The purpose of this book is to discuss a classical issue in moral theory, i.e. how the motive of duty can be properly understood. A new approach, starting from the practice of promising itself and not from general theory of goodness, is particularly helpful to understand what it means for an agent to act from duty.

In Deep Space Nine's Chief of Security Odo is one who finds his identity in his job, which is a sufficient burden to keep him plenty occupied. In a more benign laboratory than what Odo experienced, philosophical instead of exobiological, he presents an ideal case study of George Herbert Mead's theory of how the self is formed and transformed. According to Mead, language starts with meaningful gestures. When creatures act in coordination through a gesture, signaling that the gesture means the (...) same to them; it becomes language. Focused attention is one of the ways one has of influencing the clarity and extent of memories. Over the arc of Deep Space Nine's tales, all the characters change. Yet Odo goes from being a one‐dimensional to a multidimensional character by learning languages from those who start out as generalized others, but become specific others as time goes on. (shrink)

How do people detect mental dysfunction? What is the influence of cultural models of dysfunction on this detection process? The detection process as such is not usually researched as it falls between the domains of cross-cultural psychiatry and anthropological ethno-psychiatry . I provide a general model for this “missing link” between behavior and cultural models, grounded in empirical evidence for intuitive psychology. Normal adult minds entertain specific intuitive expectations about mental function and behavior, and by implication they infer that specific (...) kinds of behavior are the result of underlying dysfunction. This suggests that there is a “catalogue” of possible behaviors that trigger that intuition, hence a limited catalogue of possible symptoms that feed into culturally specific folk-understandings of mental disorder. It also suggests that some mental dysfunctions, as they do not clearly violate principles of intuitive psychology, are “invisible” to folk-understandings. This perspective allows us to understand the cultural stability and spread of particular views of madness. It also suggests why certain types of mental disorder are invisible to folk-understandings. (shrink)

Nous sommes aujourd'hui confrontés, à travers les objets techniques comme la réalité virtuelle ou, plus quotidiennement les images des jeux vidéo, à un changement qui affecte non pas les objets de la perception mais la perception elle-même. Ce changement a un nom qui est aussi un des grands impensés de la philosophie du XXe siècle : la «perception artificielle». A travers les textes d'Edmund Husserl, Jacques Derrida et Bernard Stiegler et en s'appuyant sur des cas empruntés tant aux jeux vidéos (...) et aux dispositifs de simulation qu'au cinéma, Elsa Boyer se livre à une enquête philosophique à la fois radicale et profonde. Car c'est la perception elle-même que son artificialité l'amène à repenser, par-delà l'opposition entre le réel et l'imaginaire. Relisant Husserl après Derrida et confrontant le dernier au fantôme du premier, Elsa Boyer nous montre comment la réalité virtuelle nous oblige à (re)faire de la philosophie. (shrink)

Written from the perspective of a liberal intellectual who has spent a lifetime as a writer, editor, and college professor, The Tyranny of Virtue is a precise and nuanced insider's look at shifts in American culture--most especially in the American academy--that so many people find alarming. Part memoir and part polemic, an anatomy of important and dangerous ideas, and a cri de coeur lamenting the erosion of standard liberal values, Boyers's collection of essays is devoted to such subjects as tolerance, (...) identity, privilege, appropriation, diversity, and ableism that have turned academic life into a minefield. Why, Robert Boyers asks, are a great many liberals, people who should know better, invested in the drawing up of enemies lists and driven by the conviction that on critical issues no dispute may be tolerated? In stories, anecdotes, and character profiles, a public intellectual and longtime professor takes on those in his own progressive cohort who labor in the grip of a poisonous and illiberal fundamentalism. The end result is a finely tuned work of cultural intervention from the front lines."--Inside front book jacket flap. (shrink)

Le fait d'être humain ne procède pas uniquement de nous-mêmes, comme le fait d'être d'une culture, d'une histoire ne procède pas d'un seul autre, ou d'un seul semblable, mais de l'ensemble des autres, de tous les semblables, et plus loin encore de l'autre à venir, du dissemblable, de l'étranger, de l'autre culture, de l'autre histoire. Où et comment se pose la question de l'honneur à cet instant? N'est-ce pas à cette pliure que fait courir à l'espèce le mépris, l'incompréhension, le (...) refus de l'autre? Aujourd'hui nous devons faire face. Et savoir d'instinct, savoir sans le comprendre que la seule force, la seule valeur, la seule dignité, c'est de ne pas comprendre si comprendre nous fait renoncer à l'amour de l'autre. Voilà ce qui fonde, voilà ce qui fait la légitimité non seulement d'une existence mais de toute communauté. (shrink)

Introduction -- Authority -- Pleasure -- Reading from the life -- Fidelity -- Saving beauty -- My "others" -- Politics and the novel -- Realism -- The sublime -- Psychoanalysis -- Modernism -- Judgment.

Within anthropology, as elsewhere in the human sciences, there is a tendency to divide knowledge making into two separate poles: conceptual (theory) vs. empirical (ethnography). In Theory Can Be More than It Used to Be, Dominic Boyer, James D. Faubion, and George E. Marcus argue that we need to take a step back from the assumption that we know what theory is to investigate how theory—a matter of concepts, of analytic practice, of medium of value, of professional ideology—operates in (...) anthropology and related fields today. They have assembled a distinguished group of scholars to diagnose the state of the theory-ethnography divide in anthropology today and to explore alternative modes of analytical and pedagogical practice. Continuing the methodological insights provided in Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be, the contributors to this volume find that now is an optimal time to reflect on the status of theory in relation to ethnographic research in anthropology and kindred disciplines. Together they engage with questions such as, What passes for theory in anthropology and the human sciences today and why? What is theory's relation to ethnography? How are students trained to identify and respect anthropological theorization and how do they practice theoretical work in their later career stages? What theoretical experiments, languages, and institutions are available to the human sciences? Throughout, the editors and authors consider theory in practical terms, rather than as an amorphous set of ideas, an esoteric discourse of power, a norm of intellectual life, or an infinitely contestable canon of texts. A short editorial afterword explores alternative ethics and institutions of pedagogy and training in theory. Contributors: Andrea Ballestero, Rice University; Dominic Boyer, Rice University; Lisa Breglia, George Mason University; Jessica Marie Falcone, Kansas State University; James D. Faubion, Rice University; Kim Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Andreas Glaeser, University of Chicago; Cymene Howe, Rice University; Jamer Hunt, Parsons The New School for Design and the Institute of Design in Umea, Sweden; George E. Marcus, University of California, Irvine; Townsend Middleton, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Deepa S. Reddy, University of Houston–Clear Lake; Kaushik Sunder Rajan, University of Chicago. (shrink)

Research ethics review is a critical aspect of the research governance framework for human subjects research. This usually requires that research protocols be submitted to a research ethics committee for review and approval. This has led to very rapid developments in the domain of research ethics, as RECs proliferate all over the globe in rhyme with the explosion in human subjects research. The work of RECs has increasingly become elaborate, complex, and in many cases urgent, necessitating supporting rules and procedures (...) of operation. Guidelines for elaborating standard operating procedures for the functioning of RECs have also been proposed. The SOPs of well-placed and well-resourced RECs have tended to pay much attention to details, resulting, as a consequence, in generally long, elaborate, intricate and complex SOPs; a model that can hardly be replicated by other committees, equally under ethics review pressures, but working under much more constraining conditions in resource-destitute environments. In this paper, we looked at the content and length of SOPs from African RECs and compared them to the World Health Organization ’s guidelines as the gold standard. We also looked at the SOPs from the Ethics Review and Consultancy Committee of the Cameroon Bioethics Initiative that we elaborated in a simplified way in 2013, and compared them to the WHO’s guidelines and to the other SOPs. Sixteen SOPs from 14 African countries were collected from various sources. Their average length was of 30 pages. By comparison to the guidance of the WHO, only six of them were found acceptable with more than 70 % of the criteria from the gold standard that were fully described. Among those six, two of them were very long and detailed, while the four remaining SOPs ranged from 16 to 24 pages. The ERCC SOPs are seven pages long but maintain all that is of essence for the rigorous, efficient and timely review of protocols. We are convinced that, because of their brevity, simplicity, clarity and user-friendliness, the ERCC SOPs recommend themselves as a model template to, at least, committees similarly situated and/or circumstanced as the ERCC of the Cameroon Bioethics Initiative is. In fact, brevity, clarity, simplicity and user-friendliness are recognized values. Whatever is brief and clear is better than what is not and saves time. What is simple and user-friendly is better than what is not even though the two have the same aims because it saves both time and mental energy. And if this be true in general, it is even truer of the context and its peculiar constraints that we are addressing. (shrink)

69 Thompson-Schill, S.L. _et al. _(1997) Role of left inferior prefrontal cortex 59 Buckner, R.L. _et al. _(1996) Functional anatomic studies of memory in retrieval of semantic knowledge: a re-evaluation _Proc. Natl. Acad._ retrieval for auditory words and pictures _J. Neurosci. _16, 6219–6235 _Sci. U. S. A. _94, 14792–14797 60 Buckner, R.L. _et al. _(1995) Functional anatomical studies of explicit and 70 Baddeley, A. (1992) Working memory: the interface between memory implicit memory retrieval tasks _J. Neurosci. _15, 12–29 and cognition (...) _J. Cogn. Neurosci. _4, 281–288 61 Bäckman, L. _et al. _(1997) Brain activation in young and older adults 71 Petrides, M. (1994) Frontal lobes and behavior _Curr. Opin. Neurobiol._ during implicit and explicit retrieval _J. Cogn. Neurosci. _9, 378–391. (shrink)

A large amount of research in cognitive psychology is focused on memory distortions, understood as deviations from various (largely implicit) standards. Many alleged distortions actually suggest a highly functional system that balances the cost of acquiring new information with the benefit of relevant, contextually appropriate decision-making. In this sense many memories may be examples of functionally adaptive misbelief.

Eric Miller's affordable, elegant translation of Nemesis divina by Carolus Linnaeus reveals a little-known side of the great natural historian. A classic of Swedish literature that influenced luminaries such as August Strindberg, Nemesis divina was composed over years, apparently for the edification of Linnaeus's wayward son Carl. A surprising field-guide to theodicy, the book explores the occult operation of a Theologia experimentalis, an "empirical theology," in the lives of men and women. Many of these people were known to Linnaeus (...) himself. Eric Miller, an award-winning poet and scholar, set Linnaeus's fascinating and eloquent work in a broad literary and philosophical context, linking it to matters as diverse as New England Transcendentalism, the subculture of Black Metal, the Icelandic sagas and contemporary Swedish poetry. Nemesis divina will intrigue students of literature, religion, science, and philosophy alike. (shrink)

Energy humanities is a field of scholarship that, like medical humanities and digital humanities before it, overcomes traditional boundaries between the disciplines and between academic and applied research. Like its predecessors, energy humanities highlights the essential contribution that the insights and methods of the human sciences can make to areas of study and analysis once thought best left to the natural sciences. This isn't a case of the humanities simply helping their cross-campus colleagues to learn the mechanics of communication so (...) that they might better articulate their ideas. Rather, these fields of scholarship are ones that demonstrate how the scale and complexity of the issues being explored demand insights and approaches that transcend old school disciplinary boundaries. Energy Humanities : A Reader offers a carefully curated selection of the best and most influential work in energy humanities that has appeared over the past decade. To stay true to the diverse work that makes up this emergent field, selections range from anthropology and geography to philosophy, history, and cultural studies to recent energy-focused interventions in art and literature. The three readers all agree that this is an important, ground-breaking collection of work"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications Research Program at the National Human Genome Research InstituteEric M. Meslin (bio), Elizabeth J. Thomson (bio), and Joy T. Boyer (bio)Organizers of the Human Genome Project (HGP) understood from the beginning that the scientific activities of mapping and sequencing the human genome would raise ethical, legal, and social issues that would require careful attention by scientists, health care professionals, government officials, and (...) the public. The establishment of the ELSI (ethical, legal, and social implications) programs at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) and the Department of Energy (DOE) was thought to be vital to the success of the HGP in the United States. It also provided a novel approach to the simultaneous study of ethical, legal, and social issues and basic scientific issues. Eric Juengst, the first director of the ELSI program, described its origins in a previous issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (Juengst 1991). Now in its seventh year, the ELSI program has accomplished much. This article summarizes the evolution and goals of the ELSI program at NHGRI, outlines the program’s current research priorities with examples of activities within each priority area, and provides a look to the future, including the initiation of a strategic planning process.Evolution and Goals of the ELSI Research ProgramThe HGP’s “genomic” goals are unique: to map and sequence the entire human genome—some 3 billion base pairs that make up approximately 80–100,000 genes—and the genomes of related model organisms by the year 2005. This goal was particularly ambitious since, when it was proposed, the technologies for mapping and sequencing had yet to be developed. When the HGP was first established, its organizers also elaborated a set of ELSI goals, which they saw as vital to the success of the genome project. The original ELSI goals were: (1) to anticipate and address the implications of the HGP for individuals and society and (2) to examine the ELSI consequences of mapping and sequencing the human genome in order to stimulate public discussion. To meet these goals, the NHGRI created its ELSI research program in 1990. Along with mapping, sequencing, [End Page 291] and mammalian genetics, ELSI was one of four original branches in the NHGRI Division of Extramural Research that funded research in those areas. Although the individual “branches” no longer exist, the mechanisms for funding research remain much the same. While the overall goals of the program have not changed, the specific ways of achieving the goals have continued to evolve. The importance of the ELSI program lies not in the collection of a full set of data that will be valuable in and of itself, but in the value of using and interpreting this new set of information.Early on, the NHGRI described a set of somewhat more specific goals: (1) to develop a program to help understand the ethical, legal, and social implications of the human genome project and (2) to identify and define the major issues of concern and develop policy options to address them. These more specific goals have been largely met. As the most recent biennial NHGRI Progress Report notes, “a robust ELSI research and education program has been established, many of the most urgent ELSI issues have been identified, and many policy options to address these issues have been proposed” (NCHGR 1995, p. 21). Between 1990 and 1996, ELSI provided more than $32.5 million in funding through 128 research and education grants in more than 30 states and in Canada (Table 1). The ELSI research budget is unique in that when originally created, it was specifically tied to the amount of money provided for the overall NHGRI budget. The NHGRI originally devoted 3 percent of its extramural budget to fund ELSI projects, but in FY 1991, it increased the ELSI budget to 5 percent, a figure that remains today. Table 2 lists the expenditures for each fiscal year since 1990 and the cumulative expenditures to date. The ELSI research budget at NHGRI this year will be about $7 million. When other sources of funding—e.g., co-funding arrangements with other institutes and agencies and the funding of ELSI... (shrink)

"Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance" (1927) schreibt ein Stück philosophischer Problemgeschichte und geht der Frage nach, "ob und inwiefern die Gedankenbewegung des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts bei aller Mannigfaltigkeit der Problemansätze und bei aller Divergenzen der Lösungen eine in sich geschlossene Einheit bildet". Provoziert durch Burckhardts Renaissancestudie, die die Philosophie der Zeit unberücksichtigt läßt, versucht Cassirer nachzuweisen, daß auch die Renaissancephilosophie Teil einer "geistigen Gesamtbewegung" ist und eigene systematische Mittelpunkte besitzt.

"Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance" (1927) schreibt ein Stück philosophischer Problemgeschichte und geht der Frage nach, "ob und inwiefern die Gedankenbewegung des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts bei aller Mannigfaltigkeit der Problemansätze und bei aller Divergenzen der Lösungen eine in sich geschlossene Einheit bildet". Provoziert durch Burckhardts Renaissancestudie, die die Philosophie der Zeit unberücksichtigt läßt, versucht Cassirer nachzuweisen, daß auch die Renaissancephilosophie Teil einer "geistigen Gesamtbewegung" ist und eigene systematische Mittelpunkte besitzt.