Should engineering ethics be taught? Despite the obvious truism that we all want our students to be moral engineers who practice virtuous professional behavior, I argue, in this article that the question itself obscures several ambiguities that prompt preliminary resolution. Upon clarification of these ambiguities, and an attempt to delineate key issues that make the question a philosophically interesting one, I conclude that engineering ethics not only should not, but cannot, be taught if we understand “teaching engineering ethics” to mean (...) training engineers to be moral individuals (as some advocates seem to have proposed). However, I also conclude that there is a justification to teaching engineering ethics, insofar as we are able to clearly identify the most desirable and efficacious pedagogical approach to the subject area, which I propose to be a case study-based format that utilizes the principle of human cognitive pattern recognition. (shrink)

Introductory background -- Paradigms in the arts and social sciences -- General-integrative paradigms in psychology -- Particular-specific paradigms in psychology -- Operational paradigms in psychology -- Conclusion.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to explain cross-cultural differences in online self-disclosure between Indonesians, who live in a highly collectivist culture, and Poles – a hierarchical individualist culture. Various psychological factors have been taken into consideration, such as the need for popularity, the need to belong and self-esteem. Design/methodology/approach – This study was designed as a quantitative study. First, a one-way ANOVA was performed to compare online SD and specific behaviours online between Indonesians and Poles. Second, correlational (...) analysis between online SD and other psychological factors was conducted. Findings – Indonesians were more likely than Poles to disclose information on Facebook. On the other hand, Poles showed a tendency to disclose more positive content than Indonesians. It was also found that SE was significantly correlated with positive content of online SD for both countries. Furthermore, online SD on Facebook is more closely associated with NfP than NtB. Research limitations/implications – This study possesses several limitations in regard to the lack of generalization; this is due to the choice in scales and the sampling procedure. Thereby, further studies must take into consideration the proportion of genders, the differences in the construction of the “self” between individualist and collectivist cultures and the interpretation of culture orientation based on the primary data. Furthermore, several results related to the online SD would need to be verified by further studies to get a holistic explanation. Originality/value – The current research is for all means and purposes original, as it investigates the differences of online behaviours between cultures – Polish and Indonesian – basing on the premise that there are crucial differences between collectivist and individualist cultures. No prior articles attempted the comparison between those nationalities in online behaviour. (shrink)

This essay focuses on how we embody the language we speak: how an audience "reads" the body of a speaker as it both constructs the positionality of that speaking subject and construes that subject's discursive authority. Building on the work of Linda Brodkey and Michelle Fine, I explore what is at stake when university students harass a faculty member by accusing that teacher of not embodying authority in the proper form (body).

CHAPTER ONE THE SEARCH FOR GOD He who separates the study of philosophy from holy religion errs no less than the man who would separate the pursuit of ...

_This book relates Hegel to later philosophers and philosophies._.

Vernacular language use in England throughout the later Middle Ages was a complex negotiation between English and French; that is, between the languages of English and French and the political identities of two peoples engaged in a long war. Clifford Geertz's famous analysis of “blurred genres” is used to think through the fuzzy properties of this period's bilingualism and to argue that to understand the boundaries between English and French as blurred is revealing of the linguistic and social tensions that (...) were the product of conflict between two closely intertwined cultures. This article is the first of a three-part contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on “blur,” each part corresponding broadly to Geertz's trifold instances of blur as involving “face-to-face interaction”, “collective intensities”, and “imaginative forms”. This first part takes as its main example a duel described by Jean Froissart in his Chroniques, in which a French knight is punished by his own king, Charles V, for fighting and injuring an English knight on the outskirts of Calais in 1383. (shrink)

This is the final part of a three-part essay on fuzziness in medieval literary language. Each part corresponds broadly to Clifford Geertz's trifold instances of blur as involving “face-to-face interaction” (“life as game”), “collective intensities” (“life as stage”), and “imaginative forms” (“life as text”). Part 3 considers what Geertz might mean by describing text as a “dangerously unfocused term,” through discussing how bilingualism is negotiated in poetry. Three areas of vagueness are explored: the linguistic boundaries in a bilingual poem, the (...) definition of a poem in the trilingual culture of insular medieval writing, and the relationship between literary and ordinary language. Examples are taken from a fifteenth-century bilingual carol, an early fourteenth-century trilingual poem, a bilingual sermon, a passage of love-writing discovered in the midst of a fifteenth-century legal roll, and finally a pair of French poems about the death of the English commander, Thomas Montagu, fourth earl of Salisbury, at the English siege of Orléans in 1428, contrasted with some English translations of poems by Charles d'Orléans. The essay argues that blurriness in medieval bilingualism gives us a fresh way of approaching primary questions about poetry and the literary. (shrink)

This article on fuzziness in medieval language use is the second part of a three-part contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies: On the Consequence of Blur.” Each part corresponds broadly to Clifford Geertz's trifold instances of blur as involving “face-to-face interaction” (“life as game”), “collective intensities” (“life as stage”), and “imaginative forms” (“life as text”). Part 2 discusses “collective intensities” by means of some of the key examples of diplomatic negotiations in the Hundred Years War. The main focus (...) of interest is the Treaty of Brétigny, the funeral of Jean II, and the Treaty of Leulinghen. The article asks how English and French negotiators worked collectively through language to create, identify, and maintain borderlines in their public, political relationships. (shrink)