This study aims at developing a theoretical model for workplace bullying using René Girard’s scapegoating framework. Despite the wide range of labels and related constructs present in workplace bullying literature, the explanation of the phenomenon is often studied under theoretical frameworks that do not always capture the nature of the concept. Indeed, the need to find instruments and tools to reduce or solve workplace bullying overshadowed conceptual and theoretical matters, leaving the concept undertheorized. By broadening the spectrum of social sciences (...) beyond managerial and organizational studies, we propose to use René Girard’s scapegoating framework to shed new light on workplace bullying. The scapegoating framework allows us to understand better some collective and social dimensions of workplace bullying, catching relevant elements that characterize this phenomenon, also those that are less evident from organizational studies. In a Girardian sense, scapegoating is like a trap that every human society falls into, and many aspects of workplace bullying recall its mechanism. For Girard, a human group or society can fall into a spiral of reciprocal violence because of the mimetic desire mechanism, risking a conflict escalation: violence begets more violence, putting at risk the stability or even the existence of this group or society. Scapegoating is a way to overcome reciprocal violence by uniting against a single victim who cannot reciprocate this violence. This study also proposes a tentative way to escape this trap: positive mimesis and gift-giving. (shrink)

This paper examines how unethical behavior in the workplace occurs when management places inordinately strong emphasis on goalattainment without a corresponding emphasis on following legitimate procedures. Robert Merton's theory of sodal structure and anomie provides a foundation to discuss this argument. Key factors affecting ethical climates in work organizations are also addressed. Based on this analysis, the paper proposes strategies for developing and changing aspects of organizational culture to reduce anomie, thereby creating work climates which discourage unethical practices and provide (...) employees with mechanisms to resolve ethical conflicts in a constructive way. (shrink)

Framed within the broader theoretical context of social semiotics, we attempt to show how university students communicate using a variety of unique means, in particular social contexts. We privilege Pennycook and Otsuji’s semiotic assemblages, Jimaima and Simungala’s semiotic creativity, and the notion of semiotic economy as critical ingredients that conspire to give rise to the unique and complex coinages and innovations constituting students’ repertoires. We argue that, born out of creativity, the students’ repertoires are semiotically and economically charged discourses that (...) generate extended narratives such that more is realized with less. We show that this reality undoubtedly constitutes a multi-semiotic meaning-making endeavor that enacts and sustains students’ imagined and lived experiences in real sociocultural, historical, and political spaces in the multilingual landscapes of university campuses. (shrink)

Over the last decade or so, there has been a renewed interest in a view about properties known as quidditism. However, a review of the literature reveals that ‘quidditism’ is used to cover a range of distinct views. In this paper I explore the logical space of distinct types of quidditism. The first distinction noted is between quidditism as a thesis explicitly about property individuation and quidditism as a principle of unrestricted property recombination. The distinction recently drawn by Dustin Locke (...) between extravagant quidditism and austere quidditism is a distinction between quidditisms of the first type. It is then argued that austere quidditism may itself be further sub-divided into what I call ‘extremely austere quidditism’ and ‘moderately austere quidditism’. Moderately austere quidditism is argued to be preferable to extremely austere quidditism and further to be able to address many of the arguments leveled against quidditism in general. (shrink)

A critically important ethical issue facing the AI research community is how AI research and AI products can be responsibly conceptualised and presented to the public. A good deal of fear and concern about uncontrollable AI is now being displayed in public discourse. Public understanding of AI is being shaped in a way that may ultimately impede AI research. The public discourse as well as discourse among AI researchers leads to at least two problems: a confusion about the notion of (...) ‘autonomy’ that induces people to attribute to machines something comparable to human autonomy, and a ‘sociotechnical blindness’ that hides the essential role played by humans at every stage of the design and deployment of an AI system. Here our purpose is to develop and use a language with the aim to reframe the discourse in AI and shed light on the real issues in the discipline. (shrink)

Although both philosophers and scientists are interested in how to obtain reliable knowledge in the face of error, there is a gap between their perspectives that has been an obstacle to progress. By means of a series of exchanges between the editors and leaders from the philosophy of science, statistics and economics, this volume offers a cumulative introduction connecting problems of traditional philosophy of science to problems of inference in statistical and empirical modelling practice. Philosophers of science and scientific practitioners (...) are challenged to reevaluate the assumptions of their own theories - philosophical or methodological. Practitioners may better appreciate the foundational issues around which their questions revolve and thereby become better 'applied philosophers'. Conversely, new avenues emerge for finally solving recalcitrant philosophical problems of induction, explanation and theory testing. (shrink)

One of the chief innovations in medieval adaptations of Aristotelian psychology was the expansion of Aristotle's notion of imagination orphantasiato include a variety of distinct perceptual powers known collectively as the internal senses. Amongst medieval philosophers in the Arabic world, Avicenna offers one of the most complex and sophisticated accounts of the internal senses. Within his list of internal senses, Avicenna includes a faculty known as “estimation”, to which various functions are assigned in a wide variety of contexts. Although many (...) philosophers in the Arabic world as well as in the Latin West accepted Avicenna's positing of an estimative faculty, Avicenna's best-known critics, al-Ghazâlî and Averroes, found Avicenna's arguments in support of a distinct estimative faculty problematic. For different reasons, both Averroes and Ghazâlî raised the basic question of whether one needed to posit a distinct faculty of estimation to supplement the perceptual abilities of the other internal senses, and whether the notion of an estimative power as defined by Avicenna was internally coherent. Such criticisms suggest that the Avicennian conception of estimation is not entirely unambiguous, and that a correct understanding of Avicenna's motivations for delineating an estimative power requires a careful study of the diverse activities assigned to it throughout Avicenna's philosophical writings. (shrink)

Chapter Introduction Hobbes's political doctrine presents the unusual feature that it has given rise to an "official" interpretation, in terms of which, ...

It has long been a truism of the history of philosophy that intentionality is an invention of the medieval period, and within this standard narrative, the central place of Arabic philosophy has always been acknowledged. Yet there are many misconceptions surrounding the theories of intentionality advanced by the two main Arabic thinkers whose works were available to the West, Avicenna and Averroes. In the first part of this paper I offer an overview of the general accounts of intentionality and intentional (...) being found in the linguistic, psychological, and metaphysical writings of Avicenna and Averroes, and I trace the terminology of “intentions” to a neglected passage from Avicenna’s logic. In the second part of the paper I examine the way that Avicenna and Averroes apply their general theories of intentionality to the realm of sense perception. I offer an explanation of why Avicenna might have chosen to denominate the objects of the internal sense faculty of estimation as “intentions”, and I explore the implications of Averroes’s decision to attribute intentionality to the external senses and the media of perception. (shrink)

The basic approach to understanding shared agency has been to identify individual intentional states that are somehow “shared” by participants and that contribute to guiding and informing the actions of individual participants. But, as Michael Bratman suggests, there is a problem of stability and depth that any theory of shared agency needs to solve. Given that participants in a joint action might form shared intentions for different reasons, what binds them to one another such that they have some reason for (...) continuing to participate in the joint action in the face of conflicting reasons? This is particularly pressing in cases of joint actions that unfold over long periods of time. There are a variety of ways that the problem of stability and depth of shared intention might be addressed. We review some of those ways in section 1. We do not intend to challenge these approaches. Instead, in this article, we want to suggest that narrative is an additional, perhaps in some cases a predominant, way in which stability and depth are achieved. According to some theories, narrative plays a crucial role in the development of the self. Our suggestion is that the narratives we tell about our joint projects contribute to the development of a stable and deep “we.”. (shrink)

Idiosyncrasies of Hobbes's composition process, together with a paucity of reliable autobiographical materials and the norms of seventeenth-century manuscript production, render interpretation of his political theory particularly difficult and contentious. These difficulties are surveyed here under three headings: the process of "serial" composition, which was common in the period; the relationship between Hobbes's three political-theory texts-- the "Elements of Law, De Cive ", and "Leviathan", which is basic to defining the textual embodiment of his theory, and controversial; and his method (...) of writing. I argue that Hobbes's composition process undercut his intention to produce a deductive, logical theory of politics and opened the door to inconsistency and muddle in his arguments. (shrink)

Economists and other social scientists in this century have often supported economic arguments by referring to positions taken by philosophers of science. This important new book looks at the reliability of this practice and, in the process, provides economists, social scientists, and historians with the necessary background to discuss methodological matters with authority. Redman first presents an accurate, critical, yet neutral survey of the modern philosophy of science from the Vienna Circle to the present, focusing particularly on logical positivism, sociological (...) explanations of science (Polanyi, Fleck, Kuhn), the Popper family, and the history of science. She then deals with economic methodology in the twentieth century, looking at a wide range of methodological positions, especially those supported by positions from the philosophy of science. She considers the myth of the feasibility of falsification in economics and, within the context of its significance for economics, discusses the interpretation of Kuhn's philosophy of science as consensus and the danger such a view represents to science. Appendices review the history of the is-ought dispute and list economists whose first works deal with methodological topics. Comprehensive, readable, and accessible to those with little background knowledge, Redman's book will appeal to a wide range of social scientists and philosophers of science. (shrink)

The deontic model of justice and ethical behavior proposes that people care about justice simply for the sake of justice. This is an important consideration for business ethics because it implies that justice and ethical behavior are naturally occurring phenomena independent of system controls or individual self-interest. To date, research on the deontic model and third-party reactions to injustice has focused primarily on individuals’ tendency topunishtransgressors. This research has revealed that witnesses to injustice will consider sacrificing their own resources if (...) it is the only way to sanction an observed transgressor. In this paper we seek to extend this model by arguing that punishment may not be the only “deontic” reaction, and that in fact, third-party observers of injustice may engage in moral self-regulation that would lead them to conclude that the most ethical response is to do nothing. We provide preliminary evidence for our propositions using voiced cognitions data collected during a resource allocation task. Results indicate that deonance may be more complex than originally thought, and previous tests of the model conservative in nature. (shrink)

This essay argues for the relevance of the history of family life to the history of science, taking the example of the Exners of Vienna. The Exners were an influential case of the nineteenth‐century European phenomenon of the “scientific dynasty.” The focus here is on their collaborative research on color theory at the turn of the twentieth century. At first glance, this project looks like a reactionary strike against aesthetic innovation, a symptom of what historians assume was an unbridgeable gulf (...) between scientific reason and artistic modernism. We can better understand the Exners’ motivations by situating this research at the intersection of the family's public and private lives. The domestic context sheds light on their use of such scientific terms as “subjective,” “normal,” and “universal,” providing a more nuanced sense of what rationality really meant in fin‐de‐siècle Vienna. (shrink)

Lady Mary Shepherd argued for distinctive accounts of causation, perception, and knowledge of an external world and God. However, her work, engaging with Berkeley and Hume but written after Kant, does not fit the standard periodisation of early modern philosophy presupposed by many philosophy courses, textbooks, and conferences. This paper argues that Shepherd should be added to the canon as a Scottish philosopher. The practical reason for doing so is that it would give Shepherd a disciplinary home, opening up additional (...) possibilities for research and teaching. The philosophical reason is that her views share certain features characteristic of canonical Scottish philosophers. (shrink)

L'A. presenta un'analisi della Lettera sull'anima, in cui Avicenna affronta il tema delle idee di esseri fittizi, come la fenice, ed in particolare la permanenza di tali idee nell'anima dopo la sua separazione dal corpo. Nella parte centrale dello studio l'A. esamina il rapporto fra la risposta avicenniana al problema ed alcuni elementi dottrinali caratterizzanti il pensiero del filosofo: il tema degli universali, della quidditas, o natura comune, e la distinzione fra essenza ed esistenza.

ArgumentBetween 1878 and 1880, Switzerland, Italy, and Japan initiated the world's first national earthquake commissions, but only the Swiss made ordinary citizens a vital part of this undertaking. This paper examines the texture of communication between Swiss scientists and lay observers and traces the development of a language for seismology that was simultaneously scientific and vernacular. This is the story of an aborted dialogue between scientists and citizens about living with environmental risk, an alternative abandoned on the way to the (...) increasingly technical science of the twentieth century. (shrink)

ArgumentWhat, if anything, uniquely defines the mountain as a “laboratory of nature”? Here, this question is considered from the perspective of meteorology. Mountains played a central role in the early history of modern meteorology. The first permanent year-round high-altitude weather stations were built in the 1880s but largely fell out of use by the turn of the twentieth century, not to be revived until the 1930s. This paper considers the unlikely survival of the Sonnblick observatory in the Austrian Alps. By (...) examining the arguments of the Sonnblick's critics and defenders, it reveals a seemingly paradoxical definition of the mountain as a space that simultaneously maximized isolation and communication. Drawing on the social and environmental history of the Alps, it shows how the Sonnblick came to appear as the perfect embodiment of this paradox. (shrink)

Seventeenth-century natural-law philosophers participated in colonizing and slave-trading companies, yet they discussed slavery as an abstraction. This dispassionate approach is commonly explained with the “distance thesis” that the practice of slavery was at some remove from Northwest Europe. I contest the thesis, with a specific focus on pre-Restoration English discourse and Hobbes's political theory. By laying out the salient context — English experience of Barbary-coast slavery and an inherited neo-Roman intellectual frame — I argue, first, that slavery was hardly a (...) distant phenomenon and, second, that Hobbes's discussion of slavery expressed ideas familiar in ordinary discourse. The conclusion contrasts the English neo-Roman outlook with Spanish neo-Aristotelianism. (shrink)

One method Margaret Cavendish uses is something like inference to the best explanation, and so this may be what she mean by “regular sense and reason.” As Hobbes wrote in Leviathan: the cause of Sense, is the Externall Body, or object, which presseth the organ proper to each Sense, either immediatly, as in the Tast and Touch; or mediately, as in Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling. Before examining how Cavendish appeals to ordinary perceptual phenomena to argue that pressure model of perception (...) (PMP) is unacceptable, it will be helpful to sketch Cavendish’s own alternative theory of sense perception and how it fits into her broader natural-philosophical system. Cavendish’s texts thus support ascribing a third distinction to her, between two senses of “rational perception.” Cavendish’s alternative account of perception does agree with PMP in one respect, which is that sense perceptions are constituted by motions. The very existence of sense perceptions indicates that Hobbes’s PMP is an unacceptable theory, Cavendish argues. (shrink)

For historians of science, earthquakes may well have an air of the exotic. Often terrifying, apparently unpredictable, and arguably even more deadly today than in a pre-industrial age, they are not a phenomenon against which scientific progress is easy to gauge. Yet precisely because seismic forces seem so uncanny, even demonic, naturalizing them has been one of the most tantalizing and enduring challenges of modern science. Earthquakes have repeatedly shaken not just human edifices but the foundations of human knowledge. They (...) have been known to cast doubt on divine providence, on the predictive ability of the sciences, and on the capacity of the human mind to learn from an experience of sheer terror. Most recently, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of 2011 have forced nuclear experts around the world to confront the limits of their knowledge and the vulnerability of their best-laid plans. (shrink)

À l’aube de la Révolution française, alors que l’idée de sphère domestique et intime n’est pas finalisée, la famille est encore pensée comme une société politique : en conséquence, les bouleversements ouverts dans la sphère publique s’appliquent également à la sphère familiale. C’est le cas de la pensée de ces interruptions temporelles que sont la révolution comme rupture du contrat politique et le divorce comme rupture du contrat familial. L’article montre qu’une révolution soucieuse de stabilité a cherché, entre 1789 et (...) 1794, à instaurer et à justifier la possibilité de ces ruptures dans des contrats qui ne peuvent désormais plus tenir que sur le consentement renouvelé d’individus libres, mais s’est également montrée soucieuse d’en légiférer le cours et d’en limiter les possibles. En marge de ces processus où le temps de la rupture est contrôlé et limité par la loi, on trouve quelques individus et penseurs qui, dans un tout autre rapport au temps, se montrent soucieux d’en faire l’occasion d’une ouverture permanente des possibles. (shrink)

Cet article se pose la question de la relation « genrée » entre la visibilité sociale – définie comme la reconnaissance d’un individu (ou d’une collectivité) comme membre de la nation – et la construction de la nation elle-même. L’analyse porte sur le moment de la mise en place du Bracero Program qui, entre 1942 et 1964, a conduit des Mexicains à travailler aux États-Unis : les hommes, exclus de la nation par leur position sociale et territoriale, ont été alors, (...) au cours d’un spectacle fortement « genré », reconnus formellement par l’État mexicain qui leur a donné (l’illusion) de l’inclusion, de la reconnaissance, et des privilèges. (shrink)

Dans cet article, l’auteure, psychologue clinicienne, interroge les enjeux intersubjectifs sous-jacents aux expériences de nourrissage. Elle envisage la croissance psychique comme étant fonction de l’instauration d’une relation humaine intime et nourrissante qu’elle nomme une « relation de nourrissage ». À partir d’une séquence détaillée d’observation de bébé à domicile selon la méthode E. Bick, l’auteure considère la relation de nourrissage comme le paradigme de la rencontre intersubjective. Elle souligne l’importance du travail d’accordage dans la mise en forme et l’intégration de (...) l’expérience. Elle montre ensuite que la relation de nourrissage permet, à travers le rétablissement de l’unité symbiotique postnatale ordinaire, l’accès à une reconnaissance intersubjective individuante. Enfin, elle met en lumière le fantasme organisateur de la relation de nourrissage et le rôle central tenu par la fonction paternelle. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Descartes’ Natural Light ReconsideredDeborah Boyle1. INTRODUCTIONThe “natural light” occupies an important position in Descartes’ Third Meditation, where the meditator invokes it to provide the premises needed for his proof for the existence of a non-deceiving God. Descartes also refers to the natural light throughout his Replies to the Objections to the Meditations and in the Principles of Philosophy. Yet he says almost nothing about what the natural light is (...) supposed to be, apparently assuming that his readers already know what he means. English-speaking commentators on Descartes have said little about the natural light,1 and although French commentators have paid slightly more attention to this topic, they have nonetheless provided no detailed analysis of the concept of the natural light and the role it plays in Descartes’ Meditations.2In 1973, however, John Morris published an article entitled “Descartes’ Natural Light” in the Journal of the History of Philosophy, later reprinted in Eternal Truths and the Cartesian Circle.3 Morris argues that “the understanding can be regarded in an active and a passive sense, ”4 and that the natural light should [End Page 601] be equated with the passive function of the intellect. The natural light, he asserts, isa power of cognition, which contrasts with the “active” power of conceiving. Unlike this power, it does not form ideas, or bring them to consciousness. Instead, it simply gives a click of recognition when a true idea is brought before it.5However, the textual evidence for Morris’ interpretation of the natural light is slender, and in fact the texts support a quite different reading. I shall point out some problems with Morris’ reading, and offer the beginnings of an alternative account.2. ACTIVITY, PASSIVITY, AND THE MINDIn the Fourth Meditation, Descartes draws a distinction between two faculties of mind: intellect and will. Intellect, he says, allows him “to perceive the ideas which are subjects for possible judgements” (CSM II 39/AT VII 5),6 while the will “simply consists in our ability to do or not do something (that is, to affirm or deny, to pursue or avoid)” (CSM II 40/AT VII 57). Although he does not say so in the Fourth Meditation, Descartes suggests in two 1641 letters to Regius that the intellect is passive and the will is active; strictly speaking, he says, “understanding [intellectio] is the passivity of the mind and willing [volitio] is its activity” (CSMK III 182/AT III 372). A few months later, he writes that “we should use the term ‘action’ for what plays the role of a moving force, like volition in the mind, while we apply the term ‘passion’ to what plays the role of something moved, like intellection [intellectio] and vision in the same mind” (CSMK III 199/AT III 454–5). And in the Passions of the Soul Descartes states that while volitions are actions, “the various perceptions or modes of knowledge present in us may be called its passions, in a general sense” (CSM I 335/AT XI 342).In his early work, the Rules for the Direction of the Mind, Descartes does refer to “actions of the intellect.”7 If we do not allow for changes in Descartes’ thinking, we might assume that at the time of the Meditations, too, he would be willing to speak of “actions of the intellect.” But Descartes provides no account of the [End Page 602] will in the Rules; thus any activity he might have attributed to the mind would have to be included in the role of the intellect. In the Meditations, Descartes’ philosophy of mind has expanded to provide a place for the will, which can take over the active functions previously assigned to the intellect.John Morris’ reading of the role of the natural light in the Meditations takes as its starting point a passage in the Rules where Descartes claims that the intellect itself, the cognitive power or vis cognoscens, has both active and passive functions; it is, he says, sometimes like a seal, sometimes like wax.8 After describing the various functions of the cognitive power, Descartes concludes that “according to its different functions, then, the same power is... (shrink)

This article explores a certain type of affect that accompanied the post-1945 European dream: the feeling that an impassable distance separates us from worlds at war. Starting with the interplay between protected spaces and devastated territories, the article seeks to trace the operations that give life to this affect of distance. How does this distance play a part in our ways of being at war? And what kind of agentivity is at work, which makes it possible not to feel involved? (...) Drawing on Martha Rosler’s montages of images and a fragment of Simone Weil, the article unravels the tortuous mechanisms that allow us to be at war, while at the same time setting war apart. (shrink)

Many of the central theses of Hume's philosophy – his rejection of real relations, universals, abstract objects and necessary causal relations – had precedents in the later medieval nominalist tradition. Hume and his medieval predecessors developed complex semantic theories to show both how ontologies are apt to become inflated and how, if we understand carefully the processes by which meaning is generated, we can achieve greater ontological parsimony. Tracing a trajectory from those medieval traditions to Hume reveals Hume to be (...) more radical, particularly in his rejection of abstraction and abstract ideas. Hume's denial of general, abstract ideas is consistent with his philosophical principles but fails to appreciate the more sophisticated nominalist approaches to abstraction, the result of which is a theoretically impoverished account of our capacity for generalization. (shrink)

This study combines quantitative content and qualitative production analysis of two television news programs in Flanders to investigate the impact of a Charter of Diversity on the portrayal of ethnic minorities. Findings of interviews with news production and ethnic minority experts show the ineffectiveness of a Diversity Charter not implemented at the heart of the newsroom. It seems unable to have an impact on journalists' media literacy and social capital, on the discursive structure of the news or characteristics of the (...) production process itself – all more decisive factors in minority reporting. These findings are confirmed by the results of content analysis showing no gradual improvement of ethnic minority portrayal in a newscast produced under a Diversity Charter compared to news produced under no such Charter – both showing little changes in ethnic minority reporting. (shrink)

When Brentano introduces the notion of immanent objectivity or the intentional inexistence of objects in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, he cites Scholastic theories of intentionality and suggests that his own view is continuous with medieval and ancient theories of objective being. Very few philosophers of the middle ages used the terminology of esse objectivuum and those that did, such as Peter Aureol, do not appear to be among the primary Scholastic sources for Brentano’s theory of immanence. To a modern (...) ear moreover talk of things existing in the mind objectively is confusing. But the contrast which is important for understanding Brentano’s theory of intentionality is not that between objectivity and subjectivity as commonly understood nowadays, as if having something objectively in mind excluded its being a subjective phenomenon, but something like Descartes’s opposition between that which objectively exists and that which formally exists. Hence for Descartes, whose characterization of immanent objectivity Brentano often cited approvingly in his lectures, any two thoughts, for example, a thought about God and a thought about a horse, will have exactly the same formal reality but may differ enormously in their degree of objective being. (shrink)

There is a tension within Ockham's theory of mental language between its claim to being a semantics for conventional languages and its claim to being a model of concept acquisition and thought. In particular, the commitment to a redundancy-free mental language which serves to explain important semantic relations such as synonymy and ambiguity conflicts, _prima facie, with the possibility of opaque belief contexts. I argue that it is preferable to treat the theory of mental language as an idealized theory of (...) cognitive competence than to forfeit, as Jerry Fodor does, the commitment to conceptual parsimony. (shrink)