Before women could become visible as philosophers, they had first to become visible as rational autonomous thinkers. A social and ethical position holding that chastity was the most important virtue for women, and that rationality and chastity were incompatible, was a significant impediment to accepting women's capacity for philosophical thought. Thus one of the first tasks for women was to confront this belief and argue for their rationality in the face of a self-referential dilemma.

Before women could become visible as philosophers, they had first to become visible as rational autonomous thinkers. A social and ethical position holding that chastity was the most important virtue for women, and that rationality and chastity were incompatible, was a significant impediment to accepting women's capacity for philosophical thought. Thus one of the first tasks for women was to confront this belief and argue for their rationality in the face of a self-referential dilemma.

: Before women could become visible as philosophers, they had first to become visible as rational autonomous thinkers. A social and ethical position holding that chastity was the most important virtue for women, and that rationality and chastity were incompatible, was a significant impediment to accepting women's capacity for philosophical thought. Thus one of the first tasks for women was to confront this belief and argue for their rationality in the face of a self-referential dilemma.

Despite the increase in global research on health inequalities, more needs to be done to strengthen efforts to inform local interventions. In this article, we ask what determines the local capacity to engage in research on health inequalities. A bibliometric analysis identified Spain as the 10th highest global contributor to this research field (1966–2015), yet a significant proportion of this production was affiliated to just a few institutions in Barcelona. How and why has the city produced so much health inequalities (...) research over four decades? A realist explanatory case study was conducted to test and refine six causal mechanisms, and identify the contextual conditions that might have activated them to generate this outcome. Data was triangulated from 10 semi-structured interviews, and scientific and grey literature. Our findings confirmed that several of our proposed mechanisms - functioning under certain conditions over time - explain the large volume of health inequalities research in Barcelona. Based on these findings, key lessons from the city's experience are suggested. Further research is needed on this topic. (shrink)

In the Renaissance, educating for philosophy was integrated with educating for an active role in society, and both were conditioned by the prevailing educational theories based on humanist revisions of the trivium. I argue that women's education in the Renaissance remained tied to grammar while the education of men was directed toward action through eloquence. This is both a result of and a condition for the greater restriction on the social opportunities for women.

Medical ethics committees are increasingly called on to assist doctors, patients, and families in resolving difficult ethics issues. Although committees are becoming more sophisticated in the substance of medical ethics, little attention has been given to the processes these committees use to facilitate decision-making. In 1990, the National Institute for Dispute Resolution in Washington, D.C., provided a planning grant from its Innovation Fund to the Institute of Public Law of the University of New Mexico School of Law to look at (...) what ethics committees can learn from facilitation and mediation techniques. The study's thesis was that, if adapted for use by medical ethics committees, facilitation and mediation techniques can be helpful to those bodies in case review consultations and in other internal committee processes. This article reports on that project. (shrink)

Frege begins Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, the work that introduces the project which was to occupy him for most of his professional career, with the question, 'What is the number one?' It is a question to which even mathematicians, he says, have no satisfactory answer. And given this scandalous situation, he adds, there is small hope that we shall be able to say what number is. Frege intends to rectify the situation by providing definitions of the number one and the (...) concept of number. But what, exactly, is required of a definition? Surely it will not do to stipulate that the number one is Julius Caesar - that would change the subject. It seems reasonable to suppose that an acceptable definition must be a true statement containing a description that picks out the object to which the numeral '1' already refers. And, similarly, that an acceptable definition of the concept of number must contain a description that picks out precisely those objects that are numbers - those objects to which our numerals refer. Yet, while Frege writes a great deal about what criteria his definitions must satisfy, the above criteria are not among those he mentions. Nor does he attempt to convince us that his definitions of '1' and the other numerals are correct by arguing that these definitions pick out objects to which these numerals have always referred. Yet, while Frege writes a great deal about what criteria his definitions must satisfy, the above criteria are not among those he mentions. Nor does he attempt to convince us that his definitions of ‘1’ and the other numerals are correct by arguing that these definitions pick out objects to which these numerals have always referred. There is, as we shall see shortly, a great deal of evidence that Frege’s definitions are not intended to pick out objects to which our numerals already refer. But if this is so, how can these definitions teach us anything about our science of arithmetic? And what criteria must these definitions satisfy? To answer these questions, we need to understand what it is that Frege thinks we need to learn about the science of arithmetic. (shrink)

In spite of feminist recognition that hierarchical organizations are an important location of male dominance, most feminists writing about organizations assume that organizational structure is gender neutral. This article argues that organizational structure is not gender neutral; on the contrary, assumptions about gender underlie the documents and contracts used to construct organizations and to provide the commonsense ground for theorizing about them. Their gendered nature is partly masked through obscuring the embodied nature of work.jobs and hierarchies, common concepts in organizational (...) thinking, assume a disembodies and universal worker. This worker is actually a man; men's bodies, sexuality, and relationships to procreation and paid work are subsumed in the image of the worker. Images of men's bodies and masculinity pervade organizational processes, marginalizing women and contributing to the maintenance of gender segregation in organizations. The positing of gender-neutral and disembodied organizational structures and work relations is part of the larger strategy of control in industrial capitalist societies, which, at least partly, are built upon a deeply embedded substructure of gender difference. (shrink)

In this article, the author addresses two feminist issues: first, how to conceptualize intersectionality, the mutual reproduction of class, gender, and racial relations of inequality, and second, how to identify barriers to creating equality in work organizations. She develops one answer to both issues, suggesting the idea of “inequality regimes” as an analytic approach to understanding the creation of inequalities in work organizations. Inequality regimes are the interlocked practices and processes that result in continuing inequalities in all work organizations. Work (...) organizations are critical locations for the investigation of the continuous creation of complex inequalities because much societal inequality originates in such organizations. Work organizations are also the target for many attempts to alter patterns of inequality: The study of change efforts and the oppositions they engender are often opportunities to observe frequently invisible aspects of the reproduction of inequalities. The concept of inequality regimes may be useful in analyzing organizational change projects to better understand why these projects so often fail and why they succeed when this occurs. (shrink)

El artículo tiene su origen en una conferencia que con el mismo título fue pronunciada en el Congreso Internacional de Filosofía Teórica y Práctica destinado a estudiar el problema del mal y ver el tratamiento realizado por varios autores empezando por Agustín de Hipona. En la presentación se quiere mostrar la característica única que tiene Agustín por la manera cómo enfrenta el problema del mal, por lo cual se le puede considerar el primer autor moderno porque el planteamiento sigue su (...) experiencia vital hecha de búsqueda de felicidad y el resultado pasa a ser la primera filosofía cristiana. Se estudia la respuesta maniquea a la que se adhirió y los motivos que le llevaron a abandonarla totalmente y superarla definitivamente tal y como queda patente en los textos claves de sus obras y en particular en las Confesiones y en el De natura boni que se presentan. (shrink)

Re-emergent scientific atheism bears the marks of its historical origins in the efforts of Bonč-Bruevič and Jaroslavskij. The disciples of the 'Lenin generation' use their 'fathers' somewhat as 'second-level classics'.

BackgroundThe amount of research utilizing health information has increased dramatically over the last ten years. Many institutions have extensive biobank holdings collected over a number of years for clinical and teaching purposes, but are uncertain as to the proper circumstances in which to permit research uses of these samples. Research Ethics Boards (REBs) in Canada and elsewhere in the world are grappling with these issues, but lack clear guidance regarding their role in the creation of and access to registries and (...) biobanks.MethodsChairs of 34 REBS and/or REB Administrators affiliated with Faculties of Medicine in Canadian universities were interviewed. Interviews consisted of structured questions dealing with diabetes-related scenarios, with open-ended responses and probing for rationales. The two scenarios involved the development of a diabetes registry using clinical encounter data across several physicians' practices, and the addition of biological samples to the registry to create a biobank.ResultsThere was a wide range of responses given for the questions raised in the scenarios, indicating a lack of clarity about the role of REBs in registries and biobanks. With respect to the creation of a registry, a minority of sites felt that consent was not required for the information to be entered into the registry. Whether patient consent was required for information to be entered into the registry and the duration for which the consent would be operative differed across sites. With respect to the creation of a biobank linked to the registry, a majority of sites viewed biobank information as qualitatively different from other types of personal health information. All respondents agreed that patient consent was needed for blood samples to be placed in the biobank but the duration of consent again varied.ConclusionParticipants were more attuned to issues surrounding biobanks as compared to registries and demonstrated a higher level of concern regarding biobanks. As registries and biobanks expand, there is a need for critical analysis of suitable roles for REBs and subsequent guidance on these topics. The authors conclude by recommending REB participation in the creation of registries and biobanks and the eventual drafting of comprehensive legislation. (shrink)

Not only can the influence of Gottlob Frege be found in contemporary work in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, and the philosophy of language, but his projects—and the very terminology he employed in pursuing those projects—are still current in contemporary philosophy. This is undoubtedly why it seems so reasonable to assume that we can read Frege' s writings as if he were one of us, speaking to our philosophical concerns in our language. In Joan Weiner's view, however, Frege's words (...) can be accurately interpreted only if we set that assumption aside. Weiner here offers a challenging new approach to the philosophy of this central figure in analytic philosophy. Weiner finds in Frege's corpus, from Begriffsschrift on, a unified project of remarkable ambition to which each of the writings in that corpus makes a distinct contribution—a project whose motivation she brings to life through a careful reading of his Foundations of Arithmetic. The Frege that Weiner brings into clear view is very different from the familiar figure. Far from having originated one of the standard positions on the nature of reference, Frege turns out not to have had positive doctrines on anything like what contemporary philosophers mean by "reference." Far from having served as a standard-bearer for those who take the realists' side of contemporary disputes with anti-realists, Frege turns out to have had no stake in either side of the controversy. Through Weiner's lens, Frege emerges as a thinker who has principled reasons for challenging the very assumptions and motivations that animate philosophers to dispute these doctrines. This lucidly written and accessible book will generate controversy among all readers with an interest in epistemology, philosophy of language, history of philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

Perspectives on Quine, now available in paperback, is a collection of twenty-one new essays dealing with the thought of America's most distinguished living philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine. After the editors' brief introduction to Quine's thought, the volume opens with an important new essay by Quine entitled Three Indeterminacies. The essays that follow, written by leading philosophers, are rich with insights into a wide variety of Quine's concerns ranging from logic and set theory to natural language, truth, evidence, natural kinds, (...) naturalized epistemology, and much more. Each essay concludes with a summary and response from Quine himself. (shrink)

"Speciesism: 'A failure, in attitude or practice, to accord any nonhuman being equal consideration and respect'"--From the book's cover.

There is a section in Samuel Delany’s magnificent autobiographical meditation, The Motion of Light in Water, that dramatically raises the problem of writing the history of difference, the history, that is, of the designation of “other,” of the attribution of characteristics that distinguish categories of people from some presumed norm.1 Delany recounts his reaction to his first visit to the St. Marks bathhouse in 1963. He remembers standing on the threshold of a “gym-sized room” dimly lit by blue bulbs. The (...) room was full of people, some standing, the rest an undulating mass of naked, male bodies, spread wall to wall. My first response was a kind of heart-thudding astonishment very close to fear. I have written of a space at certain libidinal saturation before. That was not what frightened me. It was rather that the saturation was not only kinesthetic but visible.2Watching the scene establishes for Delany a “fact that flew in the face” of the prevailing representation of homosexuals in the 1950s as “isolated perverts,” as subjects “gone awry.” The “apprehension of massed bodies” gave him a “sense of political power”:what this experience said was that there was a population—not of individual homosexuals … not of hundreds, not of thousands, but rather of millions of gay men, and that history had, actively and already, created for us whole galleries of institutions, good and bad, to accommodate our sex. [M, p. 174] 2. Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965 , p. 173; hereafter abbreviated M. Joan W. Scott is professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She is the author, most recently, of Gender and the Politics of History and is currently at work on a history of feminist claims for political rights in France during the period 1789-1945 as a way of exploring arguments about equality and difference. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed an escalation in corporate social reporting (CSR) by UK companies (Gray, Kouhy and Lavers 1995). Whilst some elements of CSR reporting are required by law, much of it represents voluntary reporting. By investigating the non‐mandatory reporting of two aspects of social responsibility, corporate community involvement (CCI) and environmental impact, this paper seeks to explore why companies choose to make such disclosures. It specifically asks whether companies are primarily motivated by the strategic need to manage their reputation (...) and legitimacy rather than by the recognition of their ethical accountability, which is the stated purpose of reports produced by cutting edge companies (Clarke 1998). (shrink)

When (if ever) may a professional deceive a client for the client's own good? Under what conditions (if any) is whistle-blowing morally required? These are just some of the questions that scholars as diverse as Michael D. Bayles, Thomas Nagel, Sissela Bok, Jessica Mitford, and Peter A. French confront in this stimulating anthology. Organized around philosophical issues such as the moral foundations of professional ethics, models of the professional-client relationship, deception, informed consent, privacy and confidentiality, professional dissent, and professional virtue, (...) the volume illuminates the complex ethical issues that arise in journalism, law, health care, counselling, education, engineering, business, politics, and social science research. A variety of pedagogical aids--including clear introductions to and study questions for each set of readings, concrete cases designed to focus discussion, and an appendix on preparing cases and position papers--makes the text invaluable for both students and teachers of professional ethics. (shrink)

There are many ways of enhancing human performance. For military aviation in general, and for spaceflight in particular, the most important tools are selection, training, equipment, pharmacology, and surgery. In the future, genetic manipulation may be feasible. For each of these tools, the specific modalities available range from the ethically acceptable to the ethically unacceptable. Even when someone consents to a particular procedure to enhance performance, the action may be ethically unacceptable to society as a whole and the burden of (...) risk for the individual may be too great. In addition, there are several characteristics that define the quality and the acceptability of the consent. Each method of enhancing performance will be examined in the context of the principles of medical ethics in a western society: autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice. The aim is to draw the attention of aeromedical practitioners to the complexities of ethical dilemmas such as this particular one in order to help them to develop a morally justifiable code of practice that balances society’s needs against individual ambitions and corporate goals. (shrink)

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme The Ethics and Politics of Academic Knowledge Production. Questions of who produces knowledge about what, and how that knowledge is produced, are inherent to editing and publishing academic journals. At the Journal of Business (...) Ethics, we understand the ethical responsibility of academic knowledge production as going far beyond conventions around the integrity of the research content and research processes. We are deeply aware that access to resources, knowledge of the rules of the game, and being able to set those rules, are systematically and unequally distributed. One could ask the question “for whom is knowledge now ethical’”? (See the Burrell commentary.) We have a responsibility to address these inequalities and open up our journal to lesser heard voices, ideas, and ways of being. Our six commentators pursue this through various aspects of the ethics and politics of academic knowledge production. Working with MacIntyre’s scheme of practices and institutions, Andrew West provides commentary on the internal good of business ethics learning and education. Inviting us to step out of the cave, Christopher Michaelson urges a clear-eyed, unblinking focus on the purposes and audiences of business ethics scholarship. As developmental editor, Scott Taylor uncovers some of the politics of peer review with the aim of nurturing of unconventional research. Mike Hyman presents his idiosyncratic view of marketing ethics. In the penultimate commentary, Julie Nelson attributes difficulties in the academic positioning of the Business Ethics field to the hegemony of a masculine-centric model of the firm. And finally, Gibson Burrell provides a powerful provocation to go undercover as researcher-investigators in a parallel ethics of the research process. (shrink)

The gender-based wage gap in Swedish banks began to increase in 1983 after many years of decline. The growth in the gap between the wages of nonmanagerial women and men employees was particularly high. This article asks, How did this happen? Wage setting, part of the processes of control in capitalist economies, is accomplished through concrete practices under specific historical conditions. The author studied these practices and conditions to understand the increasing wage gap. Through interviews and examination of union and (...) management documents, the author constructs an account of a wage-setting process that, in spite of a strong union and centralized bargaining, allows management to make discretionary wage decisions that favor raises for men over raises for women. Since 1983, competition and deregulation in the banking sector as well as union strategies have created conditions in which an increasing proportion of annual wage increases have been distributed on a discretionary basis. This has led to an increase in the wage gap. The author concludes that policies to raise women's relative wages should pursue general, across-the-board bargaining rather than individualized wage setting. (shrink)

W. V. Quine was quite simply the most distinguished analytic philosopher of the later half of the twentieth century. His celebrated attack on the analytic/synthetic tradition heralded a major shift away from the views of language descended from logical positivism. His most important book, Word and Object, introduced the concept of indeterminacy of radical translation, a bleak view of the nature of the language with which we ascribe thoughts and beliefs to ourselves and others. Quine is also famous for the (...) view that epistemology should be naturalized, that is conducted in a scientific spirit with the object of investigating the relationship between the inputs of experience and the outputs of belief. The eleven essays in this volume cover all the central topics of Quine's philosophy: the underdetermination of physical theory, analycity, naturalism, propositional attitudes, behaviorism, reference and ontology, positivism, holism and logic. (shrink)

Political realists claim that international relations are in a state of anarchy, and therefore every state is allowed to disregard its moral duties towards other states and their inhabitants. Realists argue that complying with moral duties is simply too risky for a state’s national security. Political moralists convincingly show that realists exaggerate both the extent of international anarchy and the risks it poses to states who act morally. Yet moralists do not go far enough, since they do not question realism’s (...) normative core: the claim that when national security is really at risk, states are allowed to disregard their moral duties. I contend that there is at least one moral duty that states should not disregard even if their inhabitants are at risk of death by military aggression: the duty to reduce extreme global poverty. The reason is that even granting that national security is about securing individuals’ right to life, global poverty relief is about that as well. (shrink)

In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern discourses - psychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these discourses only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede historicity to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan's explanation of historical process, its generative principles, and its (...) complex functionings. Her goal is to inspire a new kind of cultural critique, one that would be "literate in desire," that would be able to read what is inarticulable in cultural statements. Choosing a variety of battlegrounds, from historical phenomena - the 40,000 unsettling photographs of Moroccan drapery taken by Lacan's mentor, G. G. de ClA©rambault; the coincidence between vampire literature and the eighteenth-century imperative to breast-feed; the recurrent emptiness of urban spaces in film noir; the rise of democracy and questions of human rights - to theoretical concepts such as the gaze, cause, and sexual difference, Copjec imagines the blows that each contender might strike. Although Lacan emerges the victor, one has a sense that for Copjec the contest is close, that she is interested not in simply dismissing Foucault but in seizing his theory at those moments when its concerns and strategies are similar to Lacan's. She is intent on understanding how two compelling theories come to diverge, how small differences distort common assumptions. Establishing the links between psychoanalysis and critical philosophy, Copjec treats psychoanalysis not as a private language but as the mother tongue of modernity. She thus makes Lacan's famous "return to Freud" a return, as well, to the best principles of the Enlightenment. By this maneuver she forces us to question the historicist dialect that we have been taught to speak and that we all but take for granted and to regret the loss in it of psychoanalysis's more rousing accents. (shrink)

Political realists claim that international relations are in a state of anarchy, and therefore every state is allowed to disregard its moral duties towards other states and their inhabitants. Realists argue that complying with moral duties is simply too risky for a state’s national security. Political moralists convincingly show that realists exaggerate both the extent of international anarchy and the risks it poses to states who act morally. Yet moralists do not go far enough, since they do not question realism’s (...) normative core: the claim that when national security is really at risk, states are allowed to disregard their moral duties. I contend that there is at least one moral duty that states should not disregard even if their inhabitants are at risk of death by military aggression: the duty to reduce extreme global poverty. The reason is that even granting that national security is about securing individuals’ right to life, global poverty relief is about that as well. (shrink)

Most evolutionary analyses of animal communication suggest that low-cost signals can evolve only when both the signaller and the recipient rank outcomes in the same order. When there is a conflict of interest between sender and receiver, honest signals must be costly. However, recent work suggests that low-cost signals can be evolutionarily stable, even when the sender and the receiver rank outcomes in different orders, as long as the interest in achieving coordination is sufficiently great. In this paper, we extend (...) this body of work by analysing a game theory model that shows that low-cost signals can evolve when there are conflicts of interest and no interest in coordination, as long as individuals interact repeatedly. We also present an empirical example indicating that female rhesus macaques, Macaca mulatta, use honest, low-cost, vocal signals to facilitate interactions when conflicts of interest exist. (shrink)

There is a belief among the aborigines of Central Australia that the attributes of the divine ancestor are parcelled out among the component members of the tribe: and there are long periods in the history of ideas in which “divine philosophy” is similarly dismembered. The reason is that all great philosophical systems rest on a balanced tension of contemporary cultural elements, and as these change, and especially if they change rapidly or decisively, the unity of thought under which they have (...) been gathered begins to disintegrate. There follows a period of piecemeal experiment, in which the material of philosophy is too rich and too disorganized to be appropriated in a single conspectus: a period in which there will be no great philosophers, and perhaps little conscious philosophizing, not because philosophic genius is lacking, but because there is no scope for it till the various special tendencies of the age have achieved a certain internal development and a definite sense of direction. (shrink)

Moral distress has received much attention in the international nursing literature in recent years. In this article, we describe the evolution of the concept of moral distress among nursing theorists from its initial delineation by the philosopher Jameton to its subsequent deployment as an umbrella concept describing the impact of moral constraints on health professionals and the patients for whom they care. The article raises worries about the way in which the concept of moral distress has been portrayed in some (...) nursing research and expresses concern about the fact that research, so far, has been largely confined to determining the prevalence of experiences of moral distress among nurses. We conclude by proposing a reconsideration, possible reconstruction and multidisciplinary approach to understanding the experiences of all health professionals who have to make difficult moral judgements and decisions in complex situations. (shrink)