In a recent article Yvonne Chiu argues that nonuniformed combat is impermissible. However, her argument that by fighting without uniforms nonuniformed guerillas coerce civilians into participating in the armed conflict and thus into surrendering their immunity (their right not to be attacked) fails: there is no coercion, no participation, and no surrendering of immunity. Yet even if this argument of hers were correct, it would still not show that such “coercion” would amount to a rights infringement. Moreover, even if (...) it did, there are examples that show that such an infringement would sometimes be perfectly justified. Finally, if she were right that forcing civilians into a moral position that they have not accepted or chosen is absolutely wrong, then this would affect the moral status of uniformed combatants no less than it would affect the moral status of nonuniformed ones. (shrink)
This English translation of Vom Wesen der Sprache, volume 85 of Martin Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe, contains fascinating discussions of language that are important both for those interested in Heidegger's thought and for those who wish to ...
This book offers a radically new interpretation of the work of Theodor Adorno. In contrast to the conventional view that Adorno's is in essence a critical philosophy, Yvonne Sherratt traces systematically a utopian thesis that pervades all the major aspects of Adorno's thought. She places Adorno's work in the context of German Idealist and later Marxist and Freudian traditions, and then analyses his key works to show how the aesthetic, epistemological, psychological, historical and sociological thought interconnect to form a (...) utopian image. The book will be eagerly sought out by students and specialists in philosophy, social and political theory, intellectual history, literary theory and cultural studies. (shrink)
Continental Philosophy of Social Science demonstrates the unique and autonomous nature of the continental approach to social science and contrasts it with the Anglo-American tradition. Yvonne Sherratt argues for the importance of an historical understanding of the Continental tradition in order to appreciate its individual, humanist character. Examining the key traditions of hermeneutic, genealogy, and critical theory, and the texts of major thinkers such as Gadamer, Ricoeur, Derrida, Nietzsche, Foucault, the Early Frankfurt School and Habermas, she also contextualizes contemporary (...) developments within strands of thought stemming back to Ancient Greece and Rome. Sherratt shows how these modes of thinking developed through medieval Christian thought into the Enlightenment and Romantic eras, before becoming mainstays of twentieth-century disciplines. Continental Philosophy of Social Science will serve as the essential textbook for courses in philosophy or social sciences. (shrink)
This book offers a thorough reflection on the relationship between autonomy and paternalism, and argues that, from both theoretical and practical angles, the ...
Philosophers within the discipline of the history of philosophy have long since demonstrated a preoccupation with the history of aesthetic ideas. However, not all aesthetic concepts in 19th- and 20th-century thought have been given an adequate analysis. One concept which, while attracting interest in literary theory debates, has rarely been mentioned in history of philosophy debates, is that of aura . The reason for the marginal role of aura in present debates is due no doubt to the difficult and sometimes (...) utterly obscure nature of Adorno's texts, which often veils their underlying philosophical content. Aura concept is important because it represents a still rather neglected strand of Adorno's Aesthetische Theorie , which has often been regarded as solely an avocation of the aesthetics of the ‘New’. This article offers an original and in-depth analysis of this key concept showing how significant it is to Adorno's overall project. Key Words: Theodor Adorno • aesthetics • aura • Walter Benjamin • distance • gaze • proximity • receptivity. (shrink)
After a regime-changing war, a state often engages in lustration—condemnation and punishment of dangerous, corrupt, or culpable remnants of the previous system—e.g., de-Nazification or the more recent de-Ba’athification in Iraq. This common practice poses an important moral dilemma for liberals because even thoughtful and nuanced lustration involves condemning groups of people, instead of treating each case individually. It also raises important questions about collective agency, group treatment, and rectifying historical injustices. Liberals often oppose lustration because it denies moral individualism and (...) ignores rule of law, and their only justifications for lustration are consequentialist ones. This article suggests that lustration may not necessarily be a problem for liberals. While group treatment might be justified on grounds of convenience and pragmatism in times of transitional justice, there are also valid moral arguments consistent with moral individualism and due process for wholesale group punishment after a war. This article offers four overlapping moral justifications, in a robust defense of the core concept of lustration that is covered by each argument. (shrink)
For Quine, the ontological commitments of a discourse are what fall under its (objectual) quantifiers. The recent literature, however, is beginning to move away from this picture. There are direct challenges to Quine's criterion, and there are also attempts to provide alternatives. Azzouni suggests that the ontological commitments of a discourse should be determined by an existence predicate instead. The availability of this alternative forces an adjudication between Qune's criterion and the predicate approach to ontological commitment. I argue that to (...) adjudicate between these criteria for ontological commitment, we need first to adjudicate between criteria for what exists. My thanks to Jody Azzouni and an anonymous referee for helpful suggestions. (shrink)
Non-uniformed combat morally infringes on civilians’ fundamental right to immunity and exacts an impermissible form of unofficial conscription that is morally prohibited even if the civilians knowingly consent to it. It is often argued that revolutionary groups burdened by resource disparities relative to the state or who claim alternative sources of political legitimacy (such as national self-determination or the constitution of a political collective) are justified in using unconventional tactics such as non-uniformed combat. Neither those reasons nor the provision of (...) public goods, however, are sufficient to justify such rights violations and this form of conscription, and it calls into question the suitability of current international legal protections for the non-uniformed. (shrink)
Traditional approaches to theory structure and theory change in science do not fare well when confronted with the practice of certain fields of science. We offer an account of contemporary practice in molecular biology designed to address two questions: Is theory change in this area of science gradual or saltatory? What is the relation between molecular biology and the fields of traditional biology? Our main focus is a recent episode in molecular biology, the discovery of enzymatic RNA. We argue that (...) our reconstruction of this episode shows that traditional approaches to theory structure and theory change need considerable refinement if they are to be defended as generally applicable. 1This paper emerged from discussions between us, and we are both equally responsible for its errors. We would like to thank Yvonne Paterson for helpful comments. (shrink)
Although there is no more iconic, stalwart, and eloquent defender of liberty and representative democracy than J.S. Mill, he sometimes endorses non-democratic forms of governance. This article explains the reasons behind this seeming aberration and shows that Mill actually has complex and nuanced views of the transition from non-democratic to democratic government, including the comprehensive and parallel material, cultural, institutional, and character reforms that must occur, and the mechanism by which they will be enacted. Namely, an enlightened despot must cultivate (...) democratic virtues such as obedience, industriousness, spirit of nationality, and resistance to tyranny in the population and simultaneously prepare the way for his own demise and secure his own legitimacy by transitioning to the rule of law. This challenges recent scholarship that paints Mill’s non-democratic views as crudely and uncritically imperialist, because it fails to recognize and engage seriously with his sophisticated (if ultimately problematic) theory of individual and institutional development under enlightened colonialism. (shrink)
Adorno and Benjamin offer us an aesthetic concept, that of aura. The analysis of this has tended to circumnavigate the concept, that is, it has examined the historical dimension to aura, or turned to the texts of Adorno and Benjamin with a view to finding discrepancies between their theses. However, the important conceptual detail has not been explored with suf ficient rigour. My question is a simple one: what is aura? How do we piece together its various features such as (...) 'a feeling of distance', 'pointing beyond a work's givenness' and 'a capacity to look back'? I provide a more in-depth and thoroughgoing analysis of these qualities and their interrelation than has so far been offered. I also argue for the relevance of aura to modernity. Key Words: Adorno • . aesthetic • . aura • . Benjamin • . indeterminacy • . modernity. (shrink)
Yet, he also says that it is philosophically indeterminate which criterion for what exists is correct. Nominalism is the view that certain objects ( i.e ., abstract objects) do not exist, and not the view that it is philosophically indeterminate whether or not they do. I resolve the dilemma that Azzouni's claims pose: Azzouni is a non-factualist about what exists, but he is a factualist about which criterion for what exists our community of speakers has adopted. It is in the (...) latter sense only that Azzouni can call himself a nominalist. My thanks to Jody Azzouni and to an anonymous referee for helpful suggestions. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)
Distributed Cognition is a hybrid approach to studying all aspects of cognition, from a cognitive, social and organisational perspective. The most well known level of analysis is to account for complex socially distributed cognitive activities, of which a diversity of technological artefacts and other tools and representations are an indispensable part.
This study investigates the relationship between intention to behave ethically and gender within the context of national culture. Using Reidenbach and Robin's measures of the ethical dimensions of justice and utilitarianism in a sample of business students from three different countries, we found that gender is significantly related to the respondents' intention to behave ethically. Women relied on both justice as well as utilitarianism when making moral decisions. By contrast, men relied only on justice, and did not rely on utilitarianism (...) when faced with the same ethical issues. Further, women's intention to behave was contextual, significantly affected by two national culture dimensions (uncertainty avoidance and individualism), whereas men's decisions were more universal, and not related to national culture dimensions. (shrink)
In this comparative survey of 126 Brazilian and U.S. business professionals, we explore the effect of national culture on ethical decision-making within the context of business. Using Reidenbach and Robin''s (1988) multi-criteria ethics instrument, we examined how these two countries'' differences on Hofstede''s individualism/collectivism dimension are related to the manner in which business practitioners make ethical decisions. Our results indicate that Brazilians and Americans evaluate the ethical content of actions or decisions differently when applying utilitarian criteria. By contrast, business people (...) from both countries do not differ significantly when they use egoistic criteria in evaluating the ethical nature of business decisions. (shrink)
In this article I argue that Adorno makes an internal critique of instrumental reason. I depict Adorno's notion of instrumental reason by showing how he combines Freud's materialistic epistemology with his own German Idealist inheritance. I outline his argument for the decline of instrumental reason into mythic 'animism'. Key Words: Adorno • animism • enlightenment • Freud • instrumental reason • myth.
After having received little attention over the past decades, one of the least known human rights—the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications—has had its dust blown off. Although included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR)—be it at the very end of both instruments -this right hardly received any attention from States, UN bodies and programmes and academics. The role of science in (...) societies and its benefits and potential danger were discussed in various international fora, but hardly ever in a human rights context. Nowadays, within a world that is increasingly turning to science and technology for solutions to persistent socio-economic and development problems, the human dimension of science also receives increased attention, including the human right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications. This contribution analyses the possible legal obligations of States in relation to the right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications, in particular as regards health. (shrink)
This paper argues that, contrary to the views of Nancy Cartwright and Brian Ellis, explanations are factive: if a statement is taken to be an explanation, it also has to be accepted as true. Taking explanations to be true, in turn, seems to imply that all the entities posited in explanations are real. But this is precisely what some philosophers, such as Cartwright and Ellis, want to deny. What these philosophers do not want to deny, however, is that such statements (...) do explain. As a result, they see themselves forced to reject the facticity of explanation, a strategy that is unacceptable in my view. In order to avoid the further conclusion that all of the entities explanations posit exist, I propose to separate truth from ontology: explanations can be true, but the truth of these explanations alone does not commit us to the entities that these explanations posit. To determine where the ontological commitments of our statements lie, we must instead start with a criterion (a necessary and sufficient condition) for what exists. For instance, if all and only entities with causal powers are real, then this tells us that the only entities our true statements are committed to are entities with causal powers. (shrink)
Given the recent ethics scandals in the United States, there has been a renewed focus on understanding the antecedents to ethical decision-making in the research literature. Since ethical norms and standards of behavior are not universally consistent, an individual’s choice of referent may exert a large influence on his/her ethical decision-making. This study used a social identity theory lens to empirically examine the relative influence of the macro- and micro-level variables of national culture and peers on an individual’s intention to (...) behave ethically. Our sample consisted of respondents from Germany, Italy, and Japan. The results indicated that both national culture and peers were found to act as significant referents in ethical decision-making dilemmas. Although peers exerted a much stronger influence on an individual’s ethical decision-making, the impact of peers varied depending on the national culture levels of individualism and power distance. (shrink)
The prediction of protein–protein interactions based on independently obtained structural information for each interacting partner remains an important challenge in computational chemistry. Procedures where hypothetical interaction models (or decoys) are generated, then ranked using a biochemically relevant scoring function have been garnering interest as an avenue for addressing such challenges. The program PatchDock has been shown to produce reasonable decoys for modeling the association between pig alpha-amylase and the VH-domains of camelide antibody raised against it. We designed a biochemically relevant (...) method by which PatchDock decoys could be ranked in order to separate near-native structures from false positives. Several thousand steps of energy minimization were used to simulate induced fit within the otherwise rigid decoys and to rank them. We applied a partial free energy function to rank each of the binding modes, improving discrimination between near-native structures and false positives. Sorting decoys according to strain energy increased the proportion of near-native decoys near the bottom of the ranked list. Additionally, we propose a novel method which utilizes regression analysis for the selection of minimization convergence criteria and provides approximation of the partial free energy function as the number of algorithmic steps approaches infinity. (shrink)
In the United States, disease screening is offered to the public as a consumer service. It has been proposed that the act of “consumption” is a manifestation of agency and that the decision to consume is an exercise of autonomy. The enthusiasm of the American public for disease screening and the expansion in the demand for all sorts of disease screening in recent years can be viewed as an expression of such autonomy. Here, we argue that the enthusiasm for disease (...) screening witnessed in the American public today may be more a reflection of the constraint on autonomy than its facilitation. It is our opinion that the articulation of socio-historical processes has contributed to a moral imperative which is reflected in the decision making of individuals around disease screening. We suggest medical and health professionals have a responsibility to facilitate the exercise of individual autonomy in health care decision making as an integral component of professional obligation. These professionals need to problematise healthcare activities that constrain individual autonomy. (shrink)
This book represents the most comprehensive attempt to date to explore and test Derrida's contribution and influence on the study of theology, biblical studies, and the philosophy of religion. Over the course of the last decade, the writings of Derrida and the key concepts that emerge from his work such as the gift, apocalypse, hospitality, and messianism have wrought far-reaching and irresistible changes in the way that scholars approach biblical texts, comparative religious studies, and religious violence, for instance, as well (...) as the way they understand basic religious themes as myth, creation, forgiveness, one-ness, and multiplicity. In addition to original contributions from over twenty highly-regarded scholars including John Caputo, Daniel Boyarin, Edith Wyschogrod, Tim Beal, and Gil Anidjar, the volume opens with a lengthy interview with Derrida. (shrink)
Greatly aided by an information age in which protesting laborers in a remote offshore outpost can capture front page headlines around the globe, theSarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SARBOX) has made corporate transparency the linchpin for good corporate governance. Under a SARBOX-enhancedregulatory framework, publicly traded corporations are required to rapidly disclose material changes in their financial conditions or operations—changes such as impairments to goodwill, a trademark, or some other intangible corporate asset. Especially challenging for multinational corporations (MNCs) with far-flung corporate empires (...) is the need to stay abreast of the ebb and flow of goodwill, at a time when transnational human rights groups are aggressively mobilizing world opinion against the sweatshop labor conditions that abound at the offshore production sites favored by MNCs. The author explains why the convergence of a digital age of free-flowing information and the advent of SARBOX, a legislative enactment of paraenetic design, is causing the boards of MNCs to more critically evaluate the long-term costs of their offshore operations. (shrink)
Milan Kundera's first major novel, The Joke, was written in 1961-1965, before he made the decision to leave Czechoslovakia and take up residency as a political exile in France.1 With a few noteworthy exceptions, critics of the work focused on its political message in a Cold War context. This was easy to do: its plot revolves around an avid young Czech communist (Ludvik), who writes an ironic postcard to his overly earnest girlfriend while she is away at a political training (...) camp. The year is 1950, and among intellectuals, enthusiasm for a new era of Soviet-mediated socialism is a genuine response to the chaotic disintegration of old certainties after the Nazi occupation of the country. Ludvik is dedicated to the .. (shrink)
This paper explores the significative structure and normative quality of the child wish by focusing on the concepts that are used when people speak about it. Does having children belong to the category of human needs, or is it rather something that people desire? The Principle of Precedence holds that needs tend to have a substantially greater moral impact than desires. In order to do justice both to people’s profound happiness that goes with fulfilment of the child wish and to (...) the great distress that goes with involuntary childlessness it seems to be right then to argue that having children belongs to the category of human needs; and to use the term from Harry Frankfurt, to the category of constrained volitional needs. Accordingly, it might be argued that society has a rights-based duty to prevent involuntary childlessness. Contrary to this, I defend the thesis that an ethics of desire, which conceives the child wish as rooted in a symbolic desire, leads to a more adequate understanding of the child wish in all its various phenomenological aspects. (shrink)
To augment the consumption of the ever growing production of processed foods, food companies are specifically targeting children with their advertisements. Advertising has even infiltrated the educational system in the form of corporate sponsored “educational materials.” This paper discusses the effects such aggressive forms of advertising have on the development of personal autonomy, or self-governance. I argue that the bad reasoning skills such advertisements promote undermine the development of the very abilities children need to become adults capable of making rational (...) choices. A detailed look at several types of food advertisements aimed at children supports this claim. (shrink)
The purpose of this article is to illustrate the role of sociology in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR). It presents a case study conducted by a research group consisting of two University partners in association with a Swiss SME. This project attempted to draw conclusions from a specific sociological consultancy research project on the general possibilities and opportunities of sociology in applied research and operational sustainability consulting. On the basis of the project findings, the article reflects on the (...) extent to which sociology could profitably intervene, on the limitations for sociological research and consultations in this field and on the conclusions that can be drawn for future analyses. (shrink)
Goodman gave us resources for recognizing art; he enumerated “symptoms of the aesthetic” or features which explain something’s functioning as a work of art. But that’s not enough to tell us how a work of art signifies or bears meaning. I apply Goodman’s notion of exemplification to address the question of how dances signify. It is too often assumed that if dance doesn’t fit the model of natural language then it can’t have cognitive content; this essay is concerned with showing (...) how it can. I consider Yvonne Rainer’s dance Trio A, an archetype of the pedestrian postmodem dance of the 1960s. Although at first sight it appears to be an instance of ordinary movement, Trio A is not ordinary movement simpliciter. I argue that Trio A conveys what it does by representing something we take to be pedestrian movement, and it represents by exemplifying certain features we associate with ordinary movement. Representation and signification cannot be equated and what is signified depends not only on what is represented but on how it comes to be represented by the work. (shrink)
Greatly aided by an information age in which protesting laborers in a remote offshore outpost can capture front page headlines around the globe, theSarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SARBOX) has made corporate transparency the linchpin for good corporate governance. Under a SARBOX-enhancedregulatory framework, publicly traded corporations are required to rapidly disclose material changes in their financial conditions or operations—changes such as impairments to goodwill, a trademark, or some other intangible corporate asset. Especially challenging for multinational corporations (MNCs) with far-flung corporate empires (...) is the need to stay abreast of the ebb and flow of goodwill, at a time when transnational human rights groups are aggressively mobilizing world opinion against the sweatshop labor conditions that abound at the offshore production sites favored by MNCs. The author explains why the convergence of a digital age of free-flowing information and the advent of SARBOX, a legislative enactment of paraenetic design, is causing the boards of MNCs to more critically evaluate the long-term costs of their offshore operations. (shrink)
Across Europe, micro firms (SMEs with up to 10 employees) account for the vast majority of business activities. Supporting micro firms in the transition towards sustainability is essential: many small steps will result in a big leap. To this scope knowledge is needed on the specific challenges encountered by micro firms in the region they operate in. The research presented here offers a contribution to this knowledge. It explores the perception of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), its rewards and difficulties by (...) micro firms in Frisia, Groningen and Drenthe - the three Northern provinces of The Netherlands. (shrink)
Recorrer las etapas de formación del sujeto moderno occidental y mostrar que no siempre existió tal como lo conocemos es el objeto de este trabajo. Desde los filósofos presocráticos y Sócrates, Platón y San Agustín, la paulatina configuración de un espacio interior favorece la formación de un yo autónomo, vinculado ontológicamente en su inicio. Su posterior emancipación y el advenimiento de una reflexividad radical durante la Modernidad van ligados a la filosofía de Descartes, Locke y Kant.
Many philosophers (such as, for instance, Nancy Cartwright, Brian Ellis, and Hartry Field) regard scientific practice as the final arbiter in ontology. In this short paper, I argue that the very philosophers who profess to derive their ontological commitments from scientific practice impose certain views on the theories established by that practice that the practice itself does not support. This is not consistent with their view that science tells us what there is.
Recent debates about the legacy (and, sometimes, surpassing) of Derridean philosophy have often oriented themselves around questions of a new austerity in relation to the implicit philosophical functioning of God. Indeed, an increasing philosophical vigilance about the death or nonexistence of God has begun to be presented as a hallmark of recent criticisms of earlier receptions of Derrida and, by way of messianic structures of time, of Derridean politics as well. We argue that the inflating value of atheism in recent (...) texts operates most effectively within a broader forgetfulness of the many modes in which a serial dying of gods constitutes a more fundamental quality of the religio-political archive than the stability or life of these gods. We find, moreover, there to be something comical about a reconfiguration of the ontotheological archive around a tableau of serially dying Gods, this God who cannot stabilize or maintain for long any system of divine life support. Most importantly, we find that our sense of comedy is itself indicative of important shifts within the stylistics of Derridean discussions of auto-immunity and supplement which have yet to be worked through with any real seriousness. In this respect, our reflections pair Bergson's reflections on the universe as a ‘machine for the manufacture of gods’ with Bergson's explorations of comedy as a fundamentally mechanical affair. The serially dying gods of our religious and philosophical traditions are best understood in the same modes as Bergson's comedy, often marked by an automatism of everyday mechanisms of life which outlive their useful functioning. (shrink)
This study focuses on the cultural context of ethical decision making by considering the relationship between power distance and ethical judgment. Specifically, we propose that this relationship exists because of the influence of peers on ethical judgment and perceptions of justice. Considering the importance of peers in stage three of Kohlberg's model of moral development, we argue that peers are the basis for social comparisons, social cues and social identification and, hence, are critical to an individual's beliefs about justice. Using (...) scenarios developed by Reidenbach and Robin, data were collected from German and Italian graduate business students. Germany and Italy differ substantially in power distance, but not in the three other cultural dimensions of Hofstede. Results show that the ethical assessment of the respondents from the two countries differs when justice criteria are used. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed. (shrink)
Peer review is a widely accepted instrument for raising the quality of science. Peer review limits the enormous unstructured influx of information and the sheer amount of dubious data, which in its absence would plunge science into chaos. In particular, peer review offers the benefit of eliminating papers that suffer from poor craftsmanship or methodological shortcomings, especially in the experimental sciences. However, we believe that peer review is not always appropriate for the evaluation of controversial hypothetical science. We argue that (...) the process of peer review can be prone to bias towards ideas that affirm the prior convictions of reviewers and against innovation and radical new ideas. Innovative hypotheses are thus highly vulnerable to being “filtered out” or made to accord with conventional wisdom by the peer review process. Consequently, having introduced peer review, the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses may be unable to continue its tradition as a radical journal allowing discussion of improbable or unconventional ideas. Hence we conclude by asking the publisher to consider re-introducing the system of editorial review to Medical Hypotheses. (shrink)
All organisations must be able to answer questions from their respective constituencies. It is not an exaggeration to say that, in this respect, it is a challenge to handle the extremely broad action platform of local government administrations (municipalities). The present paper is a walk-through of questions from the citizens that are managed at Botkyrka municipality, Sweden. It is focussed on the use of an âintelligentâ citizen assistant.
