Lockheed Martin Corp. has funded research to generate a framework and methodology for developing semantic reasoning applications to support the discipline oflntelligence Analysis. This chapter outlines that framework, discusses how it may be used to advance the information sharing and integrated analytic needs of the Intelligence Community, and suggests a system I software architecture for such applications.

Despite a large and multifaceted effort to understand the vast landscape of phenotypic data, their current form inhibits productive data analysis. The lack of a community-wide, consensus-based, human- and machine-interpretable language for describing phenotypes and their genomic and environmental contexts is perhaps the most pressing scientific bottleneck to integration across many key fields in biology, including genomics, systems biology, development, medicine, evolution, ecology, and systematics. Here we survey the current phenomics landscape, including data resources and handling, and the progress that (...) has been made to accurately capture relevant data descriptions for phenotypes. We present an example of the kind of integration across domains that computable phenotypes would enable, and we call upon the broader biology community, publishers, and relevant funding agencies to support efforts to surmount today's data barriers and facilitate analytical reproducibility. (shrink)

Characterising Liberal and Evangelical theology as positions on a continuum or spectrum is common within Protestant circles. I argue that Liberals and Evangelicals do not share a common conceptual framework but embody competing and incommensurable conceptual schemes. Liberal theology then is not a distortion of true Biblical Christianity, as is often supposed, but rather is an entirely different approach to doing theology, indeed, to seeing the world. What I hope to achieve by way of this paper is to provide a (...) context within which to better understand both Liberal and Evangelical claims, and to offer an explanation as to why the debates between the two schools are seemingly intractable. Further, I hope to encourage Liberals and Evangelicals to pursue the difficult task of understanding each other's position so that genuine dialogue can take place. (shrink)

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

Book review of three book about philosopher Charles Taylor. "Charles Taylor", by Ruth Abbey. Teddington, UK: Acumen, 2000. ISBN: 0691057141. "Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity", by Nicholas H. Smith. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. ISBN: 0742521273. "Charles Taylor: Thinking and Living Deep Diversity", by Mark Redhead. Lanham and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. ISBN: 0745645767. There can be no doubt that Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has made a major contribution to the development of contemporary philosophy and is one of the (...) most influential and prolific philosophers in the English-speaking world today. Perhaps the most striking feature of his work is its breadth, both in terms of the topics addressed and per-spectives employed. Taylor's work ranges from reflections on artificial intelligence to analyses of contemporary multicultural societies, touching on questions of epistemology, ethics, identity, and metaphysics along the way. He is rare in his ability to bring his deep knowledge of history, ancient culture and religious thought to bear in his philosophical investigations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 39.4 (2005) 1-2 [Access article in PDF] A Personal Tribute to Nellie McCaslin: 20 August 1914–28 February 2005 Nellie McCaslin, pioneer in creative drama and educational theatre, passed away earlier this year in New York City at age 90. Having obtained a bachelor's degree from Western Reserve University in 1936 and a master's degree in 1937, she went on to study improvisation with Maria (...) Ouspenskaya, of the Moscow Art Theatre, in California. In 1957, she received a Ph.D. from the School of Education at New York University (NYU). A longtime Greenwich Village resident, she became associate dean at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and for over thirty years was an adjunct faculty member at NYU's Program in Educational Theatre.Her publications include Theatre for Children in the United States: A History (1971), Children and Drama (1975), Theatre for Young Audiences (1978), and Creative Drama in the Classroom and Beyond (2006), forthcoming in its eighth edition. She will be fondly remembered by her colleagues and friends for her keynote speeches delivered at conferences and events from Canada to Switzerland, from Israel to Taiwan. Throughout her career, she enthusiastically encouraged imagination and creativity through creative drama and the arts. In 1977, she was elected to the American College of Fellows. She received an honorary Doctor of Humanities from Ferrum College, Virginia, in 1986. Nellie's outstanding contribution to educational theatre was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Alliance of Theatre and Education in 1996 and with a Medallion Award from the Children's Theatre Foundation in 2001.At the Program in Educational Theatre at NYU, she taught courses in Theatre for Young Audiences and Creative Drama. She would also invite [End Page 1] friends and acquaintances to attend seminars at her church, First Presbyterian in the Village, and afterwards we might return to her apartment on 10th Street, where she would introduce us to fellow artists. Nellie found time to volunteer at church and at the local animal shelter, Bide-A-Wee. Her tireless energy and compassion were expressions of her love of living. She had begun to act again and each summer would travel south to take part in the Blue Ridge Dinner Theatre. Artistic Director Rex Stephenson said recently, "She's the only person that could cash a check from New York in Rocky Mount, Virginia, because everybody knew who she was."1 People were drawn to Nellie, as if by her luminous presence; she always had time to listen. Active to the end, she wrote the article that appears in this issue of the Journal of Aesthetic Education. Before she died, Nellie was working with NYU students to create a new play. At St. Vincent's in Manhattan, she was rehearsing her lines by telephone from her hospital bed. She will be deeply missed. Alistair Martin-Smith Endnote 1. Margalit Fox, "Nellie McCaslin, Professor and Children's Theater Authority, Dies at 90," New York Times, 12 March 2005.Photo by Maya Ishiura... (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN SPACE & PLACE thread: April Vannini, Those Between the Common * Laura Dean & Jesse McClelland, Ballard: A Portrait of Placemaking * Amara Hark Weber, Crossroad * Isaac Linder & Berit Soli-Holt, The Call of the Wild: Terro(i)r Modulations * Ashley D. Hairston, Momma taught us to keep a clean house * Sean Smith, The Garage (Take One) * * * * Ballard: A Portrait of Placemaking from continent. on Vimeo . How do people perceive changing landscapes and lifestyles in our neighborhood? We were drawn to this question, perhaps like our interviewees, because we are interested in a certain mystique in Ballard, because we enact something important about it when we go to its coffee shops and restaurants, and because we are transients from other places. Furthermore, we are not always sure of our place in the city, or how our points of reference here may be changing. Much can be said about Seattle’s role in white settlement and in its original industries: shipping, canning, and logging. Much can be said about the arrival of Scandinavian laborers in Ballard, or how the town of Ballard came to be incorporated into Seattle. But as in maps, while these accounts may ground key details, they do not encompass our imaginations of place. Over the last few decades, new meanings in Ballard have been drawn from the built environment. An old railroad track, since converted into a bike path, allows close-up views of storage lots, dry docks and shipyards still lining the ferryway at Ballard’s south edge. Hardware stores and auto repair shops remain clustered along an early bridge and what used to be the city’s first major highway. Nearby, along Market Street and Ballard Avenue, a parallel world of leisure has sprung up celebrating craft processes of work. This is a world of artisan beer, gluten-free pizza, organic coffee, vintage clothing, designer furniture, and one of the city’s finest year-round farmer’s markets. In the past, a noodle shop, a tapas bar, and a Mexican food cart might all have been out of place, but today, they all hang in the balance. As a widening array of consumer spaces channels urban trajectories into the future, contemporary landscapes and lifestyles are retrofitted to traces of the past. The functional and aesthetic components of cities are affected by scales far outside the neighborhood. But as Ballard’s rapidly changing housing market attests, people resituate themselves and the places around them by winnowing out distances and connections between self and other. Condo owners, young couples, single adults, students, senior citizens, and the homeless scramble, revise and recompile landscapes in dynamic and uneven ways. Often, these shifts are an open secret in which past and future are sutured together — debated, digested, and dreamed over. (shrink)

This article explores conceptions of moral status in the work of American thriller author Dean Koontz. It begins by examining some of the general theories of moral status used by philosophers to determine whether particular entities have moral status. This includes both uni-criterial theories and multi-criterial theories of moral status. After this examination, the article argues for exploring bioethics conceptions in popular fiction. Popular fiction is considered a rich source for analysis because it provides not only a good approximation (...) of the beliefs of ordinary members of the moral community, but also explores important issues in a context where ordinary individuals are likely to encounter them. Following on from this, the article then explores theories of moral status in the context of Koontz’s novels. In particular, the article focuses on the novel Watchers and Koontz’s Frankenstein series. Through these works, Koontz indicates that entities have moral status for a variety of reasons and thus presumably, he is a proponent of multi-criterial theories of moral status. The article concludes with an examination of what this might mean for our understanding of moral status claims generally. (shrink)

Reflection on the wrongs done by characters in Woody Allen’s romantic comedy “Manhattan” helps us get clear about the evidence required to judge them responsible and so liable to blame them for those wrongs. On the positive side, what is required is evidence that trust remains a possibility, despite the fact that they wrong, and this in turn requires evidence that the wrongdoer had, but failed to exercise, the capacity to do the right thing when they did that wrong. On (...) the negative side, what is not required is evidence of some explanation of that failure. This counts against a well-known suggestion of Gary Watson’s in “Skepticism about Weakness of Will.”. (shrink)

This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN SPACE & PLACE thread: April Vannini, Those Between the Common * Laura Dean & Jesse McClelland, Ballard: A Portrait of Placemaking * Amara Hark Weber, Crossroad * Isaac Linder & Berit Soli-Holt, The Call of the Wild: Terro(i)r Modulations * Ashley D. Hairston, Momma taught us to keep a clean house * Sean Smith, The Garage (Take One) * * * * Preface: Variations of Archiving the Anarchive Through Editorial Witnessing by April Vannini “a diagram is a map, or rather several superimposed maps.” 1 What do we do with essays, art, artefacts, and practices that go against, resist, challenge and reject archival capture or documentation since they do not fit within the screen or manage to move beyond conventional scales? What do we do with an essay or artefact that is the event of the event becoming-event itself, or how do we move from volumetric space to two-dimensional space? How do editors, curators, participants, etc. become witness to an anarchive? And most importantly, what are the potential and unanticipated ways in which a volumetric submission can be diagrammed within a two- dimensional space? In short, how do we archive the anarchive? These are questions that have emerged and have been consciously and purposely activated by Sean Smith’s thinkpiece for this issue, The Garage (Take One) . Sean, as part of his contribution to the special issue of drift within the thread in between space and place , created an artefact that emerged out of an event held during May 2013, titled Cottage University: Topology and Immanence . The visual documentation of The Garage (Take One) is not an archive but an anarchive due to its multimodal form, non-representational diagramming, and its reactivation of non-representational folding which animates its non-representational or more-than -representational condition. In short, The Garage (Take One) stymies attempts to be translated into digital text, representationally. As a reader of Sean’s submission you will only have access to a portion of the original submitted contribution (see “Take One”). At this time, I remain the only witness of The Garage (Take One) in its entirety: I was present at the original event, Cottage University: Topology and Immanence , and I was the sole receiver of the original package because of my role as editor for the thread, in between space and place . However, I would like to stress that I was unaware of what Sean would submit as his contribution to the special issue. What is presented here is an emergent rippling of the event that was not predetermined or arranged in advance ... a drifting of sorts! As for now, the artefact sits here on my desk next to a pile of books—folded, creased and somewhat lost in its translation into digital form. Questions of transcribing, translating and converting volumetric space to two-dimensional space have been considered throughout this process. And more importantly this artefact and its processes raise the issue of not what has been saved and included but what has been left out in each conversion of the original into the academic publication. What follows this preface are various “cuts” or “takes” from The Garage: Take One . Each take or cut is merely an interpretive and representational rendering of the original volumetric submission. Although with that said I would like to propose they are more than just representations or interpretations: each take or cut works as rippling variations of the event itself . It is important to acknowledge that much has been lost in the creases and much still lingers which will never be archived within an academic journal. Hence, a discussion of how to archive the anarchive is so crucial to para-academic “scholarship”. I will sum up the process that has emerged from The Garage (Take One) with a final word from Brian Massumi, written in his foreword to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus : Each 'plateau' is an orchestration of crashing bricks extracted from a variety of disciplinary edifices. They carry traces of their former emplacement, which give them a spin defining the arc of their vector. The vectors are meant to converge at a volatile juncture, but one that is sustained, as an open equilibrium of moving parts each with its own trajectory. The word 'plateau' comes from an essay by Gregory Bateson on Balinese culture, in which he found a libidinal economy quite different from the West's orgasmic orientation. In Deleuze and Guattari, a plateau is reached when circumstances combine to bring an activity to a pitch of intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax. The heightening of energies is sustained long enough to leave a kind of afterimage of its dynamism that can be reactivated or injected into other activities, creating a fabric of intensive states between which any number of connecting routes could exist. 2 The Garage (Take One) Double Take 2:31pm/5:31pm Sean Smith You there? I just wanted to emphasize a couple of things about the process of the submission: 2:31pm/5:31pm April Warn-Vannini Yes, listening. 2:36pm/5:36pm Sean Smith 1.When you describe feeding forward from the CU (Cottage University) event, it is a WALKING ACTIVITY that reinvests/reactivates the intensive energies of the event. that is what my photos are in Take One......it connects the intensive state of CU to my "one-take" writing on construction paper experience. i'm not sure if i adequately conveyed that or not, or if you did, or how important that is. 2. In doing so, it ruptures open the "space" and "place" of material practice ...and how these may enter into the mediated production of academic journal work...and its flattened two-dimensional experience. 3. the abstract machines of CU (i.e.coming out of silence) are invested with a new diagramming practice (the photo walk) to produce a new text that is neither-nor: "spaced" as a content of that walk (garages), but "placed" as a technical question (coming out of silence to language). 4. the new text is precisely diagrammatic, non-representational, anarchival. ....multimodal. ok, that's all that comes to mind right now. appreciating your efforts. 5. oh, finally, i think you might need a better definition of "anarchive" here..... it was hard to pin them down in montreal on what this is, so you wouldn't be wrong, per se, but more require a working definition for the reader. obviously, as you say, without getting too academic/citations, etc. know what i am saying? 2:46pm/5:46pm April Warn-Vannini 1. Totally got it but I think I did because of our many past conversations about how to archive the event 2. Yes this is what I love about this. And I think you speak to this very carefully in your writing on the Garage. Now whether others pick up on this I don't know. This is why I wanted to see what it would look like if I flattened it (take 3). 5. I agree that a better definition is needed. This is where I've been stumbling because I have not found anything that clearly defines what is meant by anarchive. 2:47pm/5:47pm Sean Smith "with take one being the only remainder of the original submission left to reveal...." precisely because of its digitality!!! yeah, i would probably just append an edited version of what we are saying here, as if the editing process was still a ripple of the event. me "adding" new text later i think defeats the purpose, but if you were to take snippets of this dialogue as part of the anarachive/ 2:48pm/5:48pm April Warn-Vannini Totally! 2:49pm/5:49pm Sean Smith and just *use them*, i think that's fair game. that way i won't be crafting my words with intent. you can even use this profile pic. 2:50pm/5:50pm April Warn-Vannini Okay perfect. With that said, do you think I should just discuss your process further in the preface or include an introduction that would be in take one? 2:51pm/5:51pm Sean Smith could it be Take Two in its own right, like an atemporal ripple that coexists with the others and bumps them to Three, Four and Five? Or could it be called "Double Take" and leave the others as Two, Three, Four? 2:53pm/5:53pm April Warn-Vannini Perfect. I like double take 2:53pm/5:53pm Sean Smith and it's us hashing through this discussion 2:53pm/5:53pm April Warn-Vannini Double take will follow take one. i like this. The Garage (Take Two) Folded, taped (scotch and duct), folded recycled chart paper previous emergent thoughts: performed, inscribed and made anew Red jiffy, black jiffy, blue ink pen cursive writing/block writing diagramming amplification dilated » » » » directional arrows « « « « Moistened, torn, crinkled Ruptures Anarchive of thought events Deciphering language/writing Exchanged as a volumetrics of new spaces Performing tactics of “writing off the page” on the page Enclosed [OPEN THE DOORS, MOVE FROM SURFACE TO VOLUME…AND THE CONVERSATION JUST MIGHT BEGIN ANEW. *stamped* SEAN SMITH] Drifting Drifting Drifting The Garage (Take Three) 6 Sean Smith video from April Vannini on Vimeo . The Garage (Take Four) The Garage (Take Five). (shrink)

‘Molinism’, in contemporary usage, is the name for a theory about the workings of divine providence. Its defenders include some of the most prominent contemporary Protestant and Catholic philosophical theologians.¹ Molinism is often said to be the only way to steer a middle..

Economic policy evaluations require social welfare functions for variable-size populations. Two important candidates are critical-level generalized utilitarianism (CLGU) and rank-discounted critical-level generalized utilitarianism, which was recently characterized by Asheim and Zuber (2014) (AZ). AZ introduce a novel axiom, existence of egalitarian equivalence (EEE). First, we show that, under some uncontroversial criteria for a plausible social welfare relation, EEE suffices to rule out the Repugnant Conclusion of population ethics (without AZ’s other novel axioms). Second, we provide a new characterization of CLGU: (...) AZ’s set of axioms is equivalent to CLGU when EEE is replaced by the axiom same-number independence. (shrink)

This volume puts together twelve new essays by scholars who have done groundbreaking work in epistemology over the past four decades. Unfortunately, the editor’s brief introduction offers only a sketchy presentation of the papers and their background. Given the variety and complexity of the issues tackled, one would have expected a more detailed account of the nature and developments of the epistemological theories and arguments put forward and discussed by the contributors. The absence of such an account is all the (...) more surprising considering that the editor does not himself contribute a paper to the volume. (shrink)

The foundation for a system of morals, this 1749 work is a landmark of moral and political thought. Its highly original theories of conscience, moral judgment, and virtue offer a reconstruction of the Enlightenment concept of social science, embracing both political economy and theories of law and government.

This book examines the philosophical foundations of the realist view of the progress of science as cumulative. It is a view that has recently been faced with a number of powerful attacks in which successive scientific theories are seen, not as extending their scope and honing their explanations, but as incommensurable. There is, it is held, in principle no way of establishing that they are about the same things. From the voluminous literature on the topic, Dr Smith has selected (...) relevantly and incisively and his exposition of the contending arguments is vigourous and clear, without undue technicality. As an explication and defence of realism it will interest all those concerned with this basic question in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

In mainstream analytic epistemology, Reformed theology has made its presence prominently felt in Reformed epistemology, the view of religious belief according to which religious beliefs can be properly basic and warranted when formed by the proper functioning of the sensus divinitatis, an inborn capacity or faculty for belief in God that can be prompted to generate certain religious beliefs when presented with things (e.g., certain majestic aspects of creation). A major competitor to Reformed epistemology is Wittgensteinian quasi-fideism, a position drawn (...) from the epistemology of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, according to which some foundational religious commitments are not properly basic beliefs but some kind of apodictic, unshakeable certainties that form part of the structure of one’s rationality and worldview. I argue that the Reformed tradition has contained elements of quasi-fideism at least as far back as Calvin’s account of faith from the Institutes of the Christian Religion, book 3, chapter 2. (shrink)

This title presents a comprehensive guide to interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) which is an increasingly popular approach to qualitative inquiry taught to undergraduate and postgraduate students today.

What kind of animals are human beings? And how do our visions of the human shape our theories of social action and institutions? In Moral, Believing Animals>, Christian Smith advances a creative theory of human persons and culture that offers innovative, challenging answers to these and other fundamental questions in sociological, cultural, and religious theory. Smith suggests that human beings have a peculiar set of capacities and proclivities that distinguishes them significantly from other animals on this planet. Despite (...) the vast differences in humanity between cultures and across history, no matter how differently people narrate their lives and histories, there remains an underlying structure of human personhood that helps to order human culture, history, and narration. Drawing on important recent insights in moral philosophy, epistemology, and narrative studies, Smith argues that humans are animals who have an inescapable moral and spiritual dimension. They cannot avoid a fundamental moral orientation in life and this, says Smith, has profound consequences for how sociology must study human beings. (shrink)

The Problem of Perception offers two arguments against direct realism--one concerning illusion, and one concerning hallucination--that no current theory of ...

We ordinarily suppose that there is a difference between having and failing to exercise a rational capacity on the one hand, and lacking a rational capacity altogether on the other. This is crucial for our allocations of responsibility. Someone who has but fails to exercise a capacity is responsible for their failure to exercise their capacity, whereas someone who lacks a capacity altogether is not. However, as Gary Watson pointed out in his seminal essay ’Skepticism about Weakness of Will’, the (...) idea of an unexercised capacity is much more difficult to make sense of than it initially appears. The aim of ’Rational Capacities’ is to provide the needed explication of this idea. (shrink)

Wilfred Cantwell Smith, maintained in this vastly important work that Westerners have misperceived religious life by making "religion" into one thing.

The central argument that Leslie Smith makes in this study is that reasoning by mathematical induction develops during childhood. The basis for this claim is a study conducted with children aged five to seven years in school years one and two.

Atheists have tacitly conceded the field to theists in the area of philosophical cosmology, specifically, in the enterprise of explaining why the universe exists. The theistic hypothesis is that the reason the universe exists lies in God’s creative choice, but atheists have not proposed any reason why the universe exists. I argue that quantum cosmology proposes such an atheistic reason, namely, that the universe exists because it has an unconditional probability of existing based on a functional law of nature. This (...) law of nature (“the wave function of the universe”) is inconsistent with theism and implies that God does not exist. I criticize the claims of Alston, Craig, Deltete and Guy, Oppy and Plantinga that theism is consistent with quantum cosmology. (shrink)

One of the key questions to have exercised green political theorists in recent years concerns the relationship of the environment 'agenda' and democracy. Both environmentalists and democrats have a tendency to think of each other as natural bedfellows but in fact there is little theoretical or practical reason why they should be. Indeed some theorists have argued that the environmental movement has grown from fundamentally authoritarian roots and it is arguable that the only really effective way of implementing environmental politics (...) is by imposing them in an authoritarian manner. This book deals with the tensions between democracy and environmentalism from a variety of theoretical and empirical perspectives. (shrink)

The introduction explain the need for how an international, inclusive discussion about the range of different methodological approaches from different traditions of philosophy can be read alongside each other and be seen in sometimes very critical conversation with each other. In addition, the introduction identifies four broad themes in the volume: the largest group of chapters advocate methods that promote history of philosophy as an unapologetic, autonomous enterprise with its own criteria within philosophy. Second, three chapters can be seen as (...) historicizing the history of philosophy from within. Third, four chapters argue for history of philosophy as a means toward making contributions to contemporary philosophy. Finally, two chapters explore the relationship between the history of philosophy and the history of science. (shrink)

The essays of The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss provide a comprehensive and non-partisan survey of the major themes and problems that constituted Strauss's work.