This article unveils how the local, literally the soil, contains hidden and revelatory global histories, narrating how the little settlement at the edge of Manhattan was connected and indeed enmeshed in a vast network of human activity that was global in reach. Referencing the frames of big history, the universe story, and justice, the author demonstrates that the discovery of the African Burial Ground exposes hidden narratives of race, the city, and the genesis of global economic power. Among the lessons—historical, (...) social, and environmental—that can be drawn from this story: walls can no longer protect us from the dangers we face in the twenty-first century, and social equity and environmental protection must go hand in hand. (shrink)

We introduce the notion of "semi-r.e." for subsets of ω, a generalization of "semirecursive" and of "r.e.", and the notion of "weakly semirecursive", a generalization of "semi-r.e.". We show that A is weakly semirecursive iff, for any n numbers x 1 ,...,x n , knowing how many of these numbers belong to A is equivalent to knowing which of these numbers belong to A. It is shown that there exist weakly semirecursive sets that are neither semi-r.e. nor co-semi-r.e. On the (...) other hand, we exhibit nonzero Turing degrees in which every weakly semirecursive set is semirecursive. We characterize the notion "A is weakly semirecursive and recursive in K" in terms of recursive approximations to A. We also show that if a finite Boolean combination of r.e. sets is semirecursive then it must be r.e. or co-r.e. Several open questions are raised. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Dieses Buch ist eine Open Access Publikation.Der lange gehegte Traum von künstlicher Intelligenz wird in unserer Alltagswelt zunehmend Realität. Damit verbinden sich hohe gesellschaftliche Erwartungen, aber auch Sorgen hinsichtlich einer schleichenden Entmündigung des Menschen. Am Beispiel des Forschungssektors lotet dieser Band die Optionen, Entwicklungschancen und Risiken von KI-Techniken für die Zukunft des wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisprozesses und der darauf beruhenden technischen Entwicklungen aus. Zu diesem Zweck wird zunächst der Stand der KI-Technik und ihrer Anwendungen dargestellt. Es folgen wissenschaftsphilosophische Untersuchungen zur Frage der (...) Ersetzbarkeit des forschenden Menschen durch KI und zu erwartenden Veränderungen in der wissenschaftlichen Forschung. Weitere Abschnitte widmen sich den Folgen für die Arbeitswelt von Forschern/Forscherinnen sowie den durch KI erzeugten neuen Herausforderungen für die rechtliche Regulierung im Spannungsfeld von Wissenschaftsfreiheit und Datenschutz. Der Band schließt mit Empfehlungen für die verantwortlichen Akteure in Wissenschaft, Forschungspolitik und Gesellschaft aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive. (shrink)

This paper will show that if we take conventional ethics seriously, then there is no moral justification for business profits. To show this, we explore three conventional ethical theories, namely Christian ethics, Kantian ethics and Utilitarian ethics. Since they essentially reject self-interest, they also reject the essence of business: the profit motive. To illustrate the relationship, we will concretize how the anti-egoist perspective expresses itself in business and business ethics. In business, we look at what many businesses regard as proof (...) of their virtue. In business ethics, we look at what many business ethicists say about the relationship between morality and self-interest and, thus, the profit motive. Ultimately, we will argue that conventional ethics can, at most, only justify the means of business, but not the end of business. (shrink)

The central task of cognitive neuroscience to map cognitive capacities to neural mechanisms faces three interlocking conceptual problems that together frame the problem of cognitive ontology. First, they must establish which tasks elicit which cognitive capacities, and specifically when different tasks elicit the same capacity. To address this operationalization problem, scientists often assess whether the tasks engage the same neural mechanisms. But to determine whether mechanisms are of the same or different kinds, we need to solve the abstraction problem by (...) determining which mechanistic differences are and are not relevant, and also the boundary problem by distinguishing the mechanism from its background conditions. Solving these problems, in turn, requires understanding how cognitive capacities are elicited in tasks. These three problems, which have been noted and discussed elsewhere in the literature, together form a ‘cycle of kinds’ that frames the central problem-space of cognitive ontology. We describe this cycle to clarify the intellectual challenges facing the cognitive ontologist and to reveal the kind of iterative process by which ontological revision in cognitive neuroscience is likely to unfold. (shrink)

Reminiscences of Peter, by P. Oppenheim.--Natural kinds, by W. V. Quine.--Inductive independence and the paradoxes of confirmation, by J. Hintikka.--Partial entailment as a basis for inductive logic, by W. C. Salmon.--Are there non-deductive logics?, by W. Sellars.--Statistical explanation vs. statistical inference, by R. C. Jeffre--Newcomb's problem and two principles of choice, by R. Nozick.--The meaning of time, by A. Grünbaum.--Lawfulness as mind-dependent, by N. Rescher.--Events and their descriptions: some considerations, by J. Kim.--The individuation of events, by D. Davidson.--On properties, by (...) H. Putnam.--A method for avoiding the Curry paradox, by F. B. Fitch.--Publications (1934-1969) by Carl G. Hempel (p. [266]-270). (shrink)

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This article identifies the moral premises of contemporary business ethics. After analyzing thirty business ethics texts, the article shows that many business ethicists hold the conventional view that being moral is altruistic. This altruistic perspective logically implies a negative evaluation of self-interest and the profit motive, and business. As a result, the prevailing attitude in mainstream business ethics is that without altruistic restraints businesspeople are inclined to lie, steal, and cheat, not create and earn wealth through honest production and voluntary (...) trade. Therefore, the central concern in current business ethics is to curb businesspeople morally, not to empower them in their self-interested desire to make money. In the final analysis, the article shows how the anti-egoist assumptions manifest themselves in a moral prejudice against business, leading to a biased, unfair, and misleading account of the business world. (shrink)

I argue that Quine’s naturalization of Lewis’s Kantian pragmatism should be understood in terms of Lewis’s attempt to de-psychologize pragmatist epistemology. Lewis wants epistemology to be a priori in order to be distinct from psychology. Quine’s criticisms of Lewis result in a picture that weakens the distinction between epistemology and psychology. Nevertheless, Quine’s naturalized Kantian pragmatism remains far more Kantian than is widely recognized, due to what Quine retains from Lewis.

Varieties of Ethical Reflection brings together new cultural and religious perspectives—drawn from non-Western, primarily Asian, philosophical sources—to globalize the contemporary discussion of theoretical and applied ethics.

There is a phenomenon which has from of old and in a peculiar degree attracted the attention of social philosophers and practical economists, the fact of certain commodities (these being in advanced civilizations coined pieces of gold and silver, together subsequently with documents representing those coins) becoming universally acceptable media of exchange. It is obvious even to the most ordinary intelligence, that a commodity should be given up by its owner in exchange for another more useful to him. But that (...) every economic unit in a nation should be ready to exchange his goods for little metal disks apparently useless as such, or for documents representing the latter, is a procedure so opposed to the ordinary course of things, that we cannot well wonder if even a distinguished thinker like Savigny finds it downright 'mysterious.' It must not be supposed that the form of coin, or document, employed as current money, constitutes the enigma in this phenomenon. We may look away from these forms and go back to earlier stages of economic development, or indeed to what still obtains in countries here and there, where we find the precious metals in a uncoined state serving as the medium of exchange, and even certain other commodities, cattle, skins, cubes of tea, slabs of salt, cowrie shells, etc.; still we are confronted by this phenomenon, still we have to explain why it is that the economic man is ready to accept a certain kind of commodity, even if he does not need it, or if his need of it is already supplied, in exchange for all the goods he has brought to market, while it is none the less what he needs that he consults in the first instance, with respect to the goods he intends to acquire in the course of his transactions. And hence there runs, from the first essays of reflective contemplation of a social phenomena down to our own times, an uninterrupted chain of disquisitions upon the nature and specific qualities of money in its relation to all that constitutes traffic.. (shrink)

The orthodox definition of hope suffers from an exclusion problem: it is unable to exclude subjects without hope. In fact, the orthodox definition even allows for despair to be falsely classified as hope. This problem suggests two basic desiderata for a successful analysis of hope: it should solve the exclusion problem, and it should have the resources to explain why, in a given situation, a subject does or does not form a hope. Bearing these desiderata in mind, I assess two (...) recent hope‐accounts offered by Jack M. C. Kwong and Cheshire Calhoun. I then offer my own view, which is based on the Jamesian notion of a “live possibility”. I suggest that a possibility needs to reach a certain probability threshold in order to count as live, and according to my account, to hope is to desire the truth of such a live possibility. This view is well‐equipped to solve the exclusion problem, and it can explain why a subject does or does not hope. (shrink)

Die herausragende Stellung Carl Mengers in der Volkswirschaftslehre wird in dogmenhistorischen Studien hauptsächlich darin gesehen, dass er den entscheidenden Schritt in Richtung einer subjektivistisch fundierten Erklärung des Wertes unternommen hat. Das Hauptziel dieses Aufsatzes ist es, zu zeigen, inwiefern in seinem Werk darüber hinaus auch Ansatzpunkte vorhanden sind, die für das moderne Wettbewerbsverständnis theoretisch relevant sind und Menger außer als Preistheoretiker auch als Wettbewerbstheoretiker erscheinen lassen können. Es wird gezeigt, dass alle fünf wichtigen Elemente der modernen Wettbewerbstheorie in mehr oder (...) weniger entwickelter Form in Mengers Werk zu finden sind: der prozessuale Charakter des Wettbewerbs, die Vielfalt an Wettbewerbsparametern, die Bedeutung der Zeit und der Wachstumsaspekt. (shrink)

Background For a variety of sociological reasons, different types of centredness have become important in health and social care. In trying to characterize one type of centredness, we were led to consider, at a conceptual level, the importance of the notion of centredness in general and the reasons for there being different types of centeredness. Method We searched the literature for papers on client-, family-, patient-, person- and relationship- centred care. We identified reviews or papers that defined or discussed the (...) notions at a conceptual level. The reviews and papers were analyzed as text transcripts. Results We identified 10 themes that were common to all the types of centredness. At a conceptual level we could not identify thematic differences between the types of centredness. These findings were subjected to a philosophical critique using ideas derived from Wittgenstein. Conclusion Different types of centredness are required in different contexts. The differences are justified by their practical utility. The unifying themes of centredness, however, reflect a movement in favour of increasing the social, psychological, cultural and ethical sensitivity of our human encounters. (shrink)

During his undergraduate years (1896-1899) at Basel University, Jung delivered lectures to his student fraternity, the Zofingia. Dwelling on theology, psychology, spiritism, and philosophy, the Zofingia Lectures illuminate Jung's later thought.

The eminent philosopher of science Carl G. Hempel, Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University and a Past President of the American Philosophical Association, has had a long and distinguished academic career in the course of which he has been professorial mentor to some of America's most distinguished philosophers. This volume gathers together twelve original papers by Hempel's students and associates into a volume intended to do homage to Hempel on the occasion of his 65th year in 1970. The papers (...) are grouped around the unifying topic of Hempel's own interests in logic and philosophy of science, the great majority dealing with issues on inductive logic and the theory of scientific explanatio- problems to which Hempel has devoted the bulk of his outstandingly fruitful efforts. With the approach of 'Peter' Hempel's 65th birthday, an editorial committee sprang into being by an uncannily spontaneous process to prepare to commemorate this event with an appropriate Festschrift. The editors were pleased to receive unfailingly prompt and efficient coopera tion on the part of all contributors. The responsibility of seeing the work through the press was assumed by Nicholas Rescher. The editors are grateful to all concerned for their collaboration. ALAN ROSS ANDERSON PAUL BENACERRAF ADOLF GRUNBAUM GERALD J. MASSEY NICHOLAS RESCHER RICHARD S. RUDNER TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE V PAUL OPPENHEIM: Reminiscences of Peter 1 w. v. QUINE: Natural Kinds 5 JAAKKO HINTIKKA: Inductive Independence and the Paradoxes of Confirmation 24 WESLEY c. (shrink)