This chapter contains sections titled: The Dual Vision of Black People The Status of Race and the Contributions of Black People “The Negro Problem”.

Both Ralph Waldo Emerson's and W. E. B. Du Bois' firstborn sons tragically died at very young ages. Drawing from the essays where they write about their grief, I explore Du Bois' "subversion" and "revision" of Emerson's thought by contrasting their visual metaphors: Emerson's "focal distancing" and Du Bois' practice of "second sight" and seeing through "the Veil." I show how the disruptive particular event of the deaths of their sons causes both to challenge the idealist elements of their respective (...) gazes. I draw upon Theodor Adorno to explore the larger lessons of these reconsiderations. In recognizing the seductive dangers of the idealist gaze and the value of the disruptive particular, Adorno explicitly theorizes what Emerson and Du Bois also come to appreciate, in a less overt way, in their moments of loss. (shrink)

I admit that when I think of pragmatism’s contributions to political philosophy, I primarily think of Jane Addams and John Dewey. Their contributions to democratic theory and practice have been extremely important in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, so much so that “pragmatist politics” and “Deweyan democracy” are virtually synonymous. I also think of W.E.B. Du Bois’s criticisms of anti-Black racism and white supremacy in the United States and across the globe. In any case, my first instincts have never (...) been to turn to William James for political inspiration or insight. I’m not alone in thinking and... (shrink)

Bose-Einstein statistics may be characterized in terms of multinomial distribution. From this characterization, an information theoretic analysis is made for Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen like situation; using Shannon’s measure of entropy.

In recent years, there has been much synergy between the exciting areas of quantum information science and ultracold atoms. This volume, as part of the proceedings for the XCI session of Les Houches School of Physics (held for the first time outside Europe in Singapore) brings together experts in both fields. The theme of the school focused on two principal topics: quantum information science and ultracold atomic physics. The topics range from Bose Einstein Condensates to Degenerate Fermi Gases to (...) fundamental concepts in Quantum Information Sciences, including some special topics on Quantum Hall Effects, Quantum Phase Transition, Interactions in Quantum Fluids, Disorder and Interference Phenomenoma, Trapped Ions and Atoms, and Quantum Optical Devices. (shrink)

Lucius Outlaw and Shannon Sullivan have argued for the preservation of racial distinctiveness and the necessity of racial separatism. This paper articulates and challenges this push for racial separatism and the particular conception of race evoked therein. The author points out that the multiplicity, the multiculturalism, the intersectionality within these communities of resistance is typically belittled, fragmented, or erased. Recognizing the practical use of racial coalitions to combat racism, the author articulates an alternative conception of coalitional agency, one that (...) allows for multiplicitous identities, opening avenues to intercultural communication and impure coalitions of resistance. (shrink)

This paper examines the ethical and legal duties of confidentiality owed by the nurse, with special reference to obligation to the employer. The main focus is on exploring the parameters of that duty and determining circumstances in which it might be ethically and legally justifiable to disclose confidential information. It is submitted that the obli gation to preserve the confidence of the patient or employer is relative rather than abso lute. In exceptional cases, disclosure is permissible in order to prevent (...) harm to others or to promote a greater public good. A number of suggestions for reform are also made, with a view to reinforcing nurses' ethical and legal rights to exercise discretion to dis close confidential information in appropriate cases in order to protect themselves from victimization by employers. Cet article passe à l'examen les devoirs éthiques et légales de la confidence que les infirmiers/ères doivent obligatoirement à leur employeur. Le point de mire est l'exploration des donnés de cette obligation, et la détermination des circonstances dans lesquelles il est légitime, éthiquement et légalement, d'exposer de l'information confidentielle. Il est suggéré que l'obligation de préserver la confiance du malade ou de l'employeur est relative plutôt qu'absolu. Dans des cas exceptionels pourtant, la révélation d'information est permisible pour prévenir le mal des autres ou pour promouvoir un plus grand bien public. Quelques suggestions pour réformes sont proposées en vue du renforcement des droits éthiques et légales des infirmiers/ères d'exercer la discretion en ce qui concerne la révélation d'information dans des cas bien choisis, et de les protéger des représailles de l'employeur. Dieser Artikel prüft die ethischen und legalen Pflichten des Vertrauens, die das Pflegepersonal dem Arbeitsgeber schuldet. Das Zentrum des Arguments ist eine Untersuchung dieser Pflichten, und eine Festsetzung der Umstände, in welchen es ethisch und rechtlich möglich ist, Information bekannt zu machen. Es ist anerkennt, dass die Pflicht des Vertrauens des Patienten oder des Arbeitsgebers zu behalten, eher relativ als absolut ist. In aussergewöhnlichen Fällen jedoch ist die Bekanntgabe von Information erlaubt, um das Böse zu verhindern und das Gute aller zu fördern. Eine Anzahl von Vorschlägen für Reformen sind gemacht, mit der Absicht, die ethischen und legalen Rechte des Pflegepersonals, in gegebenen Fällen Information bekannt zu machen, zu verstärken, und es von ungerechter Behandlung eines Arbeitsgebers zu schützen. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:is There a White Gift?: A Pragmatist Response to the Problem of Whiteness Terrance A. MacMullan Introduction Lucius Outlaw and Shannon SuUivan are prominent contemporary philosophers of race who follow in the footsteps of W.E.B. Du Bois as they search for a theoretical understanding of race and a political solution to the problem of racism. They agree that the solution to racism is not found in the elimination (...) of the idea of race from our discourses as suggested by Naomi Zack and Anthony Appiah, but in a critical conservation of race that is nonhierarchical and committed to addressing the suffering of non-white racial groups.1 This moral and critical conservation of race makes Sullivan and Outlaw standard bearers for Du Bois's idea of the racial gift, which John Shuford writes is rooted in the conviction that, "'race' and race-consciousness are not the causes of racism and racial injustice, [and] that 'race' may be employed toward collective and mutual liberation."2 However, despite their inteUectual kinship regarding their broad approach to race, Outlaw and SuUivan come to a significant and iUuminating disagreement over the issue of whiteness. In Du Boisian terms, they disagree about whether white people, qua white, have a racial gift worth conserving. Outlaw recognizes the illegitimacy of the hierarchical racial taxonomies established during the Enlightenment era but accepts race as a real and meaningful feature of our social landscape. Revealing a strong affinity for Du Bois' approach to race, Outlaw imagines his work as, an inquiry into raciality and ethnicity via a treacherous "third path" between racism and invidious ethnocentrism, on the one side, and anti-racism and antiinvidious ethnocentrism, on the other. What I propose can help us to recognize and nurture races and ethnies as we reconsider raciation and ethnicization as processes by which we humans produce TRANSACTIONS OFTHE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY Vol. 41, No. 4 ©2005 Hi and reproduce ourselves as crucial aspects of our "social construction of ET1 realities."3 H tr* Q η He further argues for "the need to conserve 'race' and 'ethnie' (and 'ethnic- ¡» ity') as vital components of a philosophical anthropology."4 Outlaw there- 5j fore contends that the challenge facing liberatory race theorists is not the «' elimination of race, but instead, "the challenge is to find ways to conserve a Ç) sense of raciality that is both socially useful and consistent with democratic justice." Outlaw clearly wants to avoid invidious ethnocentrism, but what is more significant is that he also rejects the idea that we should purge racial ^j ideas and practices as a means to achieve democratic justice. He, like Du τ> Bois, is fully aware of the evils of racism, but is nonetheless committed to > the belief that human existence is inevitably colored by race as a salient fea- g ture of our social reality. Outlaw's commitment to the conservation of race ;> is so deep that he would preserve race-based communities of meaning, "even ^ if, in the very next instant, racism and perverted, invidious ethnocentrism in every form or > manifestation would disappearforever'. '6 ^ The key to this balancing act is to look at race and ethnicity through the r lens of "philosophical anthropology" instead of through the materialism of > biology. Outlaw argues that when we look at race this way we glean, an understanding and appreciation of senses of belonging and of shared destiny by which individuals are intimately connected to other individuals in ways that make for the constitution of particular kinds of social collectivities, what I term social-natural kinds. Races and ethnies are such "kinds."8 Outlaw thus uses an idea of race that is fully transactional, to use a term coined by Dewey and rewardingly reclaimed by Sullivan. Race is created in the confluence of culture and biology, to the extent that certain biologicaUy determined traits, primarily morphological features, are the tags that play important symbolic roles in terms of how social groups are formed. The goal, therefore, is not to eliminate race, because people long have and likely always will use appearance as one of the many determinants of how they form groups. The goal is, instead, to form groups in ways that encourage human flourishing "consistent... (shrink)

Depuis une vingtaine d'années, l'oeuvre de C. E. Shannon semble être l'objet d'un relatif oubli dans l'ensemble disciplinaire nommé en France « Sciences de l'information et de la communication ». Cet article essaie d'en saisir les raisons, après en avoir rappelé le succès. Il plaide pour une relecture épistémologique du fameux schéma de la mesure d'information de Shannon. C'est ainsi que le « nombre de bits », terme à peu près incompréhensible du côté des sciences humaines, peut se (...) voir donner un sens et être appréhendé comme le nombre de questions pour identifier un objet. Ceci permet alors de considérer que l'élaboration shannonienne pourrait constituer un matériau fondamental pour la cyberculture, entendue comme réflexion sur notre rapport informationnel au monde physique et social.For twenty years, the work of CE Shannon seems to be the subject of a relatively neglected in all disciplinary named in France "Information Science and Communication." This article tries to understand the reasons, after having recalled the success. He argues for a reinterpretation of the famous epistemological schema information measure of Shannon. Thus the "number of bits", a term almost incomprehensible side humanities, can be given a meaning and be understood as the number of questions to identify an object. This then allows to consider the development shannonienne could be a fundamental material for cyberculture, understood as a reflection of our informational report to physical and social world. (shrink)

Pour étendre la notion d'entropie, l'auteur tente de dégager la signification de la “probabilité relative” w de Boltzmann dans sa formule S = k.log.w. Celui-ci introduit implicitement une partition d'un ensemble E de molécules en classes d'équivalence, les divers états macroscopiques du gaz; w est le rapport de la probabilité de l'état dont on cherche à définir l'entropie à celle de l'état le plus improbable.L'auteur propose de généraliser le concept toutes les fois ob sur un ensemble probabilisable E il sera (...) possible de faire une partition.La “complexité d'une structure” peut être définie par le nombre d'aspects différents que peut prendre le graphe sous-jacent à celle-ci. Alors toute stricture a une probabilité d'occurrence, et l'on peut y définir une G-entropie.Appliquant ensuite ce concept à la théorie de l'information de Shannon, l'auteur montre que la quantité d'information apportée par un message est différente de la G-entropie, mais que les deux grandeurs y prennent fortuitement la même valeur. Le concept permet également d'introduire une information liée au message, une autre au “code”, et une information totale.Le concept d'émergence permet ensuite de comprendre la raison pour laquelle celle-ci s'accompagne d'une augmentation de G-neguentropie.L'entropie est considérée depuis Boltzmann comme une borne mesure du désordre d'un gaz, d'où son intérêt en morphogénèse, en théorie des systèmes, et de l'information. Cependant son application directe pose des problèmes, et il parait préférable de tenter auparavant de généraliser le concept en le randant plus abstrait. La première difficulté à laquelle on se heurte alors est l'interprétation du nombre w de la formule de Boltzmann. (shrink)

Corruption involves greed, money, and risky decision-making. We explore the love of money, pay satisfaction, probability of risk, and dishonesty across cultures. Avaricious monetary aspiration breeds unethicality. Prospect theory frames decisions in the gains-losses domain and high-low probability. Pay dissatisfaction (in the losses domain) incites dishonesty in the name of justice at the individual level. The Corruption Perceptions Index, CPI, signals a high-low probability of getting caught for dishonesty at the country level. We theorize that decision-makers adopt avaricious love-of-money aspiration (...) as a lens and frame dishonesty in the gains-losses domain (pay satisfaction-dissatisfaction, Level 1) and high-low probability (CPI, Level 2) to maximize expected utility and ultimate serenity. We challenge the myth: Pay satisfaction mitigates dishonesty across nations consistently. Based on 6500 managers in 32 countries, our cross-level three-dimensional visualization offers the following discoveries. Under high aspiration conditions, pay dissatisfaction excites the highest- (third-highest) avaricious justice-seeking dishonesty in high (medium) CPI nations, supporting the certainty effect. However, pay satisfaction provokes the second-highest avaricious opportunity-seizing dishonesty in low CPI entities, sustaining the possibility effect—maximizing expected utility. Under low aspiration conditions, high pay satisfaction consistently leads to low dishonesty, demonstrating risk aversion—achieving ultimate serenity. We expand prospect theory from a micro and individual-level theory to a cross-level theory of monetary wisdom across 32 nations. We enhance the S-shaped Curve to three 3-D corruption surfaces across three levels of the global economic pyramid, providing novel insights into behavioral economics, business ethics, the environment, and responsibility. (shrink)

This book offers a critical feminist perspective on the widely debated topic of transitional justice and forgiveness. Louise Du Toit examines the phenomenon of rape with a feminist philosophical discourse concerning women’s or ‘feminine’ subjectivity and selfhood. She demonstrates how the hierarchical dichotomy of male active versus female passive sexuality – which obscures the true nature of rape – is embedded in the dominant western symbolic frame. Through a Hegelian and phenomenological reading of first-person accounts by rape victims, she excavates (...) an understanding of rape that also starts to open up a way out of the denial and destruction of female sexual subjectivity. (shrink)

Psychological well-being is an important indicator of well-being and has been found to be associated with a multitude of positive life outcomes. Using data collected from 1,871 Chinese college students from September 23 to October 5, 2020, this study examined students' psychological well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic and investigated how resilience and pandemic-related environmental stress may affect psychological well-being. Results showed that resilience had strong positive effects on psychological well-being during the pandemic. Meanwhile, environmental stress had a moderate effect and (...) marginally reduced psychological well-being. The magnitudes of the estimates suggested that increasing resilience can effectively buffer the negative effect of environmental stress on psychological well-being. (shrink)

Substantial research demonstrates that ethical leaders improve a broad range of outcomes for their employees, but considerably less attention has been devoted to the performance and success of the leaders themselves. The present study explores the extent to which being ethical relates to leaders’ performance and promotability. We address this question by examining ethical leadership from the two ethical perspectives most common in Western traditions—i.e., the “right” and the “good”—and whether one might be more closely associated than the other with (...) performance and promotability evaluations. Results from 117 employee-supervisor-manager triads show that supervisors with a deontological outlook are more likely to be seen as ethical leaders and that utilitarian leaders are more likely to earn higher performance evaluations. We discuss the implications of these findings for research on ethical leadership. (shrink)

In light of the ongoing development and implementation of core competencies in bioethics, it is important to proceed with a clear sense of how bioethics knowledge is utilized in the functioning of hospital ethics committees (HECs). Without such an understanding, we risk building a costly edifice on a foundation that is ambiguous at best. This article examines the empirical relationship between traditional paradigms of bioethics theory and actual decision making by HEC members using survey data from HEC members. The assumption (...) underlying the standardization of qualifications and corresponding call for increased education of HEC members is that they will base imminent case decisions on inculcated knowledge. Our data suggest, however, that HEC members first decide intuitively and then look for justification, thereby highlighting the need to re-examine the pedagogical processes of ethics education in the process of standardizing and improving competencies. (shrink)

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book traces the development of entropic themes, capturing phenomena ranging from chaos, disorder, homogenization, slackening, disspation, and ultimately death.

Translation for this volume by Lydia Patton of Chapter 9 (pages 179-200) of Émilie du Châtelet's Institutions de Physique (Foundations of Physics). Original publication date 1750. Paris: Chez Prault Fils.

"El libro que publicamos hoy no tiene otro fin que servir de guía a los espíritus deseosos de profundizar los problemas generales del Derecho; es una “Introducción” en el sentido más exacto del término. Se trata de orientar progresivamente al lector partiendo de las realidades más simples para llevarlo después hasta los problemas más abstractos. Hemos renunciado deliberadamente a dar a los primeros capítulos un rigor científico. Igualmente, hemos evitado de pronto los términos técnicos, esforzándonos por explicarlos y hacerlos asimilar (...) gradualmente en el curso de la obra". Claude Du Pasquier. (shrink)

Science is king. Every week, headlines announce new breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe, new technologies that will transform our environment, new medical advances that will extend our lives. Science is giving us unprecedented insight into some of the big questions that have challenged humanity ever since we've been able to formulate those questions. Where did we come from? What is the ultimate destiny of the universe? What are the building blocks of the physical world? What is consciousness? This (...) book asks us to rein in this unbridled enthusiasm for the power of science. Marcus du Sautoy explores the limits of human knowledge, to probe whether there is anything we truly cannot know. (shrink)

This study demonstrates the importance of social context to the study of networks vital to business success. Results from analyses of the personal and business characteristics associated with different types of networks, a topic that has been neglected in past research, show the importance of structural perspectives emphasizing that women and men in the same situations have similar networks. Yet there are some network differences even among these women and men who operate the same kinds of businesses. This suggests that (...) insights from gender construction perspectives should be integrated into network and other gender inequality studies. (shrink)

In 1947, Simone de Beauvoir traveled to the United States for a four-month stay, during which she toured the country extensively. Her copious notes taken during this time eventually became the travelogue, America Day by Day as well as a piece written for the May 25, 1947 edition of the New York Times Magazine, “An Existentialist Looks at Americans.” In both of these writings, Beauvoir offers an astute criticism of American culture from a foreign perspective. This paper explores Beauvoir’s treatment (...) of American abstraction and race with three goals in mind: first, to understand the American relationship to time and money as abstractions. Ignoring the past and projecting an idealistic future, leads to a strange kind of fatalism and lack of passion that profoundly impacts White and Black Americans but in distinctively different ways. The second part of the paper explores these differences through an analysis of how White Americans attempt to live with “good” consciences through the positing of and attachment to abstract values and things. This attitude, in turn, produces a largely instrumental and racist treatment of many populations, in particular, Black Americans. The final section focuses on how Beauvoir confronts the fact of her own whiteness, and in so doing undergoes the movement of race as an abstract theoretical category to one of lived embodiment. (shrink)

This chapter interrogates the figure “without soil” in relation to pivotal concerns in Theodor W. Adorno's thought. Freedom, the element of philosophy, proves itself as much in the conscious dismissal as in the rescuing return. The return is not that of something repressed, a claim suppressed by another claim, by the blank refusal to have anything to do with something. The fact that Adorno's thinking draws on dialectical motifs means that the conscious dismissal turns against what exists, against what is (...) merely natural, isolated, abstract in life; the life of the spirit that has freed itself from abstraction no longer sets itself in opposition to death. It no longer takes control of death as negativity and, for that very reason, no longer succumbs to it. If one wanted to revert to Kantian terminology, one could say that philosophy is concerned with neither inclination nor respect, but with favor. (shrink)

China was the first to produce tea and consumed the largest quantities and its craftsmanship was the finest. During the development of Chinese history, Chinese Tea culture came into being. In ancient China, drinking tea is not only a very common phenomenon but also an elegant taste for men of letters and officials. Chinese tea culture is extensive and profound and it is necessary for foreigners to understand Chinese tea culture for the purpose of smooth and deepen the communication with (...) the Chinese people. (shrink)

We suggest that the accounts offered by the target articles could be strengthened by acknowledging the role of group selection and cultural niche construction in shaping the evolutionary trajectory of human music. We argue that group level traits and highly variable cultural niches can explain the diversity of human song, but the target articles' accounts are insufficient to explain such diversity.