Much of the current literature on plagiarism focuses on students, attempting to understand how students view the concept of plagiarism, the best ways to prevent it, and the impact of collaboration on the concept of original authorship. In this article, we look at the role of plagiarism in 761 conference abstracts written by graduate students, early- to late-career faculty, and industry representatives, representing institutions from nearly 70 countries. These abstracts were submitted for participation in an international conference focused on the (...) liberal arts hosted by our institution over the past four years. This study analyzes the corpus for patterns of plagiarism among professional academic writers. Our findings indicate that, while other demographic categories were not consistent indicators of text-matching, full professors were the most prevalent group to produce self-plagiarized abstracts. Overall, our study illuminates the significance of power dynamics in conferences’ efforts to maintain academic integrity. (shrink)

"Something in between : on the nature of love" -- Love's blindness (1) : love's closed heart -- Love's blindness (2) : love's friendly eye -- Beyond comparison -- Commitments, values, and frameworks -- Valuing persons -- Love and morality -- Afterword. Between the universal and the particular.

Benardete paradoxes involve infinite collections of Grim Reapers, assassins, demons, deafening peals, or even sentences. These paradoxes have recently been used in arguments for finitist metaphysical theses such as temporal finitism, causal finitism, and discrete views of time. Here we develop a new finite Benardete-like paradox. We then use this paradox to defend a companions in guilt argument that challenges recent applications of patchwork principles on behalf of the aforementioned finitist arguments. Finally, we develop another problem for those applications by (...) examining the notion of exact duplication. (shrink)

Die Untersuchung der wallonischen consolatio-Übersetzung führte zur Entdeckung und Neudatierung eines lateinischen consolatio-Kommentars, der auch von Jean de Meun benutzt wurde. Somit kann durch Gegenüberstellung von Vorlage und Übersetzung an einem konkreten Beispiel Einblick in die Übersetzungspraxis im Mittelalter gewonnen werden.

The following is not a successful skeptical scenario: you think you know you have hands, but maybe you don't! Why is that a failure, when it's far more likely than, say, the evil genius hypothesis? That's the question.<br><br>This is an earlier draft.

Low birth weight, intrauterine growth retardation, and prematurity are overwhelming risk factors associated with infant mortality and morbidity. The lack of efficacious prenatal screening tests for these three outcomes illuminates the problems inherent in bivariate estimates of association. A biocultural strategy for research is presented, integrating societal and familial levels of analysis with the metabolic, immune, vascular, and neuroendocrine systems of the body. Policy decisions, it is argued, need to be based on this type of biocultural information in order to (...) impact the difficult-to-change problems of low birth weight, intrauterine growth retardation, and prematurity. (shrink)

Attempts to capture the distinction between categorical and dispositional states in terms of more primitive modal notions – subjunctive conditionals, causal roles, or combinatorial principles – are bound to fail. Such failure is ensured by a deep symmetry in the ways dispositional and categorical states alike carry modal import. But the categorical/dispositional distinction should not be abandoned; it underpins important metaphysical disputes. Rather, it should be taken as a primitive, after which the doomed attempts at reductive explanation can be transformed (...) into circular but interesting accounts. (shrink)

As computers became multi-component systems in the 1950s, handling the speed differentials efficiently was identified as a major challenge. The desire for better understanding and control of ‘concurrency’ spread into hardware, software, and formalism. This paper examines the way in which the problem emerged and was handled across various computing cultures from 1955 to 1985. In the machinic culture of the late 1950s, system programs called ‘monitors’ were used for directly managing synchronisation. Attempts to reframe synchronisation in the subsequent algorithmic (...) culture pushed the problem to a higher level of abstraction; Dijkstra’s semaphores were a reaction to the algorithms’ complexity. Towards the end of the 1960s, the culture of ‘structured programming’ created a milieu in which Dijkstra, Hoare, and Brinch Hansen (among others) aimed for a concurrency primitive which embodied the new view of programming. Via conditional critical regions and Dijkstra’s ‘secretaries’, the co-produced ‘monitor’ appeared to provide the desired encapsulation. The construct received embodiment in a few programming languages; this paper ends by considering Modula and Concurrent Pascal. (shrink)

Several conceptual and methodological challenges must be solved in order to create knowledge that can be useful to pregnant women, their families, and any clinicians who serve them: (1) going beyond nominal and ordinal hypotheses and presenting estimates of conditional probabilities; (2) focusing on clearly defined outcomes; (3) modeling the relationship of fetal growth and length of gestation; (4) understanding the process of fetal growth even though most of our data is cross-sectional; (5) estimating the independent effects of genetics, race, (...) ethnicity, maternal risk behaviors, medical prenatal care, and socioeconomic status on fetal growth and length of gestation; and (6) estimating the independent effects of maternal pre-pregnancy weight, weight gain during pregnancy, and nutrition on fetal growth and length of gestation. (shrink)

"In this fresh critique of Rawls’s political liberalism, Dostert offers a bold and stimulating account of the political potential of religion that actually enhances the prospects of a genuinely democratic public discourse. Drawing lessons from the civil rights movement to the Jubilee 2000 effort, _Beyond Political Liberalism_ presents a profoundly hopeful challenge to the ways of thinking about liberalism and religion that dominate both political science and religious studies today. Setting aside worn diatribes and tattered dichotomies, _Beyond Political Liberalism _constructs (...) a promising vision of religion's role in liberal society that will be of interest to anyone concerned about the future of contemporary western culture." —_Daniel M. Bell, Jr., Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary_ "This is a fine book. It is clearly written, accessible to a broad audience, and of special relevance now, both in academia and in the larger political and intellectual culture." —_Eldon Eisenach, University of Tulsa_ In _Beyond Political Liberalism,_ Troy Dostert offers a critical examination of political liberalism, the approach to liberal political theory advanced most forcefully in the later work of John Rawls. Political liberalism's defenders claim that an “overlapping consensus” of shared values holds out the strongest prospects for regulating democratic politics in light of our moral diversity. Dostert contends, however, that the attempt to establish such a consensus in fact works to restrict and control the presence of religious and other moral perspectives that can ennoble and invigorate public life. Dostert argues that there is a steep price to be paid for this conception of politics, for what results is a political vision characterized by a profound distrust and fear of citizens' comprehensive convictions—the animating source of many citizens' political activity. He suggests that a “post-secular” ethics is a more appropriate response to moral diversity than restricting and managing the presence of religion and other moral perspectives in public life. By drawing on the religious witness of the civil rights movement and the work of theologian John Howard Yoder, Dostert elucidates several core dialogic practices and illustrates their value through a consideration of the contemporary debates surrounding international debt relief and abortion. (shrink)

Reductionists about dispositions must either say the natural properties are all dispositional or individuate properties hyperintensionally. Lewis stands in as an example of the sort of combination I think is incoherent: properties individuated by modal profile + categoricalism.

This paper argues for a permissivism of personal rationality, a rationality concerning the epistemic evaluation of persons. I work from the perspective of virtue epistemology where the standards of evaluation are the intellectual character virtues. On this picture, an agent is personally rational in having a doxastic attitude when having it is the result of some exemplification of an intellectual virtue. Permissive cases arise when the emotional components of intellectual virtues conflict, making some potential conclusions both enabled and disabled for (...) the agent. The agent is left in a confusion needing resolution, but if each of these conflicting emotions are components of intellectual virtues, then she has multiple personally rational options. This grounds a potential case of a permissivism of personal rationality, but this should be interesting to epistemologists in general since opting for one of the sides of this conflict leads an agent to have different doxastic attitudes. (shrink)

The process-dissociation procedure has been used in a variety of experimental contexts to assess the contributions of conscious and unconscious processes to task performance. To evaluate whether motivation affects estimates of conscious and unconscious processes, participants were given incentives to follow inclusion and exclusion instructions in a perception task and a memory task. Relative to a control condition in which no performance incentives were given, the results for the perception task indicated that incentives increased the participants' ability to exclude previously (...) presented information, which in turn both increased the estimate of conscious processes and decreased the estimate of unconscious processes. However, the results also indicated that incentives did not influence estimates of conscious or unconscious processes in the memory task. The findings suggest that the process-dissociation procedure is relatively immune to influences of motivation when used with a memory task, but that caution should be exercised when the process-dissociation is used with a perception task. (shrink)

Abstract:Business ethicists are eager to connect the ethical treatment of stakeholders with financial rewards. However, little attention has been paid to the cultural and industry context that influences how stakeholders are regarded by the firm, and how innovative strategies for engaging stakeholders can help a firm outperform its competitors. By reconnecting stakeholder theory to its roots in the field of strategy, we provide a framework for understanding the dynamic interplay between stakeholder relationships, innovation, and competitive advantage. The result is a (...) set of testable propositions aimed at better characterizing when and how “ethics pays” (Paine 2003). (shrink)

An extended critical investigation of Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN). -/- I wrote this a couple of years ago as a way of thinking through the argument, but now lack the ambition to revise it into a paper. (It's too long to be a paper, too short and too narrowly focused on one person's argument to be a book.) Rather than let it age in private, I'm sharing it publicly for anyone interested in Plantinga's argument.

Abstract:Business ethicists are eager to connect the ethical treatment of stakeholders with financial rewards. However, little attention has been paid to the cultural and industry context that influences how stakeholders are regarded by the firm, and how innovative strategies for engaging stakeholders can help a firm outperform its competitors. By reconnecting stakeholder theory to its roots in the field of strategy, we provide a framework for understanding the dynamic interplay between stakeholder relationships, innovation, and competitive advantage. The result is a (...) set of testable propositions aimed at better characterizing when and how “ethics pays” (Paine 2003). (shrink)

: Can literature provide moral insight? Or can literary works do nothing more than reflect the moral views that readers bring to them? We argue that literary works can provide genuine moral insight by discussing one that does. Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient challenges two key assumptions about moral evil: that evil necessarily involves active malevolence, and that evil and aesthetic beauty are mutually exclusive. These assumptions play foundational roles both in everyday moral thinking, and in the interpretive practices of (...) many critics and readers. Thus, The English Patient provides genuine insights that are both aesthetic and moral. (shrink)

Knowledge as a Feeling offers new reflective and metacognitive tools that help meet this moment in the evolution of our information ecosystem. The book has significant implications for information science, challenging theoreticians and practitioners to reconsider how individuals process information.

Can literature provide moral insight? Or can literary works do nothing more than reflect the moral views that readers bring to them? We argue that literary works can provide genuine moral insight by discussing one that does. Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient challenges two key assumptions about moral evil: that evil necessarily involves active malevolence, and that evil and aesthetic beauty are mutually exclusive. These assumptions play foundational roles both in everyday moral thinking, and in the interpretive practices of many (...) critics and readers. Thus, The English Patient provides genuine insights that are both aesthetic and moral. (shrink)

This study explores models of how people perceive moral aspects of socio‐scientific issues. Thirty college students participated in interviews during which they discussed their reactions to and resolutions of two genetic engineering issues. The interview data were analyzed qualitatively to produce an emergent taxonomy of moral concerns recognized by the participant. The participants expressed sensitivity to moral aspects including concern and empathy for the well‐being of others, an aversion to altering the natural order and slippery slope implications. In arriving at (...) their final resolutions, many participants integrated their moral concerns with non‐moral factors. The patterns revealed suggest that moral and non‐moral concerns act in concert as they influence socio‐scientific decision‐making. (shrink)

Drawing from ethnographic research in the Research Triangle of North Carolina and Williamsburg, Virginia, the authors build on Anzaldúa's conceptualization of “borderlands” to analyze how borders of social membership are constructed and enforced in “el Nuevo South.” Our gender analysis reveals that intersecting structural conditions—the labor market, the organization of public space, and the institutional organization of health care and other public services—combine with gendered processes in the home and family to regulate women's participation in community life. Enforcers of borders (...) include institutional actors, mostly women, in social services and clinics who occupy institutional locations that enable them to define who is entitled to public goods and to categorize migrants as undeserving “others.” We reveal how a particularly configured matrix of domination transcends the spheres of home, work, and community to constrain women migrants' physical and economic mobility and personal autonomy and to inhibit their participation in their societies of reception. (shrink)

Perhaps it has always been so, but certainly in the post-Enlightenment era there are inevitable linkages between the fields of law, medicine, and science. Each of these realms of activity is embedded in the social milieu of the era, with practitioners emerging from families, communities, regions, and nations bearing deep unexamined assumptions about what is natural and normal. Equally important, these fields’ theoretical accounts of natural behavior will tend to dovetail and fit each other's – most especially as they pertain (...) to the grand social issues of the period.For the last century and a half, a conversation with a cross-section of lawyers, scientists, and physicians at any given historical juncture would produce a remarkable pattern, consistently repeated: There would be strong enthusiasm for the idea that the “current state of knowledge and practice” is both objective and transcends the current social milieu. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Metaphysics of Causality and NoveltyStephen BickhamI find myself in agreement with most of the points of Crosby's position that there are new things and new events in the world. Like him, I hold that determinists are mistaken, and I believe that time flows one way only. I appreciate Crosby's amendment of Whitehead's category of the ultimate from creativity to creativity/destructiveness or, translating Spinoza's term, nature naturing. And finally (...) I applaud his clever, and I think successful, argument that the production of novelty, rather than being incompatible with causal action, is, indeed, a requirement for any such process. Most of the meat of philosophy, however, lies not in agreements but in their contraries. While I do have significant disagreements with Crosby, I want to state at the beginning that these deal with issues in Philosophy that I find among the most perplexing, and so I hope I can expound them with at least a modicum of clarity.The major, underlying concern I have with Crosby's argument centers not on the concept of novelty nor on whether such occurs, but on the concept of causality. It is in relation to causality that Crosby attempts to prove his case on the existence of novelty. He maintains that not only is novelty not opposed to causality, but novelty itself is a necessary condition for causality to exist at all. Very importantly, I believe he proves his point. However, if causality is a totally confused notion, then, in my opinion, proving that novelty is necessary for causality to exist proves much less than Crosby intends. If I am correct, Crosby's argument is vitiated to a good extent because of its connection with causality at all.To see how this plays out, we can look at the simplest statement of this principle, "Everything that exists must have a cause." But note that this tries to make causality clear by invoking the frustrating and paradoxical notion of "thing." What is a thing, which is supposed to require a cause for its existence? [End Page 64] I present a piece of sandstone. Is it a thing? Here is a grain of sand on the surface of the piece. Is it a thing? The sandstone was taken from a ledge. Is the ledge a thing? The ledge is part of a deposit. Is the deposit of sandstone a thing? What happens to the causality principle if we try to eliminate (not an easy thing) this suspect category of thing (or something)?Maybe it is every event that must have a cause. But this gets us no closer to freedom from metaphysical quicksand. The first definition in my dictionary of event is, "Something that happens"(emphasis mine). And if we consider the notion of event on its own ground, so to speak, we run up against the following questions, among others: How much time is necessary for an event? Is a hiccup an event? A hiccup in the middle of a concert? Was the Chicago Fire an event? The battle of Antietam? The Civil War? The settling of the West? The Industrial Revolution?I am not concerned here with what is usually regarded as the essential puzzling issue of causality, that is, the nature of the causal relation. I am only struggling, and vainly I fear, with the preliminary issue of what the things are that are said to require causes. And I'm pessimistic that we will get very far in the task of specifying with precision just what these things—or occurrences or processes or fundamental entities or whatever—are.Perhaps another approach, a different angle, might be utilized. Must it not be that there is a fundamental truth or insight, or at least a strong, legitimate motive for holding that every thing (or event, etc.) must have a cause? This is a position held by virtually everyone at the level of common sense, and by the great majority, even, of skeptically minded philosophers. Rather than trying either to stipulate what the entities involved in causality are or wrestle with the issue of what the causal relationship itself is, let's try to understand why... (shrink)

For twenty-five years, Troy Southgate has been a leading figure in radical politics, and he is currently one of the leading exponents of the English New Right. This anthology is a selection of his best essays, interviews, stories and poems. Through an analysis of both historical and contemporary events, he calls for an abandonment of the traditional Left/Right dichotomy and the creation of autonomous communities outside the prevailing order which can uphold and preserve traditional values. Also offered are (...) class='Hi'>Troy's practical suggestions for how this might be put into practice, as well as his in-depth analysis of Julius Evola's Men Among the Ruins, which originally appeared in the Russian Pravda Online. This book has much to offer everyone of a revolutionary disposition. 'Troy's ideals are for power to return to local communities and their chosen leaders, firmly rooted in time-tested principles of honour, labour and responsibility. From this vantage point, it is clear that it is the forces of international capitalism which are the true heirs of the totalitarian movements, and not those such as Troy who are merely seeking a secure island upon which to ride out the coming deluge when it all falls apart... Therefore, one who wants to become active in the arena of radical politics owes it to himself to become familiar with Troy's writings. In doing so, he will avoid many of the problems and pitfalls that plague all would-be radical movements.' --John Morgan, from the Introduction. (shrink)

In this essay Troy Richardson works to develop a conceptual framework and set of terms by which a diplomatic reception of different forms of law can be developed in multicultural education. Taking up the trope of the door in multiculturalist discourse as a site in which a welcoming of the difference of others is organized, Richardson interrogates the complex nature of receptivity to Indigenous customary law, in particular. He argues that, within this trope, a metonymic structure operates in relation (...) to the deployment of “policy” that maintains a perspective of customary law as premodern and primitive. This structure leads to an impoverished set of terms and a lack of diplomacy toward difference. Richardson proceeds by considering the notion of extraterritoriality and the metonyms that organize Emmanuel Levinas's discourse of “doors” in conceptualizing a welcoming receptivity. The term “extraterritoriality” anticipates the law of the other as it approaches the door and implies a diplomatic moment of reception of such difference. Richardson concludes by highlighting Jacques Derrida's evaluation of Levinas's discourse of receptivity and by considering the possibilities for a diplomatic engagement with the laws of others toward a mutation in the current geopolitical moment. (shrink)

Nathan Salmon, in his paper Trans-World Identification and Stipulation (1996) purports to give a proof for the claim that facts concerning trans-world identity cannot be conceptually reduced to general facts. He calls this claim ‘Extreme Haecceitism.’ I argue that his proof is fallacious. However, I also contend that the analysis and ultimate rejection of his proof clarifies the fundamental issues that are at stake in the debate between the reductionist and haecceitist solutions to the problem of trans-world identity. These issues (...) hinge on the ability of modal logic and possible worlds semantics to draw a hard and fast distinction between the logic and the metaphysics of modal logic. I shall claim that the considerations in this paper call into question the viability of such a distinction. (shrink)

Loyalty is a highly charged and important issue, often evoking strong feelings and actions. What is loyalty? Is loyalty compatible with impartiality? How do we respond to conflicts of loyalties? In a global era, should we be trying to transcend loyalties to particular political communities? Drawing on a fascinating array of literary and cinematic examples - The Remains of the Day , No Country for Old Men , The English Patient , The Third Man , and more - Troy (...) Jollimore expertly unravels the phenomenon of loyalty from a philosophical standpoint. He reflects on the idea that loyalty shapes our very identities, and considers both the benefits and the dangers of loyalty: on the one hand, how excessive loyalty can move us to perform immoral, even evil actions; one the other, how loyalty can expand our lives and give us a sense of meaning and belonging. (shrink)

This paper contributes to debates regarding the normative justification of basic income (BI) via a critical reevaluation of Philippe Van Parijs’ ‘real-libertarian’ theory. Van Parijs’ work constitutes the most ambitious attempt within the literature to ground a justification of BI within a systematic normative framework. In this paper I argue that key elements of his framework should form part of any progressive justification of BI. Specifically, his linking of the principle of ‘real freedom for all’ with the policy mechanism of (...) the ‘highest sustainable basic income.’ I take issue with Van Parijs’ treatment of compensation for unequal internal endowments based on the criterion of ‘undominated diversity’ and I reject the ‘external resources’ approach to justifying the funding of a substantial BI, including Van Parijs’ ‘jobs as assets’ argument. I introduce the concept of ‘total social productivity’ as a means of understanding the production and reproduction of society in a manner that anchors the justification of BI in a commitment to a ‘deep form of social reciprocity.’ Finally, I suggest that BI be framed as a ‘pragmatic-utopian reform.’. (shrink)

“What you see depends on where you stand”–Albert Einstein.