On Becoming an Effective Teacher presents the final unpublished writings of Rogers and as such has a unique historical value. It also documents the research results of four highly relevant, related but independent studies which comprise the biggest collection of data ever accumulated to test a person-centred theory in the field of education. This body of comprehensive research on effective teaching was accomplished over a twenty-year period in 42 States in the U.S. and in six other countries including the UK, (...) Germany, Brazil, Canada, Israel, and Mexico, and is highly relevant to the concerns of teachers, psychologists, students, and parents. The principal findings of the research in this book show that teachers and schools can significantly improve their effectiveness through programs focusing on facilitative interpersonal relationships. Teachers who either naturally have, or are trained to have empathy, genuineness (congruence), and who prize their students (positive regard) create an important level of trust in the classroom and exert significant positive effects on student outcomes including achievement scores, interpersonal functioning, self-concept, and attendance. The dialogues between Rogers and Lyon offer a unique and timeless perspective on teaching, counselling and learning. The work of Reinhard Tausch on person-centered teaching to counselors, parents, athletics, and even textbook materials, as well as research on the interactions of teachers and students, is among the most thorough and rigorous research ever accomplished on the significance and potential of a person-centered approach to teaching and learning. (shrink)

In this work, legal theorist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt argues that liberalism's basis in individual rights cannot provide a reasonable justification for sacrificing oneself for the state.

Written in the intense political and intellectual tumult of the early years of the Weimar Republic, Political Theology develops the distinctive theory of sovereignty that made Carl Schmitt one of the most significant and controversial ...

In this, his most influential work, legal theorist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt argues that liberalism’s basis in individual rights cannot provide a reasonable justification for sacrificing oneself for the state—a critique as cogent today as when it first appeared. George Schwab’s introduction to his translation of the 1932 German edition highlights Schmitt’s intellectual journey through the turbulent period of German history leading to the Hitlerian one-party state. In addition to analysis by Leo Strauss and a foreword by Tracy (...) B. Strong placing Schmitt’s work into contemporary context, this expanded edition also includes a translation of Schmitt’s 1929 lecture “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” which the author himself added to the 1932 edition of the book. An essential update on a modern classic, The Concept of the Political, Expanded Edition belongs on the bookshelf of anyone interested in political theory or philosophy. (shrink)

Intentionality is one of the central problems of modern philosophy. How can a thought, action or belief be about something? Sachs draws on the work of Wilfrid Sellars, C. I. Lewis and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to build a new theory of intentionality that solves many of the problems faced by traditional conceptions. In doing so, he sheds new light on Sellars’s influential arguments concerning the ‘Myth of the Given’ and shows how we can build a productive discourse between American pragmatism, analytical (...) philosophy and European phenomenology. (shrink)

Philosophers of neuroscience have traditionally described interfield integration using reduction models. Such models describe formal inferential relations between theories at different levels. I argue against reduction and for a mechanistic model of interfield integration. According to the mechanistic model, different fields integrate their research by adding constraints on a multilevel description of a mechanism. Mechanistic integration may occur at a given level or in the effort to build a theory that oscillates among several levels. I develop this alternative model using (...) a putative exemplar of reduction in contemporary neuroscience: the relationship between the psychological phenomena of learning and memory and the electrophysiological phenomenon known as Long-Term Potentiation. A new look at this historical episode reveals the relative virtues of the mechanistic model over reduction as an account of interfield integration. (shrink)

BackgroundCountries are increasingly devoting significant resources to creating or strengthening research ethics committees, but there has been insufficient attention to assessing whether these committees are actually improving the protection of human research participants.DiscussionResearch ethics committees face numerous obstacles to achieving their goal of improving research participant protection. These include the inherently amorphous nature of ethics review, the tendency of regulatory systems to encourage a focus on form over substance, financial and resource constraints, and conflicts of interest. Auditing and accreditation programs (...) can improve the quality of ethics review by encouraging the development of standardized policies and procedures, promoting a common base of knowledge, and enhancing the status of research ethics committees within their own institutions. However, these mechanisms focus largely on questions of structure and process and are therefore incapable of answering many critical questions about ethics committees' actual impact on research practices.The first step in determining whether research ethics committees are achieving their intended function is to identify what prospective research participants and their communities hope to get out of the ethics review process. Answers to this question can help guide the development of effective outcomes assessment measures. It is also important to determine whether research ethics committees' guidance to investigators is actually being followed. Finally, the information developed through outcomes assessment must be disseminated to key decision-makers and incorporated into practice. This article offers concrete suggestions for achieving these goals.ConclusionOutcomes assessment of research ethics committees should address the following questions: First, does research ethics committee review improve participants' understanding of the risks and potential benefits of studies? Second, does the process affect prospective participants' decisions about whether to participate in research? Third, does it change participants' subjective experiences in studies or their attitudes about research? Fourth, does it reduce the riskiness of research? Fifth, does it result in more research responsive to the local community's self-identified needs? Sixth, is research ethics committees' guidance to researchers actually being followed? (shrink)

This book offers a bold new theoretical understanding of the current ecological crisis via the Frankfurt School. Focusing on key notions of dialectics, natural history, and materialism, a critical theory of nature is outlined in favor of a more traditional Marxist theory of nature, albeit one which still builds on Marxist concepts to confirm humanity's centrality in manufacturing environmental misery. Pre-eminent thinkers including Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, and Theodor Adorno are highlighted for their potential to diagnose the interpenetration of capitalism (...) and nature in a way that neither absolutizes nor obliterates the boundary between the social and natural. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to try to clarify the nature and justification of respect for the law. In section I, I try to clarify the nature of respect for a legal system and distinguish it from related concepts. In the next section, I consider problems justifying the attitude of respect toward a legal system. In section III, I discuss the extent to which one has duties to behave respectfully toward and to try to adopt an attitude of respect (...) toward a reasonably just legal system. One consequence is that it is difficult to show that one has a duty to obey the law because it is respect-worthy. In the last section, I sketch further consequences of preceding sections and suggest that respect for the law properly understood is neither the boon of oppression nor the bane of conscientious moral agents. (shrink)

Here a distinguished American historian challenges the belief that the eighteenth century was essentially modern in its temper. In crystalline prose Carl Becker demonstrates that the period commonly described as the Age of Reason was, in fact, very far from that; that Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, and Locke were living in a medieval world, and that these philosophers “demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials.” In a new foreword, Johnson Kent Wright looks (...) at the book’s continuing relevance within the context of current discussion about the Enlightenment. “Will remain a classic—a beautifully finished literary product.”—Charles A. Beard, _American Historical Review_ “_The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers _remains_ _one of the most distinctive American contributions to the historical literature on the Enlightenment.... [It] is likely to beguile and provoke readers for a long time to come.”—Johnson Kent Wright, from the foreword. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege has exerted an enormous influence on the evolution of twentieth-century philosophy, yet the real significance of that influence is still very much a matter of debate. This book provides a completely new and systematic account of Frege's philosophy by focusing on its cornerstone: the theory of sense and reference. Two features distinguish this study from other books on Frege. First, sense and reference are placed absolutely at the core of Frege's work; the author shows that no adequate account (...) of the theory can avoid analysing the notion of thought that underpins it, or explaining how it has clarified our concept of judgement. Second, the theory is situated within the development of Frege's thought; the author reveals how the theory caused Frege to alter many of his fundamental views. In doing so the author presents a clearer picture of the problems the theory was intended to solve, and delineates more sharply the characteristic features of Frege's philosophy. (shrink)

Infinite time register machines (ITRMs) are register machines which act on natural numbers and which are allowed to run for arbitrarily many ordinal steps. Successor steps are determined by standard register machine commands. At limit times register contents are defined by appropriate limit operations. In this paper, we examine the ITRMs introduced by the third and fourth author (Koepke and Miller in Logic and Theory of Algorithms LNCS, pp. 306–315, 2008), where a register content at a limit time is set (...) to the lim inf of previous register contents if that limit is finite; otherwise the register is reset to 0. The theory of these machines has several similarities to the infinite time Turing machines (ITTMs) of Hamkins and Lewis. The machines can decide all ${\Pi^1_1}$ sets, yet are strictly weaker than ITTMs. As in the ITTM situation, we introduce a notion of ITRM-clockable ordinals corresponding to the running times of computations. These form a transitive initial segment of the ordinals. Furthermore we prove a Lost Melody theorem: there is a real r such that there is a program P that halts on the empty input for all oracle contents and outputs 1 iff the oracle number is r, but no program can decide for every natural number n whether or not ${n \in r}$ with the empty oracle. In an earlier paper, the third author considered another type of machines where registers were not reset at infinite lim inf’s and he called them infinite time register machines. Because the resetting machines correspond much better to ITTMs we hold that in future the resetting register machines should be called ITRMs. (shrink)

The concept of vulnerability has long played a central role in discussions of research ethics. In addition to its rhetorical use, vulnerability has become a term of art in U.S. and international research regulations and guidelines, many of which contain specific provisions applicable to research with vulnerable subjects. Yet, despite the frequency with which the term vulnerability is used, little consensus exists on what it actually means in the context of human subject protection or, more importantly, on how a finding (...) of vulnerability should affect the process of research ethics review.The Common Rule, the centerpiece of the U.S. human subject protection regulations, uses the word vulnerable three times. First, it provides that institutional review boards that regularly review research involving a vulnerable category of subjects should consider including one or more individuals who are knowledgeable about and experienced in working with these subjects. (shrink)

Many environmental harms are produced by the consequences of too many people doing acts which taken together have collective bad consequences, e.g. overuse of an underground aquifer or acid rain 'killing' a lake. If such acts are wrong, what should a conscientious moral agent do in such circumstances? Examples of such harms have the general feature that they are produced by individual acts, which taken by themselves may be innocent and morally permissible, but which have disastrous consequences when too many (...) people perform them. Philosophers once thought that the generalisation argument, "If the consequences of everyone's doing acts of kind a are undesirable, then no one ought to do a," was the appropriate principle to guide a conscientious moral agent in such circumstances. However, there has been considerable literature discussing the shortcomings of this principle. Nevertheless, a proper understanding of the GA suggests that whole groups of people have collective duties to prevent such harms, which duties then provide clues to individual duties to protect the environment. In this paper I consider some major deficiencies of the generalisation argument, the collective duty which follows from the salvageable part of the argument, and the distribution of individual duties a conscientious moral agent has with regard to such environmental harms as a consequence. These duties turn out to be peculiarly political in nature with the result that conscientious moral agents may have a number of political duties to protect the environment heretofore unrealised. (shrink)

The United States is at a critical crossroads in its foreign policy and its relationship to the international community. Indeed, the very existence of an international community, rooted in the authority of the United Nations and capable of enforcing its resolutions, is from Washington's contemporary perspective an issue of contention. The foreign policy of the administration of George W. Bush has demonstrated, both before and after the tragic events of 11 September 2001, a willingness to undertake major initiatives unilaterally when (...) these are deemed to be in the vital interest of the United States specifically or of international order generally. In light of the inability of the United Nations to exercise collective will in the effort to disarm the aggressive regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, 1991-2003, Washington's determination to act alone or in coalitions-of-the-willing to secure international order is a welcome alternative to the international community as it is presently constituted. (shrink)

The physical activity-related health competence model assumes that individuals require movement competence, control competence, and self-regulation competence to lead a healthy, physically active lifestyle. Although previous research has already established some measurement factors of the three dimensions, no attempts have so far been made to statistically aggregate them on the sub-competence level. Therefore, the goal of the present study was to test two additional factors for PAHCO and subsequently model the second-order structure with two samples from the fields of rehabilitation (...) and prevention. We conducted two questionnaire surveys with persons with multiple sclerosis and teaching students undergoing a basic qualification course in physical education. After performing exploratory items analysis, we used second-order confirmatory factor analysis and multidimensional scaling to investigate whether the scales could be bundled in accordance with the PAHCO model. The CFAs with 10 factors demonstrated a good model fit. In contrast, the second-order analysis with a simple loading structure on the three sub-competencies revealed an unacceptable model fit. Instead, a second-order model variant was preferred [comparative fit index = 0.926, root mean square error of approximation = 0.048, standardized root mean square residual = 0.065] in which body awareness and self-efficacy had theory-conform cross-loadings. The results of multidimensional scaling were in line with the extracted second-order structure. The present results suggested that the extension of the measurement instrument to 10 first-order factors was psychometrically justified for the two populations. The results from the second-order analyses provided the basis for the creation of sum scores, representing manifest indicators of movement competence, control competence, and self-regulation competence. Future studies are needed that cross-validate the extended measurement model with other populations and that relate the sub-competencies of PAHCO to indicators of health-enhancing physical activity. (shrink)

The way politicians get in contact with local polities in Flanders bas been examined based on the sociological distinction between ascribed and achieved status positions. Politically active relatives were considered characteristic of ascribed local mandates.Membership of different associations was seen as a way of personally achieving a local mandate. The results indicate that a combination of both was most frequently occuring. In spite of popular convictions, family was still quite important to get in contact with politics. This is shown in (...) the high rates of respondents having politically active relatives.Next to this, a lot of political involvement occured via participation in a diversity of associations. Participations considered were membership, diligence and officeholding in a political party, a union, a health insurance organisation, an advisory body and all other political or non-political associations. (shrink)

In 2011, the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District’s proposed to release a genetically engineered Aedes aegypti mosquito to fight the spread of dengue fever and chikungunya. This would be the first release of a genetically engineered insect into the open environment in the US, and the proposal has sparked heated opposition in Key West. We address this controversy through Beck’s concept of reflexive modernity, tracing the way the FKMCD and Oxitec interpret the risk involved in the situation and how citizens (...) opposing the release construct their very different interpretation. We use theories of space and place and Rickert’s theory of ambient rhetoric to argue that the contrasting interpretations of risk in this case stem, at least in part, from the different construction of space and place embraced by the FKMCD and Oxitec and by many in the community. The authority of nature invoked by FKMCD and Oxitec’s scientific discourse frames the public forum in ways that exclude full deliberation and affective argumentative grounds that emerge from the materiality of place. While the public forum privileges what Latour calls matters of fact, the controversy emerges from different understanding of what Latour calls matters of concern. (shrink)

In recent years, it has become conventional to think of the world using metaphors taken from computation. Some have even suggested that the world itself is a kind of cosmological computer. In order to compare these suggestions to the process interpretation of early Daoism, I define computation as ?a process in which the fact that one system is rule governed is used to make reliable correlations to another rule governed system? and apply this definition to Yijing divination. I find that (...) early Chinese thinking about the dao is similar to computation in certain respects, but adds elements of appropriateness, novelty, and scope that are lacking in contemporary thought. (shrink)

First published in 1967. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Between the two World Wars, Jørgen Jørgensen was a central figure in Danish philosophy and internationally recognized, as his teacher Harald Høffding had been before World War 1. When in the late 1920s Jørgensen established contact with the movement that would later be called logical positivism, he found a group of philosophers of his own age who advocated empiricism, the tools of formal logic and the Unity of Science, and who shared his anti-metaphysical approach to philosophy. He became one of (...) the movement’s organizers and wrote its history, but he was only for a short period influenced by especially Rudolf Carnap’s philosophy of logic. Although Jørgensen was never an uncritical member of the movement, he is often considered as a central representative of logical positivism in Scandinavia. (shrink)

The central ideas of logical, or scientific, empiricism as it developed during the twenties and early thirties in Vienna and in Berlin, grew out of collaborative efforts of scientifically interested philosophers and philosophically interested scientists. Those thinkers noted that while the claims made by the physical sciences were amenable to objective test by experiment and observation, the pronouncements put forward by metaphysics were incapable of any such objective critical appraisal. And while hypotheses advanced in the physical sciences would eventually be (...) accepted or rejected and thus lead to the growth of a body of objective scientific knowledge, the problems and pronouncements of metaphysics, inaccessible to objective appraisal, kept reappearing over and over again. (shrink)

Developing countries face numerous barriers to conducting effective and efficient ethics reviews of international collaborative research. In addition to potentially overlooking important scientific and ethical considerations, inadequate or insufficiently trained ethics committees may insist on unwarranted changes to protocols that can impair a study's scientific or ethical validity. Moreover, poorly functioning review systems can impose substantial delays on the commencement of research, which needlessly undermine the development of new interventions for urgent medical needs. In response to these concerns, the Drugs (...) for Neglected Diseases Initiative, an independent nonprofit organization founded by a coalition of public sector and international organizations, developed a mechanism to facilitate more effective and efficient host country ethics review for a study of the use of fexinidazole for the treatment of late stage African Trypanosomiasis. The project involved the implementation of a novel ‘pre-review’ process of ethical oversight, conducted by an ad hoc committee of ethics committee representatives from African and European countries, in collaboration with internationally recognized scientific experts. This article examines the process and outcomes of this collaborative process. (shrink)

In this paper, I am concerned with what automation—widely considered to be the “future of work”—holds for the artificially intelligent agents we aim to employ. My guiding question is whether it is normatively problematic to employ artificially intelligent agents like, for example, autonomous robots as workers. The answer I propose is the following. There is nothing inherently normatively problematic about employing autonomous robots as workers. Still, we must not put them to perform just any work, if we want to avoid (...) blame. This might not sound like much of a limitation. Interestingly, however, we can argue for this claim based on metaphysically and normatively parsimonious grounds. Namely, all I rely on when arguing for my claim is that the robots we aim to employ exhibit a kind of autonomy. (shrink)

If money is used in a market setting, and if it fulfils its three traditional functions well, this creates normative problems. Arguably, the two most pressing problems linked to markets – inequality and corruption – are partly caused by the prevailing monetary design. Given the history of suggested monetary reforms, one might reasonably hope that, by consciously re-designing the functions of a currency, one might overcome these issues. This essay argues that there are clear moral limits to this. Because of (...) the way inequality and corruption are intertwined via money’s functions, we cannot simultaneously overcome both problems. This also means that even though these problems have monetary causes, they do not have purely monetary solutions, but need to be addressed relying on fiscal or market reform as well. (shrink)

The relationship between science and technology is problematic, especially when thinking about the ethics of technology. Part of the problem is the polysemic character of both terms, but especially of technology. There are also multiple perspectives from which to distinguish and relate the two, as well as a third important term, engineering. Finally, there is more than one definitional strategy with a claim to legitimacy.

In this much-needed examination of Buddhist views of death and the afterlife, Carl B. Becker bridges the gap between books on death in the West and books on Buddhism in the East.