When making a decision, humans consider two types of information: information they have acquired through their prior experience of the world, and further information they gather to support the decision in question. Here, we present evidence that data from search engines such as Google can help us model both sources of information. We show that statistics from search engines on the frequency of content on the Internet can help us estimate the statistical structure of prior experience; and, specifically, we outline (...) how such statistics can inform psychological theories concerning the valuation of human lives, or choices involving delayed outcomes. Turning to information gathering, we show that search query data might help measure human information gathering, and it may predict subsequent decisions. Such data enable us to compare information gathered across nations, where analyses suggest, for example, a greater focus on the future in countries with a higher per capita GDP. We conclude that search engine data constitute a valuable new resource for cognitive scientists, offering a fascinating new tool for understanding the human decision-making process. (shrink)

Recent studies have shown that population-level time perspectives can be approximated using “big data” on search engine queries, and that these indices, in turn, predict the per-capita Gross Domestic Product of countries. Although these findings seem to support Baumard's suggestion that affluence makes people more future-oriented, they also reveal a more complex relationship between time perspectives and economic outputs.

To make a business case for corporate sustainability, firms must be able to sell their sustainable products. The influence that firm engagement with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) may have on consumer adoption of sustainable products has been neglected in previous research. We address this by embedding corporate sustainability in a cosmopolitan framework that connects firms, consumers, and civil society organizations based on the understanding of responsibility for global humanity that underlies both the sustainability and cosmopolitanism concepts. We hypothesize that firms’ sustainability (...) engagement and their NGO engagement influence consumer adoption of sustainable products. Empirically, we investigate the adoption of sustainable Eco-circle products made from recycled fibers marketed by Li Ning, a China-based global sportswear brand. We apply a stepwise regression approach to test our hypotheses with paper-and-pencil survey data from 217 Chinese consumers. We find adoption to be positively associated with consumers’ sustainability attitude but not with firms’ sustainability engagement. For firm–NGO engagement, these relationships are reversed: Adoption is positively associated with firm–NGO engagement, but not with consumers’ related attitude. Our results present a picture of the Chinese context in which there is a business case for corporate sustainability if firms’ words about sustainable product strategies are supported by signals from civil society about firm deeds. The results imply that in a Chinese context, firms need to be particularly aware of the role of NGOs when hoping to be rewarded for sustainability. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 4, May 2020, Page 108-110.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 41, no. 3. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 689 Susannah Bartlow White Fear in Universities: The Story of an Assata Shakur Mural No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. No one will teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes if they know that knowledge will set you free. Theory without practice is just as incomplete (...) as practice without theory. The two have to go together. —Assata Shakur, quoted on a mural at Marquette University What does it mean to whitewash? To terminate? I have been tasting and retasting these words on my tongue after a mural of Assata Shakur at Marquette University was whitewashed, and I was fired—terminated —for having supported the mural, ending a fourteen-year career in feminist academia. As the founding director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center (GSRC), my job was to build an academic support office for women’s, gender, and LGBTQ+ education and empowerment. In the center’s third year, Amanda Smith (a Marquette senior) and Jeanette Martín (a community artist and program assistant at the center) envisioned, planned, and executed the Assata Shakur mural project as a way to invite greater community interest. In my role as director of the center, I supported the project, communicated it to senior leaders, and spread the word about the community-painting day in late March 2015. The mural was on display for six weeks at the GSRC before a storm of  Students fill in detail of the Assata Shakur mural at Marquette University’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center. Photograph by Amanda T. Smith. News and Views 691 media coverage in mid-May prompted the university to cover the mural in white paint and fire me for my support of the project. My experience of this process was as rapid as it sounds: I received a few phone calls alerting me that the whitewashing of the mural was imminent and that there was a formal review of my leadership decisions, and I was fired twenty-four hours later. The idiomatic usage of “whitewash” tells us that something is shameful and that it has been, or ought to be, covered up. Whose cover-up was it—and whose shame? Over the six weeks it was on display at the center, the mural invited people into a quiet space off a hallway, and it had sparked discussion among staff, faculty, and students who used the space. The mural was one of very few images of a black woman anywhere on Marquette’s campus, and it contributed to a sense among many students of color that the GSRC was a space in which they were welcomed and safe and where they could be comfortable. Yet in the distortions of white supremacy, the mural looked like a threat, rather than an intellectual and community representation central to the university itself. Other recent cases of faculty repression, from Steven Salaita to Saida Grundy and Zandria Robinson, demonstrate how concerns about liability, finances, and public perception guide administrators ’ decisions about representation on campuses. Far from being liberal utopias, or even spaces that respect speech, universities remain testing grounds when students’ or educators’ actions present direct antiracist critique. What more clear or direct example of antiracist critique than the quotes we chose for the mural: Assata Shakur’s own words asserting the importance of street smarts and intellectual prowess, naming the power invested in knowledge systems and the importance of claiming that power for ourselves? Universities are, in our time, particularly responsive to pressure from the right. Private, nonprofit, advocacy organizations troll university websites looking for evidence of liberal bias; conservative media outlets publish student bloggers who feed the fantasy that the facts of United States history, presented without whitewashing, do not belong in classrooms. In particular, those who study the lives and knowledges of historically marginalized populations are in the crosshairs of right-wing attacks. In the case of the mural—and in each of the other cases cited above— it was either a right-wing news source or a powerful donor or decision 692 News and Views maker who raised concerns about leftist bias, civility, or... (shrink)

True stories about people who triumphed over seemingly impossible medical diagnoses using untraditional, inventive therapies and perseverance--and about what scientists are discovering on the psychology of healing and the mind-body connection--from the author of theNew York TimesMagazinearticle about her own son, "The Boy with the Thorn in his Joints," which led to this book about other families.

Patient advocacy organizations provide patient- and caregiver-oriented education, advocacy, and support services. PAOs are formally organized nonprofit groups that concern themselves with medical conditions or potential medical conditions and have a mission and take actions that seek to help people affected by those medical conditions or to help their families. Examples of PAOs include the American Cancer Society, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and the American Heart Association. These organizations advocate for, and provide services to, millions of people with (...) physical and mental conditions — such as cancer, mental illness, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease — via their outreach, meetings, counseling, websites, and published materials. A PAO usually seeks to raise public awareness of a disease’s symptoms, risk factors, and treatment options and promotes research to cure or to prevent that disease. (shrink)

Patient advocacy organizations (PAOs) advocate for increased research funding and policy changes and provide services to patients and their families. Given their credibility and political clout, PAOs are often successful in changing policies, increasing research funding, and increasing public awareness of medical conditions and the problems of their constituents. In order to advance their missions, PAOs accept funding, frequently from pharmaceutical firms. Industry funding can help PAOs advance their goals but can also create conflicts of interest (COI). Research indicates that (...) bias may occur, even among well-meaning professionals, when people and organizations have financial COI. Industry funding may therefore influence PAOs to act in ways that favor the interests of their donors, which may increase the risk of harm to patients. This article extends the analysis developed in the Institute of Medicine report, Conflicts of Interest in Medical Research, Education, and Practice, and applies the analysis to understand PAOs and their relationships with industry. It argues that the preferred goal of institutional COI policies should not be to promote trust, but to promote trustworthiness and appropriately placed trust. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 3, March 2020, Page 21-24.

In Specters of Marx, Derrida suggests that a non-revolutionary — ‘spectral’ — Marxism could alleviate a contemporary crisis in imagining the future in the late twentieth century. This ‘presentist’...

Gilles Deleuze, arguably the best-known theorist of virtuality, describes the virtual as part of an ontology of becoming and multiplicity: he sees the virtual as a characteristic of being which is directly opposed to, but simultaneously constitutive of the actual aspect of reality, as a force that works mostly invisibly, but powerfully within the interstices of the material world, introducing constant flux into reality through its negotiations with the actual.1 This conception of the virtual represents something of a leitmotif for (...) the forty-four essays collected in The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality. The collection offers a wide range of approaches to virtuality as a philosophical and aesthetic concept as well as a... (shrink)

The psychology of science typically lacks integration between cognitive and social variables. We present a new framework of team innovation in multidisciplinary science and engineering groups that ties factors from both literatures together. We focus on the effects of a particularly challenging social factor, knowledge diversity, which has a history of mixed effects on creativity, most likely because those effects are mediated and moderated by cognitive and additional social variables. In addition, we highlight the distinction between team innovative processes that (...) are primarily divergent versus convergent; we propose that the social and cognitive implications are different for each, providing a possible explanation for knowledge diversity’s mixed results on team outcomes. Social variables mapped out include formal roles, communication norms, sufficient participation and information sharing, and task conflict; cognitive variables include analogy, information search, and evaluation. This framework provides a roadmap for research that aims to harness the power of multidisciplinary teams. (shrink)

The widespread receptivity of Jewish communities around the world to Meir Kahane demands that we reconsider our narrative of modern Jewish history and religious thought. His racism, calls for violence, and protofascism are startling, given the standard presentation that liberalism and assimilation mark the modern Jewish era. Even more startling is that Kahane's name almost never appears in the major surveys of American Judaism, the history of Zionism, and modern Jewish thought. Yet, Kahane's influence is growing rapidly and already outweighs (...) the influence of most other modern Jewish thinkers and shows no sign of abating, especially with the rise of authoritarian regimes around the world. (shrink)

For much of the 20th century, vulnerability to deprivations of health has often been defined by geographical and economic factors. Those in wealthy, usually ‘Northern’ and ‘Western’, parts of the world have benefited from infrastructures, and accidents of geography and climate, which insulate them from many serious threats to health. Conversely, poorer people are typically exposed to more threats to health, and have lesser access to the infrastructures needed to safeguard them against the worst consequences of such exposure. However, in (...) recent years the increasingly globalized nature of the world’s economy, society and culture, combined with anthropogenic climate change and the evolution of antibiotic resistance, has begun to shift the boundaries that previously defined the categories of person threatened by many exogenous threats to health. In doing so, these factors expose both new and forgotten similarities between persons, and highlight the need for global cooperative responses to the existential threats posed by climate change and the evolution of antimicrobial resistance. In this article, we argue that these emerging health threats, in demonstrating the similarities that exist between even distant persons, provides a catalyst for global solidarity, which justifies, and provides motivation for, the establishment of solidaristic, cooperative global health infrastructures. (shrink)

Gender transition may be figured as part of a broader creaturely process of being partners in our own becoming. Gender transition is explored through the lenses of transformation (including comparisons with theosis and with religious conversion) and neurodiversity. Humans are transformative creatures; trans and gender-variant people, like others, have the power to curate their own identities and are on a journey toward perfection. Our nature as humans, including our sexed and gendered nature, is not over-and-done-with. In this sense, our active (...) building and shaping of our identities and body-stories is not a rejection of a divine blueprint for human existence, nor an exercise of illegitimate human hubris, but rather a licit creaturely form of generativity. (shrink)

The recognition that female embodiment and feminine experience are legitimate and specific sites of the revelation of God’s love has been one of the most significant developments in theology in the last hundred years. However, an over-emphasis on feminine experience as supervening on female embodiment risks erasing unusual sex-gender body-stories and perpetuating the idea that only some bodies can mediate the divine. Feminist Theology’s future must involve a re-examination and re-negotiation of what it is to be feminist theologians without fixed (...) gender essences. Does Feminist Theology have space to hear from and nurture the voices of those whose gender experiences challenge a binary, either-or model? Can Feminist Theology, in contrast to much secular feminist theory, give space at the table to those whose sex-gender life stories undermine the notion that there is such a thing as a common or biologically-contingent feminine experience in the first place? (shrink)

The role and importance of solidarity for effective health provision is the subject of lengthy and heated debate which has been thrown into even sharper relief by the COVID-19 pandemic. In various ways, and by various authorities we have all been asked, even instructed, to engage in solidarity with one another in order to collectively respond to the current crisis. Under normal circumstances, individuals can engage in solidarity with their compatriots in the context of public health provision in a number (...) of ways, including paying taxes which fund welfare state initiatives, and avoiding others when ill. While there has been significant engagement in solidarity worldwide, there have also been high profile examples of refusals and failures to engage in solidarity, both by individual agents, and governments. In this paper I examine the consequence of these failures with reference to the actions of the current British government, which has failed to deliver an effective response to the crisis. This failure has effectively devolved responsibility for responding to the crisis to people who are simultaneously more vulnerable to infection, and less able to do anything about it. I argue that such responses represent mismanagement of a public health crisis, and a rejection of important democratic and egalitarian norms and values. (shrink)

The right to conscientious objection in the provision of healthcare is the subject of a lengthy, heated and controversial debate. Recently, a new dimension was added to this debate by the US Supreme Court's decision in Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby et al. which effectively granted rights to freedom of conscience to private, for-profit corporations. In light of this paradigm shift, we examine one of the most contentious points within this debate, the impact of granting conscience exemptions to healthcare providers on (...) the ability of women to enjoy their rights to reproductive autonomy. We argue that the exemptions demanded by objecting healthcare providers cannot be justified on the liberal, pluralist grounds on which they are based, and impose unjustifiable costs on both individual persons, and society as a whole. In doing so, we draw attention to a worrying trend in healthcare policy in Europe and the United States to undermine women's rights to reproductive autonomy by prioritizing the rights of ideologically motivated service providers to an unjustifiably broad form of freedom of conscience. (shrink)

La Meditación de la técnica contiene las reflexiones de José Ortega y Gasset sobre un fenómeno de invasora presencia en el mundo contemporáneo. Trata, en suma, de inscribir el hecho de la técnica en el marco de una antropología filosófica, fundada en el sistema orteguiano, para así contribuir a la comprensión del momento histórico contemporáneo. El volumen incluye, además del curso ¿Qué es la técnica?, desarrollado en 1933 en la Universidad de Santander, otros textos afines: la conferencia El mito del (...) hombre allende a la técnica pronuncida en Darmstadt y varios ensayos sobre el conocimiento científico, que prueban la permanente atención que Ortega prestó a las novedades de la ciencia contemporánea. En esta nueva edición el texto se ha revisado y corregido conforme a los manuscritos originales o las primeras ediciones. La principal novedad es una Introducción al curso ¿Qué es la técnica?, sólo editada póstumamente. (shrink)

The right to conscientious objection in the provision of healthcare is the subject of a lengthy, heated and controversial debate. Recently, a new dimension was added to this debate by the US Supreme Court's decision in Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby et al. which effectively granted rights to freedom of conscience to private, for-profit corporations. In light of this paradigm shift, we examine one of the most contentious points within this debate, the impact of granting conscience exemptions to healthcare providers on (...) the ability of women to enjoy their rights to reproductive autonomy. We argue that the exemptions demanded by objecting healthcare providers cannot be justified on the liberal, pluralist grounds on which they are based, and impose unjustifiable costs on both individual persons, and society as a whole. In doing so, we draw attention to a worrying trend in healthcare policy in Europe and the United States to undermine women's rights to reproductive autonomy by prioritizing the rights of ideologically motivated service providers to an unjustifiably broad form of freedom of conscience. (shrink)

These essays survey the histories, the theories and the fault lines that compose the field of memory research. Drawing on the advances in the sciences and in the humanities, they address the question of how memory works, highlighting transactions between the interiority of subjective memory and the larger fields of public or collective memory.

The Trump Administration's recent attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act have reignited long‐running debates surrounding the nature of justice in health care provision, the extent of our obligations to others, and the most effective ways of funding and delivering quality health care. In this article, I respond to arguments that individualist systems of health care provision deliver higher‐quality health care and promote liberty more effectively than the cooperative, solidaristic approaches that characterize health care provision in most wealthy countries apart (...) from the United States. I argue that these claims are mistaken and suggest one way of rejecting the implied criticisms of solidaristic practices in health care provision they represent. This defence of solidarity is phrased in terms of the advantages solidaristic approaches to health care provision have over individualist alternatives in promoting certain important personal liberties, and delivering high‐quality, affordable health care. (shrink)

The recent and ongoing refugee crisis in Europe highlights conflicting attitudes about the rights of migrants and refugees to health care in transition and destination countries. Some European and Scandinavian states, such as Germany and Sweden, have welcomed large numbers of migrants, while others, such as the U.K., have been significantly less open. In part, this is because of reluctance by certain national governments to incur what are seen as the high costs of delivering aid and care to migrants. In (...) response to these assumptions, some theorists have argued that the appropriate way to view the health needs of migrants is not in terms of rights, but in terms of the interests of destination and transition countries—and have argued that providing care to migrants and refugees will generate benefits for their host countries. However, self‐interest alone is less effective at motivating the provision of care for health deprivations that do not pose a threat to third parties, or to migrants and refugees in poor or distant countries. In this paper, I argue that while self‐interest is unlikely in itself to motivate the provision of all necessary health care to all migrants and refugees, and may risk stigmatizing already vulnerable persons, it can provide the foundation upon which such motivations can be built. My goal is therefore to show how and why a more just approach to the provision of health care to migrants can and should be derived from narrower, self‐interested commitments to preserving citizen health. (shrink)

Why is racism so tenacious? Drawing from recent methodological innovations in the study of racism, this essay explores the appeal of racism and the erotics of race within the imagination. The slippery nature of racism, and its ability to alter its manifestations with ease and hide behind various disavowals, facilitates the racialization of both religious thought and social institutions.

As we so often trip about and lose our breath over speaking precisely to "what is rhetoric?," it should come to no surprise that being asked what we want of rhetoric, of language, of an other moves us to fidget, even brings us to blush. But if we pause with these questions, lips parted without yet the words to answer, we may notice a peculiar craving that churns before the naming. We want of rhetoric—but what? We are compelled toward rhetoric—whereto? (...) We seek in rhetoric—for? If this desire, what Hannah Arendt calls an appetite for love for its own sake, refers to the will to "have and to hold," our love in/for/through rhetoric always seems to slip from capture. So much so that after a whirl of... (shrink)

The recent confirmation of the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) by the US Supreme Court has brought to the fore long-standing debates over individual liberty and religious freedom. Advocates of personal liberty are often critical, particularly in the USA, of public health measures which they deem to be overly restrictive of personal choice. In addition to the alleged restrictions of individual freedom of choice when it comes to the question of whether or not (...) to purchase health insurance, opponents to the PPACA also argue that certain requirements of the Act violate the right to freedom of conscience by mandating support for services deemed immoral by religious groups. These issues continue the long running debate surrounding the demands of religious groups for special consideration in the realm of health care provision. In this paper I examine the requirements of the PPACA, and the impacts that religious, and other ideological, exemptions can have on public health, and argue that the exemptions provided for by the PPACA do not in fact impose unreasonable restrictions on religious freedom, but rather concede too much and in so doing endanger public health and some important individual liberties. (shrink)

Many critics of the legalization of physician‐assisted death oppose it in part because they fear it will further disadvantage those who are already economically disadvantaged. This argument points to a serious problem of how economic considerations can influence medical decisions, but in the context of PAD, the concern is not borne out. We will provide empirical evidence suggesting that concerns about money influence medical decisions throughout the full course of illness, but at the end of life, financial pressure is much (...) more likely to influence a decision to pursue or reject aggressive life‐extending care than it is to influence a request for PAD. We will also address the question of whether financial pressure as a result of being poor—particularly in the context of an inadequate social safety net—robs people of their autonomy, rendering their informed request and consent invalid. We argue that it does not. We will emphasize the impracticality and injustice of rejecting the role of poverty as a legitimate factor in decision‐making, the irrational distinction between PAD and withdrawal of life‐sustaining care, and the more appropriate focus on the great flaws in the American health care system. (shrink)

This book addresses Foucault’s characterizations of the Enlightenment, asking whether the developmental history of the modern conception of knowledge--from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment--warrants the conclusion he draws. From the perspective of a critical evaluation of Foucault's thesis on "the crisis of modernity," the book examines whether Foucault, the philosophical and social critic, truly belongs to those intellectual trends known as a "deconstruction" and "post-modernism" that advocate a wholesale rejection of the project of modernity, demonstrating how a classification of this (...) kind contributes to an impoverishment of our understanding of Foucault's thought. (shrink)

This book probes the sources and nature of the 'discontents of modernity'. It proposes a new approach to the philosophic-critical discourse on modernity. The Enlightenment is widely understood to be the foundational moment of modernity. Yet despite its appeal to reason as the ultimate ground of its authority and legitimacy, the Enlightenment has had multiple historical manifestations and, therefore, can hardly be said to be a homogenous phenomenon. The present work seeks to identify a unitive element that allows us to (...) speak of the Enlightenment. To do so, it enjoins the concept of 'ethos' and its relation to the 'discontents of modernity'. This book proposes a new theoretical framework for the examination of the interrelationships between 'critical thought' and 'modernity', based on a fundamental distinction between criticism and negation. It will appeal to scholars and students of critical theory, the history of ideas, philosophy, the sociology of knowledge, and political science. (shrink)

I Philosophers and Prophets The tradition of the Falasifa tends to refute Plato's ideal of the “philosopher-king”, in which the philosopher is distinguished as the highest human type. In contrast to the philosopher, whose knowledge is incomplete and indirect, the prophet, through revelation, attains profound knowledge and truth. According to the Falasifa version of Platonic politics, the prophet, who represents the highest form of human wisdom conditioned by divine providence, is a founder of political community and a lawgiver.

The Sexual Politics of Time will be of interest tostudents and researchers of time, memory, difference and cultural change, in subjects such as Media and ...

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 72-74.

This article discusses the current ‘popularity’ of trauma research in the Humanities and examines the ethics and politics of trauma theory, as exemplified in the writings of Caruth and Felman and Laub.Written from a position informed by Laplanchian and object relations psychoanalytic theory, it begins by examining and offering a critique of trauma theory's model of subjectivity, and its relations with theories of referentiality and representation, history and testimony. Next, it proposes that although trauma theory's subject matter—the sufferings of others—makes (...) critique difficult, the theory's politics, its exclusions and inclusions, and its unconscious drives and desires are as deserving of attention as those of any other theory. Arguing that the political and cultural contexts within which this theory has risen to prominence have remained largely unexamined, the article concludes by proposing that trauma theory needs to act as a brake against rather than as a vehicle for cultural and political Manicheanism. (shrink)