Every ASEAN member envisions itself to become economically and politically efficient and stable—of becoming a First World country. No doubt there are many ways of approaching this vision and making it a reality. But I will argue in this paper that education can play a major role in transforming the region into a First World technopole or economic power through what Alvin Toffler calls the philosophy of “educational futurism.” Educational futurism states that we tailor our present educational plans (...) on our future dreams or visions. (shrink)

Today's industrial society is having an encounter with ecology: in April, 1976 the French government presented the National Assembly with documents on the dumping and burning of waste in the sea, as well as on the protection of nature. Electoral campaigns, discussions and demonstrations are centered about the theme of pollution and environment. In the last century the accumulation of waste had already become a problem : “ One of the most important duties of industry is to find a useful (...) employment for waste,” wrote P. L. Simmons in 1875. The advice was heeded if we may believe what J. Gottmann wrote on the matter nearly a century later: “ If our era is to be defined by its most important raw material and one that is truly proper to it, as is done for the Bronze Age or the Iron Age, we may no longer speak of a Steel or Petroleum Age, nor of an Atomic Age (which may come in the future) but of the Garbage Age.” The extraordinary demographic expansion of humanity that has gone from a population of five million in the Paleolithic Age to four billion today gives rise to a monstrous abundance of refuse resulting as much from the natural mechanisms of living as from industrial activity (factory waste) or from the present attitude haunted by the idea of obsolescence (the throw-away society of Alvin Toffler). The outline of a universe submerged in waste matter appears, similar to that evoked by Italo Calvino in Città Invisibili apropos of the town of Leonia: “The refuse of Leonia would gradually invade the world if the interminable garbage heaps were not pressed upon, beyond the last crest, by the refuse of other towns that also push mountains of refuse far away from themselves. Perhaps the entire world beyond the borders of Leonia is covered with craters of trash, each with a continually erupting metropolis in its center. The borders between foreign or enemy towns are thus contaminated bastions in which the detritus of the one and the other serves as mutual support, menacing and mixing together.” The world of Metamorphosis is approaching in which man, transformed into an insect, covered with dust and remains of food, gnaws on the cores and parings of half-rotten vegetables. Science fiction invents a remedy to fit the problem : a planet specialized in storing all the garbage unloaded by an entire galaxy. (shrink)

"Change is not merely necessary to life--it is life." That's Alvin Toffler, characteristically stating the profound in a profoundly direct way. And yes, even when we see change coming--as we're about to graduate from school, take a new job, get married--it's still not so easy to accept. And when we don't see it coming--oof, we have an even harder time. Here to help us embrace change and defuse its unsettling power is Change Happens, a full-color illustrated gift book (...) to consult, to share, to give, and to keep on a night table. Curated by Kathryn and Ross Petras, the ultimate connoisseurs of quotes whose books and calendars have over 4.5 million copies in print, these words of wisdom inspire us to be open to change and remind us that nothing positive in life ever happens without it. Arranged alphabetically by subject--including Adapting, Curveballs, Faith, Letting Go, Regrets, Second Chances, Vulnerability--it's a book to turn to in moments of need, when offering advice to a friend or loved one, when urging a child to find the courage to take a step, when marking an important occasion. (shrink)

Though there is a higher and wider significance to life, of what value is our education if we never discover it? We may be highly educated, but if we are without deep integration of thought and feeling, our lives are incomplete, contradictory and torn with many fears; and as long as education does not cultivate an integrated outlook on life, it has very little significance.1 Jiddh Krishnamurti, 1953All education springs from some image of the future. If the image of the (...) future held by a society is grossly inaccurate, its education system will betray its youth.2 Alvin Toffler, 1974. (shrink)

No political, economic, or cultural segment of society has escaped the universal impact of recent cataclysmic change. Physicians were no exception. During the 20th century, all members of society, including physicians, have experienced change of enormous speed and magnitude. Futurist Alvin Toffler noted that global societal transformation has created a of personal malaise that poses difficulty for both individual and group adaptation. Toffler further described current change as a fundamental shift and conflict in all aspects of civilization (...) (how we live, work, and relate to each other). Toffler also noted major alterations in the basis for distribution of societal power (who controls what, why, and how). One manifestation of recent change directly affecting all members of society, includingphysicians, has been the social transformation of medicine that has been a power shift from the individual physicians to control by organizations and management. (shrink)

This collection of essays and excerpts gives a comprehensive overview of Alvin Plantinga 's seminal work as a Christian philosopher of religion.

This is a collection of chapters by the leading proponent of process reliabilism, explaining its relation to rival and/or neighboring theories including evidentialism, other forms of reliabilism, and virtue epistemology. It addresses other prominent themes in contemporary epistemology, such as the internalism/externalism debate, the epistemological upshots of experimental challenges to intuitional methodology, the source of epistemic value, and social epistemology. The Introduction addresses late-breaking responses to ongoing exchanges with friends, rivals, and critics of reliabilism.

Knowledge of God takes the form of a debate between Alvin Plantinga and Michael Tooley. Plantinga opens the batting with a seventy-page laying out of his case ‘that theism has a significant epistemic virtue: if it is true, it is warranted; this is a virtue naturalism emphatically lacks’. Indeed, Plantinga argues that ‘if naturalism were true, there would be no such thing as knowledge’. It will be recalled [e.g. Plantinga and Plantinga ] that Plantinga's position is that warrant, understood (...) as whatever it is that needs to be added to true belief to …. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Most university students have engaged in some form of academic dishonesty. These actions can have detrimental consequences for the student, the university, and society at large. It is important to understand factors that contribute to academic dishonesty as well as to identify potential predictors of this behavior. This study employed an experimental design with 361 undergraduate students in a laboratory setting. Deception was used during the experiment to determine the impact of peer influence, personality, and an honor code on (...) cheating behavior. Results revealed that peer influence had the largest impact on cheating behavior. In addition, personality, specifically, individuals who scored high on the openness trait were significantly more likely to cheat than those who scored lower on this trait. Implications of these findings for addressing academic dishonesty in higher education are provided. (shrink)

People are minded creatures; we have thoughts, feelings and emotions. More intriguingly, we grasp our own mental states, and conduct the business of ascribing them to ourselves and others without instruction in formal psychology. How do we do this? And what are the dimensions of our grasp of the mental realm? In this book, Alvin I. Goldman explores these questions with the tools of philosophy, developmental psychology, social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. He refines an approach called simulation theory, which (...) starts from the familiar idea that we understand others by putting ourselves in their mental shoes. Can this intuitive idea be rendered precise in a philosophically respectable manner, without allowing simulation to collapse into theorizing? Given a suitable definition, do empirical results support the notion that minds literally create surrogates of other peoples mental states in the process of mindreading? Goldman amasses a surprising array of evidence from psychology and neuroscience that supports this hypothesis. (shrink)

This is the third volume in Alvin Plantinga's trilogy on the notion of warrant, which he defines as that which distinguishes knowledge from true belief. In this volume, Plantinga examines warrant's role in theistic belief, tackling the questions of whether it is rational, reasonable, justifiable, and warranted to accept Christian belief and whether there is something epistemically unacceptable in doing so. He contends that Christian beliefs are warranted to the extent that they are formed by properly functioning cognitive faculties, (...) thus, insofar as they are warranted, Christian beliefs are knowledge if they are true. (shrink)

Plantinga examines the nature of epistemic warrant; whatever it is that when added to true belief yields knowledge. This volume surveys current contributions to the debate and paves the way for his owm positive proposal in Warrant and Proper Function.

David Braybrooke makes two criticisms of my theory of social power, one that deals with the time of power and one that concerns the relation between power and cost. In his first criticism he points out that, according to my analysis, Richard Nixon had the power, in 1940, to nominate Burger for Chief Justice in 1970, and a certain twelve-year old boy may today have the power to hit the first home run of the 1990 season. Braybrooke finds these consequences (...) of the theory unacceptable. These agents may have the ability to acquire the indicated powers at these times, he argues, but they do not (yet) have these powers. (shrink)

How can we know? How can we attain justified belief? These traditional questions in epistemology have inspired philosophers for centuries. Now, in this exceptional work, Alvin Goldman, distinguished scholar and leader in the fields of epistemology and mind, approaches such inquiries as legitimate methods or "pathways" to knowledge. He examines the notion of private and public knowledge, arguing for the epistemic legitimacy of private and introspective methods of gaining knowledge, yet acknowledging the equal importance of social and public mechanisms (...) in the quest for truth. Throughout, he addresses this opposition but proposes a rigorous framework that continues to resolve such contradictions, making this exciting text one of the most important contributions to the theory of knowledge in recent years. (shrink)

Against the traditional view, Alvin Goldman argues that logic, probability theory, and linguistic analysis cannot by themselves delineate principles of rationality or justified belief. The mind's operations must be taken into account.

This paper presents a partial analysis of perceptual knowledge, an analysis that will, I hope, lay a foundation for a general theory of knowing. Like an earlier theory I proposed, the envisaged theory would seek to explicate the concept of knowledge by reference to the causal processes that produce (or sustain) belief. Unlike the earlier theory, however, it would abandon the requirement that a knower's belief that p be causally connected with the fact, or state of affairs, that p.

How can intuitions be used to validate or invalidate a philosophical theory? An intuition about a case seems to be a basic evidential source for the truth of that intuition, i.e., for the truth of the claim that a particular example is or isn’t an instance of a philosophically interesting kind, concept, or predicate. A mental‐state type is a basic evidential source only if its tokens reliably indicate the truth of their contents. The best way to account for intuitions being (...) a basic evidential source is to interpret their subject matter in psychologistic terms. Intuitions provide evidence about the contents of the intuiter's concept, where “concept” is understood as a psychological structure. (shrink)

Is belief in God epistemically justified? That's the question at the heart of this volume in the Great Debates in Philosophy series, with Alvin Plantinga and Michael Tooley each addressing this fundamental question with distinctive arguments from opposing perspectives. The first half of the book contains each philosopher's explanation of his particular view; the second half allows them to directly respond to each other's arguments, in a lively and engaging conversation Offers the reader a one of a kind, interactive (...) discussion Forms part of the acclaimed Great Debates in Philosophy series. (shrink)