Abstract: Science and emerging technologies should not be predominantly tasked with furnishing us with more sustainable societies. Continuous short-term technological bail outs without taking into account the longer socio-cultural incubation times required to transition to ‘weakly sustainable’ economies squander valuable resources and time. Emerging technologies need to be deployed strategically to buy time in order to have extended political, social and ethical discussions about the root-causes of unsustainable economies and minimize social disruptions on the path towards global sustainability. Keywords: Nanoscience; (...) nanotechnology; expanded materials design space; dematerialization; sustainability; permanent resource crises . (shrink)

Microscopy allows us to observe objects we cannot see with our eyes alone. With a light microscope, we can distinguish objects at the scale of the wavelengths of visible light just under a micrometer. Around 1870 Ernst Abbe, who laid the foundation of modern optics, suggested that the resolution of a microscope would improve by using some yet-unknown radiation with shorter wavelengths than visible light, that is, below 390 nanometers (1 nm = 10−9 m). Electrons can have wavelengths near 1 (...) picometer (1 pm = 10−12 m) and should therefore allow atoms to be distinguished since they are typically at least a few hundred pm apart. In this oversimplified view, further decreasing the wavelength of the radiation should allow us to increase the resolution of electron microscopy even more. However, this can only be done by increasing the energy of the radiation, which would ultimately destroy the samples. Other factors also affect the resolution of electron microscopes, among them non-ideal imaging properties of electromagnetic lenses, which result in false images. It took more than half a century to understand and control these aberrations and separate objects less than 1 Ångstrom (1 Å = 10−10 m) apart. (shrink)

After introducing the concept of compressed sensing as a complementary measurement mode to the classical Shannon-Nyquist approach, I discuss some of the drivers, potential challenges and obstacles to its implementation. I end with a speculative attempt to embed compressed sensing as an enabling methodology within the emergence of data-driven discovery. As a consequence I predict the growth of non-nomological sciences where heuristic correlations will find applications but often bypass conventional pure basic and use-inspired basic research stages due to the lack (...) of verifiable hypotheses. (shrink)

The role of speed in innovations needs to be explored more thoroughly. I advocate here that for innovations which rely on scarce materials, research into more abundant substitutes needs to be accelerated while a regulatory-driven extension of the product life should slow down the number of incremental innovations and reduce our overall footprint on scarce resources. Chemical elements need to be established as global commons whose overuse can be regulated if required. Part of the efficiency gains of innovations could be (...) used for research to offset the ‘rebound effect’ and provide the public with a return on early infrastructure investments. (shrink)

Book review of Harry Collins book 'Are we all scientific experts now?'.

The exploration of chemical periodicity over the past 250 years led to the development of the Periodic System of Elements and demonstrates the value of vague ideas that ignored early scientific anomalies and instead allowed for extended periods of normal science where new methodologies and concepts are developed. The basic chemical element provides this exploration with direction and explanation and has shown to be a central and historically adaptable concept for a theory of matter far from the reductionist frontier. This (...) is explored in the histories of Prout’s hypothesis, Döbereiner Triads, element inversions necessary when ordering chemical elements by atomic weights, and van den Broeck’s ad-hoc proposal to switch to nuclear charges instead. The development of more accurate methods to determine atomic weights, Rayleigh and Ramsey’s gas separation and analytical techniques, Moseley’s X-ray spectroscopy to identify chemical elements, and more recent accelerator-based cold fusion methods to create new elements at the end of the Periodic Table point to the importance of methodological development complementing conceptual advances. I propose to frame the crossover from physics to chemistry not as a loss of accuracy and precision but as an increased application of vague concepts such as similarity which permit classification. This approach provides epistemic flexibility to adapt to scientific anomalies and the continued growth of chemical compound space and rejects the Procrustean philosophy of reductionist physics. Furthermore, it establishes chemistry with its explanatory and operational autonomy epitomized by the periodic system of elements as a gateway to other experimental sciences. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung: In Abschnitt (1) dieses Aufsatzes diskutiere ich Rawls’ theologische Kritik des Verdienstes in seiner frühen Schrift Über Sünde, Glaube und Religion. Im Gegensatz zur Theorie der Gerechtigkeit kritisiert der frühe Rawls eine Berufung auf das eigene Verdienst nicht als kognitiven Irrtum oder moralische Willkür, sondern sieht darin den sündhaften Ausdruck menschlichen Stolzes. Diese Kritik des Stolzes beruht auf einem schöpfungstheologischen Argument und mündet in ein Plädoyer für religiöse Demut. Abschnitt (2) zeigt, dass Rawls’ Diskussion von Verteilungsgrundsätzen in den übergreifenden (...) Versuch einer gerechtigkeitstheoretischen Zähmung des Zufalls eingebettet ist. Rawls entwickelt in der Theorie der Gerechtigkeit eine bestimmte Typologie des Zufalls und diskutiert, wie die vier von ihm diskutierten Lesarten des zweiten Grundsatzes der Gerechtigkeit auf den Zufall reagieren. Die gerechtigkeitstheoretische Zähmung des Zufalls distanziert sich sowohl von der Dystopie einer völligen Eliminierung des Zufalls als auch von einer fatalistischen Affirmation des Zufalls. In Abschnitt (3) erläutere ich zunächst die unterschiedlichen Begriffe des Verdienstes, welche Rawls in der Theorie der Gerechtigkeit vorstellt. Ich versuche Rawls’ Kritik des Verdienstes zu klären, indem ich diese gegen ein Missverständnis in Schutz nehme, welches Samuel Schefflers und Thomas Scanlons Interpretationen kennzeichnet. Schließlich beschäftige ich mich mit Robert Nozicks Suche nach dem „positive argument“ von Rawls’ Kritik des Verdienstes, komme dabei jedoch zu einem ganz anderen Ergebnis als Nozick. Meiner Meinung findet sich das „positive argument“, nach dem Nozick vergeblich sucht, nicht in der Theorie der Gerechtigkeit, sondern verdankt sich dem kreatürlichen Egalitarismus von Rawls’ theologischer Frühschrift. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage cherche à mettre en lumière et reconstituer une manière antique négligée d’analyser la connaissance que l’auteure désigne comme « socratique » (p. 3), comme « pyrrhonienne » (p. 184) ou comme une « lecture sceptique de Platon », et dont elle trouve et analyse les principaux éléments chez Platon, Sextus Empiricus et les stoïciens. Cette lignée est définie comme liant immédiatement les questions épistémologiques à des questions normatives à propos de notre incapa­cité d’examiner nos...

The newly updated Right and Wrong 2nd Edition is an accessible introduction to the major traditions in western philosophical ethics, written in a lively and engaging style. It is designed for entry-level ethics courses and includes real-life ethical scenarios chosen to appeal directly to students. Greatly expanded and improved, this successful text introduces students to the major ethical traditions, and provides a simple methodology for resolving ethical dilemmas Treats teleological and deontological approaches to ethics as the two most important traditions, (...) but now includes chapters on virtue ethics and the ethics of care The very accessible writing style speaks directly to students’ own experience Draws examples from three types of real-life ethical scenarios submitted by students: academic dishonesty, partying, and personal relationships Provides a concise treatment of this notoriously complex subject, perfect for entry-level ethics and applied ethics courses. (shrink)

When making decisions, humans can observe many kinds of information about others' activities, but their effects on performance are not well understood. We investigated social learning strategies using a simple problem-solving task in which participants search a complex space, and each can view and imitate others' solutions. Results showed that participants combined multiple sources of information to guide learning, including payoffs of peers' solutions, popularity of solution elements among peers, similarity of peers' solutions to their own, and relative payoffs from (...) individual exploration. Furthermore, performance was positively associated with imitation rates at both the individual and group levels. When peers' payoffs were hidden, popularity and similarity biases reversed, participants searched more broadly and randomly, and both quality and equity of exploration suffered. We conclude that when peers' solutions can be effectively compared, imitation does not simply permit scrounging, but it can also facilitate propagation of good solutions for further cumulative exploration. (shrink)

Big Ideas for Little Kids includes everything a teacher, a parent, or a college student needs to teach philosophy to elementary school children from picture books. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book explains why it is important to allow young children access to philosophy during primary-school education. Wartenberg also gives advice on how to construct a "learner-centered" classroom, in which children discuss philosophical issues with one another as they respond to open-ended questions by saying whether they agree (...) or disagree with what others have said. (shrink)

v. 1. Editorial introduction -- v. 2. The English and Latin texts (i) -- v. 3. The English and Latin texts (ii).

Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness—those that take there to be (...) absolute goodness—are comparatively rich: they offer grounds for judging some types of things better than others because they have more absolute goodness. Moorean accounts, for example, can tell us that humans and human experiences are superior to bees and blades of grass. But such theories tend to be descriptively poor: they struggle to tell us in virtue of what this is so. In this essay we motivate and flesh out a view that splits the difference between accounts of goodness as relative and accounts of goodness as absolute. Such a view holds promise only if the mechanics of this kind of metaphysics of goodness can be worked out. Here we present a view on which the paradigm for absolute goodness is God and the paradigm for each kind of relative goodness is a divine idea. (shrink)

Proceedings of a conference held in Apr. 2008 in Washington, D.C.

Father Williams explains how the conscience is formed through our training and experiences and informed by the Holy Spirit, making it an essential tool for daily living. He uses familiar and surprising characters to illustrate the positive choices conscience can direct--and the disaster that results when a conscience is undeveloped or ignored. Questions he tackles include "Is it more important to be smart or good?""Is there a morally right thing to do in every situation?" and "Is the Christian moral life (...) an exciting adventure, or a necessary burden?" Rich, provocative, and practical for everyday decision making, KNOWING RIGHT FROM WRONG is a must-read for all who hunger for personal holiness. (shrink)

It is somewhat misleading to think of the Franciscans as forming a “school” in ethics, since there was a fair bit of diversity among Franciscans. Nonetheless, one can identify certain characteristic tendencies of Franciscan moral thought, and certain “celebrity” Franciscans whose views in ethics and moral psychology are particularly noteworthy. I shall first offer an overview of the general character of Franciscan moral thought in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and then turn to a more detailed examination of (...) the thought of John Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308) and William Ockham (c. 1288-1347) on three central matters of debate: the nature of the virtues, the relationship between intellect and will, and the relationship between moral requirements and the divine will. (shrink)

In this book Thomas Wren uncovers and assesses the largely hidden philosophical assumptions about human motivation that have shaped contemporary psychological ...

THE NATURE OF ART is a collection of 29 seminal, historically-organized readings that are focused on a basic philosophical question: What is Art? Including writings from the Western tradition'both Continental and Analytic traditions'as well as non-Western, minority, and feminist writings, this volume provides students with a rich set of resources to explore this matter both broadly and deeply. Introductions to each reading situate the selection amidst each respective thinker's body of work and the greater philosophical context in which the remarks (...) arose. Reading questions accompany each selection, drawing students' attention to key points to be encountered. Hailed by reviewers and adopters for its clarity and rigor, Wartenberg's THE NATURE OF ART offers a lively and engaging introduction to the philosophy of art. (shrink)

For courses in Business Ethics A fresh approach to the assumptions that underlie business practices Two recent events — the 2008 economic meltdown and the ongoing concentration of the nation's wealth in the hands of a very small percentage of the population — have led many people to question a number of basic assumptions about business, corporations, and the workings of contemporary free-market capitalism in a global economy. Written as a dialogue between Socrates and a hypothetical contemporary CEO,Socrates Comes to (...) Wall Street leads students to think critically about perspectives and practices that are taken as “givens” in most American business schools and corporations. Employing this original and provocative approach, author Thomas White seeks to encourage the next generation of business leaders to be more astute about the implications of their actions, and to act more prudently and more fairly than we have seen in the recent past. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt is associated with a strong distinction between guilt and responsibility: Whereas she insists that guilt is strictly personal, she advances a vicarious notion of collective political responsibility without guilt. Yet Arendt also proposes a political concept of forgiveness—which yields the critical question: Does a political concept of forgiveness not presuppose a political concept of guilt? Arendtian forgiveness addresses what Arendt terms trespassing. Scrutinizing her notion of trespassing and how it is situated within her theory of political action, I (...) ponder whether Arendt, in effect, offers a political concept of guilt. I argue that while trespassing is clearly a political notion, it cannot be labelled guilt. Rather, trespassing refers to a purely causal responsibility without blame, and to a social-ontological condition of non-sovereignty and fallibility inherent in political interaction. The non-blameworthiness of trespassing implies that Arendt’s oft-cited concept of forgiveness resembles what is usually categorized as excuse. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION Although the writings of Thomas Reid are very fertile and interesting, his life is biographically barren in comparison to such seventeenth - and ...

Are demands for equality motivated by envy? Nietzsche, Freud, Hayek, and Nozick all thought so. Call this the Envy Objection. For egalitarians, the Envy Objection is meant to sting. Many egalitarians have tried to evade the Envy Objection.. But should egalitarians be worried about envy? In this paper, I argue that egalitarians should stop worrying and learn to love envy. I argue that the persistent unwillingness to embrace the Envy Objection is rooted in a common misunderstanding of the nature of (...) the charge, what it reveals, and what can be said in response to it. I develop what Bernard Williams might call a vindicatory genealogy of envy, thereby allowing us to see that envy, rather than undermining egalitarian intuitions, can in fact play a distinct justificatory role (when it is fitting), which undermines the Envy Objection. (shrink)

The practice and development of modern medicine requires large amounts of data, particularly in the domain of cancer. The future of personalized medicine lies neither with “genomic medicine” nor with “precision medicine”, but with “data medicine”. The establishment of this DM has required far-reaching changes, to establish four essential elements connecting patients and doctors: biobanks, databases, bioinformatic platforms and genomic platforms. The “transformation” of scientific research areas, such as genetics, bioinformatics and biostatistics, into clinical specialties has generated a new vision (...) of care. Molecular tumor boards are one response to these changes and are now providing better access to next-generation sequencing and new cancer treatments to patients with inoperable or metastatic cancers, and those for whom the usual treatment has failed. However, MTB face a crucial ethical challenge: maintaining and improving the trust of patients, clinicians, researchers and industry in academic medical centers supported by private or public funding rather than providing genetic data directly to private companies. We believe that, in this era of DM, appropriate modern digital communication networks will be required to maintain this trust and to improve the organization and effectiveness of the system. There is, therefore, a need to reconsider the form and content of informed consent documents at all academic medical centers and to introduce dynamic and electronic informed consent. (shrink)

The origin and the development of scientific disciplines has been a topic of reflection for several decades. The few extensive case studies support the thesis that scientific disciplines are not monolithic structures but can be characterized by distinct social, organizational and scientific–technical practices. Nonetheless, most disciplinary histories of genetics confine themselves largely to an uncontested account of the content of the discipline or occasionally institutional factors. Little attention is paid to the large number of researchers who, by their joint efforts, (...) ultimately shaped the discipline. We contribute to this aspect of disciplinary historiography by discussing the role of women researchers at the Institute for Heredity Research, founded in 1914 in Berlin under the directorship of Erwin Baur, and the sister of the John Innes Institute at Cambridge. This paper investigates how and why Baur built a highly successful research programme that relied on the efforts of his female staff, whose careers, notably Elisabeth Schiemann's, are also assessedin toto. These women undertook the necessary ‘technoscience’ and in some cases innovative work and helped increase the prestige of the institute and its director. Together they played a pivotal role in the establishment of genetics in Germany. Without them the discipline would have developed much more slowly and along a divergent path. (shrink)

This study focuses on the question of neural differences in the evaluation of hypothetical and real payoffs. Hypothetical payoffs are not incentive compatible and are, therefore, not considered to be reliable. Behavioral differences between the evaluation of hypothetical and real payoffs can be attributed to this incentive effect. Because real payoff mechanisms are not always applicable in the field, it is necessary to know in which way both types of payoffs affect evaluation processes. In order to delineate the cognitive processes (...) related to hypothetical bias, we conducted a within-subject EEG experiment with hypothetical and real payoffs. A certainty equivalent elicitation method for measuring risk attitudes was performed in which subjects had to indicate whether they preferred playing a lottery or receiving a sure payoff instead. At the behavioral level, subjects were more risk averse for real payoff choices, confirming a hypothetical bias. EEG-derived event-related potentials provide evidence that the processes underlying these differences in evaluations differ. A higher N2 component for hypothetical payoffs revealed increased cognitive control for hypothetical decisions. These neuronal underpinnings indicate additional evaluation processes in hypothetical choice paradigms, which can explain the shift in risk attitude toward the expected value of a lottery. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Personhood: A Start Are Dolphins Persons? Language and the Hand Personhood Redefined Conclusion: What Kind of Beings Are Dolphins?

In ancient philosophy, there is no discipline called “logic” in the contemporary sense of “the study of formally valid arguments.” Rather, once a subfield of philosophy comes to be called “logic,” namely in Hellenistic philosophy, the field includes (among other things) epistemology, normative epistemology, philosophy of language, the theory of truth, and what we call logic today. This entry aims to examine ancient theorizing that makes contact with the contemporary conception. Thus, we will here emphasize the theories of the “syllogism” (...) in the Aristotelian and Stoic traditions. However, because the context in which these theories were developed and discussed were deeply epistemological in nature, we will also include references to the areas of epistemological theorizing that bear directly on theories of the syllogism, particularly concerning “demonstration.” Similarly, we will include literature that discusses the principles governing logic and the components that make up arguments, which are topics that might now fall under the headings of philosophy of logic or non-classical logic. This includes discussions of problems and paradoxes that connect to contemporary logic and which historically spurred developments of logical method. For example, there is great interest among ancient philosophers in the question of whether all statements have truth-values. Relevant themes here include future contingents, paradoxes of vagueness, and semantic paradoxes like the liar. We also include discussion of the paradoxes of the infinite for similar reasons, since solutions have introduced sophisticated tools of logical analysis and there are a range of related, modern philosophical concerns about the application of some logical principles in infinite domains. Our criterion excludes, however, many of the themes that Hellenistic philosophers consider part of logic, in particular, it excludes epistemology and metaphysical questions about truth. Ancient philosophers do not write treatises “On Logic,” where the topic would be what today counts as logic. Instead, arguments and theories that count as “logic” by our criterion are found in a wide range of texts. For the most part, our entry follows chronology, tracing ancient logic from its beginnings to Late Antiquity. However, some themes are discussed in several eras of ancient logic; ancient logicians engage closely with each other’s views. Accordingly, relevant publications address several authors and periods in conjunction. These contributions are listed in three thematic sections at the end of our entry. (shrink)