This article investigates the resolute readings account of Wittgenstein's early remarks on ethics, especially the claim that there are no ethical sentences. According to Cora Diamond a Wittgensteinian ethics therefore relies on a particular type of imaginative understanding consisting in taking nonsense for sense. I argue that that there are some problems connected to Diamonds reading of the remarks on ethics in the Tractatus and that these mainly stem.from her not seeing the importance of a particular concept of showing for (...) Wittgenstein's work. (shrink)

All of our information about the world is derived from the function of our senses, and thus they are the principal source of all our knowledge. This was recognized explicitly by early Greek philosophers, remained an important point of discussion for nineteenth‐century philosophers, and continues to be a key issue for present‐day philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. It is a key issue in cognitive science because, by initiating the processes that store and evaluate information, sensory information transmission can be considered a (...) cognitive initiator. In a very real sense, who we are and how we see the world are the result of the experiences that are mediated by our sensory systems. These are some of the reasons why the study of sensory systems has occupied such a prominent place in modern cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

Even after multiple cycles of ABET accreditation, many engineering programs are unsure of how much curriculum content is needed to meet the requirements of ABET’s Criterion 3.f (an understanding of professional and ethical responsibility). This study represents the first scholarly attempt to assess the impact of curriculum reform following the introduction of ABET Criterion 3.f. This study sought to determine how much professional and ethical responsibility curriculum content was used between 1995 and 2005, as well as how, when, why, and (...) to what effect changes in the amount of content occurred. Subsequently, the study sought to evaluate if different amounts of curriculum content generated differing student outcomes. The amount of curriculum content used by each of the participating programs was identified during semi-structured interviews with program administrators and a review of ABET Self-Study documents. Quantitative methods were applied to determine if a relationship existed between the curriculum content and performance on a nationally administered, engineering-specific standardized examination. The findings indicate a statistical relationship, but a lack of structure between the amount of required content in the curriculum and performance on the examination. Additional findings were also generated regarding the way that programs interpret the Criterion 3.f feedback generated during accreditation visits. The primary impact of this study is that it dispels the myth that more courses or course time on professionalism and ethics will necessarily lead to positive engineering education outcomes. Much of the impetus to add more curriculum content results from a lack of conclusive feedback during ABET accreditation visits. (shrink)

It is suggested that the world is locally projectively flat rather than Euclidean. From this postulate it is shown that an (N+1)-particle system has the global geometry of the symmetric spaceSO(4,N+1)/SO(4)×SO(N+1). A complex representation also exists, with structureSU(2,N+1)/S[U(2)×U(N+1)]. Several aspects of these geometrics are developed. Physical states are taken to be eigenfunctions of the Laplace-Beltrami operators. The theory may provide a rational basis for comprehending the groupsSO(4, 2),SU(2)×U(1),SU(3), etc., of current interest.