Deliberative democracy has assumed a central role in the debate about deepening democratic practices in complex contemporary societies. By acknowledging the citizens as the main actors in the political process, political deliberation entails a strong ideal of participation that has not, however, been properly clarified. The main purpose of this article is to discuss, through Jürgen Habermas’ analysis of modernity, reason and democracy, whether and to what extent deliberative democracy and participatory democracy are compatible and how they can, either separately (...) or together, enhance democratic practices. Further exploration of this relationship will permit a better understanding of the possibilities and limits of institutionalizing both discourses, as well as of developing democracy in a more substantive dimension. Key Words: deliberation • democracy • discourse theory • modernity • participation. (shrink)
The paper aims to present a reading of the question of Testimony rising in Derrida's later works (from Faith and Knowledge to Poetics and Politics of Witnessing): the experience of Testimony as the irreducible condition of the relation to the Other, of every possible link among living human singularities and, thus, of the thinking of a community to come. This thinking is able to divert the community from the economy grounding and structuring it within our political tradition governed by the (...) metaphysics of presence, which demands the sacrifice of the Other in its multiple theoretical and practical forms. We intend to read this proposal and to point out its rich perspectives by bringing it into the articulation of an ethical-political archi-writing. So we suggest going back to Derrida's early analyses of phenomenology and to De la grammatologie in order to present a reading of archi-writing as the irreducible condition of the relation to otherness and, thus, of the experience through which a living human singularity constitutes itself, a singularity different from the one our tradition compels us to think of within the pattern of the absolute presence to the self, free from the relation to the other. (shrink)
From teaching content and the social, cognitive and linguistic aspects of education, to changes in the political climate in the early twenty-first century, this ...
Introduction -- Part I: The lie that we are not good enough as we are -- Where the lie came from and why we bought it -- Trying to meet the criteria for good enough -- Perpetuating the striving and the lack -- Part II: Dead ends and what they teach us -- Money/stuff -- Appearance -- Religion -- Food -- Drugs/alcohol -- Sex/romantic love -- Accomplishment/education/notoriety -- Busyness -- Part III: The truth : we are innately good -- Evil (...) is an alternative, not our nature -- Lighting our darkness to let go of fear, false beliefs, and all negative -- Emotion -- Looking at our essence, which is love, or everything good -- Being who we are ... it means overcoming our separateness -- Invoking love -- Aligning with love -- Being love innately more than we ever dreamed of being. (shrink)
I argue for a conception of health as a person's ability to achieve or exercise a cluster of basic human activities. These basic activities are in turn specified through free-standing ethical reasoning about what constitutes a minimal conception of a human life with equal human dignity in the modern world. I arrive at this conception of health by closely following and modifying Lennart Nordenfelt's theory of health which presents health as the ability to achieve vital goals. Despite its strengths I (...) transform Nordenfelt's argument in order to overcome three significant drawbacks. Nordenfelt makes vital goals relative to each community or context and significantly reflective of personal preferences. By doing so, Nordenfelt's conception of health faces problems with both socially relative concepts of health and subjectively defined wellbeing. Moreover, Nordenfelt does not ever explicitly specify a set of vital goals. The theory of health advanced here replaces Nordenfelt's (seemingly) empty set of preferences and society-relative vital goals with a human species-wide conception of basic vital goals, or ‘central human capabilities and functionings’. These central human capabilities come out of the capabilities approach (CA) now familiar in political philosophy and economics, and particularly reflect the work of Martha Nussbaum. As a result, the health of an individual should be understood as the ability to achieve a basic cluster of beings and doings—or having the overarching capability, a meta-capability, to achieve a set of central or vital inter-related capabilities and functionings. (shrink)
This article is a reply to Venkatapuram's critique in his article Health, Vital Goals, Capabilities, this volume. I take issue mainly with three critical points put forward by Venkatapuram with regard to my theory of health. (1) I deny that the contents of my vital goals are relative to each community or context, as Venkatapuram claims. There is no conceptual connection at all between standard circumstances and vital goals, as I understand these concepts. (2) Venkatapuram notes that I stop short (...) of filling the framework of vital goals with any content and thereby make my concept of health less concrete. I reply that some vital goals are indeed universal, viz. the ones which are necessary conditions for survival. Many other vital goals are individual and cannot therefore be included in a universal list. (3) Venkatapuram claims that my definition of vital goals is too broad, since it entails that some persons without any disease can be regarded as ill. However, in my understanding health is a relational concept from a state of complete health to a state of maximal illness. In this framework, a minor reduction of a state of complete health does not entail illness. This article also contains a comparison between my theory of health and Martha Nussbaum's theory of capabilities for dignity. (shrink)
The true story of ten tough and tattooed bikers who rescue animals in danger Using their combined 1700 pounds of muscle, Joe, Johnny O, Batso, Big Ant, G, Angel, Eric, Des, Bruce and Robert stop at nothing within the bounds of the law to save animals, be they furred, feathered, or scaled, from life-or-death situations throughout the New York City metropolitan area. Working from tips from concerned neighbors and anonymous sources, they have rescued countless animals, including a dognapped bulldog and (...) 180 cats from the home of a hoarder. In between rescues, they've protested the barbaric practices of a horse slaughterhouse, visited schools to educate children about animal kindness and that "abusers are losers," and participated in Puppy Mill Awareness Day in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Former Newsday writer Denise Flaim chronicles their adventurous tales, detailing just what these brawny bikers, who will stop at nothing within the bounds of the law, can teach us all about respecting the creatures in our midst. (shrink)
"Healing the past helps restructure the present, which then becomes the hope for the future." As we approach a new millennium, many of us are fearing for the future while hungering for a vision of our place in a sacred whole. The immense changes of the last hundred years have severed our sense of connection to a spiritual lineage that gave past generations the strength to meet life's challenges and bequeath wisdom to their descendants. In this inspirational yet down-to-earth book, (...) renowned healer and lecturer Denise Linn draws on her own story, as well as her Native American heritage and other ancient cultures, to guide you through acts of personal power that can reopen the wellspring of ancestral wisdom within you. By finding your roots and honoring your forebears--biological or adoptive, ethnic, cultural, mythological, and spiritual--you take your place as both a descendant and an ancestor. Defining who your ancestors are is a journey of self-discovery. Discovering who you are helps you break free from negative family patterns, embrace the positive, and create your own unique traditions. By fashioning a spiritual legacy through loving acts, you create energy to empower your future descendants. This fascinating guide teaches you to - Get in touch with the strength and spirit of your ancestors - Explore your personal myth - Restructure your past - Heal the family tree - Speak to your descendants through the art of giving - Revive rituals and create traditions for the twenty-first century With real-life stories and practical, easy-to-use exercises and meditations, Sacred Legacies shows how the choices we make in our own lives--however small--can forge a link with the future and help create a powerful new reality for all humanity and the planet. (shrink)
Radical Feminism Today offers a timely and engaging account of exactly what feminism is, and what it is not. Author Denise Thompson questions much of what has come to be taken for granted as `feminism' and points to the limitations of implicitly defining feminism in terms of `women', `gender', `difference' or `race//gender//class'. She challenges some of the most widely accepted ideas about feminism and in doing so opens up a number of hitheto closed debates, allowing for the possibility of (...) moving those debates further. (shrink)
I seek to advance enquiry into the philosophical question of in virtue of what human beings have a dignity of the sort that grounds human rights. I first draw on values salient in sub-Saharan African moral thought to construct two theoretically promising conceptions of human dignity, one grounded on vitality, or liveliness, and the other on our communal nature. I then argue that the vitality conception cannot account for several human rights that we intuitively have, while the community conception can (...) do so. I conclude that, of plausible theories of human dignity with an African pedigree, the field ought to favour a community-based view and critically compare it in future work with the Kantian, autonomy-based view that dominates Western thinking about dignity. (shrink)
Ethical beliefs may vary across cultures but there are things that must be valued as preconditions to any cultural practice. Physical and mental abilities vital to believing, valuing and practising a culture are such preconditions and it is always important to protect them. If one is to practise a distinct culture, she must at least have these basic abilities. Access to basic healthcare is one way to ensure that vital abilities are protected. John Rawls argued that access to all-purpose primary (...) goods must be ensured. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum claim that universal capabilities are what resources are meant to enable. Len Doyal and Ian Gough identify physical health and autonomy as basic needs of every person in every culture. When we disagree on what to prioritize, when resources to satisfy competing demands are scarce, our common needs can provide a point of normative convergence. Need-based rationing, however, has been criticized for being too indeterminate to give guidance for deciding which healthcare services to prioritize and for tending to create a bottomless-pit problem. But there is a difference between needing something (first-order need) and needing to have the ability to need (second-order need). Even if we disagree about which first-order need to prioritize, we must accept the importance of satisfying our second-order need to have the ability to value things. We all have a second-order need for basic healthcare as a means to protect our vital abilities even if we differ in what our cultures consider to be particular first-order needs. (shrink)
Sensibility, in any of its myriad realms – moral, physical, aesthetic, medical and so on – seems to be a paramount case of a higher-level, intentional property, not a basic property. Diderot famously made the bold and attributive move of postulating that matter itself senses, or that sensibility (perhaps better translated ‘sensitivity’ here) is a general or universal property of matter, even if he at times took a step back from this claim and called it a “supposition.” Crucially, sensibility is (...) here playing the role of a ‘booster’: it enables materialism to provide a full and rich account of the phenomena of conscious, sentient life, contrary to what its opponents hold: for if matter can sense, and sensibility is not a merely mechanical process, then the loftiest cognitive plateaus are accessible to materialist analysis, or at least belong to one and the same world as the rest of matter. This was noted by the astute anti-materialist critic, the Abbé Lelarge de Lignac, who, in his 1751 Lettres à un Amériquain, criticized Buffon for “granting to the body [la machine, a common term for the body at the time] a quality which is essential to minds, namely sensibility.” This view, here attributed to Buffon and definitely held by Diderot, was comparatively rare. If we look for the sources of this concept, the most notable ones are physiological and medical treatises by prominent figures such as Robert Whytt, Albrecht von Haller and the Montpellier vitalist Théophile de Bordeu. We then have, or so I shall try to sketch out, an intellectual landscape in which new – or newly articulated – properties such as irritability and sensibility are presented either as an experimental property of muscle fibers, that can be understood mechanistically (Hallerian irritability, as studied recently by Hubert Steinke and Dominique Boury) or a property of matter itself (whether specifically living matter as in Bordeu and his fellow montpelliérains Ménuret and Fouquet, or matter in general, as in Diderot). I am by no means convinced that it is one and the same ‘sensibility’ that is at issue in debates between these figures (as when Bordeu attacks Haller’s distinction between irritability and sensibility and claims that ‘his own’ property of sensibility is both more correct and more fundamental in organic beings), but I am interested in mapping out a topography of the problem of sensibility as property of matter or as vital force in mid-eighteenth-century debates – not an exhaustive cartography of all possible positions or theories, but an attempt to understand the ‘triangulation’ of three views: a vitalist view in which sensibility is fundamental, matching up with a conception of the organism as the sum of parts conceived as little lives (Bordeu et al.); a mechanist, or ‘enhanced mechanist’ view in which one can work upwards, step by step from the basic property of irritability to the higher-level property of sensibility (Haller); and, more eclectic, a materialist view which seeks to combine the mechanistic, componential rigour and explanatory power of the Hallerian approach, with the monistic and metaphysically explosive potential of the vitalist approach (Diderot). It is my hope that examining Diderot in the context of this triangulated topography of sensibility as property sheds light on his famous proclamation regarding sensibility as a universal property of matter. (shrink)
When asked by students taking Chinese Philosophy classes with me what I can recommend as reading material, I usually say, among other things, anything written by François Jullien. Thankfully, with Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness, there is now a new title available in English translation to add to this list. As with the works of most philosophically inclined writers whom I like, this book by Jullien does not really say much that has not already been said by him, at least (...) implicitly, in previous publications. More or less "creative" writers, paradoxically, tend to produce variations of one or more themes and thus repeat themselves to a certain degree. That is, so to speak, the price one has to pay if one .. (shrink)
This article will be concerned with the phenomenon of vitality, which emerged as one of the main findings in a larger grounded theory study about life and death decisions in hospitals' neonatal units. Definite signs showing the new-born infant's energy and vigour contributed to the clinician's judgements about life expectancy and the continuation or termination of medical treatment. In this paper we will discuss the normative importance of vitality as a diagnostic cue and will argue that vitality, as a sign (...) perceived by doctors and nurses, has moral significance and represents a legitimate contribution to clinical decision-making in difficult cases where the child's life is at stake. We will argue that these clinical intuitions can be justified on a moral basis but only with certain qualifications that accounts for a certain objectivity and intersubjective reliability in the therapeutic judgements. (shrink)
Metatheoretical codifications of the sociological writings of George H. Mead, Jose Ortega y Gasset, and Alfred Schutz highlight the importance of the idea of life and of a commitment to a realist perspective. The authors turn common concern with the life concept in three directions: evolutionary emergence, historical rationality, and phenomenological analysis. In spite of differences, these directions share an empirically grounded starting point in the situated individual and its environment, and end with suggestions for a universalist rationality. Preliminary metatheoretical (...) principles from these authors offer a start toward a vital realist sociology fitted to the universal conditions of social life. (shrink)
According to the 'incompatibility thesis,' tenets of Marxist and Pragmatist ethics are incompatible at a very basic level. An opening move in the strategy of defending the incompatibility thesis is to summon the ghosts of Pragmatists and Marxists past, such as John Dewey and Leon Trotsky, and recount how their positions in a debate concerning ethics proved to be fundamentally at odds. The central claim of the paper is that despite the initial promise of this strategy, scholars should be wary (...) of citing the 1930s debate between Dewey and Trotsky and the differences revealed in this exchange as evidence in support of the incompatibility thesis. Significant areas of agreement between the two thinkers, both in their exchange and in the events surrounding it, ought to make us question the claimed incompatibility between Marxist and Pragmatist ethics. After presenting its standard interpretation, the ethical dimension of the debate is brought to the fore. Two versions of the debate - one offered by a Trotskyite and contemporary of Dewey and Trotsky's (George Novack) and the other by a recent Dewey biographer (Alan Ryan) - are reviewed. Both, it is argued, exaggerate Dewey and Trotsky's differences. Next, four areas of agreement between the two thinkers' ethical views are identified, each drawing support from the content of their debate as well from select events in the years preceding and following it. By way of reconstructing the Trotsky-Dewey debate, it is possible to trace a vital thread between Pragmatist and Marxist ethics - or so it is argued. (shrink)
In his new book, eminent psychologist - Daniel Stern, author of the classic 'The interpersonal world of the infant', explores the hitherto neglected topic of 'vitality' - that is, the force or power manifested by all living things. -/- Vitality takes on many dynamic forms and permeates daily life, psychology, psychotherapy and the arts, yet what is vitality? We know that it is a manifestation of life, of being alive. We are very alert to its feel in ourselves and its (...) expression in others. Life shows itself in so many different forms of vitality. But just how can we study this phenomenon? Till now, this has been a topic considered impervious to any kind of scientific study, but according to the Stern, it is possible to trace vitality to real physical and mental operations - including movement, time, perception of force - as well as spatial aspects of the movement and its underlying intention. Within this fascinating book he shows how an understanding of vitality can help the psychotherapeutic process (including a look at the developmental origins of forms of vitality) and looks at how these theories of vitality might fit with our current knowledge of the workings of the brain. Truly a tour de force from a brilliant clinician and scientist, Forms of Vitality is a profound and groundbreaking book - one that will be essential reading for psychologists, psychotherapists, and those in the creative arts. (shrink)
Zai’s 張載 attitude toward death and its moral significance. It launches with the unusual link between the opening statement of the Western Inscription 西銘 regarding heaven and earth as parents and the conclusion that serving one’s cosmic parents during life, one is peaceful in death. Through the analogy of human relations with heaven and earth as filial piety ( xiao 孝), Z hang Zai sets a framework for an understanding that being filial through life eliminates the fear of death. The (...) article shows that filial piety as a root for morality enables a “sense of immortality,” which is in fact a sense of morality. This moral immortality is elucidated through Z hang Zai’s discussion on vital power ( qi 氣) as that which life is made of, which persists through ongoing transformation and enables a moral continuum. This continuum is manifested through filial piety, which transcends the limits between life and death, and thus makes physical death pointless as morality endures. (shrink)
Feng Youlan emphasizes the concept of “creativity” in his article “Explanation of Mencius’ Chapter on Strong, Moving Vital Force”, in particular highlighting the problem whether the “strong, moving vital force” is “innate” or “acquired”. Cheng Hao and Zhu Xi believed the “strong, moving vital force” was endowed by Heaven, so was therefore innate; “nourishment” cleared fog and allowed one to “recover one’s original nature”. Mencius’ theory on “the good of human nature” is illustrated in the concept of (...) integrated “original endowment”. So Cheng Hao and Zhu Xi’s theory of “recovering the original nature” proposed that the “strong, moving vital force” was innate, which is in complete agreement with Mencius and of which there is ample evidence in Mencius . However, “nature” is “created by the accumulation of righteousness”. Namely, it is the completion and presentation of the process of creation and transformation of human beings. Only when we consider both Cheng Hao and Zhu Xi’s theory and Feng Youlan’s theory can we fully understand Mencius’ theory of “the nourishment of the strong, moving vital force”, which is of great theoretical and academic value in accurately understanding Mencius and the Confucian theory of mind-nature. (shrink)
Many scientists have argued forcefully for the pointlessness of nature, something that challenges any doctrine of Creation. However, apparent design and comprehensibility are also to be found in nature; it is ambivalent. This trait is nowhere more evident than in the natural inclinations that lead to concupiscence and the “seven deadly sins” in human beings. These inclinations are dealt with as pertaining to the “pre-fallen” condition of nature and human beings. As a framework to make sense of the goodness of (...) creation in this context, Paul Tillich's notion of the “vital trends of nature” is called to the fore. Being at the intersection of a philosophy of religion and a philosophy of nature, this notion hints at the goodness of Creation in fragment and anticipation. (shrink)
Recognition is a basic precondition of participation. This article applies the dimension of recognition to business ethics. A case is made for normative stakeholder management as a voluntary commitment at the level of corporate leadership; this also meets management’s strategic demands. A vitality criterion is offered as a heuristic instrument, suggesting that any operation should be avoided which would violate the legitimate interests of stakeholders. For this reason, the recognition of mutually-conditioned stakeholder claims is understood as the central management idea.
Vital Democracy outlines a theory of democracy in action, based on four elementary forms of democracy - pendulum, consensus, voter and participatory democracy - that are thoroughly analysed, compared and related to both the literature and the real world of democracy. Just like a few primary colours produce an array of shades, a few basic models of democracy appear, the author argues, to constitute a wide range of democratic variants in real life. Focusing on tried and tested democratic institutions, Frank (...) Hendriks shows that the four models of democracy - with their divergent patterns of leadership, citizenship and governance, their inherent strengths and weaknesses - are never purely instantiated. He argues that wherever democracy is practiced with some level of success, it is always as hybrid democracy, thereby challenging those democratic reformers and theorists that have inspired the quest for democratic purity. -/- Vital Democracy builds on Arend Lijphart's well-known work which distinguishes between majoritarian and consensual democratic countries but also goes well beyond it, urging attention to non-national, non-formal, and non-representative expressions of democracy as well. (shrink)
In 1738, Jacques Vaucanson unveiled his masterpiece before the court of Louis XV: a gilded copper duck that ate, drank, quacked, flapped its wings, splashed about, and, most astonishing of all, digested its food and excreted the remains. The imitation of life by technology fascinated Vaucanson's contemporaries. Today our technology is more powerful, but our fascination is tempered with apprehension. Artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, to name just two areas, raise profoundly disturbing ethical issues that undermine our most fundamental beliefs (...) about what it means to be human. In The Vital Machine, David Channell examines the history of our relationship with technology and argues that, while the resolution of these issues may not be imminent, a philosophical framework for dealing with them is already in place. The source of our fears, he suggests, lies in an outmoded distinction between organic life and machines, a distinction rooted in the two world-views that have defined and guided Western civilization: the mechanical and the organic. The mechanical view holds that the universe is basically a machine--we can understand it by breaking it down into its smallest components. Even organisms are machines. The organic view claims that there is something more, some vital, directive force. The whole is more than just the sum of its parts. Even machines are organisms. Channell presents these polar views in a fascinating chronicle of human thought and achievement, ranging over the discoveries of Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein, the philosophies of Plato, Descartes, Kant, and Marx, the fields of alchemy, physics, astrology, and biology. We see not only how the two views progressed independently, but also how they influenced each other, not only how they persisted, but also how they changed. Most fascinating of all, we follow the emergence of a third, all-embracing world view as developments in genetics, relativity, quantum mechanics, and computer intelligence force both science and philosophy to come to a more complex understanding of the universe. As a central metaphor for this third view Channell proposes "the vital machine." And in this stimulating work by the same name, he reveals how this new metaphor may provide us with the philosophical understanding we need to address the ethical issues our science has created. (shrink)
o presente ensaio traz uma breve reflexao sobre a perspectiva habermasiana de sistematlzacao do "mundo vital", examinada no quadro histórico da questao da "pós-modernidade". Esta trata da relacao, apontada por HABERMAS (03:t II), entre as esferas do "sistema" e do "mundo vital", aplicada em termos de uma teoria da sociedade que se coloca frente a ideia de uma "nova ordem mundial".
The idea that the exercise of state power should be limited so as to permit free choice in matters of personal conduct has been central to liberalism ever since John Stuart Mill defended the harm principle. However, this surface agreement conceals deeper disagreements. One disputed matter relates to the nature of the tolerant state: is it a state that refrains from improving our moral character by coercive means is it a state that takes no interest whatsoever in the moral character (...) of our lives? A second matter relates to the philosophical justification of tolerance. Should it be justified by relying on distinctively liberal values, such as personal autonomy and self-determination? Or is a less controversial justification available — one that can be endorsed by non-liberals as well as liberals? This article explores these issues. It examines the views of Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls and Joseph Raz, arguing that Rawls?s version of liberalism provides both the best conception and the best justification of the liberal ideal of tolerance. (shrink)
It is argued that the focus within organization studies on wisdom is one-sided in the sense that it ignores stupidity, wisdom's little stepbrother. Too often it is simply taken for granted that an increase in wisdom will lead to a decrease in stupidity. The problem with this assumption is that it is philosophically uninformed. Stupidity and wisdom stand in a deeply paradoxical relationship, which has been studied by philosophers at least since the Stoics. Some recent contributions to this endless debate (...) will be highlighted in this paper. However, the overall aim of the paper is to show that organizations too are familiar with these philosophical paradoxes. (shrink)
Proponents of the dominant paradigm in evolutionary psychology argue that a viable evolutionary cognitive psychology requires that specific cognitive capacities be heritable and “quasi-independent” from other heritable traits, and that these requirements are best satisfied by innate cognitive modules. We argue here that neither of these are required in order to describe and explain how evolution shaped the mind.
At the age of 15 I began calling myself an atheist. It was bad timing because the next year, in English class, I read Waiting for Godot and plunged into a philosophical depression. This was not a clinical depression with thoughts of personal worthlessness and a yearning for death. It was, rather, the kind of funk that Woody Allen’s characters were so prone to in his early movies. For example, in Annie Hall, a flashback shows us a nine-year-old Allen-esque boy (...) being asked by a doctor why he is depressed. The boy’s response is that he had recently learned that the universe will expand forever and someday break apart. He saw no further point in doing homework, despite his mother’s protestations that Brooklyn was not expanding. After reading Godot, I felt the same way. If there was no God then my life, and all life, suddenly seemed to be as pointless as the lives of Vladimir and Estragon. Here, for example, is the quote I chose later that year to place under my picture in my high school yearbook: “Whosoever shall not fall by the sword or by famine, shall fall by pestilence, so why bother shaving?” The quote is from Woody Allen[1]. The next year I went to college. I was committed to figuring out the meaning of life and I thought that studying philosophy would help. I was disappointed. Philosophy addressed many fundamental questions of being and knowing, but the question “What is the meaning of life?” never came up. I assumed it was a badly formed question, and I moved on. I went to graduate school in psychology. If only I had been able to read Susan Wolf back then! She clarifies the question so elegantly, and she points to the means by which each of us can answer it for ourselves: go find something to love, something worthy of love, that you can link to and engage with in the right sort of way. It took me a while to do that, but I eventually did, as so many of us have, both by committing to people and by committing to my work. My remaining comments flow from that work, which ended up bringing me, by a roundabout route, back to the question of the meaning of life.. (shrink)
It is commonly supposed that evolutionary explanations of cognitive phenomena involve the assumption that the capacities to be explained are both innate and modular. This is understandable: independent selection of a trait requires that it be both heritable and largely decoupled from other `nearby' traits. Cognitive capacities realized as innate modules would certainly satisfy these contraints. A viable evolutionary cognitive psychology, however, requires neither extreme nativism nor modularity, though it is consistent with both. In this paper, we seek to show (...) that rather weak assumptions about innateness and modularity are consistent with evolutionary explanations of cognitive capacities. Evolutionary pressures can affect the degree to which the development of a capacity is canalized by biasing acquisition/ learning in ways that favor development of concepts and capacities that proved adaptive to an organism's ancestors. q 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)
It is argued that the focus within organization studies on wisdom is one-sided in the sense that it ignores stupidity, wisdom's little stepbrother. Too often it is simply taken for granted that an increase in wisdom will lead to a decrease in stupidity. The problem with this assumption is that it is philosophically uninformed. Stupidity and wisdom stand in a deeply paradoxical relationship, which has been studied by philosophers at least since the Stoics. Some recent contributions to this endless debate (...) will be highlighted in this paper. However, the overall aim of the paper is to show that organizations too are familiar with these philosophical paradoxes. (shrink)
Most bills of rights allow for the restriction of rights in the interests of the public. But how should courts decide when the public interest should prevail? This article draws on philosophical work on practical reasoning to argue against the popular view that courts should use a balancing test which weighs the consequences of protecting the right against the consequences of restricting it. It argues that there are good reasons to 'overprotect' rights: judges, in their reasoning, should assign more weight (...) to rights and less weight to the public interest than they would on an application of the balancing model. (shrink)
A minority position is presented in which evidence will be cited from the Hobson, Solms, Revonsuo, and Nielsen target articles and from other sources, supporting major tenets of Freud's theory of dreaming. Support is described for Freud's view of dreams as meaningful, linked to basic motivations, differing qualitatively in mentation, and wish-fulfilling. [Hobson et al.; Nielsen; Revonsuo; Solms].
Among educational theorists and philosophers there is growing interest in the work of Jacques Derrida and his philosophy of deconstruction. This important new book demonstrates how his work provides a highly relevant perspective on the aims, content and nature of education in contemporary, multicultural societies.
A viable evolutionary cognitive psychology requires that specific cognitive capacities be (a) heritable and (b) ‘quasi-independent’ from other heritable traits. They must be heritable because there can be no selection for traits that are not. They must be quasi-independent from other heritable traits, since adaptive variations in a specific cognitive capacity could have no distinctive consequences for fitness if effecting those variations required widespread changes in other unrelated traits and capacities as well. These requirements would be satisfied by innate cognitive (...) modules, as the dominant paradigm in evolutionary cognitive psychology assumes. However, those requirements would also be satisfied by heritable learning biases, perhaps in the form of architec- tural or chronotopic constraints, that operated to increase the canalization of specific cognitive capacities in the ancestral environment (Cummins and Cummins 1999). As an organism develops, cognitive capacities that are highly canalized as the result of heritable learning biases might result in an organism that is behaviourally quite similar to an organism whose innate modules come on line as the result of various environ- mental triggers. Taking this possibility seriously is increasingly important as the case against innate cognitive modules becomes increasingly strong. (shrink)
Jean Dominique Bauby, former editor of Elle, suffereda stroke to his brain stem that left him with locked-in syndrome. Subsequently, through blinking his left eye, he writes his memoirof this experience, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Thispaper explores the meaning of embodiment, especially as one'sbody bears upon one's personal identity. It explores the variouschallenges and threats to selfhood that result from Bauby'sexperience and recounts how Bauby rises to the challenge throughhis memory and imagination.
P-Consciousness (P) is to be understood in terms of an immediate fluctuating continuum that is a presentation of raw experiential matter against which A-consciousness (A) acts to objectify, impose form or make determinate “thinkable” contents. A representationalises P but P is not itself representational, at least in terms of some concepts of “representation.” Block's arguments fall short of establishing that P is representational and, given the sort of cognitive science assumptions he is working with, he is unable to account (...) for the aspect of phenomenal content that he thinks goes beyond “representational” content. BBS discussion reveals the need for greater analysis and justification for a representationalist thesis of P. (shrink)
Machine generated contents note: List of figures; List of tables; Editors; Contributors; Editors' acknowledgements; Part I. The Conceptual Challenge of Researching Trust Across Different 'Cultural Spheres': 1. Introduction: unraveling the complexities of trust and culture Graham Dietz, Nicole Gillespie and Georgia Chao; 2. Trust differences across national-societal cultures: much to do or much ado about nothing? Donald L. Ferrin and Nicole Gillespie; 3. Towards a context-sensitive approach to researching trust in inter-organizational relationships Reinhard Bachmann; 4. Making sense of trust across (...) cultural contexts Alex Wright and Ina Ehnert; Part II. Trust Across Different 'Cultural Spheres': Inter-Organizational Studies: 5. Examining the relationship between trust and culture in the consultant-client relationship Stephanos Avakian, Timothy Clark and Joanne Roberts; 6. Checking, not trusting: trust, distrust and cultural experience in the auditing profession Mark R. Dibben and Jacob M. Rose; 7. Trust barriers in cross-cultural negotiations: a social psychological analysis Roderick M. Kramer; 8. Trust development in German-Ukrainian business relationships: dealing with cultural differences in an uncertain institutional context Guido Möllering and Florian Stache; 9. Culture and trust in contractual relationships: a French-Lebanese cooperation Hèla Yousfi; 10. Evolving institutions of trust: personalized and institutional bases of trust in Nigerian and Ghanaian food trading Fergus Lyon and Gina Porter; Part III. Trust Across Different 'Cultural Spheres': Intra-Organizational Studies: 11. The role of trust in international cooperation in crisis areas: a comparison of German and US-American NGO partnership strategies L. Ripley Smith and Ulrike Schwegler; 12. Antecedents of supervisor trust in collectivist cultures: evidence from Turkey and China S. Arzu Wasti and Hwee Hoon Tan; 13. Trust in turbulent times: organizational change and the consequences for intra-organizational trust Veronica Hope-Hailey, Elaine Farndale and Clare Kelliher; 14. The implications of language boundaries on the development of trust in international management teams Jane Kassis Henderson; 15. The dynamics of trust across cultures in family firms Isabelle Mari; Part IV. Conclusions and Ways Forward: 16. Conclusions and ways forward Mark N. K. Saunders, Denise Skinner and Roy J. Lewicki; Index. (shrink)
Research from ethology and evolutionary biology indicates the following about the evolution of reasoning capacity. First, solving problems of social competition and cooperation have direct impact on survival rates and reproductive success. Second, the social structure that evolved from this pressure is the dominance hierarchy. Third, primates that live in large groups with complex dominance hierarchies also show greater neocortical development, and concomitantly greater cognitive capacity. These facts suggest that the necessity of reasoning effectively about dominance hierarchies left an indelible (...) mark on primate reasoning architectures, including that of humans. In order to survive in a dominance hierarchy, an individual must be capable of (a) making rank discriminations, (b) recognizing what is forbidden and what is permitted based one's rank, and (c) deciding whether to engage in or refriin from activities that will allow one to move up in rank. The first problem is closely tied to the capacity for transitive reasoning, while the second and third are intimately related to the capacity for deontic reasoning. I argue that the human capacity for these types of reasoning have evolutionary roots that reach deeper into our ancestral past than the emergence of the hominid line, and the operation of these evolutionarily primitive reasoning systems can be seen in the development of human reasoning and domain-specific effects in adult reasoning. (shrink)
Dominance hierarchies are ubiquitous in the societies of human and non-human animals. Evidence from comparative, developmental, and cognitive psychological investigations is presented that show how social dominance hierarchies shaped the evolution of the human mind, and hence, human social institutions. It is argued that the pressures that arise from living in hierarchical social groups laid a foundation of fundamental concepts and cognitive strategies that are crucial to surviving in social dominance hierarchies. These include recognizing and reasoning transitively about dominance relations, (...) fast-track learning of social norms (permissions, prohibitions, and obligations), detecting violations of social norms (cheating), monitoring reciprocal obligations, and reading the intentions of others. (shrink)
Denise Meyerson has recently argued that the adaptational account of false consciousness must appeal to a psychological element, contrary to explicit declarations of its proponents. In order to explain why the rulers genuinely hold ideological beliefs, one must take them to desire to think well of themselves. She concludes that the desire to think well of oneself causes the ideological beliefs. The article defends the adaptational account from Meyerson's attempt to ground it in the psychology of the rulers. Meyerson (...) is wrong both in thinking that the desire in question is explanatorily necessary and in thinking that its explanatory role would consist in its causing ideological beliefs. (shrink)
This first book-length collection on Levinas and education gathers new texts written especially for this volume, providing an introduction to some of Levinas's major themes of ethics, justice, hope, hospitality, forgiveness, and more.
The integration of ethics into accounting curricula is a critical challenge facing accounting educators. The ethical subject matter to be covered and the role of the professor in ethical debates in the classroom are important unresolved issues. In this paper, we explore teaching basic values as an integral part of ethics education. Concern about indoctrination of students is addressed and the consistency of values education with the goals of ethics education is examined. A role for ethics researchers in identifying and (...) clarifying the basic values that define our profession is recommended, and suggestions for implementing values education in accounting ethics are provided. (shrink)
The main contention of this paper is that the underlying aim behind efforts to integrate ethics into the business school curriculum is in order to motivate and enable future business leaders to manage ethically and respond effectively to the challenges of sustainable development. Conceptualising ethics education in terms of eliciting behavioural change enables access into the insights provided by social psychological research into factors affecting behaviour, such as self-efficacy, subjective norms, knowledge, awareness, attitudes and role models. MSc students studying entrepreneurship (...) applied their entrepreneurial skills to help social enterprises achieve their objectives as part of their assessed coursework. With reference to a content analysis of their reflections, it is argued that such placements address these key factors identified as predicting behavioural change in a way that more traditional pedagogies cannot. (shrink)
An experiment was conducted to investigate the relative contributions of syntactic form and content to conditional reasoning. The content domain chosen was that of causation. Conditional statements that described causal relationships (if (cause>, then (effect>) were embedded in simple arguments whose entailments are governed by the rules -oftruth-functional logic (i.e., modus ponens, modus tollens, denying the antecedent, and affirming the consequent). The causal statements differed in terms ofthe number of alternative causes and disabling conditions that characterized the causal relationship. (A (...) disabling condition is an event that prevents an effect from occurring even though a relevant cause is present.) Subjects were required to judge whether or not each argument’s conclusion could be accepted. Judgments were found to vary systematically with the number of alternative causes and disabling conditions. Conclusions of arguments based on conditionals with few alternative causes or disabling conditionswerefoun~d:tobe-rnore accept~ able than cdnclusions based on those with many. (shrink)
Australian bills of rights are confined to the protection of civil and political rights. Economic, social and cultural rights were deliberately excluded from their coverage. This article draws on United Kingdom, Canadian and South African judgments with the aim of showing that the equality guarantees contained in these instruments can nevertheless be used as a vehicle for socio-economic claims. It further argues that there are sound moral and philosophical reasons that justify this approach.
The purpose of the work reported here was to investigate the role of problem comparison and, specifically, analogical comparison in the induction of problem categories. This work was motivated by two factors. First, it is well-documented that experts and novices represent problems in very different ways and that solution success often depends on producing expert-like problem representations (DeGroot, 1965; Duncker, 1945; Chi, Feltovich, & Glaser, 1981; Hardiman, Dufresne, & Mestre, 1989; Novick, 1988; Schoenfeld & Herrmann, 1982; Silver, 1979, 1981). Second, (...) the problem representations produced by experts and novices appear to reflect differences in the way the two groups organize their knowledge bases. Although both groups appear to represent their problem-solving knowledge in terms of problem classes, or categories, expert categories tend to be defined in terms of deep structural features, whereas novice categories tend to be defined in terms of surface features (Adelson, 1981; Chase & Simon, 1973; Chi et al., 1981; Schoenfeld &. Herrmann, 1982; Silver, 1979, 1981). Because of this differential organization, experts are more likely than novices to retrieve solution-relevant information from their categories when constructing problem representations. (shrink)
Ally-building can be an ethical pursuit in developing sources of power for the business manager. The commitment to social responsibility is a source of power, as well as an ethical practice for corporate endeavors. Pfeffer promotes a business manager's ability to develop effectiveness with ties to powerful others in an intra-organizational environment. This paper advances an analysis about how individuals in corporations may use an inter-organizational approach to developing sources of power through a notion of corporate social responsibility. As such, (...) a more meaningful qualitative reciprocity between corporations and the communities in which they operate can be developed. And, this relationship develops a source of power for the individual involved in this effort. In other words, relationships with powerful others in the community could develop by revisiting CSR based on reciprocity and exchange of sustainability in a community, rather than on a notion of paternal responsibility to some particular construct in society. (shrink)
Two experiments were conducted to investigate children’s interpretations of standard arithmetic word problems and the factors that influence their interpretations. In Experiment 1, children were required to solve a series of problems and then to draw and select pictures that represented the problems’ structures. Solution performance was found to vary systematically with the nature of the representations drawn and chosen. The crucial determinant of solution success was the interpretation a child assigned to certain phrases used in the problems. In Experiment (...) 2, solution and drawing accuracy were found to be significantly improved by rewording problems to avoid ambiguous linguistic forms. Together, these results imply that (a) word-problem solution errors are caused by misinterpretations of certain verbal expressions commonly used in problem texts, and (b) these misinterpretations are the result of missing or inadequate mappings of these verbal expressions to partwhole knowledge. (shrink)
