Aberrant consumer behaviour costs firms millions of pounds a year, and the Internet has provided young techno-literate consumers with a new medium to exploit businesses. This paper addresses Internet related ethics and describes the ways in which young consumers misdemean on the Internet and their attitudes towards these. Using a sample of 219 generation Y consumers, the study identified 24 aberrant behaviours which grouped into five factors; illegal, questionable activities, hacking related, human Internet trade and downloading. Those perceived as least (...) wrong were; "Downloading movie and music files from the Internet for free". The consequences of these behaviours have implications for educators, consumer policy and marketers. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide an easy road to nominalism which does not rely on a Field-type nominalization strategy for mathematics. According to this proposal, applications of mathematics to science, and alleged mathematical explanations of physical phenomena, only emerge when suitable physical interpretations of the mathematical formalism are advanced. And since these interpretations are rarely distinguished from the mathematical formalism, the impression arises that mathematical explanations derive from the mathematical formalism alone. I correct this misimpression by pointing out, in the (...) cases recently discussed by Mark Colyvan, exactly where the interpretations of the formalism were invoked and the function they played in the resulting explanations. A viable form of easy - road nominalism, which is also sensitive to scientific practice, then arises. (shrink)

G. A. Cohen has argued that there is a surprising truth in conservatism—namely, that there is a reason for some valuable things to be preserved, even if they could be replaced with other, more valuable things. This conservative thesis is motivated, Cohen suggests, by our judgments about a range of hypothetical cases. After reconstructing Cohen's conservative thesis, I argue that the relevant judgments about these cases do not favor the conservative thesis over standard, nonconservative axiological views. But I then argue (...) that there is a Mirrored Histories case that is such that, if one shares Cohen's conservative attitude, judgments about this case favor Cohen's conservative thesis over a wide range of non-conservative axiological views. Reflection on this case also suggests a different explanation of apparently conservative judgments that merits consideration in its own right. (shrink)

O. R. Jones; VIII—Things Known Without Observation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 61, Issue 1, 1 June 1961, Pages 129–150, https://doi.org/10.

I propose a theory of freedom of choice on which it is a variable quality of individual conscious choices that has several dimensions that admit of degrees, even though - as many theorists have traditionally supposed - it also has as a necessary condition the possession of a capacity that is all or nothing. I argue that the proposed account better fits the phenomenology of ostensibly free actions, as well as empirical findings in the human sciences.

Book description: * Seventeen brand-new essays by leading philosophers and psychologists * Genuinely interdisciplinary work, at the forefront of both fields * Includes a valuable introduction, uniting common threads Leading philosophers and psychologists join forces to investigate a set of problems to do with agency and self-awareness, in seventeen specially written essays. In recent years there has been much psychological and neurological work purporting to show that consciousness and self-awareness play no role in causing actions, and indeed to demonstrate that (...) free will is an illusion. The essays in this volume subject the assumptions that motivate such claims to sustained interdisciplinary scrutiny. Patients with Anarchic Hand syndrome sometimes find their hands perform apparently goal-directed actions which the patients disown, yet seem to be unable to suppress (for example, reaching out for someone else's food in a restaurant). On the face of it, these patients lack the kind of control and self-awareness we ordinarily take ourselves to have when acting intentionally. Questions raised by this phenomenon include: What is involved in being aware of an action as one's own? What is the nature of the control these patients are lacking and which characterizes normal intentional actions? What is the relation between a priori explanations of consciousness and self-consciousness, on the one hand, and empirical work on the information-processing mechanisms involved in action control, on the other? Questions of action control and self-awareness tend to be treated separately in both philosophy and psychology. The central idea behind this volume is that outstanding unresolved issues on both topics, and in both disciplines, can only be resolved by an interdisciplinary examination of the relations between them. The editors' useful introductory essay offers a guide to cross-disciplinary reading of the contributions, and makes connections between them explicit. The book will be compulsory reading for psychologists and philosophers working on action explanation, and for anyone interested in the relation between the brain sciences and consciousness. (shrink)

This paper advances the thesis that sensory concepts have as a semantic component the first-person indexical. It is argued that the private nature of our access to our own sensations forces, in our talking about them, an indexical reference to the inner states of the speaker in lieu of publicly accessible properties by which reference is usually fixed. Indexicals, such as ‘here’, can be understood despite ignorance of their referent. Such is the case with sensory terms. Furthermore, the thesis that (...) sensory terms are indexical has considerable explanatory power. I give two examples: firstly, I argue that clashes of intuition over Block's ‘inverted spectrum’ thought experiment can be explained by appeal to semantic properties of indexicals. Secondly, I argue that multiple realisability intuitions can be shown to be consistent with the view that sensations are type-identical with brain states. (shrink)

For the Enlightenment, science represented an ideal of rational argument, behaviour and community against which could be judged the arbitrary power and authority of other spheres of human practice. This Enlightenment ideal runs through much liberal and socialist theory. However, the Enlightenment picture of science has appeared to many to be increasingly uncompelling. What explains the apparent decline of the Enlightenment vision? This book explores one neglected answer originally proposed by Husserl, that its decline is rooted in formalism, in the (...) view that all there is to theoretical science is the construction and mastery of formal systems. O'Neill demonstrates formalist accounts of mathematics and natural science to be inadequate, and then considers and rejects Husserl's views on the origin of the formalization of the sciences. The book concludes by arguing that the rise of a formalist view of the sciences is founded in the professionalization of modern science, and discusses the significance of this professionalization for the fate of the Enlightenment view of science. Worlds Without Content: Against Formalism tackles an important set of issues which have been neglected in recent philosophy of science, and in so doing highlights themes in Husserl's later works which have been ignored by most commentators. It will be of particular interest for philosophers of mathematics, science and social theory, and for historians of mathematics and philosophy. (shrink)

Although the idea of the public interest features prominently in many accounts of deliberative democracy, the relationship between deliberative democracy and the public interest is rarely spelt out with any degree of precision. In this article, I identify and defend one particular way of framing this relationship. I begin by arguing that people can deliberate about the public interest only if the public interest is, in principle, identifiable independently of their deliberations. Of course, some pluralists claim that the public interest (...) is an implausible idea, which casts doubt on the idea that there might be something for people to deliberate about. Yet while, following Brian Barry, we can get around this problem by defining the public interest as an interest in which everyone shares qua member of the public, what still needs to be explained is why people should be prepared to privilege this particular capacity. I argue that the account of political equality with which deliberative democracy is bound up offers a compelling explanation of this sort, even if it also gives rise to some difficult questions of feasibility. I conclude by considering the charge that any political scheme that framed the relationship between deliberative democracy and the public interest in this way would be undesirable. (shrink)

This paper is a survey of standards being used in the domain of digital cultural heritage with focus on the Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard created by the Library of Congress in the United States of America. The process of digitization of cultural heritage requires silo breaking in a number of areas—one area is that of academic disciplines to enable the performance of rich interdisciplinary work. This lays the foundation for the emancipation of the second form of silo which are (...) the silos of knowledge, both traditional and born digital, held in individual institutions, such as galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Disciplinary silo breaking is the key to unlocking these institutional knowledge silos. Interdisciplinary teams, such as developers and librarians, work together to make the data accessible as open data on the “semantic web”. Description logic is the area of mathematics which underpins many ontology building applications today. Creating these ontologies requires a human–machine symbiosis. Currently in the cultural heritage domain, the institutions’ role is that of provider of this open data to the national aggregator which in turn can make the data available to the trans-European aggregator known as Europeana. Current ingests to the aggregators are in the form of machine readable cataloguing metadata which is limited in the richness it provides to disparate object descriptions. METS can provide this richness. (shrink)

Quantum state teleportation has focused attention on the role of quantum information. Here we examine quantum teleportation through the Bohm interpretation. This interpretation introduced the notion of active information and we show that it is this information that is exchanged during teleportation. We discuss the relation between our notion of active information and the notion of quantum information introduced by Schumacher.

Adorno, Culture and Feminism brings Adorno's work and feminism together, and explores how feminism can both harness and develop Adorno's ideas. The picture that emerges displays how gendered relations and cultural practices and texts operate today, and the relevance of critical theory for contemporary feminisms. Adorno's work on the scale of inequality and repression in the administered society is presented as matching the feminist understanding of the unequal balance of power between the sexes. This volume shows how Adorno's central concepts (...) - commodification, authenticity, the culture industry, Kulturkritik, negative dialectics, non-identity thinking and authoritarian personality - can be used productively and purposefully in feminist thinking. Adorno, Culture and Feminism shows how a dialogue between feminism, Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School enhances our understanding of culture and society. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in sociology, feminism and cultural studies. (shrink)

Healthcare professionals who feel psychologically safe believe it is safe to take interpersonal risks such as voicing concerns, asking questions and giving feedback. Psychological safety is a complex phenomenon which is influenced by organizational, team and individual level factors. However, it has primarily been assessed as a team-level phenomenon. This study focused on understanding healthcare professionals' individual experiences of psychological safety. We aim to gain a fuller understanding of the influence team leaders, interpersonal relationships and individual characteristics have on individuals' (...) psychological safety and their decisions to engage in voice or silence behavior. Thirty-four interviews were conducted with healthcare professionals from across five teams working within an acute, suburban hospital. Hybrid inductive-deductive thematic analysis focused on identifying themes which captured the complexities of individuals' varied experiences of psychological safety. The themes identified were: “Personal Characteristics,” “Past Experiences,” “Individual Perceptions of Being Valued,” and “Judged Appropriateness of Issues/Concerns.” These themes are explored within the context of motivating and inhibiting factors associated with the influence of leadership, interpersonal relationships and individual characteristics on experiences of psychological safety and voice behavior. These results extend existing theoretical frameworks guiding our understanding of psychological safety by accounting for the variation in individuals' experiences and studying these significant influences on voice behavior. Important considerations for the development of interventions to enhance psychological safety are discussed. (shrink)

Leading political theologian Oliver O'Donovan here takes a fresh look at some traditional moral arguments about war. Modern Christians differ widely on this issue. A few hold that absolute pacifism is the only viable Christian position, others subscribe in various ways to concepts of 'just war' developed out of a Western tradition that arose from the legacies of Augustine and Aquinas, while others still adopt more pragmatically realist postures. Professor O'Donovan re-examines questions of contemporary urgency including the use of biological (...) and nuclear weapons, military intervention, economic sanctions, war crimes trials and the roles of the Geneva Convention, international conventions and the UN. His enquiry opens with a challenging dedication to the new Archbishop of Canterbury and proceeds to shed new light on vital topics with which the Archbishop and others will be very directly engaged. It should be read by anyone concerned with the ethics of warfare. (shrink)

The human resources profession emphasizes the personal and interpersonal aspects of work, that make it conscious of complex ethical issues in relationships in the workplace, while finance specialists are conversant with routine compliance with regulations. Marketing professionals are under pressure to produce revenue results. Thus, this research hypothesized that human resources managers would be more disapproving of unethical conduct than both finance and marketing functional managers, and that finance managers would be more disapproving than marketing managers. When asked to evaluate (...) instances of unethical behavior in vignettes, human resources and finance managers were both significantly more disapproving than marketing managers. However, human resources managers were not significantly more disapproving than finance managers. Explanations for the results lie in the divergent antecedent conditions, objectives, perceptions of ethical problems and demands of the various functions. Alternative behavior patterns to resolve ethical dilemmas and expected consequences by the different functions also define their ethical orientations. Average responses on the disapproving side from all three functional groups are explained by two complementary trends that promote ethical awareness among all functional managers. One is the adoption of homogeneous conventions in ethical business practice. The other trend is the increase in ethical awareness specific to each of the functional professions. (shrink)

There is a special problem with respect to our obligations to future generations which is that we can benefit or harm them but that they cannot benefit or harm us. Goodin summarizes the point well:No analysis of intergenerational justice that is cast even vaguely in terms of reciprocity can hope to succeed. The reason is the one which Addison… puts into the mouth of an Old Fellow of College, who when he was pressed by the Society to come into something (...) that might rebound to the good of their Successors, grew very peevish. ‘We are always doing’ says he, ‘something for Posterity, but I would fain see Posterity do something for us’. (shrink)

Lüders and Pauli proved the $\mathcal{CPT}$ theorem based on Lagrangian quantum field theory almost half a century ago. Jost gave a more general proof based on “axiomatic” field theory nearly as long ago. The axiomatic point of view has two advantages over the Lagrangian one. First, the axiomatic point of view makes clear why $\mathcal{CPT}$ is fundamental—because it is intimately related to Lorentz invariance. Secondly, the axiomatic proof gives a simple way to calculate the $\mathcal{CPT}$ transform of any relativistic field (...) without calculating $\mathcal{C}$ , $\mathcal{P}$ and $\mathcal{T}$ separately and then multiplying them. The purpose of this pedagogical paper is to “deaxiomatize” the $\mathcal{CPT}$ theorem by explaining it in a few simple steps. We use theorems of distribution theory and of several complex variables without proof to make the exposition elementary. (shrink)

There have been calls for mandatory vaccination legislation to be introduced into the UK in order to tackle the national and international rise of vaccine-preventable disease. While some countries have had some success associated with mandatory vaccination programmes, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health insist this is not a suitable option for the UK, a country which has seen historical opposition to vaccine mandates. There is a lack of comprehensive data to demonstrate a direct link between mandatory vaccination (...) legislation and increased uptake. While there are examples whereby there has been an improvement, some studies suggest that comparable results can be obtained by strongly recommending vaccinations instead. The RCPCH insist that healthcare workers are ideally placed to engage and inform parents to make every interaction a ‘vaccine opportunity’. This paper calls for a principled, rational approach to interpretations of autonomy which underpin parental informed consent. MacLean’s concept of mutual persuasion could be a vehicle to ensuring parents are suitably informed of both the material risks associated with vaccine choices and to consider the rationality of their decisions, while ultimately upholding parental autonomy. It is argued that this, alongside infrastructural improvement, could create a more sustainable, long-term improvement in childhood vaccination rates in the UK than mandatory vaccination. (shrink)

The results of two experiments provide the first direct demonstration that subjects can process a word lexically despite concurrently being engaged in decoding a task cue telling them which of two tasks to perform. These results, taken together with others, point to qualitative differences between the mind‘s ability to engage in lexical versus sublexical processing during the time they are engaged with other tasks. The emerging picture is one in which some form of resource plays little role during lexical processing (...) whereas the need for some form of resource during sublexical processing serves to bottleneck performance. (shrink)

Lucy F. O'Brien; XII*—The Problem of Self-Identification, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95, Issue 1, 1 June 1995, Pages 235–252, https://doi.o.

This essay considers a number of proposals for liberal political democracy in East Asian societies, and some of the critical responses such proposals have attracted from political philosophers and from East Asian intellectuals and leaders. These proposals may well be ill-suited to the distinctive traditional values of societies claiming a Confucian inheritance. Offered here instead is a pragmatist- and Confucian-inspired vision of participatory democracy in civic life that is possibly better able to address the problem of conserving and continuing these (...) traditional values through times of economic and social change. (shrink)

This book expounds and analyses notions of transcendence, creation and incarnation reflectively and personally, combining both philosophical and religious insights. Preferring tender-minded approaches to reductively materialistic ones, it shows some ways in which reductive approaches to human affairs can distort the appreication of our lives and activities. In the book's first half it examines a number of aspects of human life and experience in the thought of Darwin, Ruskin, and Scruton with a view to exploring the extent to which there (...) could be intimations of transcendence. The second half is then devoted to outlining an account of divine creation and incarnation, deriving initially, though not uncritically, from the thought of Simone Weil. The text concludes by examining the extent to which grace is needed to engage in religious practice and belief. Taking in art, literature, music and classical Greek writings, this is a multifaceted thesis on transcendence. It will, therefore, will be of keen interest to any scholar of Philosophy of Religion, Theology, Aesthetics and Metaphysics. (shrink)

This article argues that Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship presents an implicit but significant critique of Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community. In Blanchot’s text, the Other disrupts any sense of fusional or essentialist community. But Derrida criticises Blanchot for neglecting the need to negotiate my responsibility to infinite others. Derrida proposes a logic of the plus un, playing on this double meaning in French, where a need to count singularities (‘plus one’) disrupts the unity of community (‘no longer one’). For (...) Derrida, this offers a greater emphasis on those outside the boundaries of constituted communities, something he finds lacking in Blanchot. I demonstrate that Derrida’s position is a challenge to an emerging xenophobic discourse in 1980s French politics. I propose, therefore, that Derrida’s difference with Blanchot is motivated as much by a political difference as a philosophical one, with Derrida judging Blanchot’s account inadequate for contemporary political concerns. (shrink)

In this article, it is shown that, following the precedent set in particular by Marinus' "Life of Proclus", Damascius, in his "Life of Isidore", uses biography so as to illustrate philosophical progress through the Neoplatonic scale of virtues. Damascius applies this scale, however, to a wide range of figures belonging to pagan philosophical circles of the fifth century AD: they show different degrees and forms of progress in this scale and thus provide an edificatory panorama of patterns of philosophical perfection. (...) Each level of the scale of virtues is shown to be exemplified in Damascius' biographies. It is suggested that few, in Damascius' opinion, reached the highest levels of virtue and that philosophical decline is intimated in his descriptions of his contemporaries. (shrink)

O'Brien, Roderick Among the treasures at the Congregational Archives of the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart in North Sydney is a booklet, a hymnal: a collection of hymns and sacred songs attributed to Fr Julian Tenison Woods.1 The purpose of this short article is to introduce one of those hymns, and provide some information about poetry and songs in Woods's life and mission. I am grateful to the archivist for making this booklet available. Introducing this particular hymn, (...) 'Longing to Go', also gives us some insight into Woods's spirituality regarding death and regarding mission. (shrink)

Key issues in the philosophy of mind, examined by leading figures in the field.

This special issue, entitled “Post-AIDS’ and Global Health Discourses: Interdisciplinary Perspectives,’ emerged from a one day Medical Humanities symposium at the Leeds Centre for Medical Humanities, at the University of Leeds, England, on February 27th 2015. This special issue focusses on the perceived deprioritising of HIV and AIDS in the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, that were launched in 2015. The SDGs function as policy benchmarks for all entities within the United Nations system and they supersede the Millennium Development Goals, (...) or MDGs, which expired in 2015. As the word millennium indicates, the MDGs were launched in 2000 and 2015 was designated as the benchmark year when the successes and shortcomings of the MDGs would be critically assessed. One key difference between the MDGs and the SDGs, which D’Ambruoso foregrounds, is that the writing process underpinning the SDGs involved lengthy consultations, and feedback, with communities and health care practitioners around the world. By contrast, because the MDGs were mainly written by government officials, policy makers and health care practitioners without consulting wider communities, the processes underpinning the SDGs consultations are more inclusive than the MDGs. What is most critical about the SDGs for this special issue, however, is that they reflect a clear shift away from ‘HIV exceptionalism’ and towards what critics have described as ‘post-AIDS’ rhetoric, specifically when one compares the MDG health goal 6 and the SDG health goal 3. (shrink)

This paper examines a lasting tension in pragmatism between broadly functionalist outlooks on meaning and a primacy placed on what can be revealed by direct experiential or practical encounters. Both the inferentialist and experiential emphases can be traced back to Peirce’s original pragmatic maxim. Here the tension is examined first in William James’s insightful views on intentionality and experience, followed by a diagnosis of the problem as it has arisen in neo­pragmatist debates concerning the nature of perceptual knowledge in Rorty (...) and Brandom and their critics. In the end the paper sketches the general form of a resolution of the tension that is consistent with both of these core emphases in the pragmatist tradition. (shrink)

This piece explicates some chief modes of consciousness in phenomenology in order to show that a very significant challenge of virtuality surfaces both within, as well as outside of, the discipline. This issue is of no small importance today, where the difference between perception and imagination, real and irreal, as well as presence and absence, are all becoming increasingly vague because of new technologies and the intrinsic virtualities involved therein. In this context, the question is: Where does virtuality fit in (...) such a picture? I will argue that phenomenology can start to account for such developments, although much more explicative work will be required in the future. With this in mind, sections two to four will articulate an initial phenomenology of perception, phantasy, and image-consciousness, as found chiefly in works by Husserl and Sartre. Then, section five will question the preceding phenomenological theory through some phenomenological and non-phenomenological thinkers, who all seem to have a concept of virtuality at the heart of their work. Lastly, in the final two sections I will suggest a difference between real and irreal virtualities, and briefly mention some current virtual technologies in order to show that there is a constant and complex interplay between the real, irreal, and the virtual in many of our everyday experiences—an interplay that needs to be investigated much further if we are to make sense of how it is changing how we think and behave. (shrink)

As leadership discourses in higher education are increasingly being mediated online, texts previously reserved for staff are now being made available in the public domain. As such, these texts become accessible for study, critique and evaluation. Additionally, discourses previously confined to the written domain are now increasingly multimodal. Thus, an approach is required that is capable of relating detailed, complex multimodal discourse analyses to broader sociocultural perspectives to account for the complex meaning-making practices that operate in online leadership discourses. For (...) this purpose, a digital multimodal discourse approach is proposed and illustrated via a small-scale case study of the online leadership discourse of an Australian university. The analysis of two short video texts demonstrates how a digital multimodal discourse perspective facilitates the identification of key multimodal systems used for meaning-making in online communication, how meaning arises through combinations of semiotic choices, and how the results of multimodal discourse analysis using digital technology can reveal larger sociocultural patterns – in this case, divergent leadership styles and approaches as reflected in online discourse, at a time of immense change within the higher education sector. (shrink)

This chapter re-examines Heidegger’s analysis of moods in Being and Time against the backdrop of his famous 1929 inaugural lecture and his 1940s retrospectives on the same lecture along with some related discussions in his 1935 lecture course—Introduction to Metaphysics. The chapter argues that Heidegger’s major concern in his early account of moods is best understood as an attempt to identify the role that absence plays in Dasein’s barest affective states which testify once more to the constant interplay of presence (...) and absence in terms of what it means for anything to be. Though Heidegger looks to clarify his position in later writings, his account of moods is frequently misunderstood by commentators who see Heidegger’s early work as existentialist, humanist and/or anthropological in ways that fail to appreciate how his discussions in the existential analytic and the subsequent account of authenticity are, in fact, fledgling attempts to begin to sketch out the possibility of moving beyond the metaphysics of presence. (shrink)