De dicto moral motivation is typically characterized by the agent’s conceiving of her goal in thin normative terms such as to do what is right. I argue that lacking an effective de dicto moral motivation would put the agent in a bad position for responding in the morally-best manner in a certain type of situations. Two central features of the relevant type of situations are the appropriateness of the agent’s uncertainty concerning her underived moral values, and the practical, moral importance (...) of resolving this uncertainty. I argue that in some situations that are marked by these two features the most virtuous response is deciding to conduct a deep moral inquiry for a de dicto moral purpose. In such situations lacking an effective de dicto moral motivation would amount to a moral shortcoming. I show the implications for Michael Smith’s argument against Motivational Judgment Externalism and for Brian Weatherson’s argument against avoiding moral recklessness: both arguments rely on a depreciating view of de dicto moral motivation, and both fail; or so I argue. (shrink)

Controversies over the innateness of cognitive processes, mechanisms, and structures play a persistent role in driving research in philosophy as well as the cognitive sciences, but the appropriate way to understand the category of the innate remains subject to dispute. One venerable approach in philosophy and cognitive science merely contrasts innate features with those that are learned. In fact, Jerry Fodor has recently suggested that this remains our best handle on innateness.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Catholic Social Teaching in Global PerspectiveRon MercierCatholic Social Teaching in Global Perspective Edited by Daniel Mcdonald, SJ Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 2010. 218 pp. $26.00The collection of essays in Catholic Social Teaching in Global Perspective, the second in a Gregorian University series, responds to a question posed to its authors: “How can you reflect on your particular continent and its ‘culture’ in order to best apply... CST [Catholic social (...) teaching] in your area of the world?” (x). Although the responses of the various authors to that challenge are uneven, the deliberate emphasis on a cultural-critical approach makes this [End Page 211] volume noteworthy and a significant contribution to the discussions in the field.Thomas Hughson’s introductory essay frames the task provocatively. Exploring the work of Bernard Lonergan and Robert Doran on culture, he takes aim at the ways in which “common good” and “Catholic social teaching” too often serve as categorical realities, as if they had a universal and absolute meaning applicable to any concrete situation. He recasts CST by placing it in dialogue with contemporary currents in philosophy and social science and notes both the broader meaning and the fluidity of social justice within CST. He develops what he calls a “modified eudemonistic perspective... to highlight incompleteness in social justice and a common good taken by themselves” (25). This calls for a “reflexive culture,” along the lines of the “transcendental humanism” in Benedict XVI’s Caritas in veritate. While the emphasis on “human flourishing” certainly has a long history in the tradition, Hughson’s approach empowers local communities to make CST their own as a mode of discerning what fosters or undermines human flourishing. For too long CST “has ignored how movement toward just social practice depends on two factors, reflexive culture ‘from above’ and popular culture ‘from within’ practicality” (22). This perspective links well with the insights and concerns of liberation theology, notably its ecclesiology, and helps clarify the meaning and potential of CST.Several essays in the volume pick up this theme even as they explore the many prisms through which one can understand “culture.” David Kaulemu reflects on the African situation in ways similar to Paulinus Odozor and Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator, calling for “moral/cultural/spiritual efforts to accompany our political and economic reforms” (37). He explores cultural resources for and barriers to human flourishing in an African context. Agnes Brazal (East Asia) and Joseph Jadhav (India) write in a similar vein: Brazal on the relationship between the role of “harmony” in an East Asian world view and the fragmentation and hybridity engendered by globalization; Jadhav on the interplay between CST and local culture in an arid rural part of India, which has created possibilities for culturally transformative action. John Coleman’s rich and nuanced reflection on North American (especially US) culture underlines the challenges CST faces.Sandie Cornish and David Freeman (Australia) and Johan Verstraeten (EU) explore ecclesiological perspectives: how episcopal, religious, and lay groups have read “the signs of the times” in their area, though largely without a cultural-critical frame. Curiously, the volume avoids any cultural critique of the Church; the dialectic “from above” and “from below” remains ad extra, although Coleman does note how US bishops have frequently undercut their ability to engage culture by focusing narrowly on the institutional interests of the Church. [End Page 212]In sum, the volume advances the work of CST by reframing key concepts within a broader perspective, in particular one that invites voices “from below.” It exposes the reader, especially those familiar with CST, to contemporary dialogues on the ethical significance of “culture” while deepening the value of CST for contemporary reflection. Contributions from Latin America and Eastern Europe, though, would have strengthened the volume.Ron MercierSt. Louis UniversityCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Robert Cummins has recently used the program of Clark Hull to illustrate the effects of logical positivist epistemology upon psychological theory. On Cummins's account, Hull's theory is best understood as a functional analysis, rather than a nomological subsumption. Hull's commitment to the logical positivist view of explanation is said to have blinded him to this aspect of this theory, and thus restricted its scope. We will argue that this interpretation of Hull's epistemology, though common, is mistaken. Hull's epistemological views were (...) developed independently of, and in considerable contrast to, the principles of logical positivism. (shrink)

Measure H is confusing to many people, because the scientific issues involved are complex, and few have the necessary scientific background to analyze them themselves. When those of us of more advanced years were growing up, the university scientific community for the most part was independent and objective, today even the best universities are dependent upon multinational corporations for their funding. Many scientists even have to go out and fund-raise for major portions of their own salaries. Nowhere is the situation (...) worse in this regard than in the field of biotechnology. And no modern day Jesus has yet driven the money-changers from the temple of science. Where else can we look for guidance? (shrink)

What I would like to do in the next few minutes is to outline very briefly some of my research on the authenticity of the Shurangama-sutra. Although the material is rather complex, I'll do my best to omit what is tedious without sacrificing important points. However, it will be necessary to omit most of the details just in order to get through the material.

The true chronology of the Pentekontaetia is difficult, perhaps impossible, to establish conclusively. The events between 477 and 432 were of the greatest possible importance: these years saw the creation of the Athenian empire and a precipitous decline in Spartiate manpower, drastic political realignments involving nearly every state in Hellas, and military activity often rising to a crescendo scarcely matched at the peak of the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, one might strongly argue that the fifty-odd years prior to 432 had a (...) substantially greater historical significance than the three decades of war which followed, as well as a greater degree of political and military drama. But the Pentekontaetia lacks the unifying historical narrative of a Herodotus, let alone a Thucydides, and this one deficiency has caused events of the utmost significance to fade into near obscurity. There is scarcely a single political or military occurrence during the Fifty Years which can be dated to closer than a year or two, and in some cases, proposed dates have ranged over the better part of a decade. With no firm chronological framework, historical analysis degenerates into guesswork and speculation, especially if even the relative order of events is in dispute. In cognizance of this need, this paper seeks to present portions of a new chronology of the Pentekontaetia, one differing in several very significant features from those previously suggested. The severely limited nature of the available evidence precludes any hope of firmly establishing the validity of any one dating scheme over its rivals; the best we can hope for is plausibility. (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the major philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. After Virtue, first published in 1981, remains the book for which he is best known but, as this volume testifies, his phenomenal output extends over a period of seven decades. Not only is his output extensive, but its impact, unusually for philosophers, has been wide-ranging. As MacIntyre enters his tenth decade, this book pays tribute not just to his work, but to the way in (...) which it has been influential across disciplines outside of philosophy. Beginning with an intellectual biography, the chapters which follow, written by experts in their fields, explore MacIntyre's contributions to theology, Thomism, moral philosophy, classical philosophy, political philosophy, Marxism, the Frankfurt School, communication, business ethics, sociology, education, law, and therapeutic method. Essential reading for scholars from across these disciplines, and for anyone who wishes to understand MacIntyre's contributions, this volume not only helps readers to appreciate what we may learn from MacIntyre, but also indicates how his work will continue to be influential"-- Back cover. (shrink)

This paper addresses weighting and partitioning in complex reinforcement learning tasks, with the aim of facilitating learning. The paper presents some ideas regarding weighting of multiple agents and extends them into partitioning an input/state space into multiple regions with di erential weighting in these regions, to exploit di erential characteristics of regions and di erential characteristics of agents to reduce the learning complexity of agents (and their function approximators) and thus to facilitate the learning overall. It analyzes, in reinforcement learning (...) tasks, di erent ways of partitioning a task and using agents selectively based on partitioning. Based on the analysis, some heuristic methods are described and experimentally tested. We nd that some o -line heuristic methods performed the best, signi cantly better than single-agent models. (shrink)

The pituitary hormone prolactin (PRL) is best known for its role in the regulation of lactation. Recent evidence furthermore indicates PRL is required for normal reproduction in rodents. Here, we report on the insertion of two transposon-like DNA sequences in the human prolactin gene, which together function as an alternative promoter directing extrapituitary PRL expression. Indeed, the transposable elements contain transcription factor binding sites that have been shown to mediate PRL transcription in human uterine decidualised endometrial cells and lymphocytes. We (...) hypothesize that the transposon insertion event has resulted in divergent (pituitary versus extrapituitary) expression of prolactin in primates, and in differential actions of pituitary versus extrapituitary prolactin in lactation versus pregnancy respectively. Importantly, the TE insertion might provide a context for some of the conflicting results obtained in studies of PRL function in mice and man. (shrink)

It is no secret that employees leave their organizations because of bad managers- but what about the good ones? How can researchers and organizations differentiate individuals in terms of the interpersonal skills needed to perform well in the managerial role? Although these are fundamentally important questions to organizational psychologists, there exists no conceptual model, definition, or measure of interpersonal skills specific to the managerial role. We address these questions and research gaps by developing a conceptual model and validating a concomitant (...) measure of managerial interpersonal skills through a research program that included four studies across three phases: First, through a review of the literature and structured interviews with practicing managers; next, three quantitative studies in which we develop, refine and validate our MIPS scale; and finally, in a fourth validation study with matched supervisor-employee data from a large healthcare organization. Results suggest that MIPS are best represented by a three-dimensional model comprised of supporting, motivating and managing conflict all indicating a higher-order latent MIPS factor. Results also indicate the MIPS Scale predicts job attitudes and performance among both employees and managers above and beyond personality traits and leader-member exchange, as well as constructs closely related to MIPS, such as social support and conflict management style. (shrink)

How should deontological theories that prohibit actions of type K — such as intentionally killing an innocent person — deal with cases of uncertainty as to whether a particular action is of type K? Frank Jackson and Michael Smith, who raise this problem in their paper "Absolutist Moral Theories and Uncertainty" (2006), focus on a case where a skier is about to cause the death of ten innocent people — we don’t know for sure whether on purpose or not — (...) by causing an avalanche; and we can only save the people by shooting the skier. One possible deontological attitude towards such uncertainty is what Jackson and Smith call the threshold view, according to which whether or not the deontological constraint applies depends on our degree of (justified) certainty meets a given threshold. Jackson and Smith argue against the threshold view that it leads to implausible paradoxical moral dilemmas in a special kind of case. In this response, we show that the threshold view can avoid these implausible moral dilemmas, as long as the relevant deontological constraint is grounded in individualistic patient-based considerations, such as what an individual person is entitled to object to. (shrink)

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 115, Issue 3pt3, Page 307-314, December 2015.

Ron Mallon explores how thinking and talking about kinds of person can bring those kinds into being. He considers what normative implications this social constructionism has for our understanding of our practices of representing human kinds, like race, gender, and sexual orientation, and for our own agency.

Epistemic contextualism is the thesis that the standards that must be met by a knowledge claimant vary with contexts of utterance. Thus construed, EC may concern only knowledge claims, or else the knowledge relation itself. Herein, my concern is with “Substantive EC.” Let’s call the claim that the sorts of linguistic evidence commonly cited in support of Semantic EC also imply or support Substantive EC the “Implication Thesis”. IP is a view about which some epistemologists have equivocated. Keith DeRose is (...) a case in point. Herein I argue that IP is false, and that it is false for interesting reasons. To this end, I consider two other terms which DeRose investigates, “free will” and “potency” in his efforts to demonstrate the alleged inability of distinctly philosophical or skeptical doubts to infect ordinary epistemic discourse. I describe how and why these two examples speak against, rather than for, DeRose’s recommendation of Substantive EC. (shrink)

Jennifer Rose Carr’s (2020) article “Normative Uncertainty Without Theories” proposes a method to maximize expected value under normative uncertainty without Intertheoretic Value Comparison (hereafter IVC). Carr argues that this method avoids IVC because it avoids theories: the agent’s credence is distributed among normative hypotheses of a particular type, which don’t constitute theories. However, I argue that Carr’s method doesn’t avoid or help to solve what I consider as the justificatory problem of IVC, which isn’t specific to comparing theories as such. (...) This threatens the implementability of Carr’s method. Fortunately, I also show how Carr’s method can nevertheless be implemented. I identify a type of epistemic states where the justificatory problem of IVC is not a necessary obstacle to maximizing expected value. In such states, the uncertainty stems from indecisive normative intuitions, and the agent justifiably constructs each normative hypothesis on the basis of a consistent subset of her intuitions by reference to the same unit of value. This part of my argument complements not only Carr’s (2020) argument, but also some moderate defenses of IVC. The combination of Carr’s paper and mine helps to illuminate the conditions for maximizing expected value under normative uncertainty without unjustified value comparison. (shrink)

Epistemic Contextualism is generally treated as a semantic thesis that may or may not have epistemological consequences. It is sometimes taken to concern only knowledge claims (as the assertion that the word “know” means different things in different contexts of use). Still, at other times it is taken to regard the knowledge relation itself (as the assertion that knowledge itself has no single univocal nature). Call the former view Semantic EC, the latter view Substantive EC, and the idea that the (...) plausibility of Semantic EC presupposes that of Substantive EC, the “Presupposition Thesis.” Numerous authors argue against the Presupposition Thesis on the grounds that an understanding of the nature of knowledge is no more required to understand the meaning of knowledge assertions than an understanding of the self, for instance, is needed to understand the meaning of sentences containing “I.” These authors then offer additional arguments for the same conclusion, using further comparisons between “know” and other indexicals, as well as between “know” and quantifiers, gradable and modal adjectives. Herein, I defend the Presupposition Thesis by arguing against these authors’ claims (based as they are on these types of comparisons) that Semantic EC is plausible without the supposition of Substantive EC. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the following claims. Contextualist strategies to tame or localize epistemic skepticism are hopeless if contextualist factors are construed internalistically. However, because efforts to contextualize externalism via subjunctive conditional analysis court circularity, it is only on an internalistic interpretation that contextualist strategies can even be motivated. While these claims do not give us an argument for skepticism, they do give us an argument that contextualism, as such, is not likely to provide us with an argument (...) against skepticism. (shrink)

In this book Ron Amundson examines two hundred years of scientific views on the evolution-development relationship from the perspective of evolutionary developmental biology. This perspective challenges several popular views about the history of evolutionary thought by claiming that many earlier authors had made history come out right for the Evolutionary Synthesis. The book starts with a revised history of nineteenth-century evolutionary thought. It then investigates how development became irrelevant with the Evolutionary Synthesis. It concludes with an examination of the contrasts (...) that persist between mainstream evolutionary theory and evo-devo. This book will appeal to students and professionals in the philosophy and history of science, and biology. (shrink)

Critiques of Neoclassical Economics extend, unsurprisingly, to its mathematical structure. The discussion has largely focused on General Equilibrium Theory (GET), a formalism developed by Leon Walras over a century ago. Internally consistent, but highly unrealistic, GET lacks predictive power, and has been a historical failure. As an alternative, this article proposes a methodology largely developed by Grabner et al. (2019), in which Agent-Based Models (ABMs) are linked with existing Equation-Based Models (EBMs) as a means of developing a more powerful formalism. (...) The approach is illustrated by application to the Arrow- Debreu (AD) model of Neoclassical theory, and the Kuznets Curve of Developmental Economics. Broader implications for the social and natural sciences are briefly considered. (shrink)

Economics is currently experiencing a climate of uncertainty regarding the soundness of its theoretical framework and even its status as a science. Much of the criticism is within the discipline, and emphasises the alleged failure of the neoclassical viewpoint. This article proposes the deployment of partial modelling, utilising Boolean networks (BNs), as an inductive discovery procedure for the development of economic theory. The method is presented in detail and then linked to the Semantic View of Theories (SVT), closely identified with (...) Bas van Fraassen and Patrick Suppes, in which models are construed as mediators creatively negotiating between theory and reality. It is suggested that this approach may be appropriate for economics and, by implication, for any science in which there is no consensus theory, and a wide range of viewpoints compete for acceptance. (shrink)

It is common in various quarters of philosophy to derive philosophically significant conclusions from theories of reference. In this paper, we argue that philosophers should give up on such 'arguments from reference.' Intuitions play a central role in establishing theories of reference, and recent cross-cultural work suggests that intuitions about reference vary across cultures and between individuals within a culture (Machery et al. 2004). We argue that accommodating this variation within a theory of reference undermines arguments from reference.

This exploratory study examines how managers and professionals regard the ethical and social responsibility reputations of 60 well-known Australian and International companies, and how this in turn influences their attitudes and behaviour towards these organisations. More than 350 MBA, other postgraduate business students, and participants in Australian Institute of Management (Western Australia) management education programmes were surveyed to evaluate how ethical and socially responsible they believed the 60 organisations to be. The survey sought to determine what these participants considered ‘ethical’ (...) and ‘socially responsible’ behaviour in organisations to be. The survey also examined how the participants’ beliefs influenced their attitudes and intended behaviours towards these organisations. The results of this survey indicate that many managers and professionals have clear views about the ethical and social responsibility reputations of companies. This affects their attitudes towards these organisations which in turn has an impact on their intended behaviour towards them. These findings support the view in other research studies that well-educated managers and professionals are, to some extent, taking into account the ethical and social responsibility reputations of companies when deciding whether to work for them, use their services or buy shares in their companies. (shrink)

This exploratory study examines how managers and professionals regard the ethical and social responsibility reputations of 60 well-known Australian and International companies, and how this in turn influences their attitudes and behaviour towards these organisations. More than 350 MBA, other postgraduate business students, and participants in Australian Institute of Management management education programmes were surveyed to evaluate how ethical and socially responsible they believed the 60 organisations to be. The survey sought to determine what these participants considered 'ethical' and 'socially (...) responsible' behaviour in organisations to be. The survey also examined how the participants' beliefs influenced their attitudes and intended behaviours towards these organisations. The results of this survey indicate that many managers and professionals have clear views about the ethical and social responsibility reputations of companies. This affects their attitudes towards these organisations which in turn has an impact on their intended behaviour towards them. These findings support the view in other research studies that well-educated managers and professionals are, to some extent, taking into account the ethical and social responsibility reputations of companies when deciding whether to work for them, use their services or buy shares in their companies. (shrink)

A teacher controls the release of materials in attempt to get students to appreciate the appeal of a popular yet wrongheaded argument before exposing them to its shortcomings. An instructor uses body language, tone of voice, and images in a Power-Point presentation that appeal to non-deliberative mechanisms in order to influence the students to pay more attention, maintain their focus, or to remember the content better. How do we draw the line between such innocuous educational practices and problematic manipulation, such (...) as deterring students from questioning certain views by instilling fear or shame? I help answering this question by illuminating one significant danger, which hasn’t been accurately identified in the relevant literature: the danger that manipulations in education—even when they’re non-deceptive and aim for the good of the students—will hinder the development or fulfillment of the students’ deliberative projects. (shrink)

Since the publication of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue in 1981, tensions inherent to the relationship between morally educative practices and the institutions that house them have been widely noted. We propose a taxonomy of the ways in which the pursuit of external goods by institutions undermines the pursuit of the internal goods of practices. These comprise substitution, where the institution replaces the pursuit of one type of good by another; frustration, where opportunities for practitioners to discover goods or develop new (...) standards of excellence are frustrated by institutional priorities and resource allocation; and injustice, which undermines the integrity of relationships within the organization and/or with partners. These threats, though analytically distinct, are often mutually reinforcing. This conceptual contribution is illustrated both by the extant literature and by a novel context, the three-ring circus. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a flurry of work on the metaphysics of race. While it is now widely accepted that races do not share robust, bio-behavioral essences, opinions differ over what, if anything, race is. Recent work has been divided between three apparently quite different answers. A variety of theorists argue for racial skepticism, the view that races do not exist at all.[iv] A second group defends racial constructionism, holding that races are in some way socially constructed.[v],[vi] And (...) a third group maintains racial population naturalism, the view that races may exist as biologically salient populations albeit ones that do not have the biologically determined social significance once imputed to them.[vii] The three groups thus seem to disagree fundamentally upon the metaphysical character of race. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:This article deploys Alasdair MacIntyre’s Aristotelian virtue ethics, in which meaningfulness is understood to supervene on human functioning, to bring empirical and ethical accounts of meaningful work into dialogue. Whereas empirical accounts have presented the experience of meaningful work either in terms of agents’ orientation to work or as intrinsic to certain types of work, ethical accounts have largely assumed the latter formulation and subjected it to considerations of distributive justice. This article critiques both the empirical and ethical literatures from (...) the standpoint of MacIntyre’s account of the relationship between the development of virtuous dispositions and participation in work that is productive of goods internal to practices. This reframing suggests new directions for empirical and ethical enquiries. (shrink)

Corporate management is torn between either focusing solely on the interests of stockholders or taking into account the interests of a wide spectrum of stakeholders. Of course, there need be no conflict where taking the wider view is also consistent with maximising stockholder wealth. In this paper, we examine the extent to which a conflict actually exists by examining the relationship between a company's positive and negative corporate social responsibility activities and equity performance. In general, we find little evidence to (...) suggest that managers taking a wider stakeholder perspective will jeopardise the interest of its stockholders. However, our findings do suggest that the market is not only influenced by the independent CSR activities, but also the totality of these activities and that the facets that they value do vary over time. It seems that most recently, the market has valued most firms that satisfied minimum requirements in the areas of diversity and environmental protection but were most proactive in the area of employee-relations. (shrink)

Philosophers of evolutionary biology favor the so-called etiological concept of function according to which the function of a trait is its evolutionary purpose, defined as the effect for which that trait was favored by natural selection. We term this the selected effect (SE) analysis of function. An alternative account of function was introduced by Robert Cummins in a non-evolutionary and non-purposive context. Cummins''s account has received attention but little support from philosophers of biology. This paper will show that a similar (...) non-purposive concept of function, which we term causal role (CR) function, is crucial to certain research programs in evolutionary biology, and that philosophical criticisms of Cummins''s concept are ineffective in this scientific context. Specifically, we demonstrate that CR functions are a vital and ineliminable part of research in comparative and functional anatomy, and that biological categories used by anatomists are not defined by the application of SE functional analysis. Causal role functions are non-historically defined, but may themselves be used in an historical analysis. Furthermore, we show that a philosophical insistence on the primary of SE functions places practicing biologists in an untenable position, as such functions can rarely be demonstrated (in contrast to CR functions). Biologists who study the form and function of organismal design recognize that it is virtually impossible to identify the past action of selection on any particular structure retrospectively, a requirement for recognizing SE functions. (shrink)

"The book is divided into 8-10 chapters that are each only 2 or 3 pages long... this feels like a nice feature of the book, since you can dip in and just read a short bite before moving on. The author clearly has some interesting ideas and at times I found his writing to be quite engaging." MAA Review "I did enjoy reading (and re-reading) this book very much. Reading it deserves a warm recommendation not only for mathematicians but for (...) anybody... this book makes you think about how and what you think you are thinking." European Mathematical Society "Circularity" is the story of a Janus-faced conceptual structure, that on the one hand led to deep scientific discoveries, and on the other hand is used to trick the mind into believing the impossible. Alongside mathematical revolutions that eventually led to the invention of the computer, the book describes ancient paradoxes that arise from circular thinking. Another aspect of circularity, its ability to entertain, leads to a surprising insight on the time old question "What is humor." The book presents the ubiquity of circularity in many fields, and its power to confuse and to instruct. (shrink)

In his seminal The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals Darwin explained how the expression of emotions evolved from functional motions. One of his most subtle discoveries was that some expressions come about from the reversal of other expressions. For example, clenching the fists in preparation for attack is reversed in the expression of resignation, to yield the stretching open of the palms. The aim of this article is to explain the origin of this phenomenon, namely to find (...) its functional origin. (shrink)

The so-called "adaptationism" of mainstream evolutionary biology has been criticized from a variety of sources. One, which has received relatively little philosophical attention, is developmental biology. Developmental constraints are said to be neglected by adaptationists. This paper explores the divergent methodological and explanatory interests that separate mainstream evolutionary biology from its embryological and developmental critics. It will focus on the concept of constraint itself; even this central concept is understood differently by the two sides of the dispute.

Among race theorists, the view that race is a social construction is widespread. While the term ‘ social construction’ is sometimes intended to mean merely that race does not constitute a robust, biological natural kind, it often labels the stronger position that race is real, but not a biological kind. For example, Charles Mills writes that, ‘‘the task of those working on race is to put race in quotes, ‘race’, while still insisting that nevertheless, it exists ’’. It is to (...) ‘‘make a plausible social ontology neither essentialist, innate, nor transhistorical, but real enough for all that’’. Racial constructionism, thus conceived, is a metaphysical position that contrasts both with the view that race is an important biological kind and with the more recent claim that race does not exist. The desire for a constructionist metaphysics of race emerges against the background of a cluster of normative disputes, including. (shrink)

_Reading Aristotle: Argument and Exposition_ demonstrates that Aristotle’s treatises rely crucially on expository principles—questions of proper sequence, pedagogical method, and distinctions between different sciences.

Neoclassical economic theory, which still dominates the science, has proven inadequate to predict financial crises. In an increasingly globalised world, the consequences of that inadequacy are likely to become more severe. This article attributes much of the difficulty to an emphasis on equilibrium as an idealised property of economic systems. Alternatively, this article proposes that actual economies are typically out of balance, and that any equilibrium which may exist is transitory. That single changed assumption is central to complexity economics, a (...) view which is presented in detail. It is suggested that economic crises will be most effectively avoided when economists utilise methods, grounded in complexity theory, which can identify threat in an early stage. As a programmatic example, the use of Agent-Based Models (ABMs) combined with Boolean networks (BNs), is defended as a promising method for recognising vulnerability. (shrink)

In a series of papers Geoff Moore has applied Alasdair MacIntyre’s much cited work to generate a virtue-based business ethics. Central to this project is Moore’s argument that business falls under MacIntyre’s concept of ‘practice’. This move attempts to overcome MacIntyre’s reputation for being ‘anti-business’ while maintaining his framework for evaluating social action and replaces MacIntyre’s hostility to management with a conception of managers as institutional practitioners (craftsmen). I argue however that this move has not been justified. Given the importance (...) MacIntyre places on the protection of practices, the result is that much of Moore’s contribution is misplaced. Business cannot name a practice but business institutions certainly do house practices. The task then is to try to understand the circumstances under which practices might flourish and those under which they might founder in a business context. This is not aided by Moore’s redescription of all businesses as practices. (shrink)

Social constructionism about race is a common view, but there remain questions about what exactly constitutes constructed race. Some hold that our concepts and conceptual practices construct race, and some hold that the causal consequences of these concepts and conceptual practices also play a role. But there is a third option, which is that the causal effects of our concepts and conceptual practices constitute race, but not the concepts and conceptual practices themselves. This paper reconsiders an argument for the reality (...) of race that grows out of the role of racial kinds in social scientific generalizations. It then uses recent work on the correlation of racial attitudes with behaviors to raise questions about the sufficiency, and perhaps also the necessity, of our concepts and conceptual practices in constituting constructed race, thus understood. (shrink)

Editorial introduction to series of papers resulting from a European Commission Project on mental capacity.