A civic science curriculum is advocated. We discuss practical mechanisms for (and highlight the possible benefits of) addressing the relationship between scientific knowledge and civic responsibility coextensively with rigorous scientific content. As a strategy, we suggest an in-course treatment of well known (and relevant) historical and contemporary controversies among scientists over science policy or the use of sciences. The scientific content of the course is used to understand the controversy and to inform the debate while allowing students to see the (...) role of scientists in shaping public perceptions of science and the value of scientific inquiry, discoveries and technology in society. The examples of the activism of Linus Pauling, Alfred Nobel and Joseph Rotblat as scientists and engaged citizens are cited. We discuss the role of science professors in informing the social conscience of students and consider ways in which a treatment of the function of science in society may find, coherently, a meaningful space in a science curriculum at the college level. Strategies for helping students to recognize early the crucial contributions that science can make in informing public policy and global governance are discussed. (shrink)

The Lorentz transformation relates the Einstein-defined measures, associated with two inertial frames, of the space and time coordinates of a body or event. From such information relative velocities and accelerations may be deduced, and their appropriate transformations derived. All other transformations of special relativity are derived from the Lorentz transformation and hence depend on the coordinate measures related by the transformation. In particular, the transformation of forces depends on that for accelerations; hence it may not be appropriately applicable to equilibrium (...) phenomena involving null-acceleration. It is suggested that this is the root of the apparent paradox which arises when the conventional force transformation is applied to the consideration of a right-angled lever in equilibrium in its proper inertial frame. It is shown that this paradox is resolved by the employment of a nonconventional but appropriate special relativistic transformation for forces not associated with corresponding accelerations. (shrink)

We welcome Blair's argument that the relationship between fluid cognition and other aspects of intelligence should be an important focus of research, but are less convinced by his arguments that fluid intelligence is dissociable from general intelligence. This is due to confusions between (a) crystallized skills and g, and (b) universal and differential constructs. (Published Online April 5 2006).

Good academic practice is more than the avoidance of clear-cut cheating. It also involves navigation of the gray zones between cheating and good practice. The existing literature has left students’ understanding of gray zone practices largely unexplored. To begin filling in this gap, we present results from a questionnaire study involving N = 1639 undergraduate students from seven European countries representing all major disciplines. We show that large numbers of these students are unable to identify gray area issues and lack (...) sensitivity to the context dependence of these. We also show that a considerable proportion of students have a poor understanding of concepts like plagiarism and falsification, not only in gray zone scenarios, but also in cases of relatively clear-cut cheating. Our results are similar across the faculties and countries of study, and even for students who have attended academic integrity training. We discuss the implications of this for academic integrity training. (shrink)

Since its founding in 1950, the Metaphysical Society of America has remained a pluralistic community dedicated to rigorous philosophical inquiry into the most basic metaphysical questions. At each year’s conference, the presidential address offers original insights into metaphysical questions. Both the insights and the questions are as perennial as they are relevant to contemporary philosophers. This volume collects eighteen of the finest representatives from those presidential addresses, including contributions from George Allan, Richard Bernstein, Norris Clarke, Vincent Colapietro, Frederick Ferré, Jorge (...) J. E. Gracia, Joseph Grange, Marjorie Grene, George Klubertanz, Ivor Leclerc, Ralph McInerny, Ernan McMullin, Joseph Owens, John Herman Randall, Jr., Nicholas Rescher, Stanley Rosen, John E. Smith, and Robert Sokolowski. Also included are Paul Weiss’s inaugural address to the Society, an introduction chronicling the history of the Society, and an original Foreword by William Desmond and Epilogue by Robert Neville. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is, first, to demonstrate to future editors of the Metamorphoses , whether conservative or sceptical, just how improbable is the reading of the majority of MSS, illas , and how strong are the claims of the variant ilia , first recommended by P.Lejay in 1894 and vigorously championed by E.J.Kenney in 1976; and, second, to suggest an interpretation of this reading that is open to fewer objections than the one proposed by Kenney.I have given above (...) the beginning of Ovid's longest poem as it ought to stand in all modern editions and as it stands in fact in only one, the French school edition of selections edited by Lejay in 1894: ‘Gods, on my undertakings breathe your favour.’ To be sure, all of Ovid's MSS read illas in line 2, and ilia is attested only as a variant in two of them.But majorities, in textual as in other matters, are frequently wrong.Even before the minority report of the Urbinas had been heard, Lejay adopted ilia , av.1.in the Erfordensis.1. (shrink)

Anderson and Dyck claim that the current trend of almost exclusively using citation-based evaluative metrics to assess the research output of scholars is unsound. I agree with them in this, but I feel that, for practical reasons, this system will not disappear in the near future, so we must concentrate on making it fairer. Both commentators doubt whether numerically expressing each contributor's relative contribution is feasible. I admit that an important precondition for this task is the possibility of an informed, (...) democratic debate among equals about the relative contribution of each contributor to the article. Mechanisms should be established to protect vulnerable researchers in the academic field in the same way as safeguards exist today to protect vulnerable research participants. Theoretically, however, I think that the fair allocation of authorship credit is possible, and much of this task is already being performed routinely when contributors determine the order of their names in the byline, being well aware of the widespread assumption that this order mostly mirrors the order of their relative contributions. All they would have to do as an additional task is to express this order in numbers. If they cannot reach a consensus, they could always choose not to express their relative contribution in numbers, in which case the presumption would be that they contributed equally. My proposal could, at best, make the system fairer and, at worst, not reduce the options that evaluators already have. (shrink)

The reception of Kant began in Croatia at the turn of the 19th century with the writings of J.B. Horváth, whose textbooks were in use at that time in Croatia and Hungary. Unlike Horváth's decidedly negative attitude toward Kant, Šimun Čučić (Simeon Chuchich), in his systematic work Philosophia Critice Elaborata (1815), adopted some aspects of Kantian philosophy. This includes, for example, the formalistic conception of logic, Kantian apriorism and subjectivism, the formalistic approach to the moral law, and the like. However, (...) since these elements were incorporated into a schoolbook type of text, they could not always be consistently implemented. The beginning of the reception of Kant in Croatia coincided with the revival of Croatian national self-awareness. -- Die Kantrezeption setzte in Kroatien an der Wende zum 19. Jahrhundert ein mit den Schriften J. B. Horváths, dessen Lehrbuecher in Kroatien und Ungarn damals in Gebrauch waren. Im Unterschied zu Horváth's ausgeschprochen negativer Einstellung zu Kant hat Šimun Čučić in seinem systematischen Werk Philosophia critice elaborata (1815) einige Aspekte der Kantischen Philosophie uebernommen. Dies betrifft z.B. die formalistische Auffassung der Logik, die Uebernahme des kantianischen Apriorismus und Subjektivismus, die formalistische Auffassungsweise des moralischen Gesetzes und dgl. Da nun diese Momente in ein schulmaeßig konzipiertes Buch aufgenommen wurden, konnten sie nicht immer konsequent durchgefuehrt werden. Der Beginn der Kantrezeption in Kroatien koinzidierte mit der Wiedererweckung des kroatischen nationalen Selbsbewußtseins. (shrink)

[English in PhilArchive, unpublished]. Ruđer Bošković's (Rogerius Joseph Boscovich, 1711-1787) induction is described as a reasoning procedure that combines abductive, generalizing and deductive forms of inference. According to Bošković, the application of inductive reasoning extends beyond natural science. Bošković's critique of the use of the principle of sufficient reason is discussed, and constructive rules of Bošković's inductive logic are proposed from the standpoint of contemporary justification logic. To that end, justification logic could be extended with Bošković's typology of reasons. Hunter's (...) result (1965) is conceived as a confirmation that the inference from the constructive defectus rationis is a necessary component of Bošković's induction. - English version in _PhilArchive_. (shrink)

U članku se promatraju osnovne karakteristike razvojne dinamike hrvatskoga logičkoga nazivlja od izlazka Pacelove Logike za gimnazije, prve sustavne logike na hrvatskome jeziku, 1868. godine, pa sve do Petrovićeve Logike, također za srednja učilišta, iz 1964., koja je još uviek u uporabi. Nazivlje je u tu svrhu razvrstano u nekoliko tipičih skupina. Općenito, uočava se porast zastupljenosti latinizama (i grecizama) na štetu hrvatskih naziva. U analizi nazivlja autor se ograničuje na knjige namienjene nastavi logike bilo na srednjim učilištima, bilo na (...) sveučilištu, i to na nazivlje tradicionalne logike. Mjestimice su pridodane i napomene o nazivlju moderne (matematičke) logike. (shrink)

Divine simplicity is central to Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy of God. Most important for Aquinas is his view that God’s existence (esse) is identical to God’s essence; for everything other than God, there is a distinction between existence and essence. However, recent developments in analytic philosophy about the nature of existence threaten to undermine what Aquinas thought regarding divine simplicity. In the first chapter of this dissertation, I trace Aquinas’s thinking on divine simplicity through the various texts he wrote regarding the (...) matter. I establish that it is crucial for Aquinas that God is identical to his existence. But, is it even coherent to talk about “a thing’s existence?” In Chapter Two I summarize the arguments of C.J.F. Williams that existence is not a real property that individuals have and that predicating the word “exists” after the name of an individual produces linguistic gibberish. After considering, and rejecting, in Chapter Three attempts by some philosophers to refute Williams’s arguments, I turn, in Chapter Four, to a more detailed account of what Aquinas means by esse, the Latin word often rendered in English as “existence.” The conclusion that I come to is that Aquinas does not mean by esse what contemporary philosophers have usually meant by “existence.” Rather, he understands esse to be the act by which anything can be anything at all, instead of there being nothing whatsoever. In the final chapter, I turn to implications of this for Aquinas’s views of divine simplicity, showing that rather than being incoherent, Aquinas’s thinking on esse points toward the unfathomable mystery that is God. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is, first, to demonstrate to future editors of the Metamorphoses, whether conservative or sceptical, just how improbable is the reading of the majority of MSS, illas, and how strong are the claims of the variant ilia, first recommended by P.Lejay in 1894 and vigorously championed by E.J.Kenney in 1976; and, second, to suggest an interpretation of this reading that is open to fewer objections than the one proposed by Kenney.I have given above the beginning of (...) Ovid's longest poem as it ought to stand in all modern editions and as it stands in fact in only one, the French school edition of selections edited by Lejay in 1894: ‘Gods, on my undertakings breathe your favour.’ To be sure, all of Ovid's MSS read illas in line 2, and ilia is attested only as a variant in two of them.But majorities, in textual as in other matters, are frequently wrong.Even before the minority report of the Urbinas had been heard, Lejay adopted ilia, av.1.in the Erfordensis.1. (shrink)

This collection of thirteen essays represents an in-depth, well-focused, creative exploration of Heidegger’s sustained, extensive dialogue with the Presocratics. The list of contributors from abroad and America is impressive: Heidegger, Gadamer, Jean-François Courtaine, Michel Serres, Parvis Emad, Michael Naas, David F. Krell, John Sallis, Dennis J. Schmidt, David C. Jacobs, Charles E. Scott, Walter A. Brogan, and Véronique M. Fóti. These well-researched, thoughtful studies constitute a unified work that amounts to a rediscovery of the early Greeks from the perspective of (...) Heidegger’s fascination with the dawn of occidental thinking. The diversity of approaches of the contributions leads to the discernment of basic insights and to unearthing of unthought dimensions of Heidegger’s understanding of the Presocratics; it clearly shows the need for hermeneutic attentiveness and openness in trying to come to grips with the texts of the early Greek thinkers and with Heidegger’s own project. This book, then, is more than an “anthology”; it is a unified, perceptive, thoughtful festival of interpretations. (shrink)

A collection of 37 essays surveying the state of the art on metaphysical ground. -/- Essay authors are: Fatema Amijee, Ricki Bliss, Amanda Bryant, Margaret Cameron, Phil Corkum, Fabrice Correia, Louis deRosset, Scott Dixon, Tom Donaldson, Nina Emery, Kit Fine, Martin Glazier, Kathrin Koslicki, David Mark Kovacs, Stephan Krämer, Stephanie Leary, Stephan Leuenberger, Jon Litland, Marko Malink, Michaela McSweeney, Kevin Mulligan, Alyssa Ney, Asya Passinsky, Francesca Poggiolesi, Kevin Richardson, Stefan Roski, Noel Saenz, Benjamin Schnieder, Erica Shumener, Alexander Skiles, Olla Solomyak, (...) Tuomas Tahko, Naomi Thompson, Kelly Trogdon, Jennifer Wang, Tobias Wilsch, and Justin Zylstra. (shrink)

Kovacs argues that honorary authorship and regarding each co-author of multi-authored papers as if they were sole authors when the performance of researchers is being evaluated by their publications mean that we should require authors to identify what proportion of each publication should be attributed to each co-author. Even if such attributions could be made reliably, such a change should not be made. Contributions to authorship cannot be validly quantified, and the relative merits of different publications are also neither equal (...) nor validly quantifiable. Research administrators need to recognise that whatever criteria they adopt to evaluate the performance of researchers, researchers will find a way to game the system in order to maximise their personal benefit. (shrink)

This paper introduces the special issue on Formal Approaches to the Ontological Argument of the Journal of Applied Logics (College Publications). The issue contains the following articles: Formal Approaches to the Ontological Argument, by Ricardo Sousa Silvestre and Jean-Yves Béziau; A Brief Critical Introduction to the Ontological Argument and its Formalization: Anselm, Gaunilo, Descartes, Leibniz and Kant, by Ricardo Sousa Silvestre; A Mechanically Assisted Examination of Begging the Question in Anselm’s Ontological Argument, by John Rushby; A Tractarian Resolution to the (...) Ontological Argument, by Erik Thomsen; On Kant’s Hidden Ambivalence Toward Existential Generalization in his Critique of the Ontological Argument, by Giovanni Mion; The Totality of Predicates and the Possibility of the Most Real Being, by Srećko Kovač; An Even More Leibnizian Version of Gödel’s Ontological Argument, by Kordula Świętorzecka and Marcin Łyczak; A Case Study On Computational Hermeneutics: E. J. Lowe’s Modal Ontological Argument, by David Fuenmayor. (shrink)

One of the main driving forces in the era of cyber-physical systems is the introduction of massive sensor networks into manufacturing processes, connected cars, precision agriculture, and so on. Therefore, large amounts of sensor data have to be ingested at the server side in order to generate and make the “twin digital model” or virtual factory of the existing physical processes for predictive simulation and scheduling purposes usable. In this paper, we focus on our ultimate goal, a novel software container-based (...) approach with cloud agnostic orchestration facilities that enable the system operators in the industry to create and manage scalable, virtual IT platforms on-demand for these two typical major pillars of CPS: server-side framework for sensor networks and configurable simulation tool for predicting the behavior of manufacturing systems. The paper discusses the scalability of the applied discrete-event simulation tool and the layered back-end framework starting from simple virtual machine-level to sophisticated multilevel autoscaling use case scenario. The presented achievements and evaluations leverage on the synergy of the existing EasySim simulator, our new CQueue software container manager, the continuously developed Occopus cloud orchestrator tool, and the latest version of the evolving MiCADO framework for integrating such tools into a unified platform. (shrink)

Unfounded—conspiracy and health—beliefs about COVID-19 have accompanied the pandemic worldwide. Here, we examined cross-nationally the structure and correlates of these beliefs with an 8-item scale, using a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. We obtained a two-factor model of unfounded (conspiracy and health) beliefs with good internal structure (average CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.05, SRMR = 0.04), but a high correlation between the two factors (average latent factor correlation = 0.57). This model was replicable across 50 countries (total N = 13,579), (...) as evidenced by metric invariance between countries (CFI = 0.96, RMSEA = 0.06, SRMS = 0.07) as well as scalar invariance across genders (CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.04, SRMS = 0.03) and educational levels (CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.04, SRMS = 0.03). Also, lower levels of education, more fear of COVID-19, and more cynicism were weakly associated with stronger conspiracy and health beliefs. The study contributes to knowledge about the structure of unfounded beliefs, and reveals the potential relevance of affective (i.e., fear of COVID-19) and cognitive (i.e., cynicism) factors along with demographics, in endorsing such beliefs. In summary, we obtained cross-cultural evidence for the distinctiveness of unfounded conspiracy and health beliefs about COVID-19 in terms of their structure and correlates. (shrink)

Unfounded—conspiracy and health—beliefs about COVID-19 have accompanied the pandemic worldwide. Here, we examined cross-nationally the structure and correlates of these beliefs with an 8-item scale, using a multigroup confirmatory factor analysis. We obtained a two-factor model of unfounded (conspiracy and health) beliefs with good internal structure (average CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.05, SRMR = 0.04), but a high correlation between the two factors (average latent factor correlation = 0.57). This model was replicable across 50 countries (total N = 13,579), (...) as evidenced by metric invariance between countries (CFI = 0.96, RMSEA = 0.06, SRMS = 0.07) as well as scalar invariance across genders (CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.04, SRMS = 0.03) and educational levels (CFI = 0.98, RMSEA = 0.04, SRMS = 0.03). Also, lower levels of education, more fear of COVID-19, and more cynicism were weakly associated with stronger conspiracy and health beliefs. The study contributes to knowledge about the structure of unfounded beliefs, and reveals the potential relevance of affective (i.e., fear of COVID-19) and cognitive (i.e., cynicism) factors along with demographics, in endorsing such beliefs. In summary, we obtained cross-cultural evidence for the distinctiveness of unfounded conspiracy and health beliefs about COVID-19 in terms of their structure and correlates. (shrink)

In this work I attempt to articulate a principle or set of principles that can guide violent revolution, or emancipatory violence, and yet still prevent the end-stage backlash that generally follows; e.g., the Terror's culmination in which the originators are the targets of the Terror.