La présente contribution analyse les deux risques auxquels sont confrontés l’administration pénitentiaire et son personnel, les surveillants notamment, dans leur lutte contre la radicalisation : le risque de la protection insuffisante de la société face à des conversions non repérées et susceptibles d’aboutir à des actes violents de type terroriste, d’une part, et, d’autre part, le risque du signalement systématique pouvant conduire au renforcement du sentiment de discrimination chez certains détenus et, paradoxalement, constituer un terrain favorable au développement de la (...) radicalisation violente. Pour dépasser ces deux risques, il est proposé, à partir de données de terrain, une application équilibrée du principe de précaution qui devrait reposer sur une meilleure formation des personnels par la pratique, entre autres, de l’interprétation croisée. (shrink)

On one classical conception of God, God has no parts, not even metaphysical parts. God is not composed of form and matter, act and potency, and he is not composed of existence and essence. God is absolutely simple. This is the doctrine of Absolute Divine Simplicity. It is claimed that ADS implies a modal collapse, i.e. that God’s creation is absolutely necessary. I argue that a proper way of understanding the modal collapse argument naturally leads the proponent of ADS to (...) reject a particular premise of the argument: namely, “the same identical cause brings about the same effect.” However, I argue that the rejection of that premise leads to a deeper problem for ADS. It leads to an explanatory gap: how can we explain the relevant type of indeterminism in an absolutely simple God? (shrink)

Informed by Gloria Anzaldúa's and José Carlos Mariátegui's work, as well as by Andean cosmology, Omar Rivera turns to Inka stonework and architecture as an example of a "Cosmological Aesthetics." He articulates ways of sensing, feeling and remembering that are attuned to an aesthetic of water, earth and light. On this basis, Rivera brings forth a corporeal orientation that can be inhabited by the oppressed, one that withdraws from predominant modern/Western conceptions of the human. By providing an aesthetic analysis (...) of cosmological sensing, Rivera sets the stage for exploring physical dimensions of anti-colonial resistance, and furthers the Latinx and Latin American tradition of anti-colonial and liberatory philosophy. Seeingaesthetic involvements with the cosmos as a source for embodied modes of resistance, Rivera turns to the work of María Lugones and Enrique Dussel in order to make explicit the aesthetic dimensions of their work. Andean Aesthetics and Anticolonial Resistance creates a new dialogue between art historians, artists, and philosophers working on Latin American thought, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. It weaves together a Latin American philosophy that connects pre-Columbian cosmologies with contemporary thinkers. Rivera's original approach introduces us to the living, evolving and aesthetic alternatives to coloniality of power and of knowledge, overhauling current understandings of decolonial theory and opening the tradition in transformative ways. (shrink)

This paper aims to balance the conceptual reception of Bourdieu's sociology in the United States through a conceptual re-examination of the concept of Habitus. I retrace the intellectual lineage of the Habitus idea, showing it to have roots in Claude Levi-Strauss structural anthropology and in the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, especially the latter's generalization of the idea of operations from mathematics to the study of practical, bodily-mediated cognition. One important payoff of this exercise is that the common misinterpretation of (...) the Habitus as an objectivist and reductionist element in Bourdieu's thought is dispelled. The Habitus is shown to be instead a useful and flexible way to concep-tualize agency and the ability to transform social structure. Thus ultimately one of Bourdieu's major contributions to social theory consists of his development of a new radical form of cognitive sociology, along with an innovative variety of multilevel sociological explanation in which the interplay of different structural orders is highlighted. In keeping with the usual view, the goal of sociology is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the "mechanisms" that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation. Merging with psychology, though with a kind of psychology undoubtedly quite different from the most widely accepted image of this science, such an exploration of the cognitive structures that agents bring to bear in their practical knowledge of the social worlds thus structured. Indeed there exists a correspondence between social structures and mental structures, between the objective divisions of the social world . . . and the principles of vision and division that agents apply to them. (shrink)

In this book, Omar Farahat presents a new way of understanding the work of classical Islamic theologians and legal theorists who maintained that divine revelation is necessary for the knowledge of the norms and values of human actions. Through a reconstruction of classical Ashʿarī-Muʿtazilī debates on the nature and implications of divine speech, Farahat argues that the Ashʿarī attachment to revelation was not a purely traditionalist position. Rather, it was a rational philosophical commitment emerging from debates in epistemology and (...) theology. He further argues that the particularity of this model makes its distinctive features helpful for contemporary scholars who defend a form of divine command theory. Farahat's volume thus constitutes a new reading of the issue of reason and revelation in Islam and breaks new ground in Islamic theology, law and ethics. (shrink)

Capacity evaluation has become a widely used assessment device in clinical practice to determine whether patients have the cognitive ability to render their own medical decisions. Such evaluations, which might be better thought of as “capacity challenges,” are generally thought of as benign tools used to facilitate care. This paper proposes that such challenges should be reconceptualized as significant medical interventions with their own set of risks, side effects, and potentially deleterious consequences. As a result, a cost–benefit analysis should be (...) implemented prior to imposing such capacity challenges, and efforts should be made to minimize such challenges in situations where they are unlikely to alter the course of treatment. (shrink)

Introduction -- Stout's proto-new-realism -- Situating G.F. Stout -- Stout's doctrine of primary and secondary qualities -- Stout and the Brentano School -- Representative function of presentations -- Sensible space and real space -- Cook Wilson's geometrical counter-example -- Stout's central question -- Ideal constructions -- Ideal constructions in psychology and epistemology -- British new realism : the language of madness -- Stout's criticisms of Alexander -- Alexander's response -- The nature of sensations, images, and other presentations -- What is (...) the metaphysical problem? -- "How can the interpretation which is supplied by the mind be a constituent of the [physical] object?" -- Some general remarks -- British new realism : the language of common-sense -- T.P. Nunn and the new realism -- Nunn and things -- Nunn's postulate -- Russell and Stout on sensible objects -- Russell, sense-data and sensibilia -- The methods of construction -- Russell's constructions and Nunn's postulate -- Constructions, psychology, and the essence of philosophy -- The methods of logical construction -- A mathematical development -- The principle of abstraction. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically examine Stephen Turner's critique of practice theory in light of recent neurophysiological discoveries regarding the “mirror neuron system” in the pre-frontal mo-tor cortex of humans and other primates. I argue that two of Turner's strongest objections against the sociological version of the practice-theoretical account, the problem of transmission and the problem of sameness, are substantially undermined when examined from the perspective of re-cently systematized accounts of embodied learning and intersubjective action understanding in-spired by these developments. (...) In addition, I show that the practice-theoretical framework out-lined by Pierre Bourdieu in the Logic of Practice and other works is, in contrast to Turner's por-trayal of a confused hodgepodge of logical errors and empirical impossibilities, largely consistent with the latest neurophysiological evidence and as such fundamentally foreshadowed more recent understandings of the neurocognitive foundations of the perception, understanding and structure of the motor schemes productive of action in the world. Also in line with these newer neurosci-entific developments, the practice-theoretical focus on the body as the central matrix generative of tacit understandings and analogical operations responsible for “higher order” systems of classi-fication emerges as the key to solving some of the thorniest problems in the theory of action: eliminating to need to resort to unwarranted “collective object” explanations for the origins of shared presuppositional frameworks. (shrink)

While previous literature provides evidence of the positive relationship between ethical climate and job satisfaction, the possible mechanisms of this relationship are still underexplored. This study aims to enhance scholars’ and practitioners’ understanding of the ethical climate–job satisfaction relationship by identifying and testing two of the possible mechanisms. More specifically, this study fills an existing research gap by examining social and interpersonal mechanisms, referred to in this study as workplace isolation of colleagues and salesperson’s teamwork, of the ethical climate–job satisfaction (...) relationship. This is vital for the selling profession because job satisfaction is known to drive higher levels of salespeople’s performance. The arguments for such mechanisms are built on the foundations of social/psychological contract theory and ethical climate literature. Empirical testing using a large sample of salespeople shows higher levels of ethical climate to decrease workplace isolation and increase teamwork. Findings support hypothesized model where ethical climate positively relates to job satisfaction as partially mediated by workplace isolation and teamwork. Ethical climate is negatively related to workplace isolation and positively to teamwork. Further, findings indicate negative effect of workplace isolation on teamwork and sales performance. Job satisfaction is found to be key factor in driving performance of salespeople. (shrink)

The Farm to Fork (F2F) Strategy at the heart of the European Union’s Green Deal set out to create a “just transition” towards a sustainable food system, with benefits for all actors. We conducted a critical discourse analysis (CDA) to explore discourses around power in the food system and farmers’ position in the communication and implementation of the Farm to Fork Strategy. Discourse analysis encapsulates various scientific methodologies for deciphering the meaning behind the creation and communication of different forms of (...) language and identify power dynamics, amongst other aspects. We identified two prior discourses in one of the objectives of the European Union’s new Common Agricultural Policy (2023-27). Our analysis found that the discourses, namely “rebalance power in food system” and “strengthening farmers’ position in value chains,” are marginalized in favour of an innovation-investment discourse, indicative of greater financialization and technologization based on techno-finances fixes in transforming the European Union agri-food system. We argue that entities representing agri-business interests have been influential in the policymaking process and voices representing smallholder and medium-sized farmers’ transformational discourses have been excluded. (shrink)

In this paper, I outline a general framework for cultural analysis consistent with an “analytic” approach to explanation in social science. The proposed approach provides coherent solutions to thorny problems in cultural theory. These include providing a coherent definition of culture (and the “cultural”), specifying the nature of cultural units (both simple and complex), and outlining the processes making possible episodes of cultural genesis, transformation, and reproduction within bounded units characterized as cultural causal systems.

Abstract:The coronavirus pandemic has challenged the ability of countries to both protect personal freedoms and effectively counteract viral infections. Attempts to reduce viral vulnerability and increase immunity based on liberal or authoritarian principles seem to be either failing or succeeding at the price of eliminating freedoms altogether. The concept of social freedom, as an alternative to that of liberal autonomy, may provide a third alternative, integrating freedom with elements of social responsibility. However, I argue that it too will fail, since (...) all attempts to ensure immunity without challenging the exploitation of natural environments from where the virus originated do not go to the source of the problem. (shrink)

Clinical mental health researchers may understandably struggle with how to incorporate biological assessments in clinical research. The options are numerous and are described in a vast and complex body of literature. Here we provide guidelines to assist mental health researchers seeking to include biological measures in their studies. Apart from a focus on behavioral outcomes as measured via interviews or questionnaires, we advocate for a focus on biological pathways in clinical trials and epidemiological studies that may help clarify pathophysiology and (...) mechanisms of action, delineate biological subgroups of participants, mediate treatment effects, and inform personalized treatment strategies. With this paper we aim to bridge the gap between clinical and biological mental health research by (1) discussing the clinical relevance, measurement reliability, and feasibility of relevant peripheral biomarkers; (2) addressing five types of biological tissues, namely blood, saliva, urine, stool and hair; and (3) providing information on how to control sources of measurement variability. (shrink)

A distinctive focus of 19th- and 20th-century Latin American philosophy is the convergence of identity formation and political liberation in ethnically and racially diverse postcolonial contexts. From this perspective, Omar Rivera interprets how a "we" is articulated and deployed in central political texts of this robust philosophical tradition. In particular, by turning to the work of Peruvian political theorist José Carlos Mariátegui among others, Rivera critiques philosophies of liberation that are invested in the redemption of oppressed identities as conditions (...) for bringing about radical social and political change, foregrounding Latin America's complex histories and socialities to illustrate the power and shortcomings of these projects. Building on this critical approach, Rivera studies interrelated epistemological, transcultural, and aesthetic delimitations of Latin American philosophy in order to explore the possibility of social and political liberation "beyond redemption.". (shrink)

Muslim physicians and Islamic jurists analyze the moral dimensions of biomedicine using different tools and processes. While the deliberations of these two classes of experts involve judgments about the deliverables of the other's respective fields, Islamic jurists and Muslim physicians rarely engage in discussions about the constructs and epistemic frameworks that motivate their analyses. The lack of dialogue creates gaps in knowledge and leads to imprecise guidance. In order to address these discursive and conceptual gaps we describe the sources of (...) knowledge and reasoning employed by Islamic jurists and clinicians to resolve the question of when a patient must seek healthcare. As we examine both the scriptural evidence and legal reasoning of jurists and the types of medical evidence used by clinicians to address the same question, we draw attention to the epistemic frameworks and constructs at play and identify how constructs from one field may sharpen the deliberative exercises of the other. Hence our work advances discourses at the intersection of Islam and medicine and offers building blocks for a comprehensive Islamic framework that fully integrates the deliverables of medical science within the deliberations of Islamic jurists. (shrink)

Abū Hāmid al-Ghazālī (1058–1111 c.e .) is well known, among other things, for his account, in al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl (Deliverance from error), of a struggle with philosophical skepticism that bears a striking resemblance to that described by Descartes in the Meditations . This essay aims to give a close comparative analysis of these respective accounts, and will concentrate solely on the processes of invoking or entertaining doubt that al-Ghazālī and Descartes describe, respectively. In the process some subtle differences between them (...) in this regard will be brought to light that are relevant to the comparative issue of the respective solutions at which they arrive. The latter issue will not be touched upon here, although the present discussion is intended as a prelude to a future treatment of that topic. (shrink)

In this paper, I look to draw novel connections between critiques of drill and epistemic injustice by addressing the question of whether the critical scrutiny of drill constitutes an epistemic injustice. I argue that these critiques constitute two types of epistemic injustice: testimonial injustice and contributory injustice. We see testimonial injustice in how courts and police do not give credibility to drill artists’ testimonies about the storylike nature of their songs, and these credibility deficits are based in racist stereotypes about (...) black criminality and believability. We see contributory injustice in how courts and police, through wilful ignorance, see drill music as violent and criminal rather than expressive and fictional – as drill artists do – which thwarts drill artists’ ability to contribute to shared knowledge. (shrink)

IntroductionAnorexia nervosa promotes psychological distress in caregivers who adopt different coping strategies. Dysfunctional caregiving styles exacerbate further distress in the patient promoting the maintenance of the illness. We aimed to assess the possible contribution of personality traits of caregivers to the adoption of different coping strategies to deal with the affected relative.MethodsAbout 87 adolescents with AN were recruited. Their parents completed the Family Coping Questionnaire for Eating Disorders and the Temperament and Character Inventory-Revised. Differences between mothers and fathers were assessed (...) through the independent sample t-test. Multivariate regression analyses were run to assess if personality traits, the occurrence of psychiatry conditions in the parents, the marital status, and the duration of the illness predicted parental coping strategies.ResultsThe group of mothers showed higher levels of avoidance and seeking for information coping strategies than the sample of fathers. Lower illness duration predicted higher collusion with the illness in both parents. Harm avoidance, cooperativeness, and self-directedness positively predicted parental coercion, collusion, and seeking for information strategies with some differences between mothers and fathers.DiscussionIllness duration and personality traits of parents affect the type of parental coping strategies developed to face AN in adolescents. These variables should be considered in the assessment of families of adolescents with AN and may be addressed to promote more fine-tuned clinical interventions for caregivers. (shrink)

The construction industry is usually characterized as a fragmented system of multiple-organizational entities in which members from different technical backgrounds and moral values join together to develop a particular business or project. The greatest challenge in the construction process for the achievement of a successful practice is the development of an outstanding reputation, which is built on identifying and applying an ethical framework. This framework should reflect a common ethical ground for myriad people involved in this process to survive and (...) compete ethically in today’s turbulent construction market. This study establishes a framework for ethical judgment of behavior and actions conducted in the construction process. The framework was primarily developed based on the essential attributes of business management identified in the literature review and subsequently incorporates additional attributes identified to prevent breaches in the construction industry and common ethical values related to professional engineering. The proposed judgment framework is based primarily on the ethical dimension of professional responsibility. The Ethical Judgment Framework consists of descriptive approaches involving technical, professional, administrative, and miscellaneous terms. The framework provides the basis for judging actions as either ethical or unethical. Furthermore, the framework can be implemented as a form of preventive ethics, which would help avoid ethical dilemmas and moral allegations. The framework can be considered a decision-making model to guide actions and improve the ethical reasoning process that would help individuals think through possible implications and consequences of ethical dilemmas in the construction industry. (shrink)

I this paper, I draw on recent research on the radically embodied and perceptual bases of conceptualization in linguistics and cognitive science to develop a new way of reading and evaluating abstract concepts in social theory. I call this approach Sociological Idea Analysis. I argue that, in contrast to the traditional view of abstract concepts, which conceives them as amodal “presuppositions” removed from experience, abstract concepts are irreducibly grounded in experience and partake of non-negotiable perceptual-symbolic features from which a non-propositional (...) “logic” naturally follows. This implies that uncovering the imagistic bases of allegedly abstract notions should be a key part of theoretical evaluation of concepts in social theory. I provide a case study of the general category of “structure” in the social and human sciences to demonstrate the analytic utility of the approach. (shrink)

A leading young Italian semiologist scrutinizes today's cultural phenomena and finds the prevailing taste to be "neo-baroque"--characterized by an appetite for virtuosity, frantic rhythms, instability, poly-dimensionality, and change. Omar Calabrese locates a "sign of the times" in an amazing variety of literary, philosophical, artistic, musical, and architectural forms, from the Venice Biennale through the "new science" to television series, video games, and "zapping" with the remote control device from channel to channel! Calabrese admits that he begins the book with (...) a refusal to distinguish between "Donald Duck and Dante." Avoiding hierarchies or ghettos among works, he takes his readers on a fast-paced expedition through contemporary culture that closes with an elegant essay on evaluation and classical form. According to Calabrese, the enormous quantity of narrative now being produced has led to a new situation: everything has already been said, and everything has already been written. The only way of avoiding saturation has been to turn to a poetics of repetition. The author shows that pleasure in texts is now produced by tiny variations, and a certain kind of citation from other works has taken on a central importance that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. In describing this development, and others shared by both avant-garde and mass media, he makes us aware of the rapid shrinkage in the once ample space between "highbrow" and "lowbrow." Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

In this book Omar Dahbour examines all of the arguments that have been given for national self-determination, whether by international lawyers, moral philosophers, democratic theorists, or political communitarians.

By putting forward the notions of “eco-sensibilities” and “eco-permeable relationalities,” this paper explores a non-instrumentalizing mode of relation with the “non-human.” On this basis, it shows the possibility of affectively disempowering the hold of “ecological indifference” as Nancy Tuana describes it. It focuses on “animal becoming” and “elemental architecture” as “eco-sensibilities” that effect such a disempowerment.

The Islamic philosophical, mystical, and theological sub-traditions have each made characteristic assumptions about the human person, including an incorporation of substance dualism in distinctive manners. Advances in the brain sciences of the last half century, which include a widespread acceptance of death as the end of essential brain function, require the abandonment of dualistic notions of the human person that assert an immaterial and incorporeal soul separate from a body. In this article, I trace classical Islamic notions of death and (...) the soul, the modern definition of death as "brain death," and some contemporary Islamic responses to this definition. I argue that a completely naturalistic account of human personhood in the Islamic tradition is the best and most viable alternative for the future. This corporeal monistic account of Muslim personhood as embodied consciousness incorporates the insights of pre-modern Muslim thinkers yet rehabilitates their characteristic mistakes and thus has the advantages of neuroscientific validity and modern relevance in trans-cultural ethical discourse; it also helps to alleviate organ shortages in countries with majority Muslim populations, a serious ethical impasse of recent years. (shrink)

The authors of the target article articulate the complicated, often conflicting demands of U.S. Food and Drug Administration roles as justification for the FDA’s delay in releasing guidelines...

The purpose of this research is to examine the notion of salesperson moral identity as a prosocial individual trait and its associated effects on customer and coworker relationships. In addition, this study examines the underlying processes in which these effects occur as well as the moderating role of internal competitive climate. Our empirical investigation of business-to-business (B2B) sales professionals reveals that moral identity has both direct and indirect effects on a salesperson’s customer- and team-directed outcomes. Specifically, our results demonstrate that (...) salesperson moral identity positively affects both salesperson-customer identification and organizational identification, which, in turn, impact customer service provision and teamwork. Our findings also indicate that internal competitive climate exacerbates the positive effects of salesperson moral identity on customer service provision and teamwork. (shrink)

Metaphysical naturalism can be taken, roughly, to be the view that there is no God, and nothing beyond nature. Alvin Plantinga has argued that naturalism, in this sense, is self‐defeating. More specifically, he argues that an evolutionary account of human origins gives the naturalist compelling reasons for doubting the reliability of human cognitive faculties, and thus compelling reasons for doubting the truth of any of his beliefs, including naturalism itself. This argument, which has come to be known as the ‘evolutionary (...) argument against naturalism’, has generated a great deal of controversy, and a substantial literature concerning it has grown up as a result. In this paper, I will introduce readers to this literature. I begin by explaining the argument itself, and making clear its intuitive force. I then survey the main objections to it, such as the Perspiration Objection, the ‘Can’t the Naturalist Just Add a Little Something?’ Objection, and the Tu Quoque Objection: in the course of this survey, I pay particular attention to the most interesting of these, a version of the Tu Quoque Objection according to which the problem of evil results in a form of epistemic self‐defeat for the theist that is exactly analogous to the self‐defeat with which the naturalist is allegedly faced in the evolutionary argument. I go on to suggest that, despite the wide range of objections in the literature, the challenge of the evolutionary argument against naturalism is still very much with us, and I conclude by describing some promising directions for future research. (shrink)

What Russell regarded to be the ‘chief outcome’ of his 1914 Lowell Lectures at Harvard can only be fully appreciated, I argue, if one embeds the outcome back into the ‘classificatory problem’ that many at the time were heavily engaged in. The problem focused on the place and relationships between the newly formed or recently professionalized disciplines such as psychology, Erkenntnistheorie, physics, logic and philosophy. The prime metaphor used in discussions about the classificatory problem by British philosophers was a spatial (...) one, with such motifs as ‘standpoints’, ‘place’ and ‘perspectives’ in the space of knowledge. In fact, Russell’s construction of a perspectival space of six-dimensions was meant precisely to be a timely solution to the widely discussed classificatory problem. (shrink)

This paper examines the interrelations between astronomical images of nebulae and their observation. In particular, using the case of the ‘Great Spiral’ , we follow this nebula beginning with its discovery and first sketch made by the third Earl of Rosse in 1845, to giving an account, using archival sources, of exactly how other images of the same object were produced over the years and stabilized within the record books of the Rosse project. It will be found that a particular (...) ‘procedure’ was employed using ‘working images’ that interacted with descriptions, other images and the telescopic object itself. This stabilized not only some set of standard images of the object, but also a very potent conception of spirality as well, i.e. as a ‘normal form’. Finally, two cases will be contrasted, one being George Bond's application of this spiral conception to the nebula in Orion, and the other Wilhelm Tempel's rejection of the spiral form in M51. (shrink)

How do groups—be they religious or ethnic—achieve sovereignty in a postnationalist world? In Self-Determination without Nationalism, noted philosopher Omar Dahbour insists that the existing ethics of international relations, dominated by the rival notions of liberal nationalism and political cosmopolitanism, no longer suffice. Dahbour notes that political communities are an ethically desirable and historically inevitable feature of collective life. The ethical principles that govern them, however—especially self-determination and sovereignty—require reformulation in light of globalization and the economic and environmental challenges of (...) the twenty-first century. Arguing that nation-states violate the principle of self-determination, Dahbour then develops a detailed new theory of self-determination that he calls "ecosovereignty.” Ecosovereignty defines political community in a way that can protect and further the rights of indigenous peoples as well as the needs of ecological regions for a sustainable form of development and security from environmental destruction. In the series Global Ethics and Politics, edited by Carol Gould. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd russell: the Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies n.s. 30 (winter 2010–11): 155–82 The Bertrand Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. issn 0036-01631; online 1913-8032 eviews AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PROBLEMSz Omar W. Nasim Science Studies / Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (eth) 8092 Zürich, Switzerland [email protected] David Mills Daniel and Megan Daniel. BrieXy: Russell’sz The Problems of Philosophy. London: scm (...) P., 2007. Pp. viii, 131. isbn 978-0-334-04118-4. £7.99. The following book is a part of the SCM BrieXyz series, which already includes such titles as Anselm’s Prosologion and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. The series objective is to “enable students and general readers to acquire knowledge and understanding of key texts in philosophy, philosophy of religion, theology and ethics” (p. vii). Each volume is a “short guide” to a particular philosopher ’s ideas through a close reading of a primary text by that philosopher. This review looks at the volume on Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, which is divided by the authors into a few parts, including a section on the “Context”, a “Detailed Summary of Bertrand Russell’s The Problem of Philosophy ”, an overview and a helpful glossary of terms. The “Context” provides a very brief statement about who Russell was, and spends most of its pages summarizing the arguments of Russell’s Problems. The last few pages of this section provide some helpful “Issues to Consider,” which are a list of pertinent questions one may ask of Russell’s Problems, and ends with some further reading. It ought to be noted that the “Context” is not about the history of Russell’s text, nor is it an attempt to relate the latter to Russell’s other works. This is unfortunate, considering Russell’s well-known philosophical development and the rich history surrounding Problems. The volume under review is indeed a problemoriented study of Problems which uncritically rehearses the same embedding of problems that Russell urges, especially in relation to the British empiricist tradition of the early modern period. The main section of the book is the “Detailed Summary” and is itself divided in the same way in which Russell’s Problems is divided; that is, into Wfteen subsections, with exactly the same headings and order. Using a reissued second edi- February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd 156 Reviews 1 It has the same pagination as oup’s 1967 edition in the uk.z—zEd. tion of Russell’s Problems by Oxford University Press (2001),1 Daniel and Daniel provide a very close, page-by-page exposition of each chapter of Russell’s Problems. The reading is in fact so close that not only is there nearly the same number of pages dedicated to each chapter as in the original, but just about every sentence teems with scare quotes. This goes for not only technical terms such as “universal”, “sense-data”, “relations”, etc., which remain snared by scare quotes throughout the entire section, but also all sorts of other terms such as “light”, “motion”, “just”, “forgotten”, etc. The rationale for this is given in the introduction and is supposed to “enable the reader to follow each development in the philosopher’s argument” (p. vii). Unlike the terms that are in bold type, which are given some explanation in the glossary, the reviewer Wnds the sheer number of scare quotes distracting and pedagogically confusing, because there is no distinction made between terms central to Russell’s argument and those used only in the construction of a sentence. But even the glossary entries are oddly compiled. While most correspond to the bold-type terms in the Summary, some are terms not found anywhere but in the introduction or the “Context” section. So Sartre, Wittgenstein, McMaster University, and Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation are nowhere to be found in Russell’s original, or in the summary provided by the authorsz—zthey are simply terms used in passing in the introduction or “Context” and without being introduced in bold type. Other... (shrink)

Today we are all familiar with the iconic pictures of the nebulae produced by the Hubble Space Telescope’s digital cameras. But there was a time, before the successful application of photography to the heavens, in which scientists had to rely on handmade drawings of these mysterious phenomena. Observing by Hand sheds entirely new light on the ways in which the production and reception of handdrawn images of the nebulae in the nineteenth century contributed to astronomical observation. Omar W. Nasim (...) investigates hundreds of unpublished observing books and paper records from six nineteenth-century observers of the nebulae: Sir John Herschel; William Parsons, the third Earl of Rosse; William Lassell; Ebenezer Porter Mason; Ernst Wilhelm Leberecht Tempel; and George Phillips Bond. Nasim focuses on the ways in which these observers created and employed their drawings in data-driven procedures, from their choices of artistic materials and techniques to their practices and scientific observation. He examines the ways in which the act of drawing complemented the acts of seeing and knowing, as well as the ways that making pictures was connected to the production of scientific knowledge. An impeccably researched, carefully crafted, and beautifully illustrated piece of historical work, Observing by Hand will delight historians of science, art, and the book, as well as astronomers and philosophers. (shrink)

For this year’s Virtual Issue, our guest editor, Omar W. Nasim, has collected together papers from the Aristotelian Society archives that represent a substantial part of a dispute that contributed to the emergence of analytic philosophy in Britain at the turn of the 20th Century. The dispute was primarily concerned with the problem of the external world – the nature of the sensible objects of perception, and how they relate to physical things and the perceiving subject. The participants in (...) this controversy contested the nature of the appearance-reality distinction, whether it is it is possible for a thing to instantiate contrary sensible qualities at the same place and time, the distinction between presentation and representation, the nature of knowledge by acquaintance, and the nature of sense-data – e.g., whether sense-data are psychical or physical, whether they persist unperceived, and how they give rise to knowledge of the external world. G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell were significant contributors to these debates, but so too were several philosophers whose names are now less well known: G. F. Stout, G. Dawes Hicks, Abraham Wolf, T. Percy Nunn, and S. Alexander. This Virtual Issue collects together, for the first time, the important contributions made to these debates by all of these figures. In doing so it provides a fascinating insight into the ways in which Russell’s earliest attempts to construct the external world from sense-data were influenced by the ideas and arguments of his immediate contemporaries. Omar W. Nasim’s specially commissioned introduction to the Virtual Issue sets out the historical context of these disputes about the external world, and details the prominent role played by the Aristotelian Society in making them possible. (shrink)

The construction industry is typically characterized as a fragmented, multi-organizational setting in which members from different technical backgrounds and moral values join together to develop a particular business or project. The most challenging obstacle in the construction process is to achieve a successful practice and to identify and apply an ethical framework to manage the behavior of involved specialists and contractors and to ensure the quality of all completed construction activities. The framework should reflect a common moral ground for myriad (...) people involved in this process to survive and compete ethically in today’s turbulent construction market. This study establishes a framework for moral judgment of behavior and actions conducted in the construction process. The moral framework provides the basis of judging actions as “moral” or “immoral” based on three levels of moral accountability: personal, professional, and social. The social aspect of the proposed framework is developed primarily from the essential attributes of normative business decision-making models identified in the literature review and subsequently incorporates additional attributes related to professional and personal moral values. The normative decision-making models reviewed are based primarily on social attributes as related to moral theories. The professional and moral attributes are established by identifying a set of common moral values recognized by professionals in the construction industry and required to prevent common construction breaches. The moral framework presented here is the complementary part of the ethical framework developed in Part I of this article and is based primarily on the personal behavior or the moral aspect of professional responsibility. The framework can be implemented as a form of preventive personal ethics, which would help avoid ethical dilemmas and moral implications in the first place. Furthermore, the moral framework can be considered as a decision-making model to guide actions and improve the moral reasoning process, which would help individuals think through possible implications and the consequences of ethical and moral issues in the construction industry. (shrink)

We agree with Lynch et al. that patients with chronic diseases and Band-Aid treatments are unlikely to benefit from a version of Operation Warp Speed or by deprioritizing standards of scientific ev...

In this paper, I argue that recent sociological theory has become increasingly bifurcated into two mutually incompatible styles of theorizing that I label formalist and behavioral-realist. Formalism favors mathematization and proposes an instrumentalist ontology of abstract processes while behavioral-realist theory takes at its basis the "real" physical individual endowed with concrete biological, cognitive and neurophysiological capacities and constraints and attempts to derive the proper conceptualization of social behavior from that basis. Formalism tends to lead toward a conceptually independent sociology that (...) in principle requires only minimal reference to the empirical and ontological storehouse of other disciplines, while behavioral-realist theory leads to an interdisciplinary sociology that can be located within a hierarchy of behavioral sciences, leading to questions regarding the relationship between sociology and other disciplines as well as issues of transdisciplinary unification and possible interdisciplinary reduction. I explore the consequences of this split for the project of explanatory sociological theory within the context of how it has manifested itself in sociological network theory and social psychology. I close with a critique and assessment of formalist tendencies in sociological theorizing. (shrink)

I defend an account of God’s ineffability that depends on the distinction between fundamental and non-fundamental truths. I argue that although there are fundamentally true propositions about God, no creature can have them as the object of a propositional attitude, and no sentence can perfectly carve out their structures. Why? Because these propositions have non-enumerable structures. In principle, no creature can fully grasp God’s intrinsic nature, nor can they develop a language that fully describes it. On this account, the ineffability (...) of God is explained in terms of the inability of our language and mental capacities to grasp God as he really is. I will motivate my account by distinguishing it from a rival proposal. According to this rival, there are no fundamentally true propositions about God’s intrinsic nature. I argue that this rival proposal faces problems that my account does not face. And unlike this rival and other accounts of ineffability, my account provides a fitting explanation of why God is ineffable. God is ineffable because the structure of his intrinsic nature is infinite. (shrink)

Many social scientists report that they find it difficult to frame adequate definitions of the important terms of the field. At present they are definition-shy. It is the purpose of this paper to show that this avoidance reaction is neither necessary nor desirable as a means for advancing social science. In order that this be made clear, an analysis of an important term will be presented. First, however, a few preparatory questions about the technique of defining must be asked and (...) answered. (shrink)