The complexity of these terms and their relationship with truth and truthfulness are put on display by the contributors to this volume.

His is a journey marked by the questioning of experience itself, until what is reached is sovereign laughter, non-knowledge, and a Presence in no way distinct from Absence, where "The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy ...

Essays on the French writer and critic Georges Bataille, that examine his thought in relation to Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida.

Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure and Death Sentence are marked by the imperative to hear the call of night, of darkness, and death. In each work, the ear is enlisted to undermine the prominence accorded to the eye. If sight is essential to measure and confirm the space separating subjects from objects or subjects from other subjects, Blanchot introduces hearing as a way to collapse this protective distance. The border between inside and outside becomes porous, and the subject is no longer (...) protected by vision’s capacity to establish a neutral and demonstrable distance between itself and the object of sight. As vision becomes catastrophic, hearing assumes an ascendant role. Thomas and Anne each hear the call of death, as well as cries, laments and sudden sounds that burst through silence. The characters of Death Sentence also hear and respond to a variety of calls, including the call to yield to death and the open grave. In both works, Blanchot provides a literary space in which sounds... (shrink)

The emergence and development of the field of clinical ethics coincided with the revitalization of moral philosophy following the publication of John Rawls’ ma...

This paper is premised on the thought that aside from Emerita Quito, who is generally considered in the Philippines as the "Filipino philosopher, " there is another Filipina philosopher who is unfortunately ignored in the various philosophy circles in the country but whose works and scholarship can easily rival those of the former. This paper, therefore, surveys the thoughts of Mary John Mananzan in order to understand her contributions to the development of Filipino philosophy. To attain such a goal, this (...) paper discusses six substantive sections, which tackle the following: (]) her intellectual biography, (2) her critique of patriarchal religion, (3) her critique of the Philippine political economy, (4) her critique of patriarchal everyday culture, (5) her critique of Philippine colonization, and (6) her recollections on her own political praxis. This paper defines the place of Mananzan among the various discourses of Filipino philosophy and assesses her contributions to such a philosophy. (shrink)

Coalitional games raise a number of important questions from the point of view of computer science, key among them being how to represent such games compactly, and how to efficiently compute solution concepts assuming such representations. Marginal contribution nets , introduced by Ieong and Shoham, are one of the simplest and most influential representation schemes for coalitional games. MC-nets are a rulebased formalism, in which rules take the form pattern → value, where “pattern ” is a Boolean condition over agents, (...) and “value ” is a numeric value. Ieong and Shoham showed that, for a class of what we will call “basic” MC-nets, where patterns are constrained to be a conjunction of literals, marginal contribution nets permit the easy computation of solution concepts such as the Shapley value. However, there are very natural classes of coalitional games that require an exponential number of such basic MC-net rules. We present read-once MC-nets, a new class of MC-nets that is provably more compact than basic MC-nets, while retaining the attractive computational properties of basic MC-nets. We show how the techniques we develop for read-once MC-nets can be applied to other domains, in particular, computing solution concepts in network flow games on series-parallel networks. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 92-94.

The pandemic creates unprecedented challenges to society and to health care systems around the world. Like all crises, these provide a unique opportunity to rethink the fundamental limiting assumptions and institutional inertia of our established systems. These inertial assumptions have obscured deeply rooted problems in health care and deflected attempts to address them. As hospitals begin to welcome all patients back, they should resist the temptation to go back to business as usual. Instead, they should retain the more deliberative, explicit, (...) and transparent ways of thinking that have informed the development of crisis standards of care. The key lesson to be learned from those exercises in rational deliberation is that justice must be the ethical foundation of all standards of care. Justice demands that hospitals take a safety‐net approach to providing services that prioritizes the most vulnerable segments of society, continue to expand telemedicine in ways that improve access without exacerbating disparities, invest in community‐based care, and fully staff hospitals and clinics on nights and weekends. (shrink)

Tim Wardle’s 2018 documentary film Three Identical Strangers is an exploration of identity, family, and loss. It’s also about nature versus nurture and the boundaries of ethically permissible research, particularly research involving children. The film tells the story of identical triplets who were separated soon after birth in 1961. A different family adopted each boy, without being told that their son had two identical brothers. The adoption agency responsible for finding the families was collaborating with a group of researchers working (...) on a study about … something. Three Identical Strangers details the boys’ fight to obtain information about the study and for closure. But while the film may have received rave reviews, it left us feeling uneasy. We came away with two sets of questions, one having to do with the story that the film documents and the second with the ethics of filmmaking itself. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: What is Sexism? Background: Language, Experience, and Recognition Levels of Sexism Two Feminist Views of Sexism Objections.

U.S. researchers and scholars often point to two legal factors as significant obstacles to the inclusion of pregnant women in clinical research: the Department of Health and Human Services’ regulatory limitations specific to pregnant women's research participation and the fear of liability for potential harm to children born following a pregnant woman's research participation. This article offers a more nuanced view of the potential legal complexities that can impede research with pregnant women than has previously been reflected in the literature. (...) It reveals new insights into the role of legal professionals throughout the research pathway, from product conception to market, and it highlights a variety of legal factors influencing decision-making that may slow or halt research involving pregnant women. Our conclusion is that closing the evidence gap created by the underrepresentation and exclusion of pregnant women in research will require targeted attention to the role of legal professionals and the legal factors that influence their decisions. (shrink)

This book's importance is derived from three sources: careful conceptualization of teacher induction from historical, methodological, and international perspectives; systematic reviews of research literature relevant to various aspects of teacher induction including its social, cultural, and political contexts, program components and forms, and the range of its effects; substantial empirical studies on the important issues of teacher induction with different kinds of methodologies that exemplify future directions and approaches to the research in teacher induction.

This paper considers the importance of play as a conventional space for hypothetical self-expression and self-trial, its importance for determination of identity, and for development of self-possibilities. Expanding such possibilities in play enables challenging of socially entrenched assumptions concerning possible and appropriate identities. Discussion is extended to the contexts of gender performance (drag) and sport-play. It is argued that play proceeds on the basis of a fundamental pretence of reality that must be taken seriously by its participants; this discussion includes (...) considerations of serious and ironical play, “playing-at”, and travesty. (shrink)

Flaubert himself, in an early and now famous letter, identifies in "bêtise" the effect of an inordinate desire to conclude: "Oui, la bêtise," he writes, "consiste à vouloir conclure. Nous sommes un fil et nous voulons savoir la trame" . This is to say stupidity, to Flaubert, is less a given content of discourse than a particular order of that discourse itself.1 It is the sign of an hasty and elliptical intervention into thought of a series of preconceived conclusions, the (...) source of which may be situated in the doxa and in the rhetoric of verisimilitude that sustains the persuasive power of the doxa. Stupidity, as the project of the Dictionnaire demonstrates, is an endless fabric of maxims and probable syllogisms the function of which is to determine the particular and the specific, the singular and the different, as paradigmatic exempla of the larger discourse of encyclopaedic universality expressed in the verisimilitude of received ideas. It is in this sense that one can see in Flaubert's notion of "bêtise" the denunciation by the writer of an especially vulgarised form of the Aristotelian concept of verisimilitude, which, built around the rhetorical figures of the probable syllogism—the enthymeme—and the exemplum , is directed towards winning adhesion to a particular thesis by appealing to generalities and probabilities, and which constructs its arguments from material drawn from the doxa.2 It is this rhetoric of persuasion by verisimilitude that Flaubert, in the various discourses of the lover, the dreamer, and the politician, will throw into ironic relief in Madame Bovary and L'Éducation sentimentale. · 1. Cf. Valéry, Oeuvres, 1:1452.· 2. The concept of verisimilitude is a difficult one and one which had received much critical attention in recent years. I have taken the term here to refer to the complex network of constraints by which the mimetic novelist, like the rhetorician, is able to engage his audience in a contract of mutual recognition and to persuade them of the "sense of reality" of his narrative, that his is a plausible interpretation of reality, worthy of belief . It is here that Aristotle's elaboration of mimesis and of the art of rhetoric is decisive. Both in the Poetics and in the Rhetoric, Aristotle distinguishes two concepts with regards to the manner in which the artist or the rhetorician solicits from his audience the belief in the justness of his reconstruction of reality. The first concept is that of pithanon, the plausible or the persuasive. This corresponds to the speculative consideration of what strategy will be most forceful in any given case. Rhetoric is indeed defined as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion " . As such, pithanon is the sign of a desire to convince, a decision on the part of an individual in a particular situation. For this desire to convince to become fully operative in the context of an audience, it needs to be recast not as a plausibility, but as a probability, as eikos. Aristotle defines eikos as "a thing that usually happens: not . . . anything whatever that usually happens, but only if it belongs to the class of the 'contingent' or 'variable.' It bears the same relation to that in respect of which it is probable as the universal bears to the particular" . Eikos is on one level a collection of contents, of topoi. But it is more than this. For otherwise this would mean that works deriving from different historical contexts would become unintelligible to the uninitiated reader. Eikos is a patterning of discourse, a rhetorical syntax, based upon the integration of the singular in the universal, and translated in the text by the enthymeme and the exemplum. The homogeneity of the mimetic novel derives from the way in which the desire to convince is mediated and dissimulated by a totalising, "natural" eikos, when, in other words, the narrator is "objective." It is when these two dimensions are dissociated, as in Bouvard et Pécuchet, that all manner of disturbance is generated. . Leslie Hill, fellow in Clare College, Cambridge University, is presently doing research on Flaubert and on general aspects of the modern French novel. This is his first publication. (shrink)

Performance Anxieties looks at the on-going debates over the value of psychoanalysis for feminist theory and politics--specifically concerning the social and psychical meanings of racialization. Beginning with an historicized return to Freud and the meaning of Jewishness in Freud's day, Ann Pellegrini indicates how "race" and racialization are not incidental features of psychoanalysis or of modern subjectivity, but are among the generative conditions of both. Performance Anxieties stages a series of playful encounters between elite and popular performance texts--Freud meets Sarah (...) Bernhardt meets Sandra Bernhard; Joan Riviere's masquerading women are refigured in relation to the hard female bodies in the film Pumping Iron II: The Women ; and the Terminator and Alien films. In re-reading psychoanalysis alongside other performance texts, Pellegrini unsettles relations between popular and elite, performance and performative. (shrink)

Grice proposed an implicature-based account of irony, according to which ironical utterances give rise to an antiphrasis implicature. This view, which followed the classical rhetorical account of irony, merely transported it from the semantic to the pragmatic domain, which is clearly not enough to answer the questions which the antiphrasis account triggers, i.e., the explanation of how the hearer recovers the antiphrasis interpretation, or of why the speaker should say something when she means exactly the reverse. A final, and devastating, (...) criticism is, quite simply, that not all ironical utterances are assertions and, hence, that the antiphrasis account does not easily apply to them. What is more, some ironical utterances, perhaps most of them, do not at all trigger an antiphrasis. Contemporary accounts of irony, such as those proposed by Sperber and Wilson — the echoic account — or by Currie — the pretence account —, do not meet with the same difficulties. They are generally presented as being able to account for “central” examples of irony and as incompatible..In the present paper, I will show that the echoic and the pretence accounts, far from being incompatible, seem to be applicable to exactly the same set of examples, and that, in fact, some of the strictures levelled by Currie against the echoic account are not in fact valid criticism. Additionally, there are quite a lot of examples of ironical utterances which are not susceptible of an account in terms of echo or pretence. Thus, it seems that neither account can serve as a general account of irony. I finally propose an account in terms of ironical utterancesshowing(rather thansaying) an unreasonable behaviour, belief or reasoning on the part of the target of the irony and plead for a Gricean account, based not on an antiphrasis implicature, but on meaningNN and the recognition of the double-barrelled intention of the speaker. This, clearly, is compatible with the echoic or pretence accounts, though more general than either. (shrink)

But nathelees, syn I knowe youre delit, / I shal fulfille youre worldly appetit.1 Chaucer’s Wife of Bath centers on a wonderfully fruitful paradox: she claims for women and for herself the right to “maistrie” and “sovereynetee” in marriage, but she does so by articulating the discourse imparted to her by the “auctoritee” of anti-feminism.2 Indeed, this paradoxical challenge to and reiteration of anti-feminist ideas has left Chaucer’s readers debating for decades which way the irony cuts: is the Wife to (...) be understood as a proto-feminist, or is she merely “a delightful buffoon inadvertently lampooning herself for the ironic pleasure of a knowing, male audience”?3 How we choose to answer this question .. (shrink)

The proposed volumes are aimed at a multidisciplinary audience and seek to fill the gap between law, semiotics and visuality providing a comprehensive theoretical and analytical overview of legal visual semiotics. They seek to promote an interdisciplinary debate from law, semiotics and visuality bringing together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a prelude to identifying fertile avenues for research going forward. Advance Praise for Law, Culture and Visual Studies This diverse and exhilarating collection of essays explores the (...) many facets both historical and contemporary of visual culture in the law. It opens a window onto the substantive, jurisdictional, disciplinary and methodological diversity of current research. It is a cornucopia of materials that will enliven legal studies for those new to the field as well as for established scholars. It is a 'must read' that will leave you wondering about the validity of the long held obsession that reduces the law and legal studies to little more than a preoccupation with the word. Leslie J Moran Professor of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London Law, Culture and Visual Studies is a treasure trove of insights on the entwined roles of legality and visuality. From multiple interdisciplinary perspectives by scholars from around the world, these pieces reflect the fullness and complexities of our visual encounters with law and culture. From pictures to places to postage stamps, from forensics to film to folklore, this anthology is an exciting journey through the fertile field of law and visual culture as well as a testament that the field has come of age. Naomi Mezey, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., USA This highly interdisciplinary reference work brings together diverse fields including cultural studies, communication theory, rhetoric, law and film studies, legal and social history, visual and legal theory, in order to document the various historical, cultural, representational and theoretical links that bind together law and the visual. This book offers a breath-taking range of resources from both well-established and newer scholars who together cover the field of law's representation in, interrogation of, and dialogue with forms of visual rhetoric, practice, and discourse. Taken together this scholarship presents state of the art research into an important and developing dimension of contemporary legal and cultural inquiry. Above all, Law Culture and Visual Studies lays the groundwork for rethinking the nature of law in our densely visual culture: How are legal meanings produced, encoded, distributed, and decoded? What critical and hermeneutic skills, new or old, familiar or unfamiliar, will be needed? Topical, diverse, and enlivening, Law Culture and Visual Studies is a vital research tool and an urgent invitation to further critical thinking in the areas so well laid out in this collection. Desmond Manderson, Future Fellow, ANU College of Law / Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University, Australia. (shrink)

This article takes a critical look at the television show ‘Uit de Kast’ that has been broadcast on Dutch public television for the past three years. In this program, young male and female lesbian, gay, and bisexual participants, who have not come out yet for various reasons, reveal their homosexuality to their family, peers, and colleagues while being documented on camera. We problematize the compatibility of the genre ‘reality television’, which by definition focuses on personal emotions and conflict, with subjects (...) that have emancipatory goals, such as the creation of more awareness for and acceptance of homosexuality. The data reveal that in the show LGB emancipation is framed as a personal problem and not as a socio-political issue with moral and ideological dimensions. In the end, we argue, the effect could very well be that the show does not promote but rather – ironically – hinders LGB emancipation. (shrink)

In this review, the authors reflect on the making of an illustrated pocketbook for everybody who cares about universities – one that challenges the norms of academic publishing.It is ironic that wh...

“Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” juxtaposes elliptical descriptions that reveal the interiorization of commodities in the economy of high capitalism. “Allegory in the nineteenth century vacated the outer world, to colonize the inner world.”32 Each of the exposé’s six sections consists of two parts: “Fourier, or the Arcades,” “Daguerre, or the Panoramas,” “Grandville, or the World Exhibitions,” “Louis-Philippe, or the Interior,” “Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris,” “Haussmann, or the Baricades.”33The commercial arcade and not the factory is the logical (...) starting point for Benjamin. Paris, like London, the other capital of nineteenth-century capitalism, is an administrative and financial but not an industrial center. Paris is the locus classicus of bourgeois culture, which finds its most conspicuous expression in the arcade. The arcade cuts through and commercializes the residential block. It harnesses the technology of cast-iron “Pompeian” pillars, to offer in its enticing bay windows the latest, most sophisticated form of bourgeois merchandising. Fourier houses his “land of Cockaigne” in a “reactionary modification” of the arcade.34Parallel to the technical innovation of the arcades is that of the lifelike painted panoramas, which serve Jacques-Louis David’s pupils when they “draw from nature.” Politically superior, the city still dreams of the country. “The panoramas, which declare a revolution in the relation of art to technology, are at the same time an expression of a new feeling about life.”35 They drive a wedge between “plastic foreground” and “informational base.” The worker in the literary panorama is “a trimming for an idyll.” Technical innovations in photography reduce the representational significance of painting. Now photography “is given the task of making discoveries”: it explores the sewers and catacombs. It markets events. With impressionism and cubism, painting in turn transcends bourgeois conceptions of realism. 32. “Die Allegorie hat im neunzehnten Jahrhundert die Umwelt geräumt, um sich in der Innenwelt anzusiedeln” .33. Adorno objects to the use of people’s names in these titles and suggests that objects like dust or plush would bemore illuminating. Benjamin retains the names to evoke bourgeois interiorization. Louis-Philippe, however, is anomalous, since he is emblem rather than allegorist; the true allegorist of the “Louis-Philippe, or the Interior” section is the collector. Otherwise, the organization is strictly symmetrical: Benjamin discusses Charles Fourier, Louis Daguerre, and Grandville at the end of the sections in which they appear, the others at the beginning.34. Trans. Jephcott, p. 148. “Das Schlaraffenland,” “ihre reaktionäre Umbildung” . Anne Higonnet, formerly a student at the Ecole du Louvre, is a graduate student of art history at Yale University. Margaret Higonnet, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Connecticut, has written on Romantic and modern literary theory. Patrice Higonnet is Goelet Professor of French History at Harvard University. He has written on the French Revolution and, with Margaret Higonnet, is coauthor of a forthcoming book on suicide in eighteenth-century France. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that the concept of “the body,” ironically generic and a-bodily, is a legacy of the modern political/ecological distinction. I proceed through five sections. First I suggest that the political and the ecological, in spite of a lot of excellent work undermining the nature-culture distinction, remain mutually resistant concepts. In section two I argue that this split can be partially understood through the work of Bruno Latour. For Latour modernity is defined by an attempt to purge (...) culture of nature. This is the “first Great Divide” that constitutes modernity as a concept and in fact a distinct nature-culture. For Latour, this distinction then gets externalized or projected to create a second Great Divide, one imagined by moderns between themselves and other societies. To illustrate the extent of the sway of this distinction, I read a recent and widely influential essay on doing history in the Anthropocene by Dipesh Chakrabarty. Chakrabarty underestimates the role of the nature-culture distinction in the making of climate crisis. Here I also explain that perhaps what is needed is recognition that the human as a morphology both separates itself from ecology and yet—incompatibly—is considered to be an ecological pinnacle. The human isn’t and yet is ecological. Differences among humans, when they are discussed, are attributed unilaterally to the political side of a new political-ecological split. After Latour the nature and culture distinction is questionable, but a political-ecological split survives that attributes the eruptions of discontinuous life entirely to human agency. In the third section I then turn to the work of Frantz Fanon to argue that Latour’s Great Divides are expressed as “Manichaean” in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The “ecological” import of Fanon’s concept of Manichaean-ism has largely been missed, thanks both to the salience of the political-ecological distinction and to the subtlety of Fanon’s account. But Fanon is not only talking about politics; he’s talking about ecology. The human, Fanon explains, is meant to be a natural master of the planet, a human among animals. The human is master of all “matter” with which all things related to bodies and all bodies related to things are identified. In the fourth section I suggest that it is this modern Manichaean-ism that produces a crucial double bind in the present: Those who fail to be “the body” of modernism are also those most harmed by its elemental (a word I borrow from a critical reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Luce Irigaray for an indistinguishably political and ecological) destruction. Politics, at least in the tradition that gives rise to modern politics, is in fact and has always been the privileging of certain bodies over others. There is no perfectly apolitical bodily feature, though some features of bodies are more politically formative than others. Modernity does nothing to intervene on this. In fact it exacerbates this theme. Neither the discourse of politics nor the discourse of ecology offers refuge to those whose bodies are considered a threat to a human morphology that is planetarily alienated. In the final section of the essay I argue that this partitioning of politics (relations among the humans) from ecology produces “the body” and its generic justice. I return to Latour to argue that he ultimately does not appreciate the double bind discussed in section four. Fanon does. Therefore Fanon offers a better framework for undermining “the political,” not by reducing it to the modern sense of “the ecological,” but by giving attention to what he suggests is the “cortico-visceral” injustice of a modernity that denies its own earthly status. (shrink)

With the arrival of another wave of “boat people” to Australian waters in late 2009, issues of human rights of asylum seekers and refugees once again became a major feature of the political landscape. Claims of “queue jumping” were made, particularly by some sections of the media, and they may seem populist, but they are also ironic, given the protracted efforts on the part of the federal government to stymie any orderly appeals process, largely through resort to “privative clauses”. Such (...) clauses demonstrate the many ways in which human rights of those seeking asylum in far-off lands and are potential future immigrants, who often lack much-touted needed papers, yet who are for the most part genuine refugees, are subject to the slings and arrows of political fortune (and misfortune). Approaching the courts if treated unfairly or seeking a further decision as to your fate would seem one of the fundamental premises of human rights. Yet privative clauses—or attempts to ouster the jurisdiction of the courts and to insulate decisions from appeal—have become an increasingly frequent feature of the Australian migration legislation. With a seemingly watertight federal constitutional power set in stone since 1901, to deal with migration and aliens, and without the tempered contemporary update of a federal Bill of Rights, the Australian federal government has been able to narrow the grounds of judicial review in those contexts. We argue that the concerted efforts to deny such fundamental rights of appeal to those most in need of the full armoury of the protection of the law in a modern, affluent democracy, constitutes both a breach of their human rights and a breach of core constitutional principles such as separation of powers. Those principles may not be formally articulated in the text of the Australian Constitution, but in our view they are implicit in the constitutional arrangements, and hence we can conclude with the arguments of former Justice of the High Court of Australia, Michael Kirby, who asked—to whom does sovereignty truly belong? (shrink)

Excellence in sport performance is normally taken to be a matter of superior performance of physical movements or quantitative outcomes of movements. This paper considers whether a wider conception can be afforded by certain kinds of nature based sport. The interplay between technical skill and aesthetic experience in nature based sports is explored, and the extent to which it contributes to a distinction between different sport-based approaches to natural environments. The potential for aesthetic appreciation of environmental engagement is found to (...) be strongly dependent on whether or not environmental engagement is exploited for the end of producing a quantifiable result or enhancing technical skill. It is also argued that an existential rather than spectatorial attitude to aesthetic experience is offered by specifically nature oriented sport. Aesthetic experience achieved in this way is therefore neither passive nor detached, but extends Berleant's concept of participatory environmental aesthetics and underpins both an alternate (wide) conception of excellence in sport activity and a richer experience of aesthetic engagement than more objectivised standpoints. (shrink)

Applies ancient wisdom to modern life with Taoist exercises designed to identify and strengthen the balance between the demands of society and one's true desires.

Jeremy Horder, Excusing Crime Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, xx + 295 pp.

While Specific Informed Consent has been the established standard for obtaining consent for medical research for many years, it does not appear suitable for large-scale biobank and health data research. Thus, alternative forms of consent have been suggested, based on a variety of ethical background assumptions. This article identifies five main ethical perspectives at stake. Even though Tiered Consent, Dynamic Consent and Meta Consent are designed to the demands of the self-determination perspective as well as the perspective of research as (...) a public good, they are still also criticized from both perspectives. In addition, criticisms based on concerns of justice, participation and democratic deliberation, and relational concerns have been levelled at each of the models. As all of these perspectives have valid points to make, the task at hand lies in balancing these ethical perspectives. What constitutes an adequate balancing depends on contextual factors. These factors include digital infrastructure and digital literacy, data safety regulation, good scientific and clinical practice, transparent debates on ethically relevant features of research, social inequalities, anti-discrimination laws and practices, trust in health care institutions and recognition of patient preferences, and consensus on unethical research. We argue that the role of context in determining acceptable models of consent puts the ethical importance of models of consent into perspective. Since altering contextual factors can help to live up to the ethical concerns at stake in debates about models of consent, opting for such a shift of focus comes without ethical loss. (shrink)

This research addresses the question of whether men and women in sales differ in their ethical attitudes and decision making. The study asked 209 subjects to respond to 20 ethical scenarios, half of which were "relational" and half "non-relational." The study concludes (1) that there are significant ethical differences between the sexes in situations that involve relational issues, but not in non-relational situations, and (2) that gender-based ethical differences change with age and years of experience. The implications of these finding (...) for sales organizations are discussed. (shrink)

Rooted in the field of cathedral studies, this paper draws into dialogue three bodies of knowledge: Edward Bailey’s notion of implicit religion that, among other things, highlights the continuing traction of the Christian tradition and Christian practice within secular societies; David Walker’s notion of the multiple ways through which in secular societies people may relate to the Christian tradition as embodied within the Anglican Church and John Fisher’s notion of spiritual wellbeing as conceptualised in relational terms. Against this conceptual background, (...) this paper draws on data provided by 1234 participants attending one of the Christmas Eve carol services in Liverpool Cathedral to explore the perceived impact of attendance on the spiritual health of people who do not believe in God and yet feel that Liverpool Cathedral is their cathedral, and it is this sense of belonging that brings them back at Christmas time.Contribution: Situated within the science of cathedral studies, this paper links in an original way three fields of discourse: Edward Bailey’s notion of implicit religion, David Walker’s notion of the four ways of belonging to God facilitated by the Anglican Church and John Fisher’s conceptualisation and operationalisation of the notion of spiritual wellbeing. The hypothesis developed from this original integration of theoretical perspectives is then tested empirically on data provided by 404 participants at carol services who do not believe in God. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics and probability theory share one peculiarity. Both have well established mathematical formalisms, yet both are subject to controversy about the meaning and interpretation of their basic concepts. Since probability plays a fundamental role in QM, the conceptual problems of one theory can affect the other. We first classify the interpretations of probability into three major classes: inferential probability, ensemble probability, and propensity. Class is the basis of inductive logic; deals with the frequencies of events in repeatable experiments; describes (...) a form of causality that is weaker than determinism. An important, but neglected, paper by P. Humphreys demonstrated that propensity must differ mathematically, as well as conceptually, from probability, but he did not develop a theory of propensity. Such a theory is developed in this paper. Propensity theory shares many, but not all, of the axioms of probability theory. As a consequence, propensity supports the Law of Large Numbers from probability theory, but does not support Bayes theorem. Although there are particular problems within QM to which any of the classes of probability may be applied, it is argued that the intrinsic quantum probabilities are most naturally interpreted as quantum propensities. This does not alter the familiar statistical interpretation of QM. But the interpretation of quantum states as representing knowledge is untenable. Examples show that a density matrix fails to represent knowledge. (shrink)

The feminist philosopher and social scientist shows how "gendering" has affected the social and natural sciences as she reconciles the long-standing dichotomy between the quantitative and qualitative methods and demonstrates the tandem use of both experimental and intuitive approaches.

The extent to which machine metaphors are used in synthetic biology is striking. These metaphors contain a specific perspective on organisms as well as on scientific and technological progress. Expressions such as “genetically engineered machine”, “genetic circuit”, and “platform organism”, taken from the realms of electronic engineering, car manufacturing, and information technology, highlight specific aspects of the functioning of living beings while at the same time hiding others, such as evolutionary change and interdependencies in ecosystems. Since these latter aspects are (...) relevant for, for example, risk evaluation of uncontained uses of synthetic organisms, it is ethically imperative to resist the thrust of machine metaphors in this respect. In addition, from the perspective of the machine metaphor viewing an entity as a moral agent or patient becomes dubious. If one were to regard living beings, including humans, as machines, it becomes difficult to justify ascriptions of moral status. Finally, the machine metaphor reinforces beliefs in the potential of synthetic biology to play a decisive role in solving societal problems, and downplays the role of alternative technological, and social and political measures. (shrink)