This article examines the inherently ethical nature of resource allocation in policing. Decision-makers must make trade-offs between values such as efficiency vs. equity, individual vs. collective benefit, and adopt principles of distribution which allocate limited resources fairly. While resource allocation in healthcare has been the subject of extensive discussion in both practitioner and academic literature, ethical resource allocation in policing has received almost no attention. We first consider whether approaches used in healthcare settings would be suitable for policing. Whilst (...) there are some high-level similarities in the relevant ethical considerations and processes—such as aiming for efficient and equitable resource deployment—there are also fundamental differences between the two settings, which we argue necessitate a different approach. These differences include: (1) greater diversity and incommensurability of the benefits of policing, (2) more frequent non-linearity in returns on policing investment, (3) greater “ethical divisibility” (permissible scaling down) of programs in policing, (4) a requirement to assess “need” for policing resources at the collective (rather than individual) level, and (5) clearer primacy of equity considerations in policing. Having drawn out the implications of these differences, we sketch some tentative proposals for ethical resource allocation in policing. (shrink)

This paper examines the inferential framework employed by Palaeolithic cognitive archaeologists, using the work of Wynn and Coolidge as a case study. I begin by distinguishing minimal-capacity inferences from cognitive-transition inferences. Minimal-capacity inferences attempt to infer the cognitive prerequisites required for the production of a technology. Cognitive-transition inferences use transitions in technological complexity to infer transitions in cognitive evolution. I argue that cognitive archaeology has typically used cognitive-transition inferences informed by minimal-capacity inferences, and that this reflects a tendency to favour (...) cognitive explanations for transitions in technological complexity. Next I look at two alternative explanations for transitions in technological complexity: the demographic hypothesis and the environmental hypothesis. This presents us with a dilemma: either reject these alternative explanations or reject traditional cognitive-transition inferences. Rejecting the former is unappealing as there is strong evidence that demographic and environmental influences play some causal role in technological transitions. Rejecting the latter is unappealing as it means abandoning the idea that technological transitions tell us anything about transitions in hominin cognitive evolution. I finish by briefly outlining some conceptual tools from the philosophical literature that might help shed some light on the problem. (shrink)

Thomas Paine was an English-American political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary. One of the Founding Fathers of the United States, he authored the two most influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, and he inspired the rebels in 1776 to declare independence from Britain. His ideas reflected Enlightenment-era rhetoric of transnational human rights. He has been called "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination." Odin's Library Classics is dedicated to bringing the (...) world the best of humankind's literature from throughout the ages. Carefully selected, each work is unabridged from classic works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or drama. (shrink)

Competitor intelligence, information that helps managers understand their competitors, is highly valued in today's marketplace. Firms, large and small, are taking a more systematic approach to competitor intelligence collection. At the same time, information crimes and litigation over information disputes appear to be on the rise, and survey data show widespread approval of unethical and questionable intelligence-gathering methods. Despite these developments, few corporations address the ethics of intelligence gathering in their corporate codes of conduct. Neither managers nor management educators have (...) paid sufficient attention to this topic. From a review of questionable intelligence-gathering practices reported in various literatures, the author identifies some important ethical principles to help managers draw the line between legitimate and illegitimate methods of information acquisition. The paper also discusses the costs of failure to heed these principles and suggests steps managers can take to provide ethical leadership in this area. (shrink)

The present article aims to introduce the field of “Zoorhetorics”, as a particular case of Biorhetorics, earlier introduced by the author in the academic world. A brief explanation will be provided of its aims, methods and models, while particular attention will be devoted to the concept of “sustainable good”, considered crucial in both the “Bio-” and “Zoorhetorics” formulations.

This paper is an introduction to the new field of biorhetorics. Biorhetorics is an applied form of rhetoric that evolved from the study of classical rhetoric, particularly Aristotelian. The author illustrates the stages of development necessary for the creation of a species-specific rhetoric: by (1) formalising rhetoric so as to create a functional rhetoric, (2) then reducing this to a symbolic rhetoric that can be used in conjunction with the collected data of an organism’s Umwelt (including its genome) to form (...) (3) a species-specific rhetoric. The paper draws upon the latest research on bacterial and viral communication to show the possibilities of biorhetorics. In the course of discussing the nature of biorhetorics the author distinguishes it from argumentation theory and rhetoric/s of biology, and positions alongside other fields used in the life sciences such as biosemiotics, information theory, game theory, etc. (shrink)

This paper is an introduction to the new field of biorhetorics. Biorhetorics is an applied form of rhetoric that evolved from the study of classical rhetoric, particularly Aristotelian. The author illustrates the stages of development necessary for the creation of a species-specific rhetoric: by (1) formalising rhetoric so as to create a functional rhetoric, (2) then reducing this to a symbolic rhetoric that can be used in conjunction with the collected data of an organism’s Umwelt (including its genome) to form (...) (3) a species-specific rhetoric. The paper draws upon the latest research on bacterial and viral communication to show the possibilities of biorhetorics. In the course of discussing the nature of biorhetorics the author distinguishes it from argumentation theory and rhetoric/s of biology, and positions alongside other fields used in the life sciences such as biosemiotics, information theory, game theory, etc. (shrink)

The present article aims to introduce the field of “Zoorhetorics”, as a particular case of Biorhetorics, earlier introduced by the author in the academic world. A brief explanation will be provided of its aims, methods and models, while particular attention will be devoted to the concept of “sustainable good”, considered crucial in both the “Bio-” and “Zoorhetorics” formulations.

The present article aims to introduce the field of “Zoorhetorics”, as a particular case of Biorhetorics, earlier introduced by the author in the academic world. A brief explanation will be provided of its aims, methods and models, while particular attention will be devoted to the concept of “sustainable good”, considered crucial in both the “Bio-” and “Zoorhetorics” formulations.

In their landmark 2010 paper, “The weirdest people in the world?”, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan outlined a serious methodological problem for the psychological and behavioural sciences. Most of the studies produced in the field use people from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, yet inferences are often drawn to the species as a whole. In drawing such inferences, researchers implicitly assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that WEIRD populations are generally representative of the (...) species. Yet neither of these assumptions is justified. In many psychological and behavioural domains, cultural variation begets cognitive variation, and WEIRD samples are recurrently shown to be outliers. In the years since the article was published, attention has focused on the implications this has for research on extant human populations. Here we extend those implications to the study of ancient _H. sapiens_, their hominin forebears, and cousin lineages. We assess a range of characteristic arguments and key studies in the cognitive archaeology literature, identifying issues stemming from the problem of sample diversity. We then look at how worrying the problem is, and consider some conditions under which inferences to ancient populations via cognitive models might be provisionally justified. (shrink)

End-of-life decision making is fraught with ethical challenges. Withholding or withdrawing life support therapy is widely considered ethical in patients with high treatment burden, poor premorbid status, or significant projected disability even when such treatment is not “futile.” Whether such withdrawal of therapy in the aftermath of attempted suicide is ethical is not well established in the literature. We provide a clinical vignette and propose criteria under which such withdrawal would be ethical. We suggest that it is appropriate to (...) withdraw life support, regardless of the cause of the critical illness or disability, when the following criteria are met: Surrogates request withdrawal of care and the adequacy of surrogates is confirmed, an external reasonability standard is met, passage of time, perhaps 72 hours, to allow certainty regarding the patient's wishes, and psychiatric morbidity should be considered as grounds for withdrawal only in truly treatment-refractory cases. Fundamentally, we believe the question to ask is, “If this were not an attempted suicide, would a request to withdraw care be reasonable?” We believe that under these circumstances, such withdrawal of life support, even in an individual who has attempted suicide, does not constitute physician assistance with suicide and is distinct from physician aid-in-dying in several important respects. (shrink)

End-of-life decision making is fraught with ethical challenges. Withholding or withdrawing life support therapy is widely considered ethical in patients with high treatment burden, poor premorbid status, or significant projected disability even when such treatment is not ?futile.? Whether such withdrawal of therapy in the aftermath of attempted suicide is ethical is not well established in the literature. We provide a clinical vignette and propose criteria under which such withdrawal would be ethical. We suggest that it is appropriate to (...) withdraw life support, regardless of the cause of the critical illness or disability, when the following criteria are met: (1) Surrogates request withdrawal of care and the adequacy of surrogates is confirmed, (2) an external reasonability standard is met, (3) passage of time, perhaps 72 hours, to allow certainty regarding the patient's wishes, and (4) psychiatric morbidity should be considered as grounds for withdrawal only in truly treatment-refractory cases. Fundamentally, we believe the question to ask is, ?If this were not an attempted suicide, would a request to withdraw care be reasonable?? We believe that under these circumstances, such withdrawal of life support, even in an individual who has attempted suicide, does not constitute physician assistance with suicide and is distinct from physician aid-in-dying in several important respects. (shrink)

This book's importance is derived from three sources: careful conceptualization of teacher induction from historical, methodological, and international perspectives; systematic reviews of research literature relevant to various aspects of teacher induction including its social, cultural, and political contexts, program components and forms, and the range of its effects; substantial empirical studies on the important issues of teacher induction with different kinds of methodologies that exemplify future directions and approaches to the research in teacher induction.

End-of-life decision making is fraught with ethical challenges. Withholding or withdrawing life support therapy is widely considered ethical in patients with high treatment burden, poor premorbid status, or significant projected disability even when such treatment is not “futile.” Whether such withdrawal of therapy in the aftermath of attempted suicide is ethical is not well established in the literature. We provide a clinical vignette and propose criteria under which such withdrawal would be ethical. We suggest that it is appropriate to (...) withdraw life support, regardless of the cause of the critical illness or disability, when the following criteria are met: Surrogates request withdrawal of care and the adequacy of surrogates is confirmed, an external reasonability standard is met, passage of time, perhaps 72 hours, to allow certainty regarding the patient's wishes, and psychiatric morbidity should be considered as grounds for withdrawal only in truly treatment-refractory cases. Fundamentally, we believe the question to ask is, “If this were not an attempted suicide, would a request to withdraw care be reasonable?” We believe that under these circumstances, such withdrawal of life support, even in an individual who has attempted suicide, does not constitute physician assistance with suicide and is distinct from physician aid-in-dying in several important respects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Pleasure and Pain in LiteratureOliver ConollyWhy do we enjoy the depiction, in imaginative literature, of situations that typically arouse negative emotions such as pity, sadness, and horror? One view, which aims to dissolve rather than solve the problem, is that we do not enjoy them at all. According to this theory—the pure pain theory—the problem does not arise in the first place. But the theory must (...) explain why we chose to undergo such painful experiences. Are we simply aesthetic masochists? The pure pleasure theory, by contrast, denies that there are any painful aspects to our experience of such literature. This theory must explain how we can take pure delight in the literary depiction of suffering. Are we simply aesthetic sadists? Lying between both extremes is the hybrid theory, which asserts that there are both painful and pleasant aspects of such experiences. The hybrid theory must specify which aspects of the experience are painful and which pleasant. In this paper a version of the hybrid theory is advanced and defended.IThe pure pleasure theory denies that we feel painful emotional identification with fictional characters. Why take this view? One reason is that it is a way of resolving the paradox of fiction, as formulated by Colin Radford.1 The paradox asserts that there is an inconsistency between the propositions that: (1) we have emotions for fictional characters, (2) we know that they do not exist, (3) it is irrational to have emotions for non-existent objects. Each proposition seems plausible, yet one must be false. Whilst most of the participants in the debate have attacked the notion that feelings for fictions are irrational, some have [End Page 305] denied that we have such feelings in the first place. One intuition guiding this denial is that the depiction of a fictional horrible event is likely to be less painful than the depiction of an identical but real event. In other words, the mere fictionality of an event is liable, by itself, to diminish the pain we are liable to feel at its depiction in comparison with a real event: I label this the fictionality gap. If the fictionality gap exists, it applies across the board, to the sufferings of Pip in Great Expectations as well as those of King Lear. The characters in those works are fictional, and so the lessening of the pain we feel at their fates must, if the fictionality gap holds, hold merely in virtue of the fact that they are fictional.It has often been noted—rather than argued, but this is question of impression rather than logic—that one would feel more affected were the stories real rather than fictional. The kinds of events depicted in King Lear—ugly struggles for power, the manipulation of the naïve, the impotence of the good, inconsolable grief—are not in themselves other-worldly, and can be imagined taking place in reality. However it is much more difficult to imagine King Lear in its full particularity taking place in the real world, given the theatricality of its form and language. In order to imagine King Lear as real, one would have to rob it of Shakespeare's poetry, which is other-worldly in its eloquence. French proponents of the Three Unities thought that theatre should aim at, among other things, verisimilitude, but never overcame the problem that the fact that characters in French theatre speak in rhyming couplets might detract from that verisimilitude, which it clearly does. This worry about the transplantability of King Lear into the real world appears to be less of a problem in relation to realist novels, which, as their appellation suggests, are easier to imagine taking place in the real world. Not only is the language used in realist novels less exalted than that used in tragedies, the situations such novels depict tend to be more likely to occur. Clearly, the realist novel is capable of depicting horrible or unpleasant events. About such novels, say, Madame Bovary, it seems to make sense to ask ourselves how we would feel about them if we read them as true stories.I would like however to question the very intelligibility of the... (shrink)

Public’s concern about poor animal welfare provided by intensive farming systems has increased over the last decades. This study reviewed the interest of the scientific research on the pain issue in pig production to assess if the societal instances may be a driving force for the research activity. A literature search protocol was set up to identify the peer-reviewed papers published between 1970 and 2017 that covered the topic of ‘pain in pigs’ using Scopus®, database of Elsevier©. (...) One hundred and thirty papers were selected and they were mainly focused on the practice of castration followed by tail docking. The scientific community first focused on these painful practices as a way to improve production efficiency and quality issues while more recently, due to the increased pressure by the public opinion, turned its interest towards the search of alternative solutions. A text mining analysis on the abstract of the selected papers clearly indicated the effort of the research to explore solutions to alleviate pain. Evocative words of this target were the selected terms ‘pharmacological analgesic’ and ‘anaesthetic treatments’. The text mining highlighted vocalizations as the main pain indicators in pigs as this term was frequently associated to ‘acute stress’. Ethical issues were a minor research topic in the scientific literature on pig breeding but in the short run, they are supposed to become a major subject to justify the acceptance of the modern production systems at the eyes of the consumers. (shrink)

Though it reflects on the play of Paine's name and links it can establish, this essay is concerned with the role of fiction in the performativity of texts, both literary and nonliterary, and especially texts which, like Thomas Paine's Common Sense, affect to abjure any literariness for their political efficacy. The author reads Paine with Blanchot in elucidating the power of a certain fictionality, at work for instance in the performatives that found a democratic nation.

This essay argues that the representation of pain in Beckett’s writing exposes the paradox in his work concerning the relationship of the individual suffering subject and the community. Making reference to studies of pain and literature generally and to salient studies of Beckett, the essay shows how the narration of pain in Beckett’s prose works in particular is closely linked to its more general interrogation of subject-object relations. As the preeminent agent, source as well as repository (...) of pain, writing in Beckett itself comes to occupy, in a transpositional manner, the poles of subject, object and work. If ‘pain’ names the subject-object continuum, that very conjunction exposes the co-habitants to their own mutual espacement – qua subject and object. The common feeling is countermanded in advance by separation. The conjunction gives rise to a sapping, devastating and agonising attempt to conjure an image, an image which holds out the possibility of the felicity, or at least palliation, offered by community. The image is, however, both a wounding regime and a generative regime. The two components, pain and community, are illustrated with specific reference to Texts for Nothing, through an analysis of which a new conjuncture of the themes of pain, community and the role of the work of art is proposed. (shrink)

This essay argues that the representation of pain in Beckett’s writing exposes the paradox in his work concerning the relationship of the individual suffering subject and the community. Making reference to studies of pain and literature generally and to salient studies of Beckett, the essay shows how the narration of pain in Beckett’s prose works in particular is closely linked to its more general interrogation of subject-object relations. As the preeminent agent, source as well as repository (...) of pain, writing in Beckett itself comes to occupy, in a transpositional manner, the poles of subject, object and work. If ‘pain’ names the subject-object continuum, that very conjunction exposes the co-habitants to their own mutual espacement – qua subject and object. The common feeling is countermanded in advance by separation. The conjunction gives rise to a sapping, devastating and agonising attempt to conjure an image, an image which holds out the possibility of the felicity, or at least palliation, offered by community. The image is, however, both a wounding regime and a generative regime. The two components, pain and community, are illustrated with specific reference to Texts for Nothing, through an analysis of which a new conjuncture of the themes of pain, community and the role of the work of art is proposed. (shrink)

Richly illustrated study drawing on art, literature and science to explore Victorian attitudes towards sight.

Selections from Paine's Common sense, Dissertation of the first principles of government, and Dissertations on government, the affairs of the bank, and paper money, along with several American federal documents and state constitutions, all in Spanish.

Thomas Paine is one of history's most renowned thinkers and was indispensible to both the American and French revolutions. The three works included, Common Sense, The Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason, are among his most famous publications. Paine is probably best known for his hugely popular pamphlet, Common Sense, which swayed public opinion in favor of American independence from England. The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason further advocated for universal human rights, a republican instead (...) of monarchical government, and truth and reason in politics. The works of this moral visionary, whose ideas are as relevant today as ever, are now available as part of the Word Cloud Classics series, providing a stylish and affordable addition to any library. (shrink)

Explore Thomas Paine's political and philosophical ideology in this collection of his most famous works.

We can call Thomas Paine-eminent Founder, verbal bomb-thrower, Deist, revolutionary, and rationalist-the spark of the American Revolution. In his influential pamphlets, Paine codified both colonial outrage and the intellectual justification for independence, arguing consistently and convincingly for Enlightenment values and the power of the people. He was a master of political rhetoric, from the sarcastic insult to the diplomatic aperçu. Today, we are living in times that, as Paine said, try men's souls. Whatever your politics, if you're seeking a new (...) Paine-with rhetoric to ignite social and political transformations-where better to start than at the source? This is a work that provides quotes from Thomas Paine's writings. (shrink)

Written in the years from 1792 to 1795 while Thomas Paine was in prison, The Age of Reason shocked 18th-century readers with its attack on the conventions of Christianity. Based on years of study and reflection by the author, the work is written from the deist point of view and questions Christian beliefs and the role of religion in society. Its resonance remains undiminished after two centuries, and it continues to influence thinkers around the world.

Explore Thomas Paine's political and philosophical ideology in this collection of his most famous works.

Imagine that Socrates gets a cavity treatment. The drilling is painful, but he also knows that it is best to get it done and so he stays. Callicles is not so smart. Once the dentist starts drilling, Callicles takes off. I argue that this scenario presents a puzzle that interpreters have missed, namely: why does Socrates have an aversion to pain? To us, this might not be puzzling at all. Socrates, however, believes that we have an aversion only to (...) bad things and that pain is not in fact bad. If Socrates knows that pain is not bad, why does he still feel aversive pain from drilling? I argue that the Protagoras and Hippias Major suggest that pain immediately appears to be bad to us. So even though pain is not in fact bad, it appears and feels that way, and thus even Socrates has an aversion to it. Pain is a felt evaluation. My interpretation contributes to the debates in the literature in two ways. First, it fills an explanatory gap. Interpreters have acknowledged that a Socratic theory of motivation has room for pain aversions as “itches,” but they leave unexplained why we have an aversion to pain, i.e., why those itches itch. Second, I offer an alternative account of Socratic motivation by proposing that pain aversions can motivate some of our actions. (shrink)

This paper argues that moral thinking is an essential management capability which strengthens organizations and contributes to theirperformance in the marketplace. The paper explains what moral thinking is, and addresses the most common reasons for considering it inappropriate or irrelevant to managerial practice. The argument provides a compelling rationale for the corporate ethics initiatives undertaken in recent years.

Thomas Paine was a hugely influential revolutionary pamphleteer, whose writings were instrumental in bringing about some of the greatest political changes the world has seen. Paine's enduring importance lies not so much in the depth of his political philosophy as in his great abilities as a communicator of political ideas. Conway's Writings was the first complete critical collection of Paine's works, and his Life was the first account to show Paine in a positive light.

Angus Fletcher is one of our finest theorists of the arts, the heir to I. A. Richards, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye. This, his grandest book since the groundbreaking Allegory of 1964, aims to open another field of study: how thought--the act, the experience of thinking--is represented in literature. Recognizing that the field of formal philosophy is only one demonstration of the uses of thought, Fletcher looks for the ways other languages (and their framing forms) serve the purpose of certain (...) thinking activities. What kinds of thinking accompany the writing of history? How does the gnomic sentence manage to represent some point of belief? The fresh insights Fletcher achieves at every turn suggest an anatomy of poetic and fictional strategies for representing thought--the hazards, the complications, the sufferings, the romance of thought. Fletcher's resources are large, and his step is sure. The reader samples his piercing vision of Milton's Satan, the original Thinker, leaving the pain of thinking as his legacy for mankind; Marvell's mysteriously haunting "green thought in a green shade"; Old Testament and Herodotus, Vico and Coleridge; Crane, Calvino, Stevens. Fletcher ranges over the heights of literature, poetry, music, and film, never losing sight of his central line of inquiry. He includes comments on the essential role of unclear, vague, and even irrational thinking to suggest that ideas often come alive as thoughts only in a process of considerable distress. In the end he gives us literature--not the content of thought, but its form, its shape, the fugitive colors taken on by the mind as represented in art. (shrink)

Thomas Paine often declared himself a citizen of the world. This Norton Critical Edition presents Paine and his writing within the transatlantic and global context of the revolutionary ideas and actions of his time. Thomas Paine's loyalties were with universal and self-evident principles rather than with a particular group or nation, and it is this dimension that informed his most important works. This Norton Critical Edition shows how Paine's fury at the British Empire, including its injustices to South Asians and (...) Africans, shaped his first best seller, Common Sense, and how his direct involvement with the French Revolution pushed his ideas toward a unique form of democratic radicalism. Together with his rejection of organized religion, Paine's radicalism resulted in his being one of the most hated men in both monarchial Britain and republican America. This volume includes J. M. Opal's introduction, "Thomas Paine and the Revolutionary Enlightenment, 1770s-90s," which provides essential biographical and historical details across three tumultuous decades. Paine's most important works-from Common Sense (1776) through Agrarian Justice (1796)-are reprinted and are accompanied by explanatory annotations. Supporting materials include a wide range of documents from the turbulent years following the publication of both Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence. These include Pennsylvania's gradual emancipation statute of the 1780s, an ex-slave's impassioned call for revolutionary violence against European imperialists and masters, and a British conservative's witty rejoinder to Paine's vision of a brave new world. Four major interpretations of Paine's work are provided by Nathan R. Perl-Rosenthal, Robert A. Ferguson, Gary Kates, and Gregory Claeys. A Selected Bibliography is also included. (shrink)

Dr. Benjamin Rush, who was much impressed by the essay, says, " He [Paine] told me the essay to which I alluded was the first thing he had ever published in ...

The relationship between ethics and economics has never been easy. Opponents in a tug of war, friends in a warm embrace, ships passing in the night—the relationship has been highly variable. In recent years, the friendship model has been gaining credence, particularly among U.S. corporate executives. Increasingly, companies are launching ethics programs, values initiatives, and community involvement activities premised on management’s belief that “Ethics pays.”.

Thomas Paine published this treatise defending the principles of freedom in 1791. He fought for independence in America, and was in France during the Revolution. He writes as a first-hand observer of political realities. He saw all government as arbitrary unless it conformed to the will of the people and argued for reforms in the British Parliament.

A central figure in Western history and American political thought, Thomas Paine continues to provoke debate among politicians, activists, and scholars. People of all ideological stripes are inspired by his trenchant defense of the rights and good sense of ordinary individuals, and his penetrating critiques of arbitrary power. This volume contains Paine’s explosive Common Sense in its entirety, including the oft-ignored Appendix, as well as selections from his other major writings: The American Crisis, Rights of Man, and The Age of (...) Reason. It also contains several of Paine’s shorter essays. All the documents have been transcribed directly from the originals, making this edition the most reliable one available. Essays by Ian Shapiro, Jonathan Clark, Jane Calvert, and Eileen Hunt Botting bring Paine into sharp focus, illuminating his place in the tumultuous decades surrounding the American and French Revolutions and his larger historical legacy. (shrink)

Acclaimed historian Peter LInebaugh provides an original examination of Paine's works and legacy in the introduction to these two influential arguments for liberty of political thought--including Common Sense, which inspired the American Revolution, and The Rights of Man, a defense of the French Revolution. Original.

The impassioned democratic voice of the Age of Revolution, Paine possessed a gift for stating complex ideas in concise language. This accessible collection of highlights from the social and political philosopher's best-known works includes lengthy selections from Common Sense , The American Crisis , The Rights of Man , and The Age of Reason.

Objective Apeiron was founded in 1966 and has developed into one of the oldest and most distinguished journals dedicated to the study of ancient philosophy, ancient science, and, in particular, of problems that concern both fields. Apeiron is committed to publishing high-quality research papers in these areas of ancient Greco-Roman intellectual history; it also welcomes submission of articles dealing with the reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition. The journal appears quarterly. Articles are peer-reviewed on (...) a double-blind basis. Topics ancient philosophy ancient science reception of ancient philosophical and scientific ideas in the later western tradition Article formats Original Articles. (shrink)

Common sense -- African slavery in America -- An occasional letter on the female sex -- Agrarian justice -- The rights of man -- The age of reason.

Recent work by Stout and colleagues indicates that the neural correlates of language and Early Stone Age toolmaking overlap significantly. The aim of this paper is to add computational detail to their findings. I use an error minimisation model to outline where the information processing overlap between toolmaking and language lies. I argue that the Early Stone Age signals the emergence of complex structured representations. I then highlight a feature of my account: It allows us to understand the early evolution (...) of syntax in terms of an increase in the number and complexity of models in a cognitive system, rather than the development of new types of processing. (shrink)

Collects several works covering a variety of political subjects, including independence from Britain for the American colonies, service in the Continental army, ...

In this article, I seek to define the status and role of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense as a historical document. I argue that although Paine’s influential pamphlet offers no original ideas and seems simply to reinforce existing trends, its layered text transcends the regurgitation of propaganda and extends to literary achievement in its reflection of social and economic conditions, its deliberate narrative style, and its usage of literary devices and culture references grounded in historical context. Consequently, my methodology is necessarily (...) focused through literary discourse to achieve historical understanding of this key document from the American Revolution. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the possibility of conceiving a form of ontological nihilism, starting from D. M. Armstrong’s combinatorialism. This possibility has been suggested by Efird and Stoneham, by means of proposing an alternative strategy to the ‘subtraction argument’. They claim that it is possible to sustain such nihilism trough the concepts of construction and totality state of affairs. However, this hypothesis will require the acceptance of non-instanciated universals, that is, platonic universals. Yet this is opposite to requirements that are (...) basic for a combinatorial theory, which should uphold that universals exist only in their instantiations. Then, the assumption of platonic universals results in high costs for a combinatorial naturalism, according to which only exists what is located in space and time. (shrink)

In light of the recent Abu Ghraib prison scandal, this paper examines various works of literature to reveal that people who have prisoners in their power tend to torment their victims. Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville’s seafaring novels reveal how the captain and his mates assume brutal, godlike powers over the common sailors; T. E. Lawrence describes how the victim’s pain can become a masochistic pleasure; Franz Kafka imagines a state of universal guilt, where the victim, an (...) average man, suffers in the grip of an elaborate torture machine; Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jacobo Timerman, both political prisoners who survived to describe their terror, and George Orwell, meditating on contemporary totalitarian regimes as he suffered the agonies of medical treatment, transform their pain into art. Such literary works provide insights into the morally ambiguous depths of punishment. Every scene of torture, based on the authors’ experience, observation and imagination, has the same context as those vividly captured in the Abu Ghraib snapshots. (shrink)

In this essay I shall examine the representation of aggression and its issues in the model animal, the Fruit Fly, Drosophila melanogaster. The Fruit Fly is the model animal for genetics and more recently neuroscience. On the basis of its behaviour conclusions are being drawn that will help in the development of new treatments for clinical entities like aggression and anxiety disorders—the author questions those findings and asks whether more should be done to focus on the actual biology and behaviour—the (...) Umwelt, instead of trying to bridge the gulf between invertebrate and human behaviours. (shrink)

How do technologies that are too complex for any one individual to produce arise and persist in human populations? Contra prevailing views focusing on social learning, Osiurak and Reynaud argue that the primary driver for cumulative technological culture is our ability for technical reasoning. Whilst sympathetic to their overall position, we argue that two specific aspects of their account are implausible: first, that technical reasoning is unique to humans; and second, that technical reasoning is a necessary condition for the production (...) of cumulative technological culture. We then present our own view, which keeps technical reasoning at the forefront but jettisons these conditions. This produces an account of cumulative technological culture that maintains an important role for technical reasoning, whilst being more evolutionarily plausible. (shrink)