Machine generated contents note: 1. Astrobiology in societal context Constance Bertka; Part I. Origin of Life: 2. Emergence and the experimental pursuit of the origin of life Robert Hazen; 3. From Aristotle to Darwin, to Freeman Dyson: changing definitions of life viewed in historical context James Strick; 4. Philosophical aspects of the origin-of-life problem: the emergence of life and the nature of science Iris Fry; 5. The origin of terrestrial life: a Christian perspective Ernan McMullin; 6. The alpha and the (...) omega: reflections on the origin and future of life from the perspective of Christian theology and ethics Celia Deane-Drummond; Part II. Extent of Life: 7. A biologist's guide to the Solar System Lynn Rothschild; 8. The quest for habitable worlds and life beyond the Solar System Carl Pilcher; 9. A historical perspective on the extent and search for life Steven J. Dick; 10. The search for extraterrestrial life: epistemology, ethics, and worldviews Mark Lupisella; 11. The implications of discovering extraterrestrial life: different searches, different issues Margaret S. Race; 12. God, evolution, and astrobiology Cynthia S. W. Crysdale; Part III. Future of Life: 13. Planetary ecosynthesis on Mars: restoration ecology and environmental ethics Christopher P. McKay; 14. The trouble with intrinsic value: an ethical primer for astrobiology Kelly C. Smith; 15. God's preferential option for life: a Christian perspective on astrobiology Richard O. Randolph; 16. Comparing stories about the origin, extent, and future of life: an Asian religious perspective Francisca Cho; Index. (shrink)

This article examines the excitement that Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments generated in France during the French Revolution, focusing particularly on the writings of political theorists, participants and commentators such as the abbé Sieyès, Pierre-Louis Rœderer, the Marquis de Condorcet and Sophie de Grouchy Condorcet, who were dismayed at their political opponents’ use of Rousseau, and looked to Smith for an understanding of the passions that was compatible with democratic sovereignty and representative government. In the political context of the (...) early 1790s, clarifying the concept of natural sociability, which Rousseau had rejected, but Smith and Helvétius, in different ways, each regarded as indispensible to a society dependent on advanced division of labour, became a central concern in the public lectures delivered by Pierre-Louis Rœderer as the Terror took hold. ☆ My thanks to Emma Rothschild, Michael Sonenscher, Brian Young and other participants in the History of Political Thought Seminar, Oxford, and The Hexagonal Forum, Cambridge, where earlier versions of this paper were presented and helpfully discussed. I’m also grateful for comments on an earlier draft from Carolina Armenteros, Clare Jackson, Duncan Kelly, Michael Sonenscher and Richard Whatmore. (shrink)

George Boolos was one of the most prominent and influential logician-philosophers of recent times. This collection, nearly all chosen by Boolos himself shortly before his death, includes thirty papers on set theory, second-order logic, and plural quantifiers; on Frege, Dedekind, Cantor, and Russell; and on miscellaneous topics in logic and proof theory, including three papers on various aspects of the Gödel theorems. Boolos is universally recognized as the leader in the renewed interest in studies of Frege's work on logic and (...) the philosophy of mathematics. John Burgess has provided introductions to each of the three parts of the volume, and also an afterword on Boolos's technical work in provability logic, which is beyond the scope of this volume. (shrink)

Economists evaluate their models in terms of credibility. For example, Rothschild and Stiglitz argued from a model of a completive insurance market that under the “plausible” (632) assumption of information asymmetry, one can “credibly” infer the non-existence of equilibria in specific situations – despite the fact that, as they admit, the real ‘market … for insurance is probably not competitive’ (648).1 Another example is Richard Thaler’s column on anomalies of (micro-) economic theory. From 1987 to 2001, he headed (...) every article with the following sentence: ‘An empirical result is anomalous if it is difficult to rationalize, or if implausible assumptions are necessary to explain it within the paradigm’.2 Or, yet another example, Hans Lind concludes in a survey of mathematical models of rent control that ‘what is shown in the model[s]…is just one type of argument…for why a certain story is more credible than a competing story. (shrink)

More than any other textbook, Moore and Parker's Critical Thinking has defined the structure and content of the critical thinking course at colleges and universities across the country--and has done so with a witty writing style that students enjoy. Now in full-color, the eighth edition brings the concepts of critical thinking to life in vivid detail, with current examples relevant to today's students.

We often ask for the opinion of a group of individuals. How strongly does the scientific community believe that the rate at which sea levels are rising has increased over the last 200 years? How likely does the UK Treasury think it is that there will be a recession if the country leaves the European Union? What are these group credences that such questions request? And how do they relate to the individual credences assigned by the members of the particular (...) group in question? According to the credal judgement aggregation principle, linear pooling, the credence function of a group should be a weighted average or linear pool of the credence functions of the individuals in the group. In this chapter, I give an argument for linear pooling based on considerations of accuracy. And I respond to two standard objections to the aggregation principle. (shrink)

This volume collects a number of important and revealing interviews with Richard Rorty, spanning more than two decades of his public intellectual commentary, engagement, and criticism. In colloquial language, Rorty discusses the relevance and nonrelevance of philosophy to American political and public life. The collection also provides a candid set of insights into Rorty's political beliefs and his commitment to the labor and union traditions in this country. Finally, the interviews reveal Rorty to be a deeply engaged social thinker (...) and observer. (shrink)

This comprehensive study of probability considers the approaches of Pascal, Laplace, Poisson, and others. It also discusses Laws of Large Numbers, the theory of errors, and other relevant topics.

Statelessness and refugees -- The right to have rights -- Loyal opposition : Arendt's critique of Zionism -- Racism and segregation -- The banality of evil -- Truth, politics and lying -- Plurality, politics, and public freedom -- The American Revolution and the revolutionary spirit -- Personal and political responsibility.

In this third edition of "John Locke", the text is divided into three parts. The first is biographical, giving an account of the development of Locke's mind. The second expounds the teaching of the "Essay", and relates this to its background; while the third deals with Locke's teaching in political theory, moral philosophy, education, and religion. -- From publisher's description.

In this piece we explore the COVID pandemic as an opportunity for the articulation and realization of digital health futures. Our discussion draws on an engagement with emergent discourse around COVID-19 and ongoing work on imaginaries of future care associated with digital tools for the detection of cognitive decline and the risk of dementia. We describe how the post-COVID futures of digital health are narrated in terms of the timing and speed with which they are being brought into being, as (...) market actors attempt to establish the scale and durability of the COVID transformation. However, we also point to the particularly spatial changes to medical practice they envisage. In a time of distancing and isolation, the ability to operate effectively at a distance has become integral to the future of medical assessment, diagnosis and care. However, spatialized promises of digital health and the ability to act remotely are unevenly spread – some organizations and entities inevitably have greater reach. (shrink)

Clarke and Beck import certain assumptions about the nature of numbers. Although these are widespread within research on number cognition, they are highly contentious among philosophers of mathematics. In this commentary, we isolate and critically evaluate one core assumption: the identity thesis.

This book is devoted to the reintroduction of the remarkable approach to sociological inquiry developed by Harvey Sacks. Sacks's original analyses - concerned with the lived detail of action and language-in-interaction, discoverable in members' actual activities - demonstrated a means of doing sociology that had previously seemed impossible. In so doing, Sacks provided for highly technical, detailed, yet stunningly simple solutions to some of the most trenchant troubles for the social sciences relating to language, culture, meaning, knowledge, action, and social (...) organisation. In this original collection, scholars working in a range of different fields, including sociology, human geography, communication and media studies, social psychology, and linguistics, outline the ways in which their work has been inspired, influenced, and shaped by Sacks's approach, as well as how their current research is taking Sacks's legacy forward in new directions. As such, the collection is intended to provide both an introduction to, and critical exploration of, the work of Harvey Sacks and its continued relevance for the analysis of contemporary society. (shrink)

A close look at Frege's proof in "Foundations of Arithmetic" that every number has a successor. The examination reveals a surprising gap in the proof, one that Frege would later fill in "Basic Laws of Arithmetic".

Models of collective deliberation often assume that the chief aim of a deliberative exchange is the sharing of information. In this paper, we argue that an equally important role of deliberation is to draw participants’ attention to pertinent questions, which can aid the assembly and processing of distributed information by drawing deliberators’ attention to new issues. The assumption of logical omniscience renders classical models of agents’ informational states unsuitable for modelling this role of deliberation. Building on recent insights from psychology, (...) linguistics and philosophy about the role of questions in speech and thought, we propose a different model in which beliefs are treated as answers directed at specific questions. Here, questions are formally represented as partitions of the space of possibilities and individuals’ information states as sets of questions and corresponding partial answers to them. The state of conversation is then characterised by individuals’ information together with the questions under discussion, which can be steered by various deliberative inputs. Using this model, deliberation is then shown to shape collective decisions in ways that classical models cannot capture, allowing for novel explanations of how group consensus is achieved. (shrink)

Ethics and the Clinical Encounter explores the moral dimensions of clinical medicine and the phenomenon of illness, to determine what ethics must be in order to be fully responsive to clinical encounters. Written in a lively and conversational style with minimal technical terminology, and enhanced by actual experience or real clinical situations, this volume lays out a clinical ethics methodology both in practical and theoretical terms. Here's what the experts had to say: Professor Zaner has provided us with a remarkably (...) lucid and trenchant discussion of the interface of philosophy and the field of medicine. He brings into play an extraordinary range of historial knowledge, extensive observations based on firsthand experience with medical practices, and an acute sense of philosophical argumentation. This is a work that will be an exemplary and indispensable text in the philosophy of medicine for years to come. -- Calvin Schrag... it is a highly original contribution usable in a number of fields.... It really has no competition.... The genius of Zaner's approach is to ground ethics from the 'bottom up' and to direct us to the concrete particulars of therapeutic encounters wherein lie moral and ethical matters... meaty, challenging, and ultimately rewarding.... -- Paul R. Dokecki Richard M. Zaner founded the Center for Clinical and Research Ethics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Having established Vanderbilt's first Hospital Ethics Committee (1985), he served as co-chair of VUMC's Ethics Committee since its inception in 1990. Zaner has published five original books, edited ten, and translated four more, and has published more than 100 sections of books and professional journals. (shrink)

A basic system of inductive logic; An axiomatic foundation for the logic of inductive generalization; A survey of inductive systems; On the condition of partial exchangeability; Representation theorems of the de finetti type; De finetti's generalizations of excahngeability; The structure of probabilities defined on first-order languages; A subjectivit's guide to objective chance.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Qualitative Hedonism Objections to Mill's Qualitative Hedonism: Internal Inconsistency and Value Pluralism The Judgment of Competent Agents: Self‐Development and Value Measurement Self‐Development and Virtue Ethics Further Reading.

The main aim of this article is to start a discussion of social pattern, a term that is commonly used in sociology but not specified or defined. The key question can be phrased as follows: Is it possible to transform the notion of social pattern from its current status in sociology as a proto-concept into a fully worked out concept? And if so, how can this be done? To provide material for the discussion we begin by introducing a few different (...) types of patterns that are currently being used (patterns in nature, cultural patterns, statistical patterns, and computationally generated patterns). This is followed by a suggestion for what a strictlysociologicalconcept of social pattern may look like. A useful and theoretically solid concept of social pattern can in our view be constructed by basing it on Weber’s concept of social action. This means thatboththe behavior of the actorsandthe meaning these invest their behavior with must be taken into account. The article ends with a brief discussion of how to use the concept of social patterns in an effective way and what may endanger such a use. (shrink)

Abstract Responding to recent calls from within critical MOS and organizational ethics studies to explore questions of difference and inclusion ‘beyond unity and fixity’, this paper seeks to enrich the debate on difference and its negotiation in organizations, thereby foregrounding difference as the contested and ever-changing outcome of power-invested configurations of practice. The paper presents an ethnographic study conducted in a psychosocial day-care centre that positions itself as a ‘space of multiplicity’ wherein ‘it is normal to be different’. Highlighting the (...) context-specific challenges and struggles encompassing mental ill-health as a category of difference deviating from the norm, our paper contributes to a critical-affirmative understanding of difference. We foster an approach that values normative orientations such as ‘egalitarian difference’ and ‘difference as multiplicity’ yet avoids idealising portrayals of an ethics of difference that challenges normalcy and unconditionally favours otherness and calls for ‘radically other kinds of difference’. (shrink)

We study the values on which managers of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) draw when constructing their personal and organizational-level engagement with environmental issues, particularly climate change. Values play an important mediating role in business environmental engagement, but relatively little research has been conducted on individual values in smaller organizations. Using the Schwartz Value System (SVS) as a framework for a qualitative analysis, we identify four “ideal-types” of SME managers and provide rich descriptions of the ways in which values shape (...) their constructions of environmental engagement. In contrast to previous research, which is framed around a binary divide between self-enhancing and self-transcending values, our typology distinguishes between individuals drawing primarily on Power or on Achievement values and indicates how a combination of Achievement and Benevolence values is particularly significant in shaping environmental engagement. This demonstrates the theoretical usefulness of focusing on a complete range of values. Implications for policy and practice are discussed. (shrink)

This seriously playful book provides comic relief in an age of neoliberalism and argues that parody can be used to creatively benefit our practices of self-narration and quests for knowledge. It demonstrates how parody utilizes humor, play, and self-reflection to allow for a helpful, alternative relationship to mistakes and our multifaceted-self. The book works to delineate specific ways of viewing, studying, creating, and performing a particular form of humorous parody, and through pedagogical application, it balances practical hands on examples via (...) digital video creation with examples and exercises such as interrogating our creative histories and parodying them--either as a classroom exercise or in individual self-reflection. The core readership for this book is rhetoric and composition scholars researching continental philosophy, humor, and narrative theory, and it lends itself to classroom implementation for professors, as it brings together (often for the first time) major academic conversations on humor throughout philosophy, literary and cultural studies, communication studies, and media studies. Therefore, this book will be essential reading for undergraduate/graduate courses that feature humor, alternative forms of communication in the public sphere, alternative rhetorical strategies, and courses that focus on the importance of creativity and play in our daily lives and scholarship. (shrink)

Previous theory and research on bounded rationality has emphasized how limited cognitive resources constrain people from making utility maximizing choices. This paper expands the concept of bounded rationality to consider how people’s rationality may be constrained by their internalization of a qualitatively distinct standard for sound judgment, which is commonly labeled reasonableness. In contrast to rationality, the standard of reasonableness provides guidance for making choices in situations that involve balancing incommensurable values and interests or reconciling conflicting points-of-view. We review recent (...) evidence showing that laypeople readily recognize the distinctions between rationality and reasonableness and thus are able to utilize these as distinct standards to inform their everyday decision-making. The fact that people appear to have internalized rationality and reasonableness as distinct standards of sound judgment supports the notion that people’s pursuit of rationality may be bounded by their determination to also be reasonable. (shrink)

This Very Short Introduction explores the philosophical ideas and political theories of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975). As a survivor of the Holocaust, Arendt's life informed her work exploring the meaning and construction of power, evil, totalitarianism, and direct democracy. Through insightful readings of Arendt's best-known works, from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) to The Life of the Mind (1978), Dana Villa traces the importance of Arendt's ideas for today's reader. In so doing, Villa explains how Arendt gained world-wide fame with the (...) publication of Origins, and went on to have a distinguished career as a political theorist and public intellectual. A sometimes controversial figure, Arendt is now recognised as one of the most important political thinkers of the twentieth century and her works have become an acknowledged part of the Western canon of political theory and philosophy"--From the publisher. (shrink)

The problem of the nature of mind has lingered for a long time. Generated by the question of whether the mind is an independently existing entity or merely an aspect of bodily events and processes, the problem of the nature of mind has divided Western philosophers into two opposing camps, namely dualism and physicalism. Contemporary discourse of the nature of minds, within the Western philosophical tradition, continues to privilege physicalism over dualism, because it avoids the theoretical impasse engendered by the (...) dualist inability to account for how two radically different entities manage to interact with each other. Although physicalism avoids the dualist pitfalls, it, however, encounters the problem of plausibly accounting for the possibility of conscious experience without commitment to the dualist ontology of a realm different from the body. In this article, we provide an African (Yoruba) perspective to the question of the nature of mind as an alternative to the Western perspective represented by dualist and physicalist theories. We develop a variant of dualism called “contextual dualism,” which accepts the dualist basic tenet of the duality of body and mind but diverges from it by permitting that some physical organs of the body also function in the capacity of the mind. Using ethnological analysis and the Yoruba linguistic hermeneutics as theoretical frameworks, the paper argues that the difference between when a physical organ functions as body and when it functions as mind is revealed in Yoruba language through their contexts of use. The paper concludes that contextual dualism drives a reconciliatory wedge between mainstream dualism and physicalism. (shrink)