This book presents in translation writings by six medieval philosophers which bear on the subject of conscience. Conscience, which can be considered both as a topic in the philosophy of mind and a topic in ethics, has been unduly neglected in modern philosophy, where a prevailing belief in the autonomy of ethics leaves it no natural place. It was, however, a standard subject for a treatise in medieval philosophy. Three introductory translations here, from Jerome, Augustine and Peter Lombard, present the (...) loci classici on which subsequent discussions drew; there follows the first complete treatise on conscience, by Philip the Chancellor, while the two remaining translations, from Bonaventure and Aquinas, have been chosen as outstanding examples of the two main approaches which crystallised during the thirteenth century. (shrink)

This book presents in translation writings by six medieval philosophers which bear on the subject of conscience. Conscience, which can be considered both as a topic in the philosophy of mind and a topic in ethics, has been unduly neglected in modern philosophy, where a prevailing belief in the autonomy of ethics leaves it no natural place. It was, however, a standard subject for a treatise in medieval philosophy. Three introductory translations here, from Jerome, Augustine and Peter Lombard, present the (...) loci classici on which subsequent discussions drew; there follows the first complete treatise on conscience, by Philip the Chancellor, while the two remaining translations, from Bonaventure and Aquinas, have been chosen as outstanding examples of the two main approaches which crystallised during the thirteenth century. (shrink)

This 1994 book develops a way of representing the meanings of linguistic expressions which is independent of any particular language, allowing the expressions to be manipulated in accordance with rules related to their meanings which could be implemented on a computer. It begins with a survey of the contributions of linguistics, logic and computer science to the problem of representation, linking each with a particular type of formal grammar. A system of graphs is then presented, organized by scope relations in (...) which linguistic constituents are sub-graphs whose configuration is determined by their categories. In developing this system, the author extends the notion of scope and argues that anaphoric and relative pronouns are structural signs not linguistic constituents. Certain count nouns are made the basis of this system and an account of proper names relating the count nouns, is given. (shrink)

In this lecture, I want to convey some ideas about linguistic communication which will probably be found not only unfamiliar, but also difficult to grasp at a first encounter. Perhaps I am being too ambitious in so short a compass. At any rate, my only hope of success is to work within closely defined limits, to concentrate more upon expounding these suggestions than upon detailed justification of them, and to say as little as possible about the shortcomings of alternative proposals (...) which are current. The references which I cite have also been rather narrowly selected. As to the limits of this discussion, it will be confined to linguistic communication, as effected by the use of sentences. This is not to deny that there are non-linguistic forms of communication, both between men and between other animals, nor that there are other units of linguistic communication than the sentence; I have taken only what seems most typical of human communication, in order to make the task manageable. (shrink)

In this lecture, I want to convey some ideas about linguistic communication which will probably be found not only unfamiliar, but also difficult to grasp at a first encounter. Perhaps I am being too ambitious in so short a compass. At any rate, my only hope of success is to work within closely defined limits, to concentrate more upon expounding these suggestions than upon detailed justification of them, and to say as little as possible about the shortcomings of alternative proposals (...) which are current. The references which I cite have also been rather narrowly selected. As to the limits of this discussion, it will be confined to linguistic communication, as effected by the use of sentences. This is not to deny that there are non-linguistic forms of communication, both between men and between other animals, nor that there are other units of linguistic communication than the sentence; I have taken only what seems most typical of human communication, in order to make the task manageable. (shrink)

Review of Timothy Potts, *Structures and Categories for the Representation of Meaning* (CUP).

A graduate-level introduction to finite classical groups featuring a comprehensive account of the conjugacy and geometry of elements of prime order.

Has biopolitics actually become thanatopolitics, a field of study obsessed with death? Is there something about the nature of biopolitical thought today that makes it impossibile to deploy affirmatively? If this is true, what can life-minded thinkers put forward as the merits of biopolitical reflection? These questions drive Improper Life.Campbell argues that a "crypto-thanatopolitics" can be teased out of Heidegger's critique of technology and that some of the leading scholars of biopolitics---including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Peter Sloterdijk---have been substansively (...) influenced by Heidegger's thought, particularly his reading of proper and improper writing. In fact, Campbell shows how all of these philosophers have pointed toward a tragic, thanatopolitical destination as somehow an inevitable result of technology. But in Improper Life he articulates a corrective biopolitics that can begin with rereadings of Foucault, Freud, and Gilles Deleuze. Throughout Improper Life, Campbell insists that biopolitics can become more positive and productively asserts an affirmation techne not thought through thanatos but rather through bios. (shrink)

Sound is an inherent component of the environment that provides conditions and information necessary for many animal activities. Soniferous species require specific acoustic and physical conditions suitable for their signals to be transmitted, received, and effectively interpreted to successfully identify and utilize resources in their environment and interact with conspecifics and other heterospecific organisms. We propose the Acoustic Habitat Hypothesis to explain how the acoustic environment influences habitat selection of sound-dependent species. We postulate that sound-dependent species select and occupy habitats (...) with unique acoustic characteristics that are essential to their functional needs and conducive to the threshold of sound frequency they produce and detect. These acoustic habitats are based on the composition of biophony, geophony, and technophony in the soundscape and on the biosemiotics mechanisms described in the eco-field hypothesis. The Acoustic Habitat Hypothesis initiates questions of habitat selection that go beyond the physical attributes of the environment by applying ecoacoustics theory. We outline the theoretical basis of the Acoustic Habitat Hypothesis and provide examples from the literature to support its assumptions. The concept of acoustic habitats has been documented in the literature for many years but here, we accurately and extensively define acoustic habitat and we put this concept into a unified theory. We also include perspectives on how the Acoustic Habitat Hypothesis can stimulate a paradigm shift in conservation strategies for threatened and endangered species. (shrink)

Recent studies of organizational behavior have witnessed a growing interest in unethical leadership, leading to the development of abusive supervision research. Given the increasing interest in the causes of abusive supervision, this study proposes an organizing framework for its antecedents and tests it using meta analysis. Based on an analysis of effect sizes drawn from 74 studies, comprising 30,063 participants, the relationship between abusive supervision and different antecedent categories are examined. The results generally support expected relationships across the four categories (...) of abusive antecedents, including: supervisor related antecedents, organization related antecedents, subordinate related antecedents, and demographic characteristics of both supervisors and subordinates. In addition, possible moderators that can also influence the relationships between abusive supervision and its antecedents are also examined. The significance and implications of different level factors in explaining abusive supervision are discussed. (shrink)

While the Enlightenment brought about an unprecedented growth in freedom, it also gave rise to a set of dichotomies that Hegel's philosophy helps to overcome. In this book, Timothy C. Luther examines Hegel's contribution to polical philosophy and his attempt to resolve tensions in political philosophy and democracy_particularly, his reconciliation of individual liberty and community. Hegel's dialectic preserves what he sees as valuable in liberalism while reformulating it in a way that is more sensitive to community and historical context.

This paper argues that the subsistence of the fundamental theorem of contemporary financial mathematics is the ethical concept ‘reciprocity’. The argument is based on identifying an equivalence between the contemporary, and ostensibly ‘value neutral’, Fundamental Theory of Asset Pricing with theories of mathematical probability that emerged in the seventeenth century in the context of the ethical assessment of commercial contracts in a framework of Aristotelian ethics. This observation, the main claim of the paper, is justified on the basis of results (...) from the Ultimatum Game and is analysed within a framework of Pragmatic philosophy. The analysis leads to the explanatory hypothesis that markets are centres of communicative action with reciprocity as a rule of discourse. The purpose of the paper is to reorientate financial economics to emphasise the objectives of cooperation and social cohesion and to this end, we offer specific policy advice. (shrink)

This anthology collects the texts that defined the concept of biopolitics, which has become so significant throughout the humanities and social sciences today. The far-reaching influence of the biopolitical—the relation of politics to life, or the state to the body—is not surprising given its centrality to matters such as healthcare, abortion, immigration, and the global distribution of essential medicines and medical technologies. Michel Foucault gave new and unprecedented meaning to the term "biopolitics" in his 1976 essay "Right of Death and (...) Power over Life." In this anthology, that touchstone piece is followed by essays in which biopolitics is implicitly anticipated as a problem by Hannah Arendt and later altered, critiqued, deconstructed, and refined by major political and social theorists who explicitly engaged with Foucault's ideas. By focusing on the concept of biopolitics, rather than applying it to specific events and phenomena, this Reader provides an enduring framework for assessing the central problematics of modern political thought. _Contributors_. Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, Timothy Campbell, Gilles Deleuze, Roberto Esposito, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Michael Hardt, Achille Mbembe, Warren Montag, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, Adam Sitze, Peter Sloterdijk, Paolo Virno, Slavoj Žižek. (shrink)

The theory of metaphor proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980a, 1980b) and Lakoff (1993) involves a mapping of conceptual structure from one semantic domain to another. We investigate properties of these conceptual domain mappings by comparing them to morphological derivational relations. Schematicity and productivity are properties that Bybee (1985) and Langacker (1987) propose for characterizing morphological derivational relations, which we apply to our analysis of metaphor. Metaphors are argued to vary in their degree of semantic schematicity: Domain relations function as (...) generalizations over specific metaphorical expressions. We also demonstrate three points on a continuum of productivity: Conventional metaphors are highly productive, metaphorically motivated transparent idioms are semiproductive, and opaque idioms are unproductive. Each point is compared with an example of morphological productivity having a corresponding conceptual organization. The results demonstrate that semantic productivity can be characterized in the same way as morphological productivity, suggesting that form and meaning are organized by the same principles. (shrink)

While the Enlightenment brought about an unprecedented growth in freedom, it also gave rise to a set of dichotomies that Hegel's philosophy helps to overcome. In this book, Timothy C. Luther examines Hegel's contribution to polical philosophy and his attempt to resolve tensions in political philosophy and democracy_particularly, his reconciliation of individual liberty and community. Hegel's dialectic preserves what he sees as valuable in liberalism while reformulating it in a way that is more sensitive to community and historical context.

In sections 4.80 and 4.81 of the Historia Naturalis, Pliny the Elder describes the peoples living beyond the Danube River in his own day in the later first century c.e.: ab eo in plenum quidem omnes Scytharum sunt gentes, uariae tamen litori adposita tenuere, alias Getae, Daci Romanis dicti, alias Sarmatae, Graecis Sauromatae, eorumque Hamaxobii aut Aorsi, alias Scythae degeneres et a seruis orti aut Trogodytae, mox Alani et Rhoxolani; superiora autem inter Danuuium et Hercynium saltum usque ad Pannonica hiberna (...) Carnunti Germanorumque ibi confinium, campos et plana Iazyges Sarmatae, montes uero et saltus pulsi ab iis Daci ad Pathissum amnem. a Maro, siue Duria est a Suebis regnoque Vanniano dirimens eos, auersa Basternae tenent aliique inde Germani. […] Scytharum nomen usquequaque transiit in Sarmatas atque Germanos. nec aliis prisca illa durauit appellatio quam qui extremi gentium harum, ignoti prope ceteris mortalibus, degunt. (shrink)

Unlike birds and mammals, reptiles are commonly thought to possess only the most rudimentary means of interacting with their environments, reflexively responding to sensory information to the near exclusion of higher cognitive function. However, reptilian brains, though structurally somewhat different from those of mammals and birds, use many of the same cellular and molecular processes to support complex behaviors in homologous brain regions. Here, the neurological mechanisms supporting reptilian cognition are reviewed, focusing specifically on spatial cognition and the hippocampus. These (...) processes are compared to those seen in mammals and birds within an ecologically and evolutionarily relevant context. By viewing reptilian cognition through an integrative framework, a more robust understanding of reptile cognition is gleaned. Doing so yields a broader view of the evolutionarily conserved molecular and cellular mechanisms that underlie cognitive function and a better understanding of the factors that led to the evolution of complex cognition. (shrink)

Evidence presented in Salmon (2001; Econometrica 69(6) 1597) indicates that typical tests to identify learning behavior in experiments involving normal form games possess little power to reject incorrect models. This paper begins by presenting results from an experiment designed to gather alternative data to overcome this problem. The results from these experiments indicate support for a learning-to-learn or rule learning hypothesis in which subjects change their decision rule over time. These results are then used to construct an adaptive learning model (...) which is intended to mimic more accurately the behavior observed. The final section of the paper presents results from a simple simulation based analysis comparing the performance of this adaptive learning model with that of several standard decision rules in reproducing the choice patterns observed in the experiment. (shrink)

Aaron Ridley has concluded that “Collingwood’s global Idealism is really only a distraction from the much more important and interesting ideas that constitute his aesthetics.” My paper takes issue with this conclusion. Collingwood’s idealism is an integral part of his aesthetics, and it simply cannot be shucked off, leaving his aesthetics untouched and intact. A careful reading of Collingwood’s oeuvre in aesthetics reveals that it is his long-standing antipathy to realism that grounds both his critique of pseudo-art and his own (...) theory of art, particularly his idealist theory of the imagination. If Collingwood’s aesthetics are interesting and important, so is the idealism that grounds them. (shrink)

Collingwood’s An Essay on Philosophical Method provides an insightful critique of Russell’s analysis and metaphysics of logical atomism, proposing an unduly neglected neo-idealist alternative to Russell’s philosophical method. I summarize Collingwood’s critique of analysis and sympathetically outline the philosophical methodology of Collingwood’s post-Hegelian dialectical method: his scale of forms methodology, grounded on the overlap of philosophical classes. I then delineate Collingwood’s critique of the metaphysics of logical atomism, demonstrating how the scale of forms methodology is opposed to Russell’s logical atomism. (...) Finally, I reflect on the reasons Collingwood’s Essay aroused little interest upon publication and the importance of continually rethinking the history of philosophy. (shrink)

I argue that eliminative materialism, with its aim of jettisoning folk psychology, cannot account for the possibility of historical knowledge. Eliminative materialism destroys the disciplinary distinctions between history and science in such a way as to eclipse the former. I argue that ‘historical consciousness’ cannot be reduced to the discoveries of neuroscience; Paul Churchland’s charge of folk psychology’s explanatory impotence is undercut by the possibility, indeed, the actuality of historical knowledge, and one of Churchland’s main arguments for eliminative materialism is (...) dependent upon historical knowledge-claims that themselves must contradictorily utilize the propositional attitudes of folk psychology. (shrink)