This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

A comprehensive introduction to current research on the psychology of concept formation and use.

How can a system of criminal punishment be justified? In particular can it be justified if the moral demand that we respect each other as autonomous moral agents is taken seriously? Traditional attempts to justify punishment as a deterrent or as retribution fail, but Duff suggests that punishment can be understood as a communicative attempt to bring a wrong-doer to repent her crime. This account is supported by discussions of moral blame, of penance, of the nature of the law's (...) demands, and of the proper meaning and purpose of the criminal process of trial and verdict: it deals both with the ideals that should inform a system of criminal law and the extent to which those ideals are actualised in existing institutions and practices. The conclusion is pessimistic: punishment cannot be justified within our legal system; and this gap between the ideal and the actual presents us with serious moral dilemmas. (shrink)

I begin by discussing the ways in which a would-be blamer's own prior conduct towards the person he seeks to blame can undermine his standing to blame her. This provides the basis for an examination of a particular kind of 'bar to trial' in the criminal law – of ways in which a state or a polity's right to put a defendant on trial can be undermined by the prior misconduct of the state or its officials. The examination of this (...) often neglected legal phenomenon illuminates some central features of the criminal law and the criminal process, and some of the preconditions for the legitimacy of the criminal law in a liberal republic. (shrink)

Principia Mathematic goes to great lengths to hide its order/type indices and to make it appear as if its incomplete symbols behave as if they are singular terms. But well-hidden as they are, we cannot understand the proofs in Principia unless we bring them into focus. When we do, some rather surprising results emerge ? which is the subject of this paper.

In recent years, many in medical education have examined the question of how best to reinvigorate the doctor-patient relationship, given the increasing technological distance that has emerged between them in modern medicine. In this paper it is argued that “humanism” and caring in medicine reflect the quality of transitional relatedness in the illness condition, a significant separation-attachment phase of life. By improving our understanding of the origin of caring, educational strategies for physicians in training may improve as might our abilities (...) to provide care. (shrink)

The director of the Center for Ethics and Public Life presents a series of essays on the philosophical implications of the Narnia series, exploring Lewis's ...

The author addresses ethical issues involved in the assignment of grades and student evaluations in undergraduate courses. The author prescribes an ethical approach to grade assignment. Instructors, according to the author, should take into account various factors in grading assignment like the student's individual efforts, improvement throughout the course, the student’s general psychological state, and potential disadvantaged starting points in the educational process. Instead of basing grade assignments on judgments from arbitrary criteria or letting them be an expression of power, (...) the author suggests incorporating the variability model into the practice of grade assignment. Proper grade assignment facilitates students to be more reflective on the instructor’s feedback and to develop the ability to evaluate their own work. (shrink)

Nigel Walker’s first principle of criminalization declares that ‘Prohibitions should not be included in the criminal law for the sole purpose of ensuring that breaches of them are visited with retributive punishment’. I argue that we should reject this principle, for ‘mala prohibita’ as well as for ‘mala in se’: conduct should be criminalized in order to ensure (as far as we reasonably can) that those who engage in it receive retributive punishment. In the course of the argument, I show (...) why we should not see the criminal law as consisting in ‘prohibitions’; I explain different species of mala prohibita, and show how their commission does involve genuine wrongdoing; and I show the importance of distinguishing the question of regulation from that of sanction. (shrink)

I am grateful to the editor of this journal for the opportunity to respond to Tom Moylan's comments on my Dystopia: A Natural History. There are some serious misapprehensions about my arguments in Moylan's treatment, as well as a failure to engage with some of the central themes of the book. Substantial differences also clearly exist between my approach and Moylan's approach to the subject of dystopia and indeed to scholarly engagement in general. Illuminating these further might well assist students (...) of the subject to further explore the relevant issues.Moylan is chiefly a student of science fiction rather than dystopian fiction as such. His two books are mainly concerned with the period from the 1970s... (shrink)

A range of views on the morality of synthetic biology and its place in public policy and political discourse.

According to Thomas Aquinas, the ideas in the mind of God serve two distinct although interrelated roles: (1) as epistemological principles accounting for God’s knowledge of things other than himself, and (2) as ontological or causal principles involved in God’s creative activity. This article examines the causal role of the divine ideas by focusing on their relation to natural agents. Given Thomas’s observation that from God’s intellect “forms flow forth (effluunt) into all creatures,” the article considers whether the causality of (...) the divine ideas excludes that of natural agents, or whether both modes of causality can somehow produce one and the same effect. (shrink)

Thucydides, the patron saint of Realpolitik, continues to be read in many fields outside of classics. Why did his History succeed in setting the pattern for future scholars where Hereodotus's earlier Histories failed? In this fascinating study of the construction of intellectual authority, Gregory Crane argues that Thucydides was successful for two reasons. First, he refined the language of administration: Who was in charge? How much money was spent? How many people were killed? Second, he drew upon the abstract (...) philosophical rhetoric developing in the fifth century, one in which the state and the public, rather than the family and the individual, stand at the center of the world. Ironically, it was through deeply personal alliances that aristocratic Greeks had defined themselves and exerted power. Thucydides's discursive practice was therefore fundamentally incompatible with his ideological goals. (shrink)

The use of contingent valuation methods for estimating the economic value of environmental improvements and damages has increased significantly. However, doubts exist regarding the validity of the usual willingness to pay CV methods. In this article, we examine the CV approach in light of recent findings from behavioral decision research regarding the constructive nature of human preferences. We argue that a principal source of problems with conventional CV methods is that they impose unrealistic cognitive demands upon respondents. We propose a (...) new CV approach, based on the value-structuring capabilities of multiattribute utility theory and decision analysis, and discuss its advantages and disadvantages. (shrink)

Much work in bioethics tries to sidestep bedrock questions about moral values. This is fine if we agree on our values; arguments about human enhancement suggest we do not. One bedrock question underlying these arguments concerns the role of emotion in morality: worries about enhancement are derided as emotional and thus irrational. In fact, both emotion and reason are integral to all moral judgment.

We use the path integral form of quantum electrodynamics to show that a causal classical limit to QED can be derived by functionally integrating over the photon coordinates, starting from an initial photon vacuum and ending in a final coherent radiation state driven by the anticipated classical charged particle trajectories. The resulting charged particle transition amplitude depends only on particle coordinates. When the \ limit is taken, only those particle paths that are not constrained by the final radiation state are (...) varied. These results demonstrate that the collapse from an infinity of charged particle paths, a path integral description, to causally interacting classical trajectories, a stationary-action description, is critically dependent on including final coherent state radiation and maintaining the distinction between particle paths that are free to vary and those trajectories that can be monitored by the final state radiation. (shrink)

This book presents an original and creative enactment of a confrontation between Heidegger and Plato. Gregory Fried outlines a new approach to ethics and politics combining skeptical idealism and what he calls polemical ethics, and goes on to apply polemical ethics to the crucial questions around fascism and racism.

In this article, I expand upon Slavoj Zižek’s “anamorphic” reading of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men. In this reading, Zižek distinguishes between the film’s ostensible narrative structure, the “foreground,” as he calls it, and the “background,” wherein the social and spiritual dissolution endemic to Cuaron’s dystopian England draws the viewer into a recognition of the dire conditions plaguing the post-9/11, post-Iraq invasion, neoliberal world. The foreground plots the conventional trajectory of the main character Theo from ordinary, disaffected man to self-sacrificing (...) hero, one whose martyrdom might pave the way for a new era of regeneration. According to Zižek, in this context the foreground merely entertains, while propagating some well-worn clichés about heroic individualism as demonstrated through Hollywood’s generic conventions of an action-adventure/political thriller/science-fiction film. Zižek contends that these conventions are essential to the revelation of the film’s progressive politics, as “the fate of the individual hero is the prism through which … [one] see[s] the background even more sharply.” Zižek’s framing of Theo merely as a “prism” limits our understanding of the film by not taking into account its status as an adaptation of P.D. James’ The Children of Men. This article offers such an account by interpreting the differences between the film and its literary source as one informed by the transition from Cold War to post-9/11 neoliberal conceptions of identity and politics. To articulate the terms of this argument and its implications, I turn to another narrative depicting the identity and politics at the end of history, Francis Fukuyama’s infamous The End of History and the Last Man, published the same year as James’ novel, both offering meditations on the Cold War and speculations on its aftermath. Incorporating these two texts into Zižek’s anamorphic paradigm contributes to our understanding of the film’s message regarding the “state of things” during the post-9/11 era, as well as the Cold War era that preceded it, as perceived through the eyes of Theo adapted to suit the respective dystopian conditions of the novel and film. (shrink)

In previous work, Gregory K. Dow created a broad and accessible overview of worker-controlled firms. In his new book, The Labor-Managed Firm: Theoretical Foundations, Dow provides the formal models that underpinned his earlier work, while developing promising new directions for economic research. Emphasizing that capital is alienable while labor is inalienable, Dow shows how this distinction, together with market imperfections, explains the rarity of labor-managed firms. This book uses modern microeconomics, exploits up-to-date empirical research, and constructs a unified theory (...) that accounts for many facts about the behavior, performance, and design of labor-managed firms. With a large number of entirely new chapters, comprehensive updating of earlier material, a critique of the literature, and policy recommendations, here Dow presents the capstone work of his career, encompassing more than three decades of theoretical research. (shrink)

Pike, Gregory K The various levels at which misunderstanding exist with regards to stem cell research are discussed. The mismatch that exists between public perception and reality with regards to the same is highlighted.

In this fresh interpretation of Heidegger, Alexander S. Duff explains Heidegger's perplexing and highly varied political influence. Heidegger and Politics argues that Heidegger's political import is forecast by fundamental ambiguities about the status of politics in his thought. Duff explores how, in Being and Time as well as earlier and later works, Heidegger analyzes 'everyday' human existence as both irretrievably banal but also supplying our only tenuous path to the deepest questions about human life. Heidegger thus points to (...) two irreconcilable attitudes toward politics: either a total and purifying revolution must usher in an authentic communal existence, or else we must await a future deliverance from the present dispensation of Being. Neither attitude is conducive to moderate politics, and so Heidegger's influence tends towards extremism of one form or another, modified only by explicit departures from his thought. (shrink)

To mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Søren Kierkegaard, I review in this essay the relationship between Kierkegaard and the Catholic tradition. First, I look back to consider both Kierkegaard’s encounter with Catholicism and the influence of his work upon Catholics. Second, I look around to consider some of the recent work on Kierkegaard and Catholicism, especially Jack Mulder’s recent book, Kierkegaard and the Catholic Tradition, and the many articles that examine Kierkegaard’s relation to Catholicism in the multi-volume (...) Kierkegaard Research series edited by Jon Stewart. Finally, I look ahead to consider possible directions in which the conversation between Catholics and Kierkegaardians might continue. (shrink)

We estimate the influence of classmates? ability characteristics on student achievement in exogenously formed university student groups. The study uses administrative data on undergraduate students at a large selective university in Russia. The presence of high-ability classmates has a significant positive effect on individual grades in key economics and mathematics courses as well as on overall academic performance. While a simple linear-in-means model reveals moderate peer effects, non-linear specifications give strong evidence that students at the top of the ability distribution (...) derive the greatest benefit from high-ability classmates. Less able students are not affected by peers and have no significant influence on peers? outcomes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 61.3 (2000) 433-452 [Access article in PDF] When Ideas Matter: The Moral Philosophy of Fontenelle Gregory Matthew Adkins Introduction There has been a recent trend in the historiography of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century intellectual culture to analyze that culture from a sociological perspective. This perspective, a necessary corrective to a pure history of ideas, takes knowledge as a socially constructed phenomenon and thus (...) subject to sociological analysis. The point of the sociology of knowledge, however, is not to re-hash and bolster old externalist arguments but to do away with the whole debate over whether ideas or social conditions are more important in intellectual history and the history of science. A focus on sociology does not mean that ideas do not matter. This becomes apparent when analyzing the ethics of early modern intellectuals.For example, Anne Goldgar's recent work, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 (1995), gives much attention to the sociology of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Republic of Letters--but at the cost of relegating the role of ideas to the sidelines. According to Goldgar, if one wants to understand early modern intellectuals as a community, including their ethics and sense of morality, one should focus on forms of sociability rather than the ideas and philosophies they put forth in their writings. An aristocratic ethic dominated early modern scholarship, she argues, and even took precedence over knowledge claims: "[i]n striving to make its inner workings acceptable to the outside community the Republic of Letters chose, like the aristocracy, to empty its internal relationships of content, choosing instead to concentrate on form.... [A]rguments were often judged on the politeness with which they were presented, rather than on their intrinsic merit." 1 Men of [End Page 433] letters, although often of humble origin, cultivated nobility by emulating aristocratic modes of decorum and noble interests in status and reputation. One way they promoted these ideas was through a literary genre adopted from classical antiquity, the éloge (eulogy), which presented exemplary modes of behavior by praising the lives of the "heroes" of the Republic of Letters. Interestingly, the years on which Goldgar focuses her analysis almost precisely encompass the period of Bernard le Bouyer de Fontenelle's mature intellectual production. Yet Fontenelle (1657-1757), widely hailed during his lifetime as having perfected the art of the éloge, plays no role in her argument.From 1699 to 1740 Fontenelle, as secrétaire perpétuel of the Académie Royale des Sciences, composed some sixty-nine éloges in honor of recently deceased members of the academy and of other notable savants. Even a brief glance at Fontenelle's eulogies reveals an intimate link between philosophy and morality. A more careful examination of them in the context of his life and works shows that this link was logically commensurate with his genuinely held notions of human nature, happiness, reason, and the good. In fact the relationship in the eulogies between notions of nobility and the virtues proper to the savant or philosopher is highly intellectualized. Fontenelle was not as concerned with status and reputation or with self-fashioning as one might think. 2 We can only assimilate his ethics to those of the court aristocracy if we ignore what he actually wrote.Through his eulogies and other writings, Fontenelle's thoughts on philosophy and morality have had a lasting impact on western culture. He presented an image of what would come to characterize the proper, objective, modern scientist and thinker. 3 In order to understand the éloge as an institution in the Republic of Letters (and by extension the early modern intellectual ethic) it is therefore important to examine Fontenelle's moral philosophy more carefully. It is a philosophy expressed in his eulogies but understood clearly only in the context of his life and works. On the ÉlogesAs noted above, one way to contextualize the institution of the éloge is to place it within a Republic of Letters concerned with adopting the manners of the nobility: the éloges... (shrink)

Francesco Casetti _Theories of Cinema: 1945-1995_ Translated by Francesca Chiostri and Elizabeth Gard Bartolini-Salimbeni, with Thomas Kelso Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999 ISBN 0-292-71207-3 368 pp.