A workshop in Philosophy for Children was offered this summer at Viterbo College with generous support from the Wisconsin Humanities Committee. Dr. Ronald Reed and the author conducted the week long workshop. The workshop was promoted primarily by distribution of brochures to regional schools. Four questions were addressed in the brochure: What is Philosophy for Children?, How will Philosophy for Children work in your classroom?, Why teach Philosophy for Children?, and Who should attend?. This approach was taken as part of (...) an effort at making teachers, principals and parents informed about the basic nature fo a Philosophy for Children program. (shrink)

Advice is interesting because it is a relationship that is built upon two asymmetries. Advice concerns what the advisee ought to do. For that reason, considerations of autonomy suggest that the advisee has a greater claim on what matters in deliberation. However, the advisor is wiser than the advisee. That suggests that the advisor has a greater insight into what matters in deliberation. These are the asymmetry of autonomy and the asymmetry of wisdom. To account for both, I argue for (...) informed subjectivism. Informed subjectivism is the view that the quality of advice is determined by the likelihood that the advisee would consistently prefer acting on the advice to not acting the advice. The theory captures the asymmetry of autonomy by making the quality of advice based on the advisee’s judgment. It captures the asymmetry of wisdom by making the relevant judgments of the advisee be ones that are informed by experience. (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt and David Velleman have both offered accounts of paradigmatic action. That is, they have offered theories as to which capacities allow us to maximally express our agency. To greatly over simplify, Frankfurt ultimately roots our agency in our capacity to care, while Velleman places it in our cognitive capacity to make sense of ourselves. This paper contends that both have an important piece of the truth and that we should accept a pluralistic approach to paradigmatic agency. It argues (...) that we manifest a capacity that is distinctive of an agency when we have so fully embraced a motivation we are no longer capable of consciously controlling whether we act on it or not. (shrink)

Part I. Naturalistic ethics -- Part II. Law and behavioral morality -- Part III. Biopolitical science.

In Timothie Bright and the Origins of Early Modern Shorthand, J. D. Fleming brings together two areas of sixteenth-century intellectual history. One is the period emergence of artificial systems for verbatim shorthand notation-a crucial episode in the history of information. The other is the ancient medical discourse of melancholy humour, or black bile. Timothie Bright (1550-1615), physician and priest, prompts the juxtaposition. For he was the author, not only of the period's original shorthand manual-Characterie (1588)-but also of the first (...) book in English on the dark humour: The Treatise of Melancholy (1586). Bright's account of melancholy involves a cybernetic phenomenology of the human. Essentially, we are psyches (souls or minds). We are sealed off from our bodies, operating them as automata across an interface. Psychological presence, for Bright, is illusion and pathology. Engrossing performances or representations therefore bring great danger, and so does the doctrine of predestination-less for its content than its typical delivery. Painful preaching was indispensable in sixteenth-century English Protestantism. But it falls foul of Bright's proscriptions. This is followed by his publication of the first known system for verbatim shorthand notation since antiquity, its technique heavily inflected toward a vocabulary of the pulpit. The passionate, oral performance of the inspired preacher receives an unprecedented textual preservative-and prophylactic. Bright's technology of information serves his phenomenology of alienation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the early modern period, the tradition of melancholy, and the history of information-as theory, and technology. (shrink)

For neoclassical economists, Homo economicus, or economic human, represents the ideal employee: an energetic worker bee that is a rational yet competitive decision-maker. Alternatively, one could view the concept as a cold and selfish workaholic endlessly seeking the accumulation of money and advancement - a chilling representation of capitalism. Or perhaps, as Peter Fleming argues, Homo economicus does not actually exist at all. In The Death of Homo Economicus, Fleming presents this controversial claim with the same fierce logic (...) and perception that launched his Guardian column into popularity. Fleming argues that as an invented model of a human being, Homo economicus is, in reality, a tool used by economists and capitalists to manage our social world through the state, business, and even family. As workers, we are barraged with constant reminders that we should always strive toward this ideal persona. It's implied - and sometimes directly stated - that if we don't then we are failures. Ironically, the people most often encouraged to emulate this model are those most predisposed to fail due to their socioeconomic circumstances: the poor, the unemployed, students, and prisoners. Fleming illuminates why a peculiar proactive negativity now marks everyday life in capitalist societies, and he explores how this warped, unattainable model for workers would cause chaos if enacted to the letter. Timely and revelatory, The Death of Homo Economicus offers a sharp, scathing critique of who we are supposed to be in the workplace and beyond"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In recent years, two important books by Yoram Cohen and Matthew Rutz have marked significant progress in research on the archives of Late Bronze Age Emar in northwestern Syria. Both of them approach Emar by way of its scribes. Cohen undertakes a systematic review of all named scribes identified in texts associated with Emar, while Rutz narrows his object to the building that yielded by far the largest number of excavated tablets. This work is foundational to future work on the (...) Emar texts even as it calls for cautious consideration. (shrink)

Images of and references to women are so rare in the vast corpus of his published work that there seems to be no "woman question" for Hans-Georg Gadamer. Yet the authors of the fifteen essays included in this volume show that it is possible to read past Gadamer's silences about women and other Others to find rich resources for feminist theory and practice in his views of science, language, history, knowledge, medicine, and literature. While the essayists find much of value (...) in Gadamer's work, he emerges from their discussion as a controversial figure. Some contributors see him as promoting genuine respect for and engagement with Otherness: others claim that in a Gadamerian conversation the Other has no voice. For some, Gadamer's immersion in tradition is an impediment to feminist inquiry; for others, cognizant of the need to understand tradition well in order to contest its intransigence or benefit from its insights, his way of engaging tradition is especially productive. Some contributors take issue with the separation he maintains between philosophy and politics; others find problems in his relative silence on matters of embodiment; still others maintain that a "fusion of horizons" amounts to a colonizing of difference. But a common aim of each of these controversies is to discern what feminists can learn from Gadamer as well as what limitations feminist reinterpretations of his work must inevitably encounter. Contributors are Linda Martín Alcoff, William Cowling, Gemma Corradi Fiumara, Marie Fleming, Silja Freudenberger, Susan Hekman, Susan-Judith Hoffmann, Grace M. Jantzen, Patricia Altenbernd Johnson, Laura Kaplan, Robin Pappas, Robin May Schott, Meili Steele, Veronica Vasterling, Georgia Warnke, and Kathleen Roberts Wright. (shrink)

1. What is it according to Berkeley for bodies to exist in the mind? Maybe no simple or single answer to this question fits everything that he says about it in the Principles and Dialogues , but I think he gives or suggests an answer in Principles section 49 that he may have to give or be willing to accept across the board. The trouble is that this answer comes with a fairly high price.

ABSTRACT In this paper I examine some of the issues surrounding the moral status of the therapy known as ‘deprogramming’. I argue against the extreme view that all deprogrammings are morally impermissible. In certain instances deprogramming is morally justified because it is quite capable of restoring the conditions needed for the exercise of autonomy. The view of autonomy I am following is that constructed by Gerald Dworkin, wherein two conditions must be met in describing a person as autonomous—authenticity and procedural (...) independence. Autonomy of another type, described by Dworkin as authenticity plus substantive independence, may be lost by persons involved in cults but in those instances deprogramming as reconstructed in this paper is not a morally justified measure. (shrink)

1. ‘“But aren't you saying that all that happens is that he moans, and that there is nothing behind it?” I am saying that there is nothing behind the moaning ’ . This passage seems to me to epitomize a conception of the mind and its relation to the body found in the later work of Wittgenstein. It will be convenient to write as if this is his view of the mind. He suggests elsewhere that he is not advancing philosophical (...) theses in his later work; so maybe this view is not a philosophical thesis in some relevant sense; or maybe Wittgenstein is not wholly consistent; or maybe he puts it forward only dialectically, and in other philosophical contexts would have espoused other views of the mind as much as he espouses this one. In any case, what does this one amount to? ‘There is nothing behind the moaning.’ What does this mean? (shrink)

Critical development and food studies scholars argue that the current food security paradigm is emblematic of a ‘New Green Revolution’, characterized by agricultural intensification, increasing reliance on biotechnology, deepening global markets, and depeasantization. High-profile examples of this model are not hard to find. Less examined, however, are food-security programs that appear to work at cross-purposes with this model. Drawing on the case of Feed the Future in Guatemala, I show how USAID engages in activities that valorize ancestral crops, subsistence production, (...) and agroecological practices. Rather than the result of macro-level planning—of either the New Green Revolution or a greener reform regime—I argue that nonconforming food security projects can be traced to individual actors and their interactions on the ground. I draw on an ‘interface approach’ (Long 1990 ), focusing on the lifeworlds of development workers, their interfaces with each other, and with the to-be-developed. Doing so reveals how food security projects are significantly shaped by the relationships and interests of development actors enmeshed in particular organizational and national settings. This research contributes a fresh perspective on the food security paradigm and its role within the ‘corporate food regime’. (shrink)

Our understanding of the universe has grown rapidly in recent decades. We’ve discovered evidence of water in nearby planets, discovered planets outside our solar system, mapped the genomes of thousands of organisms, and probed the very origins and limits of life. The scientific perspective of life-as-it-could-be has expanded in part by research in astrobiology, synthetic biology, and artificial life. In the face of such scientific developments, we argue there is an ever-growing need for universal biology, life-as-it-must-be, the multidisciplinary study of (...) non-contingent aspects of life as guided by biological theory and constrained by the universe. We present three distinct but connected ways of universalizing biology—with respect to characterizing aspects of life everywhere, with respect to the explanatory scope of biological theory, and with respect to extending biological insights to the structure of nonbiological entities. For each of these, we sketch the theoretical goals and challenges, as well as give examples of current research that might be labeled universal biology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, and: Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after WittgensteinRichard FlemingRhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, by Walter Jost; 368 pp. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004, $55.00. Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein, edited by Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost; 353 pp. Evansville: Northwestern University Press, 2003, $29.95 paper.On the question of ordinary language criticism and (...) philosophy, "Who pleases whom?" Judging by many of the articles, essays, and books of the last decade the answer might be: almost nobody pleases anyone. Whether in appreciation or incomprehension of its importance and substance, renewed efforts at understanding, redirections of thinking, and disappointments and frustrations with the [End Page 209] subject-matter are prevalent when ordinary language is the topic of discussion. These two recent books tend to strengthen this assessment. Rhetorical Investigations is a sustained effort to "revisit" and "rethink" grammatical (conceptual) reflections on ordinary language and literature; and in so doing provide a "reinvention" of characteristics of literary theory through an extensive and detailed consideration of the work of Robert Frost. Although sometimes overreaching in its efforts (particularly when discussing logic), it imaginatively uses rhetoric and ordinary language concerns as a means of direction and focus for new, explanatory discussions in literary—philosophical analysis. Ordinary Language Criticism (part of the general series, "Rethinking Theory," edited by Gary Saul Morson) is a diverse and uneven collection of fifteen articles concerning and using ordinary language interests, several of which (R. M. Berry, Garry L. Hagberg, Richard Eldridge, Gerald L. Bruns) valuably repay the diligence needed to discover them in 350 plus pages. The text includes an editors' introduction that voices the wish to "return criticism to its grounds in the 'ordinary' or natural language we all speak" and (unsuccessfully but lustily) pronounces and explains "ordinary language criticism" as a new yet traditional area of study. ("New" in that it takes "as its point of departure" the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein, and "traditional" in that "all criticism is really ordinary language criticism.") The editors further undertake in this introduction the endeavor to sketch something of a program for the book, meant to show connected promptings among the various writings, whereas the specific authors themselves settle down quickly and separately to a critical work at hand without particular references to each other. Both of these texts, like others in this field of study before, valuably raise questions and apprehensions of what use there is in talk about ordinary language. The best of such material provides provocations for thinking that are to be found nowhere else. The worst of such books and articles is that they prejudice sensible people against the study of the ordinary.Can one conceive of something to say about these two books that the authors and the current readers haven't already heard or of which they can be profitably reminded? It certainly would not be wise to presume such a grand stand. This is a large question to which only a small answer might be given here. Setting aside the perhaps undiscussable differences of what we each see of primary importance in the primary texts and how best to read them, one issue and difference of understanding, specific and plain enough to state briefly, perhaps usefully does arise. It is a lack of a clear sense of the "ordinary," its distinctiveness, its implications; and thereby a continuation of many of the confusions that have inhabited philosophical and literary writing before and after Wittgenstein turned his attention to the matter. Is this not partly why frustrations of understanding, disagreements in thinking, and displeasures in discussion remain pervasive and unrelenting?This difficulty and difference with such work can only prove worthwhile introducing, however, against a background of agreement over the centrality [End Page 210] of a cluster of issues, of which three might be specified: a first agreement concerns the sensitivity or fear that something is being missed or remains unintelligible in the culture about the ordinary; a respect for the ordinary is a needed, often unnoticed beginning of our reflections. Rhetorical Investigations importantly develops its analyses from such a perspective (Jost's... (shrink)

Idealist philosopher Georg Hegel defied the traditional epistemological distinction of objective from subjective and developed his own dialectical alternative. Remarkable for its breadth and profundity, this work combines aspects of psychology, logic, moral philosophy, and history to form a comprehensive view that encompasses all forms of civilization. Its three divisions consist of the subjective mind (dealing with anthropology and psychology), the objective mind (concerning philosophical issues of law and morals), and the absolute mind (covering fine arts, religion, and philosophy). Wide-ranging (...) in its influence, this survey of the evolution of consciousness is essential reading for all students of philosophy and history. (shrink)

This book delivers a definitive contribution to the understanding of Habermas's oeuvre as it applies to education. The authors examine Habermas's contribution to pedagogy, learning and classroom interaction; the relation between education, civil society and the state; forms of democracy, reason and critical thinking; and performativity, audit cultures and accountability.

TRANSLATORS PREFACE THE PRESENT TRANSLATION OF GEORG SIMMEL'S Schopen- hauer und Nietzsche: Ein Vortragszyklus (1907), ...

When there have been substantial failures by institutional leadership in their oversight responsibility to protect research integrity, the public should demand that these be recognized and addressed by the institution itself, or the funding bodies. This commentary discusses a case of research failures in developing genomic predictors for cancer risk assessment and treatment at a leading university. In its review of this case, the Office of Research Integrity, an agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services, focused their (...) report entirely on one individual faculty member and made no comment on the institution’s responsibility and its failure to provide adequate oversight and investigation. These actions missed an important opportunity to emphasize the institution’s critical responsibilities in oversight of research integrity and the importance of institutional transparency and accountability. (shrink)

This paper develops the concept of the ‘continuum of destructiveness’ in relation to organizational corruption. This notion captures the slippery slope of wrongdoing as actors engage in increasingly dubious practices. We identify four kinds of individuals along this continuum in corrupt organizations, who range from complete innocence to total guilt. They are innocent bystanders, innocent participants, active rationalizers and guilty perpetrators. Traditional explanations of how individuals move from bystander status to guilty perpetrators usually focus on socialization and institutional factors. In (...) addition to these factors, we propose that the very distance between an act and its ethical consequences (ethical distance) may also play a determining role – if not always in the same way – in the transition process. Having developed this conceptual argument, we conclude with a discussion of managerial and research implications. (shrink)

Background The fourth section of the 1967 Abortion Act states that individuals (including health care practitioners) do not have to participate in an abortion if they have a conscientious objection. A conscientious objection is a refusal to participate in abortion on the grounds of conscience. This may be informed by religious, moral, philosophical, ethical, or personal beliefs. Currently, there is very little investigation into the impact of conscientious objection on service users in Britain. The perspectives of service users are imperative (...) in understanding the real-world consequences and potential impact of conscientious objection and should be considered when creating and reviewing policies and guidelines. This research provided a platform for women and those who can become pregnant to share their experiences and opinions at a time when these voices are largely excluded in the great tradition of Western political philosophy and law-making processes. Method Five service users were interviewed using a narrative interview approach to uncover their abortion journeys and experiences of conscientious objection. Findings The findings were presented as found poems and uncovered that doctors are not always: informing service users that they have a conscientious objection to abortion, giving service users enough information to access abortion (indirect referral), treating them non-judgmentally, and providing medically correct information. Service users did not experience burdens such as long waiting times and were still able to access legal abortion. However, service users did experience negative emotional effects, as they were often left feeling scared, angry, and hopeless when they were not referred and/or were mistreated. Conclusions Findings indicate that conscientious objection could work in practice. However, it is currently failing some individuals on an emotional level, as not all doctors are adhering to guidelines. Conscientious objection in Britain needs to be addressed, to ensure service users receive fair, impartial, non-judgmental care. (shrink)

Human behavior depends on the ability to effectively introspect about our performance. For simple perceptual decisions, this introspective or metacognitive ability varies substantially across individuals and is correlated with the structure of focal areas in prefrontal cortex. This raises the possibility that the ability to introspect about different perceptual decisions might be mediated by a common cognitive process. To test this hypothesis, we examined whether inter-individual differences in metacognitive ability were correlated across two different perceptual tasks where individuals made judgments (...) about different and unrelated visual stimulus properties. We found that inter-individual differences were strongly correlated between the two tasks for metacognitive ability but not objective performance. Such stability of an individual’s metacognitive ability across different perceptual tasks indicates a general mechanism supporting metacognition independent of the specific task. (shrink)

Introduction: from grammatology to cultural graphology -- The psychopathology of writing -- Type ornament -- Sign tailoring -- Psychoanalytic graphology.

The description for this book, Desert, will be forthcoming.

An important area of business ethics research focuses on how otherwise normal and law-abiding individuals can engage in acts of corruption. Key in this literature is the concept of rationalization. This is where individuals attempt to justify past and future corrupt deeds to themselves and others. In this article, we argue that rationalization often entails a process of overcompensation whereby the justification forwarded is excessive in relation to the actual act. Such over-rationalization provides an impetus for further and more serious (...) acts of illegality. Using a number of high profile cases, it is argued that this dynamic gap between the act and excessive rationalization can explain why corruption often escalates in severity and scope in the organization. (shrink)

Berkeley's Idealism both advances Berkeley scholarship and serves as a useful guide for teachers and students.

The Reeh-Schlieder theorem asserts the vacuum and certain other states to be spacelike superentangled relative to local quantum fields. This motivates an inquiry into the physical status of various concepts of localization. It is argued that a covariant generalization of Newton-Wigner localization is a physically illuminating concept. When analyzed in terms of nonlocally covariant quantum fields, creating and annihilating quanta in Newton-Wigner localized states, the vacuum is seen to not possess the spacelike superentanglement that the Reeh-Schlieder theorem displays relative to (...) local fields, and to be locally empty as well as globally empty. Newton-Wigner localization is then shown to be physically interpretable in terms of a covariant generalization of the center of energy, the two localizations being identical if the system has no internal angular momentum. Finally, some of the counterintuitive features of Newton-Wigner localization are shown to have close analogues in classical special relativity. (shrink)