According to Mellor, we know what an experience is like if we can imagine it correctly, and we will do so if we recognise the experience as it is imagined. This paper identifies a constraint on adequate accounts of how we ordinarily imagine experiences correctly: the capacities to imagine and to recognise the experience must be jointly operative at the point of forming an intention to imagine the experience. The paper develops an account of imagining experiences correctly that meets this (...) constraint in terms of the subject's possession of a concept of the experience. The account implies that the imagination is active in conscious perception. (shrink)

The primary impediment to formulating a general theory for adaptive evolution has been the unknown distribution of fitness effects for new beneficial mutations. By applying extreme value theory, Gillespie circumvented this issue in his mutational landscape model for the adaptation of DNA sequences, and Orr recently extended Gillespie's model, generating testable predictions regarding the course of adaptive evolution. Here we provide the first empirical examination of this model, using a single-stranded DNA bacteriophage related to phiX174, and find that our data (...) are consistent with Orr's predictions, provided that the model is adjusted to incorporate mutation bias. Orr's work suggests that there may be generalities in adaptive molecular evolution that transcend the biological details of a system, but we show that for the model to be useful as a predictive or inferential tool, some adjustments for the biology of the system will be necessary. (shrink)

Nurses and midwives are the majority of healthcare professionals globally, including Africa, and they provide care at all levels of the health system including community levels. Nurses and midwives contribute to the care of patients with rigid or dogmatic religious beliefs or those with suicidal ideations. This review paper discusses acute and chronic diseases that have suicidal tendencies such as terminal cancer, diseases with excruciating pain, physical disability, stroke, end-stage renal failure, and diabetics who are amputated. It was reiterated that (...) nurses and midwives taking care of these patients should be alert and observant to identify their suicidal tendencies. The paper also discusses religious or spiritual inclinations that negatively affect healthcare access and adherence, especially to biomedical or western medicine. It was emphasized that some religious beliefs do not allow their followers to employ biomedical treatment and nurses and midwives should not impose their faith on patients and their families. The paper ends with a discussion on the specific roles of nurses and midwives in the care of patients with suicidal ideations such as assessment, counseling, administering medication, observation, social interaction, ensuring safety measures, and providing an enabling environment for the family to part of the care and for the observation of religious coping strategies. Nurses and midwives should enhance their knowledge and skills on suicide and increase public education on suicide prevention and identification of those at risk. (shrink)

Woods is an insightful and thoughtful authority on the Bretton Woods institutions. In this book she examines their activities and focuses on their engagements with Mexico, Russia, and the sub-Saharan African nations.

In recent decades, much work has been directed toward clarifying the logical relations among various sciences. Because of an emphasis on the logical aspects of interfield relations, the issue of scientific unity often wore a distinctly logical mantle.1 For example, Robert Causey, a prominent philosopher of this tradition, has linked scientific unity and progress to a project of successive microreductions. He states, “Other things being equal, we tend to feel that our understanding of a class of phenomena increases as we (...) develop increasingly general and intuitively unified theories of that class of phenomena. It is therefore natural to consider the possibility of one very general, unified theory which, at least in principle, governs all known phenomena.” (1977, p. 1)Kinds of unity separable from reductive logical unity have, of course, been proposed; these include reductive and nonreductive unities of method, translation, and ontology. For example, J.A. Fodor (1974) has argued for a broad kind of ontological unity of token physicalism, and against type reduction. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Puzzle of Fanny PriceJoyce L. JenkinsIt is common to open a work regarding the merits of Mansfield Park by noting that Fanny Price is very difficult to like. Nietzsche might have described her as a "moral tarantula." 1 She sits, making negative moral judgments about the actions of others, while doing nothing herself. Fanny spends most of her time, literally, sitting or lying down. Austen describes her character (...) as "supine." Comparing Fanny with her sister Susan, Austen says that "Susan was only acting on the same truths, and pursuing the same system, which her [Fanny's] own judgment acknowledged, but which her more supine and yielding temper would have shrunk from asserting. Susan tried to be useful, where she could only have gone away and cried" (MP, p. 395). 2 And Fanny cries all of the time. She cries at least thirteen times over the course of the novel. So, there are two questions about the novel that need to be answered. Why did Austen create a heroine who is so clearly distasteful? Why do some critics and philosophers see Fanny as a moral ideal or cultural icon? Some (Alasdair MacIntyre, Gilbert Ryle, Lionel Trilling) argue that Fanny is so unappealing just because Austen wants to be didactic 3 and force us to focus on virtue. According to Lionel Trilling, for example, Mansfield Park has a different moral message from Pride and Prejudice. "Its praise is not for social freedom, but for social stasis. It takes full notice of spiritedness, vivacity, celerity and lightness, but only to reject them as having nothing to do with virtue and happiness, as being, indeed, deterrents to the good life." 4 Others think that the infelicities of the novel and its heroine make it a parody of traditional feminine values and conservative moral thought in general. 5 Here, I shall argue that a path between these two extreme ways of reading the novel is correct. I shall argue, using Alasdair MacIntyre's discussion as a starting [End Page 346] point, that Austen does not cast Fanny as a moral ideal. If Austen is Aristotelian (a common view among philosophers) Fanny cannot be an ideal. And, although I agree with Johnson's view that those who have read the novel as morally conservative are wrong, I do not think that the novel exhibits global skepticism about traditional standards for the beautiful/feminine. Austen condemns the idea that women should be passive dolls who do not think for themselves, but she does not parody the traditional idea that women should be sweet, gentle, and caring. In my view, Fanny's character constitutes a criticism of passivity, and of rigid adherence to moral rules.Alasdair MacIntyre's view is that Austen is an Aristotelian moralist with a Christian slant on the make-up of the virtues. He describes Fanny's character as an ideal of virtue. He argues that Fanny is pretty much lacking in charm just because Austen wanted to focus on the nature of virtue, which charm can obscure and which Fanny is meant to epitomize.For charm is the characteristically modern quality which those who lack or simulate the virtues use to get by in situations of characteristically modern social life... And the charm of an Elizabeth Bennett... may mislead us... Fanny is charmless; she has only the virtues, the genuine virtues to protect her... and when she disobeys her guardian, Sir Thomas Bertram, and refuses marriage to Henry Crawford it can only be because of what constancy requires. In so refusing she places the danger of losing her soul before the reward of gaining what for her would be a whole world. She pursues virtue for the sake of a certain kind of happiness and not for its utility. 6So, MacIntyre thinks that Fanny Price is meant to be a stripped down model of virtue, with constancy being the keystone virtue that she exhibits. "Constancy is crucial in at least two novels, Mansfield Park and Persuasion, in each of which it is a central virtue of the heroine... And without constancy all the other virtues to some degree lose their point" (AV, p. 242).But when constancy is discussed... (shrink)

This collection of eleven papers by Elijah Millgram (nine of which have been previously published) is ostensibly united by the thesis that the best way to go about assessing moral theories is to identify the view of practical reasoning that each such theory rests upon, and evaluate the adequacy of these respective theories of practical reasoning. The correct moral theory, Millgram assures us, will be the one that is paired with the best theory of practical reasoning. He outlines this methodology (...) in a substantial (32 pp.) introduction. Why should we adopt Millgram’s method? A host of concerns immediately leap to mind. If two or more different moral theories rest on the same theory of practical reasoning, then how would discovering the latter to be the correct theory of practical reasoning help us decide among the moral theories? What if a given moral theory is consistent with two or more different theories of practical reasoning? What if we cannot evaluate theories of practical reasoning independently of having adopted a moral perspective? Millgram doesn’t address these natural questions head on, but rather proposes that the essays of the volume collectively constitute a “feasibility demonstration” (p. 3) of the method. In other words, the only way that we will be persuaded that the pairings between moral theories and practical reasoning theories are tight enough to support this grand project is to get our hands dirty in detailed discussion of particular moral theories, particular theories of practical reasoning, and the relations between them. It is through seeing the method at work that we will become convinced, Millgram hopes, of several interlocking theses: (1) that each of the major moral theories of the past has had a distinctive take on practical reasoning; (2) that pivotal structural elements of these theories are due to the underlying theory of practical reasoning; (3) that problems in a moral theory can often be traced to problems in the underlying theory of practical reasoning; (4) that theories of practical reasoning are “engines” (p.. (shrink)

Current assumptions and values with respect to management training for women are examined. A number of suggestions for change are made. The thrust of the changes will move us toward ensuring that education for women does not remain education for frustration, that is, education which gives women the desire for change in a world that remains the same.Many women have paid their dues, even a premium, for a chance at a top position, only to find a glass ceiling between them (...) and their goal. The glass ceiling is not simply a barrier for an individual, based on the person's inability to handle a higher-level job. Rather, the glass ceiling applies to women as a group who are kept from advancing higher because they are women. (Morrison, White and Velsor, 1987, p. 13). (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Developing a Dialogical Platform for Disseminating Research through Design” by Abigail C. Durrant, John Vines, Jayne Wallace & Joyce Yee. Upshot: The practice of thoughtful conference design helps to preserve the research conference as a vital arena for knowledge construction and exchange.

Fran Brearton: Robert Graves and The White Goddess Joyce Hill: Authority and Intertextuality in the Works of Ælfric Michael Pennington: Barnardine's Straw: The Devil in Shakespeare's Detail David Womersley: Dulness and Pope Terence Cave: Montaigne Lord Moser: The Future of Our Universities Alexander Murray: The Inquisition and the Renaissance Robert Bagley: The Prehistory of Chinese Music Theory Edwin Cameron: Patents and Public Health: Principle, Politics and Paradox Mervyn King: What Fates Impose: Facing Up to Uncertainty Dominic Lieven: Empire, History (...) and the Contemporary Global Order Joan Oates: Archaeology in Mesopotamia: Digging Deeper at Tell Brak Timothy Besley: The New Political Economy Richard Gray: 'They Worship Death Here': William Faulkner, Sanctuary and Hollywood Lord Sutherland: Nomad's Progress James Piscatori: Imagining Pan-Islam: Religious Activism and Political Utopias. (shrink)

The author is interested in discussing various aspects of the propositional calculus; in particular, the relationships among the various propositional connectives in various systems of logic such as Intuitionistic and modal are scrutinized. The first three chapters survey the notation to be used and describe the general notion of logistic system; the author then describes the concept of a deductive system in exceptional generality, then treats the connexions of equivalence and independence among such deductive systems in what are essentially algebraic (...) terms. Building on the latter work, he then treats the idea of one system's being an extension of the other, going into the details concerning the fine structure of exactly what sort of extension it is—conservative, consistent, and thus arrives at Lindenbaum's lemma. The equivalence relations of congruence and equipollence among propositional systems form the central core around which Porte's discussion of axiomatizability of systems of connectives constituting various propositional calculi is based. Porte is one of the best of the several young logicians now working in France and this book is useful both as a technical treatise containing a sophisticated treatment of sentential logic, and as a guide to at least one direction and trend of contemporary French logical thought.—P. J. M. (shrink)

Six beautifully written essays dealing with the relation of society to self in the novels of Cervantes, nineteenth-century English writers, Proust, Sinclair Lewis and Joyce. Though there is a great deal of individual variety, the authors see the structure of the novel in terms of a tension between private vision and an unsatisfying public truth; it is the task of the novelist both to portray and to resolve this tension.--A. C. P.

An impressive book whose purpose is to "relate the outstanding events of contemporary life and thought to the accumulated wisdom of the past." Forming part of the series The Great Books of the Western World, its contributors are among the most qualified in their fields: Alfred Kazin, George Gamow, Irving Kristol, Karl Ubell, and James Collins, not to mention the editors themselves. Five parts make up the book: in Part I, The Great Debate of the Year: "Does America's best hope (...) for the future lie in political conservatism?", Barry Goldwater speaks for the affirmative and Jacob Javits for the negative; Part II, The Editors' Review of the Year, analyzes three problems as yet unsolved: the divided world, automation, and television; Part III, the largest portion of the work, reviews the contemporary scene in literature, physical science and technology, social sciences and law, biology and medicine, and philosophy and religion ; Part IV offers four important additions to the Great Books Library: M. Luther's The Freedom of a Christian, R. H. Tawney's The Acquisitive Society, Max Planck's The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics, and James Joyce's The Dead; finally, Part V gives a bibliography of significant books published in the last ten years.--V. G. P., S. J. (shrink)

We explore the existence and the size of infinite models of categorical theories having cardinality less than the size of the associated Tarski-Lindenbaum algebra. Restricting to totally transcendental, categorical theories we show that “Every tiny model is countable” is independent of ZFC. IfT is trivial there is at most one tiny model, which must be the algebraic closure of the empty set. We give a new proof that there are no tiny models ifT is not totally transcendental and is (...) non-trivial. (shrink)

A tribute to vision boards evaluates their creative, motivational, and inspirational role in providing visual life and career maps for famous and everyday ...

Many male traits are well explained by sexual selection theory as adaptations to mating competition and mate choice, whereas no unifying theory explains traits expressed more in females. Anne Campbell's “staying alive” theory proposed that human females produce stronger self-protective reactions than males to aggressive threats because self-protection tends to have higher fitness value for females than males. We examined whether Campbell's theory has more general applicability by considering whether human females respond with greater self-protectiveness than males to other threats (...) beyond aggression. We searched the literature for physiological, behavioral, and emotional responses to major physical and social threats, and found consistent support for females' responding with greater self-protectiveness than males. Females mount stronger immune responses to many pathogens; experience a lower threshold to detect, and lesser tolerance of, pain; awaken more frequently at night; express greater concern about physically dangerous stimuli; exert more effort to avoid social conflicts; exhibit a personality style more focused on life's dangers; react to threats with greater fear, disgust, and sadness; and develop more threat-based clinical conditions than males. Our findings suggest that in relation to threat, human females have relatively heightened protective reactions compared to males. The pervasiveness of this result across multiple domains suggests that general mechanisms might exist underlying females' unique adaptations. An understanding of such processes would enhance knowledge of female health and well-being. (shrink)

Following Kripke and Putnam, the received view of chemical kinds has been a microstructuralist one. To be a microstructuralist about chemical kinds is to think that membership in said kinds is conferred by microstructural properties. Recently, the received microstructuralist view has been elaborated and defended, but it has also been attacked on the basis of complexities, both chemical and ontological. Here, I look at which complexities really challenge the microstructuralist view; at how the view itself might be made more complicated (...) in order to accommodate such challenges; and finally, at what this increasingly complicated picture implies for our standard assessment of chemical kindhood—primarily, for the widespread assumption that chemical kinds in general are more neat and tidy than those messy biological ones. _1_ The Received View _2_ A Taxonomy of Chemical Kinds _3_ Atomic Number _4_ H2O, H3O+, OH−, and More _5_ Complicating the Microstructuralist Picture _6_ Concrete and Other Mixtures _7_ Macromolecules, Especially Proteins _8_ Abandoning Sameness of Elemental Composition _9_ Not So Different after All. (shrink)

More than a decade of exacting scientific research involving paleontological fragments and ancient DNA has lately produced a series of pronouncements about a purportedly novel population of archaic hominins dubbed “the Denisova.” The science involved in these matters is both technically stunning and, socially, at times a bit reckless. Here I discuss the responsibilities which scientists incur when they make inductively risky pronouncements about the different relative contributions by Denisovans to genomes of members of apparent subpopulations of current humans. This (...) science is sensational: it is science which empirically speculates, to the public delight’s and entertainment, about scintillating topics such as when humans evolved, where we came from, and who else we were having sex with during our early hominin history. An initial characterization of sensational science emerges from my discussion of the case, as well as a diagnosis of an interactive phenomenon termed amplified inductive risk. (shrink)

This volume considers how current transitions in postsecondary education are impacting Higher Education institutions and subjects in a number of Northern nations, as well as how these transitions are indicative of the wider shift from the welfare to the market state. The university is now considered a key site for training and wealth generation in the so-called 'knowledge economy' that operates in a globalising, high tech world. Further, these transitions are underpinned by neo-liberal economic ideas that assume that the public (...) sector is a drag on the economy unless it is subject to the rules, regulations and assumptions that govern the private sector. This excellent volume - an important contribution to Education as well as Economics and Politics - furthers our understandings of universities as marketable entities as part of the globalized economy. (shrink)

There is a perennial philosophical dream of a certain natural order for the natural kinds. The name of this dream is ‘the hierarchy requirement’. According to this postulate, proper natural kinds form a taxonomy which is both unique and traditional. Here I demonstrate that complex scientific objects exist: objects which generate different systems of scientific classification, produce myriad legitimate alternatives amongst the nonetheless still natural kinds, and make the hierarchical dream impossible to realize, except at absurdly great cost. Philosophical hopes (...) for a certain order in nature cannot be fulfilled. Natural kinds crosscut one another, ubiquitously so, and this crosscutting spells the end of the hierarchical dream. (shrink)

Skipper and Millstein analyze natural selection and mechanism, concluding that natural selection is not a mechanism in the sense of the new mechanistic philosophy. Barros disagrees and provides his own account of natural selection as a mechanism. This discussion identifies a missing piece of Barros's account, attempts to fill in that piece, and reconsiders the revised account. Two principal objections are developed: one, the account does not characterize natural selection; two, the account is not mechanistic. Extensive and persistent variability causes (...) both of these difficulties, so further attempts to describe natural selection as a mechanism are also unlikely to succeed. (shrink)