In this first full-length study of male homosexuality in Cather's short stories and novels, John P. Anders examines patterns of male friendship ranging on a continuum from the social to the sexual. He reveals how Cather's work assumes an unexpected depth and complexity by drawing on both the familiar tradition of friendship literature inspired by classical and Christian texts and a homosexual legacy that is part of, yet distinct from, established literary traditions. Anders argues that Cather's artistic (...) achievement is distinguished by her sexual aesthetics, an elusive literary style inextricably associated with homosexuality. His analysis demonstrates how a homosexual ethos and eros helped Cather develop a sensitivity to human variation and a style to accommodate it and thus became the objective correlative of her art, dramatizing the diversity of human nature as it deepens the mystery of her work. (shrink)

This paper presents a longue durée account of the discursive emergence of ‘the market'. It seeks to develop understanding of the ‘crisis system' by showing that the crises of the present have their origins earlier than some critical realist scholars have suggested and can be better understood by the theorization of the generative mechanisms that emerged from the economic and political chaos of the early 1600s. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is employed to show that in the context of the emergence (...) of capitalism in England, these generative mechanisms resulted in the meaning of the word ‘market’ slipping loose of the geo-spatial semiotic bounds by which it had commonly been delineated – i.e. as a physical space in a town or city where goods were bartered or sold – and being re-semioticised to refer to abstract space where all acts of capitalist economic exchange, including those impacting upon the natural world, take place. (shrink)

Søren Kierkegaard and Walter Lippmann wrote in very different times and places but both characterized the public as a “phantom.” Importantly, each did so within the context of a broader analysis that linked the press with specific notions about the public and democracy. This paper highlights the specific characteristics of the press that each thinker believed were responsible for the construction of the phantom public and its effects. While taking seriously the differences between Kierkegaard and Lippmann, in both their respective (...) sociopolitical contexts and their formulations of the public and the press, this paper applies their critiques to a vastly different media terrain than either thinker could have envisioned. (shrink)

In this paper Sullins argues that in certain circumstances robots can be seen as real moral agents. A distinction is made between persons and moral agents such that, it is not necessary for a robot to have personhood in order to be a moral agent. I detail three requirements for a robot to be seen as a moral agent. The first is achieved when the robot is significantly autonomous from any programmers or operators of the machine. The second is when (...) one can analyze or explain the robot's behavior only by ascribing to it some predisposition or 'intention' to do good or harm. And finally, robot moral agency requires the robot to behave in a way that shows and understanding of responsibility to some other moral agent. Robots with all of these criteria will have moral rights as well as responsibilities regardless of their status as persons. (shrink)

Introduction A brief look at the competing present-day interpretations of Hume's philosophy will leave the uninitiated reader completely baffled. On the one hand , Hume is seen as a philosopher who attempted to analyse concepts with ...

Genetic changes arising in human pluripotent stem cells (hPSC) upon culture may bestow unwanted or detrimental phenotypes to cells, thus potentially impacting on the applications of hPSCs for clinical use and basic research. In the 20 years since the first report of culture‐acquired genetic aberrations in hPSCs, a characteristic spectrum of recurrent aberrations has emerged. The preponderance of such aberrations implies that they provide a selective growth advantage to hPSCs upon expansion. However, understanding the consequences of culture‐acquired variants for specific (...) applications in cell therapy or research has been more elusive. The rapid progress of hPSC‐based therapies to clinics is galvanizing the field to address this uncertainty and provide definitive ways both for risk assessment of variants and reducing their prevalence in culture. Here, we aim to provide a timely update on almost 20 years of research on this fascinating, but a still unresolved and concerning, phenomenon. (shrink)

This article criticizes the standard way philosophers pose issues about the core practices of criminal justice institutions. Attempting to get at some of the presuppositions of posing these issues in terms of punishment, I construct a revised version of Rawls's ‘telishment’ case, a revision based on actual features of contemporary criminal justice practices in the USA. In addressing the implications of ‘racialment’, as I call it, some connections are made to current philosophical discussions about race. I conclude with brief remarks (...) about the importance of race to philosophical discussion as such. (shrink)

The most important distinctively American contribution to philosophy is the pragmatist tradition. In this short, lucid, and completely convincing exposition, Professor John P. Murphy begins by exploring the roots of this tradition as found in the work of Peirce, James, and Dewey, demonstrating its power and originality. Historians of philosophy will appreciate the insight Murphy brings to these figures, but the special value of this book lies in his discussion of how the pragmatist spirit has flowered in contemporary philosophy (...) in the work of Quine, Rorty, and Davidson.Throughout, Murphy emphasizes the logic and structure of the views held by these six philosophers and what it is they have in common that makes their work especially “pragmatist.” There is no better introduction to this historical tradition and perhaps no better way into the philosophies of the contemporaries whom Murphy discusses.Interest in pragmatist ideas is undergoing a revival at present, and this book shows us why. It will be of interest to both historians of philosophy and students of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John P. Sisk DOCTOR JOHNSON KICKS A STONE Readers OF Boswell's Life ofJohnson will remember the great Doctor's refutation of Bishop Berkeley's idealism. He and Boswell had just come out of a church in Harwich and were discussing the Bishop's "ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter." Boswell observed "that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it." To mis (...) Johnson responded, "striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, T refute it thus.'" For Boswell diis was an argument from first principles diat are as fundamental to metaphysics as axioms are to mathematics. To use Johnson's own phrase, it is an argument based on "the experience of mankind" — the ground upon which he confidendy stood when he expressed his disapproval of such other phUosophical contemporaries as Hume, Voltaire, and Rousseau (the latter "a rascal who ought to be hunted out of society"). Or as WalterJackson Bate puts it in TheAchievement ofSamuelJohnson, the first principle ofhis thinking was "To go back to the living and concrete nature of experience."1 Boswell thought Johnson a philosopher, though he admits in a famous passage that his table manners might have suggested otherwise. Apparently G. K. Chesterton thought he had some claim to the term, for he called Johnson's novel Rasselas "a sort of philosophical satire on philosophy." Most likelyJohnson thought ofhimselfas among many other things a philosopher: the humanities had not yet setded snugly into dieir modern compartments. Now, of course, any undergraduate student of philosophy is willing to believe that Johnson's argument against Berkeley isn't worth much (he may be no less willing to believe that the Bishop's argument isn't worth much eitiier). He may also know that in the perspective of die modern physicist Johnson's stone was not as solid as Johnson thought it was — though it is likely he would have thought diis information 65 66Philosophy and Literature no more relevant to die argument dian Thaïes' belief diat all diings are made of water or Pydiagoras' diat all diings are numbers. The important thing was whether a drinker violated die experience of mankind. When the Scotchman Lord Hunderland praised the ancient philosophers for the candor and good humor widi which they disputed with one anotherJohnson would have none of it: "They disputed with good humour upon dieir fanciful dieories," he said, "because diey were not interested in the truth of them." It is not hard to imagine the Doctor's reaction to our own fanciful theories in philosophy, linguistics, and literary criticism. Suppose him at the Mitre Tavern for an evening's defense of die experience of mankind against die ingenious sophistries of a company made up ofJacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman, Stanley Fish, Michel Foucault, Paul de Man, and Jacques Lacan — the lot of them variously committed to the belief diat the proper job of philosophy is not the pursuit of the truth but the pursuit of die trudi about die pursuit of die truth. Johnson eyes die group warily, expecting the worst. There are too many Frenchmen present, and as he made clear at supper one July evening in the Turk's Head coffee house, French writers are superficial "because they are not scholars, and so proceed upon the mere power of dieir own minds." Nevertheless, the assembled gendemen present their positions: we are all prisoners ofthe total epistemological environment of our age, our episteme; locked linguistically into interpretive communities, we cannot know die text in itself; die proper function of the critic is creative free play, the text being merely a convenient occasion; language, being self-referential, cannot reveal a subject; human agency is a flattering but deceptive myth; transcendent systems of thought are impossible; if literature touches reality anywhere we cannot know it. MeanwhileJohnson, than whom no man ever had "a more ardent love of literature, or a higher respect for it," is in high dudgeon, kicking figurative stones right and left, no real ones being available inside the Mitre. His adversaries observe him with indulgent good humor, amused but not impressed with this crude bourgeois display, having... (shrink)

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin loved the world, but, theologically and spiritually, he often tried to leave it behind. This essay shows that from the 1920s until his death in 1955, Teilhard de Chardin unequivocally supported racist eugenic practices, praised the possibilities of the Nazi experiments, and looked down upon those who he deemed "imperfect" humans. These ideas explicitly lay the groundwork for Teilhard’s famous cosmological theology, a link which has been largely ignored in Teilhardian research until now. This study concludes (...) that such support requires a reconsideration of how Teilhard is used in twenty-first century theology. (shrink)

David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature presents the most important account of skepticism in the history of modern philosophy. In this lucid and thorough introduction to the work, John P. Wright examines the development of Hume's ideas in the Treatise, their relation to eighteenth-century theories of the imagination and passions, and the reception they received when Hume published the Treatise. He explains Hume's arguments concerning the inability of reason to establish the basic beliefs which underlie science and morals, (...) as well as his arguments showing why we are nevertheless psychologically compelled to accept such beliefs. The book will be a valuable guide for those seeking to understand the nature of modern skepticism and its connection with the founding of the human sciences during the Enlightenment. (shrink)

Darwinism, Democracy, and Race examines the development and defence of an argument that arose at the boundary between anthropology and evolutionary biology in twentieth-century America. In its fully articulated form, this argument simultaneously discredited scientific racism and defended free human agency in Darwinian terms. The volume is timely because it gives readers a key to assessing contemporary debates about the biology of race. By working across disciplinary lines, the book's focal figures--the anthropologist Franz Boas, the cultural anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, the (...) geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, and the physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn--found increasingly persuasive ways of cutting between genetic determinist and social constructionist views of race by grounding Boas's racially egalitarian, culturally relativistic, and democratically pluralistic ethic in a distinctive version of the genetic theory of natural selection. Collaborators in making and defending this argument included Ashley Montagu, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Lewontin. Darwinism, Democracy, and Race will appeal to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and academics interested in subjects including Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Sociology of Race, History of Biology and Anthropology, and Rhetoric of Science. (shrink)

By utilizing new information from both clinical and experimental (lesion, electrophysiological, and gene-activation) studies with animals, the anatomy underlying anterograde amnesia has been reformulated. The distinction between temporal lobe and diencephalic amnesia is of limited value in that a common feature of anterograde amnesia is damage to part of an comprising the hippocampus, the fornix, the mamillary bodies, and the anterior thalamic nuclei. This view, which can be traced back to Delay and Brion (1969), differs from other recent models in (...) placing critical importance on the efferents from the hippocampus via the fornix to the diencephalon. These are necessary for the encoding and, hence, the effective subsequent recall of episodic memory. An additional feature of this hippocampalanterior thalamic and the perirhinal–medial dorsal thalamic systems are compromised, leading to severe deficits in both recall and recognition. (shrink)

Scientific authorship has become a contested terrain in contemporary science. Based on a survey of authors across fields, we measure the likelihood of specialist authors : people who only made specialized contributions, such as data, materials, or funding; and “nonauthor collaborators” : those who did significant work on the project but do not appear as authors, across different research contexts, including field, size of the project team, commercial orientation, impact of publication, and organization of the collaboration. We find that guest (...) and ghost authors are common, with about one-third of publications having at least one specialist author and over half having at least one nonauthor collaborator. We see significant cross-field variations in both overall rates and types of specialist authors and nonauthor collaborators. We find there are generally fewer specialist authors among highly cited papers and more graduate student nonauthor collaborators in single location projects. The results suggest authorship practices vary across fields, and by project characteristics, complicating the use of authorship lists as a basis for evaluation. We discuss implications of these findings for interpreting author lists in the context of science policy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 29, Number 1, April 2003, pp. 125-141 Dr. George Cheyne, Chevalier Ramsay, and Hume's Letter to a Physician JOHN P. WRIGHT The publication of a new intellectual biography of George Cheyne1 provides a "propitious" occasion for "a thoroughly skeptical review"2 of the question which has long exercised Hume scholars, whether Cheyne was the intended recipient of David Hume's fascinating pie-Treatise Letter to a Physician,3 the (...) letter which describes his own hypochondriacal physical and mental symptoms and gives an account of his early philosophical development.4 Hume's nineteenth-century biographer, John Hill Burton, argued that Hume was probably writing to Cheyne,5 while Ernest Mossner claimed to definitively refute that hypothesis in an article entitled "Hume's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot," published in 1944.6 Anita Guerrini's intellectual biography does not discuss Cheyne as a possible recipient of Hume's letter, but she does present a well-rounded picture of this interesting eighteenth-century physician from which we can judge his appropriateness as its addressee. In the following discussion I will make use of the biographical material found in this new biography of Cheyne, as well as other sources, to show that Mossner's arguments are less than definitive, and that it would be wrong to dismiss the possibility that the letter was sent to George Cheyne.7 This is a possibility that, for reasons that I will make clear, makes good biographical and philosophical sense. At the same time, it is important to keep a proper suspense of judgment as Burton did, for the evidence that the letter was either intended for or actually sent to Cheyne is not definitive. John P. Wright is Professor of Philosophy, Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, MI 48859, USA. e-mail: [email protected] 126 John P. Wright Burton, who first published the autobiographical letter of the 22-yearold Hume in 1846, narrowed down the possible addressees of Hume's letter to either Cheyne or John Arbuthnot. He also pointed out that it is possible that the letter was never sent, and that the ten and a half page manuscript is only a neatly written draft, rather than a fair copy of an actual letter. Nevertheless, Burton thought he could identify the unnamed addressee on the basis of the internal evidence of the manuscript and the records of Scottish physicians practicing in England at the time. In the letter, Hume refers to the intended recipient as his "Countryman, a Scotchman [,]... a skilful Physician, a man of Letters, of Wit, of Good Sense, & of great Humanity."8 Further he writes that he is consulting him because he is a person "of great Learning beyond [his]... own Profession" who is acquainted with the "Motions of the Mind" he has described in his letter, and that "Fame pointed [him]... out as the properest person to resolve my Doubts..." about the cure of his disorder.9 Burton tells us that "the first name that suggested itself... was Arbuthnot, whose fine genius was just then flickering in the socket."10 (John Arbuthnot had been ill for some time, and died a year later.) But he then added that "a more full consideration showed to my satisfaction that it must have been destined for Dr. George Cheyne." His main reason for settling on Cheyne was that Cheyne's immensely popular The English Malady (1733) had recently been published, and that "there is a certain unison of tone between Hume's letter and this book." Burton quotes a portion of Cheyne's own long autobiographical account of his own disease in The English Malady. Cheyne's autobiography begins with the claim that "I passed my Youth in close study, and almost constant Application to the abstracted Sciences, (wherein my chief pleasure consisted) and consequently in great Temperance and a Sedentary Life"; it is followed by the reflection that any overindulgence in food or drink led to physical and psychological problems.11 He goes on to describe these in great detail for 39 pages, along with a history of his life. Burton also quotes a section of the book in which Cheyne describes how a studious and sedentary life causes the symptoms... (shrink)

While we are commonly told that the distinctive method of mathematics is rigorous proof, and that the special topic of mathematics is abstract structure, there has been no agreement among mathematicians, logicians, or philosophers as to just what either of these assertions means. John P. Burgess clarifies the nature of mathematical rigor and of mathematical structure, and above all of the relation between the two, taking into account some of the latest developments in mathematics, including the rise of experimental (...) mathematics on the one hand and computerized formal proofs on the other hand. Along the way, a great many historical developments in mathematics, philosophy, and logic are surveyed. Yet very little in the way of background knowledge on the part of the reader is presupposed. (shrink)

The great logician Gottlob Frege attempted to provide a purely logical foundation for mathematics. His system collapsed when Bertrand Russell discovered a contradiction in it. Thereafter, mathematicians and logicians, beginning with Russell himself, turned in other directions to look for a framework for modern abstract mathematics. Over the past couple of decades, however, logicians and philosophers have discovered that much more is salvageable from the rubble of Frege's system than had previously been assumed. A variety of repaired systems have been (...) proposed, each a consistent theory permitting the development of a significant portion of mathematics. This book surveys the assortment of methods put forth for fixing Frege's system, in an attempt to determine just how much of mathematics can be reconstructed in each. John Burgess considers every proposed fix, each with its distinctive philosophical advantages and drawbacks. These systems range from those barely able to reconstruct the rudiments of arithmetic to those that go well beyond the generally accepted axioms of set theory into the speculative realm of large cardinals. For the most part, Burgess finds that attempts to fix Frege do less than advertised to revive his system. This book will be the benchmark against which future analyses of the revival of Frege will be measured. (shrink)

The article discusses the varying conceptions of the faculty of ‘the understanding’ in 18th-century British philosophy and logic. Topics include the distinction between the understanding and the will, the traditional division of three acts of understanding and its critics, the naturalizing of human understanding, conceiving of the limits of human understanding, British innatism and the critique of empiricist conceptions of the understanding, and reconceiving the understanding and the elimination of scepticism. Authors discussed include Richard Price, James Harris, Zachary Mayne, Edward (...) Bentham, Isaac Watts, Dugald Stewart, John Norris—as well as Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Reid. (shrink)

Psychologists have long debated the underlying cause of infants' perseverative reaching. Thelen et al. explain the error in terms of general processes that make goal-directed actions to remembered locations. The context- and experience-dependent nature of their model implies that there is no single cause of the A-not-B error, and, more generally, no core essence to cognitive development.

Critics of organ donation after circulatory death (DCD) argue that, even if donors are past the point of autoresuscitation, they have not satisfied the “irreversibility” requirement in the circulatory and respiratory criteria for determining death, since their circulation and respiration could be artificially restored. Thus, removing their vital organs violates the “dead-donor” rule. I defend DCD donation against this criticism. I argue that practical medical-ethical considerations, including respect for do-not-resuscitate orders, support interpreting “irreversibility” to mean permanent cessation of circulation and (...) respiration. Assuming a consciousness-related formulation of human death, I then argue that the loss of circulation and respiration is significant, because it leads to the permanent loss of consciousness and thus to the death of the human person. The DNR request by an organ donor should thus be interpreted to mean “do not restore to consciousness.” Finally, I respond to an objection that if “irreversibility” has a medical-ethical meaning, it would entail the absurd possibility that one of two individuals in the same physical state could be alive and the other dead—an implication that some think is inconsistent with understanding death as an objective biological state of the organism. I argue that advances in medical technology have created phenomena that challenge the assumption that human death can be understood in strictly biological terms. I argue that ethical and ontological considerations about our nature bear on the definition and determination of death and thus on the permissibility of DCD. (shrink)

Roboethics is the recent offshoot of computer ethics that pays special attention to the alterations that need to be made to computer ethics when we give the computer mobility and a means to interact directly in the human environment. The closely related field of machine morality explores how ethical systems and behaviors may be programmed into social robotics applications. As robots move from the factory floor into our homes and work lives, they stand to change key aspects of the way (...) our lives are lived. In order to be successful, these machines must be programmed with the ability to navigate the human life world without committing ethical faux pas or moral outrage. Thus, the roboethicist is tasked not only with critiquing the attempts of robots engineers to achieve the integration of these machines into our life world, but also, and more importantly, with suggesting means of achieving better results than what is presently on offer. (shrink)

Numbers and other mathematical objects are exceptional in having no locations in space or time or relations of cause and effect. This makes it difficult to account for the possibility of the knowledge of such objects, leading many philosophers to embrace nominalism, the doctrine that there are no such objects, and to embark on ambitious projects for interpreting mathematics so as to preserve the subject while eliminating its objects. This book cuts through a host of technicalities that have obscured previous (...) discussions of these projects, and presents clear, concise accounts of a dozen strategies for nominalistic interpretation of mathematics, thus equipping the reader to evaluate each and to compare different ones. The authors also offer critical discussion, rare in the literature, of the aims and claims of nominalistic interpretation, suggesting that it is significant in a very different way from that usually assumed. (shrink)

In the newly discovered letter Hume answers Reid's charge that he held a theory of ideas derived from his predecessors and criticizes Reid's own theory of innate ideas. He defends his own theory that ideas are derived from impressions. I discuss Reid's own puzzlement that in the first _Enquiry_ Hume ascribes a natural belief in necessary connections to the vulgar without an idea--and its influence on subsequent readings of Hume as a 'regularity theorist.' I argue that it was the 'Common (...) Sense' school of philosophers following Reid, rather than Hume, who insisted that beliefs must be based on legitimate ideas. (shrink)

Highlighting previously neglected democratic strains in Machiavelli's major writings, McCormick excavates institutions through which the common people of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance republics constrained the power of wealthy citizens and public magistrates, and he imagines how such institutions might be revived today.

One approach to the problem of differentiating a religious from a non- religious ethic would be to formulate a definition of religion that would clearly distinguish between religious and nonreligious traditions; however, a broad definition of religion would include some moral traditions, such as Marxism, commonly thought to be forms of secular humanism. A second approach would argue that some moral beliefs are independent, both in content and justification, of religious convictions; such a set of moral beliefs could be described (...) as a secular version of natural law. This approach would be rejected by those who argue that religious convictions go "all the way down." While the first can be debated by appealing to the heuristic value of various definitions of religion, the second involves familiar issues of moral epistemology. The author explores the consequences of holding a broad definition of religion and an "all the way down" epistemology. (shrink)

Al-Maʾmūn, the Inquisition, and the Quest for Caliphal Authority. By John Abdallah Nawas. Resources in Arabic and Islamic Studies, vol. 4. Atlanta: Lockwood Press, 2015. Pp. xvi + 340. $45.

What role do moment‐to‐moment comprehension processes play in visual attentional selection in picture stories? The current work uniquely tested the role of bridging inference generation processes on eye movements while participants viewed picture stories. Specific components of the Scene Perception and Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT) were tested. Bridging inference generation was induced by manipulating the presence of highly inferable actions embedded in picture stories. When inferable actions are missing, participants have increased viewing times for the immediately following critical image (Magliano, (...) Larson, Higgs, & Loschky, ). This study used eye‐tracking to test competing hypotheses about the increased viewing time: (a) Computational Load: inference generation processes increase overall computational load, producing longer fixation durations; (b) Visual Search: inference generation processes guide eye‐movements to pick up inference‐relevant information, producing more fixations. Participants had similar fixation durations, but they made more fixations while generating inferences, with that process starting from the fifth fixation. A follow‐up hypothesis predicted that when generating inferences, participants fixate scene regions important for generating the inference. A separate group of participants rated the inferential‐relevance of regions in the critical images, and results showed that these inferentially relevant regions predicted differences in other viewers’ eye movements. Thus, viewers’ event models in working memory affect visual attentional selection while viewing visual narratives. (shrink)

This book will appeal to mathematicians and philosophers interested in the foundations of mathematics.

The source, status, and significance of the derivation of the necessity of identity at the beginning of Kripke’s lecture “Identity and Necessity” is discussed from a logical, philosophical, and historical point of view.

This volume reprints a dozen of the author’s papers, most with substantial postscripts, and adds one new one. The bulk of the material is on topics in philosophy of language, but there are also two papers on philosophy of mathematics written after the appearance of the author’s collected papers on that subject, and one on epistemology. As to the substance of Field’s contributions, limitations of space preclude doing much more below than indicating the range of issues addressed, and the general (...) orientation taken towards them. As to the style of his writing, it well exhibits the first of the two virtues, clarity and conciseness, that one looks for in philosophical prose. (shrink)

Crowdfunding platforms have revolutionized entrepreneurial finance, with 200 billion dollars expected to be dispersed annually to entrepreneurs and small business owners by 2020. Despite the importance of this growing phenomenon, our knowledge of the dynamics of successful lending-based prosocial crowdfunding and its implications for the business ethics literature remain limited. We use a social responsibility lens to examine whether crowdfunders on a lending-based prosocial platform lend their money based on altruistic or strategic motives. Our results indicate that the dynamics of (...) prosocial lending-based crowdfunding are somewhat consistent with traditional forms of financing. Specifically, despite a prosocial setting in nature, crowdfunders tend to act strategically, positively responding to signals of quality and low risk. Notably, we also find that projects that are high on both financial and social appeal receive the highest average amount of funding. Furthermore, language on the lender’s profile indicating ability to pay is positively related to both funding success and funding amount. Our study contributes to filling the gap in the business ethics literature about the dynamics of lending-based prosocial crowdfunding, and the strategic and altruistic ethical motives that drive lenders in such endeavors. (shrink)

Crowdfunding platforms have revolutionized entrepreneurial finance, with 200 billion dollars expected to be dispersed annually to entrepreneurs and small business owners by 2020. Despite the importance of this growing phenomenon, our knowledge of the dynamics of successful lending-based prosocial crowdfunding and its implications for the business ethics literature remain limited. We use a social responsibility lens to examine whether crowdfunders on a lending-based prosocial platform lend their money based on altruistic or strategic motives. Our results indicate that the dynamics of (...) prosocial lending-based crowdfunding are somewhat consistent with traditional forms of financing. Specifically, despite a prosocial setting in nature, crowdfunders tend to act strategically, positively responding to signals of quality and low risk. Notably, we also find that projects that are high on both financial and social appeal receive the highest average amount of funding. Furthermore, language on the lender’s profile indicating ability to pay is positively related to both funding success and funding amount. Our study contributes to filling the gap in the business ethics literature about the dynamics of lending-based prosocial crowdfunding, and the strategic and altruistic ethical motives that drive lenders in such endeavors. (shrink)

The complexity of the set of truths of arithmetic is determined for various theories of truth deriving from Kripke and from Gupta and Herzberger.

John Norton says that philosophers have been led astray for thousands of years by their attempt to treat induction formally. He is correct that such an attempt has caused no end of trouble, but he is wrong about the history. There is a rich tradition of non-formal induction. In fact, material theories of induction prevailed all through antiquity and from the Renaissance to the mid-1800s. Recovering these past systems would not only fill lacunae in Norton’s own theory but would (...) highlight areas where Norton has not freed himself from the straightjacket of formal induction as much as he might think. This essay begins that recovery. (shrink)

Mathematics tells us there exist infinitely many prime numbers. Nominalist philosophy, introduced by Goodman and Quine, tells us there exist no numbers at all, and so no prime numbers. Nominalists are aware that the assertion of the existence of prime numbers is warranted by the standards of mathematical science; they simply reject scientific standards of warrant.

Psyche and Soma is a multi-disciplinary exploration of the history of understanding of the human mind or soul and its relationship to the body, through the course of more than two thousand years. Thirteen specially commissioned chapters, each written by a recognized expert, discuss such figures as the doctors Hippocrates and Galen, the theologians St Paul, Augustine, and Aquinas, and philosophers from Plato to Leibniz.