I argue that Norman's thesis works in sofaras one is prepared to be lax about the alleged congruency between “ecological” and “dorsal,” and unconcerned by the results of recent studies showing that grasping movements are subject to the same geometric distortion illusions as perceptual judgements.

In the Principles of the Penal Code, Jeremy Bentham described offences that he labelled presumed or evidentiary. The conduct penalized under such offences is punished not because it is intrinsically wrong, but because it probabilistically indicates the presence of an intrinsic wrong. Bentham was sceptical of the need to create offences, but grudgingly accepted their value in light of deficiencies in procedure and the judiciary. These days the scepticism is even greater, with courts and commentators in the United States, Canada, (...) the United Kingdom and elsewhere believing that such offences deny a defendant the right to establish that he did not engage in the conduct that the presumed offence probabilistically but not necessarily indicates. On closer analysis, however, such scepticism appears unjustified. Almost all offences, and indeed almost all legal rules, are premised on a probabilistic relationship between the behaviour the rule encompasses and the behaviour that is the rule-maker's real concern. Presumed offences may make this relationship especially obvious, but it is a relationship that exists whenever the law operates by the use of rules. (shrink)

This essay describes the background and possible reasons for legal intervention in the use of lime in the early bleaching industry and draws on the Statutes at Large and other Acts of Parliament as primary sources. The developing chemical knowledge that may have contributed to the later Acts of repeal is also considered in some detail. The earliest noted prohibition was in 1633 and the years 1823, 1825, and 1828 were important repeal dates. No related legislation later than 1828 has (...) been found. During the period from 1633 to 1828 there were many renewals and modifications to existing laws concerning linen and hempen manufacture; several of these contained subsections regarding bleaching. The considerable number of such Acts may account for the apparent confusion shown by earlier authors on this subject. Furthermore, the various Acts passed by the Irish House of Commons over its lifetime from 1400 to 1800, with its many interruptions, were published in a limited number of editions and are consequently held by few libraries. Ireland instituted its own laws and it was only after the Act of Union in 1800 that matters were dealt with by Westminster. Indeed, earlier historians have not always appreciated that, at certain periods of the history of the United Kingdom, Ireland and Scotland had their own separate parliaments. (shrink)

It is an article of almost religious faith in the United Kingdom that the National Health Service is far superior to a competitive market in health care services. In this brief and informal paper I show that the opposite is true. In contrast to market provision, the existence of the National Health Service entails the following. First, consumer sovereignty is virtually destroyed, since what services the consumer receives and how much he pays (through taxation) are determined by the government (...) of the day in consultation with vested and ideological interests. Second, a person may be denied a life-saving service despite having contributed more than his fair share to National Health Service over the course of his working life. Third, people often spend less on health care than they would like to spend, because any additional contributions (via increased taxes) are not linked to any benefit specifically for the person who makes them. Fourth, provision of services free at the point of need which is not linked to what a person pays encourages a wasteful misuse of resources. Fifth, absence of competition between health care providers leads to high cost and poor quality of service and a tendency to produce a standardised service rather than a tailored one; and government attempts to address this problem usually make it worse. Sixth, people’s freedom to engage in particular activities or lifestyles is likely to be curtailed because the costs of those activities are artificially socialised. I also point out that issues of inequality or poverty are much better addressed by means other than a nationalised health service. (shrink)

Written by one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Heidegger, this book is an important statement about the basis of human sociability that is a major contribution to the continuing debates about Heidegger in particular, and ethics in general. Existential philosophy is often thought to promote moral nihilism in which everything is permitted. This book demonstrates that, in the case of Martin Heidegger, any such accusation is unjust. On the contrary, Heidegger thought seriously about the implications of human co-existence, and this (...) book shows that conceptions of trust and responsibility that lie at the very heart of morality are to be found in the sketch of Mitsein - our being together with one another in the world - offered in Being and Time. That Heidegger never developed these conceptions may explain why they have been overlooked, but renders them no less important for that. (shrink)

_Naturalism and the Human Condition_ is a compelling account of why naturalism, or the 'scientific world-view' cannot provide a full account of who and what we are as human beings. Drawing on sources including Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Sartre, Olafson exposes the limits of naturalism and stresses the importance of serious philosophical investigation of human nature.

Taylor Carman has argued that the passages I submitted to him as proof that Heidegger identifies being with presence are really just his characterizations of a metaphysical conception of being that he repudiates. I show that he has misread these passages and has misunderstood the nature of the continuity that Heidegger himself recognizes between the views of Kant which are under discussion in the texts from which these passages are drawn and his own (Heidegger's) position which finds expression in them. (...) I then cite other passages from another work by Heidegger that make the same point about being and presence just as emphatically and quite independently of any account of any other philosopher's views. Finally, I explain the difference between the ways Heidegger uses the word Anwesenheit ? his word for presence. One of these is as a translation of the Greek ousia which he interprets as a concept of being as presence sans temporality; the other is the radicalized concept of being as presence toward which Heidegger was working in Being and Time. (shrink)

This broad, ambitious study is about human nature, but human nature treated in a way quite different from the scientific account that influences so much of contemporary philosophy. Drawing on certain basic ideas of Heidegger the author presents an alternative to the debate waged between dualists and materialists in the philosophy of mind that involves reconceiving the way we usually think about 'mental' life. Olafson argues that familiar contrasts between the 'physical' and the 'psychological' break down under closer scrutiny. They (...) need to be replaced by a conception of human being in which we are not entities compounded out of body and mind, but unitary entities that are distinguished by 'having a world', which is very different from simply being a part of the world. (shrink)

He demonstrates that a broad parallelism exists between developments in ethical theory among Continental philosophers of the phenomenological persuasion and the more analytically inclined philosophers of the English-speaking world.

Master corporate valuation: the financial art and science of accurately valuing any business. George Chacko's Applied Corporate Finance: Valuation is the first valuation book to combine true academic rigor with the practical skills you need to successfully value companies in the real world. Renowned financial instructor and investment manager George Chacko focuses on concepts, techniques, tools, and methodologies that lead directly to accurate valuations, and explains each key concept with up-to-date examples. One step at a time, Chacko develops a practical, (...) rigorous approach to conducting valuation, addressing the projection of financial statements, calculation of free cash flows, risk-adjusted cost of capital, and leading methodologies including WACC, flow-to-equity, and Adjusted Present Value (APV). By avoiding elementary content that financial managers, analysts, and MBA-level finance students already know, this book can focus more tightly on the realistic techniques and advanced issues practitioners are actually concerned with. Coverage includes: market value and accounting balance sheets, cash cycles, the DuPont formula, financial distress, and capital as a risk buffer; constructing pro-formas, projecting and bridging financing shortfalls, and planning sustainable growth; sources/uses of cash, cash income statements, pro-forma balance sheet changes, working capital, depreciation, and capital expenditures; risk-free cost, investment risks, and diversifiable vs. idiosyncratic risks; NPV, APV, Optimal Debt Ratios, Capital Structure Dynamics, Terminal Value Calculations, and more. For all finance professionals, analysts, and MBA students who need to sharpen their skills in valuation and related areas of corporate finance, accounting, or strategic planning. (shrink)

Philipse's interpretation of Heidegger's concept of being is fundamentally mistaken. It treats that concept as an amalgam of themes drawn from Aristotle, Husserl, Kant and Hegel with no hint of the utterly different ontology of the human subject that is Heidegger's most original contribution. Heidegger emerges incongruously as a transcendental philosopher a la Kant and the world is supposed to be constituted by the meaning-giving activity of a transcendental subject. As a result, the whole conception of human being as Dasein (...) and being-in-the-world goes by the board. In its place we get religious and politico-military construals of the big movements in Heidegger's thought and no attention at all to the centrally important conception of being as presence. The only sense in which the author's evident intention of demolishing every thesis Heidegger defends succeeds that nothing recognizably Heideggerian emerges from the account he gives. (shrink)

A new hermeneutical theory is needed that will avoid both the "analytical" fixation on the epistemic functions of the historian and the "dialectical" tendency to "ontologize" interpretation to the point where questions of truth in the sense of fidelity to the past become increasingly marginal. The prospects for such a theory are not particularly good. We do not have what would be required to reconcile these ways of thinking about interpretation. That would be a new and more powerful way of (...) conceiving the unity of theoretical and practical reason based on a much deeper understanding of what it is to be hurnan. But the antihumanistic temper of much contemporary thought makes a revival of constructive philosophical inin that question unlikely. (shrink)

This article rejects the idea that Heidegger's Nazism derives from his philosophical thought. No connection has convincingly been shown to hold between the ontological apparatus of Being and Time and any political orientation. The elaboration of the concept of being in the later work needs to be understood as Heidegger's own reaction to the activism of his earlier thought which in the absence of any principle of respect for other human beings could provide no moral basis for resistance to Nazi (...) ideology. The tensions between the circumstances of Heidegger's early life - rural, conservative, and Catholic - and the Nietzschean modernism of his philosophical thought are explored. It is suggested that there were analogous tensions between tradition and the modern world in Nazism and that it was Heidegger's hatred of that world that led him to respond favorably to some (but not all) of the themes of Nazi thought. (shrink)

This paper examines the moral arguments for and against employees' blowing the whistle on illegal or immoral actions of their employers. It asks whether such professional dissidents are justified in disclosing wrongdoing by others while concealing their own identity. Part I examines the concept of anonymity, distinguishing it from two similar concepts — secrecy and privacy. Part II analyzes the concept of whistleblowing using recent definitions by Bok, Bowie and De George. Various arguments against anonymous whistleblowing are identified and evaluated. (...) The author concludes with a defense of the practice in terms of social benefits — primarily the redressing of wrongdoing. (shrink)

One Introduction The student who tries to define Edmund Burke's political theory attempts something that Burke refused to do himself. ...

Philosophers who have turned their thoughts to the subject of education have most often concerned themselves with the construction of very abstract models of cognition by means of which the activities of teaching and learning are to be understood. Such attention as they have given to the subject matter of instruction has tended to be dominated by a concern with the morally or practically beneficial effects to be expected from a child’s acquisition of a certain kind of knowledge. It would (...) appear, too, that the decisive index used in assessing the value of such knowledge has often been the degree to which it approximated to an antecedently established archetype of knowledge. While the primary emphasis that has been given to these matters by Plato and by most of the modern philosophers of education from Locke to Dewey is understandable and has led to the elaboration of important theses in general epistemology, there are good reasons for thinking that this commentary needs to be more broadly based than it has often been in the past. More specifically, it will need to be informed by a better understanding of the distinctive character of the several subjects of instruction. Whatever contribution general epistemology may be able to make to the understanding of teaching and learning, its theses clearly stand in need of the kind of amplification that can come only from a survey of the particular types of knowledge to which the divisions of academic subject-matter correspond. In the absence of such a survey, there will be a very strong tendency for a single type of knowledge to be treated as the perfect exemplification of the general model of knowledge produced by our epistemology and for other subjects to be regarded simply as inferior approximations to that epistemic standard which will itself very likely become harder and harder to distinguish from its paradigm instance. What I am suggesting then is that the philosophy of education needs to orient itself to a much greater degree than it has previously done on the various ‘philosophies of’, e. g. the philosophies of science, of history and the social sciences, of law, and of art, which have come to occupy such an important place in contemporary philosophy. My special concern in this paper will be to argue that much discussion of the humanities and of their place within the instructional programs of the schools could benefit from work that has recently been done in the philosophy of language and in the philosophy of history and the social sciences. My guiding assumption which I will try to make as plausible as I can is that a consideration of the distinctive logical and conceptual features of the humanities does not have a merely theoretical interest but offers important clues to the nature of the educational and broadly moral importance which we traditionally impute to these studies. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate the notion of an unconscious intention as it is discussed and defended in Freud's A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. I am concerned with two issues: first, whether the evidence that Freud adduces supports his conclusion that there are unconscious intentions, and, second, whether the notion of an unconscious intention is coherent. I call into question some of Freud's arguments to support the notion, and I present a case for the incoherence of the notion. Finally, I (...) suggest how one might begin to reconcile my argument for its incoherence with an argument for the existence of unconscious intentions. (shrink)