In this original collection of essays, distinguished scholars critically examine the ethical dimensions of business using the Kantian themed business ethics of Norman E. Bowie as a jumping off point. the authors engage Bowie's influential body of scholarship as well as contemporary themes in business, including topics such as: the normative foundations of capitalism; the applicability of Kantian ethics, virtue ethics, and pragmatism in normative business ethics; meaningful work; managerial ethics; the ethics of high leverage finance capitalism; business ethics (...) and corporate social responsibility; and responsibility for the natural environment. the contributors to this volume include both scholars sympathetic to Bowie's Kantian business ethics and scholars critical of that perspective. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Cybernetic Foundations for Psychology” by Bernard Scott. Upshot: Scott’s proposal is well-founded and opens interesting possibilities. We selected some critical aspects of his argumentation and discuss them in the context of the constructivist perspective. We highlight as Scott’s “blind spot” his statement - presented without further argument - of the need for a conceptual and theoretical unification of psychology from the perspective of second-order cybernetics. We find this especially worrisome as it is based (...) on only one version of cybernetics. (shrink)

This book is the scholarly & fully annotated edition of the award-winning _The Illustrated To Think Like God.__ _To Think Like God_ focuses on the emergence of philosophy as a speculative science, tracing its origins to the Greek colonies of Southern Italy, from the late 6th century to mid-5th century B.C. Special attention is paid to the sage Pythagoras and his movement, the poet Xenophanes of Colophon, and the lawmaker Parmenides of Elea. In their own ways, each thinker held that (...) true insight, whether as wisdom or certainty, belonged not to mortal human beings but to the gods. The Pythagoreans sought to approach this otherwordly knowledge by studying numerical relationships, believing them to govern the universe, and that those who know the number of a thing know its true nature. Yet their quest was a hopeless one, bogged down by cultism, numerology, political conspiracies, bloody uprisings, and exile. Above all, number did not turn out as the most reliable of mediums; it was certainly not a key to the realm of the divine. Thus, their contributions to philosophy's inception, while much better-publicized, was not the most significant. That particular role was reserved for an unusual challenge and the elaborate reaction it provoked. The challenge came from Xenophanes, who had argued that reliable truth was beyond mortal reach, because even if by accident a human being should state what is exactly the case, he had no way of knowing that he did, all things being susceptible to opinion. This dilemma is sure to have bothered a legislative mind like that of Parmenides, and we find him introducing techniques for testing the veracity of statements. These methods were meant to be carried out by reasoning and argument alone, without relying in physical evidence or mortal sense-perception, which was deemed untrustworthy. Reason was that one faculty shared by gods and humans alike. In time, Parmenides' ingenious arguments have earned him the titled of the first logician and metaphysician whose influence on subsequent thinkers was immeasurable. Parmenides taught us that philosophy was not about claims but about proof, which also makes him the father of theoretical science -- which, curiously, began as a quest into the mind of God. "Arnold Hermann makes a genuine contribution to Presocratics studies. This book, which is both an introduction to Pythagoras and Parmenides and a scholarly study, will interest novices and experts alike. Hermann's multi-leveled approach and his careful analyses of alternate views make his work a useful teaching tool, while his systematic inquiry into Pythagoreanism, the poem of Parmenides, and the development of early Greek thought will well repay the attention of scholars. — Patricia Curd_,_ _Purdue University_ "_To Think Like God_ is a highly ambitious book... Hermann's approach deserves to be taken seriously as an alternative to standard interpretations." — Richard D. McKirahan, Jr.,___ __Edwin Clarence Norton Professor of Classics and Professor of Philosophy, Pomona College_ "Arnold Hermann brings fresh life into the specialists' debates... a blow of wind that dissipates much fog." — Walter Burkert_, Professor Emeritus of Classical Philology, University of Zurich_ ARNOLD HERMANN_ is pursuing independent research on the origins of philosophy and methods of thinking. He specialices on subjects connected with Parmenides and Plato's _Parmenides._. (shrink)

We study the preservation of selective covering properties, including classic ones introduced by Menger, Hurewicz, Rothberger, Gerlits and Nagy, and others, under products with some major families of concentrated sets of reals.Our methods include the projection method introduced by the authors in an earlier work, as well as several new methods. Some special consequences of our main results are : Every product of a concentrated space with a Hurewicz S1S1 space satisfies S1S1. On the other hand, assuming the Continuum (...) Hypothesis, for each Sierpiński set S there is a Luzin set L such that L×SL×S can be mapped onto the real line by a Borel function. Assuming Semifilter Trichotomy, every concentrated space is productively Menger and productively Rothberger. Every scale set is productively Hurewicz, productively Menger, productively Scheepers, and productively Gerlits–Nagy. Assuming d=ℵ1d=ℵ1, every productively Lindelöf space is productively Hurewicz, productively Menger, and productively Scheepers.A notorious open problem asks whether the additivity of Rothberger's property may be strictly greater than addadd, the additivity of the ideal of Lebesgue-null sets of reals. We obtain a positive answer, modulo the consistency of Semifilter Trichotomy >ℵ1.Our results improve upon and unify a number of results, established earlier by many authors. (shrink)

Fascinating illustrations contribute to this illuminating and award-winning account of how and why philosophy emerged and make it a must-read for any inquisitive thinker unsatisfied with prevailing assumptions on this timely and highly relevant subject._ By taking the reader back to the Greek colonies of Southern Italy more than 500 years B.C., the author, with unparalleled insight, tells the story of the Pythagorean quest for otherwordly konwledge -- a tale of cultism, political conspiracies, and bloody uprisings that eventually culminate in (...) tragic failure. The emerging hero is Parmenides, who introduces for the first time a technique for testing the truth of a statement that was not based on physical evidence or mortal sense-perception, but instead relied exclusively on the faculty we humans share with the gods: the ability to reason. "Figures from Anaximander to Zeno, the ruins where they lived and thought, and the paradoxes and thought-experiments they proposed are depicted among the [many] well-chosen color illustrations. The results read like an introductory textbook, but one that has been lovingly written, lavishly laid-out and crisply printed-- making it engaging enough to draw in readers to whom it has not been assigned." - _ Publishers Weekly___ "_To Think Like God_ is a highly ambitious book... Hermann's approach deserves to be taken seriously as an alternative to standard interpretations." - _ Richard D. McKirahan, Jr., Edwin Clarence Norton Professor of Classics and Professor of Philosophy, Pomona College___ "Arnold Hermann brings fresh life into the specialists' debates... a blow of wind that dissipates much fog." - _ Walter Burkert, Professor Emeritus of Classical Philology, University of Zurich___ ARNOLD HERMANN_ is pursuing independent research on the origins of philosophy and methods of thinking. He specialices on subjects connected with Parmenides and Plato's _Parmenides._. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Hume's Skepticism about Inductive Inference N. SCOTT ARNOLD IT HAS BEEN A COMMONPLACE among commentators on Hume's philosophy that he was a radical skeptic about inductive inference. In addition, he is alleged to have been the first philosopher to pose the so-called problem of induction. Until recently, however, Hume's argument in this connection has not been subject to very close scrutiny. As attention has become focused on (...) this argument, a debate has been shaping up concerning just what Hume intended to establish here. The principal purpose of this article is to settle this interpretive issue as decisively as the texts permit. I should also like to locate Hume's main argument about induction in the larger context of his discussion of skepti- cism in book 1 of the Treatise. I shall suggest that arguments for the radical skepticism commonly attributed to Hume can be found only very late in book 1 of the Treatise and that the most famous argument about inductive inference establishes and is intended to establish only a relatively modest form of skepticism. The argument under consideration can found in book l, part 3, section 6 of the Treatise. It can also be found in essays 4 and 5 of the Enquiries and in the abstract of the Treatise published anonymously by Hume. I shall concen- trate on the Treatise version since it is the first and perhaps most explicit formulation of the argument and because part of my purpose is to place this argument in the larger context of book 1 of the Treatise. The received opinion concerning Hume's argument has it that Hume was highly skeptical about the mind's claims to knowledge about the future (or, more generally, about the unobserved). All beliefs arrived at via inductive I should like to thank M. G. Anderson, John Bahde, Jon Nordy, and Robert Paul Wolff, as well as David Fate Norton and a referee for the Journal of the History of Philosophy, for helpful comments on earlier drafts on this article. 32 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY inferences are unreasonable or unjustified. The alternative interpretation, to be defended below, is that Hume held that no such belief is or can be rendered certain relative to past experience and that such beliefs are not, upon that account, unreasonable or unjustified. Something like this inter- pretation has been defended by Tom L. Beauchamp, Thomas Mappes, and Alexander Rosenberg. ~ My view differs from theirs in that I shall argue that Hume did offer arguments for the more radical skepticism commonly attri- buted to him (though it is unclear whether he regarded them as decisive). These arguments, however, come at the end of book ~ of the Treatise and are independent of the more famous argument to be discussed below. Defenders of the received view are both numerous and distinguished. Versions of this interpretation of the main argument can be found in the writings of Karl Popper, Wesley Salmon, F. L. Will, and Norman Kemp Smith; most recently a variation on the standard interpretation has been defended by Barry Stroud. The fullest and most elaborate defense of the standard interpretation can be found in a monograph by D. C. Stove. '~ Stove's discussion is perhaps the most impressive because of his painstaking efforts to lay bare the structure of Hume's reasoning and to give a line-by- line analysis of the argument. This has the effect of bringing more clearly into focus the main grounds for the standard view. If this standard interpre- tation is correct, then Hume's position is that scientific method is epistemically no better than "superstition" and "enthusiasm." And, Hume would be among those for whom this claim, if true, would be very bad news, because one of his primary purposes in the Treatise is to construct a science of man. Thus, this argument is of considerable internal significance because, if my opponents are correct, Hume appears to have cut the ground out from under what he took to be one of his most important projects -- the construc- tion of a science of man. The other feature of this argument that makes it worthy of serious con- sideration is that it is philosophically... (shrink)

Dans le domaine biomédical, qui est l’objet principal de cet article, la littérature montre une corrélation directe entre le financement d’une recherche par un industriel et la communication de résultats qui lui sont favorables. Cet effet, appelé « le biais de financement », persiste depuis les travaux des années 1990 jusqu’aux travaux récents. Il peut être élargi à d’autres domaines tels que l’agro-alimentaire, l’étude des risques environnementaux et sanitaires, etc. Les conflits d’intérêts peuvent influencer la recherche par des voies inconscientes (...) ou volontaires. Nous analysons les modes d’action possibles des conflits d’intérêts sur le déroulement de l’activité scientifique, ainsi que l’efficacité des diverses solutions qui ont été proposées pour gérer ces influences.In the field of biomedicine, which is the main object addressed in this article, the literature shows a direct correlation between industrial funding for research and the communication of results that are favourable to the industry. This effect, known as the “ funding effect”, has been persistenly found since the 1990s. It can also affect other fields such as agri-foods or environmental and health risk assessments. Conflicts of interest can influence research subconsciously or deliberately. In this article, we analyse the various ways in which conflicts of interest can influence the way scientific activities proceed, as well as the effectiveness of the different solutions put forward to manage the influence exerted. (shrink)

Over the course of three decades, in works spanning questions of theory, technique, and clinical practice, Charles Brenner has emerged as one of the preeminent analysts of his generation, a thinker whose probing estimation of mental conflict has promoted the evolutionary growth of analysis as theory even as it has clarified the clinical import of analysis as therapy. In _Psychoanalysis: The Science of Mental Conflict_, distinguished theorists and clinicians pay homage to Brenner by presenting original essays that converge in their (...) estimation of analysis as "the science of mental conflict." In sections that encompass "The Theory of Psychoanalysis," "The Concepts of Psychoanalysis," "The Technique of Psychoanalysis," "The Clinical Practice of Psychoanalysis," "The Teaching of Psychoanalysis," and "The Application of Psychanalysis," the contributors show how the perspective of conflict - broadened and refined by the clinical findings of recent decades - offers a vehicle for creative theory-building and, as such, a conceptual handle for apprising the indications for, and action of, psychoanalytic therapy. Arnold Richards' comprehensive overview of Brenner's ranging contributions to theory and practice, along with Martin Willick's critical introductions to the various sections of the book, round out a collections whose scope is complimented by its unusual coherence and thematic unity. Taken together, the essays comprising this book present readers with a cogent summary of current psychoanalytic thinking, along with an exciting preview of where it is heading in the future. As such, this volume will be welcomed not only by analysts, but by all mental health professionals who draw on, and learn from, the psychoanalytic assessment of conflict in mental life. It is a work that follows Brenner's own example in promoting the critical understanding of a generation of theorists, clinicians, and educators. (shrink)

Base rates have no necessary relation to judgments that are not themselves probabilities. There is no logical imperative, for instance, that behavioral base rates must affect causal attributions or that base rate information should affect judgments of legal liability. Decision theorists should be cautious in arguing that base rates place normative constraints on judgments of anything other than posterior probabilities.

Foreword by Students' Committee.--Signatures of the Graduate Faculty members.--Faculty foreword.--Introduction: The life and the political philosophy of Arnold Brecht.--Relative and absolute justice.--The rise of relativism in political and legal philosophy.--The search for absolutes in political and legal philosophy.--The myth of is and ought.--The impossible in political and legal philosophy.--The latent place of God in twentieth-century political theory.--Bibliography of books and articles by Arnold Brecht (p. [161]-174)--Biographical summary of Arnold Brecht.

The underdetermination of theory by data obtains when, inescapably, evidence is insufficient to allow scientists to decide responsibly between rival theories. One response to would-be underdetermination is to deny that the rival theories are distinct theories at all, insisting instead that they are just different formulations of the same underlying theory; we call this the identical rivals response. An argument adapted from John Norton suggests that the response is presumptively always appropriate, while another from Larry Laudan and Jarrett Leplin suggests (...) that the response is never appropriate. Arguments from Einstein for the special and general theories of relativity may fruitfully be seen as instances of the identical rivals response; since Einstein’s arguments are generally accepted, the response is at least sometimes appropriate. But when is it appropriate? We attempt to steer a middle course between Norton’s view and that of Laudan and Leplin: the identical rivals response is appropriate when there is good reason for adopting a parsimonious ontology. Although in simple cases the identical rivals response need not involve any ontological difference between the theories, in actual scientific cases it typically requires treating apparent posits of the various theories as mere verbal ornaments or computational conveniences. Since these would-be posits are not now detectable, there is no perfectly reliable way to decide whether we should eliminate them or not. As such, there is no rule for deciding whether the identical rivals response is appropriate or not. Nevertheless, there are considerations that suggest for and against the response; we conclude by suggesting two of them. (shrink)

Professor Toynbee observes in his Study of History that as he walked down Whitehall one day in the spring of 1918, and passed the Board of Education offices which had been commandeered for a new department of the War Office, “improvised in order to make an intensive study of trench warfare,” he found himself repeating the passage from St. Matthew's Gospel.

The recent publication by Wylie et al. is reviewed, demonstrating that the p53 protein regulates the movement of transposons. While this work presents genetic evidence for a piRNA‐mediated p53 interaction with transposons in Drosophila and zebrafish, it is herein placed in the context of a decade or so of additional work that demonstrated a role for p53 in regulating transposons and other repetitive elements. The line of thought in those studies began with the observation that transposons damage DNA and p53 (...) regulates DNA damage. The presence of transposon movement can increase the rate of evolution in the germ line and alter genes involved in signal transduction pathways. Transposition can also play an important role in cancers where the p53 gene function is often mutated. This is particularly interesting as recent work has shown that de‐repression of repetitive elements in cancer has important consequences for the immune system and tumor microenvironment. (shrink)

Titles and abstracts for the Pitt-London Workshop in the Philosophy of Biology and Neuroscience: September 2001.

This document collects discussion and commentary on issues raised in the workshop by its participants. Contributors are: Greg Frost-Arnold, David Harker, P. D. Magnus, John Manchak, John D. Norton, J. Brian Pitts, Kyle Stanford, Dana Tulodziecki.

According to Marr, a computational-level theory consists of two elements, the what and the why. This article highlights the distinct role of the Why element in the computational analysis of vision. Three theses are advanced: that the Why element plays an explanatory role in computational-level theories, that its goal is to explain why the computed function is appropriate for a given visual task, and that the explanation consists in showing that the functional relations between the representing cells are similar to (...) the “external” mathematical relations between the entities that these cells represent. (shrink)

Biologists, historians, lawyers, art historians, and literary critics all voice arguments in the critical dialogue about what constitutes evidence in research and scholarship. They examine not only the constitution and "blurring" of disciplinary boundaries, but also the configuration of the fact-evidence distinctions made in different disciplines and historical moments the relative function of such concepts as "self-evidence," "experience," "test," "testimony," and "textuality" in varied academic discourses and the way "rules of evidence" are themselves products of historical developments. The essays and (...) rejoinders are by Terry Castle, Lorraine Daston, Carlo Ginzburg, Ian Hacking, Mark Kelman, R. C. Lewontin, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Mary Poovey, Donald Preziosi, Simon Schaffer, Joan W. Scott, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Barbara Herrnstein Smith. The critical responses are by Lauren Berlant, James Chandler, Jean Comaroff, Arnold I. Davidson, Harry D. harootunian, Elizabeth Helsinger, Thomas C. Holt, Francoise Meltzer, Robert J. Richards, Lawrence Rothfield, Joel Snyder, Cass R. Sunstein, and William Wimsatt. (shrink)

Sensitivity to the square of the cutoff scale of quantum corrections of the Higgs boson mass self-energy has led many authors to conclude that the Higgs theory suffers from a naturalness or fine-tuning problem. However, speculative new physics ideas to solve this problem have not manifested themselves yet at high-energy colliders, such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. For this reason, the role of naturalness as a guide to theory model-building is being severely questioned. Most attacks suggest that one (...) should not resort to arguments involving gravity, which is a much less understood quantum field theory. Another line of attack is against the assumption that there exists a multitude of additional heavy states specifically charged under the Standard Model gauge symmetries. Nevertheless, if we give ground on both of these assaults on naturalness, what remains is a naturalness concern over the prospect of numerous additional spin-zero scalar states in nature. The proliferation of heavy scalars generically destabilizes the Higgs boson mass, raising it to the highest and most remote scalar mass values in nature, thus straining the legitimacy of the Standard Model. The copious use of extra scalars in theory model building, from explaining flavor physics to providing an inflationary potential and more, and the generic expectation of extra scalar bosons in nature argues for the proliferation instability problem being the central concern for naturalness of the Standard Model. Some approaches to solving this problem are presented. (shrink)

Naturalness is an extra-empirical quality that aims to assess plausibility of a theory. Finetuning measures are often deputized to quantify the task. However, knowing statistical distributions on parameters appears necessary. Such meta-theories are not known yet. A critical discussion of these issues is presented, including their possible resolutions in fixed points. Both agreement to and skepticism of naturalness’s utility remains credible, as is skepticism to any extra-empirical theory assessment that claims to identify “more correct” theories that are equally empirically adequate. (...) The severe implications of SEETA are set forward in some detail. We conclude with a summary and discussion of the viability of three main viewpoints toward naturalness and finetuning, where the “moderate naturalness position” is suggested to be most appealing, not suffering from the disquietudes of the extreme pro- and anti-naturalness positions. (shrink)

The centrally recognized theoretical achievement that enabled the Higgs boson discovery in 2012 was the hypothesis of its existence, made by Peter Higgs in 1964. Nevertheless, there is a significant body of comparably important theoretical work prior to and after the Higgs boson hypothesis. In this article we present an additional perspective of how crucial theory work was to the genesis of the Higgs boson hypothesis, especially emphasizing its roots in Landau's theory of phase transitions and subsequent theoretical work on (...) superconductivity. A detailed description is then given of the opposition to the Higgs boson hypothesis by many researchers, giving evidence to its speculative nature. And finally, it is discussed the importance of theory work in the decades after the hypothesis in order to make possible the experimental discovery of the Higgs boson. (shrink)

Proceedings of the Pittsburgh Workshop in History and Philosophy of Biology, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, March 23-24 2001 Session 2: Female Orgasms and Evolutionary Theory.