The 1800?4 scientific expedition that was commissioned by Bonaparte and captained by Nicolas Baudin was a vast note?producing machine. Recording information in the form of notes was indeed its mode of being. The expedition, conceived in the late eighteenth century, represents in its scope and achievements Enlightenment knowledge?gathering at its most ambitious: the exhaustive collection, measurement, description and classification of objects of the natural world. Aiming at encyclopædic inclusiveness and at the same time seeking accurate knowledge, the achievements of the (...) expedition were remarkable. Some 72,120 items (including drawings and writings) were brought back to France: raw material for future research, as well as quantities of notes, reports and narratives that in themselves constituted fragments of new knowledge about the natural world. Underpinning this plethora of note?taking was a particular understanding of what constituted science and the scientific enterprise at this time in post?Revolutionary France, and this understanding welded together both officers and naturalists in a common aim. The written traditions of sea?voyaging intersected with the reporting requirements of the emerging natural sciences, producing a unique social and intellectual interaction and cross?fertilisation, supported by the methods of recording. (shrink)

Through the use of particular pedagogies and the adoption of new modes of thinking, physical literacy promises more realistic models of physical competence and ...

Insight has been investigated under the assumption that participants solve insight problems with insight processes and/or experiences. A recent trend has involved presenting participants with the solution and analysing the resultant experience as if insight has taken place. We examined self-reports of the aha experience, a defining aspect of insight, before and after feedback, along with additional affective components of insight (e.g., pleasure, surprise, impasse). Classic insight problems, compound remote associates, and non-insight problems were randomly interleaved and presented to participants. (...) Solution feedback increased ratings of aha experience in both insight and non-insight problems, with this result being driven by responses to solutions that were initially incorrectly generated. Ratings of aha for correctly generated solutions decreased after the correct solution was presented. These findings have implications for insight research paradigms as well as informing teaching methods. (shrink)

Feminist discussions of ethics in the Western philosophical tradition range from critiques of the substance of dominant moral theories to critiques of the very practice of "doing ethics" itself. I argue that these critiques really target a certain historically specific model of ethics and moral theory-a "theoretical-juridical" one. I outline an "expressive-collaborative" conception of morality and ethics that could be a politically self-conscious and reflexively critical alternative.

David Lockwood's distinction between System Integration and Social Integration is brought together with the Morphogenetic Approach to account for the current societal fragmentation experience...

Despite its virtues, lay decision-making in medicine shares with professional decision-making a disturbing common feature, reflected both in formal policies prohibiting high-risk research and in informal policies favoring treatment decisions made when a crisis or change of status occurs, often late in a downhill course. By discouraging patient decision-making but requiring dedication to the patient's interests by those who make decisions on the patient's behalf, such practices tend to preclude altruistic choice on the part of the patient. This eclipse is (...) to be regretted not just because widescale altruism has the capacity to provide important social goods and correct injustices in distribution, but for intrinsic reasons as well. It is argued that preserving the possibility of altruism obliges patients – and future patients – to make decisions about dying and other medical matters in advance, thus avoiding that displacement of decision-making onto lay and professional second parties which results in altruism's eclipse. Keywords: altruism, medical decision-making, patient's interest, self-interest, autonomy, death and dying decisions, refusal of treatment, prolongation of life, allowing to die, high-risk research CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In a 1998 book, the psychologist Virginia Valian asked the question of her title, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women (Valian 1998). This question has become perennial specifically within the profession of philosophy, where the advancement, or just the representation, of women seems a bit worse than slow. While the past decades have seen advances in our numbers within professional philosophy, in recent years we seem to be stuck.

George Berkeley was born on 12 March 1685 in Ireland, in or near Kilkenny. Berkeley's education began in Kilkenny, at the Duke of Ormonde's school. Berkeley took his BA in 1704 and, while waiting for a fellowship vacancy, worked on some mathematical issues, the results of which he published in 1707 as Arithmetica and Miscellanea Mathematica. In 1709, he published his first significant work, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, rapidly followed in 1710 by A Treatise Concerning the (...) Principles of Human Knowledge. In 1724, Berkeley published A Proposal for the Better Supplying of Churches, in which he laid out his plans for his university, to be situated in Bermuda. There are several important lessons to be learned from Berkeley's continued involvement with The Querist throughout the period of his life at Cloyne. Dying at age 68, Berkeley can be said to have lived out close to his allotted three‐score‐and‐ten years. (shrink)

A "MIRACLE" IS AN OBSERVABLE EVENT INEXPLICABLE BY SCIENCE BUT EXPLICABLE IN TERMS OF SOME SUPERNATURAL AGENT. UNLESS ALL TALK OF SUPERNATURAL AGENCY IS MEANINGLESS, THIS CONCEPT SUCCESSFULLY DENOTES A (PERHAPS EMPTY) CLASS. DESPITE THE FALSIFIABILITY OF SCIENCE, IT MIGHT SOMETIMES BE REASONABLE TO DENY THE POSSIBILITY OF ANY FUTURE SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION OF A GIVEN EVENT. BUT THAT EVENT COULD BE CLASSIFIED AS A "MIRACLE" ONLY IF IT ACCORDED WITH CERTAIN MORAL AND THEOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE PARTICULAR SUPERNATURAL BEING SUPPOSED (...) ACTIVE. VARIOUS HYPOTHETICAL AGENTS MAY BE SUGGESTED; WHICH - IF ANY - OF THESE AGENTS MIGHT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE EVENT CAN BE DECIDED ONLY BY A CONCEPTUAL COMPARISON OF THE POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVES. THUS THE CLASSIFICATION OF AN EVENT AS A "MIRACLE" IS NOT A MATTER OF WHIM, BUT DEPENDS UPON THE PARTICULAR CONCEPT OF THE SUPERNATURAL CONCERNED. (shrink)

Moral psychology studies the features of cognition, judgement, perception and emotion that make human beings capable of moral action. Perspectives from feminist and race theory immensely enrich moral psychology. Writers who take these perspectives ask questions about mind, feeling, and action in contexts of social difference and unequal power and opportunity. These essays by a distinguished international cast of philosophers explore moral psychology as it connects to social life, scientific studies, and literature.

I defend moral objectivism against charges that it cannot plausibly preserve or explain morality's action-guiding nature. I take as my starting point the intuitive view that morality has a special connection to motivation: one who genuinely accepts a moral verdict must have a motivating reason to follow its dictates and, indeed, must often enough be motivated to act as it recommends. ;Many have argued that this connection vindicates subjectivism. Some argue that there can be no universally accessible truths whose acknowledgements (...) necessarily give one reason to act, because all reasons for action are based on desires that vary across rational agents. I argue against the Humean doctrine, implicit in this claim, that beliefs alone cannot move rational agents. The 18th-century metaphors of "passive" belief and "active" desire rest on arguments which either beg the question, equivocate, or misunderstand what would be involved in attributing the appropriate motivational power to belief. Others ground their objection in morality's holistic tie to desire, claiming that desires distort truth, rather than reveal it to us. I argue that there is nothing mysterious about the idea that possession of certain desires can be preconditions to seeing how things are. (shrink)

The posthumously published diaries and letters of Beauvoir and Sartre challenge the traditional account of Beauvoir as Sartre's philosophical follower. They show Sartre drawing on Beauvoir's account of relations with the Other in her metaphysical novel, She Came to Stay, as he began writing Being and Nothingness, and point to an unexplored Beauvoirean lineage of existentialism, including Bergson as well as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Husserl and Heidegger, and the African-American writer, Richard Wright.

Acts of martyrdom have been found in nearly all major religions. Though considered by devotees to be perhaps the greatest expression of faith, martyrdom is also one of the most difficult concepts for modern observers of religion to understand. Cormack seeks to foster a greater understanding of these acts by explaining how martyrdom has historically been viewed in the major religions. She provides the first cross-cultural examination of this fascinating aspect of religious life.

Journal of Religious Ethics, Volume 49, Issue 2, Page 219-225, June 2021.

Researchers who have attempted to collect and compare bilateral labor agreements have encountered varying degrees of accessibility of information on these agreements. Why is it harder to find out information on some bilateral labor agreements than others? In this Article, we argue that it is more difficult to find information and agreements tend to be more informal when governments want to obscure what they are doing. Building on insights from the study of optimal obfuscation in trade policy and research on (...) informal institutions in international politics, we argue that policymakers use more informal agreements and make it more difficult to find information on BLAs when they think they will be politically unpopular and are unlikely to be ratified. In contrast, leaders will be more likely to use formal agreements when they want to lock in a policy. Drawing on original quantitative data on the accessibility of information on bilateral labor agreements and Peters’ 2019 database on BLAs, the Article analyzes the accessibility of information on bilateral labor agreements and finds some support for our argument. (shrink)