This is the second volume of an "essay in existential philosophy." The first, published in 1977, was intended to "do justice to certain experiential givens of immediate experience" which, once subjected to "severe" testing, could be established as "scientific hypotheses at the level of an existential critique of knowledge". The second volume now means to provide "an ensemble of ideal base intuitions, expressible as a 'system', of which each constitutes the concrete taking of a position before a certain state of (...) things in the existential domain". Its method is to work from descriptions of "the existent in the domain of action" in order to find "kernels of convergence, centers of autonomy, that is structures," and so to be able to ask, finally, about the ground of these in a transcendent act of being. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume, Tillotson, and Dialogue XIIJeff JordanJeff JordanUniversity of DelawareFootnotes1. 'Natural religion' in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries denoted knowledge of the divine which could be had via reason or instinct, independent of any purported special revelation.2. Of the two best works on Hume's philosophy of religion, J. C. A. Gaskin, Hume's Philosophy of Religion (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, 1988); and K. Yandell, Hume's "Inexplicable Mystery": His Views on Religion (...) (Philadelphia, 1990), only the first examines Hume's critique of the argument from prudence at all (see Hume's Philosophy of Religion, 194-203); but Gaskin's treatment of Hume's critique leaves untouched several important elements of the critique.3. B. Pascal, Pensées, ed. L. Lafuma, trans. J. Warrington (1670; reprint, London, 1960), 92-96.4. On Locke, see Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), bk. 2, chap. 21. On Leibniz, see Die Philosophischen Schriften, 3:621. On Craig, see Theologiae Christianae Principia Mathematica (1699), chap. 6. On Paley, see A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1795), pt. 3, chap. 8.5. Tillotson, "The Wisdom of Being Religious," Sermon 1 in Works of Tillotson (London, 1820), 1:317-89 (hereafter cited as W).6. I do not mean to suggest that Hume was aware only of the sermon "The Wisdom of Being Religious," but that Hume was aware of Tillotson's claims and arguments as found in several of his sermons. "The Wisdom of Being Religious" is important because (i) it is explicitly mentioned by Hume in his A Letter From A Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh (1745; reprint, Edinburgh, 1967), 23, so we know that Hume had read this sermon; (ii) it was one of the best known of Tillotson's sermons; and (iii) it contains all of the elements of Tillotson's argument from prudence.7. T. Birch, "Life of the Author," in Works of Tillotson, 1:xix-xx. See also L. G. Locke, Tillotson (Copenhagen, 1954).8. Tillotson may have been aware of the Port Royal Logic version of the wager through Locke with whom Tillotson was in correspondence. See Tillotson, 83.9. Tillotson's case for (1) is treated extensively in his sermon, "The Advantage of Religion to Societies," Sermon 3 in Works of Tillotson, 1:409-23.10. In the passage quoted (W 361-62), Tillotson claims that the atheist will naturally dread a superior being who can defeat one's plans and judge one's actions.11. See also "The Efficacy, Usefulness, and Reasonableness Of Divine Faith," Sermon 223 in Works of Tillotson, 9:258-79. The idea of a grand lie is first found in Plato; see Republic 3:389, 414, 5:459.12. "Pascalian Wagering," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 16, no. 3 (1986): 437-54.13. Though Tillotson mentions "odds" and "hazards," he does not incorporate probability values in his version of the wager. His wager is a decision under uncertainty and not a decision under risk: he does not, that is, calculate the expected utility of theistic belief. Pascal was the first to formulate the wager as a decision under risk where the probability-weighted averages of the utility values (the expected utility) determine the right choice.14. Of course, these principles were not stated explicitly until much later. See Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (London, 1975).15. For an example of the many-gods objection, see M. Martin, Atheism: A Philosophical Justification (Philadelphia, 1990), 232-34. For a response to the many-gods objection see my "Pascal's Wager and the Many-Gods Objection," International Philosophical Quarterly 31, no. 3 (1991): 309-17.16. See David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. N. Kemp Smith (1778; reprint, Indianapolis, 1947), 214, 218 (hereafter cited as "D").17. It should be noted that Philo's first point is interrupted by the second and is not completed until after the second is completed.18. I will assume that Philo speaks for Hume in this exchange with Cleanthes (D 219-27). Of the three points asserted by Philo in this exchange all three are asserted elsewhere by Hume. On the first point, see The Natural History of Religion (1757), secs. 9 and... (shrink)

This broad and insightful book presents current scholarship in important subfields of philosophy of science and addresses an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary readership. It groups carefully selected contributions into the four fields of I) philosophy of physics, II) philosophy of life sciences, III) philosophy of social sciences and values in science, and IV) philosophy of mathematics and formal modeling. Readers will discover research papers by Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Keizo Matsubara, Kian Salimkhani, Andrea Reichenberger, Anne Sophie Meincke, Javier Suárez, Roger Deulofeu, Ludger Jansen, (...) Peter Hucklenbroich, Martin Carrier, Elizaveta Kostrova, Lara Huber, Jens Harbecke, Antonio Piccolomini d'Aragona and Axel Gelfert. This collection fosters dialogue between philosophers of science working in different subfields, and brings readers the finest and latest work across the breadth of the field,illustrating that contemporary philosophy of science has successfully broadened its scope of reflection. It will interest and inspire a wide audience of philosophers as well as scholars of the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. The volume shares selected contributions from the prestigious second triennial conference of the German Society for Philosophy of Science/ Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsphilosophie (GWP.2016, March 8, 2016 - March 11, 2016). (shrink)

The recent revival of scholarly interest in Suetonius provides a good occasion to emend a long-standing crux in Joannes Lydus' description of Suetonius' dedication of his Vitae Caesarum to his friend the praetorian prefect Septicius Clarus. The codex unicus Caseolinus has Τράγκυλλος τοίνυν τος τν Καισάων βίους ν γράμμασιν † ποτίνων † Σεπτικί, ς ν παρχος τν πραιτωριανν σπειρν πì ατο. The conjectures ποτείνων by J. D. Fuss and ποτείνων by I. Bekker do little to improve the sense, and although (...) W. Kroll's προτείνων gives the meaning required by the context , προ- would not easily have been misread as πο-. For ποτίνων read νατείνων. For parallels compare BGU ii , 613.3–4 'Ανέτινα βιβλ[ίδι]α τλαμπροτάτ [γεμόνι] in a papyrus from the reign of Antoninus Pius cited by LSJ, and several other passages, most of which I owe to the supplement to Preisigke and Kiessling's Wörterbuch der griechischen Papyrusurkunden and to Dr Francisco R. Adrados of the Diccionario Griego-Español: Sammelbuch x , 10527.5–7 ['Ανέτε]ινά σοι, κ[ύριε,]…ναφόρ[ιον… of a.d. 152–3, P. Fouad iii , 26.5–10 , 8252.5–10) Ο νέτινάσυ τ κυρί βιβλιδίου…ντίγραφον πέταξα of a.d. 157–9, P. Oslo. iii , 80.21 ο νέτιναν βιβλιδί[ου…written sometime after March 7, a.d. 161, Sammelbuch iv 7472.3 'Ανέτεινά [σοι, κύριε πίτροπε, βιβλείδιον of a.d. 164, Sammelbuch vi.3 9339.24–7 13.5–7) ο νετείναμεν τ [κρατίσ τρχιερε O]λπί Σερηνιαν βιβλιδίου…[…] ντίγραφον πετάξαμεν from a.d. 178 or a little later, P. Mich. xii 616.13–14 τ δίκαιά μου βιβλειδί νγράψασ νέτεινα Νεμεσιαν πωσ τα[]τα διαπέμψηται[τ ]πιτρόπ from ca. a.d. 182, P. Cornell 14.2–4 ο νέτει[να τ κρατίστ πιστρ]ατηγ Κλαυδί [Ξενοφντι βιβλδίο]υ from a.d. 180–92, Wilcken, Chrestomathie 461.3–5 О[ νέ]τεινα τ λαμπροτάτ [γεμόνΚ]υίντω[ι] Μαικίωι λαιτίωι βιβλιδίου…ντίγραφον [ποτάξασ] from the beginning of the third century, and Sammelbuch v , 8246.3–4 α συνηγερούμεναι λιβέλλον νέτιναν π τν παρχον ξουσίαν from a.d. 340. (shrink)

The recent revival of scholarly interest in Suetonius provides a good occasion to emend a long-standing crux in Joannes Lydus' description of Suetonius' dedication of his Vitae Caesarum to his friend the praetorian prefect Septicius Clarus. The codex unicus Caseolinus has Τράγκυλλος τοίνυν τος τν Καισάων βίους ν γράμμασιν † ποτίνων † Σεπτικί, ς ν παρχος τν πραιτωριανν σπειρν πì ατο. The conjectures ποτείνων by J. D. Fuss and ποτείνων by I. Bekker do little to improve the sense, and although (...) W. Kroll's προτείνων gives the meaning required by the context, προ- would not easily have been misread as πο-. For ποτίνων read νατείνων. For parallels compare BGU ii, 613.3–4 'Ανέτινα βιβλ[ίδι]α τλαμπροτάτ [γεμόνι] in a papyrus from the reign of Antoninus Pius cited by LSJ, and several other passages, most of which I owe to the supplement to Preisigke and Kiessling's Wörterbuch der griechischen Papyrusurkunden and to Dr Francisco R. Adrados of the Diccionario Griego-Español: Sammelbuch x, 10527.5–7 ['Ανέτε]ινά σοι, κ[ύριε,]…ναφόρ[ιον… of a.d. 152–3, P. Fouad iii, 26.5–10, 8252.5–10) Ο νέτινάσυ τ κυρί βιβλιδίου…ντίγραφον πέταξα of a.d. 157–9, P. Oslo. iii, 80.21 ο νέτιναν βιβλιδί[ου…written sometime after March 7, a.d. 161, Sammelbuch iv 7472.3 'Ανέτεινά [σοι, κύριε πίτροπε, βιβλείδιον of a.d. 164, Sammelbuch vi.3 9339.24–7 13.5–7) ο νετείναμεν τ [κρατίσ τρχιερε O]λπί Σερηνιαν βιβλιδίου…[…] ντίγραφον πετάξαμεν from a.d. 178 or a little later, P. Mich. xii 616.13–14 τ δίκαιά μου βιβλειδί νγράψασ νέτεινα Νεμεσιαν πωσ τα[]τα διαπέμψηται[τ ]πιτρόπ from ca. a.d. 182, P. Cornell 14.2–4 ο νέτει[να τ κρατίστ πιστρ]ατηγ Κλαυδί [Ξενοφντι βιβλδίο]υ from a.d. 180–92, Wilcken, Chrestomathie 461.3–5 О[ νέ]τεινα τ λαμπροτάτ [γεμόνΚ]υίντω[ι] Μαικίωι λαιτίωι βιβλιδίου…ντίγραφον [ποτάξασ] from the beginning of the third century, and Sammelbuch v, 8246.3–4 α συνηγερούμεναι λιβέλλον νέτιναν π τν παρχον ξουσίαν from a.d. 340. (shrink)

Through 1886 to 1889 understanding of the mechanism of telephone transmission was transformed from an electrostatic and traditional view to an electrodynamic one conforming with Maxwell's scheme. Observed at the level of commercial application this painful adjustment occurred via a sequence of controversies connected with self-induction—on techniques of telephony, on electrical measurement, on lightning conductors and on matters of professional ethics—in which the parts played by evidence, by theory, and by authority were strangely mixed. The well-known confrontation of O. Heaviside (...) and W. H. Preece was at the centre of the debate. An open division between traditionalists and progressives amongst electrical engineers was provoked, and the effectiveness of mathematical theory as against pure pragmatism at the practical level had in the end to be conceded. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFear of positive evaluation is experiencing dread during real or potential praise. FPE is associated with social anxiety, but its relation to depressive symptoms is unclear. Anhedonia is a core symptom of depression related to symptoms of anxiety in cross-sectional research. The current study investigated the indirect effect of FPE on depressive symptoms via anhedonia over time. One-hundred ninety-six participants completed three waves of questionnaires over a total timespan of approximately four months via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, including measures of FPE, (...) depressive symptoms, and anticipatory and consummatory anhedonia. Findings indicated that anticipatory anhedonia at Time 2 mediated the relationship between FPE at Time 1 and depressive symptoms at Time 3. Consummatory anhedonia, however, did not. Each model was contextualised by accounting for prospective covarying relationships, such as depressive symptoms predicting the same symptoms at later waves. The constellation of findings is c... (shrink)

Some individuals devalue positivity previously associated with negativity (Winer & Salem, 2016). Positive emotions (e.g. happiness) may be seen as threatening and result in active avoidance of futu...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Feminism and World ReligionsJordan PaperFeminism and World Religions. Edited by Arvind Sharma and Katherine K. Young. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. Pp. x + 333.The editors of Feminism and World Religions, Arvind Sharma and Katherine K. Young, both at McGill University, have been editing anthologies, as well as an [End Page 118] annual journal, on the subject of "women and religion" in its various modes (...) and variations, for a number of years. This new iteration is particularly specific to its avowed topic and a valuable addition to the genre. In-depth contributions were solicited for the "Religions of the Book" and for South and East Asian religions. As with any anthology, no matter how well planned, individual treatments will invariably reflect the differences in the interests and methodologies of the various authors. All of the treatments here, however, do focus on history and ideology. All were ostensibly written by insiders, although what this actually means varies from tradition to tradition.Katherine Young has contributed an excellent, analytical introduction to both the topics of the book and the individual chapters. She has also authored an in-depth "Postscript" (thirty-four pages) concerning a number of contemporary issues relevant to the volume's theme and the issue of "insiders." She addresses such problems as "the politics of identity," "the proper sphere for feminism," "the tension between revolution and reform," and the "polarization between men and women."I will begin with the chapters on the Religions of the Book, although this does not accord with the order in the anthology. "Feminism in Judaism," by Ellen M. Umansky, is possibly the most succinct introduction available from the last two decades to the extraordinary number of changes, as well as the lack of change, in some varieties of this religion. The contribution by the well-known Rosemary Radford Ruether, "Feminism in World Christianity," briefly traces the roots of Christian feminism from the time of the New Testament and then surveys developments in the United States and feminist theology in Europe, moving on to what many such surveys ignore: the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. "Feminism in Islam" by Riffat Hassan focuses on the nature of androcentrism in Islam. She juxtaposes the Hadith literature against the Qur'ān, and finds that the negative attitudes toward women are not in the Qur'ān but are based on a questionable interpretation of a few Hadith statements. She analyzes three basic theological assumptions and finds all wanting: the issue of woman's creation, the issue of woman's "guilt" in the "Fall" episode, and the issue of the purpose of woman's existence. She concludes with a fascinating comparison of the issue of women's sexuality as found in the Qur'ān and in the history of Islam.South Asia is dealt with in two very different approaches. Vasudha Narayanan's "Brimming with Bhakti, Embodiments of Shakti: Devotees, Deities, Performers, Reformers, and Other Women of Power in the Hindu Tradition," is a full (fifty-three pages) and engaging exposition of the subject from a variety of perspectives as delineated in the chapter's title. It is a lucid and comprehensive analysis of a most complex issue; indeed, she begins with a survey of the problem of identifying "Hinduism" in and of itself. Rita M. Gross, in her "Strategies for a Feminist Revalorization of Buddhism," quite properly, given her own cultural milieu, speaks not of Buddhism in Asia, but of how Buddhism can be in the West. She argues here, as she has in a relatively recent book, Buddhism after Patriarchy, that the androcentrism, even aspects of misogyny, that is found in the development of Buddhism, does not follow from essential Buddhist ideology, and it need not be continued in the present. [End Page 119]The remaining two chapters, on China, are more problematic than the preceding ones. The two authors of "Feminism and/in Taoism," Karen Laughlin and Eva Wong, are both connected with the International Taoist Tai Chi Society, which can be perceived as far removed from the continuing aspects of Daoist religion on both the Chinese mainland and Taiwan. Their focus is on the classical texts of Daoist... (shrink)

The article deals with the perception of the Pope John Paul II and Poland in the two speeches of the Presidents of the United States of America. The George W. Bush’s speech given on the occasion of the dedication of the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington DC on March 22, 2001 and the Donald Trump’s speech delivered in front of the Warsaw Uprising Monument on the Krasinski Square in Warsaw on July 8, 2017 were used as the (...) sources for the study. The former speech is a laudation in honor of the Pope from Poland, whose biography was considered by the 43rd President of the United States as one of the most interesting in human history. Among the most notable episodes of the pontificate, George W. Bush listed the 1979 pilgrimage to his homeland, the 1995 visit to Manila in Philippines, the unprecedented visits to a synagogue and a Muslim country, the forgiveness shown to Ali Ağca – the would-be assassin, and the visits to the United States during which the Pope from Poland reminded the people of human dignity and the virtues of a just society. The latter speech is a laudation on the spirit of the Polish nation. Donald Trump emphasized the steadfastness of the Poles in the struggle to preserve their cultural identity despite the loss of their homeland. He recalled the period of partition and extermination of the Polish nation by the German Nazis and the Soviet Communists during World War II. The 45th President of the United States reminded the world about famous Poles: Nicolaus Copernicus, Frederic Chopin, Casimir Pulaski, Thaddeus Kosciuszko and Saint John Paul II. He also spoke about the lasting ties between the Americans and the Poles and about the common values cherished on both sides of the Atlantic. On the example of social transformations in Poland and Europe initiated by John Paul II’s pilgrimage to Poland in 1979, Donald Trump emphasized the influence of faith in God on political and social transformations in the world. He also expressed hope for the survival of Western civilization based on faith in God and the preservation of family and freedom. (shrink)

This first volume of Wittgenstein's Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology was written between October 1948 and March 1949, when the philosopher had moved to Dublin and was having one of his most fruitful working periods. He then finished work which he had begun in 1946 and which in its entirety constitutes the source material for Part II of the "Philosophical Investigations". When, later in 1949, Wittgenstein composed the manuscript for Part II he selected more than half the remarks (...) for it from the Dublin manuscript. Although this material is a direct continuation of the writings which make up the two volumes of the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology it deserves more than they to be regarded as a "preliminary study" for the second part of Wittgenstein's "chef-d'oeuvre". (shrink)

This first volume of Wittgenstein's Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology was written between October 1948 and March 1949, when the philosopher had moved to Dublin and was having one of his most fruitful working periods. He then finished work which he had begun in 1946 and which in its entirety constitutes the source material for Part II of the "Philosophical Investigations". When, later in 1949, Wittgenstein composed the manuscript for Part II he selected more than half the remarks (...) for it from the Dublin manuscript. Although this material is a direct continuation of the writings which make up the two volumes of the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology it deserves more than they to be regarded as a "preliminary study" for the second part of Wittgenstein's "chef-d'oeuvre". (shrink)

The author endeavours to show two things: first, that Schrödingers (and Eckarts) demonstration in March (September) 1926 of the equivalence of matrix mechanics, as created by Heisenberg, Born, Jordan and Dirac in 1925, and wave mechanics, as created by Schrödinger in 1926, is not foolproof; and second, that it could not have been foolproof, because at the time matrix mechanics and wave mechanics were neither mathematically nor empirically equivalent. That they were is the Equivalence Myth. In order to make (...) the theories equivalent and to prove this, one has to leave the historical scene of 1926 and wait until 1932, when von Neumann finished his magisterial edifice. During the period 1926–1932 the original families of mathematical structures of matrix mechanics and of wave mechanics were stretched, parts were chopped off and novel structures were added. To Procrustean places we go, where we can demonstrate the mathematical, empirical and ontological equivalence of ‘the final versions of’ matrix mechanics and wave mechanics. -/- The present paper claims to be a comprehensive analysis of one of the pivotal papers in the history of quantum mechanics: Schrödingers equivalence paper. Since the analysis is performed from the perspective of Suppes structural view (‘semantic view’) of physical theories, the present paper can be regarded not only as a morsel of the internal history of quantum mechanics, but also as a morsel of applied philosophy of science. The paper is self-contained and presupposes only basic knowledge of quantum mechanics. For reasons of length, the paper is published in two parts; Part I appeared in the previous issue of this journal. Section 1 contains, besides an introduction, also the papers five claims and a preview of the arguments supporting these claims; so Part I, Section 1 may serve as a summary of the paper for those readers who are not interested in the detailed arguments. (shrink)

The popular press and academic research has focused primarily on the characteristics of corporate leaders. Subordinates have been studied much less frequently than leaders and yet they play a pivotal role in destructive leadership processes. An area holding significant potential to bring clarity to subordinates’ ability to withstand (or succumb) to pressures from superiors is dispositional affect. In our exploratory study, we examine how specific affective states influence subordinates’ unethical behavior. We performed an experiment with 63 mid-level managers having significant (...) work experience. Participants were given ethical scenarios and asked to assess their intentions to comply with their superiors’ requests to engage in unethical conduct. The participants also completed the positive affect negative affect schedule (PANAS) which provides measures of affective states. Our results provide support for theory-based predictions. The findings of our study make important contributions and have implications to both practice and theory. First, we identify certain affective states that encourage subordinates to adopt the behavior of a conformer or colluder and thus be susceptible to their superiors’ unethical directives. Second, our results suggest the need for training programs to assist employees in managing affect in the work place and consideration of organizational changes that provide a culture of empowerment of its employees. Third, unlike a large majority of prior research, we measured naturally occurring affective states rather than providing a contrived (and potentially exaggerated) triggering event to elicit affective states. Fourth, we examined specific affective states rather than examining only general positive and negative valence categories. (shrink)

The Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 requires company executives to certify financial statements and internal controls as a means of reducing fraud. Many companies have operationalized this by instituting a sub-certification process and requiring lower-level managers to sign certification statements. These lower-level organizational members are often the individuals who are aware of fraud and are in the best position to provide information on the fraudulent act. However, the sub-certification process may have the effect of reducing employees’ intentions to report wrongdoing. We (...) suggest that subordinates with knowledge of a superior who committed a fraudulent act and certified that there is no fraud will feel less personal responsibility to report the act, thus, decreasing reporting intentions. Additionally, we suggest that if the fraud is discovered subsequent to the reports being filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, employees will perceive lower management responsiveness to investigate the fraud, which will reduce intentions to report. Using an experimental approach, we manipulate two between-participant variables: the presence or absence of sub-certification by the transgressor and the timing of fraud discovery, either before or after the reports have been filed with the SEC. We find that when sub-certification is present, perceived personal responsibility and intentions to report were diminished compared to when sub-certification is absent. Timing of the discovery of the fraudulent act did not influence perceived management responsiveness or reporting intentions. Supplemental analysis shows that personal responsibility partially mediates the relationship between sub-certification and reporting intentions. Our findings suggest that audit committees and senior executives may want to carefully consider the costs and benefits of the sub-certification process. (shrink)

To compose a Christian book on exemplary Christian living, Ambrose appropriates and criticizes Cicero's book on "duties," "De officiis." In many passages within the moral part of his "Summa of Theology," Thomas Aquinas incorporates quotations from both Cicero and Ambrose. Comparison of the three texts raises issues about the relation of genres to terms, arguments, rules, and ideals in religious teaching. Genre becomes a useful category for analyzing religious rhetoric only when it is conceived as a set of persuasive or (...) pedagogical relations below a text's surface disposition. (shrink)

This first volume of Wittgenstein's Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology was written between October 1948 and March 1949, when the philosopher had moved to Dublin and was having one of his most fruitful working periods. He then finished work which he had begun in 1946 and which in its entirety constitutes the source material for Part II of the "Philosophical Investigations". When, later in 1949, Wittgenstein composed the manuscript for Part II he selected more than half the remarks (...) for it from the Dublin manuscript. Although this material is a direct continuation of the writings which make up the two volumes of the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology it deserves more than they to be regarded as a "preliminary study" for the second part of Wittgenstein's "chef-d'oeuvre". (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas’s explanation of the (then new) doctrine of sacramental character can seem a crudely mechanical view of the causality of rites of church membership. It explains in fact the capacity and horizon for moral action in salvation history. Participation in the priesthood of Christ enables the believer to inhabit the pedagogy through which history is brought back to Trinitarian life. This sort of account, which is for Thomas the indispensable ground of moral theology, sounds archaic to many contemporary Christian (...) readers who nonetheless want to excerpt from Thomas particular ethical conclusions. They fail to appreciate the challenge posed by change in the deep categories of moral performance—a change nowhere more consequential or invisible than in contemporary debates over sexuality. (shrink)

This study suggests a new approach to EEG data classification by exploring the idea of using evolutionary computation to both select useful discriminative EEG features and optimise the topology of Artificial Neural Networks. An evolutionary algorithm is applied to select the most informative features from an initial set of 2550 EEG statistical features. Optimisation of a Multilayer Perceptron is performed with an evolutionary approach before classification to estimate the best hyperparameters of the network. Deep learning and tuning with Long Short-Term (...) Memory are also explored, and Adaptive Boosting of the two types of models is tested for each problem. Three experiments are provided for comparison using different classifiers: one for attention state classification, one for emotional sentiment classification, and a third experiment in which the goal is to guess the number a subject is thinking of. The obtained results show that an Adaptive Boosted LSTM can achieve an accuracy of 84.44%, 97.06%, and 9.94% on the attentional, emotional, and number datasets, respectively. An evolutionary-optimised MLP achieves results close to the Adaptive Boosted LSTM for the two first experiments and significantly higher for the number-guessing experiment with an Adaptive Boosted DEvo MLP reaching 31.35%, while being significantly quicker to train and classify. In particular, the accuracy of the nonboosted DEvo MLP was of 79.81%, 96.11%, and 27.07% in the same benchmarks. Two datasets for the experiments were gathered using a Muse EEG headband with four electrodes corresponding to TP9, AF7, AF8, and TP10 locations of the international EEG placement standard. The EEG MindBigData digits dataset was gathered from the TP9, FP1, FP2, and TP10 locations. (shrink)

Background Nonanonymized direct contact between organ recipients and donor families is a topic of international interest in the adult context. However, there is limited discussion about whether direct contact should be extended to pediatric settings due to clinician and researcher concerns of the potential harms to pediatric patients.Methods We interviewed pediatric organ recipients, their families, and donorfamilies in British Columbia, Canada, to determine their views on direct contact. Interviews were conducted in two stages, with those who were further removed from (...) the transplant process informing the approach to interviews with those who more recently went throughthe transplant process.Results Twenty-nine individuals participated in twenty in-depth interviews. The study included participants from three major organ systems: kidney, heart, and liver. Only five participants expressed that direct contact might cause harm or discomfort, while twenty-three indicated they saw significant potential for benefits. Nearly half focused on the harms to others rather than themselves, and nearly two-thirds focused on the benefits for others rather than themselves.Conclusion There appears to be a community desire for direct contact in pediatric organ transplant programs among those living in British Columbia, Canada. These results suggest a need to revisit the medical community’s assumptions around protection and paternalism in our practice as clinicians and researchers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy by John InglisMark D. JordanJohn Inglis. Spheres of Philosophical Inquiry and the Historiography of Medieval Philosophy. Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, volume 81. Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 1998. Pp. x + 324. Cloth, $99.50.Modern philosophers have shown themselves quite unphilosophical about the academic history of their own discipline. Content with grand stories that move from Plato to themselves, (...) they have treated institutional histories, recent histories, and bibliographical histories as unworthy of attention. John Inglis sets out to change all that for the study of medieval philosophy. He demonstrates by the book’s end that we have failed to recognize our historiographical procedures as conventions—with very particular histories of their own.The first part of the book traces the genealogy of the dominant (one might say, hegemonic) model in recent studies of medieval philosophy. The genealogy is prefaced with two chapters that show how various were the motives for reconstructions of medieval thought before 1850 in authors such as Billuart, Goudin, and Brucker or Hegel, Ritter, and Hauréau. These chapters might be dismissed by contemporary scholars as so much antiquarianism. There can be no dismissing the relevance to contemporary work of Inglis’s main genealogy, which runs with surprising directness from Joseph Kleutgen (1811–1883) and Albert Stöckl (1823–1895) to Norman Kretzmann and Anthony Kenny.It adds to the piquancy of Inglis’s argument that most specialists in medieval philosophy will not even recognize the names of Kleutgen and Stöckl, much less feel kinship with them. But Inglis shows convincingly what Kleutgen and Stöckl did to make the study of medieval philosophy possible in modern universities. Kleutgen mapped the medieval texts onto a system of “spheres,” of fields or topics, recognizable to professors of philosophy. This means that he necessarily privileged epistemology, as he necessarily connected a medieval thinker’s views across the “spheres” into a system—or a failed attempt at one. Kleutgen then emphasized the reason/revelation dichotomy and an allegiance to what he understood as the system of Thomas Aquinas. Put these elements together and you have a surprisingly familiar story. It remained for Stöckl to write it up as an erudite and monumental narration.Inglis follows this „Kleutgen-Stöckl model” through a number of more familiar authors, including De Wulf, Gilson, Boehner, Weinberg, and the editors of the Cambridge [End Page 530] History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Of course, in reducing the genealogy to a list of famous names I ignore two of its great virtues. The first is the detail with which it retells the institutional circumstances and the forgotten intermediaries of the scholarly tradition. Behind the genealogy, around its borders, there stands Inglis’s enormous effort of original research, much of it archival. The genealogy’s second virtue is the dialectical subtlety with which it locates continuities under contradictions. Gilson is usually touted as the antithesis of De Wulf, and Kretzmann of Gilson. Inglis makes such antitheses seem superficial by comparing them with an abiding if tacit agreement about how medieval texts can be appropriated within modern philosophy. To seal the comparison, Inglis suggests in the book’s second part what a real antithesis to the Kleutgen-Stöckl model might be. He reconstructs, in his last two chapters, Thomas’s accounts of human knowledge and of theology’s relations to philosophy in opposition to that model’s prescriptions.No review can represent—or even adequately praise—the enormous learnedness of this book. Moreover, since the book already discusses so much, it must seem ungrateful to suggest that it ought to discuss anything else. Let me end then rather by posing two questions beyond the book’s end. First, does Inglis’s genealogy mean to suggest that the Kleutgen-Stöckl model is now chiefly received in English-speaking philosophy departments? I wonder, for example, how far Inglis might judge Alain de Libera’s Penser au Moyen Age (Paris: Éds. de Seuil, 1991) an alternative to that model. Certainly de Libera shows more self-consciousness about the culturally determined history behind our historiography. His emphasis on the thirteenth-century recovery... (shrink)

Arguments that Aquinas’s literal commentaries on Aristotle present his own philosophy are often proxies for larger claims about the relation of philosophy to theology. While trying to secure a place for Thomas in philosophic conversation, such arguments impose modern notions of an autonomous and apodictic philosophy, with fixed genres of declarative speech. The result is neither a plausiblereading of the Thomistic corpus nor a helpful exemplar for contemporary Catholic philosophy.

Integrating large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 into medical ethics is a novel concept, and understanding the effectiveness of these models in aiding ethicists with decision-making can have significant implications for the healthcare sector. Thus, the objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of GPT-4 in responding to complex medical ethical vignettes and to gauge its utility and limitations for aiding medical ethicists. Using a mixed-methods, cross-sectional survey approach, a panel of six ethicists assessed LLM-generated responses to eight (...) ethical vignettes.The main outcomes measured were relevance, reasoning, depth, technical and non-technical clarity, as well as acceptability of GPT-4’s responses. The readability of the responses was also assessed. Of the six metrics evaluating the effectiveness of GPT-4’s responses, the overall mean score was 4.1/5. GPT-4 was rated highest in providing technical (4.7/5) and non-technical clarity (4.4/5), whereas the lowest rated metrics were depth (3.8/5) and acceptability (3.8/5). There was poor-to-moderate inter-rater reliability characterised by an intraclass coefficient of 0.54 (95% CI: 0.30 to 0.71). Based on panellist feedback, GPT-4 was able to identify and articulate key ethical issues but struggled to appreciate the nuanced aspects of ethical dilemmas and misapplied certain moral principles.This study reveals limitations in the ability of GPT-4 to appreciate the depth and nuanced acceptability of real-world ethical dilemmas, particularly those that require a thorough understanding of relational complexities and context-specific values. Ongoing evaluation of LLM capabilities within medical ethics remains paramount, and further refinement is needed before it can be used effectively in clinical settings. (shrink)

How far is Thomas Aquinas available for current discussions in political philosophy? While there are certainly things to be learned from him about our political preoccupations, the pedagogy of his moral teaching typically resists our familiar questions. This holds even when the question is put in terms that Thomas should recognize—say, as a question about the virtues appropriate for a democracy. Thomas not only gives different meanings to these terms, he moves political topics away from the center of theological attention (...) and so organizes them very differently. A reader can notice these differences at many points but perhaps especially in the attention that Thomas gives in the Summa to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. His account of these gifts qualifies significantly what he says of virtue and suggests large limits on human agency, whether in ethics or in politics. (shrink)