This article investigates journalists? attitudes regarding the interface between the craft's commitment to detached observation when covering the news and the perhaps equally compelling drive to assist other human beings in need at the scene of a life?threatening newsworthy incident. Also examined is the journalistic attitude toward the propriety of incorporating relevant ?good Samaritan?; provisions in existing codes of ethics and policy statements as exceptions to the primary goal of detached observation. While journalists generally are in agreement that they have (...) a responsibility to help others in need, these same journalists are reluctant to see provisions codifying this position included in written codes of ethics. It is suggested, however, that a properly written clause outlining appropriate journalist intervention in life?saving acts would be beneficial, and a model provision is proposed. (shrink)

Ralph Wedgwood gives a general account of what it is for states of mind and processes of thought to count as rational. Whether you are thinking rationally depends purely on what is going on in your mind, but rational thinking is a means to the goal of getting things right in your thinking, by believing the truth or making good choices.

This book gives a general theory of rational belief. Although it can be read by itself, is a sequel to the author's previous book The Value of Rationality (Oxford, 2017). It takes the general conception of rationality that was defended in that earlier book, and combines it with an account of the varieties of belief, and of what it is for these beliefs to count as "correct", to develop an account of what it is for beliefs to count as rational. (...) According to this account, rationality comes in degrees: the degree to which one's beliefs counts as rational is determined by their distance from a corresponding probability function - where this distance is measured by those beliefs' "expected degree of incorrectness" according to the probability function; the account also involves an explanation of what determines exactly which probability function plays this role in each case, and of why this probability function should play this role. In developing and defending this account, new light is shed on several central epistemological issues. These issues include: the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification; the debates between internalism and externalism, and between foundationalism and coherentism; the significance - or lack of it - of the notion of 'evidence'; the relationship between credences, full belief, inference, and suspension of judgment; the nature of the kind of possibility that is presupposed by the relevant sort of probability; and whether rationality is "diachronic" - so that the beliefs that it is rational for us to have now depend, in part, on the beliefs that we held in the past. Finally, some suggestions are made about how this theory bears on a range of further topics, including the defeasibility of inference, scepticism, and the analysis of knowledge. (shrink)

It is not the details in the account of the tabernacle that make up its significance but the underlying notion that God elects to be present with God's people. In both the ritual of liturgy and the commonality of daily life, God's presence is an act of grace, made in sovereign freedom.

THE VISIBLE HAND: THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION IN AMERICAN BUSINESS by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977. 608 pp., $9.95 paper STRATEGY AND STRUCTURE: CHAPTERS IN THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISE by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1962. 463 pp., $9.95 paper.

Spirituality emerges in the function of culture to reinforce and yet redirect our genetic heritage. Our genes urge us to be concerned only for our own welfare, which can turn us to evil behaviors. Our religious traditions urge us to engage in behaviors of transkin altruism. These religious traditions have been selected for in the processes of natural selection. The challenge to spirituality is to discern the fundamental dynamics of the evolutionary processes, both genetic and cultural, that have created us (...) and to direct our behaviors in ways that can be beneficial to the entire natural system. Reason is not enough; we must also cultivate spiritual discernment in order to perceive the true nature of our situation and the best responses that are called for. The religious communities have the major responsibility for cultivating the spirituality that can achieve the most adequate discernment. (shrink)

In this article I examine some of the issues involved in taking psychiatric disorders as natural kinds. I begin by introducing a permissive model of natural kind-hood that at least prima facie seems to allow psychiatric disorders to be natural kinds. The model, however, hinges on there in principle being some grounding that is shared by all members of a kind, which explain all or most of the additional shared projectible properties. This leads us to the following question: what grounding (...) do psychiatric disorders qua natural kinds have? My principal method for examining the issue is a case study of a particular psychiatric disorder: the so-called “apathetic children.” I argue that there appear to be at least two competing models that both appeal to non-organic a grounding of the disorder. However, for other psychiatric disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, the evidence points toward an organic explanation of the disorder. I contend that what unites psychiatric disorders is not a distinctive type of grounding that all psychiatric disorders share, but the distinctive set of determinable properties that is shared by all psychiatric disorders. (shrink)

Does Descartes belong to metaphysics? What do we mean when we say "metaphysics"? These questions form the point of departure for Jean-Luc Marion's groundbreaking study of Cartesian thought. Analyses of Descartes' notion of the ego and his idea of God show that if Descartes represents the fullest example of metaphysics, he no less transgresses its limits. Writing as philosopher and historian of philosophy, Marion uses Heidegger's concept of metaphysics to interpret the Cartesian corpus--an interpretation strangely omitted from Heidegger's (...) own history of philosophy. This interpretation complicates and deepens the Heideggerian concept of metaphysics, a concept that has dominated twentieth-century philosophy. Examinations of Descartes' predecessors (Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and Suarez) and his successors (Leibniz, Spinoza, and Hegel) clarify the meaning of the Cartesian revolution in philosophy. Expertly translated by Jeffrey Kosky, this work will appeal to historians of philosophy, students of religion, and anyone interested in the genealogy of contemporary thought and its contradictions. (shrink)

The Epistle to Yemen (composed in 1172) offers a rare opportunity to observe an individual of genuine philosophical stature engaging in popular enlightenment. As in his other works, Moses Maimonides appears here as a religious teacher, but one who goes beyond that and insists on introducing his audience to elementary notions of evidence, credibility, probability, and critical judgment.His Epistle is a decidedly political speech, both in subject matter and in manner of treatment.

In psychology, deception is commonly used to increase experimental control. Yet, its use has provoked concerns that it raises participants' suspicions, prompts second-guessing of experimenters' true intentions, and ultimately distorts behavior and endangers the control it is meant to achieve. Over time, these concerns regarding the methodological costs of the use of deception have been subjected to empirical analysis. We review the evidence stemming from these studies.

The Historical Dictionary of Epistemology provides an overview of this field of study and of the theories, concepts, and personalities through the use of a list of acronyms, a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and more than 500 cross-referenced dictionary entries, covering notable concepts, theories, arguments, publications, issues, and philosophers. Students and others who wish to acquaint themselves with epistemology will be greatly aided by this reference.

I concur with Williams that improving human ethics requires full consideration of the biogenetic facts; but I argue that the understanding of biogenetic facts, and of ethics also, can be improved by a fuller view of nature's mechanism for selecting what is fit, a view recently generated by physical scientists. For me ethics necessarily must fit the evolved genotype, but ethics does not emerge until the rise of cultural evolution, where nature selects a culturetype symbiotic with the genotype. I outline (...) my integrated dynamics of the relation of culturetypes to genotypes and to the laws governing physical systems. The biologist's finding that a living organism is of transient significance compared with its lines of heritage and their consequences, I argue, is constructively important for ethical and theological understanding. (shrink)

The contemporary debate on the metaphysical side of metaethics is dominated by two paradigms—reductive naturalism and primitivist non- naturalism. It is argued here that these are both extreme views. In principle, it should be possible for there to be a host of intermediate views between these two extremes. In fact, most of the views that were taken on these metaphysical questions by philosophers of ancient and medieval times differed from both reductive naturalism and primitivist non-naturalism. However, the metaphysical views of (...) these past philosophers cannot easily be endorsed today. This is because our conception of the natural world has changed from that of these premodern thinkers, because of the development of modern natural science. Nonetheless, it is still possible to make sense of intermediate positions, lying between the two extremes of reductive naturalism and primitivist non- naturalism. These intermediate positions are prima facie promising, and deserve careful consideration from contemporary metaethicists. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are still clues in the ideas of Ralph Cudworth that enable us to develop a philosophical concept of God capable of addressing many of the perplexities of our own time. The association of love with the ultimately real emerges in Cudworth as a viable philosophical idea. It is argued further that the only successful idealist philosophy of religion is one which makes goodness paramount, and that only its concrete manifestation as love can make the (...) notion of God intelligible, as can be seen today in the works of Jean-Luc Marion. Résumé On tente de démontrer ici que les idées de Ralph Cudworth permettent de développer un concept philosophique de Dieu qui répond à plusieurs des perplexités de notre temps. L’association de l’amour et du réel ultime s’avère chez Cudworth une idée philosophique viable. Il y a lieu de se demander si la seule philosophie de la religion idéaliste réussie ne serait pas celle qui accorde la primauté au bien, et si ce n’est sa manifestation concrète comme amour qui seule puisse rendre intelligible le concept de Dieu, comme on le voit aujourd’hui dans l’oeuvre de Jean-Luc Marion. (shrink)

The paper discusses the limitations of engineering ethics as implemented in practice, with a focus on the fact that engineering and other activities are carried out without any consideration of whether the activities are themselves ethical, and on the gap between legality and ethics. This leads to the following three central ideas of the paper. The first is the need for engineers to both be aware of and critique their own values and be able to widen their perspective to that (...) of the ‘other’, i.e., marginalised and minority groups and the environment. This understanding of the ‘other’ and values is also applied to the discussion of ethical issues relating to minority world (‘developed’) country engineers working in majority world (‘developing’) countries. The second central idea is the fact that structural and contextual factors in the form of barriers and enablers affect ethical values and practices. Individuals are not necessarily unethical in themselves, but the context and organisational ethos may present barriers to ethical behaviour and encourage the development of unethical values. These barriers and enablers are investigated through a pilot survey. The third central idea is the relationship between individual and collective responsibility and the need for support to enable engineers to think and behave ethically. (shrink)

Although van der Velde's de Kamps's (vdV&dK) attempt to put syntactic processing into a broader context of combinatorial cognition is promising, their coverage of neuroscientific evidence is disappointing. Neither their case against binding by temporal coherence nor their arguments against recurrent neural networks are compelling. As an alternative, vdV&dK propose a blackboard model that is based on the assumption of special processors (e.g., lexical versus grammatical), but evidence from the cognitive neuroscience of language, which is, overall, less than supportive of (...) such special processors, is not considered. As a consequence, vdV&dK's may be a clever model of syntactic processing, but it remains unclear how much we can learn from it with regard to biologically based human language. (shrink)

Nietzsche gilt als ein "Dichterphilosoph", dessen Werk sich der konventionellen Unterscheidung von Literatur und Philosophie entzieht. Das betrifft zum einen seine offensichtliche Vorliebe für literarische Schreibweisen und Textformen, die ein wesentlicher Grund dafür ist, dass Nietzsche sich so schwer auf eindeutige philosophische Positionen festlegen lässt. Damit hängt zum anderen zusammen, dass er, der akademisch ausgebildete Philologe, sich zeit seines Lebens intensiv mit der abendländischen Literatur von der Antike bis zu seiner Gegenwart beschäftigte. Und so wie sein eigenes Schreiben durch vielfältige (...) literarische Einflüsse geprägt wurde, übte er umgekehrt auch eine immense Wirkung auf die nachfolgende Literatur aus. Der Band erkundet in einer exemplarischen Reihe von Beiträgen Nietzsches Verhältnis zur Literatur sowie das Verhältnis der Literatur zu ihm und zeigt neue Wege der Forschung auf. (shrink)

Ein Adorno und Castoriadis gemeinsames Verständnis von Freiheit und emanzipierter Subjektivität verbindet Motive, die oft in einander entgegengesetzten Diskursen vorkommen. Man stößt auf ein naturalistisch-spontaneistisches Freiheitsmotiv, einen stark ausgeprägten Diskurs über subjektive Autonomie sowie ein differenztheoretisches Motiv, das um das „Unbestimmte” oder „Nichtidentische” kreist. Der Aufsatz entwickelt Ansätze eines Begriffs dreidimensionaler Freiheit und einer darauf beruhenden Ethik des freien Lebens. Das Resultat wird schließlich mit dem ethisch bescheideneren, negativen Freiheitsbegriff des politischen Liberalismus konfrontiert.

One of the traditional ways in which we manage dissensus is by argumentation, which may be construed as the attempt of the proponent to persuade rationally the other party of the truth of some thesis. To achieve this, the arguer will often anticipate a possible objection. In this paper, I attempt to shed light on the normative aspect of the task of anticipating objections. I deal with such questions as: How is the arguer to anticipate objections? Which of the anticipated (...) objections are to be dealt with? What is required to deal successfully with an objection? (shrink)

This article looks at a number of issues relating to Unhealthy Dependency between churches in Africa and those in the Materially Developed World. Having defined unhealthy Dependency and recognizing the significance of finance in this area, it looks at the bigger picture, identifying a number of other areas where Unhealthy Dependency has arisen and continues to be significant. It also begins to point out some of the methods by which such unhealthy dependency is being tackled.

One sector that severely suffers from the outbreak of the coronavirus is carsharing. The downswing of the carsharing industry may not only experience negative economic consequences but also ecological ones. Carsharing has the potential to reduce emissions, occupied space, and congestion and hence can actively contribute to mitigating climate change. As Bill Gates strikingly states: “Covid-19 is awful. Climate change could be worse.” For this reason, it is important to understand which underlying mechanisms drive carsharing usage during the Covid-19 pandemic. (...) The current research has the overall objective to provide deeper insights into the mediating mechanisms that explain carsharing usage intention during the Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, we draw on signaling theory to explore how different claims that prompt two different opposing underlying processes influence carsharing usage intention. An online experiment employing a 3 × 2 between-subjects design with participants acquired by the online panel platform Clickworker was conducted in April 2020. Fictitious labels and fictitious advertisements served as stimulus material and constituted the five experimental conditions. The data were analyzed by a multicategorial moderated mediation analysis and a multivariate analysis of covariance. Results reveal that environmental claims can stimulate perceived ecological benefits, which, in turn, positively affect carsharing usage intention. Interestingly, our research demonstrates that safety claims cannot decrease perceived physical risk in the context of Covid-19 and carsharing. Nevertheless, perceived physical risk has a negative influence on carsharing usage intention and hence should not be discarded altogether. The findings of this article offer new insights into the mental processes that guide consumer decision-making during the coronavirus crisis and also offer important policy implications by highlighting the relevance of environmental claims during the Covid-19 pandemic. Furthermore, the negative influence of perceived physical risk on carsharing usage intention points to the need for alternative measures to reduce users' risk perceptions. (shrink)