Spirit communication was a major facet of daily life across the ancient world. This paper seeks to enumerate and contextualize the act of prayer in elite religious ritual at the commencement of the historical period and is part of a larger inquiry into inscriptions and manuscripts unearthed over the last several decades that testify to the intimate relationship between divination, prayer, and the early development of the Chinese literary tradition. Within a corpus of oracle bone inscriptions recently discovered in Anyang, (...) Henan, an intact turtle shell with hardly any other writing on it contains a rare divination on a prayer to be uttered by a princely grandson of the Shang royal family to his deceased kingly grandfather. After providing a synopsis of prayer in the ancestral cult of the royal family, I present an initial reading and commentary of what now stands as China’s first prayer text. My conclusion verifies the pedigree of the prince, his otherwise undetectable personal name, and the identity of the recipient ancestor. (shrink)

The authors conducted a baseline survey of baccalaureate and graduate degree health humanities programs in the United States and Canada. The object of the survey was to formally assess the current state of the field, to gauge what kind of resources individual programs are receiving, and to assess their self-identified needs to become or remain programmatically sustainable, including their views on the potential benefits of program accreditation. A 56-question baseline survey was sent to 111 institutions with baccalaureate programs and 20 (...) institutions with graduate programs. Respondents were asked about three areas: (1) program administration (managing unit, paid director, faculty lines, paid staff, funding sources); (2) educational program (curricular structure, CIP code usage, completion rates); and (3) views on accreditation for the field. A clear majority of respondents agreed that some form of accreditation or consultation service could address resource and sustainability issues. Overall, the survey responses to staffing, curricular structure, and support suggest the need for developing a sustainable infrastructure for health humanities. (shrink)

In the human quest for meaning, work occupies a central position. Most adults spend the majority of their waking hours at work, which often serves as a primary source of purpose, belongingness, and identity. In light of these benefits to employees and their organizations, organizational scholars are increasingly interested in understanding the factors that contribute to meaningful work, such as the design of jobs, interpersonal relationships, and organizational missions and cultures. In a separate line of inquiry, scholars of business ethics (...) have examined meaningful work as a moral issue concerning the management of others and ourselves, exploring whether there are definable characteristics of meaningful work to which we have moral rights, and whether there are moral duties to ourselves and others to fulfill those rights. In this article, we examine contemporary developments in both disciplines about the nature, causes, and consequences of meaningful work; we explore linkages between these disciplines; and we offer conclusions and research opportunities regarding the interface of ethical and organizational perspectives on performing and providing meaningful work. (shrink)

Background and objectives: Developmental coordination disorder is a neurodevelopmental motor disorder occurring in 5-6% of school-aged children. It is suggested that children with DCD show deficits in motor learning. Transcranial direct current stimulation enhances motor learning in adults and children but is unstudied in DCD. We aimed to investigate if tDCS, paired with motor skill training, facilitates motor learning in a pediatric sample with DCD.Methods: Twenty-eight children with diagnosed DCD were randomized and placed into a treatment or sham group. Anodal (...) tDCS was applied in conjunction with fine manual training over 5 consecutive days. Children's motor functioning was assessed with the Purdue Pegboard Test and Jebsen-Taylor Hand Function Test at baseline, post-intervention and 6 weeks following intervention. Group differences in rates of motor learning and skill transfer/retention were examined using linear mixed modeling and repeated measures ANOVAs, respectively.Results: There were no serious adverse events or drop-outs and procedures were well-tolerated. Independent of group, all participants demonstrated improved motor scores over the 5 training days [F, p < 0.001, 95% CI ], with no skill decay observed at retention. There was no interaction between intervention group and day [F, p = 0.086, 95% CI ].Conclusion: Children with DCD demonstrate motor learning with long-term retention of acquired skill. Motor cortex tDCS did not enhance motor learning as seen in other populations. Before conclusions of tDCS efficacy can be drawn, additional carefully designed trials with reproducible results are required.Clinical Trial Registration:ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT03453983. (shrink)

When Adam Smith published his celebrated writings on economics and moral philosophy he famously referred to the operation of an invisible hand. Adam Smith's Political Philosophy makes visible the invisible hand by examining its significance in Smith's political philosophy and relating it to similar concepts used by other philosophers, revealing a distinctive approach to social theory that stresses the significance of the unintended consequences of human action. This book introduces greater conceptual clarity to the discussion of the invisible (...) hand and the related concept of unintended order in the work of Smith and in political theory more generally. By examining the application of spontaneous order ideas in the work of Smith, Hume, Hayek and Popper, Adam Smith's Political Philosophy traces similarities in approach and from these builds a conceptual, composite model of an invisible hand argument. While setting out a clear model of the idea of spontaneous order the book also builds the case for using the idea of spontaneous order as an explanatory social theory, with chapters on its application in the fields of science, moral philosophy, law and government. (shrink)

Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) was a leading member of the Scottish Enlightenment. He is often considered to be more sceptical about commercial modernity than his friend Adam Smith. This paper examines Ferguson’s views on trade and empire with particular reference to the British North American Empire. By contrasting Ferguson’s analysis with that of Smith, it shows that, while Smith’s discussion sees an economic analysis drive his political recommendations, in the case of Adam Ferguson a political analysis predominates over (...) economic concerns in his view on the dispute with the American colonists. (shrink)

Throughout his career Adam Ferguson made a series of conservative political pronouncements on contemporary events.This paper treats these pronouncements as having a solid basis in his social theory and examines his place in the conceptual development of the tradition of British conservatism.It examines Ferguson's distinction between two forms of human knowledge: book learning of abstract science acquired from formal education and capacity acquired from practical experience in real affairs. Ferguson's empiricism leads to a series of sustained warnings against the (...) danger of excessive abstraction to the pursuit of science and these concerns are extended into the social and political realm as he cautions against reliance on abstract philosophy and defends the superiority of practical politicians. (shrink)

The Scottish moral philosopher Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) is recognized as one of the founding fathers of sociology and social science more generally. This article examines his early ruminations on what has come to be seen as one of the most pressing methodological concerns for social science: the problem of ethnocentrism. The article explores Ferguson’s attempts to deal with this problem and his attempt to plot the relationship between empirical research, theory formation and normative moral judgement. It argues that Ferguson (...) was well aware of the danger of cultural bias and that his understanding of moral science is marked by a concern that empirical and normative judgements are freed from the danger of bias. (shrink)

Adam Ferguson’s twin reputations as the most republican of the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and as one of the founding fathers of sociology make him one of the most interesting figures in eighteenth-century political thought. I argue that in his Essay on the History of Civil Society and elsewhere, Ferguson develops a novel understanding of the place of warfare in human social experience. By deploying a proto-sociological account of the naturalness of warfare between nations he proposes a normative (...) criterion for the assessment of civilisation. This argument sets Ferguson apart from contemporaries like Kant who argued for perpetual peace as a criterion of civilisation. (shrink)

It is a commonplace that the writers of eighteenth century Scotland played a key role in shaping the early practice of social science. This paper examines how this ‘Scottish’ contribution to the Enlightenment generation of social science was shaped by the fascination with unintended consequences. From Adam Smith's invisible hand to Hume's analysis of convention, through Ferguson's sociology, and Millar's discussion of rank, by way of Robertson's View of Progress, the concept of unintended consequences pervades the writing of the (...) period. The paper argues that the idea of unintended order shapes the understanding of the purpose of theoretical social science that emerges from the Scottish Enlightenment. (shrink)

In this paper I propose an account of representation for scientific models based on Kendall Walton’s ‘make-believe’ theory of representation in art. I first set out the problem of scientific representation and respond to a recent argument due to Craig Callender and Jonathan Cohen, which aims to show that the problem may be easily dismissed. I then introduce my account of models as props in games of make-believe and show how it offers a solution to the problem. Finally, I (...) demonstrate an important advantage my account has over other theories of scientific representation. All existing theories analyse scientific representation in terms of relations, such as similarity or denotation. By contrast, my account does not take representation in modelling to be essentially relational. For this reason, it can accommodate a group of models often ignored in discussions of scientific representation, namely models which are representational but which represent no actual object. (shrink)

When Henry Adams became one of the forty million marveling at the eighty thousand exhibits of the 1900 Paris Exhibition – a Disneyland of engineering – he came to believe that, as the Virgin Mary had once inspired the great leap forward represented by Mont St Michel and Chartres, so technology would transform modern civilization, and so it has.

When Henry Adams became one of the forty million marveling at the eighty thousand exhibits of the 1900 Paris Exhibition – a Disneyland of engineering – he came to believe that, as the Virgin Mary had once inspired the great leap forward represented by Mont St Michel and Chartres, so technology would transform modern civilization, and so it has.

The Divide between the prominence of final causes in Aristotelian natural philosophy and the rejection or severe limitation of final causation as an acceptable explanation of the natural world by figures such as Bacon, Descartes, and Spinoza during the seventeenth century has been considered a distinguishing mark between pre-modern and modern science.1 Admittedly, proponents of the mechanical and corpuscular philosophies of the seventeenth century were not necessarily stark opponents of teleology. Pierre Gassendi and Robert Boyle endorsed teleology, Leibniz embraced entelechies, (...) and they creep into Descartes's natural philosophy, despite his adamant attempts to eliminate them.2 Nonetheless, critiques of ends in .. (shrink)

This paper elaborates on an argument in my book *Perception*. It has two parts. In the first part, I argue against what I call "basic" naive realism, on the grounds that it fails to accommodate what I call "internal dependence" and it requires an empirically implausible theory of sensible properties. Then I turn Craig French and Ian Phillips’ modified naïve realism as set out in their recent paper "Austerity and Illusion". It accommodates internal dependence. But it may retain the (...) empirically implausible theory of sensible properties. And it faces other empirical problems. Representationalism about experiences avoids those problems and is to be preferred. (shrink)

We develop a Gentzen-style proof theory for super-Belnap logics, expanding on an approach initiated by Pynko. We show that just like substructural logics may be understood proof-theoretically as logics which relax the structural rules of classical logic but keep its logical rules as well as the rules of Identity and Cut, super-Belnap logics may be seen as logics which relax Identity and Cut but keep the logical rules as well as the structural rules of classical logic. A generalization of the (...) cut elimination theorem for classical propositional logic is then proved and used to establish interpolation for various super-Belnap logics. In particular, we obtain an alternative syntactic proof of a refinement of the Craig interpolation theorem for classical propositional logic discovered recently by Milne. (shrink)

Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau -- Self-interest and sympathy -- Moral sentiments and spectatorship -- Commercial society and justice -- Politics and freedom.

Erik Wielenberg argued that William Lane Craig’s attack against nontheistic ethical models is detrimental to Craig’s Divine Command Theory (DCT) as follows: Craig claims it is unacceptable for ethical models to include logically necessary connections without providing an explanation of why such connections hold. Yet Craig posits certain logically necessary connections without providing an explanation of them. Wielenberg concluded that “Craig is hoisted by his own petard.” In this paper I respond to Wielenberg’s criticism by (...) clarifying, and elaborating on, the DCT. I will attempt to provide a preliminary explanation for the logically necessary connections included in the DCT. (shrink)

Preface Introduction Christopher J. Berry: Adam Smith: Outline of Life, Times, and Legacy Part One: Adam Smith: Heritage and Contemporaries 1: Nicholas Phillipson: Adam Smith: A Biographer's Reflections 2: Leonidas Montes: Newtonianism and Adam Smith 3: Dennis C. Rasmussen: Adam Smith and Rousseau: Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment 4: Christopher J. Berry: Adam Smith and Early Modern Thought Part Two: Adam Smith on Language, Art and Culture 5: Catherine Labio: Adam Smith's Aesthetics 6: James (...) Chandler: Adam Smith as Critic 7: Michael C. Amrozowicz: Adam Smith: History and Poetics 8: C. Jan Swearingen: Adam Smith on Language and Rhetoric: The Ethics of Style, Character, and Propriety Part Three: Adam Smith and Moral Philosophy 9: Christel Fricke: Adam Smith: The Sympathetic Process and the Origin and Function of Conscience 10: Duncan Kelly: Adam Smith and the Limits of Sympathy 11: Ryan Patrick Hanley: Adam Smith and Virtue 12: Eugene Heath: Adam Smith and Self-Interest Part Four: Adam Smith and Economics 13: Tony Aspromourgos: Adam Smith on Labour and Capital 14: Nerio Naldi: Adam Smith on Value and Prices 15: Hugh Rockoff: Adam Smith on Money, Banking, and the Price Level 16: Maria Pia Paganelli: Commercial Relations: from Adam Smith to Field Experiments Part Five: Adam Smith on History and Politics 17: Spiros Tegos: Adam Smith: Theorist of Corruption 18: David M. Levy & Sandra J. Peart: Adam Smith and the State: Language and Reform 19: Fabrizio Simon: Adam Smith and the Law 20: Edwin van de Haar: Adam Smith on Empire and International Relations Part Six: Adam Smith on Social Relations 21: Richard Boyd: Adam Smith, Civility, and Civil Society 22: Gavin Kennedy: Adam Smith on Religion 23: Samuel Fleischacker: Adam Smith and Equality 24: Maureen Harkin: Adam Smith and Women Part Seven; Adam Smith: Legacy and Influence 25: Spencer J. Pack: Adam Smith and Marx 26: Craig Smith: Adam Smith and the New Right 27: Tom Campbell: Adam Smith: Methods, Morals and Markets 28: Amartya Sen: The Contemporary Relevance of Adam Smith. (shrink)

In a pair of recent articles, William Hasker has attempted to defend Robert Adams’s new anti-Molinist argument. But I argue that the sense of explanatory priority operative in the argument is either equivocal or, if a univocal sense can be given to it, it is either so generic that we should have to deny its transitivity or so weak that it would not be incompatible with human freedom.

We (your guest editors) have established a productive professional and personal relationship through discussions of the role of experience and, in particular, basic learning processes in shaping sexuality in humans and animals. We are grateful to Harold Mouras as well as our contributors for allowing us to organize this special issue of Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology , which highlights what we believe to be an underrepresented perspective in the scientific study of sexual behavior and psychology. Craig (1912, 1918) suggested, (...) and Zitovitch (as cited by Pavlov, 1928) as well as - more recently - Hall, Arnold and Myers (2000) have demonstrated that behaviors as straightforward as approaching food, and water require learning. Surely (human) sexuality, for which the approach is even more complicated, is shaped by experience. We offer nine papers from leading researchers in the field that we hope will inspire divergent thinking and scholarship regarding the evolution and development of sexual preferences in both humans and animals. (Published: 15 March 2012) Citation: Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology 2012, 2 : 17415 - DOI: 10.3402/snp.v2i0.17415. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend divine conceptualism against one prominent critique from William Lane Craig in his book God and Abstract Objects. Craig argues that the divine conceptualist’s only way out of the “bootstrapping objection” results in an unpalatable concession of defeat to the metaphysical anti-realist. Craig’s argument depends on an analysis whereby God is causally or logically prior to the divine concepts. As such, the conceptualist may resist it by adopting—following Ralph Cudworth—a version of divine conceptualism (...) which does not construe the relationship between God and His thoughts as one of either causal or logical priority. (shrink)

A review of William Lane Craig, Erik J. Wielenberg, and Adam Lloyd Johnson's "A Debate on God and Morality: What is the Best Account of Objective Moral Values and Duties?".

In Robust Ethics, I defend a nontheistic version of moral realism according to which moral properties are sui generis, not reducible to other kinds of properties (e.g., natural properties or supernatural properties) and objective morality requires no foundation external to itself. I seek to provide a plausible account of the metaphysics and epistemology of the robust brand of moral realism I favor that draws on both analytic philosophy and contemporary empirical moral psychology. In this paper, I respond to some objections (...) to my view advanced by William Craig, Mark Murphy, Tyler McNabb, and Adam Johnson. (shrink)

As we navigate through life, we model time as flowing, the present as special, and the past as “dead.” This model of time—manifest time—develops in childhood and later thoroughly infiltrates our language, thought, and behavior. It is part of what makes a human life recognizably human. Yet if physics is correct, this model of the world is deeply mistaken. This book is about this conflict between manifest and physical time. The first half dives into the physics and philosophy to establish (...) the conflict’s existence; but it also argues that the claim that physics “spatializes” time is overstated. Rather, even relativity theory makes time special in deep and significant ways. The second half turns to psychology, biology, and more, seeking to understand why creatures like us develop manifest time. The novel picture that results is that manifest time is a natural reaction to the many cognitive and evolutionary challenges that we face. For subjects embedded in our circumstances, it makes sense to develop—even if fundamentally wrong. (shrink)

Over 50% of the world population will develop a psychiatric disorder in their lifetime. 1 In the realm of psychiatric treatment, two primary modalities have been established: pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy. Yet, pharmacological interventions often take precedence as the initial treatment choice despite their comparable outcomes, severe side effects and disputed evidence of their efficacy. This preference for medication foregrounds a vital re-examination of what it means to be invasive in medical treatments, namely in psychiatric care. De Marco _et al_ challenge (...) the standard account of invasiveness, presenting considerations that transcend the traditional criteria of physical intrusion. 2 Through case studies centred on treatments for schizophrenia and depression, we aim to (1) reinforce De Marco _et al_’s challenge to the standard account of invasiveness and (2) extend the dialogue to the moral imperative of redefining mental invasiveness. Our aims are to broaden the definition of mental invasiveness, aligning... (shrink)