The history of Western philosophy, at least as reflected in university curricula in the English-speaking world, is standardly divided into three major periods: ancient philosophy, early modern philosophy, and modern philosophy. Ancient philosophy is seen as inaugurated by Socrates, and the subsequent writings of Plato and Aristotle undoubtedly set much of the agenda for the development of Weste...

Thirty-six ethical codes from national professional associations were studied, the aim to test whether librarians have global shared values or if political and cultural contexts have significantly influenced the codes' content. Gorman's 8 core values of stewardship, service, intellectual freedom, rationalism, literacy and learning, equity of access to recorded knowledge and information, privacy...

Humans have a predictable liking for theories of what makes humans special, far above mere beasts and machines. Robert Brandom backs one of the most popular candidates, reason, in a specific form indicated by the word 'reasoning': making inferences, reaching conclusions from premises. Are we really the only reasoners? A dog traces its quarry to a place where it could have gone any of three ways...

Herman Melville’s final novel The Confidence-Man destabilizes conventional Western models of ethical behavior, particularly Kantian notions of moral agency, by exposing and challenging their basis in rationality and a progressivist model of history. The Confidence-Man shows rationality to be nothing more than one way, among many other possible ways, that human beings attempt to fix the world in...

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This essay creates an unlikely conversation between two 20th century thinkers: John Rawls and Michael Oakeshott. I say “unlikely” because apart from a few scant remarks in the writing of each did not directly engage other. The begins by examining Oakeshott’s explication “The Rationalist” her tradition history political thought. Specifically, shows that rationalism politics involves belief reaso...

Abstract This article discusses explanations behind theory choice, that is, ultimately, what leads people to accept a certain claim as valid. There has been recent debate how closure was achieved in the continental-drift discussion. The controversy had found its usual explanation under rationalist terms: Wegener’s 1912 accepted 50 years later only after plate tectonic provided more evidence or ...

This paper maps definitions of modernism extracting some of the features of aesthetic modernism as it discusses Descartes, the Enlightenment, Cartesian rationalism and the notion of ‘aesthetics’. Within modernism, I consider its major assumptions, values, (or its aesthetic), the theoretical sources of formalism and the ideas and outstanding figures associated with modernism, such as Immanuel Ka...

The dominant view of design in information systems and software engineering, the Rational Design Paradigm, views software development as a methodical, plan-centered, approximately rational process of optimizing a design candidate for known constraints and objectives. This paper synthesizes an Alternative Design Paradigm, which views software development as an amethodical, improvisational, emoti...