What are management gurus? Who are they? Why do we need them? This informative and practical guide analyses the value to be gained from reading the gurus, sets the growth of gurudom in context and traces the lines of development of the major schools of thought from their beginnings to the present day.

In this collection of closely interrelated essays, Robert Young emphasizes the scope of the nineteenth-century debate on 'man's place in nature' at the same time as he engages with the approaches of scholars who write about it. He is critical of the separation of the writing of history from writing about history, historiography, and of the separation of history from politics and ideology, then or now. Dr Young challenges fellow historians for reimposing the very disciplinary boundaries that the nineteenth-century debate (...) showed were in the service of ideological forces in that culture. Rather, he proposes that the full weight of the contending forces should be made apparent and debated openly so that neither nineteenth-century nor contemporary issues about the role of science in culture should be treated in a narrow perspective. (shrink)

out a visitation and a thorough assessment of his diocese. His predecessor (or rather his friend Benson, the bishop of Gloucester, who during Edward Chandler's decline had managed Durham's affairs) had kept the deanery records in good ...

"The Symons Medal—one of Canada's most prestigious honours—recognizes an individual who has made an exceptional contribution to Canadian life. The 2020 Symons Medal was awarded to Mr. Bob Rae, P.C., C.C., O.Ont, Q.C. Mr. Rae is the 20th Medallist in this series, following a formidable line of recipients. Hon. Rae's lecture is Learning from The Past, Imagining the Future: Reflections from a Political Life. Throughout the address, published in a bilingual book format, he explores such themes as Canada's improbable origins (...) as a nation; post-war emergence onto the global stage; active membership within the United Nations; and the significance of the ever-evolving Canadian constitution—a "living tree document." Welcoming remarks were made by the Honourable Premier Dennis King, while the official response was delivered by the Honourable Roy Romanow, PC, OC, SOM, QC. Hon. Rae is the 2020 recipient in part for his many years of work on humanitarian issues, most recently the Rohingya Refugee crisis, as well as his time focusing on indigenous issues and his decades of public service and teaching. He has always been deeply involved in the political life of Canada—as MP, former premier of Ontario, and interim leader of the federal Liberal Party. The Symons Medal and Lecture Series is named in honour of Professor Thomas H.B. Symons, a long-time supporter of Confederation Centre and a Board Governor. Held each fall, the medal ceremony and its associated lecture offer a national platform for an eminent Canadian to discuss the nation’s current state, shared histories, and future prospects using themes related to their professional pursuits. The award is presented at Confederation Centre of the Arts—Canada’s living monument to Canadian Confederation—in honour of the meetings of the Fathers of Confederation, who first gathered at Province House National Historic Site in the fall of 1864."--. (shrink)

According to a rich tradition in philosophy of action, intentional action requires practical knowledge: someone who acts intentionally knows what they are doing while they are doing it. Piñeros Glasscock argues that an anti-luminosity argument, of the sort developed in Williamson, can be readily adapted to provide a reductio of an epistemic condition on intentional action. This paper undertakes a rescue mission on behalf of an epistemic condition on intentional action. We formulate and defend a version of an epistemic condition (...) that is free from any luminosity commitments. While this version of an epistemic condition escapes reductio, it comes with substantive commitments of its own. In particular, we will see that it forces us to deny the existence of any essentially intentional actions. We go on to argue that this consequence should be embraced. On the resulting picture, intentional action is not luminous. But it still entails practical knowledge. (shrink)

This essay defends a novel form of virtue epistemology: Modal Virtue Epistemology. It borrows from traditional virtue epistemology the idea that knowledge is a type of skillful performance. But it goes on to understand skillfulness in purely modal terms — that is, in terms of success across a range of counterfactual scenarios. We argue that this approach offers a promising way of synthesizing virtue epistemology with a modal account of knowledge, according to which knowledge is safe belief. In particular, we (...) argue that the modal elements of the view offer important advantages over traditional virtue epistemology, which assigns a central explanatory role to aptness. At the same time, the virtue epistemological elements of the theory reveal new avenues for overcoming obstacles to traditional modal accounts of knowledge. Finally, we highlight the advantages of Modal Virtue Epistemology over alternative syntheses, such as Pritchard's (2012) hybrid approach. (shrink)

This paper argues that we should assign certainty a central place in epistemology. While epistemic certainty played an important role in the history of epistemology, recent epistemology has tended to dismiss certainty as an unattainable ideal, focusing its attention on knowledge instead. I argue that this is a mistake. Attending to certainty attributions in the wild suggests that much of our everyday knowledge qualifies, in appropriate contexts, as certain. After developing a semantics for certainty ascriptions, I put certainty to explanatory (...) work. Specifically, I argue that by taking certainty as our central epistemic notion, we can shed light on a variety of important topics, including evidence and evidential probability, epistemic modals, and the normative constraints on credence and assertion. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging interview, Bob Jessop discusses the development of, and many of the main themes in, his work over the last fifty years. He explains how he became interested in realism and Marx...

A theory of categorization is presented in which knowledge of causal relationships between category features is represented in terms of asymmetric and probabilistic causal mechanisms. According to causal‐model theory, objects are classified as category members to the extent they are likely to have been generated or produced by those mechanisms. The empirical results confirmed that participants rated exemplars good category members to the extent their features manifested the expectations that causal knowledge induces, such as correlations between feature pairs that are (...) directly connected by causal relationships. These expectations also included sensitivity to higher‐order feature interactions that emerge from the asymmetries inherent in causal relationships. Quantitative fits of causal‐model theory were superior to those obtained with extensions to traditional similarity‐based models that represent causal knowledge either as higher‐order relational features or “prior exemplars” stored in memory. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:What more can be said about COVID-19 and the social determinants of health? This article describes neglected perspectives that derive from the history of social epidemiology, a field that identifies the social etiology of disease and variations in disease incidence among people differentially located in the social structure. The "discovery" of social determinants of diseases like COVID-19 is nothing new for epidemiology: debate over how to analyze structural determinants versus individual-level risk factors persisted throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. By (...) the late 20th century, research had highlighted fundamental causes of health disparities, such as social conditions and structural racism; these are structural factors, embedded in the social fabric of life. Measurement of structured inequalities within systems faces complex and challenging problems, as research aims to better account for these lived realities at different levels of analysis and as multiple factors merge to influence outcomes (revealed in intersectionality theory). At each of these intersections, there are opportunities for bioethicists to consider their ethical implications. It is imperative to understand the social and ethical roots of our present conversations about health inequalities, in order to partner intelligently with researchers on the forefront of advocating for change. (shrink)

One attractive feature of process reliabilism is its reductive potential: it promises to explain justification in entirely non-epistemic terms. In this paper, I argue that the phenomenon of epistemic defeat poses a serious challenge for process reliabilism’s reductive ambitions. The standard process reliabilist analysis of defeat is the ‘Alternative Reliable Process Account’ (ARP). According to ARP, whether S’s belief is defeated depends on whether S has certain reliable processes available to her which, if they had been used, would have resulted (...) in S not holding the belief in question. Unfortunately, ARP proves untenable. I show, by way of counterexample, that ARP fails to articulate either necessary or sufficient conditions on defeat. Process reliabilists must either provide an alternative reductive account of defeat or renounce their reductive aspirations. (shrink)

Quasi-realists face the challenge of providing a plausible analysis of acknowledgments of moral fallibility. This paper devel...

The dictum ‘“ought” implies “can”’ has a status in moral philosophy in some respects like that of ‘a good player needs good co-ordination’ in talk about ball-games. Clearly, you say something important but not conclusive about proficiency in playing a ball-game when you say that it requires good co-ordination: similarly, you say something important but not conclusive about obligation when you say that it implies a certain possibility or power or ability. Each dictum is a reminder: the one about such (...) courses of physical instruction, the other about such exhortations to duty, as are worth persevering with. It would be hopeless to keep on teaching a boy the moves and tricks of rugby football if he could never co-ordinate well enough to get his eye in, so to speak. Correspondingly, it would be meaningless to recommend that someone ought to do something the specification of which involved a contradiction, and pointless to suggest that he ought to do something which, for quite general reasons, was not, and was certain to remain not, within his power. So each dictum expresses a bluff, no-nonsense wisdom which we should count on before involving ourselves in certain more detailed commitments. But probably this is as far as the comparison between the two sayings can well be taken. (shrink)

This paper develops a question-sensitive theory of intention. We show that this theory explains some puzzling closure properties of intention. In particular, it can be used to explain why one is rationally required to intend the means to one’s ends, even though one is not rationally required to intend all the foreseen consequences of one’s intended actions. It also explains why rational intention is not always closed under logical implication, and why one can only intend outcomes that one believes to (...) be under one’s control. (shrink)

What is it to believe something might be the case? We develop a puzzle that creates difficulties for standard answers to this question. We go on to propose our own solution, which integrates a Bayesian approach to belief with a dynamic semantics for epistemic modals. After showing how our account solves the puzzle, we explore a surprising consequence: virtually all of our beliefs about what might be the case provide counterexamples to the view that rational belief is closed under logical (...) implication. (shrink)

When is it permissible to rely on a proposition in practical reasoning? Standard answers to this question face serious challenges. This paper uses these challenges to motivate a certainty norm of practical reasoning. This norm holds that one is permitted to rely on p in practical reasoning if and only if p is epistemically certain. After developing and defending this norm, I consider its broader implications. Taking a certainty norm seriously calls into question traditional assumptions about the importance of belief (...) and knowledge. In particular, it raises the possibility that many epistemological jobs that are usually assigned to belief and knowledge should be reallocated to two related but importantly different states: psychological and epistemic certainty. (shrink)

The past decade has seen a protracted debate over the semantics of epistemic modals. According to contextualists, epistemic modals quantify over the possibilities compatible with some contextually determined group’s information. Relativists often object that contextualism fails to do justice to the way we assess utterances containing epistemic modals for truth or falsity. However, recent empirical work seems to cast doubt on the relativist’s claim, suggesting that ordinary speakers’ judgments about epistemic modals are more closely in line with contextualism than relativism (...) (Knobe & Yalcin 2014; Khoo 2015). This paper furthers the debate by reporting new empirical research revealing a previously overlooked dimension of speakers’ truth-value judgments concerning epistemic modals. Our results show that these judgments vary systematically with the question under discussion in the conversational context in which the utterance is being assessed. We argue that this ‘QUD effect’ is difficult to explain if contextualism is true, but is readily explained by a suitably flexible form of relativism. (shrink)

A central question in cognitive research concerns how new properties are generalized to categories. This article introduces a model of how generalizations involve a process of causal inference in which people estimate the likely presence of the new property in individual category exemplars and then the prevalence of the property among all category members. Evidence in favor of this causal‐based generalization (CBG) view included effects of an existing feature’s base rate (Experiment 1), the direction of the causal relations (Experiments 2 (...) and 4), the number of those relations (Experiment 3), and the distribution of features among category members (Experiments 4 and 5). The results provided no support for an alternative view that generalizations are promoted by the centrality of the to‐be‐generalized feature. However, there was evidence that a minority of participants based their judgments on simpler associative reasoning processes. (shrink)

Uses interviews with persons who have changed from belief to nonbelief or vice versa, and discusses what comfort people receive from religion.

As we begin our exploration of our relationship with animals, we come face to face with Peter Singer and his insistence that speciesism is a vice. It is important to come to know what he means by speciesism, why he regards it as a moral mistake.

BackgroundChildhood abuse increases risk for high levels of distress in response to future stressors. Interpersonal social support is protective for health, particularly during stress, and may be particularly beneficial for individuals who experienced childhood abuse.ObjectiveInvestigate whether childhood abuse predicts levels of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and test whether the perceived availability of social companionship preceding the pandemic moderates this relationship.MethodsDuring Phase 1, adults (N= 120; AgeM[SD] = 19.4 [0.94]) completed a retrospective measure of childhood (...) adversity along with a measure of perceived availability of opportunities for social engagement immediately preceding the pandemic. Two weeks after the COVID-19 pandemic declaration, participants completed the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) with respect to the pandemic. Hierarchical linear regression analyses examined the interaction between childhood abuse and the perceived availability of social companionship preceding the pandemic as a predictor of PTSD symptoms.ResultsAdjusting for covariates, the interaction between childhood abuse and perceived availability of others to engage with before the onset of the pandemic was a significant predictor of IES-hyperarousal (β = −0.19,t= −2.06,p= 0.04, ΔR2= 0.032, CI: [−0.31 to −0.01]).ConclusionLevels of perceived opportunities for social companionship before the pandemic associates with levels of hyperarousal related to the pandemic, particularly for individuals who experienced high levels of childhood abuse. More research is needed to understand how to mitigate the higher levels of distress related to the pandemic for these individuals in order to reduce risk for future psychiatric disorders. (shrink)

This essay deals with plague and plagues in renaissance and early modern Europe over the longue durée, principally from a methodological perspective. I shall combine an historiographical approach with an historical account of developing reactions to plague and in passing compare measures to cope in the early sixteenth century with reactions to the impact of the Great Pox or the Mal de Naples. I shall concentrate on southern Europe and in particular on Italy and my aim is to re-assess the (...) historiography of plague through the lens of some of the more recent Anglo-Saxon literature in this field. In the process I shall outline some of the debates within the field and end with some general methodological observations drawn from early modern Italy. (shrink)

The book, which stepwise develops successively more powerful logical and grammatical systems, covers an unusually broad range of material.

We often claim to know what might be—or probably is—the case. Modal knowledge along these lines creates a puzzle for information-sensitive semantics for epistemic modals. This paper develops a solution. We start with the idea that knowledge requires safe belief: a belief amounts to knowledge only if it could not easily have been held falsely. We then develop an interpretation of the modal operator in safety that allows it to non-trivially embed information-sensitive contents. The resulting theory avoids various paradoxes that (...) arise from other accounts of modal knowledge. It also delivers plausible predictions about modal Gettier cases. (shrink)

One leading approach to justification comes from the reliabilist tradition, which maintains that a belief is justified provided that it is reliably formed. Another comes from the ‘Reasons First’ tradition, which claims that a belief is justified provided that it is based on reasons that support it. These two approaches are typically developed in isolation from each other; this essay motivates and defends a synthesis. On the view proposed here, justification is understood in terms of an agent’s reasons for belief, (...) which are in turn analyzed along reliabilist lines: an agent's reasons for belief are the states that serve as inputs to their reliable processes. I show that this synthesis allows each tradition to profit from the other's explanatory resources. In particular, it enables reliabilists to explain epistemic defeat without abandoning their naturalistic ambitions. I go on to compare my proposed synthesis with other hybrid versions of reliabilism that have been proposed in the literature. (shrink)

We know that animals are harmed in plant production. Unfortunately, though, we know very little about the scale of the problem. This matters for two reasons. First, we can’t decide how many resources to devote to the problem without a better sense of its scope. Second, this information shortage throws a wrench in arguments for veganism, since it’s always possible that a diet that contains animal products is complicit in fewer deaths than a diet that avoids them. In this paper, (...) then, we have two aims: first, we want to collect and analyze all the available information about animal death associated with plant agriculture; second, we try to show just how difficult it’s to come up with a plausible estimate of how many animals are killed by plant agriculture, and not just because of a lack of empirical information. Additionally, we show that there are significant philosophical questions associated with interpreting the available data—questions such that different answers generate dramatically different estimates of the scope of the problem. Finally, we document current trends in plant agriculture that cause little or no collateral harm to animals, trends which suggest that field animal deaths are a historically contingent problem that in future may be reduced or eliminated altogether. (shrink)

Relativism and expressivism offer two different semantic frameworks for grappling with a similar cluster of issues. What is the difference between these two frameworks? Should they be viewed as rivals? If so, how should we choose between them? This chapter sheds light on these questions. After providing an overview of relativism and expressivism, I discuss three potential choice points: their relation to truth conditional semantics, their pictures of belief and communication, and their explanations of disagreement.

According to expressivists, normative language expresses desire‐like states of mind. According to noncognitivists, normative beliefs have a desire‐like functional role. What is the relation between these two doctrines? It is widely assumed that expressivism commits you to noncognitivism, and vice versa. This paper opposes that assumption. I advance a view that combines a noncognitivist psychology with a descriptivist semantics for normative language. While this might seem like an ungainly hybrid, I argue that it has important advantages over more familiar metaethical (...) positions. The noncognitivist aspect of the theory captures all of the explanatory benefits standardly associated with expressivism. At the same time, the descriptivist element allows us to avoid the semantic headaches for expressivism. (shrink)

A sourcebook/textbook on the problem of free will and determinism. Contains a history of the free will problem, a taxonomy of current free will positions, the standard argument against free will, the physics, biology, and neuroscience of free will, the most plausible and practical solution of the problem, and reviews of the work of the leading determinist Ted Honderich, the leading libertarian Robert Kane, the well-known compatibilist Daniel Dennett, and the determinism-agnostic Alfred Mele.