What big questions and large‐scale narratives give coherence to the history of science? From the late 1970s onward, the field has been transformed through a stress on practice and fresh perspectives from gender studies, the sociology of knowledge, and work on a greatly expanded range of practitioners and cultures. Yet these developments, although long overdue and clearly beneficial, have been accompanied by fragmentation and loss of direction. This essay suggests that the narrative frameworks used by historians of science need (...) to come to terms with diversity by understanding science as a form of communication. The centrality of processes of movement, translation, and transmission is already emerging in studies of topics ranging from ethnographic encounters to the history of reading. Not only does this approach offer opportunities for crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline that are all too easily taken for granted; it also has the potential for creating a more effective dialogue with other historians and the wider public. (shrink)

What big questions and large‐scale narratives give coherence to the history of science? From the late 1970s onward, the field has been transformed through a stress on practice and fresh perspectives from gender studies, the sociology of knowledge, and work on a greatly expanded range of practitioners and cultures. Yet these developments, although long overdue and clearly beneficial, have been accompanied by fragmentation and loss of direction. This essay suggests that the narrative frameworks used by historians of science need (...) to come to terms with diversity by understanding science as a form of communication. The centrality of processes of movement, translation, and transmission is already emerging in studies of topics ranging from ethnographic encounters to the history of reading. Not only does this approach offer opportunities for crossing boundaries of nation, period, and discipline that are all too easily taken for granted; it also has the potential for creating a more effective dialogue with other historians and the wider public. (shrink)

Ethics research in Accounting has not proceeded beyond the descriptive level while, at the same time, ethics is a vital part of accounting decisions to the point where professional codes of etherics are necessary. A theoretical model is offered using cognitive and contingency (field) theories to gain insight into how ethical considerations enter into accounting decisions. Propositions are generated so that the use of ethics in accounting decisions can be predicted.

For years, _Multicultural Education_ has served as an essential resource for education professionals, featuring scholarly articles written by industry leaders and topics, following current trends in education instruction today. The text helps educators understand the concepts, paradigms, and explanations necessary for becoming effective practitioners in the ever-evolving classroom environment, highlighting cultural, raocial and language-focused topics. Each chapter now incorporates new theoretical, conceptual, and research developments within the field, providing an adaptable approach to classroom techniques. With growing classroom diversity, the (...) text also features a chapter that focuses on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues. Statistical tables, figures and charts have been updated to present the most current information. (shrink)

Remhof contends that Nietzsche is a metaphysician. According to his Meta-Metaphysical Argument, Nietzsche’s texts satisfy the criteria for an adequate conception of metaphysics. According to his Constructivist Argument, Nietzsche adopts a metaphysical position on which concepts’ application conditions constitute the identity conditions of their objects. This article critically appraises these arguments. I maintain that the criteria advanced in the Meta-Metaphysical Argument are collectively insufficient for delineating metaphysics as a distinct field of inquiry and that the Constructivist Argument attributes a (...) position to Nietzsche that remains vulnerable to his evaluative and psychological indictments of two-world metaphysics. I conclude by discussing how these objections might help non-metaphysical readers of Nietzsche resist Remhof’s interpretation. (shrink)

While substantial progress has been made in the field known as artificial consciousness, at the present time there is no generally accepted phenomenally conscious machine, nor even a clear route to how one might be produced should we decide to try. Here, we take the position that, from our computer science perspective, a major reason for this is a computational explanatory gap: our inability to understand/explain the implementation of high-level cognitive algorithms in terms of neurocomputational processing. We explain how (...) addressing the computational explanatory gap can identify computational correlates of consciousness. We suggest that bridging this gap is not only critical to further progress in the area of machine consciousness, but would also inform the search for neurobiological correlates of consciousness and would, with high probability, contribute to demystifying the “hard problem” of understanding the mind–brain relationship. We compile a listing of previously proposed computational correlates of consciousness and, based on the results of recent computational modeling, suggest that the gating mechanisms associated with top-down cognitive control of working memory should be added to this list. We conclude that developing neurocognitive architectures that contribute to bridging the computational explanatory gap provides a credible and achievable roadmap to understanding the ultimate prospects for a conscious machine, and to a better understanding of the mind–brain problem in general. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky has made major contributions to three fields: political history and analysis, linguistics, and the philosophies of mind, language, and human nature. In this thoroughly revised and updated volume, James McGilvray provides a critical introduction to Chomsky's work in these three key areas and assesses their continuing importance and relevance for today. In an incisive and comprehensive analysis, McGilvray argues that Chomsky’s work can be seen as a unified intellectual project. He shows how Chomsky adapts the tools of (...) natural science to the study of mind and of language in particular and explains why Chomsky's "rationalist" approach to the mind continues to be opposed by the majority of contemporary cognitive scientists. The book also discusses some of Chomsky’s central political themes in depth, examining how Chomsky's view of the good life and the ideal form of social organization is related to and in part dependent on his biologically based account of human nature and the place of language within it. As in the first edition, McGilvray emphasizes the distinction between common sense and science and the difference between rationalist and empiricist approaches to the mind, making clear the importance of these themes for understanding Chomsky's work and showing that they are based on elementary observations that are accessible to everyone. This edition has been extensively re-written to emphasize Chomsky's recent work, which increasingly 'biologizes' the study of language and mind and - by implication - the study of human nature. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy, linguistics, and politics, as well as to all those keen to develop a critical understanding of one of the most controversial and important thinkers writing today. (shrink)

This article discusses the properties of a controllable, flexible, hybrid parallel computing architecture that potentially merges pattern recognition and arithmetic. Humans perform integer arithmetic in a fundamentally different way than logic-based computers. Even though the human approach to arithmetic is both slow and inaccurate it can have substantial advantages when useful approximations are more valuable than high precision. Such a computational strategy may be particularly useful when computers based on nanocomponents become feasible because it offers a way to make use (...) of the potential power of these massively parallel systems. Because the system architecture is inspired by neuroscience and is applied to cognitive problems, occasional mention is made of experimental data from both fields when appropriate. (shrink)

The motto of the Royal Society—Nullius in verba—was intended to highlight the members’ rejection of received knowledge and the new place they afforded direct empirical evidence in their quest for genuine, useful knowledge about the world. But while many studies have raised questions about the construction, reception and authentication of knowledge, Evidence in the Age of the New Sciences is the first to examine the problem of evidence at this pivotal moment in European intellectual history. What constituted evidence—and for whom? (...) Where might it be found? How should it be collected and organized? What is the relationship between evidence and proof? These are crucial questions, for what constitutes evidence determines how people interrogate the world and the kind of arguments they make about it. In this important new collection, Lancaster and Raiswell have assembled twelve studies that capture aspects of the debate over evidence in a variety of intellectual contexts. From law and theology to geography, medicine and experimental philosophy, the chapters highlight the great diversity of approaches to evidence-gathering that existed side by side in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this way, the volume makes an important addition to the literature on early science and knowledge formation, and will be of particular interest to scholars and advanced students in these fields. (shrink)

This book develops an original and comprehensive theory of political liberalism. It defends bold new accounts of the nature of autonomy and individual liberty, the content of distributive justice, and the justification for the authority of the State. The theory that emerges integrates contemporary progressive and pluralistic liberalism into a broadly Aristotelian intellectual tradition. The early chapters of the book challenge the traditional conservative idea of individual liberty-the liberty to dispose of one's property as one wishes-and replace it with a (...) new one, according to which liberty is of equal value to all persons, regardless of economic position. The middle chapters present an original theory of socio-economic justice, arguing that a society in which every citizen enjoys an equal share of liberty should be the distributive goal of the State. It is argued that this goal is incompatible with the existence of large disparities in wealth and economic power, and that (contra conservative and libertarian economic arguments) such disparities are harmful to the overall health of national and global economies. The final chapters provide an original argument that the State has both a moral duty and a moral right to pursue this program of socio-economic justice (contra conservative and libertarian moral arguments), and that only the measures necessary to implement this program lie within the morally justifiable limits on the State's authority. Though primarily a political work, it spans most areas of practical philosophy-including ethical, social, and legal theory; and meta-ethics, moral psychology, and action theory. And though fundamentally a philosophical work, it incorporates research from a number of fields-including decision theory, economics, political science, and jurisprudence; primatology, neuroscience, and psychology; and history, anthropology, sociology, and ecology-and is sure to be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students. (shrink)

Authors such as Krishnasamy Selvan argue that “all human endeavors including engineering and science” have a single primary objective: “bettering humanity.” They favor discussing “the history of science and measurement uncertainty.” This paper respectfully disagrees and argues that “human endeavors including engineering and science” should not pursue “bettering humanity” as their primary objective. Instead these efforts should first pursue individual betterment. One cannot better humanity without knowing what that means. However, there is no one unified theory of what is to (...) the betterment of humanity. Simultaneously, there is no one field (neither science, nor engineering, nor philosophy) entitled to rule univocally. Perhaps if theorists tended their own gardens, the common weal would be tended thereby. (shrink)

In this article I respond to commentaries of my review of latent versus emergent variable models of emotion. I note that Ross Buck’s view of emotion as stated in his commentary largely endorses an emergent variable model. Drawing from Dynamical Systems Theory, Camras frames the emergent variable model as softly-assembled attractor states. This implies that emotions are “fuzzy sets” of indicators that vary in the degree to which they indicate an emergent emotional state. Calvo offers affective computing as a method (...) of evaluating indicators according to their incremental contribution to predicting human emotional responses. This innovative perspective holds a great deal of promise. Ultimately, I hope that this discussion has contributed to the field's understanding of emotion and emotional processes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche on Morality and the Affirmation of Life ed. by Daniel CameJames A. MollisonDaniel Came, ed., Nietzsche on Morality and the Affirmation of Life Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 220 pp. isbn: 978-0-198-72889-4. Hardback, $70.00Daniel Came's most recent edited collection features original essays from leading figures in the field. As most of its chapters are well-written and well-argued, it will interest Nietzsche scholars generally. It's difficult to (...) narrow the volume's intended audience much further than this, however. The source of this difficulty is not merely titular, though one wonders what aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy could not plausibly be yoked under the dual headings of "morality" and "life affirmation." Rather, the difficulty stems from a shortcoming of Nietzsche's. As Came puts the point in his introduction, "Nietzsche is greatly more forthcoming in his diagnosis of the life-denying nature of morality than he is about what should replace morality and in particular the type of life-affirming attitude which might then ensue" (7). The underdeveloped character of Nietzsche's positive [End Page 110] pronouncements about life affirmation leaves many questions unanswered, the most basic of which might be, "What exactly is it to affirm life?" (7). This collection admirably attempts to tackle such questions head-on by foregrounding Nietzsche's "practical-existential concern with the value of existence" (4)—even if, in resisting the temptation to delve ever deeper into the complexities of Nietzsche's critical enterprise, this approach risks leaving some specialist concerns aside.In light of the inchoate nature of Nietzsche's remedy for life denial, a volume taking life affirmation as its starting point can be forgiven if its contributions are somewhat scattered. Four chapters in this collection—authored by Gemes, Hassan, Huddleston, and Janaway—identify distinct obstacles to Nietzsche's project of life affirmation and explain how Nietzsche might overcome them. Three others—written by Came, Stern, and Kanterian—overlap in arguing that Nietzsche's notion of life affirmation is deeply confused at best and fatally flawed at worst. Two remaining chapters, by Reginster and Clark, are functionally close readings of GM. Below, I discuss the standout essays by Gemes, Came, Huddleston, and Stern, which straightforwardly interact with one another. I then comment on the volume's remaining essays.In his chapter, Gemes suggests that Nietzsche's concern with nihilism emerges after HH, whereas his earlier works express a Romantic preoccupation with cultural renewal. While Reginster analyzes nihilism as a cognitive state of disorientation or despair (The Affirmation of Life [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006]) and Pippin analyzes nihilism as a waning of erotic desire (Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010]), Gemes contends that these forms of nihilism are downstream from a more fundamental condition of affective nihilism that becomes fully manifest with the advent of Christian morality. (Kaitlyn Creasy's work on affective nihilism goes unmentioned.) Gemes then rightly observes that nihilism does not merely subtend overt expressions of life denial, as Nietzsche also "characterizes the need to ask reflective questions about the value of existence as a pathological symptom" of nihilism (29, emphasis added; see also GS P:2; TI "Socrates" 2; TI "Morality" 5). This presents a problem for Nietzsche's life-affirming ambitions. For, even if the ancient Greeks and GM's nobles can accomplish "naïve affirmation," which is "more an affective state than a consciously avowed cognitive belief" (28–29), it is unclear whether we late moderns can do the same. Moreover, Nietzsche's [End Page 111] challenge of affirming the eternal recurrence (GS 341) seems to require the sort of reflective, cognitive assessment of life that Nietzsche diagnoses as nihilistic. I would have liked for Gemes to have examined Nietzsche's indictment of judgments about life in more detail, as this seems crucial for delimiting Nietzsche's project of life affirmation. In any case, Gemes concludes by suggesting that Z might strive to incite "deep poetic inspiration […] among those who [can] hear rightly" (35), thereby helping these select few overcome affective nihilism. This might be Nietzsche's best strategy for facilitating life affirmation.Came is less confident... (shrink)

This article discusses the properties of a controllable, flexible, hybrid parallel computing architecture that potentially merges pattern recognition and arithmetic. Humans perform integer arithmetic in a fundamentally different way than logic-based computers. Even though the human approach to arithmetic is both slow and inaccurate it can have substantial advantages when useful approximations ( intuition ) are more valuable than high precision. Such a computational strategy may be particularly useful when computers based on nanocomponents become feasible because it offers a way (...) to make use of the potential power of these massively parallel systems. Because the system architecture is inspired by neuroscience and is applied to cognitive problems, occasional mention is made of experimental data from both fields when appropriate. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish EnlightenmentJames A. HarrisAlexander Broadie, editor. The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi + 366. Cloth, $65.00.A Cambridge Companion can be expected to attempt to do two different things at the same time: to provide a clear and concise introduction to the existing scholarly literature on all the principal topics discussed by the philosopher or (...) school of philosophy to which the Companion is devoted; and to advance the discussion in ways that will be of interest to those already working in the field. Alexander Broadie's Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment succeeds admirably at both tasks. Excellent introductions are provided to eighteenth-century Scottish writing on religion, the philosophy of mind and its engagement with scepticism, the history of the human species and the basis of human sociability, mathematics and natural science, moral philosophy, political philosophy and theories of justice, economic theory, legal theory, historiography, and aesthetics. In the process, familiar figures such as Hutcheson, Hume, Smith, Robertson and Reid are placed amid a huge range of writers no longer very often taught at the undergraduate level, and the result provides a rich resource for those who want to begin to broaden and deepen textbook accounts of what was achieved in Scotland during le Siècle des lumières. In fact, as a single-volume introduction to the wealth of ideas bestowed to posterity by the Scottish Enlightenment, this book has no serious competition. It is almost entirely free of the overblown rhetoric and blatant chauvinism characteristic of some recently published accounts of what the Scots contributed to the modern world.In addition, many of the chapters contain information and arguments that will stimulate and sometimes provoke those who need no introduction to the Scottish Enlightenment. M. A. Stewart, for example, reminds us how easy it is to exaggerate the damage Hume did to religious belief in his own time. His Scottish contemporaries did their best to minimize Hume's impact and to downplay his significance; and, Stewart shows, for the most part they succeeded. Aaron Garrett describes the various ways, some rather less-than-enlightened, in which historians used animals, women, and racial difference in order "to get at the original of man." The editor of the volume takes important steps toward placing Scottish writing on the arts and aesthetic judgment in the context of what he terms "the general [End Page 479] programme of improvement that characterised the Scottish Enlightenment from its earliest days" (295).In his Preface, Alexander Broadie sets out three rival large-scale interpretations of the Scottish Enlightenment considered as a whole: one that gives priority to political economy and the disciplines which form its intellectual foundation (moral philosophy, jurisprudence, and the historical study of social institutions); another which sees the cultivation of mathematics and the natural sciences as central to the process of enlightenment in Scotland; and a third which portrays the Scottish Enlightenment as being a cultural phenomenon as much as a purely intellectual one, using just enough of both the "political economic" interpretation and the "natural scientific" interpretations as is necessary to understand how the Scottish "literati" worked within and transformed the institutions that shaped the Scotland of their day: the law, the Kirk, and the universities. My judgment is that the reader of this volume will find himself leaning toward the first of these three approaches. This is partly because the chapters both on the disciplines on which political economy was built and on economics itself are the strongest in the book: Fania Oz-Salzberger on political theory, Knud Haakonnsen on natural jurisprudence, Andrew Skinner on economics, John Cairns on legal theory, and Christopher Berry on "sociality and socialisation". Ironically, perhaps, these chapters work so well because they build on a brilliant account of "The Contexts of the Scottish Enlightenment" provided by one of the chief exponents of the "natural scientific" approach, Roger Emerson.Broadie claims that it is "arguable that science is crucially important to the Scottish Enlightenment, perhaps more important than were moral philosophy, historiography and political economy" (4). It is to be regretted, then, that so little space... (shrink)

This study examines a moderated/mediated model of ethical leadership on follower job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment. We proposed that managers have the potential to be agents of virtue or vice within organizations. Specifically, through ethical leadership behavior we argued that managers can virtuously influence perceptions of ethical climate, which in turn will positively impact organizational members’ flourishing as measured by job satisfaction and affective commitment to the organization. We also hypothesized that perceptions of interactional justice would moderate the ethical (...) leadership-to-climate relationship. Our results indicate that ethical leadership has both a direct and indirect influence on follower job satisfaction and affective commitment. The indirect effect of ethical leadership involves shaping perceptions of ethical climate, which in turn, engender greater job satisfaction and affective organizational commitment. Furthermore, when interactional justice is perceived to be high, this strengthens the ethical leadership-to-climate relationship. (shrink)

Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data sets (...) them. However, such ‘minimum information’ MI checklists are usually developed independently by groups working within representatives of particular biologically- or technologically-delineated domains. Consequently, an overview of the full range of checklists can be difficult to establish without intensive searching, and even tracking thetheir individual evolution of single checklists may be a non-trivial exercise. Checklists are also inevitably partially redundant when measured one against another, and where they overlap is far from straightforward. Furthermore, conflicts in scope and arbitrary decisions on wording and sub-structuring make integration difficult. This presents inhibit their use in combination. Overall, these issues present significant difficulties for the users of checklists, especially those in areas such as systems biology, who routinely combine information from multiple biological domains and technology platforms. To address all of the above, we present MIBBI (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations); a web-based communal resource for such checklists, designed to act as a ‘one-stop shop’ for those exploring the range of extant checklist projects, and to foster collaborative, integrative development and ultimately promote gradual integration of checklists. (shrink)

Interoperability across data sets is a key challenge for quantitative histopathological imaging. There is a need for an ontology that can support effective merging of pathological image data with associated clinical and demographic data. To foster organized, cross-disciplinary, information-driven collaborations in the pathological imaging field, we propose to develop an ontology to represent imaging data and methods used in pathological imaging and analysis, and call it Quantitative Histopathological Imaging Ontology – QHIO. We apply QHIO to breast cancer hot-spot detection (...) with the goal of enhancing reliability of detection by promoting the sharing of data between image analysts. (shrink)

This copiously illustrated volume is the first systematic general work to do justice to the fruits of recent scholarship in the history of natural history. Public interest in this lively field has been stimulated by environmental concerns and through links with the histories of art, collecting and gardening. The centrality of the development of natural history for other branches of history - medical, colonial, gender, economic, ecological - is increasingly recognized. Twenty-four specially commissioned essays cover the period from the (...) sixteenth century, when the first institutions of natural history were created, to its late nineteenth-century transformation by practitioners of the new biological sciences. An introduction discusses novel approaches that have made this a major focus for research in cultural history. The essays, which include suggestions for further reading, offer a coherent and accessible overview of a fascinating subject. An epilogue highlights the relevance of this wide-ranging survey for current debates on museum practice, the display of ecological diversity and concerns about the environment. (shrink)

Software application ontologies have the potential to become the keystone in state-of-the-art information management techniques. It is expected that these ontologies will support the sort of reasoning power required to navigate large and complex terminologies correctly and efficiently. Yet, there is one problem in particular that continues to stand in our way. As these terminological structures increase in size and complexity, and the drive to integrate them inevitably swells, it is clear that the level of consistency required for such navigation (...) will become correspondingly difficult to maintain. While descriptive semantic representations are certainly a necessary component to any adequate ontology-based system, so long as ontology engineers rely solely on semantic information, without a sound ontological theory informing their modeling decisions, this goal will surely remain out of reach. In this paper we describe how Language and Computing nv (L&C), along with The Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Sciences (IFOMIS), are working towards developing and implementing just such a theory, combining the open software architecture of L&C’s LinkSuiteTM with the philosophical rigor of IFOMIS’s Basic Formal Ontology. In this way we aim to move beyond the more or less simple controlled vocabularies that have dominated the industry to date. (shrink)

Comparisons of Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Cage typically focus on the “later Wittgenstein” of the Philosophical Investigations. However, in this article I focus on the deep intellectual sympathy between the “early Wittgenstein” of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—with its evocative and controversial invocation of silence at the end, the famous proposition 7: “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent”—and Cage's equally evocative and controversial work on the same theme—his “silent piece,” 4′33″. This sympathy expresses itself not only in the common (...) aim of the two works (a mystical appreciation for the ordinary, everyday world that surrounds us) but also in a shared methodology for bringing about this aim (tracing the limits of language from within in order to transcend those very limits). In this sense, I argue that Cage's work gives a concrete, performative reality to Wittgenstein's early conception of language as well as the mystical revelation that lies behind it. (shrink)

In this invited editorial, Dr. Jim Field reflects on the recent meeting of the 12th annual Canadian Hermeneutic Institute, which hosted Professor Ted George as our visiting scholar. Three days of lecture and scholarly conversation left all of us in thoughtful and interpretive spaces.

The collaboration of Language and Computing nv (L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) is guided by the hypothesis that quality constraints on ontologies for software ap-plication purposes closely parallel the constraints salient to the design of sound philosophical theories. The extent of this parallel has been poorly appreciated in the informatics community, and it turns out that importing the benefits of phi-losophical insight and methodology into application domains yields a variety of improvements. L&C’s LinKBase® (...) is one of the world’s largest medical domain ontologies. Its current primary use pertains to natural language processing ap-plications, but it also supports intelligent navigation through a range of struc-tured medical and bioinformatics information resources, such as SNOMED-CT, Swiss-Prot, and the Gene Ontology (GO). In this report we discuss how and why philosophical methods improve both the internal coherence of LinKBase®, and its capacity to serve as a translation hub, improving the interoperability of the ontologies through which it navigates. (shrink)

Heart disease is the leading cause of death amongst adult Americans and has recently become a top killer worldwide. The direct costs of cardiovascular disease are projected to triple in the next 20 years, from $272.5 billion to $818.1 billion (Heidenreich et al. 2011). Although there has been a decreased incidence and prevalence of ischemic heart disease over the past several decades in the United States, heart failure remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality. In the United States, approximately (...) 500,000 to 700,000 new cases are identified each year (Lloyd-Jones et al. 2009). Heart failure is now the number one diagnosis leading to hospitalization. As such, it is an increasingly heavy economic burden on .. (shrink)

The original version of this paper was written during a year spent at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.A. and was prepared for presentation at the International Colloquium on Malthus, ‘Congrès International de Démographie Historique: Malthus Hier et Aujourd'hui', Paris, France, 27–29 May. 1980.

Compassion is a prosocial motivation that is critical to the development and survival of the human species. Cultivating compassion involves developing deep wisdom, insight, and understanding into the nature and causes of human suffering; and wisdom and commitment to take positive action to alleviate suffering. This perspective piece discusses how compassion relates to the context of modern technology, which has developed at a rapid pace in recent decades. While advances in digital technology build on humankind’s vast capacity to develop practical (...) tools that promise to enrich our lives and improve our social connections, in reality the effects are often far from benign. The motives underlying the development of many contemporary digital platforms seem rooted in competitiveness and capitalism; while modern social media and online platforms are having a profound and pervasive impact on the mental health and wellbeing of humans around the globe. Nonetheless, digital technology holds considerable potential to promote compassionate insight, wisdom, and prosocial behavior. We reflect on the current state of technology within human society and examine the notion of compassionate technologies; discuss how contemporary paradigm shifts such as the inclusive design movement may be harnessed to build tools and platforms that promote collective good and increase prosocial behavior; and highlight examples of initiatives that are harnessing modern technology to advance democracy, collective knowledge, and personal freedoms and agency. (shrink)

The central hypothesis of the collaboration between Language and Computing (L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) is that the methodology and conceptual rigor of a philosophically inspired formal ontology greatly benefits application ontologies. To this end r®, L&C’s ontology, which is designed to integrate and reason across various external databases simultaneously, has been submitted to the conceptual demands of IFOMIS’s Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). With this project we aim to move beyond the level of (...) controlled vocabularies to yield an ontology with the ability to support reasoning applications. Our general procedure has been the implementation of a meta-ontological definition space in which the definitions of all the concepts and relations in LinKBase® are standardized in a framework of first-order logic. In this paper we describe how this standardization has already led to an improvement in the LinKBase® structure that allows for a greater degree of internal coherence than ever before possible. We then show the use of this philosophical standardization for the purpose of mapping external databases to one another, using LinKBase® as translation hub, with a greater degree of success than possible hitherto. We demonstrate how this offers a genuine advance over other application ontologies that have not submitted themselves to the demands of philosophical scrutiny. LinKBase® is one of the world’s largest applications-oriented medical domain ontologies, and BFO is one of the world’s first philosophically driven reference ontologies. The collaboration of the two thus initiates a new phase in the quest to solve the so-called “Tower of Babel”. (shrink)

The integration of information resources in the life sciences is one of the most challenging problems facing bioinformatics today. We describe how Language and Computing nv, originally a developer of ontology-based natural language understanding systems for the healthcare domain, is developing a framework for the integration of structured data with unstructured information contained in natural language texts. L&C’s LinkSuite™ combines the flexibility of a modular software architecture with an ontology based on rigorous philosophical and logical principles that is designed to (...) comprehend the basic formal relationships that structure both reality and the ways humans perceive and communicate about reality. (shrink)

The framework for addiction offered by the target article can perhaps be simplified into fewer, more basic, vulnerabilities. covers a number of vulnerabilities, not just enhanced delay discounting. Real-world drug-use decisions involve both delay and probability discounting. The motivational salience of, and attentional bias for, drug cues may be related to a number of vulnerabilities. Interactions among vulnerabilities are of significance and complicate the application of this framework.

The central hypothesis of the collaboration between Language and Computing (L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) is that the methodology and conceptual rigor of a philosophically inspired formal ontology greatly benefits application ontologies.[1] To this end LinKBase®, L&C’s ontology, which is designed to integrate and reason across various external databases simultaneously, has been submitted to the conceptual demands of IFOMIS’s Basic Formal Ontology (BFO).[2] With this project we aim to move beyond the level of (...) controlled vocabularies to yield an ontology with the ability to support reasoning applications. Our general procedure has been the implementation of a meta-ontological definition space in which the definitions of all the concepts and relations in LinKBase® are standardized in a framework of first-order logic. In this paper we describe how this standardization has already led to an improvement in the LinKBase® structure that allows for a greater degree of internal coherence than ever before possible. We then show the use of this philosophical standardization for the purpose of mapping external databases to one another, using LinKBase® as translation hub, with a greater degree of success than possible hitherto. We demonstrate how this offers a genuine advance over other application ontologies that have not submitted themselves to the demands of philosophical scrutiny. (shrink)

When looking at a scene, observers feel that they see its entire structure in great detail and can immediately notice any changes in it. However, when brief blank fields are placed between alternating displays of an original and a modified scene, a striking failure of perception is induced: identification of changes becomes extremely difficult, even when changes are large and made repeatedly. Identification is much faster when a verbal cue is provided, showing that poor visibility is not the cause of (...) this difficulty. Identification is also faster for objects mentioned in brief verbal descriptions of the scene. These results support the idea that observers never form a complete, detailed representation of their surroundings. In addition, results also indicate that attention is required to perceive change, and that in the absence of localized motion signals it is guided on the basis of high-level interest. (shrink)

Over the past decade there has been a burgeoning of work in philosophy of religion that has drawn upon and been oriented by “continental” sources in philosophy—associated with figures such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, Gilles Deleuze, and others. This is a significant development and one that should be welcomed by the community of Christian philosophers. However, in this dialogue piece I take stock of the field of “continental philosophy of religion” and suggest that the (...) field is developing some un-healthy patterns and habits. The burden of the paper is to suggest a prescription for the future health of this important field by articulating six key practices that should characterize further scholarship in continental philosophy of religion. (shrink)

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a (...) compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

On behalf of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, I want to thank the Public Health Law Association and the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics for your leadership and the work that both you and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have done to grow this field. RWJF is pleased to co-sponsor this conference.The music that opened this talk is a clip from Warren Zevon, who encouraged us musically to “send lawyers, guns and money.” Zevon was a (...) singer/songwriter and social critic whose songs often took a jaundiced, somewhat cynical point of view. Even so, I know that I am probably stretching his meaning when I think of this song. I see “lawyers, guns and money” as his take on the major drivers of how change happens in a society. (shrink)

On behalf of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, I want to thank the Public Health Law Association and the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics for your leadership and the work that both you and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have done to grow this field. RWJF is pleased to co-sponsor this conference.The music that opened this talk is a clip from Warren Zevon, who encouraged us musically to “send lawyers, guns and money.” Zevon was a (...) singer/songwriter and social critic whose songs often took a jaundiced, somewhat cynical point of view. Even so, I know that I am probably stretching his meaning when I think of this song. I see “lawyers, guns and money” as his take on the major drivers of how change happens in a society. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 120-124 [Access article in PDF] Pictures & Tears. a History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, by James Elkins. London: Routledge, 2001, xiii + 272pp., $26. In "Tears, Idle Tears" from The Princess, Alfred, Lord Tennyson wonders at the tears forming in his eyes as he gazes out across the fields one fall day. The idyllic countryside, far (...) from providing solace, triggers within him a debilitating sadness, an all-encompassing melancholia, manifested by the tears originating from a deep despair; the autumn fields remind Tennyson's narrative persona of all the days that have passed by him.If Tennyson's eyes had fallen not on autumn fields but on a painting of them then the opening lines to "Tears, Idle Tears" might have served as the perfect epigraphic frame to James Elkins's important study of the tears we do and do not shed when looking at art.One of several recent books by the increasingly influential professor at Chicago's School of the Art Institute, Pictures & Tears probes that aspect of our consciousness that has the capacity [End Page 120] to move us to tears when looking at paintings.Shedding tears in front of paintings? Within contemporary culture it seems rather unlikely for someone to respond to a painting by fighting off, or giving in, to tears. Reactions to paintings in previous periods and societies were wholly different from ours, Elkins argues. Paintings not only incited the passions but were blamed for the onset of numerous, serious medical conditions. Though rare today, cases continue to be reported. The Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini even coined a term for it in 1989, "Stendhal syndrome," referring to the novelist whose viewing of art in Florence was accompanied by the onset of a form of nervous exhaustion.While the subtitle of Elkins's book suggests a history of crying in front of pictures, leading us to the nearly tearless present, and thus, presumably, to answers about why we no longer cry in front of paintings, A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings is somewhat misleading. In the truest sense Pictures & Tears is neither a history of crying in front of pictures nor individual histories of those who have. The book does not follow a linear historical narrative of the tears that pictures have evoked over the centuries. Rather, Elkins's chapters constitute a tableau, the accumulation of fragments, with alternating chapters exploring, first, a particular work of art and the tears it has evoked and, second, ruminations on why that might be the case.At the heart of Elkins's argument is a concern over why we no longer seem willing, or indeed able, to have emotional responses to paintings. Besides the occasional grand response to works of art, particularly those vested withsignificant religious meaning, few admit to intimate connections with paintings. Elkins wants to know why.To answer these questions, Elkins turned to colleagues as well as to people he had never met. His research for the book included letters to fellow scholars and peers, and open calls in newspapers and journals, requesting stories from anyone moved to tears on encountering a painting. He received more than four hundred responses, many of which are included in a substantial appendix. The responses themselves make for an intriguing read and from them Elkins builds a two-pronged argument: we now live in an age that is marked by "stoic intellectualism" (p. 163), yet we still have the capacity to feel an intimate connection to paintings. Art in recent years has demanded greater intellectual engagement, lessintimate involvement. There may be exhibitions that fuel fear, distrust, anger, or rage but these are alienating to the works themselves, although these feelings can certainly be as intense as the more intimate connection that Elkins equates with falling in love.What is it about viewing paintings, as opposed to film or theater, he asks, which prevents full emotional expression? Is it the accoutrements used to view gallery paintings — the exhibition catalogs... (shrink)

When brief blank fields are placed between alternating displays of an original and a modified scene, a striking failure of perception is induced: the changes become extremely difficult to notice, even when they are large, presented repeatedly, and the observer expects them to occur (Rensink, O'Regan, & Clark, 1997). To determine the mechanisms behind this induced "change blindness", four experiments examine its dependence on initial preview and on the nature of the interruptions used. Results support the proposal that representations at (...) the early stages of visual processing are highly volatile, and that focused attention is needed to stabilize them sufficiently to support the perception of change. (shrink)

Imagery is one of the new, exciting frontiers in cognitive therapy. From the outset of cognitive therapy, its founder Dr. Aaron T. Beck recognised the importance of imagery in the understanding and treatment of patient's problems. However, despite Beck's prescience, clinical research on imagery, and the integration of imagery interventions into clinical practice, developed slowly. It is only in the past 10 years that most writing and research on imagery in cognitive therapy has been conducted. The Oxford Guide to Imagery (...) in Cognitive Therapy is a landmark book, which will play an important role in the next phase of cognitive therapy's development. Clinicians and researchers are starting to recognise the centrality of imagery in the development, maintenance and treatment of psychological disorders - for example, in social phobia, agoraphobia, depression, PTSD, eating disorders, childhood trauma, and personality disorder. In the fields of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, researchers are identifying the key role that imagery plays in emotion, cognition and psychopathology.The Oxford Guide to Imagery in Cognitive Therapy has been written both for clinicians and researchers. For clinicians, it is a user-friendly, practical guide to imagery, which will enable therapists to understand imagery phenomenology, and to integrate imagery-based interventions into their cognitive therapy practice. For researchers, it provides a state-of-the-art summary of imagery research, and points the way to future studies. Written by three well-respected CBT researcher-clinicians, it is essential reading for all cognitive therapists, who have recognised the limitations of purely 'verbal' CBT techniques, and want to find new ways to work with clients with psychological disorders. Readership: CBT therapists. (shrink)

In this paper, the authors address the perceived recent trend of funding and publishing bodies that seem to have taken a regard of qualitative research as a subordinate to, or even a subset of, quantitative research. In this reflection, they pull on insights that Hans-Georg Gadamer offered around the history of the natural and human science bifurcation, ending with a plea that qualitative research needs to be received, appraised, judged, and promoted by different lenses and criteria of value.

Ecological research and conservation practice frequently raise difficult and varied ethical questions for scientific investigators and managers, including duties to public welfare, nonhuman individuals (i.e., animals and plants), populations, and ecosystems. The field of environmental ethics has contributed much to the understanding of general duties and values to nature, but it has not developed the resources to address the diverse and often unique practical concerns of ecological researchers and managers in the field, lab, and conservation facility. The emerging (...) field of “ecological ethics” is a practical or scientific ethics that offers a superior approach to the ethical dilemmas of the ecologist and conservation manager. Even though ecological ethics necessarily draws from the principles and commitments of mainstream environmental ethics, it is normatively pluralistic, including as well the frameworks of animal, research, and professional ethics. It is also methodologically pragmatic, focused on the practical problems of researchers and managers and informed by these problems in turn. The ecological ethics model offers environmental scientists and practitioners a useful analytical tool for identifying, clarifying, and harmonizing values and positions in challenging ecological research and management situations. Just as bioethics provides a critical intellectual and problem-solving service to the biomedical community, ecological ethics can help inform and improve ethical decision making in the ecology and conservation communities. (shrink)

Building on nearly eighty years of scientific work, The Handbook of Emotional Intelligence is the first definitive resource that brings together a stellar panel of academics, researchers, and practitioners, in the field. Sweeping in scope, the text presents information on the most important conceptual models, reviews and evaluates the most valid and reliable methods for assessing emotional intelligence, and offers specific guidelines for applying the principles of Emotional Intelligence in a variety of settings.

The fact that genes and environment contribute differentially to variation in human behaviors, traits and attitudes is central to the field of behavior genetics. Perceptions about these differential contributions may affect ideas about human agency. We surveyed two independent samples (N = 301 and N = 740) to assess beliefs about free will, determinism, political orientation, and the relative contribution of genes and environment to 21 human traits. We find that lay estimates of genetic influence on these traits cluster (...) into four distinct groups, which differentially predict beliefs about human agency, political orientation, and religiosity. Despite apparent ideological associations with these beliefs, the correspondence between mean lay estimates and published heritability estimates for the surveyed traits is large (r = .77). Belief in genetic determinism emerges as a modest predictor of accuracy in these lay estimates. Additionally, educated mothers with multiple children emerge as particularly accurate in their estimates of the genetic contribution to these traits. (shrink)