Formal epistemology is a growing field of philosophical research. It is also evolving, with the subject matter of formal epistemology papers changing considerably over the past two decades. To quantify the ways in which formal epistemology is changing, I generate a stochastic block topic model of the abstracts of papers classified by PhilPapers.org as pertaining to formal epistemology. This model identifies fourteen salient topics of formal epistemology abstracts at a first level of abstraction, and four topics at a second level (...) of abstraction. I then study diachronic trends in the degree to which formal epistemology abstracts written in a given year are likely to contain words associated with a particular topic, beginning in 2000 and continuing to 2020. My findings suggest that there has been a marked decline in the likelihood of a given formal epistemology abstract being about logical approaches to belief revision. On the other hand, over the past two decades, the salience of probabilistic techniques in formal epistemology has increased, as has the salience of work at the intersection of formal epistemology and some areas of philosophy of science. (shrink)

The main title and subtitle of this well-researched, lucidly written, and engaging book reflect the author's double-sided approach. On the one hand, David Edmonds uses individual life stories as a route of access to key philosophical, political, and sociocultural issues and trends in the first half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, in chronicling the broader history of the origins, aims, and legacy of the Vienna Circle, he shows how individual lives were caught up in—and shaped by—the (...) group's collective endeavor to "marry an old empiricism with the new logic", pioneered by thinkers such as Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ludwig... (shrink)

A survey of the outstanding developments in Soviet philosophical logic shows that the formal and dialectical logicians have resolved most of the issues that divided them in the early 1950s. In orientation they are both converging on the avant-garde of English-speaking logicians who regard formalization as irrelevant for solving the essential problems of philosophical logic. Soviet dialecticians consider their logic to be a rapprochement with epistemology that will result in a logic that is concerned with the content and genetic development (...) of concepts. Such a logic will provide a methodology of science that can encompass the creative growth of science, in contrast to the positivists' fixation on the 'logic of the finished research report'. (shrink)

We call beliefs reasonable or unreasonable, justified or unjustified. What does this imply about belief? Does this imply that we are responsible for our beliefs and that we should be blamed for our unreasonable convictions? Or does it imply that we are in control of our beliefs and that what we believe is up to us? Reason Without Freedom argues that the major problems of epistemology have their roots in concerns about our control over and responsibility for belief. David (...) Owens focuses on the arguments of Descartes, Locke and Hume - the founders of epistemology - and presents a critical discussion of the current trends in contemporary epistemology. He proposes that the problems we confront today - scepticism, the analysis of knowlege, and debates on epistemic justification - can be tackled only once we have understood the moral psychology of belief. This can be resolved when we realise that our responsibility for beliefs is profoundly different from our rationality and agency, and that memory and testimony can preserve justified belief without preserving the evidence which might be used to justify it. Reason Without Freedom should be of value to those interested in contemporary epistemology, philosophy of mind and action, ethics, and the history of 17th and 18th century. (shrink)

Empirical research has recently emerged as a key method for understanding the nature of causation, and our concept of causation. One thread of research aims to test intuitions about the nature of causation in a variety of classic cases. These experiments have principally been used to try to resolve certain debates within analytic philosophy, most notably that between proponents of transference and dependence views of causation. The other major thread of empirical research on our concept of causation has investigated the (...) role that normative considerations play in causal judgments. These experimental results suggest that philosophical accounts of our concept of causation should take a broader view of what might be relevant. For both lines of research, we describe some of the significant experiments and outline key philosophical morals that have been drawn, all while pointing out various limitations. We conclude by considering other kinds of empirical research that should be philosophically interesting for those studying the nature of causation and our concept of causation. In particular, we point towards the need for philosophical research about causal perception, causal reasoning, and causal learning, as well as ways in which this research could play a role in prescriptive metaphysics. (shrink)

One important trend in political philosophy is to hold that non-human animals don't directly place demands of justice on us. Another important trend is to give considerations of justice normative priority in our general normative theorising about social/political institutions. This situation is problematic, given the actual ethical standing of non-human animals. Either we need a theory of justice that gives facts about non-human animals a non-derivative explanatory role in the determination of facts about what justice involves, or else (...) we should be wary of the default normative priority that considerations of justice have in much of contemporary political philosophy. This discussion brings out important general methodological points tied to the role of concept and word choice in normative theorising about our social/political institutions. These methodological points, I argue, matter for a range of discussions in contemporary political philosophy, including those about global justice. (shrink)

Organisms are self-producing and self-maintaining, or autopoietic systems. Therefore, the course of evolution and adaptation of an organism is strongly determined by its own internal properties, whatever role external selection may play. The internal properties may either act as constraints that preclude certain changes or they open new pathways: the organism canalizes its own evolution. As an example the evolution of feeding mechanisms in salamanders, especially in the lungless salamanders of the family Plethodontidae, is discussed. In this family a large (...) variety of different feeding mechanisms is found. The authors reconstruct this evolutionary process as a series of bifurcation points of either constraints or opportunities forming a sequence of preconditions for the formation of a high-speed projectile tongue characteristic of tropical salamanders. Furthermore, it is shown how parallel evolution of seemingly unrelated domains within an organism such as respiratory physiology, life history biology and pattern of ontogeny has rather direct relevance to the feeding biology, thus demonstrating that organisms always evolve as wholes. (shrink)

Some Aspects of Market Socialism: A Dialogue with David Schweickart.

The ArgumentThe article studies a small Hebrew book called “The Wars of God” composed by an Anglo-Jewish jeweler who lived in London at the end of the eighteenth century. The book is interesting in further documenting the Jewish response to Newtonianism, that amalgam of scientific, political, and religious ideas that pervaded the culture of England and the Continent throughout the century. Hart, while presenting Newton in a favorable light, departs from other Jewish Newtonians in voicing certain reservations about Newton's alleged (...) religious orthodoxy, specifically his fear that the force of gravitation might be explained independent of God's divine providence. The key to understanding Hart's unique stance is his reliance on two eighteenth-century Christian theologians: William Whiston and Robert Greene, particularly the latter. In staking out this position, Hart also endorsed the theological position of his more well known Jewish colleague David Levi, the publisher of his Hebrew text. Both men reveal together the capacity of Jewish thinkers to absorb the dominant trends of thinking by the majority culture while defending honestly and defiantly the integrity of their religious faith and community. (shrink)

In _Religion and Nothingness_ the leading representative of the Kyoto School of Philosophy lays the foundation of thought for a world in the making, for a world united beyond the differences of East and West. Keiji Nishitani notes the irreversible trend of Western civilization to nihilism, and singles out the conquest of nihilism as _the_ task for contemporary philosophy. Nihility, or relative nothingness, can only be overcome by being radicalized to Emptiness, or absolute nothingness. Taking absolute nothingness as the (...) fundamental notion in rational explanations of the Eastern experience of human life, Professor Nishitani examines the relevance of this notion for contemporary life, and in particular for Western philosophical theories and religious believes. Everywhere his basic intention remains the same: to direct our modern predicament to a resolution through this insight. The challenge that the thought of Keiji Nishitani presents to the West, as a modern version of an Eastern speculative tradition that is every bit as old and as variegated as our own, is one that brings into unity the principle of reality and the principle of salvation. In the process, one traditional Western idea after another comes under scrutiny: the dichotomy of faith and reason, of being and substance, the personal and transcendent notions of God, the exaggerated role given to the knowing ego, and even the Judeo-Christian view of history itself. _Religion and Nothingness_ represents the major work of one of Japan's most powerful and committed philosophical minds. (shrink)

This book discusses the development of Edward Tolman's purposive behaviourism from the 1920s to the 1950s, highlighting the tension between his references to cognitive processes and the dominant behaviourist trends. It shows how Tolman incorporated concepts from European scholars, including Egon Brunswik and the Gestalt psychologists, to justify a more purposive form of behaviourism and how the theory evolved in response to the criticisms of his contemporaries. The manuscript also discusses Tolman's political activities, culminating in his role in the California (...) loyalty oath controversy in the 1950s. Tolman was involved in a number of progressive causes during his lifetime, activities that drew the attention of both state legislators in California and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It treats Tolman's theoretical and political activities as emanating from the same source, a desire to understand the learning process in a scientific manner and to apply these concepts to improve the human condition. (shrink)

Hume and contemporary “Humeans” have had prominent roles in reinvigorating the study of practical reason as a topic in its own right. I introduce a distinction between two divergent trends in the literature on Hume and practical reason. One trend, action-theoretic Humeanism, primarily concerns itself with defending a general account of reasons for acting, often one supposed to establish that moral reasons lack the categorical status the moral rationalist requires them to possess. The other trend, virtue-theoretic Humeanism, concentrates (...) on defending the case for being an agent of a particular practical character, one whose enduring dispositions of practical thought are virtuous. I discuss work exemplifying these two trends and warn against decoupling thought about Hume’s and a Humean theory of practical reason from Hume’s and a Humean ethics. I conclude that the virtue-theoretic approach is a fruitful one for pursuing future work on Hume and Humeanism about practical reason. (shrink)

There is a new trend among academically trained philosophers and political theorists to address issues in political economy that were formerly the preserve of Marxist economists.

Traditional debates about scientific realism tend to focus on issues concerning scientific representation and de-emphasize issues concerning scientific intervention. Questions about the relation between theories and the world, the nature of scientific inference, and the structure of scientific explanations have occupied a central place in the realism debate, while questions about experimentation and technology have not. Ian Hacking's experimental realism attempts to reverse this trend by shifting the defense of realism away from representation to intervention. Experimental realism, according to (...) Hacking, does not require us to believe that our theories are true, nor does its defense depend on inference to the best explanation. For Hacking, the strongest proof for realism is that we can manipulate objects: 'So far as I'm concerned, if you can spray them, then they are real'. (shrink)

In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx outlined his idea of a material 'base' and politico-cultural 'superstructure'. According to this formula, a material reality - wealth, income, occupation - determined your politics, leisure habits, tastes, and how you made sense of the world. Today, the importance of material deprivation, in terms of threats to life, health and prosperity, are as acute as ever. Despite the continued importance of inequality and disadvantage, the identities apparently generated by these (...) realities are increasingly detached from material circumstances. In many casesthe identity has become a powerful signifier in its own right, and is now instrumentalised, idealised and imitated. People attempt to police the boundaries and determine the significance of the identity, so that the identity matters more than the lives of the individuals concerned. These powerful identities can be used for various purposes, from the commercial to the aesthetic to the political. This trend has accelerated in recent years, with increasing precarity and increasingly obvious inequality fuelling anger, and the internet acting as a perfect mechanism for identity theft. Identity Theft covers four different kinds of identity most susceptible to these trends - class, race, sex and age - considering how the boundaries of different identities are policed, and how different versions of the same identity can be deployed to different ends. Ultimately, the argument is not just that 'identities are more complex' than they appear, but rather that there are more important commonalities. Many totemic 'culture war' issues are not particularly contested, but have broad appeal, or little concern for most people. In the UK at least, what might be called a 'culture war' is waged largely on the periphery by crank politicians, social media groups and newspaper columnists. If there is one argument to be taken from this book, it is a call for conscientious objection in the culture wars.,. (shrink)

In recent years, the discipline of archaeology has witnessed its scientific base challenged by new interpretive approaches, new kinds of data and proposals for new levels of social relevance. The Reader in Archaeological Theory comprises a summary perspective on these different trends, problems and currents in recent archaeological method and theory, how they are related, and how they differ. Remarkable in its emphasis on North American research, many of the papers in this volume focus on ancient Mesoameria and the native (...) peoples of our continent. The breadth of scholarship covered in the Reader demonstrates how a variety of disciplines--from cognitive neuroscience to poststructural semiotics--have influenced some newer approaches to archaeological theory. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On the NoseDavid F. Bell (bio)I recently underwent a COVID test. As the technician inserted the rather ominous cotton-tipped probe into my nostril, she told me that it was going to feel as if she were tickling my brain. Indeed… This experience, shared by many during the past three years, and likely multiple times, prompted me to think about my nose. Not since cocaine reentered American mainstream culture in (...) the 1970s and '80s—and found its way into countless movies that reflect the trend—has the nose been so central to a certain state of public life. It's difficult to find a film dealing with American culture from that period and beyond, from Scarface to The Wolf of Wall Street, in which there is not a scene depicting characters snorting the obligatory line or spoon of cocaine. Yes, snorting, sniffing, sneezing, ingesting the line through the nose and finishing leftover dust by collecting it with a moist finger, rubbing it lovingly against the front gum of the mouth. Freud's "Über Coca" looms ominously in the background, the work of a phase in Freud's professional career complicated by his obscure relationships with Parke-Davis (now a subsidiary of Pfizer) and Merck, pharmaceutical companies that supplied him with early samples to tickle his nose (Freud; Merkel). The Sacklers of the moment. In our day, Pfizer wants to transform our noses into defenses against the virus rather than conduits toward mind-altering dreams. In the wake of the Freud and William Halsted cocaine addictions chronicled by Howard Merkel, the irony of the contemporary link between Pfizer and the nose is patent.The nose: that orifice through which the virus creeps, the first stage in breathing, the first filter for air-borne pollutants. Recently, important immunological analyses of COVID have focused on the question of viral load, how much virus is necessary to overcome the nose's filtering function and reach the deeper airways leading to the lungs. The processes triggered by any of the major vaccines prepare antibody blueprints and actual antibodies that can be dispatched to the linings of the nose to counter the virus as soon as the body detects its presence. The Delta, Omicron, and subsequent variants remind us that the virus has mechanisms to challenge this response, namely, increased viral load that intensifies transmissibility and the potential to overwhelm antibodies. It seems, however, that [End Page 231] so-called breakthrough infections are still well controlled by the body's vaccinated immune system. Hysteria about the dangers of such incursions is partially a product of biased and often incorrect or incomplete media coverage of the COVID vaccine, which has terrified the vaccinated and fueled the skepticism of the unvaccinated.The virus tries to overpower and confuse the filtering nose in another way, more immediately apparent to our conscious selves. As many as eighty-five percent of COVID infections result in the loss of smell, generally recovered in about two to three weeks in sickened people who overcome the infection. About five percent of COVID victims, however, have not recovered their sense of smell six months or more after they have shed the virus.1 What might it mean to lose one's sense of smell? In our vision-oriented culture, both sound (the ear) and smell (the nose) have been less recognized as primary defense mechanisms than in other cultures. When one hears a sound, the first reaction is to prepare for a threat, before the sonic source is seen or understood. Orientation in the world, knowing from which direction the sound emanates, is key to preparing the body for an encounter with an unknown phenomenon: "To sound (an alarm) means to warn. Isn't any emerging sound understood as a warning? Any unexpected sonic occurrence is seen as an indication of something that is to come and that must be clarified rapidly" (Deshays 34). By the same token, to sample surroundings by sniffing what is in the air signals whether one should inhale or somehow try to hold one's breath in search of cleaner, more palatable air. Without olfaction, we are at potentially heightened risk of asphyxiation. We are more likely to... (shrink)

This text examines recent illiberal trends in traditionally liberal institutions. Specifically, it critiques radical “anti-racism” approaches based on critical race theory (CRT) and the ideas of academics such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. It also focuses on Unitarian Universalism, a historically liberal church whose national leadership has adopted an extreme version of critical race theory. -/- Racial and other inequities are problems in all societies and all of human history, and there are no simple, easy or objectively correct (...) solutions. While critical race theory (CRT) offers important insights on racism and racial disparities, I believe in liberalism, freedom of speech and the free exchange of ideas, things that extreme CRT adherents, Kendi and DiAngelo oppose. -/- Freedom of speech and expression and the free exchange of ideas support diversity, multiculturalism and marginalized groups. Illiberalism, dogmatism and authoritarianism are oppressive of all groups, minority and majority, and should be rejected wherever they appear. (shrink)

The centre of world Christianity has shifted to the southern hemisphere largely due to the growth of the Evangelical/pentecostal/charismatic churches in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Christian unity is understood more in terms of spiritual unity in Christ than as organizational unity. The Lausanne Congress held in 2010 is a good example of this. Christian unity is to be recognized and celebrated. The primary mission of the Church is to fulfill the Great Commission of our Lord Jesus. As far as (...) Christian unity is concerned, the Global Christian Forum provides the best platform, where all traditions and global church organizations can comfortably come together based on the simplest yet the most essential confession of Christian faith. (shrink)

In this article I argue that the best way to ensure that students engage with assigned reading is by having open-ended questions that require textual interpretation to accompany every class session. Although this runs contrary to a recent trend of using multiple-choice questions or true/false questions to ensure reading compliance, using questions that require written responses has four key benefits: (1) such questions result in 75 percent of students completing the assigned reading; this leads to more successful class discussions, (...) and a deeper dive into the course material. (2) Daily assignments can be used to develop specific skills that the instructor would like students to demonstrate. (3) When students come to class having completed the reading, it is much easier to assign productive group assignments. (4) When students engage in significant reading and writing tasks within a semester, critical thinking, reading and writing skills are more likely to be improved. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Music, Spirituality, and EducationDavid Carr (bio)Recent Interest in Spiritual EducationFew concerned with educational theory and policy could have failed to notice the recent upsurge of interest—not least in such economically developed democracies as the United Kingdom and the United States—in the notion of spiritual development as a possible aim or goal of public or common schooling. Indeed, in addition to the enormous growth of academic literature on this topic—including (...) the recent emergence of specialist journals and handbooks1 — official educational policy makers have devoted much explicit attention to this issue in the form of positive educational proposals and prescriptions.2 Elsewhere,3 I have speculated on the possible reasons for such increased interest, which seems to include interrelated concerns about (1) the instrumental trends and tendencies of much state schooling in developed economies; (2) the rise of materialistic and selfish individualism in such contexts; (3) the apparent decline of public morality and the rise of anomic and nihilistic behavior—particularly among youth; and (4) the need to find some politically and publicly acceptable substitute for the educational role that religion has often formerly played (at any rate in older Western European cultures) in the cultivation of moral and spiritual attitudes and values.One may, of course, respond to such concerns—and/or to the attempts to address them in terms of some notion of spirituality or spiritual education—in a variety of less than enthusiastic ways. For one thing, one may hold that the picture of Western selfishness, instrumentalism, materialism, immorality, impiety, and so on is somewhat overstated (and in any case, this claim would require the sort of empirical support that is seldom provided for such sweeping claims). For another, it seems rather paradoxical to cast spiritual education in the instrumental role of halting the instrumental [End Page 16] trends to which spirituality is proposed as a noninstrumental solution. On the other hand, one might accept that while there may be something to such points, there is nevertheless some educational warrant for trying to cultivate (perhaps at least partly in schools) noninstrumental attitudes or qualities of human engagement with experience of roughly the sort that the theoretical and other literature has associated with spirituality. That said, we also need to bear in mind—especially in what follows—that different approaches to spiritual education have identified somewhat diverse (and perhaps not always obviously mutually consistent) human qualities and benefits with spirituality.A more presently pressing question, however, is that of the pedagogical means by which theorists of spiritual education might cultivate any supposed spiritual qualities or benefits. If we are to take the idea of promoting spirituality seriously, how might we set about it? On what sorts of curricular or other resources might we draw in order to help pupils become more spiritual, to acquire spiritual capacities, or to have spiritual experiences? Here there is evidence of substantial agreement—even on the part of those who would regard spiritual education as a cross-curricular matter—that certain fields of knowledge or areas of the school curriculum are better placed than others to assist the cultivation of spiritual virtues, values, and attitudes. Of these, perhaps unsurprisingly, religious and/or moral education has often been regarded (rightly or wrongly) as synonymous with spirituality and spiritual education. That said, such identification is obviously—especially in culturally pluralist liberal democracies—rather educationally problematic. However, an area of the school curriculum that seems to be a close runner-up to religious education (RE) in the spiritual education stakes—notwithstanding any and all claims that various kinds of scientific study may conduce to environmental or nature-conscious spirituality—is that of the arts. Moreover, if it is widely assumed that exposure to various arts can have real spiritual benefits, it has often also seemed natural to associate music, of all the different arts on offer, with spiritual experience or growth.4 It might therefore be held to follow, if spiritual education is indeed a proper aim of schooling, that music education is a prime vehicle of spiritual education, and that music teachers might include the promotion of spiritual qualities among their educational aims.Clearly, however, none of these alleged conceptual... (shrink)

Integrationism advocates a radical epistemological reform in semiological theory. It is a relatively recent perspective, developed by Oxford Professor Roy Harris (1931–2015); yet integrationism’s main principles are best seen as the outcome of different timid trends in the history of theories of language. The epistemological exigencies that this perspective puts on theorists has often provoked reproaches that this perspective was too negative, nihilistic, destructive, a form of scepticism. This article takes this criticism at its word and outlines a comparison between (...) the main form of scepticism known in Greek Antiquity, Pyrrhonism, and integrationism. A historical outline of the development of both movements is drawn, for context. Then particular issues serve as comparison points between both: the definition of doctrinal cohesion; the relation of each intellectual movement to ‘science’; the use of particular forms of arguments or ‘modes’; and some specific aspects of language-use that Pyrrhonism has addressed. (shrink)

Traditional explanations of multistable visual phenomena (e.g. ambiguous figures, perceptual rivalry) suggest that the basis for spontaneous reversals in perception lies in antagonistic connectivity within the visual system. In this review, we suggest an alternative, albeit speculative, explanation for visual multistability – that spontaneous alternations reflect responses to active, programmed events initiated by brain areas that integrate sensory and non-sensory information to coordinate a diversity of behaviors. Much evidence suggests that perceptual reversals are themselves more closely related to the expression (...) of a behavior than to passive sensory responses: (1) they are initiated spontaneously, often voluntarily, and are influenced by subjective variables such as attention and mood; (2) the alternation process is greatly facilitated with practice and compromised by lesions in non-visual cortical areas; (3) the alternation process has temporal dynamics similar to those of spontaneously initiated behaviors; (4) functional imaging reveals that brain areas associated with a variety of cognitive behaviors are specifically activated when vision becomes unstable. In this scheme, reorganizations of activity throughout the visual cortex, concurrent with perceptual reversals, are initiated by higher, largely non-sensory brain centers. Such direct intervention in the processing of the sensory input by brain structures associated with planning and motor programming might serve an important role in perceptual organization, particularly in aspects related to selective attention. (shrink)

Procedural approaches to political legitimacy have become increasingly popular amongst liberals. According to such an approach, the legitimacy of a state decision is primarily derived from the processes followed in order to make that decision and not from the quality of the decision itself. The processes that liberals have in mind are typically those found within a system of democratic institutions. These electoral and legislative procedures are supposed to allow the state’s constitutive members to reach legitimately binding agreements on how (...) the state should exercise its power. In response to this trend in liberalism, this dissertation has two goals. The first is to argue that formal results in the social decision sciences seriously question the viability of these procedural approaches. The second goal, however, is to argue that these results do not necessitate complete abandonment of procedural approaches but require liberals to more carefully specify the sorts of agreements that legitimacy requires and what procedures may reliably produce such agreements. I ultimately agree that procedures are important for liberalism but they require more careful understanding and defense. In order to carry this project out, this dissertation is divided into five chapters. In the first two chapters, I outline a fairly standard account of liberalism while arguing that it contains a serious tension that liberal democratic institutions are supposed to resolve. The second chapter in particular seeks to explain the various ways in which the procedural aspects of democracy are particularly appealing in this respect. In the third chapter, I then present Arrow’s famous impossibility result along with other formal result from social choice theory suggesting that in certain situations there simply is no correct procedure for legitimate outcomes that the liberal state may employ. The fourth chapter responds to this concern by maintaining that there exists a symmetry between how an individual person and the liberal state make decisions, and that insights into individual decision making sheds light on how it may be done by a group of people in a liberal democracy. Finally, in the fifth chapter, I move in this direction by presenting an account of the sort of agreements between individuals that legitimacy ought to be grounded upon. Ultimately, procedures like voting remain an important aspect of liberal democracy for authorizing state action, though not necessarily for the reasons that many liberal democrats endorse. (shrink)

One of the most significant trends within linguistics in the 1970s has been the move away from the formalised models of language introduced by Chomsky towards an account of language that incorporates functional premises. As Charles Fillmore put it, in a 1972 paper, the emphasis on formalisation needs to be balanced by a consideration of what exactly it is that linguists want to formalise. Putting this another way, a contrast can be drawn between the stress laid in the 1960s on (...) the specification in formal terms of the common factors that underlie utterances and the stress laid in the 1970s on the specification in functional terms of the differences between language forms, as captured by such notions as dialect, style, level, etc. (shrink)

This paper briefly reviews the theories that seek to explain the phenomenon of corporate charitable donations and then provides a review of the empirical issues that have arisen in previous studies in this area. The findings of an analysis of charitable donations data from the entire U.K. FTSE index for the years 1985–2000 are then reported. These findings include the observation of a time-related increase in charitable donations, which is compared with an earlier study to give a 24 year history (...) of charitable donations in the U.K. The findings note little responsiveness of the monetary value of charitable donations to the economic performance of firms. An international comparison over time against U.S. trends is also reported and shows how U.S. corporations have traditionally been more generous than U.K. firms, but that the trend in the U.S. is downwards. Membership of a U.K.-based "tithing" club (the PerCent Club) is shown to be associated with higher profit performance against non-members. Members' charitable contributions against profit are shown to be higher than the FTSE mean although short of the 0.5% target figure in "cash" terms. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of these findings in relation to the theoretical positions advanced for corporate philanthropy. (shrink)

Three kinds of concepts can be distinguished in Plato and Aristotle, empirical genera and species, “transcendental” concepts such as being and unity, and polarized “meanings of being” such as power and actuality. Both Kant and Hegel break with the traditional dominance of polarized meanings of being, but they do so in different ways which are at work as competing trends inside both Continental and analytic philosophy today.

This article examines the work of Martin Loughlin, a prominent public lawyer who works in the leftwing tradition of political and legal theory, often associated with the London School of Economics and Political Science. It argues that tensions in Loughlin’s work exemplify certain trends within the left, the result of the left having lost faith in its positive political programme, one which was supposed to be delivered by Parliament. What remains once this faith is lost is a traditional hostility to (...) liberalism and judicial review in combination with a sense that the realm of politics—the political—is valuable. This combination explains the turn taken by certain leftwing theorists to Carl Schmitt’s authoritarian understanding of politics and to a kind of romanticism about tradition. Given the risks inherent in this turn, would be better for the left both to return to its roots in a positive programme. This move would require the left to engage properly in the contemporary debate about the normativity of law. (shrink)

Introduction : changing forms of global order. Towards a multipolar world ; The paradox of our times ; Economic liberalism and international market integration ; Security ; The impact of the global financial crisis ; Shared problems and collective threats ; A cosmopolitan approach ; Democratic public law and sovereignty ; Summary of the book ahead -- Cosmopolitanism : ideas, realities and deficits. Globalization ; The global governance complex ; Globalization and democracy : five disjunctures ; Cosmopolitanism : ideas and (...) trajectories ; Cosmopolitan realities ; Addressing the institutional deficit : reframing the market -- Principles of cosmopolitan order. Cosmopolitan principles ; Thick or thin cosmopolitanism? ; Cosmopolitan justifications ; From cosmopolitan principles to cosmopolitan law -- Cosmopolitan law and institutional requirements. The idea of cosmopolitan law ; Institutional requirements ; In sum ; Political openings -- Violence, law and justice in a global age. Reframing human activity : international law, rights and responsibilities ; 9/11, war and justice ; Islam, the Kantian heritage and double standards ; Concluding reflections -- Reframing global governance : apocalypse soon or reform!. The paradox of our times ; Why be concerned with global challenges? ; Deep drivers and governance challenges ; Global governance : contemporary surface trends ; Problems and dilemmas of global problem-solving ; Strengthening global governance ; Global governance and the democratic question ; Multilevel citizenship, multilayered democracy -- Parallel worlds : the governance of global risks in finance, security and the environment. Global governance and the paradox of our times ; The global governance of finance ; The global governance of security ; The global governance of the environment ; Conclusion : crisis, politicization and reform -- Democracy, climate change and global governance. Democracy I : the democratic nation-state and climate change ; Democracy II : global governance and climate change ; The policy debate : squaring the circle? ; The political elements of a democratic global deal ; Democracy and the policy menu ahead. (shrink)

The integration of technology into the workplace has resulted in a long trend of changing working conditions, from agriculture to today’s growing “knowledge economy.” This latest development depends on information technology, which may continue to evolve through eventual convergence with nanotechnology and biotechnology. Knowledge work places more emphasis on an expanded skill set, as opposed to the smaller set of specialized skills typically needed in an industrial economy. Future technological progress might lead to further enhancement of human potential or (...) to even greater inequality in income distribution, generating even larger pressures toward the divisions in society. This is illustrated by recently proposed scenarios of accelerated and logistic growth of technological progress. In an attempt to understand these dynamics, a simple model is constructed to clarify a possible relationship between technology and social systems. The model, based on the technology maturation process, focuses on the delay in social systems in responding to a technological change. Examples of current problems of technology and social issues are reviewed in the model’s context. Some potential approaches to framing these problems from an ethical viewpoint are reviewed, including applying Rawlsian concepts of fairness and the “veil of ignorance” and applying a simple discount rate to balance perceived future risks, technological solutions, and uncertainty. (shrink)

A recent trend among Marxist economists tries to vindicate Marx, in opposition to criticism from mainstream economics and to developments in what may be called the mainstream of Marxist theory in the 20th century. It does this, however, by insisting on the literal truth of Marx's formulations, especially in Volume III of Capital. Well-known difficulties with these formulations are countered by resort to a "temporal" interpretation, in which inputs and outputs are differently timedated. This, however, reduces either to the (...) abandonment of theory altogether, or to replication of firmly established results in value theory. While temporal dynamics contributes to our understanding of both value formation and capitalist accumulation, no good purpose is served by a fundamentalist orientation, argument by appeal to textual authority, and denigration of the achievements in Marxist economics in the time since Marx wrote. (shrink)

One recent trend in Kant scholarship has been to read Kant as undertaking a project in philosophical semantics, as opposed to, say, epistemology, or transcendental metaphysics. This trend has evolved almost concurrently with a debate in contemporary philosophy of mind about the nature of concepts and their content. Inferentialism is the view that the content of our concepts is essentially inferentially articulated, that is, that the content of a concept consists entirely, or in essential part, in the role (...) that that concept plays in a system of inferences. By contrast, relationalism is the view that this content is fixed by a mental or linguistic item's standing in a certain relation to its object. The historical picture of Kant and the contemporary debate about concepts intersect in so far as contemporary inferentialists about conceptual content often cite Immanuel Kant not only as one of the founding fathers of a tradition that leads more or less straightforwardly to contemporary inferentialism, but also as the philosopher who first saw the fatal flaws in any attempt to articulate the content of our concepts relationally. (shrink)

Biosynthesis means "integration of life". It is a holistic form of body psychotherapy, which was founded over forty-five years ago. The concept of life-streams is one of its major foundations, which has since been supported by research in neurobiology. How can we integrate the three most important domains of being human: our bodily existence, our psychological experience and our spiritual essence? Biosynthesis Therapy has developed a broad spectrum of reliable methods to make this possible and to free our life energy. (...) It is resource-oriented and is practised worldwide. David Boadella brings his many years of experience to provide in this book a trend-setting model for the understanding both of the origin of illness and of therapy. First published in 1987, this book has appeared in ten languages. It provides numerous case examples and is fascinating and enriching for the normal reader as well as for therapists from many different schools. In this book, the word "bioenergetic" is used to refer to the study of life energy, which is a major foundation of the therapy method "Biosynthesis". This is not to be confused with the term "Bioenergetic Analysis", an other and different form of body psychotherapy. Since 1985, together with David Boadella, Biosynthesis has been developed further by Dr. Silvia Specht Boadella, particularly in its philosophical and transpersonal aspects. In 1990, Biosynthesis was the first form of body psychotherapy to be scientifically accredited by the European Association of Psychotherapy. Biosynthesis therapists can therefore receive the European Certificate of Psychotherapy ECP. In 2001, the International Foundation of Biosynthesis IFB was formed, to coordinate trainings and research in twenty countries in Europe, Asia, North and South America. The newest information about Biosynthesis, including our actual course programme, you will find on our website. David Boadella International Institute for Biosynthesis IIBS, Benzenrüti 6, CH-9410 Heiden, Switzerland E-mail: [email protected]_ _www.biosynthesis.org_ _The Author_ David Boadella, born 1931 in London, pioneer of body psychotherapy and founder of Biosynthesis. He studied education, psychology and literature and wrote numerous articles and several books. Since 1985, he is the Director of the International Institute for Biosynthesis in Switzerland. In 1989, he was elected as the first President of the European Association for Body Psychotherapy EABP. In 1995, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the "Open International University of Complementary Medicine". Author of "Wilhelm Reich: The evolution of his work". _Disclaimer_ Basically this book contains neither exercises or advices. Nevertheless, if statements from the book should be used for self-treatment or for treatment of others, every form of liability of the author or the publisher for personal, material, or financial damage is excluded. (shrink)

History shows convincingly that major transformations coincide with periods of crisis or wars. Many aspects of the contemporary world and US economy point to a possible crisis, in particular financial instability, and domestic and external imbalances. Neither hyperinflation nor deflation appear as likely issues. The consolidation of neoconservative authoritarism appears as a potential answer. Fortunately, there is a substantial opposition which can be mobilized against such trends. There are to ways of addressing the problem of alternatives. One is suggested by (...) the directions taken by oppositional movement, now on the rise. The second is critical analysis. But analysis also points up exploitable contradictions within the neoliberal and neoconservative agenda. (shrink)

The fundamental principles of the classical utilitarian school characterize this trend as an administrative and legal criminology. This had two implications. On the one hand, the motives, and ultimate causes of the behavior and the unequal consequences of an arbitrary rule were ignored. On the other hand, the role of the judge was reduced to enforcing the law, while it was up to the judge to set a penalty for each offence. At the end of the nineteenth century, these (...) principles saw the gradual emergence of another punitive episteme that had emerged as a result of the colonization of the legal space by the positive sciences and etiological action programs. This was not a planned and pre-established course, but the confluence of a series of theories and programs for penal prevention that Michel Foucault summarized as the realization that the law was increasingly functioning as a norm. Now, criminality, besides being the object of scientific interest, also constitutes the indicator of a social problem and therefore its insertion in an economy of changing power. (shrink)

This article analyzes the concept of “grand challenges” as part of a shift in how scientists and policymakers frame and communicate their respective agendas. The history of the grand challenges discourse helps to understand how identity work in science and science policy has been transformed in recent decades. Furthermore, the question is raised whether this discourse is only an indicator, or also a factor in this transformation. Building on conceptual history and historical semantics, the two parts of the article reconstruct (...) two discursive shifts. First, the observation that in scientific communication references to “problems” are increasingly substituted by references to “challenges” indicates a broader cultural trend of how attitudes towards what is problematic have shifted in the last decades. Second, as the grand challenges discourse is rooted in the sphere of sports and competition, it introduces a specific new set of societal values and practices into the spheres of science and technology. The article concludes that this process can be characterized as the sportification of science, which contributes to self-mobilization and, ultimately, to self-optimization of the participating scientists, engineers, and policymakers. (shrink)

Pluralism is an essential feature of liberal democratic theory and practice and rests upon the fundamental value of tolerance. Today, commitment to various forms of constitutional representative democracy appears to be widespread, and globilization has diminished the political, economic, and cultural significance of borders to some degree. But concurrently, in a trend which seems to have accelerated since the end of the Cold War, there has been a marked increase in many areas around the world of conflict, tormoil, and (...) violence rooted in ethnic, religious, and regional identities. This trend, a sort of 21st century balkanization, is a serious threat to pluralism. This chapter defines pluralism and argues for its advantages. It also presents an argument against one influential approach to handling identity-based activities and claims, which advocates recognition of special group rights and privileges. The chapter concludes with the proposal of conditions conducive to the well-being and expansion of pluralism, and with suggestions for the kinds of public policies likely to foster such conditions. -/- . (shrink)

The Snowden revelations about National Security Agency surveillance, starting in 2013, along with the ambiguous complicity of internet companies and the international controversies that followed provide a perfect segue into contemporary conundrums of surveillance and Big Data. Attention has shifted from late C20th information technologies and networks to a C21st focus on data, currently crystallized in “Big Data.” Big Data intensifies certain surveillance trends associated with information technology and networks, and is thus implicated in fresh but fluid configurations. This is (...) considered in three main ways: One, the capacities of Big Data intensify surveillance by expanding interconnected datasets and analytical tools. Existing dynamics of influence, risk-management, and control increase their speed and scope through new techniques, especially predictive analytics. Two, while Big Data appears to be about size, qualitative change in surveillance practices is also perceptible, accenting consequences. Important trends persist – the control motif, faith in technology, public-private synergies, and user-involvement – but the future-orientation increasingly severs surveillance from history and memory and the quest for pattern-discovery is used to justify unprecedented access to data. Three, the ethical turn becomes more urgent as a mode of critique. Modernity's predilection for certain definitions of privacy betrays the subjects of surveillance who, so far from conforming to the abstract, disembodied image of both computing and legal practices, are engaged and embodied users-in-relation whose activities both fuel and foreclose surveillance. (shrink)