Despite inroads made by critical realism against the ‘scientific method’ in social science, the latter remains strong in subject-areas like human resource management. One argument for the alleged superiority of the scientific method lies in the taken-for-granted belief that it alone can formulate empirically testable predictions. Many of those who employ the scientific method are, however, confused about the way they understand and practice prediction. This paper takes as a case study empirical research on the alleged empirical association between human (...) resource management practices and organisational performance. By unpacking the confusion surrounding the two basic notions of prediction used, it reveals what is wrong with them, why the scientific method cannot actually make accurate predictions and why, therefore, the scientific method fails to meet its own criteria for scientificity. Finally, explanation is considered in order to prevent any confusion between it and prediction and to offer what we call tendential prediction. (shrink)

Historians looking to make history a professional discipline of study in Victorian Britain believed they had to establish firm boundaries demarcating history from other literary disciplines. James Anthony Froude ignored such boundaries. The popularity of his historical narratives was a constant reminder of the continued existence of a supposedly overturned phase of historiography in which the historian was also a man of letters, transcending the boundary separating fact from fiction and literature from history. Just as professionalizing historians were constructing (...) a methodology that called on historians to be inductive empirical workers, Froude refused to accept the new science of history, and suggested instead that history was an individual enterprise, one more concerned with drama and art than with science. E. A. Freeman warned the historical community that they “cannot welcome [Froude] as a partner in their labors, as a fellow-worker in the cause of historic truth.”This article examines the boundary work of a professionalizing history by considering the attempt to exclude Froude from the historian’s discourse, an attempt that involved a communal campaign that sought to represent Froude as “constitutionally inaccurate.” Froude suffered from “an inborn and incurable twist,” argued Freeman, thereby diagnosing “Froude’s disease” as the inability to “make an accurate statement about any matter.” By unpacking the construction of “Froude’s disease,” the article exposes the disciplinary techniques at work in the professionalization of history, techniques that sought to exclude non-scientific modes of thought such as that offered by Froude. (shrink)

Over the last three decades, social theory has become an increasingly important subdiscipline within sociology. Social theory has attempted to elucidate the philosophical basis of sociology by defining the nature of social reality. According to social theory, society consists of objective institutions, structure, on the one hand, and individuals, agency on the other, it promotes human social relations, insisting that in every instance social reality consists of these relations.

Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the philosophy of painting, though widely influential and much discussed, remain enigmatic. In this paper I compare his views on painting with those of his older contemporary, Jacques Maritain, who also holds that painting can give us a non-conceptual insight into deep truths about things that are inaccessible to discursive thought. I argue that some ideas that are obscure and undeveloped in Merleau-Ponty are developed more clearly and fully in Maritain. Even where there are significant differences between (...) them, these are not as great as it might at first seem. This comparison can help us to see the ways in which both philosophers’ theories of art are important for understanding their philosophies as a whole. Furthermore, the views they hold in common can continue to suggest a plausible and fruitful way to think about art today. (shrink)

This is a note from an AMC session on Jeff Horty's (2012) book *Reasons as Defaults*.

A personal view made in light of the recent news article regarding a husband wanting to sue Addenbrooke's hospital over a Do Not Attempt Resuscitation decision. This article aims to highlight how the rolling out of cross boundary palliative care registers may be more at risk of infringing human rights.

Although there are several provisions within the Nigerian legal framework that, however, address the issue of church attack, the state capacity to implement effective constitutional sanctioning on perpetrators of this heinous crime has always been found wanting or completely absent, leading to countless religious attacks on churches with seeming state consent. This study employs semi-structured interviews to draw data from affected families from Benue and Enugu States, Nigeria. The article explored their experiences. The study participants were recruited through snowball sampling (...) technique, and data were analysed thematically. The respondents stated that church killings or killing of Christians is rising because of the fact that perpetrators stand lower risk of detection and apprehension than other crimes. Also respondents interrogated that justification for the crime is land acquisition and religious intolerance. On the persistence of the challenge, all the 13 respondents stated that the crime seems to have state approval that has made it seemly impossible to tackle. The article calls for continuous inter-religious dialogue and intentional governmental responsibility in protecting lives of all persons living within the geographical enclave of Nigeria which is necessary for the common good. Closer understanding of other faiths and religions will help build bridges of peace and tolerance. The article also calls for the need to promote African traditional values, such as the value of sacredness of life, human respect and good neighbourliness. Contribution: This study initiated the discussions that will help the public understand the reason for continuous church attacks in Nigeria, what church crime connotes in the Nigerian context and its uniqueness from other crimes. These discussions sit quite well within the transdisciplinary religious perspective of this journal. (shrink)

The first in a new series with Australian Catholic University, this collection of essays deals with two important themes. 'Faith' and 'reason' are heavily weighted words. They point to elemental aspects of human existence. The papers and discussions presented strive to clarify and corelate these basic activities or dimensions of human beings. In all the complexities of the possible relationships and interweaving of faith and reason, two kinds of questions keep recurring. One the one hand, what is the value of (...) human intelligence, and how is it endorsed and supported by faith' On the other hand, what is the distinctive intelligence or rationality of faith, and how does it relate to the perennial search for wisdom represented in it various philosophical forms' Contributors include: Marilyn McCord Adams, Raimond Gaita, John Haldane, John McDermott SJ, Kevin Hart, and Anthony Kelly CSsR. (shrink)

Note posted 9 Jun 08 : Modifications made today include a new section on predictive validity, and addition of recently published article and in in-press article, both by Nosek & Hansen, under the "CULTURE VS. PERSON" heading, which replaces a previously listed unpublished ms. of theirs. I continue to encourage all interested to send material that they are willing to be included on this page. Please also to let me know about errors, including faulty links.

_I am. We are. That is enough. Now we have to start._ These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch's first major work, _The Spirit of Utopia,_ written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, 1923, in the version here presented for the first time in English translation. _The Spirit of Utopia_ is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the century, but it is not an (...) obsolete one. In its style of thinking, a peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, in its analytical skills deeply informed by Simmel, taking its information from both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, Bloch's _Spirit of Utopia_ is a unique attempt to rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and to reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives to continue disrupting. The alliance between messianism and Marxism, which was proclaimed in this book for the first time with epic breadth, has met with more critique than acclaim. The expressive and baroque diction of the book was considered as offensive as its stubborn disregard for the limits of "disciplines." Yet there is hardly a "discipline" that didn't adopt, however unknowingly, some of Bloch's insights, and his provocative associations often proved more productive than the statistical account of social shifts. The first part of this philosophical meditation—which is also a narrative, an analysis, a rhapsody, and a manifesto—concerns a mode of "self-encounter" that presents itself in the history of music from Mozart through Mahler as an encounter with the problem of a community to come. This "we-problem" is worked out by Bloch in terms of a philosophy of the history of music. The "self-encounter," however, has to be conceived as "self-invention," as the active, affirmative fight for freedom and social justice, under the sign of Marx. The second part of the book is entitled "Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse." _I am. We are._ That's hardly anything. But enough _to start._. (shrink)

We spent a wonderful morning in the van Gogh gallery in Amsterdam. Of course we knew all the paintings, we had seen them all in reproduction, and the building was more like a bank vault than a setting for art. But what art! At first sight how small and uniform the paintings were in reality: yet every blade of grass, every flower in a field, every olive tree, every vibration in the sky, every patch of colour, every brush stroke, testified (...) to life and to a life vibrating beneath the surface form. In a true sense, an artist inspired, an artist breaking convention, artistic and social, but nevertheless an artist transforming life with a vision of the enhancement of life, a vision inviting each one of us to look again at the natural forms around us, to feel the spirit or the gods dwelling in them, a vision of enchantment and of humanity in a disenchanted world. Art—painting—can, then, be a source of spiritual nourishment as Kant and Schiller and Ruskin in their different ways thought it should be. (shrink)

Since its inception in the Middle Ages, the university classroom can be characterized by students gathered around a sage who imparts his or her knowledge. However, the effective classroom of today looks vastly different: First-year engineering students not only learn basic engineering principles, but are also guided to consider their own inner values and motivations as they design and build adaptive devices for people with disabilities; students in a large chemistry lecture work animatedly together in small groups on inquiry-based activities (...) while an instructor and teaching assistants circulate and guide their learning; students learning differential equations practice explicit metacognitive skills while problem-solving in class. Even though educational research, especially research that is targeted at STEM disciplines, demonstrates what most effectively engages students and supports their learning, many of today's classrooms look much like they did a century ago, with a professor delivering a primarily one-way lecture and students passively sitting in seats bolted to the floor. At this juncture in history, colleges and universities face a public call to engage a more diverse representation of students in effective learning, persistence, and degree attainment, and to do so economically and efficiently. It is essential that institutions draw upon methods demonstrated to effectively increase student learning and success. Educational researchers have thoroughly explored the "basic" science in this area, and a body of literature documents effective evidence-based instructional practices, hereafter referred to as EBIPs. (shrink)

The “information age” is often thought in terms of the digital revolution that begins with Turing’s 1937 paper, “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” However, this can only be partially correct. There are two aspects to Turing’s work: one dealing with questions of computation that leads to computer science and another concerned with building computing machines that leads to computer engineering. Here, we emphasize the latter because it shows us a Turing connected with mechanisms of information flow (...) rather than solely with the mathematical and logical problems of computability for which he is better known. Our reasons for doing so will become clear in what follows. In fact, the 1937 paper just mentioned provides a general schematic for building a computing machine; this mechanical connection puts Turing on an historical continuum with others who discovered mechanisms to cope with information. Of those involved in this quest in the 19th Century, two people in particular, Edison and Bell, had explicit visions of an information age that would follow from their work. Because they were explicitly aware of what they were doing and partly brought it about long before 1937, they deserve substantial credit for the information age they set out to inaugurate. Regarding one purely mechanical and non-electronic technology, Edison noted ten uses for the phonograph, including not only the replication of sound, but also “connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the recipient of momentary and fleeting communication”. Even though the telephone was only two years old when Edison wrote of a network made up of mechanical hard storage systems and people connected by wire, the network vision was already clearly in his head. (shrink)

The making of music has been sufficiently deep and widespread diachronically and geographically to suggest a genetic imperative. C.G. Jung's 'Collective Unconscious' and the accompanying archetypes suggest that music is a psychic necessity because it is part of the brain structure. Therefore, the present view of aesthetics may need drastic revision, particularly on views of music as pleasure, ideas of disinterest, differences between so-called high and low art, cultural identity, cultural conditioning, and art-for-art's sake.All cultures, past and present, show evidence (...) of music making. Music qua music has been a part of human expression for at least some forty-thousand years and it could well be speculated that the making of music accompanied the arrival of the first human beings. As Curt Sachs states, "However far back we tracemankind, we fail to see the springing-up of music. Even the most primitive tribes are musically beyond the first attempts".Why do humans continuahy create music and include it as an integral part of culture? What is music's driving force? Why do cultures endow music with extraordinary powers? Why do human beings, individuahy and as societies, exercise preferences for specific works and genres of music? In probing these questions, I chose one aspect of Jungian psychology, that of the Collective Unconscious with its accompanying archetypes, as the basis upon which to speculate a world aesthetics of music. Once we dispense with the mechanistic and designer idea of human origins, we have only the investigations of the human psyche to mine for data that could explain the myriad forms of artistic activity found the world over. An examination of human beings, I believe, must lead one ultimately to the study of human behavior and motivations, in short, to the psychology of human ethos. This study wih take the following course: first, a discussion of consciousness and the Collective Unconscious, plus a discussion of archetypes; then, a description of musical archetypal substance; and finally, what I beheve is implied to form a world aesthetics of music.By comparison to Jung, Freud gives us little in the way of understanding artistic substance because for him, all artistic subject matter stems purely from the personal experiences of the artist. In comparing Freud and Jung, Stephen Larsen states that "Where Freud was deterministic, Jung was teleological; where Freud was historical, Jung was mythological". Jung drew on a much wider cross-cultural experiential and intellectual base than Freud. His interests in so-cahed primitive peoples led him to Tunis, the Saharan Desert, sub-Saharan Africa, and New Mexico in the United States to visit the Pueblo Indians; visits to India and Ceylon and studies of Chinese culture all contributed to his vast knowledge of human experience. Jung constructed the cohective unconscious as a major part of the psyche with the deepest sense of tradition and myth from around the world. He was criticized because of his interests in alchemy, astrology, divination, telepathy and clairvoyance, yoga, spiritualism, mediums and seances, fortunetelling, flying saucers, religious symbolism, visions, and dreams. But he approached these subjects as a scientist, investigating the human psyche and what these subjects revealed about mental process, particularly what might be learned about the collective unconsciousness. Jung's ideation, in my view, is sufficiently comprehensive to support the probe of a world aesthetics of music. (shrink)