Over the last two decades there has been a proliferation of partnerships between business and government, multilateral bodies, and/or social actors such as NGOs and local community organizations engaged in promoting development. While proponents hail these partnerships as an important new approach to engaging business, critics argue that they are not only generally ineffective but also serve to legitimate a neo-liberal, global economic order which inhibits development. In order to understand and evaluate the role of such partnerships, it is necessary (...) to appreciate their diversity with respect to not only the activities that they engage in, but also the degree to which they are subject to social control. This paper distinguishes four different types of business partnerships, based upon differing degrees of social control: conventional business; corporate social responsibility; corporate accountability; and social economy. Each type of partnership is described, their basic forms are noted, and the conditions and prospects for them contributing to development are examined. By way of conclusion, an analysis is offered of how the different types of business partnerships relate to different conceptions of development and function as policy paradigms to promote different globalization agendas. (shrink)
In recent years India has been moving further in the direction of adopting an Anglo-American model of corporate governance. This decision, the result more of international economic and political pressures than public debate, in effect represents a new development strategy for the world's most populous democracy. In light of this situation, it is important to ask two basic questions: 1) why has the Anglo-American model of corporate governance been adopted? and; 2) can it be justified? This paper addresses the first (...) of these questions by distinguish and examining three historical models of governance in India: 1) the managing agency model in the colonial period; 2) the business house model that emerged after independence, and; 3) the Anglo-American model which has recently been adopted (and is still emerging). The second question is approached through an examination of the "development impact" of the new model, as indicated by such measures as growth, employment and respect for shareholder rights. (shrink)
This volume constitutes a lucid introduction to methodology in social research. It will enable social science researchers trained in a particular field to look beyond and relate to other methodological domains.
As social media becomes increasingly popular, human subjects researchers are able to use these platforms to locate, track, and communicate with study participants, thereby increasing participant retention and the generalizability and validity of research. The use of social media; however, raises novel ethical and regulatory issues that have received limited attention in the literature and federal regulations. We review research ethics and regulations and outline the implications for maintaining participant privacy, respecting participant autonomy, and promoting researcher transparency when using social (...) media to locate and track participants. We offer a rubric that can be used in future studies to determine ethical and regulation-consistent use of social media platforms and illustrate the rubric using our study team’s experience with Facebook. We also offer recommendations for both researchers and institutional review boards that emphasize the importance of well-described procedures for social media use as... (shrink)
The motivation of someone who is locked-in, that is, paralyzed and mute, is to find relief for their loss of function. The data presented in this report is part of an attempt to restore one of those lost functions, namely, speech. An essential feature of the development of a speech prosthesis is optimal decoding of patterns of recorded neural signals during silent or covert speech, that is, speaking “inside the head” with output that is inaudible due to the paralysis of (...) the articulators. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the importance of both fast and slow single unit firings recorded from an individual with locked-in syndrome and from an intact participant speaking silently. Long duration electrodes were implanted in the motor speech cortex for up to 13 years in the locked-in participant. The data herein provide evidence that slow firing single units are essential for optimal decoding accuracy. Additional evidence indicates that slow firing single units can be conditioned in the locked-in participant 5 years after implantation, further supporting their role in decoding. (shrink)
Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present is an authoritative and up-to-date survey of the entire history of skepticism. Divided chronologically into ancient, medieval, renaissance, modern, and contemporary periods, and featuring 50 specially-commissioned chapters from leading philosophers, this comprehensive volume is the first of its kind.
This book provides a systematic analysis of many common argumentation schemes and a compendium of 96 schemes. The study of these schemes, or forms of argument that capture stereotypical patterns of human reasoning, is at the core of argumentation research. Surveying all aspects of argumentation schemes from the ground up, the book takes the reader from the elementary exposition in the first chapter to the latest state of the art in the research efforts to formalize and classify the schemes, outlined (...) in the last chapter. It provides a systematic and comprehensive account, with notation suitable for computational applications that increasingly make use of argumentation schemes. (shrink)
This book provides a systematic analysis of many common argumentation schemes and a compendium of 96 schemes. The study of these schemes, or forms of argument that capture stereotypical patterns of human reasoning, is at the core of argumentation research. Surveying all aspects of argumentation schemes from the ground up, the book takes the reader from the elementary exposition in the first chapter to the latest state of the art in the research efforts to formalize and classify the schemes, outlined (...) in the last chapter. It provides a systematic and comprehensive account, with notation suitable for computational applications that increasingly make use of argumentation schemes. (shrink)
People are unable to report how they decide whether to move backwards or forwards to catch a ball. When asked to imagine how their angle of elevation of gaze would change when they caught a ball, most people are unable to describe what happens although their interception strategy is based on controlling changes in this angle. Just after catching a ball, many people are unable to recognise a description of how their angle of gaze changed during the catch. Some people (...) confidently choose incorrect descriptions that would guarantee failure of interception demonstrating unconscious knowledge co-existing with systematically different conscious beliefs. Where simple solutions to important evolutionary problems exist, unconscious perception needs to be impervious to conscious beliefs. (shrink)
In his thought-provoking piece, ‘Expressivism at the Beginning and End of Life’, Philip Reed contrasts the application of the expressivist objection to the use of reproductive technologies with its application to interventions that bring about death. In the process of supporting his comparative conclusion, that ‘expressivism at the end of life is a much greater concern than at the beginning’, he makes some interesting observations and offers some convincing arguments. Further examination, however, shows that his arguments actually support conclusions (...) far beyond the modest one he intends to draw. The absurdity of these conclusions can be used to identify the flaws in Reed’s argument. Reed summarises the expressivist objection in the context of physician-assisted suicide as follows: > When we allow PAS for individuals who are terminally ill or facing some severe disease or disability, we send a message of disrespect to all individuals who face such adversities in that we imply that they are inferior or their lives are not worth living. Analogous arguments have been made about decisions to use reproductive technology to prevent the birth of people with disabilities. Reed describes a common rebuttal to the …. (shrink)
In the course of reading David Lapoujade’s Aberrant Movements, readers will undoubtedly encounter its overtly nuanced positioning. In relation to the existent patterns of critical engagement with Deleuze’s works, Lapoujade chooses to make his book seem like an expressive tissue of an expanding poetic universe rather than a measurable extensity from some representational whole. So the potency of his book, as Rajchman makes evident in the ‘Introduction’ to Aberrant Movements, doesn’t lie in unfolding like a teleological mimicry of what stands (...) before us as some kind of palimpsestic accretion of a-categorical Deleuzean readings. Rather his work is a perversely creative exercise in repeating these readings into openings of inassimilable differences. Such an inclusively ‘exclusive positioning’ of his book brings about what we may call a transformative de-familiarization of it, rendering it as indistinct patterns of aberrant movements that continuously and creatively shift us from one kind of complex territorial intensity to another. (shrink)
This is a broad overview of how the prevalent family systems in the developing world influence sex preference for children. Son preference is evident in the data in East Asia and South Asia, and in the Middle East and North Africa, where patriarchal family systems make sons more valuable than daughters to parents in terms of economic, physical, and emotional sustenance. In sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, there is little difference between the levels of support parents can expect (...) from sons and daughters—and little revealed sex preference in the data. (shrink)
This piece, included in the drift special issue of continent. , was created as one step in a thread of inquiry. While each of the contributions to drift stand on their own, the project was an attempt to follow a line of theoretical inquiry as it passed through time and the postal service(s) from October 2012 until May 2013. This issue hosts two threads: between space & place and between intention & attention . The editors recommend that to experience the (...) drifiting thought that attention be paid to the contributions as they entered into conversation one after another. This particular piece is from the BETWEEN INTENTION & ATTENTION thread: Jeremy Fernando, Sitting in the Dock of the bay, watching... * R.H. Jackson, Reading Eyes * Gina Rae Foster, Nyctoleptic Nomadism: The Drift/Swerve of Knowing * Bronwyn Lay, Driftwood * Patricia Reed, Sentences on Drifitng * David Prater, drift: a way * * * * * 1. To drift is to be propelled by currents. 2. Sentences are textual currents. 3. To drift is to be com pelled with currents. 4. To be compelled is to be overcome by some force. 5. To be overcome by some force requires the instantiation of a weightless body (virtual or actual), upon which and through which a force can operate. 6. Forces can be physical, cognitive, unconscious and sensory. 7. Forces of drift have no particular telos; they incline bodies without knowable destination. 8. Drifting is nomadic, where nomadism includes movements between places, times (also time-zones), genres, thought and cognitive states. 9. Forces are attractors; attractivity is a force. 10. Attractivity is a relation between force and body. 11. Attractivity is relation of exteriority; it is of the domain of the foreign. 12. To drift is to become the prey of attraction, the prey of the foreign. 13. In the movement of becoming prey, one can either be eaten or feed into a re-composition of things. 14. Drifting is liminal; it can be equally productive and destructive. 15. The deviated course implied by drifting may yield novelty, yet may equally yield a perpetual deferral of any positionality. 16. The state of drifting is necessary to the creation of novelty. 17. The state of drifting can inhibit the creation of novelty. 18. The modern drift was celebrated as a form of emancipation, through the liberation of urban structures traced on foot, to the negation of banal tasks in riding on the open highway. In the attention economy, drifting has become a paradigm of labour, precarious and otherwise. 19. To drift in a novel fashion requires a necessary threshold between distraction and re-attraction. 20. Re-attraction is a form of going off-track, yet implies the fidelity to an alter force. Re-attraction is eccentric in inclination, that is, decentred, casting alter orbits of orientation. 21. Eccentricity is a form of drift defined as a body inflected by the force of heterogeneous inclination. Eccentricity is the fidelity to the becoming-foreign of the body as prey to attractivity. 22. Drift as eccentricity is equal to the creation of novel modes of inclination alter to the limits of normative orbits of determinate trajectories. 23. The effects of eccentric drifting can only be known post-movement. 24. All modes of drifting (natural and cognitive) are relative to some former position, although distances and their capacity for measurement are inconsistent. 25. Eccentric drifting does not result in relativism. Drifting is transitional, and, like a Moiré pattern, produces interferences between things. 26. Where there is drifting there are both side-effects and side-affects, which feed-back into the inclination of drift itself. 27. Side-effects and side-affects may produce conditions and sensibilities of failure. 28. The ethics of drifting play out in the responsiveness to side-effects/side-affects. 29. Eccentric drifting is not algorithmic, informational, strategic nor opportunistic; it is tactically lived experience. 30. Eccentric drifting is a dance with contingency, of repositioning a body (a body includes thought) through the affirmation of re-attraction. 31. Eccentric drifting is a form of love, a love of existence that proceeds strategic coupling with ideas, people, situations, places and so forth. 32. As a form of love, eccentric drifting can generate changes of state (and even changes of State). 33. Currents that propel/compel a state of eccentric drifting may be imaginary; a possible current includes the attractive force to that which is not (yet) present. 34. Eccentric drifting is not only a state of transitional movement, but most importantly includes the fabrication of imaginary forces that could propel/compel a given body and its spheres of interaction. 35. These sentences comment on drift, but are not exemplary of drifting. (shrink)
A familiar post-Kantian criticism contends that Kant enslaves sensibility under the yoke of practical reason. Friedrich Schiller advanced a version of this criticism to which Kant publicly responded. Recent commentators have emphasized the role that Kant’s reply assigns to the pleasure that accompanies successful moral action. In contrast, I argue that Kant’s reply relies primarily on the sublime feeling that arises when we merely contemplate the moral law. In fact, the pleasures emphasized by other recent commentators depend on this sublime (...) feeling. These facts illuminate Kant’s views regarding the relationship between morality, freedom, and the development of moral feelings. (shrink)
Kant claims that an intuitive understanding—such as God would possess—could cognize things in themselves. This claim has prompted many interpreters of Kant's theoretical philosophy to propose that things in themselves correspond to how an intuitive understanding would cognize things. In contrast, I argue that Kant's theoretical philosophy does not endorse the common proposal that all things in themselves correspond to how an intuitive understanding would cognize things. Instead, Kant's theoretical philosophy maintains that things in themselves might or might not correspond (...) to how an intuitive understanding would cognize things. I then consider whether Kant's moral philosophy and theory of reflecting judgment might provide alternative grounds for claiming that we should regard things in themselves as corresponding to how an intuitive understanding would cognize things. I argue that Kant's moral philosophy does not provide such grounds, but his theory of reflecting judgment does. Thus, interpretations of Kant's transcendental idealism should attend to the differences between Kant's theoretical philosophy, moral philosophy, and theory of reflecting judgment in assessing the relationship between intuitive understanding and things in themselves. (shrink)
When The Emperor of All Maladies was published in late 2010, I knew it would be near the top of my stack of books to read. Since I am a PhD student in the History of Science and Medicine, reading a notable book on the history of cancer and its treatments is a must. Sadly, at the time of its publication, my mother had just died unexpectedly at age 82 of a disease for which she had never received a prior (...) diagnosis: cancer, or acute myelogenous leukemia, to be exact. From diagnosis to death took a mere six days. So I hesitated to take this in-depth look at cancer, a disease that left my family and me stunned and grieving from such a sudden loss. I reasoned, however, that the approach of the book would be detached and scientific, perhaps similar to the tone of the academic tomes that I tackle each week. I began to read. (shrink)
In this technology-driven Digital Age, Management Education is primarily engaged in development of skills and techno-economic competence of students with dominant thrust on sharpening their rational faculties and quantitative ability. Deeper questions and nobler qualittative issues like Spirituality, Corporate Social Responsibility and Ethics are naturally assigned low priority in the rush for money, career, fame, power and position both at the individual and organizational levels. The present paper engages in a Qualitative Research by conducting Focus group Interviews among Participants at (...) the Undergraduate level who had taken up Management Education. After content analysis of the responses the authors highlight their observations on the existing gaps in prevailing management education leading to failure of the present system in charging the students with a deeper Meaning of Work and a higher Purpose of Life. The paper then delves into exploration in pertinent tenets of Classical Indian Wisdom to enrich the spectrum of Management education with insights on Humanistic Philosophy, Holistic Learning, Enlightened CSR and Ethics, and Inspirational Leadership towards creating a better and more humane future for modern organizations. (shrink)
How should we conceptualize direct action against climate change? Although direct action is an increasingly significant tactic by the global climate movement, we lack understanding how direct action contributes to the systemic change necessary for addressing the crisis. Drawing upon critical theories of climate change as a crisis in the social reproduction of the metabolic relations between humans and nature in capitalism, I conceptualize direct action as attempts to intervene directly in the organization of the social metabolism, towards reorganizing these (...) relations in a more socially just and ecologically sustainable manner. My framework thus expands and clarifies the scope and potential of direct action as a means of confronting the capitalist climate crisis, as evidenced by Greta Thunberg’s school strike for climate. (shrink)
Dignity of risk is a simple concept that is surprisingly hard to enact, honor, and prioritize in health care. The term was coined 50 years ago by Robert Perske in an article entitled "The Dignity of Risk and the Mentally Retarded". And as I have written in "Discharge Decisions and the Dignity of Risk", "the concept involves respect for persons, self-determination, and attempts to minimize paternalism or parentalism". Most simply, the dignity of risk embraces respecting or honoring an individual's choices (...) or decisions even in the face of potential harms.The central tension between safety/protection and autonomy/self-determination is at the core of the concept, but it also involves appraisals... (shrink)
In this essay I explore how travel and border-crossing for abortion care constitutes a challenge to methodological nationalism, which serves to obscure such experiences from view. Drawing up field research conducted at two abortion clinics in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I also explore some implications of regarding pregnant people who travel for abortion care as a type of migrant, even if they are U.S. citizens and legal residents. Finally, I assess how this discursive shift can make important contributions to pandemic and (...) migration ethics. (shrink)
In this paper, we present a survey of the development of the technique of argument diagramming covering not only the fields in which it originated - informal logic, argumentation theory, evidence law and legal reasoning – but also more recent work in applying and developing it in computer science and artificial intelligence. Beginning with a simple example of an everyday argument, we present an analysis of it visualised as an argument diagram constructed using a software tool. In the context of (...) a brief history of the development of diagramming, it is then shown how argument diagrams have been used to analyze and work with argumentation in law, philosophy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)
-/- Abstract: The present paper investigates the empowering force of hybridity in female diasporant in Bharati Mukherjee’s outstanding novel Jasmine. The novel depicts Jasmine’s journey of transformation from a passive, traditional girl at the mercy of fate in a village in India to an active, modern, and most importantly cross-cultural hybrid woman in America. All through the novel, her identity is transformed in line with shifts in her name from Jyoti to Jasmine to Jazzy to Jane. Accordingly, she stands (...) in-between two cultures, shuttles between identities, welds opposing identities, enters the third space and emerges as a hybrid. The present study in the light of Homi Bhabha's insights seeks to demonstrate that immigrating, experiencing displacement and in-betweenness, and being positioned in the third space pave the way for Jasmine’s becoming a hybrid and being liberated. Besides, the study is to depict by creating a hybrid character, Bharati Mukherjee, the author, alludes to her own very hybridity. -/- . (shrink)
In §76 of the 3rd Critique, Kant claims that an intuitive understanding would represent no distinction between possible and actual things. Prior interpretations of §76 take Kant to claim that an intuitive understanding would produce things merely in virtue of thinking about them and, thus, could not think of merely possible things. In contrast, I argue that §76’s modal claims hinge on Kant’s suggestion that God represents things in their thoroughgoing determination, including in their connection to God’s actual will. I (...) conclude by using my interpretation to argue that §76’s modal claims do not entail Spinozism. (shrink)
Hegel famously criticizes Kant’s resolution of the antinomies. According to Sedgwick, Hegel primarily chastises Kant’s resolution for presupposing that concepts are ‘one-sided’, rather than identical to their opposites. If Kant had accepted the dialectical nature of concepts, then (according to Sedgwick) Kant would not have needed to resolve the antinomies. However, as Ameriks has noted, any such interpretation faces a serious challenge. Namely, Kant’s first antinomy concerns the universe’s physical dimensions. Even if we grant that the concept of the finite (...) is necessarily related to that of the infinite, the physical universe cannot both have and lack a temporal beginning. I argue that Hegel neither adopts Sedgwick’s view that Kant’s antinomies require no resolution nor absurdly accepts that the physical universe both has and lacks a temporal beginning. Instead, Hegel proposes a sophisticated resolution of Kant’s first antinomy (including its physical aspect) that depends on Hegel’s theory of the Absolute. (shrink)
Wittgenstein's Method: Neglected Aspects By Gordon Baker. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004 pp. 328. £40.00 HB.. Wittgenstein's Copernican Revolution: The Question of Linguistic Idealism By Ilham Dilman. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. pp. 240. £52.50 HB. Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies By P. M. S. Hacker. Oxford: Oxford University Press,. pp. 400. £45.00 HB; £19.99 PB. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: An Introduction By David G. Stern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. pp. 224. £40.00 HB; £10.99 PB.
Gathering information from both published and unpublished material and interviews with Gibson's family, colleagues, and friends, Reed (philosophy, Drexel U.) chronicles Gibson's life and intellectual development and his attempts to synthesize several contrasting intellectual traditions into what he ultimately called an "ecological approach" to psychology. Annotation(c) 2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
It is sometimes proposed that killing or harming abortion providers is the only logically consistent position available to opponents of abortion. Since lethal violence against morally responsible attackers is normally viewed as justified in order to defend innocent parties, pro-lifers should also think so in the case of the abortion doctor and so they should act to defend the unborn. In our paper, we defend the mainstream pro-life view against killing abortion doctors. We argue that the pro-life view can, in (...) various ways, reject the assumption that defensive violence to save innocent individuals is always permissible. Now even if that assumption is accepted, we contend that defensive violence against abortion doctors still is not justified. Drawing on Frances Kamm’s work, we contend that there are structural similarities between abortion and letting someone die who needs your help to stay alive; and we argue that it is impermissible to kill those who kill in order to avoid giving life-saving aid. (shrink)
Argumentation schemes can be described as abstract structures representing the most generic types of argument, constituting the building blocks of the ones used in everyday reasoning. This paper investigates the structure, classification, and uses of such schemes. Three goals are pursued: 1) to describe the schemes, showing how they evolved and how they have been classified in the traditional and the modern theories; 2) to propose a method for classifying them based on ancient and modern developments; and 3) to outline (...) and show how schemes can be used to describe and analyze or produce real arguments. To this purpose, we will build on the traditional distinctions for building a dichotomic classification of schemes, and we will advance a modular approach to argument analysis, in which different argumentation schemes are combined together in order to represent each step of reasoning on which a complex argument relies. Finally, we will show how schemes are applied to formal systems, focusing on their applications to Artificial Intelligence, AI & Law, argument mining, and formal ontologies. (shrink)
