This paper argues that communitarian philosophy can be an important philosophic resource for feminist thinkers, particularly when considered in the light of Jane Addams's (1860-1935) feminist-pragmatism. Addams's communitarianism requires progressive change as well as a moral duty to seek out diverse voices. Contrary to some contemporary communitarians, Addams extends her concept of community to include interdependent global communities, such as the global community of women peace workers.

The current global wave of nationalism threatens the process of shared critical reflection, driving many of us back to reading Hannah Arendt. These “dark times” are especially challenging from a Deweyan pragmatist perspective because critical and cooperative inquiry requires a free community of thinkers. Having lived in a near-fascist religious group for fifteen years, this essay brings personal experiences to the questions of how we think as well as create spaces for diverse yet shared realities to think and act in (...) freedom. Drawing on Arendt as well as Dewey, Addams, and Minnich, this essay explores three necessities for integrity in dark times: Radical honesty and reflection which requires facing up to reality and being mindful about events in our world; Building communities: creating shared reality and public spaces to appear, Developing the skills of engaged thinking and the capacity for deep reflection as a foundation for action together. (shrink)

Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, and second-generation Hull House activist Grace Abbott were at the forefront of a reconstruction of early twentieth-century American democracy. They worked to reframe U.S. political democracy, expanding its focus beyond individual rights to caring for the social community. The movement away from laissez-faire government toward state and federal legislation protecting children, women, and workers was often halting, sometimes stymied by public opposition, and other times blocked by Supreme Court decisions. Grace Abbott’s social and political philosophy demonstrated (...) her training in law and political science and was influenced by her direct engagement with her Hull House neighbors. Abbott was a skilled social science researcher who saw public research as a way of crossing and blurring epistemological class boundaries, creating pathways for the general population to understand the burdens others faced. Through her leadership of the Immigrants’ Protective League and the Children’s Bureau, Abbott argued that the democratic state should be responsible for extending legislative protections into the social and industrial realms to protect vulnerable and dependent populations. Her work was essential to the continuing evolving supportive structures of governmental programs and social safety nets that are taken for granted by many Americans today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Florence Kelley: Pragmatist, Feminist, SocialistJudy D. Whippssupreme court justice felix frankfurter said in 1953 that Florence Kelley “had probably the largest single share in shaping the social history of the United States during the first 30 years of the 20th Century” (Frankfurter x). Kelley is an unusual figure to discuss in a philosophical journal, perhaps because she has generally been classified only as a social scientist. Yet, as I (...) discovered, she is a wonderful thinking partner, sometimes raising more philosophical questions than she resolves. Her commitments, struggles, failures, and accomplishments problematize and reveal new insights into pragmatist pluralism, feminist political choices, and the role of socialism in early pragmatism. Bringing her into the feminist pragmatist discussion gives us more examples of how to approach problem-solving from feminist and pragmatist perspectives.1Florence Kelley and Jane Addams first met when Kelley knocked on Hull House’s door early one snowy December morning in 1891. She was fleeing with her three small children from her physically abusive husband in New York, needing an occupation and a home in Chicago. She became the only early resident who was a single mother. Kelley spent most of the next decade at Hull House. Kelley and Addams had similar family backgrounds and became close friends, although they had dramatically different personalities. One thing they shared in common was that both were very close to their politician fathers.Kelley’s father was a longtime progressive congressman from Pennsylvania. He helped to develop her social consciousness by taking her along on his investigations of industrial conditions when, as a child herself, she often saw the horrifying conditions of children’s work environments. At two in the morning, she witnessed the “terrifying sight” of boys younger than herself working near the steel mills’ red-hot furnaces and molten metal. With her [End Page 10] father, she also witnessed young boys called “dogs” working in glass factories. Each glass blower was assisted by one of these boys who knelt with his head near the oven as the glass came out from the furnaces to prepare the hot mold for the blower’s next project. These events left her with the “astonished impression of the utter unimportance of children compared with products” (Kelley, “My Philadelphia” 56–57).She entered Cornell University at age 16 and was drawn to the study of social science and economics. Like many college-bound young women in the late nineteenth century, she quickly became committed to social reform, focusing on women and children’s social and economic conditions. As Kelley said in 1882, in her first published article after college, “In the field of sociology, there is brainwork waiting for women which men cannot do” (“Need Our Working Women” 521). In their lives and studies, young college women like Kelley experienced the inequalities and suffering around them and were looking for a solution. Kelley developed an approach that focused on both the causes as well as the effects of the social problems she worked to eradicate. She believed that college-educated women and working-class women could work together to produce knowledge and change.Kelley was exposed briefly to Marxism and socialism in her college years when a family friend convalesced in their home. This man’s father had known Karl Marx, and he shared some Marxist pamphlets with Kelley (Autobiography 72). After college, when she continued her studies in Zurich, she became immersed in Marxism. She returned to the United States three years later, with her Russian Marxist husband and their three children. She expected to continue her Marxist work with the New York Socialist Labor Party, but the party expelled her and her husband. She then turned her attention to researching working women’s financial and social struggles.In Chicago, Kelley’s early research into local living and working conditions was published in the ground-breaking Hull House Maps and Papers, written by Hull House residents (Addams et al.), considered a pioneering work in sociology and an early example of what became cultural geography. Her investigations into child labor, sweatshops, and industrial conditions led to her position as Illinois’s first chief factory inspector. Armed with data and the support of... (shrink)

For most of the 20th century Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933) was one of the “invisible women” in the history of American philosophy, although her work was taken seriously by philosophers of her time. While some have described Follett as an idealist, this essay develops the pragmatist and feminist elements of Follett’s philosophy. In particular, Follett’s concept of “integration” can be clarified by reading it through a pragmatist lens, connecting it with Dewey’s writing on experience, and with Jamesian pluralism. Follett also (...) shares with Jane Addams an understanding of the creative integrative power of diversity; Addams directly referenced Follett in 1930 when she describes how conflicts were resolved in the process of mutual action. The latter part of this essay discusses the contemporary relevance of Follett’s integrative “power-with” methodology in feminist thought. Taking integrative work seriously requires preparation and training, and Follett’s writing on education for integration has implications for contemporary pedagogical practice. (shrink)

in evolutionary theorizing,, marilyn fischer carefully unpacks and analyzes the language in Democracy and Social Ethics, looking at both the final published text as well as Addams's earlier essays and talks that were eventually incorporated into the book. By researching authors that Addams either quotes or relied on, Fischer is able to excavate many layers of historical intellectual meaning and, in doing so, gives us a different picture of Addams than the one I'm familiar with. It's not a picture of (...) Addams that is always flattering. Fischer's unpacking of these early texts shines a light on the sometimes-racist evolutionary thinking of that time. She is doing, as she says, a "close textual analysis" within the... (shrink)

[O]ur increasing democracy impels us to make a new demand upon the educator. … [A] code of social ethics is now insisting that (the individual) shall be a conscious member of society.[Black women] understood intellectually and intuitively the meaning of homeplace in the midst of an oppressive and dominating social reality, of homeplace as site of resistance and liberation struggle.this essay considers the role of city/community as homespace in an attempt to bring a particular place, the community of Muskegon, Michigan, (...) into the classroom as a learning partner in a place-based educational project. Place-based education is commonly used to describe sustainability/environmental learning (Powers), but it also can .. (shrink)

This Hypatia cluster aims to create space for sharing stories and tools designed to support situated, embodied, and dialogical philosophical activism. It emerges from a new generation of pragmatist feminists, illustrating how the field has evolved. These pieces locate pragmatist feminism in place- and issue-based philosophical activism. As an activist and pragmatically grounded philosophy, this approach values the embodied and relational nature of social change as well as the need to create multiple pathways of engagement situated in and across communities.

Learning about a scientific concept often occurs in the context of unfamiliar examples. Mutual alignment analogy ? a type of analogical comparison in which the analogues are only partially understood ? has been shown to facilitate learning from unfamiliar examples . In the present study, we examined the role of mutual alignment analogy in the abstraction and transfer of a complex scientific concept from examples presented in expository texts. Our results provide evidence that (a) promoting comparison between two examples and (...) (b) orienting the learner toward relational commonalities result in greater abstraction and transfer. These findings suggest that mutual alignment analogy is an effective means of promoting abstraction and transfer of complex scientific concepts, and may thus be used in the classroom to promote learning from unfamiliar examples. (shrink)

a few months into the covid-19 pandemic, Marilyn Fischer and Judy Whipps were commiserating about an isolated future that seemed to stretch out with no end in sight. They came up with the idea of starting their own Scholars Circle, inspired by the November 2019 Feminist Pragmatist Colloquium in Rochester, New York. At that conference, participants could submit abstracts of work at any stage of development. Participants were grouped in small circles of three or four, with each person (...) sharing their work and giving feedback and suggestions to the others. Participants at that conference were uniformly enthusiastic about how this format enriched their thinking and gave them a sense of support and camaraderie. As one of... (shrink)

Although a number of articles have addressed ethical perceptions and behaviors, few studies have examined ethics across cultures. This research focuses on measuring the job satisfaction, customer orientation, ethics, and ethical training of automotive salespersons in the U.S. and Taiwan. The relationships of these variables to salesperson performance were also investigated. Ethics training was found to be negatively related to perceived levels of ethicalness and performance. High performance U.S. salespeople reported high ethical behavior, while the opposite was true in Taiwan. (...) Customer orientation in both countries was influenced by ethics training. Managers should evaluate current ethics training programs to insure correct ethical behavior is taught and rewarded. (shrink)

DBS Think Tank IX was held on August 25–27, 2021 in Orlando FL with US based participants largely in person and overseas participants joining by video conferencing technology. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 and provides an open platform where clinicians, engineers and researchers can freely discuss current and emerging deep brain stimulation technologies as well as the logistical and ethical issues facing the field. The consensus among the DBS Think Tank IX speakers was that DBS expanded in (...) its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. After collectively sharing our experiences, it was estimated that globally more than 230,000 DBS devices have been implanted for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. As such, this year’s meeting was focused on advances in the following areas: neuromodulation in Europe, Asia and Australia; cutting-edge technologies, neuroethics, interventional psychiatry, adaptive DBS, neuromodulation for pain, network neuromodulation for epilepsy and neuromodulation for traumatic brain injury. (shrink)

This article provides a historical overview of the Existential-Phenomenological tradition in psychiatry and psychotherapy, tracing its development from its origin in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophical thought, through its major European psychiatric proponents and schools, to its emergence as an influential approach in North America after World War II. The emphasis is on the implicit themes that provide continuity within this movement as well as on the distinctive contributions of individual thinkers. We conclude with a discussion of the present status (...) and future prospects of this tradition. (shrink)

The criticism has been made that Kant looks racist, at least in his early work. This, however, is to insist on a literal reading. I explore Kant’s use of irony and satire as he battles to defend his vision. I show the rhetoric of irony in a pivotal text, looking at what happens and why.

In this essay the authors provide arguments that teaching is an art and that teachers can learn much about their trade from a careful study of the performances of other artists. Artists and teachers have the same basic challenge: in order to be successful, both groups have to obtain and retain peoples’ attention. This also holds for popular music artists. Ten female student teachers specializing in the Pre-school and Foundation phases of schooling (four-to-six-year olds), and six lecturers from the Faculty (...) of Education at the University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa, participated in a workshop at a local game lodge. During the workshop, videos of ABBA songs and Mamma Mia! The Movie were analyzed and discussed. The theme of the workshop was “Being an Excellent Teacher: Appreciating ABBA.” The 4D-cycle of Appreciative Inquiry– Discover, Dream, Design and Destiny–was used as a methodological framework to identify numerous positive themes with possible classroom applications from the songs and the film. These themes were then connected to educational theory and embedded in the insights of Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus, Judy Cramer and other people involved with ABBA. A reflective report by one student teacher about the impact the workshop had on her views of teaching and an excellent class that she presented is also included. (shrink)

In this chapter I explore various facets of Addams' approaches to culture as art and as structures of life because they illuminate not only her struggles to reconcile competing perspectives and values, but also because these issues are recurring features in the development of feminist analyses of culture. -/- “This well-crafted collection of essays recognizes Jane Addams as the inspiring and occasionally provocative feminist she was. Connecting Addams’s pragmatism to social theory, political philosophy, queer theory, postcolonial theory, and more, the (...) book’s twelve authors sympathetically and critically explore Addams’s ongoing relevance to issues of art, culture, sexuality, prostitution, religion, cosmopolitanism, public/private divisions, and community organization. Scholarly experts on Addams, as well as those discovering her feminist pragmatism for the first time, will find this volume valuable.” -/- Although Jane Addams's Twenty Years at Hull-House is considered an American classic, her dozen books and hundreds of published articles have sometimes been thought of as quaint examples of an overly optimistic era. Beginning in the 1990s, feminist scholars rediscovered the vitality of Addams's social philosophy and challenged the marginalization of her ideas. Today, following a war-laden twentieth century and the failure of militarism and "get tough" approaches to solve domestic and global problems, Addams's social theorizing, which emphasizes cosmopolitan experiences and sympathetic connections, provides a provocative alternative to Western notions of individualism, transactional relations, and spectator epistemology. Feminist Interpretations of Jane Addams brings together many of the leading Addams scholars in North America to consider Addams's ongoing relevance to feminist thought. Aside from the editor, the contributors are Victoria Bissell Brown, Marilyn Fischer, Judith M. Green, Shannon Jackson, Katherine Joslin, Louise W. Knight, L. Ryan Musgrave Bonomo, Wendy Sarvasy, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Eleanor J. Stebner, and Judy D. Whipps. (shrink)

During World War II, Niels Bohr realized that the nature of war had changed irrevocably due to the introduction of the atomic bomb. This, in his opinion, meant that nation states had to be open about nuclear knowledge and negotiate toward peace. The bomb presented a threat, yet at the same time, an opportunity, as Bohr would argue in his characteristic way. It is not too difficult to point to the epistemological origin of Bohr’s argument: One easily identifies resonances with (...) his ideas on “complementarity” from quantum mechanics. According to Bohr’s doctrine of complementarity, a quantum mechanical object shows certain qualities depending on the experimental perspective from which it is studied; and these qualities may be mutually exclusive. However, they should in fact be looked upon as “complementary” properties that together make up the full picture of the object under investigation.Initially, Bohr could express his ideas to the highest circles of power. This would soon change, howe .. (shrink)

Business and society researchers, as well as practitioners, have been critiqued for ignoring those with less voice and power often referred to as “fringe stakeholders.” Existing methods used in B&S research often fail to address issues of meaningful participation, voice and power, especially in developing countries. In this article, we stress the utility of visual participatory research methods in B&S research to fill this gap. Through a case study on engaging Ghanaian cocoa farmers on gender inequality issues, we explore how (...) VPR methods may be used by researchers to achieve more inclusive, and thus more credible, stakeholder research that can improve decision making within businesses. Furthermore, we argue that ingrained social and environmental problems tackled by B&S research and the unique context in which they occur may open up new opportunities to develop participatory visual methods for social change. (shrink)

There is little doubt that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is now a global concept and a prominent feature of international business, with its practice localised and differing across countries. Despite the growing body of research focussing on CSR in developing countries, there is dearth research on CSR institutionalisation in African countries. Drawing on institutional theory (IT), this article examines the focus and form of CSR practice of companies in Kenya. It is evident from our findings that the nature and orientation (...) of CSR differ across companies with operations only in Kenya and those headquartered abroad or with international operations. Significantly, firm-related drivers such as public relations and performance, as well as global institutional pressures explain the focus and form of CSR in Kenya. This article concludes that for the institutionalisation of CSR in Kenya, attention must be paid to conditions that stifle CSR uptake such as lack of government regulations, and the government's capacity and commitment to enforce regulation. The establishment of functional CSR institutions and a vibrant civil society that advance civil regulation ought to be encouraged. (shrink)

This study draws on Kohlberg''s Cognitive Moral Development Theory and Hofstede''s Culture Theory to examine whether cultural differences are associated with variations in ethical reasoning. Ethical reasoning levels for auditors from Australia and China are expected to be different since auditors from China and Australia are also different in terms of the cultural dimensions of long term orientation, power distance, uncertainty avoidance and individualism. The Defining Issues Tests measuring ethical reasoning P scores were distributed to auditors from Australia and China (...) including Hong Kong and The Chinese Mainland. Results show that auditors from Australia have higher ethical reasoning scores than those from China, consistent with Hofstede''s Culture Theory predictions. (shrink)

The growing global prominence of Chinese state-owned enterprises brings new dimensions to our understanding of multi-national corporations and human rights issues. This article constructs a three-level framework that enables the mapping of transnational, national, and intra-organizational human rights pressures, and uses this framework to identify and analyze the human rights that Chinese SOEs report concern with. The analysis provided suggests that while China’s most global SOEs are subject to transnational pressures to respect all human rights, such pressures appear outweighed by (...) those encouraging them to concentrate on only some human rights within their national and intra-organizational environment. The article concludes by identifying a number of ways in which our conceptual framework and empirical findings can inform future research. (shrink)

Benjamin Libet has argued that electrophysiological signs of cortical movement preparation are present before people report having made a conscious decision to move, and that these signs constitute evidence that voluntary movements are initiated unconsciously. This controversial conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the electrophysiological signs recorded by Libet, Gleason, Wright, and Pearl are associated only with preparation for movement. We tested that assumption by comparing the electrophysiological signs before a decision to move with signs present before a decision (...) not to move. There was no evidence of stronger electrophysiological signs before a decision to move than before a decision not to move, so these signs clearly are not specific to movement preparation. We conclude that Libet’s results do not provide evidence that voluntary movements are initiated unconsciously. (shrink)

From a twenty-first century partnership between bioethics and neuroscience, the modern field of neuroethics is emerging, and technologies enabling functional neuroimaging with unprecedented sensitivity have brought new ethical, social and legal issues to the forefront. Some issues, akin to those surrounding modern genetics, raise critical questions regarding prediction of disease, privacy and identity. However, with new and still-evolving insights into our neurobiology and previously unquantifiable features of profoundly personal behaviors such as social attitude, value and moral agency, the difficulty of (...) carefully and properly interpreting the relationship between brain findings and our own self-concept is unprecedented. Therefore, while the ethics of genetics provides a legitimate starting point - even a backbone - for tackling ethical issues in neuroimaging, they do not suffice. Drawing on recent neuroimaging findings and their plausible real-world applications, we argue that interpretation of neuroimaging data is a key epistemological and ethical challenge. This challenge is two-fold. First, at the scientific level, the sheer complexity of neuroscience research poses challenges for integration of knowledge and meaningful interpretation of data. Second, at the social and cultural level, we find that interpretations of imaging studies are bound by cultural and anthropological frameworks. In particular, the introduction of concepts of self and personhood in neuroimaging illustrates the interaction of interpretation levels and is a major reason why ethical reflection on genetics will only partially help settle neuroethical issues. Indeed, ethical interpretation of such findings will necessitate not only traditional bioethical input but also a wider perspective on the construction of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

This article explores how the shift from print to electronic calendars materializes and exacerbates a distinctively quantitative, “spreadsheet” orientation to time. Drawing on interviews with engineers, I argue that calendaring systems are emblematic of a larger design rationale in Silicon Valley to mechanize human thought and action in order to make them more efficient and reliable. The belief that technology can be profitably employed to control and manage time has a long history and continues to animate contemporary sociotechnical imaginaries of (...) what automation will deliver. In the current moment we live in the age of the algorithm and machine learning, so it is no wonder, then, that the contemporary design of digital calendars is driven by a vision of intelligent time management. As I go on to show in the second part of the article, this vision is increasingly realized in the form of intelligent digital assistants whose tracking capacities and behavioral algorithms aim to solve life’s existential problem—how best to organize the time of our lives. This article contributes to STS scholarship on the role of technological artifacts in generating new temporalities that shape people’s perception of time, how they act in the world, and how they understand themselves. (shrink)

The idea that our conscious decisions determine our actions has been challenged by a report suggesting that the brain starts to prepare for a movement before the person concerned has consciously decided to move . Libet et al. claimed that their results show that our actions are not consciously initiated. The current article describes two experiments in which we attempted to replicate Libet et al.'s comparison of participants' movement-related brain activity with the reported times of their decisions to move and (...) also the reported times of their decisions of which hand to move. We also looked at the distribution of participants' reports over time to evaluate an alternative explanation of Libet et al.'s results. Although the Readiness Potential was usually present before all of the decisions to move, consistent with the findings of Keller and Heckhausen and Libet et al. , we found that many reported decision times were before the onset of the Lateralized Readiness Potential, which measures hand-specific movement preparation. The latter finding is consistent with the conclusion that the LRP always started after the conscious decision to move. We conclude that even though activity related to movement anticipation may be present before a conscious decision to move, the cortical preparation necessary for the movement to happen immediately may not start until after the conscious decision to move. (shrink)

Recent advances in the brain sciences have dramatically improved our understanding of brain function. As we find out more and more about what makes us tick, we must stop and consider the ethical implications of this new found knowledge. This ground-breaking book on the emerging field of neuroethics answers many pertinent questions, such as: What makes monitoring and manipulating the human brain so ethically challenging? Will having a new biology of the brain through imaging make us less responsible for our (...) behavior and lose our free will? Should certain brain scan studies be disallowed on the basis of moral grounds? A distinguished group of contributors from a wide range of fields make this an invaluable introduction to neuroethics. (shrink)