This study explores how peer advising affects student project teams’ discussions of engineering ethics. Peer ethics advisors from non-engineering disciplines are expected to provide diverse perspectives and to help engineering student teams engage and sustain ethics discussions. To investigate how peer advising helps engineering student teams’ ethics discussions, three student teams in different peer advising conditions were closely observed: without any advisor, with a single volunteer advisor, and with an advising team working on the ethics advising project. Micro-scale discourse analysis (...) based on cognitive ethnography was conducted to find each team’s cultural model of understanding of engineering ethics. Cultural-historical activity theory analysis was also conducted to see what influenced each team’s cultural model. In cultural model, the engineering team with an ethics advising team showed broader understanding in social implications of engineering. The results of CHAT analysis indicated that differences in rules, community, and division of labor among three teams influenced the teams’ cultural models. The CHAT analysis also indicated that the peer advisors working on the ethics advising project and the engineering team working on engineering design project created a collaborative environment. The findings indicated that collaborative environment supported peer ethics advising to facilitate team discussions of engineering ethics. (shrink)

Following previous work that shows engineering students possess different levels of understanding of ethics—implicit and explicit—this study focuses on how students’ implicit understanding of engineering ethics influences their team discussion process, in cases where there is significant divergence between their explicit and implicit understanding. We observed student teams during group discussions of the ethical issues involved in their engineering design projects. Through the micro-scale discourse analysis based on cognitive ethnography, we found two possible ways in which implicit understanding influenced the (...) discussion. In one case, implicit understanding played the role of intuitive ethics—an intuitive judgment followed by reasoning. In the other case, implicit understanding played the role of ethical insight, emotionally guiding the direction of the discussion. In either case, however, implicit understanding did not have a strong influence, and the conclusion of the discussion reflected students’ explicit understanding. Because students’ implicit understanding represented broader social implication of engineering design in both cases, we suggest to take account of students’ relevant implicit understanding in engineering education, to help students become more socially responsible engineers. (shrink)

In Republican Guard , Nicholas Xenos describes the Straussian network and its nature, focusing upon delineating what in Leo Strauss’ writings has influenced and can tell us about the ‘character of American power today and the rhetoric through which it is enhanced and sustained.’ In the end he argues and demonstrates that Strauss’ political theory provides the means by which an imperial project can be camouflaged under the cloak of an appeal to liberal democracy. This book will be of (...) interest to students and scholars of politics and international relations. (shrink)

Education – typically and rightly held to be an incontrovertible good – has for some time now been dominated by mass formal schooling systems. These systems routinely harm and oppress many students. I argue that they do so impermissibly, and I call this stance “educational pacifism”. I propose that Maria Montessori’s views on mass formal schooling systems broadly align with educational pacifism and that, therefore, she can be considered an educational pacifist. Finally, I claim that contemporary Montessorians ought to be (...) educational pacifists, firstly because educational pacifism makes a compelling moral argument and secondly because Montessori herself agrees with it. (shrink)

Semi-compatibilists intend to reconcile moral responsibility with causal determinism, even if determinism is incompatible with freedom to do otherwise. For them, moral responsibility does not require free will, which is not a necessary condition for moral responsibility. They agree with the view that causal determinism is incompatible with free will. Free will is incompatible with determinism as well as moral responsibility. Both compatibilists and semi-compatibilists argue for the compatibility between determinism and moral responsibility. However, the latter fails to prove sufficiently (...) the reason why determinism is compatible with moral responsibility. (shrink)

Kant's Critique of Judgement analyses our experience of the beautiful and the sublime in relation to nature, morality, and theology. Meredith's classic translation is here lightly revised and supplemented with a bilingual glossary. The edition also includes the important First Introduction.

Proposals to make us smarter than the greatest geniuses or to add thousands of years to our life spans seem fit only for the spam folder or trash can. And yet this is what contemporary advocates of radical enhancement offer in all seriousness. They present a variety of technologies and therapies that will expand our capacities far beyond what is currently possible for human beings. In _Humanity's End,_ Nicholas Agar argues against radical enhancement, describing its destructive consequences. Agar examines (...) the proposals of four prominent radical enhancers: Ray Kurzweil, who argues that technology will enable our escape from human biology; Aubrey de Grey, who calls for anti-aging therapies that will achieve "longevity escape velocity"; Nick Bostrom, who defends the morality and rationality of enhancement; and James Hughes, who envisions a harmonious democracy of the enhanced and the unenhanced. Agar argues that the outcomes of radical enhancement could be darker than the rosy futures described by these thinkers. The most dramatic means of enhancing our cognitive powers could in fact kill us; the radical extension of our life span could eliminate experiences of great value from our lives; and a situation in which some humans are radically enhanced and others are not could lead to tyranny of posthumans over humans. (shrink)

In this provocative book, philosopher Nicholas Agar defends the idea that parents should be allowed to enhance their children’s characteristics. Gets away from fears of a Huxleyan ‘Brave New World’ or a return to the fascist eugenics of the past Written from a philosophically and scientifically informed point of view Considers real contemporary cases of parents choosing what kind of child to have Uses ‘moral images’ as a way to get readers with no background in philosophy to think about (...) moral dilemmas Provides an authoritative account of the science involved, making the book suitable for readers with no knowledge of genetics Creates a moral framework for assessing all new technologies. (shrink)

In this provocative book, philosopher Nicholas Agar defends the idea that parents should be allowed to enhance their children’s characteristics. Gets away from fears of a Huxleyan ‘Brave New World’ or a return to the fascist eugenics of the past Written from a philosophically and scientifically informed point of view Considers real contemporary cases of parents choosing what kind of child to have Uses ‘moral images’ as a way to get readers with no background in philosophy to think about (...) moral dilemmas Provides an authoritative account of the science involved, making the book suitable for readers with no knowledge of genetics Creates a moral framework for assessing all new technologies. (shrink)

Proposals to make us smarter than the greatest geniuses or to add thousands of years to our life spans seem fit only for the spam folder or trash can. And yet this is what contemporary advocates of radical enhancement offer in all seriousness. They present a variety of technologies and therapies that will expand our capacities far beyond what is currently possible for human beings. In _Humanity's End,_ Nicholas Agar argues against radical enhancement, describing its destructive consequences. Agar examines (...) the proposals of four prominent radical enhancers: Ray Kurzweil, who argues that technology will enable our escape from human biology; Aubrey de Grey, who calls for anti-aging therapies that will achieve "longevity escape velocity"; Nick Bostrom, who defends the morality and rationality of enhancement; and James Hughes, who envisions a harmonious democracy of the enhanced and the unenhanced. Agar argues that the outcomes of radical enhancement could be darker than the rosy futures described by these thinkers. The most dramatic means of enhancing our cognitive powers could in fact kill us; the radical extension of our life span could eliminate experiences of great value from our lives; and a situation in which some humans are radically enhanced and others are not could lead to tyranny of posthumans over humans. (shrink)

Nicholas Agar offers a more nuanced view of the transformative potential of genetic and cybernetic technologies, making a case for moderate human enhancement—improvements to attributes and abilities that do not significantly exceed what ...

Commentators have shown a steady interest in the role of feeling in Kant’s moral and practical philosophy over the last few decades. Much attention has been given to the notion of ‘moral feeling’ in general, as well as to what Kant calls the ‘feeling of respect’ for the moral law. My focus in this essay is on the role of feeling in practical judgment. My claim in what follows is that the act of judging in the practical domain—i.e., determining what (...) one ought to do, or what action one ought to perform, in a specific case—crucially involves feeling. Put more simply: I argue that practical judgment has an essentially affective dimension. The upshot of the account I will give is that it provides us with a richer and more complex account of moral feeling than has previously been appreciated in the literature. While it is recognized that feeling plays a certain role in moral motivation, what I hope to demonstrate here is that feeling is involved much earlier in the exercise of moral agency. Far from entering only at the point at which we are trying to muster the strength of will to carry out what we know we ought to do, feeling is present the moment we begin to deliberate about what it is that we ought to do. (shrink)

Although a large number of literatures have explored the relationship between electronic communication during nonwork time and individual perception and behavior under the Western culture background, we still have some limitations on this topic under the cultural background of collectivism, dedication and “Guanxi” in China. Different from Western organizations, Chinese employees tend to put work first and are more inclusive of handling work tasks during nonwork time. This type of communication during nonwork time can significantly affect employees’ cognition, emotion and (...) behavior. From the perspective of Job Demands-Resources theory, this study constructs a double-edged model between electronic communication during nonwork time and employee withdrawal behavior. Sample data were collected from 516 employees with clear working time boundaries in China. The results indicate that electronic communication during nonwork time has a U-shaped effect on employee withdrawal behavior and an inverted U-shaped effect on employee’s cognition, namely job engagement. Job engagement plays a mediating role between them. Moreover, regulatory emotional self-efficacy has a moderating effect on the relationship between electronic communication during nonwork time and job engagement. These findings not only provide theoretical and practical implications for managers and employees on how to reduce withdrawal behaviors, but also advance our understanding of electronic communication during nonwork time in Chinese cultural context. (shrink)

This is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the ...

Francis Fukuyama's controversial new book, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, has elicited varied reactions, but like it or not, it seems likely to be influential. Here are three opinions. —Ed.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 14-30 [Access article in PDF] Mallarmé Contra Wagner Eric Gans I In early 1885, Edouard Dujardin wrote to Stéphane Mallarmé for a contribution to his newly founded Revue wagnérienne. Mallarmé, admitting that he had never seen--and perhaps never heard--anything of Wagner, replied to Dujardin in July that he was working on a "half article, half prose poem," and that "never has anything seemed (...) to me more difficult." 1 A month later, the Revue published a text, more prose poem than article, entitled "Richard Wagner, rêverie d'un poète français." 2Wagner was an increasingly obligatory reference for the French avant-garde after his death in 1883. But as far back as 1862, the 20-year-old Mallarmé, no doubt influenced by Baudelaire's enthusiastic groundbreaking article "Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris" of the year before, had included Wagner along with Mozart and Beethoven in a group of three creators of the "mystery" of music, in a brief article entitled "Artistic Heresies: Art for Everyone." Characteristically enough, what fascinated the young Mallarmé was not music itself so much as the "signes sévères, chastes, inconnus" ("severe, chaste, unknown signs") (OC, p. 257) with which it was written, which give music the advantage over poetry--written in the universally understood alphabet--of being inaccessible to the uninitiated. This characteristic emphasis on writing over sound reappears in the "Hommage" sonnet for Wagner published in Dujardin's journal in January 1886, where Wagner's music is described as "mal tu par l'encre même en sanglots sibyllins" ("badly silenced by the ink itself in Sibylline sobs") (OC, p. 71). As we shall see, however, the relation between music and poetry suggested in "Art for Everyone" had by then been reversed. [End Page 14]Unlike most of his circle, Mallarmé was no Wagnerite; his "Rêverie," like his sonnet, expresses reluctant praise and reflects a certain professional jealousy. The theater had long been Mallarmé's chief preoccupation, as it had been for so many nineteenth-century writers who would be forced to make their reputation in other genres. The unfinished poem "Hérodiade," which occupied him throughout his life, took the form of a drama, and an early version of the "Après-midi d'un faune" had actually been presented to a theater director. References to music in Mallarmé's writings increase in number and specificity after 1885, and it is not unreasonable to assume that for him the prime representative of "music" in this period was Wagner. However much Mallarmé's own theater had become internalized and idealized, Wagner's theatrical success, as well as his near-deification by friends and disciples like Dujardin or Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, could not leave the poet indifferent. II What I would like to explore, however, is something more fundamental than the personal equation. Mallarmé's rivalry with Wagner over the theatrical center of culture is the rivalry of two arts and their respective means. What makes Mallarmé's critique of Wagner of particular interest is the exemplary rigor of the former's artistic intentions. Mallarmé's poems are a series of attempts to produce literary form with a minimum of figural content. Each poem has been submitted, so to speak, to Ockham's razor. The ultimate aim of this labor may be described as the discovery of the originary scene of poetry itself, the minimal sine qua non of representation, and therefore of humanity. 3 On the contrary, Wagner did not shrink from saturating the figural imagination in the pursuit of his totalizing aims. The confrontation reveals that musical maximalism in the service of national myth becomes a threat to what we may call, from Mallarmé's minimalist perspective, the anthropological mission of true art.Mallarmé held no particular brief for the theater of words; his tastes in performance went rather to the ballet, or to the mime-show, the subject of one of his most aesthetically interesting reflections. 4 Mallarmé anticipated 20th-century dramaturgy in seeing the theater not as a place for ratiocination and... (shrink)

BackgroundAmidst expanding roles in education and policy making, questions have been raised about the ability of Clinical Ethics Committees (CEC) s to carry out effective ethics consultations (CECons). However recent reviews of CECs suggest that there is no uniformity to CECons and no effective means of assessing the quality of CECons. To address this gap a systematic scoping review of prevailing tools used to assess CECons was performed to foreground and guide the design of a tool to evaluate the quality (...) of CECons.MethodsGuided by Levac et al’s (2010) methodological framework for conducting scoping reviews, the research team performed independent literature reviews of accounts of assessments of CECons published in six databases. The included articles were independently analyzed using content and thematic analysis to enhance the validity of the findings.ResultsNine thousand sixty-six abstracts were identified, 617 full-text articles were reviewed, 104 articles were analyzed and four themes were identified – the purpose of the CECons evaluation, the various domains assessed, the methods of assessment used and the long-term impact of these evaluations.ConclusionThis review found prevailing assessments of CECons to be piecemeal due to variable goals, contextual factors and practical limitations. The diversity in domains assessed and tools used foregrounds the lack of minimum standards upheld to ensure baseline efficacy.To advance a contextually appropriate, culturally sensitive, program specific assessment tool to assess CECons, clear structural and competency guidelines must be established in the curation of CECons programs, to evaluate their true efficacy and maintain clinical, legal and ethical standards. (shrink)

A lively topic of debate in decision theory over recent years concerns our understanding of the different risk attitudes exhibited by decision makers. There is ample evidence that risk-averse and risk-seeking behaviours are widespread, and a growing consensus that such behaviour is rationally permissible. In the context of clinical medicine, this matter is complicated by the fact that healthcare professionals must often make choices for the benefit of their patients, but the norms of rational choice are conventionally grounded in a (...) decision maker’s own desires, beliefs and actions. The presence of both doctor and patient raises the question of whose risk attitude matters for the choice at hand and what to do when these diverge. Must doctors make risky choices when treating risk-seeking patients? Ought they to be risk averse in general when choosing on behalf of others? In this paper, I will argue that healthcare professionals ought to adopt a deferential approach, whereby it is the risk attitude of the patient that matters in medical decision making. I will show how familiar arguments for widely held anti-paternalistic views about medicine can be straightforwardly extended to include not only patients’ evaluations of possible health states, but also their attitudes to risk. However, I will also show that this deferential view needs further refinement: patients’ higher-order attitudes towards their risk attitudes must be considered in order to avoid some counterexamples and to accommodate different views about what sort of attitudes risk attitudes actually are. (shrink)

This classic work on critical thinking--now fully updated and revised--uses a novel approach to teach the basics of informal logic. Relying on real-world examples, the authors show how to win an argument, defend a case, recognize a fallacy, see through deception, and more.

Artworks are seen here as presenting themselves as a means by which to navigate and plot the city for a writing interlocutor; The examples discussed reveat a plethora of emergent forms which are concentrated into three key modalities of urban arts practice in the twenty-first century walking play and cultural memory walking includes the talked walks of artist such as Richard Wentworth, the generative street incursions of Francis Alys, and the walking spectator at a site-based event, including works by Gustv (...) Metzger, Mark Wallinger and Pavel Althamer. Play embraces popular instances of mass public mobilisation in the form of flash mobs and mobile clubbing as well as ̀creative interventions such as free ranning, graffin writing and video sniffing, which reveal themselves to be engaged increasingly in a dialogue with the ̀high art' of artists like Antony Gomely, Mark Quinn and Carsten Holler. Cultural memory is considered via the burgeoning cases of holocaust installations, interrogating two of the best-known- and controversial-European urban sites from the point of view of the physical encounters that they implicity invite Peter Eisenman's memorial in Bertin and Rachel Whitereads' in Vienna. --Book Jacket. (shrink)

The authors explore the history of experiments in economics, provide examples of different types of experiments and show that the growing use of experimental methods is transforming economics into an empirical science.

On the concept of self; study based on Vedic literature.

This volume is about abstract objects and the ways we refer to them in natural language. Asher develops a semantical and metaphysical analysis of these entities in two stages. The first reflects the rich ontology of abstract objects necessitated by the forms of language in which we think and speak. A second level of analysis maps the ontology of natural language metaphysics onto a sparser domain--a more systematic realm of abstract objects that are fully analyzed. This second level reflects the (...) commitments of real metaphysics. The models for these commitments assign truth conditions to natural language discourse. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

Are bacteriophage T4 and the long-nosed elephant fish valuable in their own right? Nicholas Agar defends an affirmative answer to this question by arguing that anything living is intrinsically valuable. This claim challenges received ethical wisdom according to which only human beings are valuable in themselves. The resulting biocentric or life-centered morality forms the platform for an ethic of the environment. -/- Agar builds a bridge between the biological sciences and what he calls "folk" morality to arrive at a (...) workable environmental ethic and a new spectrum--a new hierarchy--of living organisms. The book overturns common-sense moral belief as well as centuries of philosophical speculation on the exclusive moral significance of humans. Spanning several fields, including philosophy of psychology, philosophy of science, and other areas of contemporary analytic philosophy, Agar analyzes and speaks to a wide array of historic and contemporary views, from Aristotle and Kant, to E. O. Wilson, Holmes Rolston II, and Baird Callicot. The result is a challenge to prevailing definitions of value and a call for a scientifically-informed appreciation of nature. (shrink)

In the first in-depth philosophical study of the subject, Nicholas Gier examines the published and unpublished writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, to show the striking parallels between Wittgenstein and phenomenology. Between 1929 and 1933, the philosopher proposed programs that bore a detailed resemblance to dominant themes in the phenomenology of Husserl and some “life-world” phenomenologists. This sound, thoroughly readable study examines how and why he eventually moved away from it. Gier demonstrates, however, that Wittgenstein’s phenomenology continues as his “grammar” of (...) the post-1933 works, which continue to present instructive parallels with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

I argue that the last reflections of merleau-ponty published in his working notes ``the visible and the invisible'' is a programme for an embodied phenomenology. the aim of this programme is the overcoming of metaphysics, epitomized in subject-object dualism. the dissociated look of metaphysics results in a conceptualization of the world. philosophers must return from this flight from their bodies to the flesh of their existential situation to recover the ``things themselves''.

The duties that Gandhi believed we should follow came chiefly from the Jain religion, whose main precept is ahimsa—perhaps the only word I understood in the second musical piece performed for us earlier by Sudha Ragunathan. Ahimsa means non-harm or nonviolence, for which we gather here today. Another important precept for Gandhi and the Jains is Truth. But it is important to understand why Gandhi himself attached so much importance to these precepts of nonviolence and Truth. Gandhi said, "God is (...) Truth, Truth is God." And he meant that quite literally. He believed that God comprised all of reality, that reality comprised Truth, and that to understand all of reality was to realize God. He believed that we should pursue God, pursue Truth. (shrink)

Vigorous debate over the moral propriety of cognitive enhancement exists, but the views of the public have been largely absent from the discussion. To address this gap in our knowledge, four experiments were carried out with contrastive vignettes in order to obtain quantitative data on public attitudes towards cognitive enhancement. The data collected suggest that the public is sensitive to and capable of understanding the four cardinal concerns identified by neuroethicists, and tend to cautiously accept cognitive enhancement even as they (...) recognize its potential perils. The public is biopolitically moderate, endorses both meritocratic principles and the intrinsic value of hard work, and appears to be sensitive to the salient moral issues raised in the debate. Taken together, these data suggest that public attitudes toward enhancement are sufficiently sophisticated to merit inclusion in policy deliberations, especially if we seek to align public sentiment and policy. (shrink)

Anna Smajdor and Joona Räsänen argue that we have good reason to classify pregnancy as a disease. They discuss five accounts of disease and argue that each account either implies that pregnancy is a disease or, if it does not, it faces problems. This strategy allows Smajdor and Räsänen to avoid articulating their own account of disease. Consequently, they cannot establish that pregnancy is a disease, only that plausible accounts of disease suggest this. Some readers will dismiss Smajdor and Räsänen’s (...) claims as counterintuitive. By analogy, if a mathematical proof concludes ‘2+2=5’, readers will know—without investigation—that an error occurred. Rather than dismiss Smajdor and Räsänen’s work, however, the easiest way to undermine their argument is to describe at least one plausible account of disease that (i) excludes pregnancy and (ii) avoids the problems they raise for it. This is our strategy. We focus on dysfunction accounts of disease. After outlining Smajdor and Räsänen’s main arguments against dysfunction accounts, we explain why pregnancy is not a disease on these accounts. Next, we defend dysfunction accounts against the three problems that Smajdor and Räsänen raise. If successful, then contra Smajdor and Räsänen, at least one plausible account of disease does not imply that pregnancy is a disease. We suspect that defenders of other accounts can respond similarly. Yet, we note that insofar as dysfunction accounts align with the commonsense intuition that pregnancy is not a disease, this, all else being equal, seems like a point in their favour. (shrink)

In this highly original monograph, Nicholas Georgalis proposes that the concept of minimal content is fundamental both to the philosophy of mind and to the philosophy of language. He argues that to understand mind and language requires minimal content -- a narrow, first-person, non-phenomenal concept that represents the subject of an agent's intentional state as the agent conceives it. Orthodox third-person objective methodology must be supplemented with first-person subjective methodology. Georgalis demonstrates limitations of a strictly third-person methodology in the (...) study of mind and language and argues that these deficiencies can be corrected only by the incorporation of a first-person methodology. Nevertheless, this expanded methodology makes possible an objective understanding of the subjective. Georgalis argues against the conflation of consciousness and subjectivity with phenomenal experience. Consequently, and contrary to common belief, he argues that consciousness without phenomenality is as strongly implicated in intentionality as it is in phenomenal states. He proposes a broader understanding of the "hard problem" of consciousness, arguing that there is an "explanatory gap problem" for both phenomenal and intentional states. His theory provides a framework that renders the vexing relations between mental and brain states comprehensible. Georgalis also argues for novel explanations of the phenomenal and of representation -- explanations that follow from the core concept of minimal content. Treating the topics of meaning and reference, he introduces a first-person concept of intended reference derivative from minimal content that resolves various problems in the philosophy of language. Eschewing ontology, Georgalis proposes his theory as a means to make sense of, analyze, and relate issues in the philosophies of mind and language. The concept of minimal content, he argues, plays a necessary, pivotal, unifying, and foundational role in advancing our understanding of these issues. (shrink)

The orthodox reading of Peter Strawson's “Freedom and Resentment” tends to hide interesting elements of its underlying argumentative structure. Recognition of a distinction Strawson draws between two classes of reactive attitudes raises a question about how the distinct discussions are related. The orthodox reading seems to assume the only relevant difference between the two classes is one of perspective; however, this reading obscures the analogical nature of Strawson's argument and encourages a conflation of distinct elements within that argument. In this (...) paper, I show that an analogical interpretation of the relationship between the distinct classes of attitudes reveals differences between them that have interesting implications for the secondary literature that has developed around Strawson's famous essay. (shrink)

According to cultural nationalism, members of groups sharing a common history and societal culture have a fundamental, morally significant interest in adhering to their culture and in sustaining it for generations. Moreover, this interest should be protected by states. I shall examine three theses included in this statement. The first, theadherence thesis,relates to the basic interest people have in adhering to their national culture. The second thesis ishistorical.It concerns the basic interest people have in recognizing and protecting the multigenerational dimension (...) of their culture. The third thesis, apoliticalone, holds that the interests people have in living their lives within their culture and in sustaining this culture for generations should be protected politically. Some contemporary writers who support a liberal version of cultural nationalism do so by arguing that people have an interest in culture mainly because it is a prerequisite for their freedom and also because it is a component of their identity. (shrink)

Research ethics regulation in parts of the Global North has sometimes been initiated in the face of biomedical scandal. More recently, developing and recently developed countries have had additional reasons to regulate, doing so to attract international clinical trials and American research funding, publish in international journals, or to respond to broader social changes. In Taiwan, biomedical research ethics policy based on ‘principlism’ and committee- based review were imported from the United States. Professionalisation of research ethics displaced other longer-standing ways (...) of conceiving ethics connected with Taiwanese cultural traditions. Subsequently, the model and its discursive practices were extended to other disciplines. Regulation was also shaped by decolonizing dis- courses associated with asserting Indigenous peoples’ rights. Locating research ethics regulation within the language and practices of public policy formation and transfer as well as decolonization, allows analysis to move be- yond the self-referential and attend to the social, economic and political context within which regulation operates. 研究倫理規範甚至法制化的濫觴,過去在有些北美國家是為了回應其國內發生的醫學研究倫 理醜聞。但近年來,無論是發展中或已開發國家,往往是為了爭取國際醫學臨床試驗計畫能在 其國內執行、爭取美國相關研究經費、能在英語的國際期刊發表文章、或是因應國內相關社會變化。 以台灣來說,基於「原則主義」的醫學領域之研究倫理政策及規範,以及在研究機構內成立 委員會專責倫理審查的運作模式,可說完全移植自美國。這種運作模式及研究倫理的專業化, 不但逐漸取代過去已融合台灣文化的研究倫理觀쳀,且在這種運作模式下的倫理論述及實作, 更從醫學領域擴展至其他研究領域。在此同時,台灣的研究倫理規範之發展,也受到台灣原住 民族的去殖民化及群體權主張等影響。. (shrink)

The success of a piece of behaviour is often explained by its being caused by a true representation (similarly, failure falsity). In some simple organisms, success is just survival and reproduction. Scientists explain why a piece of behaviour helped the organism to survive and reproduce by adverting to the behaviour’s having been caused by a true representation. That usage should, if possible, be vindicated by an adequate naturalistic theory of content. Teleosemantics cannot do so, when it is applied to simple (...) representing systems (Godfrey-Smith 1996). Here it is argued that the teleosemantic approach to content should therefore be modified, not abandoned, at least for simple representing systems. The new ‘infotel-semantics’ adds an input condition to the output condition offered by teleosemantics, recognising that it is constitutive of content in a simple representing system that the tokening of a representation should correlate probabilistically with the obtaining of its specific evolutionary success condition. (shrink)

As the leading contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?,” this essay asks why Rorty was so often taken to be saying things that he claimed he was not. The argument is that Rorty's rhetorical approach and jargon engendered this confusion and undermined his effectiveness as a philosopher and public intellectual. The focus here is on two points: first, on how, in his eagerness to shut down attempts to claim a privileged path to Reality, he gave (...) the impression of dismissing not only hierarchies but also distinctions; and second, on how his separation of causes and reasons retained a dualism of the “one world, many perspectives” model that elsewhere he rejected. This essay concludes that leading figures of science studies at the present time, notably Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway, better equip readers to move past the feeling of deprivation that comes from shedding centuries-old philosophical assumptions and that their explicit rejection of the nature/culture binary makes their work better suited to addressing the great problem of our time — climate change. (shrink)