Sir Dugald Baird sketches the history of abortion legislation in Great Britain from the beginning of the century. In his views the 1967 Abortion Act has been one of the most important and beneficial pieces of social legislation enacted in Britain in the last 100 years. It has, however, brought problems both of administration in the hospitals and to individual doctors and nurses, particularly when the patients are young single women and even schoolgirls. One of the consequences of (...) the Abortion Act has been a fall in maternal mortality and perinatal mortality rates. Abortion does not seem to be followed by serious emotional sequelae. Nevertheless recent changes in sexual mores have introduced new and serious social problems which are discussed in relation to the role of the doctor in his relationship with patients seeking abortion. (shrink)

Murdoch describes the historical background of the physics from which Bohr's ideas grew; he traces the origins of his idea of complementarity and discusses its meaning and significance. Special emphasis is placed on the contrasting views of Einstein, and the great debate between Bohr and Einstein is thoroughly examined. Bohr's philosophy is revealed as being much more subtle, and more interesting than is generally acknowledged.

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)

Recognizing that truth is socially constructed or that knowledge and power are related is hardly a novelty in the social sciences. In the twenty-first century, however, there appears to be a renewed concern regarding people’s relationship with the truth and the propensity for certain actors to undermine it. Organizations are highly implicated in this, given their central roles in knowledge management and production and their attempts to learn, although the entanglement of these epistemological issues with business ethics has not been (...) engaged as explicitly as it might be. Drawing on work from a virtue epistemology perspective, this paper outlines the idea of a set of epistemic vices permeating organizations, along with examples of unethical epistemic conduct by organizational actors. While existing organizational research has examined various epistemic virtues that make people and organizations effective and responsible epistemic agents, much less is known about the epistemic vices that make them ineffective and irresponsible ones. Accordingly, this paper introduces vice epistemology, a nascent but growing subfield of virtue epistemology which, to the best of our knowledge, has yet to be explicitly developed in terms of business ethics. The paper concludes by outlining a business ethics research agenda on epistemic vice, with implications for responding to epistemic vices and their illegitimacy in practice. (shrink)

To this circumstance is probably to be ascribed the little progress, which has hitherto been made in the PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN MIND ; a, science, ...

Outlines of Moral Philosophy is a classic work of philosophy that explores ethical theories and human nature. Written by Dugald Stewart, this book covers a wide range of topics, from the nature of virtue to the foundations of morality. This edition features a supplementary section with additional questions and discussion points. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the (...) "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This is a survey, intended both for group theorists and model theorists, concerning the structure of pseudofinite groups, that is, infinite models of the first-order theory of finite groups. The focus is on concepts from stability theory and generalisations in the context of pseudofinite groups, and on the information this might provide for finite group theory.

It is shown that no infinite group is interpretable in any structure which is homogeneous in a finite relational language. Related questions are discussed for other ω-categorical structures.

It is shown that if is an o-minimal structure such that is a dense total order and ≾ is a parameter-definable partial order on M, then ≾ has an extension to a definable total order.

This paper suggests that the appearance of circularity in descartes' arguments is due to a lack of precision in his statements of them, Rather than to any flaw in his reasoning. The clear and distinct perceptions presupposed in the demonstrations of the existence of God are not the same as those whose reliability depends upon the existence of god. He is presupposing the reliability only of those clear and distinct perceptions which are known through the light of nature and have (...) metaphysical certainty in that they cannot be imagined false even on the demon hypothesis. And the only clear and distinct perceptions whose reliability he is demonstrating are those which are not known through the light of nature with metaphysical certainty but are subject to metaphysical doubt on the demon hypothesis, Even though they have moral or psychological certainty. (shrink)

Hildegard of Bingen was one of the most remarkable women of her day. From early childhood she experienced religious visions, and at the age of eight she entered a cloistered religious life in the Benedictine monastery of Disibondenberg. Eventually she not only became abbess of the community, but presided over the establishment of an important new convent near Bingen. All but forgotten for hundreds of years, Hildegard was rediscovered in the 1980s and since then her visionary writings have been widely (...) read and studied. Even more surprisingly, music that she composed has been performed and recorded to great acclaim. She has come to be seen by some as a proto-feminist icon -- a woman of great accomplishments who made her own way in a man's world and exerted extraordinary influence over some of the most powerful figures of her time. Much of Hildegard's correspondence has been preserved. It reveals that for more than 30 years this cloistered nun was an unflinching adviser and correspondent to all levels of church and society, from popes and kings to ordinary lay persons, from Jerusalem to England. With the 2004 OUP publication of Volume III of Joseph Baird and Radd Ehrman's translation, the complete correspondence became available for the first time in English. For this new abridgement, Baird has selected 75 of the most interesting and revealing of the letters from Volumes I, II, and III. Freed from the organizational restraints of the Latin edition of the letters, he has arranged them in roughly chronological order and provided greatly expanded, accessibly written introductory notes that contextualize the letters and explain their significance. As a result, this fascinating collection serves as a kind of life in letters that makes an ideal introduction ot this exceptional woman, her world, and her work. This book is the first to give a thorough and definitive illlumination of the personal life of Hildegard of Bingen as viewed through the defining lens of her personal correspondence: her early, hesitant bid for recognition of her spiritual gifts; her courageous, and ultimately futile, fight to retain the companionship of her close personal friend and the poignant outcome of that struggle; her vehement defiance of the male hierarchy in her bid to establish her own communities under her personal governance; her impudent challenge to contemporary conservatives views by the dress and customs she established in her community; her paean of praise for the power of music; and her adamant refusal, even at the advanced age of eighty, to give in to the demands of the male authorities even in the face of excommunication. (shrink)

"This book describes the power of the human mind and the cognitive processes that take place through the use of our external senses. Among these cognitive processes is memory, which receives extensive coverage in the essays. The book also contains a preface section providing an account of the author's life and writings. This section is written by Dugald Stewart, who details the philosophy and publications of the deceased Thomas Reid, the book's author." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all (...) rights reserved). (shrink)

The current research investigates the interaction between thought suppression and individuals’ explicit awareness of their thoughts. Participants in three experiments attempted to suppress thoughts of a prior romantic relationship and their success at doing so was measured using a combination of self-catching and experience-sampling. In addition to thoughts that individuals spontaneously noticed, individuals were frequently caught engaging in thoughts of their previous partner at experience-sampling probes. Furthermore, probe-caught thoughts were: associated with stronger decoupling of attention from the environment, more likely (...) to occur under cognitive load, more frequent for individuals with a desire to reconcile, and associated with individual differences in the tendency to suppress thoughts. Together, these data suggest that individuals can lack meta-awareness that they have begun to think about a topic they are attempting to suppress, providing novel insight into the cognitive processes that are involved in attempting to control undesired mental states. (shrink)

Given that as much as half of human thought arises in a stimulus independent fashion, it would seem unlikely that such thoughts would play no functional role in our lives. However, evidence linking the mind-wandering state to performance decrement has led to the notion that mind-wandering primarily represents a form of cognitive failure. Based on previous work showing a prospective bias to mind-wandering, the current study explores the hypothesis that one potential function of spontaneous thought is to plan and anticipate (...) personally relevant future goals, a process referred to as autobiographical planning. The results confirm that the content of mind-wandering is predominantly future-focused, demonstrate that individuals with high working memory capacity are more likely to engage in prospective mind-wandering, and show that prospective mind-wandering frequently involves autobiographical planning. Together this evidence suggests that mind-wandering can enable prospective cognitive operations that are likely to be useful to the individual as they navigate through their daily lives. (shrink)

At the beginning of Meditation Three, Descartes puts forward the proposition that whatever he clearly and distinctly perceives is true. He observes, however, that so long as he does not know whether there is a deceiving God, he has reason to doubt the proposition. Later in Meditation Three, he purports to prove that there is no deceiving God. The difficulty, as Arnauld pointed out, is to see how Descartes avoids reasoning in a circle or begging the question here, for if (...) he can be certain that there is no deceiving God only because he clearly and distinctly perceives this, then he must already be certain that what he clearly and distinctly perceives is true. (shrink)

Enth.: Dugoald Stewart's account of Adam Smith / ed. by I.S. Ross.

One of the most influential physicists of the twentieth century, Niels Bohr was born in Copenhagen on 7 October 1885, and died there on 18 November 1962. He came of a well‐to‐do, cultivated family, his father being Professor of Physiology at Copenhagen University, where Bohr himself received his education in physics. After taking his doctorate in 1911, Bohr went to Cambridge University to continue his research on the theory of electrons under Sir J. J. Thomson. After several months in Cambridge, (...) he moved to Manchester to work under Ernest Rutherford, the world leader in the newly emerging field of atomic physics. It was in Rutherford's department that Bohr proposed his revolutionary quantum theory of the structure of the hydrogen atom in 1913. (shrink)