Science and technology are so intertwined that technoscience has been argued to more accurately reflect the progress of science and its impact on society, and most socioscientific issues require technoscientific reasoning. Education policy documents have long noted that the general public lacks sufficient understanding of science and technology necessary for informed decision-making regarding socioscientific/technological issues. The science–technology–society movement and scholarship addressing socioscientific issues in science education reflect efforts in the science education community to promote more informed decision-making regarding such issues. (...) Now Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics education has emerged as a major reform movement impacting science education. STEM education efforts emphasize literacy across the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, but with rare exceptions, treat issues of technology superficially and uncritically. Informed decision-making regarding many personal and societal issues requires technological literacy beyond merely becoming an enthusiastic designer or skilled user of technology, but the science education community has given little attention to what such literacy entails. Here, we present results of an extensive review of the literature regarding the nature of technology in order to identify key issues among scholars who study technology. We then provide predominant perspectives among those scholars and suggest which identified NOT issues are most essential to address as part of STEM education efforts that seek to promote informed personal and societal decision-making. (shrink)

Most people who write about punishment ask, Why may we punish the guilty? I want to ask, Why should the guilty put up with it? or, more specifically, To what extent does a person guilty of an offense have a duty to submit to punishment? ;This question forms the topic of the thesis. The work is divided into two parts, of three chapters each. In Part 1, I argue for the importance of the question. In Part 2, I try to (...) answer the question. ;In Chapter 1, I argue for the claim that the question of submission to punishment is in fact the central question of the theory of punishment. This being conceded, I argue in chapters 2 and 3 that we must consequently change our conception of punishment. We cannot define 'punishment' in the traditional way, as necessarily involving pain, suffering, or other sorts of disvalue ; rather, 'punishment' is to be defined by the justificatory connection between punishment and offense . ;In Chapter 4, I develop what I call the rectificatory theory of punishment. This theory views some punishments as required in order to maintain the equality of basic liberties: people who commit certain offenses thereby arrogate excess basic liberties, and must by way of punishment give up an equivalent body of liberties. In Chapter 5, I incorporate the rectificatory theory into a more general theory of punishment, a theory derived from John Rawls's version of the social contract. I argue there that punishment derives from the social contract in three distinct ways: by literal application, by reinterpretation, and by repudiation. Finally, in Chapter 6, I argue that this theory of punishment requires us to look at the contract in a certain way: the contract establishes a relationship of fraternity among the parties, not merely as a pleasant after-effect, but as something essential to the contract. (shrink)

Genetic moderation of experience of reward in response to environmental stimuli is relevant for the study of many psychiatric disorders. Experience of reward, however, is difficult to capture, as it involves small fluctuations in affect in response to small events in the flow of daily life. This study examined a momentary assessment reward phenotype in relation to the catechol-O-methyl transferase (COMT) Val158Met polymorphism. A total of 351 participants from a twin study participated in an Experience Sampling Method procedure to collect (...) daily life experiences concerning events, event appraisals, and affect. Reward experience was operationalized, as the effect of event appraisal on positive affect (PA). Associations between COMT Val 158Met genotype and event appraisal on the one hand and PA on the other were examined using multilevel random regression analysis. Ability to experience reward increased with the number of ‘Met’ alleles of the subject, and this differential effect of genotype was greater for events that were experienced as more pleasant. The effect size of genotypic moderation was quite large: subjects with the Val/Val genotype generated almost similar amounts of PA from a ‘very pleasant event’ as Met/Met subjects did from a ‘bit pleasant event’. Genetic variation with functional impact on cortical dopamine tone has a strong influence on reward experience in the flow of daily life. Genetic moderation of ecological measures of reward experience is hypothesized to be of major relevance to the development of various behavioral disorders, including depression and addiction. Neuropsychopharmacology (2008) 33, 3030–3036; doi:10.1038/sj.npp.1301520; published online 8 August 2007.. (shrink)

A great deal is compressed into this passage; pleasure is associated in important ways with our nature; it has a crucial role in moral education; we can be pleased and displeased correctly or incorrectly, and this has a place in making character; and pleasure is something that matters all through a human life. Some of the themes are introduced and discussed at earlier places in the Ethics; some receive fuller treatment in book 10. The idea that some things are naturally (...) pleasant and that the virtuous find pleasure in the correct things first occurrs in book 1. The centrality of pleasure to Aristotle's ethical inquiry is perhaps not obvious right away, but it is unmistakable when the Ethics is considered as a whole. Its relation to good is fundamental. (shrink)

a Mathematicians, like Proust and everyone else, are at their best when writing about their first lovea (TM) a ] They are among the very best we have; and their best is very good indeed. a ] One approaches this book with high hopes. Happily, one is not disappointed. a ]In paperback it might well have become a best seller. a ]read it. From The Mathematical Intelligencer Mathematics is shaped by the consistent concerns and styles of powerful minds a three (...) of which are represented here. Kaca (TM)s work is marked by deep commitment and breadth of inquiry. Rota is the easiest of these authors to reada ]a delight: witty and urbane, with a clear and interesting agenda and an astonishing intellectual range. To read him is to be a part of a pleasant and rewarding conversation. Jacob T. Schwartz attacks problems ina ]computer science, mathematical economics, computer and instructional a ] No matter how slippery the problem, Schwartz manages to capture a substantial chunk of it in his mathematical net. a Mathematics Magazine This is a volume of essays and reviews that delightfully explore mathematics in all its moods a from the light and the witty, and humorous to serious, rational, and cerebral. Topics include: logic, combinatorics, statistics, economics, artificial intelligence, computer science, and applications of mathematics broadly. You will also find history and philosophy covered, including discussion of the work of Ulam, Kant, Heidegger among others. (shrink)

_Teaching in a democracy is challenging and filled with dilemmas that have no easy answers._ For example, how do educators meet their responsibilities of teaching civic norms and dispositions while remaining nonpartisan? _Democratic Discord in Schools_ features eight normative cases of complex dilemmas drawn from real events designed to help educators practice the type of collaborative problem solving and civil discourse needed to meet these challenges of democratic education. Each of the cases also features a set of six commentaries written (...) by a diverse array of scholars, educators, policy makers, students, and activists with a range of political views to spark reflection and conversation. Drawing on research and methods developed in the Justice in Schools project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), _Democratic Discord in Schools_ provides the tools that allow educators and others to practice the deliberative skills they need in order to find reasonable solutions to common ethical dilemmas in politically fraught times. (shrink)

Substituted judgment has increasingly become the accepted standard for rendering decisions for incapacitated adults in the USA. A broad exception exists with regard to patients with diminished capacity secondary to depressive disorders, as such patients’ previous wishes are generally not honoured when seeking to turn down life-preserving care or pursue aid-in-dying. The result is that physicians often force involuntary treatment on patients with poor medical prognoses and/or low quality of life as a result of their depressive symptoms when similarly situated (...) incapacitated patients without such depressive symptoms would have their previous wishes honoured via substituted judgment. This commentary argues for reconsidering this approach and for using a substituted judgment standard for a subset of EMP/LQL patients seeking death. (shrink)

Are evolution and creation irreconcilably opposed? Is 'intelligent design' theory an unhappy compromise? Is there another way of approaching the present-day divide between religious and so-called secular views of the origins of life? Jacob Klapwijk offers a philosophical analysis of the relation of evolutionary biology to religion, and addresses the question of whether the evolution of life is exclusively a matter of chance or is better understood as including the notion of purpose. Writing from a Christian point of view, (...) he criticizes creationism and intelligent design theory as well as opposing reductive naturalism. He offers an alternative to both and an attempt to bridge the gap between them, via the idea of 'emergent evolution'. In this theory the process of evolution has an emergent or innovative character resulting in a living world of ingenious, multifaceted complexity. (shrink)

According to the two visual systems model, the visual processing of objects divides into semantic and pragmatic processing. We provide various criteria for this distinction. Further, we argue that both the semantic and pragmatic processing of visual information about objects should be divided into low-level processing and high-level processing. Finally, we re-evaluate the contribution of the human parietal lobe to the concious visual perception of spatial relations among objects.

In legal orders around the world, commitments to democracy, liberalism and constitutionalism are increasingly eroding. Although political and constitutional theorists often lament this trend, they invariably adopt frameworks that are indifferent to these commitments. My aims in this article are both critical and constructive. As a critical matter, I will expose the indifference of the leading political and constitutional theories to the emergence, maintenance and refinement of liberal democratic constitutional orders. As a constructive matter, I will draw on Immanuel Kant’s (...) constitutional theory to explain why realizing such a form of governance is a public duty and why receding from it is a public wrong. (shrink)

I pursue here three related aims. First, I criticise some of the metaphysical claims made on behalf of the so-called `enactive' approach to visual experience. Secondly, I explain why the enactive view of visual experience is hard to square with the evidence in favour of the two-visual-systems model of human vision. Finally, I explore one possible way to develop the `pre-emptive perception' framework and explain why, contrary to first appearances, some of the fundamental discoveries of brain mechanisms, whose function might (...) be to underlie pre-emptive perception, do not really support the enactive approach to visual experience. (shrink)

In his ‘On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy’ Kant makes the astonishing claim that one is not entitled to lie even to save a friend from a murderer. This claim has been an embarrassment for Kant's defenders and an indication of Kant's excessive rigour for his detractors. Responses to SRL fall into three main groups. The first of these groups, that of Kant's critics, claim that SRL demonstrates that Kant's ethical views are so rigorous that they become abhorrent (...) in practice. The second group, Kant's defenders, argues that Kant's conclusions in SRL do not follow from his own ethical principles. The third group, made up of scholars who are generally sympathetic to Kant's position, attempts to explain why a liar is responsible for all the bad consequences that follow from his act by providing an account of Kant's theory of imputation. (shrink)

The thesis that republicanism was only suited for small states was given its decisive eighteenth-century formulation by Montesquieu, who emphasized not only republics' need for homogeneity and virtue but also the difficulty of constraining military and executive power in large republics. Hume and Publius famously replaced small republics' virtue and homogeneity with large republics' plurality of contending factions. Even those who shared this turn to modern liberty, commerce and the accompanying heterogeneity of interests, however, did not all agree with or (...) know about Publius' institutional responses to the problems of executive and military power. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and on both sides of the Atlantic, it remained a live question whether large states could be stable moderate republics, with responses ranging from embraces of Montesquieuian limited monarchy, to denials that there was any real large-republic problem at all, with a variety of institutional solutions in between for those who thought there was a real but soluble large-republic problem. (shrink)

In this study, I clarify and defend the critique of the ‘sages’ and ‘robbers’ that is found in the _Zhuangzi_. As detailed in Chapter 8 of the _Zhuangzi_, both the (non-Daoist) ‘sages’ and ‘robbers’ are equally responsible for society’s ills. This is because both the ‘sages’ and ‘robbers’ are perceptually alienated from nature. This perceptual alienation involves the inability to perceive nature as fundamentally indeterminate (_wu_, 無). The Daoist alternative to the ‘sages’ and ‘robbers’ is to cultivate awareness of our (...) interdependence with nature. This study calls this process an ‘attunement to nature’ or, as Chapter 8 describes it, to not depart from ‘the actuality of their endowed circumstances’ (其性命之情) and to ‘see oneself when you see others/things’ (自見而見彼). Attunement involves an awareness of how nature primordially forms an indeterminate continuum (_wu_). (shrink)

In an age of constitutional revolutions and reforms, theory and practice are moving in opposite directions. As a matter of constitutional practice, human dignity has emerged in jurisdictions around the world as the organizing idea of a groundbreaking paradigm. By reconfiguring constitutional norms, institutional structures and legal doctrines, this paradigm transforms human dignity from a mere moral claim into a legal norm that persons have standing to vindicate. As a matter of constitutional theory, however, human dignity remains an enigmatic idea. (...) Some explicate its meaning in abstraction from constitutional practice, while others confine themselves to less exalted ideas. The result is a chasm that separates constitutional practice from a theory capable of justifying its innovations and guiding its operation. By expounding the connection between human dignity and the constitutional practices that justify themselves in its light, Jacob Weinrib brings the theory and practice of constitutional law back together. (shrink)

If there is one point on which defenders and critics of the doctrine of proportionality agree, it is that Dworkin's rights as trumps model stands as a radical alternative to the doctrine. Those who are sympathetic to proportionality reject the rights as trumps model for failing to acknowledge that there are conditions under which a right may be justifiably infringed. In turn, those who regard rights as trumps reject the doctrine of proportionality for failing to take rights seriously. This paper (...) argues that each of these views is mistaken. On the one hand, Dworkin's rights as trumps model elides with a prominent version of the proportionality doctrine. On the other, this version takes rights seriously. (shrink)

Physicians expressing opinions on medical matters that run contrary to the consensus of experts pose a challenge to licensing bodies and regulatory authorities. While the right to express contrarian views feeds a robust marketplace of ideas that is essential for scientific progress, physicians advocating ineffective or dangerous cures, or actively opposing public health measures, pose a grave threat to societal welfare. Increasingly, a distinction has been made between professional speech that occurs during the physician-patient encounter and public speech that transpires (...) beyond the clinical setting, with physicians being afforded wide latitude to voice empirically false claims outside the context of patient care. This paper argues that such a bifurcated model does not sufficiently address the challenges of an age when mass communications and social media allow dissenting physicians to offer misleading medical advice to the general public on a mass scale. Instead, a three-tiered model that distinguishes between citizen speech, physician speech and clinical speech would best serve authorities when regulating physician expression. (shrink)

The integrity of the patient–physician relationship depends on maintaining professional boundaries. While ethicists and professional organisations have devoted significant consideration to the subject of sexual boundary transgressions, the subject of non-sexual boundaries, especially outside the mental health setting, has been largely neglected. While professional organisations may offer guidance on specific subjects, such as accepting gifts or treating relatives, as well as general guidance on transparency and conflict of interest, what is missing is a principle-based method that providers can use to (...) assess non-sexual interactions with patients that transcend norms of practice. This paper attempts to offer an operational model for such assessment that considers not only the traditional emphasis on beneficence, but also incorporates concerns over entanglement and concordance. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Context: Hunting from an Anishinabe Perspective Teachings on Hunting Hunting and Awareness Notes.

In his work, the philosopher John Haugeland (1945–2010) proposed a radical expansion of philosophy's conceptual toolkit, calling for a wider range of resources for understanding the mind, the world, and how they relate. Haugeland argued that “giving a damn” is essential for having a mind—suggesting that traditional approaches to cognitive science mistakenly overlook the relevance of caring to the understanding of mindedness. Haugeland's determination to expand philosophy's array of concepts led him to write on a wide variety of subjects that (...) may seem unrelated—from topics in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to examinations of such figures as Martin Heidegger and Thomas Kuhn. Haugeland's two books with the MIT Press, Artificial Intelligence and Mind Design, show the range of his interests. -/- This book offers a collection of essays in conversation with Haugeland's work. The essays, by prominent scholars, extend Haugeland's work on a range of contemporary topics in philosophy of mind—from questions about intentionality to issues concerning objectivity and truth to the work of Heidegger. Giving a Damn also includes a previously unpublished paper by Haugeland, “Two Dogmas of Rationalism,” as well as critical responses to it. Finally, an appendix offers Haugeland's outline of Kant's "Transcendental Deduction of the Categories.” -/- Contributors Zed Adams, William Blattner, Jacob Browning, Steven Crowell, John Haugeland, Bennett W. Helm, Rebecca Kukla, John Kulvicki, Mark Lance, Danielle Macbeth, Chauncey Maher, John McDowell, Joseph Rouse. (shrink)

I am deeply grateful to Nicole Roughan for overseeing this symposium and to Alon Harel, Stephen Riley, Julian Sempill, Alec Stone Sweet, and Ionna Tourkochoriti for their insightful engagements wit...

The central nervous system uses feedback processes that occur at multiple time scales to control interactions with the environment. The long-latency response is the fastest process that directly involves cortical areas, with a motoneuron response measurable 50 ms following an imposed limb displacement. Several behavioral factors concerning perturbation mechanics and the active role of muscles prior or during the perturbation can modulate the long-latency response amplitude in the upper limbs, but the interactions among many of these factors had not been (...) systematically studied before. We conducted a behavioral study on thirteen healthy individuals to determine the effect and interaction of four behavioral factors – background muscle torque, perturbation direction, perturbation velocity, and task instruction – on the LLRa evoked from the flexor carpi radialis and extensor carpi ulnaris muscles after velocity-controlled wrist displacements. The effects of the four factors were quantified using both a 0D statistical analysis on the average perturbation-evoked EMG signal in the period corresponding to an LLR, and using a timeseries analysis of EMG signals. All factors significantly modulated LLRa, and their combination nonlinearly contributed to modulating the LLRa. Specifically, all the three-way interaction terms that could be computed without including the interaction between instruction and velocity significantly modulated the LLR. Analysis of the three-way interaction terms of the 0D model indicated that for the ECU muscle, the LLRa evoked when subjects are asked to maintain their muscle activation in response to the perturbations was greater than the one observed when subjects yielded to the perturbations, but this effect was not measured for muscles undergoing shortening or in absence of background muscle activation. Moreover, higher perturbation velocity increased the LLRa evoked from the stretched muscle in presence of a background torque, but no effects of velocity were measured in absence of background torque. Also, our analysis identified significant modulations of LLRa in muscles shortened by the perturbation, including an interaction between torque and velocity, and an effect of both torque and velocity. The time-series analysis indicated the significance of additional transient effects in the LLR region for muscles undergoing shortening. (shrink)

Cette étude entend mettre au jour l’influence de l’angélologie scotiste sur le développement des doctrines modernes de la liberté d’indifférence humaine dans la tradition jésuite et franciscaine. Cette archéologie médiévale permet de démonstrer l’articulation complexe qui existe entre logique et éthique dans la scolastique, à la faveur d’une réflexion sur les rapports entre les actes de la volonté et les instants temporels, l’applicabilité des distinctions logiques entre sens divisé et sens composé à l’action ou encore le rapport entre causalité contingente (...) et liberté d’indifférence.This study aims at showing the influence of Scotistic angelology on the development of early-modern conceptions of human liberty of indifference, mainly in Jesuit and Franciscan scholasticism. This medieval archeology will shed a new light on the complex relationship between logic and ethics in the scholastic tradition, addressing issues such as the parallelism between acts of the will and temporal instants, the applicability of the logical distinctions between divided and composite sense to action and the relationship between contingent causality and liberty of indifference. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 9, Page 9-11, September 2012.

Multinational business activity has expanded dramatically since the end of World War II. The increased presence of foreign corporations and the generally strategic significance of such presence for host countries, has increasingly confronted both sides with the need to develop guidelines governing the conduct of such operations.The new voluntary approach to guideline development suggested here is based on the proposition that the fundamental aim of business activity is the satisfaction of socially desirable needs. Under this approach, MNC's should attempt to (...) operate in a socially desirable manner in all countries of operations. Social desirability determination will be made on the basis of whether activities in particular countries will be seen, by majority concensus of all publics on which corporate activity impacts, to bring about welfare improvements in the countries concerned. Periodic public opinion polls, or more informal methods in the less developed countries, are seen to provide the necessary inputs for the development of overall corporate guidelines for action, which in turn will influence strategic corporate decisions. The long run benefits resulting from such conduct are seen to outweigh temporary gains that could accrue to corporations through the pursuit of profitable but socially undesirable activities. (shrink)