Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the (...) OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology’s compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR. Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. (shrink)

This article attempts to respond to Simon Critchley's claim in a recent debate with Richard Rorty, that the latter, by not fully recognizing its indebtedness to Levinas, misunderstands the political import of the work of Jacques Derrida. I maintain, pace Critchley, that trying to push the Derrida–Levinas connection too far will not only further compound Rorty's view of Derrida as a thinker devoid of political efficacy, but that it will moreover serve to obscure the significant differences which exist between Levinas (...) and Derrida – differences which cannot be overlooked in any serious discussion of the two thinkers in question. In the second half, I try to convince Critchley that what separates Derrida from Levinas is precisely what hooks him up with Rorty at a political level. Both, I argue, are committed to a civic religion of social hope. In so doing, I try to convince Rorty that his caricature of Derrida as a private writer without political consequence, ought now to be seriously reconsidered. (shrink)

This paper argues that Hegel's depiction of knowledge, as presented in the Encyclopaedia philosophy of subjective Spirit, is founded on what he deems to be the practical interests of self-consciousness. More specifically, it highlights the significance of the will in Hegel's understanding of the cognitive process. I begin with a survey of the relation between category-formation and the notion of self-determining freedom in the Logic , and therewith draw attention to the unity of thinking and willing in the Concept. I (...) then indicate how Hegel's philosophy of subjective Spirit should be read as the applied logic of the Concept, according to which the socially constituted self-conscious I seeks to realise its claims to freedom through its theoretical cognitions of objects. As part of what could be called Hegel's integrative theory of the faculties, I finally argue that the will underscores both the determinate character of our theoretical cognitions and the reflexivity of knowledge in general. On this score, I maintain that Hegel, whose relation to Kant and Fichte I also consider, is of the view that it is with reference to willing that we can account for the self-referential nature of reason in toto as the actualised unity of theoretical-practical subjectivity. (shrink)

This paper explores the role that willing plays in Fichte’s transcendental idealism, as set out in the nova methodo lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre and elsewhere. I first consider the link between the idea of the self-positing I and freedom, as well as the bifurcation of the I into cognition and volition. I then pinpoint the significance of intellectual intuition as part of Fichte’s strategy of substantiating the actuality of freedom via practical reason, especially in relation to the way in which (...) our capacity for self-determination conditions our knowledge-claims about nature. Finally I indicate that the will is essential for intuitional experience, which entails the ability to distinguish pure willing from empirical willing. In this context, I argue that, for Fichte, willing is constitutive of the possibility of consciousnessin general, and the possibility of determinate knowledge in particular. (shrink)

Graduate and undergraduate students were asked to evaluate the ethicality and practicality of the lead character in several case scenarios. Students' responses indicated they believed practicality was more important than ethicality. The majority of students were able to determine the correct ethicality of the cases presented to them. The authors conclude that more research is needed in the antecedents of a student's value system.

Questioning Ethics is a major discussion by some of world's leading thinkers of some of the most important ethical issues confronting us today. New essays including Habermas, MacIntyre, Ricoeur and Kristeva discuss issues such as the nature of politics, women's rights, lying, repressed memory, historical debt and forgiveness, the self and responsibility, revisionism, bioethics and multiculturalism. The contributors organize their discussions along the topics of hermeneutics, deconstruction, critical theory, psychoanalysi and the applications of ethics. Also included in this collection is (...) an interview with Jacques Derrida which provides the most accessible insight into his thinking. Contributors: Karl-Otto Apel, Geoffrey Barash, John Caputo, Maeve Cooke, Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Simon Glendinning, Jean Greish, Jurgen Habermas, Richard Kearney, Peter Kemp, Julia Kristeva, Alasdair MacIntyre, Thomas McCarthy, David Rasmussen, William J. Richardson, Paul Ricoeur, David Wood. (shrink)

In 15 insightful essays, Jacques Derrida and an international group of scholars of religion explore postmodern thinking about God and consider the nature of forgiveness in relation to the paradoxes of the gift. Among the themes addressed by contributors are the possibilities of imagining God as unthinkable, imagining God as non-patriarchal, imagining a return to Augustine, and imagining an age in which praise is far more important than narrative. Questioning God moves readers beyond the parameters of metaphysical reason and modernist (...) rationality as it attempts to think the questions of God and forgiveness in a postmodernist context. Contributors include John D. Caputo, Jacques Derrida, Mark Dooley, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Robert Gibbs, Jean Greisch, Kevin Hart, Richard Kearney, Cleo McNelly Kearns, John Milbank, Regina M. Schwartz, Michael J. Scanlon, and Graham Ward. Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion—Merold Westphal, general editor. (shrink)

As social media becomes increasingly popular, human subjects researchers are able to use these platforms to locate, track, and communicate with study participants, thereby increasing participant retention and the generalizability and validity of research. The use of social media; however, raises novel ethical and regulatory issues that have received limited attention in the literature and federal regulations. We review research ethics and regulations and outline the implications for maintaining participant privacy, respecting participant autonomy, and promoting researcher transparency when using social (...) media to locate and track participants. We offer a rubric that can be used in future studies to determine ethical and regulation-consistent use of social media platforms and illustrate the rubric using our study team’s experience with Facebook. We also offer recommendations for both researchers and institutional review boards that emphasize the importance of well-described procedures for social media use as... (shrink)

Summary A number of elite boys? schools in England have admitted girls for over 30 years, some thereby becoming mixed schools. In other schools, girls remain a very small minority. This paper focuses upon prospectuses from the latter type of school, arguing that prospectuses are particularly valuable as a basis for judging schools? policies and practices in their own terms. The researchers ask questions about the nature of this form of ?co-education?, particularly as it affects girls? educational and social opportunities. (...) On balance, the prospectuses paint a picture of boys? schools which happen to have girls in them rather than of schools whose policies and practices have become genuinely co-educational. (shrink)

Mark Dooley has recently argued (principally against Simon Critchley) that the attempt to establish too strong a ‘connection’ between Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas not only distorts crucial disparities between their respective philosophies, it also contaminates Derrida’s recent work with Levinas’s inherent ‘political naivety’. In short, on Dooley’s reading, Levinas is only of ‘inspirational value’ for Derrida. I am not concerned with defending Critchley’s own reading of the ‘Derrida–Levinas connection’. My objective is rather to demonstrate, first, the way (...) in which Dooley’s argument hinges upon a misreading of Levinas and Derrida, and, second, why Derrida’s recent thinking is in fact fundamentally Levinasian. Key Words: contingency • guilt • Holocaust • hospitality • institutions • nature • suffering • third party • violence. (shrink)

In The Politics of Exodus, Mark Dooley offers a lively interpretation of Kierkegaard as a precursor of the ethical and political insights of Jacques Derrida. While many connections have been forged in recent years between these two quintessentially "Continental" figures, Dooley's book argues that these affiliations run much deeper than any previous commentators have suggested. Indeed, his most controversial claim is that Kierkegaard is anything but a proponent of asocial individualism, but is one whose writings bear witness to (...) the notion of an "open quasi-community" which has driven much of Derrida's work over the past decade. In vigorously challenging conventional wisdom surrounding the place of Kierkegaard in contemporary thought and political theory, Dooley shows how powerfully postmodern and politically charged the latter's specifically 'religious' ideas are. As such, Kierkegaard ought to be read as someone who anticipated Derrida's claim that genuine responsibility in the political sphere depends upon a phophetic call for justice on behalf of the least among us. will appeal to anyone interested in the intersection of religion and postmodernism, as well as to those with interests in ethics and politics from a Continental perspective. It will undoubtedly change the way we read Kierkegaard in the new millennium. (shrink)

There are archetypal parallels between the shamanic African, and ‘diviner detectives' like Hercule Poirot, when it comes to tracking down homicidal sorcerers, and witches, on the one hand, and direct Western-style murderers on the other. The Ndembu diviner uses the fall of symbolic figurines or images, and the canny questioning of his clients and suspects to pierce the veil of deceit and reveal the sorcerer or witch. Hercule Poirot uses chance clues, questioning, and his intuition to identify the murderer. Both (...) processes culminate in the binding up of an evil, or at least the yearned for revelation of its source. As such they supply a form of purgation or cure to their respective congregations or guilds of readers. When the practices of diviner and detective are compared at an archetypal level, a universal dramatic pattern or model emerges which reveals that the adventitious clues commonly powering the modern detective narrative along, could have developed from what was, or still is in Africa, the old axiomatic belief that an African god is manipulating the images of divination. (shrink)

About the Author:Mark Dooley teaches philosophy at the National University of Ireland and is a former Newman Scholar of Theology at University College Dublin.Liam Kavanagh is adjunct professor, philosophy, at Villanova University.

This study examined the constraining effect of economic performance on the relationship between CEO stakeholder orientations and four pollution performance categories. Economic performance was found to moderate the relationship for two of the four categories. Additionally economic performance was found to consistently interact with some CEO stakeholder orientations and not others. Overall the results suggest that CEO concern with stakeholder expectations is in large part moderate by the economic performance of the firm.

Moral Matters: A Philosophy of Homecoming is Mark Dooley's attempt to offer an alternative to 'Cyberia'. It is a book about home, memory and identity. At a time when people are rapidly disengaging from those forms of life which once bound them together, it can be argued that our happiness depends on saving and conserving them. We cannot flourish in isolation or by detaching from the social sphere which surrounds us. We cannot truly prosper or progress if we choose (...) to forget where we came from or if we dismiss our inherited moral wisdom. And yet, in opting for loss, separation and homelessness, it seems we have done just that. We have opted for a rootless existence where alienation and amnesia are the norm. This powerful and passionate book shows how the alienated, 'postmodern' self can become re-rooted to time and place and restored to full humanity and happiness whilst moving in a virtual, hyperconnected world. In caring for creation, conserving culture and saving the sacred we can once again make our home in the world and experience the consolation of moving from loss to love."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

"A thematic exposition focused on the "whole man," especially in his practical, aesthetic, ethical, and religious dimensions, moving from consideration of the stream of consciousness and consciousness as selective according to interests, through the ethical and religious aspects of man's aspiration and experience, to the humanistic bases of James' pragmatism and radical empiricism ... Dooley's account is remarkably clear and streamlined, stressing the consistency rather than the tensions in James' thought. Thus, while James' own texts provide at once the (...) most authoritative and the most attractive approach to his thought for readers at all levels, Dooley's book seems most likely to be helpful as supplementary reading for teachers and students in introductory courses.". (shrink)

Crane's fundamental philosophical view, Dooley finds, is that reality is comprised of changing and interrelated processes.