Here a distinguished American historian challenges the belief that the eighteenth century was essentially modern in its temper. In crystalline prose Carl Becker demonstrates that the period commonly described as the Age of Reason was, in fact, very far from that; that Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, and Locke were living in a medieval world, and that these philosophers “demolished the Heavenly City of St. Augustine only to rebuild it with more up-to-date materials.” In a new foreword, Johnson Kent Wright looks at (...) the book’s continuing relevance within the context of current discussion about the Enlightenment. “Will remain a classic—a beautifully finished literary product.”—Charles A. Beard, _American Historical Review_ “_The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers _remains_ _one of the most distinctive American contributions to the historical literature on the Enlightenment.... [It] is likely to beguile and provoke readers for a long time to come.”—Johnson Kent Wright, from the foreword. (shrink)

The editors, working with a team of 325 renowned authorities in the field of ethics, have revised, expanded, and updated this classic encyclopedia. Along with the addition of 150 new entries, all of the original articles have been newly peer-reviewed and revised, bibliographies have been updated throughout, and the overall design of the work has been enhanced for easier access to cross-references and other reference features. New entries include * Aristotelian Ethics * Avicenna * Bad Faith * Beneficence * Categorical (...) and Hypothetical Imperatives * Cheating * Civil Liberty * Conventions * Dirty hands * Evolution * Fiduciary Relationships * Gay ethics * Genetic Engineering * Holocaust * Journalism * Killing/Letting Die * Moral Imagination * Narrative Ethics * Political correctness * Population Ethics * Public and 0rivate Morality * Racism, concepts of * and many more. (shrink)

Digital communication now pervades all spheres of life, creating new possibilities for commodification: personal data and communication are the new resources of surplus value. This in turn brings about a totally new category of threats to privacy. With recourse to the culture industry critique of early critical theory, this article seeks to challenge basic theoretical assumptions held within a liberal account of privacy. It draws the attention to the entanglement of technical and socio-economic transformations and aims at elaborating an alternative (...) framing which takes into account that privacy is not in the first place a pre-political space for individual freedom but a constituted sphere in which social power relations are reproduced in a particularly deceitful way. With recourse to positions of critical theory, this article revisits the conceptual ambiguity of liberation and oppression and looks to draft prospects for a socio-theoretical justification and critique of privacy, updated for the digital age. Following the tradition of critical theory, the argument focuses on (new) forms of domination in and by privacy. It aims to prepare the ground for a critique of the social’s increasing commodification as well as an idea of privacy understood as reflexive participation in social practices. (shrink)

ArgumentThe administration of mountain expeditions from the ground created special managerial problems. The Harvard College Observatory's Boyden Expeditions of 1887–1890 sent men and materiel to three sites: Pike's Peak, Colorado; Mount Wilson, California; and Chosica, Peru. Their goal was to test sites in order to find a suitable site for a permanent Boyden station to conduct astrophysical work in service of Harvard's preexisting projects. The logistical difficulties of living on the mountainside combined with the organizational difficulties of administrating a station (...) at a distance. The men who lived on the mountain were professionally vulnerable, and often cut off from their home observatory both by the weather conditions at their own altitude and local politics on the ground below them. Only when an unbroken line of communication could be established between the mountain station and the Harvard Observatory could the astronomers on both ends work together to create a successful expedition. (shrink)

Introduction to business ethics : approach and subject matter -- Ethical theory and its application to business contexts -- Conceptions of the economy and business : ethical aspects -- Organizational ethics : ethics of corporations, companies, and other business organizations -- Individuals in the world of business : ethical aspects of specific roles and professions -- Global business ethics -- Economic and ethical challenges of the 21st century : sustainability -- Conclusion--Index.

This article re-examines Vilém Flusser's philosophy of photography and its relation to what I will name the philosophical question of 'image-thinking'. It places his work on photography in the context of the much discussed 'pictorial' and 'iconic' turns in the study of visual culture and, through this, aims to reveal the depth of Flusser's approach to understanding media culture and to argue for the significance and continuing relevance of his philosophy of photography.

The editors, working with a team of 325 renowned authorities in the field of ethics, have revised, expanded and updated this classic encyclopedia. Along with the addition of 150 new entries, all of the original articles have been newly peer-reviewed and revised, bibliographies have been updated throughout, and the overall design of the work has been enhanced for easier access to cross-references and other reference features. New entries include * Cheating * Dirty hands * Gay ethics * Holocaust * Journalism (...) * Political correctness * and many more. (shrink)

Our understanding of human visual perception generally rests on the assumption that conscious visual states represent the interaction of spatial structures in the environment and our nervous system. This assumption is questioned by circumstances where conscious visual states can be triggered by external stimulation which is not primarily spatially defined. Here, subjective colors and forms are evoked by flickering light while the precise nature of those experiences varies over flicker frequency and phase. What’s more, the occurrence of one subjective experience (...) appears to be associated with the occurrence of others. While these data indicate that conscious visual experience may be evoked directly by particular variations in the flow of spatially unstructured light over time, it must be assumed that the systems responsible are essentially temporal in character and capable of representing a variety of visual forms and colors, coded in different frequencies or at different phases of the same processing rhythm. (shrink)

The aim of the present research was to develop a measure that could be used in future research for in-depth study of the psychological management of retirement. We report the results of six studies involving 1,898 French workers designed to develop and assess the psychometric properties of a new instrument named the Workers' Retirement Motivations Inventory (WRMI) using the push pull anti-push anti-pull model. The items were constructed based on a review of the relevant psychological literature and face-to-face interviews with (...) senior workers. A combined method of exploratory structural equations modeling and confirmatory factor analysis was employed and provided evidence for validating this structure of the inventory. The WRMI showed consistency of the four-factor structure across different samples, internal consistency, test-retest reliability and predictive validity of workers' plans for retirement. Implications of these findings and avenues for counseling activities and future research are discussed. (shrink)

In a recent study, Becker and Elliott [Becker, C., & Elliott, M. A. . Flicker induced color and form: Interdependencies and relation to stimulation frequency and phase. Consciousness & Cognition, 15, 175–196] described the appearance of subjective experiences of color and form induced by stimulation with intermittent light. While there have been electroencephalographic studies of similar hallucinatory forms, brain activity accompanying the appearance of hallucinatory colors was never measured. Using a priming procedure where observers were required to indicate the presence (...) of one of eight target colors we compared electrophysiological correlates of hallucinatory color with brain states associated with other visual phenomena. Different target colors were accompanied by different patterns of EEG activation. However, in general, we found that the appearance of hallucinatory colors is preceded by a power decrease in the lower alpha band alongside an increase in gamma band frequencies. We argue that decreasing activity in the lower alpha band acts as a gating mechanism, inducing a switch in perception between different colors. The increasing gamma activation may correlate with the formation of a coherent conscious percept. (shrink)

Jennifer Saul is Waterloo Chair in Social and Political Philosophy of Language at the University of Waterloo. Originally American, she spent twenty-four years at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. Her current focus is manipulative political language, which she explores in Dogwhistles and Figleaves: Linguistics Tricks for Racist and Conspiracist Discourse (forthcoming, Oxford, 2024). She has also written books and articles on feminism, lying and misleading, and implicit bias. She founded the blogs What is it Like to be (...) a Woman in Philosophy and Feminist Philosophers, and was Director of the Society for Women in Philosophy UK 2009–19. Along with Helen Beebee, she published two reports (in 2011 and 2021) on the state of women in philosophy in the UK and drew up good practice guidelines which have been adopted by dozens of departments. She’s also proud of having been a philosophical consultant on a zombie movie. (shrink)

Varieties of Ethical Reflection brings together new cultural and religious perspectives—drawn from non-Western, primarily Asian, philosophical sources—to globalize the contemporary discussion of theoretical and applied ethics.

Japan and China have long resisted the Western trend of organ transplantation from brain‐dead patients, based on a ‘Confucian’ respect for integrity of ancestors’ bodies. While their general publics continue to harbor grave doubts about such practices, their medical and political elites are hastening towards the road of organ‐harvesting and organ‐marketing, largely for economic reasons. This report illustrates the ways that economics is motivating brain‐death legislation in Japan and criminal executions in China.

Asserting that traditional Western religious groundings for ethics neither reach a modern international audience nor solve the interpersonal and global problems ...

This is a newly revised and updated edition of A History of Western Ethics, a coherent and accessible overview of the most important figures and influential ideas of the history of ethics in the Western philosophical tradition. Written by eleven distinguished scholars, and including a glossary of key terms, this book is an essential reference for students and general readers alike.

Guidelines recommend a ‘do-not-resuscitate’ code status for inpatients in which cardiopulmonary resuscitation attempts are considered futile because of low probability of survival with good neurological outcome. We retrospectively assessed the prevalence of DNR code status and its association with presumed CPR futility defined by the Good Outcome Following Attempted Resuscitation score and the Clinical Frailty Scale in patients hospitalised in the Divisions of Internal Medicine and Traumatology/Orthopedics at the University Hospital of Basel between September 2018 and June 2019. The definition (...) of presumed CPR futility was met in 467 of 2889 patients. 866 patients had a DNR code status. In a regression model adjusted for age, gender, main diagnosis, nationality, language and religion, presumed CPR futility was associated with a higher likelihood of a DNR code status. In the subgroup of patients with presumed futile CPR, 144 of 467 had a full code status, which was independently associated with younger age, male gender, non-Christian religion and non-Swiss citizenship. We found a significant proportion of hospitalised patients to have a full code status despite the fact that CPR had to be considered futile according to an established definition. Whether these decisions were based on patient preferences or whether there was a lack of patient involvement in decision-making needs further investigation. (shrink)

Business Ethics: Theories, Methods, and Applications provides a new systematic approach to normative business ethics that covers the complex and various ethical challenges of modern business. It aims to train analytical thinking skills in the field of business ethics and to approach ethical issues in business in a rational and systematic way. The book develops a number of specific methods for business ethics analysis that are tailored for ethical decision-making in business and for analysing complex ethical topics in business. The (...) book discusses fundamental ethical questions regarding the meaning of business and the economy for the individual person, society, the environment, and people around the world. As a result, Business Ethics: Theories, Methods, and Applications develops normative guidelines for business in the 21st century and its fundamental challenges and will be key reading for undergraduate, postgraduate, and MBA students of business ethics, business strategy, business and society, and related fields. This second edition is fully updated to recognize the changing nature of ethics and corporate responsibility in a globalized world and include online support material. (shrink)

In this much-needed examination of Buddhist views of death and the afterlife, Carl B. Becker bridges the gap between books on death in the West and books on Buddhism in the East.

Climate change ethics is an emerging field of applied ethics that examines the ethical implications entailed in the various climate change effects on people around the world, future generations, an...