Astbury's role in the X-ray study of DNA; his failure to continue his pioneering appraisal; surprising details of his MRC grant application; and his disinterest in Beighton's DNA photographs demand attention. Rosie Franklin's later involvement and behaviour receive comments, which, as with Astbury, are based on personal knowledge.

Frederick Soddy's contributions to fundamental aspects of atomic physics are well known. His foresight on questions of atomic, i.e. nuclear, energy have frequently been quoted, and his early concern for the social responsibilities of science and scientists has received comment. Less widely appreciated have been his many publications expounding basic weaknesses in the economic-financial system of the Western world. This paper brings together, mostly in the form of direct quotations from Soddy's many books, an overview of the insights he expressed (...) on these topics. The dates associated with his statements provide the bases for claiming their prophetic status. (shrink)

This book challenges the usual introductions to the study of law. It argues that law is inherently political and reflects the interests of the few even while presenting itself as neutral. It considers law as ideology and as politics, and critically assesses its contribution to the creation and maintenance of a globalised and capitalist world. The clarity of the arguments is admirably suited to provoking discussions of the role of law in our contemporary world. The third edition provides contemporary examples (...) to sustain the arguments in their relevance to the 21st century. The book includes an analysis of the common sense of law; the use of anthropological examples to gain external perspectives of our use and understanding of law; a consideration of central legal concepts, such as order, rules, property, dispute resolution, legitimation and the rule of law; an examination of the role of law in women's subordination; and finally a critique of the effect of our understanding of law upon the wider world. This book is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students reading law. (shrink)

Hobbes’s account of the individual’s right to resist sovereign authority is nuanced. His allowance for cases in which a sovereign’s command falls outside the terms of the social contract, despite recent reappraisals, cannot rescue him from the accusation that his system is contradictory. It has been suggested that some Hobbesian rights can be transferred whilst others are quarantined, or that it is the institution of law, rather than the particular commands of the sovereign, which Hobbes ultimately upholds. By reconsidering Hobbes’s (...) concept of sovereignty alongside his theory of natural law, I argue that his system remains in tension with itself. Hobbes’s prioritisation of sovereign judgement over that of the individual, when combined with the principles he retains from the natural law tradition, renders his theory of resistance irreconcilable with his position on sovereignty. (shrink)

Many philosophers and psychologists argue that out everyday ability to predict and explain the actions and mental states of others is grounded in out possession of a primitive 'folk' psychological theory. Recently however, this theory has come under challenge from the simulation alternative. This alternative view says that human beings are able to predict and explain each other's actions by using the resources of their own minds to simulate the psychological aetiology of the actions of the others. This book and (...) the companion volume Folk Psychology: The Theory of Mind Debate together offer a richly woven fabric of philosophical and psychological theory, which promises to yield real insights into the nature of our mental lives. (shrink)

Presents general information about meteorology, weather, and climate and includes more than thirty activities to help study these topics, including making a ...

La menzogna è irrinunciabile per vincere in politica? Davi ci spiega quali sono i meccanismi di persuasione a cui ricorrono taluni politici per farsi eleggere e quali le responsabilità di quegli elettori che scelgono comunque di votare chi sostiene anche ciò che non può essere vero. È indubbio che la comunicazione politica si rifaccia al simbolismo e al linguaggio delle favole; non necessariamente per occultare la realtà, ma più direttamente per esprimere con maggiore efficacia il suo messaggio. Alle celebri favole (...) di 'Biancaneve', 'Cenerentola', 'Il brutto anatroccolo' sono ricorsi infatti uomini politici del calibro di Berlusconi, Prodi, Nixon, Carter, Mitterrand e partiti quali la Democrazia Cristiana; l'hanno fatto per conquistare voti ma anche per attivare ampi meccanismi di consenso che attingessero direttamente dall'inconscio collettivo. Le conseguenze - ammonisce l'autore - possono essere molto serie, come nel caso dell'attuale politica americana che ha portato la manipolazione e l'inganno a essere riconosciuti come tratti identitari della presidenza di George W. Bush. (shrink)

This philosophical treatise on the foundations of semantics is a systematic effort to clarify, deepen, and defend the classical doctrine that words are conventional signs of mental states, principally thoughts and ideas, and that meaning consists in their expression. This expression theory of meaning is developed by carrying out the Gricean program, explaining what it is for words to have meaning in terms of speaker meaning, and what it is for a speaker to mean something in terms of intention. But (...) Grice's own formulations are rejected and alternatives developed. The foundations of the expression theory are explored at length, and the author develops the theory of thought as a fundamental cognitive phenomenon distinct from belief and desire, argues for the thesis that thoughts have parts, and identifies ideas or concepts with parts of thoughts. This book will appeal to students and professionals interested in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Michael Davis, a leading figure in the study of professional ethics, offers here both a compelling exploration of engineering ethics and a philosophical analysis of engineering as a profession. After putting engineering in historical perspective, Davis turns to the Challenger space shuttle disaster to consider the complex relationship between engineering ideals and contemporary engineering practice. Here, Davis examines how social organization and technical requirements define how engineers should (and presumably do) think. Later chapters test his analysis of engineering judgement and (...) autonomy empirically, engaging a range of social science research including a study of how engineers and managers work together in ten different companies. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This paper addresses a problem about epistemic warrant. The problem is posed by philosophical arguments for externalism about the contents of thoughts, and similarly by philosophical arguments for architecturalism about thinking, when these arguments are put together with a thesis of first person authority. In each case, first personal knowledge about our thoughts plus the kind of knowledge that is provided by a philosophical argument seem, together, to open an unacceptably ‘non-empirical’ route to knowledge of empirical facts. Furthermore, this unwelcome (...) prospect of transferring a ‘non-empirical’ warrant from premises about our own mental states and about philosophical theory to a conclusion about external environment or internal architecture seems to depend upon little more than the possibility of knowledge by inference. (The use of the scare-quoted term ‘non-empirical’ is explained a couple of paragraphs further on.). (shrink)

Article copyright 2002. We provide a battery of examples of delusions against which theoretical accounts can be tested. Then we identify neuropsychological anomalies that could produce the unusual experiences that may lead, in turn, to the delusions in our battery. However, we argue against Maher's view that delusions are false beliefs that arise as normal responses to anomalous experiences. We propose, instead, that a second factor is required to account for the transition from unusual experience to delusional belief. The second (...) factor in the etiology of delusions can be described superficially as a loss of the ability to reject a candidate for belief on the grounds of its implausibility and its inconsistency with everything else that the patient knows, but we point out some problems that confront any attempt to say more about the nature of this second factor. (shrink)

Western philosophers have traditionally concentrated on theory as the means for expressing knowledge about a variety of phenomena. This absorbing book challenges this fundamental notion by showing how objects themselves, specifically scientific instruments, can express knowledge. As he considers numerous intriguing examples, Davis Baird gives us the tools to "read" the material products of science and technology and to understand their place in culture. Making a provocative and original challenge to our conception of knowledge itself, _Thing Knowledge _demands that we (...) take a new look at theories of science and technology, knowledge, progress, and change. Baird considers a wide range of instruments, including Faraday's first electric motor, eighteenth-century mechanical models of the solar system, the cyclotron, various instruments developed by analytical chemists between 1930 and 1960, spectrometers, and more. (shrink)

It is often thought that traditional recidivism prediction tools used in criminal sentencing, though biased in many ways, can straightforwardly avoid one particularly pernicious type of bias: direct racial discrimination. They can avoid this by excluding race from the list of variables employed to predict recidivism. A similar approach could be taken to the design of newer, machine learning-based (ML) tools for predicting recidivism: information about race could be withheld from the ML tool during its training phase, ensuring that the (...) resulting predictive model does not use race as an explicit predictor. However, if race is correlated with measured recidivism in the training data, the ML tool may ‘learn’ a perfect proxy for race. If such a proxy is found, the exclusion of race would do nothing to weaken the correlation between risk (mis)classifications and race. Is this a problem? We argue that, on some explanations of the wrongness of discrimination, it is. On these explanations, the use of an ML tool that perfectly proxies race would (likely) be more wrong than the use of a traditional tool that imperfectly proxies race. Indeed, on some views, use of a perfect proxy for race is plausibly as wrong as explicit racial profiling. We end by drawing out four implications of our arguments. (shrink)

Read this excellent collection of informative papers in the field to stimulate your ow the field and readers interested in the nature of the discipline of ...

Grice’s Razor is a methodological principle that many philosophers and linguists have used to help justify pragmatic explanations of linguistic phenomena over semantic explanations. A number of authors in the debate over contextualism argue that an invariant semantics together with Grice’s (1975) conversational principles can account for the contextual variability of knowledge claims. I show here that the defense of Grice’s Razor found in these “Gricean invariantists,” and its use against epistemic contextualism, display all the problems pointed out earlier in (...) Davis (1998). The everyday variation in acceptable knowledge claims is better explained in terms of implicature than indexicality, but general conversational principles shed little light on whether ‘know’ is used hyperbolically, meiotically, or loosely in a context, although this issue is crucial in deciding what if anything ‘S knows p’ implicates. I present reasons favoring an account of the representative bank case in terms of loose use, making clear how they differ from Grice’s Razor. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, widely recognized as one of the most important yet difficult philosophers of the 20th century. In this much-needed introduction, Davis unpacks the concepts at the centre of Levinas's thought - alterity, the Other, the Face, infinity - concepts which have previously presented readers with major problems of interpretation. Davis traces the development of Levinas's thought over six decades, describing the context in which he worked, (...) and the impact of his writings. He argues that Levinas's work remains tied to the ontological tradition with which he wants to break, and demonstrates how his later writing tries to overcome this dependency by its increasingly disruptive, sometimes opaque, textual practice. He discusses Levinas's theological writings and his relationship to Judaism, as well as the reception of his work by contemporary thinkers, arguing that the influence of his work has led to a growing interest in ethical issues among poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers in recent years. Comprehensive and clearly written, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers in continental philosophy, French studies, literary theory and theology. (shrink)

Representing Stephen Davies's best shorter writings, these essays outline developments within the philosophy of music over the last two decades, and summarize the state of play at the beginning of a new century. Including two new and previously unpublished pieces, they address both perennial questions and contemporary controversies, such as that over the 'authentic performance' movement, and the impact of modern technology on the presentation and reception of musical works. Rather than attempting to reduce musical works to a single (...) type, Davies recognizes a great variety of kinds, and a complementary range of possibilities for their rendition. (shrink)

An examination of the state of journalism and the need for change. For students and professionals on journalism fields.

In this paper, I shall defend externalism for the contents of perceptual experience. A perceptual experience has representational properties; it presents the world as being a certain way. A visual experience, for example, might present the world to a subject as containing a surface with a certain shape, lying at a certain distance, in a certain direction; perhaps a square with sides about 30 cm, lying about one metre in front of the subject, in a direction about 20 degrees to (...) the left of straight ahead. (shrink)

Humanism offers students a clear and lucid introductory guide to the complexities of Humanism, one of the most contentious and divisive of artistic or literary concepts. Showing how the concept has evolved since the Renaissance period, Davies discusses humanism in the context of the rise of Fascism, the onset of World War II, the Holocaust, and their aftermath. Humanism provides basic definitions and concepts, a critique of the religion of humanity, and necessary background on religious, sexual and political themes (...) of modern life and thought, while enlightening the debate between humanism, modernism and antihumanism through the writings and works of such key figures as Pico Erasmus, Milton, Nietzsche, and Foucault. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: Questions of Meaning Theories of Meaning Language, Mind and Metaphysics: Questions of Priority Semantic Theories: Davidson's Programme Analysing the Concept of Meaning: Grice's Programme Pragmatics: Conversational Implicature and Relevance Theory.

This article draws on the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant to explore whether a corporate ‘duty of beneficence’ to non-shareholders is consistent with the orthodox ‘shareholder theory’ of the firm. It examines the ethical framework of Milton Friedman’s argument and asks whether it necessarily rules out the well-being of non-shareholders as a corporate objective. The article examines Kant’s distinction between ‘duties of right’ and ‘duties of virtue’ (the latter including the duty of beneficence) and investigates their consistency with the shareholder (...) theory. The article concludes that it is possible within the ethical framework of shareholder theory for managers to pursue directly the happiness of non-shareholders. Furthermore, shareholders have a duty to hold management to account for the moral consequences of the firm’s activities on non-shareholding stakeholders. (shrink)

Utilitarianism has an apparent pedigree when it comes to animal welfare. It supports the view that animal welfare matters just as much as human welfare. And many utilitarians support and oppose various practices in line with more mainstream concern over animal welfare, such as that we should not kill animals for food or other uses, and that we ought not to torture animals for fun. This relationship has come under tension from many directions. The aim of this article is to (...) add further considerations in support of that tension. I suggest three ways in which utilitarianism comes significantly apart from mainstream concerns with animal welfare. First, utilitarianism opposes animal cruelty only when it offers an inefficient ratio of pleasure to pain; while this may be true of eating animal products, it is not obviously true of other abuses. Second, utilitarianism faces a familiar problem of the inefficacy of individual decisions; I consider a common response to this worry, and offer further concerns. Finally, the common utilitarian argument against animal cruelty ignores various pleasures that humans may get from the superior status that a structure supporting exploitation confers. (shrink)

A COMPANION TO AESTHETICS This second edition of A Companion to Aesthetics examines questions that were among the earliest discussed by ancient philosophers, such as the nature of beauty and the relation between morality and art, while also addressing a host of new issues prompted by recent developments in the arts and in philosophy, including coverage of non-Western art traditions and of everyday and environmental aesthetics. The volume also canvases debates regarding the nature of representation, the relation between art and (...) truth, and the criteria for interpretation, which are among the most hotly discussed topics in contemporary philosophy. In this extensively revised and updated edition, 168 alphabetically arranged articles provide comprehensive treatment of the main topics and writers in aesthetics. Major additions include historical overviews from the prehistoric to the present and a section on the individual arts. A Companion to Aesthetics will serve students of philosophy, literary criticism, and cultural studies - as well as the educated general reader - both as a work of reference and, with its many substantial essays, as a guide to the best thinking about the arts from the ancient Greeks to the dawn of the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This essay (a revised version of my undergraduate honors thesis at Stanford) constructs a theory of analogy as it applies to argumentation and reasoning, especially as used in fields such as philosophy and law. The word analogy has been used in different senses, which the essay defines. The theory developed herein applies to analogia rationis, or analogical reasoning. Building on the framework of situation theory, a type of logical relation called determination is defined. This determination relation solves a puzzle about (...) analogy in the context of logical argument, namely, whether an analogous situation contributes anything logically over and above what could be inferred from the application of prior knowledge to a present situation. Scholars of reasoning have often claimed that analogical arguments are never logically valid, and that they therefore lack cogency. However, when the right type of determination structure exists, it is possible to prove that projecting a conclusion inferred by analogy onto the situation about which one is reasoning is both valid and non-redundant. Various other properties and consequences of the determination relation are also proven. Some analogical arguments are based on principles such as similarity, which are not logically valid. The theory therefore provides us with a way to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate arguments. It also provides an alternative to procedures based on the assessment of similarity for constructing analogies in artificial intelligence systems. (shrink)

Cognitive approaches contribute to our understanding of delusions by providing an explanatory framework that extends beyond the personal level to the sub personal level of information-processing systems. According to one influential cognitive approach, two factors are required to account for the content of a delusion, its initial adoption as a belief, and its persistence. This chapter reviews Bayesian developments of the two-factor framework.

This chapter contains section titled: Elaborating the Performance Theory Structure and Focus Heuristics and the Individuation of Artworks Work‐Constitution and Modality on the Performance Theory Performances, Actions, and Doings.

This chapter contains section titled: The Structure of the Focus of Appreciation Performance and Appreciation Ontology After Empiricism.

This book focuses on the significance of the body in contemporary feminist scholarship. Whether the body is treated as biological bedrock or subversive metaphor, it is implicated in the cultural and historical construction of sexual difference as well as asymmetrical power relations. The contributors to this volume examine the role of the body as socially shaped and historically colonized territory and as the focus of individual womenÆs struggles for autonomy and self-determination. They also analyze its centrality to the feminist critique (...) of male-stream science as dualistic, distanced, and decontextualized. While the body has become a "hot item" in contemporary social theory and research, the renewed interest has received a mixed reaction from feminists. The body may be back, but the "new" body theory often proves to be just as disembodied as it ever was. The body revival seems to be less an attempt to re-embody masculinist science than just another expression of the same condition that evoked the feminist critique in the first place: a flight from femininity and everything that is associated with it in Western culture. Drawing on insights from contemporary feminist theories of gender and power, this book offers a timely critical appraisal of the recent "body revival." Embodied Practices not only sets an agenda for research about the body, but for an embodied perspective on the body as well. It will be a valuable and thought-provoking resource for students of womenÆs studies, social theory, cultural studies, and medical sociology. (shrink)

The De Malo represents some of St. Thomas Aquinas' most mature thinking on goodness, badness, and human agency. Together with the second part of the Summa Theologiae, it is one of his most sustained contributions to moral philosophy and theology. Aquinas examines the full range of questions associated with evil: its origin, its nature, its variety, its relation to good, and its compatibility with the existence of an omnipotent, benevolent God. This edition offers the Leonine Commission's authoritative edition of the (...) Latin text with a new, clear, and readable English translation by Richard Regan with an extensive introduction and notes by Brian Davies. (shrink)

In this article, I explore how the ideas of French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas offer insights into a debate often held today in the field of corporate governance, concerning the relative merits of statutory and voluntary approaches to the regulation of business. The philosophical position outlined by Levinas questions whether any rule-based systematisation of ethical responsibility, either statutory or voluntary, can ever equate to a genuine responsibility for the other person. I reflect on how various authors have adapted Levinas’s philosophy to (...) form a critique of bureaucracy and rule following in business, and the lack of ethical authenticity in corporate codes. However, this article also considers the question of whether a theoretical separation can be made between an ethical responsibility based on sensibility (as is suggested by Levinas) and a rational conceptualisation of how one is required to act. Considering the difficulty of disentangling these notions of ethics, I return to the problem of corporate governance and suggest an approach to stakeholder conflict based on mediation and dialogue, which rules out neither principles of conduct nor an openness of responsibility to the Other. (shrink)

Research studies have identified various different mechanisms in the effects of nature engagement on well-being and mental health. However, rarely are multiple pathways examined in the same study and little use has been made of first-hand, experiential accounts through interviews. Therefore, a semi-structured interview was conducted with seven female students who identified the role of nature engagement in their well-being and mental health. After applying thematic analysis, 11 themes were extracted from the data set, which were: “enjoying the different sensory (...) input,” “calm nature facilitates a calm mood,” “enhancing decision making and forming action plans,” “enhancing efficiency and productivity,” “alleviating pressure from society's expectations regarding education,” “formation of community relations,” “nature puts things into perspective,” “liking the contrast from the urban environment,” “feel freedom,” “coping mechanism,” and “anxious if prevented or restricted.” The results indicate complementary mechanisms for how nature-related activities benefit mental health and well-being that may occupy different levels of experience within a hierarchical framework informed by perceptual control theory. (shrink)

Introduction -- The road to imperfection -- Cataloguing irrationality -- Some real life examples -- Science to the rescue -- A deeper look at what's wrong -- Assigning the blame -- Can it be fixed.