The question of the social commitment of the sociologist, and the scientist in general, has become a burning issue facing the sociology of East and West alike, — though it may take different forms. (P. C. Ludz, “Sociology”, in C. D Kernig (ed.), Marxism, communism, and Western society (New York, 1973), vol. viii, p. 46.).

Situating Lotze in the School of Speculative Theology, I use debates about Schelling’s critique of Hegel—then and now—to understand Lotze’s critique of Hegel. Lotze’s early metaphysics seems to employ a version of Hegel’s dialectical analysis of being, phenomena, and mind emphasizing “the interconnection of things.” One can equally argue that he proceeds in an analytic style of reviewing and testing alternative theories. My tentative conclusion is that he assumes the existence of reality (the Absolute) like Schelling, and makes cognition a (...) process subordinate to that reality. In this respect, he goes beyond his Kantian mentors J. F. Fries and E. F. Apelt. From all these sources came a radically original Gestalt metaphysics. For example, he reverses Kant’s forms of intuition (Anschauung) into “forms of intuitability”(Anschaulichkeit), including the relational categories of space, time, motion, mechanism, organism, law, and event. He then makes the categories into ethical levels of a “teleological idealism.” In this way he overcomes his Herbartian teachers’ separation of metaphysics from ethics, evincing his center Hegelian roots. (shrink)

Ca. 40 published papers from a summer institute in the German Democratic Republic in 1988.

A MAJOR PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETER of Kant and critic of Herbart and Hegel, Hermann Lotze ( 1817-1881) is known to historians of psychology primarily for his theory of spatial perception.' As Professor of Philosophy at Gottingen University from 1845 to 1880, he published his theory of the physiological mechanism for spatial consciousness no less than six times.2 Standard accounts present his local sign theory as an associationistic, empiricistic, or empiristic view.3 Yet they also mention its influence among nativists such as Lotze's (...) own student Carl Stumpf. Certainly there is an historical irony here which deserves explanation. This paper will describe Lotze's theory, indicate its origins in the work of scientists such as E. H. Weber and Johannes Muiller and philosophers such as Jakob Friedrich Fries and Johann Friedrich Herbart, and trace its transformation at the hands of psycholo- gists of various theoretical persuasions.4 The intent is not to argue for Lotze's personal influence so much as to illustrate how one fertile idea in the history of science can serve as the catalyst for a much broader conceptual development. (shrink)

Originally published in 1904, this book discusses the fundamental importance of education and theories of education within the works of Erasmus. Beginning with an outline of the life and characteristics of Erasmus, the text moves through his educational aims, ideas on the beginnings of the educational process and conception of the liberal arts. The second part of the text presents four extracts from the writings of Erasmus which express his views on education. Apart from a short chapter from De Conscribendis (...) Epistolis, which is given in Latin with English headings, these extracts are all translated into English. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Erasmus and the historical development of education. (shrink)

This book is about the eminent behavioral scientist B. F. Skinner, the American culture in which he lived and worked, and the behaviorist movement that played a leading role in American psychological and social thought during the twentieth century. From a base of research on laboratory animals in the 1930s, Skinner built a committed and influential following as well as a utopian movement for social reform. His radical ideas attracted much public attention and generated heated controversy. By the mid-1970s, he (...) had become the most widely recognized scientist in America, surpassing even Margaret Mead and Linus Pauling. Yet Skinner himself was an unassuming family man from a modest middle-class background, a machine-shop tinkerer whose tastes ran to English and French literature. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and historical styles appropriate to the evidence, the authors assembled in this volume examine Skinner's remarkable rise to prominence in the wider context of America's intellectual, cultural, and social history. (shrink)

As a philosopher, psychologist, and physician, the German thinker Hermann Lotze defies classification. Working in the mid-nineteenth-century era of programmatic realism, he critically reviewed and rearranged theories and concepts in books on pathology, physiology, medical psychology, anthropology, history, aesthetics, metaphysics, logic, and religion. Leading anatomists and physiologists reworked his hypotheses about the central and autonomic nervous systems. Dozens of fin-de-siècle philosophical contemporaries emulated him, yet often without acknowledgment, precisely because he had made conjecture and refutation into a method. In spite (...) of Lotze's status as a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century intellectual thought, no complete treatment of his work exists, and certainly no effort to take account of the feminist secondary literature. Hermann Lotze: An Intellectual Biography is the first full-length historical study of Lotze's intellectual origins, scientific community, institutional context, and worldwide reception. (shrink)

In January and February 1720 John Theophilus Desaguliers, a fellow of the Royal Society and a popular lecturer and experimenter, engaged in a public argument with two booksellers, William Mears and John Woodward. Each side offered for sale a translation of Willem Jacob ’sGravesande’s Physices elementa mathematica, experimentis confirmata, an introduction to Isaac Newton’s natural philosophy. The adversaries challenged each other in letters placed within advertisements for their respective translations that appeared in the Post Boy. While historians of (...) science have long noted the existence of the two translations, the events following their publication have not been explored fully. Setting Desaguliers as the focal point allows the complexities buried beneath the surface of this affair to be revealed. Desaguliers’s behavior resulted from his past experiences with the book trade, the competition among public lecturers in London, his financial situation, and concerns about the preservation of his reputation. This episode demonstrates the necessity of finding a prominent role for newspaper advertisements in the study of public science and in histories of the book. (shrink)

Sections include: experiments and generalised causal inference; statistical conclusion validity and internal validity; construct validity and external validity; quasi-experimental designs that either lack a control group or lack pretest observations on the outcome; quasi-experimental designs that use both control groups and pretests; quasi-experiments: interrupted time-series designs; regresssion discontinuity designs; randomised experiments: rationale, designs, and conditions conducive to doing them; practical problems 1: ethics, participation recruitment and random assignment; practical problems 2: treatment implementation and attrition; generalised causal inference: a grounded theory; (...) generalised causal inference: methods for single studies; generalised causal inference: methods for multiple studies; a critical assessment of our assumptions. (shrink)

In late January of 1987, the State Treasurer of Pennsylvania, R. Budd Dwyer, shot himself to death in front of a dozen reporters and camera crews during a news conference in his office. Much was subsequently made in the popular press, and within the profession, about the difficult ethical decision television journalists were faced with in determining how much of the very graphic suicide tape to air. A review of the literature in this area suggests, however, that journalists have established (...) a set of relatively detailed conventions for dealing with events involving graphic depictions of death. Analysis of the Dwyer tape and interviews conducted with Pennsylvania television news directors show that eighteen of the twenty stations in the state that carry news used basically the same type and amount of footage in their evening newscasts. One decided to use no tape. One showed the moment of death. When the story broke around noon, two additional stations showed the moment of suicide, but they revised their story for the evening program. In addition, the wide majority of news directors interviewed said they had little difficulty in deciding how to edit the tape. The processing of the Dwyer story suggests that any ethical dilemmas faced by journalists during decision making were put aside for later consideration. The material was edited quickly and according to similar patterns, or conventions, around the state. The study suggests greater attention be given to the definition and interaction of personal professional values, in the ethical sense, and norms of news processing, in the sociological sense. (shrink)

Infants have been described as 'statistical learners' capable of extracting structure (such as words) from patterned input (such as language). Here, we investigated whether prior knowledge influences how infants track transitional probabilities in word segmentation tasks. Are infants biased by prior experience when engaging in sequential statistical learning? In a laboratory simulation of learning across time, we exposed 9- and 10-month-old infants to a list of either disyllabic or trisyllabic nonsense words, followed by a pause-free speech stream composed of a (...) different set of disyllabic or trisyllabic nonsense words. Listening times revealed successful segmentation of words from fluent speech only when words were uniformly disyllabic or trisyllabic throughout both phases of the experiment. Hearing trisyllabic words during the pre-exposure phase derailed infants' abilities to segment speech into disyllabic words, and vice versa. We conclude that prior knowledge about word length equips infants with perceptual expectations that facilitate efficient processing of subsequent language input. (shrink)

In the TACITUS project for using commonsense knowledge in the understanding of texts about mechanical devices and their failures, we have been developing various commonsense theories that are needed to mediate between the way we talk about the behavior of such devices and causal models of their operation. Of central importance in this effort is the axiomatization of what might be called commonsense metaphysics. This includes a number of areas that figure in virtually every domain of discourse, such as granularity, (...) scales, time, space, material, physical objects, shape, causality, functionality, and force. Our effort has been to construct core theories of each of these areas, and then to define, or at least characterize, a large number of lexical items in terms provided by the core theories. In this paper we discuss our methodological principles and describe the key ideas in the various domains we are investigating. (shrink)

A volume in Contemporary Human Resource Management: Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities Series Editor Ronald R. Sims, College of William and Mary The primary purpose of this book is to stimulate dialogue and discussion about the most effective ways of teaching ethics. Contributors to the book focus on approaches and methodologies and lessons learned that are having an impact in leading students to confront with accountability and understanding the bases of their ethical thinking, the responsibilities they have to an enlarged (...) base of stakeholders (whose needs and interests often are conflicting), and their stewardship to use their talents responsibility not only in fulfilling an enterprise's economic goals but also to recognize the impact of their actions on both individuals and larger society. The primary audiences for the book are those individuals responsible for teaching management, especially those with responsibilities for teaching business ethics. But the book is also designed for practicing managers, for these managers have among their most important responsibilities the development of people in their organizations who have the integrity, values, and competences to be effective managers of economic resources while at the same time to recognize the roles of their enterprise in shaping society. (shrink)

The Mental Health Act 2007 introduced Deprivation of Liberty safeguards into the Mental Capacity Act 2005 with potentially far reaching resource implications. There appears to be no scientific data regarding the prevalence of deprivation of liberty in clinical settings such as hospitals and nursing homes. We examined how many patients across a whole Trust area in Wales were subject to some lack of capacity, how well documented this was and how many were potentially deprived of their liberty. We found that (...) no patient was deprived of their liberty, but 8% lacked capacity to make either basic or complex decisions; another 5% lacked capacity to make complex decisions. Documentation was good in mental health and community directorates, but there were gaps in documentation (not practice) in the medical and surgical directorates. Routine collection of data improved documentation regarding deprivation of liberty criteria. There is a high likelihood that senior nursing staff underestimate the number of patients who lack capacity. (shrink)

It was customary in traditional approaches to the sociology of knowledge to bracket either questions about the possibility of the social determination of natural scientific ideas or questions about the ability of the sociology of knowledge to evaluate other types of knowledge claims. The current strong program in the sociology of knowledge, a typical representative of the new approach to the sociology of science, wants to study the production of natural scientific knowledge scientifically and simultaneously bracket normative considerations. We criticize (...) this neglect of the normative dimension in the strong program on the basis of the role that Marx envisioned for his sociology of knowledge. For example, the sociology of knowledge should be understood as a critique of power that does not merely accept the status quo as a datum. In addition, we attempt to extend Marx's discussion of the social bases of such a critique. (shrink)

In the past two to three decades health behavior scientists have increasingly emphasized affect-related concepts in their attempts to understand and facilitate change in important health behaviors, such as smoking, eating, physical activity, substance abuse, and sex. This article provides a narrative review of this burgeoning literature, including relevant theory and research on affective response, incidental affect, affect processing, and affectively charged motivation. An integrative dual-processing framework is presented that suggests pathways through which affect-related concepts may interrelate to influence health (...) behavior. (shrink)