ONE Setting the Scene Ethics is central to modern life. Lawyers, accountants, doctors, nurses, the police, members of the armed forces, social workers and many others are required to study ethical issues as part of their training.

Many people who dismiss belief in God do so because this question seems to have no answer. Either God has the power to prevent evil and is cruel enough not to, or does not have the power and is not worth believing in. Peter Vardy's incisive new book sets out to explain the issues on the sides of believers and non-believers, drawing upon the work of both secular and religious writers. Complex arguments are expressed in clear and entertaining (...) language, even as Vardy invites us to reach new and often startling conclusions. (shrink)

Peter Vardy explains the philosophic process that has led to post-modernism - with its rejection of a single truth - and charts the political, social, environmental and personal consequences of undermining the distinction between truth and falsity.

Vardy (philosophy, U. of London) summarizes the main features of many of the central debates concerning God's reality and how God is to be understood. Among the views he includes are realist, cosmological, ontological, the design argument, religious experience, prayer, omnipotence and omniscience, God's action in the world, miracles, and eternal life. Summaries and questions for each chapter would support classroom use. First published by Fount in London. Paper edition (unseen), $18.95. No index. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., (...) Portland, OR. (shrink)

Challenges the contemporary materialist and post-truth world view and provides a challenging alternative.

What on Earth does metamathematics have to do with dialectics? One may justifiably find the association of these concepts dubious. Metamathematics, the foundational science of mathematics, seeks to grasp the conditions under which a contradiction-free science of quantity is possible. The following essay would like to show, in taking up the foundational reflections proper to metamathematics, that the principal anchoring of consistent mathematical objectivations presupposes a ground which not only founds these, but at the same time surpasses them in principle. (...) Such an immanent movement of the principal presuppositions of a spiritual construct is what Hegel understood by a dialectical development. Yet it is not my concern here to provide a Hegel-interpretation, but rather to demonstrate a development in the Hegelian sense with respect to a science. Only what is astonishing here is that it should be possible to show such a development precisely with respect to mathematics, a form of the human spirit extremely remote from dialectics. And yet this development also has to be understood dialectically: knowledge can neither avoid the quantitatively unambiguous nor be content with it. (shrink)

It is argued that causal understanding originates in experiences of acting on objects. Such experiences have consistent features that can be used as clues to causal identification and judgment. These are singular clues, meaning that they can be detected in single instances. A catalog of 14 singular clues is proposed. The clues function as heuristics for generating causal judgments under uncertainty and are a pervasive source of bias in causal judgment. More sophisticated clues such as mechanism clues and repeated interventions (...) are derived from the 14. Research on the use of empirical information and conditional probabilities to identify causes has used scenarios in which several of the clues are present, and the use of empirical association information for causal judgment depends on the presence of singular clues. It is the singular clues and their origin that are basic to causal understanding, not multiple instance clues such as empirical association, contingency, and conditional probabilities. (shrink)

Berkeley’s likeness principle is the claim that “an idea can be like nothing but an idea”. The likeness principle is intended to undermine representationalism: the view (that Berkeley attributes to thinkers like Descartes and Locke) that all human knowledge is mediated by ideas in the mind which represent material objects. Yet, Berkeley appears to leave the likeness principle unargued for. This has led to several attempts to explain why Berkeley accepts it. In contrast to ‘metaphysical’ and ‘epistemological’ interpretations available in (...) the literature, in this paper I defend a ‘conceptual’ interpretation. I argue that Berkeley accepts the likeness principle on the basis of (i) his commitment to the transparency of ideas, and (ii) his account of resemblance which he sets out in his works on vision. Thus, I provide an explanation for Berkeley’s reasons for accepting the likeness principle which, appropriately, focuses on his views concerning ideas and likeness. (shrink)

In this important new book in the IPPP series, a group of leading thinkers in psychiatry, psychology, and philosophy offer alternative perspectives that address both the scientific and clinical aspects of psychiatric validation, emphasizing throughout their philosophical and historical considerations.

For thirty years, Peter Singer's Practical Ethics has been the classic introduction to applied ethics. For this third edition, the author has revised and updated all the chapters and added a new chapter addressing climate change, one of the most important ethical challenges of our generation. Some of the questions discussed in this book concern our daily lives. Is it ethical to buy luxuries when others do not have enough to eat? Should we buy meat from intensively reared animals? (...) Am I doing something wrong if my carbon footprint is above the global average? Other questions confront us as concerned citizens: equality and discrimination on the grounds of race or sex; abortion, the use of embryos for research and euthanasia; political violence and terrorism; and the preservation of our planet's environment. This book's lucid style and provocative arguments make it an ideal text for university courses and for anyone willing to think about how she or he ought to live. (shrink)

In September 2008, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) scientists successfully switched on the historic biggest physics device, the Large ...

In my contribution to this Concise Collection on Margaret Cavendish, I focus on teaching Cavendish’s work in the context of philosophy (and, more specifically, Early Modern Philosophy). I have three aims. First, to explain why teaching women from philosophy’s history is crucially important to the discipline. Second, to outline my own reflections on teaching Cavendish’s philosophy. Third, to defend a specific claim about the benefits of teaching Cavendish to philosophy students; namely, that introducing biographical detail alongside philosophical ideas enriches the (...) learning experience. (shrink)

Margaret Macdonald was at the institutional heart of analytic philosophy in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. Yet, her views on the nature of philosophical theories diverge quite considerably from those of many of her contemporaries. In this paper, I focus on her 1953 article ‘Linguistic Philosophy and Perception’, a provocative paper in which Macdonald argues that the value of philosophical theories is more akin to that of poetry or art than science or mathematics. I do so for two reasons. First, (...) because it reveals just how far Macdonald’s meta- philosophical views diverged from those of many of her contemporaries. Second, because the discussion in LPP pre-empts recent literature on the nature of philosophical inquiry and the efficacy of philosophical arguments. Indeed, Macdonald’s paper is just as likely to provoke discussion today as it was in the 1950s. (shrink)

This paper provides a philosophical evaluation of the concept of handedness prevalent but largely unspoken in the scientific literature. This literature defines handedness as the preference or ability to use one hand rather than the other across a range of common activities. Using the philosophical discipline of phenomenology, I articulate and critique this conceptualization of handedness. Phenomenology shows defining a concept of handedness by focusing on hand use leads to a right hand biased concept. I argue further that a phenomenological (...) model based in spatial orientation rather than hand use provides a more inclusive concept of handedness. (shrink)

William Molyneux was born in Dublin, studied in Trinity College Dublin, and was a founding member of the Dublin Philosophical Society (DPS), Ireland’s counterpart to the Royal Society in London. He was a central figure in the Irish intellectual milieu during the Early Modern period and – along with George Berkeley and Edmund Burke – is one of the best-known thinkers to have come out of that context and out of Irish thought more generally. In 1688, when Molyneux wrote the (...) letter to Locke in which he posed the now famous question about a man born blind made to see, he was an active member of the DPS and was on familiar terms with several other key figures in Irish philosophy at the time. For the most part, Irish thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries answered “no” to Molyneux’s question of whether a blind man made to see could distinguish, by sight alone, between a cube and a sphere. (shrink)

Review of Joseph Y. Halpern (ed.), Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning About Knowledge: Proceedings of the 1986 Conference (Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1986),.

Prospect Theory: For Risk and Ambiguity, provides a comprehensive and accessible textbook treatment of the way decisions are made both when we have the statistical probabilities associated with uncertain future events and when we lack them. The book presents models, primarily prospect theory, that are both tractable and psychologically realistic. A method of presentation is chosen that makes the empirical meaning of each theoretical model completely transparent. Prospect theory has many applications in a wide variety of disciplines. The material in (...) the book has been carefully organized to allow readers to select pathways through the book relevant to their own interests. With numerous exercises and worked examples, the book is ideally suited to the needs of students taking courses in decision theory in economics, mathematics, finance, psychology, management science, health, computer science, Bayesian statistics, and engineering. (shrink)

Questionnaire data obtained from 97 supervisory and nonsupervisory employees representing the Production, Production Services, Marketing, and Administration departments of an Israeli metal production plant were used to test the relationship between selected personal and organizational attributes and work related misbehavior. Following Vardi and Wiener''s (1996) framework, Organizational Misbehavior (OMB) was defined as intentional acts that violate formal core organizational rules. We found that there was a significant negative relationship between Organizational Climate and OMB, and between the Organizational Climate dimensions (Warmth (...) and Support, and Reward), and OMB. Also, the activities of misbehavior reported by both managers and employees were negatively related to the Rules, Instrumental and Caring dimensions of Ethical Climates as defined by Victor and Cullen (1988). (shrink)

In der genannten Epoche werden Grundentscheidungen gefällt, welche die Fundamentalfrage der Philosophie, die Seinsfrage, in die Krisis führen, in den Nihilismus unter ontologischem, metaphysischem, epistemologischem, axiologischem Aspekt. Den Extrempositionen der Systemdenker Hegel, Schopenhauer und Schelling erwachsen in den Hegelkritikern Feuerbach, Br. Bauer, Marx und Stirner Kontrapositionen, die das Wahrheitsproblem der Beliebigkeit unterstellen. Kierkegaard klagt unter existentiellem Aspekt das Problem der Wahrheit ein. Nietzsche überholt durch Abschaffung der Wahrheit alle Positionen,was seinen Standort in der europäischen Denkgeschichte ausmacht und als Ergebnis der (...) problemgeschichtlichen Analysen zu charakterisieren ist. Die Rückgewinnung des Vernunfthorizontes setzen erst die Problemdenker N. Hartmann und M. Heidegger ins Werk durch kritische Erneuerung der Seinsfrage. (shrink)

"This book is an augmented and updated translation by the author of Theorie des Subjekts: Subjectiviteat und Identiteat zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne, Teubingen, Francke-UTB, 2010 (3rd ed.)"--Title page verso.

Starvation induces free‐living Dictyostelium discoideum amoebae to form slugs that typically contain 100,000 cells. Only recently have sufficient clues become available to suggest how coordinated cell actions might result in slug movement. We propose a “squeeze‐pull” model that involves circumferential cells squeezing forward a cellular core, followed by pulling up of the rear. This model takes into account the different classes of cells in the slug; it is proposed that prestalk cells are engines and prespore cells are the cargo.

In The Metaphysics of Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway, Marcy P. Lascano holds up the metaphysical views of two early modern women philosophers alongside one another in order to demonstrate that...

We interpret the (formal) postulates of measurement in quantum theory in terms of measurement procedures that can be done in the laboratory (at least in principle).

Asymmetrical convergence is the increasing overlap between academic and industrial sectors, but with academia moving closer toward for-profit industrial norms than vice versa. Although this concept, developed by Kleinman and Vallas, is useful, processes of asymmetrical convergence in daily laboratory life are largely unexplored. Here, observations of three lab groups of chemical scientists in academic and industry contexts illustrate variation in interactions with ethics-related policies. Findings show more tension for academic science with business-based practices, such as the move toward greater (...) accountability, than for industrial science with academic practices. This asymmetry is evident in the process of purposive decoupling: for example, where academic scientists use humor to distance themselves from the performance of compliance in required reporting and top-down ethics training requirements. This distancing from meaningless requirements contrasts with mentoring around practices of professional behavior that are thought to matter. Convergence is evident in how safety policies seem more engaging than other kinds of policies. Yet, power structures shape engagement. Academic engagement often means rule following, and flows vertically from professor’s authority to student apprenticeship. Industry engagement includes collaborative problem solving and flows along a more horizontal peer structure where informal power is less visible. (shrink)