Interdisciplinary studies has grown significantly in the last 25 years. The reductionisms of secular modernism and postmodem relativism present an opportunity for an approach to interdisciplinary faith-learning integration that provides a unifying basis for research addressing major challenges. An approach developed at Oxford Graduate School offers promise for interdisciplinary studies comprehensive enough to bridge the three cultures of the natural, social, and humane sciences in the service of bettering the world. The Learning... to Change the World methodology proceeds through seven (...) stages: problem clarification, literature review, faith-learning integration, interdisciplinary research, contextualization, ethical/social leadership, and lifelong learning evaluation. Grounded in a Creation-Fall-Redemption-Consummation metaphysical worldview, it assumes a critical realist epistemology to engage real-world challenges. The process accommodates multiple research methods and aims for a redemptive-ethical transformation of social problems. (shrink)

Respected Catholic ethicists have recently defended the use of salpingostomy and methotrexate in the management of ectopic pregnancies.This article examines the arguments for the revised assessments to determine whether there are sound reasons to believe that these two methods do not constitute the direct and immediate killing of innocent human beings. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 11.1 (Spring 2011): 65–82.

The existing literature in medical ethics does not serve the practical needs of medical students and trainees very well. Medical students or junior doctors often have their own set of ethical concerns and the dilemmas that arise are generally beyond their direct control. The editors have addressed the gap in the literature by compiling a series of case studies from around the world and inviting an international team of leading ethicists and clinicians to comment on them. This volume includes over (...) 80 actual cases that cover the range of possible problems a medical trainee may encounter on the ward. (shrink)

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

We consider extensions of Peano arithmetic suitable for doing some of nonstandard analysis, in which there is a predicate N(x) for an elementary initial segment, along with axiom schemes approximating ω 1 -saturation. We prove that such systems have the same proof-theoretic strength as their natural analogues in second order arithmetic. We close by presenting an even stronger extension of Peano arithmetic, which is equivalent to ZF for arithmetic statements.

William James is frequently considered one of America's most important philosophers, as well as a foundational thinker for the study of religion. Despite his reputation as the founder of pragmatism, he is rarely considered a serious philosopher or religious thinker. In this new interpretation David Lamberth argues that James's major contribution was to develop a systematic metaphysics of experience integrally related to his developing pluralistic and social religious ideas. Lamberth systematically interprets James's radically empiricist world-view and argues for an (...) early dating for his commitment to the metaphysics of radical empiricism. He offers a close reading of Varieties of Religious Experience; and concludes by connecting James's ideas about experience, pluralism and truth to current debates in philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and theology, suggesting James's functional, experiential metaphysics as a conceptual aid in bridging the social and interpretive with the immediate and concrete while avoiding naive realism. (shrink)

While the history of philosophy has traditionally given scant attention to food and the ethics of eating, in the last few decades the subject of food ethics has emerged as a major topic, encompassing a wide array of issues, including labor justice, public health, social inequity, animal rights and environmental ethics. This handbook provides a much needed philosophical analysis of the ethical implications of the need to eat and the role that food plays in social, cultural and political life. Unlike (...) other books on the topic, this text integrates traditional approaches to the subject with cutting edge research in order to set a new agenda for philosophical discussions of food ethics. The Routledge Handbook of Food Ethics is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over 35 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into 7 parts: the phenomenology of food gender and food food and cultural diversity liberty, choice and food policy food and the environment farming and eating other animals food justice Essential reading for students and researchers in food ethics, it is also an invaluable resource for those in related disciplines such as environmental ethics and bioethics. (shrink)

"Dr. Rubin has brought cognitive psychology into a wholly unprecedented dialogue with studies in oral tradition. The result is a truly new perspective on memory and the processes of oral tradition." --John Miles Foley, University of Missouri.

"Dr. Rubin has brought cognitive psychology into a wholly unprecedented dialogue with studies in oral tradition. The result is a truly new perspective on memory and the processes of oral tradition." --John Miles Foley, University of Missouri.

This book, in language accessible to the general reader, investigates twelve of the most notorious, most interesting, and most instructive episodes involving the interaction between science and Christianity, aiming to tell each story in its historical specificity and local particularity. Among the events treated in When Science and Christianity Meet are the Galileo affair, the seventeenth-century clockwork universe, Noah's ark and flood in the development of natural history, struggles over Darwinian evolution, debates about the origin of the human species, and (...) the Scopes trial. Readers will be introduced to St. Augustine, Roger Bacon, Pope Urban VIII, Isaac Newton, Pierre-Simon de Laplace, Carl Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Sigmund Freud, and many other participants in the historical drama of science and Christianity. (shrink)

In this paper we consider some axiomatic systems of set theory related to the system NF (New Foundations) of Quine. In particular we discuss the possible relations of cardinality between a finite set x and its subset class SC(x) = {y | y ∩ x} and also between x and its unit set class USC(x) = {{y} | y ε x}. Specker [5] has shown that in NF the cardinal of a finite set x can never be the same as (...) the cardinal of SC(x). (shrink)

I argue that thought experiments are a form of experimental reasoning similar to real experiments. They require the same ability to participate by following a narrative as real experiments do. Participation depends in turn on using what we already know to visualize, manipulate and understand what is unfamiliar or problematic. I defend the claim that visualization requires embodiment by an example which shows how tacit understanding of the properties of represented objects and relations enables us to work out how such (...) objects might behave in a postulated world. This knowledge is that of embodied agents. That thought experiments require embodied participation is what makes them experiments rather than arguments. Unlike real experiments, from which ordinary perception has been displaced by instrumentation, thought experiments still appeal to relatively unmediated common sense, even when their purpose is to criticize or subvert common sense notions. (shrink)

We explore ways in which purely qualitative belief change in the AGM tradition throws light on options in the treatment of conditional probability. First, by helping see why it can be useful to go beyond the ratio rule defining conditional from one-place probability. Second, by clarifying what is at stake in different ways of doing that. Third, by suggesting novel forms of conditional probability corresponding to familiar variants of qualitative belief change, and conversely. Likewise, we explain how recent work on (...) the qualitative part of probabilistic inference leads to a very broad class of 'proto-probability' functions. (shrink)

By means of an example, shows the possibility of beliefs that are separately rational whilst together inconsistent.

Considerable debate has occurred about the proper role of philosophers when offering ethics consultations. Some argue that only physicians or clinical experienced personnel should offer ethics consultations in the clinical setting. Others argue still further that philosophers are ill-equipped to offer such advice, since to do so rests on no social warrant, and violates the abstract and neutral nature of the discipline itself.I argue that philosophers not only can offer such consultations but ought to. To be a bystander when one's (...) discipline does offer insights and methods of value discernment is pusillanimous. But this position requires a view of clinical medical ethics as one that arises out of the clinical practice of medicine, and not just from an application of general ethical principles to the practice of medicine. I conclude with some skills that trained philosophers can bring to the consultation service, and note that all consultations are in the form of recommendations that the patient, family, and physician are still free to accept or reject. Philosophers in the clinical setting do not make decisions. (shrink)

In this article 1 I have two theological interests and a less direct philosophical one.

Several strands of contemporary cognitive science and its philosophy have emerged in recent decades that emphasize the role of action in cognition, resting their explanations on the embodiment of cognitive agents, and their embedding in richly structured environments. Despite their growing influence, many foundational questions remain unresolved or underexplored for this cluster of proposals, especially questions of how they can be extended beyond straightforwardly visuomotor cognitive capacities, and what constraints the commitment of embodiment places on the ontology of explanations. This (...) special issue aims to contribute to these foundational debates by drawing on important precursors to embodied cognition in mid-twentieth century gestalt psychology, its immediate successor ecological psychology, and their dialectical counterpart, phenomenology. Gestalt psychologists and phenomenologists wrestled with many of the same foundational questions that still haunt us today, in a manner that seems refreshing in hindsight, and poised to contribute constructively to contemporary debate. Looking back on this history reveals deep commonalities across competing embodied approaches, exposing fundamental tensions that remain unresolved, but also paving the way to a more ecumenical and conciliatory embodied cognitive science. (shrink)

Mainstream interpretations of the Phaedo take the dialogue to have a metaphysical theory at its core, primarily disagreeing on whether this theory is assumed without argument in the dialogue, or whether an attempt is made to justify it. This disagreement particularly bears on the interpretation of the ‘equals argument’ at 74a–c. The present discussion brings out a commitment shared by these different interpretations: they adopt a ‘top-down’ method, according to which the Phaedo must be understood in terms of premises and (...) arguments thought to be set out systematically in a wider group of Plato’s works. A rival ‘groundup’ approach is presented here, one which remains neutral on such questions, and instead makes use of material in the Phaedo itself to provide a philosophically interesting and plausible alternative. This interpretation develops a distinction between dramatic and philosophical levels of argument, and argues for a close connection between the discussion of equality and the ‘final argument’ at 100b–107b; it concludes that in the Phaedo Plato is primarily concerned with questions about explanation, rather than with presenting a metaphysical theory, and that the charges of dogmatism and obscurity occasioned by current interpretations are the result of distorted expectations about Plato’s aims. (shrink)

While environmental claims are increasingly used by companies to appeal consumers, they also attract greater scrutiny from independent parties interested in consumer protection. Consumers are now able to compare corporate environmental claims against external, often disconfirming, information to form their brand attitudes and purchase intentions. What remains unclear is how the level of information specificity of both the environmental claims and external disconfirming information interact to influence consumer reactions. Two experiments address this gap in the CSR communication literature. When specific (...) claims are countered by specific external information, consumers report more negative brand attitudes and lower purchase intentions. The effect is serially mediated by skepticism toward the claims and lack of corporate credibility. We conclude by discussing strategies that firms can utilize to avoid information dilution and ensure that external disconfirming information percolates to consumers as specific. (shrink)

This innovative text is psychologically informed, both in its diagnosis of inferential errors, and in teaching students how to watch out for and work around their natural intellectual blind spots. It also incorporates insights from epistemology and philosophy of science that are indispensable for learning how to evaluate premises. The result is a hands-on primer for real world critical thinking. The authors bring a fresh approach to the traditional challenges of a critical thinking course: effectively explaining the nature of validity, (...) assessing deductive arguments, reconstructing, identifying and diagramming arguments, and causal and probabilistic inference. Additionally, they discuss in detail, important, frequently neglected topics, including testimony, including the evaluation of news and other information sources, the nature and credibility of science, rhetoric, and dialectical argumentation. The treatment of probability uses frequency trees and a frequency approach more generally, and argument reconstruction is taught using argument maps; these methods have been shown to improve students’ reasoning and argument evaluation. (shrink)

Propositions about the nature of expertise, in general, and expertise in pedagogy, in particular, are discussed. The time needed to develop expertise in teaching and the highly contextual nature of teachers’ knowledge are also discussed. Four theories of teacher development are presented, with an elaboration on the heuristic value of the theory of Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986). Examples from the pedagogical literature are used to illustrate this theory. The recent research establishing causal relationships between those identified as experts in teaching (...) and their students’ academic achievement is also presented. This research allows those who study expertise in teaching to have a more objective measure for identifying and studying expert pedagogues. (shrink)

Despite its long tradition in social psychology, we consider that Cognitive Dissonance Theory presents serious flaws concerning its methodology which question the relevance of the theory, limit breakthroughs, and hinder the evaluation of its core hypotheses. In our opinion, these issues are mainly due to operational and methodological weaknesses that have not been sufficiently addressed since the beginnings of the theory. We start by reviewing the ambiguities concerning the definition and conceptualization of the term cognitive dissonance. We then review the (...) ways it has been operationalized and we present the shortcomings of the actual paradigms. To acquire a better understanding of the theory, we advocate a stronger focus on the nature and consequences of the cognitive dissonance state itself. Next, we emphasize the actual lack of standardization, both in the ways to induce cognitive dissonance and to assess it, which impairs the comparability of the results. Last, in addition to reviewing these limits, we suggest new ways to improve the methodology and we conclude on the importance for the field of psychology to take advantage of these important challenges to go forwards. (shrink)

Testimonial injustice occurs when hearers attribute speakers a credibility deficit because of an identity prejudice and consequently dismiss speakers’ testimonial assertions. Various philosophers explain testimonial injustice by appealing to interpersonal norms arising within testimonial exchanges. When conversational participants violate these interpersonal norms, they generate second-personal epistemic harms, harming speakers as epistemic agents. This focus on testimony, however, neglects how systematically misevaluating speakers’ knowledge affects conversational participants more generally. When hearers systematically misevaluate speakers’ conversational competence because of entrenched assumptions about what (...) speakers know, I call these conversational epistemic injustices. I argue the same epistemic harm in testimonial injustice arises for non-assertoric speech acts, generating conversational epistemic injustices. For across speech acts, deflated knowledge attributions create second-personal harms that prevent speakers from using their knowledge in linguistic exchanges, limiting their epistemic agency. These harms however are not reducible to linguistic harms, (e.g.,) silencing or discursive injustice. This article applies insight from how second-personal epistemic harm arises in testimonial exchanges to conversational exchanges more generally, demonstrating that epistemic injustices arise beyond testimonial exchanges and contexts of inquiry because deflated knowledge attributions undermine general conversational norms requiring participants assume each other’s conversational competence, generating conversational epistemic injustices. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Balancing Act: The New Medical Ethics of Medicine's New Economics. By E. Haavi Morreim.

In philosophy of aesthetics, scholars commonly express a commitment to the premise that there is a distinctive type of judgment that can be meaningfully labeled “aesthetic”, and that these judgments are distinctively different from other types of judgments. We argue that, within an Aristotelian framework, there is no clear avenue for meaningfully differentiating “aesthetic” judgment from other types of judgment, and, as such, we aim to question the assumption that aesthetic judgment does in fact constitute a distinctive kind of judgment (...) that is in need of, or can be subject to, distinctive theorizing. We advance our argument primarily through demonstrating that leading contemporary accounts of aesthetic judgment do not successfully distinguish a type of judgment in that they do not tell us how making an aesthetic judgment differs substantially from judging that 2 + 3 = 5, that football is entertaining, or that today is Tuesday. (shrink)

The two target articles in this issue draw an important connection between disability bioethics and geriatric bioethics. Dominic JC Wilkinson makes a pragmatic case for using frailty as a fa...

This study evaluated the online privacy policies of business-to-consumer e-commerce firms in five industries of mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Based on the neo-institutional theory, we also tested whether the four institutional factors, top management’s legal education, managerial ethics, rule of law in information privacy protection and peer practices, had any effects on e-information and e-communication content. Results from a content analysis of 229 websites found that the privacy policy contents that complied with generally accepted privacy standards were lesser (...) in mainland China firms than those of Taiwan and Hong Kong firms. There were also significant differences in the amount of contents among the five industries. The results of regression analyses showed the importance of all four factors on e-information content. They also showed the importance of coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphisms on e-information content. The validation of normative isomorphism highlighted the importance of managerial ethics and legal education. Our findings supplemented extant literature which identified economic motive as the main factor in influencing privacy practice disclosures. (shrink)

There are several branches of ethics. Clinical ethics, the one closest to medical decisionmaking, can be seen as a branch of medicine itself. In this view, clinical ethics is a unitary hermeneutics. Its rule is a guideline for unifying other theories of ethics in conjunction with the clinical context. Put another way, clinical ethics interprets the clinical situation in light of a balance of other values that, while guiding the decisionmaking process, also contributes to the very weighting of those values. (...) The case itself originates ideas, not only about which value ought to predominate in its resolution, but also provides the origin of clinical rules that can be used in other cases. These are interpretive rules. Some examples of these rules are presented as well. (shrink)

In a morally fragmented society there is no good reason for ethics committees to assume any particular point of view, yet failure to do so compromises their ability to function in either a case‐review or an educational capacity. A casuist methodology might enable committees to fulfill both roles.

Leading a corporation through a crisis requires rational decision making guided by an ethical approach (Snyder et al., Journal of Business Ethics, 63, 2006, 371). Three such approaches are virtue ethics (Seeger and Ulmer, Journal of Business Ethics, 31, 2001, 369), an ethic of justice, and an ethic of care (Simóla, Journal of Business Ethics, 46, 2003, 351). In this article, I consider the effectiveness of these approaches for leading a corporation after a crisis. The standard I use is drawn (...) from recent studies that examine how people tend to react to corporate unintentional harms. I conclude from these studies that an ethic of care approach is most effective for managing corporate crises when it comes to stakeholder concerns. I conclude the article with strategies for managing a crisis using an ethic of care. (shrink)