A collection of 37 essays surveying the state of the art on metaphysical ground. -/- Essay authors are: Fatema Amijee, Ricki Bliss, Amanda Bryant, Margaret Cameron, Phil Corkum, Fabrice Correia, Louis deRosset, Scott Dixon, Tom Donaldson, Nina Emery, Kit Fine, Martin Glazier, Kathrin Koslicki, David Mark Kovacs, Stephan Krämer, Stephanie Leary, Stephan Leuenberger, Jon Litland, Marko Malink, Michaela McSweeney, Kevin Mulligan, Alyssa Ney, Asya Passinsky, Francesca Poggiolesi, Kevin Richardson, Stefan Roski, Noel Saenz, Benjamin Schnieder, Erica Shumener, Alexander Skiles, Olla (...) Solomyak, Tuomas Tahko, Naomi Thompson, Kelly Trogdon, Jennifer Wang, Tobias Wilsch, and Justin Zylstra. (shrink)

The traditional emphasis on the physics of the very small is questioned, and the suggestion made that a crucial test of contributions to the philosophy of science ought to be their applicability to areas which are more representative of the scientific enterprise. Life science is cited as just such an area. It is quantum physics, rather than biology, which nurtures anti-realism. The most respected anti-realism today is that provided by Bas C van Fraassen; and the persuasiveness of his "Constructive Empiricism" (...) is attested to by the failure of avowed realists, such as Ian Hacking, to distance themselves very far from van Fraassen's ideas. A detailed critique of van Fraassen is presented with particular attention paid to his ideas on scientific explanation - the question of whether good explanations are true explanations being one which tends to divide realist and anti-realist. The conclusion is reached that, while realism raises - and fails to answer - a number of philosophical questions, the anti-realism provided by Bas van Fraassen is no better at answering those questions. Moreover, it is argued, van Fraassen's ideas lack plausibility as a description of science and the attitudes of scientists - particularly when attention is shifted from physics to biology. Finally, a number of suggestions are made as to how the philosophical questions posed by realism might be answered in the future. (shrink)

This collection of new papers on Scottish philosophy in the age of Hutcheson and Hume pays close attention to the study of context and the use of original historical sources as a key to philosophical interpretation. The book includes revolutionary new research on Hume's early reading in science and religion and its impact of his thought.

Presenting significant new research on the moral and religious philosophy of David Hume, this volume illustrates the importance of intellectual context in understanding the work and career of one of the most important thinkers of the eighteenth century. Distinctive in its reappraisal of the influence of John Locke, Francis Hutcheson, and others, it examines how Hume reacted to, and in turn affected, other thinkers whose views, like his own, were bound up with specific philosophical, theological, and scientific traditions and commitments. (...) This volume also publishes for the first time in facsimile form the newly discovered fragment on evil. (shrink)

Investigating key issues in English philosophical, political, and religious thought in the second half of the seventeenth century, this book presents a set of new and intriguing essays on the topics. Particular emphasis is given to the interaction between philosophy and religion among leading political thinkers of the period; connections between philosophical debate on personhood, certainty, and the foundations of faith; and new conceptions of biblical exegesis.

This is a collection of new, specially written essays on the flowering of modern philosophy on the continent of Europe. The eight leading contributors focus on the work of Descartes, later Cartesians, Leibniz, and Bayle, reassessing the influence of Augustine on Descartes and of the Reformed tradition on Leibniz, and tracing anticipations of Leibniz's monadology in the cabbalistic notions of van Helmont, the preformationist theories of Malebranche, and the experimental work of Dutch microscopists.

Since 1999 Thoemmes Press (now Thoemmes Continuum) has been engaged in a large-scale programme of biographical dictionaries of philosophy and related subjects. This volume on Irish philosophers follows the standard format of arranging entires alphabetically by thinker. It includes two forms of entry: (1) entries reproduced from previous editions of Thoemmes encyclopedias of British philosophy and (2) wholly new entries on early (renaissance-period) and_ modern (20th century) philosophers, together with some new entries on the intervening centuries. >.

As part of a European Erasmus Plus project entitled Death Education for Palliative Psychology, this study assessed the ways in which Master’s Degree students in psychology and the creative arts therapies self-rated their confidence and interest in death education and palliative and bereavement care. In five countries (Austria, Israel, Italy, Poland, Romania), 344 students completed an online questionnaire, and 37 students were interviewed to better understand their views, interest, and confidence. The results revealed some significant differences between countries, and showed (...) that older respondents with previous experience as formal caregivers for end-of-life clients showed greater interest in obtaining practical clinical competence in these fields. A mediation analysis indicated that students’ previous care experiences and past loss experiences were related to students’ current interest in death education and palliative and bereavement care through the mediation of their sense of confidence in this field. The qualitative findings identified five shared themes: life and death, learning about death, the psychological burden, personal experience and robust training, and four key training needs. Overall, students’ interest in studying and working with terminal illness and death are rooted in internal resources, a preliminary sense of confidence, but also external requirements. (shrink)

This study was designed as an action research aimed to help students to elaborate their feelings of traumatic grief, due to a car accident and a suicide of two of their classmates, in an Italian high school. A death education project was realized in order to prevent the Werther effect. The intervention was based on psychodramatic techniques and meditation with Tibetan bells to encourage reflection on the suffering of traumatic loss, the sense of life, and their future. A total of (...) 89 students from four classes participated in the study, among which 82 completed the pre- and post-test survey. The intervention consisted of eight 2-h meetings, during which the themes of death and loss were dealt with through theoretical discussions, dramatization, and meditation. Two other classes which participated in the assessment as a control group did not attend the activities. The following instruments were used: Death Attitude Profile-Revised, which measures individual attitudes toward death; Psychological Well-being Scale, which measures a person’s psychological well-being; Resilience Scale for Adolescents, which measures the construct of resilience in adolescents; Self-Transcendence Scale, which measures self-transcendence; and Testoni Death Representation Scale, which measures the ontological representations of death. The results demonstrated that in the experimental group, there was a reduction in the fear of death and its avoidance, and that the students normalized the representation of death as something natural, thus improving their well-being. It is consequently possible to say that well-being is not simply the absence of suffering and worries, but rather, is rooted in the possibility of thinking of creative solutions to the trauma. (shrink)

Originally conceptualized by Bandura as the process of cognitive restructuring that allows individuals to disassociate with their internal moral standards and behave unethically without feeling distress, moral disengagement has attracted the attention of management researchers in recent years. An increasing body of research has examined the factors which lead people to morally disengage and its related outcomes in the workplace. However, the conceptualization of moral disengagement, how it should be measured, the manner in which it develops, and its influence on (...) work outcomes are areas of continued debate among researchers. In this article, we undertake a systematic review of research on moral disengagement in the workplace and develop a comprehensive research agenda that highlights opportunities for theoretical and empirical advancement of the literature. (shrink)

The first part of this paper argues that if Craver’s ([2007a], [2007b]) popular mutual manipulability account (MM) of mechanistic constitution is embedded within Woodward’s ([2003]) interventionist theory of causation--for which it is explicitly designed--it either undermines the mechanistic research paradigm by entailing that there do not exist relationships of constitutive relevance or it gives rise to the unwanted consequence that constitution is a form of causation. The second part shows how Woodward’s theory can be adapted in such a way that (...) (MM) neither undermines the mechanistic paradigm nor reduces constitution to causation. However, it turns out that this modified theoretical embedding of (MM) makes it impossible to produce empirical evidence for constitutive relations. The paper ends by suggesting an additional criterion, the fat-handedness criterion, which, when combined with (MM), generates indirect empirical evidence for constitutive relevance. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging conversation, Michael Hardt reflects on recent transformations within Empire. Several unique themes emerge concerning power and pedagogy as they intersect with subjectivity and global crisis. Drawing on the common in conjunction with the tradition of love in education uncovers a different path that attends to today’s real political, ecological, and social needs. Finally, a focus on collectivity points to a possible strategy—collective intellectuality—for educators to revise traditional notions of leadership to encourage more ethical, democratic, and sustainable (...) futures. Yet, what this looks like in practice remains for us to imagine. (shrink)

In this article, the co-editors of the Leadership and Ethics: Quantitative Analysis section of the journal outline some of the key issues about conducting quantitative research at the intersection of business, ethics, and leadership. They offer guidance for authors by explaining the types of papers that are often rejected and how to avoid some common pitfalls that lead to rejection. They also offer some ideas for future research by drawing upon the opinions of four noted experts in the field to (...) consider the types of research questions we should be asking, the types of theory we should be building, the types of models we should be testing, and the types of methods we should be using. (shrink)

We use the apparatus of the canonical formulas introduced by Zakharyaschev [10] to prove that all finitely axiomatizable normal modal logics containing K4.3 are decidable, though possibly not characterized by classes of finite frames. Our method is purely frame-theoretic. Roughly, given a normal logic L above K4.3, we enumerate effectively a class of frames with respect to which L is complete, show how to check effectively whether a frame in the class validates a given formula, and then apply a Harropstyle (...) argument to establish the decidability of L, provided of course that it has finitely many axioms. (shrink)

Joint attention is a social-cognitive phenomenon in which two or more agents direct their attention together towards the same object. Definitions range from this rather broad conception to more specific definitions which require that, in addition, attention be directed to the same aspect of that object and that agents need to be mutually aware of their jointly attending. Joint attention is an important coordination mechanism in joint action. The capacity for engaging in joint attention, in particular in the sense of (...) this narrower definition, is frequently taken to indicate the presence of theory of mind in the participating agents, and is also implicated in the development of theory of mind. However, the prominence of sensorimotor components in establishing and sustaining episodes of joint attention — e.g., eye and head movements, pointing and vocalizations — suggests that sensorimotor approaches to social interaction may be well-placed to account for important parts of joint attention without invoking theory-of-mind abilities, and may therefore provide a valuable alternative to approaches emphasizing theory of mind. In particular, sensorimotor accounts may explain aspects of joint attention through the dynamics and regularities in the sensorimotor processes that coordinate the activities of the agents. (shrink)

The formal theory of the Model of Hierarchical Complexity is presented. Complexity theories generally exclude the concept of hierarchical complexity; Developmental Psychology has included it for over 20 years. It also applies to social systems and non-human systems. Formal axioms for the Model are outlined. The model assigns an order of hierarchical complexity to every task, using natural numbers, establishing a quantal notion of stage and stages of performance. This formalizes properties of stage theories in psychology. The formal theory of (...) the model enables extending the concept of hierarchical complexity to any field where tasks and their performances exist. (shrink)

This paper is a survey of results concerning embeddings of intuitionistic propositional logic and its extensions into various classical modal systems.

A major theme of the European Enlightenment was the rationalization of value, the use of reason to determine the value of things, from diamonds to civilizations. This view of the Enlightenment is well-established in the human sciences. It is ripe for extension to the natural sciences, given the rich recent literature on affect, evaluation, and subjectivity in early modern science. Meanwhile, in art history, the new history of connoisseurship provides a model for the historical study of the evaluation of material (...) things. Historians of natural history have already noted the connections between science, Enlightenment, and connoisseurship. The time has come to extend their insights to other areas of Enlightenment science. This means recognizing the breadth of connoisseurship – the social, linguistic, and disciplinary diversity of the practice – as understood in Europe in the eighteenth century and the latter part of the seventeenth century. An outline of the three papers in this special section gives an indication of how this historiographical project might be carried out. (shrink)

This paper is a survey of results concerning the disjunction property, Halldén-completeness, and other related properties of intermediate prepositional logics and normal modal logics containing S4.

Preview: 2020, the year the coronavirus pandemic spread globally, marked the twenty-fifth year since the publication of Pierre Hadot’s work Philosophy as a Way of Life. In that time, what began as the research specialization of just a few scholars has become a growing area of philosophical and metaphilosophical inquiry, bringing together researchers from around the globe. Hadot’s key ideas of spiritual exercises, and the very idea of PWL, have been applied to a host of individual thinkers from across the (...) history of philosophy: from the Hellenistic and Roman-era philosophers of direct concern to Hadot, through renaissance thinkers like Petrarch, Lipsius, Montaigne, Descartes, or Bacon, into nineteenth-century thinkers led by Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.In more recent years, more global reflections on the “very idea” of PWL have begun to emerge, as well as dedicated journal editions. In these more recent PWL studies, some of the manifold research questions have begun to be explored, which were opened up by the studies of Pierre and Ilsetraut Hadot, as well as its reception in Michel Foucault’s later work. What implications, after all, does understanding the history of PWL, and the predominance of this metaphilosophical conception in the history of Western thought, have for how we understand the practice of philosophy today? Does recovering the alternative understandings of philosophy as a practice in history necessarily lead to a criticism of contemporary, solely academic or theoretical modes of philosophizing, or is the idea of PWL one which has only historiographical force? (shrink)

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China;There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds– Gregory Bateson (1972, p. 492)While there are classical anteced...

Previous research has established that goal tracking emerges early in the first year of life and rapidly becomes increasingly sophisticated. However, it has not yet been shown whether young children continue to update their representations of others’ goals over time. The current study investigates this by probing young children’s ability to differentiate between goal directed actions that have been halted because the goal was interrupted, and because the goal was abandoned. To test whether children are sensitive to this distinction, we (...) manipulated the experimenter’s reason for not completing a goal-directed action - his initial goal is either interrupted by an obstacle, or it is abandoned in favour of an alternative. We measure whether children’s helping behaviour is sensitive to the experimenter’s reason for not completing his goal-directed action by recording whether they complete the experimenter’s initial goal or the alternative goal. The results showed that children helped complete the experimenter’s initial goal significantly more often after this goal had been interrupted than after it had been abandoned. These results support the hypothesis that children continue to update their representations of others’ goals over time by the age of two, and specifically that they differentiate between abandoned and interrupted goals. (shrink)

In Cultivating Citizens Dwight Allman and Michael Beaty bring together some of America's leading social and political thinkers to address the question of civic vitality in contemporary American society. The resulting volume is a serious reflection on the history of civil society and a rich and rewarding conversation about the future American civic order.

Diese Publikation handelt von der Beziehung zwischen dem Staat und dem Islam im allgemein-politischen und im schulischen Kontext, wobei der Islam neben anderen islamischen Institutionen in erster Linie von der Islamischen Glaubensgemeinschaft in Österreich (IGGÖ) vertreten wird. Der IGGÖ - ebenso wie anderen Kirchen und Religionsgesellschaften (KuR) - werden im österreichischen Religionsrechtssystem weitreichende Autonomierechte eingeräumt, vor allem in der Schule in Form eines konfessionellen Religionsunterrichts (RU). Zur Erforschung dieser Beziehung in der Schule wird ein rechts- und politikwissenschaftlicher Blick auf die (...) rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen und die soziale Wirklichkeit des Islams und des RU der IGGÖ (IRU) in Wiener Mittelschulen geworfen. Konsequenterweise wird auch auf die verschiedenen involvierten Akteur*innen geblickt, insb. auf muslimische Schüler*innen und Eltern, Religionslehrer*innen, Fachinspektor*innen und sonstige Autoritäten der IGGÖ sowie Schuldirektor*innen, Bildungsdirektionen und das Bildungsministerium. Dafür wurden im Rahmen einer qualitativen Sozialforschung sieben (Schul-)Autoritäten der IGGÖ (IGGÖ-SA) als 'Vertreter*innen des Islams' und sechs Wiener Mittelschuldirektor*innen (MSD) als 'staatliche Vertreter*innen' interviewt. Die Interviews verfolgten drei Zwecke: 1) die Ergründung negativer rechtlicher, politischer, gesellschaftlicher und religionsgesellschaftlicher Einflussfaktoren auf die allgemeine Beziehung zwischen dem Staat und dem Islam bzw. der IGGÖ (und den Muslim*innen); 2) die Erhebung von Herausforderungen, Spannungen und Konflikten sowie Idealvorstellungen in der schulpolitischen, -bürokratischen, -organisatorischen, individuellen und korporativen Beziehungsdimension, sowie 3) die Erforschung von persönlichen Einstellungen und Haltungen von IGGÖ-SA und MSD zum Islam und dem IRU in der Schule sowie - vonseiten der IGGÖ-SA - zum Staat und der Gesellschaft. Während der dritte Zweck in dieser Publikation nur eine untergeordnete Rolle einnimmt, liegt das Hauptaugenmerk auf den abstrahierten Spannungsfeldern des 'gelebten Rechts' im Sinne der sozialen Wirklichkeit in den entsprechenden Beziehungsdimensionen, die in einer rechtssoziologischen Analyse dem normativem Recht gegenübergestellt und entlang idealtypischer Einstellungen und Haltungen auf Ursachen, Wirkungen und Lösungen untersucht werden. Die Analysethemen umfassen mitunter die Einbeziehung von Fachinspektor*innen für Religion in die Bildungsdirektionen, den Streit über die Abkürzung der IGGÖ für die Eintragung in Zeugnisse, die Schwierigkeiten in der Organisation mit dem RU, das (religiöse) Verhalten muslimischer Schüler*innen und Eltern in der Schule sowie die Grenzen der Lehre im IRU im Rahmen der staatsbürgerlichen Erziehung. Diesbezügliche Idealvorstellungen zu den Herausforderungen ermöglichen abschließend aus einer sozialintegrativen und pluralistischer Perspektive der IGGÖ-SA die Konturierung eines Österreichischen Islams bzw. eines idealtypischen IRU. (shrink)

Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Al- though these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence (...) moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms rather than inherent features of human moral judgment. (shrink)

Der Aachener Physiker Michael Krämer sucht am Genfer Teilchenbeschleuniger LHC nach neuen Naturgesetzen. Ein Gespräch über die aufwändige Suche nach Erkenntnis, den Wert philosophischen Reflektierens und die größten offenen Fragen der Physik.

Research on escalation of commitment has predominantly been studied in the context of a single decision without consideration for the psychological consequences of escalating. This study sought to examine a) the extent to which people escalate their commitment to a failing course of action in a sequential decision-making task, b) confidence and anger as psychological consequences of escalation of commitment, and c) the reciprocal relationship between escalation of commitment and confidence and anger. Participants were 110 undergraduate students who completed a (...) series of investment decisions regarding a failing endeavor. Results revealed that although a high proportion of individuals escalate through all decisions, the extent to which they escalated decreased with each decision as they were less willing to invest money in the project. Furthermore, as participants escalated, confidence in one’s decision decreased and anger increased. Lastly, the analyses revealed that the relationship between escalation and confidence is reciprocal. Escalation was negatively associated with confidence, and confidence predicted escalation in the subsequent decision. These results highlight the importance of considering both the determinants and psychological consequences of escalation of commitment. (shrink)

A considerable body of research has documented the emergence of what appears to be instrumental helping behavior in early childhood. The current study tested the hypothesis that one basic psychological mechanism motivating this behavior is a preference for completing unfinished actions. To test this, a paradigm was implemented in which 2-year-olds (n = 34, 16 female/18 male, mostly White middle-class children) could continue an adult’s action when the adult no longer wanted to complete the action. The results showed that children (...) continued the adult’s actions more often when the goal had been abandoned than when it had been reached (OR = 2.37). This supports the hypothesis that apparent helping behavior in 2-year-olds is motivated by a preference for completing unfinished actions. (shrink)

A considerable body of research has documented the emergence of what appears to be instrumental helping behavior in early childhood. The current study tested the hypothesis that one basic psychological mechanism motivating this behavior is a preference for completing unfinished actions. To test this, a paradigm was implemented in which 2-year-olds (n = 34, 16 female/18 male, mostly White middle-class children) could continue an adult’s action when the adult no longer wanted to complete the action. The results showed that children (...) continued the adult’s actions more often when the goal had been abandoned than when it had been reached (OR = 2.37). This supports the hypothesis that apparent helping behavior in 2-year-olds is motivated by a preference for completing unfinished actions. (shrink)

Modern modal logic originated as a branch of philosophical logic in which the concepts of necessity and possibility were investigated by means of a pair of dual operators that are added to a propositional or first-order language. The field owes much of its flavor and success to the introduction in the 1950s of the “possible-worlds” semantics in which the modal operators are interpreted via some “accessibility relation” connecting possible worlds. In subsequent years, modal logic has received attention as an attractive (...) approach towards formalizing such diverse notions as time, knowledge, or action. Nowadays, modal logics are applied in various disciplines, ranging from economics to linguistics and computer science. Consequently, there is by now a large variety of modal languages, with an even greater wealth of interpretations. For instance, many applications require a poly-modal framework consisting of a language with a family of modal operators and a semantics in which the corresponding accessibility relations are connected somehow. (shrink)