Consciousness-based education and Maharishi Vedic science -- Consciousness-based education and education -- Consciousness-based education and physiology and health -- Consciousness-based education and physics -- Consciousness-based education and mathematics -- Consciousness-based education and literature -- Consciousness-based education and art -- Consciousness-based education and management -- Consciousness-based education and government -- Consciousness-based education and computer science -- Consciousness-based education and sustainability -- Consciousness-based education and world peace.

In this discussion with Craig Browne, Luc Boltanski comments on how his recent work reconsiders the questions of agency and the nature of social explanation. Boltanski reflects on the connections between his investigations of grammars of justifications and his later work with Eve Chiapello on the historical transition to a new spirit of capitalism. The significance of politics, conflict and critique to Boltanski’s sociology are highlighted. Bolanski explains why he regards May 1968 as a major disruption of the capitalist (...) social order and how the conservative response to this contestation subsequently prevailed in France. The reorganisation of capitalism in recent decades has increased social division, yet Boltanski believes that the recent recession and existing discontent could lead to unexpected outcomes. (shrink)

Annotation. There has never been a writer quite like Christopher Pearson. A BETTER CLASS OF SUNSET brings together Pearson's enduring columns and essays, chronicling the twists and turns of Australian cultural life over three intriguing decades. From climate change to homosexuality and the welfare of Indigenous Australians, Pearson was an unflagging champion of unfashionable causes, a conscientious objector to political correctness and a skilled dissector of muddle-headed arguments. They reveal a true man of letters with a rare (...) literary voice; passionate, moving and often very funny, Pearson's thinking seldom strays from his abiding principles. For all those who aspire to be members of what Pearson called Club Sensible, A BETTER CLASS OF SUNSET is an indispensible addition to the bookshelf. (shrink)

In deciding whether to forgive, we often focus on the wrongdoer, looking for an apology or a change of ways. However, to fully consider whether to forgive, we need to expand our focus from the wrongdoer and their wrongdoing, and we need to consider who we are, what we care about, and what we want to care about. The difference between blame and forgiveness is, at bottom, a difference in priorities. When we blame, we prioritize the wrong, and when we (...) forgive, we shift our priorities away from the wrong. Recognizing this essential role for priorities in forgiveness allows us to address a thorny puzzle in thinking about forgiveness: how is it that forgiveness can be both principled and elective? If there is sufficient reason to forgive, as will sometimes be the case because forgiveness is principled, how can it be reasonable to withhold forgiveness? Recognizing that forgiveness is a shift in our priorities dissolves this apparent tension between forgiveness being principled and forgiveness being elective. (shrink)

The publication in theJournal of the American Medical Association of a narrative entitled “It's Over, Debbie,” in which a gynecology resident apparently performs euthanasia, has stirred considerable debate characterized by varying interpretations not only of the ethical issues involved but of the meaning of the text itself. Formal analysis reveals the narrative to be strikingly literary in its ambiguity, its foregrounding of its own textuality, and its dominant structure of repetition and reversal. The analysis points to features that account for (...) some of the varying interpretations in the debate, and it calls into question the relation of the text to whatever events it may represent and to how the resident may have perceived these events. (shrink)

During the last several years, philosophers of religion have witnessed a long-drawn debate between Nelson Pike and John Fischer on the problems of theological fatalism, Fischer claiming in his most recent contribution to have proved that even if God's past beliefs are ‘nice soft facts’, still theological fatalism cannot be averted. Unfortunately, this debate has not – at least it seems to this observer – served substantially either to clarify the issues involved or to move toward a resolution of the (...) question, but has instead confused matters by its use of misleading terminology and diverted the discussion into unpromising side roads. (shrink)

Karl Pearson is the leading figure of XX century statistics. He and his co-workers crafted the core of the theory, methods and language of frequentist or classical statistics – the prevalent inductive logic of contemporary science. However, before working in statistics, K. Pearson had other interests in life, namely, in this order, philosophy, physics, and biological heredity. Key concepts of his philosophical and epistemological system of anti-Spinozism (a form of transcendental idealism) are carried over to his subsequent works (...) on the logic of scientific discovery. This article’s main goal is to analyze K. Pearson early philosophical and theological ideas and to investigate how the same ideas came to influence contemporary science, either directly or indirectly – by the use of variant theories, methods and dialects of statistics, corresponding to variant statistical inference procedures and their specific belief calculi. (shrink)

Karl Pearson is a figure of interest to historians of many areas. The historian of mathematical statistics knows the inventor of the product-moment correlation coefficient and the chi square test; the historian of philosophy knows the author of the Grammar of science; the historian of genetics knows the opponent of Mendelism; the political historian knows the ‘social-imperialist’ political thinker; the historian of feminism knows the early supporter of the women's movement and friend of Olive Schreiner; and, of course, the (...) historian of eugenics knows the first occupant of the only chair of eugenics in a British university. This paper does not attempt a biography of Pearson, but simply raises and tries to answer one question. To what extent can the sociology of knowledge throw light on Pearson's varied and many-sided thought? It concludes that there is a good case for seeing this thought as reflecting with exceptional clarity the social interests of the professional middle class to which he belonged. (shrink)

Standard statistical measures of strength of association, although pioneered by Pearson deliberately to be acausal, nowadays are routinely used to measure causal efficacy. But their acausal origins have left them ill suited to this latter purpose. I distinguish between two different conceptions of causal efficacy, and argue that: 1) Both conceptions can be useful 2) The statistical measures only attempt to capture the first of them 3) They are not fully successful even at this 4) An alternative definition more (...) squarely based on causal thinking not only captures the second conception, it can also capture the first one better too. (shrink)

Der Verfasser legt einen Kommentar vor, der allen Lesern von Humes erkenntnistheoretischen Schriften hilfreich sein wird; auch werden zentrale Aspekte seiner Moral- und Religionsphilosophie vorgefuhrt und diskutiert. Dabei wird ein Gesamtbild der Philosophie Humes entwickelt und in den Zusammenhang des zeitgenossischen europaischen Denkens gestellt. Hier bekampft der Verfasser die gelaufige Interpretation, derzufolge Hume als der konsequente Zerstorer des Empirismus gilt; Humes Ziel sei eher die Widerlegung einer Weltauffassung, die fast allen Philosophen seiner Epoche, Empiristen und Rationalisten, gemeinsam war. In einem (...) Anhang wird sein Verhaltnis zur kritischen Philosophie Kants eingehender behandelt. Auf diese Weise soll nicht nur Studenten eine Einfuhrung in die Philosophie Humes, sondern auch Spezialisten grundsatzlich neues Material geboten werden. (shrink)

A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein — modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions — constrain the felicitous flow of discourse. A requirement of (...) Relevance is satisfied by an utterance (whether an assertion, a question or a suggestion) iff it addresses the question under discussion. Finally, it is argued that the prosodic focus of an utterance canonically serves to reflect the question under discussion (at least in English), placing additional constraints on felicity in context. (shrink)

Aunque muchos lectores de las novelas de Unamuno notan que el estilo de su primera novela, “Paz en la guerra” (1897), es bastante tradicional y que, por consiguiente, difiere mucho del estilo de las novelas que don Miguel escribe después, también tiene elementos que la vinculan claramente sus novelas más tardías. Uno de estos es el manejo del tiempo, el cual hace que el tiempo se detenga y produce lo que Henri Bergson llamaría la “virtualización” del tiempo. El tiempo también (...) se detiene y se virtualiza en otras novelas de Unamuno—en particular, “Niebla”. Por ejemplo, en “Niebla” varias anomalías temporales revelan el deseo de Unamuno de detener el tiempo y eternizar el momento para así escapar la muerte y existir perpetuamente, un deseo también presente en “Paz en la guerra”. Por lo tanto, el presente muestra que, por su manejo particular del tiempo, “Paz en la guerra” se vincula claramente a novelas más experimentales de Unamuno. (shrink)

I document some of the main evidence showing that E. S. Pearson rejected the key features of the behavioral-decision philosophy that became associated with the Neyman-Pearson Theory of statistics (NPT). I argue that NPT principles arose not out of behavioral aims, where the concern is solely with behaving correctly sufficiently often in some long run, but out of the epistemological aim of learning about causes of experimental results (e.g., distinguishing genuine from spurious effects). The view Pearson did (...) hold gives a deeper understanding of NPT tests than their typical formulation as accept-reject routines, against which criticisms of NPT are really directed. The Pearsonian view that emerges suggests how NPT tests may avoid these criticisms while still retaining what is central to these methods: the control of error probabilities. (shrink)

Craig Eisendrath reinterprets and unifies the writings of the late-nineteenth-century psychologist William James and the twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. James's psychology achieves greater depth by its grounding in philosophic doctrine, and Whitehead's abstract and frequently abstruse philosophy gains greater specificity through the concrete illustrations provided by a wealth of psychological evidence. The result is an extension of James and an exegesis of Whitehead. The merging of James's theory of will and Whitehead's theory of concrescence and organism is the (...) central pivot of the book. Eisendrath discusses as well the philosophical traditions behind both men and analyzes their theories on perception, time, space, causality, the nature and role of ideas, the laws of nature, God and civilization. (shrink)

Summary Long-standing claims have been made for nearly the entire twentieth century that the biometrician, Karl Pearson, and his colleague, W. F. R. Weldon, rejected Mendelism as a theory of inheritance. It is shown that at the end of the nineteenth century Pearson considered various theories of inheritance (including Francis Galton's law of ancestral heredity for characters underpinned by continuous variation), and by 1904 he ?accepted the fundamental idea of Mendel? as a theory of inheritance for discontinuous variation. (...) Moreover, in 1909, he suggested a synthesis of biometry and Mendelism. Despite the many attempts made by a number of geneticists (including R. A. Fisher in 1936) to use Pearson's chi-square (X 2, P) goodness-of-fit test on Mendel's data, which produced results that were ?too good to be true?, Weldon reached the same conclusion in 1902, but his results were never acknowledged. The geneticist and arch-rival of the biometricians, Williams Bateson, was instead exceptionally critical of this work and interpreted this as Weldon's rejection of Mendelism. Whilst scholarship on Mendel, by historians of science in the last 18 years, has led to a balanced perspective of Mendel, it is suggested that a better balanced and more rounded view of the hereditarian-statistical work of Pearson, Weldon, and the biometricians is long overdue. (shrink)

We show that if among the tested hypotheses the number of true hypotheses is not equal to the number of false hypotheses, then Neyman-Pearson theory of testing hypotheses does not warrant minimal epistemic reliability. We also argue that N-P does not protect from the possible negative effects of the pragmatic value-laden unequal setting of error probabilities on N-P’s epistemic reliability. Most importantly, we argue that in the case of a negative impact no methodological adjustment is available to neutralize it, (...) so in such cases the discussed pragmatic-value-ladenness of N-P inevitably compromises the goal of attaining truth. (shrink)

This paper deals with, prepositional calculi with strong negation (N-logics) in which the Craig interpolation theorem holds. N-logics are defined to be axiomatic strengthenings of the intuitionistic calculus enriched with a unary connective called strong negation. There exists continuum of N-logics, but the Craig interpolation theorem holds only in 14 of them.

The philosophy of Thomas Kuhn proposes that scientific progress involves periods of crisis and revolution in which previous paradigms are discarded and replaced. Revolutions in how mental health problems are conceptualised have had a substantial impact on the work of mental health nurses. However, despite numerous revolutions within the field of mental health, the biological paradigm has remained largely dominant within western healthcare, especially in orientating the understanding and treatment of psychosis. This paper utilises concepts drawn from the philosophy of (...) Thomas Kuhn to explore the impact of what Kuhn terms ‘anomalies’ within the dominant biological paradigm: the anomaly of the meaningful utterance, the anomaly of complex aetiology and taxonomy and the anomaly of pharmacological inefficacy in recovery. The paper argues that the biological paradigm for understanding psychosis is in crisis and explores the implications for mental health nursing. (shrink)

The counterfactual mental state of negligent criminal activity invites skepticism from those who see mental states as essential to responsibility. Here, I offer a revision of the mental state of criminal negligence, one where the mental state at issue is actual and not merely counterfactual. This revision dissolves the worry raised by the skeptic and helps to explain negligence’s comparatively reduced culpability.

Drunk drivers and other culpably incapacitated wrongdoers are often taken to pose a problem for reasons-responsiveness accounts of moral responsibility. These accounts predicate moral responsibility upon an agent having the capacities to perceive and act upon moral reasons, and the culpably incapacitated wrongdoers lack exactly those capacities at the time of their wrongdoing. Many reasons-responsiveness advocates thus expand their account of responsibility to include a tracing condition: The culpably incapacitated wrongdoer is blameworthy despite his incapacitation precisely because he is responsible (...) for becoming incapacitated. As some skeptics have suggested, it is not clear that we need tracing. Here, however, I make a stronger case against tracing: I show that tracing gets things wrong. I consider a new sort of case, the case of the Odysseus agent, whose incapacitation is non-culpable (sometimes merely permissible and sometimes praiseworthy). Tracing would have us hold responsible and therefore blame unlucky Odysseus agents, Odysseus agents who commit a wrongdoing in the throes of their non-culpably induced incapacitation. But we should not hold these unlucky Odysseus agents responsible for their incapacitated wrongdoing. Because tracing gets these cases wrong, we should reject tracing. (shrink)

In ‘Professor Mackie and the Kalam Cosmological Argument’ , 367–75), Professor William Lane Craig undertakes to demonstrate that J. L. Mackie's analysis of the kalam cosmological argument in The Miracle of Theism is ‘superficial’, and that Mackie ‘has failed to provide any compelling or even intuitively appealing objection against the argument’ . I disagree with Craig's judgement; for it seems to me that the considerations which Mackie advances do serve to refute the kalam cosmological argument. Consequently, the purpose (...) of this paper is to reply to Craig's criticisms on Mackie's behalf. (shrink)

For many philosophers, bad-history wrongdoers are primarily interesting because of what their cases might tell us about the interaction of moral responsibility and history. However, philosophers focusing on blameworthiness have overlooked important questions about blame itself. These bad-history cases are complicated because blame and sympathy are both fitting. When we are careful to consider the rich natures of those two reactions, we see that they conflict in several important ways. We should see bad-history cases as cases about whether and how (...) we should blame, rather than as cases giving us ready insight into the nature of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Duress is a defense in both law and morality. The bank teller who provides an armed robber with the bank vault combination, the innocent suspect who fabricates a story after hours of interrogation, the Good Samaritan who breaks into a private cabin in the woods to save a stranded hiker, and the father who drives at high speed to rush his injured child to the hospital—in deciding how to respond to agents like these, we should take into account that they (...) have acted under duress. In this paper, I offer a new duress defense, which I call “distinctive duress.” The distinctive-duress defense is neither ordinary justification nor ordinary excuse. Rather, it is a defense available to agents who act wrongly because they are appropriately insensitive to certain reasons. In the distinctive-duress cases, an agent’s normative sensitivities are rightly directed elsewhere, leading them awry. (shrink)

Given his view that the modern world is ‘radically evil’, Adorno is an unlikely contributor to business ethics. Despite this, we argue that his work has a number of provocative implications for the field that warrant wider attention. Adorno regards our social world as damaged, unfree, and false and we draw on this critique to outline why the achievement of good work is so rare in contemporary society, focusing in particular on the ethical demands of roles and the ideological nature (...) of management’s self-understanding. Nevertheless, we show that Adorno’s comments on activities such as art and philosophy mean that it is possible to draw on his work in a way that contributes constructively to the conversation about good and meaningful work within business ethics. (shrink)

As a graduate student in Linguistics at UMass/Amherst in the 1980s, I was fortunate to be exposed to a number of new developments bearing on the relationship between formal semantics and pragmatics. In the 1970s under the influence of Cresswell, Lewis, Montague, and Partee, enormous progress in semantics was made possible by narrowing the focus of the field mainly to the consideration of the conventional, truth conditional content of an indicative utterance, calculated compositionally as a function of the semantic contributions (...) of its parts and its syntactic structure. Context was typically relegated to the background, in the form of indices of evaluation, though occasionally popping out for more serious consideration, as in the work of Kaplan, Karttunen, and Stalnaker. But eventually the nature of the rigorous formal enterprise itself, confronted with phenomena like Geach’s donkey sentences, presupposition projection, and the context-dependence of tense and aspect, forced the field into a more careful, thorough reconsideration of the relationship between context and content. Hence were born the dynamic theories of interpretation, beginning with Hans Kamp (1981) and Irene Heim (1982), who were both at UMass during my stay there, Heim completing her dissertation and Kamp on the faculty in Philosophy. Such frameworks posit a dynamic interchange between content and context, each dependent on the other, even in the course of interpreting a single utterance. Mats Rooth was also a graduate student at UMass at that time, and wrote his influential dissertation (1985) proposing an alternative semantics for the interpretation of prosodic focus, inter alia shedding light on how focus contributes to the contextual domain restriction of various operators. (shrink)

In this article I present an original interpretation of Roy Bhaskar’s project in Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. His major move is to separate an ontological dialectic from a critical dialectic, which in Hegel are laminated together. The ontological dialectic, which in Hegel is the self-unfolding of spirit, becomes a realist and relational philosophical anthropology. The critical dialectic, which in Hegel is confined to retracing the steps of spirit, now becomes an active force, dialectical critique, which interposes into the ontological (...) dialectic at the ‘fourth dimension’ of a naturalistically reconfigured account of relational human nature, agency. This account allows Bhaskar to explain and vindicate the crucial role social criticism must play in any realistic project of self-emancipation, and to create a space that didn’t exist in Hegel for an open-ended concrete utopianism. Freedom is thus the actualization of human nature, but is not automatic: the relation of human nature to freedom is mediated historically through dialectical critique, which, informed by concrete utopianism, can have emancipatory power. Content Type Journal Article Category Article Pages 13-44 Authors Craig Reeves, Brunel University Journal Journal of Critical Realism Online ISSN 1572-5138 Print ISSN 1476-7430 Journal Volume Volume 12 Journal Issue Volume 12, Number 1 / 2013. (shrink)

The influence of personal opinions and biases on scientific conclusions is a threat to the advancement of knowledge. Expertise and experience does not render one immune to this temptation. In this work, one of the founding fathers of statistics, Karl Pearson, is used as an illustration of how even the most talented among us can produce misleading results when inferences are made without caution or reference to potential bias and other analysis limitations. A study performed by Pearson on (...) British Jewish schoolchildren is examined in light of ethical and professional statistical practice. The methodology used and inferences made by Pearson and his coauthor are sometimes questionable and offer insight into how Pearson’s support of eugenics and his own British nationalism could have potentially influenced his often careless and far-fetched inferences. A short background into Pearson’s work and beliefs is provided, along with an in-depth examination of the authors’ overall experimental design and statistical practices. In addition, portions of the study regarding intelligence and tuberculosis are discussed in more detail, along with historical reactions to their work. (shrink)

The_ Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy_ is the most ambitious international philosophy project in many years. Edited by Edward Craig and assisted by thirty specialist subject editors, the REP consists of ten volumes of the world's most eminent philosophers writing for the needs of students and teachers of philosophy internationally. The REP is a project on an unparalleled scale: Over 2000 entries ranging from 500 to 15,000 words in length - thematic, biographical and national 10 volumes consisting of over 5 (...) million words of text plus considerable bibliographic material A Chief Editor and thirty specialist Subject Editors from across the world Over 1200 authors from all over the world. The importance of the REP is not to be found just in the sheer size of the project but also in its breadth of subject matter. It covers: The core of most Anglo-American philosophy - the metaphysical, epistemological and logical questions The usual menu of ethics, political philosophy and the history of philosophy The philosophy of other cultures - from Chinese, Arabic and Jewish philosophy to the philosophy of Africa and Latin America The most impressive range of authors have been gathered together on this unique project: William Alston, Roderick Chisolm, Fred Dretske, Joel Feinberg, Sandra Harding, Larry Laudan, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Popkin, Richard Rorty, Alan Ryan, Gyatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stephen Stich, Patrick Suppes and Bernard Williams, to name just a few. Also available online: www.rep.routledge.com. (shrink)

This article is a rebuttal to Robert G. Cavin and Carlos A. Colombetti’s article, “Assessing the Resurrection Hypothesis: Problems with Craig’s Inference to the Best Explanation,” which argues that the Standard Model of current particle physics entails that non-physical things (like a supernatural God or a supernaturally resurrected body) can have no causal contact with the physical universe. As such, they argue that William Lane Craig’s resurrection hypothesis is not only incompatible with the notion of Jesus physically appearing (...) to the disciples, but the resurrection hypothesis is significantly limited in both its explanatory scope and explanatory power. This article seeks to demonstrate why their use of the Standard Model does not logically entail a rejection of the physical resurrection of Jesus when considering the scope and limitations of science itself. (shrink)

The paper addresses the question of whether heritability can be useful in establishing genetics as an explanation for an individual’s display of some trait or behavior. After reviewing the fundamental philosophical challenge to heritability—that heritability is a population level measure—an argument is presented for rethinking the role heritability occupies in both causal and explanatory claims. It is argued that heritability can be useful for genetically based explanations of individual traits, if the conditions for proper genetic explanation are modestly reconceived, and (...) the measure is seen as an evidential tool which conforms to standard methods for determining causal factors. (shrink)

This study examines the presence and roles of female directors of U.S. Fortune 500 firms, focusing on committee assignments and director background. Prior work from almost two decades ago concludes that there is a systematic bias against females in assignment to top board committees. Examining a recent data set with a logistic regression model that controls for director and firm characteristics, director resource-dependence roles and interaction between director gender and director characteristics, we find that female directors are less likely than (...) male directors to sit on executive committees and more likely than male directors to sit on public affairs committees. There is little if any evidence of systematic gender bias in director assignment to other board committees. We find some evidence that boards evaluate resource dependence differently for women than men. (shrink)

Harry C. Boyte. Craig Calhoun. Geoff Eley. Nancy Fraser. Nicholas Garnham. JürgenHabermas. Peter Hohendahl. Lloyd Kramer. Benjamin Lee. Thomas McCarthy. Moishe Postone. Mary P.Ryan. Michael Schudson. Michael Warner. David Zaret.

"Clifford was famous for his public lectures on physics and math and ethics because he explained complex things with easily understood, concrete examples. As you read through his clear, simple explanations of the true bases of number, algebra and geometry you will find yourself getting angry and saying "Why the hell wasn't I taught math this way?" and "Do math ed professors know so little mathematics that they have never heard of Clifford.?" Clifford was destined to be England's Einstein until (...) his untimely death at the age of 34, just 11 days before Einstein's birth. More than 30 years before the Special Theory of Relativity was proposed he had already concluded that the force of gravity was actually due to changes in the curvature of space. He gives explanatory examples in this book that middle school children can understand."--review on Amazon.com viewed July 6, 2020. (shrink)

How can we talk meaningfully about the past if it does not exist to be talked about? What gives time its direction? Is time travel possible? This defence of presentism - the view that only the present exists - makes an original contribution to a fast growing and exciting debate.