The Psalms invite various levels of interpretation. Both expressive and formative, they not only mirror reality but also tutor persons in the spiritual life.

This book highlights some of the most pressing safety, ethical, legal and societal issues related to the diverse contexts in which robotic technologies apply. Focusing on the essential concept of well-being, it addresses topics that are fundamental not only for research, but also for industry and end-users, discussing the challenges in a wide variety of applications, including domestic robots, autonomous manufacturing, personal care robots and drones.

This book presents the first detailed history of the modern passport and why it became so important for controlling movement in the modern world. It explores the history of passport laws, the parliamentary debates about those laws, and the social responses to their implementation. The author argues that modern nation-states and the international state system have 'monopolized the 'legitimate means of movement',' rendering persons dependent on states' authority to move about - especially, though not exclusively, across international boundaries. This new (...) edition reviews other scholarship, much of which was stimulated by the first edition, addressing the place of identification documents in contemporary life. It also updates the story of passport regulations from the publication of the first edition, which appeared just before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, to the present day. (shrink)

As the expansion of the Internet and the digital formatting of all kinds of creative works move us further into the information age, intellectual property issues have become paramount. Computer programs costing thousands of research dollars are now copied in an instant. People who would recoil at the thought of stealing cars, computers, or VCRs regularly steal software or copy their favorite music from a friend's CD. Since the Web has no national boundaries, these issues are international concerns. The contributors-philosophers, (...) legal theorists, and business scholars, among others-address questions such as: Can abstract ideas be owned? How does the violation of intellectual property rights compare to the violation of physical property rights? Can computer software and other digital information be protected? And how should legal systems accommodate the ownership of intellectual property in an information age? Intellectual Property is a lively examination of these and other issues, and an invaluable resource for librarians, lawyers, businesspeople, and scholars. (shrink)

While the ethical implications of corporate actions have received increasing attention, one important area overlooked by both researchers and corporate codes of ethics is the significant ethical implications of corporate records management practices. This article discusses the operational and strategic purposes of modern corporate records management programs—including scorched earth programs which seek to reduce exposure to potential liability by eliminating documentary evidence from corporate files that could be used to establish culpability in future governmental investigations or in litigation by persons (...) injured by corporate actions. As a first step toward developing relevant ethical guidelines and decision criteria for socially-responsible records management practices, the ethical values of freedom of choice and avoidance of harm are applied to various corporate decisions as to (1) which information should be retained as records and for how long, (2) subsequent disclosure or non-disclosure of that information and to whom, and (3) decisions as to when information in corporate records may properly be destroyed. (shrink)

Sir John Hicks is one of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century. Awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 1972, he has made contributions across a wide range of economic theory, writing some twenty books. Arguably the most important of these, _Value and Capital_, is seen as the roots of modern microeconomics and general equilibrium theory. Hicks possessed an unusual ability to synthesize the ideas of other economists – something that is evident in his invention (...) of the ‘IS-LM’ diagram to expound Keynes’ General Theory, and is perhaps what he is best known to present day economists for. This two volume set is the second collection on Hicks in this series and includes new assessments of his contributions, covering the last fifteen years. With a new introduction by the editor, this comprehensive and scholarly collection provides students and scholars immediate access to Sir John Hicks’ contributions. (shrink)

WHEN WITTGENSTEIN'S TRACTATUS was published it was generally identified first with Russell's logical atomism, and later with the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. However, Wittgenstein himself claimed the work had an ethical purpose. In what has become a well-known passage from a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, the editor of Der Brenner, whose help Wittgenstein sought in trying to publish the Tractatus, he says.

This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

When von Neumann's and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior appeared in 1944, one thought that a complete theory of strategic social behavior had appeared out of nowhere. However, game theory has, to this very day, remained a fast-growing assemblage of models which have gradually been united in a new social theory - a theory that is far from being completed even after recent advances in game theory, as evidenced by the work of the three Nobel Prize winners, (...) class='Hi'>John F. Nash, John C. Harsanyi, and Reinhard Selten. Two of them, Harsanyi and Selten, have contributed important articles to the present volume. This book leaves no doubt that the game-theoretical models are on the right track to becoming a respectable new theory, just like the great theories of the twentieth century originated from formerly separate models which merged in the course of decades. For social scientists, the age of great discover ies is not over. The recent advances of today's game theory surpass by far the results of traditional game theory. For example, modem game theory has a new empirical and social foundation, namely, societal experiences; this has changed its methods, its "rationality. " Morgenstern (I worked together with him for four years) dreamed of an encompassing theory of social behavior. With the inclusion of the concept of evolution in mathematical form, this dream will become true. Perhaps the new foundation will even lead to a new name, "conflict theory" instead of "game theory. (shrink)

The principle of selection necessarily follows if we accept that a poem is a verbal structure of a very complex kind involving the interaction of all kinds of elements—ideas, images, rhythms, rhetorical features, narrative, logical patterns, whatever. The possible relationships among all these elements seem infinite or at least, in Frye's phrase, unlimited. Hence, a definitive critique of any work seems, even in theory, impossible. It is hard to see how the human mind could consciously contemplate, much less articulate, all (...) aspects at once, even in short pieces; as the various aspects are enumerated, we begin to lose sight of the wood for the trees, to lose our grip on the integrated whole which we at least partially intuit at a given moment in time. And so many are the attitudes and interests which may be brought to bear upon a poem that the critique which once seemed definitive soon seems incomplete to the critic after a further reading, for every time we read a work of any complexity, we find something new; and even the less sensitive know that each new school of criticism, not to mention each latest shift in politics, society, or psychology, will throw at least some of our masterpieces into a new light. As for translation, the only way to avoid it would be wholesale quotation, and even that would be a partial translation in that it would alter the poet's total meaning by substituting a part for the whole. John C. Sherwood, professor of English at the University of Oregon, is the author of articles on Dryden, modern literature, and English composition. He is currently at work on an annotated bibliography of R. S. Crane. (shrink)

The relation between body and mind is one of the oldest riddles that has puzzled mankind. That material and mental events may interact is accepted even by the law: our mental capacity to concentrate on the task can be seriously reduced by drugs. Physical and chemical processes may act upon the mind; and when we are writing a difficult letter, our mind acts upon our body and, through a chain of physical events, upon the mind of the recipient of the (...) letter. This is what the authors of this book call the 'interaction of mental and physical events'. We know very little about this interaction; and according to recent philosophical fashions this is explained by the alleged fact that we have brains but no thoughts. The authors of this book stress that they cannot solve the body mind problem; but they hope that they have been able to shed new light on it. Eccles especially with his theory that the brain is a detector and amplifier; a theory that has given rise to important new developments, including new and exciting experiments; and Popper with his highly controversial theory of 'World 3'. They show that certain fashionable solutions which have been offered fail to understand the seriousness of the problems of the emergence of life, or consciousness and of the creativity of our minds. In Part I, Popper discusses the philosophical issue between dualist or even pluralist interaction on the one side, and materialism and parallelism on the other. There is also a historical review of these issues. In Part II, Eccles examines the mind from the neurological standpoint: the structure of the brain and its functional performance under normal as well as abnormal circumstances. The result is a radical and intriguing hypothesis on the interaction between mental events and detailed neurological occurrences in the cerebral cortex. Part III, based on twelve recorded conversations, reflects the exciting exchange between the authors as they attempt to come to terms with their opinions. (shrink)

The apparent tension between the moral codes of the Old and New Testaments constitutes a perennial problem for Christian ethics. Scholars who have taken this problem seriously have often done so in ways that presume sharp discontinuity between the Testaments. They then proceed to devise a system for identifying what is or is not relevant today, or what pertains to this or that particular social sphere. John Howard Yoder brings fresh perspectives to this perennial problem by refuting the presumption (...) of intratestamental discontinuity. Throughout multiple scattered works on the Old Testament, Yoder offers a coherent and provocative narration that culminates in the way of Christ and establishes the ethical continuity of the entire biblical canon. This essay presents the basic parameters of Yoder's Old Testament narration, suggests points where revision is needed, and highlights several implications for social ethics. (shrink)

The first of 3 volumes of essays on Japanese philosophy, this work brings together essays that clarify its heritage and its practice, above all in the dynamic thought of Nishida Kitaro. Showing how philosophy takes shape through the translation of language and culture, the author examines the frameworks that have defined and confined Nishida’s thought and then charts new avenues of questioning Nishida and letting him question us. How should we envision the world at a time of environmental crisis, how (...) might we rethink our conceptions of history, religion and God; how is bodily awareness a way that the world knows itself, and just what can we make of Nishida'™s famous notion of nothingness—these are some of the questions that guide the meticulous explorations in this collection. (shrink)

Not long ago, a colleague chided me for using the term "the biological revolution. " Like many others, I have employed it as an umbrella term to refer to the seemingly vast, rapidly-moving, and fre quently bewildering developments of contemporary biomedicine: psy chosurgery, genetic counseling and engineering, artificial heart-lung machines, organ transplants-and on and on. The real "biological revo lution," he pointed out, began back in the nineteenth century in Europe. For it was then that death rates and infant mortality (...) began to decline, the germ theory of disease was firmly established, Darwin took his famous trip on the Beagle, and Gregor Mendel stumbled on to some fundamental principles of heredity. My friend, I think, was both right and wrong. The biological revolution did have its roots in the nineteenth century; that is when it first began to unfold. Yet, like many intellectual and scientific upheav als, its force was not felt for decades. Indeed, it seems fair to say that it was not until after the Second World War that the full force of the earlier discoveries in biology and medicine began to have a major impact, an impact that was all the more heightened by the rapid bi omedical developments after the war. (shrink)

Since the eighteenth century, the study of plants has reflected an increasingly mechanized and technological view of the natural world that divides the humanities and the natual sciences. In broad terms, this article proposes a context for research into flora through an interrogation of existing literature addressing a rapprochement between ways to knowledge. The natureculture dichotomy, and more specifically the plant-to-human sensory disjunction, follows a parallel course of resolution to the schism between objective and subjective forms of knowledge. The foundations (...) of taxonomic botany, as well as the allied fields of environmental studies, ethnobotany and economic botany, are undergirded by universalizing, sensorylimited visual structuring of the natural world. As the study of everyday embodied interactions of humans with flora, expanding upon the lens of cultural ecology, "cultural botany" provides a transdisciplinary research approach. Alternate embodied cultural engagements with flora emerge through a syncretic fusion of diverse methodologies. (shrink)

John C. Hall; III—Quantity of Pleasure, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 67, Issue 1, 1 June 1967, Pages 35–52, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotel.

Briggs (English, U. of California, Riverside) clarifies the close relation between Bacon's famous reform of scientific method and his less well-known conceptions of rhetoric, nature, and religion. He reveals, among many other things, Bacon's conviction that nature is God's code, which scientists decipher and exploit. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Simple models for the evolution of qualitative multistate traits are considered, in which the traits are permitted to evolve in time-dependent versus speciation-dependent fashion. Of particular interest are the means and variances of distances for these traits in evolutionary phylads characterized by different rates of speciation, when alternative characters are neutral with respect to fitness, and when the total number of observable characters is limited to small values. As attainable character states are increasingly restricted, mean distance (D) in a phylad (...) decreases, regardless of whether evolution is a function of time or of rate of speciation. The ratio of mean distances in species-rich and species-poor phylads of comparable evolutionary age (DR/DP) remains near one when differentiation is proportional to time, even when attainable character states are severely restricted. DR/DP also nears one as a result of restricting character states when differentiation is proportional to rate of speciation, but the effect is not severe unless the number of character states is very small and the probability of change per speciation very large. These and other results are discussed with reference to available data sets on qualitative multistate traits. (shrink)

To answer the question of whether there is such a thing as Japanese philosophy, and what its characteristics might be, scholars have typi­cally used Western philosophy as a measure to examine Japanese texts. This article turns the tables and asks what Western thought looks like from the perspective of Japanese philosophy. It uses Japanese philo­sophical sources as a lens to bring into sharper focus the qualities and biases of Greek-derived Western philosophy. It first examines ques­tions related to the reputed sole (...) origin and the nature of philosophy in ancient Greece. Using the analyses of Robert Bernasconi, it con­cludes that this reputation is a bias instilled by philosophers such as Hegel in the modern era. It then uses the scholarship of Pierre Hadot to show that Greek philosophy was not argumentative discourse for its own sake, but a way of life where reason was in the service of spir­itual progress. This suggests a definition broad enough to accommo­date Asian and other non-Western philosophies. Under the lens of Japanese philosophy, however, Greek-based Western philosophy often displays a double detachment, from everyday life and from embod­ied existence. In contrast, Japanese Buddhist and Confucian philoso­phies evince an appreciation of embodied existence in the ordinary world. The article raises several questions for further investigation in the prospect that the lens of Japanese philosophy can refocus the task of philosophizing today. (shrink)

1. Srikantha In the Southern Saiva philosopher Srikantha (c. 1 150, although it is difficult to separate him from his really greater commentator ...

The paper first summarizes the author's decision-theoretical model of moral behavior, in order to compare the moral implications of the act-utilitarian and of the rule-utilitarian versions of utilitarian theory. This model is then applied to three voting examples. It is argued that the moral behavior of act-utilitarian individuals will have the nature of a noncooperative game, played in the extensive mode, and involving action-by-action maximization of social utility by each player. In contrast, the moral behavior of rule-utilitarian individuals will have (...) the nature of a cooperative game, played in the normal mode, and involving a firm commitment by each player to a specific moral strategy (viz. to the strategy selected by the rule-utilitarian choice criterion) — even if some individual actions prescribed by this strategy, when considered in isolation, should fail to maximize social utility. The most important advantage that rule utilitarianism as an ethical theory has over act utilitarianism lies in its ability to give full recognition to the moral and social importance of individual rights and personal obligations. It is easy to verify that action-by-action maximization of social utility, as required by act utilitarianism, would destroy these rights and obligations. In contrast, rule utilitarianism can fully recognize the moral validity of these rights and obligations precisely because of its commitment to an overall moral strategy, independent of action-by-action social-utility maximization. The paper ends with a discussion of the voter's paradox problem. The conventional theory of rational behavior cannot avoid the paradoxical conclusion that, in any large electorate, voting is always an irrational activity because one's own individual vote is extremely unlikely to make any difference to the outcome of any election. But it can be shown that, by using the principles of rule-utilitarian theory, this paradox can easily be resolved and that, in actual fact, voting, even in large electorates, may be perfectly rational action. More generally, the example of rule utilitarianism shows what an important role the concept of a rational commitment can play in the analysis of rational behavior. (shrink)

The recent recession only adds to the widespread fear that loyalties in the business world are rapidly becoming obsolete. This article spells out some of the history that has put loyalty in jeopardy and some of the characteristics of this affecton. It gives reasons why it will not disappear from the workplace.The above analysis is then followed by a contrast between past and present motivations for work and a description of the workplace of the future according to three authors. Since (...) all of these address loyalty issues directly or indirectly, there follows an analysis of the new loyalties that can be anticipated or are beginning to emerge in the workplace and the role of the manager in managing these. The article concludes by placing these future loyalties within a framework inspired by Josiah Royce. (shrink)

What does the word clinic mean? The clinic is first a place to diagnose and treat sick persons. The clinic is also a way of thinking and speaking; it is a discursive practice that links health with knowledge. For Michel Foucault the clinic is a mode of perception and enunciation that allows us to see and name disease and to place statements about illness among statements about birth and death. Within the clinic resides understanding of disease visible on the surface, (...) yet hidden within the tissual depths, of an ailing patient. Foucault shows that by the dawn of the nineteenth-century medicine is no longer a two-dimensional reading of symptoms, but a three-dimensional probing from symptomatic surface into disease interior. The anatomical site of disorder hidden within tissual depths is visible to the scrutiny of pathologist, endoscopist or radiologist. The clinic, a discourse that enables us to think about disease when we make statements about health and death, operates not only in its familiar textual domain, the medical journal, but in pictures of the scene at the sickbed, and poetry about disease. The truth of disease and placement of that truth in a general plan of the world in Renaissance woodcuts and John Donne's poetry is different from the regime of truth after the birth of the clinic in Bichat'sTreatise on Membranes, the paintings of Laennec, Agnew and Gross, the modern lithographs and the verse of Walt Whitman and L. E. Sissman. Foucault's clinic is where knowledge and sickness some together in the modern period. (shrink)

As digital technology advances at a truly exponential rate, documentary filmmakers may be tempted to bypass standards of ethical conduct – like subject consent and disclosure of contrived reenactments to audiences – in favor of dramatic impact. Some may also seek to replace missing archival or historical material and manufacture seemingly authentic content with the assistance of “digital performers.” This commentary examines the use of artificial intelligence in Morgan Neville’s film, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain and places it within (...) an historical context. Comparisons to Flaherty’s Nanook of the North and Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick highlight the importance of managing and negotiating traditional audience expectations in order to preserve the unspoken agreement between viewers and makers. (shrink)