In April 2017, scientists and science sympathizers held marches in the United Kingdom as part of a coordinated international March for Science movement that was held in over 600 cities worldwide. This article reports from participant-observation studies of the marches that took place in London and Cardiff. Supplemented with data from 37 interviews from marchers at the London event, the article reports on an analysis of the placards, focusing on marchers’ concerns and the language and images through which they expressed (...) those concerns. How did the protesters articulate their concerns and objectives, and how were these articulations used to build a community? The placards did not represent a clear, focused, and unifying message; they instead illustrated disparate concerns ranging from human-induced climate change, Trump and “alternative facts,” and local UK specific political issues concerning the country’s exit from the European Union. Our analysis shows that placards gave a playful and whimsical character to the march, with slogans displaying significant amounts of humor, often formulated through insider jokes, scientific puns, or self-deprecating appropriation of negative stereotypes about scientists. We analyze the march through the social movement literature and as a collective identity-building exercise for an community of scientists and sympathizers with long-term aims of establishing a louder voice for scientists, and experts, in public discourse. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

This paper investigates how deans and directors at the top 50 global MBA programs (as rated by the "Financial Times" in their 2006 Global MBA rankings) respond to questions about the inclusion and coverage of the topics of ethics, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability at their respective institutions. This work purposely investigates each of the three topics separately. Our findings reveal that: (1) a majority of the schools require that one or more of these topics be covered in their MBA (...) curriculum and one-third of the schools require coverage of all three topics as part of the MBA curriculum, (2) there is a trend toward the inclusion of sustainability-related courses, (3) there is a higher percentage of student interest in these topics (as measured by the presence of a Net Impact club) in the top 10 schools, and (4) several schools are teaching these topics using experiential learning and immersion techniques. We note a fivefold increase in the number of stand-alone ethics courses since a 1988 investigation on ethics, and we include other findings about institutional support of centers or special programs; as well as a discussion of integration, teaching techniques, and notable practices in relation to all three topics. (shrink)

Over the past 50 years decision making research in team invasion sport has been dominated by three research perspectives,information processing,ecological dynamics, andnaturalistic decision making. Recently, attempts have been made to integrate perspectives, as conceptual similarities demonstrate the decision making process as an interaction between a players perception of game information and the individual and collective capability to act on it. Despite this, no common ground has been found regarding what connects perception and action during performance. The differences between perspectives rest (...) on the role of stored mental representations, that may, or may not facilitate the retrieval of appropriate responses in time pressured competitive environments. Additionally, in team invasion sports like rugby union, the time available to players to perceive, access memory and act, alters rapidly between specific game situations. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine theoretical differences and the mechanisms that underpin them, through the vehicle of rugby union. Sixteen semi-elite rugby union players took part in two post-game procedures to explore the following research objectives; (i) to consider how game situations influence players perception of information; (ii) to consider how game situations influence the application of cognitive mechanisms whilst making decisions; and (iii) to identify the influence of tactics and/or strategy on player decision making. Deductive content analysis and elementary units of meaning derived from self-confrontation elicitation interviews indicate that specific game situations such as; the lineout, scrum or open phases of play or the tackle situation in attack or defence all provide players with varying complexity of perceptual information, formed through game information and time available to make decisions. As time increased, players were more likely to engage with task-specific declarative knowledge-of the game, stored as mental representations. As time diminished, players tended to diagnose and update their knowledge-in the game in a rapid fashion. Occasionally, when players described having no time, they verbalised reacting on instinct through a direct connection between perception and action. From these findings, clear practical implications and directions for future research and dissemination are discussed. (shrink)

This paper presents an overview of the process of entanglement at the 25th International Philosophy of Nursing Conference (IPNC) at University of California at Irvine held on August 18, 2022. Representing collective work from the US, Canada, UK and Germany, our panel entitled ‘What can critical posthuman philosophies do for nursing?’ examined critical posthumanism and its operations and potential in nursing. Critical posthumanism offers an antifascist, feminist, material, affective, and ecologically entangled approach to nursing and healthcare. Rather than focusing on (...) the arguments of each of the three distinct but interrelated panel presentation pieces, this paper instead focuses on process and performance (per/formance) and performativity as relational, connected and situated, with connections to nursing philosophy. Building upon critical feminist and new materialist philosophies, we describe intra‐activity and performativity as ways to dehierarchise knowledge making practices within traditional academic conference spaces. Creating critical cartographies of thinking and being are actions of possibility for building more just and equitable futures for nursing, nurses, and those they accompany—including all humans, nonhumans, and more than human matter. (shrink)

Plant-based milk alternatives–or mylks–have surged in popularity over the past ten years. We consider the politics and consumer subjectivities fostered by mylks as part of the broader trend towards ‘plant-based’ food. We demonstrate how mylk companies inherit and strategically deploy positive framings of milk as wholesome and convenient, as well as negative framings of dairy as environmentally damaging and cruel, to position plant-based as the ‘better’ alternative. By navigating this affective landscape, brands attempt to make mylk as simultaneously palatable and (...) disruptive to the status quo. We examine the politics of mylks through the concept of palatable disruption, where people are encouraged to care about the environment, health, and animal welfare enough to adopt mylks but to ultimately remain consumers of a commodity food. By encouraging consumers to reach for “plant-based” as a way to cope with environmental catastrophe and a life out of balance, mylks promote a neoliberal ethic: they individualize systemic problems and further entrench market mechanisms as solutions, thereby reinforcing the political economy of industrial agriculture. In conclusion, we reflect on the limits of the current plant-based trend for transitioning to more just and sustainable food production and consumption. (shrink)

Grapheme-colour synaesthesia is a perceptual experience where graphemes, letters or words evoke a specific colour, which are experienced either as spatially coincident with the grapheme inducer (projector sub-type) or elsewhere, perhaps without a definite spatial location (associator sub-type). Here, we address the question of whether synaesthesia can be rapidly produced using a hypnotic colour suggestion to examine the possibility of ‘hypnotic synaesthesia’, i.e. subjectively experienced colour hallucinations similar to those experienced by projector synaesthetes. We assess the efficacy of this intervention (...) using an “embedded figures” test, in which participants are required to detect a shape (e.g., a square) composed of local graphemic elements. For grapheme-colour synaesthetes, better performance on the task has been linked to a higher proportion of graphemes perceived as coloured. We found no performance benefits on this test when using a hypnotic suggestion, as compared to a no-suggestion control condition. The same result was found when participants were separated according to the degree to which they were susceptible to the suggestion (number of coloured trials perceived). However, we found a relationship between accuracy and subjective reports of colour in those participants who reported a large proportion of coloured trials: trials in which the embedded figure was accurately recognised (relative to trials in which it was not) were associated with reports of more intense colours occupying a greater spatial extent. Collectively, this implies that hypnotic colour was only perceived after shape detection rather than aiding in shape detection via colour-based perceptual grouping. The results suggest that hypnotically induced colours are not directly comparable to synaesthetic ones. (shrink)

This volume is the first of a trilogy which investigates, from a broadly realist perspective, the place, and challenges, of the human in contemporary social orders. The authors, all members of the Centre for Social Ontology, ask what is specific about humanity's nature and worth, and what are their main challenges in contemporary societies? Examining the ways in which recent advances in technology threaten to blur and displace the boundaries constitutive of our shared humanity, Realist Responses to Post-Human Society: Ex (...) Machina explores the philosophical and ethical questions raised by these developments, and discusses the dangers posed by the combination of transhumanism with post-humanist social theories and antihumanist practices, institutions and ideologies. (shrink)

Increasing gender diversity in the boardroom has been promoted as a way to enhance corporate governance and risk management. This study empirically examines whether boards with more female directors play a role in reducing R&D risk. We first show that female directors help to reduce the positive relationship between R&D investment and future performance volatility. We then report that firms with more gender-diverse boards exhibit a lower adverse effect of R&D on the cost of debt. These results are robust to (...) endogeneity analysis, alternative measures of gender diversity and risky investment, and other sensitivity tests. Overall, our results suggest that female directors improve board effectiveness in risk management with respect to R&D investment. (shrink)

Religion and faith are often central aspects of an individual’s self-concept, and yet they are typically avoided in the workplace. The current study seeks to replicate the findings about the role of religious beliefs and practices in shaping an employee’s reactions to stress/burnout and job attitudes. Second, we extend the literature on faith in the workplace by investigating possible relationships between religious beliefs and practices and citizenship behaviors at work. Third, we attempted to study how one’s perceived freedom to express (...) his/her religious identity at work was related to workplace attitudes and behaviors. Mixed results suggest that religiosity can be related to stress and burnout, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and Organizational Citizenship Behavior. More research is needed to further qualify the results and explore the effects of one’s perceived freedom to express his/her religious identity in the workplace. (shrink)

This paper examines the association between corporate philanthropy and tunneling by controlling shareholders. Using a unique dataset from China, the paper finds evidence that firms donating more are less likely to tunnel. The negative association between philanthropy and tunneling is stronger when firms are faced with more severe agency conflicts, as indicated by lower largest shareholding, fewer growth opportunities, lower state ownership, and weaker product market competition. The results suggest that companies engaging in philanthropy have incentives to enhance their reputations (...) and improve their relationships with stakeholders. (shrink)

Abstract:This paper contends that rationality is more properly evaluated as a property of an organization’s relationships with its stakeholders than of the organization itself. We predicate our approach on the observation that stakeholders can hold goals quite distinct from those of owners and top managers, and these too can be rationally pursued. We build upon stakeholder theory and Weber’s classic distinction betweenwertrationalitatandzweckrationalitat, adding to them the “new institutionalist” concept of the organization field (1983, 1991). Stakeholders employ a variety of direct (...) and indirect mechanisms to rationalize relations with the firm. We discuss four: internal subunits, legislated stakeholder participation, legislated access to information, and direct stakeholder activism. These developments are blurring the distinction between the environment and the organization by importing the values and goals of external stakeholders into the internal organization. They are also precipitating a more structured set of relationships among the actors who comprise the field. To the extent that thezweckrationalitatvalues of managers and owners as well as thewertrationalitatconcerns of stakeholders are met, the firm is more rational. (shrink)

The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century is a wide-ranging collection of essays that explores philosophy, biography, and texts about and by disabled people living in the eighteenth century. The book, which introduces and affirms the notion that disability studies predates most United States and United Kingdom findings by more than a hundred years, will be of interest to philosophers, historians, sociologists, and literary scholars.

Speech unfolds over time, and the cues for even a single phoneme are rarely available simultaneously. Consequently, to recognize a single phoneme, listeners must integrate material over several hundred milliseconds. Prior work contrasts two accounts: (a) a memory buffer account in which listeners accumulate auditory information in memory and only access higher level representations (i.e., lexical representations) when sufficient information has arrived; and (b) an immediate integration scheme in which lexical representations can be partially activated on the basis of early (...) cues and then updated when more information arises. These studies have uniformly shown evidence for immediate integration for a variety of phonetic distinctions. We attempted to extend this to fricatives, a class of speech sounds which requires not only temporal integration of asynchronous cues (the frication, followed by the formant transitions 150–350 ms later), but also integration across different frequency bands and compensation for contextual factors like coarticulation. Eye movements in the visual world paradigm showed clear evidence for a memory buffer. Results were replicated in five experiments, ruling out methodological factors and tying the release of the buffer to the onset of the vowel. These findings support a general auditory account for speech by suggesting that the acoustic nature of particular speech sounds may have large effects on how they are processed. It also has major implications for theories of auditory and speech perception by raising the possibility of an encapsulated memory buffer in early auditory processing. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) made relevant contributions to deductive logic, but he was primarily interested in the logic of science, and more especially in what he called 'abduction' (as opposed to deduction and induction), which is the process whereby hypotheses are generated in order to explain the surprising facts. Indeed, Peirce considered abduction to be at the heart not only of scientific research, but of all ordinary human activities. Nevertheless, in spite of Peirce's work and writings in the field of (...) methodology of research, scarce attention has been paid to the logic of discovery over the last hundred years, despite an impressive development not only of scientific research but also of logic. -/- Having this in mind, the exposition is divided into five parts: 1) a brief presentation of Peirce, focusing on his work as a professional scientist; 2) an exposition of the classification of inferences by the young Peirce: deduction, induction and hypothesis; 3) a sketch of the notion of abduction in the mature Peirce; 4) an exposition of the logic of surprise; and finally, by way of conclusion, 5) a discussion of this peculiar ability of guessing understood as a rational instinct. -/- . (shrink)

Randomized controlled trial trial designs exist on an explanatory-pragmatic spectrum, depending on the degree to which a study aims to address a question of efficacy or effectiveness. As conceptualized by Schwartz and Lellouch in 1967, an explanatory approach to trial design emphasizes hypothesis testing about the mechanisms of action of treatments under ideal conditions, whereas a pragmatic approach emphasizes testing effectiveness of two or more available treatments in real-world conditions. Interest in, and the number of, pragmatic trials has grown substantially (...) in recent years, with increased recognition by funders and stakeholders worldwide of the need for credible evidence to inform clinical decision-making. This increase has been accompanied by the onset of learning healthcare systems, as well as an increasing focus on patient-oriented research. However, pragmatic trials have ethical challenges that have not yet been identified or adequately characterized. The present study aims to explore the views of key stakeholders with respect to ethical issues raised by the design and conduct of pragmatic trials. It is embedded within a large, four-year project that seeks to develop guidance for the ethical design and conduct of pragmatic trials. As a first step, this study will address important gaps in the current empirical literature with respect to identifying a comprehensive range of ethical issues arising from the design and conduct of pragmatic trials. By opening up a broad range of topics for consideration within our parallel ethical analysis, we will extend the current debate, which has largely emphasized issues of consent, to the range of ethical considerations that may flow from specific design choices. Semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, across multiple jurisdictions, identified based on their known experience and/or expertise with pragmatic trials. We expect that the study outputs will be of interest to a wide range of knowledge users including trialists, ethicists, research ethics committees, journal editors, regulators, healthcare policymakers, research funders and patient groups. All publications will adhere to the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications. (shrink)

In his introduction to part 2 of the Common Knowledge symposium on xenophilia, the journal's editor tours the reader through two private apartments and through two public art collections in an effort to establish that aesthetically coherent mixtures of apparently immiscible objects from widely divergent cultures are possible and also morally glamorous. Xenophobia at its least reprehensible, he argues, is a fear of ecumenism and its consequences, as well as a fear of one's own conversion — of “turning Turk.” Xenophilia (...) at its most admirable is a pursuit of coherent mixtures where others cannot imagine their possibility. Bits lifted from reputedly pure and organic wholes may be transformed by means of overlap and mediated juxtaposition into a novel milieu that has a wholeness, authenticity, and charisma of its own. Such coherence depends on minds that are capable of loving what does not satisfy their narcissism and that can sense in the products of their own culture elements or signs of enervation, anomie, lack, derangement, waywardness, rigidity, preciousness, or warping. The author concludes that xenophilia neither signals nor facilitates the adulteration that xenophobes so fear. (shrink)

According to Charles S. Peirce and to Mariano Artigas, science is the collective and cooperative activity of all those whose lives are animated by the desire to discover the truth. The particular sciences are branches of a common tree. The unity of science is not achieved by the reduction of the special sciences to more basic ones: the new name for the unity of the sciences is cross-disciplinarity. This is not a union of the sciences themselves, but rather the unity (...) and dialogue of scientists, the real inquirers into the truth. In the light of Peirce’s and Artigas’s teachings, we can see that philosophers are in just the right place to call for this unity of sciences. This call should not be seen as promoting a return to the old scientism, but seeks a deep dialogue between the particular sciences and philosophy in order to deal with the presuppositions of the scientific enterprise. The key to the cross-disciplinarity of knowledge is not revolution, but rather shared efforts in a unique mixture of continuity and fallibilism, of affection and reason, of the attempt to understand others’ disciplines as well as our own. (shrink)

BackgroundJunior medical doctors have a key role in discussions and decisions about treatment and end-of-life care for people with dementia in hospital. Little is known about junior doctors’ decision-making processes when treating people with dementia who have advance care directives, or the factors that influence their decisions. To describe among junior doctors in relation to two hypothetical vignettes involving patients with dementia: their legal compliance and decision-making process related to treatment decisions; the factors influencing their clinical decision-making; and the factors (...) associated with accurate responses to one hypothetical vignette. MethodA cross-sectional survey of junior doctors, including trainees, interns, registrars and residents, on clinical rotation in five public hospitals located in one Australian state. The anonymous, investigator-developed survey was conducted between August 2018 and June 2019. Two hypothetical vignettes describing patients with dementia presenting to hospital with an ACD and either: bacterial pneumonia; or suspected stroke were presented in the survey. Participants were asked to indicate whether they would commence treatment, given the ACD instructions described in each vignette.ResultsOverall, 116 junior doctors responded. In Vignette 1, 58% of respondents selected the legally compliant option. Participants who chose the legally compliant option perceived ‘following patient wishes’ and ‘legal requirements to follow ACDs’ as equally important reasons for complying with the ACD. The most common reason for not selecting the legally compliant option in Vignette 1 was the ‘ACD is relevant in my decision-making process, but other factors are more relevant’. In Vignette 2, 72% of respondents indicated they would commence treatment and 18% selected they would not commence treatment.. Similar reasons influenced participant decision-making in Vignette 2, a less legally certain scenario.ConclusionsThere are critical gaps in junior doctors’ compliance with the law as it relates to the implementation of ACDs. Despite there being differences in relation to the legal answer and its certainty, clinical and ethical factors guided decision-making over and above the law in both vignettes. More education and training to guide junior doctors’ clinical decision-making and ensure compliance with the law is required. (shrink)

Relationships of physical resemblance to personality similarity and social affiliation have generated considerable discussion among behavioral science researchers. A “twin-like” experimental design explores associations among resemblance in appearance, the Big Five personality traits, self-esteem, and social attraction within an evolutionary framework. The Personality for Professionals Inventory, NEO/NEO-FFI-3, Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, and a Social Relationship Survey were variously completed by 45 U-LA pairs, identified from the “I’m Not a Look-Alike” project, Mentorn Media, and personal referrals. The mean U-LA intraclass correlations were (...) negligible for all Big Five personality traits on the PfPI and NEO/NEO-FFI-3. In contrast, mean ri values of.53 and.15 for monozygotic and dizygotic reared-apart twins, respectively, have been reported for these personality measures. The U-LA self-esteem correlation was also below the correlations reported for MZ and DZ reared-together twins. Finally, far fewer U-LAs expressed close social relationships than MZA and DZA twins. The present study extends earlier findings indicating that appearance is not meaningfully related to personality similarity and social relatedness. The criticism that MZ twins are alike in personality because their matched looks invite similar treatment by others is refuted. A more judicious interpretation is reactive genotype-environment correlation, namely that MZ twins’ similar personalities evoke similar reactions from others. MZ twins’ close social relations most likely derive from their perceptions of genetically based within-pair similarities that are lacking in U-LAs. (shrink)

This paper argues that analyses of the ways in which Big Data has been enacted in other academic disciplines can provide us with concepts that will help understand the application of Big Data to social questions. We use examples drawn from our Science and Technology Studies analyses of -omic biology and high energy physics to demonstrate the utility of three theoretical concepts: primary and secondary inscriptions, crafted and found data, and the locus of legitimate interpretation. These help us to show (...) how the histories, organisational forms, and power dynamics of a field lead to different enactments of big data. The paper suggests that these concepts can be used to help us to understand the ways in which Big Data is being enacted in the domain of the social sciences, and to outline in general terms the ways in which this enactment might be different to that which we have observed in the ‘hard’ sciences. We contend that the locus of legitimate interpretation of Big Data biology and physics is tightly delineated, found within the disciplinary institutions and cultures of these disciplines. We suggest that when using Big Data to make knowledge claims about ‘the social’ the locus of legitimate interpretation is more diffuse, with knowledge claims that are treated as being credible made from other disciplines, or even by those outside academia entirely. (shrink)

Our team at the Centre for Clinical Ethics has long been engaged in internal discussion about the purpose and value of ethics debriefs and their purported role in reducing moral distress (Morley an...

Amongst intellectuals and activists, neoliberalism has become a potent signifier for the kind of free-market thinking that has dominated politics for the past three decades. Forever associated with the conviction politics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the free-market project has since become synonymous with the 'Washington consensus' on international development policy and the phenomenon of corporate globalization, where it has come to mean privatization, deregulation, and the opening up of new markets. But beyond its utility as a protest slogan (...) or buzzword as shorthand for the political-economic Zeitgeist, what do we know about where neoliberalism came from and how it spread? Who are the neoliberals, and why do they studiously avoid the label? Constructions of Neoliberal Reason presents a radical critique of the free-market project, from its origins in the first half of the 20th Century through to the recent global economic crisis, from the utopian dreams of Friedrich von Hayek through the dogmatic theories of the Chicago School to the hope and hubris of Obamanomics. The book traces how neoliberalism went from crank science to common sense in the period between the Great Depression and the age of Obama. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason dramatizes the rise of neoliberalism and its uneven spread as an intellectual, political, and cultural project, combining genealogical analysis with situated case studies of formative moments throughout the world, like New York City's bankruptcy, Hurricane Katrina, and the Wall Street crisis of 2008. The book names and tracks some of neoliberalism's key protagonists, as well as some of the less visible bit-part players. It explores how this adaptive regime of market rule was produced and reproduced, its logics and limits, its faults and its fate. (shrink)

Focal brain metabolic effects detected by proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) represent prospective indices of clinical status and guides to treatment design. Sampling bilateral pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC), anterior middle cingulate cortex (aMCC), and thalamus in 40 adult patients and 16 healthy controls, we examined relationships of the neurometabolites glutamate+glutamine (Glx), creatine+phosphocreatine (Cr), and choline-compounds (Cho) with OCD diagnosis and multiple symptom types. The latter included OC core symptoms (Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale - YBOCS), depressive symptoms (...) (Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale - MADRS), and general functioning (Global Assessment Scale - GAS). pACC Glx was 9.7% higher in patients than controls. Within patients, Cr and Cho correlated negatively with YBOCS and MADRS, while Cr correlated positively with the GAS. In aMCC, Cr and Cho correlated negatively with MADRS, while Cr in thalamus correlated positively with GAS. These findings present moderate support for glutamatergic and cingulocentric perspectives on OCD. Based on our prior metabolic model of OCD, we offer one possible interpretation of these group and correlational effects as consequences of a corticothalamic state of elevated glutamatergic receptor activity alongside below-normal glutamatergic transporter activity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How Augustinian Is Aquinas's Basic Account of Free Decision?Jamie Anne SpieringIntroductionQuestions about Augustine's influence on Thomas Aquinas are always interesting. In the previous century, leading Thomists such as Marie Dominic Chenu, Jean-Pierre Torrell, and Étienne Gilson wrote about the influence of one great master on the other. However, no one thinks the investigation is complete: the contributions of the new century have begun and are expected to continue.1 (...) In this article, I would like to consider how Augustine influenced Aquinas's account of something known to both authors as liberum arbitrium: free choice, or free decision.2 When we speak of grace and [End Page 435] human freedom, Aquinas's debt to Augustine and the extent of his fidelity to the master have been frequently explored.3 The same is true with regard to the fairly advanced question of the relation between human freedom and divine foreknowledge.4 But in this article I would like to consider Thomas's treatment of what we might call the basic questions surrounding man's ability to choose freely—questions about its essence and its existence. What is this liberum arbitrium, which Augustine repeatedly calls "a gift of nature"? How should we understand its activity? How should we understand its origin? Thomas Aquinas deals with liberum arbitrium as a power of the soul in question 83 of Summa theologiae [ST] I, in question 24 of De veritate, and in chapter 48 of Summa contra gentiles [SCG] II. These texts are not about the role of grace or the causality of God—though they prepare for the discussion—but simply about the powers of an intellectual nature. How Augustinian is Aquinas's account in these texts?5 [End Page 436] I will try to explore the question with reasonable thoroughness in this paper.6It will surprise no one to hear that my answer to "was Aquinas an Augustinian in his basic treatment of free decision?" is "in a way, no, and in a way, yes." It is both surprising and notable how significantly Aquinas departs from the Augustinian path. The first part of this paper will discuss three major ways in which Aquinas's account of liberum arbitrium breaks openly (by medieval standards) from the type of careful loyalty we see in earlier authors. In the second part of the paper, I will argue that Aquinas's account follows Augustine in distinctive ways: instead of prioritizing Augustine's context and preferred evidence for free decision, Aquinas does more to locate free decision within the quest for happiness which provided the ultimate pattern for Augustine's thought. He is an Augustinian, but of a very different kind.Aquinas's Treatment of Liberum Arbitrium Represents a Significant Break with the Augustinian TraditionIt simply was not Thomas's practice to write statements such as: "I am going to treat this topic in a way different from that of Augustine, and I plan to make significant improvements." How, then, can we understand whether, and to what extent, he made a break with Augustine's ideas? Direct comparison of the authors' works is the obvious strategy, but such comparison is complicated by our ignorance of whether Aquinas had actually seen the work in question or was only familiar with quotations from it. So I will employ an additional strategy to reveal Aquinas's breaks with Augustine: I will compare Thomas's work to that of Peter Lombard and Anselm of Canterbury. We know Aquinas had read Peter's work thoroughly, because [End Page 437] he wrote a commentary on it, and citations in De veritate reveal that Thomas knew at least the highlights of Anselm's work on free decision. Both Peter and Anselm are faithful to many aspects of Augustine's treatment: they follow him in the way they contextualize the topic, and they are careful to use Augustinian language in defining it. Aquinas does not. He radically shifts the context for the liberum arbitrium discussion and rejects definitions that use Augustine's formulations. He uses a boldly Aristotelian framework to replace a number of elements in Augustine's treatment. Finally, unlike Augustine, Peter, or Anselm, he asks about the... (shrink)

In this reply, we provide an analysis of Alter et al. response to our earlier paper. In that paper, we reported difficulty in replicating Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, and Eyre’s main finding, namely that a sense of disfluency produced by making stimuli difficult to perceive, increased accuracy on a variety of reasoning tasks. Alter, Oppenheimer, and Epley argue that we misunderstood the meaning of accuracy on these tasks, a claim that we reject. We argue and provide evidence that the tasks were (...) not too difficult for our populations and point out that in many cases performance on our tasks was well above chance or on a par with Alter et al.’s participants. Finally, we reiterate our claim that the distinction between answer fluency and perceptual fluency is genuine, and argue that Thompson et al. provided evidence that these are distinct factors that have different downstream effects on cognitive processes. (shrink)

The notion of Socratic Note Taking is introduced to enhance students’ learning from assigned readings. SNT features students asking questions and answering their own questions while doing the readings. To test the effectiveness of SNT, half the students from two sections of a philosophy course were assigned SNT on alternating weeks. Quizzes each week alternated between the two classes as either high or low stakes in a counterbalanced format. The design was a 2 x 2 x 2 within-participants factorial. On (...) ten-point quizzes, SNT made an average difference of 1.22 points. Furthermore, the results indicate that SNT is particularly effective with weaker students, e.g., we found a nearly three-point increase on ten-point quizzes for the weakest students. (shrink)