As a member of the BRAIN Neuroethics Subgroup, which drafted the Neuroethics Roadmap, I am proud of our work. The Roadmap is the result of many hours of thoughtful discussion, and reflects strong l...

The live event grotesque -- Leitmotifs, tropes, and cliches -- Aggressive sensation -- The detail -- Not through the birth canal: religion -- Semen and ash -- The four hour erection -- Go home Socrates -- The vagina and the demon -- Life for sale: religion -- Becoming a lake or a sea.

Spike Lee’s film 25 th Hour begins with an act of violence that it does not show: instead, the viewer hears the sounds of a dog being beaten. The dog’s menacing growl is then transformed into the growling image of Montgomery ‘Monty’ Brogan’s car speeding through New York. Monty spots the dog, and stops. It is only then that the viewer witnesses the results of the film’s ‘foundational’ act of violence: the bloody body of a dog beaten to pulp. When (...) Monty approaches the dog, it turns out the animal ‘still has some bite left in him’. Perhaps because the dog is a fighter, Monty decides to save him. Although the dog resists, he ultimately manages to get the dog in the trunk of his car. But Monty does not emerge from the rescue operation unscathed: blood is trickling from a cut in his neck. This scene can be read as a pre-figuration of a stomach-turning scene towards the end of the film, in which Monty’s friend Francis ‘Frank’ Slaughtery will beat up Monty’s face beyond recognition so that Monty will not be raped on his first night in jail. Monty’s face recalls the dog at the beginning of the film. It is through the bloody mess of their bodies that Monty and the dog begin to communicate, to enter into communion. This essay explores how this communion, this communication between Monty and the dog, comes about. I am interested, specifically, in what the significance of such an exploration might be for contemporary conceptions of community. The essay initially approaches this topic against the background of Emmanuel Levinas’ work on ethics, in which the notion of the face has played a crucial role. But its aim is really to situate the film, through the references to the work of Francis Bacon that it includes, in a more contemporary, post-Levinasian debate on an ethics of defacement. I am particularly interested in exploring the significance of such an ethics in the post-September 11 era, which is explicitly evoked at the beginning of Lee’s film. My argument is that Monty and the dog begin to communicate, to enter into a communion, and thus to form a community, through a process of defacement that simultaneously strips them from their ways of life and propels them into a shared ethical and political becoming. (shrink)

Résumé éditeur : "Nous avons perdu les deux repères qui permettaient autrefois de nous définir entre les dieux et les bêtes. Nous ne savons plus qui nous sommes, nous autres humains. De nouvelles utopies en naissent. D'un côté, le post-humanisme prétend nier notre animalité et faire de nous des dieux promis à l'immortalité par les vertus de la technique. D'un autre côté, l'animalisme veut faire de nous des animaux comme les autres et inviter les autres animaux à faire partie de (...) notre communauté morale. Alors forgeons une nouvelle utopie à notre mesure. Ne cherchons plus à nier les frontières naturelles - celles qui nous séparent des dieux ou des animaux - et défendons un humanisme conséquent, c'est-à-dire un cosmopolitisme sans frontières.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Innova dies nostros, sicut a principio:Novelty and Nostalgia in Thomas of Celano's First and Second Lives of St. FrancisBarbara Newman (bio)IntroductionIn his sixth-century compendium of hagiography, Gregory of Tours argued that one should always speak of the vita patrum or vita sanctorum in the singular. According to Pliny, he noted, grammarians did not believe the noun vita had a plural. More to the point, although "there is a diversity (...) of merits and virtues among [the saints], … the one life of the body sustains them all in this world."1 Just as the Church, the body of Christ, is one, so too the saints. Their project of imitatio Christi re-presents the one and only life of Christ for each new generation. As a literary genre, hagiography fleshes out this insight, for no other genre is so steeped in self-citation. Every vita is such a tissue of biblical verses that, to edit a saint's Life before Google, one had to know Scripture by heart or spend endless hours with a concordance. After the Bible, quotations from a few classic vitae were constantly recycled: Athanasius' Life of St. Antony, Sulpicius Severus' Life of St. Martin, Gregory the Great's Life of St. Benedict. With the passage of time, newer classics joined older ones to produce one vast, self-referential monument, incarnate in the Acta Sanctorum: Gregory's vita sanctorum multiplied ad infinitum. So deep did this tendency run that, when an obscure saint needed a vita to justify a cult, shameless hagiographers would plagiarize whole paragraphs, plundering stories and miracles from earlier vitae to serve their turn.2 [End Page 169]It is small wonder, then, that the hagiographic genre is so often characterized as "traditional" or "conservative." It is nostalgic, too, in the sense that each saint's words and deeds bring a glorious Golden Age back to life—most often the apostolic age or the time of the Desert Fathers, but sometimes the graced beginnings of a religious order. Such memorials enabled later generations to idealize their glorious founders. This tendency to exalt the new as a renovation of the old has deep roots in Christianity; even the evangelist Matthew systematically represents Jesus as a new Moses. In the same vein, it is not unusual to find a saint identified as a new Jacob or a second David. On the other hand, many saints' Lives make an insistent claim to newness, renovatio. For the saints were, and are, extraordinary—not merely good men and women, but radical figures whose words and deeds shocked those around them, beginning with their parents. Like Jesus, they had not only admirers, but detractors in plenty. If their publicists held them up as exemplars of virtue, theirs was no ordinary kind, for the heroic virtue that gave saints their charisma could look much like madness. Despite the precedents of earlier vitae, their ascetic feats and challenging behavior often struck observers as new and unheard-of. In hagiography, therefore, claims of novelty play a key role that balances the familiar topoi. Sometimes the newness of a saint's charism is cause for joyful celebration. Jesus, after all, had declared ecce nova facio omnia (Rev 21:5). But "novelties" also had to be handled with care, for they could easily be condemned as heresies or extreme practices deviating from the tradition of the elders.This tension between novelty and nostalgia emerges most clearly in the vitae of saints who founded genuinely new forms of religious life. In this paper I will explore the way it plays out in two early Lives of Francis of Assisi, perhaps the most popular saint of all time. After his death in 1226, Francis set a speed record for canonization—one that would be surpassed in the Middle Ages only by his disciple, St. Anthony of Padua, and by the Dominican martyr Peter of Verona.3 Aside from his charisma and the exponential growth of the Franciscan Order, the fast-track canonization is due to Pope Gregory IX, who as Cardinal Hugolino had been personally close to Francis and supported his movement. For the ceremony in July 1228, less than two years after the... (shrink)

Concerning beauty, order, harmony, design.--Concerning moral good and evil.

THE LIFE Of FRANCIS BACON, LORD HIGH CHANCELLOR OF ENGLAND. THE ancient Egyptians had a law, which ordained that the actions and characters of their dead ...

Este trabajo estudia las figuras de Abū Ya῾zà y al-Yuḥānisī desde la perspectiva de su educación y formación intelectuales. Los dos personajes analizados pueden ayudarnos, por un lado, a revisar en profundidad las características de aquellos que se consideran awliyā’ o «amigos de Dios» así como a sugerir la posibilidad de la existencia de dos modelos de santidad en el occidente islámico, uno típicamente magrebí y el otro andalusí. Los dos modelos propuestos muestran características comunes pero también claras diferencias, especialmente (...) en lo relativo a su educación y formación intelectual. De esta forma, el estudio presta especial atención a factores como la enseñanza recibida por parte de los sujetos de estudio y sus maestros, la presencia de la lengua bereber en esta enseñanza así como el fenómeno de la rihla a las tierras orientales como parte inseparable de la propia formación intelectual. (shrink)

An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (1728), jointly with Francis Hutcheson’s earlier work Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), presents one of the most original and wide-ranging moral philosophies of the eighteenth century. These two works, each comprising two semi-autonomous treatises, were widely translated and vastly influential throughout the eighteenth century in England, continental Europe, and America. -/- The two works had (...) their greatest impact in Scotland and influenced many well-known Scottish philosophers, particularly those writing after the last Jacobite upheaval, in 1745. This can be seen in the concern of the post-1745 generation with analyzing human nature as the foundation of moral theory, with the “moral sense” and moral epistemology more generally, with the impartial spectator and the calm passions, and with the independence of benevolence from self-interest. In addition to the influence of his writings, Hutcheson was also a famed teacher whose Glasgow students, notably Adam Smith, held sway over generations of Scottish moral philosophers. -/- Despite their impact on Scottish letters, the four treatises were in fact written in Dublin, and the philosophers to whom Hutcheson responded and with whom he debated were in the main not Scottish but English, Irish, French, Roman, and Greek. Consequently, part of Hutcheson’s legacy was a cosmopolitan outlook among enlightened Scots, who learned to turn their eyes far from home. (shrink)

Managers often ask why their firm should have an ethics program, especially if no one has complained about unethical behavior. The pursuit of business ethics can cost money, they say. It can lose sales to less scrupulous competitors and can drain management time and energy. But as Harvard business professor Francis Aguilar points out, ethics scandals (such as over Beech-Nut's erzatz "apple juice" or Sears's padded car repair bills) can severely damage a firm, with punishing legal penalties, bad publicity, (...) and irreparably injured customer relations. Equally important if less obvious, unethical behavior can undermine a firm's organizational spirit. On the other hand, Aguilar argues, in a well run firm, ethical programs can actually enhance corporate performance, strengthening the company at every level and supercharging employee risk taking and innovation. In Managing Corporate Ethics, Aguilar shows managers how to create ethical programs within their organizations that not only discourage large-scale wrongdoing, but can contribute substantially to the achievement of corporate excellence. Aguilar's program is down-to-earth and comprehensive, and based on his extensive research on highly successful, ethical companies, both large and small. He recommends action on three fronts: first, get senior management to provide effective ethical leadership; second, set up an ethics program that promotes concern for the interests of people affected by the firm's operations and that provides safeguards against corrupting business pressures; and third, staff the company with ethical people and surround the organization with ethical advisors (including legal, financial, accounting, tax, and marketing consultants). To illuminate this three-step program, Aguilar incorporates the lessons learned in his in-depth study of ten prominent firms with proven successful ethics programs--among them Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Nucor Steel, Cray Research, ServiceMaster, and Texas Instruments. He examines Lincoln Electric's attention to compensation and job security to ensure quality products and to reduce the pressure or temptation to act unethically. He shows how General Mills, while pushing product line managers to compete aggressively, uses corporate staff units to guard against illegal or unacceptable claims (testing cake recipes, for example, to see if a product's quality fails under the less-than-perfect conditions of a normal kitchen). And he details how Armstrong World Industries uses pep talks, inspirational stories, role models, and ready access to management to promote ethical standards among employees. Throughout, Aguilar demonstrates convincingly that an ethical program pays dividends: that employees, suppliers, customers, and the community at large know when they are being treated in a positive and constructive manner, and are likely to respond in kind. Packed with real life examples of successful (and failed) ethical programs, Managing Corporate Ethics is a valuable roadmap to an often overlooked source of business success. (shrink)

This is the third of four volumes presenting all of Francis Ellingwood Abbot's major published articles. Any scholar or library interested in American philosophy, religious thought, and social and intellectual history should find this edition of his essays a useful addition to the collection. Francis E. Abbot was a noted American philosopher and champion of Free Religion. He was a member of C.S. Peirce's Metaphysical Club, the first American philosopher to support Charles Darwin, the founding editor of The (...) Index, a founder of the Free Religious Association, and the founding President of the National Liberal League of America. In addition to over six hundred articles, he was the author of Scientific Theism (1885), The Way Out of Agnosticism, Or The Philosophy of Free Religion (1890), and The Syllogistic Philosophy, or Prolegomena to Science (1906). (shrink)

It is a welcome development when academic philosophy starts to concern itself with practical issues, in such a way as to influence people's lives. Recently this has happened with one moral issue in particular—but infortunately it is the wrong issue, and people's actions have been influenced in the wrong way. The issue is that of the moral status and treatment of animals. A number of philosophers have argued for what they call ‘animal liberation’, comparing it directly with egalitarian causes such (...) as women's liberation and racial equality and suggesting that, if racism and sexism are rationally indefensible, so is ‘speciesism’. If one ought to give equal consideration to the interests of all human beings, then, so they daim, one must on the same grounds and in the same way recognize that ‘all animals are equal’, be they human or non-human. We believe that this assimilation of ‘animal liberation’ to human liberation movements is mistaken. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Introduction -- Note on the texts -- An inquiry into the original of our ideas of beauty and virtue -- Treatise I -- An inquiry concerning beauty, order, & c. -- Treatise II -- An inquiry concerning the original of our ideas of virtue or moral good.

THE P R E F A C E, Giving fome ACCOUNT of the LIFE, WRITINGS, and CHARACTER of the AUTHOR. T"\R. FRANCIS HUTCHESON was born on the 8th of ...

Depuis les années 1980, les organisations non gouvernementales ont développé un marché de l’aide humanitaire, qui a été relayé dans les années 1990 par les organisations internationales. L’importance du capital émotionnel susceptible d’être rassemblé par ces motifs a conduit les entreprises à vouloir également se placer sur ce marché pour se positionner comme acteur majeur de la société. La gouvernance d’entreprise devient le modèle suivi par toute institution, tandis que l’entreprise prétend devenir bien commun pour sauver la planète. La finance (...) se convertit aux investissements socialement responsables. Comme l’affiche une entreprise chinoise : « le marché est le self-service du bonheur ». (shrink)

Este artículo estudia dos aspectos primordiales del cadiazgo de la ciudad de granada bajo los almorávides. Por un lado, expone la lista de los cadíes de Granada basándose en los datos proporcionados por las fuentes biográficas andalusíes. Por el otro, analiza los mecanismos de la relación entre el poder político almorávide y la élite local granadina, relación que se caracterizó, en gran medida, por la negociación y el enfrentamiento. El cadiazgo de Granada fue gestionado por varias familias andalusíes, granadinas y (...) no granadinas, y no por voluntad propia de los granadinos, sino por imposición de las autoridades almorávides. También, encontramos miembros de familias magrebíes ocupando el cadiazgo en mayor número del atestiguado al mismo tiempo en otras ciudades andalusíes ¿no se incluye a Algeciras por razones ligadas especialmente al estatuto de la ciudad¿. Con esto, las autoridades almorávides querían evitar el monopolio de las funciones judiciales por parte de la élite local, y con ello ejercer mayor control sobre la ciudad, sobre todo teniendo en cuenta que era la capital andalusí. (shrink)

Il n’existait encore aucune synthèse digne de ce nom sur l’une des congrégations féminines les plus importantes par le nombre et l’extension : à leur apogée dans les années 1960, les Filles de la Charité étaient 45 000 ; elles sont encore présentes aujourd’hui dans une centaine de pays. Ce volume se présente comme le premier d’une histoire qui fera l’objet d’un second tome couvrant la période contemporaine depuis la Révolution. Il concerne la France et accessoirement la Pologne, seul pays (...) dan... (shrink)

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

An inclusive vision of mathematics-- its beauty, its humanity, and its power to build virtues that help us all flourish. For mathematician Francis Su, a society without mathematical affection is like a city without museums. To miss out on mathematics is to live without experiencing some of humanity's most beautiful ideas. In this profound book, written for a diverse audience but especially for those disenchanted by their past experiences, an award-winning mathematician and educator weaves personal reflections, puzzles, and stories (...) to show how mathematics meets basic human desires and cultivates virtues essential for human flourishing. Readers will explore mathematical concepts-- and see how mathematical thinking can even fulfill such longings as for love, play, freedom, justice, and community. Some lessons come from those who have struggled, including philosopher Simone Weil, whose own mathematical contributions were overshadowed by her brother's, and Christopher Jackson, who discovered mathematics as an inmate in a federal prison. Christopher Jackson's letters to the author appear throughout the book and show how this intellectual pursuit can-- and must-- be open to all. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This paper examines the role of managerial self-interest in the merger market. It looks at factors influencing managers'' merger decisions by analyzing managerial expense preference factors on cross-sectional data employing non-parametric statistical methods. The same factors are examined for acquiring, acquired, and merging firms, and control groups used in each case. The results support the authors'' contention that managerial discretion is a significant motivating factor for mergers. The changes in expense preference factors indicate management decisions which provide conditions allowing management (...) to indulge in management preferred expenditures, while reducing risk to their career. The authors then provide a moral/philosophic framework of ethical analysis for examining manager''s merger decisions, using teleological and deontological theories. They conclude that merger decisions motivated or influenced by self-interest are unethical and, in the process, provide managers facing a merger decision with a framework for making an ethical decision. (shrink)

This article identifies four approaches to arguing for democracy, showing that none has an adequate way of supporting both full adult inclusion and the exclusion of children. I focus in Section 2 on the arguments of David Estlund and Thomas Christiano, showing that their arguments against guardianship call into question the exclusion of children from the franchise. In Section 3, I explain why the exclusion of children constitutes an injustice, and in the final section, I consider two approaches to remedying (...) that injustice. Key Words: justice • democracy • children. (shrink)

ABSTRACTWittgenstein’s remark that one cannot follow a rule only once has generated two puzzles: how can everyone accept it to be true? and why does Wittgenstein advance it? These two puzzles have tormented commentators for decades. In this paper I put forward a new interpretation and explain away the two puzzles. I shall show that Wittgenstein’s remark is plain truth and that his motivation behind making it is to dissolve the picture theory of meaning propounded in the Tractatus. This interpretation (...) also helps us to see that Wittgenstein’s other remark, that to follow a rule is a custom, is also a grammatical one. (shrink)

In this paper, I first review previous interpretations of Wittgenstein's remarks on private language, revealing their inadequacies, and then present my own interpretation. Basing mainly on Wittgenstein's notes for lectures on private sensations, I establish the following points: ‘remembering the connection right’ means ‘reidentifying sensation-types’; the reason for ‘no criterion of correctness’ is that nothing, especially no inner mechanisms nor external devices, can be utilised by the private speaker to tell whether some sensations are of one type or different types; (...) and private names are not really names, private language is not really a language, therefore, private language is a grammatical illusion. My interpretation has the advantage of being able to reconcile Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, which is to dissolve philosophical problems by rearranging grammatical facts, with his actual philosophical practice, at least in the case of private language. (shrink)

In this paper, I first review previous interpretations of Wittgenstein's remarks on private language, revealing their inadequacies, and then present my own interpretation. Basing mainly on Wittgenstein's notes for lectures on private sensations, I establish the following points: ‘remembering the connection right’ means ‘reidentifying sensation-types’; the reason for ‘no criterion of correctness’ is that nothing, especially no inner mechanisms nor external devices, can be utilised by the private speaker to tell whether some sensations are of one type or different types; (...) and private names are not really names, private language is not really a language, therefore, private language is a grammatical illusion. My interpretation has the advantage of being able to reconcile Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, which is to dissolve philosophical problems by rearranging grammatical facts, with his actual philosophical practice, at least in the case of private language. (shrink)

THE SENSE OF BEAUTY: A FIRST APPROXIMATION It is generally acknowledged that during the first half of the eighteenth century a profound change was wrought in the theory of art and natural beauty. To this period we owe the establishment of the modem system of the arts. 1 In England, the notion of a separate and autonomous disci pline devoted solely to art and to beauty came into being through the concept of "aesthetic disinterestedness. " 2 In addition, emphasis in (...) the theory of art shifted from object to subject - from the work of art to the perceiver and critic. Focal point for this change was the sense of beauty which, in concert with the moral sense of the British school, represented a dominant force in Enlightenment value theory. It is Francis Hutcheson who, more than anyone else, can be thought of as the founder and principal spokesman of this philosophical coterie. If the aesthetic sense was instrumental in the transfer of interest, in the philosophy of art, from object to perceiver, the aesthetic and moral senses together were no less important in a parallel transference of value judgment from the rational to the sensate. (shrink)

Excerpt from The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, Baron of Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, and Lord High-Chancellor of England, Vol. 3 of 3: Methodized, and Made English, From the Originals; With Occasional Notes, to Explain What Is Obscure; And Shew How Far the Several Plans of the Author, for the Advancement of All the Parts of Knowledge, Have Been Executed to the Present Time Ibe Nores occafionally added, we bope, will more fully open tbe De fign and Scope of (...) tbe P: ece', jo as to render it generally intelligible, and lead to its fart/oer Advancement. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)