This article addresses the relationship between the ethics underpinning leadership and change. It examines the developments in leadership and change over the last three decades and their ethical implications. It adopts a consequentialist perspective on ethics and uses this to explore different approaches to leadership and change. In particular, the article focuses on individual (egoistic) consequentialism and utilitarian consequentialism. The article argues that all leadership styles and all approaches to change are rooted in a set of values, some of which (...) are more likely to lead to ethical outcomes than others. It also argues that all stakeholders in an organisation have a role to play in ensuring ethical outcomes. It concludes that in order to achieve sustainable and beneficial change, those who promote and adopt particular approaches to leadership and change must provide greater ethical clarity about the approaches they are championing. (shrink)

Burns, C. R. Introduction.--Antiquity: Margalith, D. The ideal doctor as depicted in ancient Hebrew writings. Edelstein, L. The Hippocratic oath. Edelstein, L. The professional ethics of the Greek physician. Michler, M. Medical ethics in Hippocratic bone surgery. Maas, P. L., Oliver, J. H. An ancient poem on the duties of a physician.--The medieval era: Levey, M. Medical deontology in ninth century Islam. Bar-Sela, A., Hoff, H. E. Isaac Israeli's fifty admonitions of the physicians. Rosner, F. The physician's prayer attributed to (...) Moses Maimonides. MacKinney, L. C. Medical ethics and etiquette in the early middle ages, the persistence of Hippocratic ideals. Welborn, M. C. The long tradition, a study in fourteenth-century medical deontology.--The modern period: Larkey, S. V. The Hippocratic oath in Elizabethan England. Pleadwell, F. L. Samuel Sorbiere and his Advice to a young physician. Clark, G. Bernard Mandeville, M.D., and eighteenth-century ethics. Burns, C. R. Thomas Percival, medical ethics or medical jurisprudence? Burns, C. R. Reciprocity in the development of Anglo-American medical ethics, 1765-1865. Williams, T. F. Cabot, Peabody, and the care of the patient. (shrink)

I examine Bernard Lonergan's approach to the problem of evil. I look to determine whether his solution, which is based on the conjugate forms of faith, hope, and charity, and culminates in a heuristic where forgiveness plays an essential role in moving beyond the problem of evil is adequate. I examine the distinction between basic sin, moral evil, and physical evil as well as his claim that from the viewpoint of the unrestricted act of understanding the non-systematic vanishes.

Yes, this is the book that those who know Ronald de Sousa have been waiting for. Since long before his 1979 Dialogue article, there has been much interest in what de Sousa thinks about the rationality of emotions. Many promises are here fulfilled.In our traditional patriarchal philosophy, the standard view is that reason ought to be the controlling element in human nature. Commonly in this tradition, emotion is considered an opposing force—a female power allied with the irrational, and devoted to (...) dragging men from attending to the clarity and truth which are the proper objects of their devotion. In contemporary anglophone philosophy, the distinction between reason and emotion reached a certain pitch in emotivist accounts of ethics. Recently, beginning with the critique of emotivism, there have been gestures of revision to these views of how emotions are related to reason. Bernard Williams hinted at rethinking the traditional relationship when he remarked that, “the capacity for creative emotional response has the advantage of being, if not equally, at least broadly, distributed”. (shrink)

The Metaphysical Society was founded in 1869 at the instigation of James Knowles (editor of the Contemporary Review and then of the Nineteenth Century) with a view to "collect, arrange, and diffuse Knowledge (whether objective or subjective) of mental and moral phenomena" (first resolution of the Society in April 1869). The Society was a private club which gathered together a latter-day clerisy. Building on the tradition of the Cambridge Apostles, they elected talented members from across the Victorian intellectual spectrum: Bishops, (...) one Cardinal, philosophers, men of science, literary figures, and politicians. The Society included in its 62 members prominent figures such as T. H. Huxley, William Gladstone, Walter Bagehot, Henry Edward Manning, John Ruskin and Alfred Lord Tennyson. The papers they produced are key primary sources which shed new light on the ideas of their authors on the burning subjects of the day, ranging from the existence and personality of God to the nature of conscience or the existence of the soul. They are a legacy of a period when intellectuals were wondering how, and what, to believe in a time of social change, spiritual crisis, and scientific progress. The dissolution of the Society in 1880 did not diminish the value of the papers: they illustrate a tradition of private, open discussion among famous men of the most widely varying views; they offer detailed insight into the evolution of the relationships between different schools of Victorian scientific and religious thought; and they bring to light heretofore under-represented points of conflict and harmony. All 95 papers are included, accompanied by introductions and scholarly notes that set each paper into their proper context. (shrink)

The entropic state that engulfed the East Coast of Australia in the first eight months of 2020 followed thirty years of uninterrupted economic growth and 10 years of tenuous federal governments divided on the question of climate change. The twin geophysical crises of catastrophic bushfires and the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a public reckoning around our guardianship of the environment, as well as our relationship with science and indigenous knowledge. Congruent with this was the rapid transformation of both schools (...) and universities to online learning, causing the most significant rupture to the traditional ‘grammar of schooling’ for decades. This unprecedented conflation of crises has resulted in the unusual situation where education can be radically transformed, as the material conditions that usually remain latent suddenly exist. As a result, there has been an increased openness to pedagogies of potentiality, as schools and universities resist the urge to ‘return to normal’. Amongst these pedagogies, the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler is unique in its direct response to the entropic state with a counter-impulse, negantropy, which seeks to harness our technological capacity under an ethos of care and unite it with our existential purpose to flourish and thrive. This paper will consider the possibilities of Stiegler’s utopian call for action in relation to the Australian context, as schools and universities reconceptualise the sharing of knowledge and the purpose of education that seeks to rectify the gaps of the past. (shrink)

Late Tokugawa society and the crisis of community -- Before the Kojikiden : the divine age narrative in Tokugawa Japan -- Motoori Norinaga : discovering Japan -- Ueda Akinari : history and community -- Fujitani Mitsue : the poetics off community -- Tachibana Moribe : cosmology and community -- National literature, intellectual history, and the new Kokugaku -- Conclusion : imagined Japan(s).

In the mid twentieth century the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that games are indefinable; there are no common threads that link them all. "Nonsense," says the sensible Bernard Suits: "playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." The short book Suits wrote demonstrating precisely that is as playful as it is insightful, as stimulating as it is delightful. Suits not only argues that games can be meaningfully defined; he also suggests that playing games is a (...) central part of the ideal of human existence, so games belong at the heart of any vision of Utopia. Originally published in 1978, The Grasshopper is now re-issued with a new introduction by Thomas Hurka and with additional material (much of it previously unpublished) by the author, in which he expands on the ideas put forward in The Grasshopper and answers some questions that have been raised by critics. (shrink)

How I became a philosopher -- To love, to love me, to love us.

This important book charts the development of philosophical thinking about history over the past 250 years, combining extracts from key texts with new explanatory and critical discussion. The book is designed to make the work of thinkers such as Hume, Herder, Hegel, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault accessible to students with no prior knowledge of Western philosophy. An introductory section is followed by nine further chapters exploring contrasting schools of thought. The volume reveals the origins of contemporary trends in the (...) discipline and relates wider philosophical reflections to the study of history itself. It also points to connections between philosophy of history and literary and cultural theory which have developed in recent decades. (shrink)

This book offers the fullest and most sophisticated account of Gert's influential moral theory, a model first articulated in the classic work The Moral Rules: A New Rational Foundation for Morality, published in 1970. In this final revision, Gert makes clear that the moral rules are only one part of an informal system that does not provide unique answers to every moral question but does always provide a range of morally acceptable options. A new chapter on reasons includes an account (...) of what makes one reason better than another and a second new chapter is devoted to the question of justifying violations of the rules. Moral impartiality, the moral ideals, and virtue and vice, are all treated in greater detail. Throughout, Gert attempts to answer all of the challenges that his work has provoked. (shrink)

Conscious experience is one of the most difficult and thorny problems in psychological science. Its study has been neglected for many years, either because it was thought to be too difficult, or because the relevant evidence was thought to be poor. Bernard Baars suggests a way to specify empirical constraints on a theory of consciousness by contrasting well-established conscious phenomena - such as stimulus representations known to be attended, perceptual, and informative - with closely comparable unconscious ones - such (...) as stimulus representations known to be preperceptual, unattended, or habituated. Adducing data to show that consciousness is associated with a kind of global workplace in the nervous system, and that several brain structures are known to behave in accordance with his theory, Baars helps to clarify many difficult problems. (shrink)

Art plays a significant role in Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy, a major part of which may be interpreted as a proposal for the revision of religious belief. In this paper, I identify within Murdoch’s philosophical writings five distinct but related ways in which great art can assist moral/religious belief and practice: art can reveal to us “the world as we were never able so clearly to see it before”; this revelatory capacity provides us with evidence for the existence of the (...) Good, a metaphor for a transcendent reality of which God was also a symbol; art is a “hall of reflection” in which “everything under the sun can be examined and considered”; art provides us with an analogue for the way in which we should try to perceive our world; and art enables us to transcend our selfish concerns. I consider three possible objections: that Murdoch’s theory is not applicable to all forms of art; that the meaning of works of art is often ambiguous; and that there is disagreement about what constitutes a great work of art. I argue that none of these objections are decisive, and that all forms of art have at least the potential to furnish us with important tools for developing the insight required to live a moral/religious life. (shrink)

An updated and expanded successor to Culver and Gert's Philosophy in Medicine, this book integrates moral philosophy with clinical medicine to present a comprehensive summary of the theory, concepts, and lines of reasoning underlying the ...

When discussing the extinction of humanity, there does not seem to be any clear agreement about what ‘humanity’ really means. One aim of this paper is to show that it is a more slippery concept than it might at first seem. A second aim is to show the relationship between what constitutes or defines humanity and what gives it value. Often, whether and how we ought to prevent human extinction depends on what we take humanity to mean, which in turn (...) depends on what we value about humans. Finally, I will offer a definition of humanity that I argue offers a plausible account of when we might say humanity has gone extinct, and reflects what we value about humans, and relatedly, what many actually care about in terms of why we should be preserved. (shrink)

_Brill's Companion to Leo Strauss’ Writings on Classical Political Thought_ offers clear, accessible essays to assist a new generation of readers in their introduction to Strauss’ writings on the ancients, and to deepen the understanding of those familiar with his work.

Sentience is the capacity to have feelings, such as feelings of pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst, warmth, joy, comfort and excitement. It is not simply the capacity to feel pain, but feelings of pain, distress or harm, broadly understood, have a special significance for animal welfare law. Drawing on over 300 scientific studies, we evaluate the evidence of sentience in two groups of invertebrate animals: the cephalopod molluscs or, for short, cephalopods (including octopods, squid and cuttlefish) and the decapod crustaceans or, (...) for short, decapods (including crabs, lobsters and crayfish). We also evaluate the potential welfare implications of current commercial practices involving these animals. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are good reasons to limit the scope of luck egalitarianism to co‐existing people. First, I outline reasons to be sceptical about how “luck” works intergenerationally and therefore the very grounding of luck egalitarianism between non‐overlapping generations. Second, I argue that what Kasper Lippert‐Rasmussen calls the “core luck egalitarian claim” allows significant intergenerational inequality which is a problem for those who object to such inequality. Third, luck egalitarianism cannot accommodate the intuition that it might be required (...) to leave future generations better off than we are, even if it would come at no cost to ourselves. Finally, I argue that following another, broader, version of luck egalitarianism would require us to level down future generations and possibly even ourselves, which is a problem for those persuaded by the levelling‐down objection. (shrink)

This book is about feminism, its critics, and its possible directions for change. The nine chapters raise questions about theories of sexual difference, power, justice and history. A central theme concerns the prospects for combining feminist with other, non-feminist, political perspectives.

The basic principles of scientific research from the great French physiologist whose contributions in the 19th century included the discovery of vasomotor nerves; nature of curare and other poisons in human body; more.

This paper argues that T.M. Scanlon’s contractualism can provide a solution to the non-identity problem. It first argues that there is no reason not to include future people in the realm of those to whom we owe justification, but that merely possible people are not included. It then goes on to argue that a person could reasonably reject a principle that left them with a barely worth living life even though that principle caused them to exist, and that current people (...) could not justify creating people with barely worth living lives on the grounds that it caused those people to exist. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt is famous for her influential and innovative analysis of totalitarianism. However, her thinking on political systems and ideologies is far from limited to this theorization. Arendt also criti-cizes modern liberalism and its ideological framework. Indeed, Arendt’s thought reveals many of the political consequences of world-lessness, the loss of the world in contemporary times, particularly in terms of a sense of disempowerment and the advent of a technical vision of politics. This article looks at the political effects of world-lessness, (...) exploring the emerging opposition between liberal post-politics and conservative hyper-politics. This critique of Arendt’s thought can help us better understand the issues and questions raised by liberalism. (shrink)

Si la raison moderne, declaree en son principe par Descartes comme libre affirmation personnelle de l'universel, generalise son application avec le projet rousseauiste d'une politique de la liberte, c'est dans l'ecartelement reconnu entre le volontarisme moral de celle-ci et le constat de son destin historique negatif. Depuis les deux revolutions marquees par l'heritage de Rousseau, celle, pratique, de 1789, et celle, theorique, de Kant, le developpement de la raison politique moderne est ordonne a la fondation et a la determination nouvelle (...) d'un droit essentiellement republicain. Les etudes composant le present recueil analysent les divers aspects et moments d'une telle raison politique moderne, de leur socle doctrinal a leur insertion historique. On s'est interroge notamment sur la signification concrete revetue par eux dans le contexte essentiellement francais, mais egalement europeen et mondial. (shrink)

Part I. Phenomenology -- Phenomenology and the return to beginnings -- Delimitations: phenomenology and the end of metaphysics -- Part II. Sallis's Plato interpretation -- Being and logos: reading the Platonic dialogues -- Chorology: on beginning in Plato's Timaeus -- Platonic legacies -- Part III. Art/Sallis -- Stone -- Shades-of painting at the limit -- Topographies -- Part IV. Sallis and other thinkers -- The gathering of reason -- Spacings-of reason and imagination in texts of Kant, Fichte, Hegel -- Echoes: (...) after Heidegger -- Crossings: Nietzsche and the space of tragedy -- Part V. Sallis speaks directly -- Double truth -- Force of imagination: the sense of the elemental -- On translation -- The Sallis/Derrida dialogue -- Derrida's "Tense" and Sallis's The verge of philosophy. (shrink)

This paper explores what could be wrong with the fact of human extinction. I first present four reasons why we might consider human extinction to be wrong: it would prevent millions of people from being born; it would mean the loss of rational life and civilization; it would cause existing people to suffer pain or death; it would involve various psychological traumas. I argue that looking at the question from a contractualist perspective, only reasons and are admissible. I then consider (...) what implications this limitation on reasons has for the wrongfulness of various forms of human extinction. (shrink)