Can we have objective knowledge of the world? Can we understand what is morally right or wrong? Yes, to some extent. This is the answer given by Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl. Both rejected David Hume s skeptical account of what we can hope to understand. But they held his empirical method in high regard, inquiring into the way we perceive and emotionally experience the world, into the nature and function of human empathy and sympathy and the role of the (...) imagination in processes of intersubjective understanding. The challenge is to overcome the natural constraints of perceptual and emotional experience and reach an agreement that is informed by the facts in the world and the nature of morality. This collection of philosophical essays addresses an audience of Smith- and Husserl scholars as well as everybody interested in theories of objective knowledge and proper morality which are informed by the way we perceive and think and communicate.". (shrink)

This paper presents a review of studies that were aimed at determining which brain regions are recruited during visual self-recognition, with a particular focus on self-face recognition. A complex bilateral network, involving frontal, parietal and occipital areas, appears to be associated with self-face recognition, with a particularly high implication of the right hemisphere. Results indicate that it remains difficult to determine which specific cognitive operation is reflected by each recruited brain area, in part due to the variability of used control (...) stimuli and experimental tasks. A synthesis of the interpretations provided by previous studies is presented. The relevance of using self-recognition as an indicator of self-awareness is discussed. We argue that a major aim of future research in the field should be to identify more clearly the cognitive operations induced by the perception of the self-face, and search for dissociations between neural correlates and cognitive components. (shrink)

In France, some institutions seem to call for the engineer’s sense of social responsibility. However, this call is scarcely heard. Still, engineering students have been given the opportunity to gain a general education through courses in literature, law, economics, since the nineteenth century. But, such courses have long been offered only in the top ranked engineering schools. In this paper, we intend to show that the wish to increase engineering students’ social responsibility is an old concern. We also aim at (...) highlighting some macro social factors which shaped the answer to the call for social responsibility in the French engineering “Grandes Ecoles”. In the first part, we provide an overview of the scarce attention given to the engineering curriculum in the scholarly literature in France. In the second part, we analyse one century of discourses about the definition of the “complete engineer” and the consequent role of non technical education. In the third part, we focus on the characteristics of the corpus which has been institutionalized. Our main finding is that despite the many changes which occurred in engineering education during one century, the “other formation” remains grounded on a non academic “way of knowing”, and aims at increasing the reputation of the schools, more than enhancing engineering students’ social awareness. (shrink)

Roman B. J. Kwasniewski, a son of Polish immigrants, used his camera to document life in this neighborhood shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. The photographs in this book are representative of the Polish American experience in Milwaukee prior to World War II. Kwasniewski's photographs document this critical time when the children and grandchildren of Milwaukee's Polish immigrants established themselves fully as American citizens. The photographs in this collection depict what life was like in Kwasniewski's Lincoln Avenue/Mitchell Street (...) neighborhood. Many images such as family portraits and wedding pictures are from the time when Kwasniewski operated Park Studio between 1913 and 1947. Kwasniewski also took his camera out into the community to capture scenes of life on the streets, local businesses, homes, classrooms, and cultural, social, and recreational activities. With an introduction by well-known Milwaukee historian John Gurda, this book provides a visual picture of the growth of Milwaukee's second largest ethnic group and the distinctive community that developed on Milwaukee's South Side. (shrink)

Dans cet article, Christelle Taraud revient sur trente ans d’histoire des femmes, du genre et des sexualités au Maghreb à l’époque coloniale. Mettant l’accent sur l’apport fondamental des gender, subaltern & colonial studies, l’article vise aussi à faire un bilan critique des avancées, et au contraire des absences et résistances dans un champ qui, au moins depuis les années 1970, est en voie de constitution. Au cœur de l’article, cinq grandes thématiques – colonisation, peuplement et femmes européennes ; femmes (...) européennes et femmes « indigènes » : une rencontre coloniale? ; l’orientalisme recontextualisé ; sexualités en situation coloniale ; et femmes, hommes et guerre en contexte colonial – permettent d’avoir une vision claire, quoique non exhaustive, de la production historiographique des années 1980-2010. (shrink)

Labor unions are key stakeholders in the field of corporate social responsibility but researchers have paid surprisingly little attention to their CSR strategies. This article extends stakeholder theory by treating unions as having stakeholders that influence their CSR strategies. Drawing on qualitative data from a longitudinal study on selected unions in France between 2006 and 2013, this paper analyzes the underlying reasons for the differences in their approaches. It finds connections between the unions’ CSR strategy, and the perception of and (...) cooperation with stakeholders. (shrink)

This article presents the ethical issues of the professional practice of engineers.

In this paper, we compare and contrast institutional theory and convention theory on the concept of mimetism, suggesting how they can cross-pollinate each other and more specifically how the self-referential quality of collective beliefs improves the understanding of mimetic isomorphism. We test this proposition with the case of responsible investment’s mainstreaming.First level results decompose the history of RI into five successive periods. A content analysis of articles on RI in the financial press leads to second level results consisting in a (...) number of salient representations of RI, which we consider to be the dominant conventions. The data is structured using a bracketing strategy, which allows a longitudinal analysis of conventions and their evolution over the five RI periods. (shrink)

Il était sans doute audacieux de choisir une notion aussi peu stabilisée d’un point de vue théorique (en même temps qu’assise sur un véritable usage pédagogique) que celle de registre pour donner son unité à un volume de Mélanges. Les contributeurs ont, cependant, volontiers relevé le défi, et l’ouvrage représente de ce fait l’espace d’une vraie confrontation théorique, dont le lieu commun serait constitué par l’article d’Alain Viala (« Des registres », Pratiques, n°109-110, 2001). Ainsi soup..

The pervasiveness of domestic employment in the South African context gives rise to the question as to why women not only enter into, but remain in, such an undervalued work situation, and whether they are ultimately able to exit this sector. Contextualising the sectoral engagement of domestic workers as a transitional work-life cycle characterised by impoverishment, limited alternatives, acceptance of the work context, and future directedness, with individual transition through these phases determined by a unique set of circumstances, female domestic (...) workers’ lived experience of their work-life cycle was explored within the framework of an interpretivist research design. Non-probability respondent-driven self-sampling was employed to select 20 participants, most of whom were representative of families with a long history of sectoral involvement, particularly along the female line. Dense, non-numerical data was generated through in-depth interviewing. Inductive data explication was conducted with the aid of MAXQDA. The findings confirmed the existence of an institutionalised culture of engagement within the sector perpetuated from one generation to the next. Hardship and an urgent need for survival leave many with little option but to enter and remain within the sector. Despite negative societal perceptions of the sector, those within it take pride in their work and view their engagement as an enabling tool to better their future prospects and those of their families. Attempts to exit the sector are unsuccessful due, in part, to a limited formal education and skills repertoire. Domestic workers are thus entrapped within a never-ending cycle of sectoral engagement, with the possibility of exiting the sector remaining merely a dream for many. (shrink)

According to Adam Smith, the acquisition of moral conscience is an essential part of a person’s moral education. I argue that moral conscience as conceived by Smith enables a person to intentionally take the role of an impartial spectator. I trace the process of moral education from the child in its family, to interaction with peers to learning and then to a self-evaluation, learning to become one’s own spectator and judge. This is a move from uncritical trust to external guidance (...) to acquiring the faculty of conscience. Smith recommends most people to rely on the ‘common rules of morality’ rather than on sympathetic processes alone. But such reliance represents merely a second best procedure for reaching a properly impartial moral judgment. While the ‘wise and virtuous’ may well improve on the impartiality of the ‘common rules of morality’, even their moral judgments will never be perfectly impartial or certain beyond doubt. (shrink)

Die Theorie der ethischen Gefühle erfährt seit einigen Jahren zunehmende Beachtung, die den bisher vornehmlich als Nationalökonomen bekannten Adam Smith als eigenständigen Moralphilosophen würdigt. Die vielfältigen Perspektiven, aus denen seine Theorie heute besonderes Interesse verdient, dokumentiert der vorliegende Band mit Beiträgen namhafter Moralphilosophen und Adam Smith-Forscher.

I will demonstrate how religious change repeatedly confronts the sociology of religion with new problems of interpretation and explanation. In the first part, I will take a closer look at these problems at a macro sociological level. In doing so, I will provide a brief historical outline and link this to the respective problems of interpretation and explanation. This historical development allows us to discuss the various explanatory models. In the second part, I will take a different perspective and switch (...) to the micro sociological level. I will show how responding to the question of meaning is still possible in secular societies, where the answers handed down by religious traditions are no longer accepted as a matter of course. In this part, I will take up the problems of explanation previously outlined and trace in particular the transformation of church-based religion into subjective forms of religiosity. My paper focuses on the following questions: How are social developments and religious change interwoven? How do theories in the sociology of religion explain religious change? What does social modernization and functional differentiation mean for the individual? What effects does modernity have on religion and in particular on the religiosity of individuals? (shrink)

_Les philosophes face au vice, de Socrate à Augustin_ explore la manière dont les philosophes de l’Antiquité ont tracé une cartographie des vices, analysé leurs causes et leurs effets, et se sont interrogés sur leurs usages. _Les philosophes face au vice, de Socrate à Augustin_ explores how ancient philosophers described the vices, delineated their various kinds, accounted for their causes and effects, and reflected on how to use them.

In der 1970 gegründeten Reihe erscheinen Arbeiten, die philosophiehistorische Studien mit einem systematischen Ansatz oder systematische Studien mit philosophiehistorischen Rekonstruktionen verbinden. Neben deutschsprachigen werden auch englischsprachige Monographien veröffentlicht. Gründungsherausgeber sind: Erhard Scheibe, Günther Patzig und Wolfgang Wieland. Von 1990 bis 2007 wurde die Reihe von Jürgen Mittelstraß mitherausgegeben.

Face à l’oubli relatif dans lequel est tombée aujourd’hui la pensée des économistes germanophones du XIXe siècle qui ont critiqué l’économie classique, ce livre fait le pari de « réparer l’oubli » en resituant leurs idées dans leur contexte historique. Comme le rappelle l’auteur, le point commun des économistes étudiés dans l’ouvrage ne réside pas dans l’unité de leurs positions, mais seulement dans leur opposition au classicisme. L’intérêt de cet ouvrage, au-delà du simple exposé concernant ..