The ethical codes of the professional engineering bodies identify the responsibilities of the engineer. Of equal importance to the codes are the virtues which enable the engineer to fulfil these responsibilities. After briefly reviewing such virtues this paper argues that the systematic learning of virtues is possible in a formal way through learner centred learning. Central to this learning experience is the development of integrity which focuses the other major virtues and enables reflection upon them. A review of undergraduate courses (...) suggests how this can be achieved. (shrink)

In spite of the seemingly omnipresent corruption and Mafia activity plaguing modern Russia it is nevertheless possible, and desirable, to conduct business ethically there, as the author testifies. Pamela Woolley has recently completed a full time MBA at London Business School, prior to which her career was in international telecommunications. She has long been interested in Russia and worked in Moscow during the summer between her two years of study. The experience has prompted her to seek a more permanent (...) position in the region and was the impetus behind writing this article. She also wishes to thank Dr Jan Dauman of InterMatrix Group for his interest and contribution to the information gathered in the preparation of this article. (shrink)

In spite of the seemingly omnipresent corruption and Mafia activity plaguing modern Russia it is nevertheless possible, and desirable, to conduct business ethically there, as the author testifies. Pamela Woolley has recently completed a full time MBA at London Business School, prior to which her career was in international telecommunications. She has long been interested in Russia and worked in Moscow during the summer between her two years of study. The experience has prompted her to seek a more permanent (...) position in the region and was the impetus behind writing this article. She also wishes to thank Dr Jan Dauman of InterMatrix Group for his interest and contribution to the information gathered in the preparation of this article. (shrink)

This volume contains essays by twenty-two eminent scholars from across North America and Europe, examining various aspects of the Hebraic, Hellenic, patristic, medieval, and early modern understandings of God and creation.

Heroism presumes “humanity.” Black candidates for heroism in the United States, however, must often overcompensate for the presumed sub-humanity imposed upon them by the American popular imaginary. By way of an illustration, consider the instructive case of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who, arguably, attains the status of American Hero in spite of his Blackness. Through a unique account of the life of Dr. King, I will argue that King attains the requisite overcompensation necessary for American heroism by (...) becoming what João Costa Vargas and Joy James call a Baldwinian Cyborg, a “super human with unnatural capacities to suffer and love.” I will present, here, a literary narrative that weaves speculative fiction into the interstices of the historical record in order to contend that the Black Cyborg is necessary in a world where white Americans are “human” but Black citizens remain aspirations. (shrink)

Here, Bob Hale and Crispin Wright assemble the key writings that lead to their distinctive neo-Fregean approach to the philosophy of mathematics. In addition to fourteen previously published papers, the volume features a new paper on the Julius Caesar problem; a substantial new introduction mapping out the program and the contributions made to it by the various papers; a section explaining which issues most require further attention; and bibliographies of references and further useful sources. It will be recognized as (...) the most powerful presentation yet of a neo-Fregean program. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to George Boolos's three papers (Boolos (1987a, 1987b, 1990a)) concerned with the status of Hume's Principle. Five independent worries of Boolos concerning the status of Hume's Principle as an analytic truth are identified and discussed. Firstly, the ontogical concern about the commitments of Hume's Principle. Secondly, whether Hume's Principle is in fact consistent and whether the commitment to the universal number by adopting Hume's Principle might be problematic. Also the so-called `surplus content' worry is discussed, (...) which points out that the conceptual resources to grasp Hume's Principle vastly outstrip the conceptual resources employed in arithmetical reasoning. And lastly whether Hume's Principle is in bad company with other unsuccessful implicit definitions. In the last section, an account towards our entitlement to Hume&'s Principle is sketched. (shrink)

More than 30 years ago in Annals of Science, Dr. Eric Forbes of the University of Edinburgh published the correspondence between Carl Gauss and Great Britain's Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne. Five of the letters he listed as missing have now been discovered, along with two entirely new letters he was unaware of. Their nearly complete correspondence can now be read for the first time in 200 years.

We now know of a number of ways of developing real analysis on a basis of abstraction principles and second-order logic. One, outlined by Shapiro in his contribution to this volume, mimics Dedekind in identifying the reals with cuts in the series of rationals under their natural order. The result is an essentially structuralist conception of the reals. An earlier approach, developed by Hale in his "Reals byion" program differs by placing additional emphasis upon what I here term Frege's Constraint, (...) that a satisfactory foundation for any branch of mathematics should somehow so explain its basic concepts that their applications are immediate. This paper is concerned with the meaning of and motivation for this constraint. Structuralism has to represent the application of a mathematical theory as always posterior to the understanding of it, turning upon the appreciation of structural affinities between the structure it concerns and a domain to which it is to be applied. There is, therefore, a case that Frege's Constraint has bite whenever there is a standing body of informal mathematical knowledge grounded in direct reflection upon sample, or schematic, applications of the concepts of the theory in question. It is argued that this condition is satisfied by simple arithmetic and geometry, but that in view of the gap between its basic concepts (of continuity and of the nature of the distinctions among the individual reals) and their empirical applications, it is doubtful that Frege's Constraint should be imposed on a neo-Fregean construction of analysis. (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)

In the classical Turing test, participants are challenged to tell whether they are interacting with another human being or with a machine. The way the interaction takes place is not direct, but a distant conversation through computer screen messages. Basic forms of interaction are face-to-face and embodied, context-dependent and based on the detection of reciprocal sensorimotor contingencies. Our idea is that interaction detection requires the integration of proprioceptive and interoceptive patterns with sensorimotor patterns, within quite short time lapses, so that (...) they appear as mutually contingent, as reciprocal. In other words, the experience of interaction takes place when sensorimotor patterns are contingent upon one’s own movements, and vice versa. I react to your movement, you react to mine. When I notice both components, I come to experience an interaction. Therefore, we designed a “minimal” Turing test to investigate how much information is required to detect these reciprocal sensorimotor contingencies. Using a new version of the perceptual crossing paradigm, we tested whether participants resorted to interaction detection to tell apart human from machine agents in repeated encounters with these agents. In two studies, we presented participants with movements of a human agent, either online or offline, and movements of a computerized oscillatory agent in three different blocks. In each block, either auditory or audiovisual feedback was provided along each trial. Analysis of participants’ explicit responses and of the implicit information subsumed in the dynamics of their series will reveal evidence that participants use the reciprocal sensorimotor contingencies within short time windows. For a machine to pass this minimal Turing test, it should be able to generate this sort of reciprocal contingencies. (shrink)

Author of "Kubla Khan" and the epic "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," Samuel Taylor Coleridge is remembered principally for his contributions as a romantic poet. This innovative reconsideration of Coleridge's thought and career not only demonstrates his importance as a philosopher but also recovers romanticism as both an aesthetic and a political movement. Pamela Edwards radically departs from classic theories of Coleridge's development and reads his writing within the framework of a constantly shifting political and social landscape. Drawing (...) on the ideology, rhetoric, and institutional theory at the turn of the late British Enlightenment, Edwards unearths the fundamental continuities in Coleridge's writing during the revolutionary period of 1794 to 1834, paying particular attention to the rhetoric of Coleridge's pamphlet and miscellaneous writings, the journalism of the Napoleonic years, his philosophical and ultimately political treatises within the contexts of his notebooks and letters, and his readings and intellectual friendships. What emerges is a clearer understanding of Coleridge's political philosophy and his contributions to the origins and ideology of British Liberalism. Coleridge's interest in history, nature, and law as inherently interconnected projects producing an ideal or scientific reading of society reveals a developed progressive social and cultural state theory anchored in individual conscience, moral autonomy, and a civic and participatory human agency. If the Statesman could understand and finally master this scientific view of the world, he would be able not only to adjust political and social institutions to comprehend the historical contingencies of the moment but to see through the problem of the moment to the dynamic of change itself. (shrink)

Dummett's objections to the coherence of the strict finitist philosophy of mathematics are thus, at the present time at least, ill-taken. We have so far no definitive treatment of Sorites paradoxes; so no conclusive ground for dismissing Dummett's response — the response of simply writing off a large class of familiar, confidently handled expressions as semantically incoherent. I believe that cannot be the right response, if only because it threatens to open an unacceptable gulf between the insight into his own (...) understanding available to a philosophically reflective speaker and the conclusions available to one confined to observing the former's linguistic practice; for an observer of our linguistic practice could never justifiably arrive at the conclusion that ‘red’, ‘child’, etc., are governed by inconsistent rules. But the Sorites is not the subject of this paper. The points I hope to have made plausible are: that a generalized intuitionist position cannot be so much as formulated and that even a most local intuitionism, argued for the special case of arithmetic, is hard pressed effectively to stabilize and defend itself; that strict finitism remains the natural outcome of the anti-realism which Dummett has propounded by way of support for the intuitionist philosophy of mathematics; that it is powerfully buttressed by the ideas of the latter Wittgenstein on rule-following; and that there is no extant compelling reason to suppose that its involvement with predicates of surveyability calls its coherence into question. The correct philosophical assessment of strict finitism, and its proper mathematical exegesis, remain absolutely open, almost virgin issues. This is not a situation which philosophers of mathematics should tolerate very much longer. (shrink)

One worrying aspect of contemporary Western Society is the increasing prevalence of instances of ‘Science Denial’ in popular culture. Examples include both cases where well-attested scientific hypotheses are rejected and conversely, where scientifically discredited ideas are stubbornly retained. The paper raises the question whether the kind of argument for an anti-realist conception of empirical scientific theory considered in my contribution to the inaugural issue of this journal could in principle provide intellectual succour for these trends. The discussion proceeds through an (...) examination of the role of ‘takings for granted’ in all reflective enquiry to the conclusion that a trusting acceptance of the general credibility of informants is a precondition for the exercise of individual epistemic responsibility, and that in that context an acceptance of at least the empirical adequacy, if not the truth, realistically understood, of the teachings of scientists in general is rationally non-optional. (shrink)

Examines the relationship between making objects and knowing nature in Europe from the mid-15th to mid-19th centuries.

A good number of people currently thinking and writing about reasons identify a reason as a consideration that counts in favor of an action or attitude.1 I will argue that using this as our fundamental account of what a reason is generates a fairly deep and recalcitrant ambiguity; this account fails to distinguish between two quite different sets of considerations that count in favor of certain attitudes, only one of which are the “proper” or “appropriate” kind of reason for them. (...) This ambiguity has been the topic of recent discussion, under the head “the wrong kind of reasons problem.”2 I will suggest that confusion about “the wrong kind of reason” will be dispelled by changing our account of what a reason is. While I agree both that reasons are considerations and that certain.. (shrink)

Many assume that we can be responsible only what is voluntary. This leads to puzzlement about our responsibility for our beliefs, since beliefs seem not to be voluntary. I argue against the initial assumption, presenting an account of responsibility and of voluntariness according to which, not only is voluntariness not required for responsibility, but the feature which renders an attitude a fundamental object of responsibility (that the attitude embodies one’s take on the world and one’s place in it) also guarantees (...) that it could not be voluntary. It turns out, then, that, for failing to be voluntary, beliefs are a central example of the sort of thing for which we are most fundamentally responsible. (shrink)

This article is an ethnographic analysis of the mutuality that is possible in relationships between caregivers and women with intellectual disabilities who live together in L'Arche homes. Creating mutuality through which both parties grow and exercise agency requires that caregivers learn to negotiate delicate power relations connected to the physics of care and to reframe dominant stereotypes of disability. This helps them to support the women with intellectual disabilities to name and achieve their desires.

I hope to show that, although belief is subject to two quite robust forms of agency, "believing at will" is impossible; one cannot believe in the way one ordinarily acts. Further, the same is true of intention: although intention is subject to two quite robust forms of agency, the features of belief that render believing less than voluntary are present for intention, as well. It turns out, perhaps surprisingly, that you can no more intend at will than believe at will.