This article presents evidence supporting the claim that ethical reasoning is a skill that can be taught and assessed. We propose a working definition of ethical reasoning as 1) the ability to identify, analyze, and weigh moral aspects of a particular situation, and 2) to make decisions that are informed and warranted by the moral investigation. The evidence consists of a description of an ethical reasoning education program—Ethical Reasoning in Action —designed to increase ethical reasoning skills in a variety of (...) situations and areas of life. ERiA is housed at a public, major comprehensive U.S. university—James Madison University—and assessment of the program focuses on interventions delivered prior to and during orientation for incoming first-year students. Findings indicate that the interventions measurably enhance the ability of undergraduate students to reason ethically. ERiA’s competency-targeted program and positive student learning outcomes offers a promising model for higher education ethics programs seeking to connect classroom learning in ethics to decision-making in everyday life. (shrink)

The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy" employs a wide construal of 'philosophy' that was common in former centuries. Its biographical entries include writers on mainstream philosophical topics whose individual contribution was small (for example, writers of textbooks or minor critics of major figures). But the encyclopedia also includes celebrated figures from other intellectual domains (e.g. poets, mathematicians, scientists and clergymen), who had something to say on topics that count as broadly philosophical. This interdisciplinary approach, coupled with sophisticated indexing and cross-referencing, (...) makes "CEBP" easily accessible to students and specialists across a huge range of subjects. It will become a highly important resource to support teaching and research in literature, history, classics, cultural studies, politics, economics, language, aesthetics, psychology and science, as well as in mainstream philosophy itself. (shrink)

In this note we present a three-valued intensional logic, which is an extension of both Montague's intensional logic and ukasiewicz three-valued logic. Our system is obtained by adapting Gallin's version of intensional logic (see Gallin, D., Intensional and Higher-order Modal Logic). Here we give only the necessary modifications to the latter. An acquaintance with Gallin's work is pressuposed.

IGM form a unified group and we denote their consensus by the sign Z; in the absence of I we signify the consensus of GM with £. It will be seen that in the earlier part of Book I this family is reduced to M. Here one may sometimes call on the help of Harleianus 2564 saec. xv, which we call h; this manuscript, though overlaid with the vulgate text, shows a number of striking readings which reveal a source closely (...) related to G. At the end of the poem we lack the guidance of A, which, though not free from interpolations, is by far the most sincere witness; here the testimony of Cantabrigiensis Pembrokianus 280 saec. xii, which we call F and which in the earlier books shows more fidelity to the A-tradition than any other manuscript, is sometimes useful, though it cannot be relied on without grave reservations. Editors usually quote Monacensis 8122 as if it were a primary witness; it is nothing of the sort, but rather a much corrupted and interpolated offshoot of the A-tradition diluted by some contamination from Z. We use ω to indicate the mass of the vulgar manuscripts and ς to indicate some of them. (shrink)

The Thebaid is not easy reading, and copyists have not helped to make it easier. There are many pitfalls in the language of Statius, and words cannot be taken always at their face value. I have erred myself and suffered. It may be of interest to give a few instances.

Upshot: In our response we focus on five questions that point to important common themes in the commentaries: why start in wicked problems, what kind of system is a scientific perspective, what is the nature of second-order research processes, what does this mean for understanding interdisciplinary work, and how may polyocular research help make real-world decisions.

Upshot: In our response we focus on how different types of systems are related from a constructivist perspective, and specifically on the relation between communicational social systems and embodied agency.

Open peer commentary on the article “Social Autopoiesis?” by Hugo Urrestarazu. Upshot: We agree on the need to explore a concept of social autopoiesis that goes beyond a strictly human-centered concept of social systems as autopoietic communicative systems. But both Hugo Urrestarazu and Niklas Luhmann neglect the importance of semiosis in understanding communication, and this has important implications for the question of a more general approach to social systems.

The research ethics committee is a key element of university administration and has gained increasing importance as a review mechanism for those institutions that wish to conduct responsible...