Good academic practice is more than the avoidance of clear-cut cheating. It also involves navigation of the gray zones between cheating and good practice. The existing literature has left students’ understanding of gray zone practices largely unexplored. To begin filling in this gap, we present results from a questionnaire study involving N = 1639 undergraduate students from seven European countries representing all major disciplines. We show that large numbers of these students are unable to identify gray area (...) issues and lack sensitivity to the context dependence of these. We also show that a considerable proportion of students have a poor understanding of concepts like plagiarism and falsification, not only in gray zone scenarios, but also in cases of relatively clear-cut cheating. Our results are similar across the faculties and countries of study, and even for students who have attended academic integrity training. We discuss the implications of this for academic integrity training. (shrink)

Based on a popular legend in Gansu, the far western province of China, The Tortoise in Asia recounts the exploits of Marcus, a young Roman centurion schooled in the Greek classics who, after a devastating loss in a battle with the Parthians, is taken prisoner, marched along the Silk Road, and pressed into service as a border guard on the eastern frontier. After a daring escape, Marcus has many adventures working with the Hun army as a mercenary. Throughout (...) this harrowing journey, Marcus learns about Chinese philosophies, uncovering the startling similarities between these philosophies and those of Greece. (shrink)

Lawyers in many jurisdictions are ageing, and yet there is little information concerning the age profile of the legal profession. This paper presents the first consideration of the age profile of lawyers outside of the US, showing that Australian lawyers are ageing and delaying retirement. These findings have serious implications. Problems associated with a growing proportion of older lawyers include an increasing risk of lawyers suffering from age-related cognitive and physical impairment, and the related rise of complaints and malpractice claims (...) against older lawyers. It is also clear that the Australian legal profession is unprepared to address these problems. The legal profession has ignored important gender-specific implications of ageing, such as female lawyers experiencing menopause and the lower savings of female lawyers moving into retirement. Regulatory regimes have not considered the impact of the profession's ageing profile, and there is no mandatory reporting of lawyers suffering from age-related impairment or provisions should a lawyer die. The profession also has not provided strategies to positively transition lawyers into retirement, and there is a lack of flexible working arrangements and succession planning, especially in firms located outside urban centres. (shrink)

The paper begins with a description of a grey seal performing conspecific infanticide. The paper then gives an account of “nobleness” and “brutishness.” Roughly, a behavioural-disposition is noble/brutish if it is one that would be a moral virtue/vice if the possessor of the behavioural-disposition were a moral agent. The paper then advances two pairs of axiological claims. The first pair of claims is that nobleness is good and that brutishness is bad. The second pair of claims is about an axiological (...) interaction between nobleness/brutishness and well-being. That any non-human animal lacks well-being is bad. Yet, it is worse that a noble non-human animal lacks well-being, and not so bad that a brutish non-human animal lacks well-being. Lastly, the paper discusses some potential moral implications of these axiological claims, for instance that factory farming is especially wrong because it causes noble non-human animals to lack well-being. (shrink)

A Critical Review Given as part of a Symposium on Harfouch's Another Mind-Body Problem: A History of Racial Non-Being.

In this paper, I argue that philosophy’s potential to influence technological change is impeded by the presence of two common and influential myths surrounding technology—the myth of progress and the myth of technological determinism. Such myths, I suggest, hinder philosophy’s influence by presenting a distorted image of technology—respectively, as an unqualified good, and as an entity with its own autonomous logic. Steven Pinker and Martin Heidegger are selected as influential advocates for progress and technological determinism respectively, and their work is (...) explored in turn. The work of John Gray and of Herbert Marcuse is then employed to demythologise technology by articulating an alternative image of technology that is not just more accurate, but also more conducive to philosophical influence. Finally, the work of Hans Jonas and Luciano Floridi is used to ground the conclusion that, should philosophy wish to influence technological change, an effective method of doing so could be the articulation of ethical maxims and the supervision of their translation into a real world setting. (shrink)

School boosters are tax-exempt organizations that engage in fundraising efforts to provide public schools with supplementary resources. This paper argues that prevailing forms of school boosting are defeasibly unjust. Section 1 shows that inequalities in public education funding in the United States violate John Rawls’s two principles of domestic justice. Section 2 argues that prevailing forms of school boosting exacerbate and plausibly perpetuate these injustices. Section 3 then contends that boosting thereby defeasibly violates Rawlsian principles of nonideal theory for rectifying (...) injustice. Thus, boosting should be presumptively either made illegal or substantially reformed. Finally, Section 4 responds to potential objections. (shrink)

This article argues that if panpsychism is true, then there are grounds for thinking that digitally-based artificial intelligence may be incapable of having coherent macrophenomenal conscious experiences. Section 1 briefly surveys research indicating that neural function and phenomenal consciousness may be both analog in nature. We show that physical and phenomenal magnitudes—such as rates of neural firing and the phenomenally experienced loudness of sounds—appear to covary monotonically with the physical stimuli they represent, forming the basis for an analog relationship between (...) the three. Section 2 then argues that if this is true and micropsychism—the panpsychist view that phenomenal consciousness or its precursors exist at a microphysical level of reality—is also true, then human brains must somehow manipulate fundamental microphysical-phenomenal magnitudes in an analog manner that renders them phenomenally coherent at a macro level. However, Sect. 3 argues that because digital computation abstracts away from microphysical-phenomenal magnitudes—representing cognitive functions non-monotonically in terms of digits—digital computation may be inherently incapable of realizing coherent macroconscious experience. Thus, if panpsychism is true, digital AI may be incapable of achieving phenomenal coherence. Finally, Sect. 4 briefly examines our argument’s implications for Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory theory of consciousness, which we contend may need to be supplanted by a theory of macroconsciousness as analog microphysical-phenomenal information integration. (shrink)

Two leaders in the field offer a compelling analysis of the current state of the art and reveal the steps we must take to achieve a truly robust artificial intelligence. Despite the hype surrounding AI, creating an intelligence that rivals or exceeds human levels is far more complicated than we have been led to believe. Professors Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis have spent their careers at the forefront of AI research and have witnessed some of the greatest milestones in (...) the field, but they argue that a computer beating a human in Jeopardy! does not signal that we are on the doorstep of fully autonomous cars or superintelligent machines. The achievements in the field thus far have occurred in closed systems with fixed sets of rules, and these approaches are too narrow to achieve genuine intelligence. The real world, in contrast, is wildly complex and open-ended. How can we bridge this gap? What will the consequences be when we do? Taking inspiration from the human mind, Marcus and Davis explain what we need to advance AI to the next level, and suggest that if we are wise along the way, we won't need to worry about a future of machine overlords. If we focus on endowing machines with common sense and deep understanding, rather than simply focusing on statistical analysis and gatherine ever larger collections of data, we will be able to create an AI we can trust--in our homes, our cars, and our doctors' offices. Rebooting AI provides a lucid, clear-eyed assessment of the current science and offers an inspiring vision of how a new generation of AI can make our lives better. (shrink)

The paper argues that ‘All varieties of gratitude are only overall fitting when targeted towards agents,’ for instance that any variety of gratitude for the beautiful sunset is only overall fitting if a supernatural agent such as God exists. The first premise is that ‘Prepositional gratitude is overall fitting only when targeted towards agents.’ For this premise, intuitive judgments are offered. The second premise is that ‘Prepositional gratitude is the paradigmatic variety of gratitude.’ For this premise, an aspect of the (...) common consent of philosophers about gratitude is noted and the metaphysical basicness of prepositional gratitude is argued for. This gives the intermediate conclusion that ‘The paradigmatic variety of gratitude is overall fitting only when targeted towards agents.’ The fourth premise is that ‘If the paradigmatic variety of gratitude is overall fitting only when targeted towards agents, then all varieties of gratitude are overall fitting only when targeted towards agents.’ To supply the conditional of this premise, the Paradigmatic Fittingness Principle is offered, which states that ‘Paradigmatic emotions set the fittingness conditions for their non-paradigmatic varieties.’ This principle is argued for by noting that it vindicates some popular and plausible intuitive judgements and gives an error theory of why one might think that gratitude could be fittingly targeted towards non-agents, and by suggesting the absence of any other plausible source of fittingness conditions for non-paradigmatic emotions. (shrink)

Rigorous yet engaging and accessible, Introduction to Formal Logic with Philosophical Applications is composed of two parts. The first part provides a focused, "nuts-and-bolts" introduction to formal deductive logic that covers syntax, semantics, translation, and natural deduction forpropositional and predicate logics. The second part presents student-friendly essays on logic and its applications in philosophy and beyond, with writing prompts and suggestions for further reading.

Renaissance humanism.--Valla's Encomium of St. Thomas Aquinas and the humanist conception of Christian antiquity.--Machiavelli.

This paper interrogates and reclaims clown practices in children’s rehabilitation as ‘foolish.’ Attempts to legitimize and ‘take seriously’ clown practices in the health sciences frame the work of clowns as secondary to the ‘real’ work of medical professionals and diminish the ways clowns support emotional vulnerability and bravery with a willingness to fail and be ridiculous as fundamental to their work. Narrow conceptualizations of clown practices in hospitals as only happy and funny overlook the ways clowns also routinely engage with (...) sadness, despair, discomfort and many other ways of being and doing. Our exploration of clown practices as foolish exposes the ways children’s rehabilitation upholds particular neoliberal models of success and invites a re-centring of rehabilitation and health care research and practice towards relationship building, supporting meaningful projects and a continued nurturing of aesthetic and pleasurable ways of being-in-the-world in the present moment as valuable unto themselves. (shrink)

"Originally published in 2015 by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, Great Britain"--Title page verso.

This manuscript departs strongly from conventional accounts that ascribe a central role to war and the threat of war in Third World state building. Similarly, it challenges the conventional wisdom that abundant exportable natural resource wealth is likely to provoke institutional atrophy. Instead, it argues that a set of logically prior conditions—the social relations that govern the principal economic sectors and the pattern or intraelite conflict or compromise—launch path-dependent processes that help determine when, and if, either strategic conflict or resource (...) wealth contribute to, or impede, institutional development. The argument is tested in the comparative analysis of the state-building process in two Andean neighbors, both of which are situated in similar strategic and natural resource environments but which produced qualitatively different outcomes in terms of state capacity or “strength.”. (shrink)

This article shows how, in recent works of cultural analysis, the concept of ‘assemblage’ has been been derived from key sources of theory and put to work to provide a structure-like surrogate to express certain prominent values of a modernist sensibility in the discourse of description and analysis. Assemblage is a sort of anti-structural concept that permits the researcher to speak of emergence, heterogeneity, the decentred and the ephemeral in nonetheless ordered social life. There are other related concepts, like collage, (...) which have been used to give these values substance in research, but currently assemblage is enjoying a popularity perhaps because of the continuing fascination of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. (shrink)

In todays advanced society, there is rising concern for data privacy and the diminution thereof on the internet. I argue from the position that for one to enjoy privacy, one must be able to effectively exercise autonomous action. I offer in this paper a survey of the many ways in which persons autonomy is severely limited due to a variety of privacy invasions that come not only through the use of modern technological apparatuses, but as well simply by existing in (...) an advanced technological society. I conclude that regarding the majority of persons whose privacy is violated, such a violations are actually initiated and upheld by the users of modern technology themselves, and that ultimately, most disruptions of privacy that occur are self-levied. (shrink)

A summary of common arguments for belief in God - teleological, cosmological, ontological, and reformed epistemology.

A popular introduction to common consent arguments for belief in God.

This collection of Marcus's non-technical essays include her earlier ground-breaking axiomatizations of quantified modal logic, and explore such topics as the necessity of identity, the directly referential role of proper names as "tags", the interplay of possibility and existence, and others viewed as iconoclastic when Marcus first addressed them, but now long incorporated into current discussion.

It has been a common claim that surrogacy is morally problematic since it involves harm to the child or the surrogate—the harm argument. Due to a growing body of empirical research, the harm argument has seen a decrease in popularity, as there seems to be little evidence of harmful consequences of surrogacy. In this article, two revised versions of the harm argument are developed. It is argued that the two suggested versions of the harm argument survive the current criticism against (...) the standard harm argument. The first version argues that the child is harmed by being separated from the gestational mother. The second version directs attention to the fact that surrogacy involves great incentives to keep the gestational mother’s level of maternal-fetal attachment low, which tend to increase the risk of harm to the child. While neither of the two arguments is conclusive regarding the moral status of surrogacy, both constitute important considerations that are often ignored. (shrink)

Rogers & McClelland's (R&M's) précis represents an important effort to address key issues in concepts and categorization, but few of the simulations deliver what is promised. We argue that the models are seriously underconstrained, importantly incomplete, and psychologically implausible; more broadly, R&M dwell too heavily on the apparent successes without comparable concern for limitations already noted in the literature.

Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science VII.

Clinical populations sometimes demonstrate difficulties forgetting stimuli related to their trauma-related disorder, perhaps because their intense personal connection to these stimuli produce deficits in the inhibitory control abilities necessary for forgetting. The present work examined this possibility for people who have high levels of traits implicated in borderline personality disorder (BPD). In two well-powered studies, we found no evidence for deficits in forgetting specific to BPD traits, even for people with clinically significant levels of the traits, contrary to previous studies. (...) The present experiments updated the designs from earlier experiments to employ the most contemporary methods to examine directed forgetting recommended by recent reviews. With these improved methods, Study 1 found that participants showed significant directed forgetting for BPD-related words independent of their level of BPD traits, perhaps because the BPD-related words were so strongly associated with one another. Study 2 found that when we removed the strong relatedness between the stimuli, forgetting of BPD-relevant words was significant and did not interact with BPD symptomology. We concluded that in contrast to people with PTSD who show specific inhibitory deficits for trauma-related works, people with BPD show normal, intact inhibitory control even for words that they should find threatening. (shrink)

Democracies that appoint legislators through elections in territorially defined, sub-national constituencies and simultaneously enfranchise expatriate citizens must either assign expatriate voters to in-country constituencies (assimilated representation) or group them into distinct overseas constituencies that elect their own legislators (discrete representation). This essay critically reviews extant normative discussions of the two models and develops a normative analysis of its own. This suggests that when expatriates form but a small part of a democracy’s overall demos, discrete representation is the more attractive model (...) of expatriate representation as it overall better satisfies four important standards of evaluation, namely: equal opportunities for political influence, deliberation within the legislature, deliberation among constituents, and partisan voter mobilisation. This argument is also defended against the potential objections that the said standards can be satisfied by other means than discrete expatriate representation and that the defence of discrete expatriate representation implies a proliferation of special constituencies. (shrink)

There is an increasing suspicion that Multiple Personality Disorder is one extreme along a continuum of dissociative phenomena, ranging from children’s pretend play and dreams at one end, through borderline personality disorder, posttraumatic stress syndrome, dissociative disorders not originally specified to a severe and complete personality fragmentation at the other. In this essay, we address the questions of whether a continuum view is correct and how to characterize the differences among the various disorders through distinguishing multiplex from multiple selves. This (...) analysis has implications for how the symptoms of MPD should be characterized and treated as well as shedding some light on the relation between conscious experience and selfhood. (shrink)

This book offers a re-examination of the evidence about citizens' capacity for self-governance and what it means for the future of democratic politics, from both empirical and normative perspectives. Are ordinary citizens capable of governing themselves? For more than three decades, social scientists have accumulated evidence of the undemocratic propensities of many ordinary citizens. This has caused some to worry about the stability of existing democratic institutions, while others argue that the institutions themselves are the problem: politics needs to be (...) democratized further, giving citizens more opportunities to practice democratic politics and acquire democratic values. The thirty-three contributors to this volume enter this debate with new evidence on citizens' capacity for deliberative politics. They argue that previous methods of investigation significantly underestimate people's ability to govern themselves, and that the prospects for democracy are better than conventional wisdom suggests. Realization of these prospects will depend on citizens grasping the interplay of emotions and reason in political life, creating new opportunities for citizen deliberation, and reinvigorating the institutions of representative government. Theories of democracy in turn will have to accommodate this changing reality as citizens show themselves to be self-determining in their political activities. (shrink)