This paper applies Greco-Roman thinking about wisdom to contemporary business and management practice. The first section outlines the contexts in which Greek and Roman writers referred to wisdom and related terms. Hesiod, Aeschylus, Pericles, Demosthenes, Plato and Aristotle were concerned with sophia and phronésis. Cicero, Horace and Seneca referred to prudentia and sapientia. The second section consists of examples from contemporary business and management behaviour which ranged from the “cunning/clever to the intelligently wise”. Reference is made to current research (...) highlighting concepts such as commonsense wisdom, conventional wisdom, contrarian wisdom and experienced based wisdom. A wise person knows how to use moral skills in the service of the right aims.1. (shrink)

Focused sequent calculi are a refinement of sequent calculi, where additional side-conditions on the applicability of inference rules force the implementation of a proof search strategy. Focused cut-free proofs exhibit a special normal form that is used for defining identity of sequent calculi proofs. We introduce a novel focused display calculus fD.LG and a fully polarized algebraic semantics FP.LG\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbb {FP.LG}$$\end{document} for Lambek–Grishin logic by generalizing the theory of multi-type calculi and their (...) algebraic semantics with heterogenous consequence relations. The calculus fD.LG has strong focalization and it is sound and complete w.r.t. FP.LG\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\mathbb {FP.LG}$$\end{document}. This completeness result is in a sense stronger than completeness with respect to standard polarized algebraic semantics, insofar as we do not need to quotient over proofs with consecutive applications of shifts over the same formula. We also show a number of additional results. fD.LG is sound and complete w.r.t. LG-algebras: this amounts to a semantic proof of the so-called completeness of focusing, given that the standard (display) sequent calculus for Lambek–Grishin logic is complete w.r.t. LG-algebras. fD.LG and the focused calculus fLG of Moortgat and Moot are equivalent with respect to proofs, indeed there is an effective translation from fLG-derivations to fD.LG-derivations and vice versa: this provides the link with operational semantics, given that every fLG-derivation is in a Curry–Howard correspondence with a directional λ¯μμ~\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\overline{\lambda }\mu \widetilde{\mu }$$\end{document}-term. (shrink)

Western philosophy’s relationship with prisons stretches from Plato’s own incarceration to the modern era of mass incarceration. Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration draws together a broad range of philosophical thinkers, from both inside and outside prison walls, in the United States and beyond, who draw on a variety of critical perspectives (including phenomenology, deconstruction, and feminist theory) and historical and contemporary figures in philosophy (including Kant, Hegel, Foucault, and Angela Davis) to think about (...) prisons in this new historical era. All of these contributors have experiences within prison walls: some are or have been incarcerated, some have taught or are teaching in prisons, and all have been students of both philosophy and the carceral system. The powerful testimonials and theoretical arguments are appropriate reading not only for philosophers and prison theorists generally, but also for prison reformers and abolitionists. (shrink)

The author argues that ancient Skepticism may be most suited to deal with two crises in the Age of COVID-19: both the physical or epidemiological aspects of the pandemic, and the epistemological and ethical crisis of increasing disbelief in the sciences. Following Michel Bitbol, I suggest one way to mitigate this crisis of faith may be for science to become more epistemically modest, renouncing some of its claims to describe reality as it objectively is, and adopting an “intransitive” rather than (...) a “transitive” approach to Nature. This was the attitude adopted by the Greco-Roman medical school of the Empirics, which may also be of assistance in combatting the urgent problem of Fake News. The epistemology of Skepticism and the scientific methodology of the closely related Medical Empiricism shows that an epistemically modest, non-interventionist approach to science is quite compatible with a robust and sophisticated proto-experimental scientific methodology. (shrink)

The author argues that ancient Skepticism may be most suited to deal with two crises in the Age of COVID-19: both the physical or epidemiological aspects of the pandemic, and the epistemological and ethical crisis of increasing disbelief in the sciences. Following Michel Bitbol, I suggest one way to mitigate this crisis of faith may be for science to become more epistemically modest, renouncing some of its claims to describe reality as it objectively is, and adopting an “intransitive” rather than (...) a “transitive” approach to Nature. This was the attitude adopted by the Greco-Roman medical school of the Empirics, which may also be of assistance in combatting the urgent problem of Fake News. The epistemology of Skepticism and the scientific methodology of the closely related Medical Empiricism shows that an epistemically modest, non-interventionist approach to science is quite compatible with a robust and sophisticated proto-experimental scientific methodology. (shrink)

In a poem setting forth the way things are in nature, it is fitting for Lucretius to address, among many other phenomena, human conception and embryonic determination. With an eye toward ethics, Lucretius demonstrates how sexual reproduction at the seminal level can be explained by Epicurean atomism. In this paper, I am concerned with the biological ‘how’ of conception as explained inDe Rerum Natura(=DRN) but also with the ethical ‘therefore’ for Lucretius’ readership and (over)estimations of male autonomy. For modern audiences (...) with a basic grasp of procreation that includes sperm supplied by a male and egg supplied by a female, encountering Lucretius’ verses on women contributing semen (semina) to the process of conception can be surprising (4.1209–62). The idea of female semen may give us pause as we calibrate it with our understanding of eggs and ovulation, but Lucretius, in his time, was not advancing some novel theory. Wading into established debates on male-only or joint male-female semen production and gendered insemination (that is, who produces semen and whose semen is active at conception), Lucretius sides with those promulgating mutuality for both questions (for example Democritus [DK 24 A13]) and rejects Aristotle's representative exclusivist claim of male activity vs female passivity (τὸ ἄρρεν ἐστὶν ὡς κινοῦν καὶ ποιοῦν, τὸ δὲ θῆλυ ὡς παθητικόν,Gen. an.729a28–30; cf. 726a30–6). That is to say, a sexually mature female, like her male counterpart, emits semen that has determining potency in the formation of a human embryo (Lucr. 4.1209–62). Although the discharge and activity of female semen is the focus of this paper, my investigation is not aQuellenforschungor historical survey of Greco-Roman ideas about women's contributions to insemination and fertility, since others have treated these matters extensively. I concentrate rather on how Lucretius employs the concept of female semen in terms of his poetics in Book 4 and what I see as an ethical argument against the domineering nature of Roman masculinity. The problem of female semen, from the point of view of Lucretius’ Roman male audience, is that it is potentially costly to men because it rivals and threatens their status from the physiological to the discursive level. Iain Lonie broaches the same issue from Greek perspectives. (shrink)

Accepting Cole's the premise that, “cultural-inclusive psychology has been … an elusive goal” but one worth striving to attain, I first set out to identify my domain of interest and competence as an intellectual. Deciding it to be social interaction between individuals, I then searched out theoretical approaches to this domain that encompassed as many approaches to this trans-historical concern that have emerged from cultural traditions bequeathing us their legacies. Doing this search comprehensively required me to move outside my Judeo-Christian, (...) Greco-Roman, Renaissance heritage and its international diffusion via the European Empires since the 1500's, embodied most recently the American dominance of intellectual discourse since the Second World War. In my case, this journey has taken me in to Chinese culture and psychology where I have worked towards integrating the Chinese worldview and its psychological measures into the discipline of social psychology. Striving for a more inclusive culture-view, I am now using multi-cultural data bases to transcend this two-cultural focus and incorporate wider measures of cultural variation into our theorizing and empirical validation of universal models for social interaction. This paper describes my current procedures for such culture-mapping. (shrink)

Should one use philosophy in service of religion? I argue that Dionysius the Areopagite gives a negative answer to this question. The relevant text is Dionysius’ Letter 7, in which he explains why he does not use philosophy to attack Greco-Roman paganism. Philosophy, according to Dionysius, is something divine. In fact, in Letter 7 he goes so far as to identify philosophy with what St. Paul calls the “wisdom of God.” As a result, philosophy should not be treated as (...) a tool to be used in service of anything, even the true religion, which Dionysius of course identifies with Christianity. In order to elucidate Dionysius’ position, I provide a detailed account of how he understands philosophy, religion (thrêskeia), and use (chraô). (shrink)

© The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] is the point of epistemic evaluation? Why do we appraise others as knowers, understanders and so forth? Epistemology has traditionally focused on analysing the conditions under which one has knowledge, leaving aside for the most part questions about the roles played by epistemic evaluation in our lives more broadly. This fact is borne out by the so-called Gettier (...) literature. For decades, epistemologists have attempted to ferret out the necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge, but few have asked why knowledge would have the features suggested by conceptual analysis. Suppose, for example, that knowledge really is non-lucky justified true belief. Why would this be? What use do we have for a concept that is demarcated by those conditions? Is there something abhorrent about coming... (shrink)

The Asiatick Society of Bengal, founded by Sir William Jones in Calcutta in 1784, blazed the trails and mapped them for subsequent travellers in the discipline now called the comparative study of civilizations. This paper analyzes Jones' Presidential addresses to show how the founding of the Asiatick Society reflected and at the same time influenced a new conception of human history, whose cultural and political manifestations had to encompass much more than the Greco-Roman and Judaeo- Christian world. This essay (...) brings Jones' works to our attention and should make us more aware of the importance of his work for the comparative study of civilizations and cultures. (shrink)

This is a study of ethical and moral behavior, or perhaps unethical behavior, in two different societies. One society, contemporary Australia and in particular the state of Western Australia, is currently undergoing an exhaustive Royal Commission into the shenanigans of a number of well-known business men and former leading politicians who seem to have been playing fast and loose with large amounts of other peoples' money. While this was initially the major focus of the paper, a secondary focus developed based (...) on the interest shown in acquiring an historical background by a group of business policy students. The opportunity to acquire an appreciation of historical events and in particular, the development of a sense of history seems to be lacking in the curricula of modern day business students. The secondary focus of the paper therefore illustrated that malfeasance, misfeasance and other forms of malpractice in business and administration were just as common in Greco-Roman times as today. In this context, reference has been made to a selection of the writings of some of the more well-known writers of this period. The paper ends on a nonpositive note, raising the (rhetorical) question, that if, after two thousand years people are still continuing to engage in sharp business practices whenever the occasion arises is there any point in developing and offering courses in moral behavior and business ethics? (shrink)

I argue in this essay that Stoic philosophers in the late Greco-Roman period utilized philosophical exercises and spiritual technologies similar in form to a meditative exercise currently practiced in Buddhism. I begin with an in-depth discussion of moral development in the late Stoa, focusing particularly on their theories of cosmopolitanism and oikeiōsis. These theoretical commitments, I argue, necessitated the adoption of exercises and practices designed to guide practitioners toward the goal of universal moral concern. Using insights gained from Buddhist (...) practice, I identify passages in Stoic texts that call for and prescribe moral exercise. While much work in comparative philosophy compares the content of diverse philosophical theories, the form that these theories take can also be compared. Stoic philosophy was viewed as a “way of life” by many ancient philosophers, and thus their philosophical views share several formal characteristics with Buddhist religious practices. The primary good realized by this comparison, I conclude, is to outline the ways in which Greco-Roman philosophies can be enriched by reading these theories in light of the lived, practical traditions that characterize Buddhist thought. (shrink)

Science and philosophy study well-being with different but complementary methods. Marry these methods and a new picture emerges: To have well-being is to be "stuck" in a positive cycle of emotions, attitudes, traits and success. This book unites the scientific and philosophical worldviews into a powerful new theory of well-being.

This collective article discusses the philosophy of modern higher education in Iran, which in this case, optimistically, its history dates back to the founding of Dār al-fonūn —if we consider Dār al-fonūn as a university. Otherwise, its origin can be traced back to the University of Tehran. Central to this article is the emphasis on the lack of philosophy of higher education in Iran. Therefore, most of the criticisms in front of us are related to the internal inconsistency in the (...) Iranian higher education system due to the lack of a national-indigenized-official philosophy of higher education in Iran. Furthermore, The Islamic Revolution of 1979 brought about fundamental changes in higher education. Accordingly, several controversial issues including the rapid growth of higher education, the Islamization of universities, cultural narratives in higher education, the increase in students, especially women and the low-income class of the country were also explored. Therefore, in this collection, the political, economic, social, cultural, moral, technological and historical dimensions of Iranian higher education were examined. (shrink)

We consider relational databases organized over an ordered domain with some additional relations — a typical example is the ordered domain of rational numbers together with the operation of addition. In the focus of our study are the first-order queries that are invariant under order-preserving “permutations” — such queries are called order-generic. It has recently been discovered that for some domains order-generic FO queries fail to express more than pure order queries. For example, every order-generic FO query over rational numbers (...) with + can be rewritten without +. For some other domains, however, this is not the case.We provide very general conditions on the FO theory of the domain that ensure the collapse of order-generic extended FO queries to pure order queries over this domain: the Pseudo-finite Homogeneity Property and a stronger Isolation Property. We further distinguish one broad class of domains satisfying the Isolation Property, the so-called quasi-o-minimal domains. This class includes all the o-minimal domains, but also the ordered group of integer numbers and the ordered semigroup of natural numbers, and some other domains.An important difference of this paper from the recent series of related papers is that we generalize all the notions to the case of finitely representable database states — as opposed to finite states — and develop a general lifting technique that, essentially, allows us to extend any result of the kind we are interested in, from finite to finitely representable states. We show, however, that these results cannot be transfered to arbitrary infinite states. (shrink)

One way of increasing the supply of vital organs without violating the dead donor rule is to declare death on cardiopulmonary criteria after withdrawing life support. The question then is how quickly death may be declared.

Alison Gopnik and Andrew Meltzoff have argued for a view they call the ‘theory theory’: theory change in science and children are similar. While their version of the theory theory has been criticized for depending on a number of disputed claims, we argue that there is a fundamental problem which is much more basic: the theory theory is multiply ambiguous. We show that it might be claiming that a similarity holds between theory change in children and (i) individual scientists, (ii) (...) a rational reconstruction of a Superscientist, or (iii) the scientific community. We argue that (i) is false, (ii) is non-empirical (which is problematic since the theory theory is supposed to be a bold empirical hypothesis), and (iii) is either false or doesn’t make enough sense to have a truth-value. We conclude that the theory theory is an interesting failure. Its failure points the way to a full, empirical picture of scientific development, one that marries a concern with the social dynamics of science to a psychological theory of scientific cognition. (shrink)

At almost every election, Americans are inclined to say that this is the most consequential election in American history. 2020 is no exception. However, what is particularly remarkable about the No...

This paper outlines and reviews three forms and associated discourses of the 'knowledge economy': the 'learning economy', based on the work of Bengt-Åke Lundvall; the 'creative economy' based on the work of Charles Landry, John Howkins and Richard Florida; and the 'open knowledge economy' based on the work of Yochai Benkler and others. Arguably, these three forms and discourses represent three recent related but different conceptions of the knowledge economy, each with clear significance and implications for education and education policy. (...) The last provides a model of radically non-propertarian form that incorporates both 'open education' and 'open science' economies. (shrink)

Since the nineteenth century, the debate around the process of professionalization of higher education has been characterized by two extreme positions. For some critics the process carries the risks of instrumentalizing knowledge and of leading the university to succumb under the demands of the market or the state; for other theorists it represents a concrete opportunity for the university to open up to the real needs of society and for reorienting theoretical and fragmented disciplines towards the resolution of concrete and (...) challenging problems. This article pursues three objectives. Firstly, we show that the debate is usefully informed not only by ideas of what a university is, but also by ideas of a profession. We suggest that both ideas help to overcome the conflict between the two afore-mentioned antagonist perspectives. Secondly, we demonstrate that a certain understanding of a profession can prevent the risk of viewing knowledge exclusively as scientific expertise and reducing training to the acquisition of technical skills. The position on professions adopted here is inspired by the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, whose work is instructive in understanding professions as “rational practical activities”, embedded in a social context with their own internal goods. Our third objective, therefore, is to argue, with MacIntyre, that the presence of professions within the university opens up the opportunity to rescue forms of rationality that are oriented towards action and, by implication, promotes spaces of training that are resistant to exclusively corporate or governmental interests and criteria of mere effectiveness. (shrink)

The mechanisms by which most receptor protein‐tyrosine kinases (RTKs) transmit signals are now well established. Binding of ligand results in the dimerization of receptor monomers followed by transphosphorylation of tyrosine residues within the cytoplasmic domains of the receptors. This tidy picture has, however, some strange characters lurking around the edges. Cases have now been identified in which RTKs lack kinase activity, but, despite being “dead” appear to have roles in signal transduction. Even stranger are the cases in which genes encoding (...) RTKs produce protein products consisting of only a portion of the kinase domain. At least one such “fractured” RTK appears to be involved in signal transduction. Here we describe how these strange molecules might function and discuss the questions associated with their evolution. BioEssays 23:69–76, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The late antique and early medieval Mediterranean was characterized by wide-ranging cultural and linguistic diversity. Yet, under the influence of Christianity, communities in the Mediterranean world were bound together by common concepts of good rulership, which were also shaped by Greco-Roman, Persian, Caucasian, and other traditions. This collection of essays examines ideas of good Christian rulership and the debates surrounding them in diverse cultures and linguistic communities. It grants special attention to communities on the periphery, such as the Caucasus (...) and Nubia, and some essays examine non-Christian concepts of good rulership to offer a comparative perspective. As a whole, the studies in this volume reveal not only the entanglement and affinity of communities around the Mediterranean but also areas of conflict among Christians and between Christians and other cultural traditions. By gathering various specialized studies on the overarching question of good rulership, this volume highlights the possibilities of placing research on classical antiquity and early medieval Europe into conversation with the study of eastern Christianity. (shrink)

What does reflection on educational theory and education today actually aim at, if theory and practice can no longer be formulated as a unity? This article describes the German discourse of educational philosophy and outlines its critical view discussing the “limits of understanding subjectivity”. In the following parts it is argued that the philosophy of education of the future will encompass an “economy” as well as an “ecology” of pedagogical or educational knowledge. Here, analyses of contemporary educational practices are brought (...) together with the invention and discovery of other or alternative possibilities. (shrink)

This first volume focuses on a collection of texts from the latter twenty years of Educational Philosophy and Theory, selected for their critical status as turning points or important awakenings in post-structural theory. In the last twenty years, the applications of the postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives have become less mono-focused, less narrowly concerned with technical questions and also less interested in epistemology, and more interested in ethics. This book covers questions of genealogy, ontology, the body and the institution, giving examples (...) of theoretical applications of post-structural theory that testify to the generative and endlessly applicable potential of this work to different fields and avenues of thought. While informed by Foucault’s thinking of the political subjugation of docile bodies to individuals as self-determining beings, the chapters in this book culminate in amalgamations of different schools of educational philosophy, which explore poststructuralist approaches to education. Beyond the Philosophy of the Subject will be key reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of philosophy of education, philosophy, education, educational theory, post-structural theory, the policy and politics of education, and the pedagogy of education. (shrink)

Michael Peters, Sonja Arndt & Marek TesarThis is a collective writing experiment of PESA members, including its Executive Committee, asking questions of the Philosophy of Education in a New Key. Co...

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal UniversityThe ancient concept of ‘self-cultivation’ with its roots in Confucianism and Hellenistic philosophy can also be utilised as tool for understanding the prac...

[This editorial is part of the 50th celebration issue that explored ‘what comes after postmodernism in educational theory. The special issue is being published as a monograph and this is our group...

Positions in dialogic dispute are presented enthymematically. It is important to explore the position the disputant holds. A model is offered which relies on the presentation of a counter-example to an inferred missing premiss. The example may be: [A+J embraced as falling under the rule; [A-] rejected as basically changing the position; or, [R] rejected as changing the proffered missing premiss. In each case the offered model indicates the next appropriate action. The focus of the model is on uncovering the (...) position actually held by the disputant as opposed to identifying the "logically correct" enthymematic premiss. (shrink)

Humans are fundamentally social and tend to create emergent organizations when interacting with each other; from dyads to families, small groups, large groups, societies and civilizations. The study of the neuronal substrate of human social behavior is currently gaining momentum in the young field of social neuroscience. Hyperscanning is a neuroimaging technique by which we can study two or more brain simultaneously while participants interact with each other. The aim of this article is to discuss several factors that we deem (...) important in designing hyperscanning experiments. We first review hyperscanning studies performed by means of electroencephalography (EEG) that have been relying on a continuous interaction paradigm. Then, we provide arguments for favoring ecological paradigms, for studying the emotional component of social interactions and for performing longitudinal studies, the last two aspects being largely neglected so far in the hyperscanning literature despite their paramount importance in social sciences. Based on these premises we argue that music performance is a suitable experimental setting for hyperscanning and that for such studies EEG is an appropriate choice as neuroimaging modality. (shrink)