This book sets out a thematic presentation of human action, especially as it relates to morality, in the three most significant figures in Medieval Scholastic thought: Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham
This Element provides an account of Thomas Aquinas's moral philosophy that emphasizes the intrinsic connection between happiness and the human good, human virtue, and the precepts of practical reason. Human beings by nature have an end to which they are directed and concerning which they do not deliberate, namely happiness. Humans achieve this end by performing good human acts, which are produced by the intellect and the will, and perfected by the relevant virtues. These virtuous acts require that the agent grasps the relevant moral principles and uses them in particular cases.
Cutting through the hype, a practical guide to using artificial intelligence for business benefits and competitive advantage. In The AI Advantage, Thomas Davenport offers a guide to using artificial intelligence in business. He describes what technologies are available and how companies can use them for business benefits and competitive advantage. He cuts through the hype of the AI craze—remember when it seemed plausible that IBM's Watson could cure cancer?—to explain how businesses can put artificial intelligence to work now, in the real world. His key recommendation: don't go for the “moonshot” (curing cancer, or synthesizing all investment knowledge); look for the “low-hanging fruit” to make your company more efficient. Davenport explains that the business value AI offers is solid rather than sexy or splashy. AI will improve products and processes and make decisions better informed—important but largely invisible tasks. AI technologies won't replace human workers but augment their capabilities, with smart machines to work alongside smart people. AI can automate structured and repetitive work; provide extensive analysis of data through machine learning (“analytics on steroids”), and engage with customers and employees via chatbots and intelligent agents. Companies should experiment with these technologies and develop their own expertise. Davenport describes the major AI technologies and explains how they are being used, reports on the AI work done by large commercial enterprises like Amazon and Google, and outlines strategies and steps to becoming a cognitive corporation. This book provides an invaluable guide to the real-world future of business AI. A book in the Management on the Cutting Edge series, published in cooperation with MIT Sloan Management Review.
The first book length study of property-owning democracy, Republic of Equals argues that a society in which capital is universally accessible to all citizens is uniquely placed to meet the demands of justice. Arguing from a basis in liberal-republican principles, this expanded conception of the economic structure of society contextualizes the market to make its transactions fair. The author shows that a property-owning democracy structures economic incentives such that the domination of one agent by another in the market is structurally impossible. The result is a renovated form of capitalism in which the free market is no longer a threat to social democratic values, but is potentially convergent with them. It is argued that a property-owning democracy has advantages that give it priority over rival forms of social organization such as welfare state capitalism and market socialist institutions. The book also addresses the currently high levels of inequality in the societies of the developed West to suggest a range of policies that target the "New Inequality" of our times. For this reason, the work engages not only with political philosophers such as John Rawls, Philip Pettit and John Tomasi, but also with the work of economists and historians such as Anthony B. Atkinson, François Bourguignon, Jacob S. Hacker, Lane Kenworthy, and Thomas Piketty.
A collection of content-based chapters and case studies examining the pedagogical potential and realities of digital literacies in education. The book aims to examine a number of foundational aspects of Web 2.0 technologies and social media applications and to understand the implications for teaching, learning, and professional development.
A penetrating guide to artificial intelligence: what it is, what it does, and how it will change our lives At a breathtaking pace, artificial intelligence is getting better and faster at making complex decisions. AI can already identify malignant tumors on CT scans, give legal advice, out-bluff the best poker players in the world, and, with ever-increasing skill, drive our cars. In Who’s Afraid of AI?, award-winning author Thomas Ramge expertly explains how machines are learning to learn, and he questions what today’s explosion of AI capability could mean for tomorrow: Is it ethical to allow robots—endlessly patient—to replace human caregivers in providing comfort and companionship to the elderly? Since AI feeds on big data, can we prevent its misuse by corporations or the government? Will AI ever be capable of runaway self-improvement? And if “the singularity” does arrive, with AI’s intelligence exponentially outpacing our own, what will become of us when, in many ways, we’re obsolete?
In What Nostalgia Was, historian Thomas Dodman traces the history of clinical "nostalgia" from when it was first coined in 1688 to describe deadly homesickness until the late nineteenth century, when it morphed into the benign yearning for a lost past we are all familiar with today. Dodman explores how people, both doctors and sufferers, understood nostalgia in late seventeenth-century Swiss cantons (where the first cases were reported) to the Napoleonic wars and to the French colonization of North Africa in the latter 1800s. A work of transnational scope over the longue duree, the book is an intellectual biography of a "transient mental illness" that was successively reframed according to prevailing notions of medicine, romanticism, and climatic and racial determinism. At the same time, Dodman adopts an ethnographic sensitivity to understand the everyday experience of living with nostalgia. In so doing, he explains why nostalgia was such a compelling diagnosis for war neuroses and generalized socioemotional disembeddedness at the dawn of the capitalist era and how it can be understood as a powerful bellwether of the psychological effects of living in the modern age.
For success in school and life, students need more than proficiency in academic subjects and good scores on tests. To truly thrive, students need to develop attributes that aren't typically measured on standardized tests. In this book, educators will learn how to foster the "Formative Five" success skills that today's students need, including : empathy; self-control; integrity; embracing diversity; and grit.
Based on previously unpublished French archival records as well as published primary sources from France, its enemies, and its allies from the early 1700s until the Great War, Intrepid women is the first serious ... study of a previously ignored aspect women's and military history. Thomas Cardoza shows that these women were far more numerous and far more important to French logistics and morale than previously recognized, and suggests that their suppression was both premature and ultimately counterproductive. He also paints ... a complete picture of these women's daily lives: social origins, recruitment, business dealings, behavior on the battlefield, marriage and family life, retirement, and death"--Jacket.
Teaching Young Adult Literature: Developing Students As World Citizens (by Thomas W. Bean, Judith Dunkerly-Bean, and Helen Harper) is a middle and secondary school methods text that introduces pre-service teachers in teacher credential programs and in-service teachers pursuing a Masters degree in Education to the field of young adult literature for use in contemporary contexts. The text introduces teachers to current research on adolescent life and literacy; the new and expanding genres of young adult literature; teaching approaches and practical strategies for using young adult literature in English and Language Arts secondary classrooms and in Content Area Subjects (e.g. History); and ongoing social, political and pedagogical issues of English and Language Arts classrooms in relation to contemporary young adult literature.
A text written in conversational style, designed to look at what the Bible says about psychological topics such as: personality, the mind/brain connection, states of consciousness, self-esteem, etc. Because psychology deals with the psychological/spiritual part of man, the Bible has much to say about it. Given that God created the mind and behavior (which is the basis of psychology) it only behooves us to study this realm of man that reflects God. Loaded with hundreds of Scripture references, the in-depth look at what the Bible says about thinking and behavior helps build a basis for studying psychology. The book begins with presuppositions, moves to a definition of what "integration" means to the author, and then provides insight for a Christian perspective of the psychological makeup of man. All of this is intended to set the foundation for Christian psychological study. The book then weighs in on certain psychological topics and runs those teachings through a "biblical grid.
Over three million young men left home, shouldered rifles, and set about killing one another in the 1860s. Behind, they left wives and sweethearts. The 50,000 books about the war have told us in meticulous detail about the strategy, tactics, weapons, uniforms, canteens, famous generals, religious beliefs, personality quirks, fortifications, battles, sieges, gunboats, medical care, and recruiting policies. The causes of the war have been endlessly analyzed. The surviving veterans wrote hundreds of memoirs, sometimes inflating their own heroism and importance. What rarely appears in this literature is any mention of sex, in spite of most soldiers being in their early twenties, a time of manly vigor. The late 19th century brought the ascendancy of Victorian prudishness and hypocrisy. The Comstock laws sent men to prison for mailing contraceptive advice. Just advice! Whatever willingness there might have been to reveal wartime hanky-panky evaporated in the tenor of the time and the admiring gaze of the veteran’s growing grandchildren. The following scene would be unimaginable: the old veteran sits by the stove in the country store. His long white beard covers his tattered vest. A faded medal graces his chest. On the floor are the shavings from his most recent whittling. A tiny child pipes up: “Tell us about the war, grandpa.” “Well, Jimmy, there was this pretty little whore in Memphis...” Never happen. Material collected twenty years ago resulted in the author’s 1994 book, The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell – Sex in the Civil War, which presented everything that was then known on the subject. There had been no previous book on Civil War sex. Since then, the author and his wife, Beverly, have read over 90,000 court-martials and countless letters and diary entries. What emerges is that sexual activity was far more common and public than our previous research or any memoir had ever revealed. The records come from literally every corner of the country: Key West, Washington Territory, Los Angeles, and Maine. The malfeasants are both officers and enlisted men. The victims range from six-year girls to sixty-year old grandmothers. The soldiers carried with them lewd books and obscene photos. Even more striking is the universality of houses of prostitution. Every village and every city neighborhood has at least one such—and everybody knew it. They knew the addresses of the houses. They knew the names of the madams and the names of many of the “girls.” Most of the witnesses for the trials had visited the houses, for the usual reasons. The military police tramped through the houses, looking for deserters. Rape, thought to be rare during the war, was not that rare. An unexpected finding was that Union soldiers, who were supposedly freeing the slaves, were quick to rape black women. An even more surprising finding was that the Confederate army had a policy of not prosecuting rapists, whether the victim was black or white. The inventor of the Graham cracker had, in 1834, written a book claiming that masturbation caused severe illness, even death. This idea had taken root in the medical profession and many army doctors testified that a defendant was not guilty because of “insanity from self-abuse.” The Union army’s largest hospital listed dozens men, dead from “masturbation.” The famous ship Monitor had a thick iron turret. In other such ships, the sound-proof turret proved a convenient place for old sailors to rape young boys. A Union cavalry colonel was tried for sexually assaulted both men and women. Evidence for Civil War homosexuality was unknown until now. Even more astonishing stories appear in the records: sex with horses, sheep, even with chickens and turkeys. There are records of obscene tattoos, foul cursing by Winfield Scott Hancock, black and white mistresses of Confederate generals, even many records of “fornication and bastardy” in the little village of Gettysburg. Ads fo
Despite its written literature, ancient Greece was in many ways an oral society. The first significant attempt to study the implications of this view stresses the coexistence of literacy and oral tradition and examines their character and interaction.
In his Sentences Commentary (published ca. 1320), the Carmelite John Baconthorp discusses the question of whether beatitude is a reflexive act. He refers to John of Paris’s view in which beatitude is an act of knowing that we possess God and Durandus of St. Pourçain’s view that it is knowing that we know God. The object of the first is God as possessed (Deus ut tentus) and the second is God as known (Deus ut visus). Taking Baconthorp’s account as a starting point, the present study adopts a threefold approach: First it analyzes Baconthorp’s text on its own terms. Next it reconstructs the 13th/14th-century debate on the basis of the original sources. Finally it compares Baconthorp’s narration with the historical positions, drawing further conclusions about Baconthorp’s specific methodology.
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