The faith in progress that propelled the West for over four centuries is in decline due to its own success. The emergence of capitalism with its novel market imperatives has created both the poverty that causes political crises and the material growth that has destabilized the Earth’s climate. There is a growing sense that we are dominated by the technologies and social organizations that we hoped would liberate us. Individualism and secularity have left people feeling isolated and without a sense (...) of higher purpose, leading some to reject Enlightenment values in favor of traditionalisms and even neofascism. In universities, faculty struggle to prove their utility and relevance, because they cannot guarantee their graduates a decent living in a world of automation and globalized production. As a result of these trends, the West’s ability to produce responsible citizens is in question. Our students are largely inured to appeals to transcendent values because they are urged to be “practical.” Faculty are no longer encouraged to care about the character-building nature of a liberal education. United States universities are in danger of not having an independent voice, as those departments that can consistently get major external funding seek commercial applications for the products of their research. In the United States, ideologically based harassment and censorship of unpopular ideas takes place regularly and is a major deterrent to pursuing a career in higher education. Given these challenges, can intellectuals still make a difference in universities? Many have taken to social media and other ways of getting their ideas around the increasingly steep paywalls of academic publications and the de facto censorship in their institutions. Some of the most vibrant exchanges of ideas are now happening in other places, largely online. These venues draw in people who are trying their best to learn something they are unlikely to learn at universities. But are such alternatives truly sustainable or good enough? Higher education is at a crossroads in which even this “retreat and regroup” strategy is highly problematic. (shrink)

Laurie Johnson Bagby examines the loss of the appreciation for honor in modern Western society through an examination of the political philosophy of English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. She finds in Hobbes's thought a 'turning point for honor,' in which honor is rejected as too dangerous, and fear and self-interest are put in its place as the chief means of peace and good order.

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 685-687, August 2012.

Donald Trump’s election and the subsequent roiling of the U.S. political scene have been an unsettling spectacle and have occurred during an increase in right-wing power around the world.1 Why did...

Does a Postal Principle, a principle of destinerrance, hold true for computer mediated communication (CMC)? Perhaps. However, the question is not one concerning technology. Is it rather the case that we must ask, after Derrida, after all, whether destinerrance ever held true, as a principle? This paper considers the prospect that the Postal Principle was, in principle, or as a principle, an expression of a truth value from something that can not in fact, be held at all: the ghost in (...) the machine. Drawing on a phenomenology of computer practice, the paper argues that there is greater explanatory value to be found in Derrida's more recent comments on the relative exteriority of the technological apparatus (in Archive Fever and elsewhere), framing an understanding of the human body as partes extra partes. Yet it is demonstrated here that this same framing was already in place from the moment that the principle of destinerrance was first articulated, and that a subsequent technical turn in Derrida's work merely extends a framework already set in place in the earlier work (in The Post Card, for example). It is argued, then, that in articulating a Postal Principle for the purpose of guaranteeing its failure, Derrida had calculated the future trajectory – and had built the logic of the calculation and of the ‘jet’ words, as he calls them, into this trajectory – of what I call the ‘fantasy of the disembodied virtualm’ through which users of CMC project themselves into the archive of archives that the internet was bound to become. (shrink)

The prospects for a phenomenology of technology have been guided in the past decade by a split between supporters of Martin Heidegger and those who subscribe to Bernard Stiegler’s critique of Heidegger. This essay proposes that both are needed for a phenomenology of what Edward Castronova calls “synthetic worlds” (large on-line environments like Second Life and World of Warcraft). Here is a phenomenology that must take into account histories of design and technical evolution to account for the particular “fantasy of (...) disembodiment” that shapes a user’s experience of a synthetic world, forgetting the bodily engagement with hardware. (shrink)

The prospects for a phenomenology of technology have been guided in the past decade by a split between supporters of Martin Heidegger and those who subscribe to Bernard Stiegler’s critique of Heidegger. This essay proposes that both are needed for a phenomenology of what Edward Castronova calls “synthetic worlds” (large on-line environments like Second Life and World of Warcraft). Here is a phenomenology that must take into account histories of design and technical evolution to account for the particular “fantasy of (...) disembodiment” that shapes a user’s experience of a synthetic world, forgetting the bodily engagement with hardware. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 6, September 2019, Page 674-676.

This original book has been consistently cited by scholars of international relations who explore the roots of realism in Thucydides's history and the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. While acknowledging that neither thinker fits perfectly within the confines of international relations realism, Laurie M. Johnson proposes Hobbes's philosophy is more closely aligned with it than Thucydides's.

Volume 25, Issue 6, September 2020, Page 710-712.

Todd McGowan is professor of film studies at the University of Vermont and author of The Impossible David Lynch and Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. This most...

This book analyzes Tocqueville’s views on religion, family and gender roles, politics, relations with Native Americans, white southerners and slavery, and the military. It explores how these views can help form a uniquely American honor code, one that re-envisions aristocratic elements of honor within a modern democratic and capitalist society.

After a century-long hiatus, honor is back. Academics, pundits, and everyday citizens alike are rediscovering the importance of this ancient and powerful human motive. This volume brings together some of the foremost researchers of honor to debate honor’s meaning and its compatibility with liberalism, democracy, and modernity. Contributors—representing philosophy, sociology, political science, history, psychology, leadership studies, and military science—examine honor past to present, from masculine and feminine perspectives, and in North American, European, and African contexts. Topics include the role of (...) honor in the modern military, the effects of honor on our notions of the dignity and “purity” of women, honor as a quality of good statesmen and citizens, honor’s role in international relations and community norms, and how honor’s egalitarian and elitist aspects intersect with democratic and liberal regimes. (shrink)

John Cottingham is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Reading, a renowned Descartes scholar, and author of over 30 books. His latest book, In Search of the Soul: A Philosophical...

This book, first published in French in 2013, has now been published in English, opening to a wider readership Alain Badiou’s understanding of, and at times disagreement with, the Freudian psychoan...

This book is the English translation of Alain Badiou’s seminar on Nicolas Malebranche, part of a series of seminars on Being, the One, and the Infinite. In this extraordinary seminar, originally ta...

Oxford anthropologist Ruben Andersson has written a book that is accessible for a general audience, because it is so engagingly written, and is full of information and arguments that should be read...

Ruben Andersson is a Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford University, and author of No Go World (2019) and Illegality, Inc. (2014), among other works. David Keen is a Professor of Conflict St...

Ronald Bogue, Distinguished Research Professor of Comparative Literature and the Josiah Meigs Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Georgia, has compiled many of his previously publ...

Diane Coyle is an economist and Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, and co-director of the Bennett Institute. She serves in many other capacities, including as expert...

Volume 29, Issue 2, March 2024, Page 230-232.

Stephen Bullivant is a senior lecturer in theology and ethics, and Director of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society at St. Mary’s University, London. He is the author or co-author of te...

Larry Bartels is one of the most prominent political scientists in the areas of democracy, electoral politics, and public opinion. He is the May Werthan Shayne Chair of Public Policy and Social Sci...

Todd McGowan is professor of film studies at the University of Vermont and author of The Impossible David Lynch and Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. This most...

Martha Nussbaum has an impressive list of books to her credit, including the great Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2016), and her latest, Citadels of Pride: Sexual Abuse, Accoun...

BackgroundThe pursuit of a cure for HIV is a high priority for researchers, funding agencies, governments and people living with HIV (PLWH). To date, over 250 biomedical studies worldwide are or have been related to discovering a safe, effective, and scalable HIV cure, most of which are early translational research and experimental medicine. As HIV cure research increases, it is critical to identify and address the ethical challenges posed by this research.MethodsWe conducted a scoping review of the growing HIV cure (...) research ethics literature, focusing on articles published in English peer-reviewed journals from 2013 to 2021. We extracted and summarized key developments in the ethics of HIV cure research. Twelve community advocates actively engaged in HIV cure research provided input on this summary and suggested areas warranting further ethical inquiry and foresight via email exchange and video conferencing.DiscussionDespite substantial scholarship related to the ethics of HIV cure research, additional attention should focus on emerging issues in six categories of ethical issues: (1) social value (ongoing and emerging biomedical research and scalability considerations); (2) scientific validity (study design issues, such as the use of analytical treatment interruptions and placebos); (3) fair selection of participants (equity and justice considerations); (4) favorable benefit/risk balance (early phase research, benefit-risk balance, risk perception, psychological risks, and pediatric research); (5) informed consent (attention to language, decision-making, informed consent processes and scientific uncertainty); and (6) respect for enrolled participants and community (perspectives of people living with HIV and affected communities and representation).ConclusionHIV cure research ethics has an unfinished agenda. Scientific research and bioethics should work in tandem to advance ethical HIV cure research. Because the science of HIV cure research will continue to rapidly advance, ethical considerations of the major themes we identified will need to be revisited and refined over time. (shrink)

Empathy can be terribly important when we talk to people who are different from ourselves. And it can be terribly important that we talk to people who are different precisely about those things that make us different. If we’re to have productive conversations across differences, then, it seems we must develop empathy with people who are deeply different. But, as Laurie Paul and others point out, it can be impossible to imagine oneself as someone who is deeply different than (...) oneself—something that plausible definitions of empathy seem to require. How then, can these terribly important conversations take place? I argue that philosophical and psychological work on intellectual humility can show us a way to empathize and have these conversations even when we can’t imagine ourselves as the other. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary book examines the work of several female artists since 1960 in the areas of dance, music, installation, photography, architecture, poetry, literature, theater, film, and performance art. Each chapter is primarily devoted to an important work by a single artist, seen within its historical context, and with particular attention to how each artist incorporated gender issues or feminist thought into her respective art form. Laurie Anderson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jane Campion, Judy Chicago, Zaha Hadid, Pauline Oliveros, Yvonne Rainer, Cindy (...) Sherman, Amy Tan, and Paula Vogel have each made groundbreaking contributions to their fields. As a group, they represent a tremendous diversity of approaches to art making: from accessible to opaque, from overtly feminist to apolitical, from emotive to cool, from controversial to mainstream. (shrink)

This is a superb anthology that questions the value and even the existence of honor in the contemporary world. Although readers have had the benefit of excellent works on this concept from mainly a...

Volume 25, Issue 5, August 2020, Page 606-608.

This study investigates the differences in individuals'' ethical decision making between Canadian university business students and accounting professionals. We examine the differences in three measures known to be important in the ethical decision-making process: ethical awareness, ethical orientation, and intention to perform questionable acts. We tested for differences in these three measures in eight different questionable actions among three groups: students starting business studies, those in their final year of university, and professional accountants.The measures of awareness capture the extent to (...) which respondents felt that a particular action was unethical according to each of several ethical criteria. We found few differences between the two student groups on these measures, suggesting that their education had minimal effect on raising their awareness of the ethical issues in the vignettes. Indeed, overall, the graduating student''s scores were marginally lower than those of the entry-level students. However, the professionals viewed some actions as significantly less ethical than did the graduating students. (shrink)

While the origin and development of the just war tradition until the early modern period blended concerns, ideas, and practices from the moral, legal, political, and military spheres, from the mid-seventeenth century until the mid-twentieth it largely disappeared as a conscious source of moral reflection about war and its restraint. Beginning in the 1960s, however, American theologian Paul Ramsey initiated a recovery of just war thinking in a series of writings applying the principles of discrimination and proportionality, ideas he traced (...) both to Augustinian theology and to natural law, to the debate over nuclear weapons and later to the Vietnam War. Ramsey's work directly engaged both theological and policy debate over military force, initiating lines of reflection that have since developed further and become increasingly institutionalized. This brief essay examines the nature of Ramsey's just war thought and its influence over the last 40 years. (shrink)

Reidenbach and Robin (1988, 1990) proposed and refined a multidimensional ethics scale. This study replicates and extends their work by examining the generalizability of the scale beyond marketing to accounting, and to subjects from across the United States and other countries. Results indicate that, in general, the scale holds for this different sample and context. However, an additional utilitarian construct emerged in the current study as important for accounting academics in their ethical decision-making. We also found that when we refined (...) Reidenbach and Robin's measure of intention to make a particular choice, a social desirability bias or halo effect was identified. Methodological implications for business ethics research are also presented. (shrink)