This manuscript proposes that tax avoidance can be better understood and mitigated as a sustainability problem. Tax avoidance is not just a financial problem for tax authorities, but one that erodes critical common spaces necessary for the smooth functioning of regulatory compliance, organizational integrity, and society. Defining tax avoidance as a sustainability problem offers a broader and more holistic understanding of the organizational and societal consequences of tax avoidance behavior. Sustainability is also a mature and legitimized concept that can readily (...) incorporate taxation. A variety of established sustainability metrics have the capacity to incorporate anti-tax avoidance measures or publicize firms that engage in fair tax practices. This manuscript concludes that integrating sustainability principles, in conjunction with important extant work on corporate social responsibility and taxation, can advance the goals of decreasing the occurrence and acceptability of tax avoidance. (shrink)

Subjective experience suggests that we continuously observe, perceive, and evaluate the environment as we make decisions and intentional actions. The percept of continuity of our cognition, however, is an illusion. In the past decades, ample experimental evidence has been accumulated indicating that cognition evolves through a sequence of discontinuities and transients, and there are discernable neural processes correlating with the cognitive sequences. These discontinuities are crucial in the intentional action-perception cycle, as they mark the cognitive 'aha' moment of deep understanding (...) and conscious insight. Walter Freeman developed a hierarchical model to describe these physiological findings, culminating in the cinematic theory of cognition. Following the traditions of metastability, transient neurodynamics, and brain chaos, discontinuities are described as phase transitions in the cortical neuropil. This approach not only leads to deep theoretical insights of neural correlates of cognition and consciousness, but it also helps to form a conceptual framework to create artificially intelligent devices that are in harmony with humans and serve peaceful development of humanity. (shrink)

In a recent essay, Jerrold Levinson defends his version of hypothetical intentionalism, which is a theory of literary interpretation, from two criticisms. The first, argued by Stephen Davies, is that it is equivalent to the value-maximizing view. The second, argued by Robert Stecker, is that there are straightforward counterexamples to HI. We will argue that Levinson does not successfully fend off either criticism, and further, that in the process of attempting to do so, creates another dilemma for his view.

Resolution of quarrels arising from conflicting sacred values, as in the Middle East, may require concessions that acknowledge the opposition's core concerns.

A Scientific Approach The facts detailed in this briefing are the results of scientific exploration of terror networks and sacred values and their association to political violence. The research is sponsored by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.

Animals navigate through three-dimensional environments, but we argue that the way they encode three-dimensional spatial information is shaped by how they use the vertical component of space. We agree with Jeffery et al. that the representation of three-dimensional space in vertebrates is probably bicoded (with separation of the plane of locomotion and its orthogonal axis), but we believe that their suggestion that the vertical axis is stored (that is, not containing distance or direction metrics usable for novel computations) is unlikely, (...) and as yet unsupported. We describe potential experimental protocols that could clarify these differences in opinion empirically. (shrink)

The Seraphic Doctrine: love and knowledge in the Dionysian hierarchy -- Affect, cognition, and the natural motion of the will -- Elemental motion and the force of union -- Hierarchy and excess in the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum -- The exemplary bodies of the Legenda Maior.

As modern foreign policy and international relations encompass more and more scientific issues, we are moving towards a new type of diplomacy, known as "Science Diplomacy." Will this new diplomacy of the 21st century prove to be more effective than past diplomacy for the big issues facing the world, such as climate change, food and water insecurity, diminishing biodiversity, pandemic disease, public health, genomics or environmental collapse, mineral exploitation, health and international scientific endeavours such as those in the space and (...) the Antarctic? Providing a new area of academic focus that has only gathered momentum in the last few years, this book considers these questions by bringing together a distinguished team of international specialists to look at various facets of how diplomacy and science are influenced by each other. The book not only dissects the ways that politics, science and diplomacy have become intertwined, but also highlights how the world's seemingly most intractable problems can be tackled with international collaboration and diplomacy that is rooted in science, and driven by technology. It, therefore, challenges the conventional wisdom concerning the juxtaposition of science and the world of diplomacy. (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)

In the critical assessment of the rise of what Jameson has termed the modern centred subject … the lived experience of individual consciousness as a monadic and autonomous centre of activity, significant attention has been devoted to the impact of the institutions of the late eighteenth century ‘bourgeois cultural revolution’ such as the family and the school. Less consideration has been given in this history of regulated subjectivity to the emergence within key centres of cultural production of the discourse of (...) maternity and its lasting consequences for the understanding and representation of the mother–child bond as a matrix of both affectional relations and infant development. The late eighteenth century reconfiguration of the family as, in Jameson's words a private space within the nascent public sphere of bourgeois society intensified the ‘separation of the spheres’ begun in the early modern period and further formalised the zoning of the domestic experience as the defining site of emotional specialisation and individual growth. In the culture of early romanticism, this differentiation of domestic roles elevated children as the primary objects of a new regime of intergenerational care, replacing disciplinary control with intimate nurture and valorising a particular construction of motherhood as the ethical base of domestic piety and social stability beyond even the semantic reach of reason. Understanding the cultural processes by which this important ideological shift reshaped the paradigm of parent–child relations in industrial society – radiating beyond the realm of the family into the wider systems of childcare and education – enables us better to discern its continuing influence on perceptions of family life and motherhood today and to critically evaluate its potential contribution to changing conceptions of the place of the family in contemporary democratic society. (shrink)

The principles of the 3Rs—replacement, refinement, and reduction—strongly shape discussion of methods for performing more humane animal research and the regulation of this contested area of technoscience. This special issue looks back to the origins of the 3Rs principles through five papers that explore how it is enacted and challenged in practice and that develop critical considerations about its future. Three themes connect the papers in this special issue. These are the multiplicity of roles enacted by those who use and (...) care for animals in research, the distribution of “feelings that matter” across species and spaces of laboratory animal practice, and the growing importance of “cultures of care” in animal research. (shrink)

Five symposia from the 25th annual Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy focus on cognitive suicide, the explanatory role of content, Cartesian error and the objectivity of perception, social content and psychological content, and belief attribution and context.

This essay offers an extensive rehabilitation and reappraisal of the concept of childhood innocence as a means of testing the boundaries of some prevailing constructions of childhood. It excavates in detail some of the lost histories of innocence in order to show that these are more diverse and more complex than established and pejorative assessments of them conventionally suggest. Recovering, in particular, the forgotten pedigree of the Romantic account of the innocence of childhood underlines its depth and furnishes an enriched (...) understanding of its critical role in the coming of mass education––both as a catalyst of social change and as an alternative measure of the child-centeredness of the institutions of public education. Now largely and residually confined to the inheritance of nursery education, the concept of childhood innocence, and the wider Romantic project of which it is an element, can help question the assumptions underpinning modern, competence-centred philosophies of childhood. (shrink)

Sober (1992) has recently evaluated Brandon's (1982, 1990; see also 1985, 1988) use of Salmon's (1971) concept of screening-off in the philosophy of biology. He critiques three particular issues, each of which will be considered in this discussion.

George Will, the well-known pundit, once observed: “A society's recreation is charged with moral significance. Sport—and a society that takes it seriously—would be debased if it did not strictly forbid things that blur the distinction between the triumph of character and the triumph of chemistry.” In opposition, Dan Duchaine, the highly publicized “steroid guru” and counter-culture columnist, declared: “There comes a time for many in competitive athletics where winning is more important than those initial goals of health, recreation, and relaxation.” (...) The parallels of these two philosophies to life in general are patent simply by substituting “sports” and “winning” for “career” and “success,” respectively.This paper will review the basis for banning anabolic steroids in athletics, and consider especially the recent medical findings that support this prohibition. This survey leads into a discussion of the available deterrents, and the secondary, but essential, role of random drug testing as a final safeguard. (shrink)

George Will, the well-known pundit, once observed: “A society's recreation is charged with moral significance. Sport—and a society that takes it seriously—would be debased if it did not strictly forbid things that blur the distinction between the triumph of character and the triumph of chemistry.” In opposition, Dan Duchaine, the highly publicized “steroid guru” and counter-culture columnist, declared: “There comes a time for many in competitive athletics where winning is more important than those initial goals of health, recreation, and relaxation.” (...) The parallels of these two philosophies to life in general are patent simply by substituting “sports” and “winning” for “career” and “success,” respectively.This paper will review the basis for banning anabolic steroids in athletics, and consider especially the recent medical findings that support this prohibition. This survey leads into a discussion of the available deterrents, and the secondary, but essential, role of random drug testing as a final safeguard. (shrink)

We analyze the effects of uncertainty on WTA, WTP and the WTA–WTP gap. Extending the approach of Weber (Econom Lett 80:311–315, 2003) to the case of lotteries, we develop an exact expression for the WTA–WTP gap that allows identification of its magnitude under different utility specifications. Reinterpreting and extending results by Gabillon(Econom Lett 116:157–160, 2012), we also identify generally the relationship between an agent’s utility of income and the gap’s algebraic sign, as well as the effects of risk increases on (...) WTA and WTP. Finally, we derive the limit behavior of the gap as income or risk increase. (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)

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)

The essays included in this volume are concerned with assessing Newton's contribution to the thought of others. They explore all aspects of the conceptual background-historical, philosophical, and narrowly methodological-and examine questions that developed in the wake of Newton's science.

Seeking to preserve electronically encoded evidence implies that an incident or event has occurred requiring fact extrapolation for presentation, as proof of an irregularity or illegal act. Whether target data are in transit or at rest, it is critical that measures be in place to prevent the sought information from being destroyed, corrupted or becoming unavailable for forensic investigation.

Learning to map words onto their referents is difficult, because there are multiple possibilities for forming these mappings. Cross-situational learning studies have shown that word-object mappings can be learned across multiple situations, as can verbs when presented in a syntactic context. However, these previous studies have presented either nouns or verbs in ambiguous contexts and thus bypass much of the complexity of multiple grammatical categories in speech. We show that noun word learning in adults is robust when objects are moving, (...) and that verbs can also be learned from similar scenes without additional syntactic information. Furthermore, we show that both nouns and verbs can be acquired simultaneously, thus resolving category-level as well as individual word-level ambiguity. However, nouns were learned more quickly than verbs, and we discuss this in light of previous studies investigating the noun advantage in word learning. (shrink)

The moral potential of works of art, for good or ill, has been recognised from philosophical antiquity: on the assumption that the moral effects of art are invariably negative, Plato advised the exclusion of artists from any rationally ordered state. Arguably, however, the problem of the moral status of art has become yet more acute in contexts of post-Romantic and other modern artistic exploration of moral ambiguity, and even of some apparent contemporary celebration of the immoral and amoral. Indeed, some (...) tension between commitment to liberal-democratic openness and freedom, on the one hand, and fear about the potential literary and artistic corruption of the young, on the other, is evident in latter-day moralistic trends in children’s literature. However, in the light of some basic exploration of conceptual relationships between the artistic, the aesthetic and the moral, this paper argues that such moralising trends in particular and arguments for artistic censorship in general are mostly wrongheaded and unsustainable. (shrink)

The moral potential of works of art, for good or ill, has been recognised from philosophical antiquity: on the assumption that the moral effects of art are invariably negative, Plato advised the exclusion of artists from any rationally ordered state. Arguably, however, the problem of the moral status of art has become yet more acute in contexts of post-Romantic and other modern artistic exploration of moral ambiguity, and even of some apparent contemporary celebration of the immoral and amoral. Indeed, some (...) tension between commitment to liberal-democratic openness and freedom, on the one hand, and fear about the potential literary and artistic corruption of the young, on the other, is evident in latter-day moralistic trends in children’s literature. However, in the light of some basic exploration of conceptual relationships between the artistic, the aesthetic and the moral, this paper argues that such moralising trends in particular and arguments for artistic censorship in general are mostly wrongheaded and unsustainable. (shrink)

The current ethical norms of genomic biobanking creating and maintaining large repositories of human DNA and/or associated data for biomedical research have generated criticism from every angle, at both the practical and theoretical levels. The traditional research model has involved investigators seeking biospecimens for specific purposes that they can describe and disclose to prospective subjects, from whom they can then seek informed consent. In the case of many biobanks, however, the institution that collects and maintains the biospecimens may not itself (...) be directly involved in research, instead banking the biospecimens and associated data for other researchers. Moreover, the future uses of biospecimens may be unknown, if not unknowable, at the time of collection. Biobanking may thus stretch the meanings of inform and consent to their breaking point: if you cannot inform subjects about what their biospecimens will be used for, what can they consent to? Given that informed consent by individual subjects is the ethical gold standard, the seeming dilution of the concept in the context of biobanking is a profound problem. (shrink)