Few scholars have investigated the considerations of over-empowered teams from a non-consequential ethics approach. Leveraging a virtue-based ethics lens of team empowerment, we provide a framework of team ethical orientation and over-empowerment using highly influential market research teams as a basis for our analysis. The purpose of this research is to contrast how teams founded on virtue-based ethics can attenuate ethical dilemmas and negative organizational outcomes from team over-empowerment. We provide a framework of four conditions that include Sophisticated, Suppressed, Contagion, (...) and Impeded to discuss alignment between team ethical orientation and team empowerment. Through this framework, we aim to further our understanding of empowered team behavior between action that is virtuous, moral, and ethical and activity that threatens organizational values and goals. (shrink)

Codes of ethics exist in many, if not the majority, of all large U.S. companies today. But how the impact of these written codes affect managerial attitudes and behavior is still not clearly documented or explained. This study takes a step in that direction by proposing that attention should shift from the codes themselves as the sources of ethical behavior to the persons whose behavior is the focus of these codes. In particular, this study investigates the role of code familiarity (...) as a factor impacting the influence of an ethics code on manager behavior. Data collected from 286 executives from companies in the direct selling industry are used to test hypotheses (1) that the perceived usefulness of ethics codes is positively related to the degree of familiarity with the code, and (2) that ethical climate as assessed by managers is positively related to the code''s perceived usefulness. Both hypotheses are supported, and their implications and further research directions are discussed. (shrink)

This review provides a current perspective on the insertion of genes into plants. Some of the knowledge on the structure and control of plant genes gained recently from genetic engineering approaches is described, together with developments that can be expected to emerge from further exploitation of gene transfer techniques.

The purpose of this present research is to expand upon the foundation that codes of ethics are more useful guides to managers in their behavior and decision-making when managers are more familiar with code content and intentions. We explore whether the impact of code familiarity on code usefulness differs: (a) under varying conditions of turbulence and (b) between persons with relativist versus idealist personal values. Data have been collected from a sample of 1700 executives in member companies of the U.S. (...) Direct Selling Association, and responses were received from 286 (16.8% returned). Perceptions of ethics code familiarity and usefulness decline as business turbulence increases. The decline in familiarity/usefulness was more pronounced for managers with a relativistic ethical orientation. (shrink)

This book is a record of my dialogues with Stephen Hawking, his graduate assistants and his nurses during a four city public lecture tour I organized for Hawking, including Portland, Eugene, Seattle, Vancouver, BC. We discussed 20th century science and philosophy of science. Since I was often the one being questioned, much of the contents reflect my PhD research at the University of London. My focus was on understanding the limits of science, as represented by quantum theory and relativity. My (...) mentors had been Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos, and I was strongly influenced by Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. In one in depth presentation to Hawking I suggested that Newtonian space-time and Maxwellian space-time were complementary, were defined by complementary symmetry principles. I had opportunity to present the same arguments to Kip Thorne and Freeman Dyson. Hawking simply remarked that I 'may be right'. Thorne confirmed that practitioners of General Relativity use both depending on the problem at hand. Dyson was emphatic – "Yes. Definitely. Absolutely.". (shrink)

THOMAS NAGEL has argued that ‘true liberalism’ excludes appeals to conceptions of the good in political argument. According to Nagel, liberalism's impartiality is grounded not in skepticism but, rather, in its commitment to ‘epistemological restraint.’ As he puts it, ‘We accept a kind of epistemological division between the private and the public domains: in certain contexts I am constrained to consider my beliefs merely as beliefs rather than as truths, however convinced I may be that they are true, and (...) that I know it.’ Nagel's notion of epistemological restraint has been roundly criticized by perfectionist liberals and advocates of liberal neutrality alike. In fact, even Nagel has come to reject the epistemological argument—in part, because of the epistemological asymmetry that it presupposes. In this paper, I offer an answer to Nagel's critics, one that makes the notion of epistemological asymmetry coherent. In so doing, I show how to defend liberal neutrality without embracing skepticism. I structure the paper in the following way: Section II lays out the critique of epistemological restraint; Section III defends the coherence of this notion; and Section IV considers an objection to the analysis developed in Section III. (shrink)

Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. All are examples where humanitarian intervention has been called into action. This timely and important new volume explores the legal and moral issues which emerge when a state uses military force in order to protect innocent people from violence perpetrated or permitted by the government of that state. Humanitarian intervention can be seen as a moral duty to protect but it is also subject to misuse as a front for imperialism without regard to international law. (...) In Humanitarian Intervention, the contributors explore the many questions surrounding the issue. Is humanitarian intervention permitted by international law? If not, is it nevertheless morally permissible or morally required? Realistically, might not the main consequence of the humanitarian intervention principle be that powerful states will coerce weak ones for purposes of their own? The current debate is updated by two innovations in particular, the first being the shift of emphasis from the permissibility of intervening to the responsibility to intervene, and the second an emerging conviction that the response to humanitarian crises needs to be collective, coordinated, and preemptive. The authors shed light on the timely debate of when and how to intervene and when, if ever, not to. Contributors: Carla Bagnoli, Joseph Boyle, Anthony Coates, Thomas Franck, Brian D. Lepard, Catherine Lu, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Terry Nardin, Thomas Pogge, Melissa S. Williams, and Kok-Chor Tan. (shrink)

Thomas More’s Utopia, a book that will be 500 years old next year, is astonishingly radical stuff. Not many lord chancellors of England have denounced private property, advocated a form of communism and described the current social order as a “conspiracy of the rich.” Such men, the book announces, are “greedy, unscrupulous and useless.” There are a great number of noblemen, More complains, who live like drones on the labour of others. Tenants are evicted so that “one insatiable glutton (...) and accursed plague of his native land” may consolidate his fields. Monarchs, he argues, would do well to swear at their inauguration never to have more than 1,000lbs of gold in their coffers. Perhaps this is one reason why Utopia is... (shrink)

In this witty, accessible study, the prominent Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton launches a surprising defense of the reality of evil, drawing on literary, theological, and psychoanalytic sources to suggest that evil, no mere medieval artifact, is a real phenomenon with palpable force in our contemporary world. In a book that ranges from St. Augustine to alcoholism, Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Mann, Shakespeare to the Holocaust, Eagleton investigates the frightful plight of those doomed souls who apparently destroy for (...) no reason. In the process, he poses a set of intriguing questions. Is evil really a kind of nothingness? Why should it appear so glamorous and seductive? Why does goodness seem so boring? Is it really possible for human beings to delight in destruction for no reason at all? (shrink)

If the contemporaneity of difference seems the most striking characteristic of contemporary life today, its conceptual structure continues to elude definition. The same lack of clarity attends a frequently evoked parameter for the most desired resolution of such volatile differences: a cohesive, consensual world picturing, sometimes named “planetarity.” My overall project is a close examination of these two concepts, aimed at finding productive connections between them. Previous attempts to think them, from the confessions of St Augustine to the New York (...) Times columns of Thomas Friedman, reveal a plethora of illuminating insights, but the overall record reveals that both concepts remain inadequately imagined for current circumstances. Temporality and world-being seems to constellate around these concepts: contemporaneity, history, decoloniality, connectivity, artworlds, and planetarity. How might the contemporaneity of difference and the embattled yet emergent planetary commons be imagined in terms appropriate to present need – that is, as contemporaneous, differential and convergent? While this question is obviously of the broadest relevance, my specific goal within the history and theory of art and architecture is to articulate the conceptual structure underlying my recent accounts of the relationships between contemporary art and architecture and contemporary life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 115-121 [Access article in PDF] Instrumentality, Complexity, and Reason: A Christian Approach to Religions Terry C. Muck Asbury Theological Seminary I want to call into question The Paradigm, the threefold classification of Christian approaches to other religions as Exclusivism, Inclusivism, and Pluralism. I call this classification The Paradigm, with a capital T and a capital P, because it is the way we have categorized (...) Christian theological approaches to the other religions ever since 1982, when Alan Race proposed this "broad typological framework within which most of the current Christian theologies of religions can be placed," in his book Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions (Orbis Books). 1Race's was not the first attempt at such a paradigm. He was preceded by others, most notably Owen Thomas, who classified Christian responses to other religions under the headings of rationalism, romanticism, relativism, exclusivism, dialectic, reconception, tolerance, dialogue, catholicism, and presence. 2 But Thomas's categories have not stuck like Race's, perhaps because of the larger number and perhaps because they seem a mixture of apples and oranges, that is, a conglomeration of logical positions, emotive states, and simple demographics. Although this hodgepodge may be more true to the reality of the complex ways Christians relate to people of other faiths, Race's paradigm, simple and straightforward, has won out in the descriptive derby.I think it is time to question whether Race's paradigm should continue to be the primary way we classify the many ways Christian theologians and other Christians relate to the world's other religious traditions. I will describe why I think The Paradigm is losing its usefulness, make a proposal for a new way of looking at the other religions, and list both the losses/dangers and benefits of thinking in a new way. The Problem with the Paradigm The first sign that The Paradigm is showing its age is that very few people seem to really fit in any one of the three categories. I suspect that few of us here would be willing to say unambiguously, "I am an exclusivist," or "I am an inclusivist," or "I am [End Page 115] a pluralist." 3 And even if we were willing to identify with one or another of the options, then most likely we would in the same breath quickly say something like, "But let me tell you what I mean when I say I am an exclusivist (or inclusivist or pluralist)." That is, we quickly define the words in qualifying ways that address the objections that have been raised in reference to each of the positions:Exclusivists, for example, struggle to counter the charges of being inhumane, 4 or of making God seem inhumane, 5 or of being narrow, or of being misinformed, 6 or of being unscholarly. 7Inclusivists, for their part, struggle to counter the charges of being Christian exclusivists in disguise, 8 or of being offensive to non-Christians, 9 or of being pluralists in disguise, 10 or of holding a philosophically unstable position.Pluralists, in turn, make sure we know they are not relativists, 11 that they are not necessarily universalists, 12 that being a pluralist does not mean they are a-religious or that they consider themselves above the fray of common religious commitment. 13I don't think that this problem has just to do with the fact that the paradigm is what Max Weber called an ideal-type paradigm, where we set up ideal types as a way of clearly delineating logically possible positions vis-à-vis a presenting issue as a heuristic device. 14 Were that the case, it seems to me that we could still embrace The Paradigm as a way of talking about interreligious interchange and explicitly/implicitly acknowledge to one another that we recognize the ambiguity of the categories when it comes to applying them to complex individual adherents of complex religious traditions. 15I think dissatisfaction with The Paradigm goes beyond frustration with it as an ideal-type typology. The Paradigm has come to stand for... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 115-121 [Access article in PDF] Instrumentality, Complexity, and Reason: A Christian Approach to Religions Terry C. Muck Asbury Theological Seminary I want to call into question The Paradigm, the threefold classification of Christian approaches to other religions as Exclusivism, Inclusivism, and Pluralism. I call this classification The Paradigm, with a capital T and a capital P, because it is the way we have categorized (...) Christian theological approaches to the other religions ever since 1982, when Alan Race proposed this "broad typological framework within which most of the current Christian theologies of religions can be placed," in his book Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions (Orbis Books). 1Race's was not the first attempt at such a paradigm. He was preceded by others, most notably Owen Thomas, who classified Christian responses to other religions under the headings of rationalism, romanticism, relativism, exclusivism, dialectic, reconception, tolerance, dialogue, catholicism, and presence. 2 But Thomas's categories have not stuck like Race's, perhaps because of the larger number and perhaps because they seem a mixture of apples and oranges, that is, a conglomeration of logical positions, emotive states, and simple demographics. Although this hodgepodge may be more true to the reality of the complex ways Christians relate to people of other faiths, Race's paradigm, simple and straightforward, has won out in the descriptive derby.I think it is time to question whether Race's paradigm should continue to be the primary way we classify the many ways Christian theologians and other Christians relate to the world's other religious traditions. I will describe why I think The Paradigm is losing its usefulness, make a proposal for a new way of looking at the other religions, and list both the losses/dangers and benefits of thinking in a new way. The Problem with the Paradigm The first sign that The Paradigm is showing its age is that very few people seem to really fit in any one of the three categories. I suspect that few of us here would be willing to say unambiguously, "I am an exclusivist," or "I am an inclusivist," or "I am [End Page 115] a pluralist." 3 And even if we were willing to identify with one or another of the options, then most likely we would in the same breath quickly say something like, "But let me tell you what I mean when I say I am an exclusivist (or inclusivist or pluralist)." That is, we quickly define the words in qualifying ways that address the objections that have been raised in reference to each of the positions:Exclusivists, for example, struggle to counter the charges of being inhumane, 4 or of making God seem inhumane, 5 or of being narrow, or of being misinformed, 6 or of being unscholarly. 7Inclusivists, for their part, struggle to counter the charges of being Christian exclusivists in disguise, 8 or of being offensive to non-Christians, 9 or of being pluralists in disguise, 10 or of holding a philosophically unstable position.Pluralists, in turn, make sure we know they are not relativists, 11 that they are not necessarily universalists, 12 that being a pluralist does not mean they are a-religious or that they consider themselves above the fray of common religious commitment. 13I don't think that this problem has just to do with the fact that the paradigm is what Max Weber called an ideal-type paradigm, where we set up ideal types as a way of clearly delineating logically possible positions vis-à-vis a presenting issue as a heuristic device. 14 Were that the case, it seems to me that we could still embrace The Paradigm as a way of talking about interreligious interchange and explicitly/implicitly acknowledge to one another that we recognize the ambiguity of the categories when it comes to applying them to complex individual adherents of complex religious traditions. 15I think dissatisfaction with The Paradigm goes beyond frustration with it as an ideal-type typology. The Paradigm has come to stand for... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 22 (2002) 115-121 [Access article in PDF] Instrumentality, Complexity, and Reason: A Christian Approach to Religions Terry C. Muck Asbury Theological Seminary I want to call into question The Paradigm, the threefold classification of Christian approaches to other religions as Exclusivism, Inclusivism, and Pluralism. I call this classification The Paradigm, with a capital T and a capital P, because it is the way we have categorized (...) Christian theological approaches to the other religions ever since 1982, when Alan Race proposed this "broad typological framework within which most of the current Christian theologies of religions can be placed," in his book Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religions (Orbis Books). 1Race's was not the first attempt at such a paradigm. He was preceded by others, most notably Owen Thomas, who classified Christian responses to other religions under the headings of rationalism, romanticism, relativism, exclusivism, dialectic, reconception, tolerance, dialogue, catholicism, and presence. 2 But Thomas's categories have not stuck like Race's, perhaps because of the larger number and perhaps because they seem a mixture of apples and oranges, that is, a conglomeration of logical positions, emotive states, and simple demographics. Although this hodgepodge may be more true to the reality of the complex ways Christians relate to people of other faiths, Race's paradigm, simple and straightforward, has won out in the descriptive derby.I think it is time to question whether Race's paradigm should continue to be the primary way we classify the many ways Christian theologians and other Christians relate to the world's other religious traditions. I will describe why I think The Paradigm is losing its usefulness, make a proposal for a new way of looking at the other religions, and list both the losses/dangers and benefits of thinking in a new way. The Problem with the Paradigm The first sign that The Paradigm is showing its age is that very few people seem to really fit in any one of the three categories. I suspect that few of us here would be willing to say unambiguously, "I am an exclusivist," or "I am an inclusivist," or "I am [End Page 115] a pluralist." 3 And even if we were willing to identify with one or another of the options, then most likely we would in the same breath quickly say something like, "But let me tell you what I mean when I say I am an exclusivist (or inclusivist or pluralist)." That is, we quickly define the words in qualifying ways that address the objections that have been raised in reference to each of the positions:Exclusivists, for example, struggle to counter the charges of being inhumane, 4 or of making God seem inhumane, 5 or of being narrow, or of being misinformed, 6 or of being unscholarly. 7Inclusivists, for their part, struggle to counter the charges of being Christian exclusivists in disguise, 8 or of being offensive to non-Christians, 9 or of being pluralists in disguise, 10 or of holding a philosophically unstable position.Pluralists, in turn, make sure we know they are not relativists, 11 that they are not necessarily universalists, 12 that being a pluralist does not mean they are a-religious or that they consider themselves above the fray of common religious commitment. 13I don't think that this problem has just to do with the fact that the paradigm is what Max Weber called an ideal-type paradigm, where we set up ideal types as a way of clearly delineating logically possible positions vis-à-vis a presenting issue as a heuristic device. 14 Were that the case, it seems to me that we could still embrace The Paradigm as a way of talking about interreligious interchange and explicitly/implicitly acknowledge to one another that we recognize the ambiguity of the categories when it comes to applying them to complex individual adherents of complex religious traditions. 15I think dissatisfaction with The Paradigm goes beyond frustration with it as an ideal-type typology. The Paradigm has come to stand for... (shrink)

Dr. Norman L. Geisler has been called the "father of evangelical Christian philosophy." He has written more than one hundred books and taught at universities and top seminaries for some fifty-six years. He was the first president of the Evangelical Philosophical Society and the founder and first president of the International Society of Christian Apologetics. He has spoken or debated in more than two dozen countries and held pastoral/pulpit ministries in four states. Many view him as a cross between (...) class='Hi'>Thomas Aquinas and Billy Graham. No one has done more to communicate the modern challenges of the Faith to the "average" Christian, to the church, and to the academy. This volume offers creative and constructive essays from twenty-three contributors, all notable in their own right, who preserve and propagate Dr. Geisler's ideas and express appreciation for his influence. Those who know him best say he is "true, faithful, and blessed by God!" -- from book cover. (shrink)

In this witty, accessible study, the prominent Marxist thinker Terry Eagleton launches a surprising defense of the reality of evil, drawing on literary, theological, and psychoanalytic sources to suggest that evil, no mere medieval artifact, is a real phenomenon with palpable force in our contemporary world. In a book that ranges from St. Augustine to alcoholism, Thomas Aquinas to Thomas Mann, Shakespeare to the Holocaust, Eagleton investigates the frightful plight of those doomed souls who apparently destroy for (...) no reason. In the process, he poses a set of intriguing questions. Is evil really a kind of nothingness? Why should it appear so glamorous and seductive? Why does goodness seem so boring? Is it really possible for human beings to delight in destruction for no reason at all? (shrink)

Political Beckett? In September 1941, one of the twentieth century’s most apparently non-political artists secretly took up arms against fascism. Samuel Beckett, who with exquisite timing for a notorious pessimist was born on Good Friday 1906, had been living in Paris since 1937, self-exiled from his native country in the manner of many an eminent Irish writer. The Irish, unlike their erstwhile colonial proprietors, have always been a cosmopolitan nation, from the nomadic monks of the Middle Ages to the corporate (...) executives of the Celtic Tiger. If the oppressiveness of colonial rule turned some of them into nationalists, it turned others into citizens of the world. Joyce, Synge, Beckett and Thomas MacGreevy, men already caught between two or three cultures and languages, were to flourish in the rootless, polyglot, ambience of high-modernist Europe, rather as half a century later their compatriots were to embrace the European Union. It helped, in signing up to a linguistically self-conscious modernism, to stem from a nation in which language, as a political minefield, could never be taken for granted. (shrink)

This essay introduces a cluster of articles titled “Devalued Currency: An Elegiac Symposium on Paradigm Shifts.” Eagleton's piece addresses, from a perspective indebted to Walter Benjamin, the notion of Thomas Kuhn that “shifts” in the controlling paradigms of disciplines and practices are entirely transformative not only of their futures but also of their pasts. Benjamin argued that a work of art is a set of potentials that may or may not be realized in the vicissitudes of its afterlife. The (...) true significance of works might be said, therefore, to emerge only after some as-yet-unexpected event or upheaval makes their significance apparent. In this sense, we might argue that historical events make full sense only in the light of “judgment day”; until then, history remains an incoherent chronicle. But the totality that will one day be revealed cannot be anticipated. The past is open-ended because the present is, and meanwhile, the meaning of history is in our hands to change. Since we have that power, Eagleton suggests that we recycle figures of the past as characters in a comedy rather than tragedy. Still, it is never possible to say which figures of the past and which works are ultimately important and which are not, because we cannot say which mutations will result in major developments to come. No work or person is important or peripheral in itself or himself; it is the critic and historian who render them so. (shrink)

Oliver Cromwells historical reputation underwent significant change during the nineteenth century. Writers such as Thomas Carlyle were prominent in this reassessment, creating a Cromwell that found particular support among Nonconformists in the north of England. Projects to memorialize Cromwell included the raising of public statues. This article traces the history of the Manchester statue, the first major outdoor statue of Cromwell to be unveiled in the country. The project originated among Manchester radical Liberal Nonconformists in the early 1860s but (...) was not realized until 1875. It was the gift of Elizabeth Heywood; the sculptor was Matthew Noble. The project, including its intended site in Manchesters new Town Hall, was contentious, exposing political and religious divisions within the community, reinforcing the view that the reassessment of Cromwells place in the making of modern Britain was far from settled. (shrink)

Charvet’s arguments revolve around very recent discussions in Anglo-American analytical ethics and political philosophy. He considers and rejects, for example, arguments in favor of both Thomas Nagel’s version of ethical realism and the view that value is constituted by fulfillment of our strongest desires. Both suffer from the inadequate “shared assumption as to the fundamental independence of desire and value, and hence desire and reason”. Instead, we should see both as “interdependent”; value “comes into the world through the medium (...) of the interacting desire and the belief systems of the organism as these articulate and project onto the environment the organism’s needs”. He likewise rejects Nagel’s and Parfit’s views on prudential rationality and personal identity, arguing that no “attempt to establish [personal identity] purely in impersonal terms” can succeed, that “the self is a basic primitive concept that is presupposed in all experience”. (shrink)

Der Gedanke, der sich in der modernen Idee der Autonomie verdichtet, ist ein doppelter: Die Figur der Autonomie enthält zugleich eine neue Auffassung von Normativität und eine eigene Konzeption von Freiheit. Dem Gedanken der Autonomie zufolge ist ein Gesetz, das wahrhaft normativ ist, eines, als dessen Urheber wir uns selbst betrachten können; und eine Freiheit, die im vollen Sinne wirklich ist, drückt sich in Gestalt eben solcher selbstgegebener Gesetze aus. Die Idee der Autonomie artikuliert so die Einsicht, dass man Freiheit (...) und Gesetz nicht durch ihre Entgegensetzung bestimmen kann, sondern durcheinander erläutern muss. Wirkliche Freiheit ist nicht Freiheit von Gesetzen, sondern Freiheit in Gesetzen; verbindliche Normen sind nicht das, was Freiheit äußerlich beschränkt, sondern das, was Freiheit innerlich verwirklicht. Die Idee der Autonomie, die für die moderne praktische Philosophie seit Rousseau und Kant grundlegend ist, zielt so darauf, Freiheit und Verbindlichkeit in einem Zuge zu artikulieren: durch die Form selbstgegebener Gesetze. Mit Beiträgen von Robert Brandom, Judith Butler, Thomas Khurana, Christoph Menke, Terry Pinkard und Sebastian Rödl. (shrink)

Thomas & Karmiloff- Smith show that the assumption of residual normality does not hold in connectionist simulations, and argue that RN has been inappropriately applied to childhood disorders. We agree. However, we suggest that the RN hypothesis may never have been fully viable, either empirically or computationally.

Der Gedanke, der sich in der modernen Idee der Autonomie verdichtet, ist ein doppelter: Die Figur der Autonomie enthält zugleich eine neue Auffassung von Normativität und eine eigene Konzeption von Freiheit. Dem Gedanken der Autonomie zufolge ist ein Gesetz, das wahrhaft normativ ist, eines, als dessen Urheber wir uns selbst betrachten können; und eine Freiheit, die im vollen Sinne wirklich ist, drückt sich in Gestalt eben solcher selbstgegebener Gesetze aus. Die Idee der Autonomie artikuliert so die Einsicht, dass man Freiheit (...) und Gesetz nicht durch ihre Entgegensetzung bestimmen kann, sondern durcheinander erläutern muss. Wirkliche Freiheit ist nicht Freiheit von Gesetzen, sondern Freiheit in Gesetzen; verbindliche Normen sind nicht das, was Freiheit äußerlich beschränkt, sondern das, was Freiheit innerlich verwirklicht. Die Idee der Autonomie, die für die moderne praktische Philosophie seit Rousseau und Kant grundlegend ist, zielt so darauf, Freiheit und Verbindlichkeit in einem Zuge zu artikulieren: durch die Form selbstgegebener Gesetze. -/- Mit Beiträgen von Robert Brandom, Judith Butler, Thomas Khurana, Christoph Menke, Terry Pinkard und Sebastian Rödl. (shrink)

In our reply to Rowe, we explain why most of what he criticizes is actually the product of his misunderstanding our argument. We begin by showing that nearly all of his Part 1 misconceives our project by defending a position we never attacked. We then question why Rowe thinks the distinction we make between motivational and virtue intellectualism is unimportant before developing a defense of the consistency of our views about different desires. Next we turn to Rowe’s criticisms of our (...) account of the prudential paradox and show these criticisms to rest on a misunderstanding. We close with some remarks about the implausibility and textual problems Rowe faces in denying that Socrates recognized a role for painful punishments. (shrink)

My thirteen years as president of Hastings have been rich in solidarity. Now for some solitude, and a new adventure: Cynthia and I will relocate to Cape Cod, a place rich in family memories. I'll explore the roads and trails on my bicycle and, if I can become a competent kayaker, the waterways. Some of my best thinking has come while riding. I'll have a study there, a place to think and write. I will continue to support the initiatives we've (...) begun at the Center, especially bioethics in the public interest and the flourishing of bioethics internationally. The challenge is to balance solitude and solidarity. Next year I'll be the Terry Visiting Scholar at Yale, a wonderful chance to discuss ideas with students and faculty there. I'm considering other opportunities to share what I've learned and to learn from others. To everyone, thanks for your patience, wisdom, and support. May your next adventure be surprising and fulfilling. (shrink)

The paper documents the post-war retrenchment and failure of the post-war British Consumer Co-operative Movement. In contrast to the general failure one CEO, Terry Thomas stands out both for his success in co-operative rebranding and returning to profitability the UK Co-operative Bank and because he alone amongst the top echelons of the Co-operative Groups Management based his strategies on a clearly articulated philosophy based on his understanding of the values and purpose of the co-operative movement rooted in its (...) historical traditions grounded in the writings and achievements of Robert Owen, The paper goes on to provide a case study of the bank’s process of transformation from loss-making subsidiary to the first positive co-operative national brand in the post-war period of its history. The author argues that lack of appropriate vision based on the founding values and purposes of the Co-operative Movement is the principal reason for the management’s and governance failures that have beset the UK Co-operative Group. Instead of using the past to help in understanding the present and planning for the future, the UK Co-operative Group Leadership ignored it or worse used the past successes to congratulate itself and disguise its manifest failures. In this, they were supported by an uncritical Co-operative Union. Davis argues large co-operatives cannot be managed by a civil service responsible to an elected board. Co-operatives need a servant-leadership model of professional management dedicated to the transformational goals set by the founders of the co-operative movement. This needs a radical rethink and promotion of co-operative management education and a dedicated executive recruitment that seeks out value-based professionals whose attitudes and values are compatible with Co-operative values, ownership and purpose. (shrink)

The Phenomenology of Spirit is both one of Hegel's most widely read books and one of his most obscure. The book is the most detailed commentary on Hegel's work available. It develops an independent philosophical account of the general theory of knowledge, culture, and history presented in the Phenomenology. In a clear and straightforward style, Terry Pinkard reconstructs Hegel's theoretical philosophy and shows its connection to ethical and political theory. He sets the work in a historical context and shows (...) the contemporary relevance of Hegel's thought for European and Anglo-American philosophers. The principal audience for the book is teachers and students of philosophy, but the great interest in Hegel's work and the clarity of Pinkard's exposition ensure that historians of ideas, political scientists, and literary theorists will also read it. (shrink)

There are two main ways in which an interest in the sociology of literature can be justified. The first form of justification is realist: literature is in fact deeply conditioned by its social context, and any critical account of it which omits this fact is therefore automatically deficient. The second way is pragmatist: literature is in fact shaped by all kinds of factors and readable in all sorts of contexts, but highlighting its social determinants is useful and desirable from a (...) particular political standpoint.Both of these cases would seem to have something going for them. Hardly anybody would want to deny that literature is in an important sense a social product; but this claim is so general that a specifically “sociological” treatment of literary works does not necessarily follow from it. Metaphors and line endings, after all, are also in some sense social products, so that to attend to these elements of a literary text is not necessarily to deny the work’s sociality. “Social product” would seem too comfortably broad a category, just as “economic product” would seem too crippingly narrow. A problem with the realist case about the sociology of literature, then, is that it is not very clear what exactly is being claimed. The pragmatist case would seem a persuasive rationale for, say, a feminist reading of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, since few people would want to claim that the poem was in some central way about patriarchal relations in the sense that The Rape of the Lock is. A Marxist critic who attended to questions of social class in Treasure Island, perhaps placing Long John Silver in the context of the British shop stewards’ movement and celebrating his antagonism to the gentry, would not necessarily be committed to holding that these issues were “in fact” crucial to the text; he or she would insist instead that they should be brought to light because they were crucial to history and society in general. Terry Eagleton’s recent works include collected essays—Against the Grain and William Shakespeare—as well as a novel, Saints and Scholars. His work in progress is on the ideology of the aesthetic. (shrink)

This study is divided into three parts: the classical tradition; Althusser and after; and modern debates. It includes chapters on class consciousness, ideology and utopia, and the epistemology of sociology, looking at the work of Georg Lukas, Karl Mannheim and Lucien Goldman respectively.