Kaye and Prisco draw our attention to one of the more obvious difficulties with all versions of the argument from design.

In this fascinating study, the author analyzes the conceptual roots of molecular biology and the social matrix in which it was developed.

Education and schooling -- What are the purposes of schooling? -- Who are the students? -- What are we teaching students in schools and universities and why? -- Teaching, learning and assessment -- Alternative views of education -- Education and the world.

Sandplay is a growing field of interest for Jungian and other psychotherapists. _Sandplay - Silent Workshop of the Psyche_ by Kay Bradway and Barbara McCoard, provides an introduction to sandplay as well as extensive new material for those already using this form of therapy. Based on the authors' wide-ranging clinical work, it includes: in-depth sandplay case histories material from a wide range of adults and children over 90 illustrations in black and white and colour detailed notes on interpretation of sand (...) trays an examination of symbols and concepts used in sandplay. Clearly written and soundly based in theory, this book provides historical background for understanding sandplay as well as helpful discussion of how it works in a clinical context. Kay Bradway and Barbara McCoard bring their indispensable personal experience to the subject to stress the healing potential of sandplay. They also reflect on the nature of a therapy where the psyche works largely in silence. (shrink)

This paper starts by investigating Ackermann's interpretation of finite set theory in the natural numbers. We give a formal version of this interpretation from Peano arithmetic (PA) to Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the infinity axiom negated (ZF−inf) and provide an inverse interpretation going the other way. In particular, we emphasize the precise axiomatization of our set theory that is required and point out the necessity of the axiom of transitive containment or (equivalently) the axiom scheme of ∈-induction. This clarifies the (...) nature of the equivalence of PA and ZF−inf and corrects some errors in the literature. We also survey the restrictions of the Ackermann interpretation and its inverse to subsystems of PA and ZF−inf, where full induction, replacement, or separation is not assumed. The paper concludes with a discussion on the problems one faces when the totality of exponentiation fails, or when the existence of unordered pairs or power sets is not guaranteed. (shrink)

The economic sciences want to explain economical phenomena scientifically, which presupposes a causality concept. But the distinction between causes and reasons makes causal approaches problematic. While it is true that the question of the naturalizability of causal arguments is undecided, the significance of causal explanations of economic phenomena remains unaffected.

The fact that I am a committed gardener has some practical upshot or other. But what, exactly, is the upshot of the fact that I am committed to some project, person, or principle? According to a standard view, my commitment to gardening directly effects a change in the normative facts by giving me a further reason to garden. I argue that we should reject this view and its attendant psychological story involving a normatively significant will. According to the view I (...) develop here, a commitment to X just is a decision to take seriously the reasons to which X gives rise, and where necessary, to give those reasons an elevated place in one’s practical thinking. In virtue of being decisions to conduct one’s deliberation in a certain way, commitments alter what it is rational for us to do without giving us further reasons to act. (shrink)

Personal narratives have become one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims across the world. Human Rights and Narrated Lives explores what happens when autobiographical narratives are produced, received, and circulated in the field of human rights. It asks how personal narratives emerge in local settings how international rights discourse enables and constrains individual and collective subjectivities in narration how personal narratives circulate and take on new meanings in new contexts and how and under what conditions they (...) feed into, affect, and are affected by the reorganization of politics in post-cold war, postcolonial, globalizing human rights contexts. (shrink)

The problem of synthetic judgments touches upon the question whether philosophy is in fact capable of making independent truth statements. According to Kant, synthetic judgments formulate the conditions for the possibility of objectively valid knowledge a priori. As far as empirical attempts at reinterpretation of the aprioristic fall short of this ambition, Kant’s a priori goes deeper. This is because modern science strives towards objective knowledge, although its statements are fundamentally fallible. The topic of synthetic a priori thus continues to (...) be relevant. -/- This paper will show that, in order to be viable at all, a modernized version of transcendental philosophy must ‘depart from’ the concepts of “independence from empirics” and/or the “purity” of the aprioristic. Kant’s reflections on non-pure synthetic a priori knowledge already contain attempts at this. Furthermore, the aprioristic validity of knowledge does not exclude the possibility, that it can be discovered empirically. Fries and, subsequently, Nelson proceeded with this separation (initially ascribed to Reichenbach) between the contexts of validity and discovery of knowledge, pointing out that the a priori can indeed be discovered empirically, yet never be proven. -/- Currently, there are still a number of valid reasons for arguing that concepts from transcendental philosophy continue to be of fundamental importance for the modern sciences. However, it must not be neglected that, even within a modernized framework of transcendental philosophy various unsolved problems remain and/or are created (such as the unfeasibility of the aprioristic claim to general validity and necessity, the problem of drawing a clear boundary between the noumenal and phenomenal worlds). Moreover, the “beautiful structure” of the Kantian system, which constitutes much of its persuasive strength, is lost. (shrink)

Das Problem einer einheitlichen Grundlage alles Bestehenden hat seit jeher eine große Rolle in der Philosophie gespielt und stets auch eine große Ausstrahlung auf die Naturwissenschaft gehabt. Exemplarisch werden verschiedene Entwürfe für eine höherdimensionale einheitliche Feldtheorie diskutiert. -/- Es wird der Frage nachgegangen, was überhaupt unter der „Einheit von Theorien“ zu verstehen ist. Dabei zeigt sich, dass sich zwischen unterschiedlichen Ebenen der „Einheit von Theorien“ unterscheiden lässt. Die „Einheit von Theorien“ kann sich beziehen auf übergreifende Begriffe (z. B. Feldbegriff), auf (...) eine formal mathematische Zusammenfassung unterschied­licher Phänomene (z. B. im Rahmen der Projektiven Einheitlichen Feldtheorie), auf einen genetischen Zusammenhang von Theorien (z. B. zwischen newtonscher und relativistischer Mechanik), auf ein einheitliches Gesetz zur Erklärung unterschiedlicher Phänomene (z. B. die Maxwelltheorie als Erklärungsgrundlage elektromagnetischer Erscheinungen), aber auch auf einen gemeinsamen Referenzbereich verschiedener Theorien (z. B. phänomenologische und statistische Thermodynamik). -/- Die Verwendung höherdimensionaler Geometrien wirft die Frage nach dem ontologischen Status höherdimensionaler Raum-Zeiten auf. Handelt es sich lediglich um mathematische Formalismen, oder kommt ihnen eine eigene Realität zu? Es zeigt sich, dass beide Interpretationskonzepte ihre Berechtigung besitzen. Spielt etwa bei der Klasse der Projektiven Einheitlichen Feldtheorien (kurz: PUFT) der höherdimensionale Raum die Rolle eines Instruments zur mathematisch eleganten Darstellung, so lassen sich bei der Klasse der Kaluza-Klein-Theorien Eigenschaften ableiten, die als Hinweis auf einen ontologisch eigenständigen Realitätsstatus gedeutet werden können. Folgt man Poppers Realitätskriterium, wonach als real zu betrachten ist, was sich durch physikalische Wirkungen nachweisen lässt, so kann etwa der Einfluss der Extradimensionen auf die Dynamik des physikalischen Geschehens in der vierdimensionalen Raum-Zeit als Hinweis auf deren Realität gedeutet werden. -/- Interessant sind die höherdimensionalen einheitlichen Feldtheorien auch unter dem Blickwinkel der Wissenschaftstheorie. Da sie recht gut dem Modell des Forschungsprogramms im Sinne von Lakatos entsprechen, stellen sie gute Musterbeispiele für theoriedynamische Betrachtungen dar. (shrink)

Valuing Peak Experience in Everyday Lives takes Abraham Maslow's concept of peak experience and compares how people have encountered transcendent peak experiences, and related phenomena such as flow and peak performance in their everyday lives. By examining existing research and sharing people's actual encounters in different contexts such as music, education, sport, creative arts and nature, the importance and value of peak experiences and self-transcendence in our lives can be better understood and fostered. The book explores the challenges, benefits and (...) opportunities presented by understanding peak experience in contemporary contexts. Drawing on research from positive psychology and transpersonal psychology, each of the twelve chapters, reports on a work or leisure context where peak experiences have been generated and studied. The chapters are introduced by drawing on relevant theory and research and then expanded via accounts, vignettes and examples from people immersed in those activities or contexts to provide a blend of case stories and theoretical foundations. The book is valuable reading for professional practitioners such as psychologists, educators, coaches, psychotherapists and those interested in personal development. It will also be relevant for students of transpersonal and positive psychology, humanism and human development, interested in understanding transcendent peak experiences and related concepts, such as flow. (shrink)

According to the scientific ideal of modernity, the propositions of science are considered fundamentally fallible. On the other hand, science strives for objective knowledge. Kant saw in the apriori the precondition for objective knowledge. But with the new conception of science the apriori (if it is not to be only logic) has become problematic. With it, however, the objectivity of scientific knowledge is at stake. As long as one grants objectivity to scientific knowledge, the question of the apriori remains topical. (...) On the one hand, this volume wants to trace the historical roots as well as the different interpretations of the apriori, and on the other hand, it wants to ask for approaches for a contemporary reinterpretation of this basic concept. (shrink)

Attempts to ‘modernize’ the English National Health Service (NHS) have included significant workforce re‐design, including the development of new, advanced roles in nursing. There is a wealth of evidence documenting and evaluating such roles in hospital and, to a lesser extent, in community settings. This paper builds on this work, drawing on recent post structural and sociological analyzes to theorize these roles, locating them within broader social and cultural changes taking place in healthcare and exploring how understandings of new roles (...) in community nursing are in the process of being constructed. Building on a literature review, the paper draws out what an analysis of new advanced nursing roles in the community reveals about competing conceptualizations of the nursing mandate, the ambivalence and ambiguity that practitioners experience in shaping ‘new’ identities (the shaping of subjectivities), and the often implicit ideological positions that underpin such developments. (shrink)

Each book in the series includes six 40-minute studies designed to draw you into God’s Word through basic inductive Bible study.

Excerpt from The Semitic Religions: Hebrew, Jewish, Christian, Moslem John croall, Esq., of Southfield, being deeply interested in the defence and maintenance of the doctrines of the Christian Religion, and desirous of increasing the religious literature of Scotland, instituted a Lectureship. The Lectures shall be delivered biennially in Edinburgh, Shall be not less than six in number, and shall be devoted to a consideration of the Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion and the Doctrines of the Christian Religion. About the (...) Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

I defend Spinoza's claim that extension is an attribute that an indivisible substance, such as God, could have. However, in order to explain why, we must abandon two long held orthodoxies in Spinoza scholarship. First, Spinoza acknowledges only parts that do not depend on their whole. Second, God, considered as natura naturans, has no parts of any kind. Against these orthodoxies, I show that having parts which depend on their whole, for Spinoza, does not entail divisibility and that God, considered (...) as natura naturans, must have such parts in order to be extended. Along the way, we will have a closer look at Spinoza’s mereology and address apparently conflicting statements that Spinoza makes about the relation of part and whole that have long vexed commentators. (shrink)

Saunders & van Brakel's claim that Berlin and Kay (1969) assumed a language/vision correlation in the area of color categorization and disguised this assumption as a finding is shown to be false. The methodology of the World Color Survey, now nearing completion, is discussed and the possibility of an additional language/vision correlation in color categorization is suggested.

To assert its position as the “Queen of the sciences,” philosophy responded to the developing trend in the mid-19th century to divide psychology from philosophy by coining the battle slogan of ‘psychologism’. However, specifically with regard to the philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773–1843), who was viewed as the principal representative of psychologism, this appellation truly does not apply. Fries never took seriously any ‘anthropologized apriori’ of the kind represented by evolutionary epistemology (for example, Konrad Lorenz). For Fries, the laws of (...) logic and mathematics and basic philosophical principles are objective; they are universally valid and necessary. Instead, Fries clearly differentiates between the universal and necessary validity of the apriori on the one side and the empirical methods for its discovery on the other. (shrink)

Recently, there has been a debate focusing on the question of whether groups can literally have beliefs. For the purposes of epistemology, however, the key question is whether groups can have knowledge. More specifi cally, the question is whether “group views” can have the key epistemic features of belief, viz., aiming at truth and being epistemically rational. I argue that, while groups may not have beliefs in the full sense of the word, group views can have these key epistemic features (...) of belief. However, I argue that on Margaret Gilbert's infl uential “plural subject” account of group belief, group views are unlikely to be epistemically rational. (shrink)

Zizek insisted on the ‘temporal gap between the production of value and its actualization’ (Zizek, 2009b [2006], p. 52): ‘the temporality here is that of the futur antérieur: value “is” not immediately, it only “will have been,” it is retroactively actualized, performatively enacted’ (ibid.). His use of the word ‘gap’ calls to mind the psychoanalytic literature on which Zizek draws, which provides a way to understand the 2007 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and its aftermath. This paper presents three key ideas (...) about the GFC. First, the GFC was a traumatic encounter with lack, in which global capitalism confronted a gap at the centre of its chain of signifiers. Whether the financial system is seen as a series of promises or a system for allocating and hedging risk, a gap or lack remained at the origin of its chain of signifiers. Secondly, many explanations of the crisis focus on ‘getting back to fundamentals’, which can be read as an attempt to paper over the lack. Finally, in the panic to re-establish the master signifier, global finance tossed aside core justifications for capitalism, and it is not yet clear what the results will be: re-establishment of the old regime, a return to a Primal Father, or a turn to the analyst’s discourse. (shrink)

Objectives—To assess perceptions of the informed consent process in patients undergoing urgent abdominal surgery.Design—A prospective observational study was carried out using structured questionnaire-based interviews. Patients who had undergone urgent abdominal surgery were interviewed in the postoperative period to ascertain their perceptions of the informed consent process. Replies were compared to responses obtained from a control group undergoing elective surgery, to identify factors common to the surgical process and those specific to urgent surgery. Patients' perceptions of received information were also compared (...) to the information perceived to have been provided by the consent obtainers. Setting—Gastrointestinal surgical service of a university teaching hospital.Patients—Seventy-four consecutive patients undergoing urgent abdominal surgery and 80 control patients undergoing elective surgery. Main measurements—Principal outcome measures were patients' perceptions of factors interfering with the ability to give informed consent, assessment of the quality of informed consent and the degree of discussion of the expected outcomes. Results—Forty-nine of the seventy-four (66%) patients undergoing urgent surgery perceived that pain did not affect their ability to give informed consent. Twenty-seven reported an adverse effect of analgesia on the ability to give informed consent. Only 22% of patients undergoing urgent surgery perceived that there had been any discussion of potential side effects and complications of surgery. Conclusion–The majority of patients in this series with acute intra-abdominal surgical conditions perceive that they retain the ability to give informed consent for surgery. There is a need for improved discussion of therapeutic options and likely outcomes. (shrink)

Despite claims of ‘evidence based policy’, the place of empirical evidence in family law reform is ambiguous. There is ongoing socio-legal analysis of the differential value and uses of quantitative data and anecdote in detailing women’s experiences and advocating for change. In this paper, we engage with these issues through a focus on how data were constructed in a key government report, Every Picture Tells a Story, which was used to officially define the problem and outline recommendations in the controversial (...) 2006-08 reform of the Australian Child Support Scheme. Our discussion focuses on two questions: what legitimacy is accorded to different kinds of evidence in family law reform processes?; and, how is this legitimacy gendered? We applied feminist critical discourse analysis to the type, source and claims of the data included in the child support chapter of the report. Our findings indicate that both quantitative data and anecdote were used to privilege fathers’ financial interests and autonomy; in contrast, women’s voices and interests were marginalised. Thus, we argue the legitimacy of data is ascribed through its relationship to the gendered definition of the ‘problems’ of child support, rather than the type of data per se. (shrink)

Sociology and Animals : Beginnings -- Animals and Biology as Destiny -- Animals, Social Inequalities and Oppression -- Animals, Crime and Abuse -- Town and Country : Animals, Space and Place -- Consumption of the Animal -- Animals, Leisure and Culture -- Animal Experiments and Animal Rights -- Conclusion: Sociology for Other Animals.

In this paper we present an equivalence between the category of commutative regular rings and the category of Boolean-valued fields, i.e., Boolean-valued sets for which the field axioms are true. The author used this equivalence in [12] to develop a Galois theory for commutative regular rings. Here we apply the equivalence to give an alternative construction of an algebraic closure for any commutative regular ring.Boolean-valued sets were developed in 1965 by Scott and Solovay [10] to simplify independence proofs in set (...) theory. They later were applied by Takeuti [13] to obtain results on Hilbert and Banach spaces. Ellentuck [3] and Weispfenning [14] considered Boolean-valued rings which consisted of rings and associated Boolean-valued relations. To the author's knowledge, the present work is the first to employ the Boolean-valued sets of Scott and Solovay to obtain results in algebra.The idea that commutative regular rings can be studied by examining the properties of related fields is not new. For several years algebraists and logicians have investigated commutative regular rings by representing a commutative regular ring as a subdirect product of fields or as the ring of global sections of a sheaf of fields over a Boolean space. These representations depend, as does the work presented here, on the fact that the set of central idempotents of any ring with identity forms a Boolean algebra. The advantage of the Boolean-valued set approach is that the axioms of classical logic and set theory are true in the Boolean universe. Therefore, if the axioms for a field are true for a Boolean-valued set, then other properties of the set can be deduced immediately from field theory. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIlya Somin, like several other political epistemologists, effectively exposes the extent of public ignorance and the ways in which such ignorance may damage democratic outcomes. This underpins his case for a more streamlined state, leaving more to individual “foot voting”—where citizens are better incentivized to choose knowledgeably and rationally. One cannot dispute the fact of deep public ignorance. However, one can question the widespread assumption that ignorance is necessarily ethically significant, always productive of undesirable outcomes, or otherwise implicitly dangerous for (...) democracy. The sheer lack of individual efficacy in mass democracies not only incentivizes ignorance, but also creates conditions wherein such ignorance is individually harmless and unlikely in the aggregate to greatly contribute to one or another outcome. Beyond this, there may be no way to attain meaningful knowledge in the areas where democratic decision making is most fraught. Indeed, ignorance may at times lead to better outcomes than would knowledge. The seemingly unassailable status of democracy itself, and the valuable institutional stability that this status ensures, seem to be founded upon a bedrock of public ignorance as to the real nature of democracy. (shrink)

Nelkin presents a simple and natural account of freedom and moral responsibility which responds to the great variety of challenges to the idea that we are free and responsible, before ultimately reaffirming our conception of ourselves as agents. Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility begins with a defense of the rational abilities view, according to which one is responsible for an action if and only if one acts with the ability to recognize and act for good reasons. The view is (...) compatibilist -- that is, on the view defended, responsibility is compatible with determinism -- and one of its striking features is a certain asymmetry: it requires the ability to do otherwise for responsibility when actions are praiseworthy, but not when they are blameworthy. In defending and elaborating the view, Nelkin questions long-held assumptions such as those concerning the relation between fairness and blame and the nature of so-called reactive attitudes such as resentment and forgiveness. Her argument not only fits with a metaphysical picture of causation -- agent-causation -- often assumed to be available only to incompatibilist accounts, but receives positive support from the intuitively appealing Ought Implies Can Principle, and establishes a new interpretation of freedom and moral responsibility that dovetails with a compelling account of our inescapable commitments as rational agents. (shrink)