The world of work over the past 3 years has been characterized by a great reset due to the COVID-19 pandemic, giving an even more central role to scholarly discussions of ethics and the future of work. Such discussions have the potential to inform whether, when, and which work is viewed and experienced as meaningful. Yet, thus far, debates concerning ethics, meaningful work, and the future of work have largely pursued separate trajectories. Not only is bridging these research spheres important (...) for the advancement of meaningful work as a field of study but doing so can potentially inform the organizations and societies of the future. In proposing this Special Issue, we were inspired to address these intersections, and we are grateful to have this platform for advancing an integrative conversation, together with the authors of the seven selected scholarly contributions. Each article in this issue takes a unique approach to addressing these topics, with some emphasizing ethics while others focus on the future aspects of meaningful work. Taken together, the papers indicate future research directions with regard to: (a) the meaning of meaningful work, (b) the future of meaningful work, and (c) how we can study the ethics of meaningful work in the future. We hope these insights will spark further relevant scholarly and practitioner conversations. (shrink)

Ayahuasca is a hallucinogenic plant mixture used in a ceremonial context throughout western Amazonia, and its use has expanded globally in recent decades. As part of this expansion, ayahuasca has become popular among westerners who travel to the Peruvian Amazon in increasing numbers to experience its reportedly healing and transformative effects. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in and around the area of Iquitos, Peru, the epicenter of ayahuasca tourism, this paper focuses on some of the problematic aspects of western engagement with (...) indigenous spiritual traditions. This engagement is usually based on idealized and romanticized notions of indigenous shamanism and an inability to digest its less palatable aspects, such as sorcery. Through ethnographic examples and ethnohistorical evidence, I show that the romanticization indigenous peoples is not benign. In fact, this one-sided romantic image hides the complexity of indigenous peoples’ situations by erasing the injustices that they have experienced and continue to experience. I propose a more holistic approach to ayahuasca shamanism that views indigenous peoples not living in a fictitious harmony with nature but as people embedded in larger struggles and facing important challenges not the least of which is the recent commercialization of indigenous spirituality. (shrink)

"In this book, Evgenia Cherkasova brings the philosopher Kant and the novelist Dostoevsky together in conversations that probe why duty is central to our moral life. She shows that just as Dostoevsky is indebted to Kant, so Kant would profit from the deeply philosophical narratives of Dostoevsky, which engage the problem of evil and the claims of human community. She not only produces a novel reading of Dostoevsky, but also guides us to later, often neglected Kantian texts. This study (...) is written with scholarly care, penetrating analysis, elegance of style, and moral urgency: Cherkasova writes with both mind and heart." Emily Grosholz, Professor of Philosophy, The Pennsylvania State University Social Philosophy (SP), in conjunction with the Center for Ethics, Peace and Social Justice, SUNY Cortland, explores theoretical and applied issues in contemporary social philosophy, drawing on a variety of philosophical traditions. (shrink)

Are freedom, rationality, and morality intrinsically connected? Or perhaps freedom's very nature is transgression, going beyond rationality and ethics? These questions are the center of my discussion of free will and arbitrariness in Kant's late writings. Kant's interlocutor here is Dostoevsky's underground man, a passionate proponent of the Russian _volia--("freedom," "unfettered, arbitrary will"). The underground man questions freedom's relationship to rationality and moral law and insists that free will, arbitrariness and even tyranny are inseparable. Finally, in its attack on rational (...) conceptions of freedom the _Notes offer a surprisingly consistent, that is, self-destructive, philosophical pursuit of arbitrariness. (shrink)

When in 1792 Kant published his essay “On the Radical Evil in Human Nature” in the Berlinische Monatsschrift it had the effect of an exploding bomb. Many of those who previously embraced his ethics were shocked and bewildered. Goethe’s well-known metaphorical statement sums up the reaction: “Kant required a long lifetime to purify his philosophical mantle of many impurities and prejudices. And now he has wantonly tainted it with the shameful stain of radical evil, in order that Christians too might (...) be attracted to kiss its hem.” The deep emotional disappointment of Kant’s followers aside, there is very little reason to believe that Kant’s alleged sharp turn in regard to the problem of evil was dictated by any political considerations. Rather, it was Kant’s decision to face philosophically his inner conviction of “the insuperable evil of our hearts,” which before the essay on radical evil only appears—rather implicitly—in his personal correspondence. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss how ritual is framed in the context of ayahuasca tourism, using ethnographic data collected in and around Iquitos, Peru. Alluding to a lack of socially sanctioned spaces for altered states of consciousness (ASCs) in western cultures, contemporary seekers flock to the Amazon to participate in ayahuasca ceremonies for an array of reasons, including healing and personal transformation. Taking Gregory Bateson's concept of “framing” as a point of departure, and applying Erving Goffman's frame analysis, I will (...) show that contemporary ayahuasca ceremonies attended by westerners are designed to be liminal, transformative, and meaningful experiences that aim to heal the body through emotional modulation. I will demonstrate how this is achieved through specific discourse that takes place before or during rituals in the form of long speeches delivered by the shamans. This framing not only separates the ritual space as liminal but also frames the way that the experience is conceptualized by the participants, ultimately increasing its meaningfulness. (shrink)

One of the central difficulties for practitioners of cognate disciplines like comparative political theory and comparative philosophy concerns the hermeneutic problem of understanding that which is different. The philosophical challenge, put briefly, is this: Is it possible to bring something of an entirely different order into our world of understanding without imposing our own epistemological categories and civilizational prejudices on it? This essay focuses on recent exemplary work in comparative political theory that has explicitly grappled with this issue. Examined here (...) are three models of encountering and learning from different traditions of thought—the models of existential immersion, conversion, and pilgrimage—as exemplified in the contributions by Farah Godrej, Leigh Jenco, and J. L. Mehta. The essay shows that while the first two authors have sought to resolve the problem of the encounter with difference methodologically (Godrej) and epistemologically (Jenco), their respective solutions remain implicitly bound to a spectator theory of knowledge. This becomes especially evident when their work is contrasted with Mehta’s own. Unlike Godrej and Jenco, Mehta does not view difference as a problem to be resolved. The advantage of his approach, I argue, is that it provides liberation from the rigid subject-object dichotomy which encourages the view that the ‘objects’ of our knowledge exist prior to and wholly apart from the act of knowing. Mehta’s work, therefore, opens the possibility for redirecting our attention to a question that has thus far been thoroughly avoided in the consolidation of the subfield: the question of the very constitution of difference or heterology. (shrink)

Hegel's philosophy has been a fundamental reference point for a broad network of mid-twentieth century anticolonial thinkers and activists, a major inspiration for figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Martin Luther King Jr. and Angela Davis, among others. James's Notes on Dialectics (1948) constitutes one of the most significant textual engagements with Hegel from within that internationalist tradition. Even though James considered Notes to be his most important work and one of his (...) lasting contributions to Marxist theory, it remains the least read and studied of his books. In comparison to the abovementioned thinkers, all of whom drew inspiration from Hegel's social and political philosophy, in his monograph, James turns instead to Hegel's most difficult text, the Science of Logic, as the true locus of Hegel's critical theory. Situating James's study within the Marxist philosophical tradition, this essay explores how James interprets, appropriates and makes use of Hegel's dialectic. (shrink)

This essay explores the relationship between Edward Said’s well-known contrapuntal reading of history and Erich Auerbach’s Ansatzpunkt, or point of departure, as a means of entering a given hermene...

In this paper I take up the question of whether and in what sense action might be the conclusion of practical reasoning and argue against the answer provided by Sebastian Rödl's account of practical reasoning. Rödl's account aspires to steer a middle ground between the attitudinal and the neo-Aristotelian accounts of practical reasoning, by proposing that its conclusion is at once a thought and a movement. This account is worth considering for it promises to explain both practical reasoning's practicality and (...) its rationality in one move. But, I argue in this paper, a Rödlian account—an account which grants Rödl's central theses—fails to deliver on its promise. The reason is that, like others, a Rödlian also assumes that the only sense in which practical reasoning is practical is the sense in which it has a conclusion. Challenging this assumption in the right way, I finally suggest, helps us reassess the task of explaining practical reasoning in a way that goes beyond Rödlian, attitudinal and neo-Aristotelian accounts alike. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to illustrate the issues and challenges which the higher education system in Bulgaria faces, with a particular accent on the phenomenon “education per kilogram”. The latter describes, in a popular language, the up-scaling of the university graduation, related to the mass proliferation of the higher education institutions, the facilitated access to enrolment through paid tuitions, etc. The big quantity of HEIs in the country is in a mismatch with the low percentage of GDP which (...) the government dedicates to education. The number of HEIs is also disproportionate against its population size - 54 HEIs in Bulgaria for population of 7.2 million. The research methodology includes a desktop study based on national statistical data and data from the governmentally-supported university rating system. An empirical survey, conducted among 250 tertiary education students enrolled in four Bulgarian universities, is a valuable contribution towards disclosing the pros and cons of the teaching practices in the tertiary education in the country. The first chapter describes at large the “education per kilogram” issue with regard to its possible origins, variations and consequences for the misbalance of labour market demand for certain qualifications and the universities supplies of qualified individuals. The second chapter reveals a comparative analysis by professional fields possible through the Ministry of Education and Science’s university rating system, i.e. students’ preferences for disciplines, universities and professions; the graduates’ professional fulfilment and how the income of the recent diploma-holders is a function of attending a particular HEI. The third chapter presents a sociological survey conducted among students in four Bulgarian universities which demonstrates learners’ attitudes towards various aspects of training, teaching methods and involvement in research assignments in the context of tertiary education. The main conclusion of the article is that the “universities per kilogram” trend brought about other corresponding characteristics, such as “students per kilogram”, “academic titles per kilogram”, etc. Hence, the large number of HEIs in Bulgaria has not led to improving the quality and efficiency of education, and yet does not respond adequately to the changing labour market demands for qualified professionals. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw a contrast between two ways of posing the question of moral experience: the episodic and the contemplative. On the first, the episodic outlook, the question of moral experience is the question of specifying the workings of a capacity (or set of capacities) whose exercise may ground claims of moral knowledge. On the contemplative outlook, on the other hand, the question of understanding moral experience is the question of articulating a standpoint: the moral standpoint. On this (...) view, philosophical reflection on moral experience aims to shed light on the human experiences that paradigmatically exemplify and, thus, best reveal the moral standpoint. In the tradition of contemplative accounts, I propose that some of the human experiences that paradigmatically exemplify and reveal the moral standpoint are experiences of “moral growth and change”. Finally, I argue that in “moral growth and change”, one is in view of the world as what is at stake. This leads to a different sense in which moral experience grounds knowledge claims. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the relation between intentional action and morality from the perspective of practical epistemology. In other words I study the relation between Elizabeth Anscombe's knowledge of one’s own intentional actions (knowledge in action) and Iris Murdoch's knowledge of what is good to do or what one ought to do in particular circumstances (knowledge in the circumstances). If practical knowledge in the former sense (knowledge in action) and practical knowledge in the latter sense (knowledge in the circumstances) (...) turn out to constitute exercises of one and the same capacity for knowledge, as I will argue they do, this will give us strong reason to believe that what is known in the two cases (i.e. intentional action and the moral fabric of the world) is in some sense the same. In examining the relation between practical knowledge of one’s own intentional actions and practical knowledge of what is good to do I draw from two traditions of thought on practical epistemology. The first is the tradition of Anscombe’s conception of knowledge in action and the second is the tradition of Murdoch’s conception of knowledge in the circumstances. What is striking about these traditions is that they tend to understand practical knowledge by reference to the possible involvement therein of perception. Thus Anscombe claims in her Intention[1] that knowledge in action is specified as knowledge without observation; a claim to the effect that the epistemological status of knowledge in action is determined by reference to the lack of a certain sort of involvement therein of perception. And Iris Murdoch in her Sovereignty of the Good[2] proposes that what makes knowledge in the circumstances knowledge is a form of sensitivity to particular features or aspects of the circumstances in which the agent finds herself. Thus, for Murdoch, knowledge in the circumstances owes its status as knowledge to the capacity of the agent to perceive what she ought to do in particular circumstances. In this paper I will argue that both of these forms of knowledge are instances of the exercise of one and the same capacity for knowledge. But the question now arises. How can we both claim that the two forms of practical knowledge are instances of the exercise of one and the same capacity for knowledge and that perception plays such a diverse role in their epistemological grounding? In the main body of this paper I will show how to interpret the Murdochian and the Anscombean claims so as to provide the materials with which we can answer this question. If the argument of this paper works, it will transpire that both of these forms of knowledge are instances of the exercise of our capacity for self-knowledge. This account of practical knowledge opens the way for understanding intentional action and the moral fabric of the world as knowable as the self. And it is thus that what is known in the two forms of knowing (i.e. intentional action and the moral fabric of the world) is in some sense the same. [1] Anscombe, 1957. [2] Murdoch, 1970. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to develop a constitutivist account of instrumental normativity (an account of the requirement to take the means to one’s end as the normative standard that constitutes intentional action) that overcomes the restrictions of the neo-Anscombean variant of constitutivism without reverting to the reductivism of Kantian constitutivism. I call this account “Murdochian”, for it relies on Iris Murdoch’s conception of the practicable good.

Volume 23, Issue 2, June 2020, Page 167-179.

The problem of person’s social formation becomes especialy actual in all its aspects during the periods of social historical transformations. The guiding lines of individual’s development accepted by society (socialization norms) are either lacking or being overthrown. Such situation demands from the researchers to switch their attention from the mechanisms of sociality reproduction to the mechanisms responsible for the sociality formation. The last ones become the main subject of the self-organization theory (synergetics). According to it, socialization can be represented as (...) the self-organizing system-process. The attempt to use the principle of unlinearity in the research of social formation of personality, is undertaken in the present article. (shrink)

Personal data is highly vulnerable to security exploits, spurring moves to lock it down through encryption, to cryptographically ‘cloud’ it. But personal data is also highly valuable to corporations and states, triggering moves to unlock its insights by relocating it in the cloud. We characterise this twinned condition as ‘clouded data’. Clouded data constructs a political and technological notion of privacy that operates through the intersection of corporate power, computational resources and the ability to obfuscate, gain insights from and valorise (...) a dependency between public and private. First, we survey prominent clouded data approaches, suggesting their particular affordances produce distinctive versions of privacy. Next, we perform two notional code-based experiments using synthetic datasets. In the field of health, we submit a patient’s blood pressure to a notional cloud-based diagnostics service; in education, we construct a student survey that enables aggregate reporting without individual identification. We argue that these technical affordances legitimate new political claims to capture and commodify personal data. The final section broadens the discussion to consider the political force of clouded data and its reconstitution of traditional notions such as the public and the private. (shrink)

Against the dominant view of reductive naturalism, John McDowell argues that human life should be seen as transformed by reason so that human minds, while not supernatural, are in an important sense sui generis. This collection assembles eleven critical essays exploring the strengths, weaknesses, and ramifications of McDowell's unorthodox position.

In the remainder of this article, we will disarm an important motivation for epistemic contextualism and interest-relative invariantism. We will accomplish this by presenting a stringent test of whether there is a stakes effect on ordinary knowledge ascription. Having shown that, even on a stringent way of testing, stakes fail to impact ordinary knowledge ascription, we will conclude that we should take another look at classical invariantism. Here is how we will proceed. Section 1 lays out some limitations of previous (...) research on stakes. Section 2 presents our study and concludes that there is little evidence for a substantial stakes effect. Section 3 responds to objections. The conclusion clears the way for classical invariantism. (shrink)

Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people (...) spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general. (shrink)

Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen (...) different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated whether, if determinism is true, we should hold people morally responsible for their actions since in a deterministic universe, people are arguably not the ultimate source of their actions nor could they have done otherwise if initial conditions and the laws of nature are held fixed. To reveal how non-philosophers ordinarily reason about the conditions for free will, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,268) spanning twenty countries and sixteen languages. Overall, participants tended (...) to ascribe moral responsibility whether the perpetrator lacked sourcehood or alternate possibilities. However, for American, European, and Middle Eastern participants, being the ultimate source of one’s actions promoted perceptions of free will and control as well as ascriptions of blame and punishment. By contrast, being the source of one’s actions was not particularly salient to Asian participants. Finally, across cultures, participants exhibiting greater cognitive reflection were more likely to view free will as incompatible with causal determinism. We discuss these findings in light of documented cultural differences in the tendency toward dispositional versus situational attributions. (shrink)

This article examines whether people share the Gettier intuition (viz. that someone who has a true justified belief that p may nonetheless fail to know that p) in 24 sites, located in 23 countries (counting Hong Kong as a distinct country) and across 17 languages. We also consider the possible influence of gender and personality on this intuition with a very large sample size. Finally, we examine whether the Gettier intuition varies across people as a function of their disposition to (...) engage in “reflective” thinking. (shrink)

In this paper I show how John Hyman takes the traditional question whether we should give a physical, ethical, psychological or intellectual account of human action and stands it on its head. For Hyman argues that the real question is how to distinguish the physical, the ethical, the psychological and the intellectual dimensions of human action, and he thereby changes the landscape in the philosophy of action. Finally, I argue that Hyman's positive proposal fails by the lights of his own (...) argument. (shrink)

Is behavioral integration a necessary feature of belief in folk psychology? Our data from over 5,000 people across 26 samples, spanning 22 countries suggests that it is not. Given the surprising cross-cultural robustness of our findings, we argue that the types of evidence for the ascription of a belief are, at least in some circumstances, lexicographically ordered: assertions are first taken into account, and when an agent sincerely asserts that p, nonlinguistic behavioral evidence is disregarded. In light of this, we (...) take ourselves to have discovered a universal principle governing the ascription of beliefs in folk psychology. (shrink)

Aging is associated with decreased functional connectivity in the main brain networks, which can underlie changes in cognitive and emotional processing. Neurofeedback is a promising non-pharmacological approach for the enhancement of brain connectivity. Previously, we showed that a single session of infra-low frequency neurofeedback results in increased connectivity between sensory processing networks in healthy young adults. In the current pilot study, we aimed to evaluate the possibility of enhancing brain connectivity during aging with the use of infra-low frequency neurofeedback. Nine (...) females aged 52 ± 7 years with subclinical signs of emotional dysregulation, including anxiety, mild depression, and somatoform symptoms, underwent 15 sessions of training. A resting-state functional MRI scan was acquired before and after the training. A hypothesis-free intrinsic connectivity analysis showed increased connectivity in regions in the bilateral temporal fusiform cortex, right supplementary motor area, left amygdala, left temporal pole, and cerebellum. Next, a seed-to-voxel analysis for the revealed regions was performed using the post- vs. pre-neurofeedback contrast. Finally, to explore the whole network of neurofeedback-related connectivity changes, the regions revealed by the intrinsic connectivity and seed-to-voxel analyses were entered into a network-based statistical analysis. An extended network was revealed, including the temporal and occipital fusiform cortex, multiple areas from the visual cortex, the right posterior superior temporal sulcus, the amygdala, the temporal poles, the superior parietal lobule, and the supplementary motor cortex. Clinically, decreases in alexithymia, depression, and anxiety levels were observed. Thus, infra-low frequency neurofeedback appears to be a promising method for enhancing brain connectivity during aging, and subsequent sham-controlled studies utilizing larger samples are feasible. (shrink)

Personal branding has become an important concept in management literature in recent years. Yet, with more than 100 scholarly papers published on the concept to date, it has developed into a fragmented area of research with a diversity of definitions and conceptual boundaries. This paper posits that this heterogeneity of extant research impedes theoretical and empirical advancement. To strengthen the foundation for future work, we review the extant literature and offer an integrative model of personal branding. Through our systematic literature (...) review we identify the key attributes of the construct, establish its clarity by comparing it with similar concepts in its nomological network, and suggest the definitions of personal branding and personal brand based on the reviewed literature. Further, we propose a theoretical model of personal branding summarizing the findings from the reviewed papers. The proposed model outlines the trends conducive to personal branding, as well as its drivers, processes, and outcomes. Finally, we discuss ethical implications of personal branding for both scholarly work and practice. In conclusion, we outline a further research agenda for studying personal branding as a critical career and organizational behavior activity in contemporary working environment. (shrink)

Interview of Olga Simoroz, Sofia Dmitrenko, Evgenia Zaichenko with Viktor Malakhov on the development of ethics as a philosophical discipline in Ukraine of the 60's - 70's.

Introduction. Artificial intelligence is a trend of NBIC-convergence and information technologies in particular. Since the 70s of the 20th century it has been a subject of intense debate in the scientific community. A direct indicator of the importance of the topic is the publication dynamics and the annual increase in the number of indexed articles. According to the statistics, Western social sciences are in the top five industry leaders. The purpose of the study is to analyze the Scopus database and (...) identify the key mythologems of the scientific discourse of social sciences (in the field of artificial intelligence). The latter go beyond the boundaries of research norms and standards and express non-reflective research intentions. Methods. The reference base of scientific arti- cles includes works published during the decade (2010—2020). Methods for detecting verbal mark- ers and content analysis were used. At the same time, the emphasis was mainly placed not on quan- titative, but on qualitative analytics as well. The basis for the choice of markers was the frequency of their use in abstracts (abstracts), headings (titles) and keywords. The selection of verbal markers was made in accordance with two conditionally desig- nated categories: «trends», or frequency engineering, technical and social and humanitarian terms, expressing the direction of research practic- es and «mythologemes», or elements of a second- ary semiotic system. Scientific novelty of the study. Scientific novelty is due to the specification of the research subject. In the West, the direction of the so-called «Tech- nological mythology», which focuses mainly on the discourses of art and ideological documents is being developed. The analytics of scientific content makes it possible to remove the existing research limitations of the subject and identify prospects for further study of modern mythology. Content analysis made it possible to identify some extreme- ly general formulations of technological mythologe- mes, which can be refined and concretized. Results. Following the results of the study, a de- scription of three metatrends was made — techno- logical, social and anthropological. All key directions within the boundaries of each trend are listed. At the same time, it is argued that the anthropotrend has a relatively smaller share in the discourse of Western social sciences. As a debatable aspect of the study, five scientific mythologemes were iden- tified and conditionally designated. Interpretations and characteristic examples of the functioning of each are offered. Conclusion. The technological trend is constituted by the data of technical sciences and engineering developments with a social orientation. Sociotrend is determined by the spectrum of technology application areas. The conclusion is made about the diffusion of two trends and the discourses serving these trends. Discursively, the technotrend serves to construct a strictly scientific discourse based not on abstract, but on specific and precise proposi- tions. Particular attention is paid to the discursive mainstream of «smartization», which is characteris- tic of the scientific content of the second decade of the 21st century. Emphasis is placed on the anthro- pological risks of extrapolating «smartization» to specialized practices. (shrink)

(2012). Dostoevsky and Kant: Dialogues on Ethics. By Evgenia Cherkasova. The European Legacy: Vol. 17, No. 7, pp. 953-954. doi: 10.1080/10848770.2012.717914.