Stanley Fish opens the collection with a persuasive argument for the role of intention and biography. Michael McKeon, Gordon Turnbull, and Jerome Christensen are concerned with the late eighteenth--and early nineteenth-century English cultural discourse that gave rise to the nearly simultaneous emergence of literary biography, Romantic sensibility, and reflexive human consciousness. The essays by Alison Booth, Cheryl Walker, and Sharon O'Brien reveal that the recognition or lack thereof the biographical subject has received and remains both a problem and an (...) opportunity for women writers and readers. The essays by Valerie Ross, Rob Wilson, Steven Weiland, and William Epstein pursue the question of difference and cultural reification in the theory and practice of a specifically American biography and biographical criticism. (shrink)

Individual differences in the mere willingness to think analytically has been shown to predict religious disbelief. Recently, however, it has been argued that analytic thinkers are not actually less religious; rather, the putative association may be a result of religiosity typically being measured after analytic thinking (an order effect). In light of this possibility, we report four studies in which a negative correlation between religious belief and performance on analytic thinking measures is found when religious belief is measured in a (...) separate session. We also performed a meta-analysis on all previously published studies on the topic along with our four new studies (N = 15,078, k = 31), focusing specifically on the association between performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test (the most widely used individual difference measure of analytic thinking) and religious belief. This meta-analysis revealed an overall negative correlation (r) of -.18, 95% CI [-.21, -.16]. Although this correlation is modest, self-identified atheists (N = 133) scored 18.7% higher than religiously affiliated individuals (N = 597) on a composite measure of analytic thinking administered across our four new studies (d = .72). Our results indicate that the association between analytic thinking and religious disbelief is not caused by a simple order effect. There is good evidence that atheists and agnostics are more reflective than religious believers. (shrink)

The form of this paper, which has more than one purpose, needs a word of explanation and perhaps of excuse. I had had it in mind to bring together and discuss a number of passages of Plautus in which gratus or gratia occurred. Then I came across an interesting paper by Professor L. R. Palmer in Hommages à Max Miedermann , Bruxelles, 1956, pp. 258–69, entitled ‘The Concept of Social Obligation in Indo-European: A Study in Structural Semantics’. There Palmer dealt, (...) among other things, with gratus and related words; he seemed to me, however, to treat the Latin evidence, the greater part of it from Plautus, in a way which I felt to be mistaken. In addition it seemed that a preconceived theory, derived from a special interpretation of the Mycenean tablets, was being read into Roman thought and institutions against the evidence. I have therefore taken the opportunity to discuss the passages of Plautus in which I was first interested within a general examination of Palmer's treatment of the Latin evidence for his theory. (shrink)

This is a study of Aristotle's moral philosophy as it is contained in the Nicomachean Ethics. Hardie examines the difficulties of the text; presents a map of inescapable philosophical questions; and brings out the ambiguities and critical disagreements on some central topics, inclduing happiness, the soul, the ethical mean, and the initiation of action.

Book reviewed in this article: Madness and the Criminal Law. By Norval Morris. The Insanity Plea: The Uses and Abuses of the Insanity Defense. By William J. Winslade and Judith Wilson Ross.

By pointing to deep philosophical confusions endemic to cognitive science, Wittgenstein might seem an enemy of computational approaches. We agree that while Wittgenstein would reject the classicist’s symbols and rules approach, his observations align well with connectionist or neural network approaches. While many connectionisms that dominated the later twentieth century could fall prey to criticisms of biological, pedagogical, and linguistic implausibility, current connectionist approaches can resolve those problems in a Wittgenstein-friendly manner. We present the basics of a Vector Symbolic Architecture (...) formalism, inspired by Smolensky, and indicate how high-dimensional vectors can operate in a context-sensitive and object-independent manner in biologically plausible time scales, reflecting Wittgenstein’s notions of language-games and family resemblance; we show how “soft” symbols for such a formalism can be formed with plausible learning cycles using Sparse Distributed Memory, resolving disputes surrounding Wittgenstein’s private language argument; and show how connectionist networks can extrapolate meaningful patterns to solve problems, providing “ways to go on” without explicit rules, which indicates linguistic plausibility. Connectionism thus provides a systematicity and productivity that is more than a mere implementation of a classical approach, and provides Wittgenstein-friendly and Wittgenstein-illuminating models of mind and language for cognitive science. (shrink)

This paper does not mean to imply that it is only public controversy that can meaningfully affect political outcomes, or even that it is the most important factor. Rather, we have attempted to indicate that public controversy constitutes a forum on which political actorsact; on which they attempt to implicate each other and the public in terms of some preferred view of the controversy at hand. It is certainly the case that the formal structure of the government and power relationships (...) provides important constraints in terms of which controversy may take place. Yet within these constraints, actors can meaningfully construct various views of the structure of the controversy which differently construe the rights and obligations of participants. In this sense, the course of public controversy may in part be understood as a function of the language employed by these actors, both to the extent that particular expressions stand as documentary evidence of underlying discrepancies about the shape of the controversy and to the extent that the logic of certain speech-acts constrains the forms subsequent statements may take. (shrink)

2015 Reprint of 1956 Printing. Full facsimile of the original edition. Not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Cybernetics is here defined as "the science of control and communication, in the animal and the machine"-in a word, as the art of steersmanship; and this book will interest all who are interested in cybernetics, communication theory and methods for regulation and control. W. Ross Ashby (1903-1972) was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of complex systems. His two (...) books, "Design for a Brain" and "An Introduction to Cybernetics," were landmark works. They introduced exact and logical thinking into the nascent discipline and were highly influential. Contents include: What is new -- Change -- The Determinate Machine -- The Machine with Input -- Stability -- The Black Box -- Quantity of Variety -- Transmission of Variety -- Incessant Transmission -- Regulation in Biological Systems -- Requisite Variety -- The Error-controlled Regulator -- Regulating the Very Large System -- Amplifying Regulation. (shrink)

The Right and the Good, a classic of twentieth-century philosophy by the great scholar Sir David Ross, is now presented in a new edition with a substantial introduction by Philip Stratton-Lake, a leading expert on Ross. Ross's book is the pinnacle of ethical intuitionism, which was the dominant moral theory in British philosophy for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Intuitionism is now enjoying a considerable revival, and Stratton-Lake provides the context for a proper understanding (...) of Ross's great work today. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper develops a framework for examining decision making about ethical issues and tests the applicability of a social contract perspective. Using two separate samples of students and salespeople, we determine that community members (salespeople) tend to judge a potentially unethical act to constitute a violation of an implicit social contract and non-community members (students) do not. Also, consistent with the emphasis on context specificity of integrative social contracts theory, situational variables influence perceptions of ethicality for the community members, but (...) do not affect the perceptions of individuals outside the community. The study finds considerable support for the use of a social contractarian perspective in the study of decision-making processes about ethical issues. (shrink)

The value of any kind of data is greatly enhanced when it exists in a form that allows it to be integrated with other data. One approach to integration is through the annotation of multiple bodies of data using common controlled vocabularies or ‘ontologies’. Unfortunately, the very success of this approach has led to a proliferation of ontologies which itself creates obstacles to integration. The Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) consortium has set in train a strategy to overcome this problem. Existing (...) OBO ontologies, including the Gene Ontology, are undergoing a process of coordinated reform and new ontologies being created on the basis of an evolving set of shared principles governing ontology development. The result is an expanding family of ontologies designed to be interoperable, logically well-formed, and to incorporate accurate representations of biological reality. We describe the OBO Foundry initiative, and provide guidelines for those who might wish to become involved. (shrink)

The world's leading authorities in the sciences and humanities—dozens of top scholars, including three Nobel laureates—join a cultural and intellectual battle that leaves no human life untouched. Is the universe self-existent, self-sufficient, and self-organizing, or is it grounded instead in a reality that transcends space, time, matter, and energy?

The Strange Situation procedure was developed by Ainsworth two decades agoas a means of assessing the security of infant-parent attachment. Users of the procedureclaim that it provides a way of determining whether the infant has developed species-appropriate adaptive behavior as a result of rearing in an evolutionary appropriate context, characterized by a sensitively responsive parent. Only when the parent behaves in the sensitive, species-appropriate fashion is the baby said to behave in the adaptive or secure fashion. Furthermore, when infants are (...) observed repeatedly in the Strange Situation,the pattern of behavior is said to be highly similar, and this pattern is said to predict the infants' future behavior in a diverse array of contexts. After an exhaustive review of the literature, it is shown that these popular claims are empirically unsupported in their strong form, and that the interpretations in terms of biological adaptationare misguided. There is little reliable evidence about the specific dimensions of parental behavior that affect Strange Situation behavior, although there does appear to be some relationship between these constructs. Temporal stability in security of attachment ishigh only when there is stability in family and caretaking circumstances. Likewise, patterns of Strange Situation behavior only have substantial predictive validity in similarly stable families. Implications for future research and theorizing — particularly as they relate to the use of evolutionary biology in psychological theory — are discussed. (shrink)

Charity is not only about giving to those in need, but in a broader sense about loving your neighbor and doing good things for other people without thought of reward. So wrote Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg, who believed that charity, along with faiths, was part of the foundation of spiritual practice. This work combines two of Swedenborg's unpublished manuscripts to form a practical, inspirational handbook for appying the principle of doing good to daily life.