To achieve impact, academics need to create personal impact development plans, focused on what and on whom to have an impact and the necessary competencies to do so. Profession and university leaders play a critical role in the successful implementation of such plans.

Most of us have been brought up on the idea that moral theories divide as they are, at the root, either deontological or consequentialist. A new point of division has been emerging that places deontological and consequentialist theories together against theories of virtue, or a conception of morality constrained at the outset by the requirements of the “personal.” In a series of important essays Bernard Williams has offered striking arguments for the significance of the personal in moral thought based on (...) the role of integrity in human activity and character. His criticisms of both Kantian and utilitarian theories for their deep-seated tendencies to undermine the integrity of persons brings to a new level of seriousness and subtlety long-standing complaints against these theories—the invasive do-gooding of utilitarianism, the coldness and severity toward normal human concerns of Kantian theory. Although Williams is inclined to find the sources of the attack on integrity in these different features of the two traditional theories, in the end his complaint against both of them turns on their demand that the moral agent submit himself to the authority of impartial value. (shrink)

The present paper studies the general implications of theprinciple of compositionality for the organization of grammar.It will be argued that Janssen''s (1986) requirement that syntax andsemantics be similar algebras is too strong, and that the moreliberal requirement that syntax be interpretable into semanticsleads to a formalization that can be motivated and applied more easily,while it avoids the complications that encumber Janssen''s formalization.Moreover, it will be shown that this alternative formalization evenallows one to further complete the formal theory of compositionality, inthat (...) it is capable of clarifying the role played by translation,model-theoretic interpretation and meaning postulates,of which the latter two aspects received little or no attention inMontague (1970) and Janssen (1986). (shrink)

The uniform halting problem (UH) can be stated as follows.Give a decision procedure which for any given Turing machine (TM) will decide whether or not it has an immortal instantaneous description (ID).An ID is called immortal if it has no terminal successor. As it is generally the case in the literature (see e.g. Minsky [3, p. 118]) we assume that in an ID the tape must be blank except for some finite numbers of squares. If we remove this restriction the (...) UH becomes the immortality problem (IP). The UH should not be confused with the initialised uniform halting problem (whether or not a TM has an immortal ID when started in a specified state) which can easily be shown to be undecidable (see e.g. Minsky [3, p. 151]). (shrink)

This second volume arising from the Frontiers in American Philosophy Conference held at Texas A&M University is "festive, celebrating the diversity of thought and influences in American philosophy," say its editors. In these thirty-six essays, there is no attempt to define an American ethos; in fact, the editors conclude that, even pragmatism, identified by Tocqueville as America's defining attribute, should not be described as a national philosophy. It is, as Gerard Deledalle notes in his essay, "the new universal philosophy, because (...) it is the philosophy of experience and democracy that is any nation's `manifest destiny.'" These articles, by thoughtful scholars from North America and several European nations, look forward through the developments presently shaping philosophical inquiry in the United States and backward to the origins and plurality of the American intellectual heritage. Not a parochial or narrow perspective, the focus on American philosophy sharpens the dialogue that clarifies and explicates American thought in the context of a world community. (shrink)

To push the edges of the known, to look at the accepted in novel ways, is indeed to stand at the frontiers of a field. In Frontiers in American Philosophy thirty-five contemporary scholars explore classical American thought in bold new ways. An extraordinary range of issues and thinkers is represented in these pages--from such core themes as metaphysics and social philosophy, which receive primary attention, to some consideration of American philosophers' technical accomplishments in mathematical logic and philosophical analysis. The authors (...) also offer new perspectives on the work of the leading American philosophers, including George Herbert Mead, William James, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Emma Goldman. Not surprisingly perhaps, a great deal of the discussion revolves, either directly or indirectly, around that great axis of intellectual issues commonly known as the "realism/idealism" controversy. It seems fitting that so much attention is devoted to the possibility of some sort of middle position between "external realism" and its antipode in some form of relativistic subjectivism. For, in the last analysis, such a middle position is for the American philosophers the core meaning of "pragmatism.”. (shrink)

We dispute Penn et al.'s claim of the sharp functional discontinuity between humans and nonhumans with evidence in bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) of higher-order generalizations: spontaneous integration of previously learned rules and concepts in response to novel stimuli. We propose that species-general explanations that are in approach are more plausible than Penn et al.'s innatist approach of a genetically prespecified supermodule.

In response to critical discussions of my book, Moral Literacy, by Stephen Engstrom, Sally Sedgwick and Andrews Reath, I offer a defence of Kant's formalism that is not only friendly to my claims for the moral theory's sensitivity to a wide range of moral phenomena and practices at the ground level, but also consistent with Kant's high rationalist ambitions.

Introduction -- Sagesse et savoir théorique (Spinoza I) -- Naturalisme et religion révélée (Spinoza II) -- Un naturalisme ironique (Hume I) -- Théorie et pratique, et la pratique de la théorie (Spinoza et Hume) -- Science, sens commun et sagesse -- Science et religion -- Science et éthique -- Ethique et religion -- La fin de l'histoire -- Progrès et tradition.