise Lost affirms the very role of dialectical (as opposed to intuitive) reasoning... (shrink)

This study investigated the link between meditation, self-reported mindfulness and cognitive flexibility as well as other attentional functions. It compared a group of meditators experienced in mindfulness meditation with a meditation-naïve control group on measures of Stroop interference and the “d2-concentration and endurance test”. Overall the results suggest that attentional performance and cognitive flexibility are positively related to meditation practice and levels of mindfulness. Meditators performed significantly better than non-meditators on all measures of attention. Furthermore, self-reported mindfulness was higher in (...) meditators than non-meditators and correlations with all attention measures were of moderate to high strength. This pattern of results suggests that mindfulness is intimately linked to improvements of attentional functions and cognitive flexibility. The relevance of these findings for mental balance and well-being are discussed. (shrink)

The mere presence of irrelevant external stimuli results in interference with the fidelity of details retrieved from long-term memory (LTM). Recent studies suggest that distractibility during LTM retrieval occurs when the focus of resource-limited, top-down mechanisms that guide the selection of relevant mnemonic details is disrupted by representations of external distractors. We review findings from four studies that reveal distractibility during episodic retrieval. The approach cued participants to recall previously studied visual details when their eyes were closed, or were open (...) and irrelevant visual information was present. The results showed a negative impact of the distractors on the fidelity of details retrieved from LTM. An fMRI experiment using the same paradigm replicated the behavioral results and found that diminished episodic memory was associated with the disruption of functional connectivity in whole-brain networks. Specifically, network connectivity supported recollection of details based on visual imagery when eyes were closed, but connectivity declined in the presence of visual distractors. Another experiment using auditory distractors found equivalent effects for auditory and visual distraction during cued recall, suggesting that the negative impact of distractibility is a domain-general phenomenon in LTM. Comparisons between older and younger adults revealed an aging-related increase in the negative impact of distractibility on retrieval of LTM. Finally, a new study that compared categorization abilities between younger and older adults suggests a cause underlying age-related decline of visual details in LTM. The sum of our findings suggests that cognitive control resources, although limited, have the capability to resolve interference from distractors during tasks of moderate effort, but these resources are overwhelmed when additional processes associated with episodic retrieval, or categorization of complex prototypes, are required. (shrink)

What is the future of Philosophy of education? Or as many of scholars and thinkers in this final ‘future-focused’ collective piece from the philosophy of education in a new key Series put it, what are the futures—plural and multiple—of the intersections of ‘philosophy’ and ‘education?’ What is ‘Philosophy’; and what is ‘Education’, and what role may ‘enquiry’ play? Is the future of education and philosophy embracing—or at least taking seriously—and thinking with Indigenous ethicoontoepistemologies? And, perhaps most importantly, what is that (...) ‘Future’? These debates have been located in the work of diverse scholars: from the West, from Global South, from indigenous thinkers. In this collective piece, we purposefully juxtapose diverse takes on the future of these intersections. We have given up the urge to organise, place together, separate with subheadings or connect the paragraphs that follow. Instead, we let these philosophers of education and thinkers who use philosophical texts and ideas to sit together in one long read as potentially ‘strange and unusual bedfellows’. This text urges us to understand how these scholars and thinkers perceive our educational philosophical futures, and how the work and thinking they have done on thinking about what the future of that new key in philosophy of education may look like is embedded in a much deeper and richer literature, and personal experience. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers have gathered impressive evidence for the surprising conclusion that philosophers' intuitions are out of step with those of the folk. As a result, many argue that philosophers' intuitions are unreliable. Focusing on the Knobe Effect, a leading finding of experimental philosophy, we defend traditional philosophy against this conclusion. Our key premise relies on experiments we conducted which indicate that judgments of the folk elicited under higher quality cognitive or epistemic conditions are more likely to resemble those of the (...) philosopher. We end by showing how our experimental findings can help us better understand the Knobe Effect. (shrink)

We outline the drivers, main features, and conceptual underpinnings of the compliance paradigm. We then use a similar structure to investigate the drivers, main features, and conceptual underpinnings of the cooperative paradigm for working with CSR in global value chains. We argue that the measures proposed in the new cooperation paradigm are unlikely to alter power relationships in global value chains and bring about sustained improvements in workers’ conditions in developing country export industries. After that, we provide a critical appraisal (...) of the potential and limits of the cooperative paradigm, we summarize our findings, and we outline avenues for research: purchasing practices and labor standard noncompliance, CSR capacity building among local suppliers, and improved CSR monitoring by local resources in the developing world. (shrink)

As a unique work of reference, The Cambridge Handbook of Australian Criminology covers the broad range of contemporary and historical subjects of criminology, combining statistical and narrative analyses. The book provides the most up-to-date figures and facts, traces historical trends in Australian crime and criminal justice, and comprehensively covers the key contemporary issues in Australian criminology. Including valuable crime statistics compiled by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, this book is the complete companion to Australian criminology - the single most important (...) resource for Australian criminology and criminal justice. (shrink)

In Navigating Everyday Life, Peter Adams explores the moments when everyday experience seems to open up spaces beyond what we normally experience. Adams draws on two philosophical concepts: finitude, the things that bind a person to a situation, and transcendence, the things that lie beyond these boundaries.

Rensink [Rensink, R. A. . Visual sensing without seeing. Psychological Science, 15, 27–32] has presented evidence suggesting visual changes may be sensed without an accompanying visual experience. Here, we report two experiments in which we monitored observers’ eye-movements whilst they searched for a difference between two simultaneously presented images and pressed separate response keys when a difference was seen or sensed. We first assessed whether sensing performance was random by collecting ratings of confidence in the validity of sensing and assessing (...) gaze location during sensing. Sensing was not random: fixation position and confidence ratings were different when a difference was present compared to catch trials. Furthermore, the uniformity of objects in the images and the type of difference appear to affect seeing and sensing differently, suggesting that these processes are dissociated. The possibility is discussed of a sensing mechanism that increases vigilance toward unconsciously registered differences, particularly changes to scene layout. (shrink)

Through case studies that highlight the type of information that is seldom reported in the news, Faces of Environmental Racism exposes the type and magnitude of environmental racism, both domestic and international. The essays explore the justice of current environmental practices, asking such questions as whether cost-benefit analysis is an appropriate analytic technique and whether there are alternate routes to sustainable development in the South.

Through case studies that highlight the type of information that is seldom reported in the news, Faces of Environmental Racism exposes the type and magnitude of environmental racism, both domestic and international. The essays explore the justice of current environmental practices, asking such questions as whether cost-benefit analysis is an appropriate analytic technique and whether there are alternate routes to sustainable development in the South.

Reflecting on the Inevitable combines evidence from several disciplinary fields to explore the varying ways each of us engages with the prospect of personal mortality. In each chapter the subtleties and applicability of key ideas are enhanced through a series of illustrative narratives built up around the lives of four people at different ages living in two adjacent houses. Reflecting on the Inevitable is relevant not only to academics of death studies, but also those training and practicing in people-helping professions, (...) as well as anyone experiencing or attempting to make sense of major life events. (shrink)

Excessive dog barking is among the leading sources of noise pollution world-wide; however, the reasons for the annoyance of barking to people remained uninvestigated. Our questions were: is the annoyance rating affected by the acoustic parameters of barks; does the attributed inner state of the dog and the nuisance caused by its barks correlate; does the gender and country of origin affect the subjects’ sensitivity to barking. Participants from Hungary (N = 100) and Brazil (N = 60) were tested with (...) sets of 27 artificial bark sequences. Subjects rated each bark according to the inner state of the dog and the annoyance caused by the particular bark. Subjects from both countries found high-pitched barks the most annoying: however, harsh, fast-pulsing, low-pitched barks were also unpleasant. Men found high-pitched barks more annoying than the women did. Annoyance ratings showed positive correlation with assumed negative inner states of the dog, positive emotional ratings showed negative correlation with the annoyance level. This is the first indication that acoustic features that were selected for effective vocal signalling may be annoying for human listeners. Among the explanations for this effect the role of affective communication and similar bioacoustics of particular animal vocalizations and baby cries are discussed. (shrink)

The theory of scale-covariant gravity is extended to include charged matter and electromagnetism at the classical level. The possibility of charge creation exists and the creation rate of charge differs from the creation rate of matter. A variational principle for scale-covariant gravity and electromagnetism coupled to a charged perfect fluid is given.

This article develops the new concept of environing media against the case of Mexico’s complex history over the past five centuries. To do this, it stakes out a theoretical development consisting in a shift in understanding from media as content-delivery systems to data processors, combining it with a processual understanding of environment as an ongoing and historical process of environing. In addition, the article discusses examples of indigenous media, an area that has so far received very little attention. The Aztec (...) empire was as dependent on media forms as the Spanish colonizers who replaced it, and there are numerous cases of knowledges and practices surviving in hybrid forms, for example as part of maps. For much of its history, the field of media studies has been biased toward questions of (1) ideological or attitudinal influence caused by (2) modern or emergent technologies. This article goes in another direction by thinking about media as (1) environing and (2) residual. Media are agencies of civilizational and environmental order. The rise of digital media in recent decades has reinforced the fundamental logistical role of media as agencies that arrange, catalog, organize, network, and index people, places, and things. Our understanding of media as fundamental constituents of organization joins the recent interest in infrastructures. Calendars, clocks, towers, names, addresses, maps, registers, arms, and money are all infrastructural media. Such media become second nature, morphing biorhythms and altering ecosystems. Today’s planetary digital infrastructure builds upon the long legacy of resource management via databases. We argue for a longer genealogy of the nature shaping logistical role of media that is so evident today. In this article, we refine and exemplify these claims via a case study of some environing media in Mexico, a country with a deep and rich media history. (shrink)

In a questionnaire study we surveyed the owners of 113 companion dogs. Owners had to mark on a four-grade scale how long their dog remembered particular memory items (persons, other animals, events, objects). Additionally we collected descriptive data on the demographical characteristics of the dog and the keeping conditions.A principal component analysis on the memory items resulted in five components. From these, two were connected to people (`Family' and `Intruders'), three other components contained individual items of memory of objects and (...) events (`Going out', Playing' and `Doing something'). Analyses of variance revealed that the dog-owner relationship, the keeping conditions, age and breed of the dog affect the dogs' memory as described by the owner. The amount of time spent together or the education of the owner had no or minimal effect on these components.Our study showed that owners form stable opinions about their dogs' episodic memory capacity. Nevertheless, the results can be biased by such factors that affect either the owners' opinions about their dog-companions, or the dogs' access to particular stimuli, which can modify the formation of memory traces. In the future, these results can serve as a starting point for empirical testing of family dogs' memory. Keywords: dogs; dog owners; memory; questionnaire. (shrink)

In a questionnaire study we surveyed the owners of 113 companion dogs. Owners had to mark on a four-grade scale how long their dog remembered particular memory items. Additionally we collected descriptive data on the demographical characteristics of the dog and the keeping conditions.A principal component analysis on the memory items resulted in five components. From these, two were connected to people, three other components contained individual items of memory of objects and events. Analyses of variance revealed that the dog-owner (...) relationship, the keeping conditions, age and breed of the dog affect the dogs’ memory as described by the owner. The amount of time spent together or the education of the owner had no or minimal effect on these components.Our study showed that owners form stable opinions about their dogs’ episodic memory capacity. Nevertheless, the results can be biased by such factors that affect either the owners’ opinions about their dog-companions, or the dogs’ access to particular stimuli, which can modify the formation of memory traces. In the future, these results can serve as a starting point for empirical testing of family dogs’ memory. Keywords: dogs; dog owners; memory; questionnaire. (shrink)

In a questionnaire study we surveyed the owners of 113 companion dogs. Owners had to mark on a four-grade scale how long their dog remembered particular memory items. Additionally we collected descriptive data on the demographical characteristics of the dog and the keeping conditions.A principal component analysis on the memory items resulted in five components. From these, two were connected to people, three other components contained individual items of memory of objects and events. Analyses of variance revealed that the dog-owner (...) relationship, the keeping conditions, age and breed of the dog affect the dogs’ memory as described by the owner. The amount of time spent together or the education of the owner had no or minimal effect on these components.Our study showed that owners form stable opinions about their dogs’ episodic memory capacity. Nevertheless, the results can be biased by such factors that affect either the owners’ opinions about their dog-companions, or the dogs’ access to particular stimuli, which can modify the formation of memory traces. In the future, these results can serve as a starting point for empirical testing of family dogs’ memory. Keywords: dogs; dog owners; memory; questionnaire. (shrink)

This article provides a review of what we know, what we do not know, and what we need to know about the relationship between industrial clusters and corporate social responsibility in developing countries. In addition to the drivers of and barriers to the adoption of CSR initiatives, this study highlights key lessons learned from empirical studies of CSR initiatives that aimed to improve environmental management and work conditions and reduce poverty in local industrial districts. Academic work in this area remains (...) embryonic, lacking in empirical evidence about the effects of CSR interventions on the profitability on local enterprises, workers, and the environment. Nor do theoretical frameworks offer clear explanations of the institutionalization and effects of CSR in local industrial districts in the developing world. Other key limitations in this research stream include an excessive focus on export-oriented industrial clusters, the risk that CSR becomes a form of economic and cultural imperialism, and the potential for joint-action CSR initiatives in clusters of small and medium-sized enterprises to offer a new form of greenwashing. From this review, the authors develop a theoretical model to explain why CSR has not become institutionalized in many developing country clusters, which in turn suggests that the vast majority of industrial clusters in developing countries are likely to engage in socially irresponsible behavior. (shrink)

In real-time, Twitter strongly imprints world events, popular culture, and the day-to-day; Twitter records an ever growing compendium of language use and change; and Twitter has been shown to enable certain kinds of prediction. Vitally, and absent from many standard corpora such as books and news archives, Twitter also encodes popularity and spreading through retweets. Here, we describe Storywrangler, an ongoing, day-scale curation of over 100 billion tweets containing around 1 trillion 1-grams from 2008 to 2020. For each day, we (...) break tweets into 1-, 2-, and 3-grams across 150+ languages, record usage frequencies, and generate Zipf distributions. We make the data set available through an interactive time series viewer, and as downloadable time series and daily distributions. We showcase a few examples of the many possible avenues of study we aim to enable including how social amplification can be visualized through ‘contagiograms’. (shrink)

Should the law recognize an elephant’s right to be released from solitary confinement? The New York State Court of Appeals—the highest court in the State of New York—will consider this question on May 18. At issue is an Asian elephant named Happy. But happy she is not. Every human being has a right to bodily liberty because they have strong interests that this right protects. Since Happy has the same strong interests, the Court should recognize Happy’s right to be freed (...) from solitary confinement. (shrink)

We argue on consequentialist grounds for the transfer of Sandai, an orangutan, to an orangutan sanctuary. First, we show that satisfying his interest in being transferred brings far greater value than the value achieved by keeping him confined. Second, we show that he has the capacities sufficient for personhood. Third, we show that all persons have a right to relative liberty insofar as they have interests they can exercise only under conditions of relative liberty. Fourth, we show that individuals need (...) not be able to assume social obligations and duties in order to be rights holders. -/- Our argument reflects commitments, as we say, to consequentialist reasoning about moral problems. However, we note that influential representatives of the other dominant ethical traditions—the deontological and Aristotelian traditions—reach our conclusion, too. It makes no difference, in this instance, which ethical theory one adopts. Under all of them, Sandai is a person with an interest in relative liberty entitled to habeas corpus protection. (shrink)

This article contributes to literature on corporate social responsibility exhibited by industrial clusters in developing countries. The authors conceptualize and empirically investigate the role of donor-funded CSR initiatives aimed at promoting collective action by cluster-based small- and medium-sized enterprises. A case study of the Sialkot football-manufacturing cluster in Pakistan indicates that donor-funded support of CSR initiatives in industrial clusters in developing countries may be short-lived, due to the political economy of aid, the national context of CSR implementation, tensions within SME (...) networks, and negative perceptions of CSR by the cluster-based SMEs themselves. The findings and implications of this analysis can inform both research and policy making in this area. (shrink)

It is a pleasure to be able to pay tribute to Adam Potkay’s interesting and impressive book on two of the most important figures in the eighteenth century. It brings together the philosophical and the literary, the “anatomist” and the “painter” of the passions and the moral life, integrating worlds that, however isolated they may have become in the twentieth century, were not seen as all that distinct in the eighteenth. Having said this, the most remarkable feature of Potkay’s (...) book is that it unites two figures usually thought to be opposed—the irascible, domineering, and deeply Christian Johnson and the dispassionate, moderate, and pagan Hume. (shrink)

We present ethical reasons that the court should grant the Nonhuman Rights Project’s (NhRP) request for habeas corpus relief for Happy, an elephant. Happy has a basic interest in not being confined, an interest that should be legally protected just as the human interest in not being confined is legally protected. Since the decision in The Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v Breheny failed to weigh Happy’s interests properly, we ask this body to correct the error.