Kierkegaard is considered by many to be the father of existentialism because he is believed to have asserted that our interpretations of existence are the expression of absolutely free choices, or choices for which no rational criteria can be given. This paper argues that that view is false. It presents a sketch of Kierkegaard position on the nature of human rationality, and argues that according to Kierkegaard, there are rational criteria for choosing between competing interpretations of existence and that people (...) make such choices only with reference to these criteria. (shrink)

Almost no work has been done on the substance of Kierkegaard's epistemology. I argue, however, that knowledge plays a much more important role in Kierkegaard's thought than has traditionally been appreciated. ;There are two basic types of knowledge, according to Kierkegaard: "objective knowledge" and "subjective knowledge." I argue that both types of knowledge are associated by Kierkegaard with "certainty" and may be defined as justified true mental representation . I also argue, however, that the meaning of 'certainty,' 'justified' and 'true' (...) is derivative of the object of knowledge. That is, I argue that Kierkegaard employs these expressions in both an objective and subjective sense and that the latter sense is not, as it has often been interpreted to be, subjectivist. ;Finally, I argue that an appreciation of the substance of Kierkegaard's epistemology reveals that the charges of irrationalism which have often been made against him, are without foundation. (shrink)

These two complementary works give the reader a unique insight into the breadth and substance of Kierkegaard's thought. One reads like a novel and the other a Platonic dialogue but both concern the nature of love, faith, and happiness. These are the first translations to convey the literary quality and philosophical precision of the originals.

There has been a plethora of studies outlying the various factors which may affect undergraduate student cheating, generally focusing on individual, situational and deterrent factors. But beyond these factors, does the type of cheating affect students’ perceptions of cheating? We found that there were differences in regards to gradable cheating such as cheating on homework, tests and papers versus non-gradable cheating such as illegally downloading software/music from the Internet or photocopying materials which violate the university’s academic integrity policy. Gender, discussion (...) of ethical issues in class and enforcement of cheating reduces the acceptance of cheating across types of cheating. Less time spent on the Internet reduces the acceptance of only non-gradable cheating and the type of institution and knowing the consequences of cheating reduces the acceptance of only gradable cheating. (shrink)

Do undergraduate students perceive that it is more acceptable to ‹cheat’ using information technology (IT) than it is to cheat without the use of IT? Do business discipline-related majors cheat more than non-business discipline-related majors? Do undergraduate students perceive it to be more acceptable for them personally to cheat than for others to cheat? Questionnaires were administered to undergraduate students at five geographical academic locations in the spring, 2006 and fall 2006 and spring, 2007. A total of 708 usable questionnaires (...) were returned including 532 from students majoring in business-related disciplines and 139 from students majoring in non-business related disciplines (37 were undecided). It appears that in terms of intellectual property violations, undergraduate students in general find cheating using IT more acceptable than cheating without the use of IT. It also appears that undergraduate students perceive that it is relatively more acceptable for them to personally cheat when using IT than for others to cheat when using IT, although this is reversed when IT is not involved. No significant differences on these issues were found between undergraduate students having business discipline-related majors and those having non-business discipline-related majors. (shrink)

One of the most significant developments in the latter part of the 20th century and the first part of this new millennium has been the triumph of short-term over long-term thinking. We are increasingly a culture that looks neither to the past nor to the future, but only to the next “quarter,” or to the next Delphic pronouncement by Alan Greenspan. This cultural construction of time has given rise to social, political and personal problems of unprecedented magnitude. The short-term focus (...) of contemporary American capitalism is causing us to behave, both individually and collectively, in an increasingly irrational and thus self-destructive manner. Ours is now the most violent, crime-ridden society in the industrialized world. Capitalism is sometimes blamed for this, yet there are other capitalist societies that do not suffer the same evils we suffer. I argue that we can learn from these societies how to correct some of the ills of our own system and in this way construct a new paradigm of the market, a paradigm for the new millennium, a more mature, rational version of capitalism that would focus on the long rather than the short term. (shrink)

Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics, one of several popularizations paralleling Eastern mysticism and modern physics, is critiqued, demonstrating that Capra gives little attention to the differing philosophies of physics he employs, utilizing whatever interpretation suits his purposes, without prior justification. The same critique is applied and similar conclusions drawn, about some recent attempts at relating theology and physics. In contrast, we propose the possibility of maintaining a cogent relationship between these disciplines by employing theological hypotheses to account for aspects (...) of physics that are free from interpretive difficulties, such as the ability to create mathematical structures with extraordinary predictive success. (shrink)

When people engage in conversation, they tailor their utterances to their conversational partners, whether these partners are other humans or computational systems. This tailoring, or adaptation to the partner takes place in all facets of human language use, and is based on a mental model or a user model of the conversational partner. Such adaptation has been shown to improve listeners' comprehension, their satisfaction with an interactive system, the efficiency with which they execute conversational tasks, and the likelihood of achieving (...) higher level goals such as changing the listener's beliefs and attitudes. We focus on one aspect of adaptation, namely the tailoring of the content of dialogue system utterances for the higher level processes of persuasion, argumentation and advice‐giving. Our hypothesis is that algorithms that adapt content for these processes, according to a user model, will improve the usability, efficiency, and effectiveness of dialogue systems. We describe a multimodal dialogue system and algorithms for adaptive content selection based on multi‐attribute decision theory. We demonstrate experimentally the improved efficacy of system responses through the use of user models to both tailor the content of system utterances and to manipulate their conciseness. (shrink)

This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Comparative Relativism” outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usually involves the assumption that contexts exhibit, or may exhibit, radically different, incomparable, or incommensurable traits. Comparative studies are required to (...) treat their objects as alike, at least in some crucial respects; relativism indicates the limits of this practice. Jensen argues that this seeming paradox is productive, as he moves across contexts, from Lévi-Strauss's analysis of comparison as an anthropological method to Peter Galison's history of physics, and on to the anthropological, philosophical, and historical examples offered in symposium contributions by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, and Isabelle Stengers. Comparative relativism is understood by some to imply that relativism comes in various kinds and that these have multiple uses, functions, and effects, varying widely in different personal, historical, and institutional contexts that can be compared and contrasted. Comparative relativism is taken by others to encourage a “comparison of comparisons,” in order to relativize what different peoples—say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans—compare things “for.” Jensen concludes that what is compared and relativized in this symposium are the methods of comparison and relativization themselves. He ventures that the contributors all hope that treating these terms in juxtaposition may allow for new configurations of inquiry. (shrink)

This article exploits the “binary license” offered by the title of the symposium in which it appears (“Comparative Relativism”) as a kind of promise of connection. The author suggests, however tentatively, that in the challenge of heterogeneity, fractality, perspective/-alism, and multiplicities lies the power of the forking pathway: the moment a relation is created through divergence. If we are invited—in the same breath—to consider forms of comparison and forms of relativism (dropping difference and similarity), we are also offered two paths, (...) one based on a world of singularities and multiplicities, and the other on a world of not-quite repetitions. The article asks if the binary is not essential to the epistemic work that Western (Euro-American) scholars might want to do, since we forever reinvent the divide between the modern and the post-/pre-modern. Strathern assumes the anthropologist's license to talk about concepts through persons, and begins by asking how Papua New Guineans who come together in a city compare themselves, and in contrast to ethnic comparisons elsewhere (e.g., contra Sarah Green's Balkan interactions). In talking about persons through concepts, it is worth asking what is entailed in relativizing one scholar's work through that of another. The author says that her “hunch” is that in both cases the analyst might wish to have the liberty of discerning—in the same breath—the multiplicities of what John Law and Annemarie Mol call perspectivalism (their very general alternative to comparison) and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's radically divergent perspectivism (a self-contained, recursive and above all socially specific relativism). (shrink)

Pediatric participation in non-therapeutic research that poses greater than minimal risk has been the subject of considerable thought-provoking debate in the research ethics literature. While the need for more pediatric research has been called morally imperative, and concerted efforts have been made to increase pediatric medical research, the importance of protecting children from undue research risks remains paramount.United States research regulations are derived largely from the deliberations and report of the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical (...) and Behavioral Research. The authors of this report specifically designated children as a vulnerable population and suggested additional protections, most of which became U.S. law. One of the more contested sets of regulations surrounds non-therapeutic research, e.g., research that does not offer the potential for direct benefit to participants. Federal regulations allow local Institutional Review Boards to approve non-therapeutic research posing a minor increase above minimal risk when it involves children who have the disease or medical condition that the research addresses. (shrink)

Anselm inherited a Platonizing approach to philosophy from Augustine and Boethius. But he characteristically reworked what he found in their texts by questioning and disputing it into something more rigorous. In this paper, I compare and contrast Anselm’s treatment of the trope ‘evil is nothing, not a being’ withBoethius’s use of it in The Consolation of Philosophy. In the first section, I expose a fallacious argument form common to them both: paradigm Fness is identical with paradigm Gness; X participates in (...) paradigm Fness and so is F; therefore, X participates in paradigm Gness and so is G. In the second section, I contrast Philosophy’s “strong medicine”—‘evil is nothing,’ ‘evil-doings are nothing,’ ‘evil humans do not exist’—with Anselm’s development of the point that injustice is a privation and so parasitic on the beings that are deprived. By contrast with Boethius, Anselm emphasizes that the willinstrument, will-power, the will’s action and turnings are something and so from God. Likewise, Anselm insists—pace Boethius—that Adam’s fallen race is still the human race. In the final section, I turnto Anselm’s distinction between injustice (iniustitia) and disadvantage (incommoda), his concession that some disadvantages are something, and his explanation of happiness in terms of advantage or bona sibi. For Anselm, happiness and justice break apart, so that it is possible in this world for the just to lack advantage. Moreover, in the world to come, the damned will suffer radical deprivation—not only of the justice, which they deserted, but of advantages. I contrastthis with Boethius’s insistence (based on the argument in section I) that virtue suffices for happiness and vice for unhappiness, and that there is no such thing as bad fortune. I conclude by pondering why Anselm treated disadvantage as a something rather than as a misfit between somethings. (shrink)

Anselm inherited a Platonizing approach to philosophy from Augustine and Boethius. But he characteristically reworked what he found in their texts by questioning and disputing it into something more rigorous. In this paper, I compare and contrast Anselm’s treatment of the trope ‘evil is nothing, not a being’ withBoethius’s use of it in The Consolation of Philosophy. In the first section, I expose a fallacious argument form common to them both: paradigm Fness is identical with paradigm Gness; X participates in (...) paradigm Fness and so is F; therefore, X participates in paradigm Gness and so is G. In the second section, I contrast Philosophy’s “strong medicine”—‘evil is nothing,’ ‘evil-doings are nothing,’ ‘evil humans do not exist’—with Anselm’s development of the point that injustice is a privation and so parasitic on the beings that are deprived. By contrast with Boethius, Anselm emphasizes that the willinstrument, will-power, the will’s action and turnings are something and so from God. Likewise, Anselm insists—pace Boethius—that Adam’s fallen race is still the human race. In the final section, I turnto Anselm’s distinction between injustice (iniustitia) and disadvantage (incommoda), his concession that some disadvantages are something, and his explanation of happiness in terms of advantage or bona sibi. For Anselm, happiness and justice break apart, so that it is possible in this world for the just to lack advantage. Moreover, in the world to come, the damned will suffer radical deprivation—not only of the justice, which they deserted, but of advantages. I contrastthis with Boethius’s insistence (based on the argument in section I) that virtue suffices for happiness and vice for unhappiness, and that there is no such thing as bad fortune. I conclude by pondering why Anselm treated disadvantage as a something rather than as a misfit between somethings. (shrink)

Our moral valuation of nonhuman and human beings alike may arise in sympathy, the realization in feeling of a significant commonality between self and others; in scrupulous observance of policy, the affirmation in practical consistency of a system of relations with others; and in piety, the attitude of boundless appreciation and absolute scruple with respect to objects as sacred - that is, as valued for the sake of adequate valuation of the holy. Differences between the moral status of humans and (...) that of nonhumans are to be explained not by any single criterion such as the capacity to suffer or to make contracts, but rather by finding the relative positions of humans and nonhumans on continua of feelable commonality, policy considerateness, and sacredness. Investigation of these differences must take into account the way basic religious apprehensions (or the absence thereof) organize these frames of reference. (shrink)

Seeing the way Daniel has been interpreted in other times calls attention to the impoverishment critical studies have imposed upon the contemporary preacher who seeks in Daniel a word for our time.

in the euthyphro, socrates tells euthyphro that Meletus is taking him to court for impiety.1 Upon hearing Euthyphro’s claim to have knowledge of piety, Socrates asks Euthyphro to take him on as a pupil, so that he might acquire knowledge of piety himself. Although this may seem unsurprising, given Socrates’s high regard for knowledge in other dialogues, the reason that Socrates gives for wishing to acquire knowledge, in this case, is bizarre—for he says it is because knowledge of piety will (...) help him to secure his acquittal on charges of impiety.It is unclear, however, why Socrates believes that his learning what piety is should lead to the impiety charges against him being dropped, yet no one has ever made a.. (shrink)

It is an irony that Kierkegaard would have relished that Marilyn Piety’s review in The Owl, 21, 2 : 205–208, of my book, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness, was published in a journal dedicated to Hegel studies and read by Hegel scholars. For her criticisms are typical of those for whom Kierkegaard is the David who slew forever the Goliath of Hegelianism. Thus it is not really, as she states, a lack of “substance” that disturbs her about my book; it (...) is the entire project, the very effort to show how much Kierkegaard continued to write books susceptible to Hegelian dialectical analysis long after he had turned his rhetorical weapons in Hegel’s direction. I am grateful to the editors of The Owl for this opportunity to try to convey to Hegel scholars a bit of my own excitement over what I believe is indeed a substantial discovery within the vexed field of Kierkegaard scholarship. (shrink)

Interpretations of Poetry and Religion is the third volume in a new critical edition of the complete works of George Santayana that restores Santayana's original text and provides important new scholarly information.Published in the spring of 1900, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion was George Santayana's first book of critical prose. It developed his view that "poetry is called religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry." This statement (...) and the point of view it espoused contributed significantly to the debate between science and religion at the turn of the century, and its eloquence and clearsightedness continue to have an impact on current discussions about the nature of religion.Interpretations of Poetry and Religion affronted Santayana's peers with its assault on literary and religious pieties of the cultivated classes. William James called its philosophy of harmonious and integral ideal systems nothing less than "a perfection of rottenness."In his insightful introductory essay, Joel Porte observes that while Santayana's theory of correlative objects, his espousal of the "ideal" - the normal human affinity for abstraction - and exaltation of the imagination may have offended some at Harvard, these ideas had a significant influence on other Harvard scholars T.S. Eliot and Santayana's "truest disciple," Wallace Stevens.Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., heads the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at Texas A & M University. William G. Holzberger is a Professor of English at Bucknell University. Joel Porte is Whiton Professor of American Literature at Cornell University. (shrink)

The title of this book should be read as a pun, for Smith thinks that the term "religion" has no precise or useful meaning and should be put an end to. He argues primarily as an historian, but his book poses a serious and deliberate challenge to the philosopher of religion. He proposes a mild language reform, the substitution of the two categories "cumulative tradition" and "faith" for the single one "religion." He gives some good positive reasons for this. But (...) too much of his book is devoted to historical accounts of the origins and use of the term "religion" within various cultures, and of the different proper names of religions. As the arguments progress, it becomes clear that the language reform he really wants to make is to employ only the category of "faith" understood as personal piety. There is a good deal of confusion at the theoretical level, but the issue is important, the positive contribution valuable and the challenge to clarity much needed.—W. G. E. (shrink)