Philosophy or Auto-Anthropology?

2019 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 26-28
Author(s):  
Daniel C. Dennett ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Computer Modeling ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
The Other ◽  
Theoretical Physics ◽  
Experimental Physics ◽  
Timothy Williamson ◽  
Working Out ◽  
Armchair Philosophy

Timothy Williamson is mainly right, I think. He defends armchair philosophy as a variety of armchair science, like mathematics, or computer modeling in evolutionary theory, economics, statistics, and I agree that this is precisely what philosophy is, at its best: working out the assumptions and implications of any serious body of thought, helping everyone formulate the best questions to ask, and then leaving the empirical work to the other sciences. Philosophy – at its best – is to other inquiries roughly as theoretical physics is to experimental physics. You can do it in the armchair, but you need to know a lot about the phenomena with which the inquiry deals.

The Continuum of Conscientiousness: The Antagonistic Interests among Obsessive and Antisocial Personalities

2014 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven C. Hertler
Keyword(s):  
Personality Disorder ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Antisocial Personality Disorder ◽  
The Other ◽  
Antisocial Personality ◽  
Obsessive Compulsive ◽  
Demographic Differences ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Continuum

Abstract The five factor trait of conscientiousnessis a supertrait, denoting on one hand a pattern of excessive labor, rigidity, orderliness and compulsivity,and on the other hand a pattern of strict rectitude, scrupulosity, dutifulness and morality. In both respects the obsessive-compulsive personality is conscientious; indeed, it has been labeled a disorder of extreme conscientiousness (Widiger et al., 2009). Antisocial personality disorder, in the present paper, is described as occupying the opposite end of the conscientiousness continuum. The antisocial is impulsive rather than compulsive, illicit rather than licit, and furtive rather than forthright.After clinically comparing the obsessive and antisocial personalities, the present paper invokes evolutionary theory to explain their resultant behavioral, ideological, political and demographic differences.

scholarly journals Hiketeia

1973 ◽  
Vol 93 ◽  
pp. 74-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gould
Keyword(s):  
Dominant Role ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Other ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Dead Body ◽  
Greek Literature ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Working Out

To Professor E. R. Dodds, through his edition of Euripides'Bacchaeand again inThe Greeks and the Irrational, we owe an awareness of new possibilities in our understanding of Greek literature and of the world that produced it. No small part of that awareness was due to Professor Dodds' masterly and tactful use of comparative ethnographic material to throw light on the relation between literature and social institutions in ancient Greece. It is in the hope that something of my own debt to him may be conveyed that this paper is offered here, equally in gratitude, admiration and affection.The working out of the anger of Achilles in theIliadbegins with a great scene of divine supplication in which Thetis prevails upon Zeus to change the course of things before Troy in order to restore honour to Achilles; it ends with another, human act in which Priam supplicates Achilles to abandon his vengeful treatment of the dead body of Hector and restore it for a ransom. The first half of theOdysseyhinges about another supplication scene of crucial significance, Odysseus' supplication of Arete and Alkinoos on Scherie. Aeschylus and Euripides both wrote plays called simplySuppliants, and two cases of a breach of the rights of suppliants, the cases of the coup of Kylon and that of Pausanias, the one dating from the mid-sixth century, the other from around 470 B.C. or soon after, played a dominant role in the diplomatic propaganda of the Spartans and Athenians on the eve of the Peloponnesian War.

scholarly journals On the Support that the Special and General Theories of Relativity Provide for Rock’s Argument Concerning Induced Self-Motion and Vice Versa

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Michael Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Reference Frame ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Special Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Relativity Theory ◽  
Inertial Reference Frame ◽  
Theory Of Relativity ◽  
Special Theory Of Relativity ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Self Motion

Though Einstein and other physicists recognized the importance of an observer being at rest in an inertial reference frame for the special theory of relativity, the supporting psychological structures were not discussed much by physicists. On the other hand, Rock wrote of the factors involved in the perception of motion, including one’s own motion. Rock thus came to discuss issues of significance to relativity theory, apparently without any significant understanding of how his theory might be related to relativity theory. In this paper, connections between Rock’s theory on the perception of one’s own motion, as well as empirical work supporting it, and relativity theory are explored. Paper available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/9908025v1 .

scholarly journals Memorial Book of the Chechen Republic

2011 ◽  
pp. 58-62
Author(s):  
Zarema H. Ibragimova
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Great Patriotic War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Working Out

On the history of the Memorial Book of the Chechen Republic as compared with preparation and publication of similar books in the other country’s regions. Working out of historical and documentary sources and present them a wide public in the long term reconstruction of historical events of the Great Patriotic War is actual.

scholarly journals Fellow Traveller Versus Moral Stranger: How Overall Views of Offenders Impact on Punishment and Rehabilitation Decisions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Stephanie Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Structural Equation ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
The Other ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Fellow Traveller ◽  
The Media ◽  
Empirical Context ◽  
Objective View ◽  
Moral Stranger ◽  
The Way

<p>Theoretical discussions have proposed that opinions relating to offenders can be viewed along a continuum, with the moral stranger at one end and the fellow traveller at the other (Connolly & Ward, 2008). At the very basic level the moral stranger is the offender who is a bad person, while the fellow traveller is the offender who has done a bad thing. It is proposed that where an individual’s view of offenders sits on the continuum will help determine punishment and rehabilitation decisions that they make about offenders. It is further proposed that these views are influenced by outside factors such as the way that the media portrays offenders. The media is an important source of information on crime and offenders (Gilliam & Iyengar, 2000; Klite, Bardwell, & Salzman, 1997), and so the way that the media write about offenders can influence the public’s opinions about offenders. The moral stranger and the fellow traveller are theoretical concepts at present, so the aim of the current research was to investigate these concepts in an empirical context. Firstly, Studies 1 and 2 presented crime vignettes written from either the moral stranger perspective or the fellow traveller perspective and then investigated what punishment and rehabilitation differences there were. Study 3 then developed a measure to evaluate individuals’ opinions about offenders, to create an empirical basis for the existing theory. The Opinions about Criminal Offenders (OCO) Scale was developed in Study 3. Study 4 then tested the psychometric properties of this Scale, and through further factor analysis the scale was pared down to 12-items made up of four subscales. Study 5 then brought together the empirical work from Studies 1 and 2 and the developed measure from Studies 3 and 4. Participants were presented with two vignettes, one written from a subjective view and the other from an objective view. They were also given the 12-item OCO Scale. Structural Equation Modelling was then used to extend the work of Studies 1 and 2, and to further develop the decision making process individuals go through. Results indicated that each subscale of the OCO predicted different judgements made about the offender, in terms of his characteristics and likelihood of reoffending, and that these judgements then predicted different judgements about the outcome of the offence, including punishment motive. These studies, together, show that the moral stranger and fellow traveller concepts do exist, as a continuum, and the development of the OCO Scale showed that there is utility in the scale in terms of the type of judgements made about an offender and an offence. The current study was conducted with a sex offence in the vignettes and so further research needs to extend this by using different offence types and different offender characteristics, to investigate how generalisable these findings are.</p>

scholarly journals The bias of avoiding spatial dynamic panel models

REGION ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-180
Author(s):  
Lorenz Benedikt Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Dynamic Models ◽  
Regional Economics ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Optimal Estimation ◽  
Spatial Dimension ◽  
The Other ◽  
Omitted Variables ◽  
Time Dimension ◽  
Opposite Case ◽  
Dynamic Panel Models

Many questions in urban and regional economics can be characterized as including both a spatial and a time dimension. However, often one of these dimensions is neglected in empirical work. This paper highlights the danger of methodological inertia, investigating the effect of neglecting the spatial or the time dimension when in fact both are important. A tale of two research teams, one living in a purely dynamic and the other in a purely spatial world of thinking, sets the scene. Because the researcher teams' choices to omit a dimension change the assumed optimal estimation strategies, the issue is more difficult to analyze than a typical omitted variables problem. First, the bias of omitting a relevant dimension is approximated analytically. Second, Monte Carlo simulations show that the neglected dimension projects onto the other, with potentially disastrous results. Interestingly, dynamic models are bound to overestimate autoregressive behavior whenever the spatial dimension is important. The same holds true for the opposite case. An application using the well-known, openly available cigarette demand data supports these findings.

scholarly journals Observations on the mobilization of peat nitrogen in incubation experiments

1959 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 268-281
Author(s):  
Jaakko Kivekäs ◽  
Erkki Kivinen
Keyword(s):  
Nitrate Nitrogen ◽  
Ammonium Nitrogen ◽  
The Other ◽  
Incubation Experiments ◽  
Different Types ◽  
Working Out ◽  
Original Amount

60 peat samples from northern Finland representing different types of peat were incubated in a laboratory at a temperature of 17—18° C. The ammonium nitrogen, the nitrate nitrogen and the pH in the samples were determined after one month of incubation as well as after three months of incubation. The results were compared to results from determinations made before incubation. An attempt was made to elucidate the factors that influence the mobilization of nitrogen. On the basis of the above results it is evident that the differences between the various peat types as mobilizers of nitrogen are under these circumstances not very distinct, nor do these differences seem to be dependent on the types of peat. The following facts can, however, be established: In the amounts of ammonium nitrogen an increase takes place in most groups of samples during the first month. This increase is fairly big in the Sphagnum-dominated peats. The increase in ammonium nitrogen continues in the unlimed samples in most peat groups during all three months of incubation. After three months of incubation the amount of ammonium nitrogen in the limed samples is smaller than in the unlimed samples, although it is usually bigger than in the original samples. After the first month of incubation the amounts of nitrate nitrogen in all types of peat have decreased compared to the amounts in the original samples. In the limed samples the decrease is not as great as in the unlimed ones. After three months of incubation the amount of nitrate nitrogen has considerably increased as compared to the amount after one month of incubation. In the limed samples it might to some extent exceed the original amount of nitrate nitrogen, however, this is seldom the case in the unlimed samples. If the results are calculated on the basis of weight unit, it can be stated that the ability to mobilize nitrogen is greater in the Sphagnum peats than in the other peat groups. Working out the results in kg per ha it will be noted that somewhat more nitrogen is mobilized in the Carex-dominated than in the Sphagnum-dominated peats. The results obtained by experiments in the laboratory are not directly applicable to conditions in the field.

Born idolaters: The limits of the philosophical implications of the cognitive science of religion

2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Jong ◽  
Christopher Kavanagh ◽  
Aku Visala
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Cognitive Science Of Religion ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Cognitive Constraints ◽  
Science Of Religion ◽  
Work Done

SummaryIn recent years, theoretical and empirical work done under the rubric of the cognitive science of religion (CSR) have led many to conclude that religion (or, at least, some aspects thereof) is “natural”. By this, it is meant that human beings are predisposed to believe in supernatural agents, and that their beliefs about these agents are constrained in various ways. The details about how and why these predispositions and cognitive constraints developed and evolved are still largely unknown, though there is enough of a theoretical consensus in CSR for philosophers to have begun reflecting on the implications of CSR for religious belief. In particular, much philosophical work has been done on the implications of CSR for theism, on both sides of the debate. On one hand, CSR might contribute to defeating particular arguments for theism, or indeed theism altogether; on the other hand, CSR might provide support for specific theological views. In this paper, we argue that the CSR is largely irrelevant for

Building Materials and Techniques

1997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Ling ◽  
Paul Arthur ◽  
Georgia Clarke ◽  
Estelle Lazer ◽  
Lesley A. Ling ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Building Materials ◽  
The Other ◽  
Upper Crust ◽  
Calcareous Tufa ◽  
Volcanic Ashes ◽  
Wear And Tear ◽  
Modern House ◽  
Working Out ◽  
Yellowish White

Much of the ensuing discussion will focus on the working-out of structural sequences, first within individual houses or parts of houses, then within the insula as a whole. As a preface to this discussion, it is necessary to give a description of the building materials and techniques found in the insula. Brief surveys of Pompeian building techniques have appeared in various publications. Still one of the most serviceable accounts is that of R. C. Carrington in his article ‘Notes on the building materials of Pompeii” published in 1933, and most of the forms of construction found in I10 are discussed therein. First, the materials. The commonest is the socalled ‘Sarno stone’ (often inaccurately called limestone’), a yellowish white calcareous tufa which is very rough and porous, being riddled with the imprints of shells and vegetable matter; it is used both in large blocks to form quoins and the like and in smaller rubble for facing and infilling of all types. Next most common is a hard grey (trachytic) lava which is stronger and more water resistant than Sarno stone but which, because it is less easy to cut into regular shapes, is generally employed in the form of small rubble. An exception to this rule is its use for door thresholds, where its hardness is well suited to withstanding wear and tear. Rather less common in our insula is the red or purple vesicular lava known as cruma (English “scoria”), derived from the frothy upper crust of consolidated lava streams; it is occasionally cut into small blocks but more normally occurs as a sporadic material in rubble wall-facings where Sarno stone and grey lava predominate. The other main lithic materials found in the insula are varieties of tufo (tuff), formed by the consolidation of volcanic ashes. The brown or grey tuff from Nuceria (modern Nocera) is a hard and close-grained material containing darker brown or blackish specks. It can be easily cut to shape when freshly exposed in the quarry but hardens later on contact with the air, so is ideally suited for producing ashlar blocks, small tufelli (blocks of similar size to modern house bricks) and the pyramidal pieces used in reticulate work (opus reticulaium: see below), not to mention carved detail such as column and pilaster capitals.

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