The eight pieces constituting this Meeting Report are summaries of presentations made during a panel session at the 2011 Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) annual meeting held between March 3rd and 6th in Cincinnati. Lisa Newton organized the session and served as chair. The panel of eight consisted both of pioneers in the field and more recent arrivals. It covered a range of topics from how the field has developed to where it should be going, from identification of (...) issues needing further study to problems of training the next generation of engineers and engineering-ethics scholars. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Millennium Jahrgang: 10 Heft: 1 Seiten: 39-114.

Blair proposes that fluid intelligence, working memory, and executive function form a unitary construct: fluid cognition. Recently, our group has utilized a combined correlational–experimental cognitive neuroscience approach, which we argue is beneficial for investigating relationships among these individual differences in terms of neural mechanisms underlying them. Our data do not completely support Blair's strong position. (Published Online April 5 2006).

The Kaisergeschichte was a set of short imperial biographies extending from Augustus to the death of Constantine, probably written between 337 and c. 340. It no longer exists but its existence can be deduced from other surviving works. Amongst the histories of the fourth century – Aurelius Victor, Eutropius, Festus, Jerome's Chronici canones, the Historia Augusta, the Epitome de Caesaribus, and, in places, even Ammianus Marcellinus and perhaps the Origo Constantini imperatoris – there is a common selection of facts and (...) errors, and common wording and phrasing in their narratives between Augustus and the death of Constantine, especially in their accounts of the third century. A natural assumption is that later historians copied earlier ones, yet later historians include information not contained in earlier ones, and historians who could not have known each other's work share similarities. For example, it looks as though Aurelius Victor was copying Eutropius, yet Victor wrote before Eutropius, and Eutropius contains information not in Victor and does not reproduce Victor's peculiar style or personal biases, things which he could hardly have avoided. Therefore Eutropius cannot be copying Victor. Since neither could have copied the other, there must therefore have been a common source. In his Chronici canones Jerome appears at first to be simply copying Eutropius. Yet when he deviates from Eutropius, his deviations usually mirror other histories, such as Suetonius, Victor, Festus, even the Epitome and the Historia Augusta, two works that had not even been written when Jerome compiled his chronicle and that did not use, and would never have used, the Christian chronicle as a source. Jerome was hurriedly dictating to his secretary, he had no time to peruse four or five works at a time for his brief notices. There must have been a single source that contained both the Eutropian material and the deviations common to Jerome and the other works. That source was the KG. It is the purpose of this paper to add to the above list of authors who relied upon the KG two other writers whose work can be shown to have derived, either at first hand or later, from the KG: Polemius Silvius and Ausonius. (shrink)

BackgroundPreprint usage is growing rapidly in the life sciences; however, questions remain on the relative quality of preprints when compared to published articles. An objective dimension of quality that is readily measurable is completeness of reporting, as transparency can improve the reader’s ability to independently interpret data and reproduce findings.MethodsIn this observational study, we initially compared independent samples of articles published in bioRxiv and in PubMed-indexed journals in 2016 using a quality of reporting questionnaire. After that, we performed paired comparisons (...) between preprints from bioRxiv to their own peer-reviewed versions in journals.ResultsPeer-reviewed articles had, on average, higher quality of reporting than preprints, although the difference was small, with absolute differences of 5.0% [95% CI 1.4, 8.6] and 4.7% [95% CI 2.4, 7.0] of reported items in the independent samples and paired sample comparison, respectively. There were larger differences favoring peer-reviewed articles in subjective ratings of how clearly titles and abstracts presented the main findings and how easy it was to locate relevant reporting information. Changes in reporting from preprints to peer-reviewed versions did not correlate with the impact factor of the publication venue or with the time lag from bioRxiv to journal publication.ConclusionsOur results suggest that, on average, publication in a peer-reviewed journal is associated with improvement in quality of reporting. They also show that quality of reporting in preprints in the life sciences is within a similar range as that of peer-reviewed articles, albeit slightly lower on average, supporting the idea that preprints should be considered valid scientific contributions. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Three indexes have been compiled: authors of main articles (including our special departments such as ‘Projects in progress’ and ‘Notes and discussions’); essay reviews; and book reviews. Co-author...

Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century by Scott Soames reminds me of nothing so much as Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov. Both are works that arose immediately out of the needs of undergraduate teaching, yet each manages to say much of significance to knowledgeable professionals. Each indirectly provides an outline of the history of its field, through a presentation of selected major works, taken in chronological order and including items that are generally recognized as marking decisive turning points. Yet (...) neither Soames’s work nor Nabokov’s is a history in any conventional sense, both being immediately disqualified from that category by the general absence of coverage of minor and middling works and writers. The emphasis is pedagogical rather than historiographical: the emphasis is on introducing the student to the field through very close examination of the limited number of key texts selected for inclusion. The author’s distinctive personality is also apparent in both works. Each writer has a favorite theme he repeatedly sounds: for Soames, the danger of conflating the analytic, the a priori, and the necessary; for Nabokov, the philistinism of expecting an uplifting “message” from works of literary art. Each also includes some quirky, individual selections: The Right and the Good, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Few others would have taken R. L. Stevenson to be up there with Dickens, Flaubert, and Proust, or W. D. Ross with Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine. Each also sets aside for separate treatment elsewhere a major body of work one might have expected to be covered. Nabokov reserves Russian literature for a companion volume, while Soames gives only slight coverage to what he describes as “work in logic, the foundations of logic, and the application of logical techniques to the study of language” — a category that in practice turns out to include the bulk of the relevant material (by such writers as Frege, Carnap, and Tarski) that published originally in German without simultaneous English translation.. (shrink)

This paper sets mathematics among the sciences, despite not being empirical, because it studies relations of various sorts, like the sciences. Each empirical science studies the relations among objects, which relations determining which science. The mathematical science studies relations as such, regardless of what those relations may be or be among, how relations themselves are related. This places it at the extreme among the sciences with no objects of its own (A Subject with no Object, by J.P. Burgess and (...) G. Rosen). Examples are discussed. The historical development of written mathematics from algorithms on clay tablets to theorems with proofs is said to show that application of algorithms to specific problems and theorems to scientific objects is like allegorical interpretation. Mathematics fits into the modern scientific context because the sciences, beginning with Galileo, have been constructed in imitation of mathematics. Viewing mathematics this way does not solve any ontological problems, but it does show how mathematics avoids them. Epistemological problems, insuperable for object realism, are simplified. For example, we have access to relations among any objects that we can consider objectively, first physical objects and then mathematical objects of greater and greater abstraction. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders certain questions about Ausonius’ two incomplete works on historical themes, Fasti and Caesares, with particular attention to points raised in a recent article by R. W. Burgess. Of the Fasti we have only a few tantalizing snippets, the packaging and not the core: what did the work look like when it left Ausonius? What was its coverage? was it in verse or prose? The Caesares as we have it breaks off in mid-quatrain, at line 139: did (...) it go beyond Elagabalus? What of the evidence in Giovanni Mansionario that Ausonius treated certain imperatores from Decius to Diocletian? (shrink)

This paper reconsiders certain questions about Ausonius’ two incomplete works on historical themes, Fasti and Caesares, with particular attention to points raised in a recent article by R. W. Burgess. Of the Fasti we have only a few tantalizing snippets, the packaging and not the core: what did the work look like when it left Ausonius? What was its coverage? was it in verse or prose? The Caesares as we have it breaks off in mid-quatrain, at line 139: did (...) it go beyond Elagabalus? What of the evidence in Giovanni Mansionario that Ausonius treated certain imperatores from Decius to Diocletian? (shrink)

Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life is a study of the fossils of the Burgess Shale of British Columbia. My concern is with the morals that Gould draws, with the ?new picture of life? that, he says, the reinterpreted Burgess animals compel. I conclude that his case is not established. (1) There may have been reasons to do with ?fitness? why most of the Burgess animals left no descendants, even if we cannot guess exactly what they were. (2) (...) We do not know that our past is dotted with the kind of mass extinctions that are needed for the random evolution that he proposes. (3) Even if what happened does rest on random variation and largely random selection, it does not follow that there are no standing forms that will be constantly re?instantiated. If Rational Life, in particular, is not special, then we have no right to think the world we experience bears any remote resemblance to a putative real world. (4) Even if there are no such forms, the fact that nothing in the state of things required us to exist is no good reason to say that No one requires us to. What Gould says does count against a simple progressivism, but not against an older and more orthodox theology. It also has implications for the Search for Extra?Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). (shrink)

Saul Kripke’s analysis of the concept of the natural numbers that we are taught in school yields a novel and axiomatically economical way of representing arithmetic in standard set theory—one that helps to answer Benacerraf’s objection from extraneous content as well as Wittgenstein’s objection from unsurveyability. After describing Kripke’s proposal in some detail, we examine it in the light of work by Quine, Steiner, Parsons, Boolos and Burgess. Although the primary aim of this paper is to present and explicate (...) Kripke’s view, we conclude by discussing some of the issues that are faced by Kripke’s proposal, so that the reader can get a sense of the geography of these issues. (shrink)

Paleoneuranatomy is an emerging subfield of paleontological research with great potential for the study of evolution. However, the interpretation of fossilized nervous tissues is a difficult task and presently lacks a rigorous methodology. We critically review here cases of neural tissue preservation reported in Cambrian arthropods, following a set of fundamental paleontological criteria for their recognition. These criteria are based on a variety of taphonomic parameters and account for morphoanatomical complexity. Application of these criteria shows that firm evidence for fossilized (...) nervous tissues is less abundant and detailed than previously reported, and we synthesize here evidence that has stronger support. We argue that the vascular system, and in particular its lacunae, may be central to the understanding of many of the fossilized peri‐intestinal features known across Cambrian arthropods. In conclusion, our results suggest the need for caution in the interpretation of evidence for fossilized neural tissue, which will increase the accuracy of evolutionary scenarios. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/2_JlQepRTb0. (shrink)

Die Monographie, die der in Ottawa lehrende Althistoriker Richard W. Burgess (B.) geschrieben hat, ist alles andere als eine leichte Lektüre. Dies ist ihrem Inhalt zuzuschreiben, geht es doch um nicht weniger als die Rekonstruktion und inhaltliche Auswertung von verlorenen spätantiken Chroniken, die nur mit großer Mühe aus meist späteren Quellen wiederhergestellt werden können.

John P. Burgess is the John N. Woodhull Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Logic and Methodology program at the University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of Jack H. Silver with a thesis on descriptive set theory. He is a very distinguished and influential philosopher of mathematics. He has written several books: A Subject with No Object (with G. Rosen, Oxford University Press, 1997), Computability and Logic (with G. Boolos and R. (...) Jeffrey, 5th ed., Cambridge University Press, 2007), Fixing Frege (Princeton University Press, 2005), Mathematics, Models, and Modality (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Philosophical Logic (Princeton University Press, 2009), Truth (with A. G. Burgess, Princeton University Press, 2011), Saul Kripke: Puzzles & Mysteries (Polity Press, 2012), Rigor & Structure (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Set Theory (Cambridge Elements, Forthcoming). In this interview, Professor Burgess talks about how his interests in mathematics and philosophy developed and relate to each other. He then answers questions about specific themes of his philosophical work, with a focus on issues pertaining to philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

John P. Burgess kritisiert Kurt Gödels Begriff der mathematischen oder rationalen Anschauung und erläutert, warum heuristische Intuition dasselbe leistet wie rationale Anschauung, aber ganz ohne ontologisch überflüssige Vorannahmen auskommt. Laut Burgess müsste Gödel einen Unterschied zwischen rationaler Anschauung und so etwas wie mathematischer Ahnung, aufzeigen können, die auf unbewusster Induktion oder Analogie beruht und eine heuristische Funktion bei der Rechtfertigung mathematischer Aussagen einnimmt. Nur, wozu benötigen wir eine solche Annahme? Reicht es nicht, wenn die mathematische Intuition als Heuristik (...) funktioniert? Für Gödel sind Mengen Extensionen von Begriffen und er beharrt beispielsweise auf dem ontologischen Objektstatus von Mengen, weil Denken für ihn einen Input benötigt, den es selbst nicht zu liefern im Stande ist. Im Falle der mathematischen Anschauung darf dieser Input allerdings nicht subjektiv kontingent sein, wenn es sich um objektiv gültige Theorien handeln soll. (Zudem vertritt Gödel eine Korrespondenztheorie der Wahrheit.) Der Begriff der heuristischen Intuition, den Burgess expliziert, stammt hingegen nicht zuletzt aus der kognitiven Psychologie, der bei der Verarbeitung impliziter, also unbewusster Informationen ansetzt und so das menschliche Vermögen erklärt, Entscheidungen und Urteile zu fällen, ohne sich der Urteilsgrundlagen bewusst zu sein. Über den ontologischen oder erkenntnistheoretischen Status dieser Urteilsgrundlagen sagen diese Theorien nichts aus. Sie könnten auch subjektiv kontingent zustande gekommen sein. Ihr normativer Anspruch ergibt sich lediglich aus „dem Funktionieren“, nicht daraus, dass es sich um Gesetze des Wahrseins handelt. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics are branches of philosophy concerned with questions about how to assess and ameliorate our representational devices (such as concepts and words). It's a part of philosophy concerned with questions about which concepts we should use (and why), how concepts can be improved, when concepts should be abandoned, and how proposals for amelioration can be implemented. Central parts of the history of philosophy have engaged with these issues, but the focus of this volume is on applications (...) to work in contemporary philosophy of language and mind, epistemology, gender and race theory, ethics, philosophy of science, and philosophical logic. This is the first volume devoted entirely to conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics. The volume explores the possibilities, benefits, problems, and applications of conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics. It consists of twenty chapters written by leading philosophers. (shrink)

Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosophy. In (...) this pair of papers, we try to unify the field, reflecting on its basic nature, structure, and methodology. (shrink)

Saul Kripke has been a major influence on analytic philosophy and allied fields for a half-century and more. His early masterpiece, Naming and Necessity, reversed the pattern of two centuries of philosophizing about the necessary and the contingent. Although much of his work remains unpublished, several major essays have now appeared in print, most recently in his long-awaited collection Philosophical Troubles. In this book Kripke’s long-time colleague, the logician and philosopher John P. Burgess, offers a thorough and self-contained guide (...) to all of Kripke’s published books and his most important philosophical papers, old and new. It also provides an authoritative but non-technical account of Kripke’s influential contributions to the study of modal logic and logical paradoxes. Although Kripke has been anything but a system-builder, Burgess expertly uncovers the connections between different parts of his oeuvre. Kripke is shown grappling, often in opposition to existing traditions, with mysteries surrounding the nature of necessity, rule-following, and the conscious mind, as well as with intricate and intriguing puzzles about identity, belief and self-reference. Clearly contextualizing the full range of Kripke’s work, Burgess outlines, summarizes and surveys the issues raised by each of the philosopher’s major publications. Kripke will be essential reading for anyone interested in the work of one of analytic philosophy’s greatest living thinkers. (shrink)

Which concepts should we use to think and talk about the world, and to do all of the other things that mental and linguistic representation facilitates? This is the guiding question of the field that we call ‘conceptual ethics’. Conceptual ethics is not often discussed as its own systematic branch of normative theory. A case can nevertheless be made that the field is already quite active, with contributions coming in from areas as diverse as fundamental metaphysics and social/political philosophy. In (...) this pair of papers, we try to unify the field, reflecting on its basic nature, structure, and methodology. (shrink)