In what follows I distinguish «postmodern animism» from my preferred term «postmedia animism», which I propose is a better term to express a minor, virtual, contrarian art and media. In the time of planetary trauma, ecological devastation and collapse, this term will serve as a heuristic concept to trace the passage from pandemic, panic, catastrophe and crisis to the series pandemonium, delirium and the carnivalesque. My gambit is to invoke a rebellious and affirmative Yōkai imaginary (妖怪, ghost, phantom, strange apparition) (...) in order to contest passive forms of «transcendental narcissism» or «transcendental miserabilism».This we shall designate s an aesthetics of existence. In particular, I will analyse the relationship between natural disasters and politics within the Japanese imagination through reference to Namazu-e (鯰絵, woodblock prints depicting catfish), and their political effects in the aftermath of the earthquake of October 1855 (安政江戸地震, Ansei Edo Jishin) in the Edo period of Japanese history (FIG 1). My intention is to show that this historic art form, which grew out of trauma, demonstrates a fabulatory, dissensual and political aesthetics of resistance and creativity. It is an imaginary which appears conspicuously absent in our contemporary moment. (shrink)

Dmitri Nikulin is one of the few contemporary philosophers to have devoted books to the topic of dialogue and the dialogical self, especially in the last fifteen years. Yet his work on dialogue and the dialogical has received scant attention by philosophers, and this neglect has hurt the ongoing development of contemporary philosophical work on dialogicality. I want to address this lacuna in contemporary philosophical scholarship on dialogicality and suggest that, although Nikulin’s account is no doubt insightful and thought-provoking, it (...) is problematic for two main reasons: first, his account fails to recognize the proper relationship between dialogue and agency; and second, his enumeration of the necessary and sufficient conditions for dialogue contains conceptual inconsistencies. (shrink)

Since archaeology is fundamentally the study of the human past, which is what the word “archaeology” connotes according to its Greek etymology, it is part of the humanities. However, archaeologists work in teams with scientists and employ quantitative techniques and comparative methods of the social sciences; archaeologists are thus an academic hybrid and are pleased to live in the interstices of many disciplines. In this article we review the history of archaeology in the humanities and explore some new directions in (...) archaeological research. We discuss the enduring questions of origins of the antiquity of humanity, religion and art, the first agricultural villages, and the earliest cities, states, and civilizations. We also consider new agendas in archaeology: historical archaeology, landscapes in the past and present, material studies of the present, and how archaeologists are engaged in modern politics. (shrink)

Since the l960s, archaeology has become increasingly taught in universities and practiced on a growing scale by national and local heritage agencies throughout the world. This book addresses the criticisms of postmodernist writers about archaeology's social role, and asserts its intellectual importance and achievements in discovering real facts about the human past. It looks forward to the creation of a truly global consciousness of the origins of human societies and civilizations.

This book uses an incidence approach to look at the economic repercussions of birth defects. The authors investigate eighteen of the most clinically significant birth defects affecting 35,000 newborns each year in our country. Their assessments suggest that the annual cost of these eighteen birth defects, together, is more than eight billion dollars . The authors describe in detail their methodology and data sources while providing thorough accounts of each of the eighteen birth defects. Waitzman, Scheffler, and Romano break new (...) ground by using reports from the California Birth Defects Monitoring Program in order to provide cost estimates. They illustrate to the reader how cost estimates of specific birth defects can be used to justify prevention interventions and strategies. In chapter seven, they provide an important example, showing cost-benefit analysis of a program of folate supplementation of food to prevent neutral tube defects. Contents: List of Tables; Preface; Acknowledgements; Introduction; The Application of Cost-of-Illness Methodology To Birth Defects; The Direct Medical Costs of Birth Defects; Nonmedical Direct Costs of Birth Defects: Developmental Services and Special Education; The Indirect Costs of Birth Defects; Premature Mortality and Heightened Morbidity; An Assessment of Total Costs and Policy Implications; Description of Birth Defects; Description of Major Data Sources; Index. (shrink)

An important line of response to scepticism appeals to the best explanation. But anti-sceptics have not engaged much with work on explanation in the philosophy of science. I plan to investigate whether plausible assumptions about best explanations really do favour anti-scepticism. I will argue that there are ways of constructing sceptical hypotheses in which the assumptions do favour anti-scepticism, but the size of the support for anti-scepticism is small.

A quick look at what is happening in the corporate world makes it clear that the stakeholder idea is alive, well, and flourishing; and the question now is not “if ” but “how” stakeholder theory will meet the challenges of its success. Does stakeholder theory’s “arrival” mean continued dynamism, refinement, and relevance, or stasis? How will superior stakeholder theory continue to develop? In light of these and related questions, the authors of these essays conducted an ongoing dialogue on the current (...) state and future of stakeholder thinking. Beginning with a review of research and theory that has developed since the major stakeholder theorizing efforts of the 1990s, the authors individually offer their perspectives on the key issues relevant today to stakeholder thinking, and to suggest possible approaches that might lead toward and enable the continuing development of superior stakeholder theory. (shrink)

Schopenhauer is famously abusive toward his philosophical contemporary and rival, Friedrich William Joseph von Schelling. This chapter examines the motivations for Schopenhauer’s immoderate attitude and the substance behind the insults. It looks carefully at both the nature of the insults and substantive critical objections Schopenhauer had to Schelling’s philosophy, both to Schelling’s metaphysical description of the thing-in-itself and Schelling’s epistemic mechanism of intellectual intuition. It concludes that Schopenhauer’s substantive criticism is reasonable and that Schopenhauer does in fact avoid Schelling’s errors: (...) still, the vehemence of the abuse is best perhaps explained by the proximity of their philosophies, not the distance. Indeed, both are developing metaphysics of will with full and conflicted awareness of the Kantian epistemic strictures against metaphysics. In view of this, Schopenhauer is particularly concerned to mark his own project as legitimate by highlighting the manner in which he avoids Schelling’s errors. (shrink)

A quick look at what is happening in the corporate world makes it clear that the stakeholder idea is alive, well, and flourishing; and the question now is not “if ” but “how” stakeholder theory will meet the challenges of its success. Does stakeholder theory’s “arrival” mean continued dynamism, refinement, and relevance, or stasis? How will superior stakeholder theory continue to develop? In light of these and related questions, the authors of these essays conducted an ongoing dialogue on the current (...) state and future of stakeholder thinking. Beginning with a review of research and theory that has developed since the major stakeholder theorizing efforts of the 1990s, the authors individually offer their perspectives on the key issues relevant today to stakeholder thinking, and to suggest possible approaches that might lead toward and enable the continuing development of superior stakeholder theory. (shrink)

Researchers in all management specialties have discussed and investigated the important role values play in personal and organizational phenomena. However, because research on values has been performed in a wide range of social science disciplines and at different levels of analysis, much of thiswork has been uninformed by other work and is neither well integrated nor systematized, resulting in a great deal of confusion concerning the topic. This article attempts to add order and clarity to this area of research by (...) proposing a framework of values research based on level of analysis and by cataloguing and reviewing the vast theoretical and empirical research in light of this framework. It concludes with a critique of the extant literature and recommendations for further research. (shrink)

Abstract:Lately, the field of business ethics has begun to take an intense interest in the relationship between religion and business ethics. Various books and articles are being produced at an increasing rate using theoretical and qualitative research methods. However, to date, almost no data exist quantifying relationships between religion and business ethics. This paper begins to provide such data by testing the relationships between religious upbringing, religious practice, Christian beliefs, and attitudes toward corporate social responsibility. Analysis of our sample demonstrates (...) that religious practice and Christian beliefs have a weak relationship to attitudes toward corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

Abstract:Lately, the field of business ethics has begun to take an intense interest in the relationship between religion and business ethics. Various books and articles are being produced at an increasing rate using theoretical and qualitative research methods. However, to date, almost no data exist quantifying relationships between religion and business ethics. This paper begins to provide such data by testing the relationships between religious upbringing, religious practice, Christian beliefs, and attitudes toward corporate social responsibility. Analysis of our sample demonstrates (...) that religious practice and Christian beliefs have a weak relationship to attitudes toward corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

We investigate the dynamics of sensory integration for perceiving musical performance, a complex natural behavior. Thirty musically trained participants saw, heard, or both saw and heard, performances by two clarinetists. All participants used a sliding potentiometer to make continuous judgments of tension (a measure correlated with emotional response) and continuous judgments of phrasing (a measure correlated with perceived musical structure) as performances were presented. The data analysis sought to reveal relations between the sensory modalities (vision and audition) and to quantify (...) the effect of seeing the performances on participants' overall subjective experience of the music. In addition to traditional statistics, functional data analysis techniques were employed to analyze time-varying aspects of the data. The auditory and visual channels were found to convey similar experiences of phrasing but different experiences of tension through much of the performances. We found that visual information served both to augment and to reduce the experience of tension at different points in the musical piece (as revealed by functional linear modeling and functional significance testing). In addition, the musicians' movements served to extend the sense of phrasing, to cue the beginning of new phrases, to indicate musical interpretation, and to anticipate changes in emotional content. Evidence for an interaction effect suggests that there may exist an emergent quality when musical performances are both seen and heard. The investigation augments knowledge of human communicative processes spanning language and music, and involving multiple modalities of emotion and information transfer. (shrink)

In this paper we explain our pretense account of truth-talk and apply it in a diagnosis and treatment of the Liar Paradox. We begin by assuming that some form of deflationism is the correct approach to the topic of truth. We then briefly motivate the idea that all T-deflationists should endorse a fictionalist view of truth-talk, and, after distinguishing pretense-involving fictionalism (PIF) from error- theoretic fictionalism (ETF), explain the merits of the former over the latter. After presenting the basic framework (...) of our PIF account of truth-talk, we demonstrate a few advantages it offers over T-deflationist accounts that do not explicitly acknowledge pretense at work in the discourse. In turning to the Liar Paradox, we explain how the quasi-anaphoric functioning that our account attributes to truth-talk provides a diagnosis of the Liar Paradox (and other instances of semantic pathology) as having no content—in the sense of not specifying any of what we call M-conditions. At the same time, however, we vindicate the intuition that we can understand liar sentences, thereby avoiding one standard objection to “meaningless strategy” responses to the Liar Paradox. With this diagnosis in place, we then, by way of treatment, introduce a new predicate, ‘semantically defective’, and show how the explanation we give for its application allows for a consistent, yet revenge-immune, (dis)solution of the Liar Paradox, and semantic pathology generally. (shrink)

One might well wonder—is there a category under which every thing falls? Offering an informative account of such a category is no easy task. For nothing would distinguish things that fall under it from those that don’t—there being, after all, none of the latter. It seems hard, then, to say much about any fully general category; and it would appear to do no carving or categorizing or dividing at all. Nonetheless there are candidates for such a fully general office, including (...) thing, being, entity, item, existent, and—especially—object.[ It is not obvious that there is any fully general category (whether object or otherwise). Accordingly, not all accounts of object assign it to a fully general category, instead allowing that there are non-objects. On those views, object does indeed divide. Accounts of object, then, differ with respect to whether there are non-objects. And this is not the only fault line. Other dimensions of difference include what objects there are and what objects are. Accordingly, this entry will survey three broad questions about the category object: What, if any, is its contrast or complement? What is its extension? What is its nature? (shrink)

Hamblin distinguished between formal and descriptive dialectic. Formal normative models of deliberation dialogue have been strongly emphasized as argumentation frameworks in computer science. But making such models of deliberation applicable to real natural language examples has reached a point where the descriptive aspect needs more interdisciplinary work. The new formal and computational models of deliberation dialogue that are being built in computer science seem to be closely related to some already existing and very well established computing technologies such as problem (...) solving and decision making, but whether or how dialectical argumentation can be helpful to support these systems remains an open question. The aim of this paper is to examine some real examples of argumentation that seem to hover on the borderlines between deliberation, problem solving and decision making. (shrink)

Descartes' proof that his essence is thinking.--Thoughtless brutes.--Descartes' proof that he is essentially a non-material thing.--Behaviorism as a philosophy of psychology.--The privacy of experience.--Wittgenstein on the nature of mind.--The myth of cognitive processes and structures.--Moore and Wittgenstein on the sense of "I know."--The groundlessness of belief.

Ackn o wledgments I owe special gratitude to Professors Hugo Adam Bedau and John Rawls for many helpful discussions of the general idea and scope, ...

The lesson to be learned from the paradoxical St. Petersburg game and Pascal’s Mugging is that there are situations where expected utility maximizers will needlessly end up poor and on death’s door, and hence we should not be expected utility maximizers. Instead, when it comes to decision-making, for possibilities that have very small probabilities of occurring, we should discount those probabilities down to zero, regardless of the utilities associated with those possibilities.

Over the past decade, a number of accounting and financial reporting frauds have led to lost stock wealth, destroyed public trust, and a worldwide recession that called for necessary reform. Regulatory responses and systemic reforms quickly followed, and we show that, while necessary, these reforms are insufficient. The purpose of this paper is to forward virtuous professionalism as a necessary path toward restoring financial reporting systems. We take the position of external observer and analyze the accounting profession over time to (...) assess what has transpired within our financial reporting systems. Our analysis reveals that the combined influence of commercialism and regulatory response has led to a systemic decline in accounting’s professional ideals and, as a result, an erosion of public trust. We then propose virtuous professionalism as a necessary process for restoring financial reporting systems based on sociological, professional, and philosophical theories. We argue that virtuous professionalism is necessary for restoring the public servant identity of the accounting professional. We conclude that efforts to restore financial reporting systems should begin with reforms that restore professional identity shaped by virtues. (shrink)

Mereological nihilism is the view that no objects have proper parts. Despite how counter‐intuitive it is, it is taken quite seriously, largely because it solves a number of puzzles in the metaphysics of material objects – or so its proponents claim. In this article, I show that for every puzzle that mereological nihilism solves, there is a similar puzzle that (a) it doesn’t solve, and (b) every other solution to the original puzzle does solve. Since the solutions to the new (...) puzzles apply just as well to the old puzzles, the old puzzles provide no motivation to be a mereological nihilist. (shrink)

In this paper, I articulate and argue for a new truthmaker view of ontological commitment, which I call the “General Truthmaker View”: when one affirms a sentence, one is ontologically committed to there being something that makes true the proposition expressed by the sentence. This view comes apart from Quinean orthodoxy in that we are not ontologically committed to the things over which we quantify, and it comes apart from extant truthmaker views of ontological commitment in that we are not (...) ontologically committed to the truthmakers of our sentences. (shrink)

object an item which does not have a position in space and time but which exists. (Philosophers have nominated such things as numbers, sets, and propositions to this category. The need to posit such entities has been discussed and disputed for at least 2400 years.).

In recent years, many philosophers of religion have turned their attention to the topic of faith. Given the ubiquity of the word “faith” both in and out of religious contexts, many of them have chosen to begin their forays by offering an analysis of faith. But it seems that there are many kinds of faith: religious faith, non‐religious faith, interpersonal faith, and propositional faith, to name a few. In this article, I discuss analyses of faith that have been offered and (...) point out the dimensions along which they differ. (shrink)

The rapidly increasing numbers of elderly people in our society have raised some important moral questions: How should we distribute social resources among different age groups? What does justice require from both the young and the old? In this book, Norman Daniels offers the first systematic philosophical discussion of these urgent questions, advocating what he calls a "lifespan" approach to the problem: Since, as they age, people pass through a variety of institutions, the challenge of caring for the elderly (...) becomes the prudent allocation of public resources among the various stages of people's lives. Using this philosophical approach, Daniels addresses specific public policy issues such as the allocation of medical funds, the adequacy of long-term care, current Medicare cost-containment measures, and the equitable distribution of income support over the lifespan and between generations. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a new theory of grounding. The theory has it that grounding is a job description that is realized by different properties in different contexts. Those properties play the grounding role contingently, and grounding is the property that plays the grounding role essentially. On this theory, grounding is monistic, but ‘grounding’ refers to different relations in different contexts. First, I argue against Kit Fine’s monist univocalism. Next, I argue against Jessica Wilson’s pluralist multivocalism. Finally, I introduce (...) monist multivocalism, explicate three versions of it (of which the above is one), and show its advantages. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss some prominent features of our use of social media and what I think are its harms. My paper has three main parts. In the first part, I use a dialogical framework to argue that much of the discursive activity online is manifested as an ethically impoverished other-directedness and interactivity. In the second part, I identify and discuss several reasons that help explain why so much of the discursive activity on social media is ethically lacking. And (...) in the final part, I mention some of the effects these discursive practices have on us even when offline. Specifically, I suggest that the persistent use of digital communication technologies trains its users to adopt these problematic online discursive attitudes and activities into their experiences offline, making it more difficult for them to engage with themselves and others in more dialogically ethical ways. (shrink)

This article examines our ethical responsibility toward artists engaged in harmful behaviors. Specifically, I demonstrate when and why we are morally obligated to withdraw our public and financial support from Artists Who Cause Harm such as Louis C.K., Terry Richardson, and Ryan Adams. Using a moral distinction presented by Philippa Foot and others, I identify this support as enabling harm when the wealth and influence that we support removes typical barriers that protect victims from harm and interposes barriers that prevent (...) victims from avoiding harm. I proceed to demonstrate that our personal support is morally significant, and we have a moral responsibility to make contributions to collective action when the cost is low or the degree of belief that others will contribute is high. Here we have both a strong belief that others will withdraw support and a relatively low cost to ourselves to do so. I acknowledge that enabling current harms is only a sufficient condition to withdrawing support from an artist and should not minimize other reasons for avoiding certain artists and their works. However, when we do believe that our support enables an artist engaged in harmful behaviors, we have an obligation to withdraw that support. (shrink)

A powerful work of moral and political philosophy.The idea which I shall present here came to me more or less out of the blue. I was on a train some five years ago, on my way to spend a day at Headingley and I was reading a book about the death camp at Sobibor... The particular, not very appropriate, conjunction involved for me in this train journey... had the effect of fixing my thoughts on one of the more dreadful features (...) of human coexistence, when in the shape of a simple five-word phrase the idea occurred to me. In The Contract of Mutual Indifference, Norman Geras discusses a central aspect of the experience of the Holocaust with a view to exploring its most important contemporary implications. In a bold and powerful synthesis of memorial, literary record, historical reflection and political theory, he focuses on the figure of the bystander -- the bystander to the destruction of the Jews of Europe and the bystander to more recent atrocities -- to consider the moral consequences of looking on without active response at persecution and great suffering. Geras argues that the tragedy of European Jewry, so widely pondered by historians, social scientists, psychologists, theologians and others, has not yet found its proper reflection within political philosophy. Attempting to fill the gap, he adapts an old idea from within that tradition of enquiry, the idea of the social contract, to the task of thinking about the triangular relation between perpetrators, victims and bystanders, and draws a somber conclusion from it. Geras goes on to ask how far this conclusion may be offset by the hypothesis of a universal duty to bring aid. The Contract of Mutual Indifference is an original and challenging work, aimed at the complacent abstraction of much contemporary theory. It is supplemented by three shorter essays on the implications of the Jewish catastrophe for conceptions of human nature and progress and for certain types of Marxist explanation. (shrink)

Many philosophers and scientists have claimed that time has an arrow that points in a special direction. The Roman poet Ovid may have referred to this one-way property of time when he said, “Time itself glides on with constant motion, ever as a flowing river.” However, understanding this arrow is not … Continue reading The Arrow of Time →.

A variety of ethical objections have been raised against the military employment of uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs, drones). Some of these objections are technological concerns over UAVs abilities’ to function on par with their inhabited counterparts. This paper sets such concerns aside and instead focuses on supposed objections to the use of UAVs in principle. I examine several such objections currently on offer and show them all to be wanting. Indeed, I argue that we have a duty to protect an (...) agent engaged in a justified act from harm to the greatest extent possible, so long as that protection does not interfere with the agent's ability to act justly. UAVs afford precisely such protection. Therefore, we are obligated to employ UAV weapon systems if it can be shown that their use does not significantly reduce a warfighter's operational capability. Of course, if a given military action is unjustified to begin with, then carrying out that act via UAVs is wrong, just as it would be with any weapon. But the point of this paper is to show that there is nothing wrong in principle with using a UAV and that, other things being equal, using such technology is, in fact, obligatory. (shrink)

Monism about being says that there is one way to be. Pluralism about being says that there are many ways to be. Recently, Trenton Merricks and David Builes have offered arguments against Pluralism. In this paper, I show how Pluralists who appeal to the relative naturalness of quantifiers can respond to these arguments.

Nelson et al.(2023) argue that the inclusion of personal experience in bioethical debates has significant benefits and liabilities, illustrating their claim with two examples: unproven medical treatments and disability bioethics. We believe that the benefits of including personal experience in disability bioethics far exceed its liabilities. The absence of participants with relevant experience impoverishes and biases bioethical debates, while the biases risked by their inclusion are hardly unique to personal experiences and are readily mitigated.