This study aimed to develop a valid and reliable performance analysis template for quantifying team action variables in elite men’s wheelchair basketball. First action variables and operational definitions were identified by the authors and verified by an expert panel of wheelchair basketball coaching staff in order to establish expert validity. A total of 109 action variable were then placed into 17 agreed Categorical Predictor Variable categories. The action variables were then used to develop a computerized performance analysis template for post-event (...) analysis. Each possession (n = 200) from an international men’s wheelchair basketball game was analyzed by the first author on two occasions for assessment of intra-observer reliability and by a coach and a performance analyst for inter-observer reliability. Percentage error and Weighted Kappa coefficients were calculated to compare the levels of error and agreement for each action variable. Intra-observer reliability demonstrated perfect or almost perfect agreement (. (shrink)

Owen Flanagan argues in this book for a more psychologically realistic ethical reflection and spells out the ways in which psychology can enrich moral philosophy. Beginning with a discussion of such "moral saints" as Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Oskar Shindler, Flanagan charts a middle course between an ethics that is too realistic and socially parochial and one that is too idealistic, giving no weight to our natures.

The book Philosophy of Sport: International Perspectives represents the work of some of the leading moral and philosophical academics in the popular practice of sport. All contributors are scholars and researchers in the area of the Philosophy of Sport, a growing area of serious study within universities and colleges across the world. The contributors are also active members of the International Association for the Philosophy of Sport a worldwide organisation dedicated to the development of the philosophy of sport as a (...) serious and influential area of academic study. The book adds to the growing literature, which focuses on rigorously examining the global significance that sport plays in the fabric of twenty-first century life. Articles within the book provide a diverse set of ideas related to sport from more familiar issue related to the ethics of performance enhancing substances and fair play, to issue of nationalism, and the way sport can contribute to human well-being. (shrink)

Two models of assertion are described and their epistemological implications considered. The assurance model draws a parallel between the ethical norms surrounding promising and the epistemic norms which facilitate the transmission of testimonial knowledge. This model is rejected in favour of the view that assertion transmits knowledge by expressing belief. I go on to compare the epistemology of testimony with the epistemology of memory.

I begin by examining perception of photographs from two directions: what we think photographs are, and the aspects of mind involved when viewing photographs. Traditional photographs are shown to be mnemonic tools, and memory identified as a key part of the process by which photographs are fully perceived. Second, I describe the metamorphogram; a non-traditional photograph which fits specific, author-defined criteria for being memory. The metamorphogram is shown to be analogous to a composite of all an individual’s episodic memories. Finally, (...) using the metamorphogram in artistic works suggests a bi-directional relationship between individual autobiographical memory and shared cultural memory. A model of this relationship fails to align with existing definitions of cultural memory, and may represent a new form: sociobiographical memory. I propose that the experiences documented here make the case for promoting a mutually beneficial relationship between philosophy and other creative disciplines, including photography. (shrink)

Successful prototype marine chronometers, developed by Harrison and others in the eighteenth century, stimulated a sector of the British watchmaking industry to supply Admiralty and commercial demand for this instrument. Chronometers, like other British-made timepieces, were constructed by an elaborate pre-industrial method of production. The instrument's static technology and extreme durability meant replacement demand was minimal, and new demand was low relative to existing stock and the industry's capacity. The First World War created a final surge of demand that left (...) supplies far in excess of peacetime needs; and a new technology—radio transmissions of time signals—offered an alternative method of determining Greenwich time, and thus longitude, at sea. (shrink)

The potential of the folic acid biosynthesis pathway as a target for the development of antibiotics has been acknowledged for many years and validated by the clinical use of several drugs. Recently, the crystal structures of all but one of the enzymes in the pathway from GTP to dihydrofolate have been determined. Given that structure‐based drug design strategies are now widely employed, these recent developments have prompted a re‐evaluation of the potential of each of the enzymes in the pathway as (...) a target for development of specific inhibitors. Here, we review the current knowledge of the structure and mechanism of each enzyme in the bacterial folic acid biosynthesis pathway from GTP to dihydrofolate and draw conclusions regarding the potential of each enzyme as a target for therapeutic intervention. BioEssays 24:637–648, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Jason Stanley has proposed that we can account for the effects of extralinguistic context on truth-conditional content whilst remaining loyal to a compositional semantics for natural language. This is possible, he argues, because there are covert variables present in the logical forms of certain sentences whose values are fixed relative to contexts, but which do not register in the overt structure of those sentences. In the present article I assess the plausibility of positing such variables in logical form, focusing particularly (...) on the examples Stanley provides in order to corroborate their presence. I argue that these examples are apt for an alternative treatment than that offered by Stanley—one which does not make recourse to covert variables, and is hence more credible. I end by spelling out some consequences of this argument for Stanley’s proposal. (shrink)

Constitutional dialogue has become an influential concept to understand the relationship between courts and other the institutional branches of the state, with the primary focus being on legislatures. More recently, the place of dialogue within the constitutional literature has been challenged as vague; providing a potential to over-reach or overstate the judicial role and distorting the reality of practices which in fact shape the relationship between courts and other institutions. Critics have placed into focus the question: should constitutional scholarship abandon (...) ‘constitutional dialogue’ as a way of understanding the relationship between courts and other institutions within the constitutional order? This article seeks to respond to this question by arguing that constitutional dialogue remains an important aspect of understanding the development of constitutional understanding about inter-institutional roles but does so by acknowledging the criticisms levelled against constitutional dialogue. Developing this approach, the argument made in this article seeks to recast the theoretical foundations of dialogue in constitutional theory by shifting the understanding of dialogue away from its normative and descriptive tethers. In its place, constitutional dialogue should be considered in the context of a philosophical understanding of language and the role that it plays to create constitutional meanings and experiences. Dialogue has a deeper and more significant register than a metaphor conveying a ‘conversation’, ‘communication’ or a ‘deliberative rationality’ between the institutions of the constitutional order—dialogue must be understood through the perspective of language as disclosing a world of common meaning and experience. (shrink)

In Measuring the Immeasurable Mind: Where Contemporary Neuroscience Meets the Aristotelian Tradition, Matthew Owen argues that despite its nonphysical character, it is possible to empirically detect and measure consciousness. -/- Toward the end of the previous century, the neuroscience of consciousness set its roots and sprouted within a materialist milieu that reduced the mind to matter. Several decades later, dualism is being dusted off and reconsidered. Although some may see this revival as a threat to consciousness science aimed at (...) measuring the conscious mind, Owen argues that measuring consciousness, along with the medical benefits of such measurements, is not ruled out by consciousness being nonphysical. Owen proposes the Mind-Body Powers model of neural correlates of consciousness, which is informed by Aristotelian causation and a substance dualist view of human nature inspired by Thomas Aquinas, who often followed Aristotle. In addition to explaining why there are neural correlates of consciousness, the model provides a philosophical foundation for empirically discerning and quantifying consciousness. En route to presenting and applying the Mind-Body Powers model to neurobiology, Owen rebuts longstanding objections to dualism related to the mind-body problem. With scholarly precision and readable clarity, Owen applies an oft forgotten yet richly developed historical vantage point to contemporary cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

Unlike many other animals, human beings enjoy freedom of action. They are capable of acting freely because they have certain psychological capacities which other animals lack. In this paper, I argue that the crucial capacity here is our ability to make practical judgements; to make judgements about what we ought to do. A number of other writers share this view but they treat practical judgement as a form of belief. Since, as I argue, we don't control our beliefs, that undermines (...) this model of human freedom. I suggest a different account of practical judgement, according to which they are cognitive states but not beliefs and I show how this provides us with a better model of practical freedom. (shrink)

The first book-length treatment in English of Habermas’s theory of social evolution and progress.

This is the first critical edition of a fascinating medieval work on music, written in Iraq in the tenth century. It is accompanied by an English translation and full annotation. The Epistle examines not just the technical, scientific, and mathematical aspects of music, but its cosmic, psychological, and spiritual dimensions.

Nick Bostrom and others have suggested treating decision-making under moral uncertainty as analogous to parliamentary decision-making. The core suggestion of this “parliamentary approach” is that the competing moral theories function like delegates to the parliament, and that these delegates then make decisions by some combination of bargaining and voting. There seems some reason to hope that such an approach might avoid standard objections to existing approaches (for example, the “maximise expected choiceworthiness” (MEC) and “my favourite theory” approaches). However, the parliamentary (...) approach is so far extremely underspecified, making it largely indeterminate how such a model will in fact behave in the respects that those concerned with moral uncertainty care about. This paper explores one way of making it precise. We treat predicaments of moral uncertainty as analogous to bargaining situations alone (setting aside voting), and apply a version of the Nash solution that is standard in bargaining theory. The resulting model does indeed perform in many of the hoped-for ways. However, so also does a version of MEC that employs a structural approach to intertheoretic comparisons. It seems to us an open question which, regarding this version of MEC and the bargaining-theoretic approach, is superior to the other. We identify the key points on which the two differ. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Problem of Normative Power Consent and Choice Promise, Consent and Normative Interests Permissive Interests.

In Morality Bernard Williams confronts the problems of writing moral philosophy, and offers a stimulating alternative to more systematic accounts which seem nevertheless to have left all the important issues somewhere off the page.

In recent years it has become increasingly the norm in football1 to kick the ball out of play when a player is, or appears to be, inadvertently injured. Kicking the ball out of play in football represents a particular instantiation of a generally understood fair play norm, the voluntary suspension of play (VSP). In the philosophical literature, support for the VSP norm is provided by John Russell (2007) who claims that his interpretivist account of sport is helpful for evaluating complex (...) moral issues in sport in general and issues related to injury in football in particular. This paper examines whether Russell's interpretivist-backed account of autonomy can adequately inform football players as to the nuanced and ambiguous moral considerations that arise in relation to the VSP norm. The paper goes on to identify the highly complex dynamic circumstances football players need to consider in order to better discharge their moral responsibilities when faced with inadvertent injuries. (shrink)

This paper examines the learning and performance of the air traffic control (ATC) work domain. This domain was chosen because it embodies features that represent future work for many other industries (e.g., information service provision mediated by information technologies; a high reliance on communication skills and collaborative work; increasing complexity and intensity of the work activity), within an organisational context undergoing considerable change. In ATC work learning occurs formally as part of accredited training and informally, as part of everyday practice. (...) In this way learning and experience of ATC work shapes – and is shaped by – the way work is organised, which includes the divisions of labour and technological artefacts. ATC work is experienced temporally, complexly, through affect and socially. Controllers learn to use a variety of socio-material resources which include embodiment and artefacts to undertake the work. In so doing the article demonstrates the ways in which learning and performance is not just a cognitive undertaking, but one that draws on embodiment to achieve what here is called “interdependent sentience”. This involves using all their senses to gain an awareness of problems as they emerge to collectively accomplish a seamless air traffic flow in a complex interdependent socio-technical system. (shrink)

Studying Lacan's Seminar VII offers a contemporary, critically informed set of analyses of Lacan's ethics seminar and astute reflections about what Lacan's ethics offers to the field of psychoanalytic thought today. The volume interrogates the seminar with fresh voices and situated curiosities and perspectives, making for a compellingly exciting range of explorations of the crucial matters related to an ethics of psychoanalysis. The essays question and tease out the paradoxes Lacan draws attention to in his seminar of 1959-1960, and in (...) addition, offer radical engagements with the seminar in light of theories of racism, inequality, capitalism, education, and subjectivity. The key elements in Lacan's seminar are explained, debated, and reconsidered with Antigone, das Ding, and the inevitable "ne ceder pas sur son desir" duly unpacked, examined, and ruminated upon. Studying Lacan's Seminar VII will be of interest to psychoanalytic scholars and students of Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as psychoanalytic therapists and analysts. It will also be of interest to scholars and students of politics, philosophy, and studies at the intersections of racism, film, feminism, sociology, gender and queer theory. (shrink)

A historical review -- Contemplative practices in higher education -- Challenges and replies to contemplative methods -- Contemplative research -- The contemplative mind : a vision of higher education for the 21st century.

Joanna Leidenhag’s research monograph Minding Creation: Theological Panpsychism and the Doctrine of Creation argues that theologians should seriously consider and perhaps even support panpsychism. In light of rekindled interest in panpsychism amongst philosophers of mind and a noteworthy minority of cognitive neuroscientists, which comes in the wake of physicalism’s faltering, Leidenhag’s thesis is timely. This work briefly analyzes some key aspects of Minding Creation.

This paper investigates the medical law and ethics learning needs of Foundation doctors by means of a national survey developed in association with key stakeholders including the General Medical Council and Health Education England. Four hundred sevnty-nine doctors completed the survey. The average self-reported level of preparation in MEL was 63%. When asked to rate how confident they felt in approaching three cases of increasing ethical complexity, more FYs were fully confident in the more complex cases than in the more (...) standard case. There was no apparent relationship with confidence and reported teaching at medical school. The less confident doctors were no more likely to ask for further teaching on the topic than the confident doctors. This suggests that FYs can be vulnerable when facing ethical decisions by being underprepared, not recognising their lack of ability to make a reasoned decision or by being overconfident. Educators need to be aware of this and provide practical MEL training based on trainee experiences and real-world ethics and challenge learners’ views. Given the complexities of many ethical decisions, preparedness should not be seen as the ability to make a difficult decision but rather a recognition that such cases are difficult, that doubt is permissible and the solution may well be beyond the relatively inexperienced doctor. Educators and supervisors should therefore be ensuring that this is clear to their trainees. This necessitates an environment in which questions can be asked and uncertainty raised with the expectation of a supportive response. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Learning Difference Against Ignoring Difference I Am Because We Are and We Are Because I Am Practicing Just Parenting Teaching Alienation? Notes.

Extending a normal 24 hours day by four hours is unexpectedly highly disruptive to daily rhythms in gene expression in the blood. Using a paradigm in which human subjects were exposed to a 28 hours day, Archer and colleagues show how this sleep‐altering forced desynchrony protocol caused complex disruption to daily rhythms in distinct groups of genes. Such perturbations in the temporal organisation of the blood transcriptome arise quickly, and point to the fragile nature of coordinated genomic activity. Chronic disruption (...) of the daily and circadian rhythms in sleep compromise health and well‐being and this study reveals potential new molecular targets to combat the disruptive effects of shift work and jetlag. (shrink)

After #MeToo, academics have become increasingly focused on the liberal concept of consent. Either problematized as a means of distinguishing between sex and rape, or vaunted as a tool for having better sex, consent remains central to discussions of sexual violence. Returning to Andrea Dworkin’s thought, this article argues that contemporary feminists must move beyond consent and recenter the problem of violence to theorize rape. Dworkin, alongside Catharine MacKinnon and Carole Pateman, critiques consent for disguising the violence of rape, sex, (...) and pornography. By defining violence as a process of objectification, Dworkin exposes rape, pornography, and most controversially, consensual heterosexual intercourse as “a new kind of death.” She, in turn, calls for the feminist exercise of violence as a tactic of disclosure that promises to make visible patriarchal violence hidden by consent and sexualization. Moving beyond consent to recenter the problem of violence, I conclude, opens up new avenues for feminist action and brings into view the seemingly unthinkable possibility of a world without rape. (shrink)

"In the great English tradition of the lay specialist, Barfield, a lawyer, modernizes the Platonic dialogue format to focus on the philosophic problems of reality and ways of knowing.. This is the solvent mind at its best-distinguished exchanges giving provocative, open-ended results at every point. Highly recommended. of permanent value." Owen Barfield, who died in 1997 shortly after entering his hundredth year, was one of the seminal minds of the twentieth century, of whom C. S. Lewis wrote "he towers (...) above us all." His books have won respect from many writers other than Lewis, among them T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkein, and Saul Bellows, and John Lukacs. He was born in North London in 1898 and received his B.A. with first-class honors from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1921. He also earned B.C.L., M.A., and B.Litt. degrees from Oxford and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He served as a solicitor for twenty-eight years until his retirement from legal practice in 1959. Barfield was a visiting professor at Brandeis and Drew Universities, Hamilton College, the University of Missouri at Columbia, UCLA, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His books include seven others published by The Barfield Press: Romanticism Comes of Age, Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s, Unancestral Voice, Speaker's Meaning, What Coleridge Thought, The Rediscovery of Meaning, and History, Guilt and Habit. (shrink)

Heraclitus accepts as a principle that any particular insight into things is necessarily partial and perspectival. Edward Halper has discussed how, for this reason, it is in principle impossible for a particular thinker to attain the perspective of the Logos by which the whole can be made intelligible. So, metaphysics itself tells us that metaphysics is impossible. According to Halper, Heraclitus was wrong to take the Logos as applying to itself, as the Logos should properly be understood as applying only (...) to what is not a product of human agency. I argue that Halper’s move cannot serve as a corrective patch to Heraclitus’ metaphysical thought, since it posits a distinction between the human and the rest of reality which Heraclitus could never accept. Although not a radical monist who denies the reality of all multiplicity, a fundamental principle of his thought is that all distinctions and oppositions are grounded in a more fundamental unity. I instead approach the Heraclitean paradox by appealing to the strategy, familiar from a number of ancient Greek philosophers, of making a distinction between different levels of knowledge inherent within the same knower. (shrink)

This article addresses the relationship of toleration and humour as virtues. It argues that our understanding of toleration as a virtue has been captured and shaped by the conception of tolerance as a duty and, through a critique of John Horton’s classic article on toleration as a virtue, seeks to show what a view freed from such captivity would look like. It then turns to argue that humour plays a fundamental role in relation to living a virtuous life. Finally, it (...) attempts to establish the practical necessity of the relationship between tolerance and humour setting out what I take to be significant structural relationships between them and between their formation as settled dispositions of character. (shrink)

We build on Morgan’s deep conventionalist base by offering a pragmatic approach for achieving normative progress on sports most intractable problems (e.g. performance enhancemen...

Narrative and History explains the key concepts and practices in the composition and writing of history. It explores how knowledge of the ways in which historians author history affects many conventional understandings of its nature. Major concepts such as truth, objectivity, reference and representation are re-evaluated and re-thought in radical ways. Combining theory with practice, Alun Munslow expands the boundaries of the discipline and charts a new role for unconventional historical forms and modes of expression.

Whether art can be wholly autonomous has been repeatedly challenged in the modern history of aesthetics. In this collection of specially-commissioned chapters, a team of experts discuss the extent to which art can be explained purely in terms of aesthetic categories. Covering examples from Philosophy, Music and Art History and drawing on continental and analytic sources, this volume clarifies the relationship between artworks and extra-aesthetic considerations, including historic, cultural or economic factors. It presents a comprehensive overview of the question of (...) aesthetic autonomy, exploring its relevance to both philosophy and the comprehension of specific artworks themselves. By closely examining how the creation of artworks, and our judgements of these artworks, relate to society and history, Aesthetic and Artistic Autonomy provides an insightful and sustained discussion of a major question in aesthetic philosophy. (shrink)

This article argues that a person’s well-being at a time and the goodness of her life are two distinct values. It is commonly accepted as platitudinous that well-being is what makes a life good for the person who lives it. Even philosophers who distinguish between well-being at a time and the goodness of a life still typically assume that increasing a person’s well-being at some particular moment, all else equal, necessarily improves her life on the whole. I develop a precise (...) statement of this standard assumption, and then show that it is subject to counterexamples. The possibility of such counterexamples depends only on premises similar to those sometimes invoked to argue that a person’s well-being over a long period is not simply the aggregate well-being of the shorter periods that compose the long period. The refutation of the standard assumption linking well-being and life-goodness entails that these are distinct and sometimes divergent values. As an alternative to the standard assumption, it is proposed that well-being is best understood as an ingredient in a good life. (shrink)

Imagine you are casually browsing an online bookstore, looking for an interesting novel. Suppose the store predicts you will want to buy a particular novel: the one most chosen by people of your same age, gender, location, and occupational status. The store recommends the book, it appeals to you, and so you choose it. Central to this scenario is an automated prediction of what you desire. This article raises moral concerns about such predictions. More generally, this article examines the ethics (...) of artificial social cognition—the ethical dimensions of attribution of mental states to humans by artificial systems. The focus is presumptuous aim attributions, which are defined here as aim attributions based crucially on the premise that the person in question will have aims like superficially similar people. Several everyday examples demonstrate that this sort of presumptuousness is already a familiar moral concern. The scope of this moral concern is extended by new technologies. In particular, recommender systems based on collaborative filtering are now commonly used to automatically recommend products and information to humans. Examination of these systems demonstrates that they naturally attribute aims presumptuously. This article presents two reservations about the widespread adoption of such systems. First, the severity of our antecedent moral concern about presumptuousness increases when aim attribution processes are automated and accelerated. Second, a foreseeable consequence of reliance on these systems is an unwarranted inducement of interpersonal conformity. (shrink)

This article addresses three questions about well-being. First, is well-being future-sensitive? I.e., can present well-being depend on future events? Second, is well-being recursively dependent? I.e., can present well-being depend on itself? Third, can present and future well-being be interdependent? The third question combines the first two, in the sense that a yes to it is equivalent to yeses to both the first and second. To do justice to the diverse ways we contemplate well-being, I consider our thought and discourse about (...) well-being in three domains: everyday conversation, social science, and philosophy. This article’s main conclusion is that we must answer the third question with no. Present and future well-being cannot be interdependent. The reason, in short, is that a theory of well-being that countenances both future-sensitivity and recursive dependence would have us understand a person’s well-being at a time as so intricately tied to her well-being at other times that it would not make sense to consider her well-being an aspect of her state at particular times. It follows that we must reject either future-sensitivity or recursive dependence. I ultimately suggest, especially in light of arguments based on assumptions of empirical research on well-being, that the balance of reasons favors rejecting future-sensitivity. (shrink)

FIFA President Sepp Blatter’s recent attempt to resurrect the 6 + 5 quota for club football which limits the number of home-grown players to six is a protectionist measure at odds with global trends in free trade and freedom of movement. We remain unconvinced that his goals—to arrest the decline in the competitive quality and balance of international football, ensure greater investment in developing native talent and safeguarding national identity—are a problem or served well by such a regulation. We show (...) that the impact of foreign players on national teams is mixed and restrictions are as likely to undermine the quality of national teams as much as they will improve them. Our moral case will show he is wrong to assert that elite club football’s prime agenda ought to be a nationalist one. We conclude that the primary threat to the integrity, competitive balance and cultural significance of football is not labour migration but misplaced financial imperatives that have an overriding impact on shaping footba.. (shrink)