Despite there being deep lines of convergence between the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead, C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and other classical American philosophers, it remains an open question whether Whitehead is a pragmatist, and conversation between pragmatists and Whitehead scholars have been limited. Indeed, it is difficult to find an anthology of classical American philosophy that includes Whitehead’s writings. These camps began separately, and so they remain. This volume questions the wisdom of that separation, exploring their connections, (...) both historical and in application. The essays in this volume embody original and creative work by leading scholars that not only furthers the understanding of American philosophy, but seeks to advance it by working at the intersection of experience and reality to incite novel and creative thought. This exploration is long overdue. Specific questions that are addressed are: Is Whitehead a pragmatist? What contrasts and affinities exist between American pragmatism and Whitehead’s thought? What new questions, strategies, and critiques emerge by juxtaposing their distinct perspectives? -/- . (shrink)

The emergence of new obstetrical and neonatal technologies, as well as more aggressive clinical management, has significantly improved the survival of extremely low birth weight infants. This development has heightened concerns about the limits of viability. ELBW infants, weighing less than 1,000 grams and no larger than the palm of one's hand, are often described as of late twentieth century technology. Improved survivability of ELBW infants has provided opportunities for long-term follow-up. Information on their physical and emotional development contributes to (...) developing standards of practice regarding their care. (shrink)

Well-known social psychologist David G. Myers addresses why Americans can have so many social problems--reflecting a deep spiritual poverty--at a time when material wealth is at record levels. 32 illustrations.

Rhythmic structure in speech is characterized by sequences of stressed and unstressed syllables. A large body of literature suggests that speakers of English attempt to achieve rhythmic harmony by evenly distributing stressed syllables throughout prosodic phrases. The question remains as to how speakers plan metrical structure during speech production and whether it is planned independently of phonemes. To examine this, we designed a tongue twister task consisting of disyllabic word pairs with overlapping phonological segments and either matching or non‐matching metrical (...) structure. Results showed that speakers had more difficulty producing metrically regular word pairs, compared to irregular pairs; that is, word pairs with irregular meter had faster productions and fewer speech errors in this production task. This finding of metrical regularity inhibiting production is inconsistent with an abstract metrical structure that is planned independently of phonemes at the point of phonological encoding. (shrink)

In this fascinating new collection of essays, contemporary historians examine the ways earlier historians have framed, written, and "made" the Jewish past. Probing the ideology and methodology of their professional predecessors, American and Israeli historians offer new perspectives on some of the central figures of twentieth-century Jewish historiography, including Gershom Scholem, S. D. Goitein, Yitzhak Baer, Elias Bickermann, and Cecil Roth, as well as the Israeli "New Historians." Although the lives and work of these scholars differ in many ways, Jewish (...) historians have recurrently confronted the challenges posed by assimilation, antisemitism, and various forms of nationalism. Through their critical examinations of the construction of the Jewish past, the contributors to this volume develop important insights into current attitudes toward the dominant canons and ideals of historical scholarship and the future of historiography. They shine new light on the formation of a historical worldview and the "making" of history. (shrink)

The multifarious nature of biodiversity is considered in relation to difficulties of definite determination and managerial mandates for monitoring. At a micro scale there is some convergence with the concept of community, but the linkage is largely lost in the spectra of temporal scope, spatial scales, successional seres, and taxonomic trajectories. Practicality points to selecting suitable suites of indicators as surrogates for particular purposes. Domains of partial ordering on multiple indicators constitute comparable collectives, whereas different domains require recognition of special (...) situations. Theoretical treatise and practical process can proceed in parallel, with dialogue and cross-fertilization serving to invigorate and inspire; whereas compulsive concern for completeness and consistency can be counter-productive as well as unduly expensive. Inability to completely capture all aspects of biodiversity in one full formulation is interesting and integral to issues of biocomplexity. (shrink)

Allthough small business accounts for over 90% of businesses in U.K. and indeed elsewhere, they remain the largely uncharted area of ethics. There has not been any research based on the perspective of small business owners, to define what echical delemmas they face and how, if at all, they resolve them. This paper explores ethics from the perspective of small business owner, using focus groups and reports on four clearly identifiable themes of ethical delemmas; entrepreneurial activity itself, conflicts of personal (...) values with business needs, social responsibility and the impact of owners' personality on business ethics. The mechanisms for resolving ethical dilemmas is not at all clear, as there appears to be a web of filters which are used in an inter-connected way. However a common starting point for resolving an ethical delemma which involves others is based on identifying who it is (e.g., a friend or institution) and the quality of the relationship with that person. The research yielded a rich source of material on business ethics and it is clear that future researchers must focus on this sector if business ethics is to make significant advances. (shrink)

The fields of machine learning (ML) and cognitive science have developed complementary approaches to computationally modeling human behavior. ML's primary concern is maximizing prediction accuracy; cognitive science's primary concern is explaining the underlying mechanisms. Cross-talk between these disciplines is limited, likely because the tasks and goals usually differ. The domain of e-learning and knowledge acquisition constitutes a fruitful intersection for the two fields’ methodologies to be integrated because accurately tracking learning and forgetting over time and predicting future performance based on (...) learning histories are central to developing effective, personalized learning tools. Here, we show how a state-of-the-art ML model can be enhanced by incorporating insights from a cognitive model of human memory. This was done by exploiting the predictive performance equation's (PPE) narrow but highly specialized domain knowledge with regard to the temporal dynamics of learning and forgetting. Specifically, the PPE was used to engineer timing-related input features for a gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT) model. The resulting PPE-enhanced GBDT outperformed the default GBDT, especially under conditions in which limited data were available for training. Results suggest that integrating cognitive and ML models could be particularly productive if the available data are too high-dimensional to be explained by a cognitive model but not sufficiently large to effectively train a modern ML algorithm. Here, the cognitive model's insights pertaining to only one aspect of the data were enough to jump-start the ML model's ability to make predictions—a finding that holds promise for future explorations. (shrink)

The fields of machine learning (ML) and cognitive science have developed complementary approaches to computationally modeling human behavior. ML's primary concern is maximizing prediction accuracy; cognitive science's primary concern is explaining the underlying mechanisms. Cross-talk between these disciplines is limited, likely because the tasks and goals usually differ. The domain of e-learning and knowledge acquisition constitutes a fruitful intersection for the two fields’ methodologies to be integrated because accurately tracking learning and forgetting over time and predicting future performance based on (...) learning histories are central to developing effective, personalized learning tools. Here, we show how a state-of-the-art ML model can be enhanced by incorporating insights from a cognitive model of human memory. This was done by exploiting the predictive performance equation's (PPE) narrow but highly specialized domain knowledge with regard to the temporal dynamics of learning and forgetting. Specifically, the PPE was used to engineer timing-related input features for a gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT) model. The resulting PPE-enhanced GBDT outperformed the default GBDT, especially under conditions in which limited data were available for training. Results suggest that integrating cognitive and ML models could be particularly productive if the available data are too high-dimensional to be explained by a cognitive model but not sufficiently large to effectively train a modern ML algorithm. Here, the cognitive model's insights pertaining to only one aspect of the data were enough to jump-start the ML model's ability to make predictions—a finding that holds promise for future explorations. (shrink)

As the Zika virus pandemic continues to bring worry and fear to health officials and medical scientists, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) have recommended that residents of the Zika-infected countries, e.g., Brazil, and those who have traveled to the area should delay having babies which may involve artificial contraceptive, particularly condom. This preventive policy, however, is seemingly at odds with the Roman Catholic Church’s position on the contraceptive. As least since the promulgation of (...) Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, the Church has explicitly condemned artificial birth control as intrinsic evil. However, the current pontiff, Pope Francis, during his recent visit to Latin America, remarked that the use of artificial contraception may not be in contradiction to the teaching of Humanae Vitae while drawing a parallel between the current Zika Crisis and the 1960’s Belgian Congo Nun Controversy. The pope mentioned that the traditional ethical principle of the lesser of two evils may be the doctrine that justified the exceptions. The authors of this paper attempt to expand the theological rationale of the pope’s suggestion. In so doing, the authors rely on casuistical reasoning as an analytic tool that compares the Belgian Congo Nun case and the given Zika case, and suggest that the former is highly similar to, if not the same as, the latter in terms of normative moral feature. That is, in both cases the use of artificial contraception is theologically justified in reference to the criteria that the doctrine of the lesser of two evils requires. The authors wish that the paper would provide a solid theological-ethical ground based on which condom-use as the most immediate and effective preventive measure can be recommended in numerous Catholic hospitals as well as among Catholic communities in the world, particularly the most Zika-affected and largest Catholic community in the world, Brazil – 123 million present Brazilian citizens are reported to be Roman Catholic. (shrink)

This paper is an adaptation of a paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in August 1998. It reports on a study on reading pedagogy and metacognition in six classrooms in Leeds and six classrooms in Dublin. The evidence is based on 12 teacher interviews, 43 separate lesson observations and school/class, policy/lesson documents. The paper analyses the teachers' thinking and their classroom practices with reference to inter-related themes, tasks, texts and contexts, and it draws (...) out the implications for the development of metacognitive awareness among the g-year-old children that these teachers reach. It attempts to explain practice with reference to teachers' conceptions of teaching, the learner and reading. (shrink)

Many neuroimaging studies of semantic memory have argued that knowledge of an object's perceptual properties are represented in a modality-specific manner. These studies often base their argument on finding activation in the left-hemisphere fusiform gyrus-a region assumed to be involved in perceptual processing-when the participant is verifying verbal statements about objects and properties. In this paper, we report an extension of one of these influential papers-Kan, Barsalou, Solomon, Minor, and Thompson-Schill (2003 )-and present evidence for an amodal component in the (...) representation and processing of perceptual knowledge. Participants were required to verify object-property statements (e.g., "cat-whiskers?"; "bear-wings?") while they were being scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We replicated Kan et al.'s activation in the left fusiform gyrus, but also found activation in regions of left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and middle-temporal gyrus, areas known to reflect amodal processes or representations. Further, only activations in the left IFG, an amodal area, were correlated with measures of behavioural performance. (shrink)

This essay defends the view of G. C. Pande that, contrary to received opinion, "ānanda" (bliss, felicity) is accepted by Śaṅkara (ca. 788-820) as a feature of Brahman consistent with and parallel to sat (being) and cit (consciousness). It also includes a counterargument by B. N. K. Sharma, and in conclusion offers a reasoned judgment of the arguments of Śaṅkara and these two contemporary philosophers.

The notion that there is a category mistake or some other conceptual confusion in regarding seeing, hearing, and other forms of perception as events, states, or processes is incorrect. Ryle's analysis of "seeing" as an achievement word does not rule out our regarding seeing as an event, but in fact suggests that we do so when we carry the analysis beyond the point where Ryle leaves it. Furthermore there are uses of "see" not noticed by Ryle which justify our saying (...) that within certain contexts seeing is a state and within other contexts a process. The question of what these events, states, and processes are cannot be met without recognizing a fundamental duality of aspect that characterizes perception. This duality can be formulated in terms of the way perception is known. One who observes a perceiver knows the perceiver's perception in a categorically different way than the perceiver knows it. From this it can be seen that perceptual events, states, and processes have both a physical aspect and an epistemological aspect. Any attempt to reduce one of these aspects to the other would involve a category mistake. (shrink)

Thinking with Whitehead and the American Pragmatists is a volume whose topic is so obvious and fertile that I was sure someone must have already collected essays illustrating the many ways these two lines of inquiry challenge and reinforce one another. And, indeed, there exists the 1994 collection Process Pragmatism: Essays on a Quiet Philosophical Revolution, which was edited by Guy Debrock and contains essays by Sandra Rosenthal, Carl Hausman, and others. The revolution cited in that title must have been (...) exceedingly quiet, since twenty-one years later the timely and well-executed Thinking with Whitehead and the American Pragmatists finds it necessary, once again, to knock down ill-conceived barriers separating... (shrink)

This is a review of a book that tries to re-establish mind-body dualism by using (a) empirical research on near-death experiences, placebo effects, creativity, claiming even that parapsychology should become a respected part of science, and (b) Frederic W. H. Myers' (1843-1901) metaphor of the brain as a kind of receiving device that records what the irreducible mind sends as messages. Among other things, we criticize the lack of philosophical clarity about mind-body relation, and question the book's tendency to (...) refer to past and current parapsychological literature as reliable. (shrink)

In order to study early human development while avoiding the burdens associated with human embryo research, scientists are redirecting their efforts towards so-called human embryo-like structures (hELS). hELS are created from clusters of human pluripotent stem cells and seem capable of mimicking early human development with increasing accuracy. Notwithstanding, hELS research finds itself at the intersection of historically controversial fields, and the expectation that it might be received as similarly sensitive is prompting proactive law reform in many jurisdictions, including the (...) Netherlands. However, studies on the public perception of hELS research remain scarce. To help guide policymakers and fill this gap in the literature, we conducted an explorative qualitative study aimed at mapping the range of perspectives in the Netherlands on the creation and research use of hELS. This article reports on a subset of our findings, namely those pertaining to (the degrees of and requirements for) confidence in research with hELS and its regulation. Despite commonly found disparities in confidence on emerging biotechnologies, we also found wide consensus regarding the requirements for having (more) confidence in hELS research. We conclude by reflecting on how these findings could be relevant to researchers and (Dutch) policymakers when interpreted within the context of their limitations. (shrink)

Sept. 24, 1901 Chicago Ills. U.S.A.– 6026 Monroe Ave. Chicago University – William R. Harper, President Professor of Astronomy and Mathematics – School of Education Mr. H. Poincaré, Paris France My dear Sir: You have perhaps noticed in Professor André’s book entitled _“Traité d’astronomie stellaire”_ Vol II p. 303 that my discussions of β Lyrae and U Pegasi both seem to point to a concrete confirmation of your excellent work on rotating liquids. I am now curious to see if by (...) computing light curves based upon any of your other theoretical forms—perhaps the apiodal—I may be able to represent the light curves of any other variables. To this end I write to inquire whether you can put into my hands a copy of the paper containing your discussion, or discussions, of your various forms of rotating liquid masses in equilibrium. If you can do so, you will greatly oblige me and help me, perhaps, to accomplish something which may be of interest to you as furnishing tangible proof of the existence in th... (shrink)

Resetting the agenda -- The conflict motif in historical perspective -- From conflict to concordism -- Integration under the microscope : historical perspective -- Integration : contemporary views -- Insights from n neuropsychology : an overview -- Insights from neuropsychology about spirituality -- Insights about conversion, morality, wisdom, and memory -- Insights from evolutionary psychology -- Insights about human needs and motivation -- Social psychology and faith : stories of conflict, concordism, and authentic congruence (by David G. Myers) -- (...) The way ahead for psychological science and Christian faith. (shrink)

This study is based on the 1983 Rural Health Survey of Ethiopia. Patterns and levels of child morbidity by age, sex, geographic region, and sanitary facilities are examined. Morbidity levels peak in the second year of life. Diarrhoeal diseases are of major importance, especially among infants and toddlers. Parasitic diseases, and respiratory diseases other than pneumonia, become increasingly important with age.There are no significant sex differentials in morbidity except for higher rates of diarrhoeal diseases among female children. Geographic differentials are (...) quite marked with particularly high morbidity levels from all disease types in the western mountainous regions of Ethiopia. Access to high quality drinking water, a latrine, and garbage disposal, are strongly related to reduced overall morbidity levels, though not necessarily to reduced diarrhoeal disease levels. (shrink)

Fifteen essays by as many contributors with a summative introduction by Edie. The contributors are Dreyfus, Adamczewski, Earle, Compton, J. E. Smith, J. M. Anderson, Natanson, Silber, Crosson, Molina, G. E. Myers, Tillman, W. J. Richardson, Langan, and Findlay. All of the essays were presented in one form or another at one of the last three meetings of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Some of them have been considerably reworked and expanded, the most important of which is (...) John Silber's fifty-seven page paper, "Being and Doing." Silber subjects the contemporary analytical version of voluntary responsibility, as found paradigmaticaliy in H. L. A. Hart's work, to a severe critique, arguing that a notion of status responsibility which involves following intentions and motives back to their pre-thematic roots in attitudes and a whole style of life, or way of being, is more consonant with human experience and nature than the antiseptic notion of responsibility developed by Hart. Even Hampshire takes his lumps at Silber's hands. Other excellent papers include Findlay's "Essential Probabilities," which can be read as a plea for a material logic, and Richardson's "Kant and the Late Heidegger," which uses Heidegger's reflection on the Kantian problematic to examine the issue of the continuity between the early and the later Heidegger. Not all of the essays approach the standards of these three, but for a collection of papers that have only the meeting of the same society in common, this is better than most.—E. A. R. (shrink)

Moral education through service learning at post-secondary level is an important but under-researched field. Most existing studies center on its learning outcomes like academic progress, personal development, communication, and leadership skills, with only a few evaluating the moral development of college students participating in service-learning projects. The lack of study on moral development in service learning indicates a need for clarification of the theoretical underpinnings of service learning, John Dewey's ideas on moral growth, in particular his model of moral imagination (...) and the implications thereof, for current service-learning research and practice. We argue that Dewey's work here can help strengthen .. (shrink)

This analysis examines the practice of care providers in residential aged care lying to residents with dementia. Qualitative data were collected through multiple methods. Data here represents perceptions from registered and enrolled nurses, personal care assistants, and allied health professionals from five residential aged care facilities located in Queensland, Australia. Care providers in residential aged care facilities lie to residents with dementia. Lying is conceptualized as therapeutic whereby the care provider’s intent is to eliminate harm and also control behaviour. Care (...) providers of residents with dementia in RACFs need guidance around lying. An ethical framework cognisant of an ethical theory of good and ethical theory of right supplemented by a theory of virtue is proposed. A complimentary four stage communication strategy that promotes truth telling as a first option while also recommending the lie as a suitable strategy is also promoted. (shrink)

This paper describes the topological aspect of a logic-based, artificial intelligence approach to formalising the qualitative description of spatial properties and relations, and reasoning about those properties and relations. This approach, known as RCC theory, has been under development for several years at the University of Leeds. The main rationale for this project is that qualitative descriptions of spatial properties and relationships, and qualitative spatial reasoning, are of fundamental importance in human thinking about the world: even where quantitative spatial data (...) are most important, they must be attached to the components of a perceived spatial structure if we are to make use of them. RCC theory covers other qualitative aspects of spatial description and reasoning, but the topological properties and relations of spatially extended entities are fundamental to our work. The topological formalisms used by mathematicians are, in general, not well suited to the task of formalising the kinds of ‘common-sense’ or ‘everyday’ qualitative spatial description and reasoning which are our primary interest. Nevertheless, we must come to grips with the concepts of topology as practised by mathematicians if we are not to risk constantly ‘reinventing wheels’. (shrink)