The flyer accompanying Metaphysics: the Elements describes it as The English tradition, on the whole, from its beginnings in Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, and William of Ockham, in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, has been unsympathetic to teleological explanations, preferring the procedures of what came to be called empirical science; and it is to this tradition that Aune's book clearly belongs. It is hardly a comprehensive survey of what the traditional metaphysicians themselves considered their key concepts, nor is (...) it any more comprehensive a survey of contemporary metaphysics unless one restricts this to Anglo-American analytic metaphysics as Aune implicitly does: there is not a single reference to Nietzsche or Heidegger; Whitehead is mentioned only briefly and only with reference to the Principia ; and the discussion of time makes no reference to Husserl or Bergson. Earlier continental philosophers fare slightly better: Hegel is mentioned twice, in passing, and Schopenhauer is dismissed with contempt in three lines. No book that takes such an attitude toward the teleological traditions of metaphysics can properly describe itself (or--. (shrink)

Although ethics consultation is offered as a clinical service in most hospitals in the United States, few valid and practical tools are available to evaluate, ensure, and improve ethics consultation quality. The quality of ethics consultation is important because poor quality ethics consultation can result in ethically inappropriate outcomes for patients, other stakeholders, or the health care system. To promote accountability for the quality of ethics consultation, we developed the Ethics Consultation Quality Assessment Tool. ECQAT enables raters to assess the (...) quality of ethics consultations based on the written record. Through rigorous development and preliminary testing, we identified key elements of a quality ethics consultation, established scoring criteria, developed training guidelines, and designed a holistic assessment process. This article describes the development of the ECQAT,.. (shrink)

In his 2004 book, Who Are We?, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington argues that America’s national identity is in danger of being lost because of the influx of immigrants, particularly Hispanic, who are not being assimilated to American society. Huntington believes that the American identity was formed through the interaction of the Protestant Christianity of the original settlers with the New World. He calls for a revival of the American identity through a return to its sources, but fails to see (...) that the liberalized and attenuated Protestant Christianity of today is no longer capable of revitalizing the American identity. (shrink)

The aim of this project was to explore the possibility of constructing a psychologic inference engine that might enhance introspective self-awareness by delivering inferences about a user based on what he said in interactive dialogues about his closest opposite-sex relation. To implement this aim, we developed a computer program (guru) with the capacity to simulate human conversation in colloquial natural language. The psychologic inferences offered represent the authors' simulations of their commonsense psychology responses to expected user-input expressions. The heuristics of (...) the natural language processor and its relation to output responses are described in enough detail for the operations of the implementation to be understood. Evaluation of this new cognitive agent presents, we hope, puzzles for artificial intelligence and cognitive science. (shrink)

Responding to volatile criticisms frequently leveled at Leo Strauss and those he influenced, the prominent contributors to this volume demonstrate the profound influence that Strauss and his students have exerted on American liberal democracy and contemporary political thought. By stressing the enduring vitality of classic books and by articulating the theoretical and practical flaws of relativism and historicism, the contributors argue that Strauss and the Straussians have identified fundamental crises of modernity and liberal democracy.

These two volumes collect papers presented at the first joint meeting of the two principal logic programming conferences, held in August of 1988. The more than fifty contributions cover all aspects of the field, including applications (particularly those that exploit the unique character of logic programming), the role of logic programming in artificial intelligence, deductive databases, relations to other computational paradigms, language issues, methodology, implementations on sequential and parallel architectures, and theory.Logic Programming is included in the Logic Programming series Research (...) Reports and Notes, edited by Ehud Shapiro. (shrink)

The Ethics Consultation Quality Assessment Tool (ECQAT) establishes standards by which the quality of ethics consultation records (ECRs) can be assessed. These standards relate to the ethics question, consultation-specific information, ethical analysis, and recommendations and/or conclusions, and result in a score associated with one of four levels of ethics consultation quality. For the ECQAT to be useful in assessing and improving the quality of healthcare ethics consultations, individuals who rate the quality of ECRs need to be able to reliably use (...) the tool.We developed a short course to train ethics consultants in using the ECQAT, and evaluated whether the participants (1) achieved an acceptable level of calibration in matching expert-established quality scores for a set of ethics consultations, and (2) were satisfied with the course. We recruited 28 ethics consultants to participate in a virtual, six-session course. At each session participants and faculty reviewed, rated, and discussed one to two ECRs. The participants’ calibration in matching expert-established quality scores improved with repeated exposure at all levels of ethics consultation quality. Participants were generally more accurate when assessing consultation quality at the dichotomous level of “acceptable” (scores of three or four) versus “unacceptable” (scores of one or two) than they were with a more specific score. Participants had higher rates of accuracy with the extreme ratings of “strong” (level four) or “poor” (level one). Although participants were highly satisfied with the course, only a minority of participants achieved the prespecified acceptable level of calibration (that is, 80 percent or greater accuracy between their score and expert-established scores). These results suggest that ECQAT training may require more sessions or need modification in the protocol to achieve higher reliability in scoring. Such trainings are an important next step in ensuring that the ECQAT is a tool that can be used to promote improvement in ethics consultation quality. (shrink)

Introduction -- The classical theories -- Emile Durkheim -- Talcott Parsons and structural functionalism -- Karl Marx and marxism -- Max Weber -- The successors -- Norbert Elias -- Critical theory, the Frankfurt school and Jurgen Habermas -- Herbert Blumer and symbolic interactionism -- Michel Foucault -- Pierre Bourdieu -- The present -- The latest modern age -- Modernisation theory -- Conclusions.

What is the nature and the place of religion in an ever changing human condition, and in an ever changing world? As Kenneth Masong shows, such a reflection requires a broader perspective: the perspective of metaphysics, and actually the perspective of a metaphysics of becoming. Becoming-religion in a becoming universe. Indeed, religion is not an exception, but a phenomenon among others, although a peculiar one. But what applies to the rest of the universe, also applies to religion. And vice (...) versa. Now, one central law for all that exists, is that it is subject to change. The book is written with the distance, requisite for philosophical reflection, but with a warm heart for the topic, coming from a deep religious life. Again and again the book testifies to the author’s conviction of the intrinsic value of “the event of the religious” now and in the future – for what is called “ethnopoiesis”: the constitution of a unity of wills, by the persuasive power of the divine vision, on humanity’s journey towards civilization. –Professor André Cloots Catholic University of Leuven. (shrink)

��This paper investigates how an evolutionary al- gorithm with an indirect encoding exploits the property of phenotypic regularity, an important design principle found in natural organisms and engineered designs. We present the first comprehensive study showing that such phenotypic regularity enables an indirect encoding to outperform direct encoding con- trols as problem regularity increases. Such an ability to produce regular solutions that can exploit the regularity of problems is an important prerequisite if evolutionary algorithms are to scale to high-dimensional real-world (...) problems, which typically contain many regularities, both known and unrecognized. The indirect encoding in this case study is HyperNEAT, which evolves artificial neural networks (ANNs) in a manner inspired by concepts from biological development. We demonstrate that, in contrast to two direct encoding controls, HyperNEAT produces both regular behaviors and regular ANNs, which enables HyperNEAT to significantly outperform the direct encodings as regularity increases in three problem domains. We also show that the types of regularities HyperNEAT produces can be biased, allowing domain knowledge and preferences to be injected into the search. Finally, we examine the downside of a bias toward regularity. Even when a solution is mainly regular, some irregularity may be needed to perfect its functionality. This insight is illustrated by a new algorithm called HybrID that hybridizes indirect and direct encodings, which matched HyperNEAT’s performance on regular problems yet outperformed it on problems with some irregularity. HybrID’s ability to improve upon the performance of HyperNEAT raises the question of whether indirect encodings may ultimately excel not as stand-alone algorithms, but by being hybridized with a further process of refinement, wherein the indirect encoding produces patterns that exploit problem regu-. (shrink)

A growing body of literature has examined managers’ use of restorative practices in the workplace. However, little is currently known about why managers use restorative practices as opposed to alternative responses. We employed a qualitative interview technique to develop an inductive model of managers’ restorative versus punitive response in the context of employee wrongdoing. The findings reveal a set of key motivating and moderating influences on the manager’s decision to respond to wrongdoing in a restorative versus punitive manner. The findings (...) also suggest that managers’ personal needs and perceived duties in the aftermath of employee wrongdoing are generally more consistent with restorative responses than punishment responses, which helps explain managers’ use of restorative workplace practices. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of clinical practitioners and clinical researchers internationally in establishing the utility of harm-reduction approaches to substance use. It thus illustrates the potential for clinicians to play a pivotal role in health promoting structural interventions based on harm-reduction goals and public health models. Popular media images of drug use as uniformly damaging, and abstinence as the only acceptable goal of treatment, threaten to distort clinical care away from a basis in evidence, which shows that some ways (...) of using drugs are far more harmful than others and that punitive approaches and insistence on total abstinence as the only goal of treatment often increases the harms of drug use rather than reducing drug use. Therefore the leadership and scientific authority of clinicians who understand the health impact of harm-reduction strategies is needed. Through a review of harm-reduction interventions in Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, we identify three ways that clinicians have helped to achieve a paradigm shift from punitive approaches to harm-reduction principles in clinical care and in drug policy: through clinical research to provide data establishing the effectiveness and feasibility of harm-reduction approaches, by developing innovative clinical programmes that employ harm reduction, and thereby changing the standard of care to include routine use of these evidence-based approaches in their practices. We argue that through promotion of harm-reduction goals and methods, clinicians have unique opportunities to improve the health outcomes of vulnerable populations. (shrink)