The value of anthropocentric indirect arguments, as stated by Elliott, is to focus on non-environmental benefits that derive from actions or policies that also benefit the environment...

The human visual system is capable of learning both abstract and specific mappings to underlie shape recognition. How could dissimilar shapes be mapped to the same location in visual representation space, yet similar shapes be mapped to different locations? Without fundamental changes, Chorus, like other single-system models, could not accomplish both mappings in a manner that accounts for recent evidence.

Dienes & Perner argue that the explicit representation of an individual to which a property is attributed requires explicit representation of the attributed property. The reasons for this conclusion are similar to the reasons why another of their conclusions may be considered suspect: A property may be explicit without an explicit representation of an individual or the predication of the property to an individual. We question the latter conclusion and draw connections to neurophysiological and cognitive evidence.

According to Pylyshyn, depictive representations can be explanatory only if a certain kind of first-order isomorphism exists between the mental representations and real-world displays. What about a system with second-order isomorphism (similarities between different mental representations corresponding with similarities between different real-world displays)? Such a system may help to address whether “depictive” representations contribute to the visual nature of imagery.

Implementational-level evidence of dissociable neural subsystems is a critical element that is missing from the analysis in the Schyns et al. target article. The question of whether fixed or flexible features are used in visual form recognition may have different answers for different subsystems; the evidence that features typically are created during category learning may apply most directly to a specific visual form subsystem.

Political corruption imposes substantial costs on shareholders in the U.S. Yet, we understand little about the basic factors that exacerbate or mitigate the value consequences of political corruption. Using federal corruption convictions data, we find that firm-level economic rents and monitoring mechanisms moderate the negative relation between corruption and firm value. The value consequences of political corruption are exacerbated for firms operating in low-rent product markets and mitigated for firms subject to external monitoring by state governments or monitoring induced by (...) disclosure transparency. Our results should inform managers and policymakers of the tradeoffs imposed on firms operating in politically corrupt districts. (shrink)

Studies with humans have failed to produce evidence that any direct causal relation exists between the asymmetry of one function in an individual and the asymmetry of a different function in that individual. Without such evidence, factors external to an individual's nervous system, such as social interactions, may play crucial roles in explaining the directions of all asymmetries at all levels.

Purpose: to characterize ethics course content, structure, resources, pedagogic methods, and opinions among academic administrators and course directors at U.S. medical schools. Method: An online questionnaire addressed to academic deans and ethics course directors identified by medical school websites was emailed to 157 Association of American Medical Colleges member medical schools in two successive waves in early 2022. Descriptive statistics were utilized to summarize responses. Results: Representatives from 61 (39%) schools responded. Thirty-two (52%) respondents were course directors; 26 (43%) were (...) deans of academic affairs, medical education, or curriculum; and 3 with other roles also completed the survey (5%). All 61 schools reported some form of formal ethics education during the first year of medical school, with most (n = 54, 89%) reporting a formal mandatory introductory course during preclinical education. Schools primarily utilized lecture and small-group teaching methods. Knowledge-based examinations, attendance, and participation were most commonly used for assessment. A large majority regarded ethics as equally or more important than other foundational courses, but fewer (n = 37, 60%) provided faculty training for teaching ethics. Conclusions: Despite a response rate of 39 percent, the authors conclude that medical schools include ethics in their curricula in small-group and lecture formats with heterogeneity regarding content taught. Preclinical curricular redesigns must innovate and implement best practices for ensuring sound delivery of ethics content in future curricula. Additional large-scale research is necessary to determine said best practices. (shrink)

The manufacturing industry faces a trend in which employees’ work processes are being redesigned into simple, repetitive tasks that maximize performance and efficiency. This neo-Tayloristic business model reduces social interactions and stifles relationship building, leading to disgruntled employees and raising questions about leaders’ moral obligation as to the mechanisms they use to enhance employees’ performance at work. As an alternative to redesigning work processes, we contend that servant leaders can enhance employees’ overall performance by cultivating positive interpersonal dynamics at work (...) where social connectedness flourishes. Integrating insights from self-determination theory with servant leadership’s moral foundations, we investigate the degree to which servant leadership fosters two elements of a relationally supportive social context, interactional justice climate and coworker support, that facilitate its influence on followers’ intrinsic motivation and, subsequently, their voice and in-role performance. Temporally-separated data collected from a sample of 296 employees and their supervisors situated in 44 teams yielded results that support our hypotheses. Results underscore the importance of servant leadership cultivating a positive relational context to increase employees’ intrinsic motivation and improve their behaviors at work. (shrink)

It is argued that core areas of philosophy can benefit from reflection on cross-disciplinary research (CDR). We start by giving a brief account of CDR, describing its variability and some of the ways in which philosophers can interact with it. We then provide an argument in principle for the conclusion that CDR is philosophically fecund, arguing that since CDR highlights fundamental differences among disciplinary research worldviews, it can be used to motivate new philosophical problems and supply new insights into old (...) problems. We close by providing an argument by example that uses the epistemology of peer disagreement to establish the potential of CDR for core philosophical areas. With this argument, we aim to demonstrate how the complex research contexts that CDR affords can point the way toward important avenues of epistemological research by highlighting potential limitations of key epistemological components, such as peerage and uniqueness. (shrink)

Environmental problems often outstrip the abilities of any single scientist to understand, much less address them. As a result, collaborations within, across, and beyond the environmental sciences are an increasingly important part of the environmental science landscape. Here, we explore an insufficiently recognized and particularly challenging barrier to collaborative environmental science: value pluralism, the presence of non-trivial differences in the values that collaborators bring to bear on project decisions. We argue that resolving the obstacles posed by value pluralism to collaborative (...) environmental science requires detecting and coordinating the underlying problematic value differences. We identify five ways that a team might coordinate their problematic value differences and argue that, whichever mode is adopted, it ought to be governed by participatory virtues, pragmatic resolve, and moral concern. Relying on our experiences with the Toolbox Dialogue Initiative, as well as with other dialogical approaches that support team inquiry, we defend the claim that philosophical dialogue among collaborators can go a long way towards helping teams of environmental scientists and fellow travelers detect their problematic value differences. Where dialogical approaches fare less well is in helping teams coordinate these differences. We close by describing several principles for augmenting philosophical dialogue with other methods, and we list several of these methods in an appendix with brief descriptions and links for further learning. Overall, the article makes three main contributions to the research collaboration and values in science literatures: It deepens our understanding of problematic value pluralism in team science; It provides actionable guidance and methods for improving values-oriented philosophical dialogue interventions; and It demonstrates one way of doing engaged philosophy. (shrink)

Protection of human participants is a fundamental facet of biomedical research. We report the activities of a health service research study in which there were three institutional review boards (IRBs), three legal departments and one research administration department providing recommendations and mandating changes in the study methods. Complying with IRB requirements can be challenging, but can also adversely affect study outcomes. Multiple protocol changes mandated from multiple IRBs created a research method that was not reflective of how substance use screening (...) would be performed in a clinical setting. There was direct conflict between the IRBs' perceptions of participants' protection with the researchers' need to use research methodology that assures the clinical relevancy of results. (shrink)

Implicit memory refers to a change in task performance due to an earlier experience that is not consciously remembered. The topic of implicit memory has been studied from two quite different perspectives for the past 20 years. On the one hand, researchers interested in memory have set out to characterize the memory system underlying implicit memory, and see how they relate to those underlying other forms of memory. The alternative framework has considered implicit memory as a by-product of perceptual, conceptual, (...) or motor systems that learn. That is, on this view the systems that support implicit memory are heavily constrained by pressures other than memory per se. Both approaches have yielded results that have been valuable in helping us to understand the nature of implicit memory, but studied somewhat in isolation and with little collaboration. This volume is unique in explicitly contrasting these approaches, bringing together world class scientists from both camps in an attempt to forge a new approach to understanding one of the most exciting and important issues in psychology and neuroscience. Written for postgraduate students and researchers in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, this is a book that will have an important influence on the direction that future research in this field takes. (shrink)

This book examines influential conceptions of sport and then analyses the interplay of challenging borderline cases with the standard definitions of sport. It is meant to inspire more thought and debate on just what sport is, how it relates to other activities and human endeavors, and what we can learn about ourselves by studying sport.

The University of Hawai’i at Mānoa’s Uehiro Academy for Philosophy and Ethics in Education (UHM Uehiro Academy) prepares, supports and sustains philosophy for children Hawai‘i (p4cHI) educators, researchers, and students in Hawai‘i and beyond. This paper documents the impact of the Uehiro Academy’s philosophy outreach program at Kailua High School (KHS), a public secondary school on the Hawaiian Island of O’ahu. It describes the twenty year partnership between the University and KHS, which built a foundation for p4cHI to become integrated (...) across the curriculum and within the school culture. To better understand the overall impact of the UHM Uehiro Academy philosophy outreach program on KHS, researchers asked, ‘How has the UHM Uehiro Academy philosophy outreach program impacted the school culture at KHS?’ Qualitative methods were applied to design and conduct a research study, which included interviewing 68 members of the KHS community. Data analysis revealed four main themes: (1) a schoolwide learner-centred pedagogy, (2) a place for learning more than just academics, (3) a community of diverse and connected individuals, (4) a commitment to professional growth for the purpose of a better world. The paper ends with conclusions, implications of the findings, and the researchers reflecting on the findings, including the benefits and challenges of university philosophy outreach programs in the secondary school setting. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviews 91 A SURVEY OF FREE THOUGHT Chad Trainer 1006 Davids Run Phoenixville, pa 19460, usa stratof{[email protected] Paul Edwards. God and the Philosophers. Edited by Timothy J. Madigan. New York: Prometheus Books, 2009. Pp. 330. isbn 978-1-59102-618-1 (hb). us$28.98. zaul Edwards (1923–2004) is most famous as the editor of the magisterial PEncyclopedia of Philosophy. He was one of three coauthors of its lengthy entry on Bertrand Russell. In (...) 1957, Edwards also edited Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian. A collection of his writings entitled God and the Philosophersz has been recently published, edited by Tim Madigan. Timothy Madigan is a previous editor of Free Inquiry who would visit Ed­ wards when travelling to New York City and who had the privilege over the years of reading several drafts of God and the Philosophers, which Edwards knew would be his Wnal project (p. 8). Madigan explains: “Never one to hide his own unbelief, Edwards often com­ mented that his two main goals were to demolish the inXuence of Heidegger and keep alive the memory of William Reich, the much-reviled psychoanalyst whose critiques of religion Edwards felt still remained valid” (p. 10). God and the Philosophersz is probably best appreciated as a very readable survey that is basically a patchwork of Edwards’ various musings on some of the West’s more iconoclastic philosophers. The work is not a systematic compendium and is probably of most value to those inclined to free thought and making their ini­ tial forays into the history of philosophy. The order in which Edwards discusses the thinkers is chronological, but his method of selection is idiosyncratic, especially in the earlier chapters. It is un­ clear why medieval Wgures like Maimonides and Aquinas are includedz in this col­ lection and great ancient independent thinkers like Xenophanes of Colophon and Strato of Lampsacus are excludedz. In any case, Edwards nowhere explains his criteria, or method, for selecting the thinkers he discusses. Edwards credits Russell with being “probably the most inXuential unbeliever of the twentieth century” (p. 253). And the personal inXuence of Russell on Ed­ wards is clear from Edwards’ mention that, while he himself was already “mov­ ing in the direction of unbeliefz”, reading three of Russell’s critiques of religion “Wxed me for good” (p. 253). Not only does Edwards devote an entire chapter to Russell but he cites him December 2, 2009 (5:28 pm) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE2901\russell 29,1 060 red.wpd E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE2901\russell 29,1 060 red.wpd 92 Reviews throughout the book. In the chapter on Hume, Edwards presents the Natural History of Religion’s observation of “religionists’z” insecurity regarding their own beliefs as corresponding to Russell’s view that “believers hate and persecute their critics because they dimly realize that their own beliefs are myths” (p. 96). Ed­ wards takes both Schopenhauer (p. 179) and Spencer (p. 242) to task for assum­ ing that something has no value if it is not permanent and, on both occasions, credits Russell with having a superior rival view. The one occasion where Russell evidently stuns Edwards as being more in the camp of the believers rather than the non-believers is Russell’s discussion of Spinoza’s equation of a mind conceiving something “under a form” of eternity with that mind being eternal. As Edwards sees it, Russell was “apparently under such a spell of Spinoza that he [Russell] reports this view without one word of dissent. My own dissent is very simple: if consciousness cannot exist without the body, no part of it can survive and be Wlled with ‘eternal thoughts’ of God or Nature or anything else” (p. 37). Perhaps Edwards’ most poignant invocation of Russell is at the close of the chapter on Nietzsche. After detailing the “romantic cult of war” and “transition to modern totalitarianism”asamong Nietzsche’s legacies, Edwards illustrates the moral high ground with which German and Austrian establishmentarians could counter contrarian claims that “God is dead”, whereas “[i]n Anglo-Saxon coun­ tries intelligent adolescents have the great fortune of having Bertrand Russell as their guide to unbelief minus... (shrink)

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

Des philosophes théistes comme Thomas D. Sullivan ont adapté les arguments cosmologiques bases sur le Principe de raison suffisante pour les ajuster à la cosmologie contemporaine du Big Bang Leur thèse centrale est que uisque le Big Bang n'a pas pu avoir une cause physique et puisque tout a une cause, le Big Bang a dû avoir une cause non physique ou surnaturelle. Des philosophes non théistes qui acceptent la cosmologie standard du Big Bang ont remis en question la vérité (...) de PRS, en soutenant que certains événements peuvent se produire sans aucune cause. Quentin Smith a défendu l'idée que PRS n'est pas du tout évident par lui-meme et qu'il y a en fait de bonnes raisons de supposer que des choses comme des singularites peuvent se produire sans cause. Thomas D. Sullivan a répliqué à l'argument de Smith voulant que PRS ne soit pas évident par lui-même, et il afourni en outre une pretendue preuve de PRS. Je soutiens dans cet article que PRS, en réalité, n'est pas évident par soi-même et que l'argument de Sullivan en faveur du contraire repose sur un malentendu quant à ce que nous entendons généralement pas «évident par lui-même». J'essaie également de montrer que la preuve de PRS fournie par Sullivan souffre de nombreuses difficultés. Si j'ai raison sur tout cela le PRS nest pas evident par lui-même et nous ne disposons d'aucun argument en safaveur. Il n'en découle pas que PRS soit faux, mais il en découle que nous sommes justifiés de ne pas être convaincus par les arguments en faveur de l'existence de Dieu qui prennent PRS pour prémisse. (shrink)

The anticipated social capabilities of robots may allow them to serve in authority roles as part of human-machine teams. To date, it is unclear if, and to what extent, human team members will comply with requests from their robotic teammates, and how such compliance compares to requests from human teammates. This research examined how the human-likeness and physical embodiment of a robot affect compliance to a robot's request to perseverate utilizing a novel task paradigm. Across a set of two studies, (...) participants performed a visual search task while receiving ambiguous performance feedback. Compliance was evaluated when the participant requested to stop the task and the coach urged the participant to keep practicing multiple times. In the first study, the coach was either physically co-located with the participant or located remotely via a live-video. Coach type varied in human-likeness and included either a real human, a Nao robot, or a modified Roomba robot. The second study expanded on the first by including a Baxter robot as a coach and replicated the findings in a different sample population with a strict chain of command culture. Results from both studies showed that participants comply with the requests of a robot for up to 11 min. Compliance is less than to a human and embodiment and human-likeness on had weak effects on compliance. (shrink)

Sister (Sr.) Marie Simone Roach, of the Sisters of St. Martha of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, died at the Motherhouse on 2 July 2016 at the age of 93, leaving behind a rich legacy of theoretical and practical work in the areas of care, caring and nursing ethics. She was a humble soul whose deep and scholarly thinking thrust her onto the global nursing stage where she will forever be tied to a central concept in nursing, caring, through her Six (...) Cs of Caring model. In Canada, she was the lead architect of the Canadian Nurses Association's first code of ethics, and her influence on revisions to it is still profound more than 35 years later. In this paper, four global scholars in nursing and ethics are invited to reflect on Sr. Simone's contribution to nursing and health‐care, and we link her work to nursing and health‐care going forward. (shrink)

This is a short introduction to a book symposium on Paul Gowder's recent book, _The Rule of Law in thee Real World_ (Cambridge University Press, 2016). The book symposium will appear in the St. Luis University Law Journal, 62 St. Louis U. L.J., -- (2018), with commentaries on Gowder's book by colleen Murphy, Robin West, Chad Flanders, and Matthew Lister, along with replies by Paul Gowder.

ABSTRACT:Drawing upon the collective action model of institutional change, I reconceptualize moral imagination as both a social process and a cognitive one. I argue that moral outcomes are not produced by individual actors alone; rather, they emerge from collective action processes that are influenced by political conditions and involve behaviors that include issue framing and resource mobilization. I also contend that individual moral imagination involves the integration of moral sensitivity with consideration of collective action dynamics. I illustrate my arguments with (...) a case study of the Chad-Cameroon oil project. The paper suggests new directions in teaching and research on moral imagination. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue in favor of a novel interpretation of the semantic theory that can be found in the Later Mohist writings. Recent interpretations by Chad Hansen and Chris Fraser cast the Later Mohist theory as a realist theory; this includes attributing to the Later Mohists what we can call “kind-realism,” the idea that there is some correct scheme of kind-terms that carves the world at its joints. While I agree with Hansen and Fraser that the Later (...) Mohist theory is realist in various ways, I offer challenges to their kind-realist interpretations, and argue instead for a kind-conventionalist interpretation on which there is no fixed, correct set of kinds, leaving schemes of kind terms to be determined by conventional decisions that occur during disputation. (shrink)

After one has read for a while in the history of Western thought, one becomes cognizant of how many great intellects, believers and non-believers alike, have presented compelling examinations of Christian theism. And until recently, religious skeptics, following in the wake of David Hume, assumed that the ship of Christian philosophy of religion was too damaged to sail again. However, something unexpectedly emerged recently from the weathered ship, even after many pilots advised cautious hugging the shores, especially in light of (...) the ‘death of God’ storms of the 1960’s. Many abandoned the ancient mother ship, some escaping on rafts, lifeboats, or flotsam, transferring to modern vessels, such as SS Darwin, Freud, Marx, or Nietzsche. Still, a number of sailors stayed on board the ancient craft, and responded to the latter secularist fleet, honing their skills as navigators, first mates, and lookouts, so as to safeguard the ancient ship from secularist vessel forays.The anthology under re .. (shrink)

This review provides a brief summary and analysis of T.J. Mawson's monograph, Monotheism and the Meaning of Life (part of the Cambridge Elements series, edited by Chad Meister and Paul Moser).

Patient narratives from two investigational deep brain stimulation trials for traumatic brain injury and obsessive‐compulsive disorder reveal that injury and illness rob individuals of personal identity and that neuromodulation can restore it. The early success of these interventions makes a compelling case for continued post‐trial access to these technologies. Given the centrality of personal identity to respect for persons, a failure to provide continued access can be understood to represent a metaphorical identity theft. Such a loss recapitulates the pain of (...) an individual's initial injury or illness and becomes especially tragic because it could be prevented by robust policy. A failure to fulfill this normative obligation constitutes a breach of disability law, which would view post‐trial access as a means to achieve social reintegration through this neurotechnological accommodation. (shrink)

In this paper I critically examine the implications of the uncodifiability thesis for principlism as a pluralistic and non-absolute generalist ethical theory. In this regard, I begin with a brief overview of W.D. Ross’s ethical theory and his focus on general but defeasible prima facie principles before turning to 2) the revival of principlism in contemporary bioethics through the influential work of Tom Beauchamp and James Childress; 3) the widespread adoption of specification as a response to the indeterminacy of abstract (...) general principles and the limitations of balancing and deductive approaches; 4) the challenges raised to fully specified principlism by the uncodifiability thesis and 5) finally offer a defense of the uncodifiability thesis against various critiques that have been raised. (shrink)

Healthcare priority-setting institutions have good reason to want to demonstrate that their decisions are morally justified—and those who contribute to and use the health service have good reason to hope for the same. However, finding a moral basis on which to evaluate healthcare priority-setting is difficult. Substantive approaches are vulnerable to reasonable disagreement about the appropriate grounds for allocating resources, while procedural approaches may be indeterminate and insufficient to ensure a just distribution. In this paper, we set out a complementary, (...) coherence-based approach to the evaluation of healthcare priority-setting. Drawing on Rawls, we argue that an institutional priority-setter’s claim to moral justification can be assessed, in part, based on the extent to which its many normative commitments are mutually supportive and free from dissonance; that is, on the ability to establish narrow reflective equilibrium across the normative content of a priority-setter’s policy and practice. While we do not suggest that the establishment of such equilibrium is sufficient for moral justification, we argue that failure to do so might—like the proverbial canary in the coalmine—act as a generalised warning that something is awry. We offer a theoretical argument in support of this view and briefly outline a practical method for systematically examining coherence across priority-setting policy and practice. (shrink)

What is property, and why does our species happen to have it? In The Property Species, the economist Bart Wilson explores how we acquire, perceive, and know the custom of property, and why this might be relevant to social scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars for understanding how property works in the twenty-first century.