This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This paper provides an evaluation of the spinoff of a for-profit company from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), a nonprofit professional association. The evaluation is based on a review of the literature on public policy issues surrounding organizational conversions from nonprofit to for-profit legal status. Many criticisms of this for-profit spinoff were voiced by professional leaders and accounting regulators, and we demonstrate that these criticisms are grounded in widely recognized policy principles relating to nonprofit conversions. The public (...) policy issues raised by this study have implications for the governance of professional associations in all disciplines. (shrink)

Within any organization (e.g. a hospital or clinic) the perception of the way things operate may vary dramatically as a function of one’s location in the organizational hierarchy as well as one’s professional discipline. Interorganizational variability depends on organizational coherence, safety, and stability. In this four-nation (Canada, Ireland, Australia, and Korea) qualitative study of 42 nurses, we explored their perception of how ethical decisions are made, the nurses’ hospital role, and the extent to which their voices were heard. These nurses (...) suggested that their voices were silenced (often voluntarily) or were not expressed in terms of ethical decision making. Finally, they perceived that their approach to ethical decision making differed from physicians. (shrink)

Against Theory is unique in that it puts disparate thinkers from both the analytic and continental traditions into conversation on a central topic in moral philosophy. It also addresses the issue of the impact of postmodernism on ethics, unlike most of the literature on postmodernism which tends to deal with social and political issues rather than ethics. Dwight Furrow's Against Theory is a spirited assessment of two main alternatives to the theoretical approach. One approach, Furrow argues, posits moral life (...) has the form of a narrative and emphasizes the role of historical understanding or imaginative identification in recognizing moral obligation. The second postmodernist alternative, stresses that moral obligation is a feeling of being bound by a presence the source of which cannot be identified through reason or understanding. Furrow's position compellingly negotiates the tension between the living practice of ethics on the one hand, and normative ideals of equality and justice on the other. Furrow questions whether it is possible to resolve this seeming contradition. In doing so, he provides lucidly detailed examinations of such major thinkers as Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Against Theory 's is a compelling examination of the continental and analytical philosophical ethical traditions. It is one od the few available books that thoroughly considers the impact of postmodernism on the subject and practice of ethics. (shrink)

Using case studies from the Indonesian context, this article argues that the current truth regimes we now live by are always and already “hybrid” and that we need new methods for understanding meaning-making practices in an era of globalization and climate change than comparative approaches allow. Following the works of such thinkers as physicist Karen Barad, political philosopher William Connolly, and eco-critic Timothy Morton, this article develops the idea that an event-oriented or object-oriented approach better captures our hybrid meaning-making (...) practices. Not only that, but it also provides a lens through which to understand traditions as polydox and the rise of “modern” science as itself a planetary phenomenon. (shrink)

When George Bernard Shaw described Dartington Hall as a ‘salon in the countryside’, he was referring to the maelstrom of ideas, conversations, and experimentation around psychology, mysticism, and spirituality within the estate's larger ethos of community living and rural reform. Disenchanted with the effects of industrialization and the ravages of the First World War, American railway heiress Dorothy Whitney Elmhirst and her second husband, Leonard Elmhirst, purchased the extensive Devonshire estate in 1925 and began to encourage regular visits and (...) social and spiritual advice from prominent British interwar intellectuals such as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard. As the estate's activities expanded during the 1930s, Dorothy enlisted the help of visiting American constitutional psychologist William Sheldon to assess and advise upon the well-being of children attending Dartington's experimental school. Sheldon's ‘Promethean Psychology’ and ‘Somatotyping’ body classification system offered the Dartington group, a social, spiritual, and ‘scientific’ alternative to Freudian understandings of the mind. Visitors such as Huxley, decades later, relied on Sheldon's somatotyping system to fashion a utopian education in Pala (in his last novel, Island) where the population might live in nonmaterialistic cooperative harmony. Dartington's attraction to the use of Sheldon's Promethean psychology in supporting a utopian view of progressive education was as short-lived as were Pala's utopian ambitions decades later. In years to come, however, elements of Sheldon's views continued to find an audience among physical educators and sports scientists, who saw in somatotypes a useful guide for assessing talent identification and future sporting success. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the temporal openness of perceptual experience provides insight into the basic structure of learning. I draw on Husserl's account of the mutability of the retained past inAnalyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, and Merleau‐Ponty's account of the perceptual field, as well as his remarks on habit, inPhenomenology of Perception, in order to elucidate the relation between the perceptual past and the future it portends. More specifically, I argue that retention and habituation in perceptual experience (...) open dimensions of meaning that transform the initial, initiating, experiences in which meaning is first established. As a result, our experience of meaning is always subject to further development that we cannot anticipate. This temporal openness has consequences for our learning to navigate a perceptual field, but also, I argue, for our developing more complex ways of engaging with the world. Specifically, I show how learning requires that we commit ourselves to an object or task before we are in a position to recognize the implications or significance of our commitment. I further consider the role that others play in the inherent openness of learning to the development of new meaning. (shrink)

This paper examines an ancient debate over the rationality of perception. What leads the Stoics to affirm, and the Epicureans to deny, that to form a sense-impression is an activity of reason? The answer, we argue, lies in a disagreement over what is required for epistemic success. For the Stoics, epistemic success consists in believing the right propositions, and only rational states, in virtue of their predicational structure, put us in touch with propositions. Since they identify some sense-impressions as criteria (...) of truth and thus as the basis for epistemic success, the Stoics maintain that sense-impressions must be rational. The Epicureans agree with the Stoics that sense-impressions function as criteria of truth, and also agree broadly on what it means for a state to be rational, but deny that sense-impressions are rational because (1) they think that epistemic success must be supported by a state that is necessarily error-free and (2) accept that rational states can be false. In reconstructing this debate, we refine the standard interpretation of the fundamental difference between Epicurean and Stoic epistemology and also develop parallels with epistemological debates today. One upshot is a more nuanced appreciation of the merits of Epicurean epistemology vis-à-vis the Stoics. (shrink)

Models of cultural evolution need to address not only the organizational aspects of human societies, but also the complexity and structure of cultural idea systems that frame their systems of organization. These cultural idea systems determine a framework within which behaviors take place and provide mutually understood meanings for behavior from the perspective of both agent and recipient that are critical for the coherence of human systems of social organization.

The term “deep history” refers to historical accounts framed temporally not by the advent of a written record but by evolutionary events (Smail 2008; Shryock and Smail 2011). The presumption of deep history is that the events of today have a history that traces back beyond written history to events in the evolutionary past. For human kinship, though, even forming a history of kinship, let alone a deep history, remains problematic, given limited, relevant data (Trautman et al. 2011). With regard (...) to a deep history, one conjecture is that human kinship evolved from primate social systems in a gradual, more-or-less continuous manner (see Chapais 2008); another conjecture is that kinship, in accordance with the incest account of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969) or the fanciful, tetradic account of Nicholas J. Allen (1986), “comes into existence with a leap” (Trautman et al. 2011: 176); and yet another, the account to be developed in this paper, is that kinship, as it is understood and lived by culture bearers today, is the consequence of a profound and qualitative evolutionary transformation going from an ancestral primate-like social system predicated on extensive face-to-face interaction to the relation-based social systems that characterize human societies (Read 2012). (shrink)

Small family businesses have generally been shown to exhibit significant concern for social responsibility, especially at the community level. Despite the reported heterogeneity of family firms in their preferences for and participation in social responsibility, the drivers of such differences are not agreed upon in the literature. We draw from enlightened self-interest and social capital theories by exploring their complementary and competing implications for the effect of duration and community satisfaction on participation in community-oriented social responsibility. Additionally, drawing on the (...) association between gender and self-construal and evidence that gender shapes helping and giving behaviors, we assess the moderating role of the gender of the firm manager in these relationships. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 279 family businesses and find support that gender moderates the relationship between community duration and satisfaction and measures of CSR. (shrink)

At the end of the Meno, the character Socrates claims that true doxa is distinguished from epistēmē by a working out of the explanation. This chapter argues that working out the explanation consists, for Socrates, in seeing how the fact to be explained is grounded in facts about the natures of the relevant fundamental entities of the domain to which it belongs. It reconstructs the resulting conception of epistēmē. Once that reconstruction is complete, it argues that notions of epistemic justification (...) are out of place in interpreting the Meno. It then appeals to recent work in epistemology to settle the long-standing question of whether Socrates' account of epistēmē is better interpreted as an account of knowledge or as an account of understanding, arguing that it is more charitably taken in the latter way. Moreover, the chapter notes that Socrates' account of epistēmē provides insights that any philosopher interested in the nature of understanding should take seriously. (shrink)

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients (...) than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours. Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. _Shame and Necessity_ gives a new account of our relations to the Greeks, and helps us to see what ethical ideas we need in order to live in the modern world. (shrink)

The pioneering work of Johann Winckelmann (1717-1768) identified a homoerotic appreciation of male beauty in classical Greek sculpture, a fascination that had endured in Western art since the Greeks. Yet after Winckelmann, the value (even the possibility) of art's queer beauty was often denied. Several theorists, notably the philosopher Immanuel Kant, broke sexual attraction and aesthetic appreciation into separate or dueling domains. In turn, sexual desire and aesthetic pleasure had to be profoundly rethought by later writers. Whitney Davis follows (...) how such innovative thinkers as John Addington Symonds, Michel Foucault, and Richard Wollheim rejoined these two domains, reclaiming earlier insights about the mutual implication of sexuality and aesthetics. Addressing texts by Arthur Schopenhauer, Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Sigmund Freud, among many others, Davis criticizes modern approaches, such as Kantian idealism, Darwinism, psychoanalysis, and analytic aesthetics, for either reducing aesthetics to a question of sexuality or for removing sexuality from the aesthetic field altogether. Despite these schematic reductions, sexuality always returns to aesthetics, and aesthetic considerations always recur in sexuality. Davis particularly emphasizes the way in which philosophies of art since the late eighteenth century have responded to nonstandard sexuality, especially homoeroticism, and how theories of nonstandard sexuality have drawn on aesthetics in significant ways. Many imaginative and penetrating critics have wrestled productively, though often inconclusively and "against themselves," with the aesthetic making of sexual life and new forms of art made from reconstituted sexualities. Through a critique that confronts history, philosophy, science, psychology, and dominant theories of art and sexuality, Davis challenges privileged types of sexual and aesthetic creation imagined in modern culture-and assumed today. (shrink)

Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order to (...) take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

This review article discusses the conception of collective rights necessary to ground contemporary entrenchments of minority educational rights, Indigenous rights and collective bargaining rights, as discussed in Miodrag Jovanović’s book, Collective Rights: A Legal Theory. Jovanović argues for a role for value collectivism in elucidating a rationale for the entrenchment of rights held by what he conceives of as pre-legally existing groups with interests not reducible to those of their individual members. This approach can offer an explanation for the entrenchment (...) of minority educational rights and Indigenous rights. The article extols Jovanović’s attempt to grapple with an explanation for rights not explained within standard liberal theory, even in Will Kymlicka’s attempt to justify minority rights within liberalism. The review also critiques the argument offered by Jovanović. First, the review argues that a full-fledged adoption of value collectivism is not necessary to provide a justification for irreducibly collective rights and that the unnecessary adoption of such a theoretical construct may, in practical terms, work counter to the ongoing entrenchment of the rights it seeks to justify, thus becoming what it will categorize as a ‘self-threatening theory’. Second, the review argues that Jovanović’s stark division of rights held by pre-legally existing groups and legally constituted collective entities undermines his account’s ability to explain collective bargaining rights of trade unions that are entrenched in some jurisdictions. (shrink)

Anton Wilhelm Amo (c. 1700 – c. 1750) – born in West Africa, enslaved, and then gifted to the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel – became the first African to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy at a European university. He went on to teach philosophy at the Universities of Halle and Jena. On the 16th of April, 1734, at the University of Wittenberg, he defended his dissertation, De Humanae Mentis Apatheia (On the Impassivity of the Human Mind), in which Amo investigates the (...) logical inconsistencies in René Descartes’ (1596 – 1650) res cogitans (mind) and res extensa (body) distinction and interaction by maintaining that (1) the mind does not sense material things nor does it (2) contain the faculty of sensing. (shrink)

Cet article relève une impasse qui apparaît quand les travaux récents sur la suspension du jugement sont intégrés aux solutions évidentialistes au problème de la «mauvaise sorte de raison» : il semble qu’il n’existe aucune raison pour suspendre le jugement. Deux réponses possibles à cette impasse sont considérées ici : l’une redéfinit la suspension du jugement comme une action mentale, l’autre la redéfinit comme une attitude de second ordre. L’article fait valoir que ces réponses n’évitent l’impasse qu’en compromettant de manière (...) inacceptable la notion de suspension du jugement. (shrink)