A growing literature testifies to the persistence of place as an incorrigible aspect of human experience, identity, and morality. Place is a common ground for thought and action, a community of experienced particulars that avoids solipsism and universalism. It draws us into the philosophy of the ordinary, into familiarity as a form of knowledge, into the wisdom of proximity. Each of these essays offers a philosophy of place, and reminds us that such philosophies ultimately decide how we make, use, and (...) understand places, whether as accidents, instruments, or fields of care. (shrink)

Geography and Ethics examines the place of geography in ethics and of ethics in geography by drawing together specially commissioned contributors from distinguished scholars from around the world.

In this supplementary volume, a number of renowned scholars of Plato reflect upon their interpretive methods. Topics covered include the use of ancient authorities in interpreting Plato's dialogues, Plato's literary and rhetorical style, his arguments and characters, and his use of the dialogue form. The collection is not intended as a comprehensive survey of methodological approaches; rather it offers a number of different perspectives and clearly articulated interpretations by leading scholars in the field.

We here analyse the ethical dimensions of the UK's ‘Research Excellence Framework’, the latest version of an exercise which assesses the quality of university research in the UK every seven or so years. We find many of the common objections to this exercise unfounded, such as that it is excessively expensive by comparison with alternatives such as various metrics, or that it turns on the subjective judgement of the assessors. However there are grounds for concern about the crude language in (...) which for example all relevant scholarship becomes called ‘research’ and publications become ‘outputs’. The focus on the impact of research, which was a new feature of the most recent exercise, is particularly problematic, creating as it does a tendency to what Aristotle called alazony, self-aggrandisement, on the part of academics. We conclude that the REF is a mixed good from an ethical point of view, and that more could be done to mitigate its more unfortunate features. (shrink)

We here analyse the ethical dimensions of the UK’s ‘Research Excellent Framework’, the latest version of an exercise which assesses the quality of university research in the UK every seven or so years. We find many of the common objections to this exercise unfounded, such as that it is excessively expensive by comparison with alternatives such as various metrics, or that it turns on the subjective judgement of the assessors. However there are grounds for concern about the crude language in (...) which for example all relevant scholarship becomes called ‘research’, and publications become ‘outputs’. The focus on the impact of research, which was a new feature of the most recent exercise, is particularly problematic, creating as it does a tendency to what Aristotle called alazony, self-aggrandisement, on the part of academics. We conclude that the REF is a mixed good from an ethical point of view, and that more could be done to mitigate its more unfortunate features. (shrink)

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is an annual publication which includes original articles on a wide range of topics in ancient philosophy, and review articles of major books. In this supplementary volume, a number of renowned scholars of Plato reflect upon their interpretative methods. Topics covered include the use of ancient authorities in interpreting Plato's dialogues, Plato's literary and rhetorical style, his arguments and characters, and his use of the dialogue form. The collection is not intended as a comprehensive survey (...) of methodological approaches; rather it offers a number of different perspectives and clearly articulated interpretations by leading scholars in the field. (shrink)

Categorization and decision making are combined in a task with photorealistic faces. Two different types of face stimuli were assigned probabilistically into one of two fictitious groups; based on the category, faces were further probabilistically assigned to be hostile or friendly. In Part I, participants are asked to categorize a face into one of two categories, and to make a decision concerning interaction. A Markov model of categorization followed by decision making provides reasonable fits to Part I data. A Markov (...) model predicting decision making followed by categorization is rejected. In Part II, a no-parameter model predicts decisions using categorization and decision responses collected in separate trials, suggesting that Part 1 results are not an artifact of the presentation of categorization and decision questions within a single trial. Decisions concerning interaction (defensive/friendly) appear to be based on information from the category decision, and not from the face stimuli alone. (shrink)

Athens and Wittenberg explores how Luther and early Lutheranism did not neglect the classics of Greece and Rome, but continued to draw from the philosophy and poetry of antiquity in their quest to reform the church.

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book (...) is a compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

A fascinating discussion of the discordant elements that divide society into fragments, Convictions includes a practical, helpful proposal as to what is necessary to bring such discordant elements together.

This paper describes an AFOSR-supported basic research program that focuses on developing a new framework for combining hard with soft data in order to improve space situational awareness. The goal is to provide, in an automatic and near real-time fashion, a ranking of possible threats to blue assets (assets trying to be protected) from red assets (assets with hostile intentions). The approach is based on Conceptual Spaces models, which combine features from traditional associative and symbolic cognitive models. While Conceptual Spaces (...) are revolutionary, they lack an underlying mathematical framework. Several such frameworks have attempted to represent Conceptual Spaces, but by far the most robust is the model developed by Holender. His model utilizes integer linear programming in order to obtain an overall similarity value between observations and concepts that support the formation of hypotheses. This paper will describe a method for building Conceptual Spaces models for threats that utilizes ontologies as a means to provide a clear semantic foundation for this inferencing process; in particular threat ontologies and space domain ontologies are developed and employed in this approach. A space situational awareness use-case is presented involving a kinetic kill scenario and results are shown to assess the performance of this fusion-based inferencing framework. (shrink)

The collaboration of Language and Computing nv (L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) is guided by the hypothesis that quality constraints on ontologies for software ap-plication purposes closely parallel the constraints salient to the design of sound philosophical theories. The extent of this parallel has been poorly appreciated in the informatics community, and it turns out that importing the benefits of phi-losophical insight and methodology into application domains yields a variety of improvements. L&C’s LinKBase® (...) is one of the world’s largest medical domain ontologies. Its current primary use pertains to natural language processing ap-plications, but it also supports intelligent navigation through a range of struc-tured medical and bioinformatics information resources, such as SNOMED-CT, Swiss-Prot, and the Gene Ontology (GO). In this report we discuss how and why philosophical methods improve both the internal coherence of LinKBase®, and its capacity to serve as a translation hub, improving the interoperability of the ontologies through which it navigates. (shrink)

Mr. F. is a fifty‐year‐old father of two school‐aged daughters. Six years ago, he received a double lung transplant because he was suffering from interstitial lung disease, a fatal illness that causes suffocation by progressive scarring of the lungs. He is now experiencing chronic rejection of the transplant and is being considered to receive another. Without it, he is expected to survive only a year and a half. With it, his prognosis will improve, but the numbers are still not good. (...) Three years after his lung transplant, Mr. F. stopped attending his office visits. For a period of sixteen months he went without the studies and attention essential to posttransplant care. He stopped performing the required daily self‐monitoring of his lung function about eight months after his transplant, but he has maintained a regular exercise regimen. While lost to follow‐up, he continued to take his immunosuppressant medications, but he stopped taking medicine to control his high blood pressure because of its expense. (shrink)

Precision targeting of specific white matter bundles that traverse the subcallosal cingulate has been linked to efficacy of deep brain stimulation for treatment resistant depression. Methods to confirm optimal target engagement in this heterogenous region are now critical to establish an objective treatment protocol. As yet unexamined are the time-frequency features of the SCC evoked potential, including spectral power and phase-clustering. We examined these spectral features—evoked power and phase clustering—in a sample of TRD patients with implanted SCC stimulators. Electroencephalogram was (...) recorded during wakeful rest. Location of electrical stimulation in the SCC target region was the experimental manipulation. EEG was analyzed at the surface level with an average reference for a cluster of frontal sensors and at a time window identified by prior study. Morlet wavelets generated indices of evoked power and inter-trial phase clustering. Enhanced phase clustering at theta frequency was observed in every subject and was significantly correlated with SCC-EP magnitude, but only during left SCC stimulation. Stimulation to dorsal SCC evinced stronger phase clustering than ventral SCC. There was a weak correlation between phase clustering and white matter density. An increase in evoked delta power was also coincident with SCC-EP, but was less consistent across participants. DBS evoked time-frequency features index mm-scale changes to the location of stimulation in the SCC target region and correlate with structural characteristics implicated in treatment optimization. Results also imply a shared generative mechanism between evoked potentials evinced by electrical stimulation and evoked potentials evinced by auditory/visual stimuli and behavioral tasks. Understanding how current injection impacts downstream cortical activity is essential to building new technologies that adapt treatment parameters to individual differences in neurophysiology. (shrink)

A controversy rages over the question of how should controversial topics be taught. Recent work has advanced the “epistemic criterion” as the resolution to this controversy. According to the epistemic criterion, a matter should be taught as controversial when contrary views can be entertained on the matter without the views being contrary to reason. When an issue is noncontroversial, according to the epistemic criterion, the correct position can be taught “directively,” with the teacher endorsing that position. When there is a (...) legitimate controversy, the view should be taught “nondirectively,” with the teacher remaining neutral. In response, Bryan Warnick and Spencer Smith argue that the proponents of the epistemic criterion fail to recognize the multidimensional nature of what it means to learn to be rational. Recognizing this complexity undermines the link between the epistemic status of the controversy and directiveness of one's teaching, suggesting more flexibility in how teachers approach controversial issues. It also implies the need for a new category of teaching, which Warnick and Smith call “soft-directive” teaching. (shrink)

We argue that once a normative claim is developed, there is an imperative to effect changes based on this norm. As such, ethicists should adopt an “implementation mindset” when formulating...

According to a widely credited model in the business ethics literature, ethical decisions are a function of two kinds of factors, personal(individual) and situational, and these factors interact with each other. According to a contrary view of decision making that is widely held in some areas of business research, individuals’ decisions about ethical issues (and subsequent actions) are purely a function of their self-interest.The laboratory experiment reported in this paper provides a test of the person-situation interactionist model, using the general (...) theoretical and experimental framework used in the experimental economics literature. One individual and two situational factors relating to moral intensity were examined which may influence decisions to misrepresent information in the course of business activities.The individual and one situational variable were significantly related to participants’ actions. The interactions among individual andsituation variables were not individually significant, although the model including interactions had a much higher level of statistical significance. Gender was significant, both directly and in interaction with moral development, suggesting that it may be worthy of further examination. (shrink)

According to a widely credited model in the business ethics literature, ethical decisions are a function of two kinds of factors, personal(individual) and situational, and these factors interact with each other. According to a contrary view of decision making that is widely held in some areas of business research, individuals’ decisions about ethical issues (and subsequent actions) are purely a function of their self-interest.The laboratory experiment reported in this paper provides a test of the person-situation interactionist model, using the general (...) theoretical and experimental framework used in the experimental economics literature. One individual and two situational factors relating to moral intensity were examined which may influence decisions to misrepresent information in the course of business activities.The individual and one situational variable were significantly related to participants’ actions. The interactions among individual andsituation variables were not individually significant, although the model including interactions had a much higher level of statistical significance. Gender was significant, both directly and in interaction with moral development, suggesting that it may be worthy of further examination. (shrink)

What, if anything, would be wrong with replacing the light postulate in Einstein’s 1905 formulation of special relativity with a ‘sound postulate’, stating that the speed of sound is independent of the speed of the source? After reviewing the historical reasons underlying the particular focus on light in the special theory, we consider the circumstances under which such a theory of ‘sonic relativity’ would be justified on empirical grounds. We then consider the philosophical upshots of ‘sonic relativity’ for four contemporary (...) areas of investigation in the philosophy of spacetime: global versus subsystem symmetries, dynamical versus geometrical approaches to spacetime, the possibility of a preferred frame in theories of quantum gravity, and spacetime functionalism. (shrink)

We explore the significance of physical theories set in Euclidean spacetimes. In particular, we explore the use of these theories in contemporary physics at large, and the sense in which there can be a notion of temporal evolution in these theories. Having achieved these tasks, we proceed to reflect on the lessons that one can take from such theories for Knox’s ‘inertial frame’ version of spacetime functionalism, which seems to issue incorrect verdicts in the case of theories with Euclidean metrical (...) structure. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 82-84.

Hollywood films partially construct how Americans think about education. Recent work on the representation of schools in American cinema has highlighted the role of class difference in shaping school film genres. It has also advanced the idea that a nuanced understanding of American individualism helps to explain why the different class genres are shaped as they are. This article attempts to refine this theoretical approach by focusing on the paradox of individualism, which suggests that individualism must always be dependent on (...) community. We examine 5 films (Rushmore 1988, The Breakfast Club 1985, Mona Lisa Smile 2003, School of Rock 2003, and Stand and Deliver 1988) and argue that, although the values of individualism are certainly celebrated, these films also show, perhaps unwittingly, that the achievements of individualism require robust student communities. We describe how student communities function in these films, what achievements they make possible, and what obstacles they face. (shrink)

Research has shown that individuals with high levels of psychopathic personality traits are likely to cause harm to others in the workplace. However, there is little academic literature on the potentially adaptive outcomes of corporate psychopathy, particularly because the “boldness” psychopathy domain has largely been under-acknowledged in this literature. This study aimed to elaborate on past findings by examining the associations between psychopathy, as operationalized using scales from the relatively new triarchic model of psychopathy, and both adaptive and maladaptive workplace (...) behaviors. Participants were 343 working community adults who completed a series of self-report questionnaires that measured psychopathy and various workplace behaviors, including counterproductive work behaviors, tactics of influence, unethical decision-making, leadership strategies, team play, and creativity. Structural equation modeling was used to estimate the associations between latent constructs of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition, and the eight different constructs related to workplace behaviors. It was found that boldness preferentially predicted the use of soft tactics of influence, adaptive leadership, and team play, and negatively predicted passive leadership. Meanness predicted unethical decision-making, poor team play, and hard tactics of influence. Disinhibition positively predicted CWB and passive leadership. Meanness also moderated the association between disinhibition and CWB, in that greater scores on both psychopathy domains indicated greater levels of CWB. These findings provide conceptual support for the triarchic model, including the “boldness” domain, which measures adaptive aspects of psychopathy in addition to maladaptive ones, as well as suggest that not all individuals high on psychopathy would be an overt menace to the workplace. The different psychopathy traits may also interact with each other to predict different types or levels of workplace behaviors. (shrink)

Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy is often characterised in terms of competitive individuals debating orally with one another in public arenas. But it also developed over its long history a sense in which philosophers might acknowledge some other particular philosopher or group of philosophers as an authority and offer to that authority explicit intellectual allegiance. This is most obvious in the development after the classical period of the philosophical 'schools' with agreed founders and, most importantly, canonical founding texts. There also (...) developed a tradition of commentary, interpretation, and discussion of texts which itself became a mode of philosophical debate. As time went on, the weight of a growing tradition of reading and appealing to a certain corpus of foundational texts began to shape how later antiquity viewed its philosophical past and also how philosophical debate and inquiry was conducted. In this book leading scholars explore aspects of these important developments. (shrink)

This article examines the extent to which diversity characteristics and stakeholder role influence individuals’ corporate social orientation (CSO). Our findings indicate that one’s relationship to the organization as well as diversity, gender, and race influence one’s CSO. Specifically, we found that employees’ greatest concern was economic whereas customers had a stronger ethical orientation. The results also suggest that women as well as Black employees and customers place more emphasis on whether an organization is fulfilling its discretionary responsibilities than do males (...) and Whites. A model using the concept of value congruence is presented to guide future research. (shrink)

This special issue of Foundations of Physics collects together articles representing some recent new perspectives on the hole argument in the history and philosophy of physics. Our task here is to introduce those new perspectives.