Agency without Actors? New Approaches to collective Action is rethinking a key issue in social theory and research: the question of agency. The history of sociological thought is deeply intertwined with the discourse of human agency as an effect of social relations. In most recent discussions the role of non-humans gains a substantial impact. Consequently the book asks: Are nonhumans active, do they have agency? And if so: how and in what different ways? The volume offers a critical state-of-the-art debate (...) of internationally and nationally leading scholars within Sociology, Social Anthropology and STS on agency (Latour, Law, Michael, Rammert etc.). It fosters the productive exchange of empirical settings and theoretical views by outlining a wide range of novel accounts that link human and non-human agency. It tries to understand social-technical, political and environmental networks as different forms of agency that produce discrete and identifiable entities like humans, animals, technical artifacts. It also asks how different types of (often conflicting) agency and agents actors are distinguished in practice, how they are maintained and how they interfere with each other. (shrink)

This paper examines the critical role that organizational leaders play in establishing a values based climate. We discuss seven mechanisms by which leaders convey the importance of ethical values to members, and establish the expectations regarding ethical conduct that become engrained in the organizations climate. We also suggest that leaders at different organizational levels rely on different mechanisms to transmit values and expectations. These mechanisms then influence members practices and expectations, further increase the salience of ethical values and result in (...) the shared perceptions that form the organizations climate. The paper is organized in three parts. Part onebegins with a brief discussion of climates regarding ethics and the critical role of values. Part two provides discussion on the mechanisms by which leaders and members transmit values and create climates related to ethics. Part three provides a discussion of these concepts with implications for theory, research, and practice. (shrink)

Deliberate contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is a reader’s ability to figure out a (not the) meaning for an unknown word from its “context”, without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. The appropriate context for such CVA is the “belief-revised integration” of the reader’s prior knowledge with the reader’s “internalization” of the text. We discuss unwarranted assumptions behind some classic objections to CVA, and present and defend a computational theory of CVA that we have adapted to a new (...) classroom curriculum designed to help students use CVA to improve their reading comprehension. (shrink)

In this book I address a dichotomy that is as central as any in ontology - that between ordinary objects or substances and the various attributes (Le., properties, kinds, and relations) we associate with them. My aim is to arrive at the correct philosophical account of each member of the dichotomy. What I shall argue is that the various attempts to understand substances or attri butes in reductive terms fail. Talk about attributes, I shall try to show, is just that (...) - talk about attributes; and, likewise, talk about substances is just tha- talk about substances. The result is what many will find a strange combina tion of views - a Platonistic theory of attributes, where attributes are univer sals or multiply exemplifiable entities whose existence is independent of "the world of flux", and an Aristotelian theory of substance, where substances are basic unities not reducible to metaphysically more fundamental kinds of things. Part One is concerned with the ontology of attributes. After distinguishing three different patterns of metaphysical thinking about attributes, I examine, in turn, the phenomena of predication, resemblance, and higher order quanti fication. I argue that none of these phenomena by itself is sufficient to establish the inescapability of a Platonistic interpretation of attributes. Then, I discuss the phenomenon of abstract reference as it is exhibited in the use of abstract singular terms. (shrink)

We discuss a research project that develops and applies algorithms for computational contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA): learning the meaning of unknown words from context. We try to unify a disparate literature on the topic of CVA from psychology, first- and secondlanguage acquisition, and reading science, in order to help develop these algorithms: We use the knowledge gained from the computational CVA system to build an educational curriculum for enhancing students’ abilities to use CVA strategies in their reading of science texts (...) at the middle-school and college undergraduate levels. The knowledge gained from case studies of students using our CVA techniques feeds back into further development of our computational theory. Keywords: artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, reading, reasoning, science education, vocabulary acquisition. (shrink)

Diese Festschrift für Michael Fischer ist ein Patchwork und eine wunderbare Mischung aus Wissenschaft, Persönlichem, Freundschaft und Genuss. Sie setzt sich aus unterschiedlichen und vielseitigen Texten, Zeichnungen und Bildern zusammen, von Menschen, die ihn begleitet haben, manche viele Jahre, manche nur eine kurze, aber entscheidende Zeit. Studentinnen und Studenten, die von ihm gelernt haben, Kolleginnen und Kollegen, die mit ihm Ideen entwickelt, Projekte initiiert und geforscht haben, Freunden aus Kunst und Kultur, Theater, Oper und den Bühnen des Lebens, nämlich: (...) Eric Hobsbawm, Claudio Magris, André Glucksmann, Wolf Singer, Johannes Hahn, Volker Gerhardt, Thomas Fischer, Rudolf (+) und Gundl Hradil, Helga Rabl-Stadler, Gerard Mortier, Jürgen Flimm, Brita Steinwendtner, Veit Heinichen, Peter Ruzicka, André Tubeuf, Thomas Oberender, Stefan Zweifel, Hermann Lübbe, Eduardo Chitas, Wilhelm Donner, Hans Eichhorn, Reinhard Kacianka, Tina Perisutti, Ulrich H. J. Körtner, Markus Hengstschläger, Henriette und Conrad Ulrich-Hürlimann, Michael Hagner, Thomas Macho, Johann Weyringer, Birgit Recki, Walther Ch. Zimmerli, Andreas Cesana, Kurt Seelmann. (shrink)

RationaleSurrogates of critically ill patients often have inaccurate expectations about prognosis. Yet there is little research on how intensive care unit clinicians should discuss prognosis, and existing expert opinion-based recommendations give only general guidance that has not been validated with surrogate decision makers.ObjectiveTo determine the perspectives of key stakeholders regarding how prognostic information should be conveyed in critical illness.MethodsThis was a multicenter study at three academic medical centers in California, Pennsylvania, and Washington. One hundred eighteen key stakeholders completed in-depth semistructured (...) interviews. Participants included 47 surrogates of adult patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome; 45 clinicians working in study ICUs, including physicians, nurses, social workers, and spiritual care providers; and 26 experts in health communication, decision science, ethics, family-centered care, geriatrics, healthcare disparities, palliative care, psychology, psychiatry, and critical care.Measurements and main resultsThere was broad support among surrogates for existing expert recommendations, including truthful prognostic disclosure, emotional support, tailoring the disclosure strategy to each family's needs, and checking for understanding. In addition, stakeholders offered suggestions that add specificity to existing recommendations, including: In addition to conveying prognostic estimates, clinicians should help families "see the prognosis for themselves" by showing families radiographic images and explaining the clinical significance of physical manifestations of severe disease at the bedside. Many physicians did not support using numeric estimates to convey prognosis to families, whereas many surrogates, clinicians from other disciplines, and experts believed numbers could be helpful. Clinicians should conceptualize prognostic communication as an iterative process that begins with a preliminary mention of the possibility of death early in the ICU stay and becomes more detailed as the clinical situation develops. Although prognostic information should be initially disclosed by physicians, other members of the multidisciplinary team-nurses, social workers, and spiritual care providers-should be given explicit role responsibilities to reinforce physicians' prognostications and help families process a poor prognosis emotionally.ConclusionsFamily members, clinicians, and experts identified specific communication behaviors that clinicians should use to discuss prognosis in the critical care setting. These findings extend existing opinion-based recommendations and should guide interventions to improve communication about prognosis in ICUs. (shrink)

A unique anthology of essays exploring the philosophical wisdom runners contemplate when out for a run. It features writings from some of America’s leading philosophers, including Martha Nussbaum, Charles Taliaferro, and J.P. Moreland. A first-of-its-kind collection of essays exploring those gems of philosophical wisdom runners contemplate when out for a run Topics considered include running and the philosophy of friendship; the freedom of the long distance runner; running as aesthetic experience, and “Could a Zombie Run a Marathon?” Contributing essayists include (...) philosophers with athletic experience at the collegiate level, philosophers whose pasttime is running, and one philosopher who began running to test the ideas in his essay. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the boundaries of political sovereignty, one key aspect of global political justice and an important background condition to the issues of global economic justice treated in the other papers of this volume. I first present an interpretive summary of the traditional arguments against and for intervention, stressing, to a greater extent than is usual, the consequentialist character of the ethics of intervention. It makes a difference whether we think that an intervention will do more good than (...) harm, and some of the factors that determine the outcome are matters of strategy and institutional choice. I then explore the significance of a key factor that makes for much of what is new in the new interventionism: the role of multilateral and particularly U.N. authorization and implementation. I argue that the more salient role of the United Nations should lead us to a more expansive tolerance of international intervention and that global standards of justice, both political and economic, can therefore be more widely enforced against claims to national autonomy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.4 (2001) 584-585 [Access article in PDF] Phillip Cary. Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xvii + 214. Cloth, $45.00. In a gloss on the well-known gospel text, G. K. Chesterton noted that it is precisely because salt is unlike the foods it preserves that it is able to do (...) its distinctive work of preservation. Likewise, according to the thesis of this book, it is precisely because Augustine of Hippo invented his distinctive approach to interiority that he has done so much to preserve for the Western tradition the Platonic conception of the soul. Yet Augustine's contribution to the philosophy of the inner self is not simply one of inventio in the classical sense of a discovery of the Platonic self, it is also an innovation pointing philosophy in a new direction.Using a series of provocative images, Phillip Cary outlines the history of the idea of the private inner self in a way that highlights Augustine's distinctive contribution. He begins with Plato's Allegory of the Cave wherein the soul or self is an eye that has escaped the lower darkness to gaze upward away from itself toward the sun achieving intellectual vision. This idea is developed by Plotinus, for whom the soul is like a sphere revolving around the inner source of intelligibility at the center of things. This soul can look out toward the darkness or inward toward the intelligible light. In a further development, Augustine pictures the self as an inner palace with large courtyards open to the intelligible light of the sun such that the eye of the soul must turn inward and then upward to be enlightened. The final modern development is represented by Locke's picture of the self as a dark room where nothing but images are projected within through windows out of which the self cannot see, the intelligible light of the sun being kept out. Introducing the notion of the private inner life, Augustine is the forerunner of modern philosophy and all that has followed from the Cartesian turn. Yet Augustine is also a Platonist seeking the source of intelligibility that enlightens the inner self taking it beyond itself. This dual thesis is defended by Cary through a study of Augustine's place in the Platonic tradition of inner divinity. The task takes up the [End Page 584] first half of the book and builds on the well-known studies of Augustine's Platonism by J. J. O'Meara, R. J. O'Connell, and others. The second part of the book is devoted to Augustine's innovations of privacy and the inward-upward turn and yields some surprising discoveries that will interest the historian of philosophy.One surprise concerns Augustine's expressionist semiotics according to which signs are outward expressions of what is within. As a Platonist, however, Augustine also holds that signs signify intelligible things that nonetheless fail to be made truly intelligible by signs. The knower, then, does not grasp the intelligible thing from its being signified by the sign, but grasps the significance of a sign by knowing the intelligible thing it signifies. Thus, according to the De Doctrina Christiana, the correct interpreter of scripture is the one who already knows the spiritual things the words of scripture signify and, therefore, is not a slave to a literal interpretation of these words.Another surprise is Augustine's notion of grace as a sort of Platonic eros. Operating by attraction rather than coercion, grace is as much directed at the reason as the will. Thus, the discussions of grace as inward teaching in the anti-Pelagian works is a development of Christ, the inner teacher of the De Magistro, and Reason, the inner teacher of the Soliloquies.Yet another surprise concerns the traditional faith-reason problem. Rather than seeing faith and reason as contrasting modes of inner cognition of outward objects, Augustine associates faith with authority as external... (shrink)

Correspondence and texts by Fichte and Schelling illuminate their thought and the trajectory of their philosophical falling out.

Evaluates trade-offs and uncertainties inherent in achieving sustainable energy, analyzes the major energy technologies, and provides a framework for assessing policy options.

The etiology of visual hallucinations is largely undetermined in schizophrenia. Collerton et al.'s PAD model partly concurs with what we know about neurocognition in schizophrenia, but we need to specify the types of perceptual and attentional abnormalities that are implicated in recurrent complex visual hallucinations (RCVH). Available data suggest that abnormal attentional control and top-down processing play a larger role than the ventral stream deficits.

This article examines a somewhat neglected argument for the existence of God which appeals to the divine perspective as a way of reconciling the conflicting claims of realism and anti-realism. Six representative examples are set out (Berkeley, Ferrier, T. H. Green, Josiah Royce, Gordon Clark and Michael Dummett), reasons are considered why this argument has received less attention than it might, and a brief sketch given of the most promising way in which it might be developed.

The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics offers the most authoritative and compelling guide to this diverse and fertile field of philosophy. Twenty-four of the world's most distinguished specialists provide brand-new essays about 'what there is': what kinds of things there are, and what relations hold among entities falling under various categories. They give the latest word on such topics as identity, modality, time, causation, persons and minds, freedom, and vagueness. The Handbook's unrivaled breadth and depth make it the definitive reference work (...) for students and academics across the philosophical spectrum. (shrink)

J. N. Adams, Michael Lapidge, and Tobias Reinhardt: IntroductionJ. H. W. Penney: Connections in Archaic Latin ProseJ. Briscoe: Language and Style of the Fragmentary Republican HistoriansJ. N. Adams: The Bellum AfricumChristina Shuttleworth Kraus: Hair, Hegemony, and Historiography: Caesar's Style and its Earliest CriticsJ. G. F. Powell: Cicero's Adaptation of Legal Latin in the De legibusTobias Reinhardt: Language of Epicureanism in Cicero: The Case of AtomismG. O. Hutchinson: Pope's Spider and Cicero's WritingR. G. Mayer: The Impracticability of 'Kunstprosa'H. M. Hine: (...) Poetic Influence on Prose: The Case of the Younger SenecaHarm Pinkster: The Language of Pliny the ElderD. R. Russell: Omisso speciosiore stili genereS. J. Harrison: The Poetics of Fiction: Poetic Influence on the Languages of Apuleius' MetamorphosesD. R. Langslow: 'Langues réduites au lexique'? The Languages of Latin Technical ProseDanuta Shanzer: of Tours and Poetry: Prose into Verse and Verse into ProseMichael Lapidge: Poeticism in Pre-Conquest Anglo-Latin ProseRichard Sharpe: The Varieties of Bede's ProseCarlotta Dionisotti: Translator's LatinWalter Berschin: Realistic Writing in the Tenth Century: : Gerhard of Ausburg's Vita S. UodalriciR. M. Thomson: William of Malmesbury and the Latin Classics RevisitedGiovanni Orlandi: Metrical and Rhythmical Clausulae in Medieval Latin Prose: Some Aspects and Problems. (shrink)

Talents that selectively facilitate the acquisition of high levels of skill are said to be present in some children but not others. The evidence for this includes biological correlates of specific abilities, certain rare abilities in autistic savants, and the seemingly spontaneous emergence of exceptional abilities in young children, but there is also contrary evidence indicating an absence of early precursors of high skill levels. An analysis of positive and negative evidence and arguments suggests that differences in early experiences, preferences, (...) opportunities, habits, training, and practice are the real determinants of excellence. Key Words: exceptional ability; expertise; gift; innate capacity; music; potential; prodigy; specific ability; talent. (shrink)

Recently, Rueger and Sharp (1996) and Koperski (1998) have been concerned to show that certain procedural accounts of model confirmation are compromised by non-linear dynamics. We suggest that the issues raised are better approached by considering whether chaotic data analysis methods allow for reliable inference from data. We provide a framework and an example of this approach.

This collection examines the classical liberal perspective within the professional study of history. The contributors investigate the origins and development of the classical liberal approach, argue for its revival within academia, and analyze its relevance to such topics as economics, civil liberties, feminism, and civil rights.

The decidability of the logic of pure ticket entailment means that the problem of inhabitation of simple types by combinators over the base { B, B′, I, W } is decidable too. Type-assignment systems are often formulated as natural deduction systems. However, our decision procedure for this logic, which we presented in earlier papers, relies on two sequent calculi and it does not yield directly a combinator for a theorem of ${T_\to}$. Here we describe an algorithm to extract an inhabitant (...) from a sequent calculus proof—without translating the proof into another proof system. (shrink)

Negative people/wildlife interaction has raised public interest in wildlife population control. We present a contingent valuation study of alternative deer control measures considered for Hilton Head Island, SC. Lethal control usig sharpshooters and nonlethal immuno-contraception techniques are evaluated. A mail-back survey was used to collect resident willingness-to-pay information for reduced deer densities and consequent property damage. Residents are unwilling to spend more for the nonlethal alternative. The estimated WTP appears theoretically consistent as increasing levels of abatement for both lethal and (...) nonlethal alternatives demonstrate diminishing marginal benefits. Over 60% of respondents bid zero regardless of control measure, suggesting a referendum would fail. However, only half of these zero bidders expressed no problem with deer, while the other half bid zero because of distaste for the control alternative, safety concerns, or doubt about effectiveness. Inclusion of these responses as legitimate zero bids depressed mean WTP estimates from 22 to 31%. (shrink)