Lawrence Kohlberg's Approach to Moral Education presents what the late Lawrence Kohlberg regarded as the definitive statement of his educational theory. Addressing the sociology and social psychology of schooling, the authors propose that school culture become the center of moral education and research. They discuss how schools can develop as just and cohesive communities by involving students in democracy, and they focus on the moral decisions teachers and students face as they democratically resolve problems. As the authors put it: "...we (...) propose an educational renewal of our democratic society.... We have attempted to establish schools that do more than just teach about democratic citizenship, that are themselves democratic societies.". (shrink)

The statistical properties of a single quantum object and an ensemble of independent such objects are considered in detail for two-level systems. Computer simulations of dynamic zero-point quantum fluctuations for a single quantum object are reported and compared with analytic solutions for the ensemble case.

In this paper, we discuss the macroscopic quantum behavior of simple superconducting circuits. Starting from a Lagrangian for electromagnetic field with broken gauge symmetry, we construct a quantum circuit model for a superconducting weak link (SQUID) ring, together with the appropriate canonical commutation relations. We demonstrate that this model can be used to describe macroscopic excitations of the superconducting condensate and the localized charge states found in some ultrasmall-capacitance weak-link devices.

A propos de : Thomas G. WEINANDY, O.F.M. Cap., «The Father's Spirit on Sonship. Reconceiving the Trinity», Edinburgh : T&T Clark, 1995.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IN PRAISE OF PLURALISM * RONALD F. THIEMANN Harvard Diviinity School Cambridge, Massachusetts K CENTLY A GROUP of scholars at Harvard University met to discuss the question of whether the United States ha;d entered a. period of moral decline. Our conversations ranged over a wide spectrum of topics: the distinction between priva.te and public life, the relation of notions like mol'lality and justice, the issue of how a decline (...) in morality might be dooumented. The discuS'sion was carried on with a sense of intellectual seriousness and passion but was also characterized by a degree of frustration, given the brea;dth of the topic and the diversity of the participants, who were drawn from the faculties of arts and sciences, 1aw, medicine, government, business, and divinity. Our approaches to the topic were diverse and consequentily our disputes were spirited. Whatever the disagreements among the group, however, we were united by a conviction tha.t such conversations a;re essential if we are to under:s.tand the moral complexity of our pluralistic society. Tihis gathering of soho1ars at Harvard exhibits four important ohamcteristics of the current deba.te about moraility and public life. 1) The recognition that the moral issues we are facing cut a;cross traditional disciplinary lines and require a joint effort by scholar:s working in diverse fields and pl'ofessions ; 2) an awaireness that the plurality of moral positions within pwblic and aicademic life threatens the possibility of consensus on issues of public importance; 3) the conviction, nonetheless, that joint scholarly refieob:ion can have an impact *Ethics After Babel. By JEFFREY STOUT. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988. Pp. 338. $27.50. 489 490 RONALD F. THIEMANN on the moral issues currently vexing American public life: 4) the a;eknowledgement that religion has a role to play in the conversation about the future of momlity and public affairs.1 Jeffrey Stout'·s new book Ethics After Babel is an important and lively contiribution to the current discussion about mora;lity and public life. While the book focuses primarily on issues central to moral philosophy, its arguments have broad implications for debate on topics of importance to public life more generally. Stout'.s work can be seen as an exemplification, expansion, and justification of the four points identified in the previous pM"agraph. But the book is much more than that: it is an extended, sustained, and persuasive argument that pluralism iin public discourse about moral issues need not lead to 1skepticism, nihilism, or relativism. Stout steers a steady oourse between the cultural pessimists who decry our current state as one of hopeless mor:al fragmentation and the intellectual foundationafists who seek to dispel our cultural malaise through some philosophical sleight-of-hand. Ethics After Babel is divided into three major sections. The first," Spectres of MoI"al Diversity," tackles the issue of truthclaiming in moral discouvse and defends non-foundational ethics against the charge of relativism. The -second, " The Eclipse of Religious Ethics," deals with the relation between reJigion and moraJity, reruson and tradition, and with the question of the future of a public theology. In the final section, "Moral Discourse in P·lur:aiistic Society," Stout defends aversion of pragmatic liiberalism and distinguishes his own po.s:i.tion from that of Alasdair Maicintyre and Richaro Rorty. In the·last chapter Stout shows how many of the concepts Macintyre has introduced into the philosopmcal discussion can be used in service of Li:beral social criticism. The reader gilimpses in 1 It is unlikely that the Divinity School would have been represented in any such gathering as recently as five years ago. The fact that no one from the School of Education was invited to join this group is evidence of the continuing marginality of certain crucial professions within American higher education. IN PRAISE OF PLURALISM 491 these final chapters the :beginnings of Stout's own constructive oontriibution to the issues of morality and pwblic life. Stout seeks in this v:olume to move the discussion in poJitical philosophy and ethics beyond the "liberal vs. oommuntarian " issues that have dominruted the recent litemture. In opposition to the individualism and foundationalism that characterize the classic modern... (shrink)

The reappearance of Professor Alasdair MacIntyre's far-ranging and provocative article, ‘Hume on “is” and “ought”’, is the proximate cause of this short excursion to an old, well-scarred, and still fascinating battleground. Re-reading MacIntyre's brilliant offensive thrust led me to review the counter-attacks and diversionary movements that followed its first appearance. They in turn sent me back, inevitably and ultimately, to look again at the cause of this philosophic skirmishing: Section 1 of Part i of Book III of Hume's Treatise (...) of Human Nature, entitled ‘Moral Distinctions not deriv'd from Reason’. The battles of the past have been waged chiefly round the last paragraph of this Section (pp. 469–470 in Selby-Bigge's edition), but my primary concern here is going to be with those ‘reasonings’ that precede the celebrated ‘is-ought’ paragraph. Closer attention to the bulk of Book III, Part i, Section 1, to which ‘reasonings’ Hume says he ‘cannot forbear adding … an observation’ on ‘is’ and ‘ought’, and some selective attention as well to Books I and II of the Treatise, should help to scale down the exaggerated importance attached to the ‘is-ought’ passage. Unless this is done, one runs the risk of permitting a tailpiece to wag the body of the chapter, if not the whole Book ‘Of Morals’. (shrink)

The reappearance of Professor Alasdair MacIntyre's far-ranging and provocative article, ‘Hume on “is” and “ought”’, is the proximate cause of this short excursion to an old, well-scarred, and still fascinating battleground. Re-reading MacIntyre's brilliant offensive thrust led me to review the counter-attacks and diversionary movements that followed its first appearance. They in turn sent me back, inevitably and ultimately, to look again at the cause of this philosophic skirmishing: Section 1 of Part i of Book III of Hume's Treatise (...) of Human Nature, entitled ‘Moral Distinctions not deriv'd from Reason’. The battles of the past have been waged chiefly round the last paragraph of this Section, but my primary concern here is going to be with those ‘reasonings’ that precede the celebrated ‘is-ought’ paragraph. Closer attention to the bulk of Book III, Part i, Section 1, to which ‘reasonings’ Hume says he ‘cannot forbear adding … an observation’ on ‘is’ and ‘ought’, and some selective attention as well to Books I and II of the Treatise, should help to scale down the exaggerated importance attached to the ‘is-ought’ passage. Unless this is done, one runs the risk of permitting a tailpiece to wag the body of the chapter, if not the whole Book ‘Of Morals’. (shrink)

Contained in this rather short but quite excellent Clarke F. Ansley Award winning work is a skillful presentation of an intriguing thesis: Spinoza’s definition and criterion of truth follows neither the strictly correspondence nor the strictly coherence lines which many commentators have suspected. Rather, says Mark, Spinoza’s doctrine follows the "ontological" view of truth, prevalent in ancient and medieval times. To be true is to be a being, a thing which "is." It is the author’s contention that there are (...) texts which seem to be evidence in favor of interpreting Spinoza’s doctrine along the lines of a correspondence theory, and there are still other texts which seem to betray a kind of family resemblance to the coherence theory of truth. Most commentators, says Mark, have either focused their entire attention on one or the other of these sets of texts, or else pointed out the discrepancy and went on to something else. But what Mark here suggests to us is a rather bold and interesting approach, which, to Mark’s mind, accomplishes the task of facing squarely both sets of texts without compromising either, and without reducing Spinoza to contradiction. (shrink)

Contained in this rather short but quite excellent Clarke F. Ansley Award winning work is a skillful presentation of an intriguing thesis: Spinoza’s definition and criterion of truth follows neither the strictly correspondence nor the strictly coherence lines which many commentators have suspected. Rather, says Mark, Spinoza’s doctrine follows the "ontological" view of truth, prevalent in ancient and medieval times. To be true is to be a being, a thing which "is." It is the author’s contention that there are (...) texts which seem to be evidence in favor of interpreting Spinoza’s doctrine along the lines of a correspondence theory, and there are still other texts which seem to betray a kind of family resemblance to the coherence theory of truth. Most commentators, says Mark, have either focused their entire attention on one or the other of these sets of texts, or else pointed out the discrepancy and went on to something else. But what Mark here suggests to us is a rather bold and interesting approach, which, to Mark’s mind, accomplishes the task of facing squarely both sets of texts without compromising either, and without reducing Spinoza to contradiction. (shrink)

The four principles approach to biomedical ethics (4PBE) has, since the 1970s, been increasingly developed as a universal bioethics method. Despite its wide acceptance and popularity, the 4PBE has received many challenges to its cross-cultural plausibility. This paper first specifies the principles and characteristics of ancient Chinese medical ethics (ACME), then makes a comparison between ACME and the 4PBE with a view to testing out the 4PBE's cross-cultural plausibility when applied to one particular but very extensive and prominent cultural context. (...) The result shows that the concepts of respect for autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence and justice are clearly identifiable in ACME. Yet, being influenced by certain socio-cultural factors, those applying the 4PBE in Chinese society may tend to adopt a "beneficence-oriented", rather than an "autonomy-oriented" approach, which, in general, is dissimilar to the practice of contemporary Western bioethics, where "autonomy often triumphs". (shrink)

This article explores a German philosophy of metaphor, which proposed a close link between the body and the mind as the basis for metaphor, debunked the view that metaphor is just a decorative rhetorical device and questioned the distinction between the literal and the figurative. This philosophy of metaphor developed at the intersection between a reflection on language and thought and a reflection on the nature of beauty in aesthetics. Thinkers such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul (...) and others laid the foundations for this philosophy and it was successively refined by Gustav Gerber, Alfred Biese and Friedrich Nietzsche. It influenced in its turn in various ways the linguistic study of metaphor and the psychology of metaphor as elaborated, for instance, by a lesser-known American scholar, Gertrude Buck. All these thinkers contributed to a philosophy and psychology of the metaphoric according to which metaphors are not only nice, but necessary for the structure and growth of human thought and language. Obvious parallels between this 19th-century philosophy of metaphor and the 20th-century theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff and his followers are examined throughout. (shrink)

MEDIEVAL LOGICS LAMBERT MARIE DE RIJK (ed.), Die mittelalterlichen Traktate De mod0 opponendiet respondendi, Einleitung und Ausgabe der einschlagigen Texte. (Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, Neue Folge Band 17.) Miinster: Aschendorff, 1980. 379 pp. No price stated. THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY MARTA FATTORI, Lessico del Novum Organum di Francesco Bacone. Rome: Edizioni dell'Ateneo 1980. Two volumes, il + 543, 520 pp. Lire 65.000. VIVIAN SALMON, The study of language in 17th century England. (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory (...) and History of Linguistic Science, Series 111: Studies in theHistory of Linguistics, Volume 17.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1979.x + 218 pp. Dfl. 65. Theoria cum Praxi. Zum Verhaltnis von Theorie und Praxis im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. (Akten des 111. Internationalen Leibnizkongress, Hannover, 12. bis 17.November 1977, Band 111: Logik, Erkenntnistheorie, Wissenschaftstheorie, Metaphysik, Theologie.) Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1980. vii + 269 pp. DM 48. CLASSICAL AND NON-CLASSICAL LOGICS MICHAEL CLARK, The place of syllogistic in logical theory. Nottingham: University of Nottingham Press, 1980. ix + 151 pp. £3.00. A.F. PARKER-RHODES, The theory of indistinguishables. Dordrecht, Boston and London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1981. xvii + 216 pp. Dfl.90.00/$39.50. NICHOLAS RESCHER and ROBERT BRANDOM, The logic of inconsistency. Oxford:Basil Blackwell, 1980. x + 174 pp. f 11.50. MISCELLANEOUS J. ZELENY, The logic of Marx. Translated from the German by T. Carver. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980. xcii + 247 pp. £12.50. FELIX KAUFMANN, The infinite in mathematics. Edited by Brian McGuinness. Introduction by E. Nagel. Translation from the German by Paul Foulkes. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978. xvii + 235 pp. Dfl 85/$39.50 (cloth); Dfl 45/$19.95 (paper). PAMELA MCCORDUCK, Machines who think. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1979. xiv + 275 pp. $14.95. J. MITTELSTRASS (ed.), Enzyklopadie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie Bd. 1 : A-G. Mannheim, Wien, Ziirich: Bibliographisches Institut, 1980. 835 pp. DM 128. (shrink)

For language to function we clearly need two formal ordering principles: lexical entries and rules. Clahsen's target article provides multiple empirical evidence for this distinction, but this may be simply to overconfirm the undeniable and to overlook the hidden motor of language use and language development, namely, function. Since at least 1859, linguists have argued for the primacy of function, and these arguments are worth rediscovering today.

Prioritarianism is an ethical theory that gives extra weight to the well-being of the worse off. In contrast, dominant policy-evaluation methodologies, such as benefit-cost analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and utilitarianism, ignore or downplay issues of fair distribution. Based on a research group founded by the editors, this important book is the first to show how prioritarianism can be used to assess governmental policies and evaluate societal conditions. This book uses prioritarianism as a methodology to evaluate governmental policy across a variety of (...) policy domains: taxation, health policy, risk regulation, education, climate policy, and the COVID-19 pandemic. It is also the first to demonstrate how prioritarianism improves on GDP as an indicator of a society's progress over time. Edited by two senior figures in the field with contributions from some of the world's leading economists, this volume bridges the gap from the theory of prioritarianism to its practical application. (shrink)

I have argued in other work that emotion, attentional functions, and executive functions are three interpenetrant global state variables, essentially differential slices of the consciousness pie. This paper will outline the columnar architecture and connectivities of the PAG (periaqueductal gray), its role in organizing prototype states of emotion, and the re-entry of PAG with the extended reticular thalamic activating system (“ERTAS”). At the end we will outline some potential implications of these connectivities for possible functional correlates of PAG networks that (...) are just starting to be mapped. Overall, we will look at many lines of evidence that PAG should be conceptualized as a peri-reticular structure that has a foundational role in emotion, in generating the meaningful organization of behavior by the brain through prototype emotional states, and in allowing the various emotional systems to globally influence and tune both the forebrain and brainstem. Finally, we address implications of these concepts for what is currently understood about consciousness, underlining the need for somewhat more humility within consciousness studies about our current level of understanding of consciousness in the brain, combined with a deeper appreciation of the intrinsic connections between emotion and consciousness. One hopes that more concerted empirical interest in structures underneath the thalamus, combined with a deeper appreciation for the fundamental role that organismic and social value must have in bootstrapping awareness in the developing brain, would begin more widely to influence the fundamental lines of neuroscientific research in both emotion studies and consciousness studies. (shrink)

The printed proceedings of the 1960 meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association open with two personal testaments: the Presidential Address of Father R. F. Lechner on the professional task of the philosopher to contemplate truth personally, fully and in communication with his fellows and, in reply to his citation for the Aquinas Medal, the address of Dr. Rudolf Allers upon ‘Co-operation and Communication’ in intellectual culture. Next Professor Wilfrid Sellars presents a critical paper, ‘Being and Being Known’ evaluating the (...) ‘over-simplified’ isomorphism of the Thomistic theory of knowing faculty and object in contrast with the ‘radically mistaken’ theories of Descartes and Anglo-Saxon realism. The three other papers concentrate upon current applications of analytic method to philosophical problems. Fr. Ernan McMullin offers a general evaluation of the methods of reductive and linguistic analysts, comparing their insights with their limitations. Fr. Robert Miller analyses in critical detail the theoretical and practical attitudes of the ‘informalist’ group of linguistic analysis to metaphysics, while Fr. W. Norris Clarke more particularly examines their attitude to natural theology. (shrink)