This paper reflects on quality assessment and performance evaluation in higher education, namely by analysing the insufficient link between those two aspects. We start by reviewing the current state of the art regarding different processes and mechanisms of quality assessment and performance evaluation and discuss some of the major issues regarding the implementation of some of them. In particular, we analyse the current limitations regarding data collected, available and publicised on the performance of HEIs and the problems those limitations bring (...) to a fair evaluation of higher education. Through this analysis we intend to contribute to a better understanding of the mechanisms of evaluation in higher education and the way these may lead to the promotion of better quality assessment practices and institutional management. (shrink)

The Schwarzschild solution has played a fundamental conceptual role in general relativity, and beyond, for instance, regarding event horizons, spacetime singularities and aspects of quantum field theory in curved spacetimes. However, one still encounters the existence of misconceptions and a certain ambiguity inherent in the Schwarzschild solution in the literature. By taking into account the point of view of an observer in the interior of the event horizon, one verifies that new conceptual difficulties arise. In this work, besides providing a (...) very brief pedagogical review, we further analyze the interior Schwarzschild black hole solution. Firstly, by deducing the interior metric by considering time-dependent metric coefficients, the interior region is analyzed without the prejudices inherited from the exterior geometry. We also pay close attention to several respective cosmological interpretations, and briefly address some of the difficulties associated to spacetime singularities. Secondly, we deduce the conserved quantities of null and timelike geodesics, and discuss several particular cases in some detail. Thirdly, we examine the Eddington–Finkelstein and Kruskal coordinates directly from the interior solution. In concluding, it is important to emphasize that the interior structure of realistic black holes has not been satisfactorily determined, and is still open to considerable debate. (shrink)

This paper describes the first three-year experience of the Consortium Ethics Program (CEP-1) of the University of Pittsburgh Center for Medical Ethics, and also outlines plans for the second three-year phase (CEP-2) of this experiment in continuing ethics education. In existence since 1990, the CEP has the primary goal of creating a cost-effective, permanent ethics resource network, by utilizing the educational resources of a university bioethics center and the practical expertise of a regional hospital council. The CEP's conception and specific (...) components stem from recognition of the need to make each hospital a major focus of educational efforts, and to provide academic support for the in-house activities of the representatives from each institution. (shrink)

This article introduces the special issue on “Corporate Reputation: Being Good and Looking Good.” Three of the five included articles help to reinforce a conclusion that “being good” and “looking good” are not dichotomous, mutually exclusive conditions. Rather, the two dimensions are linked in some kind of causal relationship for which continuing conceptual and empirical research is desirable. A fourth article concerns the reputational effects of the stock-option backdating scandal. The fifth article offers a critique of conventional approaches to defining (...) and measuring reputation. (shrink)

Compilation of diverse unpublished thesis on literary theory and contemporary Argentine literature.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the special workshop "Truth and Objectivity in Law and Morals," held at the 26th World Congress of the IVR. The papers deal with diverse but correlated issues such as the search for truth in and through legal argumentation; the intelligible character of rules inside theories of interpretation which guarantee the coherence and the integrity of law; the role of hermeneutic analysis in the construction of the objectivity of law; the procedural and (...) contextual aspects of objectivity in legal reasoning; the role of objectivity in the distinction between the context of justification and the context of discovery; the problem about truth of normative propositions and legal statements; the incompatibility of non factualism with the traditional account of validity and legality; as well as the possibility of objectivity in morals. (shrink)

While the concept of adaptive preferences is an important tool for criticizing injustice, it is often claimed that using the concept involves showing disrespect for persons judged to have adaptive preferences. In this paper, I propose an account of adaptive preferences that does the relevant political work while still showing persons two centrally important kinds of respect. My account is based in what I call an indirect substantive account of autonomy, which places substantive requirements on the options available to a (...) person, rather than on the option that she ultimately prefers. This allows us to pinpoint cases in which a person's circumstances have rendered her insufficiently autonomous, without saying that any conception of the good must be non-autonomous tout court. (shrink)

The nm23 gene, a putative metastasis suppressor gene, was originally identified by its reduced expression in highly metastatic K‐1735 murine melanoma cell lines, as compared to related, low metastatic melanoma cell lines. Transfection of nm23 cDNA has been reported to suppress malignant progression in Drosophila and mammalian cells. Highly conserved homologues of nm23 have been found in organisms ranging from the prokaryote Myxococcus xanthus to Drosophila, where the gene is involved in normal development and differentiation. The product of the nm23 (...) gene exhibits a nucleoside diphosphate kinase activity, yet the nucleoside diphosphate kinase activity of Nm23 does not correlate with its apparent biological functions. We review recent cellular, genetic, biochemical and X‐ray crystallographic data to formulate and evaluate hypotheses concerning the molecular mechanism of nm23 action. (shrink)

Pedagogy of Life takes its readers through the echoing stories of the half-century, historical Cultural Revolution of China to the literate lifeworld today. Rosa Hong Chen offers a gripping array of personal and kindred stories woven into the power of words and empathy of art through the volutes of writing and dancing for life, expressing genera of warm melancholy, weighty sensations, compulsive sobs, and refrained elation. It is for the existential history of individual lives and communal sharing that life creates (...) a pedagogical condition of possible experiences. Life itself forms a historical and social path of human growth and maturation. In a philosophical and educational autoethnographical inquiry, the author examines the nature of literacy for those marginalized and oppressed; Chen explores how one's name and the ways in which that name is used affect a person's self-knowing and knowing of the world. This book exemplifies the idea that individuals' autobiographical stories are importantly connected to wider cultural, political, and social meaning and understanding. Pedagogy of Life echoes readers' musings, affects, relations, imagination, choice, learning, teaching, and much more, because we, each and all, have our own names, ways of uttering, writing, and dancing, and, ultimately, our own ways of living, knowing, and becoming. (shrink)

Although the problem of adaptiveness plays an important motivating role in her work on human capabilities, Martha Nussbaum never gives a clear account of the controversial concept of adaptive preferences on which she relies. In this paper, I aim both to reconstruct the most plausible account of the concept that may be attributed to Nussbaum and to provide a critical appraisal of that account. Although her broader work on the capabilities approach moves progressively towards political liberalism as time passes, I (...) aim to show that her account of adaptive preferences continues to maintain her earlier commitment to perfectionism about the good. I then distinguish between two obligatory kinds of respect for persons, which I call, respectively, primary and secondary recognition respect. This distinction allows us to see that her perfectionist account of adaptive preferences allows her to show persons primary but not secondary recognition respect. Ultimately, I claim that an acceptable account of adaptive prefer.. (shrink)

With its emphasis on indeterminacy, ambiguity, uncertainty, and chance, contingentism depicts normativity as one of our human practical possibilities rather than as a metaphysical bottleneck which we should necessary fulfill at the cost of repudiating concrete ways in which we grant epistemic and ethical meaning to our activities. Richard McKay Rorty's "neo-pragmatism" launched a powerful challenge to entrenched philosophical and pre-philosophical certainties of modernity, allowing us to articulate the powerful picture of normativity as a distinctive exercise and activity of human (...) beings. The book is a critical survey of his philosophy, in the light of various theoretical arguments as well as of his own resourceful attempts to renew philosophy from within its practice by using the conceptual tools and argumentative techniques of both analytic philosophy and pragmatism. (shrink)

Delusions are often portrayed as paradigmatic instances of incomprehensibility and meaninglessness. Here we investigate the relationship between delusions and meaning from a philosophical perspective, integrating arguments and evidence from cognitive psychology and phenomenological psychopathology. We review some of the empirical and philosophical literature relevant to two claims about delusions and meaning: delusions are meaningful, despite being described as irrational and implausible beliefs; some delusions can also enhance the sense that one’s life is meaningful, supporting agency and creativity in some circumstances. (...) Delusions are not incomprehensible representations of reality. Rather, they can help make sense of one’s unusual experiences and in some circumstances even support one’s endeavours, albeit temporarily and imperfectly. Acknowledging that delusions have meaning and can also give meaning to people’s lives has implications for our understanding of psychotic symptoms and for addressing the stigma associated with psychiatric conditions. (shrink)

A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a dominant tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which behaviors violate the rule. This tendency varied markedly across (k = 15) countries, owing to variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared with laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether and consequently exhibited stronger textualist tendencies. Finally, we evaluated a plausible mechanism for the emergence of textualism: (...) in a two-player coordination game, incentives to coordinate in the absence of communication reinforced participants’ adherence to rules’ literal meaning. Together, these studies (total n = 5,794) help clarify the origins and allure of textualism, especially in the law. Within heterogeneous communities in which members diverge in their moral appraisals involving a rule’s purpose, the rule’s literal meaning provides a clear focal point—an identifiable point of agreement enabling coordinated interpretation among citizens, lawmakers, and judges. (shrink)

From Realism to "Realicism" is a unique critical study of Peirce's metaphysics, and his repeated insistence on the realism of the medieval schoolman as the key to understanding his own system. By tracing the problem of universals beginning with its Greek roots, Rosa Maria Perez-Teran Mayorga provides the necessary yet underrepresented background of moderate realism and Peirce's eventual revision of metaphysics.

The English translation of Sister Rosa Goglia's biography of the Italian priest, philosopher, and theologian.

The main goal of the text is to emphasize Nietzsche’s friendship with Peter Gast, as well as to present Gast’s dedication to Nietzsche, in terms of music, writing and the philosopher’s books.

The significance of critical phenomenology for psychiatric praxis has yet to be expounded. In this paper, I argue that the adoption of a critical phenomenological stance can remedy localised instances of hermeneutical injustice, which may arise in the encounter between clinicians and patients with psychosis. In this context, what is communicated is often deemed to lack meaning or to be difficult to understand. While a degree of un-shareability is inherent to subjective life, I argue that issues of unintelligibility can be (...) addressed by shifting from individualistic conceptions of understanding to an interactionist view. This takes into account the contextual, historical and relational background within which meaning is co-constituted. I conclude by providing a corrective for hermeneutical injustice, which entails a specific attentiveness towards the person’s subjectivity, a careful sensitivity to contingent meaning-generating structures, and a degree of hermeneutical flexibility as an attitude of openness towards alternative horizons of possibility. (shrink)

Philosophical proponents of predictive processing cast the novelty of predictive models of perception in terms of differences in the functional role and information content of neural signals. However, they fail to provide constraints on how the crucial semantic mapping from signals to their informational contents is determined. Beyond a novel interpretative gloss on neural signals, they have little new to say about the causal structure of the system, or even what statistical information is carried by the signals. That means that (...) the predictive framework for perception can be relabeled in traditional, non-predictive terms, with no empirical consequences relevant to existing or future data. To the extent that neuroscientific research based on predictive processing is both innovative and productive, it will be due to the framework’s suggestive heuristic effects, or perhaps auxiliary empirical claims about implementation, rather than a difference in the information-processing structure that it describes. (shrink)

The use of case-based reasoning in teaching professional ethics has come of age. The fields of medicine, engineering, and business all have incorporated ethics case studies into leading textbooks and journal articles, as well as undergraduate and graduate professional ethics courses. The most recent guidelines from the National Institutes of Health recognize case studies and face-to-face discussion as best practices to be included in training programs for the Responsible Conduct of Research. While there is a general consensus that case studies (...) play a central role in the teaching of professional ethics, there is still much to be learned regarding how professionals learn ethics using case-based reasoning. Cases take many forms, and there are a variety of ways to write them and use them in teaching. This paper reports the results of a study designed to investigate one of the issues in teaching case-based ethics: the role of one’s professional knowledge in learning methods of moral reasoning. Using a novel assessment instrument, we compared case studies written and analyzed by three groups of students whom we classified as: Experts in a research domain in bioengineering. Novices in a research domain in bioengineering. The non-research group—students using an engineering domain in which they were interested but had no in-depth knowledge. This study demonstrates that a student’s level of understanding of a professional knowledge domain plays a significant role in learning moral reasoning skills. (shrink)

Multiple realizability says that the same kind of mental states may be manifested by systems with very different physical constitutions. Putnam ( 1967 ) supposed it to be “overwhelmingly probable” that there exist psychological properties with different physical realizations in different creatures. But because function constrains possible physical realizers, this empirical bet is far less favorable than it might initially have seemed, especially when we take on board the richer picture of neural and brain function that neuroscience has been uncovering (...) over the past forty years, in which all sorts of brain activities play crucial roles beyond all-or-nothing electrical signaling. Because of its evolutionary history, the brain’s metabolic and informational processes are inextricably intertwined. The resulting complex integrated functions impose more constraints on possible realizers than the clean, single-purpose functions usually cited as examples in discussions of multiple realizability—with ramifications for the functionalist and computationalist foundations of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

From Realism to 'Realicism' is a unique critical study of Peirce's metaphysics, and his repeated insistence on the realism of the medieval schoolman as the key to understanding his own system. By tracing the problem of universals beginning with its Greek roots, Rosa Maria Perez-Teran Mayorga provides the necessary yet underrepresented background of moderate realism and Peirce's eventual revision of metaphysics.

An advocate of radical democracy and individual responsibility, Rosa Luxemburg remains the most eminent representative of the libertarian socialist tradition. A reevaluation and renewal within the Left has allowed the ideas of Luxemburg to assume greater vitality and relevance today than ever before. This volume provides an essential representative sampling of Luxemburg's writings that have generally not been among those commonly anthologized. That she had a powerful impact on every generation of the 20th century is documented in the accompanying essays, (...) which include scholarly reflections, comradely arguments, and even a loving reminiscence. Paul Le Blanc, who has been active in labor and social movements for many years, explains that the socialism that animated Luxemburg as a thinker and revolutionary activist involved a vision of society in which our economic resources would be socially owned, democratically controlled, and utilized for the benefit of all people. Luxemburg was convinced this goal could only be realized through the struggles of the working-class majority. The goals Luxemburg sought-popular sovereignty, rule by the people, democracy-were lost in the decades following her 1919 martyrdom. Among the selections from Luxemburg are "Martinique," "The Problem of the Nationality Question and Autonomy," "Rebuilding the International," "The Accumulation of Capital," "Letters from Prison," and "What Are the Leaders Doing?" Included are essays by Lelio Basso, Claire Cohen, Raya Dunayevskaya, Luise Kautsky, and Andrea Nye. (shrink)

La naturaleza interdisciplinar del "enfoque de las capacidades" ha hecho que su estudio se encuentre diseminado en un amplio espectro de revistas. Así el CA se ha asentado en las áreas de la filosofía política o la economía del desarrollo, y ha ampliado su alcance al ser utilizado como marco teórico para la creación de indicadores sobre la privación, la calidad de vida o la salud, o bien para abordar las cuestiones de la educación superior o el impacto de la (...) tecnología en la vida de las personas. Se ofrece una visión general sobre los principales conceptos empleados en ese enfoque, buscando distinguir las propuestas de A. Sen y M. Nussbaum, con el fin de analizar la idea de sostenibilidad y su incorporación en la agenda del enfoque. The interdisciplinary nature of the "Capability Approach" has resulted in its dissemination in a broad range of journals. As a result, the CA has spread to political philosophy and economic development and its scope has been expanded to be used as a theoretical framework in the creation of indicators on deprivation, quality of life or health. It has also been used to approach issues of higher education and the impact of technology on people's lives. The article offers an overview of the main concepts used in this approach, seeking to differentiate A. Sen and M. Nussbaum's proposals, in order to analyze sustainability and its inclusion in the approach agenda. (shrink)

Industrial pollution is of both national and international concern in the context where one country's emissions contribute to the problem of global warming. Existing studies have focused on government and regulations rather than on employees. The context of this study is in respect of 472 workers in seven Chinese energy companies in Shanxi province in China, one of the biggest coal mining regions and a region most responsible for environmental pollution. The key findings are two-fold: first, employees' values were positively (...) correlated with attitudes toward the environment, which also correlates with perceived corporate citizenship; second, the ownership type of the firm had a significant influence on corporate citizenship, employee values and their attitudes toward environment. Contrary to existing beliefs, Stateowned enterprises in China have much poorer ratings on all the three constructs compared to privately owned companies. The results highlight the role of the government and policy makers in shaping employees' attitudes toward the environment, and in turn the corporate citizenship of the Chinese energy industry. (shrink)

Charles Peirce did not seem to have a consistent view regarding ethics. His occasional remarks on this subject appear to be contradictory at best and cynical at worst. As a result, many have suggested that his comments on ethics, especially those expressed in the 1898 Cambridge Conference lectures, should be dismissed or ignored. This chapter argues that Peirce's views on ethics can be best understood by comparing them to his views on scholastic realism and nominalism. When analyzed in this way, (...) Peirce's observations on ethics can serve as the grounds for a robust moderate moral realism that can compare favorably with contemporary metaethical theories. (shrink)

Many authors have already observed that the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus of Baruch Spinoza was, in its time, the most discussed and most vehemently refuted book. Indeed, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, and almost until the end of the nineteenth century, Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise was an assertive and powerful appeal to freedom of expression and thought, a bold claim of religious tolerance and freedom of conscience in a Europe that was unaccustomed to the exercise of free thought. But, what is after (...) all the subject of the Theological-Political Treatise, a book maligned for so long and by so many as ultra pestilential and immoral? The present volume, collecting essays by notable European scholars, attempts to address some of the problems created by the broad spectrum of topics included in Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise. (shrink)

According to Arendt and Habermas, the reinterpretation of Aristotle made by Thomas Aquinas, identifying politicus and socialis, has weakened the nature of classical Aristotelian politics by introducing in the polis relations and private interests that the Greeks had reserved for domestic space. Moreover, being the concept of societas in this context naturally Christian, the purpose of society is no longer self-sufficiency and acquisition of natural virtue, which allow us to live together in order to the good life, but requires supernatural (...) virtue given by God in order to achieve the true supreme good. Therefore, the possibility of happiness now refers to eschatology, reason because kings are to be subject to priests, especially the pope, Christ’s representative, whose role is to take care of the highest aim of our existence. However, the application of a pyramidal and hierarchical scheme of spiritual power over the temporal realm is subverted by Juan Quidort of Paris, introducing a «small» shift: the kingdom understood as perfecta multitudo. In this perfect multitude an upward causality is the basis for distinction and non-subordination of the temporal power by the spiritual; at the same time freedom of individuals to choose their leaders is essential. This view undermines the dynastic transmission’s model of power in a kingdom as well as, at the ecclesial level, points to superiority of the General Council in relation to the pope. (shrink)

According to Adam Smith, vanity is a vice that contains a promise: a vain person is much more likely than a person with low self-esteem to accomplish great things. Problematic as it may be from a moral perspective, vanity makes a person more likely to succeed in business, politics and other public pursuits. “The great secret of education,” Smith writes, “is to direct vanity to proper objects:” this peculiar vice can serve as a stepping-stone to virtue. How can this transformation (...) be accomplished and what might go wrong along the way? What exactly is vanity and how does it factor into our personal and professional lives, for better and for worse? This book brings Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments into conversation with William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair to offer an analysis of vanity and the objects to which it may be directed. Leading the way through the literary case study presented here is Becky Sharp, the ambitious and cunning protagonist of Thackeray’s novel. Becky is joined by a number of other 19th Century literary heroines – drawn from the novels of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot – whose feminine perspectives complement Smith’s astute observations and complicate his account of vanity. The fictional characters featured in this volume enrich and deepen our understanding of Smith’s work and disclose parts of our own experience in a fresh way, revealing the dark and at times ridiculous aspects of life in Vanity Fair, today as in the past. (shrink)

To understand Lacan’s thinking process on vision, the entirety of his teaching must be taken into consideration. Until the 60s, the visual field is the imaginary, the constitutive principle of reality in its phenomenal giving to the experience of a subject. This register is the opposite of the field of the word with the L schema and, subsequently, as subordinated to the symbolic system according to the model of the optical schema of the inverted flower vase of Bouasse. It is (...) only with the 1964 seminar that Lacan makes a daring turnaround through which the visual becomes a sign of the emergence of a real that is irreducible to both reality and the mediation of the subject of knowledge. The split that separates reality and the real is reproduced in Lacan within the visual field, which is, on the one hand, the cardinal principle of the consistency of the experience of reality, and on the other, it is an element of irreducibility to reality. This produces a cascade of consequences: first of all, the modification of the presentation of the mirror stage. Unlike the voice, which through prosody, tone, and volume, finds some strips with which anchor itself imaginatively to reality, the gaze, invisible and elusive, escapes the imaginary grasp. Captured in myths, it reveals its power and ability to annihilate—as in the myth of Medusa’s gaze—or to make people fall in love but only with a narcissistic love that leads inexorably to death as in the myth of Narcissus. The gaze is elusive because the subject is dependent on it in the field of desire. Like the voice, it is about the desire on which the subject is supported; it is one of the objects on which the phantom depends. In our opinion, thanks to this characteristic, the gaze object can make remote psychoanalytic treatment possible through easily accessible videoconferencing tools and, at the same time, create new conditions within it that should be carefully evaluated to understand its implications in the session itself. (shrink)

This paper offers the first large-scale empirical study of organizational virtue as perceived by both internal and external stakeholders and of the links between these virtues and organizational outcomes such as identification, satisfaction, and distinctiveness. It takes a strategic approach to virtue ethics, one that differs from a more traditional Aristotelian concept of virtue and from Alasdair MacIntyre’s manner of distinguishing between internal and external goods. The literature review compares three different perspectives on the empirical study of organizational virtues, taken (...) by virtue theorists, POS scholars, and strategy scholars. The main study describes an empirical research undertaking that involved the analysis of 2548 usable questionnaires administered to employees and customers of seven organizations in the U.K. A structural equation model was used to test the linkages of the six dimensions of organizational virtue to satisfaction, identification, and distinctiveness. All the links were significant, with the strongest between virtue and identification. For employees, identification was driven most significantly by integrity, whereas customers’ identification was principally influenced by empathy. The empirical finding also sounds an alarm bell to the global firms who focus on creating a differentiated image based on CSR in the hope that it will lead to satisfaction. The results lead to a discussion of how companies might build favorable stakeholder perceptions of key dimensions of virtue that most shape their identification and differentiation in the marketplace. (shrink)

On April 18, 2019, a small group of Peirce scholars arrived in Milford, the small Pennsylvania town where Charles and Juliette Peirce spent the last few decades of their lives. The purpose of the gathering was to dedicate the monument to Charles Peirce that had been completed some months before, in August, at the Peirce gravesite in the Milford Cemetery. Organized under the auspices of the Charles S. Peirce Society, and with additional support of the Charles S. Peirce Foundation, the (...) program of activities for the two-day event, "Charles Peirce: In Lasting Memory," consisted of invited papers on Peirce's life; the graveside monument dedication ceremony; a visit to the Columns Museum which houses Peirce memorabilia;... (shrink)

In this ambitious study of the development of Charles Peirce 's realism, Mateusz Oleksy attempts "to show that over the course of his entire career Peirce significantly modified his position on realism ". Oleksy differentiates between Peirce 's earlier scholastic realism and Peirce 's mature realism, which Oleksy calls pragmatic realism. "One of the main theses of this book," he proclaims in the introduction, "is that PR is incompatible with SR as a whole, and that it replaces the latter in (...) Peirce 's mature thought". Oleksy proposes to defend this thesis in the four ensuing chapters, "knowing very well that Peirce would most likely protest, since all throughout his career he declared loyalty to SR". (shrink)

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

A purely theoretical analysis of Martha Nussbaum’s basis of the capabilities approach in feminist (rather than more broadly liberal humanist) justice yields a philosophical project that may appear inconsistent, if not incoherent. However, I suggest in this paper that when the reader considers the project’s very concrete aims, there surfaces an intelligible reason for the apparent incongruities between her feminist and liberal commitments. Since even a capabilities approach rooted in feminist justice is itself radical and must win political support in (...) order to be implemented, I suggest that Nussbaum’s basis of the approach in feminist justice can perhaps be understood as a canny attempt to win support for her project on politically popular grounds, using the rhetoric of sex and social justice that has already been embraced by current economic powers. Once arguments based on morally irrelevant differences between sexes are politically endorsed, it will perhaps be easier to argue for the directly parallel moral irrelevance of differences based on accident of birth into the underdeveloped world. (shrink)

Abstract:The influence of John Duns Scotus' doctrine of the free will on Charles Peirce's normative theory is proposed in the context of commentaries on James J. Liszka's latest book on Peirce and the normative sciences.

At the 2019 and 2021 International Conference on Environmental Psychology, discussions were held on the future of conferences in light of the enormous greenhouse gas emissions and inequities associated with conference travel. In this manuscript, we provide an early career researcher perspective on this discussion. We argue that travel-intensive conference practices damage both the environment and our credibility as a discipline, conflict with the intrinsic values and motivations of our discipline, and are inequitable. As such, they must change. This change (...) can be achieved by moving toward virtual and hybrid conferences, which can reduce researchers’ carbon footprints and promote equity, if employed carefully and with informal exchange as a priority. By acting collectively and with the support of institutional change, we can adapt conference travel norms in our field. To investigate whether our arguments correspond to views in the wider community of ECRs within environmental psychology, we conducted a community case study. By leveraging our professional networks and directly contacting researchers in countries underrepresented in those networks, we recruited 117 ECRs in 32 countries for an online survey in February 2022. The surveyed ECRs supported a change in conference travel practices, including flying less, and perceived the number of researchers wanting to reduce their travel emissions to be growing. Thirteen percent of respondents had even considered leaving academia due to travel requirements. Concerning alternative conference formats, a mixed picture emerged. Overall, participants had slightly negative evaluations of virtual conferences, but expected them to improve within the next 5 years. However, ECRs with health issues, facing visa challenges, on low funding, living in remote areas, with caretaking obligations or facing travel restrictions due to COVID-19 expected a switch toward virtual or hybrid conferences to positively affect their groups. Participants were divided about their ability to build professional relationships in virtual settings, but believed that maintaining relationships virtually is possible. We conclude by arguing that the concerns of ECRs in environmental psychology about current and alternative conference practices must be taken seriously. We call on our community to work on collective solutions and less travel-intensive conference designs using participatory methods. (shrink)