Portion of the ancient Hindu epic, on fundamentals of the Vedanta school in Hindu philosophy.

As interpreted here, Garfinkel's "ethnomethodological experiment" (1967) demonstrates the existence of a social convention by flouting it and observing the consternation and aversive consequences for the perpetrator which that provokes. I suggest that the hostility which behaviorism has provoked throughout its history is evidence that it flouts an important social convention, the convention that, whenever possible, human beings are treated as and must always give the appearance of being rational agents. For these purposes, a rational agent is someone whose behavior (...) is controlled by a logically consistent body of means-end beliefs ("rules" in Skinner's terminology) and complementing desires which between them provide a basis for predicting how the individual will behave and for suggesting what arguments will persuade the agent to modify his or her beliefs and the behavior based upon them. The behaviorist flouts this convention by suggesting that its fictional character makes it unsuitable for the purposes of scientific explanation of behavior. The hostility that this suggestion provokes is evidence of the importance attached by the verbal community both to preserving a consistent and rational connection between what is said and what is done and presenting it as part of the natural order of things. (shrink)

In this article, we present results from a literature review of intrinsic, instrumental, and relational values of nature conducted for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, as part of the Methodological Assessment of the Diverse Values and Valuations of Nature. We identify the most frequently recurring meanings in the heterogeneous use of different value types and their association with worldviews and other key concepts. From frequent uses, we determine a core meaning for each value type, which is (...) sufficiently inclusive to serve as an umbrella over different understandings in the literature and specific enough to help highlight its difference from the other types of values. Finally, we discuss convergences, overlapping areas, and fuzzy boundaries between different value types to facilitate dialogue, reduce misunderstandings, and improve the methods for valuation of nature's contributions to people, including ecosystem services, to inform policy and direct future research. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionLori A. Custodero and Anna NeumannIn this symposium, three scholars present the genesis, meaning, and artfulness of creative work and its realization as aesthetic experience within three educational fields. Lori A. Custodero, working out of music education, provides a perspective emanating from an aesthetic of childhood wonder and playfulness; David T. Hansen, writing out of philosophy of education, discusses how being fully present in the teaching moment leads to (...) meaningful experience; and Anna Neumann, who writes out of the field of higher education studies, represents scholars as engaged in intellectual pursuits, often framed aesthetically, and as struggling to hold on to precious time for creation. Aware of the inherent tensions in learning environments from child care centers to graduate schools, we address ways in which our research has revealed people's sustained pursuit of imagined possibilities, oftentimes amidst perceived impediments.Creative work involves imagining possibilities whereby individuals, alone and together, pose personally relevant questions and pursue fluent pathways of inquiry within the shared meanings of cultural context. At its finest, such work is artful, simultaneously responding to and emanating from immediate circumstance and past experience. It is malleable and vulnerable and compelling, fusing familiar images and surprising perceptions into new "equilibria... stable, even though moving" whereby "changes interlock and sustain one another."1 As scholars and teachers committed to learning, we strive to create and discern meaning between established understandings and emerging ideas and images. As we dance between reception and action, between insight and "onsight,"2 fully attentive to the perceived potentials in our work, we move toward synchrony, experiencing the aesthetic. The realizations that arise from experiences such as these — new or newly reconfigured words, sounds, images, movement, and ideas — express new balances of sense and feeling and, sometimes, beauty. Whether in the shared, artfully expressive vocalizations between the newborn infant and mother or in the scientist's finessing patience with elegant mathematical imagery, creative work invites a drawing together of what we know and what we struggle to know. Over time, the interplay of this work and its realization, [End Page 33] what Dewey refers to as "movement and culmination,"3 creates a momentum that serves to define lives as aesthetic.We have created this symposium as a space for considering the meanings of the aesthetic in lives — from its earliest instantiations in the experiences of infants and young children, to its developed expression in the professional (in this case, intellectual) efforts of adults pursuing scholarly careers, to its representation in teaching as intergenerational fusions of knowledge, learning, and lives. We see the aesthetic as both native and learned; as individually held and formed and felt, and as collectively created and voiced, the product of lives in intersection; as marking bounded moments in time (those instants of compelling "present-ness") and as spreading through years, well beyond bounded present-ness, perhaps as memory. Yet while striving to define the aesthetic in lives, we also strive to understand lives, individually and interactively, as lodgings for the aesthetic, as locations that give shape, form, and voice to beauty and insight, to creativity and learning. As we explore the lives in which the aesthetic finds its home, and within which it forms, we wonder about the extent to which the aesthetic may, in its turn, illuminate the strivings of those lives, including human desires to create, know, learn, understand, sense. We are then collectively concerned with the meanings of the aesthetic in lives and about the lives themselves as "moving spaces" within which the aesthetic can grow.We pursue this theme, centered on the power of the aesthetic to illuminate human lives, out of a realization that current understandings of what it means to be human — and especially what it means to learn and create — have been framed within the rubrics of the social sciences, certainly in productive ways. And yet we suggest that the artful, though powerful in its abilities to voice emotion and beauty, has not been employed as intensively as it might in efforts to understand what it means to create and learn as virtues of human existence, as perhaps the ultimate of human strivings. We hope that these symposium papers will help invigorate such... (shrink)

'Why did the window break when it was hit by the stone? Because the window is brittle and the stone is hard; hardness and brittleness are powers, dispositional properties or dispositions.' Dispositions are essential to our understanding of the world. This book is a record of the debate on the nature of dispositions between three distinguished philosophers - D. M. Armstrong, C. B. Martin and U. T. Place - who have been thinking about dispositions all their working lives. Their distinctive (...) accounts cover many of the issues surrounding dispositions such as the nature of mind, matter, universals, existence, laws of nature and causation. Dispositions illuminates this central topic in analytic philosophy and at the same time highlights deeper concerns of metaphysics. (shrink)

T. A. Cavanaugh's Hippocrates' Oath and Asclepius' Snake: The Birth of the Medical Profession articulates the Oath as establishing the medical profession's unique internal medical ethic - in its most basic and least controvertible form, this ethic mandates that physicians help and not harm the sick. Relying on Greek myth, drama, and medical experience (e.g., homeopathy), the book shows how this medical ethic arose from reflection on the most vexing medical-ethical problem -- injury caused by a physician -- and argues (...) that deliberate iatrogenic harm, especially the harm of a doctor choosing to kill (physician assisted suicide, euthanasia, abortion, and involvement in capital punishment), amounts to an abandonment of medicine as an exclusively therapeutic profession. The book argues that medicine as a profession necessarily involves stating before others what one stands for: the good one seeks and the bad one seeks to avoid on behalf of the sick, and rejects the view that medicine is purely a technique lacking its own unique internal ethic. It concludes noting that medical promising (as found in the White Coat Ceremony through which U. S. medical students matriculate) implicates medical autonomy which in turn merits respect, including honoring professional conscientious objections. (shrink)

Boldly focusing on sexuality as a crucial definer of social order, Being and Symptom argues that there is an "M theory" -- a master theory of theories -- not only in Quantum Physics, but also in Continental Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Sociology, disclosing how the ontological structure of the "fantastic four" ingredients of metaphysics (potentiality, impotentiality, actuality, completion) has recurred through time. Öğüt also seeks to turn Thomas Hobbes's political philosophy into a social theory within the fields of sexuality and sovereignty (...) and to locate parallels among Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Foucault, Lacan, Agamben, Nash, Derrida, Girard, Kristeva, and Žižek, with a special emphasis on how Žižek has adapted Lacanian psychoanalysis into social theory. Öğüt conveys a highly original analysis of the unconscious of our social (sexual) relations, subjectivities, and politics. (shrink)

Understanding the differences between scientific approaches to cybernetics is difficult because of the very different histories and intellectual traditions in Russia and the West, i.e. the U.S. and Europe. This paper, firstly, describes the peculiarities of the Russian style of scientific thinking, considering as an example Alexander Bogdanov’s theory in context of the Russian intellectual tradition. Secondly, the paper compares Vladimir E. Lepskiy’s and Stuart A. Umpleby’s theories of cybernetics looking at them through the prism of Russian and American intellectual (...) traditions. Western cybernetics of the second order includes biological and social versions. It arose from “experimental epistemology.” The goal was to understand the processes of cognition on the basis of neurophysiological experiments, as a result of which cyberneticians came to the conclusion that the observer cannot be excluded from science. Biological cybernetics is concerned with how the brain creates descriptions of the world. Little attention is paid to the world since it already is included in the perceptions of the observer. Social cybernetics is concerned with how people act in the world. Theories or descriptions are thought to be less important than appropriate actions. The Russian interpretation of second-order cybernetics develops its social version. The paper concludes that the differences described demonstrate the great potential for ideas from Russian and Western scientists to enrich further development of cybernetics and science in East and West. (shrink)

The American Antitrust Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank, recently completed a study that concludes that competition law and policy plays little if any role in business ethics courses taught in U.S. business schools. To fill this intellectual void, this article makes a case for the development of a business ethics sub-field of antitrust ethics that is synonymous with the ethics of competitive strategy. After reviewing Paine''s Five Principles of Positive Competition and Boatright''s and Hendry''s views on the Moral Manager (...) Model and Moral Market Model, the need for ethical decision-making in a dynamic, innovative environment is explained through a Federal Trade Commission antitrust case involving the Dell Computer Corporation. The author argues that the contributions of Paine, Boatright, and Hendry provide an initial foundation for further research concerning the moral theories, principles, and rules pertaining to antitrust ethics, especially as it pertains to dynamic competition and "fair and competitive" executive behavior. (shrink)

This is the one and only book by the pioneer of the identity theory of mind. The collection focuses on Place's philosophy of mind and his contributions to neighboring issues in metaphysics and epistemology. It includes an autobiographical essay as well as a recent paper on the function and neural location of consciousness.