It is almost unanimously accepted that Kant denies resultant moral luck—that is, he denies that the lucky consequence of a person’s action can affect how much praise or blame she deserves. Philosophers often point to the famous good will passage at the beginning of the Groundwork to justify this claim. I argue, however, that this passage does not support Kant’s denial of resultant moral luck. Subsequently, I argue that Kant allows agents to be morally responsible for certain kinds of lucky (...) consequences. Even so, I argue that it is unclear whether Kant ultimately endorses resultant moral luck. The reason is that Kant does not write enough on moral responsibility for consequences to determine definitively whether he thinks that the lucky consequence for which an agent is morally responsible can add to her degree of praiseworthiness or blameworthiness. The clear upshot, however, is that Kant does not deny resultant moral luck. (shrink)

Philosophers often consider problems of free will and moral luck in isolation from one another, but both are about control and moral responsibility. One problem of free will concerns the difficult task of specifying the kind of control over our actions that is necessary and sufficient to act freely. One problem of moral luck refers to the puzzling task of explaining whether and how people can be morally responsible for actions permeated by factors beyond their control. This chapter explicates and (...) assesses skeptical, compatibilist, and libertarian approaches to moral luck. First, I argue that what makes the above problems of free will and moral luck distinct is largely their emphasis on different kinds of luck. Second, I describe and evaluate skeptical arguments from constitutive and circumstantial luck that it is impossible to act freely. Third, I explicate and assess various support and implication relationships between various kinds of compatibilism and libertarianism, on the one hand, and causal, constitutive, circumstantial, and resultant moral luck, on the other. (shrink)

This book is a small handbook designed to give Institutional Review Board (IRB) members the information they need to protect the rights and welfare of research subjects in a way that is both effective and efficient. The chapters of this book are short and to the point. Topic-specific chapters list the criteria IRB members should use to determine how to vote on specific kinds of studies and offer practical advice on what IRB members should do before and during full-committee meetings.

Studies the books of Spinoza to clarify some of his central ideas on man, society, and government.

Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a watershed event when it was published in 1962, upending the previous understanding of science as a slow, logical accumulation of facts and introducing, with the concept of the “paradigm shift,” social and psychological considerations into the heart of the scientific process. More than fifty years after its publication, Kuhn’s work continues to influence thinkers in a wide range of fields, including scientists, historians, and sociologists. It is clear that The Structure (...) of Scientific Revolutions itself marks no less of a paradigm shift than those it describes. In Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” at Fifty, leading social scientists and philosophers explore the origins of Kuhn’s masterwork and its legacy fifty years on. These essays exhume important historical context for Kuhn’s work, critically analyzing its foundations in twentieth-century science, politics, and Kuhn’s own intellectual biography: his experiences as a physics graduate student, his close relationship with psychologists before and after the publication of Structure, and the Cold War framework of terms such as “world view” and “paradigm.”. (shrink)

Introduction -- Knowing at the level of sympathy -- The drama of schooling/the schooling of drama -- The challenging world of educational leadership -- Cultivating a perspective on learning -- Building an ethical school -- Working within the geography of human development -- Foundational qualities of an ethical person -- The moral dimension of human resource development -- The ethics of teaching -- Cultivating a mature community -- The complexity of ethical living and learning.

This article argues that we could improve the design of research protocols by developing an awareness of and a responsiveness to the social contexts of all the actors in the research enterprise, including subjects, investigators, sponsors, and members of the community in which the research will be conducted. ?Social context? refers to the settings in which the actors are situated, including, but not limited to, their social, economic, political, cultural, and technological features. The utility of thinking about social contexts is (...) introduced and exemplified by the presentation of a hypothetical case in which one central issue is limitation of the probability of injury to subjects by selection of individuals who are not expected to live long enough for the known risks of the study to become manifest as harms. Benefits of such considerations may include enhanced subject satisfaction and cooperation, community acceptance, and improved data quality, among other desirable consequences. (shrink)

This paper develops a view of the content of perceptual states that reflects the cognitive significance those states have for the subject. Perhaps the most important datum for such a theory is the intuition that experiences are ‘transparent’, an intuition promoted by philosophers as diverse as Sartre and Dretske. This paper distinguishes several different transparency theses, and considers which ones are truly supported by the phenomenological data. It is argued that the only thesis supported by the data is much weaker (...) than those typically considered in the literature, and has no obvious implications for the existence of sensory intermediaries. It does, however, have implications for the content of perceptual experience. It is argued that combining the first personal project with the transparency intuition yields an error theory of perception. The counterintuitive implications of this error theory are mitigated, however, by an account of perceptual beliefs which allows for them to be true even if the perceptual states are non-veridical. (shrink)

"This book is a sorely needed corrective. Animal Spirits is an important--maybe even a decisive--contribution at a difficult juncture in macroeconomic theory.

This handbook examines what education would look like if it prepared gifted students to transform the world—to make it a better place for all, not just for those who receive extra resources from schools in return for being labeled as “gifted.” The editors explore how transformationally gifted people can seek to make the world a better and more just place: they try to make a positive, meaningful, and possibly enduring contribution to changing things in the world that are not working. (...) They do not view “giftedness” merely as a transaction whereby, in exchange for being labeled as “gifted,” they accrue benefits to themselves: such as a more prestigious education, more income, or residence in a more exclusive community. The overarching aim of this book is to present conceptions of what identification and instruction of the gifted would look like if the focus of gifted education was transformational rather than transactional. What if gifted education did not focus so much on acceleration vs. enrichment, or pull-out versus in-class integration, but rather on how to be gifted in giving back—in using one’s gifts to create a better world? (shrink)

"Teaching College Students How to Solve Real-Life Moral Dilemmas" will speak to the sometimes confounding, real-life, moral challenges that quarterlife students actually face each and every day of their lives. It will spell out an original, all-inclusive approach to thinking about, and applying, ethical problem-solving that takes into consideration people's acts, intentions, circumstances, principles, background beliefs, religio-spiritualities, consequences, virtues and vices, narratives, communities, and the relevant institutional and political structures. This approach doesn't tell students exactly what to do as much (...) as it evokes important information in order to help them think more deeply and expansively about ethical issues in order to resolve actual ethical dilemmas. There is no text like it on the market today. "Teaching College Students How to Solve Real-Life Moral Dilemmas" can be used in a variety of ethics courses. (shrink)

Reason and revelation in the Middle Ages -- What is decisive about Averroes's decisive treatise? -- Is revelation really necessary? Revelation and the intellect in Averroes and Al-Ghazali -- Law, covenant, and intellect in Moses Maimonides's guide of the perplexed -- Natura as Creatura: Aquinas on nature as implicit revelation -- Why does the unity of the intellect become such a burning issue in medieval thought? Aquinas on human knowing as incarnate knowing -- Aquinas on revelation as incarnate divine intellect (...) -- The rationality of revelation in three traditions. (shrink)

This article argues that we could improve the design of research protocols by developing an awareness of and a responsiveness to the social contexts of all the actors in the research enterprise, including subjects, investigators, sponsors, and members of the community in which the research will be conducted. “Social context” refers to the settings in which the actors are situated, including, but not limited to, their social, economic, political, cultural, and technological features. The utility of thinking about social contexts is (...) introduced and exemplified by the presentation of a hypothetical case in which one central issue is limitation of the probability of injury to subjects by selection of individuals who are not expected to live long enough for the known risks of the study to become manifest as harms. Benefits of such considerations may include enhanced subject satisfaction and cooperation, community acceptance, and improved data quality, among other desirable consequences. (shrink)

A sourcebook for developing and facilitating collaborative groups capable of continuously adapting to anticipate the evolving learning needs of students. Based on a theoretical foundation of schools as complex systems in which linear management models are no longer sufficient.

Western culture has been moving away from its Christian roots for several centuries but the turn from Christianity accelerated in the 20th century. At the core of this decline is a loss of a sense of our own transcendence. Scientific materialism has so seriously impacted our belief in human transcendence that many people find it difficult to believe in God and the human soul. This anti-transcendent perspective has not only cast its spell on the natural sciences, psychology, philosophy, and literature, (...) it has also negatively impacted popular culture through the writings of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and many others. The warning signs of this loss of transcendence have been expressed by thinkers as diverse as Carl Jung (psychiatrist), Mircea Eliade (historian of religion), Gabriel Marcel (philosopher), C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. These warnings were validated by a 2004 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry which showed that the absence of religion alone was responsible for a marked increase in suicide rates, sense of meaningless, substance abuse, separation from family, and other psychiatric problems. Thus, the loss of transcendence is negatively affecting not only individuals’ sense of happiness, dignity, ideals, virtues, and destiny, but also the culture. Ironically, the evidence for transcendence is greater today than in any other period in history. The problem is – this evidence has not been compiled and propagated. Fr. Spitzer’s book provides a bright light in the midst of this cultural darkness by presenting both traditional and contemporary evidence for God and a transphysical soul from several major sources. He also shows how human consciousness and intelligence is completely special – and cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence or animal consciousness. We are transcendent beings with souls capable of surviving bodily death – self-reflective beings aware of perfect truth, love, goodness, and beauty. We are beings with an unrestricted capacity to know and create science, law, culture, art, music, literature, and so much more. The evidence reveals that we have the dignity of being created in the very image of God, and if we underestimate it, we will undervalue one another, underlive our lives, and underachieve our destiny. This work is the most comprehensive treatment of human transcendence available today. (shrink)

In an increasingly competitive higher education environment, America's public universities are seeking ways to differentiate themselves. This book suggests that a hopeful vision of what a university should be lies in a reexamination of the "land-grant mission," the common system of values originally set forth in the Morrill Land Grant Acts of 1862 and 1890, which established a new system of practically oriented higher learning across the United States. While hard to define, these values are often expressed by the one (...) hundred or so institutions that currently define themselves as "land grants" under the three pillars of research, teaching, and engagement/extension.In order to understand the unique character of a modern land-grant institution, this book focuses especially but not exclusively on the multiple components of a single organization, Oklahoma State University, founded in 1890 and currently enrolling 35,000 students across five campuses. Contributors from across the university focus on what the land-grant mission means to them in their daily endeavors, whether that be crafting the undergraduate academic experience, stimulating research, or engaging with the community through extension activities. The twenty contributions are divided into four parts, exploring in turn the core mission of the modern land-grant university, the university environment, the university's public value, and its accountability. The volume ends with an epilogue by the editor, which summarizes the values underlying the activities of land-grant institutions. In a time of uncertainty in higher education, this volume provides a helpful overview of the many different types of value public universities bring to American society. It also offers a powerful vision of a future founded on land-grant ideas that will be inspiring to university administrators and trustees, other educational policymakers, and faculty and staff, especially those fortunate enough to be part of land-grant institutions. (shrink)

D. M. Armstrong famously claims that deterministic laws of nature are contingent relations between universals and that his account can also be straightforwardly extended to irreducibly probabilistic laws of nature. For the most part, philosophers have neglected to scrutinize Armstrong’s account of probabilistic laws. This is surprising precisely because his own claims about probabilistic laws make it unclear just what he takes them to be. We offer three interpretations of what Armstrong-style probabilistic laws are, and argue that all three interpretations (...) are incompatible either with some feature of Armstrong’s broader metaphysics or with essential features of his account of laws (or both). (shrink)

In this book, Dr. Robert J. Levine reviews federal regulations, ethical analysis, and case studies in an attempt to answer these questions.

"All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one." Friedrich Schlegel's words perfectly capture the project of the German Romantics, who believed that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn't be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone. In this wide-ranging work, Robert J. Richards shows how the Romantic conception of the world influenced (and was influenced by) both the lives of the people (...) who held it and the development of nineteenth-century science. Integrating Romantic literature, science, and philosophy with an intimate knowledge of the individuals involved—from Goethe and the brothers Schlegel to Humboldt and Friedrich and Caroline Schelling—Richards demonstrates how their tempestuous lives shaped their ideas as profoundly as their intellectual and cultural heritage. He focuses especially on how Romantic concepts of the self, as well as aesthetic and moral considerations—all tempered by personal relationships—altered scientific representations of nature. Although historians have long considered Romanticism at best a minor tributary to scientific thought, Richards moves it to the center of the main currents of nineteenth-century biology, culminating in the conception of nature that underlies Darwin's evolutionary theory. Uniting the personal and poetic aspects of philosophy and science in a way that the German Romantics themselves would have honored, The Romantic Conception of Life alters how we look at Romanticism and nineteenth-century biology. (shrink)

How are dependent (or linked) premises to be distinguished from independent (or convergent) premises? Deductive validity, sometimes proposed as a necessary condition for depende'nce, cannot be, for the premises of both inductive and deductive but invalid arguments can be dependent. The question is really this: When do multiple premises for a certain conclusion fonn one argument for that conclusion and when do they form multiple arguments? Answer: Premises are dependent when the evidence they offer for their conclusion is more than (...) the ordinary sum of their probabilities. Ordinary sums are defined in the paper. (shrink)

How can we experience real emotions when viewing a movie or reading a novel or watching a play when we know the characters whose actions have this effect on us do not exist? This is a conundrum that has puzzled philosophers for a long time, and in this book Robert Yanal both canvasses previously proposed solutions to it and offers one of his own. First formulated by Samuel Johnson, the paradox received its most famous answer from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, (...) who advised his readers to engage in a "willing suspension of disbelief." More recently, philosophers have argued that we are irrational in emoting toward fiction, or that we do not emote toward fiction but rather toward factual counterparts, or that we do not have real but only quasi-emotion toward fiction, generated by our playing games of make-believe. All of these proposed solutions are critically reviewed. Finding these answers unsatisfactory, Yanal offers an alternative, providing a new version of what has been dubbed "thought theory." On this theory, mere thoughts not believed true are seen as the functional equivalent of belief at least insofar as stimulating emotion is concerned. The emoter's disbelief in the actuality of components of the thoughts must be rendered relatively inactive. Such emotion is real and typically has the character of being richly generated yet unconsummated. The book extends this theory also to resolving other paradoxes arising from emotional response to fiction: how we feel suspense over what comes next in a story even when we are re-reading it for a second or third time; and how we take pleasure in narratives, such as tragedy, that excite unpleasant emotions such as fear, pity, or horror. (shrink)

arratives, fictional and factual, commonly raise in their audience suspense. A narrative lays out over time a sequence of events; and because the events of the narrative are not completely told all at once, questions arise for the audience which will be answered only later in the narrative’s telling. Will the transfigured panther-woman pounce on her rival as she walks home alone at night, hearing strange noises around her? Will Sam and Annie ever make their date at the top of (...) the Empire State Building? And the most classic question of all, Who dunnit?, or as it appears in its post-modern form, Who will do it? ‘This is the story of a murder. It hasn’t happened yet. But it will,’ Martin Amis writes at the beginning of London Fields. ‘I know the murderer, I know the murderee,’ and we’re soon told that the murderee is to be Nicola Six.1 But who will kill her? And why? (shrink)

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Examines the skeptical arguments in David Hume's major work and analyzes the place of skepticism in his philosophy.

This first edition of this book was a broad study, drawing on a wide range of published research and historical evidence, of the enormous stock market boom that started around 1982 and picked up incredible speed after 1995. Although it took as its specific starting point this ongoing boom, it placed it in the context of stock market booms generally, and it also made concrete suggestions regarding policy changes that should be initiated in response to this and other such booms. (...) The book argued that the boom represents a speculative bubble, not grounded in sensible economic fundamentals. Part one of the book considered structural factors behind the boom. A list of twelve precipitating factors that appear to be its ultimate causes was given. Amplification mechanisms, naturally-occurring Ponzi processes, that enlarge the effects of these precipitating factors, were described. Part Two discussed cultural factors, the effects of the news media, and of "new era" economic thinking. Part Three discussed psychological factors, psychological anchors for the market and herd behavior. Part Four discussed attempts to rationalize exuberance: efficient markets theory and theories that investors are learning. Part Five presented policy options and actions that should be taken. The second edition, 2005, added an analysis of the real estate bubble as similar to the stock market bubble that preceded it, and warned that "Significant further rises in these markets could lead, eventually, to even more significant declines. The bad outcome could be that eventual declines would result in a substantial increase in the rate of personal bankruptcies, which could lead to a secondary string of bankruptcies of financial institutions as well. Another long-run consequence could be a decline in consumer and business confidence, and another, possibly worldwide, recession." Thus, the second edition of this book was among the first to warn of the global financial crisis that began with the subprime mortgage debacle in 2007. (shrink)

A prospective introduction -- The received view -- Troubles with the received view -- Are propositional attitudes relations? -- Foundations of a measurement-theoretic account of the attitudes -- The basic measurement-theoretic account -- Elaboration and explication of the proposed measurement-theoretic account.

This work, written from a neo-Pyrrhonian perspective, is an examination of contemporary theories of knowledge and justification. It takes ideas primarily found in Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism, restates them in a modern idiom, and then asks whether any contemporary theory of knowledge meets the challenges they raise. The first part, entitled "Gettier and the Problem of Knowledge," attempts to rescue our ordinary concept of knowledge from those philosophers who have assigned burdens to it that it cannot bear. Properly understood, (...) Fogelin shows that the concept of knowledge is unproblematic. The second part of this study, called "Agrippa and the Problem of Justification," examines Agrippa's contribution to Pyrrhonism, a systematic reduction of its procedures which came to be known as the "Five Modes Leading to the Suspension of Belief." These modes present a completely general procedure for refuting any claim a dogmatist might make. Though largely unnoticed, there is, according to Fogelin, an uncanny resemblance between problems posed by Agrippa's "Five Modes" and those that contemporary epistemologists address under the heading of a theory of justification. Fogelin examines the strongest contemporary theories of justification--in both foundationalist and anti-foundationalist forms. The conclusion is that recent philosophical writings on justification have made no significant progress in responding to the Pyrrhonian problems these writings have addressed. (shrink)

he first institutional theory of art is outlined in a 1964 essay by Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” which ruminates on the paradox that Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes is art though any of its perceptually indistinguishable twins—any stack of Brillo boxes in a grocery store—is not. Danto’s offers this solution to the paradox: “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.” Ultimately, though, it is “art (...) theory” that makes Warhol’s stack of silk screened plywood boxes into art. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Now in its Eighth Edition, UNDERSTANDING ARGUMENTS: AN INTRODUCTION TO INFORMAL LOGIC, 8th Edition. has proven itself to be an exceptional guide to understanding and constructing arguments in the context of students' academic studies as well as their subsequent professional careers. Its tried and true strengths include multiple approaches to the analysis of arguments; a thorough grounding on the uses of language in everyday discourse; and chapters in the latter half of the book that apply abstract concepts to concrete legal, (...) moral, and scientific issues. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version. (shrink)