One way to articulate the promise of interdisciplinary research is in terms of the relationship between knowledge and ignorance. Disciplinary research yields deep knowledge of a circumscribed range of issues, but remains ignorant of those issues that stretch outside its purview. Because complex problems such as climate change do not respect disciplinary boundaries, disciplinary research responses to such problems are limited and partial. Interdisciplinary research responses, by contrast, integrate disciplinary perspectives by combining knowledge about different issues and as a result (...) reduce ignorance about more aspects of the problem. In this paper, we develop this idea and argue that while interdisciplinary research can help remediate damaging ignorance about complex problems, it also creates conditions in which other damaging forms of ignorance can arise. We illustrate this point in detail with three case studies before discussing three implications of our analysis for identifying and managing deleterio... (shrink)

This introduction to the history, philosophy and methodology of human geography explores complex ideas in an intelligible and accessible style. It takes into account the new developments in geographical thought and methods.

This volume outlines a Deleuzian approach to analyzing science, culture and politics.

Since the 1980s the concept of ANT has remained unsettled. ANT has continuously been critiqued and hailed, ridiculed and praised. It is still an open question whether ANT should be considered a theory or a method or whether ANT is better understood as entailing the dissolution of such modern ‘‘genres’’. In this paper the authors engage with some important reflections by John Law and Bruno Latour in order to analyze what it means to ‘‘do ANT,’’ and, doing so after ‘‘doing (...) ANT on ANT.’’ In particular the authors examine two post-ANT case studies by Annemarie Mol and Marilyn Strathern and outline the notions of complexity, multiplicity, and fractality. The purpose is to illustrate the analytical consequences of thinking with post-ANT. The analysis offers insights into how it is possible to ‘‘go beyond ANT,’’ without leaving it entirely behind. (shrink)

C. S. Lewis is one of the most beloved Christian apologists of the twentieth century; David Hume and Bertrand Russell are among Christianity’s most important critics. This book puts these three intellectual giants in conversation with one another on various important questions: the existence of God, suffering, morality, reason, joy, miracles, and faith. Alongside irreconcilable differences, surprising areas of agreement emerge. Curious readers will find penetrating insights in the reasoned dialogue of these three great thinkers.

The influence of conscience on nurses in terms of guilt has frequently been described but its impact on care has received less attention. The aim of this study was to describe nurses' conceptions of the influence of conscience on the provision of inpatient care. The study employed a phenomenographic approach and analysis method. Fifteen nurses from three hospitals in western Sweden were interviewed. The results showed that these nurses considered conscience to be an important factor in the exercise of their (...) profession, as revealed by the descriptive categories: conscience as a driving force; conscience as a restricting factor; and conscience as a source of sensitivity. They perceived that conscience played a role in nursing actions involving patients and next of kin, and was an asset that guided them in their efforts to provide high quality care. (shrink)

One can (for the most part) formulate a model of a classical system in either the Lagrangian or the Hamiltonian framework. Though it is often thought that those two formulations are equivalent in all important ways, this is not true: the underlying geometrical structures one uses to formulate each theory are not isomorphic. This raises the question of whether one of the two is a more natural framework for the representation of classical systems. In the event, the answer is yes: (...) I state and sketch proofs of two technical results—inspired by simple physical arguments about the generic properties of classical systems—to the effect that, in a precise sense, classical systems evince exactly the geometric structure Lagrangian mechanics provides for the representation of systems, and none provided by Hamiltonian. The argument not only clarifies the conceptual structure of the two systems of mechanics, but also their relations to each other and their respective mechanisms for representing physical systems. It also shows why naïvely structural approaches to the representational content of physical theories cannot work. [Lagrange] grasped that he had gained a method of stating dynamical truths in a way, which is perfectly indifferent to the particular methods of measurement employed in fixing the positions of the various parts of the system. Accordingly, he went on to deduce equations of motion, which are equally applicable whatever quantitative measurements have been made, provided that they are adequate to fix positions. The beauty and almost divine simplicity of these equations is such that these formulae are worthy to rank with those mysterious symbols which in ancient times were held directly to indicate the Supreme Reason at the base of all things. (Whitehead [1948], p. 63)1. Introduction2.Classical Systems3. The Possible Interactions of a Classical System and the Structure of Its Space of States4. Classical Systems Are Lagrangian5. Classical Systems Are Not Hamiltonian6. How Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Mechanics Represent Classical Systems7. The Conceptual Structure of Classical Mechanics. (shrink)

This article argues for the value of working with conflicts in social practice as resources for collaboration, learning and development. The interest in conflicts in social practice is rooted in a preoccupation with social power relations and how to understand and analyse power relations from a subject-science perspective. Following this interest, a methodological framework, best described as a kind of ‘mobile ethnography’, is discussed and exemplified through an empirical example. A preliminary conceptual framework for understanding power as a capacity for (...) action is presented. The overarching ambition of the article is to consider what democratic collaboration and coexistence entails and how it might be supported conceptually and analytically by the notion of conflicts as heuristics for social inquiry and by the notion of power as a capacity for action and social participation. (shrink)

In Consequentialism Reconsidered, Carlson strives to find a plausible formulation of the structural part of consequentialism. Key notions are analyzed, such as outcomes, alternatives and performability. Carlson argues that consequentialism should be understood as a maximizing rather than a satisficing theory, and as temporally neutral rather than future oriented. He also shows that certain moral theories cannot be reformulated as consequentialist theories. The relevant alternatives for an agent in a situation are taken to comprise all actions that they can perform (...) in the situation. The defense of this idea necessitates certain modifications to the standard consequentialist criteria of obligatoriness, rightness and wrongness. The problem of whether agents should adapt their actions to their own future actions is also addressed. Further, a conditional analysis of performability is suggested, and it is argued that particular actions should in this connection be regarded as `abstract' rather than `concrete'. The final chapter sketches a consequentialist theory for collective agents. (shrink)

Angesichts der ökologischen Krise und der zunehmenden Zivilisationsprobleme ist es notwendig, einen philosophischen Naturbegriff, der das Verhältnis des Menschen zur Natur aufgrund dieser Tatsache neu bestimmt, zu entwickeln. Der Jesuit, Paläontologe und Philosoph Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) ist ein herausragendes Beispiel einer Vermittlung von Naturwissenschaft und Naturphilosophie. Teilhard entwirft eine Zusammenschau von transzendent-metaphysischer Teleologie, die aus dem christlichen Glauben heraus Gott als einzige Zweckursache des Geschehens sieht, philosophischer Anthropologie und naturwissenschaftlich orientierter kausalmechanischer Evolutionstheorie, dem allmählichen Entwickeln eines höheren Zustands (...) aus einem vorhergehenden. Die in der Ursache gegründeten Seinszusammenhänge ergeben einen vom Ziel her bestimmten Zusammenhang. Gott ist Totum alles wirklich Seienden im Horizont des möglichen Seins. Das für Teilhard so wichtige teleologische Prinzip hat seinen philosophiehistorischen Ursprung bei Aristoteles, der damit eine Denktradition begründete, die im Gegensatz zum kausal-mechanischen Weltbild der Naturwissenschaften steht und die sich über Thomas von Aquin und Hegel bis zu Teilhard als vorläufig letztem Höhepunkt erhält. Der aus Teilhards Naturphilosophie folgende Optimismus kann von großer Bedeutung für die Gegenwart sein. Er resultiert aus der Übernahme von Verantwortung für die Schöpfung und ist die ethische Konsequenz aus Naturfinalität und christlichem Universalismus. Der Autor: Erik Lehnert, geb. 1975 in Berlin. Studium der Philosophie, Geschichte sowie Ur- und Frühgeschichte in Berlin, z. Z. Promotion über die Aktualität der Philosophie von Karl Jaspers. 1995 bis 1997 Mitherausgeber von "Aletheia - Neues kritisches Journal der Philosophie, Theologie, Geschichte und Politik", Veröffentlichungen u.a. zur Philosophie des 19. Jahrhunderts. (shrink)

Ethical decision making is of concern to researchers across all fields. However, researchers typically focus on the biases that may act to undermine ethical decision making. Taking a new approach, this study focused on identifying the most common compensatory strategies that counteract those biases. These strategies were identified using a series of interviews with university researchers in a variety of areas, including biological, physical, social, and health as well as scholarship and the performing arts. Interview transcripts were assessed with two (...) scoring procedures, an expert rating system and computer-assisted qualitative analysis. Although the expert rating system identified Understanding Guidelines, Recognition of Insufficient Information, and Recognizing Boundaries as the most frequently used compensatory strategies across fields, other strategies, Striving for Transparency, Value/norm Assessment, and Following Appropriate Role Models, were identified as most common by the computer-assisted qualitative analyses. Potential reasons for these findings and implications for training and practice are identified and discussed. (shrink)

There are several theses in political science that are usually explicitly called ‘laws’. Other theses are generally thought of as laws, but often without being explicitly labelled as such. Still other claims are well-supported and arguably interesting, while no one would be tempted to call them laws. This situation raises philosophical questions: which theses deserve to be called laws and which not? And how should we decide about this? In this paper we develop and motivate a strategy for thinking about (...) laws in political science which integrates two core concepts: spatio-temporal stability and social mechanisms. The proposed strategy is a set of guidelines that political scientists can use to reflect on and argue about specific cases within their discipline, not a clear-cut demarcation criterion. We defend and motivate this strategy and apply it to two cases (one with respect to state repression, one about parliamentary elections). After we have developed and motivated our strategy for political science, we show that our proposal is relevant for other disciplines in the social sciences. We explain how our views fit into critical realism and embed them in the debate on laws in general philosophy of science and in the philosophy of the social sciences. (shrink)

A number of researchers have begun to demonstrate that the widely discussed ?Knobe effect? (wherein participants are more likely to think that actions with bad side-effects are brought about intentionally than actions with good or neutral side-effects) can be found in theory of mind judgments that do not involve the concept of intentional action. In this article we report experimental results that show that attributions of knowledge can be influenced by the kinds of (non-epistemic) concerns that drive the Knobe effect. (...) Our findings suggest there is good reason to think that the epistemic version of the Knobe effect is a theoretically significant and robust effect, and that the goodness or badness of side-effects can often have greater influence on participant knowledge attributions than explicit information about objective probabilities. Thus, our work sheds light on important ways in which participant assessments of actions can affect the epistemic assessments participants make of agents? beliefs. (shrink)

The increasing interconnectedness of academic research and external industry has left research vulnerable to conflicts of interest. These conflicts have the potential to undermine the integrity of scientific research as well as to threaten public trust in scientific findings. The present effort sought to identify themes in the perspectives of faculty researchers regarding conflicts of interest. Think-aloud interview responses were qualitatively analyzed in an effort to provide insights with regard to appropriate ways to address the threat of conflicts of interest (...) in research. Themes in participant responses included disclosure of conflicts of interest, self-removal from situations where conflict exists, accommodation of conflict, denial of the existence of conflict, and recognition of complexity of situations involving conflicts of interest. Moral disengagement operations are suggested to explain the appearance of each identified theme. In addition, suggestions for best practices regarding addressing conflicts of interest given these themes in faculty perspectives are provided. (shrink)

The book revives the neutral monism of Mach, James, and Russell and applies the updated view to the problem of redefining physicalism, explaining the origins of sensation, and the problem of deriving extended physical objects and systems from an ontology of events.

A consideration of Mach's elements, his philosophy of neutral monism, and philosophy of physics, especially space and time, much of it based on unpublished writings from the Nachlass and other original sources. The historical connection between Mach and logical positivism is shown to be superficial at best, and Mach's elements are shown to be mind independent natural qualities (world-elements) with dynamic force, not limited to human sensations.

Research misconduct is of growing concern within the scientific community. As a result, organizations must identify effective approaches to training for ethics in research. Previous research has suggested that biases and compensatory strategies may represent important influences on the ethical decision-making process. The present effort investigated a training intervention targeting these variables. The results of the intervention are presented, as well as a description of accompanying exercises tapping self-reflection, sensemaking, and forecasting and their differential effectiveness on transfer to an ethical (...) decision-making task. (shrink)

In everyday life we often act adequately, yet without deliberation. For instance, we immediately obtain and maintain an appropriate distance from others in an elevator. The notion of normativity implied here is a very basic one, namely distinguishing adequate from inadequate, correct from incorrect, or better from worse in the context of a particular situation. In the first part of this paper I investigate such ‘situated normativity’ by focusing on unreflective expert action. More particularly, I use Wittgenstein’s examples of craftsmen (...) (tailors and architects) absorbed in action to introduce situated normativity. Situated normativity can be understood as the normative aspect of embodied cognition in unreflective skillful action. I develop Wittgenstein’s insight that a peculiar type of affective behaviour, ‘directed discontent’, is essential for getting things right without reflection. Directed discontent is a reaction of appreciation in action and is introduced as a paradigmatic expression of situated normativity. In the second part I discuss Wittgenstein’s ideas on the normativity of what he calls ‘blind’ rule-following and the ‘bedrock’ of immediate action. What matters for understanding the normativity of (even ‘blind’) rule-following, is not that one has the capacity for linguistic articulation or reflection but that one is reliably participating in a communal custom. In the third part I further investigate the complex relationships between unreflective skillful action, perception, emotion, and normativity. Part of this entails an account of the link between normativity at the level of the expert’s socio-cultural practice and the individual’s situated and lived normativity. (shrink)

Ruth Chang has defended a concept of "parity", implying that two items may be evaluatively comparable even though neither item is better than or equally good as the other. This article takes no stand on whether there actually are cases of parity. Its aim is only to make the hitherto somewhat obscure notion of parity more precise, by defining it in terms of the standard value relations. Given certain plausible assumptions, the suggested definiens is shown to state a necessary and (...) sufficient condition for parity, as this relation is envisaged by Chang. (shrink)

In a discussion of Parfit's Drops of Water case, Zach Barnett has recently proposed a novel argument against “No Small Improvement”; that is, the claim that a single drop of water cannot affect the magnitude of a thirsty person's suffering. We first show that Barnett's argument can be significantly strengthened, and also that the fundamental idea behind it yields a straightforward argument for the transitivity of equal suffering. We then suggest that defenders of No Small Improvement could reject a Pareto (...) principle that is presupposed in Barnett's argument and our developments of it. However, this does not save No Small Improvement, since there is a convincing argument against this claim that does not presuppose the Pareto principle. (shrink)

Thomas Nagel recognizes that it is commonly believed that people can neither be held morally responsible nor morally assessed for what is beyond their control. Yet he is convinced that although such a belief may be intuitively plausible, upon reflection we find that we do make moral assessments of persons in a large number of cases in which such assessments depend on factors not under their control. Of such factors he says: (p. 26).

John Broome has argued that incomparability and vagueness cannot coexist in a given betterness order. His argument essentially hinges on an assumption he calls the ‘collapsing principle’. In an earlier article I criticized this principle, but Broome has recently expressed doubts about the cogency of my criticism. Moreover, Cristian Constantinescu has defended Broome’s view from my objection. In this paper, I present further arguments against the collapsing principle, and try to show that Constantinescu’s defence of Broome’s position fails.

This cutting-edge book brings together eminent experts who propose ways to bridge cultural and developmental approaches to human psychology. The experts heed the call of cultural psychology to study different peoples around the world and to recognize that culture profoundly impacts how we think, feel, and act. At the same time, they also take seriously the developmental science perspective that humans everywhere share common life stage tasks and ways of learning. Doing what has not previously been done, the experts integrate (...) key insights and findings from cultural and developmental research. The result is a book brimming with new and creative syntheses for theory, research, and policy. This book is in step with a world where culturally diverse peoples interact with one another more than ever due to migration, worldwide media, and international trade and travel. With these interactions come changes to cultures and the psychological development of their members, and the implications for scholarship and policy are thoughtfully examined here. The book covers a wide range of related topics. It addresses the intersection of development and culture for psychological processes such as learning and memory, for key contexts of development such as family and civil society, for conceptions of self and identity, and for how the life course is partitioned including a focus on childhood and emerging adulthood.With its inclusion of diverse life phases, diverse topics, and experts from diverse disciplines and cultures, this volume speaks to a broad range of developmental and cultural issues. The synthesis of cultural and developmental approaches should be exciting and eye-opening to anyone with an interest in human psychology in today's global world. (shrink)

Ernst Cassirer Ernst Cassirer was the most prominent, and the last, Neo-Kantian philosopher of the twentieth century. His major philosophical contribution was the transformation of his teacher Hermann Cohen ’s mathematical-logical adaptation of Kant’s transcendental idealism into a comprehensive philosophy of symbolic forms intended to address all aspects of human cultural life and creativity. In … Continue reading Ernst Cassirer →.

Increasing interest in applying the theory and practice of deliberative democracy to new and varied political contexts leads us to ask whether or not deliberation is a universal political practice. While deliberation does manifest a universal competence, its character varies substantially across time and space, a variation partially explicable in cultural terms. We deploy an intersubjective conception of culture in order to explore these differences. Culture meets deliberation where publicly accessible meanings, symbols, and norms shape the way political actors engage (...) one another in discourse. Fuller understanding of political deliberation requires comparative and historical studies of particular contexts. We look at one case from Egypt in some depth and provide shorter illustrations from Botswana, Europe, India, Japan, Madagascar, the United States, Yemen, and elsewhere. Cross-cultural learning can enrich the theory of deliberative democracy, and give democratic theory a more universal reach. (shrink)

Much controversy surrounds the question of what ought to be the proper definition of 'singularity' in general relativity, and the question of whether the prediction of such entities leads to a crisis for the theory. I argue that a definition in terms of curve incompleteness is adequate, and in particular that the idea that singularities correspond to 'missing points' has insurmountable problems. I conclude that singularities per se pose no serious problem for the theory, but their analysis does bring into (...) focus several problems of interpretation at the foundation of the theory often ignored in the philosophical literature. (shrink)

A full appreciation for Ernst Mach's doctrine of the economy of thought must take account of his direct realism about particulars (elements) and his anti-realism about space-time laws as economical constructions. After a review of thought economy, its critics and some contemporary forms, the paper turns to the philosophical roots of Mach's doctrine. Mach claimed that the simplest, most parsimonious theories economized memory and effort by using abstract concepts and laws instead of attending to the details of each individual event (...) or experiment. For Mach, the individual case never truly repeated in all of its uniqueness, nor was all of the individual detail of a physical element adequately captured in abstract laws and schemata, however necessary these were for the pursuit of science. As can be shown from specific passages, some already published, some not, Mach's elements included physical qualia in nature similar to Russell's unsensed sensibilia, which existed even where there were no conscious observers. An argument will be presented to make the case that Mach believed in the mind-independent elements from the 1870s on, while other aspects of his thought evolved over time; I have thus dated the references to reflect this historical progression. I concentrate on Mach's ontology, as it bears on economy of thought, not his epistemology per se, which might well have been restricted to observable elements/sensations. After his own conversion to neutral monism, in the 1920s, Bertrand Russell echoed Mach's call for a 'future science' capable of handling the 'intrinsic character' of qualitative data directly without the excessive abstraction of physics. (shrink)