Contemporary liberal thinkers commonly suppose that there is something in principle unjust about the legal prohibition of putatively victimless crimes. Here Robert P. George defends the traditional justification of morals legislation against criticisms advanced by leading liberal theorists. He argues that such legislation can play a legitimate role in maintaining a moral environment conducive to virtue and inhospitable to at least some forms of vice. Among the liberal critics of morals legislation whose views George considers are Ronald Dworkin, Jeremy (...) Waldron, David A.J. Richards, and Joseph Raz. He also considers the influential modern justification for morals legislation offered by Patrick Devlin as an alternative to the traditional approach. George closes with a sketch of a "pluralistic perfectionist" theory of civil liberties and public morality, showing that it is fully compatible with a defense of morals legislation. Making Men Moral will interest legal scholars and political theorists as well as theologians and philosophers focusing on questions of social justice and political morality. (shrink)

Much controversy surrounds Schenker's mature theory and its attempt to explain musical pitch motion. Becoming Heinrich Schenker brings a new perspective to Schenker's theoretical work, showing that ideas characteristic of his mature theory, although in many respects fundamentally different, developed logically out of his earlier ideas. Robert P. Morgan provides an introduction to Schenker's mature theory and traces its development through all of his major publications, considering each in detail and with numerous music examples. Morgan also explores the relationship (...) between Schenker's theory and his troubled ideology, which crucially influenced the evolution of his ideas and was heavily dependent upon both the empirical and idealist strains of contemporary German philosophical thought. Relying where possible on quotations from Schenker's own words, this book offers a balanced approach to his theory and a unique overview of this central music figure, generally considered to be the most prominent music theorist of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Selected by CHOICE as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1995.

Although considerable attention has been paid to the possible involvement of sleep in memory processing, there is no substantial evidence for it. Walker describes a phenomenon of consolidation-based enhancement (CBE), whereby performance on select procedural tasks improves with overnight sleep; that is, without additional practice on the tasks. CBE, however, appears restricted to a few tasks, and even with these tasks CBE is not confined to sleep but also occurs during wakefulness. Sleep serves no unique role in this process. At (...) best, CBE is a slow, time-dependent process of consolidation that begins with task acquisition in waking and can under some circumstances extend to sleep. (shrink)

For some time now, commentators in and out of the scientific community have been expressing concern over the direction of scientific research. Cogent critics have labeled it excessively commercial, out of touch with its “pure,” public-spirited roots, and generally too much a creature of its entrepreneurial, self-interested times. In most if not all of this hand-wringing, the scientific community's growing reliance on intellectual property rights, especially patents, looms large. Indeed, for many the pursuit of patents is emblematic of just what (...) is rotten in the republic of science today. (shrink)

"Crease’s brilliantly exploited theatrical analogy places scientific theorizing back into the wider context of experimental inquiry." —Robert C. Scharff Crease attacks the "mystical" account of experimentation embraced by the positivist and Kantian varieties of philosophy of science, according to which experimentation takes a backseat to theory.

"Public reason" is one of the central concepts in modern liberal political theory. As articulated by John Rawls, it presents a way to overcome the difficulties created by intractable differences among citizens' religious and moral beliefs by strictly confining the place of such convictions in the public sphere. Identifying this conception as a key point of conflict, this book presents a debate among contemporary natural law and liberal political theorists on the definition and validity of the idea of public reason. (...) Its distinguished contributors examine the consequences of interpreting public reason more broadly as "right reason," according to natural law theory, versus understanding it in the narrower sense in which Rawls intended. They test public reason by examining its implications for current issues, confronting the questions of abortion and slavery and matters relating to citizenship. This energetic exchange advances our understanding of both Rawls's contribution to political philosophy and the lasting relevance of natural law. It provides new insights into crucial issues facing society today as it points to new ways of thinking about political theory and practice. (shrink)

This monograph is designed to provide an introduction to the principal areas of tense logic. Many of the developments in this ever-growing field have been intentionally excluded to fulfill this aim. Length also dictated a choice between the alternative notations of A. N. Prior and Nicholas Rescher - two pioneers of the subject. I choose Prior's because of the syntactical parallels with the language it symbolizes and its close ties with other branches of logi cal theory, especially modal logic. The (...) first chapter presents a wider view of the material than later chapters. Several lines of development are consequently not followed through the remainder of the book, most notably metric systems. Although it is import ant to recognize that the unadorned Prior-symbolism can be enriched in vari ous ways it is an advanced subject as to how to actually carry off these enrichments. Readers desiring more information are referred to the appropri ate literature. Specialists will notice that only the first of several quantifi cational versions of tense logic is proven complete in the final chapter. Again constraints of space are partly to blame. The proof for the 'star' systems is wildly complex and at the time of this writing is not yet ready for publi cation. (shrink)

The Second Creation is a dramatic--and human--chronicle of scientific investigators at the last frontier of knowledge. Robert Crease and Charles Mann take the reader on a fascinating journey in search of "unification" with brilliant scientists such as Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Richard Feynman, Murray Gell-Mann, Sheldon Glashow, Steven Weinberg, and many others. They provide the definitive and highly entertaining story of the development of modern physics, and the human story of the physicists who set out (...) to find the "theory of everything.". (shrink)

Free markets alone do not work effectively to solve certain kinds of human problems, such as education, old age care, or disaster relief. Nor have markets ever been the sole solution to the psychological challenges of death, suffering, or injustice. Instead, we find a major role for the non-market institutions of society - the family, the state, and social institutions. The first in-depth anthropological study of charities in contemporary Chinese societies, this book focuses on the unique ways that religious groups (...) have helped to solve the problems of social well-being. Using comparative case studies in China, Taiwan and Malaysia during the 1980s and onwards, it identifies new forms of religious philanthropy as well as new ideas of social 'good', including different forms of political merit-making, new forms of civic selfhood, and the rise of innovative social forms, including increased leadership by women. The book finally argues that the spread of these ideas is an incomplete process, with many alternative notions of goodness continuing to be influential. (shrink)

Philosophical concerns about nuclear armaments raises questions about the logical and conceptual basis for deterrence theory as well as the effects of nuclear threats on our common humanity. Most philosophical concern centers around around the morality of nuclear deterrence. It is sometimes thought that the doctrine of just war can provide a moral justification for nuclear deterrence based on threats of massive retaliation. Ye attempts to apply the doctrine of just war lead to a moral dilemma: although nuclear deterrence seems (...) justified as self-defense, there are compelling reasons for concluding that threats of retaliation are immoral. Alternative deterrence policies might be thought to overcome the moral dilemma. However, counterforce strategy and anti-missile defense, as recently proposed by President reagan, must still depend upon immoral threats of retaliation. Proposals for a nonviolent national defense offer a possible solution, and serious attention should be given to claims that nonviolent defense is relevant in the nuclear age and would deter aggression. (shrink)

Millum and Bromwich’s excellent article provides both conceptual and practical rationale for reexamining the fundamentals of the informed consent process for research and clinical interventi...

Francis Bacon's New Atlantis -- Galileo and the authority of science -- Rene Descartes : workshop thinking -- Giambattista Vico : going mad rationally -- Mary Shelley's hideous idea -- Auguste Comte's religion of humanity -- Max Weber : authority and bureaucracy -- Kemal Atatørk : science and patriotism -- Edmund Husserl : cultural crisis -- Hannah Arendt : action -- Conclusion.

This short essay summarizes an understanding of the trial as a medium in which law is realized or actualized, rather than imposed or enforced. It suggests that we should pay close attention to the actual practices that prevail at trial, its "consciously structured hybrid" of languages and practices, if we want to understand the nature of law.

Seven features which in practice seem to differentiate belief systems from knowledge systems are discussed. These are: nonconsensuality, “existence beliefs,” alternative worlds, evaluative components, episodic material, unboundedness, and variable credences. Each of these features gives rise to challenging representation problems. Progress on any of these problems within artificial intelligence would be helpful in the study of knowledge systems as well as belief systems, inasmuch as the distinction between the two types of systems is not absolute.

The paper describes the development of a model for representing the ethical climate of a business community. It describes the steps followed in identifying the model’s components and in validating the model’s structure through use of expert panels. The expert panel validation methodology has yielded a weighting scheme for use in the model’s eventual operationalization, whose derivation, together with the analysis performed on qualitative discoveries of the process, is described. The model’s development is part of a larger research project that (...) is intended to result in a validated instrument for measuring and comparing ethical climates of different business communities and for assessing longitudinal progress of individual business communities. The project’s ultimate goal is to provide an index measure that can also serve as a “report card” assessment tool at a level of analysis, which has not yet been addressed in the literature – that of the business community. (shrink)

This book argues that the last eight years in particular have shown us that our democracy has largely evaporated, leaving behind only an exoskeleton that was once its original vertebrae of ends and principles. It is critical to our form of democracy in the U.S. that citizens become active participants.

We investigated the pairing of a financial news article prediction system, AZFinText, with sentiment analysis techniques. From our comparisons we found that news articles of a subjective nature were easier to predict in both price direction (59.0% vs 50.4% without sentiment) and through a simple trading engine (3.30% return vs 2.41% without sentiment). Looking into sentiment further, we found that news articles of a negative sentiment were easiest to predict in both price direction (50.9% vs 50.4% without sentiment) and our (...) simple trading engine (3.04% return vs 2.41% without sentiment). Investigating the negative sentiment further, we found that AZFinText was best able to predict price decreases in articles of a positive sentiment (53.5%) and price increases in articles of a negative or neutral sentiment (52.4% and 49.5% respectively). (shrink)

In this book it is argued that this picture of Feyerabend is false.

A computational theory of primate social intelligence is proposed in which primates represent social situations internally by discrete symbol structures, called scripts. Three well‐defined computational operations on scripts are sufficient to support social learning, planning, and prediction. This gives a formal, predictive model with which to analyse how primate social knowledge is acquired, as well as how it is used.The theory is compared with primate data, such as Cheney and Seyfarth's observations of vervet monkeys. It gives simple, understandable script‐based analyses (...) of many observed phenomena—such as the recognition and use of kin relations, learning of alarm calls, habituation to calls, knowledge of rank, tactical deception, and attachment behaviour.I argue that a tight, concise theory of social cognition, such as script theory, is needed to explain the rapid learning and social guile seen in primates. It also has the benefits of simplicity and testability. The extension of scripts to incorporate a primate theory of mind is described in a subsequent paper. (shrink)