"A valuable collection both for original source material as well as historical formulations of current problems."-- The Review of Metaphysics "Much more than a mere collection of papers . . . a valuable addition to the literature."-- Mathematics of Computation An anthology of fundamental papers on undecidability and unsolvability by major figures in the field, this classic reference opens with Godel's landmark 1931 paper demonstrating that systems of logic cannot admit proofs of all true assertions of arithmetic. Subsequent papers by (...) Godel, Church, Turing, and Post single out the class of recursive functions as computable by finite algorithms. Additional papers by Church, Turing, and Post cover unsolvable problems from the theory of abstract computing machines, mathematical logic, and algebra, and material by Kleene and Post includes initiation of the classification theory of unsolvable problems. Suitable for graduate and undergraduate courses. 1965 ed. (shrink)

We argued in earlier work that South Africa's democratic transition accomplished more than abolishing formal apartheid and replacing it with civil and political democracy. The transition also established a platform for “transformative constitutionalism,” an aspiration and generous constitutional framework for South Africa to embark on a postliberal path toward becoming an egalitarian social and economic democracy. Manifestly, the promised social and economic transformation remains largely unfulfilled. Many South Africans blame the constitutional settlement for this failure of delivery, seeing it as (...) a weak compromise with the old regime that restricts socio-economic transformation. We reject this view and assign blame for the failure of the transformative project squarely on the politics and policies of ANC governments in power over three decades. The transformative project was not blocked by the constitutional settlement; it was never attempted. The ANC brought mostly conventional, liberal democratic goals to the transition negotiations. It embraced neoliberalism before the 1996 Constitution was drafted, indeed before the 1994 elections brought the ANC to power. Ironically, during the Final Constitution drafting process (1994-1996), ANC negotiators moved left under the inspiration of and pressure from the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM). The 1996 text is transformative in aspiration and in its toolbox of innovative legal technologies, but the ANC never took it seriously as a guide to policy. If South African politics ever realigns, future activists will find in the 1996 text a storehouse of legal values and tools meant to nourish radical social and economic change. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Ethics and Research Topics What We Know Responses.

This article explores various analytical issues involved in conceptualizing the interrelationships of gender, class, race and ethnicity and other social divisions. It compares the debate on these issues that took place in Britain in the 1980s and around the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism. It examines issues such as the relative helpfulness of additive or mutually constitutive models of intersectional social divisions; the different analytical levels at which social divisions need to be studied, their ontological base and their relations (...) to each other. The final section of the article attempts critically to assess a specific intersectional methodological approach for engaging in aid and human rights work in the South. (shrink)

Working in subsystems of second order arithmetic, we formulate several representations for hypergraphs. We then prove the equivalence of various vertex coloring theorems to \, \, and \.

Molly Farneth’s Hegel’s Social Ethics hearkens back to the tradition of Josiah Royce, which has continued in the work of Richard Bernstein and Jeffrey Stout. At the same time, it reflects the impact of three decades of interpretive work which has offered an alternative to the 19th and early 20th century reading of Hegel as a metaphysical systematizer. In this new reading he was from the beginning a social critic and political theorist who looked to lay the groundwork for post‐Enlightenment (...) vision of the social world as evolving toward one of social cooperation based on mutual recognition. Farneth has developed this reading of Hegel into one of powerful resources for democratic pluralism. (shrink)

The problem of the will has long been viewed as central to Heidegger's later thought. In the first book to focus on this problem, Bret W. Davis clarifies key issues from the philosopher's later period--particularly his critique of the culmination of the history of metaphysics in the technological "will to will" and the possibility of Gelassenheit or "releasement" from this willful way of being in the world--but also shows that the question of will is at the very heart of (...) Heidegger's thinking, a pivotal issue in his path from Being and Time (1926) to "Time and Being" (1962). Moreover, the book demonstrates why popular critical interpretations of Heidegger's relation to the will are untenable, how his so-called "turn" is not a simple "turnaround" from voluntarism to passivism. Davis explains why the later Heidegger's key notions of "non-willing" and " Gelassenheit " do not imply a mere abandonment of human action; rather, they are signposts in a search for an other way of being, a "higher activity" beyond the horizon of the will. While elucidating this search, his work also provides a critical look at the ambiguities, tensions, and inconsistencies of Heidegger's project, and does so in a way that allows us to follow the inner logic of the philosopher's struggles. As meticulous as it is bold, this comprehensive reinterpretation will change the way we think about Heidegger's politics and about the thrust of his philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel research program to assess methods of teaching engineering ethics, a program that would allow ordinary instructors, with little effort, to turn ordinary assessment tools (graded exams, homework assignments, and so on) into publishable research, whether the course in question is a stand-alone course in professional ethics or a technical course in which some professional ethics has been inserted. The paper has three parts. The first briefly distinguishes the subject of this research from the main line (...) of research in ethics education. The main line is concerned with assessing improvement in ethical judgment (or moral development). In contrast, the research discussed here is concerned with assessing improvement in ethical sensitivity and ethical knowledge. The second part of this paper describes work already done that provides a model for what is proposed, the use of ratios between scores on course-specific pre- and post-tests to provide a measure allowing assessment across courses, programs, and even institutions.While the use of pre- and post-tests is not new, the use of their ratios across courses, programs, and institutions to do assessment is new. The third part of this paper sketches the research program itself—or, rather, a framework for answering a family of research questions. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to establish connections between the pragmatist philosophical tradition and the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I argue that among these connections is the affinity between John Dewey’s account of the development of group morality as articulated in his early work and Wittgenstein’s admittedly vague concept, ‘form of life.’ I argue that this affinity is evident in that both are dependent on inter-subjective experience. Moreover, both Dewey’s account of the development of group morality and Wittgenstein’s concept (...) of form of life suggests an intimate relationship between the individual and the community. I argue further that both Dewey’s account of group morality and Wittgenstein’s form of life concept hold that there is a significant influence of inherited norms, conventions, traditions, etc., on the development of the individual and her conduct in a variety of social interactions. I go on to raise and address potential and anticipated criticisms. In this section I take what I consider to be the most penetrating of the potential criticisms of the arguments presented in this paper: that Dewey and Wittgenstein direct their analyses at different issues (the former directs his analysis toward group moral development and social issues, while the latter directs his toward linguistic activity and its grounding social context), that Dewey focuses much of his attention on moral agency, whereas Wittgenstein is more concerned with what might be called epistemological issues, and finally that my treatment of the form of life concept is incomplete in that I spend a roughly proportionate amount of time discussing related concepts: language games, meaning as use, and, to a lesser extent, rule- following. I respond to these criticisms in turn by arguing that a careful reading of these aspects of each philosopher’s work circumvents such criticisms. The goal of this paper is to contribute to the growing literature on connections between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the Pragmatist tradition. The subject matter might also be a contribution to the history of philosophy and possibly have implications for epistemology. There is also the hope that in establishing commonalities between the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Dewey one can provide an interpretation of some of the more vague concepts in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, prompting further discussion on these concepts. Finally, this research might pave the way for further research into connections among different aspects of Dewey’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophies. This paper is a first step toward a study of a much larger scope and should not be taken as conclusive. (shrink)

Philosopher Davis argues that Christian belief in the resurrection is rational on historical, philosophical, and theological grounds. Each of the book's ten chapters takes up a different aspect of the Christian concept of bodily resurrection and subsequently deals with such matters as perservation of personal identity and soul-body dualism, issues in biblical scholarship, and the reliability of New Testament accounts.

This book focuses on the significance of the body in contemporary feminist scholarship. Whether the body is treated as biological bedrock or subversive metaphor, it is implicated in the cultural and historical construction of sexual difference as well as asymmetrical power relations. The contributors to this volume examine the role of the body as socially shaped and historically colonized territory and as the focus of individual womenÆs struggles for autonomy and self-determination. They also analyze its centrality to the feminist critique (...) of male-stream science as dualistic, distanced, and decontextualized. While the body has become a "hot item" in contemporary social theory and research, the renewed interest has received a mixed reaction from feminists. The body may be back, but the "new" body theory often proves to be just as disembodied as it ever was. The body revival seems to be less an attempt to re-embody masculinist science than just another expression of the same condition that evoked the feminist critique in the first place: a flight from femininity and everything that is associated with it in Western culture. Drawing on insights from contemporary feminist theories of gender and power, this book offers a timely critical appraisal of the recent "body revival." Embodied Practices not only sets an agenda for research about the body, but for an embodied perspective on the body as well. It will be a valuable and thought-provoking resource for students of womenÆs studies, social theory, cultural studies, and medical sociology. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to further assess and develop feminist standpoint theory by introducing the notion of the `situated imagination' as constituting an important part of this theory as well as that of `situated knowledge'. The article argues that the faculty of the imagination constructs as well as transforms, challenges and supersedes both existing knowledge and social reality. However, like knowledge, it is crucial to theorize the imagination as situated, that is, as shaped and conditioned (although not determined) (...) by social positioning. (shrink)

Ethics and Humanity pays to tribute to Jonathan Glover, a pioneering figure whose thought and personal influence have had a significant impact on applied ...

Practitioners in the vanguard of new economic thinking will also find plenty of useful information in this path-breaking book.

In higher-level cognitive tasks, older compared to younger adults show a bias towards positive emotion information and away from negative information (a positivity effect). It is unclear whether this effect occurs in early perceptual processing. This issue is important for determining if the positivity effect is due to automatic rather than controlled processing. We tested this with older and younger adults on a positive/negative face emotion valence classification task using masked priming. Positive (happy) and negative (angry) face targets were preceded (...) by masked repetition or valence primes with neutral face baselines. In Experiment 1, 30 younger and 30 older adults were tested with 50 ms primes. Younger adults showed repetition priming for both positive and negative targets. Older adults showed repetition priming for positive but not negative targets. Neither group showed valence priming. In Experiment 2, 30 older and 29 younger adults were tested with longer duration primes. Younger adults showed repetition priming for both positive and negative emotions, and no valence priming. Older adults only showed repetition and valence priming for positive targets. We proposed older adults’ lack of angry face priming was due to an early attention orienting strategy favouring happy expressions at the expense of angry ones. (shrink)

This article describes China’s century-long concern with the professional ethics of engineers, especially a succession of codes of engineering ethics going back at least to 1933. This description is the result both of our own archival research and of “philosophical history”, the application of concepts from the philosophy of professions to the facts historians (or we) have discovered. Engineers, historians, social scientists, and philosophers of technology, as well as students of professional ethics, should find this description interesting. It certainly provides (...) a reason to wonder whether those who write about codes of professional ethics as if they were an Anglo-American export unlikely to put down roots elsewhere might have overlooked many early codes outside English-speaking countries. While code writers in China plainly learned from Western codes, the Chinese codes were not mere copies of their Western counterparts. Indeed, the Chinese codes sometimes differed inventively from Western codes in form (for example, being wholly positive) or content (for example, protecting local culture). (shrink)

As part of an article symposium on Partha Dasgupta and Sanjeev Goyal’s “Narrow Identities”, John B. Davis reflects on the variety of social identities and the implications this variety has for social identity analysis.

Freedom and the subject in Jean-Paul Sartre -- Freedom and necessity in Jacques Derrida -- Freedom and the subject in contemporary philosophy and theory -- Theorizing pathologies and therapeutics of freedom.

We analyze the effects of uncertainty on WTA, WTP and the WTA–WTP gap. Extending the approach of Weber (Econom Lett 80:311–315, 2003) to the case of lotteries, we develop an exact expression for the WTA–WTP gap that allows identification of its magnitude under different utility specifications. Reinterpreting and extending results by Gabillon(Econom Lett 116:157–160, 2012), we also identify generally the relationship between an agent’s utility of income and the gap’s algebraic sign, as well as the effects of risk increases on (...) WTA and WTP. Finally, we derive the limit behavior of the gap as income or risk increase. (shrink)