In the Law of Civilisation and Decay, Adams considers various societies and civilisations by the symbolism, manner and influence of their coinage, and concludes that a society or civilisation becomes sapped of its culture-vigour, when entering a cycle where money becomes the dominant factor rather than merely serving as a mechanism.

In his 1923 play R.U.R.: Rossum s Universal Robots, Karel Capek coined In 1993, we began a humanoid robotics project aimed at constructing a robot for use in exploring theories of human intelligence. In this article, we describe three aspects of our research methodology that distinguish our work from other humanoid projects. First, our humanoid robots are designed to act autonomously and safely in natural workspaces with people. Second, our robots are designed to interact socially with people by exploiting natural (...) human social cues. Third, we believe that robotics offers a unique tool for testing models of human intelligence drawn from developmental psychology and cognitive science. (shrink)

The Law of Civilization and Decay is an overview of history, articulating Brooks' critical view of capitalism. A civilization grows wealthy, and then its wealth causes it to crumble upon itself due to greed.

The most recent global refugee figures are staggering, with over 82.4 million people forcibly displaced and 26.4 million registered refugees. The ongoing conflict in Syria is a major contributor. After a decade of violence and destabilization, over 13.4million Syrians have been displaced, including 6.7 million internally displaced persons and 6.7 million refugees registered in other countries. Beyond the immediate political and economic challenges, an essential component of any response to this humanitarian crisis must be health-related, including policies and interventions specific (...) to mental health. This policy and practice review addresses refugee mental health in the context of the Syrian crisis, providing an update and overview of the current situation while exploring new initiatives in mental health research and global health policy that can help strengthen and expand services. Relevant global health policy frameworks are first briefly introduced, followed by a short summary of recent research on refugee mental health. We then provide an update on the current status of research, service provision, and health policy in the leading destinations for Syrians who have been forcibly displaced. This starts within Syria and then turns to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Germany. Finally, several general recommendations are discussed, including the pressing need for more data at each phase of migration, the expansion of integrated mental health services, and the explicit inclusion and prioritization of refugee mental health in national and global health policy. (shrink)

Humans are an exceptionally cooperative species, but there is substantial variation in the extent of cooperation across societies. Understanding the sources of this variability may provide insights about the forces that sustain cooperation. We examined the ontogeny of prosocial behavior by studying 326 children 3–14 y of age and 120 adults from six societies (age distributions varied across societies). These six societies span a wide range of extant human variation in culture, geography, and subsistence strategies, including foragers, herders, horticulturalists, and (...) urban dwellers across the Americas, Oceania, and Africa. When delivering benefits to others was personally costly, rates of prosocial behavior dropped across all six societies as children approached middle childhood and then rates of prosociality diverged as children tracked toward the behavior of adults in their own societies. When prosocial acts did not require personal sacrifice, prosocial responses increased steadily as children matured with little variation in behavior across societies. Our results are consistent with theories emphasizing the importance of acquired cultural norms in shaping costly forms of cooperation and creating cross-cultural diversity. (shrink)

Previous research has demonstrated that reversing the contrast of the eye region, which includes the eyebrows, affects the N170 ERP. To selectively assess the impact of just the eyes, the present study evaluated the N170 in response to reversing contrast polarity of just the iris and sclera in upright and inverted face stimuli. Contrast reversal of the eyes increased the amplitude of the N170 for upright faces, but not for inverted faces, suggesting that the contrast of eyes is an important (...) contributor to the N170 ERP. (shrink)

In The life of Richard Owen by his grandson there is an inference to the effect that Owen had objected to his name being used to authorize various statements that Whewell was drafting in opposition to the Vestiges. The inference is drawn from letters that Whewell wrote to Owen on 13 and 15 February 1845. Corroboration of this would corne from a letter of Owen to Whewell, dated 14 February 1845, if extant. Among the Whewell papers at Trinity College, Cambridge, (...) there are several letters from Owen to Whewell, none of which bears that date. There is one, however, dated 14 February 1844 which, on doser inspection, turns out to be the missing link in their correspondance. The evidence for the misdating is not merely that the letter falls naturally into a later sequence. The conclusion is inescapable because Owen refers to an ‘opinion which I have always entertained, and still do strongly, on the subject of a refutation of “Vestiges”’. Since the first edition of Chambers's book did not appear until October 1844, the letter must belong to the following year. My object in this paper is to examine the implications of this letter for a reconstruction of Owen's attitude to that book which Adam Sedgwick could so detest for, among many things, its ‘gross views of physiology’. (shrink)

In the Garden of Eden, the serpent convinces Eve to eat fruit from the Tree of Conscience, which she does and shares with Adam. Adam and Eve act in contravention to God’s orders against eating fruit from the tree. Traditional interpretations have suggested that this event—commonly referred to as “the Fall”—is an event where the serpent lied to Eve and that it was entirely negative. Instead, I argue that the serpent was correct to say, in fact, that in eating thisfruit (...) we would become closer to God. The Fall reveals a new mystery to us of God’s love for us and a blessing in disguise. (shrink)

What is the relationship between our moral sentiments and the justification of punishment? One position is that our moral sentiments provide for punishment’s justification. This article’s focus is on Adam Smith’s theory of punishment and the role that moral sentiments play in this theory. The author argues that commentators have been mistaken to view Smith’s position as essentially retributivist. Instead, Smith defends a unified theory where punishment serves retributivist, deterrent, and rehabilitative goals. The author then concludes with some critical remarks (...) on how well this theory speaks to contemporary concerns. (shrink)

Thomas Nevin's new reading of Nietzsche is at home on an island of misfit toys. Like Ariosto's Astolfo, who goes to the moon in search of Orlando's sanity only to find the good things that humanity has shed, Nevin has gone—not quite as far as the moon—in search of a true Christian. That Nietzsche might brook accommodation in his father's house, however, pleads convincingly that Luther may have wanted to reform the Church but ended up installing a lost-and-found box instead. (...) Late of the quincentenary of Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, Nevin has sorted through half a millennium of Christian miscellany and found the following items: one failed monk who refused to presume that he could love God; a late gnostic theosophist... (shrink)

Adam Smith's theory of punishment is rarely explored. This article examines his understanding of punishment in light of his theory of moral sentiments. My aim is to show how he is neither a retributivist or deterrence advocate, but instead defends a more unified theory of punishment bringing different penal goals together in a new framework.

Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 - March 27, 1918) was an American historian and member of the Adams political family, being descended from two U.S. Presidents.As a young Harvard graduate, he was secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Abraham Lincoln's ambassador in London, a posting that had much influence on the younger man, both through experience of wartime diplomacy and absorption in English culture, especially the works of John Stuart Mill. After the American Civil (...) War, he became a noted political journalist who entertained America's foremost intellectuals at his homes in Washington and Boston.In his lifetime, he was best known for his History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, a 9-volume work, praised for its literary style.His posthumously published memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams, won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to be named by the Modern Library as the top English-language nonfiction book of the 20th century.A LETTER TO AMERICAN TEACHERS OF HISTORY. It proposes a "theory of history" based on the second law of thermodynamics and the principle of entropy, which essentially states that all energy dissipates, order becomes disorder, and the earth will eventually become uninhabitable. He applied the physics of dynamical systems of Rudolf Clausius, Hermann von Helmholtz, and William Thomson to the modeling of human history. (shrink)

New Tenth Anniversary edition of this classic text with a new preface by the author, compares myths about meat-eating with myths about manliness, and seeks to ...

In the wake of ethical scandals and close ethical scrutiny throughout business and the accounting professional today, Brooks/Dunn's BUSINESS & PROFESSIONAL ETHICS, 9E provides the ethical insights and strategies you need for corporate and professional success. Learn why ethical behavior is so important and how to recognize potential pitfalls that involve much more than memorizing rules. You master the skills to develop a corporate culture of integrity that maintains stakeholder support and enables directors and auditors to complete their jobs. (...) You also learn how to use ethical strategies to make decisions, as this edition examines the latest information on governance scandals, legal liability and professional accounting and auditing issues. More than 130 cases and readings highlight new and classic cases of fraud, bankruptcy and unprofessional practices to help you better understand appropriate codes of conduct and sound ethical reasoning while strengthening your persuasive and leadership skills for success. (shrink)

Many normative political theorists have engaged in the systematic collection and/or analysis of empirical data to inform the development of their arguments over the past several decades. Yet, the approach they employ has typically not been treated as a distinctive mode of theorizing. It has been mostly overlooked in surveys of normative political theory methods and methodologies, as well as by those critics who assert that political theory is too abstracted from actual political contestation. Our aim is to unearth this (...) grounded normative theory (GNT) approach – to identify its definitive practices and highlight its potential significance. We detail four overlapping commitments characteristic of GNT. These include commitments to expanding the comprehensiveness of input for normative arguments through original empirical research and/or analysis, recursivity in the development of normative claims, attentiveness to the systematic inclusion of a range of voices and ways of knowing, and accountability to those engaged by the theorist in empirical contexts. We discuss methodological distinctions within GNT, including between more- and less-solidaristic approaches. We discuss how GNT answers calls for theorists to engage more closely with empirical political dynamics and we consider responses to possible critiques. (shrink)

Ulrich Beck's best selling Risk Society established risk on the sociological agenda. It brought together a wide range of issues centering on environmental, health and personal risk, provided a rallying ground for researchers and activists in a variety of social movements and acted as a reference point for state and local policies in risk management. The Risk Society and Beyond charts the progress of Beck's ideas and traces their evolution. It demonstrates why the issues raised by Beck reverberate widely throughout (...) social theory and covers the new risks that Beck did not foresee, associated with the emergence of new technologies, genetic and cybernetic. The book is unique because it offers both an introduction to the main arguments in Risk Society and develops a range of critical discussions of aspects of this and other works of Beck. (shrink)

Kant made a number of highly original discoveries about the mind - about its ability to synthesise a single, coherent representation of self and world, about the unity it must have to do so, and about the mind's awareness of itself and the semantic apparatus it uses to achieve this awareness. The past fifty years have seen intense activity in research on human cognition. Even so, Kant's discoveries have not been superseded, and some of them have not even been assimilated (...) into current thinking. That is particularly true of his work on unity and on the semantic apparatus of self-awareness. The first four chapters of this book present a comprehensive overview of Kant's model for non-specialists, an overview largely unencumbered by detailed exegesis. The work then offers a close study of five major discussions of the mind in the Critique of Pure Reason and Anthropology. (shrink)

Can we respond to injustices in the world in ways that do more than just address their consequences? In this book, Brooke A. Ackerly argues that what to do about injustice is not just an ethical or moral question, but a political question about assuming responsibility for injustice. Ultimately, Just Responsibility offers a theory of global injustice and political responsibility that can guide action.

Thomas Reid (1710–96) is increasingly being seen as a highly significant philosopher and a central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. This new edition of Reid's classic philosophical text in the philosophy of mind at long last gives scholars a complete, critically edited text of the Inquiry. The critical text is based on the fourth life-time edition (1785). A selection of related documents showing the development of Reid's thought, textual notes, bibliographical details of previous editions and a full introduction by the (...) editor makes this an important contribution to the study of this increasingly respected philosopher. -/- Key Features - Complete, critically edited text of the Inquiry accompanied by a judicious selection of manuscript evidence relating to its composition - Comprehensive Introduction providing an historical and philosophical account of the formation of the Inquiry - Detailed textual notes which include bibliographical details and allusions, translations, references to secondary literature and selected passages from Reid's manuscripts. (shrink)

John Rawls argues that A Theory of Justice suffers from a “serious problem”: the problem of political stability. His theory failed to account for the reality that citizens are deeply divided by reasonable and incompatible religious, philosophical, and moral comprehensive doctrines. This fact of reasonable pluralism may pose a threat to political stability over time and requires a solution. Rawls proposes the idea of an overlapping consensus among incompatible comprehensive doctrines through the use of public reasons in his later Political (...) Liberalism. -/- Rawls’s proposed solution to the problem of political stability has received much criticism. Some, such as Kurt Baier, Brian Barry, George Klosko, and Edward McClennen, argue that an overlapping consensus is relatively unnecessary. Rawls should have acknowledged existing resources in his account that might secure political stability over time without major changes to his original views about justice. Others, including Kent Greenawalt, Michael Sandel, Leif Wenar, and Iris Marion Young believe that an overlapping consensus is too fragile to secure political stability. Rawls correctly identifies a major problem for his original account, but he fails to provide a satisfactory solution. -/- I believe these objections rest on a mistake easily overlooked. Each objection claims that, for Rawls, the possibility of future political stability is to be guaranteed by an overlapping consensus alone. This perspective fails to recognize the central importance of the social minimum in securing political stability. There is, in fact, more resources to secure political stability than Rawls or his critics have recognized. -/- My discussion will begin with a brief explanation of why the problem of political stability raises an important challenge to Rawls’s views on justice and why he argues for an overlapping consensus as a solution to it. I will next consider the more important objections to Rawls’s solution and why these fail. I will argue that the social minimum might better support political stability if it is broadly understood in terms of the capabilities approach. This approach is compatible with Rawls’s political liberalism and it provides a more robust understanding of a just social minimum. Political stability does not rely upon an overlapping consensus alone — and it may be better secured where the capabilities approach plays a more central role. Therefore, Rawls does provide a illuminating solution to the problem of political stability that is more compelling if we incorporate the capabilities approach into political liberalism. (shrink)

This new translation presents the _Analects_ in a revolutionary new format that, for the first time in any language, distinguishes the original words of the Master from the later sayings of his disciples and their followers, enabling readers to experience China's most influential philosophical work in its true historical, social, and political context.

From the diverse work and often competing insights of women's human rights activists, Brooke Ackerly has written a feminist and a universal theory of human rights that bridges the relativists' concerns about universalizing from particulars and the activists' commitment to justice. Unlike universal theories that rely on shared commitments to divine authority or to an 'enlightened' way of reasoning, Ackerly's theory relies on rigorous methodological attention to difference and disagreement. She sets out human rights as at once a research ethic, (...) a tool for criticism of injustice and a call to recognize our obligations to promote justice through our actions. This book will be of great interest to political theorists, feminist and gender studies scholars and researchers of social movements. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis symposium brings together normative and empirical scholars in dialogue on Brooke Ackerly’s innovative and compelling recent monograph, Just Responsibility. Contributors discuss the book’s distinctive grounded normative theory methodology, its arguments for how individuals can take appropriate responsibility for global structural injustices, and its potential for practical impact.

This article explores how anticipations of parenthood differentially affect the career aspirations and choices of women and men who have not had children. Drawing from in-depth interviews conducted separately with 60 coupled young adults, I find that women in my sample were disproportionately likely to think and worry about future parenthood in their imagined work paths. Moreover, women were more likely than men to alter or downshift their present-day career goals in anticipation of the changes in preferences and responsibilities that (...) accompany new parenthood. Because men were unlikely to engage in the mental work of anticipating parenthood, they were also free from its emotional and behavioral consequences. In this way, gendered anticipations of parenthood, which begin relatively early in an individual’s career path, are likely to play a key role in reproducing patterns of labor market inequality even before the real constraints of parenthood have set in. (shrink)

Plato’s political philosophy is for the sake of directing people towards the good life: this purpose is manifest from his theory of the Good. Nevertheless, Platonic scholarship has often criticized this theory for being impractical. Against this criticism, I argue that this theory has a practical aspect because of its strategic and methodological nature. This essay reconstructs Plato’s induction towards the absolute Good, through his justice theory and educational recommendations, with a view to the intended practicality of the theory of (...) the Good. The major conclusion is that the theory of the Good provides a formula to achieve the greatest good in an everchanging, sensible world. (shrink)

Teacher Subject Identity in Professional Practicefocuses on a key, but neglected, element of a teacher's identity: that of their subject expertise.Studies of teachers' professional practice have shown the importance of a teacher's identity and the extent to which it can affect their resilience, commitment and ultimately their effectiveness. Drawing upon narrative research undertaken with a range of teachers over a period of 14 years, the book explores how subject expertise can play a significant role in teacher identity, acting as a (...) professional compass guiding teachers at all levels of their professional practice. It reveals powerful individual stories of meaning-making which highlight the dynamic importance of teachers' subject expertise The book's metaphor of a professional compass goes to the heart of teacher professionalism, and provides a valuable mechanism to enable teachers to respond to challenges they face in their daily practice. It enables teachers to consider the moral dimensions of their practice, and can constitute a significant component in professional formation and identity. Throughout the book the importance of subject expertise for teachers' professional practice is explored at a range of scales: from the classroom to broad education policy, and at different stages of a teacher's career which offers readers a deeper understanding of the importance of subject expertise for teachers. Teacher Subject Identity in Professional Practicemakes a significant contribution to an under-researched area. It identifies the role and significance of teachers' subject expertise as a dimension of their teacher identity. The book is key reading for teacher educators, policy makers and researchers with an interest in teachers' professional development and practice. (shrink)

In Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, Brooke Ackerly demonstrates the shortcomings of contemporary deliberative democratic theory, relativism and essentialism for guiding the practice of social criticism in the real, imperfect world. Drawing theoretical implications from the activism of Third World feminists who help bring to public audiences the voices of women silenced by coercion, Brooke Ackerly provides a practicable model of social criticism. She argues that feminist critics have managed to achieve in practice what other theorists do only incompletely (...) in theory. Complemented by Third World feminist social criticism, deliberative democratic theory becomes critical theory - actionable, coherent, and self-reflective. While a complement to democratic theory, Third World feminist social criticism also addresses the problem in feminist theory associated with attempts to deal with identity politics. Third World feminist social criticism thus takes feminist theory beyond the critical impasse of the tension between anti-relativist and anti-essentialist feminist theory. (shrink)

This article identifies a foundation for Confucian democratic political thought in Confucian thought. Each of the three aspects emphasized is controversial, but supported by views held within the historical debates and development of Confucian political thought and practice. This democratic interpretation of Confucian political thought leads to (1) an expectation that all people are capable of ren and therefore potentially virtuous contributors to political life; (2) an expectation that the institutions of political, social, and economic life function so as to (...) develop the virtue of being a perfected human being; and (3) an expectation that there be public spacefor political criticism and for ongoing contestation over the duties and behaviors of individual leaders and citizens and over the functioning of the institutions that am to cultivate their behavior. (shrink)

It is a profound compliment that Robyn Eckersley, Michael Goodhart, Luis Cabrera, and Kristi Kenyon have engaged so thoughtfully with the arguments of Just Responsibility. In their treatments, the...

This article identifies a foundation for Confucian democratic political thought in Confucian thought. Each of the three aspects emphasized is controversial, but supported by views held within the historical debates and development of Confucian political thought and practice. This democratic interpretation of Confucian political thought leads to an expectation that all people are capable of ren and therefore potentially virtuous contributors to political life; an expectation that the institutions of political, social, and economic life function so as to develop the (...) virtue of being a perfected human being; and an expectation that there be public space for political criticism and for ongoing contestation over the duties and behaviors of individual leaders and citizens and over the functioning of the institutions that are to cultivate their behavior. (shrink)

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has drawn attention to the technology’s transformative potential, including what some see as its prospects for causing large-scale harm. We review two influential arguments purporting to show how AI could pose catastrophic risks. The first argument — the Problem of Power-Seeking — claims that, under certain assumptions, advanced AI systems are likely to engage in dangerous power-seeking behavior in pursuit of their goals. We review reasons for thinking that AI systems might seek power, that (...) they might obtain it, that this could lead to catastrophe, and that we might build and deploy such systems anyway. The second argument claims that the development of human-level AI will unlock rapid further progress, culminating in AI systems far more capable than any human — this is the Singularity Hypothesis. Power-seeking behavior on the part of such systems might be particularly dangerous. We discuss a variety of objections to both arguments and conclude by assessing the state of the debate. (shrink)

Despite being a seemingly straightforward moral concept (that all humans have certain rights by virtue of their humanity), human rights is a contested concept in theory and practice. Theorists debate (among other things) the meaning of “rights,” the priority of rights, whether collective rights are universal, the foundations of rights, and whether there are universal human rights at all. These debates are of relatively greater interest to theorists; however, a given meaning of “human rights” implies a corresponding theory of change (...) and through that can be an important guide to the practice of human rights activists and their funders. In practice, any organization can describe their work as “rights based.” This article clarifies the practices of human rights activists and their funders that are consistent with a theory of human rights as (1) universal, (2) interdependent across groups and categories of people, (3) indivisible across issue areas and claims, and (4) measured by the enjoyment of rights. (shrink)

D. M. Armstrong is an eminent Australian philosopher whose work over many years has dealt with such subjects as: the nature of possibility, concepts of the particular and the general, causes and laws of nature, and the nature of human consciousness. This collection of essays explores the many facets of Armstrong's work, concentrating on his more recent interests. There are four sections to the book: possibility and identity, universals, laws and causality, and philosophy of mind. The contributors comprise an international (...) group of philosophers from the United States, England and Australia. An interesting feature of the volume is that Armstrong himself has written responses to each of the essays. There is also a complete bibliography of Armstrong's writings. (shrink)

What makes your life go well for you? In this paper, we give an account of welfare. Our core idea is simple. There are impersonally good and bad things out there: things that are good or bad period, not (or not only) good or bad for someone. The life that is good for you is the life in contact with the good. We’ll understand the relevant notion of ‘contact’ here in terms of manifestation: you’re in contact with a value either (...) when it is manifest in parts of your life or parts of your life are manifest in it. So, the more the good is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the good, the better for you. The more the bad is manifest in your life, or your life manifest in the bad, the worse for you. We’ll argue that this account is extensionally adequate: it explains the welfare value of achievements, friendships, knowledge, pleasures and virtues. Moreover, it has a number of explanatory virtues: it’s unified, elegant and explanatorily powerful. So, we’ll suggest, it’s an excellent account of welfare, and in many ways superior to its main competitors. (shrink)

Toward an ontology of the social-historical -- Proto-institutions and epistemological encounters -- Anthropological aspects of subjectivity: the radical imagination -- Hermeneutical horizons of meaning -- The rediscovery of physis -- Objective knowledge in review -- Rethinking the world of the living being -- Reimaging cosmology -- Conclusion: the circle of creation.

The questions of this article are: what can we learn from deliberative democratic theory, its critics, the practices of local deliberative communities, the needs of potential participants, and the experiences of virtual communities that would be useful in designing a technology-facilitated institution for global civil society that is deliberative and democratic in its values? And what is the appropriate design of such an online institution so that it will be attentive to the undemocratic forces enabled by power inequalities that can (...) emerge in discursive communities? I answer these questions with an institutional innovation that meets a need of global civil society and that is responsive to critics of deliberative democratic theory and attentive to the particular agents engaged in women's human rights activism. (shrink)