At the 1969 annual meeting of the American Association for the Ad vancement ofScience, held in Boston on December 27-29, a sequence of symposia on the philosophical foundations of science was organized jointly by Section L of the Association and the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science. Section L is devoted to the history, philos ophy, logic and sociology of science, with broad connotations extended both to 'science' and to 'philosophy'. With collaboration generously extended by other and more specialized (...) Sections of the AAAS, the Section L program took an unusually rich range of topics, and indeed the audiences were large, and the discussions lively. This book, regrettably delayed in publication, contains the major papers from those symposia of 1969. In addition, it contains the distin guished George Sarton Memorial Lecture of that meeting, 'Boltzmann, Monocycles and Mechanical Explanation' by Martin J. Klein. Some additions and omissions should be noted: In Part 1, dedicated to the 450th anniversary of the birth of Leonardo da Vinci, we have been una bie to include a contrihution by Elmer Belt who was prevented by storms from participating. In Part II, on physics and the explanation of life, we were unable to persuade Isaac Asimov to overcome his modesty about the historical remarks he made under the title 'Arrhenius Revisited'. (shrink)

This study examines two recent cases of ethical responses to crisis management; the 1995 fire at Malden Mills and Aaron Feuerstein''s response, and a 1998 fire at Cole Hardwoods, followed by the response of CEO Milt Cole. The authors describe these crises, the responses of Feuerstein and Cole, their motivations and the impact on crisis stakeholders using the principles of virtue ethics and effective crisis management. What emerges is set of post-crisis virtues grounded in values of corporate social responsibility and (...) entrepreneurial ethics. These include virtues of immediacy of response, supportiveness of victims, and rebuilding and renewal. (shrink)

In their article “Out of nowhere: thought insertion, ownership and context-integration”, Jean-Remy Martin & Elisabeth Pacherie criticize the standard approach to thought insertion. However, their criticism is based on a misunderstanding of what the standard approach actually claims. By clarifying the notions ‘sense of ownership’ and ‘sense of agency’, I show that Martin & Pacherie’s own approach can be construed as a refined version of the standard approach.

In thought insertion, subjects experience thoughts which they claim not to be their own. What they claim, it is typically said, is that the thought is not theirs in the sense that they are not the agent or author of the thought. But what does it mean to be the agent or author of a thought? The most intuitive idea is that for a thought to be one's own means for the thought to causally originate within the subject. I defend (...) this analysis against rivaling accounts and discuss several challenges that have not been recognized so far. (shrink)

According to the incentives argument, inequalities in material goods are justifiable if they are to the benefit of the worst off members of society. In this paper, I point out what is easily overlooked, namely that inequalities are justifiable only if they are to the overall benefit of the worst off, that is, in terms of both material and social goods. I then address the question how gains in material goods can be weighed against probable losses in social goods. The (...) ultimate criterion, so my idea, is how these gains and losses affect a person's ability to reach her goals in life. Based on the idea that goals in life cannot be taken as given, I conclude that the absolute material gains are negligible compared to the losses of social goods and the disadvantage in the relative position caused by material inequalities. (shrink)

Human presencing explores how people’s past encounters with others shape their present actions. In this paper, I present an alternative perspective on human embodiment in which the re-evoking of the absent can be traced to the intricate interplay of bodily dynamics. By situating the phenomenon within distributed, embodied, and dialogic approaches to language and cognition, I am overcoming the theoretical and methodological challenges involved in perceiving and acting upon what is not perceptually present. In a case study, I present strong (...) and weak dimensions of human presencing. In the former, a person uses their body in distinct ways and shapes their immediate ecology to make others present to them. In contrast, in the latter, a person’s past encounter with others powerfully shapes the projections they make onto written digital inscriptions. These findings have implications for how people act in online learning environments and how human activity shapes the machines we use every day. In this way, the paper highlights the complexity of a person as a social being and allows for different approaches to human embodiment in technology. (shrink)

This paper takes a step back from considering expertise as a social phenomenon. One should investigate how people become knowers before assigning expertise to a person’s actions. Using a temporal-sensitive systemic ethnography, a case study shows how undergraduate students form a social system out of necessity as they fabricate knowledge around an empty wording like ‘conscious living’. Tracing the engagement with students and tutor to recursive moments of coaction, I argue that, through the subtleties of bodily movements, people incorporate the (...) actions of others as they become knowers. Knowing for a person solidifies as they imbue concepts, terms, facts, etc. with their own understanding. While coaction refers to the interlocking of actions in a specific moment, the fabrication of knowledge resides in temporally distributed moments of coaction where students deliberately incorporate and build on past occurrences in a present moment. In so doing, people cannot be separated from their systemic embedding. Linking coaction with systemic cognition, people fabricate knowledge within wider systemic structures. Within these boundaries, knowers come to fabricate knowledge for themselves and a wider system. Thus, knowing must be seen as an active, embodied, dialogical and multiscalar activity. (shrink)

Jonathan Weinberg (2007) has argued that we should not appeal to intuition as evidence because it cannot be externally corroborated. This paper argues for the normative claim that Weinberg’s demand for external corroboration is misguided. The idea is that Weinberg goes wrong in treating philosophical appeal to intuition analogous to the appeal to evidence in the sciences. Traditional practice is defended against Weinberg’s critique with the argument that some intuitions are true simply in virtue of being intuited by the majority (...) of people. The argument proceeds by way of examining a paradigm case, Putnam’s Twin Earth. (shrink)

This volume provides new sources of knowledge based on Michael Otte’s fundamental insight that understanding the problems of mathematics education – how to teach, how to learn, how to communicate, how to do, and how to represent ...

Abstractabstract:Taking Yanis Varoufakis’s novel Another Now as a case study, this article introduces and makes an argument for a new concept in utopian studies: the postcritical utopia. It begins by making four claims: (1) that Varoufakis has written a utopian socialist novel; (2) that this represents a retrieval of a historical form of literature; (3) that the utopia at its center takes the form of a utopian blueprint; and (4) that two objections to this utopia, posed by one of its (...) main characters, complicate our understanding of Another Now, with implications for how we ought to classify it. It is then argued that Another Now’s combination of a systematic utopian blueprint with insights drawn from the tradition of the critical utopia qualifies it as a postcritical utopia. The latter concept is then considered in the context of utopian studies scholarship. (shrink)

James Pryor distinguishes two varieties of error through misidentification, de re misidentification and which-object misidentification, and two corresponding varieties of immunity to error through misidentification. This paper examines the relation between de re and which-object misidentification. I argue that the most natural reading of which-object misidentification, according to which the two kinds of error are mutually exclusive, is in tension with Pryor’s claim that immunity to which-object misidentification implies immunity to de re misidentification. To resolve the tension, Pryor should construe (...) which-object misidentification more broadly, as encompassing de re misidentification. (shrink)

This paper examines a paradigm case of allegedly successful reductive explanation, viz. the explanation of the fact that water boils at 100°C based on facts about H2O. The case figures prominently in Joseph Levine’s explanatory gap argument against physicalism. The paper studies the way the argument evolved in the writings of Levine, focusing especially on the question how the reductive explanation of boiling water figures in the argument. It will turn out that there are two versions of the explanatory gap (...) argument to be found in Levine’s writings. The earlier version relies heavily on conceptual analysis and construes reductive explanation as a process of deduction. The later version makes do without conceptual analysis and understands reductive explanations as based on theoretic reductions that are justified by explanatory power. Along the way will be shown that the bridge principles — which are being neglected in the explanatory gap literature — play a crucial role in the explanatory gap argument. (shrink)

Peer review is a widely accepted instrument for raising the quality of science. Peer review limits the enormous unstructured influx of information and the sheer amount of dubious data, which in its absence would plunge science into chaos. In particular, peer review offers the benefit of eliminating papers that suffer from poor craftsmanship or methodological shortcomings, especially in the experimental sciences. However, we believe that peer review is not always appropriate for the evaluation of controversial hypothetical science. We argue that (...) the process of peer review can be prone to bias towards ideas that affirm the prior convictions of reviewers and against innovation and radical new ideas. Innovative hypotheses are thus highly vulnerable to being “filtered out” or made to accord with conventional wisdom by the peer review process. Consequently, having introduced peer review, the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses may be unable to continue its tradition as a radical journal allowing discussion of improbable or unconventional ideas. Hence we conclude by asking the publisher to consider re-introducing the system of editorial review to Medical Hypotheses. (shrink)

In this article, we address the problem of the potential crisis in people’s life’s meaning due to massive automation-driven technological unemployment. Assuming that the problem of (re)distribution of economic resources to the whole of society in such a scenario will be solved (e.g. through provision of a Universal Basic Income), the question arises concerning the meaning of people’s lives in a world in which almost everyone does not have to (or even could not) work in order to live. Here, we (...) side with many current proposals that paid work is not the only possible source of meaning and hence, that a meaningful life could indeed be led in a post-work society. We especially focus on one of the most developed accounts, Danaher’s Virtual Utopia (Danaher, 2016, 2019, 2022). According to him, living immersed in playful virtual worlds where new, expanded and personalized possibilities of personal and collective experiences and actions, could not only be perfectly meaningful lives, but furthermore, “be the utopia we are looking for” (Danaher, 2019, p. 270). However, our analysis will suggest that although it is a very well thought and carefully articulated position, it suffers from various important problems. Our criticism will be based on an alternative framework to think about life’s meaning and the conditions for leading a good life in general. This alternative is based on the philosophy of buen vivir (“good living”). This notion has its roots in common aspects of various Latin American indigenous cultures regarding a community-centered way of life where humans, society and nature are taken to be deeply interconnected and interdependent, and where the notions of respect, harmony and balance are at the core of this interrelationship (Gudynas, 2011; Acosta, 2008; Beling et al., 2021). Buen vivir has many facets, but we will focus on three: the importance of healthy human communities, the human-nature relationship, and the intrinsic value of nature. Based on these, we argue that the Virtual Utopia is not a good candidate for human’s post-work utopia because i) it unnecessarily augments the environmental damage that is already involved in massive labor automation; ii) it entails an unnecessary and detrimental dependence on technology for human relationships; and iii) increases the severance of the link between humanity and nature. We conclude that the buen vivir approach is a promising candidate for an alternative utopian project, but one that needs further construction. (shrink)

This article argues that Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction is a form of ‘speculative anthropology’ that reconciles thick description and historicity. Like Clifford Geertz’s ethnographic writings, Le Guin’s science fiction utilises thick description to place the reader within unfamiliar social worlds rendered with extraordinary phenomenological fluency. At the same time, by incorporating social antagonisms, cultural contestation, and historical contingency, Le Guin never allows thick description to neutralise historicity. Rather, by combining the two and exploring their interplay, Le Guin establishes a (...) critical relation between her imagined worlds and the reader’s own historical moment. This enables her to both counter Fredric Jameson’s influential criticism of her work – the charge of ‘world reduction’ – and point to ungrasped utopian possibilities within the present. Le Guin’s speculative anthropology thus combines the strengths while overcoming some of the limitations of both Geertz’s thick-descriptive method and Jameson’s theory of the science fiction genre. (shrink)

Against the backdrop of a global pandemic, this study investigates how U.S. higher education leaders have centered their crisis management on values and guiding ethical principles. We conducted 55 in-depth interviews with leaders from 30 U.S. higher education institutions, with most leaders participating in two interviews. We found that crisis plans created prior to the COVID-19 pandemic were inadequate due to the long duration and highly uncertain nature of the crisis. Instead, higher education leaders applied guiding principles on the fly (...) to support their decision-making. If colleges and universities infuse shared values into their future crisis plans, they will not have to develop a moral compass on the fly for the next pandemic. This paper suggests the following somewhat universal shared values: engage in accuracy, transparency, and accountability; foster deliberative dialog; prioritize safety; support justice, fairness, and equity; and engage in an ethic of care. To navigate ethics tensions, leaders need to possess crisis-relevant expertise or ensure that such expertise is present among crisis management team members. Standing up formal ethics committees composed of diverse stakeholders also is instrumental in navigating tensions inherent in crises. The next pandemic is already on the horizon according to experts. Through infusing values into future crisis plans, higher education leaders can be confident that their responses will be grounded in their communities’ shared values. (shrink)

Understanding the relationship between wilderness outings and the resulting experience has been a central theme in resource-based, outdoor recreation research for nearly 50 years. The authors provide a review and synthesis of literature that examines how people, over time, build relationships with wilderness places and express their identities as consequences of multiple, ongoing wilderness engagements (i.e., continued participation). The paper reviews studies of everyday places and those specifically protected for wilderness and backcountry qualities. Beginning with early origins and working through (...) contemporary research the authors synthesize what diverse social scientists have learned about the long-term and continual nature of wilderness participation and its impact on the formation of identity. The thrust of the paper points researchers, planners, and managers in non-traditional directions and reframes goals and objectives for visitor planning and management in wilderness and other protected areas. (shrink)

The Gorgias ends with Socrates telling an eschatological myth that he insists is a rational account and no mere tale. Using this story, Socrates reasserts the central lessons of the previous discussion. However, it isn’t clear how this story can persuade any of the characters in the dialogue. Those (such as Socrates) who already believe the underlying philosophical lessons don’t appear to require the myth, and those (such as Callicles) who reject these teachings are unlikely to be moved by this (...) far-fetched tale. This raises the question of who the myth is told for and what function it is meant to serve. This chapter argues that the myth is aimed, not at Callicles, but Socrates and those who aspire to follow him. There are uncertainties about the philosophical life that are due to the nature of embodiment, as well as reasons to doubt the connection between happiness and virtue. The myth assists with the former by presenting an image that draws a philosopher away from the goods of the body toward the goods of the soul. The story assists with the latter by presenting an image of cosmic justice, thereby securing happiness in proportion to virtue. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Basic Human Rights Public Reason Sovereignty and Self‐determination The DNSL Argument and the Minimum Respect‐for‐Justice Condition Adequate Justification Rights of Political Participation Post‐war Nation Building Promoting Political Reform Conclusion Acknowledgments Notes.

The prelims comprise: Half‐Title Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Page Table of Contents Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations.

This chapter by Fisher continues the theme of the relation between Armstrong and Lewis, only Fisher casts the net far wider. He begins by arguing that there were at least two different lines of influence from early twentieth-century behaviourism to the identity theory: one through logical positivism and the other through ordinary language philosophy, the latter involving Place and Smart, and Lewis and Armstrong. It was Armstrong and Lewis who were to have a profound influence on subsequent developments in analytic (...) philosophy, both methodologically and in metaphysics, and it is for this reason that Fisher devotes the rest of his chapter to tracing the origins of their theories of mind and the manner in which the emphases and methodologies deployed in developing their respective theories became the hallmarks of their wider impact on analytic philosophy. (shrink)

. This is one of the better books on Indian religion" ÑChoice In this book, Farella combines the classic studies of Gladys Reichard and Berard Haile with recent interviews with tribal elders, in order to develop an understanding of the ...

Since the publication of Edmund Gettier's challenge to the traditional epistemological doctrine of knowledge as justified true belief, Roberts and Wood claim that epistemologists lapsed into despondency and are currently open to novel approaches. One such approach is virtue epistemology, which can be divided into virtues as proper functions or epistemic character traits. The authors propose a notion of regulative epistemology, as opposed to a strict analytic epistemology, based on intellectual virtues that function not as rules or even as skills (...) but as habits of the heart. To that end, they divide the task of clarifying and expounding their notion in the book's two parts.In the first part, Roberts and Wood examine various components that constitute their notion of regulative epistemology. The first are the epistemic goods or goals that drive the epistemic process. What is needed, claim Roberts and Wood, is an enriched notion of these goods rather than the restricted notion of justified true belief. Epistemic agents are more than calculating devices in that …. (shrink)

Nicht nur mit Engelszungen: Beiträge zur semitischen Dialektologie—Festschrift für Werner Arnold zum 60. Geburtstag. Edited by Renaud Kuty; Ulrich Seeger; and Shabo Talay. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013. Pp. xx + 412. €118.

In this Introduction, Alexander and his work are outlined in its historical context with an account of his place in the history of philosophy. The background and motivation of the work is given along with a description of the organisation and content of the chapters that follow. Justification is also given for the inclusion of three posthumous papers by Alexander and how these posthumous papers relate to the newly commissioned essays.