We present and discuss the responses to a survey we sent to selected libraries regarding their decisions to accept unsolicited book donations, especially regarding any with an apparent political or proselytizing intent.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scott Joplin and the Quest for IdentityEarl Stewart and Jane DuranIn his innovative work I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity, Ted Gracyk does much to dismantle notions of cultural authenticity and theft as they are currently articulated by some critics. Explaining that such concepts are less monolithic than some have claimed, Gracyk writes:While popular musicians often "pick up" the music of other cultures, (...) such practices are culturally, politically, and morally complex. In discussing such issues, I hope to show that they are even more complex than is typically thought. Here, I borrow an insight from Michelle Moody-Adams, who argues that prevailing positions in social and cultural anthropology assume that cultures are internally integrated wholes and that each culture is fundamentally a set of self-contained and discrete practices and beliefs. The same assumptions infest discussions of appropriation in cultural studies, folk-lore studies, and ethnomusicology. But these assumptions are highly questionable.1Gracyk's overall point is that what has frequently been simplified as "theft" or "inauthentic" is not susceptible to such easy formulation; indeed, Gracyk contends there is scarcely such a thing as a pure musical tradition.Gracyk's sophisticated argument is one, however, that itself admits of gradations and emendations. While it is no doubt accurate that there is very little that might count as artistically or culturally pure (hence, very little that can justifiably be claimed to have been stolen), some work is much more evocative of a cultural point of view than other efforts, and some work is much more centrally located within a given culture and its traditions than other musical work. In this article we shall make the twofold argument that much of the work of Scott Joplin is located in a tradition that is manifestly African derived, and that the composition of such work had, as one of its motivators, the desire to make a cultural statement. Thus, more so than some of Gracyk's exemplars, Joplin's work is strongly culturally attached, and its attachment needs to be duly noted.IThe origins of Joplin's work speak to the concerns of the nineteenth century and of the period immediately subsequent to emancipation. Most of [End Page 94] the black leadership of the time was united in its belief that a nationalist art would serve in the reconstruction of the image of African Americans. During the latter part of the nineteenth century many of these leaders saw the spiritual as the ideal folkloric basis for a serious black artistic expression. In music this notion was given strong support as a result of a concurrent interest on the part of European composers in African American music—an interest fed by the aesthetic of romanticism, which encouraged artistic investment in the strange, unusual, primitive, and exotic.Most classically trained African American composers attempted to comply with the vision of these black leaders by constructing a more or less European-style music tinctured with African American folk elements. The result would be a set of works that to this day has failed to be adopted by the African American community at large.Scott Joplin tried a different approach. He sought to create an African American musical expression that would be predicated upon an African American vernacular style—ragtime. Joplin essentialized his music in many ways. First, by choosing ragtime as a stylistic paradigm he assured the preservation of black rhythm. Second, to promote continuity and coherence he often employed rhythmic relationships between contrasting sections. Third, he frequently employed African American folk idioms like pentatonicism and call-and-response (antiphony) as interregnal devices in the structure of his melodies. Fourth, to assure an intrastructural linkage with the African American vernacular music of his day, he frequently used phrase structures that were consistent with those employed in folk music, particularly the black spiritual, for example, aaab. In his opera, Treemonisha, he based his libretto largely on black dialect, thus linking it with black literary tradition. These are but a few of the devices Joplin employed to assure a strong cultural essentialism to his music. As a result, Joplin has been acknowledged as one of the great icons of... (shrink)

From very early on, Western philosophers have been obsessed with the understanding of a relatively few works of philosophy which have played a disproportionately large and fundamental role in developing the Western philosophical canon, dominating the curriculum in the past and in the present; there is no indication that they will not do so in the future.Uses and Abuses of the Classics examines the various ways in which the different periods of the history of philosophy have approached these texts. The (...) editors have chosen for analysis some of the major philosophers from periods of the history of philosophy in which the interpretation of the classics has been particularly significant.Contributions to this book include entries on: Aristotle's reading of Plato; Averroes on Aristotle; Nietzsche on the Beginnings of Western Philosophy; and Thomas Aquinas's Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics. (shrink)

The prefrontal cortex has long been suspected to play an important role in cognitive control, in the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals. Its neural basis, however, has remained a mystery. Here, we propose that cognitive control stems from the active maintenance of patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex that represent goals and the means to achieve them. They provide bias signals to other brain structures whose net effect is to guide the flow of (...) activity along neural pathways that establish the proper mappings between inputs, internal states, and outputs needed to perform a given task. We review neurophysiological, neurobiological, neuroimaging, and computational studies that support this theory and discuss its implications as well as further issues to be addressed. (shrink)

Evidentialism holds that the justified attitudes are determined entirely by the person's evidence. This book is a collection of essays, mostly jointly authored, that support and apply evidentialism.

Evidentialism is a view about the conditions under which a person is epistemically justified in having a particular doxastic attitude toward a proposition. Evidentialism holds that the justified attitudes are determined entirely by the person's evidence. This is the traditional view of justification. It is now widely opposed. The essays included in this volume develop and defend the tradition. Evidentialism has many assets. In addition to providing an intuitively plausible account of epistemic justification, it helps to resolve the problem of (...) the criterion, helps to disentangle epistemic and ethical evaluations, and illuminates the relationship between epistemic evaluations of beliefs and the evaluation of the methods used to form beliefs. These issues are all addressed in the essays presented here. External world skepticism poses the classic problem for an epistemological theory. The final essay in this volume argues that evidentialism is uniquely well qualified to make sense of skepticism and to respond to its challenge. Evidentialism is a version of epistemic internalism. Recent epistemology has included many attacks on internalism and has seen the development of numerous externalist theories. The essays included here respond to those attacks and raise objections to externalist theories, especially the principal rival, reliabilism. Internalism generally has been criticized for having unacceptable deontological implications, for failing to connect epistemic justification to truth, and for failing to provide an adequate account of what makes basic beliefs justified. Each of these charges is answered in these essays. The collection includes two previously unpublished essays and new afterwords to five of the reprinted essays; it will be the definitive resource on evidentialism for all epistemologists. (shrink)

The past 30 years has seen a theoretical and clinical renaissance in psychoanalysis, as well as a flourishing of Christian engagement in the fields of psychology and anthropology. This volume of essays stages a new conversation between Christianity and psychoanalysis that opens up new ways of thinking about the rich mosaic of human experience.

Science and the originality of life -- Christian facticity -- Grasping life as a topic -- Ruinance -- The retrieval of history -- Facticity and ontology -- Factical speaking -- Rhetoric -- Sophistry.

This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.

“Natural logic” was proposed by Lewis Henry Morgan as the engine of cultural evolution, concluding that the “course and manner” of cultural development “was predetermined, as well as restricted within narrow limits of divergence, by the natural logic of the human mind.” This essay argues that Morgan’s conception of natural logic aids the project of settler colonialism. Rather than being a false account of human agency, however, it is a conception of natural logic that is produced through the systematic narrowing (...) of possibilities for agency, human, and otherwise. This narrowed logic is thus only a part of a differently conceived logic of agency that is also general and normative. The discussion proceeds in four sections: first, a presentation of Morgan’s conception of natural logic and its origins; second, an analysis of four colonizing implications of Morgan’s view; third, examples of further developments of natural logic in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the work structuralist and post-structuralist theorists; and, last, a brief introduction of a decolonial logic that provides a broader alternative conception of the structure of agency, human, and otherwise, and that avoids the oppressive effects of the reductionism of the natural logic received from Morgan and his successors. (shrink)

Pragmatism, Experience, and the Given The doctrine of the Given is that subjects have direct non-inferential awareness of content of their experiences and apprehensions, and that some of a subject's beliefs are justified on the basis of that subject's awareness of her experiences and apprehensions. Pragmatist criticisms of the Given as a myth are shown here not only to be inadequate but to presuppose the Given. A model for a pragmatist account of the Given is then provided in terms of (...) refinements of Dewey's theory of experience. The doctrine of the Given is implicated in the functions of inquiry insofar as one must take it that experience is a source of justification. (shrink)

The paper explores the promise of ethical codes as a means to control unethical behavior in business. After a review of arguments for ethical codes from outside the business system, the paper outlines the arguments for codes from inside the business system at the level of the industry, firm and individual executive.The paper then discusses the problems of code design — the dilemma between specific practices and general precepts — and offers a model for a thoroughgoing code. This is followed (...) by a discussion of the problems of promulgation and code enforcement. (shrink)

E j lemmon, B a o williams, Bas van fraassen, And ruth marcus have argued on behalf of the existence of moral dilemmas, I.E., Cases where an agent is subject to conflicting absolute moral obligations. The paper criticizes this support and contends that no moral dilemma is possible.

Although a number of articles have addressed ethical perceptions and behaviors, few studies have examined ethics across cultures. This research focuses on measuring the job satisfaction, customer orientation, ethics, and ethical training of automotive salespersons in the U.S. and Taiwan. The relationships of these variables to salesperson performance were also investigated. Ethics training was found to be negatively related to perceived levels of ethicalness and performance. High performance U.S. salespeople reported high ethical behavior, while the opposite was true in Taiwan. (...) Customer orientation in both countries was influenced by ethics training. Managers should evaluate current ethics training programs to insure correct ethical behavior is taught and rewarded. (shrink)

Many fans of Diogenes of Sinope laud his parrhesia, free speech used for critique. However, Diogenes abused not only the powerful but also the socially marginalized. We argue that interpreters of Diogenes cannot explain away the undeniably troublesome things that Diogenes said about those at the margins. But we also argue that Diogenes ought nonetheless to be preserved. Some of his chreiai can be reminders of how to be courageous and fight for the downtrodden, and others can serve as reminders (...) of how easily those aspirations can be forgotten. We offer a variety of ways to interpret Diogenes, especially since the figure of Diogenes is an historical composite from centuries of sources. But we arrive at a position of loving antagonism toward Diogenes, loving Cynic commitments to autarkeia and against wealth and power, and disapproving when Cynics fell short of their commitments and critical aspirations. (shrink)

Inspired by a debate between Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, this work traces the development of natural history from Aristotle to Darwin, and demonstrates how the science of plants and animals has emerged from the common conceptions of folkbiology.

This is an introduction to metaphysics for students and non-philosophers. (Philosophers: it's supposed to be the kind of book you can give to your friends and family, when they ask what you do for a living.) Contents: personal identity, fatalism, time, God, why not nothing?, free will, constitution, universals, necessity and possibility, what is metaphysics? (There is a second edition, which adds chapters on meta-metaphysics and the metaphysics of ethics.).

The paper argues against Timothy Williamson's anti-luminosity argument. It also offers an argument against luminosity from the possibility of defeat of introspective justification.

Moral judgment and behavior are uniquely resistant to psychological analysis because morality generally is defined in terms that do not admit of psychological predication. Principal among these is the idea of freedom. An agent can act morally only on the condition that it is also free to do otherwise. The respective theoretical premises of C. Sunstein and E. Brunswik are contrasted in order to suggest that Brunswikian theory constitutes a distinct and highly promising new approach to the psychology of moral (...) judgment. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Universities in North America and Europe increasingly provide financial incentives to encourage collaboration between faculty in different disciplines, based on the premise that this yields more innovative and sophisticated research. Drawing from a wealth of empirical data, the contributors to Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration put that theory to the test. What they find reveals how interdisciplinarity is not living up to its potential, but also suggests how universities might foster more genuinely collaborative and productive research. Chapter 10 is available Open Access (...) here: https: //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK395883/. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In 2010,Business Ethics Quarterlypublished ten articles that considered the potential contributions to business ethics research arising from recent scholarship in a variety of philosophical and social scientific fields (strategic management, political philosophy, restorative justice, international business, legal studies, ethical theory, ethical leadership studies, organization theory, marketing, and corporate governance and finance). Here we offer short responses to those articles by members ofBusiness Ethics Quarterly’s editorial board and editorial team.

Tim defines a "luminous" condition as one that we are always in a position to know that we are in, whenever we are in it. To explain the idea of being in a position to know, Tim tells us that we are in a position to know a proposition when it states a fact that is open to our view, unhidden, and with no obstacle to our knowing it. He also tells us that if we are in a position to (...) know a proposition, and we do what we are in a position to do toward knowing whether or not it is true, then we know it to be true. So a luminous condition obtains only if it is all set to be known to obtain by the one in the condition. (shrink)