The study explored the motivations behind Australian wool producers’ intentions regarding mulesing; a surgical procedure that will be voluntarily phased out after 2010, following retailer boycotts led by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Telephone interviews were conducted with 22 West Australian wool producers and consultants to elicit their behavioral, normative and control beliefs about mulesing and alternative methods of breech strike prevention. Results indicate that approximately half the interviewees intend to continue mulesing, despite attitudes toward the act of (...) mulesing being quite negative. This indicates that attitudes alone are unlikely to be good predictors of this goal directed behavior. Most respondents believed mulesing was more effective and involved less cost, time, and effort than the currently available alternatives to prevent breech strike. Further, they felt relatively little social pressure, as they believed few consumers were concerned about mulesing. However, they noted that if consumer sentiment changed they would likely change their practices. Thus, attitudes are likely to be only one of several factors influencing intentions to change farm practices to address societal concerns about animal welfare. Further, mulesing appears to be goal - directed behavior , suggesting that other factors depicted by the Model of Goal-directed Behavior (MGB; Perugini and Bagozzi In: Br J Soc Psychol, 40: 79–98, 2001 ) may be worth exploring in this context. Finally, these results provide insight into how policy makers may influence farmers to change practices in response to societal pressure for improving farm animal welfare. (shrink)

The multi-disciplinary unit Social Responsibility in Action was developed for students with an interest in ethics who were completing undergraduate degrees in Arts, Commerce, Design or Science at an Australian research-intensive university. The academic objectives of this unit were to increase student awareness, knowledge, understanding and critical thinking skills related to various ethical issues. Lecturers from five disciplines collaborated in the design and delivery of SRA, which comprised lectures, tutorials and a research-based project. Anonymous surveys were administered at the start (...) and end of the semester to obtain feedback on student expectations and learning experience, respectively. Data across three student cohorts showed that at the start of semester, 80% of student comments indicated a desire to expand their interest of ethical matters, 59% a desire to gain understanding and knowledge and 59% to gain critical thinking or communication skills. SRA was extremely well received by students, with 98% of respondents indicating that this multi-disciplinary ethics unit had met their expectations. Students also found that the variety of teaching styles, unit content and multi-disciplinary approach stimulated learning. (shrink)

Ethical debate about the use of animals in science is argued within different ethical frameworks; mainly utilitarianism, deontology, relativism or emotional ethics, with some debaters preferring particular frameworks. Stakeholders to the debate are veterinarians, scientists using animals, animal welfare groups and the general public. To estimate the balance of ethical frameworks used, we ran a discourse analysis of written texts by each stakeholder . The discourse analysis targeted the description of animals, instances of emotional language and language associated with utilitarianism, (...) deontology and relativism. Frequencies were compared using ANOVAs and Tukey tests. All stakeholders used words associated with all frameworks but emotional language was the most used followed by utilitarian , relativist and deontological language. Emotional language was used in texts from the general public more than in texts from veterinarians and scientists and animal welfare representatives . Animals were mainly described in a utilitarian way , more frequently by scientists than the general public . All stakeholders preferentially used negative emotional language when referring to animals than positive , and all stakeholders prioritised human interests over animals . Not surprisingly, a mixture of ethical frameworks were used to assess the ethics of animal experimentation. However, the language used in texts from animal welfare groups and the general public suggest that those two groups preferentially build arguments with emotion rather than utilitarianism, a framework that is privileged by veterinarians and scientists since they primarily use animals. (shrink)

In Australia, the ethics of the use of animals for scientific purposes are assessed by Animal Ethics Committees that are comprised of the four major parties involved in the animal experimentation debate: veterinarians, scientists using animals, animal welfare representatives and members of the public. AECs are required to assess animal experiments as ethical based on a cost/benefit analysis, suggesting the use of consequentialist ethics. However, people are more likely to use a mixture of frameworks when making ethical decisions. Therefore, we (...) hypothesised that AEC members will make their decisions using argumentation relying on multiple frameworks, including ethical relativism, deontology and emotional ethics; frameworks commonly used in the public debate about animal experimentation. The language used by AEC members, examined using discourse analysis techniques, can indicate which ethical frameworks they rely upon. Using a role playing method, representatives from each of the four AEC categories discussed the ethical value of eight fictional protocols involving animal experimentation. The discussions were recorded and analysed using Nvivo for instances of emotional and ethical language. Data were analysed using ANOVAs and Tukey tests. Emotional language was more common than ethical language (p. (shrink)

The study explored the motivations behind Australian wool producers’ intentions regarding mulesing; a surgical procedure that will be voluntarily phased out after 2010, following retailer boycotts led by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Telephone interviews were conducted with 22 West Australian wool producers and consultants to elicit their behavioral, normative and control beliefs about mulesing and alternative methods of breech strike prevention. Results indicate that approximately half the interviewees intend to continue mulesing, despite attitudes toward the act of (...) mulesing being quite negative. This indicates that attitudes alone are unlikely to be good predictors of this goal directed behavior. Most respondents believed mulesing was more effective and involved less cost, time, and effort than the currently available alternatives to prevent breech strike. Further, they felt relatively little social pressure, as they believed few consumers were concerned about mulesing. However, they noted that if consumer sentiment changed they would likely change their practices. Thus, attitudes are likely to be only one of several factors influencing intentions to change farm practices to address societal concerns about animal welfare. Further, mulesing appears to be goal - directed behavior , suggesting that other factors depicted by the Model of Goal-directed Behavior (MGB; Perugini and Bagozzi In: Br J Soc Psychol, 40: 79–98, 2001 ) may be worth exploring in this context. Finally, these results provide insight into how policy makers may influence farmers to change practices in response to societal pressure for improving farm animal welfare. (shrink)

This chapter provides an overview of the issues involved in recent debates about the epistemological relevance of emotions. We first survey some key issues in epistemology and the theory of emotions that inform various assessments of emotions’ potential significance in epistemology. We then distinguish five epistemic functions that have been claimed for emotions: motivational force, salience and relevance, access to facts and beliefs, non-propositional contributions to knowledge and understanding, and epistemic efficiency. We identify two core issues in the discussions about (...) such epistemic functions of emotions: First, even though it is plausible that emotions are involved in epistemic processes, it may be doubted whether they really matter for the normative question of what counts as knowledge or justified belief. Second, some of the epistemic functions claimed for emotions in general may only be attributed to some specifically epistemic emotions, which have been present all along in traditional epistemology, albeit under different labels such as ‘intuitions’. (shrink)

In this paper, we build upon Bruno Latour’s political writings to address the current impasse regarding algorithms in public life. We assert that the increasing difficulties at governing algorithms—be they qualified as “machine learning,” “big data,” or “artificial intelligence”—can be related to their current ontological thinness: deriving from constricted views on theoretical practices, algorithms’ standard definition as problem-solving computerized methods provides poor grips for affective dissensions. We then emphasize on the role historical and ethnographic studies of algorithms can potentially play (...) in the politicization of algorithms. By both digging into the genealogy of algorithms’ constricted definition and by making their contemporary constitutive relationships more visible, both historical and ethnographic studies can contribute to vascularizing algorithms and making them objects of enlarged disputes. We conclude by giving a flavor of the political potential of the vascularization efforts we call for, using materials from an ethnographic study conducted in a computer science laboratory. (shrink)

There is no direct, constant relationship between the anthropological and cultural aspects of modernity. Anthropologically modern peoples display a certain heterogeneity that is not unconnected with earlier peoples, and the culture produced by modern humans, which is also heterogeneous, is differentiated diachronically and according to territory. Though paleogenetic research seems to point us to a single, African source for modern peoples, who had replaced the pre-sapiens populations in Eurasia, this view is not completely proven or accepted. On the other hand, (...) paleo-genetic research has contributed to our relinquishing the hypothesis of a multiregional ‘total continuity’ of local pre-modern populations in the Old World. Indeed the theory of a partial replacement, by a migration ‘out of Africa’, appears to be getting increasingly plausible. This article deals with the problems of the origins of modern man from the points of view of anthropological, paleogenetic, paleoenvironmental and cultural approaches. (shrink)

There is currently no consensus regarding what measures are most valid to demonstrate perceptual processing without awareness. Likewise, whether conscious perception and unconscious processing rely on independent mechanisms or lie on a continuum remains a matter of debate. Here, we addressed these issues by comparing the time courses of subjective reports, objective discrimination performance and response priming during meta-contrast masking, under similar attentional demands. We found these to be strikingly similar, suggesting that conscious perception and unconscious processing cannot be dissociated (...) by their time course. Our results also demonstrate that unconscious processing, indexed by response priming, occurs, and that objective discrimination performance indexes the same conscious processes as subjective visibility reports. Finally, our results underscore the role of attention by showing that how much attention the stimulus receives relative to the mask, rather than whether processing is measured by conscious discrimination or by priming, determines the time course of meta-contrast masking. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage étudie la langue du vrai dans la première modernité. La vérité dépend-elle d'une belle énonciation? Y a-t-il des règles institutionnelles spécifiques d'énonciation de la vérité? Pourquoi la doctrina constitue-t-elle l'horizon de tout savoir et de tout enseignement prétendant à la vérité?

"Dans l'Espagne du XVe au XVIIe siècle, avec les grands voyages et les explorations de mondes inconnus, l'art de bâtir des palais ou des jardins, d'écrire un voyage expérimental ou une quête mystique, de peindre des paysages et des gloires célestes témoigne d'un renouvellement du regard - philosophique, alchimique, théologique, politique. Habiter le monde s'inscrit dans une perspective géométrique et mystique de l'infini et de l'éternité. Il y aurait peut-être là la marque d'une spécificité hispanique. L'ouvrage s'articule autour de quatre (...) parties consacrées aux palais, jardins et demeures spirituelles, aux merveilles de l'univers de Séville à Mexico, à la mystique des paysages et à la magie naturelle, à la représentation de l'infini" --. (shrink)

Au xvie siècle, l’autobiographie et le récit de voyage étaient étroitement liés et suivirent pendant quelques décennies une évolution parallèle. Thomas Platter l’aîné essaya de fournir dans sesMémoires la description d’une vie exemplaire retraçant ses expériences multiples sur les routes d’Europe. Son fils Felix nous laissa un ouvrage disparate (un mélange de journal, de récit de voyage et de mémoires) où l’auteur paraît omniprésent. Sa conception de l’écriture autobiographique rappelle celle de Montaigne. Le jeune frère Thomas suivit rigoureusement les règles (...) émises par les théoriciens du voyage, condamnant toute opinion subjective. Les ouvrages des Platter nous donnent le meilleur exemple de l’évolution du genre (auto-)biographique entre la Renaissance classique et le Baroque dit sauvage. (shrink)

Pour Thomas d’Aquin, la Trinité n’est pas d’ordre philosophique mais théologique, dépendant de la révélation biblique. Les controverses trinitaires sont déjà loin, les résolutions conciliaires aussi, mais Thomas, à plusieurs reprises et à chaque fois de manière différente, expose un traité des plus délicats. Il s’agit de poser trois personnes dans une seule substance. L’un de ses principaux apports est d’enrichir les relations d’origine qui distinguent les trois personnes en relations substantielles. Thomas tire les concepts au-delà de leur acception ordinaire, (...) manifestant ainsi la manière qui est la sienne d’entrecroiser philosophie et théologie. (shrink)

Victor Hugo a soutenu : « Dieu, cela n’est pas tant que ce n’est pas en pierre / Il faut une maison pour mettre la prière. » L’histoire de l’incarnation christique suffit-elle à expliquer la place de la pierre dans l’imaginaire des sociétés culturellement issues du christianisme? En quoi l’Église – la communauté et l’institution nées de l’enseignement du Christ – poursuit-elle ce projet d’inscription de la chair dans la pierre? Dans quelle mesure la parole de Jésus à l’un de (...) ses apôtres, Pierre – « tu es Pierre et sur cette pierre je bâtirai mon Église » (Mt. xvi, 18) – est-elle fondatrice non seulement de la « pétrification » de l’Église, mais plus généralement du poids donné à l’architecture et au bâti dans les mille et une façons occidentales de penser la société et de faire communauté? (shrink)

Miguel de Cervantès a ouvert le dossier des rapports de « la vérité » avec le « réel », appliquant à cette question toute sa puissance visionnaire. Dans au moins deux de ses œuvres, il compose une approche très originale de ce questionnement : Le Retable des Merveilles, joué longtemps avant sa date de publication en 1615, et le fameux Don Quichotte. Le réel est-il « vrai » ou répond-il d’une construction mentale confinant à la folie? Le Retable, par la (...) mise en scène hallucinatoire de la pseudo-réalité suggérée, dénonce l’emprise du pouvoir politique sur l’imaginaire collectif, soumis à la domestication qu’impose le Saint-Office, tandis que le Quichotte, irrémédiablement placé sous la direction de la « doctrine dulcinéenne », brave l’oppression du système inquisitorial en créant sa propre épistémologie fondée sur un « code ». En matière de vérité, comme le dit le Chevalier de Lions, ne s’agit-il pas de « peser la chose et la mettre à son vrai point »? Aussi, dans ces deux œuvres, le lecteur est-il constamment invité à transcender toute lecture littéraliste, à surplomber la quiétude des banalisations indéfiniment répétées, pour découvrir ce qui constitue l’épistémologie quichottienne, libératrice du sens. Et si ce « point de vérité » se trouvait précisément dans le nom du Quichotte, audible en une langue bannie de la Péninsule en 1492 dont l’auteur semble être un fin connaisseur? L’histoire du Quichotte devient alors l’histoire de la vérité en mouvement, accompagnée de la grâce tutélaire de Dulcinée, que le lecteur est appelé à suivre, peut-être même à rattraper, pour mieux comprendre combien le réel se code selon une haute folie que le rationalisme ne rejoint pas. (shrink)

Den 27. november 1985 døde den franske historiker, Fernand Braudel, som af mange verden over regnes for en af de betydeligste historikere nogen sinde. Han var Annales-skolens førende skikkelse.

M. Buber, figure majeure de l'intelligentsia juive et européenne, a entretenu sa vie durant une immense correspondance. Propose une sélection de près de 200 lettres, des premiers échanges du jeune Buber avec Theodore Herzl, le fondateur du sionisme, jusqu'à l'année de sa mort en 1965. Sa correspondance montre qu'il a toujours souhaité un retour de la diaspora juive en Palestine.

Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale, Volume 62, Issue, Page 430-436, January 2020.