First published over thirty years ago, "Classic Philosophical Questions" has presented decades of students with the most compelling classic and contemporary readings on the most enduring and abiding questions in philosophy. The anthology, topically arranged, uses debate and argument as vehicles to teach students the fundamentals of philosophy while also demonstrating that philosophy is a discourse spanning centuries. "James A. Gould" and "Robert J. Mulvaney" continue to provide students with interesting, intriguing essays from major philosophers in a distinctive presentation, (...) often involving a pro/con format, to ensure that both the apparent and subtle points of argument are both meaningful and clear. Features of this new edition: Sections on epistemology and metaphysics introduced earlier in this edition New readings from Martha Nussbaum and Martin Luther King, Jr. Concise, student-friendly introductions to each philosopher and reading Helpful study and reflection questions focus students' reading and improve comprehension. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The New Health Care For Profit: Doctors and Hospitals in a Competitive Environment. Edited by Bradford H. Gray The Healing Mission and the Business Ethic. By Robert M. Cunningham The Medical Industrial Complex. By Stanley Wohl.

Episodic memory is usually regarded in a Conceptualist light, in the sense of its being dependent upon the grasp of concepts directly relevant to the act of episodic recollection itself, such as a concept of past times and of the self as an experiencer. Given this view, its development is typically timed as being in the early school‐age years (Perner, 2001; Tulving, 2005). We present a minimalist, Non‐Conceptualist approach in opposition to this view, but one that also exists in clear (...) contrast to the kind of minimalism (‘episodic‐like’) espoused by Clayton and Dickinson (1998) with regard to memory in food‐caching birds. While emphasising the nonconceptual elements of episodic memory (in common with the ‘episodic‐like’ approach) we also insist on the essentially phenomenological nature of the memory (as does the Conceptualist approach). We propose the third year of life as a plausible onset period. Our view is rooted in Kantian assumptions about the spatiotemporal content of experience (and thus of re‐experience) and about the synthetic unity of experience—and thus of re‐experience. We answer two objections to this position. (shrink)

This study examines a moderated/mediated model of ethical leadership on follower job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment. We proposed that managers have the potential to be agents of virtue or vice within organizations. Specifically, through ethical leadership behavior we argued that managers can virtuously influence perceptions of ethical climate, which in turn will positively impact organizational members’ flourishing as measured by job satisfaction and affective commitment to the organization. We also hypothesized that perceptions of interactional justice would moderate the ethical (...) leadership-to-climate relationship. Our results indicate that ethical leadership has both a direct and indirect influence on follower job satisfaction and affective commitment. The indirect effect of ethical leadership involves shaping perceptions of ethical climate, which in turn, engender greater job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment. Furthermore, when interactional justice is perceived to be high, this strengthens the ethical leadership-to-climate relationship. (shrink)

Regulatory focus theory is proposed as offering an explanation for the influence of ethical leadership on organizational citizenship behaviors and employee commitments. The prevention focus mindset of an employee is argued to be the mechanism by which an ethical leader influences extra-role compliance behavior as well as normative commitment, whereas the promotion focus mindset of an employee is argued to be the mechanism by which an ethical leader influences extra-role voice behavior as well as affective commitment. Moreover, leader-member exchange is (...) proposed as a moderator of the relationship of ethical leadership to regulatory focus mindsets and employee behavior and commitments. Using the data collected in two waves from 250 working adults, we tested the proposed relationships with moderated mediation bootstrap procedures. The findings generally support the hypothesized relationships and point toward important implications for ethical leadership in work settings. (shrink)

Generation Y is a cohort of the population larger than the baby boom generation. Consisting of approximately 80 million people born between 1981 and 2000, Generation Y is the most recent cohort to enter the workforce. Workplaces are being redefined and organizations are being pressed to adapt as this new wave of workers is infused into business environments. One critical aspect of this phenomenon not receiving sufficient research attention is the impact of Gen Y ethical beliefs and ethical conduct in (...) workplace contexts. It is widely accepted that distinct generational experiences shape ethical ideologies and ethical ideologies in turn affect the way people function in the workplace. Thus, Gen Y’s unique cohort experiences are likely to shape their ethical ideologies and consequent workplace judgments and actions. In this article, we examine Gen Y’s ethical ideology and study its impact on workplace functioning regarding leadership style, teamwork, and judgments about ethical violations. Our analyses indicate that Gen Y’ers tend toward situationalism (high idealism and high relativism), and their socially connected orientation produces more lenient judgments of collaborative vs. unilateral ethical violations. However, Gen Y’ers do exhibit individual variation. Relativist Gen Y’ers are more tolerant of ethical violations, whereas, Gen Y Idealists are less tolerant of ethical violations. High Idealists also show stronger teamwork and leadership characteristics. In addition, Gen Y’ers possessing servant leader traits exhibit incrementally better teamwork, and greater perceived unacceptability of ethical violations. We conclude by discussing implications of these findings for managing ethical climates and conduct. (shrink)

In this comprehensive collection of essays, most of which appear for the first time, eminent scholars from many disciplines—philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, demography, theology, history, and social psychology—examine the causes, nature, and consequences of present-day consumption patterns in the United States and throughout the world.

Episodic memory is usually regarded in a Conceptualist light, in the sense of its being dependent upon the grasp of concepts directly relevant to the act of episodic recollection itself, such as a concept of past times and of the self as an experiencer. Given this view, its development is typically timed as being in the early school-age years. We present a minimalist, Non-Conceptualist approach in opposition to this view, but one that also exists in clear contrast to the kind (...) of minimalism espoused by Clayton and Dickinson with regard to memory in food-caching birds. While emphasising the nonconceptual elements of episodic memory we also insist on the essentially phenomenological nature of the memory. We propose the third year of life as a plausible onset period. Our view is rooted in Kantian assumptions about the spatiotemporal content of experience and about the synthetic unity of experience—and thus of re-experience. We answer two objections to this position. (shrink)

The essays in this book engage the original and controversial claims from Michael Boylan's A Just Society. Each essay discusses Boylan's claims from a particular chapter and offers a critical analysis of these claims. Boylan responds to the essays in his lengthy and philosophically rich reply.

This reader collects and introduces important work in linguistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics on the use of linguistic devices in natural languages to situate events in time: whether they are past, present, or future; whether they are real or hypothetical; when an event might have occurred, and how long it could have lasted. In focussing on the treatment and retrieval of time-based information it seeks to lay the foundation for temporally-aware natural language computer processing systems, for example (...) those that process documents on the worldwide web to answer questions or produce summaries. The development of such systems requires the application of technical knowledge from many different disciplines. The book is the first to bring these disciplines together, by means of classic and contemporary papers in four areas: tense, aspect, and event structure; temporal reasoning; the temporal structure of natural language discourse; and temporal annotation. Clear, self-contained editorial introductions to each area provide the necessary technical background for the non-specialist, explaining the underlying connections across disciplines.A wide range of students and professionals in academia and industry will value this book as an introduction and guide to a new and vital technology. The former include researchers, students, and teachers of natural language processing, linguistics, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, computer science, information retrieval, library sciences, human-computer interaction, and cognitive science. Those in industry include corporate managers and researchers, software product developers, and engineers in information-intensive companies, such as on-line database and web-service providers. (shrink)

This paper synthesises a collaborative review of social capital theory, with particular regard for its relevance to the changing educational landscape within Scotland. The review considers the common and distinctive elements of social capital, developed by the founding fathers-Putnam, Bourdieu and Coleman-and explores how these might help to understand the changing contexts and pursue opportunities for growth.

Using the definition of “education as a practice”, the only coherent interpretation of Heslep's central thesis of “Education's moral role” was found to need the notion of a “social institution” of Education. This in turn made sense only by positing a notion such as a Political Proficiency Certificate, with its concomitant drastic government intervention. Heslep himself did not suggest this, presumably because he saw the tension that would appear between such an institution and the voluntary actions of citizens. This tension (...) was then shown to exist even in his notion of the “public interest”, which brought into question his argument of why Education needs to be standardized. This was reinforced by the realisation that, if the “public interest” required votes to be aggregated into a social choice, then it is unlikely to be realised by any current voting system. This suggested it was an unsuitable foundation on which to rest either a theory of democracy or a justification for the need for standardized Education. With that justification brought into question, the need for a “social institution” of Education disappears; without that, as we have said, Heslep's central thesis is without a coherent interpretation. (shrink)

Rather than starting with traits and speculating whether selective forces drove evolution in past environments, we propose starting with a candidate gene associated with a trait and testing first for patterns of selection at the DNA level. This can provide limitations on the number of traits to be evaluated subsequently by adaptationism as described by Andrews et al.

The late 1960s witnessed a key conjunction between political activism and the history of science. Science, whether seen as a touchstone of rationality or of oppression, was fundamental to all sides in the era of the Vietnam War. This essay examines the historian Robert Maxwell Young's turn to Marxism and radical politics during this period, especially his widely cited account of the ‘common context’ of nineteenth-century biological and social theorizing, which demonstrated the centrality of Thomas Robert Malthus's writings on population (...) for Charles Darwin's formulation of the theory of evolution by natural selection. From Young's perspective, this history was bound up with pressing contemporary issues: ideologies of class and race in neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, the revival of Malthusian population control, and the role of science in military conflict. The aim was to provide a basis for political action – the ‘head revolution’ that would accompany radical social change. The radical force of Young's argument was blunted in subsequent decades by disciplinary developments within history of science, including the emergence of specialist Darwin studies, a focus on practice and the changing political associations of the history of ideas. Young's engaged standpoint, however, has remained influential even as historians moved from understanding science as ideology to science as work. (shrink)

Francis Bacon, the English philosopher, statesman and jurist, is best known for developing the empiricist method which forms the basis of modern science. Bacon's writings concentrated on philosophy and judicial reform. His most significant work is the Instauratio Magna comprising two parts - The Advancement of Learning and the Novum Organum. The first part is noteworthy as the first major philosophical work published in English. James Spedding and his co-editors arranged this fourteen-volume edition, published in London between 1857 and (...) 1874, not in chronological order but by subject matter, so that different volumes would appeal to different audiences. The material is divided into three parts: philosophy and general literature; legal works; and letters, speeches and tracts relating to politics. Volume 8, published in 1862, contains letters, and miscellaneous writings relating to Bacon's political duties from 1561 to 1594, offering a valuable insight into Elizabethan statecraft. (shrink)

The papers in this volume are contributions to a comparative semantics, understood in the context of the theory of Logical Form as a branch of comparative syntax. In contrastively exploring a wide range of languages, including Arabic, Chinese, English, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Navajo, Spanish and Toba Batak, the authors provide new insights into our understanding of the nature of quantificational, WH and anaphoric phenomena, and into the form of constraints, including subjacency and ECP, on the structure of binding at Logical (...) Form. -- Back cover. (shrink)

Development is a process whereby a relatively unspecified system comprised of loosely connected lower level parts becomes organized into a coherent, higher-level agency. Its temporal corollaries are growth, increasingly deterministic behavior, and a progressive reduction of developmental potential. During immature stages with relatively low specification and high potential, development is largely controlled by local interactions from the “bottom-up,” whereas during more highly specified stages with reduced potential, emergent autocatalytic processes exert “top-down” control. Robert Ulanowicz has shown that this phenomenology of (...) ascendency follows thermodynamic principles and can be described quantitatively using information theory, providing a general theory of development. However, the theory has not found a wide audience among developmental biologists, as genetic determinism encourages the popular reductionistic perception that ontogeny is controlled entirely by molecular mechanisms that exert efficient causality from the bottom-up. Nonetheless, measurements of metabolic rates and mRNA complexity in developing embryos, as well as functional analyses of gene regulatory systems, indicate that ontogeny fits the paradigm of developmental ascendency. Beyond informing biomedical research and the interpretation of large datasets obtained by systems-biological approaches, developmental ascendency helps explain the origin of life, and, being independent of scale, provides an overarching explanation for phylogenetic change that contextualizes Darwinian evolution. (shrink)

800x600 In our book _Global Insanity_ we argued that the existential predicament faced by humanity is a predictable consequence of Western Enlightenment thinking and the resulting world model, whose ascendance with the Industrial Revolution entrained development of the global consumer Economy that is destroying the biosphere. This situation extends from a dominant mindset based on the philosophy of reductionism. The problem was recognized and characterized by Robert M. Hutchins. In 1985, Hutchins ideas were discussed by Robert Rosen in Chapter 1 (...) of _Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical & Methodological Foundations_._ _Building on Hutchins' ideas, Rosen laid the foundation for an entire new, non-reductionist paradigm, which he called "complexity theory". This new paradigm is what we are further developing here. One has to recognize that a paradigm shift is needed to overcome the entrenched mindset and world model that reductionism has created. Here we explore the myriad interconnected ways-psychological, social, cultural, political, and technological-that the Western world model and consumer economy works as a complex system to thwart, neutralize, or co-opt for its own ends any effort to bring about the kind of radical change that is needed to avert global ecological catastrophe and societal collapse. This resistance to change stems from the need, inherent in the Western model, to continually grow the consumer economy. The media's continued portrayal of consumptive economic growth as a good thing, the widely held belief that the Economy is paramount, and current political and technological trends all manifest the system's active resistance to change. From the perspective of the mature economic system, any work that does not serve to grow the Economy is counterproductive, and viewed as unnecessary, a luxury, or subversive. The potential for real change is thus inversely related to the viability of the Economy, which will eventually decline as the system develops into senescence. To the extent that the fragile metastability of senescence affords opportunity for radical change, economic decline can be viewed as a hopeful sign. But taking maximum advantage of that opportunity will be extraordinarily difficult, as it will require widespread recognition of the problem, major voluntary sacrifice by the relatively large numbers of people who still benefit from the system, and concerted "grassroots" efforts. It can be expected that the system will resist those efforts until the end, becoming increasingly reliant on media-enabled distraction and divisive politics, as well as violent coercion, to maintain itself. Investment in education and science is widely touted as necessary for improving our situation, but this is misguided as long as the educational system and scientific enterprise continue to work in collusion with the larger system, as they currently do. Until the reductionist mindset and world model that drives the system is effectively challenged, there can be little hope for the kind of change needed to avert the catastrophic collapse of civilization. Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4. (shrink)

This article explores the process of teaching Christian theological ethics beyond the common focus on European and North American sources. In conversation with moves to decolonise university curricula, the article proposes a theology of listening, an example of a research seminar for master’s and doctoral students at the University of Aberdeen on Christian ethics beyond Europe and North America, and an exploration of broader challenges for the formation of the theologian. The article asks, what can we learn when we give (...) up power and control when teaching and learning theology? How can we shift our methods of knowing and practising theology? We write as theologians from India, Mexico, and the United States living in the United Kingdom. We reflect on forms of exclusion in theological method and formation that arise from colonising, systemic violence, and inequalities. The article considers intercultural challenges when encountering different methods of reflection on the Christian experience. In a search for a more profoundly theological approach, we propose listening to the other as integral to doing theology. In an intercultural move, we draw on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology of listening, proposing that theology must be an advent of voices from beyond our usual places and methods. (shrink)

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original.

Robert N. McCauley's new book Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not (2011) presents a new paradigm for investigating the relationship between science and religion by exploring the cognitive foundations of religious belief and scientific knowledge. McCauley's contention is that many of the differences and disagreements regarding religion and science are the product of distinct features of human cognition that process these two domains of knowledge very differently. McCauley's thesis provides valuable insights into this relationship while not necessarily leading (...) to a dismissive view of theology or religious belief. His paradigm allows the research lens to focus on cognitive differences in processing scientific versus religious information and the important role of automatic, unconscious, and intuitive cognitive processes in understanding both the natural and supernatural worlds. (shrink)