Economics has developed into one of the most specialised social sciences. Yet at the same time, it shares its subject matter with other social sciences and humanities and its method of analysis has developed in close correspondence with the natural and life sciences. This book offers an up to date assessment of economics in relation to other disciplines. -/- This edited collection explores fields as diverse as mathematics, physics, biology, medicine, sociology, architecture, and literature, drawing from selected contributions to the (...) 2005 Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET). There is currently much discussion at the leading edges of modern economics about openness to other disciplines, such as psychology and sociology. But what we see here is that economics has drawn on (as well as contributed to) other disciplines throughout its history. In this sense, in spite of the increasing specialisation within all disciplines, economics has always been an open discipline and the chapters in this volume provide a vivid illustration for this. -/- Open Economics is a testament to the intellectual vibrancy of historical research in economics. It presents the reader with a historical introduction to the disciplinary context of economics that is the first of its kind, and will appeal to practising economists and students of the discipline alike, as well as to anybody interested in economics and its position in the scientific and social scientific landscape. -/- Table of Contents -/- Introduction: Economics in relation to other disciplines Richard Arena, Sheila Dow and Matthias Klaes Part I. Economics in relation to the humanities and social sciences 1. The social science of economics Brian J. Loasby 2. Economics and literature Bruna Ingrao 3. Happiness: what Kahneman could have learnt from Pietro Verri Pier Luigi Porta Part II. Economics in relation to the life and natural sciences 4. Newtonian physics, experimental moral philosophy and the shaping of political economy Sergio Cremaschi 5. Evolutionary biology and economic behaviour: re-visiting Veblen's instinct of workmanship Mark Harrison 6. Medicine and economics in pre-classical economics Alain Clément and Ludovic Desmedt Part III. Economics and mathematics 7. Mathematics as the role model for neoclassical economics Nicola Giocoli 8. The role of econometric method in economic analysis: A reassessment of the Keynes-Tinbergen debate, 1938-43 Giovanna Garrone and Roberto Marchionatti IV. Economics and architecture 9. Economics and architecture Maurice Lagueux 10. Economic policies and urban development in Latin America Michele Alacevich and Andrea Costa V. Economics and geography 11. ‘Space’ in economic thought Giovanna Vertova 12. Economics, geography and colonialism in the writings of William Petty Hugh Goodacre Part VI. Economics and sociology 13. Economics and sociology: Gustav Schmoller and Werner Sombart on social differentiation Joachim Zweynert 14. Is Homo Oeconomicus a 'bad guy'? Isabelle This Saint-Jean -/- . (shrink)

Prepared for an ANU Humanities Research Centre Symposium in early August 2003, these notes may be considered as a comment on Brian Massumi’s proposition that ‘a political ecology would be a social technology of belonging, assuming coexistence and co-becoming as the habitat of practices’.

A number of authors have commented on the topic of mandated reporting in cases of suspected child maltreatment and the application of this requirement to researchers. Most of these commentaries focus on the interpretation of current legal standards and offer opinions for or against the imposition of mandated reporting laws on research activities. Authors on both sides of the issue offer ethical arguments, although a direct comparison and analysis of these opposing arguments is rare. This article critically examines the ethical (...) arguments made by authors on both sides of the debate. The conclusion is reached that researchers should be mandated reporters of child maltreatment because the current arguments do not justify their exclusion from current ethical and legal standards. The author makes recommendations for the ethically responsible conduct of research in regard to this topic and legal implications are discussed. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive presentation of the Pratyabhij philosophy (elaborated in the 10th and 11th centuries by Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta) by showing how its main concepts arose from the confrontation of aiva religious dogmas ...

So far, the conceptualization and measurement of parental burnout have been deduced from those of job burnout. As a result, it is unclear whether current measures of parental burnout constitute the best representation of the parental burnout construct/syndrome: the possibility cannot be excluded that some dimensions ought to be added, which would change the structure and definition of parental burnout. In this study, the conceptualization and measurement of parental burnout were approached using an inductive method, in which the parental burnout (...) phenomenon was (re)constructed based solely on the testimonies of burned-out parents. Items extracted from their testimonies were presented to a sample of French-speaking and English-speaking parents (N = 901) and submitted to factor analyses. An identifiable parental burnout syndrome including four dimensions was found (exhaustion in one’s parental role, contrast with previous parental self, feelings of being fed up with one’s parental role and emotional distancing from one’s children). The resulting instrument, the Parental Burnout Assessment (PBA) presents good validity. Factorial invariance across gender and languages was also found. Finally, the results of this study replicate previous findings that psychological traits of the parents, parenting factors and family functioning account for more variance in parental burnout than sociodemographic factors. (shrink)

We contribute to the exploration of diversity in interdisciplinary science by elaborating the notion of epistemic commitments to address researchers’ different views of knowledge that matters and how these views are embedded in research practices and networks. Based on previous science and technology studies and science-policy literature, we define epistemic commitments as reflexive commitments to regimes of relevant research. Drawing on an in-depth enquiry in the case of biodiversity studies in France, we describe four regimes of research, each of them (...) bringing together certain disciplinary approaches and technologies, certain scenarios about environmental changes and certain contributions to decision making and management. We distinguish between an environmentalist regime, a management-oriented regime, a function-based regime, and an ecoengineering regime. We give insights into how researchers’ commitments to these regimes are shaped, stabilized, and maintained over time, suggesting the coevolution of research practices, practical contributions, and environmental scenarios. We emphasize pluralism rather than hegemony of a type of knowledge over the others. Our results show that environmental research’s diversity does not result only from the complexity of reality itself but is also embedded in various views of scientific advancement, future scenarios, and useful contributions to environmental governance. (shrink)

This article examines how the Kashmiri non-dualistic Śaiva philosophers Utpaladeva (tenth century) and Abhinavagupta (10th–11th centuries) present and criticize a theory expounded by certain Buddhist philosophers, identified by the two Śaiva authors as Sautrāntikas. According to this theory, no entity external to consciousness can ever be perceived since perceived objects are nothing but internal aspects (ākāra) of consciousness. Nonetheless we must infer the existence of external entities so as to account for the fact that consciousness is aware of a variety (...) of objects: just as a mirror takes on a variegated appearance only by reflecting a multiplicity of objects that remain external to it, in the same way, phenomenal variety can be explained only by assuming the existence of various objects external to consciousness. In Īśvarapratyabhijñākārikās I, 5, 8–9 and their commentaries, Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta endeavour to criticize this theory, which challenges their own idealistic principles: according to them, the Sautrāntikas’ inference is neither legitimate nor even possible. The passage is particularly telling as regards the strategy developed by Pratyabhijñā philosophers with respect to their Buddhist opponents: they make use of certain arguments propounded by Dharmakīrti in defense of Vijñānavāda in order to criticize the Sautrāntikas’ inference, but they also exploit this discussion to underline the superiority of their idealism over that of the Vijñānavādins. (shrink)

Storytellers and their audiences over many millennia have thought that we can learn from fiction. Philosopher Gregory Currie challenges that supposition. He doubts knowing can be founded on imagining, and claims that what we think we learn from fiction is not reli­able in the way science or philosophy is, because not tested through peerreview, experi­ment, and argument. He underrates the role of the imagination in understanding all hu­man language, in fictionality outside formal fictions, and in science. Science is not “reliabilist” (...) as Currie assumes: it aims at bold imaginative discoveries that often overturn what had previously been thought secure and may well be displaced by still newer discov­eries. Fiction may not have peer review, but it is tested on the highly developed intuitions of audiences, on the expertise of critics, and through the corrective competition and inno­vations of other storytellers, as Joyce challenges Homer, or David Sloan Wilson’s recent Atlas Hugged challenges Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. There are strong reasons for predicting that fiction has a prosocial bias from which humans over many millennia have learned to expand their sociality. That does not mean that all exposure to fiction is beneficial. (shrink)

It was proved recently that Telgársky’s conjecture, which concerns partial information strategies in the Banach–Mazur game, fails in models of \. The proof introduces a combinatorial principle that is shown to follow from \, namely: \::Every separative poset \ with the \-cc contains a dense sub-poset \ such that \ for every \. We prove this principle is independent of \ and \, in the sense that \ does not imply \, and \ does not imply \ assuming the consistency (...) of a huge cardinal. We also consider the more specific question of whether \ holds with \ equal to the weight-\ measure algebra. We prove, again assuming the consistency of a huge cardinal, that the answer to this question is independent of \. (shrink)

[From the publisher] "Augustine and Roman Virtue" seeks to correct what the author sees as a fundamental misapprehension in medieval thought, a misapprehension that fuels further problems and misunderstandings in the historiography of philosophy. This misapprehension is the assumption that the development of certain themes associated with medieval philosophy is due, primarily if not exclusively, to extra-philosophical religious commitments rather than philosophical argumentation, referred to here as the ‘sacralization thesis'. Brian Harding explores this problem through a detailed reading of (...) Augustine's City of God as understood in a Latin context, that is, in dialogue with Latin writers such as Cicero, Livy, Sallust and Seneca. The book seeks to revise a common reading of Augustine's critique of ancient virtue by focusing on that dialogue, while showing that his attitude towards those authors is more sympathetic, and more critical, than one might expect. Harding argues that the criticisms rest on sympathy and that Augustine's critique of ancient virtue thinks through and develops certain trends noticeable in the major figures of Latin philosophy. (shrink)

In Defence of Christianity is a short book of Christian apologetics. Acknowledging that reason is not the basis of faith, Brian Hebblethwaite sets out some of the main reasons that can be advanced in support of the Christian faith. He defends the view that belief in God makes most sense of a world that has come up with moral and creative persons and communities, including all that they have produced in the way of culture, mysticism, and sainthood. He also (...) argues that the history of religions, and in particular the history of Israel and the story of Christ and his Church, offers the best diagnosis and solution of the problems that afflict humanity and the most hopeful picture of the ultimate future of creation. (shrink)

Females and males often exhibit conspicuous morphological, physiological and behavioral differences. Similarly, gene expression profiles indicate that a large portion of the genome is sex‐differentially deployed, particularly in the germ line. Because males and females are so fundamentally different, each sex is likely to have a different optimal gene expression profile that is never fully achieved in either sex because of antagonistic selection in females versus males. Males are hemizygous for the X chromosome, which means that recessive male‐favorable de novo (...) mutations on the X chromosome are subject to immediate selection. In females, a recessive female‐favorable mutation on one of two X chromosomes is not available for selection until it becomes frequent enough in the local population to result in homozygous individuals. Given that most mutations are recessive, one would expect that genes or alleles favoring males should accumulate on the X chromosome. Recent microarray work in Drosophila and C. elegans clearly shows the opposite. Why is the X chromosome a highly disfavored location for genes with male‐biased expression in these animals? BioEssays 26:543–548, 2004. Published 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

In this paper I offer a limited defence of “fairness” or “fair play” arguments for political obligation by focussing on one important critique of such arguments, that offered by A. John Simmons. I isolate Simmons's concentration on the idea of “accepting” benefits and argue that, among other difficulties, his criteria for when we can be said to accept a benefit from our political communities are too restrictive. While the scope of the discussion is narrow, I try to sketch ways in (...) which the failings of Simmons's critique are symptomatic of deeper problems with his libertarian approach. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.23(3) 2004: 282-291. (shrink)

This article introduces the special issue on middle-range theory in science and technology studies, providing the background to its production and reviewing different notions of “middle.” It begins with Merton's ideas about middle-range theory as a way of moving beyond the production of either descriptions or theories of everything. Instead of seeing the middle as the space between the theoretical imagination and the detailed depiction of everyday practices, the authors outline three ways of thinking about the middle range: as an (...) adjective, the closest to Merton's conception; as a noun, the liminal place between theories, audiences, and levels; and as a verb, a process, a means of making connections across time, discipline, community, and place. A summary of each of the articles in this special issue is provided, preceding a call for further discussion about the role of case studies and the nature of the middle in STS. (shrink)

The boy-emperor Leo II has bequeathed us more than his share of chronological puzzles. He was only seven years old when he died in 474 but he had possessed imperial authority for nearly half his short life. There is uncertainty about the date of his birth, and most of his career as emperor with his grandfather Leo I. If we still had the chronicle of Nestorianos which actually terminated at the death of Leo II we would probably be fully informed (...) on these matters. Instead, several of the relevant documents have been consistently misconstrued, that is, they have been made to fit a predetermined interpretation or order of events. Moreover, one important text has been ignored altogether. The chronology of the boy-emperor's career depends on Seeck's Regesten which has inevitably shaped the coverage in the standard accounts of Bury and Stein. The authority of Seeck also underpins the entry in the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire which sets out the following chronology of Leo's brief life and imperial career: 467 – birth; 473 – elevated to Caesar by Leo I, October; 474 – elevated to Augustus by Leo I, before 18 January; 474 – death, November. This investigation is designed to show that the multiple phases in the imperial rule of Leo II have never been properly disentangled. To do so not only brings greater precision to the sequence of events, and to Leo's short career, but also casts light on the wider context of these turbulent few years. (shrink)

Continuing with the theme of what can be known of God apart from Revelation, this chapter turns to three beliefs that are absolutely fundamental to the thinking of Thomas Aquinas. These are: that God is everywhere; that God is unchangeable; and that God is eternal. The third topic is addressed in some detail, and includes discussion of Aquinas on time, and on why God is eternal. The last part of the chapter discusses Aquinas’ views on eternity in the light of (...) contemporary criticism, indicating the objections most frequently raised, and what Aquinas might have said against these. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a notable increase in the production of scientific expertise by large multidisciplinary groups. The issue we address is how reports may be written by such groups in spite of their size and of formidable obstacles: complexity of subject matter, uncertainty, and scientific disagreement. Our focus is on the International Panel on Climate Change, unquestionably the best-known case of such collective scientific expertise. What we show is that the organization of work within the IPCC aims to make (...) it possible to produce documents that are indeed expert reports. To do so, we first put forward the epistemic norms that apply to expert reports in general, that is, the properties that reports should have in order to be useful and to help decision-making. Section 2 claims that these properties are: intelligibility, relevance and accuracy. Based on this analysis, section 3 points to the difficulties of having IPCC reports indeed satisfying these norms. We then show how the organization of work within the IPCC aims at and to a large extent secures intelligibility, relevance and accuracy, with the result that IPCC reports can be relied on for decision-making. Section 4 focuses on the fundamentals of IPCC’s work organization--that is, division of labour within the IPCC--while section 5 investigates three frameworks that were introduced over the course of the functioning of the IPCC: the reviewing procedure of IPCC reports, the language that IPCC authors use to express uncertainty and the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project. Concluding remarks are offered in section 6. (shrink)

This paper aims 1) to introduce the notion of theoretical story as a resource and source of constraint for the construction and assessment of models of phenomena; 2) to show the relevance of this notion for a better understanding of the role and nature of values in scientific activity. The reflection on the role of values and value judgments in scientific activity should be attentive, I will argue, to the distinction between models and the theoretical story that guides and constrains (...) their construction. The aim of scientific activity is to develop understanding of phenomena, and something that serves this aim and contributes to the development of understanding has a cognitive value. Cognitive values are the features that something that plays a role in scientific activity should have so that it can serve its aim. I will focus my attention on the features of the theoretical story and of the models. (shrink)

Pionnier de ce que nous appelons aujourd’hui, parfois trop vite, la « recherche-création », défenseur d’une approche scénique et unitaire de l’esthétique théâtrale, André Veinstein a œuvré à la définition de ce qu’il appelait une « conception esthétique de la mise en scène ». Il entendait par là souligner l’importance de la liberté interprétative propre au théâtre, tout en mettant en garde contre les tentatives de déformation et de dissociation, selon ses mots, de l’œuvre dramatique.

L’ouvrage dirigé par D. Haase-Dubosc et M.-E. Henneau s’inscrit à la suite de la publication d’un premier volume consacré aux périodes pré- et post-révolutionnaires. Les deux volumes sont issus de colloques menés depuis 2008 à l’instigation de la SIEFAR dont l’objectif est d’inclure la question du genre dans l’approche des sociétés anciennes, avec une volonté forte de pluridisciplinarité en un croisement des points de vue et des bases documentaires. L’ensemble des onze articles couvre la péri...

The goal of this dissertation is to show that cognitive science, while dealing with the special subject of the mind, can nonetheless fit into the same general model that Bas van Fraassen provides for the natural sciences. The dissertation focuses specifically on the nature of explanation in the cognitive sciences. ;Chapter One makes clear what I take cognitive science to be in the work. The two central cases here are Noam Chomsky's theory of generative syntax, and David Marr's computational theory (...) of vision. The bulk of this chapter is devoted to setting out the structure of the two theories, in order to provide concrete case studies in the sorts of explanations they give. ;Chapter Two sets out the model of explanation employed by considering the relative virtues of several recent approaches--Hempel's classic D-N model, Salmon's statistical relevance model, and Stalnaker and Lewis' counterfactual approach--and concluding with van Fraassen's pragmatics-oriented model. Like many accounts, van Fraassen's takes explanations to be answers to "Why?" questions, and emphasizes the pragmatic machinery at work in question-asking. ;Chapter Three considers two influential views of explanation in cognitive science. Such explanations are often said to be functional or dispositional. I look at proposals of each sort and argue that none of the explanatory strategies singled out can count as the central one in cognitive scientific explanation, because cognitive science has no central explanatory strategy. ;In Chapter Four I hold instead that cognitive science uses all the relevance relations found in natural science. The odd features of cognitive scientific explanation turn instead around the sorts of objects and processes that get posited in its theories--abstract, multiply-instantiable objects that can act as representations, and abstract processes of transformation on these objects. I do not, then, deny that we get new sorts of explanation in cognitive science--only that the source of this novelty has been properly located. (shrink)