We examine the question of how many Boolean algebras, distinct up to isomorphism, that are quotients of the powerset of the naturals by Borel ideals, can be proved to exist in ZFC alone. The maximum possible value is easily seen to be the cardinality of the continuum $2^{\aleph_{0}}$ ; earlier work by Ilijas Farah had shown that this was the value in models of Martin's Maximum or some similar forcing axiom, but it was open whether there could be fewer in (...) models of the Continuum Hypothesis. We develop and apply a new technique for constructing many ideals whose quotients must be nonisomorphic in any model of ZFC. The technique depends on isolating a kind of ideal, called shallow, that can be distinguished from the ideal of all finite sets even after any isomorphic embedding, and then piecing together various copies of the ideal of all finite sets using distinct shallow ideals. In this way we are able to demonstrate that there are continuum-many distinct quotients by Borel ideals, indeed by analytic P-ideals, and in fact that there is in an appropriate sense a Borel embedding of the Vitali equivalence relation into the equivalence relation of isomorphism of quotients by analytic P-ideals. We also show that there is an uncountable definable wellordered collection of Borel ideals with distinct quotients. (shrink)

We examine the question of how many Boolean algebras, distinct up to isomorphism, that are quotients of the powerset of the naturals by Borel ideals, can be proved to exist in ZFC alone. The maximum possible value is easily seen to be the cardinality of the continuum $2^{\aleph_{0}}$ ; earlier work by Ilijas Farah had shown that this was the value in models of Martin's Maximum or some similar forcing axiom, but it was open whether there could be fewer in (...) models of the Continuum Hypothesis. We develop and apply a new technique for constructing many ideals whose quotients must be nonisomorphic in any model of ZFC. The technique depends on isolating a kind of ideal, called shallow, that can be distinguished from the ideal of all finite sets even after any isomorphic embedding, and then piecing together various copies of the ideal of all finite sets using distinct shallow ideals. In this way we are able to demonstrate that there are continuum-many distinct quotients by Borel ideals, indeed by analytic P-ideals, and in fact that there is in an appropriate sense a Borel embedding of the Vitali equivalence relation into the equivalence relation of isomorphism of quotients by analytic P-ideals. We also show that there is an uncountable definable wellordered collection of Borel ideals with distinct quotients. (shrink)

This paper examines the role that linguistic and cognitive prominence play in the resolution of anaphor–antecedent relationships. In two experiments, we found that pronouns are immediately sensitive to the cognitive prominence of potential antecedents when other antecedent selection cues are uninformative. In experiment 1, results suggest that despite their theoretical dissimilarities, topic and contrastive focus both serve to enhance cognitive prominence. Results from experiment 2 suggest that the contrastive prosody appropriate for focus constructions may also play an important role in (...) enhancing cognitive prominence. Thus different types of linguistic prominence (topic, contrastive focus) appear to have the common effect of increasing the cognitive prominence of the discourse referent. For pronouns with two possible antecedents, the cognitive prominence of an antecedent aids in anaphor resolution, immediately biasing selection towards the more prominent (and ultimately preferred) antecedent. (shrink)

Abduction is or subsumes a process of inference. It entertains possible hypotheses and it chooses hypotheses for further scrutiny. There is a large literature on various aspects of non-symbolic, subconscious abduction. There is also a very active research community working on the symbolic (logical) characterisation of abduction, which typically treats it as a form of hypothetico-deductive reasoning. In this paper we start to bridge the gap between the symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches to abduction. We are interested in benefiting from developments (...) made by each community. In particular, we are interested in the ability of non-symbolic systems (neural networks) to learn from experience using efficient algorithms and to perform massively parallel computations of alternative abductive explanations. At the same time, we would like to benefit from the rigour and semantic clarity of symbolic logic. We present two approaches to dealing with abduction in neural networks. One of them uses Connectionist Modal Logic and a translation of Horn clauses into modal clauses to come up with a neural network ensemble that computes abductive explanations in a top-down fashion. The other combines neural-symbolic systems and abductive logic programming and proposes a neural architecture which performs a more systematic, bottom-up computation of alternative abductive explanations. Both approaches employ standard neural network architectures which are already known to be highly effective in practical learning applications. Differently from previous work in the area, our aim is to promote the integration of reasoning and learning in a way that the neural network provides the machinery for cognitive computation, inductive learning and hypothetical reasoning, while logic provides the rigour and explanation capability to the systems, facilitating the interaction with the outside world. Although it is left as future work to determine whether the structure of one of the proposed approaches is more amenable to learning than the other, we hope to have contributed to the development of the area by approaching it from the perspective of symbolic and sub-symbolic integration. (shrink)

© Ginn et al. 2016.The indexing methods currently used for serial femtosecond crystallography were originally developed for experiments in which crystals are rotated in the X-ray beam, providing significant three-dimensional information. On the other hand, shots from both X-ray free-electron lasers and serial synchrotron crystallography experiments are still images, in which the few three-dimensional data available arise only from the curvature of the Ewald sphere. Traditional synchrotron crystallography methods are thus less well suited to still image data processing. Here, a (...) new indexing method is presented with the aim of maximizing information use from a still image given the known unit-cell dimensions and space group. Efficacy for cubic, hexagonal and orthorhombic space groups is shown, and for those showing some evidence of diffraction the indexing rate ranged from 90% to 151%. Here, the indexing rate refers to the number of lattices indexed per image. (shrink)

Located in Kleinbasel close to the Rhine, the Kaskadenkondensator is a place of mediation and experimental, research-and process-based art production with a focus on performance and performative expression. The gallery, founded in 1994, and located on the third floor of the former Sudhaus Warteck Brewery (hence cascade condenser), seeks to develop interactions between artists, theorists and audiences. Eight, maybe, nine or ten 40 litre bags of potting compost lie strewn about the floor of a high-ceilinged white washed hall. Dumped, split (...) open, the soil mixed with iridescent specks of green, blue and red glitter. On the walls hang large black and white photographic images—negative and positive prints barely clean, hardly sharp, scavenged from the world and presented half processed. On a third wall, hangs a framed golden and charcoal surface. Finally, a huge stain of black dye runs down a wall that descends into a sunken quarter of the Kaskadenkondensator gallery space. The results of a collaboration between Oliver Minder and Walter Derungs reflect on themes addressed in the recent Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference held by the department of English, University of Basel. In particular, the joint show questions how an aesthetic experience may be other than a human-world interaction, hinting at the withdrawal and veiling that objects perform, while demanding that different works engage with each other and play out this game under the non-supervisory eyes of a human audience. Things here are becoming—sometimes it’s a movement towards a more complete ontic whole in a projection of finality, other times it’s a dispersal, an atrophy to rather disarrayed entities. Yet, in the moment and place in which the objects are, we take them as here and now. Let’s get to the material of the stuff that Minder and Derungs have assembled. Oliver Minder employs organic materials—potting earth, cuttlefish ink secretion, rice, and insects; yet his works hardly seem natural in the sense of a harmonic relation between material and the form they are constrained into, the objects they are compelled to occupy. For the substrates on, through, or within which these natural materials are mediated are harshly inorganic substances—Plexiglas, safety glass, acrylic resin, boat varnish, spray paint. Minder, thus, generates a conflict within the materiality of his work between two polar opposites—from the human perspective—in the contiguity of materials engaging with each other in a thrown together formation that nonetheless appears to keep the materials and the objects they make in happy accidental relation to each other. Let me expand a little: on the one hand, the things Minder makes query our belief in substance as belonging in a particular domain, an environment suited to precisely that stuff. We are focused on thinking categorically where things belong, both in terms of natural place and natural relations they might extend to each other. Hence, we are driven to think of environment and order. On the other hand, while extracting things from their conventional place and arranging them within awkward constellations that we as observers feel isn’t quite right, Minder manages to persuade the viewer that the materials are nonetheless “doing alright.” So, simultaneous to our awareness of the appropriateness of the world according to our global notions of accord and uniformity, we are forced to accept the local discrepancies of disassociation, inappropriateness and misplacement. The tension between these two vectors generates a vacillation that intensifies Minder’s work. In the Kaskadenkondensator works, then, it is vital to first consider the material of Minder’s works: potting compost—what is it doing here in the first place?—seems to enjoy being “polluted” by sparkly glitter. Glitter has a long history, used in cosmetics by the Egyptians, and in cave paintings, too, earlier made of beetle shells and mica, nowadays glitter is made of plastic cut to minute sizes down to 50 microns. So what’s the point here? Well shiny bits of dust-like material are actually generated from ultra-thin plastic sheets and are normally cut into shapes that fit contiguously on a two-dimensional surface: squares, triangles, hexagons etc. What then appears to be totally random, chaotic decoration, is actually an array of extremely regular identifiable objects. 1 Of course scale has a role to play here. The minuteness of the dimensions means the regularity is beyond our recognition—all we see are the twinkling surfaces of the multi-coloured grains of plastic. In contrast, potting compost, which appears to be unary in its dull unresponsive lumpen disposition, is in fact an amalgam of a variety of organic and inorganic materials: peat, bark, mushroom compost, and sand and perlite, and should perhaps be more proactively exciting to the viewer because of this complexity. Yes; we can (if we care to) identify different textures, different sizes in the mixture of the medium, but I claim that we tend to treat this organic/inorganic assemblage as just a simple substance. Further and crucially important to our consideration here is that the medium is partially contained, but also partially spilling from the split plastic bags in which it is sold in garden centres. That the compost spills out gives it a movement suggesting life; that the bags are cast here and there in a random fashion by Oliver Minder, lying like discarded carcasses, hacked torsos, dismembered bodies, suggests a horrific murder scene, a Tatort. 2 The glitter flourishes in the medium, lies happy and decorative; that is simply what it does, how it is—always already broken, made-for-scattering, designed to be incomplete; the taken-to-be-natural compost, in contrast, cannot rest content but is forced to speak to us metaphorically in its abject overflowing of violence and rupture. While Oliver Minder’s elements in the installation direct our attention to material, Walter Derungs’ works raise questions around seeing and making in photography. There is a simultaneous flicker between the materials and their use in the production of a sense making representation, on the one hand, and on the other the very notion of what is worthy of picturing, framing, representing on the other. Derungs' images are of non-places. Ranging from archaic decaying monster buildings, buildings that have gone far beyond the ravages of a time that we can safely associate with the genteel preservation of a Bernd and Hill Belcher post-industrial decline, to the background “noise” of an urban world that is falling apart, and to which we most of the time seem to pay little attention, and habitually just pass by. In this respect, their non-ness differs somewhat from the conventional association of the term with Marc Augé 3 , where emphasis is on the specifics (if we do care to examine them for their non-placedness) of the spatial or place containment in which movement between multimodal coordinates occurs in supermodern late capitalist post-urban spaces. In other words, we might be in an Augéian non-place and (not) experience—be impervious to—that environment, or we might in Derungs’ manner look out from such a position at the “scenery” around us. I claim scenery, as this is what Derungs seems to do with his partial photography—construct a very purposefully articulated, symmetric, flat world of image. Mostly depopulated, his images construct a space in which the direction of time is uncertain: are these partial structures falling apart, or perhaps terminated in a never-to-be-completed state, or are they a few steps from final completion? Temporal and spatial dimensions figure large in Derungs’ image-making: his world, and perhaps this is in fact the only way for it to be registered photographically, is already image before it is photographed. A key combination of images in this show is a matrix of six black and white negative prints measuring 300 x 215 cm that form the image of a semi-derelict (or is it yet incomplete) church, and adjacent on a perpendicular wall, a single black and white positive print 150 x 250 cm of two bricked-up windows of a late-Victorian industrial building. What are we led to believe that we see here? In the negative print, the conditions of perception 4 are sufficiently reproduced for us to recognise the structure of the building, to distinguish ground and form, to relate some partial elements of narrative, and to recognize symbols such as the alter cross and figure of Christ, a looming crane, a traffic cone, and banks of tiered seating. We piece the image together both from the individual forms which we recognize despite the tonal reversal, and we piece the six prints together as a whole, the matrix of lines between them emphasizing our purview onto the world. While we recognise the forms at work in the image and might possibly relate the negative reversals to other figurations such as Vera Lutter’s camera obscura exposures, we cannot but avoid seeing the partialness of the image in the sponge marks of the developer that was spread by hand across the prints. 5 Derungs’ thus intervenes with our usual conception of photography as the mimetic realist vehicle sine qua non , by exposing the viewer to tonal reversal and incomplete or over developed areas of the print. We thus confront both the idiom of such image making and its raw (chemical) materiality at once in the simultaneity of the recognition of what the image pictures and the recognition that it is in the act of picturing. The church image, taken from the series “BW Negativs 2011,” thus orients us towards how we see things in the world via photographs. The single image of the bricked-up wall presents us with a completely different visuality that relates to a faciality 6 which we cannot easily escape from. We look, or rather try to look with no success, through the face of the windows, through the classic Albertian screen 7 which has already been given to us in the church matrix beside. Yet although we should be able to make more of these concealed windows because they are a positive print, because they are complete, because they approach us on a more realistic scale, reproduced at life size, we cannot. The objects pictured here withdraw from us; furthermore, they merely mock our blindness at not seeing how we look. Blocked up with quite a hint of paned glass behind, one window is blanked out with a white blind, the other simply blankly dark. The apertures look like eyes with teeth in them, or a Dogon mask, or even Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche (1926) if we want to get really perverse. The height of elegant modernist chauvinist beauty thrown against the vacuity of post-industrial decline. Derungs thus catapults us consciously into a world enfolded with and through images, but in such a way that the images themselves become objects that stand resistant to us, impervious to our gaze, indifferent. We—and indeed they—do not attempt to reach out to a real that is beyond, rather the images play in a world that is just theirs, and we can only enter that world if we too submit to their regime: tonal reversal, segmented, partial, inadequate, still, wrenched out of time. In contemplation, in the flood of the image “falling” off the wall, we too become image-object. Perhaps enough has now been said about the works, yet enough can never really be said, we know the image will always exceed the word—let’s accelerate the critique: Derungs’ work continues in a second space partially partitioned from this first room. Opposing three more “BW Negativs” which figure yet more quotidian aspects of the world is Minder’s gold spray paint and cuttlefish secretion mix: things that just shouldn’t work together do in the dialogue between stuff that Derungs and Minder have constructed. Minder makes things; Derungs makes images; together they make objects which inhabit their own world which we can approach and sensually engage with and come to grips with only on those objects’ own terms. This is best summarised by a final work made by Oliver Minder which on a third wall faces these two semi-partitioned spaces. A deep black stain about 100 X 200 cm with streak marks running down a further 2 metres hovers positioned to observe the whole work, and also to be part of this installation, too. This liminal flat suzerain lies in/out of the whole work. The stain of cuttlefish secretion resonates with Derungs’ sponge strokes on the church image; it mirrors the iris of an all-seeing eye; it combines material in situ with the situation itself. Where Minder’s other works have material and medium or substrate upon which the material is exercised, this single black hole is image which sucks everything up into itself. It draws the viewer, who must otherwise look away attentively at the floor work, and imagine horror, or smile at the ironic play of glitter. Look away at the image constructions that suggest how it is we too look to our world. See the play of thing and image in a third area. Or, finally return to the base of the pyramid that triangulates, to realise the stuff-image that unlocks it all for us. Black on white, organic on inorganic, material to substrate, that which in the falling out of one on the other, in its running down the wall simply gives form to both content and expression in one direction, and content and expression to form in another. NOTES In fact, glitter is used as associative forensic evidence: the 20,000 or so varieties are all uniquely identifiable. Joel Sternfeld, Tatorte: Bilder gegen das Vergessen (München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1996). Marc Augé, Non­places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2006). An echo of the uneven paint strokes of light­sensitive chemicals in the paper preparations made by Henry Talbot some 170 years ago in the first sun drawings that also often pictured architectural forms. It was Talbot’s surprising discovery that where a weaker chemical solution was more thinly spread, greater light sensitivity was actualized, yet this virtual image had then to be chemically developed in a second step. Thus, Derungs unevenly finished spongings suggestively trace back to this originary technology (although his sweeps are the stains of uneven development and not those of the initial preparation of light–sensitive material). Umberto Eco, “Critique of the Image” in “Articulations of Cinematic Code” Cinematics 1, 1970. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: the Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999). (shrink)

In his book, Physical Relativity, Harvey Brown challenges the orthodox view that special relativity is preferable to those parts of Lorentz's classical ether theory it replaced because it revealed various phenomena that were given a dynamical explanation in Lorentz's theory to be purely kinematical. I want to defend this orthodoxy. The phenomena most commonly discussed in this context in the philosophical literature are length contraction and time dilation. I consider three other phenomena of this kind that played a role in (...) the early reception of special relativity in the physics literature: the Fresnel drag effect in the Fizeau experiment, the velocity dependence of electron mass in beta-ray deflection experiments by Kaufmann and others, and the delicately balanced torques on a moving charged capacitor in the Trouton-Noble experiment. I offer historical sketches of how Lorentz's dynamical explanations of these phenomena came to be replaced by their now standard kinematical explanations. I then take up the philosophical challenge posed by the work of Harvey Brown and Oliver Pooley and clarify how those kinematical explanations work. (shrink)

"... both an excellent introduction and a thoroughgoing analysis of Kristeva’s writing." —Signs "The book is a brilliant combination of a recuperative and a critical reading of Kristeva’s work." —Changes: An International Journal of Psychology & Psychotherapy "... a thorough, detailed, and critical analysis of the writings of Julia Kristeva." —Elizabeth Grosz "... the most involved and engaging study of Julia Kristeva’s work to date..." —The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory This first full-scale feminist interpretation of Kristeva’s work (...) situates her within the context of French feminism. Oliver guides her readers through Kristeva’s intellectual formation in linguistics, Freud, Lacan, and poetics. This comprehensive introduction to Kristeva makes accessible her important contributions to philosophy, linguistics, and psychoanalytic feminism. (shrink)

In his book, Physical Relativity, Harvey Brown challenges the orthodox view that special relativity is preferable to those parts of Lorentz's classical ether theory it replaced because it revealed various phenomena that were given a dynamical explanation in Lorentz's theory to be purely kinematical. I want to defend this orthodoxy. The phenomena most commonly discussed in this context in the philosophical literature are length contraction and time dilation. I consider three other phenomena of this kind that played a role in (...) the early reception of special relativity in the physics literature: the Fresnel drag effect in the Fizeau experiment, the velocity dependence of electron mass in beta-ray deflection experiments by Kaufmann and others, and the delicately balanced torques on a moving charged capacitor in the Trouton-Noble experiment. I offer historical sketches of how Lorentz's dynamical explanations of these phenomena came to be replaced by their now standard kinematical explanations. I then take up the philosophical challenge posed by the work of Harvey Brown and Oliver Pooley and clarify how those kinematical explanations work. (shrink)

We are, Julia Kristeva writes, strangers to ourselves; and indeed much of contemporary theory describes the human condition as one of alienation. Eloquently arguing that we cannot explain the developement of individuality or subjectivity apart from its social context, Kelly Oliver makes a powerful case for recognizing the social aspects of alienation and the psychic aspects of oppression.

A common objection to Russell's theory of descriptions concerns incomplete definite descriptions: uses of (for example) ‘the book is overdue’ in contexts where there is clearly more than one book. Many contemporary Russellians hold that such utterances will invariably convey a contextually determined complete proposition, for example, that the book in your briefcase is overdue. But according to the objection this gets things wrong: typically, when a speaker utters such a sentence, no facts about the context or the speaker's communicative (...) intentions single out a particular description-theoretic proposition as the proposition expressed. However, this is an objection only if it is assumed that successful linguistic communication requires the hearer to identify a proposition uniquely intended by the speaker. We argue that this assumption is mistaken. On our view, no proposition, descriptive or referential, is uniquely intended in such a context; thus, no proposition can nor need be identified as the proposition expressed. One significant upshot is that, once the aforementioned assumption is rejected, incompleteness no longer poses a threat to Russell's theory of descriptions. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung In diesem Beitrag, der als Eröffnungsvortrag der Jahrestagung der Deutschen Vereinigung für Religionswissenschaft in Heidelberg präsentiert wurde, geht es um die internationale Präsenz der gegenwärtigen deutschen Religionswissenschaft. Es werden vier Thesen vorgestellt und diskutiert: Dass die Religionswissenschaft eine transnationale Disziplin sei; dass sich die deutsche Religionswissenschaft in ihrer Forschung zunehmend auf Europa fokussiere, insbesondere auf das der Gegenwart; dass ihre Beteiligung am transnationalen Fachdiskurs gering und weiter rückläufig sei; und dass ein Zusammenhang zwischen den letzten beiden Punkten bestehe. Der (...) Beitrag schließt mit dem Aufruf an die deutsche Religionswissenschaft, sich thematisch breiter aufzustellen und international stärker einzubringen. (shrink)

Purpose Professional ethics is explored with three main foci: a critique of codes of conduct and the value of creating a global code for information and communication technology ; a critique of ICT professional certification; and the debate over whether ICT is really a profession. Design/methodology/approach This is a conceptual reflection on the current state of the ICT industry internationally, informed by the literature. Findings Compared to a mature profession, such as health, ICT is a young profession. This is evidenced (...) in the disparity of domains of practice, the lack of agreement on universal values governing the industry and the ongoing difficulties in creating international certification. Originality/value Until now, there has been little recognition of the corporatisation of ICT professionals and the effect that has on their ability to engage in appropriate professional ethics. More research is needed to explore appropriate ways in which ethical behaviour can be encouraged in the corporate workplace, including how professional development can be strengthened through building learning organisations. (shrink)

This study examines whether journalists and bloggers label paid content. In Germany, as in many other countries, advertorials have to be designated as advertising to enable the target audience to identify the promotional character of the content. This applies both to the traditional mass media and to blogs, for which advertorials provide a key source of income. To date, there have been no empirical findings on the designation practice based on a comparison of journalists and bloggers. The present study presents (...) an online survey in Germany completed by 936 journalists and 463 bloggers in 2017. The results indicate that, in fact, bloggers do not label advertorials less frequently than journalists do: 91.6 % of bloggers and 91.7 % of journalists stated that they label paid content as advertising. (shrink)

Sethi and Schepers have identified an important issue for the global economy: Providing some mechanism for requiring assurance that environmental, social, and corporate governance information provided by a business is accurate and objective. Where they have gone wrong is in trying to change the mission of the United Nations Global Compact. From its inception, the UNGC has been clear that its mission is not to provide such assurance. This article first outlines the background for the historic announcement of the UNGC (...) by the then Secretary-General of the UN, Kofi Annan. Then a summary of the major criticisms of the initiative is provided with a focus on the Sethi–Schepers article. Finally, I argue that the mission of the UNGC, to gain consensus in the global community on the shared values and moral norms that will guide the global economy, is being accomplished, although it is a work in progress. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungUnter „Selbstbindungen“ versteht man in medizinethischen Kontexten vorwegnehmende Bitten von Patienten an ihre Ärzte, eigene spätere Behandlungspräferenzen nicht zu befolgen. In diesem Beitrag werden zwei Arten von Selbstbindungen voneinander unterschieden. Wird nach einer Phase des Kompetenzverlustes, für die ein Handeln gegen den Patientenwillen vorausschauend autorisiert wird, die Kompetenz wiedererlangt, handelt es sich um eine Odysseus-Anweisung. Wird aber, wie insbesondere im Falle von Anweisungen für das Spätstadium der Demenz, die Kompetenz nach der Behandlungssituation nicht wiedererlangt, liegt eine Selbstbindung vor, die jedoch (...) keine Odysseus-Anweisung ist. In Bezug auf die erste Art von Selbstbindungen kommt die erwartete spätere Zustimmung des Patienten als Rechtfertigungskriterium für ein Handeln gegen den Patienwillen in Betracht. In Bezug auf die zweite Art von Selbstbindungen ist hingegen zu fragen, ob der Wille des Patienten in der Behandlungssituation als Widerruf des früheren Willens der kompetenten Person gelten kann. Ist dies der Fall, ist der zum früheren Zeitpunkt geäußerte Wunsch nicht mehr als derjenige einschlägig, der festlegt, was der Patient in der Behandlungssituation will. (shrink)

The work of philosophers in business ethics has been important in providing a systematic framework to analyze moral obligations of corporations and their many stakeholders. Yet the field of ethics as defined by the philosophers of the past two centuries is too narrow to do justice to what is at stake in the business world. Ethics in the theological perspective is not primarily concerned with analyzing situations so that one can make right decisions, but rather with reflecting on what is (...) constitutive of the good life. Theological business ethics can apply a crucial corrective to the business ethics of philosophers by broadening the endeavor to include a vision of what constitutes a good life — of the kind of persons we want to be and the kind of communities we want to form. (shrink)

The author devotes a good number of pages to clarifying the relations between PHN, experimental psychology, and metaphysics. It is this thesis, a problem of the order of knowledge, that we wish to question. We shall first present some of the difficulties that give rise to the problem. Second, we shall indicate the kind of knowledge which PHN is. Third, we shall attempt to demonstrate that in the body of his work the kind of knowledge represented is that of the (...) "metaphysics of man" and not the "philosophy of human nature." Finally, we shall point out the importance, and non-verbal character, of a correct answer to the problem. (shrink)

_ AS Critical Thinking for AQA_ is the definitive textbook for students of the current AQA Advanced Subsidiary Level syllabus. Structured very closely around the AQA specification, it covers the two units of the AS level in an exceptionally clear and student-friendly style. The chapters are helpfully subdivided into short digestible passages, and include: intended learning objectives at the beginning of each chapter student exercises at the end of each section with a ‘stretching activity’ for more advanced learners exam orientated (...) questions key point summaries at the end of each section cross references. In line with the AQA specification, there is a heavy emphasis on more imaginative forms of source material, for example, music, film, artwork, historical documents, adverts, moral dilemmas and scientific debates, as a means of illustrating key points. A great deal of emphasis is also placed on ‘live’ or ‘real’ arguments, taking topical examples from the world of science, politics, entertainment and sport. The book is accompanied by a companion website with extensive resources for both instructors and students. (shrink)

Wie verhalten sich Körper und Geist oder Natur und Freiheit zueinander und welche Rolle spielt der Lebensbegriff bei der Bestimmung des Verhältnisses der Begriffe? Die Erarbeitung der „Funktionen des Lebendigen“ kann als ein vielschichtiges Arbeitsprogramm verstanden werden, mit dem eine zentrale Problemlage unserer Zeit, unserer Gesellschaft und unserer Technik erschlossen werden kann. In der Verbindung des methodologischen Begriffs der Funktion mit dem phänomenalen Begriff des Lebendigen liegt ein philosophisches, wissenschaftstheoretische und kulturreflexives Potential. Denn zum einen ist der Funktionsbegriff ein Schlüsselbegriff (...) im Diskurs der Moderne, gerade im Kontext von anthropologischen, lebensphänomenologischen und bioethischen Fragen. Und zum anderen stellt das Phänomen des Lebendigen nach wie vor eine der großen Herausforderungen für das philosophische Denken dar, sei es in ontologischer, anthropologischer oder ethischer Hinsicht. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes beleuchten die unterschiedlichen Problemdimensionen des Lebendigen durch begrifflich-systematische Überlegungen ebenso wie spezielle Analysen zu Formen, Normen, Erfahrungen und Grenzen des Lebendigen. (shrink)