Hannah Arendt says that "violence is nothing more than the most flagrant manifestation of power."[1] Given this definition, one might expect that violence takes many forms. Numerous writers have, in fact, applied violence to more than direct bodily harm. Within philosophy, Newton Garver, for example, has developed a typology of violence that includes overt and covert forms, as well as personal..

Many individuals domestically and internationally who strive for peace and justice are concerned about the new National Security Strategy issued by the George W. Bush Administration in September 2002. 1 William Galston, for example, writes in a recent issue of Philosophy and Public Policy Quarterly: A global strategy based on the new Bush doctrine of preemption means the end of the system of international institutions, laws and norms that we have worked to build for more than a half a (...) century. To his credit, Kissinger recognizes this; he labels Bush’s new approach “revolutionary” and declares, “Regime change as a goal for military intervention challenges the international system.” 2 Does the new Bush doctrine end the international legal system? Is the new Bush doctrine making policy declarations that are unprecedented in United States history? While I share many of the concerns critics are expressing about the new national security strategy, I contend that the more serious issue is not the ways in which this strategy represents a departure from those of prior United States presidential administrations but the actual practices of the Bush administration that appeal to this strategy. I will indicate how this new national security strategy does not represent much of a shift in policy, capability, or practice. Instead, this strategy Bush is using the strategy as an enabling device for a disturbing resurgence of United States global imperialism that serves interests that are actually opposed to the political rhetoric of the value of nations aiming for democracy and a market economy. I conclude by commenting on pursuing genuinely democratic values. I suggest that if the United States were truly committed to democratic values, then any military interventions would require the prior consent of the people. Otherwise what the United States refer to as “bringing democracy” to a people will be more like a militarily enforced authoritarianism that too closely resembles old-style exploitive imperialism. (shrink)

This book examines the changes and challenges to democracy particularly in contemporary Russia. In the first section, Russian and American philosophers scrutinize the virtues and vices facing a country changing to a democratic government. The book, secondly, explores the challenges facing a democratic Russia. Lastly, the book considers carefully issues of social justice arising from the relationship between democracy and the current economic climate of globalization. The series _Contemporary Russian Philosophy_ explores a variety of perspectives in and on philosophy as (...) it is currently being practiced in Russia. Co-sponsored by the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and by the Russian Philosophical Society, this special series features collaborative works between Russians and Americans, collections of essays by Russians, and monographs by Russians. All volumes are published in English. (shrink)

I stumbled into my interpretation of Wittgenstein as an advocate of what is now termed applied philosophy. In doing research for an essay on linguistic violence, [2] I decided to read more by and about Ferrucio Rossi Landi because I had already made use of his work on linguistic alienation. [3] One source, in particular, caught my attention because of its clever, though sexist, subtitle. In 1991, Ranjit Chatterjee published an essay titled "Rossi Landi's Wittgenstein: 'A philosopher's meaning is his (...) use in the.. (shrink)

arguments concerning whether such changes are creative. [2] Less frequently addressed are questions about how to assess the perceptual implications of these linguistic innovations. [3] Using insights of Ricoeur and, to a lesser extent, M. Merleau Ponty and V. N. Volosinov, I will provide a model for evaluating a certain class of linguistic innovations, namely, new uses of language which rely upon distortion of typical perceptual associations. (Excluded from such new linguistic uses are, for example, analogical innovations, as presented by (...) Saussure.) As my title suggests, I will relate two superficially dissimilar products of language, i.e., metaphor and ideology. I will argue that metaphor and ideology need to be considered jointly (comparatively) to understand linguistic creativity, because -despite their differences -they mutually rely (at their inception) on atypical, even excessive, distortion of the way words shape perception of and reflection on ‘reality.’ My basic thesis is that, in language, the processes of creativity and distortion are interrelated. However, the conclusion I will reach is one which proposes a distinction between and criterion for ‘positive’ changes (which I term ‘creative distortions’) and ‘negative’ changes (which I term ‘distortive creations’). Nevertheless, I do not associate ‘creative distortions’ exclusively with metaphors and ‘distortive creations’ exclusively with ideologies. For metaphor and ideology, I relate ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ to how practical activity is facilitated, using a criterion of expansion or enrichment versus contraction or impoverishment of the semiotic perceptual field. Hence, throughout, even when I make distinctions, I will stress how metaphor and ideology are similar, not how they are different. Textually, the model I will present results from my effort to relate Ricoeur’s views on.. (shrink)

“It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” So begins Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. While he was writing about London and Paris during the turbulent times associated with the rise of the British Industrial Revolution and the French Political Revolution, these lines express the current sentiments of many Americans. Before 11 September 2001, many people thought we were living in the best of times. Baby boomers were relishing in the prospects that through inheritance (...) they would be the beneficiaries of the greatest transfer of wealth in United States history. After 11 September, even more citizens were psychologically shattered when they realized that the terrorist strikes showed that the United States, the most powerful nation on Earth, is still quite vulnerable. (shrink)

Does language do violence, and, if so, can linguistic violence be overcome? Language can do violence if violence does not require the exercise of physical force, and linguistic violence can be overcome if its use can be avoided. Some forms of violence do not use physical force, and various means are available for avoiding linguistic violence. Hence, although linguistic violence can and does occur, it also can be overcome. Much of my recent work has focused on how language, which does (...) not rely on physical force, nonetheless often does violence. Linguistic violence occurs when we are hurt psychologically by words and when we are harmed socially by words. While most people are conscious of the pain that words can cause, many social groups are often unconscious of injustices that language helps to create and sustain. Exposing both of these forms of linguistic violence is the first step. (shrink)

_Between Past Orthodoxies and the Future of Globalization_ provides essays in English by leading thinkers in Russia in philosophy, political theory, and related fields. Their essays articulate Russian perspectives on the key global issues being faced internationally and in Russia.

Andrew Fitz-Gibbon in Pragmatic Nonviolence: Working Toward a Better World argues that a principled form of pragmatism—pragmatism shaped by the theory of nonviolence—is the best hope for our world. He defines nonviolence as “a practice that, whenever possible seeks the well-being of the Other, by refusing to use violence to solve problems, and by having an intentional commitment to lovingkindness.” In the first part of the book, Fitz-Gibbon asks what a better world would look like. In the second part, he (...) covers what is the greatest obstacle to that better world: violence. In the third part, he examines philosophical theories of nonviolence. The fourth part examines pragmatism as a philosophy of “what works” (William James) through the lens of the principle of maximizing well-being through nonviolent practice. In response to Fitz-Gibbon’s work, critic Danielle Poe asks what a nonviolence response looks like to the Other whom we have wronged and wonders how nonviolence responds to systemic violence. Sanjay Lal asks whether pragmatism and nonviolence can be synthesized given the popular conception that the pragmatic possible seems at odds with the ideal of absolute nonviolence. William C. Gay affirms much of the text and suggests its uses in teaching. Mechthild Nagel wonders if Fitz-Gibbon’s pragmatic nonviolence is too anthropocentric and questions the absence of a consideration of systemic violence in the criminal justice system. Fitz-Gibbon then responds to the critics. (shrink)

This book provides brief expositions of the central concepts in the field of Global Studies. Former President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev says, “The book is intelligent, rich in content and, I believe, necessary in our complex, turbulent, and fragile world.” 300 authors from 50 countries contributed 450 entries. The contributors include scholars, researchers, and professionals in social, natural, and technological sciences. They cover globalization problems within ecology, business, economics, politics, culture, and law. This interdisciplinary collection provides a basis (...) for understanding the concepts and methods within global studies and for accessing lengthier and more technical research in the field. The articles treat such important topics as the biosphere, ozone depletion, land resources and pollution, world health challenges, education, global modeling, sustainable development, war, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism. The book also promotes academic cooperation, political dialogue, and mutual understanding across diverse traditions and national identities that are needed to engage successfully the many daunting challenges of globalization. (shrink)

“The object of this book,” writes William C. Dowling in his preface, “is to make the key concepts of Paul Ricoeur’s _Time and Narrative_ available to readers who might have felt bewildered by the twists and turns of its argument.” The sources of puzzlement are, he notes, many. For some, it is Ricoeur’s famously indirect style of presentation, in which the polarities of argument and exegesis seem so often and so suddenly to have reversed themselves. For others, it is (...) the extraordinary intellectual range of Ricoeur’s argument, drawing on traditions as distant from each other as Heideggerian existentialism, French structuralism, and Anglo-American analytic philosophy. Yet beneath the labyrinthian surface of Ricoeur’s _Temps et récit_, Dowling reveals a single extended argument that, though developed unsystematically, is meant to be understood in systematic terms. __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative_ _presents that argument in clear and concise terms, in a way that will be enlightening both to readers new to Ricoeur and those who may have felt themselves adrift in the complexities of _Temps et récit,_ Ricoeur’s last major philosophical work. Dowling divides his discussion into six chapters, all closely involved with specific arguments in _Temps et récit_: on mimesis, time, narrativity, semantics of action, poetics of history, and poetics of fiction. Additionally, Dowling provides a preface that lays out the French intellectual context of Ricoeur's philosophical method. An appendix presents his English translation of a personal interview in which Ricoeur, having completed _Time and Narrative, _looks back over his long career as an internationally renowned philosopher. __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative___ _communicates to readers the intellectual excitement of following Ricoeur’s dismantling of established theories and arguments—Aristotle and Augustine and Husserl on time, Frye and Greimas on narrative structure, Arthur Danto and Louis O. Mink on the nature of historical explanation—while coming to see how, under the pressure of Ricoeur’s analysis, these ideas are reconstituted and revealed in a new set of relations to one another. "The scholarship in William C. Dowling's __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative____ __is impeccable; Dowling knows Ricoeur inside out. He highlights Ricoeur's most important arguments, presents them in a limpid, concise language, and links them to the relevant nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical developments. Dowling's book provides us with a lucid, intelligible version of Ricoeur's major work, one that will be of considerable significance to philosophers, historians, and literary theorists." —_Thomas Pavel, Gordon J. Laing Distinguished Service Professor of French Literature, and the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago_ "William C. Dowling's __Ricoeur on Time and Narrative___ _is a subtle and remarkably well-sustained piece of work. It provides a detailed introduction to a major work of philosophy and narrative theory—already a considerable achievement, given the difficulty of Ricoeur's text. However, Dowling also shows us, sometimes explicitly, sometimes simply through the way he conducts his argument, why we should bother with Ricoeur—what we have to gain from knowing him better than we do, however well we may think we know him." —_Michael Wood, Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Princeton University _. (shrink)

This book offers a philosophy for error-prone humans trying to understand messy systems in the real world.

Ethical guidelines for multinational corporations are included in several international accords adopted during the past four decades. These guidelines attempt to influence the practices of multinational enterprises in such areas as employment relations, consumer protection, environmental pollution, political participation, and basic human rights. Their moral authority rests upon the competing principles of national sovereignty, social equity, market integrity, and human rights. Both deontological principles and experience-based value systems undergird and justify the primacy of human rights as the fundamental moral authority (...) of these transnational and transcultural compacts. Although difficulties and obstacles abound in gaining operational acceptance of such codes of conduct, it is possible to argue that their guidelines betoken the emergence of a transcultural corporate ethic. (shrink)

Although campaigns for universal human rights have been intellectually and emotionally compelling for many anthropologists, they have tended to embroil them in fruitless polemics about cultural relativism with non-Western thinkers and policy-makers. Often “universalist” discourses about “rights” depend on values and distinctions that are far from universal and that stem, in fact, from Christian, secular, or “modernist” notions about punishment, suffering, and redemption. To make some practical contribution to the struggle for human dignity in the Middle East, it may be (...) preferable to aim for a more limited goal: the abolition of torture in the region. Consensus about the illegitimacy of torture is more easily reached, since none of the Middle East's religious or philosophical traditions condone it. What is more, empirical data demonstrate that torture has increased in frequency in the region and is widely perceived, both by insiders and outsiders, as a growing problem. Ethnographers could play a role in documenting incidents of torture and in building coalitions of Middle Eastern and outsider activists who, working together, could expose torture and bring pressure to bear on those who inflict it. (shrink)

The study of Social Issues in Management (SIM) has exhausted its primary analytic framework based on corporate social performance (social science), business ethics (philosophy), and stakeholder theory (organizational science), and needs to move to a new paradigmatic level based on the natural sciences. Doing so would expand research horizons to include cosmological perspectives (astrophysics), evolutionary theory (biology, genetics, ecology), and non-sectarian spirituality concepts (theological naturalism, cognitive neuroscience). Absent this shift, SIM studies risk increasing irrelevance for scholars and business practitioners.

Exploring what a scientific metaphysics grounded in biological practices could look like and how it might impact the way we investigate the world around us, the contributors to From Biological Practice to Scientific Metaphysics review and discuss long-held objections to metaphysics by natural scientists. They illuminate how, in order to learn about the world as it truly is, we must look not only at what scientists say but also what they do.

Developments that suggest the universe is full of life make the Fermi paradox increasingly pressing, but our search for an extraterrestrial technological civilization (“ETC”) is handicapped by our ignorance of its probable nature and behavior. This paper offers a way around this problem by drawing on information theoretical concepts, including game theory and Bayesian probability. It argues that, whatever its ultimate goals, an ETC would have the same instrumental goals as other intelligent agents. Generically, these are self-preservation and the acquisition (...) of resources. For an advanced ETC, these generic goals imply the objectives of removing existential threats and acquiring strategic and non-strategic information. Since the most problematic existential threats for any ETC would be from other civilizations and planets hosting such civilizations would also be copious sources of information, these objectives would lead it to gather information from these locations and to protect itself against them. This dual-goals hypothesis resolves the Fermi paradox, redirects the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and makes testable predictions regarding ETC’s behavior on Earth if it is here. (shrink)

This paper attempts to provide a conceptual underpinning for codes of ethics in business and the professions. Rule-utilitarianism is a theory of ethics which I believe can successfully do this. Business persons and professionals, hopefully, will be able to develop codes of ethics in a manner consistent with a well-formulated general ethical theory. This will help enable codes of ethics to be a bridge between general ethical theory and specific ethical decisions made in business and the professions.

Two strategies for using a model as “null” are distinguished. Null modeling evaluates whether a process is causally responsible for a pattern by testing it against a null model. Baseline modeling measures the relative significance of various processes responsible for a pattern by detecting deviations from a baseline model. When these strategies are conflated, models are illegitimately privileged as accepted until rejected. I illustrate this using the neutral theory of ecology and draw general lessons from this case. First, scientists cannot (...) draw certain conclusions using null modeling. Second, these conclusions follow using baseline modeling, but doing so requires more evidence. (shrink)

Though the phrase 'x is true of x' is well formed grammatically, it does not express any predicate in the logical sense, because it does not satisfy the principle of reduction for statements containing 'x is true of'. recognition of this allows for solution of russell's paradox without his restrictive theory of types.

With the rejection of group selectionist derivations of ecological phenomena so incisively given by George Williams in 1966,43 Nicholson's long-ignored messages met with acceptance. Species benefit became, explicitly, incidental. But the reorientation was not just about a point of ecological theory. It was more fundamentally about theoretical style, the element shared by Wynne-Edwards' work and the newer, evolutionary ecology. That current approach is well expressed in an already classic paper by the British plant ecologist John Harper: Ultimately all the discoveries (...) of descriptive, production or population ecology must find their meaning in evolutionary phenomena... Evolutionary thinking concentrates attention on the behaviour of the individual and his descendants. If nothing in biology has meaning except in the light of evolution and if evolution is about individuals and their descendants — i.e. fitness — we should not expect to reach any depth of understanding from studies that are based at the level of the superindividual... What we see as the organised behaviour of systems is the result of the fate of individuals.44The emphasis in this passage is on style of thinking more than on study matter. What is so different from earlier ecologists is the rejection of the superorganism and its associated baggage of selfimposed constraints in an end-oriented process, such as balance of nature or species-level adaptation.The hallmark of post-1959 evolutionary ecology is the recognition, the making explicit of the question that the selective, genetical process of fitness (fates of genes) has to be separated from the observations of different levels of adaptiveness. An easy conflation of cause and result is no longer satisfying; now attempts to disentangle the complex strands tying population phenomena to the different levels of selection are providing the excitement of a new research program. In this program evolutionary theory is used to define the appropriate questions, as exemplified by the organization of the textbook Evolutionary Ecology.45 Our discussion of the invention of a new approach, with a characteristic style and set of interests, must also be about how the practitioners of ecology have perceived themselves. The early attempts of Poulton and Nicholson were not taken up by the vigorously growing science of ecology, which developed first - and intentionally — along a narrower, hierarchically restrained set of questions about population. The depth of Poulton's and Nicholson's submergence is indicated by the fact that even Wynne-Edwards did not argue in the manner of one rescuing a minor tradition. Rather, he thought he had a new approach, that of placing evolution in the foundations of ecology. Although this approach was not exactly original, we should be cautious in grouping all evolutionary concerns within ecology in one intellectual tradition. The particular style of selectionist deduction invigorated by Wynne-Edwards was successful only in the volatile situation of a rapidly growing discipline, full of self-critical examination and new rigor. Whereas in 1930 evolutionary concerns did not provide that rigor, by 1960 they could - and did. (shrink)

The corporation's social role is usually presented as a cultural phenomenon in which the corporation learns socially acceptable behaviors through voluntary social responsibility, government regulations/public policies, and/or acceptance of ethics principles. This article presents an alternative view of corporationcommunity relations as a natural phenomenon based on complexity-chaos theory and a biological-physical conception of corporate values. Corporation and community are depicted as interacting nonlinear adaptive systems having unpredictable futures, the corporate social role is depicted as largely indeterminate, and competing values are (...) depicted as key factors driving change in corporationcommunity linkages. Normative duties of corporate and community leaders are described. (shrink)

What methodological approaches do research programs use to investigate the world? Elisabeth Lloyd’s Logic of Research Questions (LRQ) characterizes such approaches in terms of the questions that the researchers ask and causal factors they consider. She uses the Logic of Research Questions Framework to criticize adaptationist programs in evolutionary biology for dogmatically assuming selection explanations of the traits of organisms. I argue that Lloyd’s general criticism of methodological adaptationism is an artefact of the impoverished LRQ. My Ordered Factors Proposal extends (...) the LRQ to characterize approaches with sequences of questions and factors. I highlight the importance that ordering one’s investigation plays in approaches at the level of adaptationism by analyzing two research programs in community ecology: competitionists and neutralists. Competitionists and neutralists take opposed starting points and use explanatory and developmental heuristics to consider more factors in due time. On the Ordered Factors Proposal, these approaches are not only the ecological factors they are open to considering but also the order in which they will consider them. My disagreement with Lloyd’s over how to characterize methodological approaches reflects different views about methodological monism and pluralism. (shrink)