Teachers need to acquire technology and digital skills in order to be able to follow the rapid changes in society. Since 2003, a national project has been carried out in Greece concerning the certification of teachers in basic computer skills. During this project many teachers participated and certified through a Computer Based Assessment system that has been developed by the Computer Technology Institute & Press - Diophantus. In this paper a brief view of syllabus, item bank, and tools that are (...) used for preparing and delivering examinations for teachers’ certification on basic computer skills is given. Moreover, the participants profile based on teachers’ responses is explored. (shrink)

Foundations for Moral Relativism consists of five self-standing, though loosely related, essays on the nature of agency and its metaethical foundations. The essays do not aspire to offer any grand theory of agency or metaethics, but only to lay out some of the foundations for such theories. These foundations portray how agency in general is constructed in the social context of a community, how moral agency in particular is constructed in the social context of a community, and how a derivative (...) relativist account of morality can be not only intellectually respectable but also plausible. In paving the way for moral relativism, Velleman clarifies popular confusions about relativism, responds to a number of traditional objections and sketches a sophisticated version of moral relativism that is meant to improve on more simplistic versions.There is much to praise in these thought provoking essays and they are highly recommended to anyone working on agency and metaethics. They are lucid, succi .. (shrink)

This is a critical notice of Christos Kyriacou and Kevin Wallbridge (eds.), Skeptical Invariantism Reconsidered. New York and London: Routledge, 2021. Pp. x + 324. ISBN 978-0-367-37018-3. It discusses in some detail contributions by Nevin Climenhaga, Christos Kyriacou, Michael Hannon, Kevin Wallbridge, Annalisa Coliva, and Genia Schönbaumsfeld.

La religion, cette névrose obsessionnelle universelle de l’humanité Freud, L’avenir d’une illusion (1927) Introduction « Sartre est … le théologien le plus important dont dispose la tradition philosophique de l’Occident ». C’est le philosophe et théologien Christos Yannaras qui s’exprime. Provocation? Plutôt : vertu de l’athéisme de l’auteur de L’être et le néant qui, bel héritier de Nietzsche et de Heidegger, produit un diagnostic au scalpel de la posture religieuse molle du piétisme du X...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a “groundbreaking” (Time) approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society—and in ourselves. “The most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.”—The New York Times ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Shelf Awareness, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews Antiracism is a (...) transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism—and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At its core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas—from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities—that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves. Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 123 become the origin of the norms of moral freedom and the formal origin of the laws os nature. The totality of the world may be interpreted in terms of the homo noumenon, or in terms of a totality of values, in terms of feeling or as the historical stream of experience. The interrelationship between the various aspects of reality is misconstrued by humanism when the modal (...) laws of the world are absolutized, and a single aspect is made the basic denominator of reality. The neo-Augustinian philosophy of Dooyeweerd recognizes the priority of faith and would unmask the alleged neutrality of theoretical reason as a dogma concealing the religious foundations of theoretical thought. The Archimedean point of Dooyeweerd's philosophy is not cogito ergo sum, nor vivo in [luxu continuo, etiam cogitans, but it is rather: Ego, in Christo regeneratus, etiam cogitans ex Christo vivo. The heart in its Biblical sense is the religious root and center of human existence, the center in which our temporal functions find their religious concentration and consummation of meaning. The Christian philosopher finds the ultimate origin of the world in God's sovereign and creative will, out of which originate all laws, and all things which are subject to law. The Christian philosopher finds the coherence of the modal diversity of the cosmos in a divine world order. The unity of the world is not a construction of philosophical thought, but is rather an enduring effect of God's sovereign power, so that each mode, each aspect of the cosmos is under divine law. Every aspect of the world is a sphere of law, sovereign under God in its own domain. God's laws constitute the universal valid determination and limitation of the individual things subject to them. Consequently, the Christian philosopher cannot hold to a theoretical conception of reality which is emancipated from the Biblical motive of creation, for all such conceptions are at least partially dominated by apostate religious motives. Nash does not attempt to refute Dooyeweerd's main thesis concerning the impossibility of a religiously neutral philosophy; however, his critical remarks do point out that more argumentation is needed in defense of that thesis, and that the introduction of a new terminology, shifts in the meaning of traditional terms, as well as vagueness and ambiguity, necessitate further elaboration on the part of Dooyeweerd and the members of his School. Nash's work successfully accomplishes a two-fold purpose: it calls attention to an important development within the Augustinian tradition of philosophy, and it raises issues which cannot be ignored by members of Dooyeweerd's own school as well as by philosophers who are self-critical of their own presuppositions. Nash's book deserves careful attention and it is to be hoped that it will direct the serious reader to a study of Dooyeweerd's own works and that it will stimulate others to take part in the critical study of a system of thought which "gives important and exciting direction to present and future thought and action and is, in the fullest sense of the word, a Christian Philosophy and a great one." DAWD H. FREEMAN University of Rhode Island Husserl et la pensde moderne--Husserl und das Denken der Neuzeit. Edited by H. L. Van Breda and J. Taminiaux. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959. Pp. x + 250.) This volume contains papers which were read at the Second International Colloquium on Phenomenology which was held at Krefeld in Germany, November 1-3, 1956, under the auspices of the Husserl Archives of Louvain and Cologne. Though the names which 124 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY appear in this volume are among the leading figures in European phenomenology, the content of the volume itself is somewhat disappointing. The editors note that the discussion of these papers was prolonged and lively but they regret that it was impossible to record and publish this part of the Colloquium. The reader of this volume can but share the regret of the editors in this case since many of the papers are but rough drafts, clearly meant to pose questions and lead into discussion and, of themselves, contain very little in the way of new or... (shrink)

We present a streamlined axiom system of special relativity in first-order logic. From this axiom system we "derive" an axiom system of general relativity in two natural steps. We will also see how the axioms of special relativity transform into those of general relativity. This way we hope to make general relativity more accessible for the non-specialist.

This book examines Fuller’s pioneering vision of social epistemology. It focuses specifically on his work post-2000, which is founded in the changing conception of humanity and project into a ‘post-‘ or ‘trans-‘ human future. Chapters treat especially Fuller’s provocative response to the changing boundary conditions of the knower due to anticipated changes in humanity coming from the nanosciences, neuroscience, synthetic biology and computer technology and end on an interview with Fuller himself. While Fuller’s turn in this direction has invited at (...) least as much criticism as his earlier work, to him the result is an extended sense of the knower, or ‘humanity 2.0’, which Fuller himself identifies with transhumanism. The authors assess Fuller’s work on the following issues: Science and Technology Studies (STS), the university and intellectual life, neo-liberal political economy, intelligent design, Cosmism, Gnosticism, agent-oriented epistemology, proactionary vs precautionary principles and Welfare State 2.0. (shrink)

Michael Polanyi was one of the great figures of European intellectual life in the 20th century. A highly acclaimed physical chemist in the first period of his career who became a celebrated philosopher after World War II, Polanyi taught in Germany, England, and the United States and associated with many of the leading intellects of his time. His biography has remained unwritten partly because his many and scattered interests in a wide variety of fields, including six subfields of physical chemistry, (...) epistemology, economics, patent law, social and political theory, aesthetics, and theology. This long-awaited volume will be the definitive resource on Polanyi and his work. (shrink)

The purpose of this quantitative study of 401 students is to identify common motivations for Chinese students to plagiarize on written English assignments and ultimately to demystify and understand the mindset of Chinese students who do plagiarize. According to a regression analysis of these data, the most significant factor relating to likelihood to self-report plagiarism for Chinese students is the belief in a “standard answer,” which represents the correct answer to a given question. The regression results also suggest that students (...) who believe that imitation of experts is important to learning are more likely to self-report plagiarism, and that business students are more likely to self-report than non-business students. The other factors examined in our model, such as English writing ability; ability to express one’s self in English writing; embarrassment about English writing ability; concern for accuracy of English writing; and concerns about grade point average, were not significant predictors of self-reported plagiarism. These results give a key insight into the English writing plagiarism behaviors of Chinese students studying in Western higher education. (shrink)

Upshot: A successful program for an enactive view of dreaming would have to clarify phenomenal and neurophysiological similarities and differences between waking perception, imagination, and dreaming. An embodied and skillful view of the dream process would require careful investigation of somatic sources of dream content, including sensory incorporation, and global, indirect ways in which dream content reacts metaphorically to changes in bodily states. Neurophenomenology of dreams would benefit from developing dreaming-specific approaches to training researchers and participants in phenomenological methods.

This study sheds light on a key concept of Yogācāra intersubjectivity that played a significant role in medieval Chinese Yogācāra. Specifically, it analyzes how Kuiji 窺基 (632–682) reinterprets adhipati (activating and amplifying influence; Ch: zengshang 增上 or zengshang li 增上力 or zengshang yuan 增上緣) to account for intersubjective karmic interactions across different lifeworlds in the events of teaching and killing.As this line of investigation shows, Kuiji’s theory of adhipati attempts to sidestep the entanglement of the problems of intersubjectivity and incommensurable (...) worlds in Yogācāra. Extant scholarship on intersubjectivity often presumes one spatio-temporal world populated by sentient beings and insentient objects, which is fundamentally at odds with the Yogācāra tenet that each mental stream generates its distinct lifeworld. To address the pragmatic question of how different mental continuums of consciousnesses can impinge into each other’s lifeworlds, Kuiji employed adhipati in a specific way to account for intersubjective interplay across different, potentially incommensurable worlds. In this framing of intersubjectivity, the problem of one world or many worlds is explained non-dualistically: these lifeworlds are neither the same nor different, neither one nor many, but karmically interconnected.Expanding on recent discussions of the puzzle of intersubjectivity in Yogācāra, this paper shows that Kuiji’s deployment of adhipati provides an account of genuine intersubjectivity in which different mental continuums are recognized as subjects and engage in causal interactions among different spatio-temporal worlds. In Kuiji’s framing, this genuine intersubjectivity gives rise to the sense of one shared world. (shrink)

A part of relativistic dynamics is axiomatized by simple and purely geometrical axioms formulated within first-order logic. A geometrical proof of the formula connecting relativistic and rest masses of bodies is presented, leading up to a geometric explanation of Einstein’s famous E = mc 2. The connection of our geometrical axioms and the usual axioms on the conservation of mass, momentum and four-momentum is also investigated.

Context: Phenomenology and the enactive approach pose a unique challenge to dream research: during sleep one seems to be relatively disconnected from both world and body. Movement and perception, prerequisites for sensorimotor subjectivity, are restricted; the dreamer’s experience is turned inwards. In cognitive neurosciences, on the other hand, the generally accepted approach holds that dream formation is a direct result of neural activations in the absence of perception, and dreaming is often equated with “delusions.” Problem: Can enactivism and phenomenology account (...) for the variety of dream experiences? What kinds of experiential and empirical approaches are required in order to probe into dreaming subjectivity? Investigating qualities of perception, sensation, and embodiment in dreams, as well as the relationship between the dream-world and waking-world requires a step away from a delusional or altered-state framework of dream formation and a step toward an enactive integrative approach. Method: In this article, we will focus on the “depth” of dream experiences, i.e., what is possible in the dream state. Our article is divided into two parts: a theoretical framework for approaching dreaming from an enactive cognition standpoint; and discussion of the role and strategies for experimentation on dreaming. Based on phenomenology and theories of enactivism, we will argue for the primacy of subjectivity and imagination in the formation of lived experience. Results: We propose that neurophenomenology of dreaming is a nascent discipline that requires rethinking the relative role of third-, first- and second-person methodologies, and that a paradigm shift is required in order to investigate dreaming as a phenomenon on a continuum of conscious phenomena as opposed to a break from or an alteration of consciousness. Implications: Dream science, as part of the larger enterprise of consciousness and subjectivity studies, can be included in the enactive framework. This implies that dream experiences are neither passively lived nor functionally disconnected from dreamers’ world and body. We propose the basis and some concrete strategies for an empirical enactive neurophenomenology of dreaming. We conclude that investigating dream experiences can illuminate qualities of subjective perception and relation to the world, and thus challenge the traditional subject-object juxtaposition. Constructivist content: This article argues for an interdisciplinary enactive cognitive science approach to dream studies. (shrink)

Critics and author, Alvin Goldman’s response to Knowledge in the Social World.

Research indicates that religious values and ethical behavior are closely associated, yet, at a firm level, the processes by which this association occurs are poorly understood. Family firms are known to exhibit values-based behavior, which in turn can lead to specific firm-level outcomes. It is also known that one’s family is an important incubator, enabler, and perpetuator of religious values across successive generations. Our study examines the experiences of a single, multigenerational business family that successfully enacted their religious values in (...) their business. Drawing upon intergenerational solidarity and values-based leadership theory, and by way of an interpretive, qualitative analysis, we find that the family’s religious values enhanced their cohesion and were manifested in their leadership style, which, in turn, led to outcomes for the business. Our findings highlight the processes that underlie the relationship between religious values and organizational outcomes in family firms and offer insights into the role of solidarity in values-based leadership. (shrink)

In a review of the cell biology and heredity studies of 1900–1910, Bernardino Fantini argues that the choice of an experimental subject or organism was crucial in opening up new discoveries and new theories for specific fields of research.69 Thinking on a broader level, Bütschli expressed a similar view when he stated that an understanding of the true nature and structure of the “elementary organism” was crucial to the whole of biology. In this article we have traced the impact of (...) Bütschli's unicellular model of protozoa up to the general acceptance of the eukaryotic cell as nature's primary organism. We have also seen that Bütschli's vision in the Studien gave birth to Protistenforschung and Zellforschung, sister sciences whose task it was to further and integrate knowledge of the living cell. Of necessity, we have confined ourselves to German scientific developments. However, our attempt to recapture and define the unity and meaning of a biology of the “cell-microcosm” has given us pause to reconsider the development and nature of Wilhelmian biological science. (shrink)

I am not sure how confident we can be about our knowledge of the meaning of a sentence, but I am sure that we should be much less confident than we often are about the meaning of a word or non-sentential expression. This paper is an attempt to whittle away our confidence about word-meaning, and it is to this end that I investigate the meaning of the word ‘know'. But the point of the investigation is to show that it is (...) not enough to investigate just the meaning of a word. We must investigate the syntax as well, something that philosophers have often ignored. A theory of meaning must be closely tied to a theory of syntax, and for one to be acceptable the other must be acceptable as well. A theory of language must be an integrated theory, and hypotheses about syntax and meaning stand or fall together. (shrink)