The inclusion of stakeholders and knowledge systems is increasingly valued in research to address complex socio-ecological challenges around the world. Often these projects take place in cross-cultural setting where external researchers risk perpetuating historically extractive research models that not only harm local communities but damage the validity of research projects. Responsible community engagement is increasingly recognized as a practice that can improve researcher-community relationships and research quality by incorporating principles of ethics, reciprocity, and power sharing. In partnership with local community (...) leaders, researchers from a U.S. university coded 76 research articles for indicators of responsible community engagement conducted in the Samburu, Kenya community since 2000. Findings from this study suggest that most of the research in Samburu has followed extractive models. Of the 76 articles reviewed many failed to acknowledge ethical protocols, did not address relevance of the study to the local community, and did not report any indication of outreach or community change as a result of the research. While a portion of articles showed evidence of community involvement in the studies, the involvement was primarily limited to secondary roles with little to no shared decision-making power over the research process. We discuss methodological considerations for future research and steps that must be taken in order to shift the norm and practice of academic research in sites such as Samburu, Kenya. (shrink)

Alexis de Tocqueville asserted that America had no truly great literature, and that American writers merely mimicked the British and European traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This new edited collection masterfully refutes Tocqueville's monocultural myopia and reveals the distinctive role American poetry and prose have played in reflecting and passing judgment upon the core values of American democracy. The essays, profiling the work of Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Updike, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Willa Cather, (...) Walker Percy, and Tom Wolfe, reveal how America's greatest writers have acted as society's most ardent cheerleaders and its most penetrating critics. Christine Dunn Henderson's exciting new work offers literature as a portal through which to view the philosophical principles that animate America's political order and the mores which either reinforce or undermine them. (shrink)

In this work, Paula Gottlieb offers a wide-ranging overview of Aristotle's virtue ethics that puts Aristotle's doctrine of the mean at the center of discussion. She distinguishes this doctrine from a doctrine of moderation, and identifies the doctrine as one of equilibrium: just as a well-calibrated scale registers the right weight, the well-calibrated, virtuous agent responds appropriately in his circumstances. The virtues, then, are balanced dispositions . Further, they are in a mean "relative to us," where, Gottlieb argues, the specific (...) features of the agent that such relativity concerns vary according to the sort of situation that the agent faces.Against this background, the first half of Gottlieb's book examines various issues that surround Aristotle's theory of virtue. Gottlieb argues that Aristotle can appeal to the doctrine of the mean to identify and independently establish certain dispositions as virtues, even if they are not recognized as virtues in a particular cultural context. Hence, Gottlieb's account emphasizes Aristotle's "nameless" virtues, and suggests that Aristotle's theory does not simply recapitulate conventional Greek ethical beliefs. After rebutting the claim (attributed to Philippa Foot and Christine Korsgaard. (shrink)

Ethical thought is articulated around normative concepts. Standard examples of normative concepts are good, reason, right, ought, and obligatory. Theorists often treat the normative as an undifferentiated domain. Even so, it is common to distinguish between two kinds of normative concepts: evaluative or axiological concepts, such as good, and deontic concepts, such as ought. This encyclopedia entry discusses the many differences between the two kinds of concepts.

One difficulty in understanding recent debates is that not only have many terms been used to refer to weakness of will – “akrasia” and “incontinence” have often been used as synonyms of “weakness of will” – but quite different phenomena have been discussed in the literature. This is why the present entry starts with taxonomic considerations. The second section turns to the question of whether it is possible to freely and intentionally act against one’s better judgment.

Christine Battersby rethinks questions of embodiment, essence, sameness and difference, self and "other", patriarchy and power. Using analyses of Kant, Adorno, Irigaray, Butler, Kierkegaard and Deleuze, she challenges those who argue that a feminist metaphysics is a a contradiction in terms. This book explores place for a metaphysics of fluidity in the current debates concerning postmodernism, feminism and identity politics.

Willie James Jennings contends that the goal of whiteness is the creation and preservation of segregated space. For Jennings, whiteness, as well as upholding perceived notions of white normativity, is a way of being in the world, an imagined reality made real by our movement in physical space which destroys the identity-forming connections between communities and land. In this article I bring together Pope Francis’s reflections on the globalised economy in Laudato Si’ with the critiques of James H. Cone and (...) Jennings to demonstrate the horrific harm of whiteness on marginalised people groups and the land itself. To resist the building project of whiteness, therefore, requires attention to our relationship with land. At this point I turn more readily to the land of England, offering the beginnings of a theology of place given the substantial land holdings of the Church of England. I close by asking whether the Church of England can be trusted to use its land to dismantle whiteness given its troubling colonial history in relation to land use. (shrink)

Emotions often misfire. We sometimes fear innocuous things, such as spiders or mice, and we do so even if we firmly believe that they are innocuous. This is true of all of us, and not only of phobics, who can be considered to suffer from extreme manifestations of a common tendency. We also feel too little or even sometimes no fear at all with respect to very fearsome things, and we do so even if we believe that they are fearsome. (...) Indeed, instead of shunning fearsome things, we might be attracted to them. Emotions that seem more thought-involving, such as shame, guilt or jealousy, can also misfire. You can be ashamed of your big ears even though we can agree that there is nothing shameful in having big ears, and even though you judge that having big ears does not warrant shame. And of course, it is also possible to experience too little or even no shame at all with respect to something that is really shameful. Many of these cases involve a conflict between one’s emotion and one’s evaluative judgement. Emotions that are thus conflicting with judgement can be called ‘recalcitrant emotions’. The question I am interested in is whether or not recalcitrant emotions amount to emotional illusions, that is, whether or not these cases are sufficiently similar to perceptual illusions to justify the claim that they fall under the same general heading. The answer to this depends on what emotions are. For instance, the view that emotions are evaluative judgments makes it difficult to make room for the claim that emotional errors are perceptual illusions. Fearing an innocuous spider would simply amount to making the error of judging that the spider is fearsome while it is in fact innocuous. This might involve an illusion of some sort, but it certainly does not amount to anything like a perceptual illusion. In this chapter, I argue that recalcitrant emotions are a kind of perceptual illusion.. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The author argues that uploading does preserve personal identity, at least identity of a certain sort. The fact that we are assuming that computers are capable of embodying all the same type of properties necessary for personal identity means that we can make use of the equivalency thesis. There are two reasons for invoking the equivalency thesis. The first is so that we are not misled by a new form of racism: substratism. The second is that it makes directly relevant (...) an enormous amount of philosophical effort that has gone into exploring the possibility of carbonto‐ carbon transfers. He examines an alternative explanation to somaticism for why people might be reluctant to use Parfit's Teletransporter, namely, fear of the unknown. Finally, the author talks about the type/token (TT) account of personal identity and then see whether the no‐branching argument has any traction against it. (shrink)

Christine M. Korsgaard presents a compelling new view of our moral relationships to the other animals. She offers challenging answers to such questions as: Are people superior to animals, and does it matter morally if we are? Is it all right for us to eat animals, experiment on them, make them work for us, and keep them as pets?

Mark Walker argues for Skeptical-Dogmatism-the view that we should disbelieve our cherished philosophical views, such as beliefs about what makes for a good life, religious beliefs, and political beliefs. To not disbelieve one's preferred views in these contested matters is hubristic.

When Carol Gilligan (1982) first introduced the ethic of care she did so from the discipline of psychology using empirical data that questioned Kohlberg's (1981) negative assumptions about the mora...

There are reasons to be skeptical of the claim that philosophy and science are making progress toward the complete truth of the universe and our place in it. I discuss two different kinds of skeptical worries about justifying contemporary philosophical and scientific beliefs. Widespread philosophical disagreement leads to a suspicion that most philosophers are probably wrong. In science there is more agreement, but science has not justified some of its basic assumptions including the use of Occam's Razor for theory selection. (...) Worse, noetic skepticism questions whether humans even have the cognitive capacity for understanding the complete truth. We do not believe that children or apes have that capacity, so the question naturally arises within both philosophy and science as to whether we have reason to believe that adult humans are adequately equipped. Finally, I propose a scientific experiment to put this type of skepticism to the test. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage est une réédition numérique d’un livre paru au XXe siècle, désormais indisponible dans son format d’origine.

This chapter puts to rest for all of eternity the self-undermining charge against conciliationism.

This book moves away from the frameworks that have traditionally guided ethical decision-making in the Western clinical setting, towards an inclusive, non-coercive and, reflective dialogic approach to moral decision-making. Inspired in part by Jürgen Habermas's discourse theory of morality and principles of communicative action, the book offers a proportionist approach as a way of balancing out the wisdom in traditional frameworks, set in the actual reality of the clinical situation at hand. Putting this approach into practice requires having a conversation, (...) a dialogue or a discourse, with collaboration amongst all the stakeholders. The aim of the dialogue is to reach consensus in the decision, via mutual understanding of the values held by the patient and others whom they see as significant. This book aims to underscore the moral philosophical foundations for having a meaningful conversation. Life and Death Decision in the Clinical Setting is especially relevant in our contemporary era, characterised medically by an ever-increasing armamentarium of life-sustaining technology, but also by increasing multiculturalism, a multiplicity of faiths, and increasing value pluralism. (shrink)

Fast‐forward two hundred years to the opening sequence of Alien: Resurrection where United Systems Military (USM) science officers aboard the Auriga are toying with her DNA—salvaged from frozen blood samples on Fiorina 161—to try to create a cloned version of the alien queen that was growing inside her at the time of her death. The absurd is what links the two— Ripley's desire to make some sense out of her troubling existence and the fact that the world is unable to (...) offer her any such sense. French essayist, Albert Camus, repeatedly stresses this point in different, sometimes rather poetic, ways throughout his classic essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus”. Ripley‐8 has one messed‐up and confusing life. When Camus talks about philosophical suicide, he is really talking about an irrational “leap of faith”. Ripley and Call are both artificial creations living a similar sort of existence. (shrink)

This chapter offers a complete account of Aristotle’s underexplored treatment of the virtue of wittiness (eutrapelia) in Nicomachean Ethics IV.8. It addresses the following questions: (1) What, according to Aristotle, is this virtue and what is its structure? (2) How do Aristotle’s moral psychological views inform Aristotle’s account, and how might Aristotle’s discussions of other, more familiar virtues, enable us to understand wittiness better? In particular, what passions does the virtue of wittiness concern, and how might the virtue (and its (...) attendant vices) be related to the virtue of temperance (and its attendant vices)? (3) How does wittiness, as an ethical virtue, benefit its possessor? (4) How can Aristotle resolve some key tensions that his introducing a virtue of wittiness apparently generates for his ethics? In addition to exploring these questions, this chapter challenges some commonly accepted accounts of Aristotle’s views on the nature of the laughable. (shrink)

This reappraisal of the geographical aspects of philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s theories finds fresh meanings and contemporary applications in his work. The book reveals what they tell us about space and politics today, how they can interpret modern geopolitics and provide the tools to overturn the status quo.

Although storybooks are often used as pedagogical tools for conveying moral lessons to children, the ability to spontaneously extract "the moral" of a story develops relatively late. Instead, children tend to represent stories at a concrete level - one that highlights surface features and understates more abstract themes. Here we examine the role of explanation in 5- and 6-year-old children's developing ability to learn the moral of a story. Two experiments demonstrate that, relative to a control condition, prompts to explain (...) aspects of a story facilitate children's ability to override salient surface features, abstract the underlying moral, and generalize that moral to novel contexts. In some cases, generating an explanation is more effective than being explicitly told the moral of the story, as in a more traditional pedagogical exchange. These findings have implications for moral comprehension, the role of explanation in learning, and the development of abstract reasoning in early childhood. (shrink)

What do psychedelics reveal about consciousness? What impact have psychedelics had on philosophy? In this rapidly growing area of study, this is the first volume to explore the philosophy of psychedelic experience, from a range of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives. In doing so, Philosophy and Psychedelics reveals just why the place of psychedelics in our societies should not be left to medical sciences alone, as psychedelic experience opens up new perspectives on fundamental philosophical questions relating to human experience, ethics, and (...) the metaphysics of mind. Mapping a range of philosophical responses to the surge in studies into psychedelic drugs in the cognitive sciences, this go-to volume examines topics including psychedelics and the role of governance; psychedelics and mysticism; what psychedelics can tell us about dyadic thankfulness; and psychedelics as ways to gain new knowledge. Written by leading international scholars, the essays cover Western and non-Western traditions, from analytic philosophy to Zen Buddhism, and discuss a variety of hallucinogens, such as LSD, MDMA, and Ayahuasca, in order to build a much-needed bridge between the rapidly growing scientific research and the philosophy behind psychedelic experience. (shrink)

This volume examines works of the early Frankfurt School that are concerned with gender identities, institutions, and ideologies, as well as the ongoing relevance of early Frankfurt School ideas for contemporary feminist analyses of gender, sex, and sexuality.

The theory of the firm did not exist, in any serious manner, until around 1970. Only then did the current theory of the firm literature begin to emerge, based largely upon the work of Ronald Coase and to a lesser degree Frank Knight. It was work by Armen Alchian, Robert Crawford, Harold Demsetz, Michael Jensen, Benjamin Klein, William Meckling and Oliver Williamson, among others, that drove the upswing in interest in the firm among mainstream economists. This accessible book provides a (...) valuable overview of the prehistory of the firm. Spanning an impressive timeline, it delves into Antiquity, the Medieval era, the pre-classical economics period and the 19th and 20th centuries. Next, the book traces the theoretical contributions from pre-classical, classical and neoclassical economics. It will be illuminating reading for students and researchers of the history of economic thought, industrial organization, microeconomic theory and business history. (shrink)

It is with these virile words of the Martinique poet Aimé Сésaire, an expression of assurance regained, testimony to a self-confidence once stolen but then reconquered, that I would like to open my remarks.*Africa was present at the last great international philosophical meeting two years ago in Montreal. I would like here to illustrate the meaning behind this presence and to explain the reasons why we wanted to be present, in order to avoid facile misunderstandings which could have weighty consequences.

Uncovering the theoretical and creative interconnections between posthumanism and philosophies of immanence, this volume explores the influence of the philosophy of immanence on posthuman theory; the varied reworkings of immanence for the nonhuman turn; and the new pathways for critical thinking created by the combination of these monumental discourses. With the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari serving as a vibrant node of immanence, this volume maps a multiplicity of pathways from Deleuze, Guattari and their theoretical allies - including (...) Spinoza and Nietzsche - to posthuman thought. As positions that insist, respectively, on the equal yet distinct powers of mind and body (immanence) and the urgent need to dismantle human privilege and exceptionality (posthumanism), each chapter reveals concepts for rethinking established notions of being, thought, experience, and life. The authors here take examples from a range of different media, including literature and contemporary cinema, featuring films such as Enthiran/The Robot (India, 2010) and CHAPPiE (USA/Mexico, 2015), and new developments in technology and theory. In doing so, they investigate Deleuzian and Guattarian posthumanism from a variety of political and ethical frameworks and perspectives, from afro-pessimism to feminist thought, disability studies, biopolitics, and social justice. Countering the dualisms of Cartesian philosophy and flattening the hierarchies imposed by Humanism, From Deleuze and Guattari to Posthumanism launches vital interrogations of established knowledge and sparks the critical reflection necessary for life in the posthuman era. (shrink)