This study examined ethical attitudes and perceptions of 691 undergraduate seniors and freshmen in a college of business. Gender was found to be correlated to perceptions of "what the ethical climate should be" with female subjects showing significantly more favorable attitude towards ethical behaviors than males. Further, Seniors had a more cynical view of the current ethical climate than freshmen. Freshmen were significantly more likely than seniors to believe that good business ethics is positively related to successful business outcomes. Ethical (...) education was significantly correlated to both perceptions of "current ethical climate" as well as "what the ethical climate should be". Students who had been exposed to ethical issues in a course were more likely to believe both, that ethical behavior is, and should be, positively associated with successful business outcomes. (shrink)

I argue that we can accept modal normativism—a view that the function of modal claims is to express semantic rules—while also accepting possible worlds semantics. I argue that by keeping the metaphysical insights of normativism at the level of metasemantics—i.e., at the level of accounts of what metaphysically explains facts about the meaning of modal claims—it is open to the normativist to wholeheartedly accept possible worlds semantics.

Past and present societies world-wide have employed well over 100 distinct notational systems for representing natural numbers, some of which continue to play a crucial role in intellectual and cultural development today. The diversity of these notations has prompted the need for classificatory schemes, or typologies, to provide a systematic starting point for their discussion and appraisal. The present paper provides a general framework for assessing the efficacy of these typologies relative to certain desiderata, and it uses this framework to (...) discuss the two influential typologies of Zhang & Norman and Chrisomalis. Following this, a new typology is presented that takes as its starting point the principles by which numerical notations represent multipliers (the principles of cumulation and cipherization), and bases (those of integration, parsing, and positionality). Many different examples show that this new typology provides a more refined classification of numerical notations than the ones put forward previously. In addition, the framework provided here can be used to assess typologies not only of numerical notations, but also of many other domains. (shrink)

The vagueness or imprecision of ‘the normal’ allows it to be exploited for various purposes and political ends. It is conspicuous in both medicine and athletics; I am going to try to say something about the normal in each of these areas. In medicine the idea of the normal is often deployed in understanding what constitutes disease and hence, as some see it, in determining the role of physicians, in determining what is or ought to be covered by insurance, and (...) in underwriting certain views on social justice. In athletics the use of performance enhancing substances raises different sorts of questions about the normal, especially when it comes to deciding what constitutes an enhancement and which enhancements, if any, are acceptable. (shrink)

Brackets and tables, circles and maps, 1554-1872 -- Early botanical networks and trees, 1766-1815 -- The first evolutionary tree, 1786-1820 -- Diverse and unusual trees of the early nineteenth century, 1817-1834 -- The rule of five, 1819-1854 -- Pre-Darwinian branching diagrams, 1828-1858 -- Evolution and the trees of Charles Darwin, 1837-1868 -- The trees of Ernst Haeckel, 1866-1905 -- Post-Darwinian nonconformists, 1868-1896 -- More late-nineteenth-century trees, 1874-1897 -- Trees of the early twentieth century, 1901-1930 -- The trees of Alfred Sherwood (...) Romer, 1933-1966 -- Additional trees of the mid-twentieth century, 1931-1943 -- The trees of William King Gregory, 1938-1951 -- Hints of new approaches, 1954-1969 -- Phenograms and cladograms, 1958-1966 -- Early molecular trees, 1962-1987 -- Notable trees of the past four decades, 1970-2010 -- Primeval branches and universal trees of life, 1997-2010. (shrink)

Devoted to the rediscovery of Heidegger’s earliest thought leading up to his magnum opus of 1927, Being and Time.

"The main argument of this paper is that there are reasons for judges not only to evaluate the substantive merit of legislation, but to advert to the fact that the place of elected legislatures in our scheme of government gives legislation a standing, an entitlement to consideration, that may go beyond judicial estimates of its intrinsic merit." [Is this just a statement of procedural legitimacy?] "To answer the question [of who assigns rights], courts must take a view as to the (...) proper role of courts vis-a-vis legislatures; they must take a view about the allocation of power in our legal/political system. In drawing this line, courts can take one of two approaches. First, they can make decisions solely on the basis of considerations internal to the relevant clauses of the Constitution, perhaps by giving them a moral reading. Second, they can include in their thinking institutional considerations regarding the role of popular decision-making bodies in our governmental structure." Claims that Dworkin advocates the first [which is false], and that we should accept the second, which is advocated by advocates of judicial restraint. It is appropriate for a judge to give weight to the fact that a decision was reached by a legislature. "Specifically, I think it appropriate that courts presume the constitutionality of such laws, understanding that their own role demands that they overturn them if they are not merely different from what the judges might have decided on their own, but are beyond acceptability." Reasons for the presumption of constitutionality: value of compromise, allocation of power ), appropriateness of humility, integrity and community. (shrink)

I combine personal narrative, prose poetry, and philosophical methods to argue that grief is a response to a metaphysical injury. Building on the theoretical work of others, I use personal narrative to develop the premise that persons are partly constituted by their relationships. Therefore, when a relationship to, say, a caretaker is severed, the bereaved literally loses a part of their self, and grief is a response to that injury. My argument is complicated by relationships where a caretaker sometimes acted (...) in abusive ways. So, I discuss one way a relationship partly founded on abuse can be a proper object of grief. I also argue that since grief is a response to a metaphysical injury, a proper response to grief ought to be based on care rather than rational evaluation. Finally, the essay itself is not merely an act of descriptive or argumentative narration but is itself an act of repair. (shrink)

In this essay, the author argues that Gadamer's approach to world literature contributes to the call for us mutually to discover our solidarities with those from different traditions, and, thus also, different linguistic traditions. He holds that the discovery of global solidarities is urgent because current prospects to address the world's political, social and economic challenges have been put in jeopardy by the increasingly ubiquitous use of calculative rationality to manage human relations. Gadamer's concern for us to discover solidarities, however, (...) concerns not first that we ally ourselves with some political identity, ideal, or cause, but, rather, that we allow ourselves to become visible to one another in our respective exteriority as finite, free beings. In this context, the author seeks to show that world literature may contribute to the discovery of solidarities by bringing us into such visibility on a global scale. (shrink)

(2009). What is the Future of the Past? Gadamer and Hegel on Truth, Art and the Ruptures of Tradition. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 40, Tradition, Art & Sexuality, pp. 4-20.

Borel's concept of denumerable probability is described by means of three of his illustrative problems and their solution. These problems are then reformulated in contemporary terms and solved from the viewpoint of probability logic. A section compares Kolmogorov set-theoretic probability with probability logic. The concluding section describes a highly adverse criticism of Borel's conception for its not using something like Kolmogorov theory and, in support of Borel, this criticism is countered from the standpoint of quantifier probability logic.

Surgical expertise does not have a clear definition and is often culturally associated with power, authority, prestige, and case number rather than more objective proxies of excellence. Multiple models of expertise progression have been proposed including the Dreyfus model, however, they all currently require subjective evaluation of skill. Recently, efforts have been made to improve the ways in which surgical excellence is measured and expertise is defined using artificial intelligence, video recordings, and accelerometers. However, these aforementioned methods of assessment are (...) still subjective or indirect proxies of expertise, thus uncovering the neural mechanisms that differentiate expert surgeons from trainees may enhance the objectivity of surgical expertise validation. In fact, some researchers have already suggested that their neural imaging-based expertise classification methods outperform currently used methods of surgical skill certification such as the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery scores. Such imaging biomarkers would not only help better identify the highest performing surgeons, but could also improve residency programs by providing more objective, evidence-based feedback and developmental milestones for those in training and perhaps act as a marker of surgical potential in medical students. Despite the potential advantages of using neural imaging in the assessment of surgical expertise, this field of research remains in its infancy. This systematic review identifies studies that have applied neuromonitoring in assessing surgical skill across levels of expertise. The goals of this review are to identify the strongest neural indicators of surgical expertise, the limitations of the current literature on this subject, the most sensible future directions for further study. We found substantial evidence that surgical expertise can be delineated by differential activation and connectivity in the prefrontal cortex across multiple task and neuroimaging modalities. Specifically, novices tend to have greater PFC activation than experts under standard conditions in bimanual and decision-making tasks. However, under high temporal demand tasks, experts had increased PFC activation whereas novices had decreased PFC activation. Common limitations uncovered in this review were that task difficulty was often insufficient to delineate between residents and attending. Moreover, attending level involvement was also low in multiple studies which may also have contributed to this issue. Most studies did not analyze the ability of their neuromonitoring findings to accurately classify subjects by level of expertise. Finally, the predominance of fNIRS as the neuromonitoring modality limits our ability to uncover the neural correlates of surgical expertise in non-cortical brain regions. Future studies should first strive to address these limitations. In the longer term, longitudinal within-subjects design over the course of a residency or even a career will also advance the field. Although logistically arduous, such studies would likely be most beneficial in demonstrating effects of increasing surgical expertise on regional brain activation and inter-region connectivity. (shrink)

This paper discusses alternative measures of assortative matching and relates them to Sewall Wright’s F-statistic. It also explores applications of measures of assortativity to evolutionary dynamics. We generalize Wright’s statistic to allow the possibility that some types match more assortatively than others, and explore the possibility of identifying parameters of this more general model from the observed distribution of matches by the partners’ types.

Chronologically sequenced chapter units give an overall historical perspective in this text on ethics, while chapter introductions include biographical, historical and other information.

We are now seeing a new wave of literature about the “crisis” of the welfare state. In the earlier wave, some critics charged that social spending significantly detracted from macro‐ or microeconomic performance, while others challenged the legitimacy or efficacy of welfare programs; a third group worried about the effect of macroeconomic problems on the viability of the welfare state. None of these criticisms can be said to have been satisfactory, and continued reiterations of them betray a lack of cross‐national (...) perspective and a priori reasoning about empirical matters. Works with greater historical depth and more recent studies constitute a much‐needed reaction against the “crisis” literature. (shrink)