The study was prompted by (a) Frederick and Vogel's debate concerning future research in business and society, (b) such recently reported managerial excesses as golden parachutes, greenmail, and fraud, (c) the increasing emphasis on coursework in the area. It appears that there is a need to assess how students, our future business leaders, perceive social issues and if a business and society course can help them define and understand the importance of these issues.Three questions provided the focal point: (1) Which (...) issues do students perceive as most important before and after completing the course? (2) How much importance do students place on issues? (3) Does completing a business and society course make a significant difference in how students perceive the importance of the issues presented? (shrink)

The moral/conventional task has been widely used to study the emergence of moral understanding in children and to explore the deficits in moral understanding in clinical populations. Previous studies have indicated that moral transgressions, particularly those in which a victim is harmed, evoke a signature pattern of responses in the moral/conventional task: they are judged to be serious, generalizable and not authority dependent. Moreover, this signature pattern is held to be pan‐cultural and to emerge early in development. However, almost all (...) the evidence for these claims comes from studies using harmful transgressions of the sort that primary school children might commit in the schoolyard. In a study conducted on the Internet, we used a much wider range of harm transgressions, and found that they do not evoke the signature pattern of responses found in studies using only schoolyard transgressions. Paralleling other recent work, our study provides preliminary grounds for skepticism regarding many conclusions drawn from earlier research using the moral/conventional task. (shrink)

For decades, presidents of the Association of American Geographers have written insightful columns in the AAG Newsletter. One of the most popular sections of the newsletter, these columns illustrate the changes and consistencies of geography over the past thirty-four years. They offer an insight into the past of the geography discipline and a broader perspective on the future. Previously inaccessible even to most professional geographers, the Presidential Columns will now be available in Presidential Musings from the Meridian: Reflections of the (...) Nature of Geography. (shrink)

This study attempts to identify differences in the perceptions of top management (defined as CEOs, directors, and presidents) and employees (defined as middle and supervisory management) regarding (a) the effects of dependent care responsibilities on job performance, and (b) the extent of a firm's responsibility in providing support for those faced with caring needs concerning eldercare, childcare, substance abuse, and mental/physical handicaps.The results indicate that these two groups have significantly different perceptions of the effect of dependent care responsibilities on job (...) performance, and on the firm's responsibility in providing support for three types of dependent care. (shrink)

On Kratzer’s canonical account, modal expressions (like “might” and “must”) are represented semantically as quantifiers over possibilities. Such expressions are themselves neutral; they make a single contribution to determining the propositions expressed across a wide range of uses. What modulates the modality of the proposition expressed—as bouletic, epistemic, deontic, etc.—is context.2 This ain’t the canon for nothing. Its power lies in its ability to figure in a simple and highly unified explanation of a fairly wide range of language use. Recently, (...) though, the canon’s neat story has come under attack. The challenge cases involve the epistemic use of a modal sentence for which no single resolution of the contextual parameter appears capable of accommodating all our intuitions.3 According to these revisionaries, such cases show that the canonical story needs to be amended in some way that makes multiple bodies of information relevant to the assessment of such statements. Here I show that how the right canonical, flexibly contextualist account of modals can accommodate the full range of challenge cases. The key will be to extend Kratzer’s formal semantic account with an account of how context selects values for a modal’s.. (shrink)

What considerations place genuine constraints on an adequate semantics for normative and evaluative expressions? Linguists recognize facts about ordinary uses of such expressions and competent speakers’ judgments about which uses are appropriate. The contemporary literature reflects the widespread assumption that linguists don’t rely upon an additional source of data—competent speakers’ judgments about possible disagreement with hypothetical speech communities. We have several good reasons to think that such judgments are not probative for semantic theorizing. Therefore, we should accord these judgments no (...) probative value for the development of a semantics for our moral terms. Such judgments can no longer be presumed to put pressure on theories according to which our moral expressions share a semantics with ordinary, descriptive terms. Many rivals to pure, Descriptivist theories count among their advantages the ability to accommodate these judgments. If these judgments have no probative value, such theories lose an important source of support. (shrink)

2. The Contingency and A posteriority Constraint: A formulation of the thesis must make physicalism come out contingent and a posteriori. First, physicalism is a contingent truth, if it is a truth. This means that physicalism could have been false, i.e. there are counterfactual worlds in which physicalism is false, for example, counterfactual worlds in which there are miracle -performing angels.[9] Moreover, if physicalism is true, our knowledge of its truth is a posteriori. This is to say that there are (...) ways the world could turn out to be such that physicalism is false. For example, if there are miracle -performing angels, then physicalism is false. So there are worlds considered as actual in which physicalism is false.[10] For short, call this ‘the a posteriority constraint’.[11]. (shrink)

We argue that Parfit's "Triviality Objection" against some naturalistic views of normativity is not compelling. We think that once one accepts, as one should, that identity statements can be informative in virtue of their pragmatics and not only in virtue of their semantics, Parfit's case against naturalism can be overcome.

Our goal here is to help identify the contextualist’s most worthy competitor to relativism. Recently, some philosophers of language and linguists have argued that, while there are contextualist-friendly semantic theories of deontic modals that fit with the relativist’s challenge data, the best such theories are not Lewis-Kratzer-style semantic theories. If correct, this would be important: It would show that the theory that has for many years enjoyed the status of the default view of modals in English and other languages is (...) in need of revision. Here we defend the default view by showing how a Kratzer-style semantics is able to make available readings of the relevant utterances that fit with the pretheoretical judgments opponents purport it cannot fully capture. Having established this, we turn to considering the more theoretical grounds proponents have offered for preferring their rival contextualist views. Here the question is to what extent such grounds favor semantic over what Korta and Perry call “near-side pragmatic” explanations of our judgments. In particular, we argue that our favored readings figure in near-side pragmatic explanations of those judgments that possess the methodological and theoretical advantages of systematicity and unity at least as well as, if not to a greater extent than, those of opponents who argue for their revised semantic theories on the basis of these advantages. (shrink)

Almost 40 years ago, scholars identified a “chilly climate” for women in college classrooms. To examine whether contemporary college classrooms remain “chilly,” we conducted quantitative and qualitative observations in nine classrooms across multiple disciplines at one elite institution. Based on these 95 hours of observation, we discuss three gendered classroom participation patterns. First, on average, men students occupy classroom sonic space 1.6 times as often as women. Men also speak out without raising hands, interrupt, and engage in prolonged conversations during (...) class more than women students. Second, style and tone also differ. Men’s language is assertive, whereas women’s is hesitant and apologetic. Third, professors’ interventions and different structures of classrooms can alter existing gender status hierarchies. Extending Ridgeway’s gender system framework to college classrooms, we discuss how these gendered classroom participation patterns perpetuate gender status hierarchies. We thus argue that the chilly climate is an underexplored mechanism for the stalled gender revolution. (shrink)

In this article a case is made for the importance of a previously overlooked phenomenon, physical empathy orcompathy,defined as the physical manifestation of caregiver distress that occurs in the presence of a patient in physical pain or distress. According to the similarity of a caregiver's response to the original symptoms, there can be four types of compathetic response: identical, initiated, transferred, and converted. Controlling for the compathetic response may involve narrowing one's focus and/or changing caregiver attitudes. Finally, we argue that (...) while the compathetic response may be beneficial to the caregiving relationship, enabling the provision of appropriate and adequate humane treatment and care, the caregiver must at times shield against the compathetic response in order to provide care. (shrink)

IntroductionDespite the need for trained physician ethicists, fellowships in clinical ethics are limited and primarily offered to thosewho have completed a graduate degree. The standardization of credentialing for clinical ethics consultants (CECs) and the restructuring of undergraduate medical education allow innovative models to train CECs that can provide an expanded opportunity for formal ethics training at an earlier stage.MethodsAt the University of Michigan Medical School we developed, implemented, and evaluated a pre-doctoral clinical ethics fellowship program from 2017 to 2019 for (...) senior medical students, designed to meet established competencies for CECs. Consultation notes from the beginning and end of the fellowship program were randomly selected for each fellow and independently rated by two faculty ethicists who used the validated Ethics Consultation Quality Assessment Tool (ECQAT).1 Inter rater reliability and trends in scores over time were calculated.ResultsThree students successfully completed the fellowship at the University of Michigan Medical School, conducted at least 50 formal ethics consultations, and spent approximately 40 hours a week on service for a minimum of six months. All students finished the fellowship with teaching and policy development experience, first-authored peer-reviewed manuscripts, and national presentations. The fellows demonstrated improvement in their ECQAT overall holistic rating score; all ended their fellowship with a holistic score of adequate or above. There was 92 percent agreement between raters withrespect to the acceptability of the fellows’ ethics consult notes. Two fellows have taken and passed the Healthcare Ethics Consultant-Certification (HEC-C) exam offered by the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH).ConclusionsIntegration of a pre-doctoral fellowship model that meets professional certification standards for clinical ethics consultation creates an opportunity for medical students to become trained CECs early in their career. (shrink)

The temporal pattern of the terminal response on periodic schedules depends on when responding begins. Pigeons pecking on fixed-interval and fixed-time schedules of food reinforcement responded, or accelerated, faster the later in an interval they began responding.

Encounters with Alphonso Lingis is the first extensive study of this American philosopher who is gaining an international reputation to augment his national one. The distinguished contributors to this volume address most of the central themes found in Lingis's writings—including singularity and otherness, death and eroticism, emotions and rationality, embodiment and the face, excess and the sacred. The book closes with a new essay by Lingis himself.

In this paper, the authors describe an aspect of a program of research around grief and clinical practice. The first phase of the study involves examination of experiences of grief with attention to troublesome or problematic beliefs that fuel the extent of suffering in the bereaved. The data, obtained from a review of videotaped clinical interviews with families seen in the Family Nursing Unit at the University of Calgary, were analyzed according to philosophical hermeneutic tradition. Findings suggest that grief is (...) an experience that is ongoing, that changes in nature over time, but that involves a continuing relationship with the deceased; it is a graceful, periodic, deliberate walk backwards while keeping a sure foot in living forward. (shrink)

POHLMAN S, CIBULKA NJ, PALMER JL, LORENZ RA and SMITHBATTLE L. Nursing Inquiry 2013; 20: 71–81 The placebo puzzle: examining the discordant space between biomedical science and illness/healingThe placebo response presents an enigma to biomedical science: how can ‘inert’ or ‘sham’ procedures reduce symptoms and produce physiological changes that are comparable to prescribed treatments? In this study, we examine this puzzle by explicating the discordant space between the prevailing biomedical paradigm, which focuses on a technical understanding of diagnosis and treatment, (...) and a broader understanding of illness and healing as relational and embodied. Although biomedical achievements are impressive, the knowledge resulting from this paradigm is limited by its ontological and epistemological assumptions. When the body and world are objectified, illness meanings, therapeutic relationships, and healing practices are dismissed or distorted. In spite of a robust critique of the tenets of biomedicine for guiding practice, the biomedical paradigm retains a tenacious hold on evidence-based medicine and nursing, downplaying our clinical understanding of the sentient body, patients’ life-worlds, and illness and healing. In reality, skilled nurses rely on multiple forms of knowledge in providing high-quality care to particular patients. Clinically wise nurses integrate their experience and knowledge of patients’ priorities, fears, and illness trajectories along with biomedical findings to make astute judgments and promote health and healing. (shrink)

This book is a compilation of the work published by the present authors in various scientific journals mainly focused on understanding how quantum physics could decipher the experiences observed and reported during near-death and end-of-life situations. The authors claim that various theories and models proposed herein (though not propounding to be a complete one) are just an attempt to understand few aspects associated with such experiences connected to the phenomenon of death. They investigate the possible role of the quantum phenomenon (...) in the occurrence of these events and call for a detailed scientific investigation to validate any hypotheses made. (shrink)

Institutional review board delays may hinder the successful completion of federally funded research in the U.S. military. When this happens, time-sensitive, mission-relevant questions go unanswered. Research participants face unnecessary burdens and risks if delays squeeze recruitment timelines, resulting in inadequate sample sizes for definitive analyses. More broadly, military members are exposed to untested or undertested interventions, implemented by well-intentioned leaders who bypass the research process altogether. To illustrate, we offer two case examples. We posit that IRB delays often appear in (...) the service of managing institutional risk, rather than protecting research participants. Regulators may see more risk associated with moving quickly than risk related to delay, choosing to err on the side of bureaucracy. The authors of this article, all of whom are military-funded researchers, government stakeholders, and/or human subject protection experts, offer feasible recommendations to improv... (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 77-80.

In this innovative cultural history, Carolyn J. Dean sheds light on the origins of poststructuralist thought, paying particular attention to the reinterpretation of the self by Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, and other French thinkers.

Reviewed: The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication, edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason Kemp Winfree, State University of New York Press, 2009, 232pp., pb. $24.95. ISBN-13: 9781438428246. This review analyzes the extent to which The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication, edited by Andrew J. Mitchell and Jason Kemp Winfree, may contribute to recent treatments of sensibility and affect in critical thought. After first posing the question of why community appeared to recede from the critical attention (...) it received in the 1990s, my discussion then assesses the ways the volume’s essays argue collectively for a renewed engagement with community via the work of Bataille. I attempt to show how Mitchell’s and Winfree’s volume provides an important provocation to recover the exigency of community at a time when popular appeals to community remain no less spectacular, inflated, and cynical than they were at the height of its engagement by critical thought. The essay concludes with a suggestion of how Bataille’s work can intervene in what Fredric Jameson has called the post-09/11 manufacturing of affect. (shrink)

Interest in the notion of the possible financial sacrifice suffered by socially responsible investment (SRI) fund investors for considering ethical, social and environmental issues in their investment decisions has spawned considerable academic interest in the performance of SRI funds. Both the Australian and international research literature have yielded largely mixed results. However, several of these studies are hampered by methodological problems which can obscure the significance of reported results, such as the use of small sample sizes, inconsistencies in the time (...) frames selected to analyse performance and different modelling frameworks used to estimate investment returns. This study attempts to redress some of these issues by investigating the returns performance of 89 ethical funds in Australia over the period 1986-2005. Using a multi-factor CAPM model [Fama, E. F., and K. R. French (1996) J. Finance 51(1), 55] (which controls for factors such as size, book-to-market value and momentum) we find that ethical funds significantly under-perform the market in Australia, particularly in the most recent 5 years of our sample period (2000-2005). Risk adjusted returns (using Jensen's alpha) indicate that average annual underperformance is around 1.52% in the 2000-2005 period for our sample and .88% over the whole sample period. Our results contrast with many previous studies (both Australian and international), which have not found statistically significant differences in the performance of ethical funds relative to market benchmarks and/or a matched sample of conventional funds. (shrink)

Christine de Pizan, one of the earliest known women authors, wrote the Livre de paix (Book of Peace) between 1412 and 1414, a period of severe corruption and civil unrest in her native France. The book offered Pizan a platform from which to expound her views on contemporary politics and to put forth a strict moral code to which she believed all governments should aspire. The text's intended recipient was the dauphin, Louis of Guyenne; Christine felt that Louis had the (...) political and social influence to fill a void left by years of incompetent leadership. Drawing in equal parts from the Bible and from classical ethical theory, the Livre de paix was revolutionary in its timing, viewpoint, and content. This volume, edited by Karen Green, Constant J. Mews, and Janice Pinder, boasts the first full English translation of Pizan's work along with the original French text. The editors also place the Livre de paix in historical context, provide a brief biography of Pizan, and offer insight into the translation process. (shrink)

Die Beiträge dieses Bandes aus verschiedenen Disziplinen, Philosophie, Literaturgeschichte und Kunstgeschichte schließen sich zum Bild einer Epoche zusammen, die einen Höhepunkt des deutschen Geisteslebens darstellt. Dabei treten bestimmte Züge heraus, welche die Genese dieser Kultur in relativ eng umgrenzten Kommunikationszentren zeigen: Königsberg - Düsseldorf - Jena - Weimar - freilich mit Ausstrahlung auf das übrige Deutschland. So etwa: die Stilisierung der Geselligkeit über den literarischen Dialog bis zur philosophischen Interpersonalitätslehre Fichtes und einer dem entsprechenden Dialektik des Dialogs; einer Staats- und (...) Gesellschaftsauffassung, die zwar noch in der klassischen Naturrechtslehre der Aufklärung gründete, aber den Rechtsbegriff so in sich zu gliedern wußte, daß er Implikationen verbindlich auch für das politische Handeln hergeben konnte und so aus dem Rechtsbegriff erstmals die Umsetzung des Völkerfriedens politisch fordern konnte. Es zeigt sich hier ein Grundmodell, das aller pragmatisch ausmachbaren Verallgemeinerungsfähigkeit überlegen ist, da die sittliche Person auch schon im Recht eine individuelle Aufforderung erhält, soll politisches Handeln von der öffentlichen Meinung anerkannt werden. Schließlich tritt eine neue Religiosität auf, die ein Naturverständnis einbezog, das ästhetischer Herkunft war, und die vielleicht deswegen ihren überzeugendsten Ausdruck in der Malerei fand. In allen diesen Bereichen aber werden Natur und Kunst im Lichte der neuentdeckten Freiheit des autonomen Individuums wiederbelebt. (shrink)