In this paper we demonstrate the importance of non-economic values to community-based conservation by presenting findings from research into Kunlog Community Resource Management Area (CREMA) in northern Ghana. One of the central motivations for creating the CREMA was to reinforce a traditional taboo on bushbuck, and while some respondents mentioned the possibility of eventually attracting tourists, the primary desire behind the CREMA is to protect bushbuck and other wildlife for future generations. Several respondents emphasised wanting children and grandchildren to be (...) able to grow up seeing the wildlife. Material benefits should not be the sole focus of those involved in promoting and legislating frameworks for community-based conservation - frameworks such as Ghana's CREMA policy. Government frameworks for the creation, registration and regulation of conservation initiatives should be flexible and able to accommodate diverse community-based conservation initiatives driven from a variety of mixes of motivations, including motivations deriving from non-material values. (shrink)

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

What are moral principles? The assumption underlying much of the generalism–particularism debate in ethics is that they are (or would be) moral laws: generalizations or some special class thereof, such as explanatory or counterfactual-supporting generalizations. I argue that this law conception of moral principles is mistaken. For moral principles do at least three things that moral laws cannot do, at least not in their own right: explain certain phenomena, provide particular kinds of support for counterfactuals, and ground moral necessities, “necessary (...) connections” between obligating reasons and obligations. Moreover, neither a best-systems theory of moral principles nor any of the competing theories of moral principles proposed by Sean McKeever and Michael Ridge, Pekka Väyrynen, and Mark Lance and Margaret Little could vindicate the law conception of moral principles. I conclude with some brief remarks about what moral principles might be if they are not moral laws. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 136-140. In early 2011, Cow Heavy Books published The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature , a compendium of catalog 'blurbs' for non-existent desired or ideal texts. Along with Erinrose Mager, I edited the project, in a process that was more like curation as it mainly entailed asking a range of contemporary writers, theorists, and text-makers to send us an entry. What resulted was a creative/critical hybrid anthology, a small book in which each page opens (...) to a new iteration of textual desire. These texts explore the material possibilities of the book. Somewhat parallel to the call of N. Katherine Hayles who, in her book Writing Machines , urges literary theorists to take up the practice of Medium Specific Analysis (to account for the way the medium in which it is presented conditions or at least bears on a literary text). I see in the imagined works of The Official Catalog a call for the innovative writers of today to become Medium-Responsive. This would mean thinking through the specific (materially constrained) possibilities offered by the media in which texts are presented, and in thinking of the literary text as a kind of art in the greater context of other arts and the book as a medium situated within the context of many other media. In doing so, the contemporary writer refutes the chorus of critics who lament the death of the book by consistently reinvigorating literary innovation. The following are selections from The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature that show possible paths for (thinking about) new writing that engages with its medium. —Ben Segal, Editor THE CUBE Even the most radical non-linear texts have tended to exploit or subvert only the sequential possibilities of print—from the continuous loop of Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the shuffled cards of Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 —but The Cube takes such multiplicities to an entirely new level. Set in a grid, the book's words can be read conventionally, across the page, as well as down each column—with either route making complete grammatical sense. But they can also be read as stacked strata and mined like lexical core samples through the layered pages of the book. Each path tells the same story from a different perspective (the narrative, naturally, hinges on the potential outcomes of a throw of cubed dice). By opening up the z-axis to reading in this way, The Cube recognizes the book as a three-dimensional sculptural space. Taking its lead from Armand Schwerner's (If Personal) and Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes , The Cube reads like a experiment by Christian Bök precision printed by Emily McVarish. Craig Dworkin is the editor, most recently, of The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (Roof Books, 2008), The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound , with Marjorie Perloff (U. Chicago Press, 2009), and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing , with Kenneth Goldsmith (Northwestern UP, 2010). He teaches at the University of Utah. HE GOES In He Goes , we read notes, letters and e-mails from a scholar father to his novelist daughter. We read of the father's musings on Beckett, on Pinter, on Anne Frank; his description of a woman hanging laundry from a line. We read about his journey toward dying, followed by a brief, third person account of his death, and his obituary. Then a long series of blank pages that demand to be read in real time, non-sentence by non-sentence, blank page by blank page. Finally—and it is here that this peculiar little book begins to soar—the dead father writes to his as-of-yet-still-living daughter. He does not write from death. He does not write from life. The words unprint, unstamp, unkindle. Still, they require no translation. The father "writes" (for lack of a better word) about the serendipitous, the commonplace; he recommends another book. He jokes. He asks his daughter how her stomach is. He says forget about presence in absence, darling; screw words as memorial and the guys in garbage cans and loss as redemption and I can't go on I must go on. He goes, "Love, Fodder." He goes, "incidentally." He goes, "I thought you might like to know." Elizabeth Graver is the author of a story collection, Have You Seen Me? , and three novels: Unravelling ; The Honey Thief ; and Awake . Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories , Best American Essays , and Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards . She teaches at Boston College. THE PAPER ARCHIVIST A stunning package and a triumph of imagination, The Paper Archivist at times looks to be less a book than an abstract expressionist painting. Softly bound, its contents unfold to a single sheet of uneven thickness and texture—a canvas splattered with colored lines, stickers, broken sentences, and nonsense pictographs. But by following the directions to fold, dip, smell, rub, scratch, and tear the sheet according to the contingencies of the weather and using only the objects at hand, the reader slowly brings the forces hidden in the noise into a glorious sculptural convergence, processing a different story and shape each time. This is the rare book that continues to stir, whirl, and pop on every new reading. Sean Higgins blogs at BOMBlog where he is responsible for the column Volumes and Territories, as well as Ghost Island , a fledgling collaborative intellectual collective. THE SLOW BOOK The Slow Book , written by an anonymous author at the dawn of literacy, on a minor planet (otherwise notable only as the source of that exceptionally hardy, not very tasty grain called “shef” sowed on hostile planets as an early step to colonization), and encoded into a series of punctures on a strip of copper coiled inside a clever device, something between a player piano and an old-fashioned film projector, is being released into print, as was the author’s intention, at a rate of one word per century (local time). Each word is, across the Forty Galaxies, agreed to be uncannily apt for the century in which it appears—even “of,” in a century during which the highest value was attached to fidelity, whether to ideals, worlds, or romantic love; even “the,” which governed two centuries, one extraordinarily materialistic, during which advances in propulsion and navigation accelerated the exchange of exceptional objects between the remotest planets of the Forty, and one in which the central concern, both of philosophers and the common man, was whether, in an age of rapidly proliferating hypothetical worlds, anyone or anything concretely existed at all. Even those words published long before interstellar contact can be seen in retrospect to have transgalactic pertinence. As a result, attempts to abstract the machine from its publishers, Hobson & Hui, in order to “predict the future” for insight or gain by “fast- forwarding” the copper strip have been many and ingenious. While, in centuries of skepticism (“maybe”), or of unrest (“go”) the book has been nearly forgotten, in others it seems to haunt every thought, every deed, despite the fact that the subject of The Slow Book is still unclear. So far only a few sentences exist in print; everyone knows them, can quote them, offer the standard exegeses and assorted heresies; yet certainties are the stuff of adolescence; mature readers are forced to acknowledge that these sentences are probably only a preamble to the main argument. They contain no proper nouns, nor can we identify any definite theme. There is even disagreement about their tone, whether coolly ironic, as some insist, or ardent. The appearance of an unusual grammatical case, sometimes called the future pluperfect continuous, used to describe events that at some future point will have always been true (but are not yet)—hitherto known to appear only in the synthetic dogmas of the Thanatographical Society, and in certain highly circumscribed religious contexts—has suggested to some scholars that the Slow Book was originally intended for ritual use, but the proximity of the usage to a term designating a small hand plow that, as Pott and Mielcke have convincingly shown, would have borne a distinctly obscene double meaning in its culture of origin in the author’s time, argues otherwise. It is likewise unclear whether the situation that seems to be—with teasing incompleteness—sketched out in these few lines is intended as an illustration of general principles, a case study, a dramatic scene, or an extended metaphor. In short, we have no idea what The Slow Book is about. In our own time, we believe that it is almost certainly a work of fiction, but that may be because we live in the century of “if”. In each age, perhaps, we see the book we most need to read. Some have dared to suggest that the metal strip is blank until, with millennial fanfare, it advances into its new position, that no ur-text exists, that the book itself is brought into being—written—by our need. But that is exactly the sort of thing we would believe, in 7645. Shelley Jackson is the author of the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy , the novel Half Life , and hypertexts including Patchwork Girl . The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2006 James Tiptree Jr Award, she has also written and illustrated several children's books, including The Old Woman and the Wave ; Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog ; and Mimi's Dada Catifesto . Her stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions , McSweeney's , The Paris Review , and Cabinet Magazine . In 2004 she launched her project SKIN , a story published in tattoos on 2095 volunteers. THE BOOK OF SOUNDS The Book of Sounds is just that: a book of sounds made when letters are construed in new ways to bring forth out of the alphabet new forms of speech. A book meant to be read out loud, The Book of Sounds is not unlike Laurie Anderson's O Superman or Brian Eno's Music for Airports in its attempt to make music out of the most primary and simplest of methods. It breaks language down to its barest bones and makes out of the page a drum that has never before been beaten upon. Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat (Dzanc Books) as well as two books of short fiction, Good, Brother and The Singing Fish , both of which were published by Calamari Press. A new collection of stories, We Make Mud , is now available from Dzanc Books. PARADISE OF THE BLIND by Celan Solen Although the reclusive Celan Solen published his first and only book in 1963—paying out-of-pocket for a limited edition of the slim collection No One May Have the Same Knowledge Again —he remained in American obscurity for almost three decades. In 1992 a micro-press in Istanbul brought out No One in Turkish. A German translation followed in 1995. Soon it became clear in literary circles Solen was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist—lyrical, dense, enigmatic—who could undo the conventional short story in 397 words by inventing impossible worlds housed in impossible whirls (in “Small Sadnesses,” a single chartreuse tree frog in Borneo unknowingly holds time together by its very presence in the universe, while each letter of its tale refers, not to itself, but to the one preceding it in the alphabet). By his disappearance last year, Solen was considered master by a generation of writers and critics (except, alas, for those gentlemen in the Swedish Academy). Imagine, then, that generation’s delight at the discovery, locked away in the author’s safe-deposit box, of his second and final composition. Had Lynch’s Lost Highway been book instead of film, and had it been penned by Beckett at his least certain, revised by Barthelme at his most formally deranged, and typeset by Derrida at his most semiotically catastrophic, the result might have been something like Paradise of the Blind : interlacing narratives of a man composed of borrowed organs (whose most cheerless and difficult to locate, god, could only have been invented by an empty heart), a nonexistent medieval painting blamed for the ruin of future hope, and the spread of a philosophy that holds earth a mistake constantly recurring in the dream of a fish lying on the floor of the Atlantic (if the fish wakes, our world winks off)—all contained in a text packed with typed-over passages, torn postcards, poems that can be deciphered only when held up to a mirror, pages ornamented with trompe-l'œil paperclips and coffee stains and buzzing houseflies, some busy with illegible runes that dissolve when exposed to light, three that smell like roses or lemons (depending on whether a man or woman is reading), two that stain with the bloody fingerprints of the those who handle them, one that ignites when brushed with breath, thirteen sewn from baby skin, one that moans when touched, and one that screams—yet all without mass, unimaginable, and invisible. Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative fiction, including, most recently, the novels Calendar of Regrets (2010) and Head in Flames (2009). He teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. SUPERSTRUCTURE! by Barbara D'Albi As soon as I opened the third drawer of Barbara D'Albi's wooden novel, everything became hopeless. Now in Ithaca, there was no going back. And it wasn't just the intricate series of shelves, hinged doors and locked drawers which D'Albi layered into the book, no, lo, I was constructed anew by the story. Who else but D'Albi to imagine a God who becomes a carpenter and gets killed?! And makes it good! You want stories? D'Albi is a skyscraper, built with planes and levers. Momentarily I wondered where I could shelve this book, and then I thought: no matter; I couldn't put it down. Adam Robinson lives in Baltimore, where he runs Publishing Genius. He is the author of Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say, Poem. (shrink)

The precipitous cliffs, rolling headlands, and rocky inlets of the Big Sur coast of California prompted Robinson Jeffers to extol their wild beauty throughout his long career as a poet. This extraordinary volume brings together Jeffers’s haunting poetry with magnificent photographs of Big Sur by his friend and neighbor, famed photographer Morley Baer.

Reflecting Alan Robinson's fundamental contribution to computational logic, this book brings together seminal papers in inference, equality theories, and logic programming. It is an exceptional collection that ranges from surveys of major areas to new results in more specialized topics. Alan Robinson is currently the University Professor at Syracuse University. Jean-Louis Lassez is a Research Scientist at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Gordon Plotkin is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. Contents: Inference. Subsumption, (...) A Sometimes Undervalued Procedure, Larry Wos, Ross Overbeek, and Ewing Lusk. The Markgraf Karl Refutation Procedure, Hans Jurgen Ohlbach and Jorg H. Siekmann. Modal Logic Should Say More than it Does, Melvin Fitting. Interactive Proof Presentation, W. W. Bledsoe. Intelligent Backtracking Revisited, Maurice Bruynooghe. A Science of Reasoning, Alan Bundy. Inductive Inference of Theories from Facts, Ehud Y. Shapiro. Equality. Solving Equations in Abstract Algebras: A Rule-based Survey of Unification, Jean-Pierre Jouannaud and Claude Kirchner. Disunification: A Survey, Hubert Comon. A Case Study of the Completion Procedure: Proving Ring Commutativity Problems, Deepak Kapur and Hantao Zhang. Computations in Regular Rewriting Systems I and II, Girard Huet and JeanJacques Levy. Unification and ML Type Reconstruction, Paris Kanellakis, Harry Mairson, and John Mitchell. Automatic Dimensional Analysis, Mitchell Wand. Logic Programming. Logic Programming Schemes and Their Implementations, Keith Clark. A Near-Horn Prolog for Compilation, Donald Loveland and David Reed. Unfold/Fold Transformations of Logic Programs, P. A. Gardner and J. C. Shepherdson. An Algebraic Representation of Logic Program Computations, Andrea Corradini and Ugo Montanari. Theory of Disjunctive Logic Programs, Jack Minker, Arcot Rajasekar, and Jorge Lobo. Bottom-Up Evaluation of Logic Programs, Jeffrey Naughton and Raghu Ramakrishnan. Absys, the First Logic Programming Language: A View of the Inevitability of Logic Programming, E. W. Elcock. (shrink)

Lance Rips describes a unified theory of natural deductive reasoning and fashions a working model of deduction, with strong experimental support, that is capable of playing a central role in mental life.

It is a standard feature of modern philosophy, at least from Locke, to tie together the questions of how we perceive the world and what we have reason to think the world is like in itself. This is a natural connection, because the questions of how we perceive it, and what kind of conception of it we can best form on the basis of that mode of perception, are obviously intimately linked. Part I of this volume defends the sense-datum theory (...) of perception against its opponents, and argues that the sense-datum theory is much closer to a form of direct realism than is normally thought: we directly perceive the world in the form that it naturally manifests itself to creatures like us. This leaves open the question of what it is like in itself, and Part II tries to show that a Berkeleian interpretation—that the world is a nomological structure in the mind of God—is the most plausible option. Arguments with roots in Berkeley, in modern philosophers such as John Foster, and in modern science, are drawn on to support this conclusion. (shrink)

SUFFERING HUMAN AND DIVINE INTRODUCTION I KNEW when I asked Dr. H. Wheeler Robinson to write this volume on Suffering that I was giving him the most difficult ...

This chapter contains sections titled: Classical Theories of Success Morris's 3‐D Approach to Life Lance Discovers His Positive Talents Lance Develops His Talents: Pre‐Cancer Lance Develops His Talents: Post‐Cancer Lance Deploys His Talents Notes.

Lines of Thought addresses how we are able to think about abstract possibilities: How can we think about math, despite the immateriality of numbers, sets, and other mathematical entities? How are we able to think about what might have happened if history had taken a different turn? Questions like these turn up in nearly every part of cognitive science, and they are central to our human position of having only limited knowledge concerning what is or might be true.

Cyclist Lance Armstrong cheated his way to seven Tour de France . Such cheating is wrong because it harms society. To explain how that harm affects all of us, I use Aristotle's ideas of virtue ethics to argue that Armstrong, despite his charitable work, is not a virtuous person. Virtue is to some extent determined by society, so we need to be clear that Armstrong is not a person to emulate. A society which does not clearly disapprove of vice (...) is less than it might otherwise be because a good society is one that encourages virtue in its citizens. (shrink)

Recent research on the metaethical beliefs of ordinary people appears to show that they are metaethical pluralists that adopt different metaethical standards for different moral judgments. Yet the methods used to evaluate folk metaethical belief rely on the assumption that participants interpret what they are asked in metaethical terms. We argue that most participants do not interpret questions designed to elicit metaethical beliefs in metaethical terms, or at least not in the way researchers intend. As a result, existing methods are (...) not reliable measures of metaethical belief. We end by discussing the implications of our account for the philosophical and practical implications of research on the psychology of metaethics. (shrink)

Following strict rules of interpretation, this book focuses on the ideas in Plato's early and middle dialogues that lie within the fields now called logic and methodology, specifically elenchus and dialectic and the method of hypothesis.

Our knowledge of natural categories includes beliefs not only about what is true of them but also about what would be true if the categories had properties other than (or in addition to) their actual ones. Evidence about these beliefs comes from three lines of research: experiments on category-based induction, on hypothetical transformations of category members, and on definitions of kind terms. The 1st part of this article examines results and theories arising from each of these research streams. The 2nd (...) part considers possible unified theories for this domain, including theories based on ideals and norms. It also contrasts 2 broad frameworks for modal category information: one focusing on beliefs about intrinsic or essential properties, the other focusing on interacting causal relations. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of the existence of corporate philanthropy. It proposes a framework for analysing corporate philanthropy along the dimensions of business/society interest and primary/secondary stakeholder focus. The framework is then applied in order to understand business involvement with the arts in the U.K. A unique dataset of 60 texts which describe different firms' involvement with the Arts is analysed using formal content analysis to uncover the motivations for business involvement. Cluster analysis is then used in order to (...) identify motivational groupings. Two broad types of involvement are identified – advertisers and legitimators. Only in one case of the 60 is there the potential to observe pure altruism. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, it provides a clear framework to understand the motivations for corporate giving and applies this using empirical data. Secondly, this research finds little evidence, if at all, of corporate philanthropy in the context of firms giving to the Arts in the U.K. (shrink)

Robinson Jeffers’ dark view of humankind is thought to owe much to Friedrich Nietzsche while his admiration for the beauty of nature has been compared to sentiments expressed by Lucretius in de rerum natura. In many respects, however, the philosopher who stands closest to Jeffers in both thought and personality is the ancient Greek thinker Heraclitus of Ephesus. Jeffers’ extended poem ‘The Double Axe’ makes no fewer than five clear references to Heraclitean ideas: (1) ‘Heraclitus’ Sibyl whose voice reached (...) over ten thousand years’; (2) the opposites ‘winter and summer…rain the drought, and peace and war; (3) ‘the eternal fire-wheel; (4) ‘One existence, one music, one organism, one life, one God: star-fire and rock-strength, the sea’s cold flow/And man’s dark soul; and (5) ‘This divine outer universe is after all not at peace with itself, but full of violent strains and conflicts. The physical world is ruled by opposing tensions.’ -/- . (shrink)

Ethical sourcing and socially responsible purchasing is increasingly on the business agenda, but developing and implementing policy and practice across a global network of suppliers is challenging. The purpose of this paper is to expand theory on the nature of linkages between firms in a social network, specifically postulating how ties between organizations can be configured to facilitate development, diffusion, and adoption of sustainability initiatives. The theory development provides a lens with which to view the influence of a firm’s structural (...) embeddedness in its organizational social network on developing, diffusing and adopting sustainability initiatives. The focus is on brokers who in various structural alignments help bridge the focal firm’s sustainability initiatives with distant or disconnected stakeholders the focal firm is trying to reach. The brokers help the focal firm engage these stakeholders by sharing knowledge and information regarding sustainability initiatives and by incorporating localized needs into the development of the initiatives to facilitate better diffusion and adoption. The theoretical contribution of this manuscript is a novel perspective on sustainability in organizational networks. This perspective allows for greater explanatory power regarding how organizations can achieve sustainable outcomes that meet a broad base of stakeholder needs and better facilitate sustainability initiatives across a diverse and expansive network. (shrink)