The goal of this study was to determine if the level of preservice teachers’ economic literacy might serve as a gatekeeper to teaching economics competencies. The participants ( n=84) were teacher candidates in an elementary education program in their final methods courses prior to their teacher internship. The findings supported the intuitive belief that elementary teachers lack the economic literacy and confidence needed to teach economics concepts in the elementary curriculum. This deficit can serve as a gatekeeper to teaching economics (...) competencies leading to curricular disjuncture between the established curriculum and actual practice in the classroom. (shrink)

The embodied simulation of smiles involves motor activity that often changes the perceivers' own emotional experience (e.g., smiling can make us feel happy). Although Niedenthal et al. mention this possibility, the psychological processes by which embodiment changes emotions and their consequences for processing other emotions are not discussed in the target article's review. We argue that understanding the processes initiated by embodiment is important for a complete understanding of the effects of embodiment on emotion perception.

Two recent papers1,2 report extensive nuclear DNA sequence from a 38,000‐year‐old Neandertal fossil, comparing it to modern humans and estimating when it diverged from, and whether it contributed to, our gene pool. Based on 65,250 and over a million base‐pairs of sequence across the genome, respectively, the groups arrived at slightly different interpretations. The data are an exciting and interesting new contribution, but are not surprising, and a sense of history and question helps put them in perspective. BioEssays 29: 105–110, (...) 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

An examination of the unconscious as it relates to popular music and the first truly interdisciplinary book on philosophy and popular music with equal weight given to each discipline.

Responding to volatile criticisms frequently leveled at Leo Strauss and those he influenced, the prominent contributors to this volume demonstrate the profound influence that Strauss and his students have exerted on American liberal democracy and contemporary political thought. By stressing the enduring vitality of classic books and by articulating the theoretical and practical flaws of relativism and historicism, the contributors argue that Strauss and the Straussians have identified fundamental crises of modernity and liberal democracy.

Perspectivism: A Contribution to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences advances the philosophy of perspectivism, showing how its capacity to assess competing views of a particular concept by approaching them as different 'sides' of a multi-dimensional object supports a concept of 'adequate' rather than 'absolute' truth. Presenting four case studies - of the social scientific concepts of power, equality, crime, and sex and gender - Smith demonstrates the manner in which the perspectivist approach does not take all differing views (...) of a concept to be equally good, but views all perspectives taken together as contributing towards the best that we can know about any given concept at the present time. An exposition and analysis of the means by which perspectivism allows for truth and objectivity in the social sciences, this volume will appeal to scholars of philosophy and across the social sciences with interests in questions of epistemology and research methodology. (shrink)

This study examines cheating behaviors among 742 marketing and management majors at three public AACSB-accredited business schools. Specifically, we studied the simultaneous influence of demographic and attitudinal characteristics on: (1) reported prior cheating behavior; (2) the tendency to neutralize cheating behaviors; and, (3) likelihood of future cheating. We additionally examined the impact of in-class deterrents on neutralization of cheating behaviors and the likelihood of future cheating. We also directly tested potential mediating effects of neutralization on cheating behavior.We conducted independent assessments (...) of the validity of the Smith et al. (2002) model of cheating behavior and its antecedents using structural equations modeling procedures. Results supported the differentiation of the theoretical constructs within the specified process model. Furthermore, tests of the aforementioned theoretical model indicated that the primary influences on future cheating were prior cheating, and the degree to which one neutralized prior cheating behaviors. Equally noteworthy, in contrast to previous research we found in-class deterrents to have no significant influence in either neutralizing behavior or future cheating proclivities. (shrink)

This book is the result of a three-year study undertaken by a multidisciplinary working party of the Institute of Medical Ethic (UK). The group was chaired by a moral theologian, and its members included biological and ethological scientists, toxicologists, physicians, veterinary surgeons, an expert in alternatives to animal use, officers of animal welfare organizations, a Home Office Inspector, philosophers, and a lawyer. Coming from these different backgrounds, and holding a diversity of moral views, the members produced the agreed report as (...) a result of detailed and rigorous discussions. The book sets out facts about animal experiments and about animal abilities to experience pain, distress and anxiety. There is a detailed examination of the moral claims related to the benefits likely to accrue from animal research, and of strategies for weighing these benefits against the harm caused to animals, in order to decide whether particular research projects ought or ought not to proceed. This leads to consideration of the statutory and non-statutory controls which safeguard standards in such research. The final section explores a variety of philosophical arguments about the use of animals in research, and offers a philosophical justification for the Working Party's more practical conclusions. Written in clear, nontechnical language, this book is accessible to lay people as well as to scientists. It is the first such document to emerge from a meeting of people with such widely differing views on this highly controversial subject, and represents a major contribution towards informing and raising the quality of contemporary debate. The book is unique in drawing together material and ideas never before found in one volume. It will interest a broad spectrum of readers, from ethicists and animal rights advocates to scientific researchers and laboratory administrators, along with general readers concerned about this compelling issue. (shrink)

Business students have long been noted for their differential proclivity to engage in academic misconduct. Unfortunately, the potential for misconduct has been exacerbated in recent years by rapid advances in technology, easy access to information, competitive pressures, and the proliferation of websites that provide students access to information that allows them to directly circumvent the learning process. Using a convenience sample of 631 students matriculating in various business majors at four U.S. universities and structural equations modeling procedures, this study assesses (...) the effects of psychological factors on business students’ propensities to utilize the services of homework assistance websites. Specifically, we examine how “Dark Triad” personality traits (i.e., narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) interact with Fraud Diamond elements to influence student decisions to engage the services of these websites. We find that each Dark Triad trait exerts a significant influence on at least one of the Fraud Diamond elements, which in turn have a significant direct or indirect positive association with students’ reported intentions to utilize, and reported utilization of, these websites. (shrink)

A follow-up to The Nature of Social and Educational Inquiry, this volume explores the problem of criteria for distinguishing knowledge from false claims to knowledge and good research from bad research. The author focuses on how the advocates of different perspectives on the nature of inquiry-postempiricists, critical theorists, and interpretivists-have attempted to resolve this criteria problem.

The concept of the Transitional Economy denotes the problematic processes of change confronting nations wishing to achieve levels of economic development comparable with that of Western nations. Such an objective is problematic, as these nations may also be said to be in a state of transition. Globalization and E-commerce have necessitated a reconsideration of the nature of business activity and its implications for both society and the individual.Writers such as Gray (1998) warn against the "refashioning" of other nations in the (...) image of the American free market. Business ethics can be seen as a symbolic expression of Beck''s (1992) concern with the implications of Risk Society and the uncertainties arising from the realization that scientific, technological, and economic progress are not necessarily concomitant with social, cultural, and political progress. Locating business ethics within the theoretical context of Reflexive Modernity provides a means of evaluating the contribution that it can make to providing a critical forum for considering the ways in which business organisations are responding to concerns regarding business activity. (168). (shrink)

Ma and Sun have recently argued that some forms of insider trading are ethically acceptable. We argue that the authors fail to prove three key premises of their argument, which is therefore unsound.

This study examines cheating behaviors among 422 business students at two public Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business-accredited business schools. Specifically, we examined the simultaneous influence of attitudinal characteristics and motivational factors on reported prior cheating behavior, the tendency to neutralize cheating behaviors, and likelihood of future cheating. In addition, we examined the impact of in-class deterrents on neutralization of cheating behaviors and the likelihood of future cheating. We also directly tested potential mediating effects of neutralization on cheating behavior. (...) Using structural equations modeling procedures, we conducted an assessment of the validity of a modified version of the K. J. Smith, Davy, Rosenberg, and Haight model of cheating behavior and its antecedents. The modified model included motivation as a potential predictor of cheating behavior. Results supported the differentiation of the theoretical constructs within the specified process model. Furthermore, tests of the aforementioned theoretical model indicated a significant positive relation between extrinsic motivation and prior cheating and a significant negative relation between both intrinsic motivation and academic performance, and prior cheating. Finally, prior cheating had a significant positive relation, whereas deterrents had a significant negative relation to likelihood of future cheating. (shrink)

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

On American Freedom critiques the value of freedom as it is now manifest in America's political, economic, and cultural life in light of a more robust value of freedom coordinated around human dignity and civic participation. Drawing from historic sources as diverse as James Madison, Adam Smith, and Catherine Beecher - as well as from contemporary sources like George W. Bush and Bob Dylan - the book paints a bleak picture of this most cherished American value. At the same (...) time, On American Freedom outlines a reform initiative that will secure a more preferred value of freedom by simply by reconfiguring the federal system to include reorganized and empowered city-states capable of serving as sites for a fuller form of freedom than Americans now enjoy. (shrink)

A review essay of Daniel W. Smith, Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.2 (2003) 172-176 [Access article in PDF] The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke. Studies in Rhetoric/Communication. Ross Wolin. Series ed. Thomas W. Benson. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Pp. xviii + 256. $34.95, cloth. Ross Wolin's The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke offers its readers an interesting mix of intellectual history and conceptual explication, along with an element of biography, which (...) Wolin performs in an effort to trace the movements of Burke's thought as it developed over time within particular socio-political circumstances. The book is divided into three parts, each corresponding to Wolin's three-part division of Burke's intellectual [End Page 172] career. Part I, "Towards a Better Life through Art, Criticism and Politics," begins with a chapter on Burke's formation as a critic in the bohemian, avant-garde culture of post-World War I Greenwich Village. Wolin offers an account of how the dynamics of this social milieu prompted Burke to incorporate politics into his already established aesthetic interests, and of this fusion's manifestation in left-leaning periodicals of the time. While some might be tempted to see this first chapter as having limited value in comparison to Jack Selzer's richly detailed Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village : Conversing with the Moderns, 1915-1931, it should be noted that Wolin does a fine job of helping his readers—in chapter one and those which follow—to understand explicitly how specific contexts shaped Burke's ideas and his rhetoric (something that Selzer's book does not do). Wolin is particularly adept at showing how, for Burke, there is an inextricable link between aesthetics, rhetoric, politics, and social life in general. This aesthetic-rhetorical connection to politics and life, argues Wolin, is key to understanding all of Burke's work. According to Wolin, equally important is how this connection informed the essays that comprised Burke's Counter-Statement, which Wolin sees as the seed from which all of Burke's theoretical and critical writings grew. For Wolin, to understand Burke one must understand Counter-Statement, and understand it within the historical circumstances that prompted and shaped its concepts and their rhetorical presentation.Chapter two is thus devoted to a discussion of the significance of Counter-Statement within Burke's oeuvre. It is in Counter-Statement, Wolin contends, that one can discern not only the fundaments of Burke's later work but also the "Critics Credo" that organized Burke's rhetorical efforts from Permanence and Change to The Rhetoric of Religion. Wolin's attempt to demonstrate the operation of this credo in all of Burke's books as an organizing principle pushes the limits of credulity at times, but readers should not let this obscure the insight Wolin offers us into Burke's responses to and interventions in early twentieth-century intellectual culture. Chapters three, four, and five comprise Part II of Wolin's book, "The Tactics of Conflict and Cooperation," which discusses in succession the three books that followed Counter-Statement chronologically: Permanence and Change, Attitudes Towards History, and The Philosophy of Literary Form. In these chapters, Wolin makes numerous interesting and novel points about Burke's thought. In the chapter on Permanence and Change, for example, Wolin highlights the conception of ethics implicit in that work, one that has its roots in poetics (particularly tragedy) and which refuses "to supplant traditional [End Page 173] ethics with another system [that is] equally fixed" (77). Although he does not state this, implicit in Wolin's reading is the suggestion that within Burke's work lies an alternative to the neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics and Habermasian universal pragmatics so many rhetorical scholars seem to embrace when theorizing a rhetorical ethics. (A "dramatistic" ethics of discourse and public life is, I think, an untapped potential of Burke's work.) Part III, "The Tactics of Motivation," offers similarly insightful and contextualized readings of A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, The Rhetoric of Religion, and Language as Symbolic Action. Particularly interesting is Wolin's discussion in chapter seven of the importance of style... (shrink)

This paper argues for a novel understanding of the relationship between law and coercion. It firstly refutes Kenneth Himma’s claim that the authorisation of coercive enforcement mechanisms is a conceptually necessary feature of law. It then claims that the best way to understand the law is as coercion-apt. The “coercion-aptness” of law is clarified, in part, by appealing to an essential distinction between law and morality: Whereas it can be reasonable for the law to appeal to coercive means in (...) order to motivate compliance, it seems decidedly unreasonable for morality to do so. (shrink)

Doug Husak suggests that sometimes an actor should be deemed reckless, and not merely negligent, with respect to the risks that she knowingly created but has forgotten at the moment of action. The validity of this conclusion, he points out, depends crucially on what it means to be aware of a risk. Husak’s neutral prompt and counterfactual actual belief criteria are problematic, however. More persuasive is his suggestion that we understand belief, in this moral and criminal law context, as a (...) concept whose meaning is determined by its function as a culpability standard. Husak concludes that inadvertent actors are often less culpable than knowing-but-later-forgetful actors; this is plausible, but there are also numerous counterexamples. Holly Smith focuses on negligence cases in which an agent’s failure to notice a risk stems, not from a prior culpable choice, but from an objectionable attitude or set of attitudes. She is right to emphasize that genuine moral culpability does not depend on conscious choice. However, Smith also asserts that decisions that flow from an actor’s objectionable attitudes are only rarely culpable, because they often do not arise from a reasonably full configuration of the actor’s motives. This last requirement is, I fear, an unrealistic and unnecessarily demanding criterion of culpability. Even when many of the actor’s evaluative attitudes are inactive in Smith’s sense, the actor might deserve blame for not bringing them to bear on his decision. Michael Moore and Heidi Hurd thoroughly explore, and find deficient, H.L.A. Hart’s unexercised capacity theory of negligence. They are correct that that theory requires a further judgment: an actor’s inadvertence is culpable only if he had the capacity to have adverted if X where X is the source of the actor’s moral desert. They overstate, however, in suggesting that the capacity issue falls out of the picture once we identify that underlying desert basis. The authors also worry that if desert is grounded on an underlying vice, we lack a reliable way of ranking the different vices that might explain the actor’s inadvertence; this is not a fatal objection, however, because negligence determinations are quite feasible even in the absence of clear rankings. Moore and Hurd conclude by identifying eight distinct categories in which criminal liability for negligence is justifiable. Negligence is indeed a surprisingly complex and pluralist concept. The three articles in this symposium brightly illuminate some of the most fundamental conceptual and normative issues in the debate over whether it is just to blame and punish the negligently inadvertent. (shrink)

Leading theorists examine the self-representational theory of consciousness as an alternative to the two dominant reductive theories of consciousness, the representational theory of consciousness and the higher-order monitoring theory. In this pioneering collection of essays, leading theorists examine the self-representational theory of consciousness, which holds that consciousness always involves some form of self-awareness. The self-representational theory of consciousness stands as an alternative to the two dominant reductive theories of consciousness, the representational theory of consciousness and the higher-order monitoring theory, combining (...) elements of both RTC and HOM theory in a novel fashion that may avoid the fundamental deficiencies of each. Although self-representationalist views have been common throughout the history of both Western and Eastern philosophy, they have been largely neglected in the recent literature on consciousness. This book approaches the self-representational theory from a range of perspectives, with contributions from scholars in analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and history of philosophy, as well as two longer essays by Antonio Damasio and David Rudrauf and Douglas Hofstadter. The book opens with six essays that argue broadly in favor of self-representationalist views, which are followed by five that argue broadly against them. Contributors next consider connections to such philosophical issues as the nature of propositional attitudes, knowledge, attention, and indexical reference. Finally, Damasio and Rudrauf link consciousness as lived with consciousness as described in neurobiological terms; and Hofstadter compares consciousness to the "strange loop" of mathematical self-reference brought to light by Gödel's incompleteness theorems. Contributors Andrew Brook, Peter Carruthers, Antonio Damasio, John J. Drummond, Jason Ford, Rocco J. Gennaro, George Graham, Christopher S. Hill, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Terry Horgan, Tomis Kapitan, Uriah Kriegel, Keith Lehrer, Joseph Levine, Robert W. Lurz, David Rudrauf, David Woodruff Smith, John Tienson, Robert Van Gulick, Kathleen Wider, Kenneth Williford, Dan Zahavi. (shrink)

This short paper is a response to Richard Smith’s ‘ion and finitude: education, chance and democracy’. In his paper Smith contends that a rationalist agenda dominates education and democracy today, and that this agenda by rendering us insensitive to the tragic dimension of life, breeds a sense of hubris, or arrogance towards fate which is fuelled by an inordinate confidence in our knowledge. In the worlds of education and politics it has led to an obsession with management and (...) transparency, and to students who fear to take risks. As a specific example of this, he takes up the recent fixation in universities with learning how to learn, which he says leads to an over-emphasis on skills in the curriculum, and to an ‘audit’ culture. While sympathising with much of his analysis of the latter, my counter-suggestion is that the contemporary world lacks anything but a sense of the contingency of things, to the contrary, that at the heart of its mangerialist culture and its performatist ethos lies the need for reassurance. My response focuses on the politics of the self-directed learner that lies at the heart of the lifelong learning literature, on learning how to learn, on the notion of transparency and on the transparent society, and on the politics of contingency and scepticism. (shrink)

We glide easily from thought and talk about worldly objects to thought and talk about the contents of our beliefs about such worldly objects all the time. Smith ask Jones about the whereabouts of their pet cat and on the basis of Jones’s assertion that the cat is on the mat, Smith comes to believe that the cat is on the mat. Black in turn may ascribe to Smith the belief that the cat is on the mat. (...) Such transitions from thought and talk about worldly objects to thought and talk about states of mind are so familiar to us as to seem second nature. But there is a long-standing philosophical tradition, originating with Frege, but endorsed by philosophers with otherwise varying philosophical outlooks, which makes the very possibility of such transitions puzzling. That tradition assumes that in making at least certain attitude ascriptions – so-called de dicto or “notionally sensitive” ascriptions -- speakers refer to, describe, quantify over, or somehow pragmatically implicate the notions, representations, or modes of presentations that plausibly figure as constituents of our mental contents -- either to the exclusion of the worldly objects themselves or in addition to those objects. Such attitude ascriptions are widely taken to be the primary or unmarked case of an attitude ascription. But it is seldom acknowledged that twin facts that on this approach worldly objects will relate to the representational items that supposedly serve as ingredients of thought content in a one-many fashion and there is no automatic way “back-up” from worldly objects to modes of presentation thereof together generate a mystery about how possibly we are able execute transitions from thought and talk about worldly objects to thought and talk about representational states of mind. It is argued in this essay that the way around this mystery is to see that de re, rather than de dicto ascriptions are the unmarked form of attitude ascription and that our representations of mental contents are parasitic on our representations of worldly objects. That is, we talk about the contents of our states of mind not by adverting, in the first instance, to talk about peculiarly mental or representational entities like notions or modes of presentations, but primarily by talking about worldly entities themselves. That is, to attribute to another the belief that the cat is on the mat, one need not refer to modes of presentations, or their ilk, of said cat or said mat, but only to the relevant cat and the relevant mat. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to trace how a perverted understanding of the human – of human nature, growth, and well-being – came to form the foundation for classical liberal economic thought and to identify some of the negative consequences of this development. My suggestion is that, in response to the social upheaval of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries that would lead to the rise of capitalism and make possible the industrial revolution, moral philosophers applied to humans and (...) to human society mechanistic principles from the highly successful natural sciences in an effort to make sense of a social world that had ceased to make sense. Thus emerged the impoverished view of the human that lies at the foundation of mainstream economic thinking: homo economicus – the human as a rational, utility-optimizing machine, driven by unlimited desires. (shrink)

2. The title has been carefully chosen. It has three terms: being, immediacy, and articulation. The argument is such that, if one of the three collapses into another, the battle is lost. The threatened term is being. For if being is absorbed into immediacy, an exaggerated realism results. But if being is absorbed into articulation, idealism results; and that, it seems, is greatly to be deplored. Being, then, is the prize between "Immediatists" and "Articulatists." If being is reduced to articulation, (...) then whatever it is that the "Immediatist" seeks to save will have been lost. And if being is reduced to immediacy, then articulation will be alien to being, and so will philosophy. It is against this second reduction that Professor Smith chiefly argues, because it is the current one-sided wisdom which makes genuine philosophy impossible. (shrink)