In light of the recent Abu Ghraib prison scandal, this paper examines various works of literature to reveal that people who have prisoners in their power tend to torment their victims. Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville’s seafaring novels reveal how the captain and his mates assume brutal, godlike powers over the common sailors; T. E. Lawrence describes how the victim’s pain can become a masochistic pleasure; Franz Kafka imagines a state of universal guilt, where the victim, an average man, (...) suffers in the grip of an elaborate torture machine; Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jacobo Timerman, both political prisoners who survived to describe their terror, and George Orwell, meditating on contemporary totalitarian regimes as he suffered the agonies of medical treatment, transform their pain into art. Such literary works provide insights into the morally ambiguous depths of punishment. Every scene of torture, based on the authors’ experience, observation and imagination, has the same context as those vividly captured in the Abu Ghraib snapshots. (shrink)

When external groups accuse a business organization of unethical practices, managers of the accused organization usually offer a communicative response to attempt to protect their organization's public image. Even though many researchers readily concur that analysis of these communicative responses is important to our understanding of business and society conflict, few investigations have focused on developing a theoretical framework for analyzing these communicative strategies used by managers. In addition, research in this area has suffered from a lack of empirical investigation. (...) In this paper we address both of these weaknesses in the existing literature. First, we explicate Impression Management Theory as an appropriate framework for studying organizational communicative responses, paying particular attention to the concept of accounts. Second, we critique previous investigations of organizational accounts and discuss the major contributions of our study. Third, we propose a coding system and content analyze the accounts offered by managers from 21 organizations that were recently the targets of consumer boycotts. Finally, we report the results of our empirical investigation and discuss ethical issues related to organizational accounts. (shrink)

David Lewis (1969) introduced sender-receiver games as a way of investigating how meaningful language might evolve from initially random signals. In this report I investigate the conditions under which Lewis signaling games evolve to perfect signaling systems under various learning dynamics. While the 2-state/2- term Lewis signaling game with basic urn learning always approaches a signaling system, I will show that with more than two states suboptimal pooling equilibria can evolve. Inhomogeneous state distributions increase the likelihood of pooling equilibria, but (...) learning strategies with negative reinforcement or certain sorts of mutation can decrease the likelihood of, and even eliminate, pooling equilibria. Both Moran and APR learning strategies (Bereby-Meyer and Erev 1998) are shown to promote successful convergence to signaling systems. A model is presented that illustrates how a language that codes state-act pairs in an order-based grammar might evolve in the context of a Lewis signaling game. The terms, grammar, and the corresponding partitions of the state space co-evolve to generate a language whose structure appears to reflect canonical natural kinds. The evolution of these apparent natural kinds, however, is entirely in service of the rewards that accompany successful distinctions between the sender and receiver. Any metaphysics grounded on the structure of a natural language that evolved in this way would track arbitrary, but pragmatically useful distinctions. (shrink)

To be a professional is to accept the obligation to sometimes participate in activities and to engage with people that one might otherwise choose to avoid. Lawyers, for example, must advocate on behalf of despicable clients, professors must teach and fairly evaluate lazy and insolent students, and physicians must minister to persons whose beliefs—and actions—run afoul of their core values. For example, at least three of the professionals who treated Robert Bower—the person who murdered 14 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue—were (...) Jewish. As the hospital president, Jeffrey Cohen—also Jewish—put it, "We're here to take care of sick people. We're not here to judge you". Professionals must behave in this... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Existence and the Good: Metaphysical Necessity in Morals and Politics by Franklin I. GamwellWilliam MeyerExistence and the Good: Metaphysical Necessity in Morals and Politics FRANKLIN I. GAMWELL Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011. 219 pp. $24.95In the current era, a few prominent philosophers have called into question the antiteleological tendencies of modern thought. For instance, Thomas Nagel argues that we should reject the antiteleology of science (...) and its “comprehensive, speculative world picture” of “reductive materialism” (Mind and Cosmos, Oxford 2012, 4). As a nontheist, Nagel proposes a “natural teleology” as a secular alternative to theism and to the nonteleology of science as a way to offer a more intelligible and holistic understanding of existence; yet he admits at one point: “Without God, it is unclear what we should aspire to harmony with” (Secular Philosophy & the Religious Temperament, Oxford 2010, 6). With less notoriety but with greater insight, Franklin Gamwell challenges not only modernity’s nonteleology but also its postmetaphysical outlook. By developing a neoclassical or process form of metaphysical theism informed by the works of Charles Hartshorne and Alfred North Whitehead, Gamwell spells out with thoughtful clarity what we should aspire to harmonize with in our individual and collective lives.Focusing on moral and political theory, Gamwell demonstrates that a coherent understanding of ethics (The Divine Good: Modern Moral Theory and the Necessity of God, HarperSanFrancisco, 1990) and politics (Democracy on Purpose: Justice and the Reality of God, Georgetown University Press, 2000) presupposes a neoclassical metaphysical teleology. Here, in Existence and the Good, he offers [End Page 228] a more concise, refined, and integrated formulation of these previous arguments as well as new engagements with important thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Jeffrey Stout.Gamwell pursues metaphysics in both a “strict” and a “broad” sense: the former refers to critical reflection on the most general characteristics of existence as such, while the latter refers to reflection on the necessary conditions of existence with understanding (17–19). Beginning with the former, he argues that metaphysics properly conceived––in terms of becoming rather than being––is a valid and essential enterprise because “something exists” is necessarily true while “nothing exists” cannot possibly be true (25). He then seeks to show that metaphysics in a broad sense includes metaphysics in the strict sense because existence with understanding necessarily presupposes a metaphysical telos. Toward this end, he engages Heidegger on the metaphysics of subjectivity (chap. 2). Whereas the later Heidegger maintains that all understandings of totality are wholly dependent upon some lifeworld, Gamwell counters that “totality is prior to meaning” because “exemplifications of subjectivity are constituted by prior or nonconscious relations to an order of actualities and possibilities” (49).In chapter 3 Gamwell explicates his neoclassical theism by arguing that the metaphysical telos must be an all-inclusive divine individual. Distinct from Hartshorne, he posits that God does not relate to the world merely in terms of an integration of all past actualities but rather “cooccupies the locus of all contemporaries.” Thus, all “worldly enactment localizes the divine” (90). Gamwell offers here a metaphysical version of incarnation: “Localization of the divine means relation to a becoming that cooccupies one’s place in the world and, therefore, means a communion unlike any other, so that God, we may say, is ‘closer than hands or feet.’ As the metaphysical individual, God is literally the one ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’” (92).Gamwell concludes by engaging Stout on the underlying necessity of metaphysics for democracy. Whereas Stout offers an “ethics without metaphysics” in the form of a “specific pragmatism,” which holds that citizens can coordinate actions on the basis of “moral norms [that] are entirely creatures of historically located social practices” (134), Gamwell maintains that democracy requires “a metaphysical pragmatism,” because “the practice of democratic discourse itself, as all human practices, implies the necessary principle or principles of morality” (146). The key distinction here is between implicit and explicit: Gamwell submits that democracy implicitly presupposes the divine metaphysical telos because that telos is rooted in the very character of reality as such. However, this does not mean that citizens must explicitly recognize or hold... (shrink)

Beneath the stylized violence and thrilling car crashes, the Mad Max films consider universal questions about the nature of human life, order and anarchy, justice and moral responsibility, society and technology, and ultimately, human redemption. In Mad Max and Philosophy, a diverse team of political scientists, historians, and philosophers investigates the underlying themes of the blockbuster movie franchise, following Max as he attempts to rebuild himself and the world. -/- This book guides you through the barren wastelands of a post-apocalyptic (...) future as you explore ethics and politics in The Wasteland, the importance of costumes and music, humankind's relationship with nature, commerce, gender, religion, madness, and more. (shrink)

Followers of Wittgenstein allegedly once held that a meaningful claim to know that p could only be made if there was some doubt about the truth of p. The correct response to this thesis involved appealing to the distinction between the semantic content of a sentence and features attaching to its use. It is inappropriate to assert a knowledge-claim unless someone in the audience has doubt about what the speaker claims to know. But this fact has nothing to do with (...) the semantic content of knowledgeascriptions; it is entirely explicable by appeal to pragmatic facts about felicitous assertion. (shrink)

Thus, Meyers provides a valuable account, not only of current medical attitudes, but also of relevant case and statute law as it stands at present.

Could space consist entirely of extended regions, without any regions shaped like points, lines, or surfaces? Peter Forrest and Frank Arntzenius have independently raised a paradox of size for space like this, drawing on a construction of Cantor’s. I present a new version of this argument and explore possible lines of response.

Richard Jeffrey is beyond dispute one of the most distinguished and influential philosophers working in the field of decision theory and the theory of knowledge. His work is distinctive in showing the interplay of epistemological concerns with probability and utility theory. Not only has he made use of standard probabilistic and decision theoretic tools to clarify concepts of evidential support and informed choice, he has also proposed significant modifications of the standard Bayesian position in order that it provide a (...) better fit with actual human experience. Probability logic is viewed not as a source of judgment but as a framework for explaining the implications of probabilistic judgments and their mutual compatability. This collection of essays spans a period of some 35 years and includes what have become some of the classic works in the literature. There is also one completely new piece, while in many instances Jeffrey includes afterthoughts on the older essays. (shrink)

The Face of the Other and the Trace of God contain essays on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and how his philosophy intersects with that of other philosophers, particularly Husserl, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Derrida. This collection is broadly divided into two parts: relations with the other, and the questions of God.

The inclusion of engineering standards in US science education standards is potentially important because of how limited engineering education for K-12 learners is, despite the ubiquity of engineering in students’ lives. However, the majority of learners experience science education throughout their compulsory schooling. If improved engineering literacy is to be achieved, then its inclusion in science curricula is perhaps the most efficient means. One significant challenge that arises, however, is in the framing of engineering relative to science by both teachers (...) and curriculum. Science and engineering are both distinct and interdependent. The nature of the contributions of science and engineering to one another has been an area of some examination in philosophy of technology and engineering, but little framing of this relationship has been conducted with K-12 science and engineering education contexts in mind. Nature of science is a critical layer of scientific understanding that has been used to explicitly support literacy in K-16 science classrooms for decades. However, engineering cannot be authentically and appropriately supported by NOS framing. There is an immediate need for discourse on the nature of engineering knowledge but not in isolation of NOS. Given the increasing inclusion of engineering in science classrooms, relationships between NOS and NOEK are in need of explication and argument. Our purpose is to promote a discussion about NOS, engineering, and the relationship between them without misrepresenting engineering as a subdomain of science or as an oversimplification of itself. (shrink)

How is women’s conception of self affected by the caregiving responsibilities traditionally assigned to them and by the personal vulnerabilities imposed on them? If institutions of male dominance profoundly influence women’s lives and minds, how can women form judgments about their own best interests and overcome oppression? Can feminist politics survive in face of the diversity of women’s experience, which is shaped by race, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, as well as by gender? Exploring such questions, leading feminist thinkers have (...) reinvigorated work on the concept of self and personal identity, as demonstrated by the discussions in this insightful volume.The concerns that animate feminist scholarship have prompted feminist philosophers to sideline the theme of individualism and to focus on the theme of intersubjectivity. In conceptualizing the self, the contributors to this volume highlight emotional bonds among people, the stories people tell one another, and the systems of categories and behavioral norms that unite and divide groups of people. Topics addressed include sexual violence and the self, the social self and autonomy, the narrative self and integrity, self-ownership and the body, forgetting yourself and your race, group membership and personal identity, grief and gender, sympathy and women’s diversity, emotion and emancipatory epistemology, and dependency and justice. This volume will be important reading for students of feminist theory, ethics, and social and political philosophy. (shrink)

This book offers a concise survey of basic probability theory from a thoroughly subjective point of view whereby probability is a mode of judgment. Written by one of the greatest figures in the field of probability theory, the book is both a summation and synthesis of a lifetime of wrestling with these problems and issues. After an introduction to basic probability theory, there are chapters on scientific hypothesis-testing, on changing your mind in response to generally uncertain observations, on expectations of (...) the values of random variables, on de Finetti's dissolution of the so-called problem of induction, and on decision theory. (shrink)

Since the introduction of radio and television news, journalism has gone through multiple transformations, but each time it has been sustained by a commitment to basic values and best practices. Journalism Ethics is a reminder, a defense and an elucidation of core journalistic values, with particular emphasis on the interplay of theory, conceptual analysis and practice. The book begins with a sophisticated model for ethical decision-making, one that connects classical theories with the central purposes of journalism. Top scholars from philosophy, (...) journalism and communications offer essays on such topics as objectivity, privacy, confidentiality, conflict of interest, the history of journalism, online journalism, and the definition of a journalist. The result is a guide to ethically sound and socially justified journalism-in whatever form that practice emerges. Journalism Ethics will appeal to students and teachers of journalism ethics, as well as journalists and practical ethicists in general. (shrink)

Meyers examines the question of personal autonomy. She observes the effects of childrearing practices and sexual biases, and reflects upon the results in women. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Few notions are more central to Aquinas’s thought than those of matter and form. Although he invokes these notions in a number of different contexts, and puts them to a number of different uses, he always assumes that in their primary or basic sense they are correlative both with each other and with the notion of a “hylomorphic compound”—that is, a compound of matter (hyle) and form (morphe). Thus, matter is an entity that can have form, form is an entity (...) that can be had by matter, and a hylomorphic compound is an entity that exists when the potentiality of some matter to have form is actualized.1 What is more, Aquinas assumes that the matter of a hylomorphic compound explains certain of its general characteristics, whereas its form explains certain of its more specific characteristics. Thus, the matter of a bronze statue explains the fact that it is bronze, whereas its form explains the fact that it is a statue. Again, the matter of a human being explains the fact that it is a material object, whereas its form explains the specific type of material object it is (namely, human). My aim in this chapter is to provide a systematic introduction to Aquinas’s primary or basic notions of matter and form. To accomplish this aim, I focus on the two main theoretical contexts in which he deploys them—namely, his theory of change and his theory of individuation. In both contexts, as we shall see, Aquinas appeals to matter and form to account for relations of sameness and difference holding between distinct individuals. (shrink)

This paper addresses a theory of intergenerational justice that we refer to as “needs-based sufficientarianism”. According to needs-based sufficientarianism, the present generation ought to enable future generations to meet their basic needs — for example, their needs for drinkable water, food and health care. Our aim is to explain and defend this theory in a programmatic way. First, we introduce what we regard as the most plausible variant of needs-based sufficientarianism. Then we argue that this variant is superior to several (...) alternative ways of thinking about intergenerational justice. In particular, we defend basic needs as the currency of intergenerational justice and sufficiency as its principle. Our arguments for these claims are neither fully comprehensive nor fully conclusive. Yet, we hope that they suffice to show that needs-based sufficientarianism is a major contender, with significant pro tanto advantages over other views. (shrink)

Bereby‐Meyer, Hayakawa, Shalvi, Corey, Costa and Keysar investigate lying for self‐serving reasons. Participants in their experiments had to report the outcome of rolling a die only known to them. They inflated their outcomes less, and thus lied less, when using a foreign language than when using their native language. The authors suggest that lying for self‐serving reasons is an automatic tendency that can be overcome by speaking in a foreign language. [71].

Jeffrey Barrett presents the most comprehensive study yet of a problem that has puzzled physicists and philosophers since the 1930s.

This book provides a systematic introduction to the debate on historical emissions and climate change, for students, researchers and policymakers.

In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the "right to die"--or to live. __The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying__, informed by Foucault's genealogy of medicine and power as well as by (...) a thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion--people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts--has become epistemologically normative for medicine. The dead body is subtly anticipated in our practices of exercising control over the suffering person, whether through technological mastery in the intensive care unit or through the impersonal, quasi-scientific assessments of psychological and spiritual "medicine." The result is a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices. Wide-ranging in its examples, from organ donation rules in the United States, to ICU medicine, to "spiritual surveys," to presidential bioethics commissions attempting to define death, and to high-profile cases such as Terri Schiavo's, __The Anticipatory Corpse__ explores the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of our care of the dying and, finally, the possibilities of change. A ground-breaking work in bioethics, this book will provoke thought and argument for all those engaged in medicine, philosophy, theology, and health policy. "With extraordinary philosophical sophistication as well as knowledge of modern medicine, Bishop argues that the body that shapes the work of modern medicine is a dead body. He defends this claim decisively with with urgency. I know of no book that is at once more challenging and informative as __The Anticipatory Corpse. __To say this book is the most important one written in the philosophy of medicine in the last twenty-five years would not do it justice. This book is destined to change the way we think and, hopefully, practice medicine." --_Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity School _ "Jeffrey Bishop carefully builds a detailed, scholarly case that medicine is shaped by its attitudes toward death. Clinicians, ethicists, medical educators, policy makers, and administrators need to understand the fraught relationship between clinical practices and death, and __The Anticipatory Corpse __is an essential text. Bishop's use of the writings of Michel Foucault is especially provocative and significant. This book is the closest we have to a genealogy of death." --_Arthur W. Frank, University of Calgary _ "Jeffrey Bishop has produced a masterful study of how the living body has been placed within medicine's metaphysics of efficient causality and within its commitment to a totalizing control of life and death, which control has only been strengthened by medicine's taking on the mantle of a bio-psycho-socio-spiritual model. This volume's treatment of medicine's care of the dying will surely be recognized as a cardinal text in the philosophy of medicine." --_H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine_. (shrink)

Eliminativists sometimes invoke evolutionary debunking arguments against ordinary object beliefs, either to help them establish object skepticism or to soften the appeal of commonsense ontology. I argue that object debunkers face a self-defeat problem: their conclusion undermines the scientific support for one of their premises, because evolutionary biology depends on our object beliefs. Using work on reductionism and multiple realizability from the philosophy of science, I argue that it will not suffice for an eliminativist debunker to simply appeal to some (...) object-free surrogate theory of evolution that results from converting any scientific proposition about some object K into a proposition about simples arranged K-wise. In the process, I examine some hazards peculiar to eliminative reductions of scientific theories, and propose a trilemma for eliminativists who attempt to recoup generality for ontologically sparse reducing theories by appealing to pluralities of simples arranged K-wise. The paper is intended to define and develop the object debunker’s self-defeat problem for further study, and to clarify some of the ways sparse and abundant ontologies interact with scientific theory. (shrink)

Over the past 25 years, no religious institution in America has done more to explore the link between the environment and spirituality than the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Now, for the first time, a selection of the finest of the Cathedral's ecological sermons appears in a single volume.

Spricht man über die Aufklärung, taucht man, wie meist in der Philosophie in eine Männerwelt, Frauen sind darin Randfiguren. In einer Zeit, als die Männer die Grundlagen der modernen Zivilisation legten, hat man Frauen eine Nebenrolle zugewiesen. Trotzdem haben Aufklärerinnen durch ihr Denken, ihr Werk und ihr Beispiel viele weitere Generationen beeinflusst. Der Titel Aufklärerinnen beschreibt Philosophinnen, Literatinnen und Wissenschaftlerinnen, die in dieser Umbruchphase etwas bewegen wollten. Mangelnder Frauenbildung, wirtschaftlicher Abhängigkeit und ehelicher Unterwerfung hatten sie den Kampf angesagt. Und das (...) in einer Zeit, die den Frauen mehr denn je ein bürgerliches Korsett aufgezwungen hat. When one speaks about the Enlightenment, one is immersed, as is usually the case in philosophy, in a man's world; women are marginal figures in it. At a time when men were laying the foundations of modern civilisation, women were assigned a supporting role. Nevertheless, women Enlightenment thinkers have influenced many more generations through their thinking, their work and their example. The title Women Enlighteners describes female philosophers, writers and scientists who wanted to make a difference during this period of upheaval. They declared war on the lack of female education, economic dependence and marital subjugation. And they did so in a time that imposed a bourgeois corset on women more than ever before. (shrink)

Theodor Geiger (1891-1952) zählt zu den vernachlässigten Klassikern der deutschen Soziologie. Realismus und Ideologiekritik bilden die Klammer für ein Opus, das von der Schichtungs-, Rechts- und Erziehungssoziologie über Fragen zur Eugenik bis hin zur Erkenntnis-, Modernitäts- und Demokratietheorie reicht. Die vorliegende Studie ist der Versuch, trotz der zahlreichen Wechselfälle in Geigers Leben eine Gesamtwürdigung seines umfangreichen und heterogenen Werkes vorzulegen. Berücksichtigt werden die zum Teil schwer zugänglichen Schriften aus dem skandinavischen Exil sowie einige bislang unveröffentlichte Arbeiten aus dem Nachlass. Dies (...) erlaubt es, wissenschaftsbiographisch aufschlussreiche Aspekte aus der Zeit der nationalsozialistischen Machtergreifung zu erhellen. Der Vergleich mit alten und neuen Klassikern macht deutlich, dass dem "Querdenker" Geiger innerhalb der frühen deutschen Soziologie eine Ausnahmerolle zukommt. So ist er zum einen Pionier einer kritischen Problem- und Wirklichkeitswissenschaft, der danach strebt, die Soziologie mit den Mitteln der empirischen Sozialforschung und der Sozialstatistik auf eine methodisch kontrollierte Grundlage zu stellen. Zugleich ist Geiger aber auch Machtkritiker, Wertnihilist und Modernist. Als Ausdruck dieser Grundposition lässt sich nicht nur die entschiedene Gegnerschaft zu Kulturkritik, Gemeinschaftsschwärmerei und der NS-Ideologie verstehen, sondern auch sein Beitrag zur Entwicklung einer "realistischen" Demokratiekonzeption. (shrink)

Epistemic Consequentialism Consequentialism is the view that, in some sense, rightness is to be understood in terms conducive to goodness. Much of the philosophical discussion concerning consequentialism has focused on moral rightness or obligation or normativity. But there is plausibly also epistemic rightness, epistemic obligation, and epistemic normativity. Epistemic rightness is often denoted with talk … Continue reading Consequentialism Epistemic →.

Epicureanism after the generation of its founders has been characterised as dogmatic, uncreative and static. But this volume brings together work from leading classicists and philosophers that demonstrates the persistent interplay in the school between historical and contemporary influences from outside the school and a commitment to the founders' authority. The interplay begins with Epicurus himself, who made arresting claims of intellectual independence, yet also admitted to taking over important ideas from predecessors, and displayed more receptivity than is usually thought (...) to those of his contemporaries. The same principles of autonomy and openness figure importantly in the three major areas of focus in these essays: theology, politics and the emotions. (shrink)