Recent scholarship in intellectual humility (IH) has attempted to provide deeper understanding of the virtue as personality trait and its impact on an individual's thoughts, beliefs, and actions. A limitations-owning perspective of IH focuses on a proper recognition of the impact of intellectual limitations and a motivation to overcome them, placing it as the mean between intellectual arrogance and intellectual servility. We developed the Limitations-Owning Intellectual Humility Scale to assess this conception of IH with related personality constructs. In Studies 1 (...) (n= 386) and 2 (n = 296), principal factor and confirmatory factor analyses revealed a three-factor model – owning one's intellectual limitations, appropriate discomfort with intellectual limitations, and love of learning. Study 3 (n = 322) demonstrated strong test-retest reliability of the measure over 5 months, while Study 4 (n = 612) revealed limitations-owning IH correlated negatively with dogmatism, closed-mindedness, and hubristic pride and positively with openness, assertiveness, authentic pride. It also predicted openness and closed-mindedness over and above education, social desirability, and other measures of IH. The limitations-owning understanding of IH and scale allow for a more nuanced, spectrum interpretation and measurement of the virtue, which directs future study inside and outside of psychology. (shrink)

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

Toward A Sociological Imagination builds on the ideas C. Wright Mills expressed in The Sociological Imagination for an approach to the scientific method broad enough to open up to the full range of knowledge within the sociology discipline. In this book, nine sociologists and one philosopher provide detailed tests of the utility of the approach within diverse substantive sociological areas.

The principle of double effect is often used in bioethics as a tool to evaluate significant cases in obstetrics and gynecology. In this article the author, a Catholic priest, presents and interprets St. Thomas Aquinas’s delineation of the principle and discusses several classical applications, namely, to hysterectomy during pregnancy, ectopic pregnancy, and craniotomy. He explains the medical anatomy and physiology of the conjoined Maltese twins, Jodie and Mary, and then examines the arguments of four moralists on their separation. He (...) concludes by arguing that the principle morally justified the surgical separation of Jodie and Mary. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 9.1 : 85–96. (shrink)

Many of us are inclined to accept something like the following principle: We can only be properly morally assessed for what is in our control. And yet our ordinary practices seem to frequently violate this principle. The resulting tension, and the attempt to resolve it, is the problem of moral luck. For example, we tend to punish and think worse of the negligent driver who kills a child than we do the equally negligent driver who was lucky there was no (...) child in his path. Thus, the lucky outcomes of our actions do seem to affect the extent to which we hold and are held responsible, but these are not things over which we exercise control. And, as Thomas Nagel famously illustrated in his response to Bernard Williams (the two of which papers form the founding documents of the moral luck debate), the influence of luck is not limited to outcomes. For the circumstances in which we find ourselves and, indeed, our very constitution are also shaped by luck. Since the publication of Williams's and Nagel's papers, the existence and breadth of moral luck has been hotly debated. This debate is not a mere intellectual trifle but, as the essays in this volume illustrate, a debate which lies at the heart of free will, responsibility, identity, causation, and self-creation. (shrink)

This book concerns the history of fine art in higher education in Britain and Ireland, from 1770 to the present. From one point of view, the book could have begun auspiciously with Hans Holbein, who, as a young artist, designed the title page cover for Thomas More’s Utopia and who came to England in 1526 with an introduction from Erasmus. But that would not have been an apt place to start since it is not a “Master” per se that (...) this book explores but, as it declares, the many roles of a “Master” as a leader, scholar, instructor, director, progenitor, role model, supervisor, curator, lecturer, teacher, practitioner, public servant, and policy maker in art education nation-building ways that, for... (shrink)

Historians and philosophers of science have furnished a wide array of theoretical-historiographical terms to emphasize the discontinuities among different systems of knowledge. Some of the most famous include Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm”, Michel Foucault’s “episteme”, and the notion of “styles of reasoning” more recently developed by Ian Hacking and Arnold Davidson. This paper takes up this theoretical-historiographical thread by assessing the values and limitations of the notion of “style” for the historical and philosophical study of science. Specifically, reflecting on various (...) methodological and theoretical concerns prompted by sexuality, translation, and East Asian studies, this paper argues that the heretofore ways in which historians and philosophers of science have used the notion of “style” are severely restricted in terms of its mere applicability to the intellectual history of Western science. The particular example of the translation of “homosexuality” into Chinese during the May Fourth era reveals that the notion of “style” has the potential of carrying a much more dynamic conceptual weight, as when used in “styles of argumentation”. The paper also engages briefly with the historiography of scientific “national styles” and ends with some concluding remarks on the limitations of “social histories from below” and the under appreciated importance of “epistemological histories of possibilities”. (shrink)

Universal Grammar promotes the study of an idealization of language behavior and language learning. In examining the diversity of actual behavioral strategies used to achieve linguistic goals, Evans & Levinson (E&L) move towards studying language as a behavior. This approach can benefit from studying communicative and cognitive capacities more broadly – across species. We exhort like-minded linguists to cast off the remaining intellectual shackles of linguistic speciesism.

A letter from Howard C. Berkowitz about “Impact of a Clinical Trials Information Handbook on Patient Knowledge, Perceptions, and Likelihood of Participation”.

All students of the classical languages are aware that, in referring to intervals of time, the Greeks and Romans often employed a method of reckoning which was inclusive and consequently different from our own. The Greeks, for example, refer to the period between two celebrations of the Olympic games as a though we should call it a four-year interval. One instance of this kind of usage in Latin is the stereotyped formula employed in expressing a date: ante diem quintum Id. (...) Mai. is 11 May, though we should say that there was an interval of four days only between 11 and 15 May. Another instance is the use of tertiana and quartana as applied to fevers which recur on alternate days and on every third day respectively. The ramifications of this mode of expression are extensive, but I am only concerned here with one, namely the use of quisque with ordinals. (shrink)

I Consider first line 58, though its interpretation cannot be separated from that of the ensuing lines. The editors put a comma after iuuenem and must therefore intend propiorque iubenti to be taken with conticuit. It seems more natural, however, to take it with what precedes. The obvious function of propior in such a case is to qualify or amplify an idea already stated, as in Stat. Ach. 2. 94–95.

From Descartes to Hume, philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries developed a dialectic of radically conflicting claims about the nature of the self. In the Paralogisms of The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant comes to terms with this dialectic and with the character of the experiencing self. In this study, Powell seeks to elucidate these difficult texts, showing that the structure of the Paralogisms provides an essential key to understanding both Kant's critique of "rational psychology" and his theory of (...) self-consciousness. As Kant realized, the ways in which we must represent ourselves to ourselves have import not only for epistemology, but for our view of persons and of our own immortality, as well as for moral philosophy. His theory of self-consciousness is also shown to have implications for contemporary discussions of the problem of other minds, functionalism, and the problem of indexical self-reference. (shrink)