Business scholars have recently proposed that the virtue of personal wisdom may predict leadership behaviors and the quality of leader–follower relationships. This study investigated relationships among leaders’ personal wisdom—defined as the integration of advanced cognitive, reflective, and affective personality characteristics (Ardelt, Hum Dev 47:257–285, 2004)—transformational leadership behaviors, and leader–member exchange (LMX) quality. It was hypothesized that leaders’ personal wisdom positively predicts LMX quality and that intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration, two dimensions of transformational leadership, mediate this relationship. Data came from (...) 75 religious leaders and 1–3 employees of each leader (N = 158). Results showed that leaders’ personal wisdom had a positive indirect effect on follower ratings of LMX quality through individualized consideration, even after controlling for Big Five personality traits, emotional intelligence, and narcissism. In contrast, intellectual stimulation and the other two dimensions of transformational leadership (idealized influence and inspirational motivation) did not mediate the positive relationship between leaders’ personal wisdom and LMX quality. Implications for future research on personal wisdom and leadership are discussed, and some tentative suggestions for leadership development are outlined. (shrink)

This essay brings the work of Isabelle Stengers into the fold of feminism to propose a feminist politics of the earth that disrupts the fantasy of human exceptionalism underpinning much Anthropocene discourse. I begin by situating Stengers’s political use of Gaia theory in current debates on the Anthropocene. Next, I show how Stengers’s reworking of Gaia helps in reconsidering the relations between two bodies of feminist theory—Deleuzian feminism and Marxist ecofeminism—that are rarely brought into conversation. On this basis, I explore (...) what a feminist politics of composition with the earth might look like. (shrink)

Idealism is the view that reality is fundamentally mental. Idealism has been influential historically, but it has been neglected in contemporary metaphysical debate. This volume of 17 essays by leading philosophers rectifies the situation.

Consisting of studies in Christian thought in relation to catastrophe, this book particularly looks at the ideas of Soren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth. When it was first published in 1940 this important investigation of ‘existential reality’ presented the view that the climate of crisis and catastrophe is also the essential climate of real religion. It addressed questions of the time surrounding war and religion. Calling for a rebirth of religion, this personal account tries to understand the thinking of Kierkegaard and (...) similar contemporaries and expose their importance in considering the nature of religion. (shrink)

There are fundamental differences between the explanation of scientific change and the explanation of technological change. The differences arise from fundamental differences between scientific and technological knowledge and basic disanalogies between technological advance and scientific progress. Given the influence of economic markets and industrial and institutional structures on the development of technology, it is more plausible to regard technological change as a continuous and incremental process, rather than as a process of Kuhnian crises and revolutions.

Previous studies of auditory expectation have focused on the expectedness perceived by listeners retrospectively in response to events. In contrast, this research examines predictive uncertainty —a property of listeners' prospective state of expectation prior to the onset of an event. We examine the information-theoretic concept of Shannon entropy as a model of predictive uncertainty in music cognition. This is motivated by the Statistical Learning Hypothesis, which proposes that schematic expectations reflect probabilistic relationships between sensory events learned implicitly through exposure. Using (...) probability estimates from an unsupervised, variable-order Markov model, 12 melodic contexts high in entropy and 12 melodic contexts low in entropy were selected from two musical repertoires differing in structural complexity (simple and complex). Musicians and non-musicians listened to the stimuli and provided explicit judgments of perceived uncertainty (explicit uncertainty). We also examined an indirect measure of uncertainty computed as the entropy of expectedness distributions obtained using a classical probe-tone paradigm where listeners rated the perceived expectedness of the final note in a melodic sequence (inferred uncertainty). Finally, we simulate listeners' perception of expectedness and uncertainty using computational models of auditory expectation. A detailed model comparison indicates which model parameters maximize fit to the data and how they compare to existing models in the literature. The results show that listeners experience greater uncertainty in high-entropy musical contexts than low-entropy contexts. This effect is particularly apparent for inferred uncertainty and is stronger in musicians than non-musicians. Consistent with the Statistical Learning Hypothesis, the results suggest that increased domain-relevant training is associated with an increasingly accurate cognitive model of probabilistic structure in music. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. We show that neoliberalization and the dismantling of community health services played a major role in turning Northern Italy into a shattered “lazaret”. Moreover, considering Italian activists’ responses to the pandemic, we suggest that they point toward a reinvention of reproduction along two main axes. First, they bring feminist insights to bear with the ecological crisis that created the conditions for COVID-19. In so doing, they direct attention to (...) reproduction as a multidimensional matrix of power relations involving both social and ecological aspects. Second, activists have strived to build infrastructures for the redistribution of care from below. Creating and developing mutual aid networks, activist groups designed a feminist logistics, that is central for creating alternatives to prevalent neoliberal models of circulating care whose flaws have fully emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all k inds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease. It must be so." -/- —Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden (1995).

The classic follow-up to the bestselling "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg " - Explains the process of acculturation and the mechanisms that create our self-limiting "cosmic egg" of consensus reality - Reveals how our biological development innately creates a "crack" in our cosmic egg--leaving a way to return to the unencumbered consciousness of childhood - Explores ways to discover and explore the "crack" to restore wholeness to our minds and reestablish our ability to create our own realities In this (...) classic follow-up to his bestselling "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg," Joseph Chilton Pearce explains the process of acculturation and the mechanisms that create our self-limiting "cosmic egg" of consensus reality. Laying the groundwork for his later classic "Magical Child," Pearce shows that we go through early childhood connecting with the world through our senses. With the development of language and the process of acculturation not only do our direct experiences of the world become much less vivid but our innate states of nonordinary consciousness become suppressed. Trapped in a specific cultural context--a "cosmic egg"--we are no longer able to have or even recognize mystical experiences not mediated by the limitations of our culture. Motivated primarily by a fear of death, our enculturation literally splits our minds and prevents us from living fully in the present. Drawing from Carlos Castaneda's writings about Don Juan and the sense of "body-knowing," Pearce explores the varieties of nonordinary consciousness that can help us return to the unencumbered consciousness of our infancy. He shows that just as we each create our own cosmic egg of reality through cultural conditioning, we also innately create a "crack" in that egg. Ultimately certain shifts in our biological development take place to offset acculturation, leaving an avenue of return to our primary state. Pearce examines the creation of the "egg" itself and ways to discover its inherent cracks to restore wholeness to our minds, release us from our fear of death, and reestablish our ability to create our own realities through imagination and biological transcendence. (shrink)

The classic work that shaped the thought of a generation with its powerful insights into the true nature of mind and reality. - Defines culture as a "cosmic egg" structured by the mind's drive for logical ordering of its universe. - Provides techniques allowing individuals to break through the vicious circle of logic-based systems to attain expanded ways of creative living and learning. The sum total of our notions of what the world is--and what we perceive its full potential to (...) be--form a shell of rational thought in which we reside. This logical universe creates a vicious circle of reasoning that robs our minds of power and prevents us from reaching our true potential. To step beyond that circle requires a centering and focus that today's society assaults on every level. Through the insights of Teilhard, Tillich, Jung, Jesus, Carlos Castaneda, and others, Joseph Chilton Pearce provides a mode of thinking through which imagination can escape the mundane shell of current construct reality and leap into a new phase of human evolution. This enormously popular New Age classic is finally available again to challenge the assumptions of a new generation of readers and help them develop their potential through new creative modes of thinking. With a masterful synthesis of recent discoveries in physics, biology, and psychology, Pearce reveals the extraordinary relationship of mind and reality and nature's blueprint for a self-transcending humanity. (shrink)

In poem 64 Catullus, as Fordyce points out in his edition, often has lines enclosed by a noun and its adjective, e.g.: 5 auratam optantes Colchis avertere pellem Very often, but not always, a syntactical unit is enclosed as well as the line. This is perhaps not surprising, considering the prevalence of punctuation at the end of the line in this poem. Nevertheless, an examination of the lines will show that when a noun and adjective1 enclose both line and syntactical (...) unit the fact that they enclose a syntactical unit can be regarded as a determinant of the word order. (shrink)

Focusing on contemporary Bolivia, this article examines promises and pitfalls of political and legal initiatives that have turned Pachamama into a subject of rights. The conferral of rights on the indigenous earth being had the potential to unsettle the Western ontological distinction between active human subjects who engage in politics and passive natural resources. This essay, however, highlights some paradoxical effects of the rights of nature in Bolivia, where Evo Morales’ model of development relies on the intensification of the export-oriented (...) extractive economy. Through the analysis of a range of texts, including paintings, legal documents, political speeches and activist interventions, I consider the equivocation between the normatively gendered Mother Earth that the state recognises as the subject of rights, and the figure of Pachamama evoked by feminist and indigenous activists. Pachamama, I suggest, has been incorporated into the Bolivian state as a being whose generative capacities have been translated into a rigid gender binary. As a gendered subject of rights, Pachamama/mother Earth is exposed to governmental strategies that ultimately increase its subordination to state power. The concluding remarks foreground the import of feminist perspectives in yielding insights concerning political ontological conflicts. (shrink)

Despite the burgeoning interest in new and more complex accounts of the organism-environment dyad by biologists and philosophers, little attention has been paid in the resulting discussions to the history of these ideas and to their deployment in disciplines outside biology—especially in the social sciences. Even in biology and philosophy, there is a lack of detailed conceptual models of the organism-environment relationship. This volume is designed to fill these lacunae by providing the first multidisciplinary discussion of the topic of organism-environment (...) interaction. It brings together scholars from history, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, medicine, and biology to discuss the common focus of their work: entangled life, or the complex interaction of organisms and environments. (shrink)