Scaliger brought critical standards and methodological innovations to the already extensive sixteenth-century interest in chronology. He invented the Julian Period, a device for the reckoning of dates, exposed historical forgeries, and showed the independent value of non-Biblical sources even acknowledging Egyptian dynastic chronology antedating the Biblical Creation, although he could not satisfactorily resolve this conflict. After Scaliger, the quality of chronological studies declined as questions were argued less on historical grounds than on theological ones, but the confusion this created eventually (...) contributed to breaking the hold of the Bible on chronology, along the lines anticipated by Scaliger. (shrink)

This paper focuses on chronology, structure and purpose of Dirck Canter’s edition of comic fragmentary poets, Aristophanes and Menander in mss. Par. suppl. gr. 1013 and D’Orville 123. It studies the history of the texts and offers unpublished conjectures of Dirck Canter and Joseph Justus Scaliger to the text of the comic poets and Machon’s “Chreiai”.

Around 1716, the French astronomer and academician Joseph-Nicolas Delisle took up a new project: the twinned topics of Chinese chronology and astronomy. Unable to access Chinese sources and not knowing any fellow savants who shared this particular interest, Delisle methodically made extracts and compiled data from the existing European literature. Among Delisle's papers at the Observatoire de Paris still exist the results of this research, including a list of the books he found relevant. This paper develops a close reading (...) of Delisle's notes from this period to stage his journey into a recondite arena of technical and textual analysis, and to examine the scholarly practices and generic conventions through which early modern European savants confronted the Chinese astronomical tradition. (shrink)

What are our duties or rights? How should we act? What are we responsible for? Joseph Raz examines the philosophical issues underlying these everyday questions. He explores the nature of normativity--the reasoning behind certain beliefs and emotions about how we should behave--and offers a novel account of responsibility.

Historical chronology is the discipline that establishes the dates of events and reconstructs the calendars used in ancient, medieval, and early modern times. Traditional accounts state that Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609) created this field by combining philological with astronomical data and techniques. But the celestial phenomena most relevant to chronology are solar and lunar eclipses. From antiquity onwards, astrologers saw these as ominous and connected them to great events on earth. Though Scaliger used dated eclipses in his work, it was (...) a number of relatively obscure sixteenth-century astronomers and scholars who realized that one could date events by eclipses and began doing so in a systematic way, without assigning them any ominous force. (shrink)

Summarizing this century's major debates over realism and the rationality of scientific knowledge, Joseph Rouse believes that these disputes oversimplify the ...

How can we understand the world as a whole instead of separate natural and human realms? Joseph T. Rouse proposes an approach to this classic problem based on radical new conceptions of both philosophical naturalism and scientific practice.

Naturalism as a guiding philosophy for modern science both disavows any appeal to the supernatural or anything else transcendent to nature, and repudiates any philosophical or religious authority over the workings and conclusions of the sciences. A longstanding paradox within naturalism, however, has been the status of scientific knowledge itself, which seems, at first glance, to be something that transcends and is therefore impossible to conceptualize within scientific naturalism itself. In Articulating the World, Joseph Rouse argues that the most (...) pressing challenge for advocates of naturalism today is precisely this: to understand how to make sense of a scientific conception of nature as itself part of nature, scientifically understood. Drawing upon recent developments in evolutionary biology and the philosophy of science, Rouse defends naturalism in response to this challenge by revising both how we understand our scientific conception of the world and how we situate ourselves within it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cocceius and the Jewish CommentatorsAdina M. YoffieThe case of Johannes Cocceius defies the commonplace that Leiden University (and perhaps post-Reformation, confessionalized Europe in general) turned away from humanist scholarship in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. In 1650 Cocceius (1603-69), a Bremen-born Oriental philology professor at Franeker, joined the Leiden theological faculty and wrote a treatise, Protheoria de ratione interpretandi sive introductio in philologiam sacram (De ratione). He (...) praised such rabbinic exegetes as Rashi (1040-1105) and David Kimchi (ca. 1160-ca. 1235) in humanist terms for their erudition. At the same time the "new" Cartesian philosophy was taking hold in the arts faculty, and mathematics instruction was encroaching on scholastic formal logic.1 Leiden would become famous for Cartesianism, mathematics, and "Calvinist Copernicanism" in the second half of the seventeenth century, but Cocceius still worked in the tradition of advanced humanist scholarship that had made the institution famous in the sixteenth century.2Leiden's earlier reputation was due in large part to the biblical humanist work of such Renaissance polymaths as Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609) and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), but by Cocceius's time Leiden theologians were subject to greater Church and State control. As Jonathan Israel and Edwin Rabbie have shown, in response to the controversy that surrounded Jacobus Arminius and his stand on predestination, the Synod of Dordrecht (Dort) drafted an anti-Arminian statement in 1619; any professor who did not sign was subject [End Page 383] to exile from the republic in addition to dismissal from his post.3 Innovative theology, exegesis, and philology suffered as professors, fearing State and Church reprisals, turned to "dogmatic humanism." As Henk Jan de Jonge has explained, this meant that "almost all the theologians of seventeenth-century Leiden who concerned themselves with the explanation of the New Testament placed exegesis at the service of dogmatic objectives."4 Unlike his fellow Leiden theologians, Cocceius pursued biblical humanism and Christian Hebraism through the study of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic-and he did so in a unique way. He was not the first to use Jewish commentaries and even Jewish post-biblical literature for the purpose of reconstructing the original Hebrew Bible, but he was innovative in praising rabbinic scholars as fellow humanists and in incorporating their scholarship into his Christological exegesis and philosophy. He did so, furthermore, not as an independent scholar or pastor or even as a professor of Hebrew; but as the holder of a university chair in theology at a confessionalized university in a century hostile to his brand of late humanism.Although he came to Leiden as a theologian, Cocceius had impressive training as an Orientalist. He had studied with the famous scholar Sixtinus Amama (1593-1629) and polished his Hebrew and Aramaic by working with a Jewish tutor from Hamburg.5 While still a student at Franeker, Cocceius wrote a translation and commentary of the Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin. A few years later he began composing commentaries on the Pentateuch, and, by the time he arrived at Leiden, he had completed one lecture, series of lectures, or piece of writing on every book of the Old Testament. These commentaries were based not only on Cocceius's extensive knowledge of Oriental languages but also on his readings of medieval Jewish commentators. These were the same commentators that Cocceius would later praise in chapter eight of the De ratione.These humanist achievements were much at variance with Cocceius's public persona as perhaps the most prominent Dutch Calvinist theologian of the seventeenth century. For approximately 100 years after his death in 1669 a faction of Leiden theologians calling themselves "Cocceians" battled the "Voetians," followers of Gisbertus Voetius, for the soul of the Dutch Church.6 At Leiden he lectured on the Pauline Epistles, a typical subject for a seventeenth-century Calvinist theologian, and he worked on his famous theological tract, the salvation-historical Summa doctrinae de foedere et testamento Dei (1648). Neither the De ratione nor his voluminous biblical commentary (except [End Page 384] for a short treatise on the last six chapters of Deuteronomy) was published in Cocceius's lifetime. His son Johann Heinrich released these and his father's... (shrink)

In this book Joseph Heath brings Jürgen Habermas's theory of communicative action into dialogue with the most sophisticated articulation of the instrumental conception of practical rationality-modern rational choice theory. Heath begins with an overview of Habermas's action theory and his critique of decision and game theory. He then offers an alternative to Habermas's use of speech act theory to explain social order and outlines a multidimensional theory of rational action that includes norm-governed action as a specific type.In the second (...) part of the book Heath discusses the more philosophical dimension of Habermas's conception of practical rationality. He criticizes Habermas's attempt to introduce a universalization principle governing moral discourse, as well as his criteria for distinguishing between moral and ethical problems. Heath offers an alternative account of the level of convergence exhibited by moral argumentation, drawing on game-theoretic models to specify the burden of proof that the theory of communicative action and discourse must assume. (shrink)

In contemporary philosophical debates in the United States "redefining pragmatism" has become the conventional way to flag significant philosophical contests and to launch large conceptual and programmatic changes. This book analyzes the contributions of such developments in light of the classic formulations of Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey and the interaction between pragmatism and analytic philosophy. American pragmatism was revived quite unexpectedly in the 1970s by Richard Rorty's philosophical heterodoxy and his running dispute with Hilary Putnam, who, like Rorty, (...) is a professed Deweyan. Reinventing Pragmatism examines the force of the new pragmatisms, from the emergence of Rorty's and Putnam's basic disagreements of the 1970s until the turn of the century. Joseph Margolis considers the revival of a movement generally thought to have ended by the 1950s as both a surprise and a turn of great importance. The quarrel between Rorty and Putnam obliged American philosophers, and eventually Eurocentric philosophy as a whole, to reconsider the direction of American and European philosophy, for instance in terms of competing accounts of realism and naturalism. (shrink)

Technical chronology establishes the structure of calendars and the dates of events; it is, as it were, the foundation of history, particularly ancient history. The chronologer must know enough philology to interpret texts and enough astronomy to compute the dates of celestial phenomena, above all eclipses, which alone provide absolute dates. Joseph Scaliger, so we are told, was the first to master and apply this range of technical skills: Of the mathematical principles on which the calculation of periods rests, (...) the philologians understood nothing. The astronomers, on their side, had not yet undertaken to apply their data to the records of ancient times. Scaliger was the first of the philologians who made use of the improved astronomy of the sixteenth century to get a scientific basis for historical chronology. So Mark Pattison. This verdict can be challenged on a number of grounds. The one relevant at present is simple: Scaliger himself claimed far less. He certainly said that technical chronology had been untouched in modern times — not an entirely fair judgement — but in antiquity it had been practised in exactly the manner he considered proper, or so he believed. In particular he singles out Censorinus, whose De die natali drew extensively on Varro's lost Antiquitates rerum humanarum, books 14–19, for information on chronology. Students of Varro have long appreciated the importance of Censorinus. His dry and compact treatise offers Varronian views on etymology, the human life-span, and the course of history itself, all couched in language so jejune as to suggest that he added little or nothing to what he read. (shrink)

Technical chronology establishes the structure of calendars and the dates of events; it is, as it were, the foundation of history, particularly ancient history. The chronologer must know enough philology to interpret texts and enough astronomy to compute the dates of celestial phenomena, above all eclipses, which alone provide absolute dates. Joseph Scaliger, so we are told, was the first to master and apply this range of technical skills: Of the mathematical principles on which the calculation of periods rests, (...) the philologians understood nothing. The astronomers, on their side, had not yet undertaken to apply their data to the records of ancient times. Scaliger was the first of the philologians who made use of the improved astronomy of the sixteenth century to get a scientific basis for historical chronology. So Mark Pattison. This verdict can be challenged on a number of grounds. The one relevant at present is simple: Scaliger himself claimed far less. He certainly said that technical chronology had been untouched in modern times — not an entirely fair judgement — but in antiquity it had been practised in exactly the manner he considered proper, or so he believed. In particular he singles out Censorinus, whose De die natali drew extensively on Varro's lost Antiquitates rerum humanarum, books 14–19, for information on chronology. Students of Varro have long appreciated the importance of Censorinus. His dry and compact treatise offers Varronian views on etymology, the human life-span, and the course of history itself, all couched in language so jejune as to suggest that he added little or nothing to what he read. (shrink)

Olof Rudbeck’s Atlantica is a characteristically wide-ranging example of Early Modern scholarship in which the author draws on a compendious assortment of evidence to argue that his native Sweden was the cradle of human civilization. Within this discussion, he devotes particular attention to the Phoenicians, whom he attempts to paint as descendants of “Scythians” who had migrated to the Mediterranean from an original Swedish homeland. Drawing upon the work of earlier Phoenician scholars such as Joseph Scaliger and Samuel Bochart, (...) as well as his own, often rather creative, etymologies, he seeks to demonstrate a relationship between the Phoenician language and Swedish. This paper explores how Rudbeck engages with and utilizes the Phoenician people and the Phoenician language in service of his wider proto-nationalist goals and places his work within the wider context of Phoenician studies in Early Modern Europe, a few decades before Barthélemy’s decipherment of the Phoenician script. While clearly wrong in many of his conclusions, Rudbeck’s work can tell us much about perceptions of Phoenicians at an important time of transition between Renaissance scholarship and the beginnings of modern archaeological and linguistic research. (shrink)

In this impressive first book, Clark explores the extraordinary history of the Destruction of Troy by Dares the Phrygian. Dares's account of the fall of Troy is a short, Latin prose narrative that claims to be an eyewitness account of the Trojan War, translated from the Phrygian by Cornelius Nepos, the Roman historian, and sent to Sallust, another, even more famous Roman historian. Dares's text came to light as late antiquity turned into the medieval era, and Dares was promptly hailed (...) as “the first pagan historian”—a predecessor of Homer—by Isidore of Seville. Throughout the medieval period, a series of scholars were transfixed by Dares. His text was taken as the earliest and thus most reliable source for the world-changing event of the Trojan War—which led to the foundation of Rome and the shape of the West. It was exciting not just for its antiquity but also for its polemical revision of the standard received story. Not only did its prefatory letter claim—with a nicely rationalizing rhetoric—that even the Athenians declared Homer was “insane” for imagining that gods and humans might meet on the battlefield, but also, even more alluringly, Dares stated that Aeneas, the pious hero of Virgil's Aeneid, was a traitor who had sold out Troy to the Greeks: he escaped the sack to found Rome because he had opened the doors of the city to its enemies. The pious Aeneas, exemplary hero, committed the deeply impious act of treachery to his own fatherland. Dares provided a moral rejoinder to later Roman political propaganda and provoked a set of intense debates about the past, its value, and its truth.Early modern humanists were more suspicious. The great scholars Scaliger and Vossius in particular turned their philological fervor against what they saw as an obvious forgery—but even then, not everyone was persuaded. The celebrated Bodin, most surprisingly, still thought Dares represented historical truth. Clark carefully shows how oversimplified the common story of the triumph of humanist learning is. It took a lot of work and much forgetting as well as persuasion for Dares to lose his position. It was indeed only in the Enlightenment that Dares finally passed into the half-light of insignificance reserved for forgeries. One strength of Clark's book is his insistence on trying to discover with generosity and understanding how apparently baffling opinions could be held and argued for—how, that is, the past is a foreign country even and especially where such apparently basic ideas as historical truth are at stake (a topic not without relevance in modern politics).Clark examines in considerable detail across several centuries how Dares was read and mobilized. It is especially satisfying to have a work of reception history that stretches across the modern historiographical divides (of the late antique, medieval, early modern, and Enlightenment periods) and sees how complex the lines of continuity and change are. The naive prose of Dares, in Clark's sophisticated analysis, raises profound questions of what antiquity is and why it matters; how authenticity and authorship are constructed differently across this time period; what the relations are between fiction, truth, and exemplarity (both in theory and in practice); and how texts shift in status and attribution. Dares indeed, as Clark puts it well, “test[s] the meaning and boundaries of antiquity itself.” The range of material is stunning: not only in terms of who read and used Dares but also in terms of the other texts that were read and transformed alongside his. It is remarkable, for example, to see how Joseph of Exeter's medieval hexameters were attributed to Dares (and then reattributed), or how Dares became silently incorporated into a work of Jerome. Despite this richness, I would have liked to see more pages on the relation between pagan and Christian historiography. How does Dares's believed (but false) claim to be an eyewitness relate to Christian claims to witness events (martyr means [eye-]witness)? Philology and its attack on authenticity were key to the battles of the Reformation. Clark could also have spent more time exploring what difference the rediscovery of the Greek text of Homer made to the story of Dares's reception. Homer's rise in the West is part of Dares's fall. In its detail, however, and its range of questions and scope of material, The First Pagan Historian is an exemplary work of reception history. (shrink)

Everyone has mistaken one thing for another, such as a stranger for an acquaintance. A person who has mistaken two things, Joseph Camp argues, even on a massive scale, is still capable of logical thought. In order to make that idea precise, one needs a logic of confused thought that is blind to the distinction between the objects that have been confused. Confused thought and language cannot be characterized as true or false even though reasoning conducted in such language (...) can be classified as valid or invalid. To the extent that philosophers have addressed this issue at all, they take it for granted that confusion is a kind of ambiguity. Camp rejects this notion; his fundamental claim is that confusion is not a mental state. To attribute confusion to someone is to take up a paternalistic stance in evaluating his reasoning. Camp proposes a novel characterization of confusion, and then demonstrates its fruitfulness with several applications in the history of philosophy and the history of science. (shrink)

What is free will? Why is it important? Can the same act be both free and determined? Is free will necessary for moral responsibility? Does anyone have free will, and if not, how is creativity possible and how can anyone be praised or blamed for anything? These are just some of the questions considered by Joseph Keim Campbell in this lively and accessible introduction to the concept of free will. Using a range of engaging examples the book introduces the (...) problems, arguments, and theories surrounding free will. Beginning with a discussion of fatalism and causal determinism, the book goes on to focus on the metaphysics of moral responsibility, free will skepticism, and skepticism about moral responsibility. Campbell shows that no matter how we look at it, free will is problematic. Thankfully there are a plethora of solutions on offer and the best of these are considered in full in the final chapter on contemporary theories of free will. This includes a rigorous account of libertarianism, compatabilism, and naturalism. _Free Will_ is the ideal introduction to the topic and will be a valuable resource for scholars and students seeking to understand the importance and relevance of the concept for contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

What is free will? Why is it important? Can the same act be both free and determined? Is free will necessary for moral responsibility? Does anyone have free will, and if not, how is creativity possible and how can anyone be praised or blamed for anything? These are just some of the questions considered by Joseph Keim Campbell in this lively and accessible introduction to the concept of free will. Using a range of engaging examples the book introduces the (...) problems, arguments, and theories surrounding free will. Beginning with a discussion of fatalism and causal determinism, the book goes on to focus on the metaphysics of moral responsibility, free will skepticism, and skepticism about moral responsibility. Campbell shows that no matter how we look at it, free will is problematic. Thankfully there are a plethora of solutions on offer and the best of these are considered in full in the final chapter on contemporary theories of free will. This includes a rigorous account of libertarianism, compatabilism, and naturalism. _Free Will_ is the ideal introduction to the topic and will be a valuable resource for scholars and students seeking to understand the importance and relevance of the concept for contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

The swamping problem is to explain why knowledge is epistemically better than true belief despite being no more true, if truth is the sole fundamental epistemic value. But Carter and Jarvis argue that the swamping thesis at the heart of the problem ‘is problematic whether or not one thinks that truth is the sole epistemic good’. I offer a counterexample to this claim, in the form of a theory of epistemic value for which the swamping thesis is not problematic: evidence (...) monism. Then I argue that another kind of response to the swamping problem given by Sylvan 2018 does not escape the problem unscathed, because it is not only instrumentalism that gives rise to the swamping problem. The upshot is that, given a standard account of fundamental value, the swamping problem favours evidence monism over truth monism. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill is one of the hallowed figures of the liberal tradition, revered for his defense of liberal principles and expansive personal liberty. By examining Mill's arguments in On Liberty in light of his other writings, however, Joseph Hamburger reveals a Mill very different from the "saint of rationalism" so central to liberal thought. He shows that Mill, far from being an advocate of a maximum degree of liberty, was an advocate of liberty and control--indeed a degree of (...) control ultimately incompatible with liberal ideals.Hamburger offers this powerful challenge to conventional scholarship by presenting Mill's views on liberty in the context of his ideas about, in particular, religion and historical development. The book draws on the whole range of Mill's philosophical writings and on his correspondence with, among others, Harriet Taylor Mill, Auguste Comte, and Alexander Bain to show that Mill's underlying goal was to replace the traditional religious basis of society with a form of secular religion that would rest on moral authority, individual restraint, and social control. Hamburger argues that Mill was not self-contradictory in thus championing both control and liberty. Rather, liberty and control worked together in Mill's thought as part of a balanced, coherent program of social and moral reform that was neither liberal nor authoritarian.Based on a lifetime's study of nineteenth-century political thought, this clearly written and forcefully argued book is a major reinterpretation of Mill's ideas and intellectual legacy. (shrink)

Various processes are often classified as both deterministic and random or chaotic. The main difficulty in analysing the randomness of such processes is the apparent tension between the notions of randomness and determinism: what type of randomness could exist in a deterministic process? Ergodic theory seems to offer a particularly promising theoretical tool for tackling this problem by positing a hierarchy, the so-called ‘ergodic hierarchy’, which is commonly assumed to provide a hierarchy of increasing degrees of randomness. However, that notion (...) of randomness requires clarification. The mathematical definition of EH does not make explicit appeal to randomness; nor does the usual way of presenting EH involve a specification of the notion of randomness that is supposed to underlie the hierarchy. In this paper we argue that EH is best understood as a hierarchy of random behaviour if randomness is explicated in terms of unpredictability. We then show that, contrary to common wisdom, EH is useful in characterising the behaviour of Hamiltonian dynamical systems. (shrink)

Edmund Husserl EDMUND GUSTAVE ALBRECHT HUSSERL was born in Prossnitz, Moravia, on April 8, 1859. After receiving his secondary education in Vienna, ...

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES IN BUSINESS ETHICS, 6E introduces readers to business ethics by focusing on the influence of market mechanisms and social values on workplace norms. And because business is increasingly a global enterprise, this edition emphasizes the role of ethics both at home and abroad.

Analyzes Schelling's arguments for his idealism and pieces together a description of his theory of nature from among the large number of his writings in this area. It also traces the influence of Naturphilosophie on 19th-century science and connects it with recent System Theory.

There is a need for empirically based research on social and ethical challenges related to informed consent processes, particularly in studies focusing on adolescent sexual and reproductive health. In a pilot study of a school-based pregnancy prevention intervention in rural Zambia, the majority of the guardians who were asked to consent to their daughters’ participation, refused. In this paper we explore the reasons behind the low participation in the pilot with particular attention to challenges related to the community engagement and (...) informed consent process. The pilot was implemented in two schools and examined the acceptability of a package of interventions including economic support to families to keep their girls in school, pocket money for girls, youth club meetings on reproductive health, and community meetings to sensitize the community. Focus group discussions were conducted with girls who participated in the pilot, boys in their class and with parents. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with teachers, peer educators and community health workers involved in the coordination of the intervention as well as with religious and traditional leaders. Data were analyzed through thematic analysis. The findings indicate that inadequate use of recognized community communication channels during the community engagement process and dissemination of information about the pilot resulted in limited understanding of the pilot concept by the community. This surfaced through uncertainty and fear that the intervention may result in loss of control over daughters, worries about why money was provided unconditionally to girls, and suspicion of links to satanism. The sense of insecurity appeared to be exacerbated by low literacy levels, poverty, fear of loss of bride wealth, perceived disregard for local perceptions of social status, and scanty trust in the actors implementing the pilot. Inadequate use of locally appropriate channels in the dissemination of information created room for interpretation and facilitated development of mistrust, undermining the conditions for community engagement and actual informed consent. A key lesson learnt is the importance of taking seriously the complexity of local values and structures that may impact people’s capability to consent or not consent to a study in an informed manner. (shrink)

This study surveys the internal audit department of a large financial services organization. Respondents were challenged to recognize and evaluate ethical and unethical situations often encountered in practice. Four key demographic variables were investigated: gender, age, years of employment and peer group influence. For the most part, respondents view themselves as more ethical than their peers. There does appear to be a gender effect suggesting females' ability to identify ethical behavior better than their male counterparts. This study contributes to the (...) extant literature in that it has explored a previously unexplored profession, namely, the internal auditing profession. (shrink)

Most causal discovery algorithms in the literature exploit an assumption usually referred to as the Causal Faithfulness or Stability Condition. In this paper, we highlight two components of the condition used in constraint-based algorithms, which we call “Adjacency-Faithfulness” and “Orientation- Faithfulness.” We point out that assuming Adjacency-Faithfulness is true, it is possible to test the validity of Orientation- Faithfulness. Motivated by this observation, we explore the consequence of making only the Adjacency-Faithfulness assumption. We show that the familiar PC algorithm has (...) to be modified to be correct under the weaker, Adjacency-Faithfulness assumption. The modified algorithm, called Conservative PC (CPC), checks whether Orientation- Faithfulness holds in the orientation phase, and if not, avoids drawing certain causal conclusions the PC algorithm would draw. Howtion: ever, if the stronger, standard causal Faith-. (shrink)

In Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology, Joseph J. Kockelmans provides the reader with a biographical sketch and an overview of the salient features of Husserl's thought. Kockelmans focuses on the essay for the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1928, Husserl's most Important effort to articulate the aims of phenomenology for a more general audience. Included are Husserl's text -- in the original German and in English translation on facing pages -- a synopsis, and an extensive commentary that relates Husserl's work as a whole (...) to the essay for the Encyclopedia. (shrink)

The idea of human-like robots with artificial intelligence (AI) engaging in sports has been considered in the light of robotics, technology and culture. However, robots with AI can also be used to clarify ethical questions in sports such as boxing with its inherent risks of brain injury and even death.This article develops an innovative way to assess the ethical issues in boxing by using a thought experiment, responding to recent medical data and overall concerns about harms and risks to boxers. (...) The thought experiment imagines a fight between a human and a robot. Critical issues about head trauma and brain injuries are then discussed. These can be summed up in two ethical questions: ‘why is it acceptable for a boxer to deliver concussive and recurrent subconcussive punches to a human head (skull and brain), powerful enough to achieve a knockout, or score more points, or to potentially inflict an injury immediately or eventually resulting in death?’, with the reciprocal question, ‘why is it acceptable to allow oneself to be injured in a like manner, possibly fatally, by an opponent?’The two questions are explored using the thought experiment in two matching perspectives: where the human boxer is attacking and the robot boxer is defending; and conversely, where the human boxer is on the receiving end of punches delivered by the robot. Each perspective opens with some general remarks, followed by an analysis of the boxing contest and eliciting some implications for future opportunities for the sport. (shrink)

In two recent papers Perez Laraudogoitia has described a variety of supertasks involving elastic collisions in Newtonian systems containing a denumerably infinite set of particles. He maintains that these various supertasks give examples of systems in which energy is not conserved, particles at rest begin to move spontaneously, particles disappear from a system, and particles are created ex nihilo. An analysis of these supertasks suggests that they involve systems that do not satisfy the mathematical conditions required of Newtonian systems at (...) the time the supertask is due to be completed, or else they rely on the application of the time-reversal transformation to states which are not well-defined. Consequently, it is unjustified to conclude that the paradoxical results are arising from within the framework of Newtonian mechanics. In the last part of this article, we discuss various aspects of the physics of these supertasks. (shrink)

By considering the history of bioethics and international humanitarian law, Joseph J. Fins contends that bioethics as an academic and moral community should stand in solidarity with Ukraine as it defends freedom and civility.

Henry Hansmann has claimed we have reached the “end of history” in corporate law, organized around the “widespread normative consensus that corporate managers should act exclusively in the economic interests of shareholders.” In this paper, I examine Hansmann’s own argument in support of this view, in order to draw out its implications for some of the traditional concerns of business ethicists about corporate social responsibility. The centerpiece of Hansmann’s argument is the claim that ownership of the firm is most naturally (...) exercised by the group able to achieve the lowest agency costs, and that homogeneity of interest within the ownership group is the most important factor in achieving lower costs. He defends this claim through a study of cooperatives, attempting to show that homogeneity is the source of the competitive advantage most often enjoyed by shareholders over other constituency groups, such as workers, suppliers and customers, when it comes to exercising control over the firm. Some business ethicists, impressed by this argument, have taken it to be a vindication of Milton Friedman’s claim that profit-maximization is the only “social responsibility” of management. I would like to suggest that this conclusion does not follow, and that the “Hansmann argument” lends itself to a less minimalist view, what I refer to as a “market failures” approach to business ethics. (shrink)