Since the 1909 work of Carathéodory, formulations of thermodynamics have gained ground which highlight the role of the the binary relation of adiabatic accessibility between equilibrium states. A feature of Carathéodory's system is that the version therein of the second law contains an ambiguity about the nature of irreversible adiabatic processes, making it weaker than the traditional Kelvin-Planck statement of the law. This paper attempts first to clarify the nature of this ambiguity, by defining the arrow of time in thermodynamics (...) by way of the Equilibrium Principle. It then argues that the ambiguity reappears in the important 1999 axiomatisation due to Lieb and Yngvason. (shrink)

Having an agreed-upon definition of character education would be useful for both researchers and practitioners in the field. However, even experts in character education disagree on how they would define it. We attempted to achieve greater conceptual clarity on this issue through a prototype analysis in which the features perceived as most central to character education were identified. In Study 1 (N = 77), we asked character education experts to enumerate features of character education. Based on these lists, we identified (...) 30 features. In Study 2 (N = 101), experts assessed which features were central to character education through a categorization task. In Study 3 (N = 166), we assessed the extent of centrality using scalar items. We conclude by offering practical advice for the development of future character education studies and programs rooted in what is deemed central to such programs. (shrink)

Background and aims: Recent investigations have highlighted the value of neuropsychological testing for the assessment and screening of Alcohol-Related Brain Damage. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the suitability of the Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination and the Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status for this purpose. Methods: Comparing 28 participants with ARBD and 30 alcohol-dependent participants without ARBD we calculated Area Under the Curve statistics, sensitivity and specificity values, base-rate adjusted predictive values, and likelihood ratios for (...) both tests. Results: High levels of screening accuracy were found for the total scores of both the ACE-III and RBANS at multiple cut-off points. Removing participants with a history of polysubstance from the samples improved the diagnostic capabilities of the RBANS substantially, while only minor improvements to the ACE-III’s accuracy were observed. Conclusions: Overall, both the ACE-III and RBANS are suitable tools for ARBD screening within an alcohol-dependent population, though the RBANS is the superior of the two. Clinicians using these tools for ARBD screening should be cautious of false-positive outcomes and should therefore combine them with other assessment methods and more detailed neuropsychological testing before reaching diagnostic decisions. (shrink)

The VIA Classification of Character Strengths and Virtue has received substantial attention since its inception as a model of 24 dimensions of positive human functioning, but less so as a potential contributor to a psychological science on the nature of virtue. The current paper presents an overview of how this classification could serve to advance the science of virtue. Specifically, we summarize previous research on the dimensional versus categorical characterization of virtue, and on the identification of cardinal virtues. We give (...) particular attention to the three-dimensional model of cardinal virtues that includes moral, self-regulatory, and intellectual domains. We also discuss the possibility that these three clusters be treated as fundamental elements of a virtue model, meaning that they clearly and directly contribute to both individual and communal flourishing across various cultures. This discussion includes a summary of previous speculations about the evolution of adaptations underlying the human capacity for using behavioral repertoires associated with the three virtues, as well as discussing ways in which they simultaneously enhance community and individual, in the last case focusing particularly on evidence concerning mating potential. We then discuss the relationship between the evolutionary perspective on virtues and Aristotle’s concept of the reciprocity of the virtues. Finally, we provide speculations about the nature of practical wisdom. While accepting the potential value of future revisions to the VIA model, that model even under its current conditions has the potential to generate a number of intriguing and testable hypotheses about the nature of virtue. (shrink)

Over the past several decades, medical ethics has gained a solid foothold in medical education and is now a required course in most medical schools. Although the field of medical ethics is by nature eclectic, moral philosophy has played a dominant role in defining both the content of what is taught and the methodology for reasoning about ethical dilemmas. Most educators largely rely on the case‐based method for teaching ethics, grounding the ethical reasoning in an amalgam of theories drawn from (...) moral philosophy, including consequentialism, deontology, and principlism.In this article we hope to make a case for augmenting the focus of education in medical ethics. We propose complementing the traditional approach to medical ethics with a more embedded approach, one that has been described by others as “microethics,” the ethics of everyday clinical practice. (shrink)

Important features of the self-concept can be located outside of the individual and inside close or related others. The authors use this insight to reinterpret data previously said to support the empathy-altruism model of helping, which asserts that empathic concern for another results in selflessness and true altruism. That is, they argue that the conditions that lead to empathic concern also lead to a greater sense of self-other overlap, raising the possibility that helping under these conditions is not selfless but (...) is also directed toward the self. In 3 studies, the impact of empathic concern on willingness to help was eliminated when oneness--a measure of perceived self-other overlap--was considered. Path analyses revealed further that empathic concern increased helping only through its relation to perceived oneness, thereby throwing the empathy-altruism model into question. The authors suggest that empathic concern affects helping primarily as an emotional signal of oneness. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Despite sustained attention to ethical leadership in organizations, scholarship remains largely descriptive. This study employs an empirical approach to examine the consequences of ethical leadership on leader promotability. From a sample of ninety-six managers from two independent organizations, we found that ethical leaders were increasingly likely to be rated by their superior as exhibiting potential to reach senior leadership positions. However, leaders who displayed increased ethical leadership were no more likely to be viewed as promotable in the near-term compared to (...) those who displayed less ethical leadership. Our findings also show ethical culture and pressure to achieve results are important contextual factors that moderate the relationships between ethical leadership and leader promotability to senior leadership roles. (shrink)

The essays in this volume concern the points of intersection between analytic philosophy and the philosophy of the exact sciences. More precisely, it concern connections between knowledge in mathematics and the exact sciences, on the one hand, and the conceptual foundations of knowledge in general. Its guiding idea is that, in contemporary philosophy of science, there are profound problems of theoretical interpretation-- problems that transcend both the methodological concerns of general philosophy of science, and the technical concerns of philosophers of (...) particular sciences. A fruitful approach to these problems combines the study of scientific detail with the kind of conceptual analysis that is characteristic of the modern analytic tradition. Such an approach is shared by these contributors: some primarily known as analytic philosophers, some as philosophers of science, but all deeply aware that the problems of analysis and interpretation link these fields together. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Despite sustained attention to ethical leadership in organizations, scholarship remains largely descriptive. This study employs an empirical approach to examine the consequences of ethical leadership on leader promotability. From a sample of ninety-six managers from two independent organizations, we found that ethical leaders were increasingly likely to be rated by their superior as exhibiting potential to reach senior leadership positions. However, leaders who displayed increased ethical leadership were no more likely to be viewed as promotable in the near-term compared to (...) those who displayed less ethical leadership. Our findings also show ethical culture and pressure to achieve results are important contextual factors that moderate the relationships between ethical leadership and leader promotability to senior leadership roles. (shrink)

This new edition of Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy sets forth clearly, for the first time for the English reader, what Hegel actually said. These lectures challenged the antiquarianism of Hegel's contemporaries by boldly contending that the history of philosophy is itself philosophy, not just history. It portrays the journey of reason or spirit through time, as reason or spirit comes in stages to its full development and self-conscious existence, through the successive products of human intellect and activity. (...) These lectures proved to be extremely influential on the intellectual history of the past two centuries. They are crucial to understanding Hegel's own systematic philosophy in its constructive aspect, as well as his views on the centrality of reason in human history and culture. Volume I holds additional importance because, as well as setting out Hegel's discussion of the history of Chinese and Indian philosophy, it presents the interesting and significant changes that Hegel made to the stage-setting introduction to these lectures across the years from 1819 to 1831. This edition adapts the considerable editorial resources of the German edition that it translates, to the needs of the general reader as well as the serious scholar, so as to constitute an unparalleled resource on this topic in the English language. (shrink)

Newton's bucket, Einstein's elevator, Schrödinger's cat – these are some of the best-known examples of thought experiments in the natural sciences. But what function do these experiments perform? Are they really experiments at all? Can they help us gain a greater understanding of the natural world? How is it possible that we can learn new things just by thinking? In this revised and updated new edition of his classic text _The Laboratory of the Mind_, James Robert Brown continues (...) to defend apriorism in the physical world. This edition features two new chapters, one on “counter thought experiments” and another on the development of inertial motion. With plenty of illustrations and updated coverage of the debate between Platonic rationalism and classic empiricism, this is a lively and engaging contribution to the field of philosophy of science. (shrink)

The question of what we are doing when we give an explanation in terms of the agent's reasons for his behaviour is both familiar and complicated. The question I shall raise here, however, is somewhat more limited. It is that of what is involved in making use of such explanations once we have some cursory acquaintance with their structure. In particular, I wish to draw attention to some relations between explanations in terms of intended goals and relations in terms of (...) the agent's reasons for an act. (shrink)

Somatic mutations arising in human skin cancers are heterogeneously distributed across the genome, meaning that certain genomic regions (e.g., heterochromatin or transcription factor binding sites) have much higher mutation densities than others. Regional variations in mutation rates are typically not a consequence of selection, as the vast majority of somatic mutations in skin cancers are passenger mutations that do not promote cell growth or transformation. Instead, variations in DNA repair activity, due to chromatin organization and transcription factor binding, have been (...) proposed to be a primary driver of mutational heterogeneity in melanoma. However, as discussed in this review here, recent studies indicate that chromatin organization and transcription factor binding also significantly modulate the rate at which UV lesions form in DNA. The authors propose that local variations in lesion susceptibility may be an important driver of mutational hotspots in melanoma and other skin cancers, particularly at binding sites for ETS transcription factors. (shrink)

Recent stories of corporate insiders avoiding losses and, in some cases, generating enormous personal profits as their companies crumbled have led investors to question the integrity of American business and the fairness of the United States stock markets. The SEC tries to ensure the fairness of the stock markets by making and enforcing laws against unfair practices such as insider trading. In the United States, when insiders trade stock based on non-public information, they have broken the law and betrayed the (...) trust that has been placed in them.This study used student subjects to test the relationship between the likelihood of trading based on insider information and subjective probabilities of deterrents and motivations for insider trading. Expected gain, guilt, cynicism, and fairness of laws were the determinants that had a significant relationship with the intent to trade based on insider information. This study also found support for prospect theory with regard to insider trading. The results indicate that subjects are more likely to trade based on insider information to avoid a loss than to achieve an abnormal gain. The study also finds evidence of social desirability response bias. (shrink)

This study examines the potential effects of unethically perceived advertising executionson consumer responses to the ad. The study found that the unethical perceptions of the advertisement shown significantly and negatively affected all advertising response variables examined in the study.

In his long-awaited new edition of Philosophy of Mathematics, James Robert Brown tackles important new as well as enduring questions in the mathematical sciences. Can pictures go beyond being merely suggestive and actually prove anything? Are mathematical results certain? Are experiments of any real value?" "This clear and engaging book takes a unique approach, encompassing nonstandard topics such as the role of visual reasoning, the importance of notation, and the place of computers in mathematics, as well as traditional (...) topics such as formalism, Platonism, and constructivism. The combination of topics and clarity of presentation make it suitable for beginners and experts alike. The revised and updated second edition of Philosophy of Mathematics contains more examples, suggestions for further reading, and expanded material on several topics including a novel approach to the continuum hypothesis."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

Over the past 50 years, postmodernism has been a progressively growing and influential intellectual movement inside and outside the academy. Postmodernism is characterised by rejection of parts or the whole of the Enlightenment project that had its roots in the birth and embrace of early modern science. While Enlightenment and ‘modernist’ ideas of universalism, of intellectual and cultural progress, of the possibility of finding truths about the natural and social world and of rejection of absolutism and authoritarianism in politics, philosophy (...) and religion were first opposed at their birth in the eighteenth century, contemporary postmodernism sometimes appeals to (and sometimes disdains) philosophy of science in support of its rejection of modernism and the enlightenment programme. (shrink)

This eye-opening book reveals how little we've understood about the ongoing pitched battles between the sciences and the humanities--and how much may be at ...

THE SOCIOLOGICAL TURN The problem we are concerned with is just this: How should we understand science? Are we to account for scientific knowledge (or ...

Museum education is a complex and specialized endeavour, even more so when involving partnerships with schools. In this paper, we engage with theories that support understanding of museum-educator pedagogies. Dewey's notion of occupations is explored as offering a better theorization of pedagogical possibilities than that available through ideas associated with identity. Museum-educator pedagogies shape occupations, as the coherence of interest-purpose-meaning. Such shaping is not a purely individual human action, as occupations are social and material, as being-in-the-world. Heidegger's phenomenological understanding of (...) the working of art, critiqued by Schapiro, enables further comprehension of this pedagogical working. Both theories together provide insights into museum-educator pedagogies as expressive of the always challenging art of education. (shrink)

This study addresses a central theme in current philosophy: Platonism vs Naturalism and provides accounts of both approaches to mathematics, crucially discussing Quine, Maddy, Kitcher, Lakoff, Colyvan, and many others. Beginning with accounts of both approaches, Brown defends Platonism by arguing that only a Platonistic approach can account for concept acquisition in a number of special cases in the sciences. He also argues for a particular view of applied mathematics, a view that supports Platonism against Naturalist alternatives. Not only (...) does this engaging book present the Platonist-Naturalist debate over mathematics in a comprehensive fashion, but it also sheds considerable light on non-mathematical aspects of a dispute that is central to contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

_Philosophy of Mathematics_ is an excellent introductory text. This student friendly book discusses the great philosophers and the importance of mathematics to their thought. It includes the following topics: * the mathematical image * platonism * picture-proofs * applied mathematics * Hilbert and Godel * knots and nations * definitions * picture-proofs and Wittgenstein * computation, proof and conjecture. The book is ideal for courses on philosophy of mathematics and logic.