John Evans’s new book Morals Not Knowledge pushes scholars to rethink contemporary debates about religion and science by moving past the rhetoric of societal elites to examine the perspectives of everyday Americans, identifying the moral conflicts at the heart of debates. We review Evans’s key contributions while also extending and challenging his arguments, urging consideration of how renewed moral debates might be informed by a broader set of U.S. “publics.” Drawing on empirical research, we highlight four sets of voices that (...) are missing from Evans’s analysis. Specifically, we highlight the voices of racial and ethnic minorities, religious communities (as opposed to individuals), members of minority religious traditions, and everyday religious scientists. Through doing so we offer avenues for future research on these diverse publics that will help facilitate a broader set of better and more informed debates about moral conflict between religious and scientific communities. (shrink)

Belief is a species of mere conception, and is modifiable, rather than bivalent (believing or disbelieving). The attendant-impression theory of transformation of conception into belief expresses the moral dimension of one and the same thing, of which the manner-of-conception (without attendant impression) theory of the transformation refers to the epistemic dimension of that same thing. These two aspects of the transformation of conception into belief point to an ambiguity in Hume's use of the term IDEA: as act and as content. (...) The act of conception, its content, and the pedigree of that content are all mutually indeterminate. The imagination conceives, constructs contents, and transforms conception into belief. The foundation of the role of mere conception in belief is the mind's "native situation of indifference", which makes it possible for Hume to account not only for warranted but also unwarranted belief. Hume is interested not only in what should actuate the soul but what does so in fact. Hume's real innovation lies in a theory of belief unburdened by traditional representation and in the effects rather than the external foundations of certitude. (shrink)

Drawing on 171 in-depth interviews with physicists at universities in the United States and the UK, this study examines the narratives of 48 physicists to explain the concept of ethical ambiguity: the border where legitimate and illegitimate conduct is blurred. Researchers generally assume that scientists agree on what constitutes both egregious and more routine forms of misconduct in science. The results of this study show that scientists perceive many scenarios as ethically gray, rather than black and white. Three orientations to (...) ethical ambiguity are considered—altruism, inconsequential outcomes, and preserving the status quo—that allow possibly questionable behavior to persist unchallenged. Each discursive strategy is rationalized as promoting the collective interest of science rather than addressing what is ethically correct or incorrect. The results of this study suggest that ethics training in science should focus not only on fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism and more routine forms of misconduct, but also on strategies for resolving ethically ambiguous scenarios where appropriate action may not be clear. (shrink)

Some research indicates that women professionals—when compared to men—may be more ethical in the workplace. Existing literature that discusses gender and ethics is confined to the for-profit business sector and primarily to a US context. In particular, there is little attention paid to gender and ethics in science professions in a global context. This represents a significant gap, as science is a rapidly growing and global professional sector, as well as one with ethically ambiguous areas. Adopting an international comparative perspective, (...) this paper relies on 121 semi-structured interviews with US and UK academic physicists to examine how physicists perceive the impact of gender on science ethics. Findings indicate that some US and UK physicists believe that female scientists handle ethical issues within science in a feminine way whereas their male colleagues approach ethics in a masculine way. Some of these physicists further claim that these different approaches to science ethics lead to male and female scientists’ different levels of competitiveness in academic physics. In both the US and the UK, there are “gender-blind” physicists, who do not think gender is related to professional ethics. Relying on physicists’ nuanced descriptions this paper contributes to the current understanding of gender and science and engineering ethics. (shrink)

Efforts to understand gender segregation within and among science disciplines have focused on both supply- and demand-side explanations. Yet we know little about how academic scientists themselves view the sources of such segregation. Utilizing data from a survey of scientists at thirty top U.S. graduate programs in physics and biology and semistructured interviews with 150 of them, this article examines the reasons academic scientists provide for differences in the distribution of women in biology and physics. In quantitative analyses, gender is (...) more salient than discipline in determining the reasons scientists provide for gender disparities between disciplines, suggesting that gender may act as a “master status,” shaping the experiences of scientists regardless of the gender composition of the discipline. Qualitative interviews confirm this interpretation and reveal that scientists also perceive mentoring, natural differences, discrimination, and the history of the disciplines to be important factors. Results contribute to research on the relationship between emotional labor and occupational gender segregation conducted in professions such as law and nursing. (shrink)

Entrepreneurs of contested commodities often face stakeholders engaged in market excluding boundary work driven by ethical considerations. For example, the conversion of academic scientific knowledge into technologies that can be owned and sold is a growing global trend and key stakeholders have different ethical responses to this contested commodity. Commercialization of science can be viewed as a good thing because people believe it bolsters economic growth and broadly benefits society. Others view it as bad because they believe it discourages basic (...) research that ought to be freely shared without concern for profit. Taking a descriptive sociological approach, we posit that the stance of a religious tradition toward capitalism will help shape individual scientists’ views on science commercialization and test whether the religious tradition of scientists correlates with their attitude toward the commercialization of science. To maximize variance on the religious tradition dimension, we analyze pooled data from a cross-national survey of university biologists and physicists encompassing France, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Taiwan, Turkey, UK and the USA. We indeed find religious tradition differences. Hindus and scientists with no religious tradition are more likely to agree that commercialization of science “harms a university’s commitment to knowledge production” than Protestants. We end with a discussion on business ethics and the moral limits of the market as well as implications for entrepreneurs of contested commodities. (shrink)

Is the market civilizing or destructive? The increased salience of science commercialization is forcing scientists to address this question. Benefiting from the sociology of morality literature’s increased attention to specific kinds of morality and engaging with economic sociology’s moral markets literature, we generate competing hypotheses about scientists’ value-driven attitudes toward patenting. The Civilizing Market thesis suggests scientists who prioritize universalism will tend to support patenting. The Destructive Market thesis, by contrast, suggests universalism will be correlated with opposition to patenting. We (...) analyze survey data from biologists and physicists nested within academic organizations, which are nested within the following regions: France, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Taiwan, Turkey, UK, and the USA. Employing multilevel analysis, we find correlational evidence to support the Destructive Market thesis. Universalism is associated with anti-patenting attitudes, suggesting scientists expect patenting to have deleterious effects on science and society. We end with a discussion of this article’s implications for the moral markets literature, sociology of morality and business ethics. (shrink)

Zygon®, Volume 57, Issue 2, Page 322-343, June 2022.

The time honoured philosophical issue of how to resolve the mind/body problem has taken a more scientific turn of late. Instead of discussing issues of the soul and emotion and person and their reduction to a physical form, we now ask ourselves how well-understood cognitive and social concepts fit into the growing and changing field of neuropsychology. One of the many projects that have come out of this new scientific endeavour is Zaidel’s (2005) inquiry into the neuropsychological bases of art.

John Wilkins and Malte Ebach respond to the dismissal of classification as something we need not concern ourselves with because it is, as Ernest Rutherford suggested, mere ‘‘stamp collecting.’’ They contend that classification is neither derivative of explanation or of hypothesis-making but is necessarily prior and prerequisite to it. Classification comes first and causal explanations are dependent upon it. As such it is an important (but neglected) area of philosophical study. Wilkins and Ebach reject Norwood Russell Hanson’s thesis that classification (...) relies on observation that is theory-laden and deny the need for aetiological assumptions and historical reconstruction to justify its arrangement. What they offer instead is a significant (albeit controversial) contribution to the philosophical literature on classification, a pre-theoretic natural classification based on the observation of patterns in data of ready-made phenomena. Their notion of ready-made phenomena rests on a conception of tacit knowledge or know-how. This is evident in their distinction between strong Theory-dependence and na ̈ıve theory-dependence. Their small t-theory-dependence permits patterns of observation that facilitate know-how but does not rely on a domain-specific explanatory theory of their aetiology. Wilkins and Ebach suggest classification differs from theory building in that it is passive (whereas theory building is active). Classification is possible just because it does not require the sieve of theory to capture classes that are ‘‘handed to you by your cognitive dispositions and the data that you observe’’ (p. 18). Finding regularities sans-theory is just something we do and can do without any prior theory about the underlying causes or origins of the resultant regularities. Luke Howard’s classification of clouds serves as an exemplar of a passive, theory-free classification system and the periodic table and the DSM help to illustrate this type of non-aetiological patterning. A recurrent theme is the nature of naturalness. For Wilkins and Ebach, the conception of naturalness is not one that is based on the generation or discovery of natural kind categories popular in both the traditional metaphysics of Mill and Wittgenstein as well as updated notions within philosophy of biology such as Boyd’s Homeostatic Property Cluster kinds. Instead, Wilkins and Ebach define the naturalness of classification as the falling into hierarchical patterns, aligning the search for natural arrangement with the aim of systematics, and as something that is grounded in a cognitive task or activity. However, they leave the question of realism v. antirealism open. ‘‘In natural classification...we must have real relations no matter how we might interpret ‘real’’’ (p. 70). There is tension with regard to their ontological commitments as they vacillate between constructive, operationalist, and realist approaches. Wilkins and Ebach initially define real as that which is causal and important (pp. 70–71), and later as that which ‘‘depends in no way upon a mind or observer’’ (p. 122). This makes their claim that there was ‘‘no real theory involved [in the pre-Darwinian classifications of Jussieu and Adanson]’’ (p. 64) difficult to interpret. Cont’d……. (shrink)

This collection extends the boundaries of global feminism to include Islamic women. Challenging Orientalist assumptions of Muslim women as victims of Islam, these essays focus on women's negotiations for identity, power, and agency as participants in religious, cultural and nationalist movements. This book gathers Signs essays on women in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Diaspora to explore how women negotiate identities and attempt to gain political, economic, and legal rights. This collection shows Islam to be a diverse set (...) of variable practices and beliefs shaped by region, nation, ethnicity, sect, and class, as well as by responses to many cultural and economic processes. In examining women's participation in religious and nationalist projects, these critics debate controversial issues: Does Islamic feminism provide an alternative, revolutionary paradigm to Eurocentric liberal humanism and western feminism? Is Islam more oppressive to women than the modern secular state? How are the lives and texts of Arab and Muslim women constructed for local or western consumption? These essays expose the shortcomings of the secularist assumptions of many recent feminist analyses, which continue to treat religion in general and fundamentalism in particular as a tool of oppression used against women, rather than as a viable form of feminist agency producing contradictory effects for its participants. The essays in this book first appeared in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Contributors: S. M. Shamsul Alam Amal Amireh Mary Elaine Heglund Shahnaz Khan Anouar Majid Val Moghadam Julia Peteet Elora Shehabbudin Gabriele vom Bruck. (shrink)

The publication of John Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet in 1558 had engendered a radical debate about the public role of women and the nature of female authority and obedience. Howard was not the only author who attempted to refute Knox's tract. The Marian exile and future Bishop of London, John Aylmer, the Catholic Bishop of Ross, John Leslie, and the Catholic, Scottish lawyer, David Chambers, all published books disproving Knox's allegations about women's unfitness for rule. Richard Bertie, (...) husband of Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, also prepared a manuscript refutation which was never published. The published works are moderately well known, and have been discussed elsewhere. This article concentrates on Howard's unpublished contribution to the Knox debate. The tract is important because of its length and detail, its conclusions regarding the potential role of aristocratic women, and because of Howard's personal reputation and aristocratic connections. The �Defense� was both eloquent and persuasive, analysing women's legal, historical and theological status within early modern society. Howard presented alternative interpretations of female stereotypes found in sermons and polemical writings. His commentaries on Genesis, Athalia, Jezebel and Deborah show how traditional biblical stories could be interpreted in radically differing ways, with profound implications for contemporary women. Because of the length of Howard's tract, this article can present only a summary of his main conclusions. His interpretation of the first three chapters of Genesis will be presented in rather more detail as an indication of the complexity of the early modern debate about women, and the dangers of trying to attach simplistic labels to individual attitudes. (shrink)

Introduction: Platonic dramatology -- The political and philosophical problems. Using pre-Socratic philosophy to support political reform: the Athenian stranger ; Plato's Parmenides: Parmenides' critique of Socrates and Plato's critique of Parmenides ; Becoming Socrates ; Socrates interrogates his contemporaries about the noble and good -- Paradigms of philosophy. Socrates' positive teaching ; Timaeus-Critias: completing or challenging Socratic political philosophy? ; Socratic practice -- The trial and death of Socrates. The limits of human intelligence ; The Eleatic challenge ; The trial (...) and death of Socrates -- Conclusion: Why Plato made Socrates his hero. (shrink)

This landmark study examines the role played by the rediscovery of the writings of the ancient atomists, Epicurus and Lucretius, in the articulation of the major philosophical systems of the seventeenth century, and, more broadly, their influence on the evolution of natural science and moral and political philosophy. The target of sustained and trenchant philosophical criticism by Cicero, and of opprobrium by the Christian Fathers of the early Church, for its unflinching commitment to the absence of divine supervision and the (...) finitude of life, the Epicurean philosophy surfaced again in the period of the Scientific Revolution, when it displaced scholastic Aristotelianism. Both modern social contract theory and utilitarianism in ethics were grounded in its tenets. Catherine Wilson shows how the distinctive Epicurean image of the natural and social worlds took hold in philosophy, and how it is an acknowledged, and often unacknowledged presence in the writings of Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, Boyle, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley. With chapters devoted to Epicurean physics and cosmology, the corpuscularian or "mechanical" philosophy, the question of the mortality of the soul, the grounds of political authority, the contested nature of the experimental philosophy, sensuality, curiosity, and the role of pleasure and utility in ethics, the author makes a persuasive case for the significance of materialism in seventeenth-century philosophy without underestimating the depth and significance of the opposition to it, and for its continued importance in the contemporary world. Lucretius's great poem, On the Nature of Things, supplies the frame of reference for this deeply-researched inquiry into the origins of modern philosophy. (shrink)

This book is collection of published and unpublished essays on the philosophy of religion by Howard Wettstein, who is a widely respected analytic philosopher. Over the past twenty years, Wettstein has attempted to reconcile his faith with his philosophy, and he brings his personal investment in this mission to the essays collected here. Influenced by the work of George Santayana, Wittgenstein, and A.J. Heschel, Wettstein grapples with central issues in the philosophy of religion such as the relationship of religious (...) practice to religious belief, what is at stake in the debate between atheists and theists, and the place of doctrine in religion. His discussions draw from Jewish texts as well as Christianity, Islam, and classical philosophy. The challenge Wettstein undertakes throughout the volume is to maintain a philosophical naturalism while pursuing an encounter with God and traditional religion. In the Introduction to this volume, Wettstein elucidates the uniting themes among the collected essays. (shrink)

An exploration of Immanuel Kant's account of war and the controversies that have arisen from its interpretation. This book brings the ideas of Kant's critical philosophy to bear on one of the leading political and legal questions of our age: under what circumstances, if any, is recourse to war legally and morally justifiable?

Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vacabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury (...) trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inatriculate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate. About the Author: Elaine Scarry is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. (shrink)

Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it.Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, (...) and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre.Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate. (shrink)

This book shows how the traditional concerns of political theory push it increasingly into the study of international relations. This is done, first, by demonstrating how many of the issues usually dealt with by political theory, such as democracy and justice, arise within an increasingly global context and, secondly, by considering how international issues, such as colonialism and war, are best illuminated by building on the work of political theorists. The book suggests that political theory and international relations theory can (...) now both be successfully engaged in as a joint enterprise only. (shrink)

The book is a comparative analysis of all the major social science/political science grand theories. It focuses on developmentalism, dependency theory, the world systems approach, Marxism, institutionalism, rational choice, psychoanalysis, political sociology, sociobiology, environmentalism, neuro-politics, transitions to democracy, and non-Western systems of analysis. To facilitate comparison and analysis, a common framework and outline are employed throughout. An integrating introduction and conclusion help tie the book together.

Mentioning products or brands on Facebook enables individuals to display an ideal self to others through a form of virtual conspicuous consumption. Drawing on conspicuous donation behaviour literature, we investigate ‘conspicuous virtue signalling’, as conspicuous consumption on Facebook. CVS occurs when an individual mentions a charity on their Facebook profile. We investigate need for uniqueness and attention to social comparison information as antecedents of two types of CVS–self-oriented and other-oriented. We also explore the relationship between CVS and self-esteem, and offline (...) prosocial and unethical behaviour intentions. Data from two studies, a college survey and an adult survey via MTurk, were analysed using structural equation modelling. Results indicate that NFU predicts both forms of CVS, while ATSCI influences both forms of CVS for adults and other-oriented CVS for students. Self-esteem is enhanced by self-oriented CVS. Self-oriented CVS predicts donation intention whereas other-oriented CVS significantly reduces donation intention for both samples. Furthermore, a significant relationship between CVS and purchase intention of counterfeit luxury goods is revealed. Findings provide insights into conspicuous virtue signalling and the relationship between CVS on Facebook and offline behavioural intentions. (shrink)

"--J.M.Coetzee "Here is a writer almost magically summoning up the world through words and ideas, in a new way, and so guiding the reader, lovingly, to receive the treasures and accept the pleasures of this book as naturally as breathing.

More and more areas of medicine involve subjects donating tissues to another — blood, organs, bone marrow, sperm, ova and embryos can all be transferred from one person to another. Within the technical frameworks of biomedicine, such fragments are generally treated as detachable things, severed from social identity once they are removed from a particular body. However an abundant anthropological and sociological literature has found that, for donors and patients, human tissues are not impersonal. They retain some of the values (...) of personhood and identity, and their incorporation often has complex effects on embodied identity. This article draws on feminist philosophy of the body to think through the implications of some of these practices. Specifically, it draws on the idea of intercorporeality, wherein the body image is always the effect of embodied social relations. While this approach is highly productive for considering the stakes involved in tissue transfer, it is argued that the concept of body image has been too preoccupied with the register of the visual at the expense of introceptive data and health/illness events. Empirical data around organ transplant and sperm donation are used to demonstrate that the transfer of biological fragments involves a profound kind of intercorporeality, producing identifications and disidentifications between donors and recipients that play out simultaneously at the immunological, psychic and social levels. (shrink)

Leibniz has often been described as holding to a kind of phenomenalism. Yet Leibniz did not have a single account of perception, or of the embodied mind, or of the monad, but a set of conflicting and mutually inconsistent accounts that preclude the possibility that there is any such thing as “Leibniz's System.” This difficulty raises problems of interpretation, since it is sometimes maintained that the principle of charity precludes the assignment of frankly inconsistent views to a philosopher. The essay (...) argues that we should not be misled by the intentionalist fallacy into looking for order within a text as opposed to order commentators can impose by making a philosopher's inconsistencies intelligible. (shrink)