Our commentary addresses how two neurodevelopmental disorders, Williams syndrome and autism spectrum disorder, provide novel insights into the credible signaling and music and social bonding hypotheses presented in the two target articles. We suggest that these neurodevelopmental disorders, characterized by atypical social communication, allow us to test hypotheses about music, social bonding, and their underlying neurobiology.

Modern Jewish philosophy emerged in the seventeenth century, with the impact of the new science and modern philosophy on thinkers who were reflecting upon the nature of Judaism and Jewish life. This collection of new essays examines the work of several of the most important of these figures, from the seventeenth to the late-twentieth centuries, and addresses themes central to the tradition of modern Jewish philosophy: language and revelation, autonomy and authority, the problem of evil, messianism, the influence of Kant, (...) and feminism. Included are essays on Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Cohen, Buber, Rosenzweig, Fackenheim, Soloveitchik, Strauss, and Levinas. Other thinkers discussed include Maimon, Benjamin, Derrida, Scholem, and Arendt. The sixteen original essays are written by a world-renowned group of scholars especially for this volume and give a broad and rich picture of the tradition of modern Jewish philosophy over a period of four centuries. (shrink)

This article argues that we could improve the design of research protocols by developing an awareness of and a responsiveness to the social contexts of all the actors in the research enterprise, including subjects, investigators, sponsors, and members of the community in which the research will be conducted. ?Social context? refers to the settings in which the actors are situated, including, but not limited to, their social, economic, political, cultural, and technological features. The utility of thinking about social contexts is (...) introduced and exemplified by the presentation of a hypothetical case in which one central issue is limitation of the probability of injury to subjects by selection of individuals who are not expected to live long enough for the known risks of the study to become manifest as harms. Benefits of such considerations may include enhanced subject satisfaction and cooperation, community acceptance, and improved data quality, among other desirable consequences. (shrink)

There is an argument for the existence of God from the incompleteness of nature that is vaguely present in Plantinga’s recent work. This argument, which rests on the metaphysical implications of quantum physics and the philosophical deficiency of necessitarian conceptions of physical law, deserves to be given a clear formulation. The goal is to demonstrate, via a suitably articulated principle of sufficient reason, that divine action in an occasionalist mode is needed (and hence God’s existence is required) to bring causal (...) closure to nature and render it ontologically functional. The best explanation for quantum phenomena and the most adequate understanding of general providence turns out to rest on an ontic structural realism in physics that is grounded in the immaterialist metaphysics of theistic idealism. (shrink)

The major competing statistical paradigms share a common remarkable but unremarked thread: in many of their inferential applications, different probability interpretations are combined. How this plays out in different theories of inference depends on the type of question asked. We distinguish four question types: confirmation, evidence, decision, and prediction. We show that Bayesian confirmation theory mixes what are intuitively “subjective” and “objective” interpretations of probability, whereas the likelihood-based account of evidence melds three conceptions of what constitutes an “objective” probability.

There is a debate in Bayesian confirmation theory between subjective and non-subjective accounts of evidence. Colin Howson has provided a counterexample to our non-subjective account of evidence: the counterexample refers to a case in which there is strong evidence for a hypothesis, but the hypothesis is highly implausible. In this article, we contend that, by supposing that strong evidence for a hypothesis makes the hypothesis more believable, Howson conflates the distinction between confirmation and evidence. We demonstrate that Howson’s counterexample fails (...) for a different pair of hypotheses. (shrink)

For forty years, successive editions of Ethical Theory and Business have helped to define the field of business ethics. The 10th edition reflects the current, multidisciplinary nature of the field by explicitly embracing a variety of perspectives on business ethics, including philosophy, management, and legal studies. Chapters integrate theoretical readings, case studies, and summaries of key legal cases to guide students to a rich understanding of business ethics, corporate responsibility, and sustainability. The 10th edition has been entirely updated, ensuring that (...) students are exposed to key ethical questions in the current business environment. New chapters cover the ethics of IT, ethical markets, and ethical management and leadership. Coverage includes climate change, sustainability, international business ethics, sexual harassment, diversity, and LGBTQ discrimination. New case studies draw students directly into recent business ethics controversies, such as sexual harassment at Fox News, consumer fraud at Wells Fargo, and business practices at Uber. (shrink)

Squeezed between increasing entitlement expenditures and static or declining real revenues, state-funded urban development is increasingly perceived as an unaffordable luxury. At the same time, the power and significance of the banking sector is giving way to new kinds of financial institutions that have little or no interest in community development. Not surprisingly, it is often argued that pension funds ought to be more sensitive to community needs. However, some analysts argue that pension funds are properly only the agents of (...) plan beneficiaries; any investment that took into account community needs would be, in effect, an unjustified tax on individuals' future welfare. Furthermore, analysts are very doubtful about the integrity of public pension plan investment decision-making. In this paper, I set out a morally informed justification of public pension plan investment in community development. In doing so, I develop a model of community development that stresses the reciprocal nature of the obligations embedded in the relationship between the community and pension plan beneficiaries. This approach also has significant implications for a wide variety of private sponsored plans. The paper begins with an assessment of pension fund decision-making and the practices of the investment management industry, drawing upon related research on pension fund capitalism. It goes on to issues of social obligation, referencing recent research on the nature of social contracts. To give the analysis empirical relevance I refer to the much disputed decision of the West Virginia legislature to require their public pension funds' Investment Management Board to invest in the state government's corrections authority. (shrink)

Squeezed between increasing entitlement expenditures and static or declining real revenues, state‐funded urban development is increasingly perceived as an unaffordable luxury. At the same time, the power and significance of the banking sector is giving way to new kinds of financial institutions that have little or no interest in community development. Not surprisingly, it is often argued that pension funds ought to be more sensitive to community needs. However, some analysts argue that pension funds are properly only the agents of (...) plan beneficiaries; any investment that took into account community needs would be, in effect, an unjustified tax on individuals’ future welfare. Furthermore, analysts are very doubtful about the integrity of public pension plan investment decision‐making. In this paper, I set out a morally informed justification of public pension plan investment in community development. In doing so, I develop a model of community development that stresses the reciprocal nature of the obligations embedded in the relationship between the community and pension plan beneficiaries. This approach also has significant implications for a wide variety of private sponsored plans. The paper begins with an assessment of pension fund decision‐making and the practices of the investment management industry, drawing upon related research on pension fund capitalism. It goes on to issues of social obligation, referencing recent research on the nature of social contracts. To give the analysis empirical relevance I refer to the much disputed decision of the West Virginia legislature to require their public pension funds’ Investment Management Board to invest in the state government's corrections authority. (shrink)

This work addresses corruption in politics and the public services, arguing that corrupt public officials should be exposed, prosecuted and gaoled, just like their colleagues in the private sector. It covers ethical standards in the public service, both state and federal; the practice of government; the relationships between officials; their advisors and the public; the interplay between politics and personal behaviour, and offering explanations as to what can be done about corruption in public service through asking questions like; how does (...) corruption gain a foothold in public affairs?; how can public trust be rebuilt between bureaucrats, the politicians and the people who vote for them?; and how can we improve accoutability over the cover-ups? (shrink)

What is the origin of individual differences in ideology and personality? According to the parasite stress hypothesis, the structure of a society and the values of individuals within it are both influenced by the prevalence of infectious disease within the society's geographical region. High levels of infection threat are associated with more ethnocentric and collectivist social structures and greater adherence to social norms, as well as with socially conservative political ideology and less open but more conscientious personalities. Here we use (...) an agent-based model to explore a specific opportunities-parasites trade-off hypothesis, according to which utility-maximizing agents place themselves at an optimal point on a trade-off between the gains that may be achieved through accessing the resources of geographically or socially distant out-group members through openness to out-group interaction, and the losses arising due to consequently increased risks of exotic infection to which immunity has not been developed. We examine the evolution of cooperation and the formation of social groups within social networks, and we show that the groups that spontaneously form exhibit greater local rather than global cooperative networks when levels of infection are high. It is suggested that the OPTO model offers a first step toward understanding the specific mechanisms through which environmental conditions may influence cognition, ideology, personality, and social organization. (shrink)

Postmodern view of Australian multiculturalism. Discusses the ways in which identity and imagery merge and interact in a multicultural society, within a postmodern theoretical framework, and examines topics such as liberalism and multiculturalism, and cultural postmodernity. Includes chapter notes, a bibliography and an index. Clark is director of the Institute of Ethics and Public Policy at Monash University, Forbes is professor of geography at Flinders University of South Australia, and Francis is a postgraduate student at Monash University. The contributors include (...) sociologists, literary theorists, geographers and a philosopher. (shrink)

Prey-catching behavior (PCB) in frogs and toads has been the focus of intense neuroethological research from the mid-twentieth century to the present and epitomizes some major themes in science and philosophy during this period. It reflects the movement from simple reflexology to more complex views of instinctive behavior, but it also displays a neural reductionism that denies subjectivity and individual agency The present article engages contemporary PCB research but provides a philosophically more promising picture of it based on Whitehead's nonreductionist (...) "philosophy of organism," which proposes that the flow of events from stimulus to response in organisms of all kinds is mediated by "the intervening touch of mentality " This approach resolves some basic mind-body and mind-nature issues that have long bedeviled modern philosophy and presents an image of a postmodern frog for a constructively postmodern science. (shrink)

Calcium storage is one of the functions commonly attributed to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) in non‐muscle cells. Several recent studies have added support to this concept. Analysis of reticuloplasm, the luminal ER content, has shown that it contains several proteins (reticuloplasmins) which are prospective calcium storage proteins. One of these, calreticulin, is also present in the sarcoplasmic reticulum (SR). In sea urchin eggs, a calsequestrin‐like protein has been clearly localised to the ER. The recent demonstration that the IP3 receptor, which (...) has similarities with the calcium release channel in the SR is also localised in the ER membrane suggests that calcium stored in the ER is important for intracellular signalling. The alternative view, that the physiologically important calcium store is a specialised organelle, the calciosome, is not supported by these observations. Recent evidence also suggests that ER calcium might be important in ER structure and in the retention of the luminal ER proteins. (shrink)

Perspectives on the difficult topic of the evolution of language can be differentiated to a large extent based on how much relevant continuity or discontinuity they see between humans and nonhuman animals. In general, biologists and psychologists tend to have a broad definition of “language” that highlights significant continuities, whereas linguists tend to define “language” more narrowly, in accord with their emphasis on the uniqueness of human capacities. This article examines the value of Whitehead's innovative theory of language, which is (...) grounded in his account of the fundamental symbolic element in basic perceptual processes, mainly for understanding the continuities between animal and human perceptual and symbolic activity but also for accommodating the discontinuity, or at least the pivotal difference, evident in the full flowering of human language. It will focus particularly on applying Whitehead's approach to gain a new understanding of the emergence, with the rise of amphibians, of the first vocalization in the history of life. (shrink)

We introduce and discuss a concept of approximation of a topological algebraic system A by finite algebraic systems from a given class K. If A is discrete, this concept agrees with the familiar notion of a local embedding of A in a class K of algebraic systems. One characterization of this concept states that A is locally embedded in K iff it is a subsystem of an ultraproduct of systems from K. In this paper we obtain a similar characterization of (...) approximability of a locally compact system A by systems from K using the language of nonstandard analysis. In the signature of A we introduce positive bounded formulas and their approximations; these are similar to those introduced by Henson [14] for Banach space structures (see also [15, 16]). We prove that a positive bounded formula φ holds in A if and only if all precise enough approximations of φ hold in all precise enough approximations of A. We also prove that a locally compact field cannot be approximated arbitrarily closely by finite (associative) rings (even if the rings are allowed to be non-commutative). Finite approximations of the field R can be considered as possible computer systems for real arithmetic. Thus, our results show that there do not exist arbitrarily accurate computer arithmetics for the reals that are associative rings. (shrink)

Using a sample of 652 college students, we examined several implications of the hypothesis that the shape of the human penis evolved to enable males to substitute their semen for those of their rivals. The incidence of double mating by females appears sufficient to make semen displacement adaptive (e.g., one in four females acknowledge infidelity, one in eight admit having sex with two or more males in a 24-hour period, and one in 12 report involvement in one or more sexual (...) threesomes with two males). We also document several changes in post-ejaculatory behavior (e.g., reduced thrusting, penis withdrawal, loss of an erection) which may have evolved to minimize displacement of the male’s own semen. Consistent with predictions derived from a theoretical model (Gallup and Burch 2006), we discovered that most females report waiting at least 48 hours following an instance of infidelity before resuming sex with their in-pair partners. (shrink)

'Origin of Species is a must read for Christians in our secularized, Darwin-saturated society. From a factual foundation, Charles Darwin persuasively extrapolates an erroneous explanation of life's diversity and complexity apart from God's handiwork, although there's a lot Darwin argues that his modern-day proponents ignore. Christians, using Scripture and science, should study this profoundly influential book thoroughly and cautiously'--from Dr. Wilson's guide. The Worldview Guides from the Canon Classics Literature Series provide an aesthetic and thematic Christian perspective on the most (...) definitive and daunting works of Western Literature. Each Worldview Guide presents the big picture (both the good and the bad) without neglecting the details. Each Worldview Guide is a friendly literary coach--and a treasure map, and a compass, and a key--to help teachers, parents, and students appreciate, critique, and begin to master the classics. (shrink)

In this article we review the emerging literature on the self-transcendent emotions. We discuss how the self-transcendent emotions differ from other positive emotions and outline the defining features of this category. We then provide an analysis of three specific self-transcendent emotions—compassion, gratitude, and awe—detailing what has been learned about their expressive behavior, physiology, and likely evolutionary origins. We propose that these emotions emerged to help humans solve unique problems related to caretaking, cooperation, and group coordination in social interactions. In our (...) final section we offer predictions about the self-transcendent emotions that can guide future research. (shrink)