By Joshua Knobe from The New York Times. "...The study of human nature, whether in Nietzsche or in a contemporary psychology journal, is obviously relevant to certain purely scientific questions, but how could this sort of work ever help us to answer the distinctive questions of philosophy? It may...

By David Johnson from Psychology Today. "Every wave of public scandal seems to bring in its wake calls for more ethics classes at out top schools. As a former philosophy professor who has taught “Moral Philosophy 101” to undergraduates, I’m actually rather dismissive about the whole idea. I don...

By Willian Grassie from The Global Spiral. "In 1927, British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead was asked to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology at the University of Edinburgh. His talks were published two years later as Process and Realit y, the book that...

by Daniel Mendelsohn for The New Yorker "Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupçon of meretriciousness: memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family. Like a drunken guest at a wedding, it is constantly mortifying its...

by Evan Lerner from Seed Magazine "Today, down in the descriptively named Research Triangle in North Carolina, more than 250 scientists, journalists, bloggers, programmers, and multi-hyphenated combinations thereof are planning the future of science communication on the web. (Practicing what it...

Interview by Nathan Gardels for New Perspectives Quarterly Czeslaw Milosz, the great Polish poet and essayist who died in 2004, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980. Just after the publication of A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry and his memoir, Road-side Dog...

by Gary Browning for Contemporary Political Theory Bonnie, the editors of Contemporary Political Theory were very enthusiastic to secure an interview with you and to enable readers to find out about your intellectual development and current thinking, so many thanks for agreeing to this interview. Your...

by Christof Koch from Scientific American "Surely there must have been times in high school or college when you laid in bed, late at night, and wondered where your “free will” came from? What part of the brain—if it is the brain—is responsible for deciding to act one way or another? One traditional...

By Jerome Groopman "Born in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, Maja Matarić originally wanted to study languages and art. After she and her mother moved to the United States, in 1981, her uncle, who had immigrated some years earlier, pressed her to concentrate on computers. As a graduate student...

By Elizabeth Pennisi | Science Mag "Cooperation has created a conundrum for generations of evolutionary scientists. If natural selection among individuals favors the survival of the fittest, why would one individual help another at a cost to itself? Charles Darwin himself noted the difficulty of...

By Gabriel Abend Drawing on Williams’ distinction between thin and thick ethical concepts, I argue that current moral neuroscience and psychology unwarrantedly restrict their researches to thin morality only. Experiments typically investigate subjects’ judgments about rightness, appropriateness, or permissibility...

By Chen Lai Abstract: This essay focuses on the unity of several virtues in pre-Qin Confucians. Confucius maintains the proper application and coherence of such virtues as benevolence, wisdom, trustworthiness, straightforwardness, courage, and firmness. Further, Confucius takes benevolence and nobility...

By Paul Bloomfield Abstract: Justice has long stood out among the virtues as being an “other-regarding” virtue. As Michael Thompson writes, “The mark of this special virtue of human agents [justice], as Aristotle says, is that it is “toward another”, pros heteron or pros allon; it is, as St. Thomas says...

By Wendell Wallach, Stan Franklin, and Colin Allen Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in general, comprehensive models of human cognition. Such models aim to explain higher-order cognitive faculties, such as deliberation and planning. Given a computational representation, the validity...

By Alex Tuckness Abstract: Making and evaluating excuses is a central part of administrative ethics. This article examines one of the most common excuses, "Everybody does it," by first providing examples of cases where the excuse might be used to justify action in public administration settings...

By Ragnar Francén "Motivational externalists and internalists of various sorts disagree about the circumstances under which it is conceptually possible to have moral opinions but lack moral motivation. Typically, the evidence referred to are intuitions about whether people in certain scenarios who...

By Gregory R. Peterson, Michael Spezio, James Van Slyke, Kevin Reimer and Warren Brown This paper argues that consideration of moral exemplars may provide a means for integrating insights across philosophical ethics, theological ethics, and the scientific study of moral cognition. Key to this endeavor...

By Alan Goldman Huckleberry Finn is not irrational in being unmotivated to follow his explicit judgments of rightness and wrongness. Philosophers have previously judged Huck to be irrational, subject to weakness of will, in being unable to act on his moral judgment. But their interpretation rests on...

By Francesco Fronterotta Plato's Republic continues to arouse intense controversy among commentators, both for its ethical and political project and for its psychological, epistemological, and ontological implications for the knowledge of philosophers, who, says Plato, should be set as guides for...

Maui Hudson Ethical review is an integral part of the process of developing research and considering issues associated with the production of knowledge. It is part of a system that primarily legitimises western traditions of inquiry and reinforces western assumptions about knowledge and its benefit to...