A survey of 345 undergraduate business students from a medium-sized southeastern regional university and 164 undergraduates from a medium-sized university in the United Arab Emirates found that 71 % of all respondents admitted to academic misconduct in a recent 1-year period, a percentage similar to McCabe’s (2005) finding that an average of 70 % of undergraduate students admitted to recent academic misconduct. Business students from the Middle East were significantly less likely to perceive various academic misconduct behaviors as forms of (...) serious cheating compared to business students from the US. Hofstede’s (2001) cultural dimension of individualism/collectivism and Ajzen’s (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 50, 179–211, 1991) theory of planned behavior are discussed as likely explanations of reported academic misconduct differences between the two countries. (shrink)

Since a few decades, policy evaluation is a main topic in Western democracies. lt identifies, measures and appreciates effects, outcomes and impacts of a policy. Yet, there is not a common way to institutionalise that policy instrument; one can observe many differences in terms of its intensity and maturity, as well as a diversity of institutional device. Compared to other countries, Belgium is characterized by a low visibility and weak decisional impact of evaluation. Public demand for enlightening state action rarely (...) takes the form of a demand for evaluation. The word 'Evaluation' is frequently pronounced, but most often in a political sense.In this article three types of arguments can be put forward to explain this Jack of evaluation: a lacking commitment of Parliament and political staff, the fragmentation and weak autonomy of the civil service and the domination of political parties upon the Belgian political and administrative system. (shrink)

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from (...) social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar was found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-negligible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic. (shrink)

This ground-breaking text offers a fresh perspective on the governance of science from the standpoint of social and political theory. Science has often been seen as the only institution that embodies the elusive democratic ideal of the 'open society'. Yet, science remains an elite activity that commands much more public trust than understanding, even though science has become increasingly entangled with larger political and economic issues.

Personal authenticity is out of fashion amongst analytic philosophers. Yet, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus were clearly preoccupied by its theoretical and practical viability. In this study, Jacob Golomb illuminates the writings of these philosophers in an attempt to explain their particular ethical stance on the subject. This book will prove invaluable reading for students and teachers of philosophy, literature and education and indeed for anyone who has ever empathized with Camus's Meursault, Sartre's Matthieu or Nietzsche's Zarathustra.

Social thinkers in all fields are faced with one unavoidable question: What does it mean to be human in the 21st century? This ambitious and groundbreaking book provides the first synthesis of historical, philosophical and sociological insights needed to address this question in a thoughtful and creative manner.

The thesis of this work is that in both modern Japanese philosophy and American pragmatism there has been a paradigm shift from a monological concept of self as an isolated "I" to a dialogical concept of the social self as an "I-Thou relation," including a communication model of self as individual-society interaction. It is also shown for both traditions all aesthetic, moral, and religious values are a function of the social self arising through communicative interaction between the individual and society. (...) However, at the same time this work critically examines major ideological conflicts arising between the social self theories of modern Japanese philosophy and American pragmatism with respect to such problems as individualism versus collectivism, freedom versus determinism, liberalism versus communitarianism, and relativism versus objectivism. (shrink)

Science and technology are so intertwined that technoscience has been argued to more accurately reflect the progress of science and its impact on society, and most socioscientific issues require technoscientific reasoning. Education policy documents have long noted that the general public lacks sufficient understanding of science and technology necessary for informed decision-making regarding socioscientific/technological issues. The science–technology–society movement and scholarship addressing socioscientific issues in science education reflect efforts in the science education community to promote more informed decision-making regarding such issues. (...) Now Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics education has emerged as a major reform movement impacting science education. STEM education efforts emphasize literacy across the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, but with rare exceptions, treat issues of technology superficially and uncritically. Informed decision-making regarding many personal and societal issues requires technological literacy beyond merely becoming an enthusiastic designer or skilled user of technology, but the science education community has given little attention to what such literacy entails. Here, we present results of an extensive review of the literature regarding the nature of technology in order to identify key issues among scholars who study technology. We then provide predominant perspectives among those scholars and suggest which identified NOT issues are most essential to address as part of STEM education efforts that seek to promote informed personal and societal decision-making. (shrink)

This volume explores Science & Technology Studies (STS) and its role in redrawing disciplinary boundaries. For scholars/grad students in rhetoric of science, science studies, philosophy & comm, English, sociology & knowledge mgmt.

The tuning-fork model of human social cognition, based on the discovery of mirror neurons (MNs) in the ventral premotor cortex of monkeys, involves the four following assumptions: (1) mirroring processes are processes of resonance or simulation. (2) They can be motor or non-motor. (3) Processes of motor mirroring (or action-mirroring), exemplified by the activity of MNs, constitute instances of third-person mindreading, whereby an observer represents the agent's intention. (4) Non-motor mirroring processes enable humans to represent others' emotions. After questioning all (...) four assumptions, I point out that MNs in an observer's brain could not synchronically resonate with MNs in an agent's brain unless they discharged in a single brain in two distinct tasks at different times. Finally, I sketch a conceptualist alternative to the resonance model according to which a brain mechanism active in both the execution and the perception of e.g., the act of grasping is the neural basis of the concept of e.g., grasping. (shrink)

"The Knowledge Book" is a unique interdisciplinary reference work for students and researchers concerned with the nature of knowledge. It is the first work of its kind to be organized on the assumption that whatever else knowledge might be, it is intrinsically social. The book consists of 42 alphabetically arranged entries on key concepts at the intersection of philosophy and sociology - what used to be called "sociology of knowledge" but is now increasingly called "social epistemology". The entries include concepts (...) common to disciplines that in recent years have devoted more of their attention to knowledge: cultural studies, communication studies, information science, education, policy studies and business studies. Special attention is given to concepts from the emerging field of science and technology studies. Each entry presents a short, self-contained essay providing an overview of a concept and concludes with suggestions for further reading. All the entries are fully cross-referenced, allowing readers to both make connections and follow their own interests. (shrink)

This paper examines an important but neglected topic in Suárez’s metaphysics–—namely, his theory of efficient causation. According to Suárez, efficient causation is to be identified with action, one of Aristotle’s ten highest genera or categories. The paper shows how Suárez’s identification of efficient causation with action helps to shed light on his views about the precise nature of efficient causation, and its role in his ontology. More specifically, it shows that Suárez understands efficient causation to be a distinctive or sui (...) generis type of entity, and that he thinks we must adopt this view in order to account for the facts of efficient causation. The paper also examines several objections to Suárez’s account. (shrink)

A translation of a dialogue between Evelyne Grossman and Jacob Rogozinski on Artaud, Deleuze, and the status of the ego.

This timely book provides a critical look at the profession's rise and subsequent fall.

Philosophy may relate to interdisciplinarity in two distinct ways On the one hand, philosophy may play an auxiliary role in the process of interdisciplinarity, typically through conceptual analysis, in the understanding that the disciplines themselves are the main epistemic players. This version of the relationship I characterise as ‘normal’ because it captures the more common pattern of the relationship, which in turn reflects an acceptance of the division of organized inquiry into disciplines. On the other hand, philosophy may be itself (...) the site for the production of interdisciplinary knowledge, understood as a kind of second-order understanding of reality that transcends the sort of knowledge that the disciplines provide, left to their own devices. This is my own position, which I dub ‘deviant’ and to which most of this article is devoted. I begin by relating the two types of interdisciplinarity to the organization of inquiry, especially their respective attitudes to the history of science. Underlying the two types are contrasting notions of what constitutes the ‘efficient’ pursuit of knowledge. This difference is further explored in terms of the organization of the university. The normal/deviant distinction was already marked in the institution’s medieval origins in terms of the difference between Doctors and Masters, respectively, an artefact of which remains in the postgraduate/undergraduate degree distinction. In the context of the history of the university, the prospects for deviant interdisciplinarity were greatest from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth century—the period called ‘early modern’ in the philosophy curriculum. Towards the end of that period, due to Kant and the generation of idealists who followed him, philosophy was briefly the privileged site for deviant interdisciplinarity. After Hegel’s death, the mantle of deviant interdisciplinarity increasingly passed to some version of ‘biology’. I explore the ‘Natur-’ and ‘Geisteswissenschaft’ versions of that post-philosophical vision, which continue to co-exist within today’s biological science. I then briefly examine the chequered reputation of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, someone who exemplified the promise and perils of deviant interdisciplinarity over the past 200 years. I conclude with an Epilogue that considers contemporary efforts to engage philosophy in interdisciplinary work, invoking William James as an exemplar. (shrink)

This essay introduces a Focus section on “Neurohistory and History of Science” by distinguishing images of the brain as governor and as transducer: the former treat the brain as the executive control center of the body, the latter as an interface between the organism and reality at large. Most of the consternation expressed in the symposium about the advent of neurohistory derives from the brain-as-governor conception, which is rooted in a “biologistic” understanding of humanity that in recent years has become (...) bound up in various nefarious “neoliberal” political and economic agendas. However, given the sophisticated attitude that neurohistory’s leading champion, Daniel Smail, displays toward evolutionary theory’s potential impact on historical practice, he is perhaps better understood as part of the brain-as-transducer tradition. This tradition, largely suppressed in current representations of neuroscience, has a strong theological provenance, ultimately concerned with our becoming attuned to the divine frequency, not least by extending the powers of the human nervous system through technology. This essay sympathetically explores the implications of this perspective for historical practice. (shrink)

The author proposes a model for theological anthropology as embodied sensing that is based on an interdisciplinary exploration of the corporeal turn from a southern African perspective. The work of James B. Nelson is acknowledged, stating that body theology starts with the concrete, the bodily expressions of life and not with doctrines about God and humanity. The theological anthropology of David H. Kelsey is evaluated as a theological anthropology with a sentiment of the flesh. Based on clearings in the work (...) of David Kelsey and an interdisciplinary research, the author proposes a model for theological anthropology as embodied sensing which functions within the intricate and complex connection of the living body, language and experiencing in a concrete lifeworld with an openness to the ‘more than’. The author considers the use of bodymapping within narrative therapy as a way in which to uncover the intimate and intricate connection between the living body, experience and language, and implementing insights from theological anthropology as embodied sensing. (shrink)

This edited volume demonstrates that a virtue-centered approach to the ethical life is a consistent feature of William James’s moral reasoning from the 1880s until his death. Yet, little else remains constant within his writings on these subjects, and this inconstancy furthers interest in his work over a century later.

It is a curious fact that the reverse surface of many of the so-called Amarna letters sent by Levantine rulers to the Egyptian pharaoh are completely blank or only partially inscribed. In this article, I establish the absolute and relative frequency of the phenomenon within this subcorpus of the Amarna letters. Next, I connect it to a particular type of letter sent by the Levantine rulers that I designate a “replies-to- an-order” letter and offer a suggestion as to why the (...) Egyptian administration may have requested that these letters have blank space on the reverse surface. Finally, I consider one possible origin for the phenomenon in other cuneiform corpora and end the article with a few comments on directions for future research. (shrink)

This work is available individually, or can be purchased as part of the 7 volume set Max Weber: Classic Monographs.

Meditation is an umbrella term for a number of mental training practices designed to improve the monitoring and regulation of attention and emotion. Some forms of meditation are now being used for clinical intervention. To accompany the increased clinical interest in meditation, research investigating the neural basis of these practices is needed. A central hypothesis of contemplative neuroscience is that meditative states, which are unique on a phenomenological level, differ on a neurophysiological level. To identify the electrophysiological correlates of meditation (...) practice, the electrical brain activity of highly skilled meditators engaging in one of six meditation styles was recorded. A mind-wandering task served as a control. Lempel–Ziv complexity showed differences in nonlinear brain dynamics during meditation compared with mind wandering, suggesting that meditation, regardless of practice, affects neural complexity. In contrast, there were no differences in power spectra at six different frequency bands, likely due to the fact that participants engaged in different meditation practices. Finally, exploratory analyses suggest neurological differences among meditation practices. These findings highlight the importance of studying the electroencephalography correlates of different meditative practices. (shrink)

Nietzsche described himself as the first psychologist of the West. His interpreters, however, have seldom regarded his works as contributions to psychology. This book gives the psychological perspective a central role and uses it as a guide through Nietzsche's aphoristic maze toward the centre of his thought, method, aims and ramifications. Psychology thus serves as the path to his philosophy and leads to a reconstruction of his substantive theses, including the morality of positive power. By exploring Nietzsche's depth psychology in (...) detail, the book clarifies his basic purpose: to entice readers into uncovering and reactivating their own sources of creative power. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche occupies a contradictory position in the history of ideas: he came up with the concept of a master race, yet an eminent Jewish scholar like Martin Buber translated his Also sprach Zarathustra into Polish and remained in a lifelong intellectual dialogue with Nietzsche. Sigmund Freud admired his intellectual courage and was not at all reluctant to admit that Nietzsche had anticipated many of his basic ideas. This unique collection of essays explores the reciprocal relationship between Nietzsche and Jewish (...) culture. It is organized in two parts: the first examines Nietzsche's attitudes towards Jews and Judaism; the second Nietzsche's influence on Jewish intellectuals as diverse and as famous as Franz Kafka, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Sigmund Freud . Each carefully selected essay explores one aspect of Nietzsche's relation to Judaism and German intellectual history, from Heinrich Heine to Nazism. (shrink)

This paper provides a reading of Nishitani’s philosophy of culture. It argues that the advent of nihilism is the logical conclusion of what will be called the “fracturing of culture” in which philosophy and religion lose their creative force to revitalize a cultural tradition as the sense of being-in-time that forms the historical life of a historical world. Section two sets out the paradoxical nature of Nishitani’s philosophy of culture as both a transcendental and existential project. Section three draws attention (...) to the fact that a concept of culture always belongs to a concrete culture as part of its own understanding of itself. Section four interprets the advent of nihilism in terms of a crisis of culture that ensues from the loss of the existential understanding of history that grounds a cultural world, that forms the standpoint of a historical event of worlding, the historical life that we are. Section five examines Nishitani’s project in terms of the reappropriation of a lost tradition through an existential receptive reinterpretation of Buddhism. Section six argues that for Nishitani the advent of nihilism comes about as a result of the negation of myth by science and thus the overcoming of nihilism comes about through the recollection of myth. Section seven determines the nature of myth for Nishitani through a comparison with Cassirer’s and Heidegger’s understanding of myth. Three elements of myth are focused on: 1) myth as an existential confrontation with being-in-the-world; 2) this existential being-in-the-world forms an existential being-in-time; and 3) myth is the position of the imagination, a thinking by means of form-images [keizō 形像] (Bild, image). Section seven considers the difference between Cassirer’s and Nishitani’s respective accounts of myth. Section nine examines the nature and function of philosophy, science, and religion in terms of their relation to myth and in terms of how they understand interdependent origination. Section, ten ends the paper by considering what is called the “fracturing” of culture and the advent of nihilism. (shrink)

The thesis that republicanism was only suited for small states was given its decisive eighteenth-century formulation by Montesquieu, who emphasized not only republics' need for homogeneity and virtue but also the difficulty of constraining military and executive power in large republics. Hume and Publius famously replaced small republics' virtue and homogeneity with large republics' plurality of contending factions. Even those who shared this turn to modern liberty, commerce and the accompanying heterogeneity of interests, however, did not all agree with or (...) know about Publius' institutional responses to the problems of executive and military power. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and on both sides of the Atlantic, it remained a live question whether large states could be stable moderate republics, with responses ranging from embraces of Montesquieuian limited monarchy, to denials that there was any real large-republic problem at all, with a variety of institutional solutions in between for those who thought there was a real but soluble large-republic problem. (shrink)

In the last several years, there has been an uptick of scholarly interest in Aristotelian theories of efficient causation. Much of this interest has focused on the late scholastic figure Francisco Suárez (1548-1617). This paper clarifies an important but neglected aspect of Suárez's theory of efficient causation—namely, his account of active causal powers. Like other Aristotelians, Suárez understands active causal powers as features that enable their subjects to perform certain sorts of actions. For example, a fire is able to heat (...) in virtue of its power or capacity for heating. However, it is not immediately clear which items in an Aristotelian ontology perform the role of an active power. The paper explains and motivates Suárez's answer to this question, and shows how this answer influences his position in a scholastic controversy about the causal roles of substantial and accidental forms in substantial change. (shrink)

In previous research, we have argued that private companies should be more open with their scientific research findings. However, our research assumed, somewhat naively perhaps, that public institutions were quite open. Recent findings have suggested otherwise, and in this paper we explore the dilemma faced by industry, universities, and society in attempting to balance the needs of openness (to rapidly advance the body of knowledge), with secrecy (to protect the economic returns to a new innovation).

This article explores nationalist interpretations of blood donation activity, examining how some Indians read integrative messages into the practical procedures through which blood is donated and distributed. The first post-Independence Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, proclaimed the need for `national integration' as a bulwark against a myriad of linguistic, caste and ethnic agitations that threatened to disrupt the unity of the newly formed nation-state. This article shows that a striking manifestation of the Nehruvian ideology of national integration possesses a (...) compelling presence in the Indian blood donation milieu. Scholars of India have long been preoccupied with documenting attempts by the Hindu right to redefine the nation in exclusively Hindu, anti-Nehruvian terms. Questioning the prevailing assumption that the only thing that counts politically in India today is the debunking or overriding of Nehruvian ideals of the secular inclusive nation, this article rehabilitates Nehruvianism as an important ethnographic subject. In so doing it demonstrates the roles of anonymity, enumeration and an array of technical and imaginative gathering points in the formation of the `difference-traversing gift'. The article also highlights ways in which technology may be employed for the imagining of social diversity. (shrink)

Flowing from his model for a contemporary theological anthropology as embodied sensing, the author focuses on the corporeal-linguistic turn in the 21st century and explores how his use of bodymapping, as an applied aspect of theological anthropology within the context of narrative therapy, intersects with the work of the neuro-scientist, Antonio Damasio on consciousness, and specifically his research on how the brain constantly maps the body in the brain. The author also explores the notion of sensing in the latest book (...) of the Irish philosopher Richard Kearney and based on this, expands his model for theological anthropology to the embodied sensing of meaning. (shrink)

In the Rebels episode “Stealth Strike,” Kanan, Ezra, Rex, and Chopper rescue Commander Sato and his crew from the clutches of the Empire. Chopper occupies an uncomfortable moral position in Rebels, as do so many droids in the Star Wars canon. Many are highly intelligent, with unique personalities that aren't merely a function of their programming. The “organics” of the Star Wars universe, those sentient species made of flesh and blood seem to have relationships with droids similar to the kind (...) many of people have with their laptops and smartphones. Philosophers call beings who exhibit traits like self‐awareness, independent thought, and unique preferences persons. Mills says race is a social construct, not a biological fact. Social constructs, things that exist because societies create them, include things like money, empires, and rebellions, things so real that people are willing to die (or kill) for them. (shrink)