Reductive explanations are psychologically seductive; when given two explanations, people prefer the one that refers to lower-level components or processes to account for the phenomena under consideration even when information about these lower levels is irrelevant (Hopkins, Weisberg, and Taylor 2016). Maybe individuals assume that a reductive explanation is what a scientific explanation should look like (e.g., neuroscience should explain psychology) or presume that information about lower-level components or processes is more explanatory (e.g., molecular detail explains better than anatomical detail). (...) Philosophers have been analyzing reduction for more than half a century (Hüttemann and Love 2016), but neither of these possibilities is a consensus view (even if psychologically applicable). Instead, there is widespread agreement that the landscape of reductionism is complicated, especially in biology (Brigandt and Love 2017). Increasing scrutiny of actual practices within biology and other sciences has often provoked the questions (paraphrasing Alasdair MacIntyre): Whose explanation? Which reductionism? Marie Kaiser’s book—Reductive Explanation in the Biological Sciences—is a decisive intervention into these discussions, offering a wealth of helpful distinctions and new analyses with a healthy focus on scientific practices of explanation. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper's primary goal is to compare the personalities, values, and influence of August Wilhelm Hofmann and Emil Fischer as exemplars and acknowledged leaders of successive generations of the German chemical profession and as scientists sharing a 19th-century liberal, internationalist outlook from the German wars of unification in the 1860s to Fischer's death in 1919 in the aftermath of German defeat in World War I. The paper will consider the influence of Hofmann and Fischer on the shaping of national scientific (...) institutions in Germany, from founding of the German Chemical Society in 1867 to the first institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society founded in 1911, their academic leadership in other areas including the shaping of a successful academic-industrial symbiosis in organic chemistry, and finally their response to war as a force disruptive of scientific internationalism. All of these developments posed serious dilemmas, exacerbated by emerging strains of nationalism and anti-Semitism in German society. Whereas Hofmann's lifework came to a relatively successful end in 1892, Fischer was not so fortunate, as the war brought him heavy responsibilities and terrible personal losses, but with no German victory and no peace of reconciliation – a bleak end for Fischer and the 19th-century liberal ideals that had inspired him. (shrink)

A conception of the relation between reasons for belief, justified belief, and knowledge is outlined on which a belief is justified, in the sense of being well‐founded, only if there is an adequate reason to believe it, reasons to believe something are constituted by truths, and a reason to believe something justifies one in believing it only if it is constituted by a truth or truths that one knows. It is argued that, contrary to initial appearances, perceptual justification does not (...) pose a problem for this view. The discussion touches upon the relation between believing for reasons and reflective knowledge. (shrink)

Speech categories are defined by multiple acoustic dimensions and their boundaries are generally fuzzy and ambiguous in part because listeners often give differential weighting to these cue dimensions during phonetic categorization. This study explored how a listener's perception of a speaker's socio-indexical and personality characteristics influences the listener's perceptual cue weighting. In a matched-guise study, three groups of listeners classified a series of gender-neutral /b/-/p/ continua that vary in VOT and F0 at the onset of the following vowel. Listeners were (...) assigned to one of three prompt conditions and rated the talker in terms of vocal gender prototypicality, attractiveness, friendliness, confidence, trustworthiness, and gayness. Male listeners and listeners who saw a male face showed less reliance on VOT compared to listeners in the other conditions. Listeners' visual evaluation of the talker also affected their weighting of VOT and onset F0 cues, although the effects of facial impressions differ depending on the gender of the listener. The results demonstrate that individual differences in perceptual cue weighting are modulated by the listener's gender and his/her subjective evaluation of the talker. These findings lend support for exemplar-based models of speech perception and production where socio-indexical features are encoded as a part of the episodic traces in the listeners' mental lexicon. This study also shed light on the relationship between individual variation in cue weighting and community-level sound change by demonstrating that VOT and onset F0 co-variation in North American English has acquired a certain degree of socio-indexical significance. (shrink)

Symbolic thought is what makes us human. Claude Lévi-Strauss stated that we can never know the genesis of symbolic thought, but in this powerful new study Alan Barnard argues that we can. Continuing the line of analysis initiated in Social Anthropology and Human Origins, Genesis of Symbolic Thought applies ideas from social anthropology, old and new, to understand some of the areas also being explored in fields as diverse as archaeology, linguistics, genetics and neuroscience. Barnard aims to answer questions (...) including: when and why did language come into being? What was the earliest religion? And what form did social organization take before humanity dispersed from the African continent? Rejecting the notion of hunter-gatherers as 'primitive', Barnard hails the great sophistication of the complex means of their linguistic and symbolic expression and places the possible origin of symbolic thought at as early as 130,000 years ago. (shrink)

The term 'episodic memory' refers to our memory for unique, personal experiences, that we can date at some point in our past - our first day at school, the day we got married. It has again become a topic of great importance and interest to psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers. How are such memories stored in the brain, why do certain memories disappear (especially those from early in childhood), what causes false memories (memories of events we erroneously believe have really taken (...) place)? Since Endel Tulving's classic book 'Episodic memory' (OUP, 1983) very few books have been published on this topic. In recent years however, many of the assumptions made about episodic memory have had to be reconsidered as a result of new techniques, which have allowed us a far deeper understanding of episodic memory. In 'Episodic memory: new directions in research' three of the worlds leading researchers in the topic of memory have brought together a stellar team of contributors from the fields of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience, to present an account of what we now know about about this fundamentally important topic. The list of contributors includes, amongst others, Daniel Schacter, Richard Morris, Fareneh Vargha-Khadem, and Endel Tulving. The work presented within this book will have a profound effect on the direction that future research in this topic will take. (shrink)

In her recent article, Does autonomy count in favor of labeling genetically modified food?, Kirsten Hansen argues that in Europe, voluntary negative labeling of non-GM foods respects consumer autonomy just as well as mandatory positive labeling of foods with GM content. She also argues that because negative labeling places labeling costs upon those consumers that want to know whether food is GM, negative labeling is better policy than positive labeling. In this paper, we argue that Hansens arguments are mistaken in (...) several respects. Most importantly, she underestimates the demands of respecting autonomy and overestimates the cost of positive labeling. Moreover, she mistakenly implies that only a small minority of people desire information about GM content. We also explore the extent to which her arguments would apply to the US context, and argue that any discussion of the relationship between autonomy and labeling should include not just considerations of consumer autonomy but also considerations of what we call citizen autonomy. (shrink)

How does corporate social performance (CSP) affect financial performance as the firm expands internationally? To address this question, I integrate arguments from the International Business (IB) literature and the literature on CSP to propose that the costs and benefits associated with CSP are unevenly distributed across the range of internationalization. Specifically, I argue that the costs of CSP outweigh the benefits at low levels of internationalization, while the benefits outweigh the costs at high levels of internationalization, leading to a moderated, (...) U-shaped relationship. In addition, I disentangle CSP’s effects further by distinguishing between “do-good” CSP and “do-no-harm” CSP, which have been theorized to evoke different stakeholder perceptions and attributions and can thus be expected to harbor different performance effects across the range of internationalization. Analysis of a panel of 1,056 U.S.-based international firms over the period 1995-2012 lends support to these arguments. (shrink)

Many leading management scientists have advocated ethicalism: the incorporation of social and ethical concerns into traditional "rational" OR-MS techniques and management decisions. In fact, elementary forms of decision analysis can readily be augmented, using ethical theory, in ways that sweep in ethical issues. In addition, alternative conceptual models of Decision-Analysis, Game-Theory and Optimality are now available, all of which have brought OR-MS and Business-Ethics into a closer alignment.

Philosophical discussions of information and specificity in biology are now commonplace, but no consensus exists about whether the privileging of genetic causation in investigation and explanation...

Although best known for the hugely influential Anarchy, State and Utopia, Robert Nozick eschewed the label 'political philosopher' because the vast majority of his writings and attention have focused on other areas. Indeed the breadth of Nozick's work is perhaps greater than that of any other contemporary philosopher. This book is the first to give full and proper discussion of Nozick's philosophy as a whole, including his influential work on the theory of knowledge, his notion of 'tracking the truth', his (...) metaphysical writings on personal identity and free will, his evolutionary account of rationality, his varying treatments of Newcomb's paradox and his ideas on the meaning of life. Illuminating and informative, the book will be welcomed as an authoritative guide to Nozick's philosophical thinking. (shrink)

From the time of the earliest self-conscious emergence of modern painting around 1905, there have not been widely accepted criteria by which to judge the artistic significance and value of the abstract and nonobjective styles that displaced the traditions of representational art. This circumstance has made the education of artists problematic. For the arts of literature and music, modernism was a relatively short-lived phase of innovation and experimentation that was played out in works that defied easy appreciation. The attention of (...) readers was soon exhausted by literary works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, as was the attention of listeners exhausted by Arnold Schoenberg’s serialism. Authors returned to writing... (shrink)

BL With revised Latin text and English translationBL New historical notes and rewritten Introduction Columba is one of the best-known saints of the early Celtic church; through his foundation of the abbey of Iona he had a far-reaching influence on medieval Christianity. In about 700, a century after his death, the Life of Columba was written by Adomnán, ninth abbot of Iona. It has long been valued as the major primary source on the subject, for the light it throws on (...) early medieval Scotland and Ireland, and as an important work of literature. The 1961 edition of the Life, by Alan and Marjorie Anderson, has long been unavailable. Marjorie Anderson has now revised both the Latin text and the English translation, provided new historical notes, and rewritten the Introduction to take account of recent work in the area. This new edition of a source indispensable for the study of the early medieval church meets a major scholarly need. (shrink)

John Ziman's 'open-ended essay', searching, as much of his work does, for 'the grounds of belief in science' covers such a range of disciplines and topics in a serious and engaging way that it is difficult to single out which parts to address. At the end he suggests that 'if you think that I have got it all wrong in your particular speciality, please do weigh in and tell us all how things really are over there'. In my case, in (...) the disciplines of history and anthropology, there is no need to do so. While specialists might disagree with certain interpretations, or complain that complex debates have been over-simplified, I think that most would agree with Ziman's central arguments. (shrink)

O texto investiga algumas dimensões do pensamento de Levinas em relação aos temas da linguagem, justiça, perdão e pluralidade, entre outros, a partir da leitura talmúdica “Envers Autrui”, estabelecendo relações com alguns aspectos da filosofia analítica e do pensamento do Kant e William Galston.

In this paper I will develop the argument that a cognitivist and virtue ethical approach to moral reasons is the only approach that can sustain a non-alienated relation to one’s character and ethical commitments. [Thomas, 2005] As a corollary of this claim, I will argue that moral reasons must be understood as reasonably partial. A view of this kind can, nevertheless, recognise the existence of general and positive obligations to humanity. Doing so does not undermine the view by leading to (...) a highly demanding view of morality. Indeed, it offers a defence against the view that an analogy between obligations of immediate rescue to particular individuals and general and positive obligations to humanity leads to the conclusion that morality is highly demanding. The plan of this paper is as follows. The first section sets out the main elements of a cognitivist and virtue ethical approach to moral reasons. The second applies it to the test case of an argument that claims that one way in which one seeks to lead a non-alienated ethical life, a life of integrity, is incompatible with the requirements of consequentialism given certain very general facts about the moral state of the world. [Ashford, 2000] My.. (shrink)

This essay argues that critical realism provides a philosophical perspective from which to talk about good and evil. It draws on dialectical critical realism’s meta-ethics of freedom and solidarity, and the different grades of freedom identified there: from the basic spontaneity in agency to the possibility of a fully flourishing, eudaimonic social condition. It argues that evil acts can be understood as those which fundamentally deny basic human freedom (spontaneity) and solidarity, and that good acts are those which affirm human (...) flourishing and solidarity. It draws upon Hannah Arendt’s depiction of what was morally evil in the Holocaust, and recent English criminal trials involving mercy killing to depict the good. It suggests that moral framing in terms of good and evil lies beyond the terms in which modern law thinks of human actions. (shrink)