The use of Big Data—however the term is defined—involves a wide array of issues and stakeholders, thereby increasing numbers of complex decisions around issues including data acquisition, use, and sharing. Big Data is becoming a significant component of practice in an ever-increasing range of disciplines; however, since it is not a coherent “discipline” itself, specific codes of conduct for Big Data users and researchers do not exist. While many institutions have created, or will create, training opportunities to prepare people to (...) work in and around Big Data, insufficient time, space, and thought have been dedicated to training these people to engage with the ethical, legal, and social issues in this new domain. Since Big Data practitioners come from, and work in, diverse contexts, neither a relevant professional code of conduct nor specific formal ethics training are likely to be readily available. This normative paper describes an approach to conceptualizing ethical reasoning and integrating it into training for Big Data use and research. Our approach is based on a published framework that emphasizes ethical reasoning rather than topical knowledge. We describe the formation of professional community norms from two key disciplines that contribute to the emergent field of Big Data: computer science and statistics. Historical analogies from these professions suggest strategies for introducing trainees and orienting practitioners both to ethical reasoning and to a code of professional conduct itself. We include two semester course syllabi to strengthen our thesis that codes of conduct can be harnessed to support the development of ethical reasoning in, and a sense of professional identity among, Big Data practitioners. (shrink)

This descriptive scientific-phenomenological study set forth to discover what is like to survive a building collapse as a firefighter. The participants of the study were 3 uniformed and sworn professional firefighters performing interior operations at a commercial building structure fire. The 3 participants all become trapped and had to self-rescue as a result of a structural collapse. The data collected from the participant interviews was analyzed and transformed so as to form the structure of the study.

By 1918 Bertrand Russell had well-formed and distinctive opinions on many aspects of economic philosophy, theory and policy. In the second half of his life (1919–70) he wrote at great length on a very wide range of economic issues, including modern technology and the prospects for abolishing scarcity; population growth, eugenics and birth control; the economic development of China; the case for democratic socialism; the case against Soviet communism; the causes of economic crises; and the economic background to war (...) and peace. Russell’s economic writings appeared as chapters of books on subjects as diverse as the philosophy of science, the history of nineteenth-century Europe, the principles of education and the case for world government. Economic themes can be detected even in his most frivolous newspaper articles. He was a great literary stylist, and his popular writings on economics were widely read and possibly quite influential, especially between the wars. (shrink)

The end of World War II marked the beginning of a new chapter in German Leibniz scholarship, with conferences all over the country gearing up to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his birth in 1946, and participants intent on promoting Leibniz as a pan-European thinker. Just a few years earlier, for obvious reasons, the outlook could not have been more different. To take one example, Oskar Becker, in his lecture, “Leibniz, the German Thinker and Good European,” had divided the different (...) versions of Leibniz up along strictly national lines: “In the international Leibniz literature of today the different aspects of his philosophy… are shown in the views of one nation from this, of another nation from that side. Thus for the West European scholars Louis Couturat and Bertrand Russell Leibniz is fundamentally a logician, while for the Germans he is fundamentally a metaphysician.”. (shrink)

A major voice in late twentieth-century philosophy, Alan Donagan is distinguished for his theories on the history of philosophy and the nature of morality. The Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan, volumes 1 and 2, collect 28 of Donagan's most important and best-known essays on historical understanding and ethics from 1957 to 1991. Volume 1 includes essays on Spinoza, Descartes, Bradley, Collingwood, Russell, Moore, and Popper, as well as two previously unpublished papers on the history of philosophy as a discipline, (...) and on Ryle and Wittgenstein's nature of philosophy. Linked by Donagan's commitment to the central importance of history for philosophy and his interest in problems of historical understanding, these essays represent the remarkable scope of Donagan's thought. (shrink)

The end of World War II marked the beginning of a new chapter in German Leibniz scholarship, with conferences all over the country gearing up to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his birth in 1946, and participants intent on promoting Leibniz as a pan-European thinker. Just a few years earlier, for obvious reasons, the outlook could not have been more different. To take one example, Oskar Becker, in his lecture, “Leibniz, the German Thinker and Good European,” had divided the different (...) versions of Leibniz up along strictly national lines: “In the international Leibniz literature of today the different aspects of his philosophy… are shown in the views of one nation from this, of another nation from that side. Thus for the West European scholars Louis Couturat and Bertrand Russell Leibniz is fundamentally a logician, while for the Germans he is fundamentally a metaphysician.”. (shrink)

The end of World War II marked the beginning of a new chapter in German Leibniz scholarship, with conferences all over the country gearing up to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his birth in 1946, and participants intent on promoting Leibniz as a pan-European thinker. Just a few years earlier, for obvious reasons, the outlook could not have been more different. To take one example, Oskar Becker, in his lecture, “Leibniz, the German Thinker and Good European,” had divided the different (...) versions of Leibniz up along strictly national lines: “In the international Leibniz literature of today the different aspects of his philosophy… are shown in the views of one nation from this, of another nation from that side. Thus for the West European scholars Louis Couturat and Bertrand Russell Leibniz is fundamentally a logician, while for the Germans he is fundamentally a metaphysician.”. (shrink)

In this book, the authors present current research in the study of the philosophy of the mind. Topics discussed in this compilation include the concepts of hope and belief; how consciousness builds the subject through relating and human behaviour; analysing the neurophysiological mechanism of qigong on the mind and brain activity; the conscious and unconscious mind and implications for society, religion, and disease; how the mind is shaped by culture; and the power of computational mathematics to explore some of the (...) universal ways by which each human mind builds its image of the world. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

This paper studies “environmental personhood” legislation as a transitional concept. A transitional concept is one whose originating context sets parameters for its pragmatic functioning even as the eventual coherence of this functioning entails deep change in this originating context. By more explicitly thematizing environmental personhood as a transitional concept, we can acknowledge worries about its entanglement with a rights paradigm emphasizing private property and human exceptionalism while still exploring how it might contribute towards deeper ecological transformation. The paper introduces Nuu-chah-nuulth (...) philosopher E. Richard Atleo’s notion of ‘phase connectors’ as a heuristic for thinking transitional tensions in environmental personhood especially in terms of the gap between its present operative strategy and possible future effects on wider imaginaries. Indeed, this gap indicates how environmental personhood’s transitional potential is entangled with challenging dominant presuppositions in what Anna Grear calls ‘law’s onto-epistemic imaginary’. Using Atleo’s heuristic and drawing on a range of sources, the paper thinks through some of the prominent fault lines and volatile dynamics of environmental personhood as a transitional concept. After establishing these critical tensions, it considers how its conceptualization in domains beyond legislative or academic articulations may or may not help induce ethico-phenomenological changes in constitutive imaginaries. Though such popular presentations are frequently reductive, understanding why and how is important if theorists can contribute to the construction of creative alternatives. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell was perhaps the last great philosopher to take an active interest in economics. After a brief, youthful engagement with the economics of socialism in 1889, Russell wrote on economic questions in three separate periods up to 1918, and in each case there was a clear political motivation. The first, in 1895–96, arose from his investigation of Marxism as a creed and of German social democracy as its principal contemporary political expression. The second, in 1903–04, was provoked (...) by his intervention on the free trade side of the tariff controversy. Finally, in 1915–18, Russell's commitment to Guild Socialism and to war resistance led him to some profound, if rather speculative, reflections on the economics of libertarian socialism. In this paper I discuss each of these three phases in Russell's economic thought and conclude that he never went far enough in his opposition to neo-classical theory in general, or to its utilitarian foundations in particular. (shrink)