This paper will examine the effects of gender, age, work experience, academic status and legality on certain ethical decisions. Six scenarios representing ethical dilemmas were presented to both undergraduate and MBA students in an attempt to determine if various demographic factors influenced ethical decision making. While some past studies have suggested that gender has an important effect on ethical decision making, this study does not completely support this conclusion and suggests that age and/or length of work experience should be included (...) in any study of ethical decision making.The legality of the decisions was determined and compared to the reason given by the students for their decisions. In some cases the choice made by a majority of the students was not the one that was supported by the legal authorities which suggests that there may be conflicts between the ethical system of the respondents and the behavior expected of them by society. (shrink)

Richard Rorty's rejection of prevailing interior-mirror understandings of the presumed relationship between “minds” and “nature,” along with his promotion of nonrepresentational accounts of knowledge, truth, and science, participates in a rich tradition of jointly pragmatist and constructivist views that spans the twentieth century. This contribution to the symposium “Whatever Happened to Richard Rorty?” considers Rorty's complex and ambivalent relation to that tradition, particularly to the work of his American pragmatist predecessors, William James and John Dewey, and to subsequent pragmatist-constructivist antirepresentationalism (...) in contemporary science and technology studies (STS) and “4E” (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive) cognitive theory. A final section on Nicholas Gaskill's contribution to the symposium questions his sense of Rorty's rhetorical recklessness and suggests that his worries over relativism, in Rorty's texts and more generally, are misplaced. (shrink)

This chapter is concerned with materialistic views of the mind and the natural world in general. It examines the scientific evidence for the claim that everything within the spatiotemporal realm is physically constituted, and considers whether this evidence leaves room for any alternatives to this physicalist thesis.

This book investigates the turning point that occurred in the middle of nineteenth-century France when utopia shifted from its literary ambitions to a social-scientific concept aimed at laying the grounds for a better, fairer society. By using passions as the central focus, the author's aim is to circumscribe what he calls the utopian "afterlife" that characterizes fin de siècle France and evolved as dystopia later on in the twentieth century. Indeed, the scope of the book runs through a corpus representing (...) the nineteenth century from Romanticism to fin de siècle literature. The introduction exposes very thoroughly the contextual emergence of utopias in nineteenth-century France and seeks to position them within... (shrink)

Confusion surrounds Catholic teaching on the use of assisted nutrition and hydration, specifically the question of when, if ever, its refusal or removal is ethical. This paper focuses on two often-neglected considerations: the relationship between means and mechanism, and an assessment of proportionality of the mechanism from the patient’s perspective. The authors draw on two critical principles of Catholic moral teaching: only ordinary means are required, and proportionality is subject to the perspective of the patient, not just that of experts (...) or the culture. The mechanisms that provide food and water have distinct benefits and burdens. Their proportionality is properly subject to analysis by the patient or surrogate, who determines which mechanism is acceptable in the patient’s situation. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I have analyzed some of the problems associated with male reproduction. I discuss basic notions regarding the origin of parental rights concluding that whatever rights parents have regarding their children arise because of the biological connection between the parents and child. A biological parent has prima facie rights to his child because that parent has property-type rights to his own body. ;I suggest that parental responsibilities automatically incur whenever the conception of a child is intentional or voluntary, (...) or when conception is the result of negligent or reckless sexual activity. Only when procreation is involuntary does automatically delegating parental responsibilities to a male seem morally problematic. The category of acts which would constitute involuntary procreation, however, is very narrow. ;I discuss morally problematic issues that arise when a child is born against the wishes of the male progenitor. Focusing specifically on the issue of child support, I conclude that the father should have some responsibility for the support of the child. The only time for which the imposition of parental responsibilities upon a reluctant father is morally questionable would involve the fraudulent misrepresentation of the female regarding her use of contraceptives, combined with some affirmative action by her to undermine the male's attempted effort at contraception. ;Finally, I discuss the moral and legal implications of a woman's decision to obtain an abortion against the wishes of the potential father. I conclude that her abortion could seriously harm the male's procreation interests. But, given the vital role women have in the reproductive process, women should possess rights superior to those males might possess. The evolution of reproductive technology, however, has made these greater rights a contingent fact. (shrink)

Centered on practices of the body - human bodies, the "body politic", this book considers a fascinating and largely uncanonical group of texts, as well as public dramas, rituals, and spectacles, from multidisciplinary perspectives. These essays consider the way the human body is subjected to educational discipline, to corporate celebration, and to the production of gendered identity through the experiences of marriage and childbirth. Among the topics explored are the "theatrics of punishment", including legal mutilation; the representation of the body (...) of Christ as social ritual; adolescent misbehaviour and its treatment; and conflicting ecclesiastical and lay models of sexual behaviour. The contributors also trace the definition of "poor", "foreign", and "dissident" bodies, examining private and public issues surrounding social identities. The result is a volume that incorporates insights from history, literature, medieval studies, and critical theory, drawing from the strengths of each discipline to illuminate a relatively little-studied period. Insightful and momentous, "Bodies and disciplines" marks an important intervention in the development of cultural studies of late medieval England. (shrink)

Building on agency and resource-based view theories, this study investigates the level of environmental disclosure (ED) practices of family versus non-family firms and explores the moderating role of board gender diversity. We test our hypotheses on a 3-year (2018–2020) panel data sample comprising 324 observations of Italian small- and medium-sized enterprises traded on the Euronext Growth Milan. Findings show that, compared to non-family firms, companies with a family firm status are characterized by lower levels of ED. Gender diversity on the (...) board, however, moderates this relationship, reducing this gap, to the extent that the family firm status is associated with higher ED when the number of women directors is high enough to constitute a critical mass. We consequently contribute to the studies on family business, corporate governance, and corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

Many of Grush's arguments should apply equally to animals with small brains, for which the capacity to internally model the body and environment must be limited. The dilemma may be solved by making only very approximate predictions, or only attempting to derive a “high-level” prediction from “high-level” output. At the extreme, in either case, the “emulation” step becomes trivial.

RESUMO O presente artigo é fruto de um estudo de doutorado acerca do ethos materno em redes sociais e tem por objetivo refletir sobre a expressão "#maternidadereal, empregada em postagens de internet. À luz do conceito de heteroglossia, de Mikhail Bakhtin, essa observação partirá da ideia de interação, fenômeno basilar e constituinte nas redes sociais. Além disso, o sentido de “real” será ponderado a partir da teoria de Jacques Lacan, para delinear as diferenças entre o discurso hegemônico da maternidade tradicional, (...) de romantização, e o discurso contemporâneo e contra-hegemônico, por meio do qual a maternidade pode ser desabafada em suas dores. Por fim, para se verificar como esses discursos se cruzam na materialidade da língua, cinco posts com a tag #maternidadereal serão analisados, determinando, por meio de suas marcas, a que eixo axiológico eles se filiam. Como resultado, percebeu-se que a ideia de “real” flutua de acordo com a posição-sujeito da mãe que se apropria dela, evidenciando a heteroglossia fundamentadora desses enunciados. (shrink)

An interesting phenomenon of diffusion of borders is observed within current discussion on realism. Philosophers retreat from unequivocal positions; as the result, clarity of this discussion is impaired. This concerns as well the internal realism as some other positions, represented e.g. by van Fraassen, Feyerabend and by the Edinburgh School. The paper aims at showing that combining realistic and antirealistic theses in one philosophical position seems to be inevitable. These theses are becoming so similar that they can be interpreted in (...) realistic as well as antirealistic way, allowing their proponents to avoid inconsistencies. However, for the same reason discussion becomes somewhat pointless, and declaration "I am a scientific realist (or antirealist)" is no longer understandable. (shrink)

The topic of the paper is to be the problem of normativity within naturalised epistemology. I pose a question whether naturalism can be conducted as a normative enterprise or whether it is merely descriptive as traditional epistemologists and some naturalists maintain. The article consists of two parts. The first one is an introduction to the main theses of naturalised epistemology, and the second one presents and disputes arguments against naturalised epistemology introduced in Jonathan Knowles’ book Norms, Naturalism and Normativity. In (...) the first part of the paper I indicate main differences between traditional and naturalised epistemology, especially I analyse their answers to the most important epistemological questions: What is the source of epistemic norms? When are beliefs valuable and how to gain such beliefs? What are criteria of justified belief and knowledge? The reason of differences in solutions of these problems is rotted in a different attitude to the naturalistic fallacy taken by the two sides of the discussion. Naturalists treat this fallacy as something that cannot be avoided and this approach deeply influences their account of normativity. To justify this thesis I firstly recall the traditional meaning of “normativity” on the bases of Descartes’ epistemology, post-Cartesian internalists’ and neopositivits’ works. Secondly, I present how and why the meanings of “epistemic norm” and “justified belief” have changed within naturalism. In this part I refer to Quine’s and Goldman’s naturalism. The second part of the paper discuses Knowles’ argument that the task of delivering genuine epistemic norms by naturalism is misguided and unreachable, for norms which naturalists refer to are reducible to descriptive statements. Naturalism, therefore, cannot be normative and consequently it cannot be an epistemology. I do not agree with this statement and in the last part of the paper I present how naturalised epistemic norms could be understood as different from descriptive statements, what functions they could perform and why naturalised epistemology is not redundant. (shrink)

Körper und Seele sind grundlegende Kategorien antiker Anthropologie. Speziell mit der spätantiken Diskussion der Thematik befasste sich 2004 eine Tagung in Konstanz. Der vorliegende Sammelband legt die Ergebnisse vor und enthält Beiträge zu christlichen, gnostischen und paganen Autoren.

A mental heuristic is a shortcut (means) to a desired end. In the moral (as opposed to factual) realm, the means/end distinction is not self-evident: How do we decide whether a given moral intuition is a mere heuristic to achieve some freestanding moral principle, or instead a freestanding moral principle in its own right? I discuss Sunstein's solution to that threshold difficulty in translating “heuristics” to the moral realm.

A juxtaposition of Frege’s and Heidegger’s conceptions of reference shows them to be complementary. The thesis that meaning determines reference has been attributed to both Frege and Heidegger. Contrary to the view that this commits them to linguistic idealism, I defend a weak version of the determination thesis according to which both Fregean and Heideggerian reference allow for the possibility of error and for the objectivity of discourse. Thus, what we refer to is accessible to us only by our grasping (...) its sense of meaning; sense is a way of fixing reference, but does not constitute the referent as what it is. (shrink)

Gregory of Nyssa’s bearing in Qohelet 3:5b to wealth, rather than to the matrimonial “embrace”, is unusual by comparison withother ancient exegeses; it seems to be motivated not only by the acoluthia which characterizes his spiritual interpretation of the passage Qo. 3:2-8, but also by the crucial importance he gives to catharsis, as one the qualities he considered necessary for the exegete.

This essay uses Garland’s framework from The Culture of Control to suggest an agenda for critical penology. This includes, as well as the analysis of choices actually made and the cultural repertoire actually available, describing and advocating other possible choices, and analysing the conditions of possibility for the adoption of other (better) policies and practices; and examining the implications for the future of choices which are currently being made. Carlen’s Women and Punishment: The Struggle for Justice and Garland’s edited collection (...) Mass Imprisonment in the USA are examples of these penologies. Another way in which penologists, social theorists and philosophers can attempt to influence policy choices is to contribute to enlargement of the available cultural repertoire. The development and promotion of restorative justice is given as one example of this; another is work by philosophers such as Duff, Matravers and Norrie which addresses questions such as the source, nature and limits of penal communities; the basis of political obligation, and the relational nature of responsibility for crime. (shrink)

An exploration of the relationship between imagination and intuition and the workings of visual perception, in light of Polanyi’s epistemology, helps us to understand aesthetic seeing. The artist and contemplative learn to see anew and accordingly grasp extraordinary coherences of meaning.

Vilar, Gerard Jean-François Lyotard: Estética y políticaBarcelona: Gedisa, 160 p.ISBN 9788418525896.