The Ouroboros Model features a biologically inspired cognitive architecture. At its core lies a self-referential recursive process with alternating phases of data acquisition and evaluation. Memory entries are organized in schemata. The activation at a time of part of a schema biases the whole structure and, in particular, missing features, thus triggering expectations. An iterative recursive monitor process termed "consumption analysis" is then checking how well such expectations fit with successive activations. Mismatches between anticipations based on previous experience and actual (...) current data are highlighted and used for controlling the allocation of attention. In case no directly fitting filler for an open slot is found, activation spreads more widely and includes data relating to the actor, and Higher-Order Personality Activation, HOPA, ensues. It is briefly outlined how the Ouroboros Model produces many diverse characteristics and thus addresses established criteria for consciousness. Coarse-grained relationships to selected previous conceptualizations of consciousness and a sketch of how the Ouroboros Model could shed light on current research themes in artificial general intelligence and consciousness conclude this paper. (shrink)

The Ouroboros Model proposes a brain inspired cognitive architecture including detailed suggestions for the main processing steps in an overall conceptualization of cognition as embodied and embedded computing. All memories are structured into schemata, which are firmly grounded in the body of an actor. A cyclic and iterative data-acquisition and -processing loop forms the backbone of all cognitive activity. Ever more sophisticated schemata are built up incrementally from the wide combination of neural activity, concurrent at the point in time when (...) the memory is established; i.e., distinct representations are accrued. Later on, an entire schema can be reinstated from diverse subsets of its constituent features. In order to decode or compile ever more elaborate constructions, extant building blocks are concatenated. They are serially linked via common or “connection-attributes” of different representations and symbols, and they are employed for serial perception, processing and action, in particular, also for language production. At various levels, commonalities between different schemata lead to a similar preferred use of their respective tokens and subsequently shared categorizations. Rules, for the concatenation of words, akin to the ones governing chemical reactions, can be abstracted. As special kinds of symbols, words and word-classes along with the whole grammar of a language can thus be seen as a direct consequence of the processes outlined in the Ouroboros Model. Strong emphasis is put on the dimension of time over short intervals during active experience and performance, and, in particular, during interactions with other agents. (shrink)

This article analyses the moral status of racial profiling from a consequentialist perspective and argues that, contrary to what proponents of racial profiling might assume, there is a prima facie case against racial profiling on consequentialist grounds. To do so it establishes general definitions of police practices and profiling, sketches out the costs and benefits involved in racial profiling in particular and presents three challenges. The foundation challenge suggests that the shifting of burdens onto marginalized minorities may, even when profiling (...) itself is justified, serve to prolong unjustified police practices. The valuation challenge argues that although both costs and benefits are difficult to establish, the benefits of racial profiling are afflicted with greater uncertainty than the costs, and must be comparatively discounted. Finally, the application challenge argues that using racial profiling in practice will be complicated by both cognitive and psychological biases, which together reduce the effectiveness of profiling while still incurring its costs. Jointly, it is concluded, these challenges establish a prima facie case against racial profiling, so that the real challenge consists in helping officers practice the art of the police and not see that which it is useless that they should see. (shrink)

We outline the drivers, main features, and conceptual underpinnings of the compliance paradigm. We then use a similar structure to investigate the drivers, main features, and conceptual underpinnings of the cooperative paradigm for working with CSR in global value chains. We argue that the measures proposed in the new cooperation paradigm are unlikely to alter power relationships in global value chains and bring about sustained improvements in workers’ conditions in developing country export industries. After that, we provide a critical appraisal (...) of the potential and limits of the cooperative paradigm, we summarize our findings, and we outline avenues for research: purchasing practices and labor standard noncompliance, CSR capacity building among local suppliers, and improved CSR monitoring by local resources in the developing world. (shrink)

In this article I critically examine a standard feature in conceptions of discrimination: the group-criterion, specifically the idea that there is a limited and definablegroup of traits that can form the basis of discrimination. I review two types of argument for the criterion. One focuses on inherently relevant groups and relies ultimately on luck-egalitarian principles; the other focuses on contextually relevant groups and relies ultimately on the badness of outcomes. I conclude that as neither type of argument is convincing, the (...) criterion is morally arbitrary, and as such untenable. Finally, I suggest both some of the conceptual and some of the practical implications of abandoning the criterion. (shrink)

This article analyses proportionality as a potential element of a theory of morally justified surveillance, and sets out a teleological account. It draws on conceptions in criminal justice ethics and just war theory, defines teleological proportionality in the context of surveillance, and sketches some of the central values likely to go into the consideration. It then explores some of the ways in which deontologists might want to modify the account and illustrates the difficulties of doing so. Having set out the (...) account, however, it considers whether the proportionality condition is necessary to a theory of morally justified surveillance. The article concludes that we need and should apply only a necessity condition, but notes that proportionality considerations may retain some use in in practice, as a form of coarse‐grained filter applied before assessing necessity when deliberating the permissibility of potential forms of surveillance. (shrink)

The generalization of history.--The continental disease.--The capacity of shipping and the seven seas.--The freedom of the seas.--Character versus characteristics.--By mistake.

Why do speakers of all languages use different grammatical structures under different communicative circumstances to express the same idea? In this comprehensive study, Professor Lambrecht explores the relationship between the structure of sentences and the linguistic and extra-linguistic contexts in which they are used. His analysis is based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects a speaker's assumptions about the hearer's state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of the utterance. This relationship between speaker assumptions and (...) formal sentence structure is governed by rules and conventions of grammar, in a component called 'information structure'. Four independent but interrelated categories are analysed: presupposition and assertion, identifiability and activation, topic, and focus. (shrink)

The concept of surveillance has recently been complemented by the concept of sousveillance. Neither term, however, has been rigorously defined, and it is particularly unclear how to understand and delimit sousveillance. This article sketches a generic definition of surveillance and proceeds to explore various ways in which we might define sousveillance, including power differentials, surreptitiousness, control, reciprocity, and moral valence. It argues that for each of these ways of defining it, sousveillance either fails to be distinct from surveillance or to (...) provide a generally useful concept. As such, the article concludes that academics should avoid the neologism, and simply clarify what sense of surveillance is at stake when necessary. (shrink)

Dieser Artikel ist die Übersetzung des zuerst in 1950 veröffentlichten Schlüsseltextes “Humanisme og kristendom” des dänischen Philosophen und Theologen Knud E. Løgstrup (1905–1981). In diesem Text legt Løgstrup seine Konzeption der Debatte zwischen Humanismus und Christentum dar. Er argumentiert dafür, dass die beiden Positionen nicht als einander entgegengesetzt zu betrachten sind, da beide die Interdependenz und Verletzlichkeit des Menschseins als Grundlage für eine “stumme” Forderung nach Umsorge erkennen – auch wenn der Humanismus in dieser Forderung lediglich die Leistung sozialer (...) Normen sehen und das Christentum sie mit Lehren der Kirche verwechseln kann. So betrachtet, greift der Text als erster Entwurf jenen Ideen vor, die Løgstrup in seinem späteren Hauptwerk Den etiske fordring (1956) entwickeln sollte. (shrink)

Dieser Artikel ist die Übersetzung des zuerst in 1950 veröffentlichten Schlüsseltextes “Humanisme og kristendom” des dänischen Philosophen und Theologen Knud E. Løgstrup (1905–1981). In diesem Text legt Løgstrup seine Konzeption der Debatte zwischen Humanismus und Christentum dar. Er argumentiert dafür, dass die beiden Positionen nicht als einander entgegengesetzt zu betrachten sind, da beide die Interdependenz und Verletzlichkeit des Menschseins als Grundlage für eine “stumme” Forderung nach Umsorge erkennen – auch wenn der Humanismus in dieser Forderung lediglich die Leistung sozialer (...) Normen sehen und das Christentum sie mit Lehren der Kirche verwechseln kann. So betrachtet, greift der Text als erster Entwurf jenen Ideen vor, die Løgstrup in seinem späteren Hauptwerk Den etiske fordring (1956) entwickeln sollte. (shrink)

The article analyses the concept of indirect discrimination, arguing first that existing conceptualisations are unsatisfactory and second that it is best understood as equal treatment that is disadvantageous to the discriminatees because of their group-membership. I explore four ways of further refining the definition, arguing that only an added condition of moral wrongness is at once plausible and helpful, but that it entails a number of new problems that may outweigh its benefits. Finally, I suggest that the moral wrongness of (...) indirect discrimination is best accounted for in terms of the harm it does to discriminatees, and sketch three ways in which it may do so. I conclude that the analysis provides both a clearer understanding of the concept of indirect discrimination as well as indirect support for a harm-based account of the wrongness of discrimination, while suggesting that our moral obligations qua non-discrimination may be more extensive than is frequently assumed. (shrink)

Criminalisation of prostitution, and minority rights for disabled persons, are important contemporary political issues. The article examines their intersection by analysing the conditions and arguments for making a legal exception for disabled persons to a general prohibition against purchasing sexual services. It explores the badness of prostitution, focusing on and discussing the argument that prostitution harms prostitutes, considers forms of regulation and the arguments for and against with emphasis on a liberty-based objection to prohibition, and finally presents and analyses three (...) arguments for a legal exception, based on sexual rights, beneficence, and luck egalitarianism, respectively. It concludes that although the general case for and against criminalisation is complicated there is a good case for a legal exception. (shrink)

This article illustrates some of the difficulties of defining discrimination and briefly sketches the benefits and desiderata of doing so. It then examines and defines generic direct discrimination as an agent treating two groups differently because of the property that defines one of the groups as a group, in a way that is worse for that group, clarifying each of these three conditions in turn. It considers two arguments for further conditions: that an act must target one among a particular (...) set of groups to constitute discrimination, and that an act must be in some sense morally wrong to constitute discrimination. It concludes that while these objections are forceful it may be the case that they illustrate that we employ multiple, partly overlapping concepts of discrimination, and that it may be more important to recognize this heterogeneity than it is to attempt to establish a dominant or unitary definition. (shrink)

We describe a prototype ontology-driven information system (ODIS) that exploits what we call Portion of Reality (POR) representations. The system takes both sensor data and natural language text as inputs and composes on this basis logically structured POR assertions. The goal of our prototype is to represent both natural language and sensor data within a single framework that is able to support both axiomatic reasoning and computation. In addition, the framework should be capable of discovering and representing new kinds of (...) situations and thematic roles, (e.g., roles such as agent, patient and instrument), based on new compositions of existing representations. We applied our prototype in an intelligence analysis use case to test the hypothesis that a framework of this sort can produce usefully structured information from combined natural language and sensor data inputs. We further tested our hypothesis by adding an enhanced US Air Force ontology framework to our ODIS in order to (1) process a collection of sensor data, intel reports, and mission plans; (2) build composite POR representations from these data; and (3) machine analyze the fused results to infer mission threats. (shrink)

Over the past decade, police departments in many countries have experimented with and increasingly adopted the use of police body-worn cameras. This article aims to examine the moral issues raised by the use of PBWCs, and to provide an overall assessment of the conditions under which the use of PBWCs is morally permissible. It first reviews the current evidence for the effects of using PBWCs. On the basis of this review the article sets out a teleological argument for the use (...) of PBWCs. The final two sections of the article review two deontological objections to the use of PBWCs: the idea that use of PBWCs is based on or expresses disrespectful mistrust, and the idea that the use of PBWCs violates a right to privacy. The article argues that neither of these objections is persuasive, and concludes that we should conditionally accept and support the use of PBWCs. (shrink)

The article explores one prominent account of what makes discrimination morally bad (when it is) – the disrespect-based account. The article first reviews and clarifies the account, arguing that it is most charitably understood as the claim that discrimination is morally bad when the discriminator gives lower weight to reasons grounded in the moral status of the discriminatee(s) in her decision-making. It then presents three challenges to the account, and reviews a recent argument in defense of it. The first challenge (...) is the fact that intuitions that might support the disrespect-based account can also be explained by reference to the fact that disrespect reflects poorly on the moral character of the discriminator. The second challenge is that there are cases where disrespectful discrimination is not intuitively worse than non-disrespectful discrimination. The third challenge is that the disrespect-based account has difficulties explaining our intuitions about cases of “doing right for the wrong reasons”. Finally, pace a recent argument in its defense, cases of harmless and apparently morally bad discrimination are plausibly best explained by other factors than disrespect. In the light of this analysis, the article concludes that the disrespect-based account should be abandoned. (shrink)

This paper makes a contribution to ongoing debates about whether and how we can empirically assess the potential, limitations, and actual impacts of public-private partnerships in developing countries. Several United Nations and bilateral aid agencies have called for the development of impact assessment methodologies that can help clarify when, how, where, and for whom partnerships work. This paper scrutinizes some of the key assumptions underlying this debate, arguing that no objective ' truth' about the effects of PPPs can be discovered (...) through the use of such methodologies. The paper then investigates what can actually be known about a PPP's effects by testing a PPP IA framework that is recommended by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This is done using a case study from Pakistan. The paper shows that IA methodology may provide an indication of how well a PPP has fared, but not why the PPP has turned out the way it has. At the same time, win-win and win-lose outcomes may exist simultaneously, even for the same stakeholder in the PPP. While the importance of ensuring proper design, monitoring, and IA of PPPs cannot be denied, their effects must be seen as an outcome of struggles between a variety of actors over the distribution of social and environmental hazards associated with broader processes of economic development and industrialization. (shrink)

Combining the methods of the modern philosopher with those of the historian of ideas, Knud Haakonssen presents an interpretation of the philosophy of law which Adam Smith developed out of - and partly in response to - David Hume's theory of justice. While acknowledging that the influences on Smith were many and various, Dr Haakonssen suggests that the decisive philosophical one was Hume's analysis of justice in A Treatise of Human Nature and the second Enquiry. He therefore begins with (...) a thorough investigation of Hume, from which he goes on to show the philosophical originality of Smith's new form of natural jurisprudence. At the same time, he provides an over all reading of Smith's social and political thought, demonstrating clearly the exact links between the moral theory of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the Lectures on Jurisprudence, and the sociohistorical theory of The Wealth of Nations. This is the first full analysis of Adam Smith's jurisprudence; it emphasizes its normative and critical function, and relates this to the psychological, sociological, and histroical aspects which hitherto have attracted most attention. Dr Haakonssen is critical of both purely descriptivist and utilitarian interpretations of Smith's moral and political philosophy, and demonstrates the implausibility of regarding Smith's view of history as pseudo-economic or 'materialist'. (shrink)

This article is the guest editors’ introduction to the special issue in Business & Society on “SMEs and CSR in Developing Countries.” The special issue includes four original research articles by Hamann, Smith, Tashman, and Marshall; Allet; Egels-Zandén; and Puppim de Oliveira and Jabbour on various aspects of the relationship of small and medium enterprises to corporate social responsibility in developing countries.

This major contribution to the history of philosophy provides the most comprehensive guide to modern natural law theory available, sets out the full background to liberal ideas of rights and contractarianism, and offers an extensive study of the Scottish Enlightenment. The time span covered is considerable: from the natural law theories of Grotius and Suarez in the early seventeenth century to the American Revolution and the beginnings of utilitarianism. After a detailed survey of modern natural law theory, the book focuses (...) on the Scottish Enlightenment and its European and American connections. Knud Haakonssen explains the relationship between natural law and civic humanist republicanism, and he shows the relevance of these ideas for the understanding of David Hume and Adam Smith. The result is a completely revised background to modern ideas of liberalism and communitarianism. (shrink)

Despite the attention equality before the law has received, both laudatory and critical, peculiarly little has been done to precisely define it. The first ambition of this paper is to remedy this, by exploring the various ways in which a principle of equality before the law can be understood and suggest a concise definition. With a clearer understanding of the principle in hand we are better equipped to assess traditional critique of the principle. Doing so is the second ambition of (...) this paper. I will argue that traditional criticisms are unpersuasive, but that there is a different, powerful argument against equality before the law. The third ambition of the paper is to argue that there is a sense, overlooked by both proponents and critics, in which the principle still captures something important, albeit at the cost of shifting from intrinsic to instrumental value. (shrink)

L’enjeu de cet article est d’explorer l’histoire longue de l’Anthropocène pour identifier des perspectives de libération dans le présent. Discutant les hypothèses d’Engels sur la naissance de la propriété et du patriarcat, de James Scott sur l’invention conjointe de l’agriculture et des États, ou de Marijas Gimbutas sur les civilisations matrifocales de l’Europe archaïque, Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen montre que la racine des crises socio-écologiques en cours doit être cherchée du côté de la domestication des femmes, c’est-à-dire de l’appropriation de leur (...) corps et de leurs savoirs en matière de subsistance et de reproduction. Mais elle montre aussi que cette domestication n’est jamais achevée et qu’elle tend même à perdre du terrain face au renouvellement contemporain de l’agriculture paysanne de subsistance, au sein de laquelle les femmes occupent le premier plan. C’est donc dans l’expérience et les pratiques des paysannes que réside la possibilité d’un monde meilleur. (shrink)

This article provides a review of what we know, what we do not know, and what we need to know about the relationship between industrial clusters and corporate social responsibility in developing countries. In addition to the drivers of and barriers to the adoption of CSR initiatives, this study highlights key lessons learned from empirical studies of CSR initiatives that aimed to improve environmental management and work conditions and reduce poverty in local industrial districts. Academic work in this area remains (...) embryonic, lacking in empirical evidence about the effects of CSR interventions on the profitability on local enterprises, workers, and the environment. Nor do theoretical frameworks offer clear explanations of the institutionalization and effects of CSR in local industrial districts in the developing world. Other key limitations in this research stream include an excessive focus on export-oriented industrial clusters, the risk that CSR becomes a form of economic and cultural imperialism, and the potential for joint-action CSR initiatives in clusters of small and medium-sized enterprises to offer a new form of greenwashing. From this review, the authors develop a theoretical model to explain why CSR has not become institutionalized in many developing country clusters, which in turn suggests that the vast majority of industrial clusters in developing countries are likely to engage in socially irresponsible behavior. (shrink)

This paper makes a contribution to ongoing debates about whether and how we can empirically assess the potential, limitations, and actual impacts of public–private partnerships (PPPs) in developing countries. Several United Nations and bilateral aid agencies have called for the development of impact assessment (IA) methodologies that can help clarify when, how, where, and for whom partnerships work. This paper scrutinizes some of the key assumptions underlying this debate, arguing that no objective ‹truth’ about the effects of PPPs can be (...) discovered through the use of such methodologies. The paper then investigates what can actually be known about a PPP’s effects by testing a PPP IA framework that is recommended by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This is done using a case study from Pakistan. The paper shows that IA methodology may provide an indication of how well a PPP has fared, but not why the PPP has turned out the way it has. At the same time, win–win and win–lose outcomes may exist simultaneously, even for the same stakeholder in the PPP. While the importance of ensuring proper design, monitoring, and IA of PPPs cannot be denied, their effects must be seen as an outcome of struggles between a␣variety of actors over the distribution of social and environmental hazards associated with broader processes of economic development and industrialization. (shrink)

In this definitive collection of today's most influential learning theorists, sixteen world-renowned experts present their understanding of what learning is and ...

Maintaining systems of military plans is critical for military effectiveness, but is also challenging. Plans will become obsolete as the world diverges from the assumptions on which they rest. If too many ad hoc changes are made to intermeshed plans, the ensemble may no longer lead to well-synchronized and coordinated operations, resulting in the system of plans becoming itself incoherent. We describe in what follows an Adaptive Planning process that we are developing on behalf of the Air Force Research Laboratory (...) (Rome) with the goal of addressing problems of these sorts through cyclical collaborative plan review and maintenance. The interactions of world state, blue force status and associated plans are too complex for manual adaptive processes, and computer-aided plan review and maintenance is thus indispensable. We argue that appropriate semantic technology can 1) provide richer representation of plan-related data and semantics, 2) allow for flexible, non-disruptive, agile, scalable, and coordinated changes in plans, and 3) support more intelligent analytical querying of plan-related data. (shrink)

We investigated whether memories are selected for the life story based on event characteristics. Sixty-one students completed weekly diaries over their first term at university. They described, dated and rated two events each week. Three months after the end of the term they completed an unexpected memory test. They recalled three memories from the diary period that were important to their life story. Three randomly selected events scoring low on importance to the life story functioned as control memories. Life story (...) memories were rated higher on goal relevance, emotional intensity, importance and rehearsal in the diary and maintained their higher ratings at the test session, while ratings for control memories dropped off. Life story memories’ content was less consistent over time but they were more accurately dated than control memories. The results suggest that event characteristics play an important role for the selection of life story memories. (shrink)

This is Thomas Reid's greatest work. It covers far more philosophical ground than the earlier, more popular Inquiry. The Intellectual Powers and its companion volume, Essays on the Active Powers of Man, constitute the fullest, most original presentation of the philosophy of Common Sense. In the process, Reid provides acutely critical discussions of an impressive array of thinkers but especially of David Hume. In Reid's eyes, Hume had driven a deep tendency in modern philosophy to its ultimate conclusions by creating (...) a phantom-world of so-called 'ideas' that sprang from objects of observation; the self was a conglomeration of perceived ideas; and the will as the source of action was nothing but the balance of passionate impulses.Reid's Common Sense philosophy answers these problems by suggesting that sceptics, such as Hume, unavoidably affirm what they purport to deny, namely the existence of a stable external world, of other minds, of the continuity of their own minds, and of their own and other people's ability to ascribe and accept responsibility for actions. We can understand all of this by proper empirical observation and philosophical analysis of the activity of the mind. Reid's major positive contribution to philosophy is a detailed account of the various innate powers of the mind. While particularly influential in the first half of the nineteenth century, Reid's work has retained a significant role in philosophy, not least in recent years. At the same time, his role in the Scottish Enlightenment is becoming much better understood.This is the only properly established text. It is accompanied by manuscript lectures on the nature and immortality of the soul, as well as helpful editorial annotation and introduction, making it useful to a wide variety of readers.Key FeaturesAccurate, reliable and critically established textThe Introduction explains the work's genesis and its place in Reid's systemAnnotations provide an understanding of Reid's contextAn Appendix contains manuscript material covering an important topic not represented in the hitherto published work. (shrink)

The propagation of errors in physics research is studied, with particular attention being paid to the effectiveness of the erratum in avoiding error propagation. We study the citation history of 17 physics papers which have significant errata associated with them. It would appear that the existence of an erratum does not significantly decrease the frequency with which a paper is cited and in most cases the erratum isnot cited along with the original paper. The authors comment on implications for the (...) responsibilities of authors. (shrink)

Since the middle of the 20th century, philosophers and legal scholars have debated the precise definition of punishment. This chapter surveys the debate, identifies six potential conditions of punishment, and critically reviews each of them: 1) the response condition, which holds that punishment must be in response to wrongdoing, 2) the culpability condition, which holds that punishment must be of a person morally responsible for wrongdoing, 3) the authority condition, which holds that punishment must be imposed by a relevant authority, (...) 4) the hard treatment condition, which holds that punishment must impose hard consequences on the punishee, 5) the intentionality condition, which holds that punishment must be intentional, and 6) the censure condition, which holds that punishment must communicate disapproval. The article argues that it is often unclear that there is a version of the condition that provides optimal lexical fit. It discusses the implications of this analysis, and concludes that there may be less reason to worry about the lack of an authoritative definition than has sometimes been assumed, but that definitional clarity remains an objective worth pursuing. (shrink)

The conceptualization and moral analysis of discrimination constitutes a burgeoning theoretical field, with a number of open problems and a rapidly developing literature. A central problem is how to define discrimination, both in its most basic direct sense and in the most prominent variations. A plausible definition of the basic sense of the word understands discrimination as disadvantageous differential treatment of two groups that is in some respect caused by the properties that distinguish the groups, but open questions remain on (...) whether discrimination should be restricted to concern only particular groups, as well as on whether it is best conceived as a descriptive or a moralized concept. Furthermore, since this understanding limits direct discrimination to cases of differential treatment, it requires that we be able to draw a clear distinction between equal and differential treatment, a task that is less simple than it may appear, but that is helpful in clarifying indirect discrimination and statistical discrimination. The second major problem in theorizing discrimination is explaining what makes discrimination morally wrong. On this issue, there are four dominant contemporary answers: the valuational and expressive disrespect accounts, which hold that discrimination is wrong when and if the discriminator misestimates or expresses a misestimate of the moral status of the discriminatee; the unfairness account, which holds that discrimination is wrong when and if the discriminator unfairly increases inequality of opportunity; and the harm account, which holds that discrimination is wrong when and if the discriminator harms the discriminatee. Each of these accounts, however, faces important challenges in simultaneously providing a persuasive theoretical account and matching our intuitions about cases of impermissible discrimination. (shrink)

In the _World Library of Educationalists_, international experts themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces – extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and practical contributions – so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Knud Illeris’ work revolves around the way adults learn and continue to do so, and his concept of learning is based on the idea of three dimensions of learning and competence development. Chronicling (...) some of his most important works, this is a compelling overview of Illeris’ contribution to Higher Education thinking and theory. (shrink)

This is Thomas Reid's greatest work. It covers far more philosophical ground than the earlier, more popular Inquiry. The Intellectual Powers and its companion volume, Essays on the Active Powers of Man, constitute the fullest, most original presentation of the philosophy of Common Sense. In the process, Reid provides acutely critical discussions of an impressive array of thinkers but especially of David Hume. In Reid's eyes, Hume had driven a deep tendency in modern philosophy to its ultimate conclusions by creating (...) a phantom-world of so-called 'ideas' that sprang from objects of observation; the self was a conglomeration of perceived ideas; and the will as the source of action was nothing but the balance of passionate impulses. -/- Reid's Common Sense philosophy answers these problems by suggesting that sceptics, such as Hume, unavoidably affirm what they purport to deny, namely the existence of a stable external world, of other minds, of the continuity of their own minds, and of their own and other people's ability to ascribe and accept responsibility for actions. We can understand all of this by proper empirical observation and philosophical analysis of the activity of the mind. Reid's major positive contribution to philosophy is a detailed account of the various innate powers of the mind. While particularly influential in the first half of the nineteenth century, Reid's work has retained a significant role in philosophy, not least in recent years. At the same time, his role in the Scottish Enlightenment is becoming much better understood. -/- This is the only properly established text. It is accompanied by manuscript lectures on the nature and immortality of the soul, as well as helpful editorial annotation and introduction, making it useful to a wide variety of readers. -/- Key Features: -/- Accurate, reliable and critically established text; The Introduction explains the work's genesis and its place in Reid's system; Annotations provide an understanding of Reid's context; An Appendix contains manuscript material covering an important topic not represented in the hitherto published work. (shrink)

Insufficient vaccination coverage is an important public health problem in many countries, since it leads to the loss of herd protection and the resurgence of previously exterminated diseases. However, policies of mandatory childhood vaccination capable of raising vaccination rates continue to be controversial. In this article I review the arguments for mandatory childhood vaccination, setting out the strongest teleological argument in favour, and then critically examining the two strongest potential objections: paternalism and the parental prerogative. I argue that the challenge (...) of paternalism fails because it confuses the identities of those subject to restricted liberty and those who autonomously dissent, and because non-vaccination imposes risks on others. I argue that the challenge of a parental prerogative fails because it cannot be intuitively or theoretically supported in a form that would make it permissible to impose risks on others. I conclude that in lieu of further and more plausible objections at least some policies of mandatory childhood vaccination are morally permissible. (shrink)

The Essays on the Active Powers of Man was Thomas Reid's last major work. It was conceived as part of one large work, intended as a final synoptic statement of his philosophy. The first and larger part was published three years earlier as Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. These two works are united by Reid's basic philosophy of common sense, which sets out native principles by which the mind operates in both its intellectual and active aspects. The Active (...) Powers shows how these principles are involved in volition, action, and the ability to judge morally. Reid gives an original twist to a libertarian and realist tradition that was prominently represented in eighteenth-century British thought by such thinkers as Samuel Clarke and Richard Price. (shrink)