Ethical training in graduate programs is an important part of the professional development process. Such training has taken a position of prominence in both counseling and clinical psychology but seems to be lagging behind in the field of sport psychology. A debate exists about whether such training is necessary and, if so, how it should be provided. An important step in better understanding these issues is to identify how such training is currently taking place. This study surveyed the program directors (...) of sport psychology programs listed in the Directory of Graduate Programs in Applied Sport Psychology (Burke, Sachs, & Schrader, 2002) about the ethical training that takes place in their programs and their perceptions of the preparedness of the students in their programs. Of those contacted, 54% (n = 47) responded to the e-mail based survey. The results from these respondents indicated that 64.4% of programs require training in ethics and that the training was most commonly integrated into other nonethics courses. Overall, respondents did not feel as if students were completely prepared for either the ethical or legal issues that they will face in their professional careers. The importance of ethical training and suggestions for improving ethical training are discussed. (shrink)

Ethical training in graduate programs is an important part of the professional development process. Such training has taken a position of prominence in both counseling and clinical psychology but seems to be lagging behind in the field of sport psychology. A debate exists about whether such training is necessary and, if so, how it should be provided. An important step in better understanding these issues is to identify how such training is currently taking place. This study surveyed the program directors (...) of sport psychology programs listed in the Directory of Graduate Programs in Applied Sport Psychology about the ethical training that takes place in their programs and their perceptions of the preparedness of the students in their programs. Of those contacted, 54% responded to the e-mail based survey. The results from these respondents indicated that 64.4% of programs require training in ethics and that the training was most commonly integrated into other nonethics courses. Overall, respondents did not feel as if students were completely prepared for either the ethical or legal issues that they will face in their professional careers. The importance of ethical training and suggestions for improving ethical training are discussed. (shrink)

The Dispersion of Power is an urgent call to rethink centuries of conventional wisdom about what democracy is, why it matters, and how to make it better. Drawing from history, social science, psychology, and critical theory, it explains why elections do not and cannot realize the classic ideal of popular rule, and why prevailing strategies of democratic reform often make things worse. Instead, Bagg argues, we should see democracy as a way of protecting public power from capture—an alternative vision that (...) is at once more realistic and more inspiring. Despite their many shortcomings, real-world elections do prevent the most extreme forms of tyranny, and are therefore indispensable. In dealing with the vast inequalities that remain, however, we cannot rely on standard solutions such as electoral reform, direct democracy, deliberation, and participatory governance. Instead, Bagg shows, protecting and enriching democracy requires addressing underlying inequalities of power directly. In part, this entails substantive policies attacking the advantages of wealthy elites. Even more crucially, deepening democracy requires the organization of oppositional, countervailing power among ordinary people. Neither task is easy, but historical precedents exist in both cases—and if democracy is to survive contemporary crises, leaders and citizens alike must find ways to revive and reinvent these essential democratic practices for the twenty-first century. (shrink)

I argue that Spinoza endorses "conceptual dependence monism," the thesis that all forms of metaphysical dependence (such as causation, inherence, and existential dependence) are conceptual in kind. In the course of explaining the view, I further argue that it is actually presupposed in the proof for his more famed substance monism. Conceptual dependence monism also illuminates several of Spinoza’s most striking metaphysical views, including the intensionality of causal contexts, parallelism, metaphysical perfection, and explanatory rationalism. I also argue that this priority (...) of the conceptual does not commit Spinoza to forms of idealism or mentalism. The question of how to understand different kinds of metaphysical dependence is quite controversial in Spinoza studies; I address major alternative readings in the notes. But there I also try to draw connections to the growing debate in contemporary discussions about metaphysical dependence, as this topic is a happy point of shared interest between Spinoza and contemporary metaphysicians alike. (shrink)

This volume is the first part of a larger work on the philosophy of Solomon Maimon and its systematic place in the history of thought. Here we deal with so me of the fundamental themes of Maimon's philosophy, including his examination of Kant's philosophy, his re lation to such immediate post-Kantians as Reinhold and Schulze, and the relation between him and Fichte. The second volume will concern itself with such aspects of Maimon's theoretical philosophy as the prob lem of the (...) categories, the relation between idea and fiction, the concept of a universal soul, and practical philosophy, that is, ethics and the philosophy of law. Chapters V, VII, and X of this volume contain, with substantial revisions in form and content, material that appeared originally in scholarly periodicals. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Hebrcw Union College A nnual for permission to use the substance of my articles: "Solomon Maimon's Treatment of the Problems of Antinomies and Its Relation to Maimonides," H.U.C.A., Vol. XXI; "Maimon and Mai monides," H.U.C.A., Vol. XXII, part one; and to the Journal 0/ the History 0/ I deas, for permission to use the substance of my essay "Solomon Maimon's Doctrine of Infinite Reason and Its Historical Relations," J.H.I., Vol. XIII, No. 2. (shrink)

Samuel Rickless presents a new account of Berkeley's controversial argument, and suggests it is the philosopher's greatest legacy: not only is it valid, but it may well be sound.

The interview transcribed in this article was conducted with Thierry Ardouin, a great witness and actor in the history of training engineering in France. Through the evocation of his journey and his reflections, the aim here is to give an account of a singular journey, but also of the timely grasping of ingenium as a dynamic of analysis and action in the field of education and training science. “With our feet on the ground and our head in the stars” is (...) the approach he proposes to us, in order to link this history to the current and future perspectives of a reflection that is still under construction on training engineering, driven by an ethical vigilance with regard to world movements. (shrink)

A new approach to uderstanding the ever-changing information that bombards us. Arbesman is an expert in scientometrics, literally the science of science--how we know what we know. It turns out that knowledge in most fields evolves in systematic and predictable ways, and understanding that evolution can enormously powerful.

Previous literature has shown contradictory results regarding the relationship between economic liberalism at the country level and firms’ engagement in corporate social action. Because liberalism is associated with individualism, it is often assumed that firms will engage in mostly symbolic rather than substantive social and environmental actions; in other words, they will practice “greenwashing.” To understand how cultural beliefs in the virtues of liberalism affect the likelihood of greenwashing, we disentangle the effects of the distinct and co-existing beliefs in the (...) virtues of economic liberalism. We begin by conducting an exploratory qualitative analysis of managers’ sentiments on this matter, based on a focus group methodology. We then use these investigative elements to articulate a comparison of the conflicting theoretical arguments: in liberal contexts, are firms, as social entities, inherently selfish or pro-active when it comes to CSA? We empirically test our hypotheses on a large-scale dataset. Finally, we show paradoxically that in countries where beliefs in the virtues of competition are strong, firms are more likely to greenwash, while in countries where beliefs in the virtues of individual responsibility are prominent, firms are more likely to focus on concrete actions. These findings suggest that in contexts where weak governments are seen as ideal, firms might feel the need to step into fill institutional voids, in contexts in which competitive mindsets dominate, this tendency is counterbalanced. (shrink)

Recreaci n del pensamiento contempor neo sobre el hombre y una brillante defensa de la filosof a moderna. Habla del papel del fil sofo y del ser humano en un mundo agitado y sombr o. Expone, sucesivamente, teor as de la realidad, del hombre, de los valores y de la persona, Para terminar por dar una orientaci n tanto al acto de filosofar como a la conducta cotidiana.

Public health and service delivery programmes, interventions and policies (collectively, ‘programmes’) are typically developed and implemented for the primary purpose of effecting change rather than generating knowledge. Nonetheless, evaluations of these programmes may produce valuable learning that helps determine effectiveness and costs as well as informing design and implementation of future programmes. Such studies might be termed ‘opportunistic evaluations’, since they are responsive to emergent opportunities rather than being studies of interventions that are initiated or designed by researchers. However, current (...) ethical guidance and registration procedures make little allowance for scenarios where researchers have played no role in the development or implementation of a programme, but nevertheless plan to conduct a prospective evaluation. We explore the limitations of the guidance and procedures with respect to opportunistic evaluations, providing a number of examples. We propose that one key missing distinction in current guidance is moral responsibility: researchers can only be held accountable for those aspects of a study over which they have control. We argue that requiring researchers to justify an intervention, programme or policy that would occur regardless of their involvement prevents or hinders research in the public interest without providing any further protections to research participants. We recommend that trial consent and ethics procedures allow for a clear separation of responsibilities for the intervention and the evaluation. (shrink)

My essay argues that Marx follows Hegel in adopting a tragic meta-ethics. This stands against interpretations of Marx that deny he made moral commitments and those which argue that he saw exploitation and alienation as immoral or unjust. Moral tragedy is the view that historical circumstances can justify two or more irreconcilable moral standpoints that conflict with one another. I detail Hegel’s tragic notion of morality inspired by Oresteia and Antigone and how it opposes the Enlightenment universalism of Kant. I (...) show how Marx’s meta-ethics takes up this tragic framework through three examples: (1) between an ascetic ethos of efficiency and an ethos of consumption and luxury; (2) between political economists and ethicists; and (3) between capitalists and workers over the length of the workday. For Marx, socialist revolution resolves moral tragedies and makes a truly universal morality possible by resolving the historical contradictions that produce them. (shrink)

The title of this book echoes a phrase used by the Washington Post to describethe American attempt to kill Saddam Hussein at the start of the war againstIraq. Its theme is the notion of targeting (skopos) as the name of an intentionalstructure in which the subject tries to confirm its invulnerability by aiming todestroy a target. At the center of the first chapter is Odysseus’s killing of the suitors;the second concerns Carl Schmitt’s Roman Catholicism and Political Form; thethird and fourth (...) treat Freud’s “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death” and“The Man Moses and Monotheistic Religion.” Weber then traces the emergenceof an alternative to targeting, first within military and strategic thinking itself(“Network Centered Warfare”), and then in Walter Benjamin’s readings of“Capitalism as Religion” and “Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin.”. (shrink)

What is a human body? Some reasons are given for thinking that, in the primary case, it is a body that is both of and suitable to a rational animal.

Decision theory has had a long-standing history in the behavioural and social sciences as a tool for constructing good approximations of human behaviour. Yet as artificially intelligent systems (AIs) grow in intellectual capacity and eventually outpace humans, decision theory becomes evermore important as a model of AI behaviour. What sort of decision procedure might an AI employ? In this work, I propose that policy-based causal decision theory (PCDT), which places a primacy on the decision-relevance of predictors and simulations of agent (...) behaviour, may be such a procedure. I compare this account to the recently-developed functional decision theory (FDT), which is motivated by similar concerns. I also address potentially counterintuitive features of PCDT, such as its refusal to condition on observations made at certain times. (shrink)

Entry into mitosis is driven by the activity of kinases, which phosphorylate over 7000 proteins on multiple sites. For cells to exit mitosis and segregate their genome correctly, these phosphorylations must be removed in a specific temporal order. This raises a critical and important question: how are specific phosphorylation sites on an individual protein removed? Traditionally, the temporal order of dephosphorylation was attributed to decreasing kinase activity. However, recent evidence in human cells has identified unique patterns of dephosphorylation during mammalian (...) mitotic exit that cannot be fully explained by the loss of kinase activity. This suggests that specificity is determined in part by phosphatases. In this review, we explore how the physicochemical properties of an individual phosphosite and its surrounding amino acids can affect interactions with a phosphatase. These positive and negative interactions in turn help determine the specific pattern of dephosphorylation required for correct mitotic exit. (shrink)

Cast a backward glance over the last hundred years and it will be seen at once where the greatest advance has been. We cannot claim, I fear, that it has been in philosophy. Nor yet has it been in the sphere of religion; nor in politics; nor in the arts. Plainly enough, it is in science that this age has excelled; and in industrial production through the help of science.

This corrects a few typos in Baker (2017) 'The metaphysics of goodness in the Ethics of Aristotle' Philosophical Studies 174(7): 1839-1856.

This article argues that contemporary polemics against critical reading, understood as the enduring legacy of “theory” in the humanities, overlook the unusual and generative concept of critique formulated by one of the literary scholars most closely associated with “theory,” the German-born American literary critic Geoffrey Hartman. For Hartman, critique amounts to a thinking that exposes itself to the alterity of the future and thus risks being wrong. Engaging two of Hartman’s essays from the mid-1980s, “The Struggle for the Text” and (...) “Meaning, Error, Text,” the article specifically argues that Hartman derives this concept of critique as thinking that risks error from rabbinic midrash. However, this does not mean that Hartman seeks to “do midrash” himself. To the contrary, what Hartman learns from midrash is that the very structure of linguistic repetition, citation, or imitation forecloses the possibility of absolute fidelity to tradition. In “The Struggle for the Text,” he demonstrates this lesson through subversive readings of Genesis 32 and a fragment from Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle; in “Meaning, Error, Text,” Hartman historicizes his hermeneutic in relation to Christian supersession and the Holocaust, claiming ethical and political significance for his “restitution” of midrash as a model of critique. (shrink)

A tension has been identified between the acquisition and participation metaphors for learning, and it is generally agreed that this tension has still not been adequately resolved. In this paper, we offer an alternative to the acquisition and participation metaphors for learning: the metaphor of mastering. Our claim is that the mastering metaphor, as grounded in inferentialism, allows one to treat both the acquisition and participation dimensions of learning as complementary and mutually constitutive. Inferentialism is a semantic theory which explains (...) concept formation in terms of the inferences individuals make in the context of an intersubjective practice of acknowledging, attributing, and challenging one another's commitments. We first introduce the key concepts of inferentialism and consider the perspective on learning that inferentialism inspires. Then, we condense the lessons of the inferentialist concepts into a single mastering metaphor for learning and argue that learning consists in the process by which learners come to master concepts and practices. We conclude by discussing how the mastering metaphor could be put to work in a theoretical reconciliation of the cognitive and sociocultural dimensions of learning. (shrink)

A debate has emerged in the bioethics literature about the use of biotechnology to modify human nature. A failure to define humanness has produced conceptual confusion in this debate. We draw upon recent social psychological work on folk concepts of humanness and dehumanization to analyse the understandings of humanness that underpin the rival positions. We argue that advocates and opponents of human nature modification employ distinct conceptions of humanness, and that their differing evaluations of modification make sense in light of (...) these conceptions. Advocates view modification as the enhancement of a non-essentialist sense of humanness that takes us further from animal nature. Opponents view it as the loss of an essentialist sense of humanness that takes us closer to a robotic state. Recognition that humanness has multiple senses implies that there is no mutually exclusive choice between seeing the outcome of modification as a quantitative gain in humanness or a fundamental, qualitative loss of it. (shrink)