Prism adaptation is a form of visuomotor training that produces both sensorimotor and cognitive aftereffects depending on the direction of the visual displacement. Recently, a neural framework explaining both types of PA-induced aftereffects has been proposed, but direct evidence for it is lacking. We employed Structural Equation Modeling, a form of effective connectivity analysis, to establish directionality among connected nodes of the brain network thought to subserve PA. The findings reveal two distinct network branches: a loop involving connections from the (...) parietal cortices to the right parahippocampal gyrus, and a branch linking the lateral premotor cortex to the parahippocampal gyrus via the cerebellum. Like the sensorimotor aftereffects, the first branch exhibited qualitatively different modulations for left versus right PA, and critically, changes in these connections were correlated with the magnitude of the sensorimotor aftereffects. Like the cognitive aftereffects, changes in the second branch were qualitatively similar for left and right PA, with greater change for left PA and a trend correlation with cognitive aftereffects. These results provide direct evidence that PA is supported by two functionally distinct subnetworks, a parietal–temporal network responsible for sensorimotor aftereffects and a fronto-cerebellar network responsible for cognitive aftereffects. (shrink)

We share with Anderson & Lebiere (A&L) (and with Newell before them) the goal of developing a domain-general framework for modeling cognition, and we take seriously the issue of evaluation criteria. We advocate a more focused approach than the one reflected in Newell's criteria, based on analysis of failures as well as successes of models brought into close contact with experimental data. A&L attribute the shortcomings of our parallel-distributed processing framework to a failure to acknowledge a symbolic level of thought. (...) Our framework does acknowledge a symbolic level, contrary to their claim. What we deny is that the symbolic level is the level at which the principles of cognitive processing should be formulated. Models cast at a symbolic level are sometimes useful as high-level approximations of the underlying mechanisms of thought. The adequacy of this approximation will continue to increase as symbolic modelers continue to incorporate principles of parallel distributed processing. (shrink)

This paper proposes to reorient the philosophical debate about peer disagreement. The problem of peer disagreement is normally seen as a problem about the extent to which disagreement provides one with evidence against one's own conclusions. It is thus regarded as a problem for individual inquiry. But things look different in more collaborative contexts. Ethical norms relevant to those contexts make a difference to the epistemology. In particular, we argue that a norm of mutual answerability applies to us when we (...) engage in shared inquiry with others, and precludes us from treating one another's conflicting judgments as evidence relevant to the dispute. From this it follows that standard philosophical accounts of peer disagreement—e.g., the Equal Weight View and the Total Evidence View—presuppose that the disagreeing parties are in a sense alienated from one another. It's doubtful that such forms of alienated disagreement should be treated as the central case. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES IN AQUINAS IN THIS PAPER I discuss principally the claim of Aquinas that the divine attribute which is the formal constituent of the divine nature is es.'!e. I also discuss the consequent attribute of simplicity, with some reflections on this relation of consequence. I conclude with some remarks on philosophical realism in general, which I take to be the necessary background to this theory or, as (...) I argue, discovery. * * * In St. Thomas's Summa Theologiae we are confronted first, not with a study of the attributes of God, but with Five Ways of knowing that God exists. Strictly consequent upon this, there are then two basic movements of thought upon which, to mix the metaphor, the next structure after the Five Ways, that of the attributes, is laid. The first step is to find just one attribute which can be put forward as the formal constituent of the divine natura, its essentia (this will be the so-called metaphysical essence, since the real divine essence is one with the simple and hence constituentless divine nature). This is come upon through an immanent logic arising strictly out of conclusions reached through the Five Ways, and is in fact subsisting existence, ipsum esse subsistens, often called Being, confusingly, since this translates ens as well as esse. If it were not this there would be unexplained composition in God, at least between His nature and His act of existing. The second step is then to derive whatever attributes can be strictly deduced from this conception of God as subsistent esse, while a subsidiary step is to divide these into what commentators later called entitative and operative attributes. The first step identifies the nature of God with His aot of existing, 37 38 liTEPHEN THERON actus essendi, stressing that as pure ad He is not in any genus, not to be grasped in an abstract idea, even though the theory of the attributes must go on to say He is truth, is goodness and so on. The saving grace of these attributions, however, is that they do not imply limitation, even though it is a general principle of the Thomistic interpretation of things that form is what places a limitation on being, so that in being a man I cannot be an elephant. Of course the necessary infinity of these absolutely simple perfections entails that each of them is really identical with the divine nature, itself identical with His esse, His actus essendi. There can only be one reality in God, understood as the infinite. But my intention here is not to run through all the well-known arguments yet again. Thus that God, any God, must be subsisting Existence, I take to be well established. We can't have a divine essence capable of receiving existence, and for God to be love, say, He has first to be. I can make no sense of saying that this is merely chosen as appropriate to our way of thinking. I would rather say it thinks itself, once we 'let being be' (Heidegger's inspired definition of thinking). Of course God is not being identified with ens in commune, that almost cynical error of pantheism. God is identified with His own act of existing, proper to Him alone. Since this is, as divine, an act without limitation, we then go on to say that this cannot be an existence shared with any other existing, that God must exist in a uniquely eminent way, that that act of existing which He himself is, is transcendent. In the sense in which God exists, nothing else does, as the doctrine of analogy should bring out rather than obscure.1 Nonetheless, we need to enquire into the significance and implications of it being just existence which is the formal attribute 1 Cf. Leo J. Elders, Die Metaphysik de Thomas von Aquin, I, Salzburg 1985, p. 133: 'Das ens commune ist das geschaffene Seiende... Gott fallt nicht unter das ens commune: Er ist das ganz Andere, von dem wir wohl wissen konnen, daB Er ist, nicht aber, was Er ist.' THE DIVINE ATTRIBUTES IN AQUINAS 39 of the divine nature, something to which both Kant and Aristotle... (shrink)

According to a natural view of instrumental normativity, if you ought to do φ, and doing ψ is a necessary means for you to do φ, then you ought to do ψ. In “Instrumental Normativity: In Defense of the Transmission Principle,” Benjamin Kiesewetter defends this principle against certain actualist-inspired counterexamples. In this article I argue that Kiesewetter’s defense of the transmission principle fails. His arguments rely on certain principles—Joint Satisfiability and Reason Transmission—which we should not accept in the unqualified forms (...) needed to establish his conclusion. (shrink)

The current system of ethical oversight in the United States is based on Institutional Review Board (IRB) review. The system was established in response to well-known and egregious mistreatment of subjects in both biomedical and social and behavioral research. In the decades since the research regulations were enacted, reaction to the burden of IRB oversight has led the system to focus on compliance and limit its active oversight disproportionately to studies that could present the risk of physical harm. At the (...) same time, the characteristics of the research enterprise have changed and methodologies now present novel risks that were not envisioned in the regulations. We convened a group of IRB professionals, academic leaders, and others to discuss limitations of the current system, how that system could be changed to recognize evolving risks and an increasing focus on participant and community voice, and how it could better serve the needs of researchers and support the societal project of science as a public good. Recommendations included a call to reexamine the academic incentive structure, to develop a system to support consideration of ethical principles from the time of study design, and to explicitly provide different ethical support and oversight for high-risk interventional trials and lower risk biomedical and social behavioral research. (shrink)

War metaphors are ubiquitous in discussions of everything from political campaigns to battles with cancer to wars against crime, drugs, poverty, and even salad. Why are warfare metaphors so common, and what are the potential benefits and costs to using them to frame important social and political issues? We address these questions in a detailed case study by reviewing the empirical literature on the subject and by advancing our own theoretical account of the structure and function of war metaphors in (...) public discourse. We argue that war metaphors are omnipresent because they draw on basic and widely shared schematic knowledge that efficiently structures our ability to reason and communicate about many different types of situations, and they reliably express an urgent, negatively valenced emotional tone that captures attention and motivates action. Nevertheless, we find that the meaning of war metaphors is intimately tied to the context in which they are used, which may result in either positive or negative outcomes, depending on the situation. Thus, blanket statements about whether or not a war frame is useful are misguided or overly constraining. Here we situate our case study results in relation to popular theories of metaphoric representation and processing and offer some guidelines for using a war framing effectively. This work helps illuminate the complex, dynamic, and nuanced functions of metaphor in cognition in general, and in public discourse in particular. (shrink)

SummaryKekulé first suggested a hexagonal structure for benzene in 1865. For over a half-century after, chemists struggled to reconcile proposed structures for benzene and other aromatic compounds with their resistance to chemical transformation and tendency to maintain the type during reaction. The combined structural and reactivity features of these compounds were eventually covered by the term ‘aromaticity’. Kekulé, Bamberger and Thiele had each proposed a criterion for aromaticity; all were either empirically contradicted or incapable of evaluation. In the 1930s, two (...) rival quantum mechanical methods succeeded in establishing a physical basis for aromaticity. Using valence bond theory, Pauling attributed benzene's stability to its being a resonance hybrid of several Lewis structures. Calculating resonance energies was challenging but manipulating Lewis structures was not; that procedure provided qualitative insights into aromatic structure and reactivity. Resonance theory appealed especially to organic chemists and eclipsed Hückel's contemporaneous molecular orbital approach, which remained relatively inaccessible. In the 1950s, however, simple rules derived from Hückel's mathematics, combined with proton NMR data, provided seemingly universal criteria for aromaticity. In the event, post-1950 discoveries of non-organic, three-dimensional compounds such as ferrocene and the fullerenes that exhibit aromatic properties led chemists to doubt the utility and universality of ‘aromaticity’ as a concept. A recent consensus maintains that aromaticity is a multi-variable phenomenon that cannot be reduced to a strict definition, a property it shares with other core chemical concepts such as ‘acidity’ and ‘reactivity’. (shrink)

This essay responds to Hirstein, Sifferd and Fagan’s book, Responsible Brains, which claims that executive function is the guiding mechanism that supports both responsible agency and the necessity for some excuses. In contrast, I suggest that executive function is not the universal acid and the neuroscience at present contributes almost nothing to the necessary psychological level of explanation and analysis. To the extent neuroscience can be useful, it is virtually entirely dependent on well-validated psychology to correlate with the neuroscientific variables (...) under investigation. The essay considers what executive function is and what the neuroscience adds to our understanding of it. Then it addresses moral and legal responsibility generally, and specific doctrines. Executive function is seldom found to be the most perspicuous approach to any of the general or specific moral and legal questions. (shrink)

Frege’s distinction between force and sense is a central pillar of modern thinking about meaning. This is the idea that a self-standing utterance of a sentence S can be divided into two components. One is the proposition P that S’s linguistic meaning and context associates with it. The other is S’s illocutionary force. The force/sense distinction is associated with another thesis, the embedding principle, that implies that the only content that embeds in compound sentences is propositional content. We argue that (...) both the Force/Sense distinction and the principle of embedding are seriously challenged by figurative language, and irony in particular. We conclude that theorists need to go back to the drawing board about the nature of illocutionary acts. (shrink)

Professor Gideon Yaffe’s recent, intricately argued book, The Age of Culpability: Children and the Nature of Criminal Responsibility, argues against the nearly uniform position in both law and scholarship that the criminal justice system should give juveniles a break because on average they have different capacities relevant to responsibility than adults. Professor Yaffe instead argues that kid should be given a break because juveniles have little say about the criminal law, primarily because they do not have a vote. For Professor (...) Yaffe, age has political rather than behavioral significance. The book has many excellent general analyses about responsibility, but all are in aid of the central thesis about juveniles, which is the central focus of this essay review. After addressing a few preliminary issues, the essay discusses Professor Yaffe’s negative argument against the validity of the behavioral difference rationale for giving juveniles a break. If the negative case fails, which the essay argues it does, then the only issue is whether the book’s alternative is desirable. Again, the essay argues that it is not, and concludes by offering three positive arguments for the traditional rationale: coherence and simplicity; a benignly definitional argument that survives the negative argument and supports giving juveniles a break in the exceedingly unlikely event that the empirical assumptions of the traditional rationale are proven incorrect; and a proposal for individualization of the culpability assessments of juveniles so that the criminal justice system blames and punishes them proportionately to their culpability. (shrink)

Provides guiding principles and values for practising responsible global media ethics.

This article addresses the question of the relevance of brain imaging to legal criteria that are behavioral, that is, that require evaluation of a defendant's actions or mental states. It begins with the legal standard for the admissibility of scientific and technical evidence. Then it considers the relevance of imaging to behavioral legal criteria. The problem is translating mechanistic neuroscience data into the law's folk psychological standards. It uses examples from the criminal law, but the analysis generalizes to behavioral criteria (...) in the civil law. The central question is, “How, precisely, does the proffered scan or data based on scanning answer the specific legal question it supposedly helps answer?” I conclude that, at present, brain imaging has little relevance to behavioral legal criteria. The final section takes note of a rampant disorder, brain overclaim syndrome, and offers a remedy, cognitive jurotherapy. (shrink)

Most studies into the performance of socially responsible investment vehicles have focused on the performance of sustainable or socially responsible mutual funds. This research has been complemented recently by a number of studies that have examined the performance of sustainable investment indices. In both cases, the majority of studies have concluded that the returns of socially responsible investment vehicles have either underperformed, or failed to outperform, comparable market indices. Although the impact of sustainable indices to date has been limited, the (...) recent launch of sustainable indices by Dow Jones and FTSE suggests that more attention is being paid to the subject by financial markets, investors, and companies. This development raises a number of important issues which are reviewed in this article: (a) the performance of indices compared with their benchmark indices; (b) the methodologies employed in compiling the indices; and (c) the impact of the indices on companies and the investment community. The article concludes with a number of suggestions for areas that merit future research. (shrink)

This paper discusses some problems with the field of educational studies and considers the role of post-structuralist theory in shifting the study of education away from a 'technical rationalist' approach (as evidenced in the case of much research on educational management and school effectiveness) towards an 'intellectual intelligence' stance that stresses contingency, disidentification and risk-taking.

Are predictions about how one will freely and intentionally behave in the future ever relevant to how one ought to behave? There is good reason to think they are. As imperfect agents, we have responsibilities of self-management, which seem to require that we take account of the predictable ways we're liable to go wrong. I defend this conclusion against certain objections to the effect that incorporating predictions concerning one's voluntary conduct into one's practical reasoning amounts to evading responsibility for that (...) conduct. There is, however, some truth to this sort of objection. To understand the legitimate role of self-prediction in practical reasoning, we need to distinguish instances of coping responsibly with an anticipated failure to behave as one ought, on the one hand, from mere acquiescence in one's flaws, on the other. I argue that, to draw this distinction, we must recognize certain limits on the use of self-prediction as a ground of choice. (shrink)

Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion argues, against intuition, that for any world A, another world Z with higher population and minimal well-being is better. That intuition is incorrect because the argument has not considered resources that support well-being. Z must have many more resources supporting well-being than A does. Z is repugnant because it spreads those resources among too many people; another world with Z’s resources and fewer people, if available, would be far superior. But Z is still better than A; it (...) is worth accepting its very large population to get the resources needed to support their well-being. (shrink)

1 Introducing Monsieur Foucault Stephen J. Ball Michel Foucault is an enigma, a massively influential intellectual who steadfastly refused to align himself ...

Temporality underpins how living systems coordinate and function. Unlike measures that use mathematical conventions, lived temporalities grant functional cohesion to organisms-in-the-world. In foxtail grasses, for example, self-maintenance meshes endogenous processes with exogenous rhythms. In embrained animals, temporalities can contribute to learning. And cowbirds coordinate in a soundscape that includes conspecifics: social learning allows them to connect copulating with past events such that females exert ‘long-distance’ control over male singing. Using Howard Pattee’s work, we compare the foxtail’s self-maintenance, gender-based cowbird learning (...) and how humans manage multi-scalar activity. We argue that, while all living things coordinate, temporal ranging is typical of vertebrates. As primates, humans too use temporal ranging – they can draw on social learning, anticipate winter and manage coordinated action. However language behaviour grants new control over the scales of time. People connect the impersonal to lived experience in narratives, as they draw on autobiography and enact cultural practices. Humans become singular individuals who use temporal experience to manage affect, relationships, beliefs, fictions, and knowledge. Individual subjectivity permits collaborative and competitive activity based on linking events with quite different histories. As a result, alone of the vertebrates, we claim that humans become time-rangers. (shrink)

Disrupting Journalism Ethics sets out to disrupt and change how we think about journalism and its ethics. The book contends that long-established ways of thinking, which have come down to us from the history of journalism, need radical conceptual reform, with alternate conceptions of the role of journalism and fresh principles to evaluate practice. Through a series of disruptions, the book undermines the traditional principles of journalistic neutrality and "just the facts" reporting. It proposes an alternate philosophy of journalism as (...) engagement for democracy. The aim is a journalism ethic better suited to an age of digital and global media. As a philosophical pragmatist, Stephen J. A. Ward critiques traditional conceptions of accuracy, neutrality, detachment and patriotism, evaluating their capacity to respond to ethical dilemmas for journalists in the 21st century. The book proposes a holistic mindset for doing journalism ethics, a theory of journalism as advocacy for egalitarian democracy, and a global redefinition of basic journalistic norms. The book concludes by outlining the shape of a future journalism ethics, employing these alternative notions. Disrupting Journalism Ethics is an important intervention into the role of journalism today. It asks: what new role journalists should play in today's digital media world? And what new mind-set, new aims, and new standards ought jounalists to embrace? The book aims to persuade--and provoke--ethicists, journalists, students, and members of the public to disrupt and invent. (shrink)

Global Media Ethics is the first comprehensive cross-cultural exploration of the conceptual and practical issues facing media ethics in a global world. A team of leading journalism experts investigate the impact of major global trends on responsible journalism. The first full-length, truly global textbook on media ethics; Explores how current global changes in media promote and inhibit responsible journalism; Includes relevant and timely ethical discussions based on major trends in journalism and global media; Questions existing frameworks in media ethics in (...) light of the impact of global media; Contributors are leading experts in global journalism and communication. (shrink)

Taking a distributed view of language, this paper naturalizes symbol grounding. Learning to talk is traced to — not categorizing speech sounds — but events that shape the rise of human-style autonomy. On the extended symbol hypothesis, this happens as babies integrate micro-activity with slow and deliberate adult action. As they discover social norms, intrinsic motive formation enables them to reshape co-action. Because infants link affect to contingencies, dyads develop norm-referenced routines. Over time, infant doings become analysis amenable. The caregiver (...) of a nine-month-old may, for example, prompt the baby to fetch objects. Once she concludes that the baby uses ‘words’ to understand what she says, the infant can use this belief in orienting to more abstract contingencies. New cognitive powers will develop as the baby learns to act in ways that are consistent with a caregiver’s false belief that her baby uses ‘words.’. (shrink)

Rather than ask if expertise is under threat, this paper uses case studies to show how expertise is enabled. Its appearance can be traced to how the already known evokes sensibility, judging, thinking and languaging. As defined below, it draws on epistemic cycles. Using Secchi and Cowley’s (2021) 3M model, this posits a second cut between the micro and the macro. In the mesosphere, people create temporary domains or what William James (1991) calls ‘little worlds’. Within these corpora popularia, the (...) new is made possible – expertise sets off unimagined outcomes. Thus, many concerns cannot be solved by scientific correlates of a natural ontological attitude: indeed, the truism clarifies many social challenges. We lack social institutions that dedicate expertise to goals like ecosocial justice and life-sustaining relations. Once the necessary expertise is traced to epistemic cycles, we can demand of institutions that they create bodies that seek to bring a rich future to evolution. (shrink)

Atheist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Kurt Baier, though from different philosophical traditions, shared a common concern about the traditional Judeo-Christian-Muslim doctrine that human beings are the creations of a Supreme Being. For Sartre, in “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1946), a God who designed us would thereby detract from our freedom and dignity. For Baier, in “The Meaning of Life” (1957), the idea that God designs us to serve his own purposes was deeply offensive in treating us as artifacts, domestic animals, (...) or slaves. Indeed, Baier said explicitly what was implicit in Sartre: that the divine creation of humans as would violate Immanuel Kant’s respect for persons principle. But this Kantian objection is badly flawed in ignoring the crucial role of human free will in traditional Abrahamic theism. Still, if we focus not on the divine-creation doctrine but on the doctrine of eternal torment for non-worshippers of God, then traditional Abrahamic theism does arguably undermine human freedom and dignity. For the threat of eternal torment is extraordinarily coercive. Keywords: theism, artifacts, free will, eternal torment, coercion. (shrink)

How, if at all, does one's intention to realize an end bear on the justification for taking the means to that end? Theories that allow that intending an end directly provides a reason to take the means are subject to a well-known "bootstrapping" objection. On the other hand, "anti-psychologistic" accounts—which seek to derive instrumental reasons directly from the reasons that support adopting the end itself—have unacceptable implications where an agent faces multiple rationally permissible options. An alternative, predictive, role for intention (...) in means-end reasoning is considered and rejected. A new proposal is then developed, according to which instrumental reasons are not merely reasons to perform an act necessary for a given end, but to perform the act for the sake of that end. (shrink)

It is argued that core areas of philosophy can benefit from reflection on cross-disciplinary research (CDR). We start by giving a brief account of CDR, describing its variability and some of the ways in which philosophers can interact with it. We then provide an argument in principle for the conclusion that CDR is philosophically fecund, arguing that since CDR highlights fundamental differences among disciplinary research worldviews, it can be used to motivate new philosophical problems and supply new insights into old (...) problems. We close by providing an argument by example that uses the epistemology of peer disagreement to establish the potential of CDR for core philosophical areas. With this argument, we aim to demonstrate how the complex research contexts that CDR affords can point the way toward important avenues of epistemological research by highlighting potential limitations of key epistemological components, such as peerage and uniqueness. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has begun to shed some light on the social, cultural, historical, and intellectual contexts in and from which the Buddha and Buddhism arose. This chapter discusses some fundamental problems with the practice of Buddhism. It provides an account of Siddhattha Gotama's intellectual biography by analyzing the philosophical context in and from which his thought and teachings emerged. The idea of rebirth and the idea of karma seem to have been among the most basic insights of the “Indian way” (...) of understanding reality. In fact, they provided the foundation for Gotama's philosophical reflections. Ancient Indians offer three distinct conceptual frameworks or “views” of reality. The first “view” is the understanding of the Dasyus, or the pre‐Aryan or “pre‐Vedic view” of things. The second Indian “view” is the understanding of the Aryans and the Vedas. The third and final “view” is the post‐Vedic understanding of reality. (shrink)

This chapter provide an introductory portrait of global media ethics as an evolving discipline in broad strokes—its motivating questions, its distinct concerns and methods, how the discipline is related to other forms of ethics, and why we need a global media ethics. Since our global world is linked by many forms of media, the chapter argues that we need an accompanying global media ethics that challenges the use of media to promote racism, xenophobia, extreme nationalism, and the denial of human (...) rights. The chapter explores the types of research and writing that comprise global media ethics and concludes with an outline of how a global media ethics can be realized in practice. (shrink)

Is it a good objection to a moral theory that it demands a great deal of individual agents? I argue that if we interpret the question to be about the potential welfare costs associated with our moral obligations, the answer must be “no.” However, the demands a moral theory makes can also be measured in terms of what it requires us to take responsibility for. I argue that this is distinct from what we may be required to do or give (...) up, and that it provides a conception of demandingness that makes better sense of our intuitive reactions. (shrink)

We address a previous finding in the business ethics literature in which accounting professionals in higher rank levels, i.e., “manager” or “partner” of auditing firms, appear to have lower moral reasoning ability than their junior counterparts. Prior investigations have relied upon a similar methodology for estimating ethical beliefs, namely testing “moral reasoning ability” using either the Moral Judgment Interview or Defining Issues Test. In the present study, we use a multiple vignettes approach to test for the existence of the inverse (...) rank-ethical beliefs effect. With only 2 of the 30 vignettes resulting in both managers and partners being more accepting of the ethically charged behaviors, the results presented here using this alternative methodology are generally not supportive of the inverse rank-ethical beliefs phenomenon. We also use a multivariate analysis in order to control for demographic characteristics. Our results suggest that the most robust predictor of ethical attitudes among accounting practitioners is age, not rank within a firm. (shrink)

Few areas of scientific investigation have spawned more alternative approaches than animal behavior: comparative psychology, ethology, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, behavioral endocrinology, behavioral neuroscience, neuroethology, behavioral genetics, cognitive ethology, developmental psychobiology---the list goes on. Add in the behavioral sciences focused on the human animal, and you can continue the list with ethnography, biological anthropology, political science, sociology, psychology (cognitive, social, developmental, evolutionary, etc.), and even that dismal science, economics. Clearly, no reasonable-length chapter can do justice to such a varied collection. We (...) have opted therefore to focus on three of these subdisciplines and to provide a somewhat historical tour of them, mentioning along the way the philosophical points that are of particular interest to us, but allowing the development of these points to be limited only by the imaginations of our readers. For readers seeking a more-traditional historical survey, see Dewsbury (1984a, b) and Burghardt (1985a). Our chosen brief is to write about comparative psychology, ethology, and cognitive ethology, although other approaches, especially neuroscience, will be mentioned where appropriate. These sciences are philosophically significant because they are enmeshed in ancient philosophical questions about the nature of mind and purposeful action and about the differences between humans and other animals. These sciences are also clustered because of their attention to mechanistic explanations of individual animal behavior as opposed to attempting to capture regularities at a population level, such as the game-theoretic strategic models popular among behavioral ecologists. (shrink)

According to the view Rik Peels defends in Responsible Belief, one is responsible for believing something only if that belief was the result of choices one made voluntarily, and for which one may be held responsible. Here, I argue against this voluntarist account of doxastic responsibility and in favor of the rationalist position that a person is responsible for her beliefs insofar as they are under the influence of her reason. In particular, I argue that the latter yields a more (...) plausible account of the conditions under which ignorance may serve as an excuse for wrongdoing. (shrink)

A timely call for a new ethic of journalism engagement for today's troubled media sphere, Objectively Engaged Journalism argues that media should be neither neutral nor partisan but engaged in protecting egalitarian democracy. It shows how journalists, professional or citizen, can be both objective in method and dedicated to improving a global public sphere toxic with disinformation, fake news, and extremism. Drawing from history, ethics, and current media issues, Stephen Ward rejects the ideals of neutrality and "just the facts" (...) objectivity, showing how they are based on invalid dualistic thinking with deep roots in Western culture. He presents a theory of pragmatic objectivity and applies it to journalism. Journalism's role in interpreting culture, he argues, needs a form of objectivity that embraces human strengths and limitations. Defining responsible journalism as situated, imperfect inquiry, Objectively Engaged Journalism is one of the first systematic studies of the ethical foundations of engaged journalism for a media that is increasingly perspectival and embedded in society. (shrink)

"This book will take its place in libraries next to the finest works abou;this creative thinker." —Religious Studies Review "... gives a fine sense of the present state and the future direction of Edwards studies... Recommended for upper-division undergraduate and graduate students." —Choice "... this volume opens up new windows, not only on previously neglected texts of Jonathan Edwards, but on the larger cultural functions and effects of those texts." —Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences Here is a (...) compact survey of current Edwards scholarship. These essays present groundbreaking contemporary scholarship focusing on the writings of the 18th-century American philosopher and theologian Jonathan Edwards. They range widely across the Edwardsian canon, including his most prominent and important published texts—Religious Affections and The Nature of True Virtue—as well as unfamiliar treatises and sermons. (shrink)