The leadership development industry regularly claims to aid in developing effective, ethical leaders, using 360-degree psychometric assessments as key tools for so doing. This paper analyses the effects of such tools on those subjected to and subjectivised by them from a Foucauldian perspective. We argue that instead of encouraging ethical leadership such instruments inculcate practices and belief systems that perpetuate falsehoods, misrepresentations and inequalities. ‘Followers’ are presumed compliant, malleable beings needing leaders to determine what is in their interests. Such techniques (...) pursue productivity and profitability, rather than ethical leadership. We examine the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire, a widely used 360-degree tool that measures transformational leadership, as an illustrative case study to substantiate these criticisms. (shrink)

The infant mortality rate in Liberia is 50 times higher than it is in Sweden, whilst a child born in Japan has a life expectancy at birth of more than double that of one born in Zambia. 1 And within countries, we see differences which are nearly as great. For example, if you were in the USA and travelled the short journey from the poorer parts of Washington to Montgomery County Maryland, you would find that ‘for each mile travelled life (...) expectancy rises about a year and a half. There is a twenty-year gap between poor blacks at one end of the journey and rich whites at the other’. (Marmot, 2004, p.2). There are two types of questions which it is important to ask about inequalities in health such as these. The first are social scientific questions about the extent of inequalities in health and the factors which are causally responsible for these inequalities. Examples of social scientific questions to ask might be: how do infant mortality rates in the UK differ according to social class? What is the difference in life expectancy between Japanese who emigrate to the US and those who remain in Japan? Why do civil servants in higher ranked jobs tend to live longer than civil servants in lower ranked jobs? The second type are normative questions about the reasons we have to care about inequalities in health. Important normative questions to answer are: which inequalities in health should we care about (all inequalities or merely some of them)? When is an inequality in health unjust? How should we weigh our concern for equality in health against other factors such as maximising the.. (shrink)

I discuss certain representative accounts of metaphysical emergence falling into three broad categories, assessing their prospects for satisfying certain criteria; the ensuing dialectic has a bit of the Goldilocks fable about it. At one end of the spectrum are what I call ‘scientistic’ accounts, which characterize metaphysical emergence by appeal to one or another specific feature commonly registered in scientific descriptions of seeming cases of emergence; such accounts, I argue, typically fail to provide a clear basis for ensuring incompatibility with (...) ontological reduction, and thus fail to guarantee satisfaction of the criterion of appropriate contrast (§2). At the other end of the spectrum are what I call ‘abstractionist’ accounts, which characterize emergence in terms floating free of scientific notions; such accounts, I’ll argue, typically fail to guarantee satisfaction of the criterion of illuminating contrast (§3). I’ll then look at several accounts of metaphysical emergence that are what I call ‘substantive’, in appealing to familiar relations or posits which are properly metaphysical, while being intelligibly connected to scientific relations and posits. As we’ll see, the resources of such accounts are up to the tasks of blocking ontological reduction and of enabling investigations into metaphysical emergence to proceed in an illuminating way (§4). I close with some methodological morals (§5). (shrink)

Eugenics does not feel so distant from where I stand. This essay explains why.

In a recent paper, Ebbs has given an elegant statement of a notable puzzle that has recurred in the literature since the original publication of Putnam’s “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’.” The puzzle can be formulated, for a certain characteristic case, along the following lines. There are very strong intuitions in support of a thesis that Putnam has explicitly endorsed, namely, the thesis: The extension of the word ‘gold’, as we use it now, is the same as the extension of ‘gold’, (...) as it was used in 1650 (before the rise of molecular chemistry). However, strong convictions about language use and truth conditions also incline us to the view that the extension of a term, as it is used at a time t, is determined by facts about the use of the term in the language at or before t, together with the facts about the various items to which the term prospectively applied. This paper looks at the various issues involved regarding these matters. (shrink)

This exhilarating tale of natural history illuminates the evolution of matter, life, and consciousness. In Everybody’s Story, Loyal Rue finds the means for global solidarity and cooperation in the shared story of humanity.

This book engages with the writings of W.G. Sebald, mediated by perspectives drawn from curriculum and architecture, to explore the theme of unsettling complacency and confront difficult knowledge around trauma, discrimination and destruction. Moving beyond overly instrumentalist and reductive approaches, the authors combine disciplines in a scholarly fashion to encourage readers to stretch their understandings of currere. The chapters exemplify important, timely and complicated conversations centred on ethical response and responsibility, in order to imagine a more just and aesthetically experienced (...) world. In the analysis of bildung as human formation, the book illuminates the pertinent lessons to be learned from the works of Sebald and provokes further investigations into the questions of memory, grief, and limits of language. Through its juxtaposition of curriculum and architecture, and using the prose of Sebald as a prism, the book revitalizes questions about education and ethics, probes the unsettling of complacency, and enables conversation around difficult knowledge and ethical responsibility, as well as offering hope and resolve. An important intervention in standard approaches to understanding currere, this book provides essential context for scholars and educators with interests in the history of education, curriculum studies, cultural studies, memory studies, narrative research, Sebaldian studies, and educational philosophy. (shrink)

Projects of human improvement take both individual and intergenerational forms. The biosciences provide many technologies, including prenatal screening and the latest gene editing techniques, such as CRISPR, that have been viewed as providing the means to human improvement across generations. But who is fit to furnish the next generation? Historically, eugenics epitomizes the science-based attempt to improve human society through distinguishing kinds of people and then implementing social policies—from immigration restriction to sexual sterilization and euthanasia—that influence and even direct what (...) sorts of people populate our future. Despite recognition of the horrors of the eugenic extremes of the past and of the subhumanizing of those sufficiently below appearance or ability norms to be viewed as “defective” or “unfit”, many people continue to be drawn to strands of eugenic thinking. (shrink)

The hypothesis of group selection fell victim to a seemingly devastating critique in 1960s evolutionary biology. In Unto Others (1998), we argue to the contrary, that group selection is a conceptually coherent and empirically well documented cause of evolution. We suggest, in addition, that it has been especially important in human evolution. In the second part of Unto Others, we consider the issue of psychological egoism and altruism -- do human beings have ultimate motives concerning the well-being of others? We (...) argue that previous psychological and philosophical work on this question has been inconclusive. We propose an evolutionary argument for the claim that human beings have altruistic ultimate motives. (shrink)

This chapter steps back from the important psychological work on collaborative remembering at the heart of the present volume to take up some broader questions about the place of memory in Western cultural thought, both historically and in contemporary society, offering the kind of integrative and reflective perspective for which philosophy is often known. In particular, the text aims to shed some light on the relationship between collaborative memory and the other two topics in this title—group-level cognizing and individuals—beginning with (...) the relationship between collective intentionality and collaborative remembering, and concluding with some brief comments on the politics of collaborative remembering by drawing on recent work that has been undertaken with eugenics survivors in Canada. (shrink)

I think there is something to be said in a positive and constructive vein about collective intentionality in non-human animals. Doing so involves probing at the concept of collective intentionality fairly directly (Section 2), considering the various forms that collective intentionality might take (Section 3), showing some sensitivity to the history of appeals to that concept and its close relatives (Section 4), and raising some broader questions about the relationships between sociality, cognition, and institutions by discussing two different possible cases (...) of collective intentionality in non-human animals: that of the social insects (Section 5) and that of highly social mammals, such as canines (Section 6). If the discussion here is on track, then the widely shared perspective on collective intentionality exemplified by the work of Searle and Tomasello needs to be reconsidered. (shrink)

"Studies the path of natural philosophy (i.e., physics) from Isaac Newton through Scotland into the nineteenth-century background to the modern revolution in physics.

Using the term world to mean a creative response to objective reality, this book considers the ways in which Eastern and Western peoples construct their natural, social, aesthetic, and religious worlds. It points the way to a view of Eastern and Western as complementary, rather than contradictory, descriptions.

This volume is a collection of cutting-edge research papers in scientifically informed metaphysics, tackling a range of philosophical puzzles which have emerged from recent work on chance and temporal asymmetry. How do the probabilities found in fundamental physics and the probabilities of the special sciences relate to one another? How can we account for the normative significance of chance? Can constraints on the initial conditions of the universe underwrite the second law of thermodynamics, and potentially also all other lawlike regularities? (...) How does contemporary quantum theory bear on debates over the nature of chance and the arrow of time? What grounds do we have for believing in a fundamental temporal direction, or flow? And how do all these questions connect up with one another? The aim of the volume is both to survey and summarize recent debates about chance and temporal asymmetry and to push them forward. The authors bring perspectives from metaphysics, from philosophy of physics and from philosophy of probability. Mainstream approaches are subjected to searching new critiques, and bold new proposals are made concerning (inter alia) the semantics of chance-attributions, the justification of the Principal Principle connecting chance and degree of belief, the limits on inter-theoretic reduction and the source of the temporal asymmetry of human experience. (shrink)

Drawing on recent feminist discussions, this collection critically reassesses ideas about agency, exploring the relationship between agency and coercion in greater depth and across a range of disciplinary perspectives and ethical contexts.

Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.

Virtue and the Moral Life brings together distinguished philosophers and theologians with younger scholars of consummate promise to produce ten essays that engage both academics and students of ethics. This collection explores the role virtues play in identifying the good life and the good society.

F. H. Bradley, while not alone in securing idealism its standing in British thought for several generations of philosophers, was by far the ablest exponent of the position. He was by far the ablest critic, too, of the “school of experience,” the empiricist philosophers. In particular, he criticized the doctrines of the associationist psychology of Hume, Hartley, and the Mills. This criticism was metaphysically based, arguing that the psychology was inadequate because of its “atomism,” that is, because it presupposed an (...) inadequate account of relations. Bradley proposed an alternative account of relations that led to a very different view of such psychological phenomena as inference. Since there were many controversies internal to introspective psychology concerning the status of relations, Bradley’s views can be seen as part of a movement that eventually forced the science to deal more adequately with relational facts. Nonetheless, Bradley’s metaphysics was decidedly antiempiricist, and was in the end antagonistic to the idea that an empirical science could provide any ultimate sort of explanation of human being. In that respect, Bradley’s critique stood apart from those that were internal to the science. (shrink)