Although contract sugarcane farming is the most dominant and popular land use among farmers in Nzoia Sugarbelt, results from a 2007 study suggests that the intended goal of increasing farmers’ incomes seems to have failed. With a mean monthly income of Kenya Shillings 723 (US $ 10) from an average cane acreage of 0.38 hectares, it would be difficult for a household of eight family members to meet their basic needs and lead a decent life. Analysis of farmer statements showed (...) that up to 86% of the changes in net income were significantly determined by six cost variables as a group (i.e., acreage, tillage costs, seedcane costs, transport costs, yield, and farmer’s education level). Area under sugarcane had the greatest influence on net income whereby an increase in one hectare under cane would result in an increase of Kenya Shillings 110,427 in net income (per crop cycle of 21 months), holding other variables constant. This translates into Kenya shillings 5,258 per month (or 175 per day per household, or for a family of eight people—KES 22 or US $ 0.3) per member, which is far below the international standard of absolute poverty. Key net income depressors were tillage, seedcane, and transportation costs, all of which were determined by the company with no input from farmers. To bridge income gaps between the company and farmers in favor of sustainable community livelihoods, this paper argues strongly for the need to institutionalize Corporate Social Responsibility within the daily operations of the company particularly to address net-income depressors. Ten key building blocks for such a policy for Nzoia Sugar Company are suggested, based on farmers’ responses and ethical considerations. (shrink)
Although contract sugarcane farming is the most dominant and popular land use among farmers in Nzoia Sugarbelt, results from a 2007 study suggests that the intended goal of increasing farmers’ incomes seems to have failed. With a mean monthly income of Kenya Shillings 723 (US $ 10) from an average cane acreage of 0.38 hectares, it would be difficult for a household of eight family members to meet their basic needs and lead a decent life. Analysis of farmer statements showed (...) that up to 86% of the changes in net income were significantly determined by six cost variables as a group (i.e., acreage, tillage costs, seedcane costs, transport costs, yield, and farmer’s education level). Area under sugarcane had the greatest influence on net income whereby an increase in one hectare under cane would result in an increase of Kenya Shillings 110,427 in net income (per crop cycle of 21 months), holding other variables constant. This translates into Kenya shillings 5,258 per month (or 175 per day per household, or for a family of eight people—KES 22 or US $ 0.3) per member, which is far below the international standard of absolute poverty. Key net income depressors were tillage, seedcane, and transportation costs, all of which were determined by the company with no input from farmers. To bridge income gaps between the company and farmers in favor of sustainable community livelihoods, this paper argues strongly for the need to institutionalize Corporate Social Responsibility within the daily operations of the company particularly to address net-income depressors. Ten key building blocks for such a policy for Nzoia Sugar Company are suggested, based on farmers’ responses and ethical considerations. (shrink)
This paper begins with a discussion of Stanley Cavell’s philosophy of language learning. Young people learn more than the meaning of words when acquiring language: they learn about (the quality of) our form of life. If we—as early childhood educators—see language teaching as something like handing some inert thing to a child, then we unduly limit the possibilities of education for that child. Cavell argues that we must become poets if we are to be the type of representatives of language (...) that education calls for. In the final section of the paper I discuss the work of Lucy Sprague Mitchell, someone who developed an approach to language teaching that overlaps in interesting ways with Cavell’s approach in The Claim of Reason. (shrink)
This is the first volume in the four-volume edition of The Works of Lucy Hutchinson, the first-ever collected edition of the writings of the pioneering author and translator. Hutchinson (1620-81) had a remarkable range of her interests, from Latin poetry to Civil War politics and theology. This edition of her translation of Lucretius's De rerum natura offers new biographical material, demonstrating the changes and unexpected continuities in Hutchinson's life between the work's composition in the 1650s and its dedication in (...) 1675. Hers is the first complete surviving English translation of one of the great classical epics, a challenging text at the borderlines of poetry and philosophy. For the first time, the Lucretius translation is made available alongside the Latin text Hutchinson used, which differs in innumerable ways from versions known today. The commentary provides multiple ways into further understanding of the translation and its contexts. Written at a momentous period in political and literary history, Hutchinson's Lucretius throws light on the complex transition between 'ancient' and 'modern' conceptions of the classical canon and of natural philosophy. It offers a case study in the history of reading, and more specifically of reading by a woman. Through close comparison with three contemporary translations, this edition situates Hutchinson's version in the context of the shifting poetic languages of the seventeenth century, and facilitates an approach to Lucretius' often rebarbative Latin. It further demonstrates the remarkable ways in which Hutchinson's engagement with this 'atheistical' poem leaves deep traces on her later, militantly Calvinist prose and verse. (shrink)
According to Aristotle, "to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also to the rest of mankind," (Poetics 1448b). But even as he affirms the unbounded human capacity for integrating new experience with existing knowledge, he alludes to a significant exception: "The sight of certain things gives us pain, but we enjoy looking at the most exact images of them, whether the forms of animals which we greatly despise or of corpses." Our capacity (...) for learning is happily engaged in viewing representations of painful objects, but not, it seems, in viewing the objects themselves. When an experience is intensely painful, what then is a rational animal to do? We can neither disable our learning process, nor erase its traces. In the face of intense pain, horror, or terror, learning and remembrance cause no pleasure but rather persistent psychological pain and disruption. The memorious mind reverberates with trauma. (shrink)
Sharvy’s puzzle concerns a situation in which common knowledge of two parties is obtained by repeated observation each of the other, no fixed point being reached in finite time. Can a fixed point be reached?
* Fascinating topic in the philosophy of mind and action * Changes the focus of, and gives fresh momentum to, current discussions of self-identification and self-reference * Rigorous discussion of rival views Lucy OBrien argues that a satisfactory account of first-person reference and self-knowledge needs to concentrate on our nature as agents. She considers two main questions. First, what account of first-person reference can we give that respects the guaranteed nature of such reference? Second, what account can we give (...) of our knowledge of our mental and physical actions? Clearly written, with rigorous discussion of rival views, this book will be of interest to anyone working in the philosophy of mind and action. (shrink)
This paper gives an interpretation of Kant's argument for transcendental idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic. I argue against a common way of reading this argument, which sees Kant as arguing that substantive a priori claims about mind-independent reality would be unintelligible because we cannot explain the source of their justification. I argue that Kant's concern with how synthetic a priori propositions are possible is not a concern with the source of their justification, but with how they can have objects. I (...) argue that Kant's notion of intuition needs to be understood as a kind of representation which involves the presence to consciousness of the object it represents, and that this means that a priori intuition cannot present us with a mind-independent feature of reality. (shrink)
This paper compares Kant's transcendental idealism with three main groups of contemporary anti-realism, associated with Wittgenstein, Putnam, and Dummett, respectively. The kind of anti-realism associated with Wittgenstein has it that there is no deep sense in which our concepts are answerable to reality. Associated with Putnam is the rejection of four main ideas: theoryindependent reality, the idea of a uniquely true theory, a correspondence theory of truth, and bivalence. While there are superficial similarities between both views and Kant's, I find (...) more significant differences. Dummettian anti-realism, too, clearly differs from Kant's position: Kant believes in verification-transcendent reality, and transcendental idealism is not a theory of meaning or truth. However, I argue that part of the Dummettian position is extremely useful for understanding part of Kant's position - his idealism about the appearances of things. I argue that Kant's idealism about appearances can be expressed as the rejection of experiencetranscendent reality with respect to appearances. (shrink)
: Interpretations of Kant's transcendental idealism have been dominated by two extreme views: phenomenalist and merely epistemic readings. There are serious objections to both of these extremes, and the aim of this paper is to develop a middle ground between the two. In the Prolegomena, Kant suggests that his idealism about appearances can be understood in terms of an analogy with secondary qualities like color. Commentators have rejected this option because they have assumed that the analogy should be read in (...) terms of either a Lockean or a Berkelean account of qualities such as color, and have argued, rightly, that neither can provide the basis for a coherent interpretation of Kant's position. I argue that the account of color that the analogy requires is one within the context of a direct theory of perception, as opposed to Locke's representative account. Using this account of color, the secondary quality analogy enables us to explain how appearances can be mind-dependent without existing in the mind. (shrink)
This article is a modified version in translation of the original Dutch version that appeared in Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 4 (2010) / * Inspired by Kant's account of intuition and concepts, John McDowell has forcefully argued that the relation between sensible content and concepts is such that sensible content does not severally contribute to cognition but always only in conjunction with concepts. This view is known as conceptualism. Recently, Robert Hanna and Lucy Allais, among others, have brought against this (...) view the charge that it neglects the possibility of the existence of essentially non-conceptual content that is not conceptualized or subject to conceptualization. Their defence against McDowell amounts to non-conceptualism. Both views believe that intuition is synthesized content in Kant's sense. In this article I am particularly interested in how their views are true to Kant. I argue that although McDowell is right that intuition is only epistemically relevant in conjunction with concepts, I also believe that Hanna and Allais are right with regard to the existence of essentially non-conceptual content, but that they are wrong with regard to intuition being synthesized content in Kant's sense. I also point out the common failure to take account of the modal nature of Kant's argument for the relation between intuition and concept. (shrink)
Abstract: Philosophers interested in Kant's relevance to contemporary debates over the nature of mental content—notably Robert Hanna and Lucy Allais—have argued that Kant ought to be credited with being the original proponent of the existence of ‘nonconceptual content’. However, I think the ‘nonconceptualist’ interpretations that Hanna and Allais give do not show that Kant allowed for nonconceptual content as they construe it. I argue, on the basis of an analysis of certain sections of the A and B editions of (...) the Transcendental Deduction, for a ‘conceptualist’ reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. My contention is that since Kant's notion of empirical intuition makes essential reference to the categories, it must be true for him that no empirical intuition can be given in sensibility independently of the understanding and its categories. (shrink)
Inspired by Kant's account of intuition and concepts, John McDowell has forcefully argued that the relation between sensible content and concepts is such that sensible content does not severally contribute to cognition but always only in conjunction with concepts. This view is known as conceptualism. Recently, Robert Hanna and Lucy Allais, among others, have brought against this view the charge that it neglects the possibility of the existence of essentially non-conceptual content that is not conceptualized or subject to conceptualization. (...) Their defense against McDowell amounts to non-conceptualism. Both views believe that intuition is synthesized content in Kant's sense. In this article, I am particularly interested in how their views are true to Kant. I argue that although McDowell is right that intuition is only epistemically relevant in conjunction with concepts, I also believe that Hanna and Allais are right with regard to the existence of essentially non-conceptual content, but that they are wrong with regard to intuition being synthesized content in Kant's sense. I also point out the common failure to take account of the modal nature of Kant's argument for the relation between intuition and concept. [the article is written in Dutch]. (shrink)
This key collection of essays sheds new light on long-debated controversies surrounding Kant’s doctrine of idealism and is the first book in the English language that is exclusively dedicated to the subject. Well-known Kantians Karl Ameriks and Manfred Baum present their considered views on this most topical aspect of Kant's thought. Several essays by acclaimed Kant scholars broach a vastly neglected problem in discussions of Kant's idealism, namely the relation between his conception of logic and idealism: The standard view that (...) Kant's logic and idealism are wholly separable comes under scrutiny in these essays. A further set of articles addresses multiple facets of the notorious notion of the thing in itself, which continues to hold the attention of Kant scholars. The volume also contains an extensive discussion of the often overlooked chapter in the Critique of Pure Reason on the Transcendental Ideal. Together, the essays provide a whole new outlook on Kantian idealism. No one with a serious interest in Kant's idealism can afford to ignore this important book. Papers by Karl Ameriks, Manfred Baum, Ido Geiger, Lucy Allais, Gary Banham, Steven M. Bayne, Marcel Quarfood, Dennis Schulting, Dietmar Heidemann, Christian Onof and Jacco Verburgt. (shrink)
In this paper I want to propose that we see solipsism as arising from certain problems we have about identifying ourselves as subjects in an objective world. The discussion will centre on Wittgenstein.
This paper argues that there is an important respect in which Rae Langton's recent interpretation of Kant is correct: Kant's claim that we cannot know things in themselves should be understood as the claim that we cannot know the intrinsic nature of things. However, I dispute Langton's account of intrinsic properties, and therefore her version of what this claim amounts to. Langton's distinction between intrinsic, causally inert properties and causal powers is problematic, both as an interpretation of Kant, and as (...) an independent metaphysical position. I propose a different reading of the claim that we cannot know things intrinsically. I distinguish between two ways of knowing things: in terms of their effects on other things, and as they are apart from these. I argue that knowing things' powers is knowing things in terms of effects on other things, and therefore is not knowing them as they are in themselves, and that there are textual grounds for attributing this position to Kant. (shrink)
My aim in this paper is to articulate further what may be called an agency theory of self-knowledge. Many theorists have stressed how important agency is to self- knowledge, and much work has been done drawing connections between the two notions.<sup>2</sup> However, it has not always been clear what _epistemic_ advantage agency gives us in this area and why it does so. I take it as a constraint on an adequate account of how a subject knows her own mental states (...) and acts, that it construe the known mental states and acts realistically and as independent of their self-ascription, and that it deliver genuine epistemic standing to the knower. The main task of the paper will, then, be to explore how our having rational agency with respect to our mental states may be able to secure genuine epistemic warrant for our self-ascriptions of states or acts independent of the ascriptions. This task will be carried out by focussing on the question of what account we should give of our knowledge of what I call our acts of judging. In the remainder of this section, I will do a little to clarify what is meant by that question. Section 2 will attempt to introduce us to elements of the best way to approach the question by considering some alternative strategies. Section 3 is devoted to forming some idea of what _kind_ of warrant we are looking for when considering how agency might give us self-knowledge. Section 4 aims to present a suggestion as to how agency gives us the kind of warrant identified over our acts of judging. Section 5 deals with some objections. (shrink)
Kant’s claim that we are ignorant of things in themselves is a claim that we cannot know ‘the intrinsic nature of things’, or so at least I argued in Kantian Humility.2 I’m delighted to find that Lucy Allais is in broad agreement with this core idea, thinking it represents, at the very least, a part of Kant’s view. She sees some of the advantages of this interpretation. It has significant textual support. It does justice to Kant’s sense that we (...) are missing out on something, in our failure to know things as they are in themselves. And it makes tellable, after all, Kant’s at first sight untellable tale, about the knowable existence of unknowable things: for we can know that things exist, without knowing what their intrinsic properties are. However, Allais is critical of the way I fill out this core idea, and she has an alternative to offer. She thinks Kant’s distinction between things in themselves and phenomena is not a distinction between two kinds of properties, intrinsic and relational. She is critical of my interpretation of causal powers, which I take to be the relevant relational properties: my idea, first, that causal powers are in fact relational properties; second, that causal powers are only contingently associated with intrinsic properties, so that creating substances with intrinsic properties is insufficient for creating causal power; and, third, that intrinsic properties are causally inert. Her criticisms of these three ideas.. (shrink)
Globalization theories posit organizational convergence, suggesting that Codes of Ethics will become commonplace and include greater consideration of global issues. This study explores the degree to which the Codes of Ethics of 157 corporations on the Global 500 and/or Fortune 500 lists include the "third generation" of corporate social responsibility. Unlike first generation ethics, which focus on the legal context of corporate behavior, and second generation ethics, which locate responsibility to groups directly associated with the corporation, third generation ethics transcend (...) both the profit motive and the immediate corporate environment. Third generation ethics are grounded in responsibilities to the larger interconnected environment. The results of the study suggest convergence, insofar as Codes of Ethics are becoming standard communication features of corporations across region and industrial sector but still manifest a primary concern with profits and those behaviors which are mandated by law. Only corporations headquartered in the European Union demonstrate a significant degree of global consciousness and reflexivity. However, there is some evidence that third generation ethics and thinking are becoming part of the corporate landscape. More then three quarters of the corporations made at least some reference to third generation ethics. (shrink)
Book description: * Seventeen brand-new essays by leading philosophers and psychologists * Genuinely interdisciplinary work, at the forefront of both fields * Includes a valuable introduction, uniting common threads Leading philosophers and psychologists join forces to investigate a set of problems to do with agency and self-awareness, in seventeen specially written essays. In recent years there has been much psychological and neurological work purporting to show that consciousness and self-awareness play no role in causing actions, and indeed to demonstrate that (...) free will is an illusion. The essays in this volume subject the assumptions that motivate such claims to sustained interdisciplinary scrutiny. Patients with Anarchic Hand syndrome sometimes find their hands perform apparently goal-directed actions which the patients disown, yet seem to be unable to suppress (for example, reaching out for someone else's food in a restaurant). On the face of it, these patients lack the kind of control and self-awareness we ordinarily take ourselves to have when acting intentionally. Questions raised by this phenomenon include: What is involved in being aware of an action as one's own? What is the nature of the control these patients are lacking and which characterizes normal intentional actions? What is the relation between a priori explanations of consciousness and self-consciousness, on the one hand, and empirical work on the information-processing mechanisms involved in action control, on the other? Questions of action control and self-awareness tend to be treated separately in both philosophy and psychology. The central idea behind this volume is that outstanding unresolved issues on both topics, and in both disciplines, can only be resolved by an interdisciplinary examination of the relations between them. The editors' useful introductory essay offers a guide to cross-disciplinary reading of the contributions, and makes connections between them explicit. The book will be compulsory reading for psychologists and philosophers working on action explanation, and for anyone interested in the relation between the brain sciences and consciousness. (shrink)
Disgrace , by J.M. Coetzee, is a story of a rape; more, it is a tale in which the victim of the rape, Lucy Lurie, is silent. She demands neither sympathy nor justice for what happens toher, presenting herself as neither a victim nor someone seeking revenge. Instead she stands as a witness, and does so by adopting an attitude reminiscent of the thinking of Simone Weil—rejecting the possibility of rights, and not looking for explanations. Rape, Coetzee thus suggests, (...) is an act without meaning, a trauma whose reality cannot be exorcised through narration. Fittingly, therefore, the novel ends with a tableau of Lucy growing flowers in her garden; living, like Candide, without rationalisation or consolatory myth. (shrink)
Russell's Principle states that in order to think about an object I must know which thing it is, in the sense of being able to distinguish it from all other things. I show that, contra Strawson, Evans and Cassam, Russell's Principle cannot be applied to first-person thought so as to yield necessary conditions of self-consciousness. Footnotes1 Thanks to Naomi Eilan, Keith Hossack, Lucy O'Brien and Ann Whittle for helpful comments.
In this paper I want to propose that we see solipsism as arising from certain problems we have about identifying ourselves as subjects in an objective world. The discussion will centre on Wittgenstein’s treatment of solipsism in his Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus. In that work Wittgenstein can be seen to express an unusually profound understanding of the problems faced in trying to give an account of how we, who are subjects, identify ourselves as objects in the (...) world. We have in his compressed remarks, the kernels of a number of arguments which all come together to form what can be called the problem of self-identification. I want to argue that the solipsism of the Tractatus arises at least in part as a solution to, or – to put it less optimistically – as a symptom or articulation of this problem. In approaching Wittgenstein’s early discussion of solipsism in this way I will obviously be in disagreement with some other interpretations of the work. For example, there are those who think that there is no ‘solipsism of the Tractatus’.1 In fact, the Tractarian arguments presented below as motivating solipsism have been seen as fulfilling the quite opposite function of refuting it. I do not intend in this piece to engage with alternative interpretations. Let me say a little bit about why I have granted myself the licence not to do so. First, the focus of my concern with solipsism is on how it connects with what I have called the problem of self-identification. While it is a concern that emerged in an attempt to make sense of Wittgenstein’s remarks in.. (shrink)
This article is concerned with a discussion of the plausibility of the claim that GM technology has the potential to provide the hungry with sufficient food for subsistence. Following a brief outline of the potential applications of GM in this context, a history of the green revolution and its impact will be discussed in relation to the current developing world agriculture situation. Following a contemporary analysis of malnutrition, the claim that GM technology has the potential to provide the hungry with (...) sufficient nourishment will be discussed within the domain of moral philosophy to determine whether there exists a moral obligation to pursue this end if and only if the technology proves to be relatively safe and effective. By using Peter Singer’s duty of moral rescue, I argue that we have a moral duty to assist the third world through the distribution of such GM plants. I conclude the paper by demonstrating that my argument can be supported by applying a version of the Precautionary Principle on the grounds that doing nothing might be worse for the current situation. (shrink)
Like any discipline, bioethics is a developing field of academic inquiry; and recent trends in scholarship have been towards more engagement with empirical research. This ‘empirical turn’ has provoked extensive debate over how such ‘descriptive’ research carried out in the social sciences contributes to the distinctively normative aspect of bioethics. This paper will address this issue by developing a practical research methodology for the inclusion of data from social science studies into ethical deliberation. This methodology will be based on a (...) naturalistic conception of ethical theory that sees practice as informing theory just as theory informs practice – the two are symbiotically related. From this engagement with practice, the ways that such theories need to be extended and developed can be determined. This is a practical methodology for integrating theory and practice that can be used in empirical studies, one that uses ethical theory both to explore the data and to draw normative conclusions. (shrink)
‘‘COGNITIVE ECOLOGY’’ is a fruitful model for Shakespearian studies, early modern literary and cultural history, and theatrical history more widely. Cognitive ecologies are the multidimensional contexts in which we remember, feel, think, sense, communicate, imagine, and act, often collaboratively, on the fly, and in rich ongoing interaction with our environments. Along with the anthropologist Edwin Hutchins,1 we use the term ‘‘cognitive ecology’’ to integrate a number of recent approaches to cultural cognition: we believe these approaches offer productive lines of engagement (...) with early modern literary and historical studies.2 The framework arises out of our work in extended mind and distributed cognition.3 The extended mind hypothesis arose from a post-connectionist philosophy of cognitive science. This approach was articulated in Andy Clark’s Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, and further developed by Susan Hurley and Mark Rowlands, among others.4 The distributed cognition approach arose independently, from work in cognitive anthropology, HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), the sociology of education and work, and science studies. The principles of distributed cognition were articulated in Hutchins’s ethnography of navigation, Cogni- tion in the Wild,5 and developed by theorists such as David Kirsh and Lucy Suchman.6 These models share an anti-individualist approach to cognition. In all these views, mental activities spread or smear across the boundaries of skull and skin to include parts of the social and material world. In remembering, decision making, and acting, whether individually or in small groups, our complex and structured activities involve many distinctive dimensions: neural, affective, kines-. (shrink)
Russellianism (also called `neo-Russellianism, `Millianism, and `thenaive theory') entails that substitution of co-referring names inattitude ascriptions preserves truth value and proposition expressed.Thus, on this view, if Lucy wants Twain to autograph her book, thenshe also wants Clemens to autograph her book, even if she says ``I donot want Clemens to autograph my book''. Some philosophers (includingMichael Devitt and Mark Richard) claim that attitude ascriptions canbe used to predict behavior, but argue that if Russellianism weretrue, then this would not be (...) so. They conclude that Russellianism isfalse. I defend Russellianism from this objection. I present severalanalyses of ``sentence S can be used to predict event E''. I arguethat, on each of these analyses, attitude ascriptions can be used topredict behavior, even if Russellianism is true. Furthermore, if myarguments are incorrect, and attitude ascriptions cannot be used topredict behavior under Russellianism, then Russellians can explainaway the intuition that they can be so used. (shrink)
General Practice and Ethics explores the ethical issues faced by general physicans in their everyday practice, addressing two central themes: the uncertainty of outcomes and effectiveness in general practice and the changing pattern of general practitioners' responsibilities.
"The last third of the twentieth century," Gerard Hauser writes, was marked by "a flurry of intellectual work aimed at theorizing rhetoric in new terms" (2001, 1). The year 1958 was key in this flurry, with five major works appearing on a rhetorically inflected philosophy and theory of argumentation: Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition (on the relationship between the vita contemplativa and vita activa); Michael Polanyi's Personal Knowledge (on the role of tacit knowledge, emotion, and commitment in science); Stephen Toulmin's (...) Uses of Argument (on the use of argument in nonformal contexts); Walter Ong's Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (on the history of the .. (shrink)
We review the relationships between language, inner speech, and cognitive control in children and young adults, focusing on the domain of cognitive flexibility. We address the role that inner speech plays in flexibly shifting between tasks, addressing whether it is used to represent task rules, provide a reminder of task order, or aid in task retrieval. We also consider whether the development of inner speech in childhood serves to drive the development of cognitive flexibility. We conclude that there is a (...) close association between inner speech and cognitive flexibility in both adults and children. Experimental work has begun to specify in detail the role that inner speech might play in adult performance, suggesting that language plays a facilitative but not essential role in representing and activating the relevant task set, processes that occur on both switch and nonswitch trials. While developmental studies suggest an increase in the spontaneous use of verbal strategies with age, implying an increase in top-down control during shifting, experimental work is needed to specify more precisely the nature and precise role that inner speech plays in the development of cognitive control through childhood. (shrink)
Based on Lucy Grealy’s memoir, Autobiography of a Face , this article explores the relationship between gender and illness in our culture, as well as the paradox of “intimacy without intimacy” in the clinical encounter. Included is a brief review of how authenticity, vulnerability, and mutual recognition of suffering can foster the kind of empathic doctor-patient relationship that Lucy Grealy sorely needed, but never received. As she says at the end of her memoir, “All those years I’d handed (...) my ugliness over to people, and seen only the different ways it was reflected back to me.”. (shrink)
The ethical decision making process behind the treatment of missing data has yet to be examined in the research literature in any discipline. The purpose of the current paper is to begin to discuss this decision-making process in view of a Foucauldian framework. The paper suggests how the ethical treatment of missing data should be considered from the adoption of this theoretical framework.
What's the world made of? Donuts! and Beer! -- Protagoras, Gorgias, Captain Kirk, and Denny Crane -- Socrates : The Sergeant Schultz of Ancient Greece -- Plato is the new American Idol -- Aristotle loves Lucy -- Charlie Harper's Non-Epicurean lifestyle -- St. Augustine's Highway to Heaven -- Scully shaves Mulder with Ockham's Razor -- Larry Hagman dreams of Descartes -- Locke versus Hobbes, or The Brady Bunch takes on Survivor -- Can or can't Kant like vampires? -- Reading (...) Hegel in Outer Space -- John Stuart Mill and the Utilitarian Heroism of Dexter Morgan -- Karl Marx and Adam Smith, meet Alex P. Keaton -- Dr. Gregory House and the Nietzschean Superman -- Don Draper, George Costanza and the non-meaning of life -- Jersey Shore's 'The Situation': The Randian Ideal man with a tan? -- Earl Hickey meets Karma in My name is Earl -- Lost but not least. (shrink)
This book considers the thought and personalities of two popular icons of twentieth century philosophical and psychological thought - Nietzsche and Jung - and reveals the extraordinary connections between them. Through a thorough examination of their work, Nietzsche and Jung succeeds in illuminating complex areas of Nietzsche's thought and resolving ambiguities in Jung's reception of these theories. This demonstration of how our understanding of analytical psychology can be enriched by investigating its philosophical roots will be of great interest to students (...) in psychology, philosophy and religion as well as practising Jungian analysts. (shrink)
There are seven sins in the world: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice and Politics without principle. (Mahatma Gandhi).
Differences in undergraduate students' perceptions of unequal status dating relationships in academia were investigated. Two hundred sixty college undergraduates from a private northeastern university evaluated three types of dating relationships: (a) professor-undergraduate student, (b) professor-graduate assistant, and (c) graduate assistant-undergraduate student. Fictional scenarios were used to assess participants' perceptions of the three types of dating relationships. Responses were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitative results indicated the professor-undergraduate student dating relationship was labeled unethical whereas the qualitative results revealed a possible (...) gender effect. (shrink)
Individuals often lie for psychological rewards (e.g., preserving self image and/or protecting others), absent economic rewards. We conducted a laboratory experiment, using a modified dictator game, to identify conditions that entice individuals to lie solely for psychological rewards. We argue that such lies can provide a ready means for individuals to manage others’ impression of them. We investigated the effect of social distance (the perceived familiarity, intimacy, or psychological proximity between two parties) and knowledge of circumstances (whether parties have common (...) or asymmetric information) on the frequency of lying. We found that lying occurs more frequently when social distance is near and that the effect is exacerbated when information is asymmetric. Our theoretical development suggests that, under these conditions, individuals’ need to manage others’ impression is magnified. We discuss the implications of our findings. (shrink)
In 1990, a conference was held at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, to explore the prospects for a new school of research: cognitive archeology. The fruits of that conference are now published; they are uneven in quality, but provocative. Archeology at its best is detective work that rivals anything in science or fiction--from Crick and Watson to Holmes and Watson. At its worst, it is imagination run wild, underconstrained speculations that often have the added vice of permanently distorting the data, (...) through erroneous "restorations" or just spuriously authoritative labels that then make alternative interpretations of those objects and sites all but unthinkable. It is hard to resist the gravitational pull of a good story, apparently, especially when one has just spent a long hot summer and a sizeable grant (or a lifetime and a fortune) painstakingly wresting an unprepossessing pile of ancient leftovers from the earth. One has to make something from these fragments, if not the lost city of Atlantis, then at least some exciting conclusions about the exotic habits, beliefs or rituals of the people who made them. So it is not surprising that the early romantic excesses of archeology--Agamemnon's tomb and all that--provoked a positivistic reformation movement. Parallel to the behaviorists' efforts to turn their field of psychology into hard science with all the trappings, the "processual" school of archeology demanded scrupulous data-gathering and forbade all but the most rigorously constructed interpretations, echoing Lloyd Morgan's Canon of Parsimony: thou shalt not impute more Mind than is strictly necessary to account for the data. One could venture cautious conclusions about the diet, tools and building materials, and size of the groups, but precious little else--next to nothing, of course, about what or how these ancient people thought. (shrink)
Teaching children ethics, values, and morals has become a real challenge for parents today. These topics aren't usually covered in school curriculums, and many families no longer attend religious services, so most modern moms and dads are clamoring for a helping hand. Ian James Corlett, an award-winning children's TV writer, was inspired to write this book as his own family grappled with this issue. When Ian's two kids were very young, he and his wife started a weekly discussion period he (...) dubbed "Family Fun Time." Every Monday after dinner, they all sat down and Ian would tell his two kids tales about two young children, Elliott and Lucy, who were much like them. - They hated going to the dentist. - They were disappointed when a favorite aunt couldn't visit. - They dreaded raking the leaves in their backyard. Ian's kids really looked forward to these talks and they hardly even realized that the stories were serving a deeper purpose -- to teach tact, understanding, and responsibility. So he decided to write these stories down to help other parents -- like you. The result is in your hands: twenty-six simple, clear, original, and entertaining stories for you to read aloud with your child. Teaching your children values, life skills, and ethics has never been so much fun! (shrink)
Health care organizations are constantly seeking ways to improve quality of care and one of the often-posed solutions to deliver ‘good care’ is reflexivity. Several authors stress that enhancing the organizations’ and caregivers’ reflexivity allows for more situated, and therefore better care. Within quality improvement initiatives, devices that guarantee quality are also seen as key to the delivery of good care. These devices do not solely aim at standardizing work practices, but are also of importance in facilitating reflexivity. In this (...) article, we study how quality improvement devices position the relationship between situated reflection and standardization of work processes. By exploring the work of Michel Callon, Michael Lynch, and Lucy Suchman on reflexivity in work practices, we study the development and introduction of the Care Living Plan. This device aimed to transform care organizations of older people from their orientation towards the system of care into organizations that take a client-centred approach. Our analysis of the construction of specific forms of reflexivity in quality devices indicates that the question of reflexivity does not need to be opposed to standardization and needs to be addressed not only at the level of where reflexivity is organizationally situated and who gets to do the reflecting, but also on the content of reflexivity, such as what are the issues that care workers can and cannot reflect upon. In this paper we point out the theoretical importance of a more detailed empirical study of the framing of reflexivity in care practices. (shrink)
This is the first book that attempts to analyze and define the metholodology and values of contemporary accounts of adjudication, which can be divided into orthodox philosophies on the one hand and heretical accounts on the other. The author offers an incisive and original analysis of how these supposedly incompatible accounts actually differ.
There are seven sins in the world: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Knowledge without character, Commerce without morality, Science without humanity, Worship without sacrifice and Politics without principle. (Mahatma Gandhi).
The way we understand language diversity, how languages differ in representing reality, affects our approach to understanding linguistic relativity, how that diversity affects thought. Historically, researchers divided over whether the diverse representations of reality across languages were natural or conventional, but all tacitly assumed an optimal fit between language and reality. Twenrieth century anthropological linguists interested in linguisric relativity have questioned this assumption and sought to characterize “reality” without it by using domain- or structure-centered approaches. Arguments are presented favoring structure-centered (...) approaches, along with a case illustration. A concluding discussion emphasizes the broader significance of language diversity in human development. (shrink)
This paper represents the first attempt to applyvertical equity principles to the South African healthsector. A vertical equity approach, which recognisesthat different groups have different starting pointsand therefore require differential treatment, appearsto offer an appropriate basis for considering how bestto redress the vast inequities which exist inpost-Apartheid South Africa. Vertical equityprinciples are applied in critically analysing twoareas of recent policy action which are particularlyrelevant to health sector equity in South Africa,namely public-private sector cross-subsidies and theallocation of government resources between provinces.Despite (...) a strong political commitment to redressinghistorical inequities, recent government policyactions in these two areas appear to fall short ofdesirable goals when viewed through a vertical equitylens. In particular, policies since the firstdemocratic elections in 1994 have done little toreduce the extent of government subsidies to theprivate health sector, which serves a minority of thepopulation. In addition, recent proposals for a SocialHealth Insurance will allow minimal cross-subsidiesbetween high- and low-income earners and would notadequately redress the currently inequitablepublic-private cross-subsidies. With respect to theallocation of government resources between provinces,a vertical equity approach would suggest that the mosthistorically dis-advantaged provinces have an evengreater claim on government resources than reflectedin the current formula, as developed by the Departmentof Finance. This paper also considers the potentialbenefits of engaging with societal views indetermining what constitutes dis-advantage in theSouth African context, in order to identify those whoshould receive priority in resource allocationdecisions. It concludes with a review of a number ofpractical steps that can be taken to draw verticalequity principles into policy action. (shrink)
Although Hannah Arendt is not usually read as a philosopher of religion, her political philosophy is noticeably filled with references to religious figures and thinkers, including Jesus of Nazareth, Augustine and Duns Scotus. Also notable is the implicit centrality in her thought of amor mundi, or love of the world. The difficulty is that although she spoke to her students about it, she rarely wrote about amor mundi. In this article, I seek to provide a plausible explanation of the meaning (...) of amor mundi in Arendt’s thought, drawing in particular upon the influence of Augustine on Arendt’s unique development of the ethical and political principle of love for the world. Specifically, through a close reading of Arendt’s doctoral dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, I identify the relationship between Augustine’s conception of cupiditas and Arendt’s conception of amor mundi. (shrink)
