The British Government has recently agreed proposals for a National Numeracy Strategy which claims to be based on evidence concerning 'what works'. This article reviews the literature in each key area in which recommendations are made, and makes a judgement of whether the claim is justified. In some areas (e.g. calculators) the recommendations run counter to the evidence.

Anabaptists have long been thought to have been ‘biblicists’ and shunned reading patristic literature. But a close analysis of the debates Anabaptists had with Magisterial Reformers shows that the Anabaptists developed an extensive history of baptism using church fathers. They attempted to show that adult baptism was the norm in the earliest centuries of the church and that infant baptism was the innovation away from the Bible. This debate was about who had inherited the biblical faith around baptism.

We discuss a recent attempt by Chris Daly and Simon Langford to do away with mathematical explanations of physical phenomena. Daly and Langford suggest that mathematics merely indexes parts of the physical world, and on this understanding of the role of mathematics in science, there is no need to countenance mathematical explanation of physical facts. We argue that their strategy is at best a sketch and only looks plausible in simple cases. We also draw attention to how frequently Daly and (...) Langford find themselves in conflict with mathematical and scientific practice. (shrink)

Tony Lawson’s book The Nature of Social Reality is an impressive overview of a philosophically coherent social ontology that he has been developing for at least a decade. The book, and the earlier...

The central thesis of this article is that by anchoring bioethics' core conceptual armamentarium in a four-principled theory emphasizing autonomy and treating justice as a principle of allocation, theorists inadvertently biased 20th-century bioethical scholarship against addressing such subjects as ableism, anti-Black racism, classism, and other forms of discrimination, placing them outside of the scope of bioethics research and scholarship. It is also claimed that these scope limitations can be traced to the displacement of the nascent concept of respect for persons—a (...) concept designed to address classist and racist discrimination—with the morally solipsistic concept of autonomy. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to open a new front in the debate between platonism and nominalism by arguing that the degree of explanatory entanglement of mathematics in science is much more extensive than has been hitherto acknowledged. Even standard examples, such as the prime life cycles of periodical cicadas, involve a penumbra of mathematical features whose presence can only be explained using relatively sophisticated mathematics. I introduce the term ‘mathematical spandrel’ to describe these penumbral properties, and focus on (...) the property that cicada period lengths are expressible as the sum of two perfect squares. I argue that mathematical spandrels pose a particular problem for nominalism because of the way in which they are entangled with scientific explanations. (shrink)

This paper examines relationships between accountants’ personal values and their moral reasoning. In particular, we hypothesize that there is an inverse relationship between accountants’ “Conformity” values and principled moral reasoning. This investigation is important because the literature suggests that conformity with rule-based standards may be one reason for professional accountants’ relatively lower scores on measures of moral reasoning (Abdolmohammadi et al. J Bus Ethics 16 (1997) 1717). We administered the Rokeach Values Survey (RVS) (Rokeach: 1973, The Nature of Human Values (...) (The Free Press, New York)) and the Defining Issues Test (DIT) (Rest: 1979, Development in Judgment Moral Issues (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN)) to164 graduating accounting students enrolled in capstone courses at two universities in the Northeastern United States. As potential entrants into the accounting profession, these subjects bring their values and moral reasoning to bear on attitudes and behaviors in the workplace. We find a highly significant inverse relationship between “Conformity” values and principled moral reasoning (i.e., those who prefer Conformity values have lower levels of moral reasoning). However, we also find that accounting students as a group do not prefer Conformity values above other values such as Self-actualization and Idealism, and we find positive relationships between Self-actualization and Idealism values and moral reasoning. Implications for values and ethics research are discussed. (shrink)

This paper develops a critique of the concept of ‘ethical identity’ as this has been used recently to distinguish between ‘cynical’ and ‘authentic’ forms of corporate responsibility. Taking as our starting point Levinas’ demanding view of responsibility as ‘following the assignation of responsibility for my neighbour’, we use a case study of a packaging company—PackCo—to argue that a concern with being seen and/or seeing oneself as responsible should not be confused with actual responsibility. Our analysis of the case points first (...) to the allure of programmes of strategic corporate responsibility and the ways in which, through identification, they can provide a tacit form of moral sanction to managers in their aggressive pursuit of profit. It then contrasts the responses of different managers to negative staff feedback to illustrate the difference between managers’ attempts to defend their identity of being ‘responsible’ managers, and responsible conduct itself. The paper concludes that a potent danger of programmes of corporate responsibility is that they allow managers to deceive not just others, but also themselves in relation to the exercise of responsibility. (shrink)

Why do public philosophy in prisons? When we think about the value and aims of public philosophy there is a well-entrenched tendency to think in transactional terms. The academy has something of value that it aims to pass on or transmit to its clients. Usually, this transaction takes place within the confines of the university, in the form of transmission of valuable skills or knowledge passed from faculty to students. Public philosophy, construed within this transactional mindset, then consists in passing (...) on something valuable from inside the academy to the outside. In this paper, we reflect on our experiences of taking philosophy into prisons and argue that making the case for public philosophy in general, and philosophy in prisons in particular in these transactional terms risks obscuring what we take to be a distinctive and valuable outcome of public philosophy. Importantly, it risks obscuring what those who participate in a particular kind of public philosophy – including the professional philosophers – experience as valuable about the activity: its transformational potential. (shrink)

Although bioethics societies are developing standards for clinical ethicists and a code of ethics, they have been castigated in this journal as “a moral, if not an ethics, disaster” for not having completed this task. Compared with the development of codes of ethics and educational standards in law and medicine, however, the pace of pro-fessionalization in bioethics appears appropriate. Assessed by this metric, none of the charges leveled against bioethics are justified. The specific charges leveled against the American Society for (...) Bioethics and Humanities and its Core Competencies report are analyzed and rejected as artifacts of an ahistoric conception of the stages by which organizations professionalize. For example, the charge that the ASBH should provide definitive criteria for what counts as “medical ethics consultation” antecedent to further progress towards professionalization is assessed by comparing it with the American Medical Association's decades-long struggle to define who can legitimately claim the title “medical doctor.” Historically, clarity about who is legitimately a doctor, a lawyer — or a “clinical ethicist”— is a byproduct of, and never antecedent to, the decades-long process by which a field professionalizes. The charges leveled against ASBH thus appear to be a function of impatient, ahistoric perfectionism. (shrink)

Just as tariffs lead to economic distortions and provide incentives for corruption, so do patent monopolies on prescription drugs, except the impact is often an order of magnitude larger.

Senses of place are strongly intertwined with senses of heritage and cultural identity. Heritage places are distinctive not only for their tangible dimensions, but also the intangible qualities which give them meaning. The conservation of heritage places, however, has often emphasised the materiality of place rather than its symbolic significance. This article explores issues surrounding sense of place and heritage management through a focus on the former site of the Paradise Hotel in Norfolk Island’s Kingston and Arthur’s Vale Historic Area. (...) Drawing on interviews and a zine co-created with Norfolk Island residents, the article unpacks various ways participants articulate connections to the Paradise via their memories and recollections of the past as well as their present interpretation of and engagement with the site. Through a localised case study, the article provides insight into transnational challenges for the relationship between sense of place, heritage value and heritage management and interpretation. (shrink)

February is Black History Month and so healthcare practitioners will soon rummage history books for information about famous African Americans, like Onesimus, the African slave who...

Motile bacteria respond to environmental cues to move to more favorable locations. The components of the chemotaxis signal transduction systems that mediate these responses are highly conserved among prokaryotes including both eubacterial and archael species. The best‐studied system is that found in Escherichia coli. Attractant and repellant chemicals are sensed through their interactions with transmembrane chemoreceptor proteins that are localized in multimeric assemblies at one or both cell poles together with a histidine protein kinase, CheA, an SH3‐like adaptor protein, CheW, (...) and a phosphoprotein phosphatase, CheZ. These multimeric protein assemblies act to control the level of phosphorylation of a response regulator, CheY, which dictates flagellar motion. Bacterial chemotaxis is one of the most‐understood signal transduction systems, and many biochemical and structural details of this system have been elucidated. This is an exciting field of study because the depth of knowledge now allows the detailed molecular mechanisms of transmembrane signaling and signal processing to be investigated. BioEssays 28:9–22, 2006. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In ‘New Threats to Academic Freedom’ Francesca Minerva argues that anonymity for the authors of controversial articles is a prerequisite for academic freedom in the Internet age. This argument draws its intellectual and emotional power from the author's account of the reaction to the on-line publication of ‘ After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?’ – an article that provoked cascades of hostile postings and e-mails. Reflecting on these events, Minerva proposes that publishers should offer the authors of controversial articles (...) the option of publishing their articles anonymously. This response reviews the history of anonymous publication and concludes that its reintroduction in the Internet era would recreate problems similar to those that led print journals to abandon the practice: corruption of scholarly discourse by invective and hate speech, masked conflicts of interest, and a diminution of editorial accountability. It also contends that Minerva misreads the intent of the hostile e-mails provoked by ‘After-birth abortion,’ and that ethicists who publish controversial articles should take responsibility by dialoguing with their critics – even those whose critiques are emotionally charged and hostile. (shrink)

Emily Butler, a psychologist and Professor of Family Studies and Human Development (FSHD) at the University of Arizona, passed away on January 31, 2023. Dr. Butler was born on October 3, 1963 in Wi...