Isocrates' Antidosis ("Defense against the Exchange") and Aristotle's Protrepticus ("Exhortation to Philosophy") were recovered from oblivion in the late nineteenth century. In this article we demonstrate that the two texts happen to be directly related. Aristotle's Protrepticus was a response, on behalf of the Academy, to Isocrates' criticism of the Academy and its theoretical preoccupations. -/- Contents: I. Introduction: Protrepticus, text and context II. Authentication of the Protrepticus of Aristotle III. Isocrates and philosophy in Athens in the 4th century IV. (...) The Protrepticus of Aristotle as a response to the Antidosis of Isocrates V. Conclusion: dueling conceptions of philosophy, still dueling. (shrink)

Philosophers have developed three theories of luck: the probability theory, the modal theory, and the control theory. To help assess these theories, we conducted an empirical investigation of luck attributions. We created eight putative luck scenarios and framed each in either a positive or a negative light. Furthermore, we placed the critical luck event at the beginning, middle, or end of the scenario to see if the location of the event influenced luck attributions. We found that attributions of luckiness were (...) significantly influenced by the framing of the scenario and by the location of the critical event. Positively framing an event led to significantly higher lucky ratings than negatively framing the same exact event. And the closer a negative event was placed toward the end of a scenario, the more unlucky the event was rated. Overall, our results raise the possibility that there is no such thing as luck and thereby pose serious challenges to the three prominent theories of luck. We instead propose that luck may be a cognitive illusion, a mere narrative device used to frame stories of success or failure. (shrink)

There is widespread agreement in neuroscience and psychology that the visual system identifies objects and faces based on a pattern of activation over many neurons, each neuron being involved in representing many different categories. The hypothesis that the visual system includes finely tuned neurons for specific objects or faces for the sake of identification, so‐called “grandmother cells”, is widely rejected. Here it is argued that the rejection of grandmother cells is premature. Grandmother cells constitute a hypothesis of how familiar visual (...) categories are identified, but the primary evidence against this hypothesis comes from studies that have failed to observe neurons that selectively respond to unfamiliar stimuli. These findings are reviewed and it is shown that they are irrelevant. Neuroscientists need to better understand existing models of face and object identification that include grandmother cells and then compare the selectivity of these units with single neurons responding to stimuli that can be identified. (shrink)

A new translation and edition of Aristotle's Protrepticus (with critical comments on the fragments) -/- Welcome -/- The Protrepticus was an early work of Aristotle, written while he was still a member of Plato's Academy, but it soon became one of the most famous works in the whole history of philosophy. Unfortunately it was not directly copied in the middle ages and so did not survive in its own manuscript tradition. But substantial fragments of it have been preserved in several (...) works by Iamblichus of Chalcis, a third century A.D. neo-Pythagorean philosopher and educator. On the basis of a close study of Iamblichus' extensive use and excerption of Aristotle's Protrepticus, it is possible to reconstruct the backbone of the lost work, and then to flesh it out with the other surviving reports about the work from antiquity (for example in Alexander of Aphrodisias and other ancient commentators on Aristotle). It is also possible to identify several papyrus fragments of the work, and many references and literary allusions in later authors, especially Cicero, whose own lost dialogue Hortensius was a defense of philosophy modeleld on Aristotle's. (shrink)

In The Virtuous Therapist, authors Elliot D. Cohen and Gale Spieler Cohen provide a systematic, philosophical approach to mental health ethics. Their comprehensive model of ethical decision making is developed to a number of difficult ethical problems counselors will experience. The issues raised in the book are timely, ethically engaging, and of practical importance to those working in the field.

It is a familiar fact that dreams are hard to recall. Because of this, memory alone is not a reliable indication of what they are like. Consider the following examples. Some people claim that they never dream. The truth is, psychologists assure us, that they do not remember having dreamt. Researchers say that they can tell when someone is dreaming, by his rapid eye movements and a certain pattern of brain waves recorded on an electroencephalograph . When a sleeper's eyes (...) move rapidly, and he registers the appropriate pattern of brain-waves on the EEG, and then he is awakened, he almost always reports a dream. By this test, no one has yet been discovered who does not dream at all. In fact, psychologists have established that the average person has four to six periods of dreaming each night. Some people say that they always dream in black and white, never in colour. Again, however, they have apparently forgotten the colours that occur in dreams, as is shown by the fact that most often, if we wake a sleeper in the middle of a dream, when it is still fresh in his mind, he then can report colours. Another claim that some people make is that dreams never last more than a few seconds. This also seems to be a case of forgetting dreams, since periods of REM, together with EEG readings, indicate that dreams take longer than this; in fact they may last as long as thirty-five minutes. Finally, it is a piece of folk wisdom that eating rich foods just before sleep causes nightmares. According to scientists, however, all that eating such foods can do is to cause a person enough bodily discomfort to wake him often during the night. This leads him to remember more of his dreams—and therefore more of their vividness and strangeness—than he usually does. (shrink)

This study examines firms that have experienced an industrial and/or environ-mental crisis and proposes that top management team (TMT) characteristics will affect a firm's ability to minimize the severity of these crisis events. Specifically, heterogeneity in the TMT will exhibit a curvilinear (U-shaped) relationship with the severity of firm crises. Our results suggest that a moderate level of age and tenure heterogeneity are positively related to a firm's ability to successfully minimize the severity of crises. Variance in educational backgrounds was (...) unrelated to crisis severity. Functional background heterogeneity exhibited a curvilinear relationship with crisis severity but was not U-shaped as hypothesized. (shrink)

As scientific and engineering efforts become increasingly global in nature, the need to understand differences in perceptions of research ethics issues across countries and cultures is imperative. However, investigations into the connection between nationality and ethical decision-making in the sciences have largely generated mixed results. In Study 1 of this paper, a measure of biases and compensatory strategies that could influence ethical decisions was administered. Results from this study indicated that graduate students from the United States and international graduate students (...) studying in the US are prone to different biases. Based on these findings, recommendations are made for developing ethics education interventions to target these decision-making biases. In Study 2, we employed an ethics training intervention based on ethical sensemaking and used a well-established measure of ethical decision-making that more fully captures the content of ethical judgment. Similar to Study 1, the results obtained in this study suggest differences do exist between graduate students from the US and international graduate students in ethical decision-making prior to taking the research ethics training. However, similar effects were observed for both groups following the completion of the ethics training intervention. (shrink)

BackgroundRandomized controlled trials (RCTs) are often complex and expensive to perform. Less than one third achieve planned recruitment targets, follow-up can be labor-intensive, and many have limited real-world generalizability. Designs for RCTs conducted using cohorts and routinely collected health data, including registries, electronic health records, and administrative databases, have been proposed to address these challenges and are being rapidly adopted. These designs, however, are relatively recent innovations, and published RCT reports often do not describe important aspects of their methodology in (...) a standardized way. Our objective is to extend the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) statement with a consensus-driven reporting guideline for RCTs using cohorts and routinely collected health data.MethodsThe development of this CONSORT extension will consist of five phases. Phase 1 (completed) consisted of the project launch, including fundraising, the establishment of a research team, and development of a conceptual framework. In phase 2, a systematic review will be performed to identify publications (1) that describe methods or reporting considerations for RCTs conducted using cohorts and routinely collected health data or (2) that are protocols or report results from such RCTs. An initial “long list” of possible modifications to CONSORT checklist items and possible new items for the reporting guideline will be generated based on the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) and The REporting of studies Conducted using Observational Routinely-collected health Data (RECORD) statements. Additional possible modifications and new items will be identified based on the results of the systematic review. Phase 3 will consist of a three-round Delphi exercise with methods and content experts to evaluate the “long list” and generate a “short list” of key items. In phase 4, these items will serve as the basis for an in-person consensus meeting to finalize a core set of items to be included in the reporting guideline and checklist. Phase 5 will involve drafting the checklist and elaboration-explanation documents, and dissemination and implementation of the guideline.DiscussionDevelopment of this CONSORT extension will contribute to more transparent reporting of RCTs conducted using cohorts and routinely collected health data. (shrink)

The relationship between mental models and ethical decision making, along with the mechanisms through which mental models affect EDM, are not well understood. Using the sensemaking approach to EDM, we empirically tested the relationship of mental models to EDM. Participants were asked to depict their mental models in response to an ethics case to reveal their understanding of the ethical dilemma, and then provide a response, along with a rationale, to a different ethical problem. Findings indicated that complexity of respondents’ (...) mental models was related to EDM, and that this relationship was mediated by sensemaking processes. The implications of these findings for improving integrity training in organizations, as well as ultimately understanding the role of mental models in EDM, are discussed. (shrink)

This case is about a study of burn patients that included a request to the IRB for a waiver of consent for perianal specimen collection–a request which ultimately was not approved by a reviewing IR...

Social impact investing is transforming the availability of private capital for nonprofits and social enterprises, but demand is not yet meeting supply. This paper analyzes the perceived barriers faced by nonprofits in engaging with SII, arguing the need to assess differences using a policy field framework. Four parameters of a subsector are conceptualized as shaping participation in SII: the scale of investment required, embeddedness in place, the need for radical innovation, and the configuration of intermediaries. Based on 25 interviews with (...) leaders of nonprofits and intermediaries in affordable housing and community economic development in Canada, the study finds that significant barriers are a lack of knowledge of the market, inadequate financial literacy, and the challenges of measuring and valuing social impacts. In addition, nonprofits report that, in spite of the inherent importance of social impact in this form of investing, they currently make limited use of evaluation and impact metrics, and perceive that intermediaries and investors, particularly in affordable housing, still put a greater emphasis on financial over social returns. (shrink)

The psychedelic psilocybin has shown promise both as treatment for psychiatric conditions and as a means of improving well-being in healthy individuals. In some jurisdictions (e.g., Oregon, USA), psilocybin use for both purposes is or will soon be allowed and yet, public attitudes toward this shift are understudied. We asked a nationally representative sample of 795 US Americans to evaluate the moral status of psilocybin use in an appropriately licensed setting for either treatment of a psychiatric condition or well-being enhancement. (...) Showing strong bipartisan support, participants rated the individual’s decision as morally positive in both contexts. These results can inform effective policy-making decisions around supervised psilocybin use, given robust public attitudes as elicited in the context of an innovative regulatory model. We did not explore attitudes to psilocybin use in unsupervised or non-licensed community or social settings. (shrink)

Philosophers have developed three theories of luck: the probability theory, the modal theory, and the control theory. To help assess these theories, we conducted an empirical investigation of luck attributions. We created eight putative luck scenarios and framed each in either a positive or a negative light. Furthermore, we placed the critical luck event at the beginning, middle, or end of the scenario to see if the location of the event influenced luck attributions. We found that attributions of luckiness were (...) significantly influenced by the framing of the scenario and by the location of the critical event. Positively framing an event led to significantly higher lucky ratings than negatively framing the same exact event. And the closer a negative event was placed toward the end of a scenario, the more unlucky the event was rated. Overall, our results raise the possibility that there is no such thing as luck and thereby pose serious challenges to the three prominent theories of luck. We instead propose that luck may be a cognitive illusion, a mere narrative device used to frame stories of success or failure. (shrink)

Human cooperation is held to be an evolutionary puzzle because people voluntarily engage in costly cooperation, and costly punishment of non-cooperators, even among anonymous strangers they will never meet again. The costs of such cooperation cannot be recovered through kin-selection, reciprocal altruism, indirect reciprocity, or costly signaling. A number of recent authors label this behavior ‘strong reciprocity’, and argue that it is: (a) a newly documented aspect of human nature, (b) adaptive, and (c) evolved by group selection. We argue exactly (...) the opposite; that the phenomenon is: (a) not new, (b) maladaptive, and (c) evolved by individual selection. In our perspective, the apparent puzzle disappears to reveal a biological and evolutionary logic to human cooperation. Group selection may play a role in theory, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain human cooperation. Our alternative solution is simpler, makes fewer assumptions, and is more parsimonious with the empirical data. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Despite widespread attention to corruption and organizational change in the literature, to our knowledge, no research has attempted to understand the linkages between these two powerful organizational phenomena. Accordingly, we draw on major theories in ethics, sociology, and management to develop a theoretical framework for understanding how organizational change can sometimes generate corruption. We extend anomie theory and ethical climate theory to articulate the deinstitutionalization of the normative control system and argue that, through this deinstitutionalization, organizations have the potential to (...) become incubators for corruption. We qualify this process by proposing conditions more ripe for anomie and under which this deinstitutionalization is more likely to occur, propounding moderating relationships that influence organizational reconfiguration. Examples of turbulence in the contemporary business environment that can trigger change highlight our discussion. We conclude with managerial implications, offering means by which the deleterious effects of corruption may be arrested or controlled. (shrink)

In this paper a theoretical framework is proposed for how the brain processes the information necessary for us to achieve the understanding of others that we experience in our social worlds. Our framework attempts to expand several previous approaches to more fully account for the various data on interpersonal understanding and to respond to theoretical critiques in this area. Specifically, we propose that social understanding must be achieved by at least two mechanisms in the brain that are capable of parallel (...) information processing. The first mechanism, based on research into mirror matching systems in the brain, suggests that representations of others are mapped onto an observer's representations of these same schemas in order to understand them. The second mechanism requires semantic analysis of a given social situation in order to understand the actions of others and most likely involves conscious processes. We suggest that experimental correlates of these systems should be dissociable using both behavioral and neuroimaging techniques. (shrink)

This is a well-behaved concept in Newtonian physics. But a center of gravity is not an atom or a subatomic particle or any other physical item in the world. It has no mass; it has no color; it has no physical properties at all, except for spatio-temporal location. It is a fine example of what Hans Reichenbach would call an abstractum. It is a purely abstract object. It is, if you like , a theorist's fiction. It is not one of (...) the real things in the universe in addition to the atoms. But it is a fiction that has nicely defined, well delineated and well behaved role within physics. (shrink)

Cooperation towards public goods relies on credible threats of punishment to deter cheats. However, punishing is costly, so it remains unclear who incurred the costs of enforcement in our evolutionary past. Theoretical work suggests that human cooperation may be promoted if people believe in supernatural punishment for moral transgressions. This theory is supported by new work in cognitive psychology and by anecdotal ethnographic evidence, but formal quantitative tests remain to be done. Using data from 186 societies around the globe, I (...) test whether the likelihood of supernatural punishment—indexed by the importance of moralizing “high gods”—is associated with cooperation. (shrink)

D. Barton Johnson traces the parallel lives and literary origins of two Russo-American writers: Ayn Rand and Vladimir Nabokov. Born in Saint Peterburg six years apart, they overlapped on the New York Times bestsellers list in the late fifties. While Nabokov's Russian cultural roots have been much explored, Rand's were little realized prior to Chris Matthew Sciabarra's investigation of her Russian philosophical context. Nabokov and Rand represent polar examples of their cultural heritage: for Nabokov, the aesthetically-oriented tradition of the (...) modernist Russian Symbolists; for Rand, the social-utilitarian tradition of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and later, Maxim Gorky, founder of Socialist Realism. (shrink)

D. BARTON JOHNSON traces the parallel lives and literary origins of two Russo-American writers: Ayn Rand and Vladimir Nabokov. Born in Saint Peterburg six years apart, they overlapped on the New York Times bestsellers list in the late fifties. While Nabokov's Russian cultural roots have been much explored, Rand's were little realized prior to Chris Matthew Sciabarra's investigation of her Russian philosophical context. Nabokov and Rand represent polar examples of their cultural heritage: for Nabokov, the aesthetically-oriented tradition of the (...) modernist Russian Symbolists; for Rand, the social-utilitarian tradition of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and later, Maxim Gorky, founder of Socialist Realism. (shrink)

Humans have long been characterized as poor probabilistic reasoners when presented with explicit numerical information. Bayesian word problems provide a well-known example of this, where even highly educated and cognitively skilled individuals fail to adhere to mathematical norms. It is widely agreed that natural frequencies can facilitate Bayesian reasoning relative to normalized formats (e.g. probabilities, percentages), both by clarifying logical set-subset relations and by simplifying numerical calculations. Nevertheless, between-study performance on “transparent” Bayesian problems varies widely, and generally remains rather unimpressive. (...) We suggest there has been an over-focus on this representational facilitator (i.e. transparent problem structures) at the expense of the specific logical and numerical processing requirements and the corresponding individual abilities and skills necessary for providing Bayesian-like output given specific verbal and numerical input. We further suggest that understanding this task-individual pair could benefit from considerations from the literature on mathematical cognition, which emphasizes text comprehension and problem solving, along with contributions of online executive working memory, metacognitive regulation, and relevant stored knowledge and skills. We conclude by offering avenues for future research aimed at identifying the stages in problem solving at which correct versus incorrect reasoners depart, and how individual difference might influence this time point. (shrink)

The ability to imagine objects undergoing rotation (mental rotation) improves markedly with practice, but an explanation of this plasticity remains controversial. Some researchers propose that practice speeds up the rate of a general-purpose rotation algorithm. Others maintain that performance improvements arise through the adoption of a new cognitive strategy—repeated exposure leads to rapid retrieval from memory of the required response to familiar mental rotation stimuli. In two experiments we provide support for an integrated explanation of practice effects in mental rotation (...) by combining behavioral and EEG measures in a way that provides more rigorous inference than is available from either measure alone. Before practice, participants displayed two well-established signatures of mental rotation: Both response time and EEG negativity increased linearly with rotation angle. After extensive practice with a small set of stimuli, both signatures of mental rotation had all but disappeared. In contrast, after the same amount of practice with a much larger set both signatures remained, even though performance improved markedly. Taken together, these results constitute a reversed association, which cannot arise from variation in a single cause, and so they provide compelling evidence for the existence of two routes to expertise in mental rotation. We also found novel evidence that practice with the large but not the small stimulus set increased the magnitude of an early visual evoked potential, suggesting increased rotation speed is enabled by improved efficiency in extracting three-dimensional information from two-dimensional stimuli. (shrink)

The similarity of documents in a large database of published Fractals articles was examined for redundancy. Three different text matching techniques were used on published Abstracts to identify redundancy candidates, and predictions were verified by reading full text versions of the redundancy candidate articles. A small fraction of the total articles in the database was judged to be redundant. This was viewed as a lower limit, because it excluded cases where the concepts remained the same, but the text was altered (...) substantially. Far more pervasive than redundant publications were publications that did not violate the letter of redundancy but rather violated the spirit of redundancy. There appeared to be widespread publication maximization strategies. Studies that resulted in one comprehensive paper decades ago now result in multiple papers that focus on one major problem, but are differentiated by parameter ranges, or other stratifying variables. This ‘paper inflation’ is due in large part to the increasing use of metrics (publications, patents, citations, etc) to evaluate research performance, and the researchers’ motivation to maximize the metrics. (shrink)

The similarity of documents in a large database of published Fractals articles was examined for redundancy. Three different text matching techniques were used on publisheds to identify redundancy candidates, and predictions were verified by reading full text versions of the redundancy candidate articles. A small fraction of the total articles in the database was judged to be redundant. This was viewed as a lower limit, because it excluded cases where the concepts remained the same, but the text was altered substantially.Far (...) more pervasive than redundant publications were publications that did not violate the letter of redundancy but rather violated the spirit of redundancy. There appeared to be widespread publication maximization strategies. Studies that resulted in one comprehensive paper decades ago now result in multiple papers that focus on one major problem, but are differentiated by parameter ranges, or other stratifying variables. This ‘paper inflation’ is due in large part to the increasing use of metrics (publications, patents, citations, etc) to evaluate research performance, and the researchers’ motivation to maximize the metrics. (shrink)