Research indicates that consumers are particularly concerned about the safety of meat. More highly processed meat is perceived as more unsafe than fresh or natural meats, i.e., consumers trust processed meat less. This paper studies the relationship between perceived trust and day-to-day purchase behavior for meat, giving special attention to the degree of meat processing. Controlling for trust in food chain actors and demographic and socio-economic variables, actual meat purchases of Canadian households are linked to answers from a commissioned food (...) attitudes survey completed by the same households. Expenditures for processed and total meat (but not for fresh meat) are significantly different by three levels of trust in the food industry. Consumer with the lowest trust levels consume less (especially of processed meat) compared to those with higher trust levels. However, in a multivariate setting, trust shows no effect on fresh or processed meat purchases with or without demographic and socio-economic control variables, suggesting that the impact of trust on meat purchases is only small. However, the low trusting consumer segment could potentially be a target for marketing strategies focused on reputation and quality to increase sales in this particular group. (shrink)

In Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, Sheldon Wolin offers a challenging reinterpretation of Tocqueville as a political thinker. Among Wolin’s major themes is a novel concept of the place of 'aristocracy' in Tocqueville's theory and practice of politics. Wolin asserts that, contrary to scholarly consensus, Tocqueville was engaged in a lifelong pursuit of anciennete, the retrieval of a rapidly disappearing aristocratic past in order to counteract new forms of despotism. However, a careful analysis of the whole range of Tocqueville’s theoretical works (...) and political action leads one to the opposite conclusion. None of his major works appears to corroborate Wolin's thesis. Both Tocqueville's theory and practice were deeply informed by a contrasting premise. The only possible means of sustaining modern liberty and avoiding, or curing, modern despotism lay in a wholehearted acceptance of the irretrievable triumph of modern democracy and its distinctive political institutions. (shrink)

Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery is a classic in the sense that it irreversyibly altered our most basic way of looking at an historical event. Writing the book in 1944, Williams broke with the century of histories portraying the British abolition of slavery as a humanist event, a moral victory. His account of slavery in the British colonies was innovative in introducing the notion that economic, rather than moral, factors were decisive in the motivation and success of the abolitionists. The (...) two farthest-reaching claims of Capitalism and Slavery are that British colonial slave production and the slave trade enabled the industrial revolution to take place in Britain, and that the abolition movement resulted solely from changes in the British imperial economy. Though few historians since Williams have agreed with him on the centrality of industrialization in the slave colonies and abolition, his work has resulted in the inclusion of economic factors in all recent accounts of slavery and its abolition. By writing a simplistic history with a global context, Williams made it impossible for subsequent historians to write about abolition as an isolated moral act of the British Empire. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to illustrate the concept of analogy in the late works of St. Thomas Aquinas, i.e., in his two Summas, and to go on to compare this with Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of “family resemblance”, in order to reveal some interesting similarities between the named linguistic-philosophical concepts of these two very different thinkers.

A thorough analysis of Tocqueville's thoughts on the lower classes of society, viewing his stances on slavery, poverty, criminality, and working class ...

Made-Up Minds addresses fundamental questions of learning and concept invention by means of an innovative computer program that is based on the cognitive ...

In Good and Real, Gary Drescher examines a series of provocative paradoxes about consciousness, choice, ethics, quantum mechanics, and other topics, in an effort to reconcile a purely mechanical view of the universe with key aspects of our ...

Exploring the economic, cultural and political role of slavery in different societies, this volume includes selections from historians, economists and contemporaries - from those enslaved as well as from free members of slave owning societies.

This volume gathers together for the first time are all the key texts in a crucial debate in modern philosophy, centered on Leibniz's famous 1695 essay, the "New System of the Nature of Substances and their Communication," in which he introduced his strikingly original theory of metaphysics. His "system" became increasingly famous and drew him into discussion and development of these ideas, both in public and in private, with a variety of thinkers, most notably the great French philosopher Pierre Bayle. (...) Woolhouse's and Francks's new English edition gives the only full representation of this debate, and will therefore be essential reading for anyone who wishes to gain a proper understanding of Leibniz's philosophy and its intelletual context. All the texts are newly translated and extensively annotated; many appear in English for the first time. (shrink)

Transgender issues and transgender rights have become increasingly a matter of media attention and public policy debates. Reflecting changes in psychiatric perspectives, the diagnosis of “trans‐sexualism” first appeared in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems in 1975 and shortly thereafter, in 1980, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Since that time, international standards of care have been developed, and today those standards are followed by clinicians across diverse cultures. In many instances, treatment of (...) older adolescents and adults is covered by national health care systems and, in some cases, by private health insurance. Most recently, the Medicare ban on coverage for gender reassignment surgery was lifted in 2014.In contrast to the relative lack of controversy about treating adolescents and adults, there is no expert clinical consensus regarding the treatment of prepubescent children who meet diagnostic criteria for what was referred to in both DSM‐IV‐TR and ICD‐10 as gender identity disorder in children and now in DSM‐5 as gender dysphoria. One reason for the differing attitudes has to do with the pervasive nature of gender dysphoria in older adolescents and adults: it rarely desists, and so the treatment of choice is gender or sex reassignment. On the subject of treating children, however, as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health notes in their latest Standards of Care, gender dysphoria in childhood does not inevitably continue into adulthood, and only 6 to 23 percent of boys and 12 to 27 percent of girls treated in gender clinics showed persistence of their gender dysphoria into adulthood. Further, most of the boys’ gender dysphoria desisted, and in adulthood, they identified as gay rather than as transgender.In an effort to clarify best treatment practices for transgender individuals, a recent American Psychiatric Association Task Force on the Treatment of Gender Identity outlined three differing approaches to treating prepubescent gender dysphoric children. (shrink)

From the materialist stance that I find compelling, the metaproblem of consciousness -- explaining why the problem of consciousness seems hard -- is hardly distinct from the 'easy' problem of explaining how the underlying physical/computational system works, and how it gives rise to perceptions of its own functioning. I discuss several confusions that might plausibly arise in that process, and propose that these confusions could create apparent gaps, ontological and epistemic, in materialist accounts of consciousness, thereby making the hard problem (...) hard. Inversely, resolving these confusions may help solve the hard problem. (shrink)

This article is the guest editors’ introduction to the special issue in Business & Society on “SMEs and CSR in Developing Countries.” The special issue includes four original research articles by Hamann, Smith, Tashman, and Marshall; Allet; Egels-Zandén; and Puppim de Oliveira and Jabbour on various aspects of the relationship of small and medium enterprises to corporate social responsibility in developing countries.

Plato's dialogues frequently criticize traditional Greek myth, yet Plato also integrates myth with his writing. Daniel S. Werner confronts this paradox through an in-depth analysis of the Phaedrus, Plato's most mythical dialogue. Werner argues that the myths of the Phaedrus serve several complex functions: they bring nonphilosophers into the philosophical life; they offer a starting point for philosophical inquiry; they unify the dialogue as a literary and dramatic whole; they draw attention to the limits of language and the limits of (...) knowledge; and they allow Plato to co-opt cultural authority as a way of defining and legitimating the practice of philosophy. Platonic myth, as a species of traditional tale, is thus both distinct from philosophical dialectic and similar to it. Ultimately, the most powerful effect of Platonic myth is the way in which it leads readers to participate in Plato's dialogues and to engage in a process of self-examination. (shrink)

t. 1. Apo ton prōto skeptomeno anthrōpo mechri ton 6. aiōna M.Ch. -- t. 2. Apo ton 7. aiōna M.Ch. mechri to sēmera.