Famous for their enigmatic ambiguity, the fragmentary texts of the Presocratic philosopher Heraclitus have puzzled and fascinated readers for over two millennia ...

This paper explores possible connections between gender and the willingness to engage in unethical business behavior. Two approaches to gender and ethics are presented: the structural approach and the socialization approach. Data from a sample of 213 business school students reveal that men are more than two times as likely as women to engage in actions regarded as unethical but it is also important to note that relatively few would engage in any of these actions with the exception of buying (...) stock with inside information. Fifty percent of the males were willing to buy stock with insider information. Overall, the results support the gender socialization approach. (shrink)

Written by one of the world's preeminent authorities on Kierkegard, this biography is the first to reveal the delicate imbrication of Kierkegard's life and thought. To grasp the importance and influence of Kierkegaard's thought far beyond his native Denmark, it is necessary to trace the many factors that led this gifted but (according to his headmaster) 'exceedingly childish youth' to grapple with traditional philosophical problems and religious themes in a way that later generations would recognize as amounting to a philosophical (...) revolution. Although Kierkegaard's works are widely tapped and cited they are seldom placed in context. Nor is due attention placed to their chronology. However, perhaps more than the work of any other contributor to the Western philosophical tradition, these writings are so closely meshed with the background and details of the author's life that knowledge of this is indispensible to their content. Alastair Hannay solves these problems by following the chronological sequence of events and focusing on the formative stages of his career from the success of his first, pseudonymous work ^Either/Or through to The Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity. This book offers a powerful narrative account which will be of particular interest to philosophers, literary theorists, intellectual historians, and scholars of religious studies as well as any non-specialist looking for an authoritative guide to the life and work of one of the most original and fascinating figures in Western philosophy. Alastair Hannay is Professor Emeritus in the department of philosophy at the University of Oslo. He is the co-editor of The Cambridge Companion of Kierkegaard (1998) and is also translator of several works by Kierkegaard in Penguin Classics. (shrink)

A globe-spanning investigation into the Transhumanist movement, considering the tech billionaires, scientific luminaries, and DIY body-hackers attempting to prolong, improve, and ultimately transcend the limits of human life.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionWilliam J. ConnellOne of the more unusual works in the corpus of the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla is the Oratio in principio sui studii, on the relation between Latin letters and the Christian faith. The speech was written and delivered in October 1455, toward the end of Valla’s life, as a lecture to inaugurate the academic year at the University of Rome where he had held the chair in (...) rhetoric since 1450. It was traditional at Rome to hold such an address each year not only to encourage the assembled students and faculty in their studies but also to thank the papacy for its support of the university, the Studium Urbis. For this reason Valla’s speech ends with customary words praising Pope Calixtus III for having increased the stipends of the lecturers in the university, even though, notwithstanding some remarkable kindnesses to Valla himself, Calixtus’s reputation was not that of a friend to scholarship. Valla’s Schoolyear Inaugural was not lengthy: it can only have lasted fifteen minutes. Nor is there indication that anyone was displeased with it. In fact, that is precisely what is oddest about the Inaugural, for throughout his career Valla had shown himself to be the sort of person who seized on such occasions to make polemical arguments. We read the speech—and it is possible that his audience also listened to it this way—expecting with each step that Valla will let fly a critical or unorthodox statement, but that never happens. 1Beginning with his earliest formal work, a comparison of Cicero and Quintilian written in 1428 and now lost, in which the humanist argued against Cicero on behalf of Quintilian, Valla seemed to delight in challenging established authorities. 2 His next important work, an attack on Bartolus of [End Page 1] Sassoferrato and the scholastic method of contemporary jurists, resulted in his forced departure from the University of Pavia. 3 A continuing combativeness is illustrated in subsequent writings, reaching an apogee in the work on the Donation. Even when Valla was developing another writer’s idea, he had a consistent way of pushing the argument to a daring extreme. This, as Riccardo Fubini argues below, is what Valla did in the De donatione, a work Fubini suggests relied more heavily on Nicholas of Cusa’s De concordantia catholica than hitherto realized, but written to promote an agenda far more radical than that of Cusanus. One of the surest indications of Valla’s brilliance as a polemicist is the fact that seventy years after his death humanists of the caliber of Agostino Steuco, the subject of Ronald K. Delph’s essay in this number, were still eager to take up cudgels against him.Valla paid a price for initiating so many disputes. In 1444, when he was called before the Inquisition in Naples after the attack on the Donation of Constantine, Valla was made to answer charges against not only that work, but also against the De vero bono for its Epicureanism, the De libero arbitrio for its determinism, the De professione religiosorum for its criticism of religious orders, and the Repastinatio totius dialectice et philosophie for various unorthodox statements, especially concerning the Trinity. This last work was the humanist’s most ambitious project, and he seems to have been aware of its explosive quality, since he alluded to a “peril to his life” should it be published. 4The 1455 Schoolyear Inaugural shows no trace of the risks that Valla took in his other writings, of his polemical temperament, or of his past disagreements with the Church. With style and vigor the speech argues that the Church deserves great thanks and praise for having ensured the survival [End Page 2] of Latin letters after the collapse of the Empire. This may seem a notable change of heart in the author who had written the oration On the Falsely Believed and Forged Donation of Constantin—a text which always seems to be lurking in the background of the Inaugural but which finds no explicit reference there. Given the proximity of Valla’s argument to the well-worn medieval theme of the translatio studii, his argument could hardly have been... (shrink)

In this review essay, Jeanne Connell examines the influence of pragmatic philosophy on the scholarly works of twentieth‐century literary theorist and English educator Louise Rosenblatt through the lens of a recent collection of her essays originally published between 1936 and 1999. Rosenblatt grounded her transactional theory of literature in pragmatic philosophy, particularly the epistemological constructs of John Dewey. While influential as a pioneer in the early development of reader‐response theory, Rosenblatt’s theory has only recently been given attention by philosophers of (...) education. Making Meaning with Texts: Selected Essays is an important collection of articles and book chapters that highlights the evolution of her thinking in literary theory, pedagogy, and literary criticism. Rosenblatt positioned the construction of meaning in the personal lived‐through quality of the literary experience, making central the generative relation between the text and the reader. Connell argues that the educational relevance of Rosenblatt’s theory for contemporary education is that it provides a powerful critique of classroom approaches that promote shallow readings with little opportunity for critical reflection. (shrink)

While women philosophers are beginning to be rediscovered in the Early Modern period, they are conspicuously missing from later nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century histories of philosophy...

The concept of hegemonic masculinity has influenced gender studies across many academic fields but has also attracted serious criticism. The authors trace the origin of the concept in a convergence of ideas in the early 1980s and map the ways it was applied when research on men and masculinities expanded. Evaluating the principal criticisms, the authors defend the underlying concept of masculinity, which in most research use is neither reified nor essentialist. However, the criticism of trait models of gender and (...) rigid typologies is sound. The treatment of the subject in research on hegemonic masculinity can be improved with the aid of recent psychological models, although limits to discursive flexibility must be recognized. The concept of hegemonic masculinity does not equate to a model of social reproduction; we need to recognize social struggles in which subordinated masculinities influence dominant forms. Finally, the authors review what has been confirmed from early formulations and what needs to be discarded. The authors suggest reformulation of the concept in four areas: a more complex model of gender hierarchy, emphasizing the agency of women; explicit recognition of the geography of masculinities, emphasizing the interplay among local, regional, and global levels; a more specific treatment of embodiment in contexts of privilege and power; and a stronger emphasis on the dynamics of hegemonic masculinity, recognizing internal contradictions and the possibilities of movement toward gender democracy. (shrink)

Through the idea of the sublime, Kant articulated a type of aesthetic judgement whereby one experiences the limits of cognition and representation. The result of this, for Kant, is the demonstration and cultivation of our moral nature. Lyotard reframes the idea of the sublime in terms of post-modernity through his development of the idea of the event. The experience of the event is roughly equivalent to the experience of the sublime. Crucially though, the experience of the event, unlike the sublime, (...) does not foster individual morality; rather, it points to injustices. (shrink)

Aristotle's account of female nature has received mostly negative treatment, emphasising what he says females cannot do. Building on recent research, this book comprehensively revises such readings, setting out the complex and positive role played by the female in Aristotle's thought with a particular focus on the longest surviving treatise on reproduction in the ancient corpus, the Generation of Animals. It provides new interpretations of the nature of Aristotle's sexism, his theory of male and female interaction in generation, and his (...) account of inherited features. It also discusses a range of more general issues which can and should be re-examined in light of Aristotle's account of female animals: his methodology, hylomorphism, teleology and psychology. Aristotle on Female Animals will be valuable to all those interested in Aristotle's philosophy and the history of gender. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Søren Kierkegaard and the Word(s): Essays on Hermeneutics and CommunicationGeorge ConnellPoul Houe and Gordon D. Marino. editors. Søren Kierkegaard and the Word(s): Essays on Hermeneutics and Communication. Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 2003. Pp. 299. Paper, kr. 375,–Though many associate Kierkegaard with isolated individuality, Kierkegaard scholars are rather gregarious. Four times since 1985, Kierkegaard devotees from all the inhabited continents have gathered at St. Olaf College for several days (...) of intense paper reading. Since it is difficult to keep a handle on so much material presented orally and because many were not able to attend, it is a commendable service that Houe and Marino have edited and published many of the papers delivered at the 2001 conference, just as they had previously published essays from 1998 conference and C. Stephen Evans and I had published essays from the 1989 conference.This volume reflects its origins in several ways. First, the essays are unusually brief compared to most journal articles (around ten pages each). While this is an agreeable format when listening to many papers in a single day, I do think that many of these essays are rather rushed and less than fully developed. Accordingly, the reader of these essays may well feel stimulated by interpretive suggestions rather than satisfied by thoroughly worked out treatments.Second, the essays are quite diverse, as conference papers tend to be, even when, as in this case, a preferred theme—hermeneutics and communication—was stated in advance. Since, as Alastair Hannay notes in the opening keynote essay, "hermeneutics" is used in a wide variety of ways, this theme really did not limit participants to any significant degree. Essays in this volume look variously at Kierkegaard's practice of hermeneutics (especially in reference to the Bible), at our predicament of interpreting Kierkegaard's notoriously elusive and cryptic pseudonymous works, at hermeneutics as our existential disposition as sense-making creature thrust into an ambiguous world, at hermeneutics as a quasi-Hegelian project of engulfing particularity without remainder in a totalizing whole, and, in contrast, at radical hermeneutics (a term coined by John Caputo and applied to Kierkegaard) as an interpretive approach that refuses the consolations and consonances of its Gadamerian cousin. As the use of "hermeneutics" varies, we hear that Kierkegaard is both an exemplary hermeneuticist and "the ultimate non-hermeneuticist." And in a number of essays, the issue of hermeneutics only seems to come up in the vacuous sense that the author offers a reading of some Kierkegaardian text or texts.The wide variety of essays included here reflects itself in the unsatisfactory final article in which Poul Houe makes a thoroughly desultory attempt at pulling the various articles together. I've tried my hand at writing such a piece, so I feel empathy for Houe's plight. But the paragraph per essay tour of the book is so hurried and so perfunctory that I wonder what purpose it really serves in this case.Though widely varying in topic and approach, most of the essays in the volume are quite good, if tantalizingly short. Given that there are twenty-five essays in the volume, it is not possible to summarize them here. But several observations are in order. First, it is especially nice to see five essays by Danish scholars included in this book. The community of Kierkegaard scholars has increasingly come to appreciate that viewing him in terms of his local context can be quite illuminating. American scholars have done excellent work along these lines, but clearly Danes have a crucial role to play in this interpretive task. Second, there have been heated disagreements in Kierkegaard circles over how to place Kierkegaard in reference to philosophical postmodernism. That polemic is in evidence in this volume as well. Several essays, most notably that of David Goicoechea, affiliate [End Page 502] Kierkegaard with postmodernist refusals of the totalizing understandings. In contrast, Sylvia Walsh juxtaposes Kierkegaard's "erotic hermeneutics," which treats its phenomenon with amorous tenderness, with Derrida's deconstructive approach to interpretation, which Walsh sees as a violent expression of the will to power. Christopher Simpson tries to reconcile these divisions by reading Kierkegaardian faith as an attractive... (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that object properties are processed faster when they follow properties from the same perceptual modality than properties from different modalities. These findings suggest that language activates sensorimotor processes, which, according to those studies, can only be explained by a modal account of cognition. The current paper shows how a statistical linguistic approach of word co-occurrences can also reliably predict the category of perceptual modality a word belongs to (auditory, olfactory–gustatory, visual–haptic), even though the statistical linguistic approach (...) is less precise than the modal approach (auditory, gustatory, haptic, olfactory, visual). Moreover, the statistical linguistic approach is compared with the modal embodied approach in an experiment in which participants verify properties that share or shift modalities. Response times suggest that fast responses can best be explained by the linguistic account, whereas slower responses can best be explained by the embodied account. These results provide further evidence for the theory that conceptual processing is both linguistic and embodied, whereby less precise linguistic processes precede precise simulation processes. (shrink)

As embodied theories of cognition are increasingly formalized and tested, care must be taken to make informed assumptions regarding the nature of concepts and representations. In this study, we outline three reasons why one cannot, in effect, represent the same concept twice. First, online perception affects offline representation: Current representational content depends on how ongoing demands direct attention to modality-specific systems. Second, language is a fundamental facilitator of offline representation: Bootstrapping and shortcuts within the computationally cheaper linguistic system continuously modify (...) representational content. Third, time itself is a source of representational change: As the content of underlying concepts shifts with the accumulation of direct and vicarious experience, so too does the content of representations that draw upon these concepts. We discuss the ramifications of these principles for research into both human and synthetic cognitive systems. (shrink)

Drawing from the perspectives of transgender individuals, this article offers an empirical investigation of recent critiques of West and Zimmerman’s “doing gender” theory. This analysis uses 19 in-depth interviews with transpeople about their negotiation and management of gendered interactions at work to explore how their experiences potentially contribute to the doing, undoing, or redoing of gender in the workplace. I find that transpeople face unique challenges in making interactional sense of their sex, gender, and sex category and simultaneously engage in (...) doing, undoing, and redoing gender in the process of managing these challenges. Consequently, I argue that their interactional gender accomplishments are not adequately captured under the rubric of “doing gender” and suggest instead that they be understood as “doing transgender.” This article outlines the process of and consequences of “doing transgender” and its potential implications for the experience of and transformation of gender inequality at work. (shrink)

This paper critically explores the way in which ‘trafficking’ has been framed as a problem involving organized criminals and ‘sex slaves’, noting that this approach obscures both the relationship between migration policy and ‘trafficking’, and that between prostitution policy and forced labour in the sex sector. Focusing on the UK, it argues that far from representing a step forward in terms of securing rights and protections for those who are subject to exploitative employment relations and poor working conditions in the (...) sex trade, the current policy emphasis on sex slaves and ‘victims of trafficking’ limits the state's obligations towards them. (shrink)

Efforts to include women in the canon have long been beset by reactionary gatekeeping, typified by the charge “That's not philosophy.” That charge doesn't apply to early and mid‐analytic female philosophers—Welby, Ladd‐Franklin, Bryant, Jones, de Laguna, Stebbing, Ambrose, MacDonald—with job titles like lecturer in logic and professor of philosophy and publications in Mind, the Journal of Philosophy, and Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. It's hopeless to dismiss their work as “not philosophy.” But comparable reactionary gatekeeping affects them, this paper argues, (...) typified by the labels “bad philosophy” and “derivative philosophy.” Virtue and vice epistemology help explain why these women have been neglected and why their own approaches are epistemically virtuous. Their contemporaries and historians are deficient in scholarly virtues in labelling these women's work “bad” or derived from male mentors with no or specious justification. Their disparaged qualities—intellectual humility, modesty, critical self‐reflection, disclosing biases—are often epistemic virtues. (shrink)

Can we coherently conceive of an agent whose practical rationality is limited to merely instrumental reasoning? I argue that we cannot. Existing arguments to this effect have focused on what is required in order to have reasons to take means to our ends-or on what is required in order to be bound by the so-called ‘instrumental principle’. By contrast, I argue that consideration of the special kind of concept-use characteristic of instrumental reasoning reveals that a merely instrumentally rational agent would (...) not be so much as able to identify means to ends in the first place. I then elucidate this line of thought by testing it against three different conceptions of merely instrumentally rational agency found in the literature. I conclude by highlighting a risk associated with remaining agnostic concerning the possibility of merely instrumentally rational agents: namely, that we arrive at a false conception of our own capacity to identify means to ends as somehow isolated from our conceptions of the good. (shrink)

Have you lost a loved one? The loss can be inestimable, the grief excruciating. What helped you? Did someone say something comforting? Did someone offer a consolation, which you resented? Have you ever tried to comfort someone with a terminal illness or one who has lost a loved one? Knowing how to help or what to say that is not trite, insincere, or superficial can be difficult. The point of view of a grieving person is quite different from that of (...) those who wish to offer comfort. In a multicultural society such as ours, anticipating the beliefs of the grieving person can be even more difficult. This book explores the perspective of a grieving person. It considers the merits and potential harm of alternative comfort strategies. As a philosophical analysis of grief, it emphasizes an understanding of the beliefs that underlie grief and the usefulness or dangers of emotions. Because grief is so complex and sensitive, a narrow approach runs the risk of alienating the grieving person. The ideas in this book are expressed in a dialogue among three characters. Their discussion is broad and fundamental. Starting from the familiar consolation, “She’s no longer suffering” and the grieving person’s resentment toward the expression, the three friends articulate the value of life and the evils of death. Their discussion enriches their understanding of grief. Many consolations offered to mourners are poor arguments. Even the better ones do their work best in the context of a greater understanding of grief. (shrink)

For Aristotle, in making the deliberate choice to incorporate the extensive requirements of the young into the aims of one’s life, people realise their own good. In this paper I will argue that this is a promising way to think about the ethics of care and parenting. Modern theories, which focus on duty and obligation, direct our attention to conflicts of interests in our caring activities. Aristotle’s explanation, in contrast, explains how nurturing others not only develops a core part of (...) the self but also lead to an appreciation of the value of interpersonal relationships. (shrink)

The human conceptual system comprises simulated information of sensorimotor experience and linguistic distributional information of how words are used in language. Moreover, the linguistic shortcut hypothesis predicts that people will use computationally cheaper linguistic distributional information where it is sufficient to inform a task response. In a pre‐registered category production study, we asked participants to verbally name members of concrete and abstract categories and tested whether performance could be predicted by a novel measure of sensorimotor similarity (based on an 11‐dimensional (...) representation of sensorimotor strength) and linguistic proximity (based on word co‐occurrence derived from a large corpus). As predicted, both measures predicted the order and frequency of category production but, critically, linguistic proximity had an effect above and beyond sensorimotor similarity. A follow‐up study using typicality ratings as an additional predictor found that typicality was often the strongest predictor of category production variables, but it did not subsume sensorimotor and linguistic effects. Finally, we created a novel, fully grounded computational model of conceptual activation during category production, which best approximated typical human performance when conceptual activation was allowed to spread indirectly between concepts, and when candidate category members came from both sensorimotor and linguistic distributional representations. Critically, model performance was indistinguishable from typical human performance. Results support the linguistic shortcut hypothesis in semantic processing and provide strong evidence that both linguistic and grounded representations are inherent to the functioning of the conceptual system. All materials, data, and code are available at https://osf.io/vaq56/. (shrink)

Grace de Laguna’s philosophical work was bold and original. She was also able to connect together seemingly disparate strands of the pragmatic, metaphysical and psychological research going on around her, as Joel Katzav shows in his paper. This commentary gives some historical background to her academic career in an attempt to explain how she could have been forgotten as a philosopher. Social and institutional factors led to her work not being recognized when she wrote and thus sinking into obscurity in (...) philosophical circles afterwards. Although her work was initially widely read, her research seems not to have had any continuing direct impact on later developments in philosophy. However, it is crucial to restore her thought to its rightful place in the history of our subject. (shrink)

Recent developments of three-dimensional printing of biomaterials in medicine have been portrayed as demonstrating the potential to transform some medical treatments, including providing new responses to organ damage or organ failure. However, beyond the hype and before 3D bioprinted organs are ready to be transplanted into humans, several important ethical concerns and regulatory questions need to be addressed. This article starts by raising general ethical concerns associated with the use of bioprinting in medicine, then it focuses on more particular ethical (...) issues related to experimental testing on humans, and the lack of current international regulatory directives to guide these experiments. Accordingly, this article considers whether there is a limit as to what should be bioprinted in medicine; examines key risks of significant harm associated with testing 3D bioprinting for humans; investigates the clinical trial paradigm used to test 3D bioprinting; analyses ethical questions of irreversibility, loss of treatment opportunity and replicability; explores the current lack of a specific framework for the regulation and testing of 3D bioprinting treatments. (shrink)

Rich and sophisticated analyses of gender have been produced around the postcolonial world. But the theory in this work gets little recognition in the current global economy of knowledge. Feminist theory needs an understanding of the coloniality of gender, seeing the gender dynamic in imperialism and the significance of global processes for the meaning of gender itself. The agendas of feminist theory are being re-shaped on issues that include violence, power and the state, identity, methodology, and the land. An alternative (...) structure of knowledge is emerging that can re-shape the global terrain of feminist theory and its connections with practice. (shrink)