The aim of the article is to intervene in debates about the digital and, in particular, framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mobilize and materialize social and other relations. In doing so, (...) our aim is to explore the implications of digital devices and data for reassembling social science methods or what we call the social science apparatuses that assemble digital devices and data to ‘know’ the social and other relations. Building on recent work at CRESC on the social life of methods, we recommend a genealogical approach that is alive to the ways in which digital devices are simultaneously shaped by social worlds, and can in turn become agents that shape those worlds. This calls for attending to the specificities of digital devices themselves, how they are varied and composed of diverse socio-technical arrangements, and are enrolled in the creation of new knowledge spaces, institutions and actors. Rather than exploring what large-scale changes can be revealed and understood through the digital, we argue for explorations of how digital devices themselves are materially implicated in the production and performance of contemporary sociality. To that end we offer the following nine propositions about the implications of digital data and devices and argue that these demand rethinking the theoretical assumptions of social science methods: transactional actors; heterogeneity; visualization; continuous time; whole populations; granularity; expertise; mobile and mobilizing; and non-coherence. (shrink)

They examine the currents of thought behind some of the most significant works in Western philosophy, including those by John Locke and David Hume.

I feel hands thumping at my chest. A drum playing its score without respite. Like that boat that didn't stop pitching like a mean and savage wind. Where am I?Come on! You can do it. Be strong. Come on, breathe!All my life I wanted to breathe, and now that they are urging me to, I simply wish to close my eyes. To stop this unholy pain in the hollow of my chest and to give in. It hurts so much."Hurry (...) up, Nina.""Wait for me, Jacob. Wait for me, I need to catch my breath."We had to walk two kilometers to get to school. The mountain is always beautiful for those who climb it willingly. Sometimes I see a foreign tourist or nature lover open their arms wide to take in the pure air. For me, inhaling hurts so much at times... Read More. (shrink)

Preface. -- I. Soul-wandering as it concerns animals. -- II. The Greek conception of animals. -- III. Animals at Rome. -- IV. Plutarch the humane. -- V. Man and his brother. -- VI. The faith of Iran. -- VII. Zoroastrian zoology. -- VIII. A religon of ruth. -- IX. Lines from the Adi Granth. -- X. The Hebrew conception of animals. -- XI. "A people like unto you." -- XII. The friend of the creature. XIII. Versipelles. -- XIV. The (...) horse as hero. -- XV. Animals in Eastern fiction. -- XVI. The growth of modern ideas about animals. -- Index. (shrink)

Ruth Myrtle Patrick was a pioneering ecologist and taxonomist whose extraordinary career at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia spanned over six decades. In 1947, an opportunity arose for Patrick to lead a new kind of river survey for the Pennsylvania Sanitary Water Board to study the effects of pollution on aquatic organisms. Patrick leveraged her already extensive scientific network, which included ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson, to overcome resistance within the Academy, establish a new Department of Limnology, (...) and carry out the survey, which was a resounding success and brought much needed money to the Academy. As demand for her expertise grew among industrial companies, such as the chemical company DuPont, Patrick became more active in the world of applied science. She repurposed data and instruments from her river surveys to run new experiments, test ecological theories, and conduct long-term ecological studies. Through these studies, she advanced an argument that biologist Thomas Lovejoy dubbed the “Patrick principle,” the idea that the ecological health of a body of water could be measured by the relative abundance and diversity of species living there. Patrick was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1970, became a board member of DuPont in 1975, and received two of the most prestigious awards in ecology: the Eminent Ecologist Award from the Ecological Society of America in 1972 and the Tyler Ecology Award in 1975. This article analyzes Patrick’s unusual success in bridging the worlds of science and industry and her unusual ability to cross, and redefine, the perceived boundary between basic and applied fields in biology. It argues that Patrick’s position at the Academy, an institution of natural history that was both willing and able to accept money from industrial corporations, is key to understanding her success in, and influence on, the field of river ecology. (shrink)

1. On 30th July 2021, the historian of philosophy Michael Alexander Stewart, ‘Sandy’ for colleagues and friends, died peacefully, leaving unfinished the redaction of a volume in which he intended t...

Robert Alexy develops his influential theory of legal reasoning exploring the nature of legal argumentation and its relation to practical reasoning. In doing so he sheds light on fundamental questions of law and rationality, which are as crucial to practising lawyers and law students as they are to scholars of legal theory.

Corruption poisons corporations in America and around the world, and has devastating consequences for the entire social fabric. In this article, we focus on organizational corruption, described as the abuse of authority for personal benefit, and draw on Weber’s three ideal-types of legitimate authority to develop a theoretical model to better understand the antecedents of different types of organizational corruption. Specifically, we examine the types of business misconduct that organizational leaders are likely to engage in, contingent on their legitimate authority, (...) motives, and justifications. We conclude by suggesting managerial implications of our theoretical model and propose directions for future research. (shrink)

Can quite different values be rationally weighed against one another? Can the value of one thing always be ranked as greater than, equal to, or less than the value of something else? If the answer to these questions is no, then in what areas do we find commensurability and comparability unavailable? And what are the implications for moral and legal decision making? This book struggles with these questions, and arrives at distinctly different answers.".

This Element offers the first detailed study of Catharine Trotter Cockburn's philosophy and covers her contributions to philosophical debates in epistemology, metaphysics, moral philosophy, and philosophy of religion. It examines not only Cockburn's view that sensation and reflection are the sources of knowledge, but also how she draws attention to the limitations of human understanding and how she approaches metaphysical debates through this lens. In the area of moral philosophy, this Element argues that it is helpful to take seriously Cockburn's (...) distinction between questions concerning the metaphysical foundation of morality and questions concerning the practice of morality. Moreover, this Element examines Cockburn's religious views and considers her understanding of the relation between morality and religion and her religious views concerning the resurrection and the afterlife. (shrink)

Offers an analysis of three strongly contrasting primitive civilizations, showing how behavior is influenced by custom and tradition.

This essay examines Locke’s chapter “Of Identity and Diversity” (Essay 2.27) in the context of the series of chapters on ideas of relations (Essay 2.25–28) that precede and follow it. I begin by introducing Locke’s account of how we acquire ideas of relations. Next, I consider Locke’s general approach to individuation and identity over time before I show how he applies his general account of identity over time to persons and personal identity. I draw attention to Locke’s claim that “person” (...) is a forensic term and analyse his arguments for why the sameness of a human being and the sameness of a substance or soul are neither necessary nor sufficient for personal identity. Instead, Locke argues that personal identity consists in sameness of consciousness. Locke regards persons as moral agents who are accountable for their actions. If a person now is held accountable for a past action it is important that the person now is the same person as the person who did the action. This means that moral accountability presupposes personal identity. Additionally, it will be important to consider whether the person deserves reward or punishment for the action. Locke’s account of moral relations, which he develops in Essay 2.28, addresses this issue and I show how it supplements his account of persons and personal identity. (shrink)

This article explores the main similarities and differences between Derek Parfit’s notion of imprecise comparability and a related notion I have proposed of parity. I argue that the main difference between imprecise comparability and parity can be understood by reference to ‘the standard view’. The standard view claims that 1) differences between cardinally ranked items can always be measured by a scale of units of the relevant value, and 2) all rankings proceed in terms of the trichotomy of ‘better than’, (...) ‘worse than’, and ‘equally good’. Imprecise comparability, which can be understood in terms of the more familiar notions of cardinality and incommensurability, rejects only the first claim while parity rejects both claims of the standard view. -/- I then argue that insofar as those attracted to imprecise comparability assume that all rankings are trichotomous, as Parfit appears to, the view should be rejected. This is because imprecise equality is not a form of equality but is a sui generis ‘fourth’ basic way in which items can be ranked. We should, I argue, understand imprecise equality as parity, and imprecise comparability as entailing ‘tetrachotomy’ – that if two items are comparable, one must better than, worse than, equal to, or on a par with the other. Thus those attracted to the idea that cardinality can be imprecise should abandon trichotomy and accept parity and tetrachotomy instead. -/- Finally, I illustrate the difference between Parfit’s trichotomous notion of imprecise comparability and parity by examining how each notion might be employed in different solutions to the problem posed by the Repugnant Conclusion in population ethics. I suggest that parity provides the arguably more ecumenical solution to the problem. (shrink)

I intend to: a) clarify the origins and de facto meanings of the term relativism; b) reconstruct the reasons for the birth of the thesis named “cultural relativism”; d) reconstruct ethical implications of the above thesis; c) revisit the recent discussion between universalists and particularists in the light of the idea of cultural relativism.. -/- 1.Prescriptive Moral Relativism: “everybody is justified in acting in the way imposed by criteria accepted by the group he belongs to”. Universalism: there are at least (...) some judgments which are valid inter-culturally Absolutism: there are at least some particular prescriptions which are valid without exception everywhere and always -/- 2. The traditional proof of prescriptive moral relativism: the argument from variability: Judgments, rules, and shared values are de facto variable in time and space. The traditional counter-proof: examples of variability do not prove what skeptics contend. -/- 3. Pre-history of the doctrine -Ancient sophists: either immoralist or contractualist -Modern moral scepticism (xvii c.): variability as an historical and ethnographic fact supports a sceptical conclusion more moderate than sheer immoralism. - Voltaire, Kant, Reid counter-attack pointing at a universally shared moral sense - Romantics and idealists stage an even more moderate reformulation: instead of universally shared moral sense they point at the Spirit of a People which is: a)alternative to abstract and universal philosophical systems as far as it is lived ‘culture’; b) indivisible unity with an inner harmony and a source of normative standards; c) dynamic, in so far as it is a manifestation of the Spirit through the becoming of National cultures. -/- 4. The birth of Cultural Relativism and its ethical implications 4.1. The 18th c. doctrine was the noble savage (a non-historical doctrine: state of nature vs. social state) 4.2 Edward Tylor (1832-1817) and ethnocentric historicism Savage moral standards are real enough, but they are far and weaker than ours. 4.3 Boas and Malinowski and an holistic reaction to ethnocentric historicism -/- Franz Boas (1858-1942): a) Development of civilizations is not ruled by technical progress nor does it follow a one-way path; instead there are parallel developments (for ex. Agriculture does not follow stock-raising); b) racial characters have no relevance in development of civilization; c) we are not yet in a position to compare externally identical kinds of behaviour till we have not yet understood beliefs and intentions laying at their roots (for ex.: “From an ethnological point of view murder cannot be considered as a single phenomenon”; d) we should distinguish among different practices which are only superficially similar (fro ex. practices traditionally classified under the label “tabù”); e) there is as a fact just one normative ethic, constant in its contents but varying in its extension; f) the implication is not that we cannot judge behavior by members of other groups; it is only a recommendation of caution. -/- Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942): a) against Tylor’s and Frazer’s “magpie” methodology, field-work is required, a culture as a whole should be observed from inside; individual elements are incomprehensible; b) a culture is an organic whole; c) its elements are accounted for by their function (economy), avoiding non-observables (empio-criticism). -/- Ruth Benedict and Melville Herskovitz identify Boas’s approach with “cultural relativism”. Benedict: what is normal and abnormal is to be judged on a culture’s own standards, not on our own (“Anthropology and the Abnormal”). Herskovits: “Boas adumbrates what we have come to call cultural relativism” (The Mind, p. 10); “Judgements are based on experience, and experience is interpreted by each individual in terms of his own enculturation” (Man and his Works). -/- 4. How analytic philosophy understood and misunderstood the discussion 4.1. At the beginning of the 20th c., the new view in ethics was non-cognitivism (emotivist and subjectivist). Eric Westermark combines this view with an old-style ethnographic approach in support of relativity of moralities. Moralities are codes, or systems of emotive ‘disinterested’ reactions selected by evolution on their usefulness in terms of survival value for the society that is the carrier of such systems or codes. The moral relativity thesis: there are cases of disagreement that cannot be settled even after agreement about facts. 4.2 Anti-realists Brandt, Mackie, Gilbert, Harman adopt Westermark’s approach in a more sophisticated version: a) moralities are codes with an overall function and may be appraised only as wholes; b) variability is an argument for moral subjectivism; c) apparent legitimacy of deriving shift from ought is legitimized only within one institution d) morality should not be described but instead made, and existing moralities may be improved. Is it ‘real’ relativism? It is clearly subjectivism (a metaethical thesis). The normative thesis is that there better and worse codes, and survival values is the normative standard. -/- 4.3 Particularists MacIntyre, Sandel, Taylor, Wiggins, McDowell ‘Wittgensteinian’ prospectivist arguments bent to support weak-relativist claims MacIntyre: there is ‘incommensurability’ between different theoretical systems in both science and ethics. No argument is possible through different systems Different traditions may coexist for a long time without being able to bring their conflicts to a rational solution. -/- 4.4 Kantian universalists Baier, Gewirth, Rawls, Apel, Habermas Shared claim: justice concerns the right and is universal in so far as it may be based on minimal assumptions Other virtues are relative to context in so far as they are related to comprehensive views of the good - O’Neill criticism: a) it is an assumption shared by both alignments; b) after an alleged crisis brought about by alleged loss of metaphysical certainties, theories of justice have dropped demanding assumptions and kept universalism, virtue theories have kept demanding assumptions and dropped universalism; c) the opposition of virtue and justice has arisen in an unjustified way. O’Neill’s positive proposal: ‘constructive’ procedures may be adopted both (i) concerning all the range of virtues and (ii) across cultures once we abandon idealization and confine ourselves to abstraction from real-world cases. -/- 4.5 A metaethical relativist and anti-relativist normative ethicists: Bernard Williams Williams: vulgar relativism may be assumed to claim that: a) 'just' means 'just in a given society'; b) 'just in a given society' is to be understood in functionalist sense; c) it is wrong for one society’s members to condemn another society’s values. It is inconsistent since in (c) uses ‘just’ in a non-relative way that has been excluded in (a). William’s positive proposal: i) keep a number of substantive or thick ethical concepts that will be different in space and time; ii) admit that public choices are to be legitimized through recourse to more abstract procedures and relying on more thin ethical concepts. -/- 5. Critical remarks 5.1 The only real relativism available is ‘vulgar’ relativism (Westermark?) 5.2. Descriptive universalism (or absolutism) has a long pedigree, from Cicero on, reaching Boas himself but it is useless as an answer to normative questions 5.3. Twentieth-century philosophical discussion seems to discuss an ad hoc doctrine reconstructed by assembling obsolete philosophical ideas but ignoring the real theory of cultural relativism as formulated by anthropologists. -/- 6. A distinction between ethoi and ethical theories as a way out of confusions a)There are systems of conventions de facto existing. These may be studies from outside as phenomena or facts. b)There is moral argument and this, when studies from outside, is a fact, but this does not influence in any degree the possible validity of claims advanced. c) the difference between the above claims and Mackie’s criticism to Searle’s argument of the promising game is that promises, arguments etc. are also phenomena, but they are also communicative phenomena with a logical and pragmatic structure. -/- 7.Conclusions: a) cultural relativism, as a name for Boas’s methodology is a valuable discovery, and in this sense we are all relativists; b) ethical relativism, as an alleged implication of cultural relativism, has been argued in a philosophically quite unsophisticated way by Benedict and Herskovits; philosophers apparently discussed ethical relativism in the basis of a rather faint impression of what cultural relativism had been. c) a full-fledged ethical relativism has hardly been defended by anybody among philosophers; virtually no modern philosopher really argued a prescriptive version of the thesis; d) we may accept the grain of truth in ethical relativism by including relativist critique to ethical absolutism into a universalist normative doctrine that be careful in separating open-textured formulations of universal claims from culturally conditioned particular prescriptions. -/- . 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John Locke accepts that every perception gives me immediate and intuitive knowledge of my own existence. However, this knowledge is limited to the present moment when I have the perception. If I want to understand the necessary and sufficient conditions of my continued existence over time, Locke argues that it is important to clarify what ‘I’ refers to. While we often do not distinguish the concept of a person from that of a human being in ordinary language, Locke emphasizes that (...) this distinction is important if we want to engage with questions of identity over time. According to Locke, persons are thinking intelligent beings who can consider themselves as extended into the past and future and who are concerned for their happiness and accountable for their actions. Moreover, for Locke a self is a person, considered from a first-personal point of view. I show that the concept of self that he develops in the context of his discussion of persons and personal identity is richer and more complex than the I-concept that he invokes in his version of the cogito. I further argue that Locke’s moral and religious views explain why he emphasizes the need for a conceptual distinction between persons and human beings. In the final section I turn to the reception of Locke’s view by some of his early critics and defenders, including Elizabeth Berkeley Burnet, an anonymous author, and Catharine Trotter Cockburn. (shrink)

Readers of this book are sure to view the ethics of incentives in a new light.

This collection of Marcus's non-technical essays include her earlier ground-breaking axiomatizations of quantified modal logic, and explore such topics as the necessity of identity, the directly referential role of proper names as "tags", the interplay of possibility and existence, and others viewed as iconoclastic when Marcus first addressed them, but now long incorporated into current discussion.

Semantics is a bridge discipline between linguistics and philosophy; but linguistics student are rarely able to reach that bridge, let alone cross it to inspect and assess the activity on the other side. Professor Kempson's textbook seeks particularly to encourage such exchanges. She deals with the standard linguistic topics like componential analysis, semantic universals and the syntax-semantics controversy. But she also provides for students with no training in philosophy or logic an introduction to such central topics in the philosophy of (...) language as logical form, truth, speech acts, analyticity, entailment and presupposition. The exposition throughout is deliberately argumentative rather than descriptive, introducing the student step by step to the major problems in theoretical semantics. Special emphasis is placed on the need to consider individual arguments within the overall perspective of semantics as an integral part of general linguistic theory. Written primarily as a textbook for undergraduates and graduates in linguistics departments, this book will also be useful to undergraduates in philosophy and in psychology where linguistics is a part of their course. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:178 Feminist Studies 46, no. 1. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Nathan Snaza Biopolitics without Bodies: Feminism and the Feeling of Life Against a restrictive and imperialist concept of “the human,” which has become globalized during the long march of colonialist, heterosexist modernity, Samantha Frost’s Biocultural Creatures summons “counter-concepts” of the human that might authorize new political possibilities and theories of what it means to be human. She (...) writes, “These counter-concepts of the human are creatures who are embedded in various ecologies and networks of relations and who can integrate their acknowledgement of their embodiment, animality, physicality, dependence, and vulnerability into their self-conception and their orientation toward and modes of being in the world” (3). As this formulation suggests, whatever the new theory of the human is, it has been emerging at the edges of imperialist humanism for some time in a number of distinct political and intellectual projects clustering around decolonization, feminism, queer critique, technoscience, and ecology.1 Frost’s book, 1. Vandana Shiva and Ingunn Moser, editors, Biopolitics: A Feminist and Ecological Reader on Biotechnology (London: Zed Books, 1995); Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David A. Rubin, and Angela Willey, eds., Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017); Sandra Harding, Sciences From Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Sandra Harding, ed., The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 179 Nathan Snaza Books Discussed in This Essay Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human. Samantha Frost. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Flourishing Thought: Democracy in an Age of Data Hoards. Ruth A. Miller. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. The Biopolitics of Embryos and Alphabets: A Reproductive History of the Nonhuman. Ruth A. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. The Economization of Life. Michelle Murphy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. along with recent work by Michelle Murphy and Ruth Miller, among many other feminist biopolitical thinkers, summons us to reconceive and decolonize the human by feeling it differently, and in so doing, open our intellectual and political projects toward what Miller calls “democracy as a nonhuman affair” in The Biopolitics of Embryos and Alphabets (9). My sense is that this reconception throws into question the ways that we have understood both the human and politics through specific ideas about bodies. The body has a certain phenomenological obviousness for (some) humans, which might explain why it has been so central to most political projects of modernity, many of which share at least some commitment to the liberal individual as a self-contained entity.2 However, something else is beginning to press on contemporary feminist biopolitical thought. Karen Barad’s claim that “[o]bjects are not already 2. For a rich overview of the ways in which the body has animated feminist thought and politics, especially in light of debates in the physical and biological sciences, see Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (New York: Routledge, 1990. A different sense of the body begins to appear a few years later in Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993); and Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 180 Nathan Snaza there; they emerge through specific practices” attunes us to this new orientation.3 For Barad, knowledge practices are open-ended, and “the differential constitutions of human and nonhuman designate particular phenomena that are themselves implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity, including their enfolding and reconstitution in the reconfiguring of apparatuses.”4 In other words, knowledge emerges from the world through “cuts” that reconfigure it: entities—such as “the body” or “the human”—come into being through specific apparatuses. These include theoretical concepts: “Theorizing, like experimenting, is a material practice.”5 The concept of the body, then, is a material part of the intra-active becoming of the world in knowledge production—its meaning exceeds the fact of its existence. While the body has been useful to an enormous number of projects, contemporary feminist thought, in a wide variety of ways, is feeling... (shrink)

Some have thought that the plausibility of teleosemantics requires that it yield a determinate answer to the question of what the semantic “content” is of the “representation” triggered in the optic nerve of a frog that spots a fly. An outsize literature has resulted in which, unfortunately, a number of serious confusions and omissions that concern the way teleosemantics would have to work have appeared and been passed on uncorrected leaving a distorted and simplistic picture of the teleosemantic position. I (...) will speak to a half dozen of the worst of these misunderstandings and then say just a word about the frog question itself. (shrink)

This book takes a fascinating look at the linguistic, psychological, and anthropological implications of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's work with Kanzi--a bonobo who has achieved stunning cognitive and linguistic skills.

Suppose lightning strikes a dead tree in a swamp; I am standing nearby. My body is reduced to its elements, while entirely by coincidence (and out of different molecules) the tree is turned into my physical replica. My replica, The Swampman.....moves into my house and seems to write articles on radical interpretation. No one can tell the difference.

My chapter examines Isaac Watts’s and Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s views concerning the metaphysics of the mind and their underlying accounts of powers and substances. In Philosophical Essays on Various Subjects Watts criticizes Locke’s account of substances and argues for his own preferred account of substance. Watts argues that there is no need to postulate an unknown substratum, as Locke does. Instead, Watts searches for a better explanation of what substances are. His proposal is that bodily substance just is solid extension (...) and that mental substance is identical with the power of thinking. This means that Watts believes that some powers can be substances. I will show how Watts defends his account of substances against various objections. Cockburn was not satisfied by Watts’s account of substance and disagrees with Watts’s understanding of powers. She believes that Watts is too quick to draw metaphysical conclusions. Cockburn takes seriously the limitations of human understanding and emphasizes that humans are ignorant about many metaphysical truths. I end by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of Watts’s and Cockburn’s accounts of powers and substances. (shrink)

Andrea R English, Ruth Heilbronn; Decolonizing the Curriculum: Philosophical Perspectives – An Introduction, Journal of Philosophy of Education,, qhae043.

The ‘enhancement agenda’ in educational policy is based on the idea that ‘something affective’, which supports and improves learning, can be a) measured and b) enhanced. This idea is explored, and it is argued that the identity of the ‘something’ that the enhancement agenda seeks to enhance is fatally obscure, as is the idea of measurable enhancement. Interpreted in Aristotelian terms as the desire to cultivate certain emotional dispositions, the idea of ‘prevailing’ on children morally makes good sense. Unlike the (...) enhancement agenda, however, the Aristotelian project is informal, intimate and bound to the notion of human flourishing. The paper concludes with an enquiry into the central concerns that drive the enhancement debate, and an answer is sketched in terms of excessive fear and shame, and the circular logic of failure. This answer, it is argued, elucidates an ‘ordinary’ concept of low self-esteem that is a potential ‘barrier to learning’, and should therefore be taken seriously by educators. (shrink)

Tim Maudlin’s argument for the inconsistency of Cramer’s Transactional Interpretation (TI) of quantum theory has been considered in some detail by Joseph Berkovitz, who has provided a possible solution to this challenge at the cost of a significant empirical lacuna on the part of TI. The present paper proposes an alternative solution in which Maudlin’s charge of inconsistency is evaded but at no cost of empirical content on the part of TI. However, Maudlin’s argument is taken as ruling out Cramer’s (...) heuristic “pseudotime” explanation of the realization of one transaction out of many. (shrink)

William Molyneux (1656–1698) was an Irish experimental philosopher and politician, who played a major role in the intellectual life in seventeenth-century Dublin. He became Locke’s friend and correspondent in 1692 and was probably Locke’s philosophically most significant correspondent. Locke approached Molyneux for advice for revising his Essay concerning Human Understanding as he was preparing the second and subsequent editions. Locke made several changes in response to Molyneux’s suggestions; they include major revisions of the chapter ‘Of Power’ (2.21), the addition of (...) the chapter ‘Of Identity and Diversity’ (2.27), and the addition of the so-called Molyneux Problem (2.9.8). Molyneux repeatedly requested that Locke develops his views on morality. Additionally, their correspondence turned to questions concerning education and Molyneux’s keen interest in the topic likely prompted Locke to publish Some Thoughts Concerning Education in 1693. Moreover, Molyneux drew on Locke’s anonymously published Two Treatises of Government in his The Case of Ireland’s Being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England, Stated, which was first published in the spring of 1698. Molyneux revealed Locke’s authorship of Two Treatises against Locke’s will, yet their friendship continued until Molyneux’s untimely death in October 1698. (shrink)

Catharine Trotter Cockburn challenges voluntarist views held by British moral philosophers during the first half of the eighteenth century. After introducing her metaphysics of morality, namely, her account of human nature, and her account of moral motivation, which for her is a matter concerning the practice of morality, I analyze her arguments against theological voluntarism. I examine, first, how Cockburn rejects the view that God can by an arbitrary act of will change what is good or evil; second, how she (...) challenges views that understand the initial creation of the world solely in terms of divine will and draws attention to the role that the divine understanding plays in God’s creation; and third, how she argues that moral obligation does not require a superior lawmaker. I conclude by highlighting how Cockburn’s arguments not only challenge voluntarist views, but also offer support for her moral fitness theory. (shrink)

Indeed, nearly one quarter of the world's population has been influenced by Confucianism in some way, especially in family structures and values. The challenge, as Tu Weiming suggests, is to ensure the continuance of tradition in modernity, thereby achieving an effective counterpoint to the destruction of both human communities and the Earth community.

This book takes a fascinating look at the linguistic, psychological, and anthropological implications of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's work with Kanzi--a bonobo who has achieved stunning cognitive and linguistic skills.