Crowdfunding platforms have revolutionized entrepreneurial finance, with 200 billion dollars expected to be dispersed annually to entrepreneurs and small business owners by 2020. Despite the importance of this growing phenomenon, our knowledge of the dynamics of successful lending-based prosocial crowdfunding and its implications for the business ethics literature remain limited. We use a social responsibility lens to examine whether crowdfunders on a lending-based prosocial platform lend their money based on altruistic or strategic motives. Our results indicate that the dynamics of (...) prosocial lending-based crowdfunding are somewhat consistent with traditional forms of financing. Specifically, despite a prosocial setting in nature, crowdfunders tend to act strategically, positively responding to signals of quality and low risk. Notably, we also find that projects that are high on both financial and social appeal receive the highest average amount of funding. Furthermore, language on the lender’s profile indicating ability to pay is positively related to both funding success and funding amount. Our study contributes to filling the gap in the business ethics literature about the dynamics of lending-based prosocial crowdfunding, and the strategic and altruistic ethical motives that drive lenders in such endeavors. (shrink)

Crowdfunding platforms have revolutionized entrepreneurial finance, with 200 billion dollars expected to be dispersed annually to entrepreneurs and small business owners by 2020. Despite the importance of this growing phenomenon, our knowledge of the dynamics of successful lending-based prosocial crowdfunding and its implications for the business ethics literature remain limited. We use a social responsibility lens to examine whether crowdfunders on a lending-based prosocial platform lend their money based on altruistic or strategic motives. Our results indicate that the dynamics of (...) prosocial lending-based crowdfunding are somewhat consistent with traditional forms of financing. Specifically, despite a prosocial setting in nature, crowdfunders tend to act strategically, positively responding to signals of quality and low risk. Notably, we also find that projects that are high on both financial and social appeal receive the highest average amount of funding. Furthermore, language on the lender’s profile indicating ability to pay is positively related to both funding success and funding amount. Our study contributes to filling the gap in the business ethics literature about the dynamics of lending-based prosocial crowdfunding, and the strategic and altruistic ethical motives that drive lenders in such endeavors. (shrink)

How to introduce 'politics' as a specific concept within a deconstructive style of thinking? In order to answer this question, this contribution compares Derrida with Laclau. According to the former the starting-point of a deconstructive style of thinking is différance. It links together the economic detour of homecoming and the relation to otherness. Laclau's analysis of politics as hegemonization within a situation of undecidability presupposes this notion of différance and can therefore be useful in introducing politics within a deconstructive style (...) of thinking. But there still is a major difference between Derrida and Laclau's decisionism: if différance as the relation without relation of economy and otherness cannot avoid decisions based on power in order to stabilize the social, these decisions are always marked by passivity and therefore deconstructible in the name of 'justice' that exceeds politics even if it takes place nowhere but within politics. Key Words: decisionism • . Derrida • . hegemony • . Laclau • . law. (shrink)

We have compared two different laser-induced optical light traps for their utility in moving organelles within living animal cells and walled fungal cells. The first trap employed a continuous wave neodymium-yttrium aluminum garnet laser at a wavelength of 1.06 micron. A second trap was constructed using a titanium-sapphire laser tunable from 700 to 1000 nm. With the latter trap we were able to achieve much stronger traps with less laser power and without damage to either mitochondria or spindles. Chromosomes and (...) nuclei were easily displaced, nucleoli were separated and moved far away from interphase nuclei, and Woronin bodies were removed from septa. In comparison, these manipulations were not possible with the Nd-YAG laser-induced trap. The optical force trap induced by the tunable titanium-sapphire laser should find wide application in experimental cell biology because the wavelength can be selected for maximization of force production and minimization of energy absorption which leads to unwanted cell damage. (shrink)

This article describes political discourse on domestic violence that obscures men's violence while placing the burden of responsibility on women. This perspective, which the author calls patriarchal resistance, challenges a feminist construction of the problem. Using a qualitative analysis of men's and political magazines, the author describes two main discursive strategies used in the resistance discourse: degendering the problem and gendering the blame. These strategies play a central role in resisting any attempts to situate social problems within a partiarchal framework. (...) It is argued that this is a political countermovement to the feminist constructions of domestic violence as opposed to a serious concern about women's violence and male victims. Three major implications this resistance discourse has are the normalization of intimate violence, the diversion of attention from men's responsibility and cultural and structural factors that foster violence, and the distortion of women's violence. (shrink)

Crowdfunding platforms have revolutionized entrepreneurial finance, with 200 billion dollars expected to be dispersed annually to entrepreneurs and small business owners by 2020. Despite the importance of this growing phenomenon, our knowledge of the dynamics of successful lending-based prosocial crowdfunding and its implications for the business ethics literature remain limited. We use a social responsibility lens to examine whether crowdfunders on a lending-based prosocial platform lend their money based on altruistic or strategic motives. Our results indicate that the dynamics of (...) prosocial lending-based crowdfunding are somewhat consistent with traditional forms of financing. Specifically, despite a prosocial setting in nature, crowdfunders tend to act strategically, positively responding to signals of quality and low risk. Notably, we also find that projects that are high on both financial and social appeal receive the highest average amount of funding. Furthermore, language on the lender’s profile indicating ability to pay is positively related to both funding success and funding amount. Our study contributes to filling the gap in the business ethics literature about the dynamics of lending-based prosocial crowdfunding, and the strategic and altruistic ethical motives that drive lenders in such endeavors. (shrink)

Der Band präsentiert die 21 wichtigsten Enzyklopädie- und Lexikonartikel des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts zum Themenfeld "Gedächtnis, Gedächtnislehre, Gedächtniskunst" mit Kommentaren, Übersetzungen (aus dem Lateinischen, Italienischen und Spanischen), ausführlicher Bibliographie und einem Nachwort, das das Verhältnis von frühneuzeitlicher Mnemonik und Enzyklopädik erörtert. Eröffnet wird hiermit eine mehrbändige Reihe »Documenta Mnemonica« (ca. 6 Bände), die die wichtigsten einschlägigen Zeugnisse seit der Antike bis zum Ende der Frühen Neuzeit in mehrsprachigen, kommentierten Quelleneditionen, Quellenverzeichnissen und Forschungsbibliographien dem internationalen Wissenschaftsdiskurs bequem und verläßlich zugänglich (...) macht. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

_Everyday Life and the Sacred_ offers gender sensitive interdisciplinary perspectives from the fields of feminist theology and religious studies on the everyday and the sacred. The volume aims to re-configure the current domain of religion and gender studies.

Nanotechnology, the emerging capability of human beings to observe and organize matter at the atomic level, has captured the attention of the federal government, science and engineering communities, and the general public. Some proponents are referring to nanotechnology as “the next technological revolution”. Applications projected for this new evolution in technology span a broad range from the design and fabrication of new membranes, to improved fuel cells, to sophisticated medical prosthesis techniques, to tiny intelligent machines whose impact on humankind is (...) unknowable. As with the appropriation of technological innovation generally, nanotechnology is likely to eventually bring dramatic and unpredictable new capabilities to human material existence, along with resulting ethical challenges and social changes to be reconciled. But as of yet, aside from a few simple new consumer goods, such as paint, rackets and fabric coatings, nanotechnology is undeveloped. Its social and ethical dimensions are not apparent. Even still, given the stated goals of the various nanotechnology initiatives to rearrange matter with increasing atomic precision, the impact of nanotechnology on human life and society is likely be profound. It is very difficult, however, to make accurate predictions about the future impact of nanotechnology development on humanity. At this time, the most important role for ethics analysis is to contribute to a humanitarian, conscientious approach to its development. This paper suggests that such an approach requires that attention be given to the roles of imagination, meaning-making, metaphor, myth and belief. (shrink)

This opinion paper takes aim at an error made recently by Clarivate Analytics in which it sent out an email that congratulated academics for becoming exclusive members of academia’s most cited elite, the Highly Cited Researchers. However, that email was sent out to an undisclosed number of non-HCRs, who were offered an apology shortly after, through a bulk mail, which tried to down-play the importance of the error, all the while praising the true HCRs. When Clarivate Analytics senior management was (...) contacted, the company declined to offer an indication of the number of academics who had been contacted and erroneously awarded the HCR status. We believe that this regrettable blunder, together with the opacity offered by the company, fortify the corporate attitude about the value of the journal impact factor, and what it represents, namely a marketing tool that is falsely used to equate citations with quality, worth, or influence. The continued commercialization of metrics such as the JIF is at the heart of their use to assess the “quality” of a researcher, their work, or a journal, and contributes to a great extent to driving scientific activities towards a futile endeavor. (shrink)

Dans des études diachroniques et synchroniques récentes, on constate une convergence vers l’idée que l’analyse de des fonctionnant comme article (« article-like » des, désormais desal) ne doit pas être fondée sur une relation avec les partitifs. Cette contribution reprend ce débat et montrera que les approches proposées pour contourner une analyse partitive de desal entraînent pourtant un certain nombre de défis. L’identification de ces défis nous mène à élargir notre perspective vers les partitifs nus (c’est-à-dire des structures partitives sans (...) déterminant « upstairs », p. ex. de ces N) en français, italien et néerlandais. Surtout cette dernière langue est particulièrement intéressante, vu que les partitifs nus ne s’y sont pas fossilisés. Sur la base de ces données, nous proposerons une analyse de desal comme faisant partie de la famille des partitifs nus. Cette approche partitive de desa, qui rend compte de faits synchroniques et diachroniques, s’avère théoriquement plus élégante et a une couverture empirique plus large. (shrink)

SYMPATHY IN SMITH The most wide-spread, but ill-informed, opinion about Adam Smith, based on his reputation as the founder of modern economics, makes him out to be a Social Darwinist for whom the most important form of human interaction is competition. In fact, the most important principle in Smith's moral psychology is what he calls sympathy, broadly understood as fellow feeling: the imaginative placing of ourselves in the situation of another, representing to ourselves what we would sense, think, and feel (...) were we in his or her situation. We not only conceive some idea of what the other is experiencing, but in a weaker degree also feel something like it; for to conceive or imagine that we are feeling something "excites some degree of the same emotion, in proportion to the vivacity or dulness of the conception." Mutual sympathy, a sense of a "correspondence of the sentiments of others with our own" seems to provide a distinct pleasure of its own: grief can be alleviated and mirth and joy enlivened by being sympathetically shared. Teaching, for example, would lose much of its relish, if one could not enter into and enjoy the feelings good students have in being introduced to important and exciting ideas--ideas that may no longer be that exciting in themselves for their teacher. Sympathy then, the key notion in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, provides the foundation for Smith's understanding of natural sociality: society, or association, proves to be an association in morality. (shrink)

Résumé Avec la cosmologie de la philosophie de l’organisme, Whitehead poursuit son enquête sur les principes de la connaissance naturelle, dans l’idée de faire se correspondre les données phénoménologiques directes et la physique de son temps. En prenant pour modèle le corps percevant, cette métaphysique fait des individus durables les centres d’où s’élabore la connaissance objective. Nous y gagnons sécurité et cohérence dans un monde en perpétuel devenir où les lois de la nature sont elles-mêmes contingentes. Mais le parcours génératif (...) du sens qu’étudie la partie III de Process and Reality interroge : en amont de toute ontologie, l’espace tensif dans lequel la théorie des préhensions inscrit la discussion ne relève-t-il pas plutôt de l’existence sémiotique? (shrink)

Contributors use a variety of theoretical frameworks to analyze distinct areas of Craven’s work, including ecology, auteurism, philosophy, queer studies, and trauma. Scholars of cinema studies, horror, and ecology will find this book of particular interest.

Que se passerait-il si l’on déplaçait les problèmes posés aujourd’hui sous la notion de « blasphème » en les envisageant à travers la catégorie de « l’insulte »? Cet article esquisse cet exercice, en s’appuyant, entre autres, sur les actes de parole d’Austin et sur les performatifs de Judith Butler. Ces discussions de philosophie du droit et du langage ont des implications très concrètes sur la façon dont nous pouvons ressentir et réagir aux multiples points de contact entre ce que (...) nous disons et ce que nous faisons avec des mots. Les sphères du droit, de la politique, de la socialité s’en trouvent sans doute plus profondément affectées que celle de la religion. (shrink)

This article argues that the intellectual legacy of Rousseau is at the root of the failure of 20th century egalitarian theorists such as Rawls and Dworkin to engage intellectually with feminist theorists working within the liberal tradition. Through an extended critique of Rousseau’s delineation of the relationship between liberal citizenship and the private family, it argues that the failure of such liberal theorists to take gender hierarchy seriously is a consequence of their attempt to place the private family outside the (...) sphere not only of politics, but also of justice. (shrink)

In this article I explain Machiavelli’s inverted and blasphemous usage of certain selected truths of theological and/or political discourse, by his self-imposed requirement to mock fear by treating it as the common affect of political philosophy. The laughter which flows from this mockery of philosophy also stands for the interruption of dialogue as a foundational philosophical practice.

Résumé L’usage inversé et blasphématoire que propose Machiavel de quelques vérités du discours théologique et / ou politique peut s’expliquer par la nécessité dans laquelle il se met de singer la crainte (en particulier celle du désordre), en faisant de celle-ci l’affect commun de la philosophie politique. Le rire qui découle de cette singerie de la philosophie marque aussi l’interruption du dialogue comme pratique philosophique fondatrice.

Résumé À la suite de La Sorcellerie capitaliste de Stengers et Pignarre, cet article cherche à cerner l’anéantissement de toute prise que signifie le capitalisme, en particulier par le fait de renvoyer tout discours rival dans le registre spéculatif, et de pouvoir ainsi devenir la seule réponse suivante.

Gender dysphoria in children has become a hot-button topic; however, clinical data still remain sparse on the effects of hormone therapy and transitional surgery on the physical and psychological well-being of those children. The American College of Pediatricians cites studies indicating that anywhere from 77 to 94 percent of boys and 73 to 88 percent of girls desist in GD; that is, following puberty the majority of children who experience GD will identify with their assigned biological sex. After reviewing the (...) clinical studies, this paper addresses the notion of gender from a Thomistic perspective, locating gender as a differentiation in the matter of the person flowing from the essence of the soul, resulting from the power of generation as opposed to other differences such as sight, which functions the same regardless of material differences. As a result, the paper concludes that hormone therapy cannot be morally licit for children. (shrink)

No one really knows where nanotechnology is leading, what its pursuit will mean, and how it may affect human and other forms of life. Nevertheless, its research and development are moving briskly into that unknown. It has been suggested that rapid movement towards 'who knows where' is endemic to all technological development; that its researchers pursue it for curiosity and enjoyment, without knowing the consequences, believing that their efforts will be beneficial. Further, that the enthusiasm for development comes with no (...) malicious intent but rather from simple ignorance. Contrary to that commonly held perception about the collective pursuit of technological development, there are individual research scientists and engineers who are quite willing to reflect on the meaning of their work in nanotechnology. Nanotalk is a book of conversations and explorations with thirty five such nano-research scientists and engineers who share their ideas, experiences, perceptions, and beliefs about their work, humanity, nature, change, and the future of the world with nanotechnology. Precisely because of the unknowable nature of nanotechnology research and development, conscientious foresight and ethical reflection are warranted every step of the way. Not only do nanotechnology research and development represent enormous financial commitments, but they also require a profound leap of faith regarding its possible outcomes. Using these conversations as the basis of reflection and deliberation, the author explores the possible significance of nanotechnology to humanity and how it might be pursued conscientiously and ethically. (shrink)

How do engineering educators adequately and richly introduce to young engineers the perplexing ethical issues associated with the development of new technologies? Robotics, nanotechnology, cloning, cyberintelligence, and genetic engineering, for example, each hold the potential to radically alter the fundamental nature of human life. Senior citizens in our society have a lifetime of experience adopting new technologies into their lives. Through an intergenerational dialogue, undergraduate engineers can come to appreciate and understand what technological change can really mean, both in practical (...) and ethical terms. This article explores the use of intergenerational dialogue as a learning tool, with a focus on the experience of students enrolled in a required engineering ethics course. Reactions and thoughts recounted in this article from both undergraduate engineers and senior citizens signify the immeasurable educational value of intergenerational exploration and its effectiveness in examining the ethical questions connected to the development of new technologies. (shrink)

By way of introduction, Thomas Berns reveals the thrust of a work which seeks to think conflict as something that must be sustained. Sustaining it means not only inscribing the order represented by the law within the disorder of conflict, but also establishing war as the permanent horizon of peace. That is, law is established only as violence, and can only be thought as permanently vulnerable to corruption. In short, this is precisely that with which a politics centred on sovereignty (...) breaks. (shrink)

This paper introduces the Eight Dimensional Methodology for Innovative Thinking (the Eight Dimensional Methodology), for innovative problem solving, as a unified approach to case analysis that builds on comprehensive problem solving knowledge from industry, business, marketing, math, science, engineering, technology, arts, and daily life. It is designed to stimulate innovation by quickly generating unique “out of the box” unexpected and high quality solutions. It gives new insights and thinking strategies to solve everyday problems faced in the workplace, by helping decision (...) makers to see otherwise obscure alternatives and solutions. Daniel Raviv, the engineer who developed the Eight Dimensional Methodology, and paper co-author, technology ethicist Rosalyn Berne, suggest that this tool can be especially useful in identifying solutions and alternatives for particular problems of engineering, and for the ethical challenges which arise with them. First, the Eight Dimensional Methodology helps to elucidate how what may appear to be a basic engineering problem also has ethical dimensions. In addition, it offers to the engineer a methodology for penetrating and seeing new dimensions of those problems. (shrink)

Prosocial crowdfunding was originally conceived as a financial mechanism to assist vulnerable unbanked populations, typically excluded from formal financial markets. It subsequently grew into a billion-dollar scheme in the multi-billion-dollar crowdfunding industry. However, recent evidence claims prosocial crowdfunding may be shifting away from its goal to support the poor and underserved. Drawing on a composite social responsibility and framing theory framework, we examine the role that vulnerability plays in successfully raising funds in a prosocial crowdfunding context. We conduct multilevel logistic (...) regressions on a sample of microloans allocated to 105,727 ventures in 64 countries. Our results indicate that applying for funds through a field partner which caters to vulnerable populations may in fact have a negative effect on the entrepreneur’s request to be fully funded. Notwithstanding, framing the entrepreneur as being female or rural as key characteristics of individual vulnerability increases the project’s likelihood to be fully funded. This conflict offers noteworthy theoretical and practical implications for ethics in prosocial crowdfunding, an understudied field of research. (shrink)