The Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences (FWS) graduate program at Virginia Tech held a student-led, discussion-based, 9-week seminar in the philosophy of science during the fall 1999 semester. This seminar presented the sociologist of science with the opportunity to investigate questions such as, How does a contemporary scientific discipline use the philosophy of science? What do scientists hope to gain from an understanding of demarcation issues? And how do they perceive themselves as a science? Issues of demarcation between science (...) and pseudo-science are prevalent in FWS. The role of public funding is at the forefront of the department’s concerns, as governmental agencies are responsible, to a dominant degree, for funding research that the public assumes will benefit them. Thus, the concerns of the department are of utility, or the perception thereof. An investigation of the sort proposed here is practical yet restrictive. The topics are preselected and noncomprehensive because the seminar organizers in FWS chose select readings pertinent to their discipline. Discussions revolved around such topics as the definition of science, methodology, credibility, specialization within FWS, the value (or lack thereof) of theory in FWS, the manager-scientist distinction, and the use of models. The intent of this article is to provide a brief ethnographic view of the seminar. It will review some of the seminar topics and relate them to the broader issue of scientific self-definition and the concept of science as a social mechanism. It is not an evaluative article about FWS but a descriptive article about how a scientific discipline regards itself. (shrink)

This article discusses popular and academic debates that turned on the merit of either science or the humanities. The author uses four cases to provide this history: the Huxley-Arnold debate of the 1880s, the science education reformation (and neglect-of-science) debates in Britain in the 1920s, the two-culture debate of the 1960s, and the science wars of recent years. Each of those debates (on one side, at least) sought to establish the supremacy of science for society’s welfare, and the first three (...) (on both sides) necessarily excised interdisciplinary approaches from their proposed solutions. More recently, the science wars have drawn comparison to the two-culture debate, even though this recent skirmish cannot be distinguished from a concern over the effects of interdisciplinary scholarship. The purpose of this article is to trace the relationship of the debates and comment on their role for the future of STS. (shrink)

This paper re-introduces the georgic ethic and the role it has historically played in debates about new agricultural practices. Public engagement, participatory research, and greater local involvement in crafting new means to work the land flood the literature of agrarian studies. Putting the experience- and place-based georgic into that discourse can help deepen its character and future possibilities. The paper draws from recent sociological research into the acceptance and resistance to new practices to show the georgic’s explanatory, descriptive utility in (...) studies of those controversies. It also highlights how agricultural and environmental ethicists can draw from the georgic tradition for its prescriptive and normative possibilities to put practitioners back into the agricultural policy process and to draw more firmly from the notion that knowledge of the environment is constituted in practices of living in it. Placing the language and terms of the georgic ethic more centrally into public conversations about agricultural ethics and policy can enrich those conversations by structuring them with attention to experience, place-based values, and the moral space of interaction between humans and the land. (shrink)

This selection of papers that were presented (or nearly so!) to the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science during the seventies fairly re presents some of the most disturbing issues of scientific knowledge in these years. To the distant observer, it may seem that the defense of rational standards, objective reference, methodical self-correction, even the distin guishing of the foolish from the sensible and the truth-seeking from the ideological, has nearly collapsed. In fact, the defense may be seen to (...) have shifted; the knowledge business came under scrutiny decades ago and, indeed, from the time of Francis Bacon and even far earlier, the practicality of the discovery of knowledge was either hailed or lamented. So the defense may be founded on the premise that science may yet be liberating. In that case, the analysis of philosophical issues expands to embrace issues of social interest and social function, of instrumentality and arbitrary perspective, of biological constraints (upon knowledge as well as upon the species-wide behavior of human beings in other relationships too), of distortions due to explanatory metaphors and imposed categories, and of radical comparisons among the perspectives of different civilizations. Some of our contributors are frankly programmatic, showing how problems must be formulated afresh, how evasions must be identified and omissions rectified, but they do not reach their own completion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:29. CONTRARIETY AND CAUSALITY IN HUME Hume's notion of contrariety ranks among the most obscure in his theory of relations. To make matters worse, the puzzling account of contrariety he offers can be shown inconsistent in the following way. The Treatise (T69-82) divides all relations into two disjoint classes - one class containing relations of knowledge (in the strict sense) ascertained by the mere comparison of ideas, the other (...) containing those of probability or 'uncertain knowledge' requiring 'experience' or empirical evidence. Causality is the paradigm of a probability relation - contrariety falls into the class of knowledge relations. Thus unlike causality the discovery of a contrary relation appears to require no experience. Yet in direct contradiction Hume claims that with the exception of existence and non-existence (which are singled out for special attention), all knowledge of contrary relations demands experience: no two ideas are in themselves contrary, except those of existence and non-existence.... All other objects, such as fire and water, heat, and cold, are only found to be contrary from experience, and from the contrariety of their 'causes ' or effects '. (T15) The charge of inconsistency appears inevitable. However, I shall argue that Hume escapes by implicitly operating with two distinct concepts of contrariety: one (which I shall term "logical contrariety") a relation of knowledge, the other (to be called "empirical contrariety") reducible to a peculiar type of causal relation, and therefore a probability relation. To adduce independent grounds for this claim I demonstrate that acceptance of these two concepts is essential if we are to explain why Hume finds 2 it important to place the following restriction on contra- 30. riety (hereafter, R): properly speaking no objects are contrary to each other, but existence an (y exists). And (4) can hardly be said to represent a form of contrariety between existent and non-existent objects. (Indeed paradox of material implication aside, (4) is an analysis of "x causes y".) Therefore to hold R and still maintain some sense of contrariety between existent and non-existent objects, Hume must restrict contrariety to logical contrariety. 32. Hume's own remarks bear out my claim. In the Treatise he recognizes that restricting contrariety to existence and non-existence means treating it as contradiction : the flattest of all contradictions... (is)... that 'tis possible for the same thing both to be and not to be. (T19, my emphasis.)... with contrariety... No one can once doubt but existence and non-existence destroy each other, and are perfectly incompatible and contrary. (T70) And in the Enquiries he interchanges the terms 'contrary' and 'negation' : The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible ; because it can never imply a contradiction... (EU25)... No negation of a fact can involve a contradiction. (EU164) This usage indicates that if? is (logically) contrary to q,? is -q, the negation of q. In this case the conjunction of? and q spells the contradiction (q & -q). The definition of logical contrariety we adopt is the same as the definition of contradiction specialized to existential sentences, so we need not state it. It is sufficient to give as a paradigm the following contradiction: (5)(Mars exists) & - (Mars exists). Here it is the existence of Mars that is logically contrary to the non-existence of Mars and therefore the contrariety restriction R is satisfied. Again it is only the existence and non-existence of the same object that is logically contrary. Empirical contrariety is most clearly defined in terms of the Lewis counterfactual G=>, where 1O' is a monadic predicate, 'e.' and 'e.' represent distinct arbitrary events, and "0(e)" means "event e occurs": 33. 5 Here it is not the existence and non-existence or occurrence (EC) e. is empirically contrary to e. iff 0(e.) D=> ~0(e.)." and non-occurrence of distinct events that gives rise to contrariety. Rather it is the existence or occurrence of one event that is empirically contrary to the existence or occurrence of another. To establish Hume's motivation for framing the condition R in such a way as to identify contrariety with contradiction, I now turn to examine the epistemological ground of the difference between empirical and logical contrariety. The ontological distinction between empirical... (shrink)

The polarization of the individual and the community that underlies much of the debate between individualists and communitarians is made possible in part by the literal vanishingof civil society—the domain whose middling terms mediate the stark opposition of state and private sectors and offer women and men a space for activity that is both voluntary and public. Modern democratic ideology and the reality of our political practices sometimesseem to yield only a choice between elephantine and paternalistic government or a radically (...) solipsistic and nearly anarchic private market sector—overnment gargantuanism or private greed. Americans do not much like either one. President Clinton's callfor national service draws us out of our selfishness without kindling any affection for government. Private markets service our avarice without causing us to like ourselves. The question of how America's decentralized and multi-vocal public can secure a coherentvoice in debates over public policy under the conditions precipitated by so hollow and disjunctive a dichotomy is perhaps the most important issue facing both the political theory and social science of democracy and the practice of democratic politics in America today. Two recent stories out of Washington suggest just how grave the situation has become. Health-care reform failed in a paroxysm of mutual recrimination highlighted by the successful campaign of the private sector against a presidential program that seemed to be widely misunderstood. The public at large simply went missing in the debates. (shrink)

The papers collected in this book share a common motivation: All respond to certain kinds of injustice that unfairly and unreasonably prevent the insights and intellectual abilities of vulnerable and stigmatized groups from being given their due recognition. Most people are opposed to injustice in principle, and do not want to have mistaken views about others. But research in the social sciences reveals a disturbing truth: Even people who intend to be fair-minded and unprejudiced are influenced by unconscious biases and (...) stereotypes, as well as social structures and institutions that lead to unjust judgments. We may sincerely want to be epistemically just, but we frequently fail, and simply thinking harder about it will not fix the problem. -/- This volume collects 17 new essays that draw from cutting-edge social science research, to suggest how we can better manage our own unjust reactions, as well as resist patterns of epistemic injustice that we may face. The volume concludes with an afterward by Miranda Fricker, reflecting on these new lines of research and potential future directions to explore. (shrink)

Miranda Fricker’s book Epistemic Injustice calls attention to an important sort of moral and intellectual wrongdoing, that of failing to give others their intellectual due. When we fail to recognize others’ knowledge, or undervalue their beliefs and judgments, we fail in two important respects. First, we miss out on the opportunity to improve and refine our own sets of beliefs and judgments. Second—and more relevant to the term “injustice”—we can deny people the intellectual respect they deserve. Along with describing the (...) wrong of epistemic injustice, Fricker proposes that epistemic justice is a virtue we “can, and should, aim for in practice”. But I argue that there are two major problems. First, it is not clear that it is reasonable to imagine there is any such stable disposition—that is, any such virtue—as the sort of justice she imagines. Second, even if there could be such a virtue, her theory of epistemic justice does not provide good guidance for avoiding epistemic injustice. While it could.. (shrink)

Reyes Mate's Memory of the West looks back in order to look forward. It is a sustained reflection on the great disillusion Europe experienced after World War I. Europeans understood that bombs had buried the Enlightenment. They knew that, to avoid catastrophe, they had to think anew. The catastrophe came, but Cohen, Benjamin, Kafka, and Rosenzweig had sounded the warning.

While psychopathy research has been growing for decades, a relatively new area of research is corporate psychopathy. Corporate psychopaths are simply psychopaths working in organizational settings. They may be attracted to the financial, power, and status gains available in senior positions and can cause considerable damage within these roles from a manipulative interpersonal style to large-scale fraud. Based upon prior studies, we analyze psychopathy research pertaining to 23 moral emotions classified according to functional quality and target. Based upon our review, (...) we suggest that psychopaths are high in moral emotions associated with other-directed negative signals, low in self-directed negative signals, and low in other-directed positive signals. We found no empirical articles related to self-directed positive signals. This understanding of the specific moral emotion deficits of corporate psychopaths provides greater theoretical understanding and practical implications of knowing which individuals not to promote, though more research is needed on moral emotions that are faked for manipulative reasons. (shrink)

Benjamin Barber is one of America's preeminent political theorists. He has been a significant voice in the continuing debate about the nature and role of democracy in the contemporary world. A Passion for Democracy collects twenty of his most important writings on American democracy. Together they refine his distinctive position in democratic theory. Barber's conception of "strong democracy" contrasts with traditional concepts of "liberal democracy," especially in its emphasis on citizen participation in central issues of public debate. These essays (...) critique the "thin representation" of liberal democracy and buttress the arguments presented in Barber's twelve books, most recently in his well-received Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Re-shaping the World. In these pieces, Barber argues for participatory democracy without dependence on abstract metaphysical foundations, and he stresses the relationship among democracy and civil society, civic education, and culture. A Passion for Democracy is divided into four sections. In the first, "American Theory: Democracy, Liberalism, and Rights," Barber addresses issues of ongoing relevance to today's debates about the roots of participatory democracy, including individualism vs. community, the importance of consent, and the irrelevance of Marxism. Essays in the second section, "American Practice: Leadership, Citizenship, and Censorship" provide a "strong democracy" critique of American democratic practice. "Education for Democracy: Civic Education, Service, and Citizenship" applies Barber's theories to three related topics and includes his much-discussed essay "America Skips School." The final section, "Democracy and Technology: Endless Frontier or End of Democracy?" provides glimpses into a future that technology alone cannot secure for democracy. In his preface, Barber writes: "In these essays... I have been hard on my country. Like most ardent democrats, I want more for it than it has achieved, despite the fact that it has achieved more than most people have dared to want." This wide-ranging collection displays not only his passion for democracy, but also his unique perspective on issues of abiding importance for the democratic process. (shrink)

The description for this book, The Conquest of Politics: Liberal Philosophy in Democratic Times, will be forthcoming.

In this well-researched, articulate, and compelling paper, Summers presents the position that addiction is a misvaluation upon which a pattern of behavior is based and which resists contrary evidence. This inability to change one’s values in response to contrary evidence is the prime wrong at stake, given its implied diminishment of rationality. In approaching this conflicted set of issues, Summers carefully surveys an impressive range of sources—from clinical DSM-based diagnosis to neurobiological underpinnings of decision making and attention, to social determinants (...) influencing the question as to what counts as ‘addiction’—and settles on the. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility, EarlyView.

An argument against dual process theories and unconscious thought to explain the human mind and behavior.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:God’s Knowledge of the World: Medieval Theories of Divine Ideas from Bonaventure to Ockham by Carl A. VaterBenjamin R. DeSpainVATER, Carl A. God’s Knowledge of the World: Medieval Theories of Divine Ideas from Bonaventure to Ockham. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022. xi + 294 pp. Cloth, $75.00Carl Vater skillfully blends historical and constructive concerns in his study of medieval theories of the divine ideas. (...) The book, first, makes a significant contribution to the body of scholarly resources on medieval philosophy by systematically mapping out the complex intellectual history of the divine ideas between the years 1250 and 1325. Throughout the work Vater displays a staggering command of the relevant literature, figures, and ideas from this period of philosophical development. Second, he provides a robust defense and promotion of John Duns Scotus’s theory of the divine ideas, which he regularly insists is the best theory. Through careful analysis of the often subtle differences in medieval articulations of the divine ideas to answer the questions of how God knows and produces creatures, Vater makes the case that Scotus avoided certain pitfalls in earlier theories that rely on a flawed understanding of relations influenced, principally, by Avicenna’s notion of essence.The book itself is divided into five parts with each systematically detailing a particular theory, beginning with the “imitability theory” represented by Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Bonaventure—the one figure, in Vater’s narrative, capable of escaping Scotus’s subsequent critiques. According to Vater, the imitability theory is defined by several notable characteristics, including that the divine ideas are “secondary objects of the divine intellect when it knows the divine essence,” that they perform both cognitive and causal roles, that they are relations, and that there are many of them. The “infinite intellect theory” critiques the imitability theory for depending on a notion of relations that is mistaken for supposing that relations can be known before the terms of the relation are themselves known. In this section, Vater examines the works of Peter John Olivi and his student Petrus de Trabibus. The third part considers what Vater calls the “objectum cognitum theory” developed by James of Viterbo. Here, according to Vater, we encounter the first signs, following Olivi and de Trabibus’s critique of the imitability theory, of the shift away from identifying the divine ideas with relations to defining them as creatures themselves. This shift culminates in the “creatura intellecta theory” introduced by Richard of Mediavilla, but it is not properly developed until Scotus, who concludes that “God knows relations because he knows possible creatures.” The section ends with an analysis of Scotus’s influence on the theories of early Thomists and Scotists, including John of Paris, Thomas of Sutton, and Henry of Harclary. In the fifth part, Vater turns to the “nominalist theory” of Peter Auriol and [End Page 373] William of Ockham. Although both Auriol and Ockham offer accounts of the divine ideas, these are, as Vater says, little more than nods to the Augustinian tradition that ultimately amount to a rejection of the divine ideas.Vater’s approach to these medieval theories has many strengths. By not only classifying the prominent theories during this period but also systematically organizing his interpretation of each respective author, he is able to create a comparative framework for assessing the central issues at play in the divine ideas, such as their status, definition, cognitive and causal roles, plurality and unity, exemplarity, and the question of nonexistent possibles, and he traces variations in each area to identify where change, development, and critique are actually occurring within this seventy-five years of intellectual history. He also is attentive to figures often overlooked in larger narrations of medieval philosophy, and he locates their contributions to the varied development of the divine ideas. More importantly, however, Vater is able to maintain coherence in his evaluation of these complex, intertwining layers of medieval philosophical reflection by constantly returning to the overarching theme of relations in the movement from identifying the divine ideas with relations to approaching them as creatures themselves. Vater is correct when he notes that the divine ideas form a... (shrink)

Clarifies Wittgenstein's ideas about ethics and aesthetics and illustrates how those ideas apply to art history and criticism and to an understanding of the importance of art in people's lives.

ABSTRACTSome liberal-cosmopolitan theorists have sought to justify preventive war by proposing new institutions meant to ensure the accurate evaluation of non-imminent threats, and also make any wa...

As new military technologies change the character of war by empowering agents in new ways, it can become more difficult for our ethics of war to achieve the right balance between moral principle and necessity. Indeed, there is an ever-growing literature that seeks to apply, defend and / or update the ethics of war in light of what is often claimed to be an unprecedented period of rapid advancement in military robotics, or warbots. To increase confidence that our approach to (...) this development finds success in appropriately constraining war, this article compares our current discourse to the ethical debate over the rise of air power during the interwar period. As moral norms largely failed to constrain air power in World War II, by highlighting the interrelated processes of technological change, ethical debate, and the eventual reconciliation of war practice and war ethics, this historical case offers insights that can help military ethicists maintain their “critical edge” as remote and autonomous robotic weapons continue to mature and proliferate. (shrink)

Altakkadisches Elementarbuch. By Francis Breyer. SILO, vol. 3. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014. Pp. xiv + 263, illus. €28.

The Third Millennium: Studies in Early Mesopotamia and Syria in Honor of Walter Sommerfeld and Manfred Krebernik. Edited by IlyA Arkhipov, Leonid Kogan, and Natalia Koslova. Cuneiform Monographs, vol. 50. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Pp. xxiii + 829, illus. $234.