sProblems about the nature of integral parts and wholes were central to twelfth-century discussions of the individuation and persistence over time of both substances and artifacts. This paper examines in detail Abaelard’s contribution to these discussions arguing that Abaelard proposes a solution to these problems which preserves our common sense intuitions about identity over time. In Abaelard’s work we find an explicit solution to the problem of the identity over time of living things which appeals to the persistence of the (...) vegetative soul through the loss or addition of corporeal matter. In work from the school of the Montani we apparently also have an account of Abaelard’s solution to the problem of the identity over time of artifacts which distinguishes between the role of a part in an integral whole and the material which plays that role such that the role persists when the matter is replaced. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 56, Issue 3-4, pp 340 - 366 The history of thinking about consequences in the Middle Ages divides into three periods. During the first of these, from the eleventh to the middle of the twelfth century, and the second, from then until the beginning of the fourteenth century, the notion of natural consequence played a crucial role in logic, metaphysics, and theology. The first part of this paper traces the development of the theory of natural consequence in (...) Abaelard’s work as the conditional of a connexive logic with an equivalent connexive disjunction and the crisis precipitated by the discovery of inconsistency in this system. The second part considers the accounts of natural consequence given in the thirteenth century as a special case of the standard modal definition of consequence, one for which the principle _ex impossibili quidlibet_ does not hold, in logics in which disjunction is understood extensionally. (shrink)

Beginning in the nineteenth century, scientists speculated that the Pleistocene megafauna—species such as the giant ground sloth, wooly mammoth, and saber-tooth cat—perished because of rapid climate change accompanying the end of the most recent Ice Age. In the 1950s, a small network of ecologists challenged this view in collaboration with archeologists who used the new tool of radiocarbon dating. The Pleistocene overkill hypothesis imagined human hunting, not climate change, to be the primary cause of megafaunal extinction. This article situates the (...) Pleistocene overkill hypothesis in a broader history of the emergence of historical ecology as a distinct sub-discipline of paleoecology. Tracing the work of the Yale Geochronometric Laboratory and an interdisciplinary research network that included Paul Sears, Richard Foster Flint, Edward Deevey, Kathryn Clisby, and Paul S. Martin, it reveals how both the methods and the meaning of studying fossil pollen shifted between the 1910s and 1960s. First used as a tool for fossil fuel extraction, fossil pollen became a means of envisioning climatic history, and ultimately, a means of reimagining global ecological history. First through pollen stratigraphy and then through radiocarbon dating, ecologists reconstructed past biotic communities and rethought the role of humans in these communities. By the 1980s, the discipline of historical ecology would reshape physical environments through the practice of ecological restoration. (shrink)

Boarding school is a major educational option for many students (e.g., students living in remote areas, or whose parents are working interstate or overseas, etc.). This study explored the motivation, engagement, and achievement of boarding and day students who are educated in the same classrooms and receive the same syllabus and instruction from the same teachers (thus a powerful research design to enable unique comparisons). Among 2,803 students (boardingn= 481; dayn= 2,322) from 6 Australian high schools and controlling for background (...) attributes and personality, we found predominant parity between boarding and day students in their motivation, engagement, and achievement. We also found that classroom-average motivation, engagement, and achievement was not significantly affected by the number of boarders (relative to day students) in the classroom. In addition, the effects of boarding were generally not moderated by students’ background or personality attributes. We conclude that boarders have academic opportunities and outcomes that are comparable to their day student counterparts. Implications for students, teachers, and parents are discussed. (shrink)

Aristotle's discussion of relatives in the Categories presented its eleventh- and twelfth-century readers with many puzzles. Their attempt to solve these puzzles and to develop a coherent account of the category led around the beginning of the twelfth century to the invention of relations as items which stand to relatives as qualities stand to qualified substances. In this paper, I first discuss the details of Aristotle's accounts of relatives and the related category of ‘situation’ and Boethius' commentary on them. I (...) then examine some of the earliest mediaeval commentaries on the Categories showing how the notion of relation, and in particular of individual relations, was developed. I conclude by showing how Peter Abaelard's treatment of relations in his Dialectica was part of an ongoing and sophisticated debate over the nature of relations. (shrink)

La présente contribution propose une étude de la périphérie gauche au sein d’un corpus oral multigenres, représentant douze activités de communication orale, annoté syntaxiquement et prosodiquement. La segmentation discursive du corpus en unités de base du discours (BDU) résulte d’une coïncidence entre unités syntaxiques et prosodiques, correspondant à des encodages linguistiques distincts mais complémentaires. Partant du postulat selon lequel ces unités discursives remplissent une fonction cognitive dans la planification et l’interprétation du discours, nous nous intéressons à l’étude de leur périphérie (...) gauche. Ce lieu, qui constitue le point d’ancrage du message, joue en effet un rôle important dans la négociation de la structure discursive. Dans l’objectif d’étudier les stratégies discursives à l’œuvre dans les différents genres du corpus, nous faisons l’inventaire des types formels observés et étudions finalement les fonctions discursives que ces éléments périphériques peuvent revêtir. (shrink)

This article surveys western business ethics' recent history to show how this ethic has neglected recently its religious traditions and become construed more narrowly as an applied philosophy and social science. It argues that this narrowness has confused business ethics' role in business education and helped to weaken the distinctiveness of certain institutions of higher education. It then suggests ways that western business ethics might become more integrated, interesting, and autonomous as an academic discipline by incorporating its key religious traditions.

Among the various testimonia assembled by Iwakuma and Ebbesen to the twelfth-century school of philosophers known as the Nominales,Iwakuma Yukio and Sten Ebbesen, “Logico -Theological Schools from the Secon d Half of the 12th Century: A List of Sources,” Vivarium XXX (1992):173–210. four record their commitment to the apparently outrageous thesis that nothing grows. My aim in this essay is to explore the reasons the Nominale s had for maintaining this thesis and to investigate the role that the theory which (...) supported it played in the development of late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century debates over the character of the hypostatic union. My investigation concerns onl y one aspect of twelfth-century NominalismSince this group were apparently the first ever to be called ‘nominalists’ I think that we may justifiably capitalize the name of the theory to indicate that we are referring to their version of it. but once this part of their system is understood, we will be better able to characterise the whole and the way in which the views of the Nominales conflicted with those of their opponents. S o long as the testimonia remain few and rather slight such a reconstruction offers our only hope for finding the Nominales and their influence where their name has not been recorded. (shrink)

An examination the development of Peter Abaelard's views on translation and figurative meaning. Mediaeval philosophers curiously do not connect the theory of translation implied by Aristotelian semantics with the multiplicity of tongues consequent upon the fall of Babel and do not seem to have much to offer to help in solving the problems of scriptural interpretation noted by Augustine. Indeed, on the Aristotelian account of meaning such problems do not arise. This paper shows that Abaelard is like others in this (...) respect in not in general finding translation problematic. Two particular cases, oppositio in adiecto and accidental predication, however, present problems for him and the paper examines and tries to explain the differences between the account given in the Dialectica and that given in the Logica 'Ingredientibus'. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “A Cybernetic Approach to Contextual Teaching and Learning” by Philip Baron. Upshot: I consider implications of Baron’s article on change in university education. In particular, I address the problem of why change happens with difficulty and how the principles and practices of second-order cybernetics that Baron discusses are applicable beyond South Africa to a wide range of situations.

Open peer commentary on the article “I Can’t Yet and Growth Mindset” by Fiona Murphy & Hugh Gash.: When a student changes to a growth mindset, a new set of affordances becomes available for that student. In my commentary, I discuss how Murphy and Gash’s approach to influencing both teacher’s and students’ beliefs about learning differs from the more prevalent and traditional approach based on the idea of transmission of knowledge. Then I consider how this approach to reflexivity is relevant (...) to bringing about change in schools, in teacher education, and in other settings. (shrink)

As one of the earliest English religious reformers of the 1520s, William Tyndale sought to influence ecclesiological reform in England through a vernacular printing campaign. Beginning with an English translation of the New Testament, Tyndale extended European ecclesiological controversy into England by offering the English people a distinct and radical ecclesiology that was built upon “a congregation.” This study examines the body of Tyndale’s printed works to illuminate the variety of methodologies he developed and utilized to gain public consensus for (...) his understanding of congregation and church in hopes that lexical reform in English would initiate ecclesiological reform in England. Over time, and perhaps because of Thomas More’s criticisms, Tyndale found that the best way to appeal to the public was by lexical flexibility. Contrary to his historiographical reputation, Tyndale embraced the public’s traditional fondness for church so that he did not have to sacrifice his theological preference for congregation. (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to distill the Christological elements from his voluminous corpus in a manner that shows the range, the coherence, and the value of Erasmus' thinking on matters Christological. While Erasmus works within the broad parameters of orthodox teaching, his critical skills with languages, accent on rhetoric in theology, keen sense of irony, appreciation for the limits of human knowledge, incipient sense of history, emphasis on the welfare of humanity, and passionate defense of peace, give his (...) work a distinctive stamp and thereby make a singular contribution to the history of Christology. (shrink)

John Buridan was a fourteenth-century philosopher who enjoyed an enormous reputation for about two hundred years, was then totally neglected, and is now being 'rediscovered' through his relevance to contemporary work in philosophical logic. The final chapter of Buridan's Sophismata deals with problems about self-reference, and in particular with the semantic paradoxes. He offers his own distinctive solution to the well-known 'Liar Paradox' and introduces a number of other paradoxes that will be unfamiliar to most logicians. Buridan also moves on (...) from these problems to more general questions about the nature of propositions, the criteria of their truth and falsity and the concepts of validity and knowledge. This edition of that chapter is intended to make Buridan's ideas and arguments accessible to a wider range of readers. The volume should interest many philosophers, linguists and logicians, who are increasingly finding in medieval work striking anticipations of their own concerns. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Heterarchical Reflexive Conversational Teaching and Learning as a Vehicle for Ethical Engineering Curriculum Design” by Philip Baron. Upshot: Philip Baron focuses on changing university curricula in South Africa to enable students to succeed who do not share the culture, expectations, and experience of their teachers. With increasing need and desire for more education worldwide, his article is relevant to university education in all countries, especially in those with underserved populations. This commentary focuses on the (...) factors Baron describes which can be generalized to all university education. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Designing Academic Conferences in the Light of Second-Order Cybernetics” by Laurence D. Richards. Upshot: The aim of this commentary is to emphasize connections between conversation-based conferences and the foundations of radical constructivism. The Richards article needs no defense - everything said here is already implied within his text. Nevertheless, drawing out the context may be helpful in showing how his suggestions are rooted in the constructivist project.

Caring for hospitalized patients with COVID-19 raises ethical dilemmas in which clinicians must weigh the unknown value of an intervention against the unknown risk of viral transmission. Current guidelines for delivering high-value care in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic do not directly address ethical dilemmas that arise from the unique concerns of individual patients. We propose an “ethical pause” in which clinicians address ethical dilemmas by taking time to ask three questions that invoke the major bioethical principles of beneficence, (...) nonmaleficence, and distributive justice: will this intervention help my patient? Could this intervention harm my patient? Could this intervention harm or help others? Using two exemplar cases, we demonstrate how the process of deliberately asking and answering structured ethical questions is a mindful problem-solving strategy that facilitates delivery of high-value care. (shrink)

In this paper we integrate a sorted unification calculus into free variable tableau methods for logics with term declarations. The calculus we define is used to close a tableau at once, unifying a set of equations derived from pairs of potentially complementary literals occurring in its branches. Apart from making the deduction system sound and complete, the calculus is terminating and so, it can be used as a decision procedure. In this sense we have separated the complexity of sorts from (...) the undecidability of first order logic. (shrink)

An Erasmian manner of thinking -- First meditation: irony and deceit -- Second meditation: war and sanity -- Third meditation: pleasure and religion -- Erasmian irony and the courage of truth.

A study of the reception of Aristotle's Prior Analytics in the first half of the twelfth century. It is shown that Peter Abaelard was perhaps acquainted with as much as the first seven chapters of Book I of the Prior Analytics but with no more. The appearance at the beginning of the twelfth century of a short list of dialectical loci which has puzzled earlier commentators is explained by noting that this list formalises the classification of extensional relations between general (...) terms and that this classification had already be put forward by Boethius in his de Syllogismo Categorico and Introductio ad Syllogismos Categoricas . It is pointed out the kind of text referred to as an ` Introductio ' at the beginning of the twelfth-century follows very closely the structure of Boethius own Introductio and adds to it material drawn from his accounts of loci and the conditional propositions. It is argued that the reception of the Prior Analytics has to be understood against the background of this well developed tradition of treating together syllogisms, loci , and conditional propostions. Referring to a challenge to the formal validity of Darapti in the Ars Meliduna the paper concludes by illustrating that the theory of the syllogism presented in Prior Analytics was still controversial in the middle of the twelfth-century. (shrink)

Consistent with the complexity of the temporally regulated processes that must occur for growth and development of higher eukaryotes, it is now apparent that transcription is regulated by the formation of multi‐component complexes that assemble on the promoters of genes. These complexes can include (in addition to the five or more general transcription factors and RNA polymerase II) DNA‐binding proteins, transcriptional activators, coactivators, adaptors and various accessory proteins. The best studied example of a complex that includes a transcriptional adaptor, accessory (...) proteins and a DNA‐binding protein is that involving the herpes simplex virus VP16 protein. Evidence suggests that the adenovirus E1a protein and the cellular Sp1 and CTF/NF1 transcription factors also function through adaptors or coactivators. Each additional component of the transcription complex provides the cell with another point at which to exert control of gene expression. (shrink)

It is a natural assumption in mainstream epistemological theory that ascriptions of knowledge of a proposition p track strength of epistemic position vis-à-vis p. It is equally natural to assume that the strength of one’s epistemic position is maximally high in cases where p concerns a simple analytic truth. For instance, it seems reasonable to suppose that one’s epistemic position vis-à-vis “a cat is a cat” is harder to improve than one’s position vis-à-vis “a cat is on the mat”, and (...) consequently, that the former is at least as unambiguous a case of knowledge as the latter. The current paper, however, presents empirical evidence which challenges this intuitive line of reasoning. Our study on the epistemic intuitions of hundreds of academic philosophers supports the idea that simple and uncontroversial analytic propositions are less likely to qualify as knowledge than empirical ones. We show that our results, though at odds with orthodox theories of knowledge in mainstream epistemology, can be explained in a way consistent with Wittgenstein’s remarks on ‘hinge propositions’ or with Stalnaker’s pragmatics of assertion. We then present and evaluate a number of lines of response mainstream theories of knowledge could appeal to in accommodating our results. Finally, we show how each line of response runs into some prima facie difficulties. Thus, our observed asymmetry between knowing “a cat is a cat” and knowing “a cat is on the mat” presents a puzzle which mainstream epistemology needs to resolve. (shrink)

Academic health centres have historically treated patients with the most complex of diseases, served as training grounds to teach the next generations of physicians and fostered an innovative environment for research and discovery. The physicians who hold faculty positions at these institutions have long understood how these key academic goals are critical to serve their patient community effectively. Recent healthcare reforms, however, have led many academic health centres to recruit physicians without these same academic expectations and to partner with non-faculty (...) physicians at other health systems. There has been limited transparency in regard to the expertise among the physicians and the academic faculty within these larger entities. Such lack of transparency may lead to confusion among patients regarding the qualifications of who is actually treating them. This could threaten the ethical principles of patient autonomy, benevolence and non-maleficence as patients risk making uninformed decisions that might lead to poorer outcomes. Furthermore, this lack of transparency unjustly devalues the achievements of physician faculty members as well as potentially the university they represent. In this paper, it is suggested that academic health centres have an obligation to foster total transparency regarding what if any role a physician has at a university or medical school when university or other academic monikers are used at a hospital. (shrink)

The study of the interdependence of grammar and logic at the beginning of the twelfth century is a difficult subject and progress here has been slow. With the recent publication of the Notae Dunelmenses, however, we are now able to see rather more clearly how closely the two disciplines were bound to one another. The following article draws upon this newly published material and on unpublished material from contemporary commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories to investigate how the grammarians’ account of number (...) was reconciled with that given by Aristotle. It considers in particular the problem of the meaning of numerical terms such as ‘pair’ and of collective names such as ‘people’ and how attempting to solve it shaped thinking about the metaphysics of number. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Cybernetic Foundations for Psychology” by Bernard Scott. Upshot: This commentary considers linear causality as an underlying model in science and in psychology and the difficulty of changing paradigms to include circularity and other concepts.