Amazon Book Review Series of “Better Economics for the Earth: A Lesson from Quantum and Information Theories”.

Rambo (2008) marked the return of Sylvester Stallone's iconic action hero. What is most striking about the fourth film (as the response from reviewers testifies), is its graphic violence. My intention here is to critically engage with Rambo (2008) as rewriting the series' established aesthetic of violence. My overarching aim is to highlight how the popular press has sought to read the 2008 version of Rambo according to the discursive narratives surrounding Stallone's 1980s action films. The negative response to (...) Rambo, I argue, stems from relying on critical patterns that do not fit the film itself. (shrink)

Reviews of “Wild Wise Weird” in the United States on October 1 & 3, 2024.

Abstract. Intelligent Tutoring System Builder (ITSB) is an authoring tool designed and developed to aid teachers in constructing intelligent tutoring systems in a multidisciplinary fields. The teacher is needed to create a set of pedagogical fundamentals, which, in line, are inured to automatically build up a broad tutor framework and construct an intelligent tutoring system. In this paper an explanation of the theory and the architecture of the tool is outlined. A presentation of several system components, the requirements of the (...) different components, integration of these components in ITSB tool are shown. Furthermore, implanting of requirements, cognitive principle, and common design fundamentals in the tool to ease the use of teachers. A variety of design matters, an example of building an intelligent tutoring system for teaching Java language using ITSB tool and an evaluation are presented. (shrink)

Philosophers of science are increasingly interested in engaging with scientific communities, policy makers, and members of the public; however, the nature of this engagement has not been systematically examined. Instead of delineating a specific kind of engaged philosophy of science, as previous accounts have done, this article draws on literature from outside the discipline to develop a framework for analyzing different forms of broadly engaged philosophy of science according to two key dimensions: social interaction and epistemic integration. Clarifying the many (...) forms of engagement available to philosophers of science can advance future scholarship on engagement and promote more strategic engagement efforts. (shrink)

Ever since Darwin people have worried about the sceptical implications of evolution. If our minds are products of evolution like those of other animals, why suppose that the beliefs they produce are true, rather than merely useful? We consider this problem for beliefs in three different domains: religion, morality, and commonsense and scientific claims about matters of empirical fact. We identify replies to evolutionary scepticism that work in some domains but not in others. One reply is that evolution can be (...) expected to design systems that produce true beliefs in some domain. This reply works for commonsense beliefs and can be extended to scientific beliefs. But it does not work for moral or religious beliefs. An alternative reply which has been used defend moral beliefs is that their truth does not consist in their tracking some external state of affairs. Whether or not it is successful in the case of moral beliefs, this reply is less plausible for religious beliefs. So religious beliefs emerge as particularly vulnerable to evolutionary debunking. (shrink)

The article concerns the interpretation of Aquinas' philosophy in the thougt of the swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar.

This article examines the distinction between active matter and active materials, and it offers foundational remarks toward a system of classification for active materials. Active matter is typically identified as matter that exhibits two characteristic features: self-propelling parts, and coherent dynamical activity among the parts. These features are exhibited across a wide range of organic and inorganic materials, and they are jointly sufficient for classifying matter as active. Recently, the term “active materials” has entered scientific use as a complement, supplement, (...) and extension of “active matter.” At the same time, new work in the philosophy of science has considered the problem of how to classify the products of synthetic and laboratory processes, and the extent to which the aims of classifying natural kinds compare and contrasts with the aims of classifying these synthetic kinds. In this article, I apply those considerations to the problems of classifying and characterizing active materials. In doing so, I also argue for a conception of active materials’ coherent dynamical activity as multiscale, rather than emergent, and I discuss how the special non-equilibrium status of active materials factors in to classificatory concerns. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAccording to Nietzsche, both modern individuals and societies are pathologically fragmented. In this paper, I examine how he proposes we combat this affliction in his Untimely Meditations. I argue that he advocates a dual struggle involving both instrumental domination and eradication. On these grounds, I claim the following: 1. pace a growing number of commentators, we cannot categorise the species of conflict he endorses in the Untimely Meditations as agonistic; and 2. this conflict is better understood as analogous to the (...) species of struggle that Schopenhauer describes in his account of purposive organisation. (shrink)

Human nature, values, and human existence and development are all intertwined in the notion of Maqāṣid al-Sharīʽah, which supports the well-being of humans, including those with mental health concerns. The high degree of mental health difficulties among students, such as severe stress and depressive symptoms, not only impact their academic performance but also lead to self-injurious behaviour and suicidal attempts. With the COVID-19 pandemic affecting Malaysian university students’ mental health, this article aims to explore the situation from a Maqāṣid al-Sharīʽah (...) perspective and positive psychology. The study employed a mixed-method approach. Firstly, a quantitative descriptive analysis was done to assess students’ overall mental health symptoms to provide a rudimentary assessment of their core psychological problems. Questionnaires were accompanied by an open-ended question to triangulate respondents’ experiences and were analysed qualitatively through a thematic analysis. A DASS-21 survey was given to 87 undergraduate IIUM students (n = 81) aged 19 to 27 years. Based on the maqāṣid framework, the study could be utilised to prioritise strategies to treat mental health concerns at various levels that will ensure the preservation of human life. The ultimate purpose of this research is to provide future implications for a multidimensional framework of psychological well-being based on Maqāṣid al-Sharīʽah principles. This is consistent with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that calls for action to protect humanity and to ensure that all individuals are living in peace and prosperity. (shrink)

The article entitled “Cultural evolution in Vietnam’s early 20th century: A Bayesian networks analysis of Hanoi Franco-Chinese house designs” investigates how diverse cultures and religious creeds influenced the architecture of Hanoi in the early 20th century.

There is a growing consensus among philosophers of science that core parts of the scientific process involve non-epistemic values. This undermines the traditional foundation for public trust in science. In this article I consider two proposals for justifying public trust in value-laden science. According to the first, scientists can promote trust by being transparent about their value choices. On the second, trust requires that the values of a scientist align with the values of an individual member of the public. I (...) argue that neither of these proposals work and suggest an alternative that does better. When scientists must appeal to values in the course of their research, they should appeal to democratic values: the values of the public or its representatives. (shrink)

This paper traces two contradicting beliefs about death and immortality in the writings of Rabbi Hayyim Hirschensohn, and examines these opposing beliefs in his Halakhic ruling, in the case of Autopsies. The paper opens by conceptualizing two possible attitudes regarding the relation between this-world and the ʽother-world’, and by analyzing two main beliefs regarding death and immortality in their relation to the body-spirit distinction (the naturalistic and the spiritualistic approach). It demonstrates how Hirschensohn was holding these two different views. The (...) paper then moves to examine whether his halakhic ruling may help us in understanding which approach was Hirschensohn’s favorable belief, by investigating his halakhic ruling regarding autopsies. Hirschensohn permits to perform such surgeries, however subject to some halakhic limitations. The paper concludes that the naturalistic belief regarding death appears to be the more dominant one in his thought. Finally, I point out a few consequences of this paper, for addressing some contemporary ethical dilemmas regarding human corpses. (shrink)

This special issue advances arguments for an examples of socially relevant and socially engaged philosophy of science. -/- The introduction (Fehr & Plaisance) provides an argument for a more socially relevant philosophy of science (SRPOS). Their aims are to characterize this body of work in philosophy of science, to argue for its importance, and to demonstrate that there are significant opportunities for philosophy of science to engage with and support this type of research. The impetus of this project was a (...) keen sense of missed opportunities for philosophy of science to have a broader social impact. Fehr & Plaisance illustrate various ways in which SRPOS can provide social benefits, as well as benefits to scientific practice and philosophy itself. Also, SRPOS is consistent with some historical and contemporary goals of philosophy of science. They call for an expansion of philosophy of science to include more of this type of work. In order to support this expansion, they characterize philosophy of science as an epistemic community and examine the culture and practices of philosophy of science that can help or hinder research in this area. (shrink)

This study aimed to identify the reality of marketing services in Palestine Cellular Communications Company (Jawwal) from the viewpoint of the workers, where the researchers used the descriptive analytical method, through a questionnaire randomly distributed to the sample of workers in Palestine Cellular Communications Company (Jawwal) in Gaza Strip reached (60) employees. The study reached a number of results, the most important of which are: The results showed that there is a high level of efficiency of marketing services in Palestine (...) Cellular Communications Company (Jawwal) with a relative weight (91.63%). The results showed that there were no statistically significant differences in the efficiency of marketing services according to the gender variable in favor of males. The study made a number of recommendations, the most important of which are: Attention to the use of electronic publishing means to motivate beneficiaries to receive the company's services. Increase the confidence of the beneficiaries in the company's services by offering competitive campaigns that meet the needs of the beneficiaries. (shrink)

To naturalize religion, we must identify what religion is, and what aspects of it we are trying to explain. In this paper, religious social institutional behavior is the explanatory target, and an explanatory hypothesis based on shared primate social dominance psychology is given. The argument is that various religious features, including the high status afforded the religious, and the high status afforded to deities, are an expression of this social dominance psychology in a context for which it did not evolve: (...) high-density populations made possible by agriculture. (shrink)

The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between the decision support systems and re-engineering in the Palestinian universities in Gaza Strip. A descriptive approach was used where a questionnaire was developed and distributed to a stratified random Sample. (500) questionnaires were distributed and (449) were returned, response rate (89.8%). The study reached many results such as: There is A statistically significant relationship at a significant level (α ≤ 0.04) between the decision support systems and re-engineering in the (...) universities under investigation. There are differences in the answers of the respondents concerning the relationship between decision support systems and re-engineering due to the gender of the respondents in favor of the males. There are differences in the answers of the respondents for the dimension (managerial support for the decision support systems) in favor of those in the age group between (45-55) years and more than (55) years, and due to the educational level in favor of those holding master degrees, and due to the name of the university in favor of the Islamic university, Al azhar university, Al aqsa university, respectively and due to the years of experience in favor of those who have (15-20) years of experience and (21) years and more. The study reached many Conclusions such as: In order to be able to cope with globalization and its technical aspects, the Palestinian universities in Gaza should focus on the process of re-engineering. The importance of this tendency should be clarified to the top management of these universities specially those who are not willing to do so. The universities should be encouraged to start implementing it’s re-engineering programs while developing the infrastructure for their information technology as a whole, and the decision support systems in particular. The top management in the universities should increase their dependence, support and use of the decision support systems in the decision-making process. The top management should also diagnose the problems and encourage the employees to use the decision support systems and overcome the obstacles that may hinder the development of the decision support systems. (shrink)

Economic theories of democratic legitimacy (discussed here as minimalist theories) have criticized deliberative accounts of democratic legitimacy on the grounds that they do not represent a practical possibility and that they create conditions that make actual democracies worse. It is not simply that they represent the wrong ideal. Rather, they are too idealistic – failing to show proper regard for the cognitive and moral limitations of persons and the depth of disagreement in democratic society. This article aims to show (1) (...) that the minimalist criterion of democratic legitimacy is self-defeating and (2) that even if there are minimal cognitive, moral, and social requirements for the possibility of practicable deliberative democracy, these limitations do not necessarily impose insuperable barriers for democratic deliberation as the normative basis of democratic legitimacy. Thus, the limiting facts do not dictate the structure of appropriate normative models of democracy in the way minimalists have supposed. (shrink)

It seems clear that second order fuzziness (indeterminacy) is possible. There can be borderline cases of borderline cases. But how about third order cases? Is there no end of degrees of borderlinehood? I offer a somewhat strange little 'language game' that seems to suggest that the ascension ends with second order cases. (The 'game' is intended to be somewhat like a simplified version of color perception.).

It is often noted that if someone has a tertiary degree in a scientific field who promotes an anti-science-establishment, antiscience, or pseudoscience agenda, they are very often engineers, dentists, surgeons or medical practitioners. While this does not mean that all members of these professions or disciplines are antiscience, of course, the higher frequency of pseudoscience among them is indicative of what I call the “deductivist mindset” regarding science itself. Opposing this is the “inductivist mindset”, a view that has been deprecated (...) among philosophers since Popper. Roughly, the deductivist mindset tends to see problems as questions that can be resolved by deduction from known theory or principle, while the inductivist sees problems as questions to be resolved by discovery. These form cognitive poles, which nobody ever purely instantiates, but a cognitive tendency to be a deductivist may explain why some people find results that conflict with prior theoretical commitments, whether scientific or not, unacceptable. The deductivist tends to be a cognitive conservative, where the inductivist tends to be a cognitive progressive, and the conservative mindset leads to a ressentiment about modernism, and hence about certain scientific results, more often, or so I shall argue in this chapter. (shrink)

The ecological crisis is one of the most critical moral concerns of the present. But the concern is not with the environment, or with that which surrounds us; it is not with an objectified nature, in relation to which humans stand as mere passive observers. Rather, ecological concern emerges from recognition that humanity participates in nature, that our behavior in the natural world affects our own present and future as well as the present and future of the biosphere and that (...) we are morally answerable for this behavior, or responsible in, through, and for our participation.1 Understood in these ways, the ecological crisis can be viewed as an unfolding historical process generated by the structural forms and .. (shrink)

In 1951 John Rawls expressed these convictions about the fundamental issues in metaethics: [T]he objectivity or the subjectivity of moral knowledge turns, not on the question whether ideal value entities exist or whether moral judgments are caused by emotions or whether there is a variety of moral codes the world over, but simply on the question: does there exist a reasonable method for validating and invalidating given or proposed moral rules and those decisions made on the basis of them? For (...) to say of scientific knowledge that it is objective is to say that the propositions expressed therein may be evidenced to be true by a reasonable and reliable method, that is, by the rules and procedures of what we may call "inductive logic"; and, similarly, to establish the objectivity of moral rules, and the decisions based upon them, we must exhibit the decision procedure, which can be shown to be both reasonable and reliable, at least in some cases, for deciding between moral rules and lines of conduct consequent to them.1 In this passage Rawls reconfigured the issue of moral objectivity and so reoriented the practice of metaethics from linguistic analysis to rational methodology. In so doing, his work has provided inspiration to philosophers as disparate in normative views as Thomas Nagel,2 Richard Brandt3, Alan Gewirth4, and David Gauthier.5 Rawls replaced the Moorean question, Do moral terms refer? with the Rawlsian question, Can moral judgments be the outcome of a rational and reliable procedure? He later gave a resoundingly positive answer to this question6 and later still, a more tentative one.7 Rawls' considered qualification of his earlier enthusiasm about the extent to which moral philosophy could be "part of the theory of rational choice"8 is a tribute to the seriousness with which he took his critics' objections. (shrink)

Drawing upon the thought of Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger, the paper argues that contemporary discussions of religious experience and religious thought as two separate parts of religious practice and tradition--with religious experience as the "heart" of religion--is erroneous. Instead, it is argued, religious experience and religious thought are woven together in practice, the one implicating the other.

Faith has many aspects. One of them is whether absolute logical proof for God’s existence is a prerequisite for the proper establishment and individual acceptance of a religious system. The treatment of this question, examined here in the Jewish context of Rabbi Prof. Eliezer Berkovits, has been strongly influenced in the modern era by the radical foundationalism and radical skepticism of Descartes, who rooted in the Western mind the notion that religion and religious issues are “all or nothing” questions. Cartesianism, (...) which surprisingly became the basis of modern secularism, was criticized by the classical American pragmatists. Peirce, James and Dewey all rejected the attempt to achieve infallible absolute knowledge, as well as the presumptuousness of establishing such a knowledge by means of casting Cartesian hyperbolic doubt. They advocated an alternative approach which was more holistic and humane. This paper lays out Descartes’s approach and the pragmatists’ critique. Despite the place that pragmatic considerations hold in Jewish tradition, some thinkers reject the relevance of these ideas. Yet Berkovits’s thought suggest a different path. He rejected Descartes’ radical skepticism and his radical foundationalism, in favor of a moderate foundationalism, which allows for a belief in God alongside constructive doubts. Similar to Peirce’s conception of the fixation of belief, Berkovits views local doubts (distinct from the hyperbolic doubt) as necessary for thought. Berkovits’s understanding of the biblical human-divine encounter, following Rosenzweig, Buber, and Heschel, is conceptualized here as “encounter theology”. Berkovits criticizes the propositionalist attempts to prove God’s existence logically, as well as the presumptuousness of basing religious belief on the teleological world-order. However, Berkovits’s conception of the ‘caring God’ is not provable, and thus defined as a pragmatic ‘postulate’. The article concludes by considering Berkovits’s “encounter theology”. In contrast to the approach described by Haym Soloveitchik, of halakhic stringency and lack of subjective experience of God’s face, Berkovits’s approach is dialogic through and through. (shrink)

Seit kurzem wird des öfteren in Deutschland die Ansicht geäußert, Deutschland solle nun seine fremdenfeindliche Vergangenheit im Zweiten Weltkrieg endlich hinter sich lassen und von nun ab als >>normalisiertes<< Land der Zukunft gegenübertreten. Diese Meinung entsteht aus der Voraussetzung, daß Deutschland durch seine Geschichte von Xenophobie und Genozid im Zweiten Weltkrieg als abnormal, als ungewöhnlich gekennzeichnet ist. Aber das ist nicht wahr. Deutschlands blutige Geschichte ist mit derjenigen der Vereinigten Staaten, Großbritanniens, der Niederlande, Rußlands, Chinas, Japans, der Türkei, Vietnams, Kambodschas, (...) Somalias, Ruandas, des Irak, des Kosovo, Bosniens, und anderer Länder vergleichbar. Zu vergleichen bedeutet weder zu relativieren, noch zu entschuldigen, sondern bloß anzuerkennen, daß die Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit, die in verschiedenen Ländern stattfinden, einige gemeinsame Eigenschaften haben. (shrink)

The book attempts to build a bridge across three cultures: mathematical statistics, quantum theory and chemometrical methods.

This article examines A.J. Heschel’s “Theology of pathos” in light of the critique Eliezer Berkovits raised against it. Heschel’s theology of pathos is the notion of God as the “most moved mover”, who cares deeply for humans, and thus highly influencing their prophetic motivation for human-social improvement. Berkovits, expressing the negative-transcendent theology of Maimonides, assessed that Heschel’s theology of pathos is not systematic, is anthropomorphic, and reflects a foreign Christian influence. However, when checking Berkovits’s own views as a thinker, it (...) turns out that he formulated some immanent theological notions that were overlapping those of Heschel, for example in attributing God the personal trait of caring. Surprisingly, most Heschel’s scholars did not consider this point. This riddle addressed here in two ways: (1) Psychological and Social, on which I understand Berkovits’s critique as a way of coping with his own religious perplexities, and in a wider sense, it is asserted that trans-denominational critique may be a discursive opportunity for mutual corrigibility. (2) Theological, since Heschel and Berkovits indeed faced a similar theological challenge, of rejecting any description of God as anthropomorphism. I thus offer a constructive theological argument for providing a justification to the immanent theologies of both Heschel and Berkovits. (shrink)

This essay ties together some main strands of the author’s research spanning the last quarter-century. Because of its broad scope and space limitations, he prescinds from detailed arguments and instead intuitively motivates the general points which are supported more fully in other publications to which he provides references. After an initial delineation of several distinct notions of meaning, the author considers such a notion deriving from the evolutionary biology of communication that he terms ‘organic meaning’, and places it in the (...) context of evolutionary game theory. That provides a framework for a special type of organic meaning found in the phenomenon of expression, of which the author here offers an updated characterization while highlighting its wide philosophical interest. Expression in turn generalizes to a paradigmatic form of human communication—conversation—and section 4 provides a taxonomy of conversation-types while arguing that attention to such types helps to sharpen predictions of what speakers say rather than conversationally implicate. We close with a view of fictional discourse on which authors of fictional works are engaged in conversation with their readers, and can provide them with knowledge in spite of the fictional character of their conversation. Such knowledge includes knowledge of how an emotion feels and is thus a route to empathy. (shrink)

As these opening quotes acknowledge, the Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) represents a core puzzle within the formal mathematics of game theory.3 Its rise in conspicuity is evident figure 2.1 above demonstrating a relatively steady rise in incidences of the phrase’s usage between 1960 to 1995, with a stable presence persisting into the twenty first century. This famous two-person “game,” with a stock narrative cast in terms of two prisoners who each independently must choose whether to remain silent or speak, each advancing (...) self-interest at the expense of the other and thereby achieving a mutually suboptimal outcome, mires any social interaction it is applied to into perplexity. The logic of this game proves the inverse of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: individuals acting on self interest will achieve a mutually suboptimal outcome. However, as this chapter illuminates, the assumptions underlying game theory drive this conclusion. (shrink)

Heidegger’s “Evening Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia, between a Younger and an Older Man”, one of three dialogues composed by Heidegger after the defeat of National Socialist Germany published in Country Path Conversations explores the being-historical situation and fate of the German people by turning to the early Daoist text of the Zhuangzi. My article traces how Heidegger interprets fundamental concepts from the Zhuangzi, mediated by way of Richard Wilhelm’s translation Das wahre Buch vom südlichen Blütenland, (...) such as naturalness, letting/releasement, the unnecessary and the useless in the context of his hermeneutical and political situation. I consider to what extent this dialogue, along with his other discussions of the Zhuangzi and intensive engagement with the Daodejing from 1943 to 1950, constitute a “Daoist turn” in Heidegger’s thinking that helped shape his Postwar thought. (shrink)

This paper explores the possibility that Hobbesian jurisprudence is best understood as a ‘third way’ in legal theory, irreducible to classical natural law or legal positivism. I sketch two potential ‘third theories’ of law -- legal pragmatism and legal dualism -- and argue that, when considered in its broadest sense, Leviathan is best viewed as an example of legal pragmatism. I consider whether this legal pragmatist interpretation can be sustained in the examination of Leviathan’s treatment of civil law, and argue (...) that the pragmatic interpretation can only be successful if we can resolve two textual issues in that chapter. First, while Hobbes argues that law entails the existence of public (sharable) reasons, he does not adequately defend the view that the sovereign is the unique authority over such reasons in all cases, especially as far as they concern known collective emergencies. Second, Hobbes both affirms and denies that a sovereign can fail to do justice, which is paradoxical. Both problems are best resolved by legal pragmatism, though the second problem resists a fully satisfying resolution. The upshot is that, although Leviathan ought to be regarded as an episode of legal pragmatism, there are trade-offs on every reading. (shrink)

The current study is conducted to examine the following research questions: 1) How are the father’s interactions with children regarding energy saving associated with the children’s energy conservation behaviors? 2) How are the mother’s interactions with children regarding energy saving associated with the children’s energy conservation behaviors?

Although they were never to meet and corresponded only briefly, Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft shared a mutual admiration and a strong intellectual bond. Macaulay’s work had a profound and lasting effect on Wollstonecraft, and she developed and expanded on many of Macaulay’s ideas. While she often took these in a different direction, there remains a great synergy between their ideas to the extent that we can understand Wollstonecraft’s own feminist arguments by approaching them through the frameworks and ideas that (...) Macaulay provided. These included the principles of classical republicanism, particularly in its understanding of the values of freedom, equality and virtue, and an understanding of reason as grounded in immutable principles that apply equally to both sexes. On the question of women’s freedom and social equality with men, I argue that though Macaulay sets up the problem in far richer and more detailed philosophical terms, in the end it is Wollstonecraft that has the more compelling account of its far-reaching social implications and of how this might be addressed. (shrink)

The current study is conducted to examine the following research questions: 1) How are the father’s interactions with children regarding waste recycling associated with the children’s recycling behaviors? 2) How are the mother’s interactions with children regarding waste recycling associated with the children’s recycling behaviors?

Tracking and goal setting are popular approaches in the personal health and fitness industry. In this paper we use a similar approach to assist users in their journey for a more sustainable lifestyle, starting with food. We employ Action Design Research (ADR) methodology to develop an application and subsequently propose design principles for developing blockchain-based applications for assisting users on their path to eating environmentally friendly food. The path to a sustainable lifestyle can be hard as individuals often do not (...) realize their personal impact towards achieving a net zero carbon future. To address this shortcoming, this study conducts an ADR experiment to create affordances for users to learn, create impact and realize that they are not alone in this journey thus motivating users to a sustainable lifestyle. The design principles that emerged from the project are design for categories and labels, design for measuring collective impact, and design for rewards and redemption. (shrink)

Technologies based on emergence will allow to reproduce sensations on non-biological carriers by making devices feel. These technologies will change fundamentally not only the approach to the creation of artificial intelligence, but also create artificial worlds of a totally different level. Which, unlike virtual models, will really exist for themselves. This approach differs completely from the methods currently used in digital technologies. Possibly the principles described herein will give a rise to many new trends.

This dissertation seeks to investigate what Nietzsche sees a being the origin of morality. The various systems of morality and ethics that make up specific religious practises and different ideologies are all derived from a similar system of cruelty and seemingly arbitrary ritualizations of behaviours.

In the first chapter of his Knowledge and Lotteries, John Hawthorne argues that thinkers do not ordinarily know lottery propositions. His arguments depend on claims about the intimate connections between knowledge and assertion, epistemic possibility, practical reasoning, and theoretical reasoning. In this paper, we cast doubt on the proposed connections. We also put forward an alternative picture of belief and reasoning. In particular, we argue that assertion is governed by a Gricean constraint that makes no reference to knowledge, and that (...) practical reasoning has more to do with rational degrees of belief than with states of knowledge. (shrink)

This essay represents a novel contribution to Nietzschean studies by combining an assessment of Friedrich Nietzsche’s challenging uses of “truth” and the “eternal return” with his insights drawn from Indian philosophies. Specifically, drawing on Martin Heidegger’s Nietzsche, I argue that Nietzsche’s critique of a static philosophy of being underpinning conceptual truth is best understood in line with the Theravada Buddhist critique of “self ” and “ego” as transitory. In conclusion, I find that Nietzsche’s “eternal return” can be understood as a (...) direct inversion of “nirvana”: Nietzsche celebrates profound attachment to each and every moment, independent from its pleasurable or distasteful registry. (shrink)

This paper critically engages Philip Mirowki's essay, "The scientific dimensions of social knowledge and their distant echoes in 20th-century American philosophy of science." It argues that although the cold war context of anti-democratic elitism best suited for making decisions about engaging in nuclear war may seem to be politically and ideologically motivated, in fact we need to carefully consider the arguments underlying the new rational choice based political philosophies of the post-WWII era typified by Arrow's impossibility theorem. A distrust of (...) democratic decision-making principles may be developed by social scientists whose leanings may be toward the left or right side of the spectrum of political practices. (shrink)

Although social scientists have identified diverse behavioral patterns among children from dissimilarly structured families, marketing scholars have progressed little in relating family structure to consumption-related decisions. In particular, the roles played by members of single-mother families—which may include live-in grandparents, mother’s unmarried partner, and step-father with or without step-sibling(s)—may affect children’s influence on consumption-related decisions. For example, to offset a parental authority dynamic introduced by a new stepfather, the work-related constraints imposed on a breadwinning mother, or the imposition of adult-level (...) household responsibilities on children, single-mother families may attend more to their children’s product preferences. -/- Without a profile that includes socio-economic, behavioral, and psychological aspects, efficient and socially responsible marketing to single-mother households is compromised. Relative to dual-parent families, single-mother families tend to have fewer resources and less buying power, children who consume more materialistic and compulsively, and children who more strongly influence decision making for both own-use and family-use products. Timely research would ensure that these and other tendencies now differentiate single-mother from dual-parent families in ways that marketers should address. Hence, our threefold goal is (1) to consolidate and highlight gaps in existing theory applied to studying children’s influence on consumption-related decision making in single-mother families, and (2) to propose a hybrid framework that merges two theories conducive to such research, and (3) to identify promising research propositions for future research. (shrink)

This article defends the conclusion that the soccer World Cup in Qatar should not be boycotted by rich countries from the Global North. This conclusion is underpinned by considerations about the economic background conditions in guest workers’ home countries. Three arguments are considered for the view that the World Cup should be boycotted. It is argued that each of these arguments is unsound. Section 7 contains a discussion of an argument for a boycott that centers on the process through which (...) Qatar was awarded the World Cup. This argument is rejected. The article lists several ways in which guest workers in Qatar are wronged, but this fact about how guest workers are treated does not justify a boycott by rich countries from the Global North. (shrink)

The paper argues that the moral philosophy of Thomas Hobbes is unified by a complex conception of reason that imposes consistency norms of both rationality and reasonableness. Hobbes’s conceptions of rightness as reciprocity, and moral goodness as sociability belong to an original and attractive moral theory that is neither teleological nor classically deontological, nor as interpreters have variously argued, subjectivist, contractarian, egoist, or dependent on divine command.

There are three questions associated with Simpson’s Paradox (SP): (i) Why is SP paradoxical? (ii) What conditions generate SP?, and (iii) What should be done about SP? By developing a logic-based account of SP, it is argued that (i) and (ii) must be divorced from (iii). This account shows that (i) and (ii) have nothing to do with causality, which plays a role only in addressing (iii). A counterexample is also presented against the causal account. Finally, the causal and logic-based (...) approaches are compared by means of an experiment to show that SP is not basically causal. (shrink)

Aristotle’s dialogue Protrepticus is not only his earliest work of ethics but also the root of all his subsequent investigations into ethics. Here we explore the various ways Aristotle retained in memory the contents of the Protrepticus and redeployed them in the Eudemian Ethics, including the common books. Since Aristotle himself does not explicitly acknowledge the foundational significance of the Protrepticus to his later works, our exploration must proceed on the basis of our knowledge of the earlier work, which can (...) then related to comparable passages in the treatises. But the Protrepticus is a lost work, unlike the EE and the EN, in the sense that no medieval manuscripts of it have survived. And so it first needs to be reconstructed on the basis of the streams of reception that deposited information in surviving works by later ancient authors. We begin in part 1 by reviewing the surviving evidence of the Protrepticus before presenting our wider reconstruction and conception of the work as a dialogue in part 2. In part 3, we discuss ideas and arguments in the reconstructed dialogue that are retained and redeployed in the Eudemian Ethics, focussing on the account of intellectual virtues in EE v and the introduction and methodological framework in EE i-ii.1. (shrink)