This essay was written for the 1984 General Motors Intercollegiate Business Understanding Program. It consists of three sections, each responding to a separate issue posed by General Motors. The opinions expressed are not those of the General Motors management.The first section attempts to document, through the use of Harvard Business Review articles, a shift in the notion of managerial responsibility from a narrowly focused role responsibility to a more widely focused moral responsibility.

This article analyzes the evolution of state capacity in Peru during the recent commodity boom. Peru’s economic growth happened in a context in which inclusive democratic institutions were at play for the longest period ever registered in the country and at a time when political elites decided to invest considerable resources in developing state capacity. This case illustrates how boom-led economic growth can lead to the institutional strengthening of a weak state. However, state capacity continues to be low in Peru. (...) The causal mechanism that yields such continuity differs from those entertained in classic path-dependent explanations of state capacity in Latin America. The article identifies a novel mechanism that helped reproduce the Peruvian path intertemporally. This relational mechanism suggests that state capacity remains low because of the relatively enhanced capacities of state challengers to locally fend off and contest an otherwise much stronger state apparatus. The article argues, on that basis, the need to employ a relational analysis that gauges net state strength with respect to the power acquired by relevant non-state actors who might challenge state authority across different local arenas. Classic conceptualizations of state capacity are indeed relational, but conventional applications are predominantly unilateral and, thus, misleading. Unilateral notions of state capacity are those that focus on either state efforts and investments to assert state capacity or, alternatively, on the presence of challenges that curtail the levels of actually observed state capacity. (shrink)

Here is a discussion that deals with storytelling by the teacher for the children, considering their contributions to the development of languages in the early years of lementary school. We assumed as the fact that a recovery of the first contact of children with the texts, which are normally through the oral narratives, potentiates the development of oral, reading and writing in an integrated manner. Therefore, we work with oral language and its importance is often overlooked by most schools. Understand, (...) according to Barthes, Echeverría, Sholles and Kellog, that the narratives are grown in different social groups, especially through the spoken, and is what makes the narrative form is the way to fundamentally discursive for humans formation. Furthermore, we believe, as Andaló, that work with oral narratives allow children, even before being literate, playing the stories and understand them, telling yourself with them and with the world. Most of the experiences we have in working with this approach in the public schools who teach in the towns of Candelaria and Vera Cruz , or in theoretical discussions with students in the Courses of Pedagogy -UNISC, shows that the creation of adequate space in school to playing oral stories is like a trigger mechanism for integrated learning – under the gaze of the multidimensional complexity – of speaking, reading and writing capabilities to understand how action and reflection in the world . That is, supported by authors such as Kaufman and Rodríguez, Gil Neto, Bettelheim, Busatto, Abramovich, Amarilha and Saraiva, we defended the thesis that storytelling enhances the development of oral, to training children as readers and texts producers, inserting them into living a socially desirable.Apresentamos aqui uma discussão que trata da contação de histórias pela professora e pelas crianças, considerando suas contribuições para o desenvolvimento das linguagens nas séries iniciais do Ensino Fundamental. Adotamos como pressuposto o fato de que uma valorização do primeiro contato das crianças com os textos, que normalmente se dá por meio de narrativas orais, potencializa o desenvolvimento da oralidade, leitura e escrita de forma integrada. Por isso, debatemos o trabalho com a linguagem oral e sua importância, muitas vezes negligenciada pela maioria das escolas. Compreendemos, de acordo com Barthes, Echeverría, Sholles e Kellog, que as narrativas são cultivadas nos diversos grupos sociais, specialmente através da oralidade, e é isso que faz com que a narração se constitua em uma forma discursiva básica para a formação dos seres humanos. Além disso, pensamos, conforme Andaló, que o trabalho com narrativas orais permite que as crianças, ainda antes de estarem alfabetizadas, contem e compreendam as histórias e a si mesmas, narrando-se com elas e com o mundo. A maioria das vivências que temos no trabalho com essa abordagem, seja nas escolas públicas em que lecionamos, nos municípios de Candelária e Vera Cruz , seja nos debates teóricos com alunas nos cursos de Pedagogia da Unisc, dão conta de que a criação de espaços adequados na escola para a contação de histórias constitui-se em um mecanismo desencadeador das aprendizagens integradas – sob o olhar multidimensional da complexidade – da expressão oral, da leitura e da escrita, que compreendemos como capacidades de ação e reflexão no mundo . Ou seja, respaldados em autores como Kaufman e Rodríguez, Gil Neto, Bettelheim, Busatto, Abramovich, Amarilha e Saraiva, defendemos a tese de que contar histórias potencializa tanto o desenvolvimento da oralidade quanto a formação das crianças como leitoras e produtoras de textos, inserindo-as em uma convivência social desejável. (shrink)

Growing concern has been expressed that we have entered a “post-truth” era in which each of us willfully believes whatever we choose, aided and abetted by alternative and social media that spin alternative realities for boutique consumption. A prime example of the belief in alternative realities is said to be acceptance of “conspiracy theories”—a term that is often used as a pejorative to indict claims of conspiracy that are so obviously absurd that only the unhinged could believe them. The epistemological (...) standard often involved in this indictment, however—the standard of “obvious” falsity—invites subjectivity in its application, because what is obviously false to one person can be common sense to another. This is not just a truism; considerable research suggests that people’s political beliefs, in general, and their acceptance or rejection of conspiracy theories in particular, tends in large part to be determined by partisan, ideological, and other priors. (shrink)

Victoria’s Voluntary Assisted Dying Act 2017 (Vic) became the first state law to permit VAD in Australia under limited circumstances from June 2019. Before this, many palliative care physicians relied on the doctrine of double effect (DDE) to justify the use of pain relievers for terminally ill patients that were known to hasten death. The DDE claims that there is a morally significant difference between intending evil and merely foreseeing some bad side-effect will occur as a result of one’s actions. (...) This article argues that the legacy of the DDE is promoting inequitable access to VAD in Victoria due to the assumption that death represents an “evil” for the patient and that the intentions of physicians providing VAD cannot be trusted. The latter claim relies on two common objections to the DDE: the risk of “purifying the intentions” and the issue of “closeness” when evaluating moral acts under this theory. (shrink)

Technology has advanced significantly over the past decades. Significant changes have occurred in the field of translation with the development of programs such as Google.translate and Yandex.translator. The presented applications are already being actively implemented in translation agencies to optimize translation activities, where written translations of documents, articles, annotations, etc. must be provided to customers as quick as possible. While working with popular science text, online programs help translators gain time, but this requires to edit the text. The artistic style (...) requires more concentration and dedication, because. the means of expression presented in it require taking into account the context and nuances of the use of certain units of language. Machine translation has the potential to become an indispensable assistant in the hands of a translator. This article discusses machine translation of expressive means, namely metaphors. The study is illustrated with examples and a comparative analysis of the translation of metaphorical units is carried out, the classification of metaphors is identified and an analysis is carried out with which means of expression the translator is able to cope with. The difficulties of translating metaphors are analyzed. (shrink)

There is a long tradition in philosophy and literary theory defending the view that engagement with literature promotes readers’ empathy. Until the last century, few of the empirical claims adduced in that tradition were investigated experimentally. Recent work in psychology and neuropsychology has now shed new light on the interplay of empathy and literature. This article surveys the experimental findings, addressing three central questions: What is it to read empathically? Does reading make us more empathic? What characteristics of literature, if (...) any, affect readers’ empathy? While experimental studies have delivered no conclusive answers to these questions, it has exposed their psychological complexity and constructed a more nuanced picture of the diverse ways in which literature interacts with our empathic capacities. (shrink)

One of Edmund Husserl's theoretical priorities throughout his philosophical career was to understand the nature of perceptual experience. His analyses of perceptual experience had a profound impact on subsequent thinkers in the phenomenological tradition, such as Aron Gurwitsch and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Naturally, his account of perception remains a topic of discussion among Husserl scholars. Despite the attention it has received over many decades, Husserl interpreters diverge considerably in how they understand his views and their relation to current debates in the (...) philosophy of perception. A case in point is Husserl's view on the relation between veridical perceptual experience and hallucination, which I will... (shrink)

1. Overconfidence is usually understood as being more confident than reality justifies (Harvey, 1997; Moore & Healy, 2008; Pompian, 2006), which leads individuals to overestimate their performance...

This book is an ambitious attempt to develop a cognitive approach to religion. Focusing particularly on ritual action, it borrows analytical methods from linguistics and other cognitive sciences. The authors, a philosopher of science and a scholar of comparative religion, provide a lucid critical review of established approaches to the study of religion, and make a strong plea for the combination of interpretation and explanation. Often represented as competitive approaches, they are rather, complementary, equally vital to the study of symbolic (...) systems. (shrink)

À travers l’analyse de certains aspects du langage de Leonardo Bruni, et en particulier de son utilisation de « popolo » et de « res publica », nous essayons de comprendre dans quelle mesure la politique des premiers humanistes est restée ancrée dans le passé récent de la ville de Florence, malgré les nouveautés idéologiques évidentes (et sans tenir compte de celles d’ordre stylistique et littéraire). En effet, Bruni semble avoir hérité l’idée de la primauté et de l’unité du peuple (...) florentin directement des discours des juristes du XIVe siècle. Par ailleurs, la « respublica»s’avère être, dans ses discours, à la fois une notion tout à fait traditionnelle et l’emblème du processus d’essentialisation d’un peuple reconstitué dans sa dimension universelle grâce à l’expulsion définitive du conflit de l’horizon des possibles. En même temps, en dialogue avec Claudia Moatti notamment, nous essayons de voir comment, avec quels outils, certaines recherches sur l’histoire romaine permettent de saisir les métamorphoses du « peuple » dans une période beaucoup plus tardive. (shrink)

Frank E. Zachos offers a comprehensive review of one of today's most important and contentious issues in biology: the species problem. After setting the stage with key background information on the topic, the book provides a brief history of species concepts from antiquity to the Modern Synthesis, followed by a discussion of the ontological status of species with a focus on the individuality thesis and potential means of reconciling it with other philosophical approaches. More than 30 different species concepts found (...) in the literature are presented in an annotated list, and the most important ones, including the Biological, Genetic, Evolutionary and different versions of the Phylogenetic Species Concept, are discussed in more detail. Specific questions addressed include the problem of asexual and prokaryotic species, intraspecific categories like subspecies and Evolutionarily Significant Units, and a potential solution to the species problem based on a hierarchical approach that distinguishes between ontological and operational species concepts. A full chapter is dedicated to the challenge of delimiting species by means of a discrete taxonomy in a continuous world of inherently fuzzy boundaries. Further, the book outlines the practical ramifications for ecology and evolutionary biology of how we define the species category, highlighting the danger of an apples and oranges problem if what we subsume under the same name ("species") is in actuality a variety of different entities. A succinct summary chapter, glossary and annotated list of references round out the coverage, making the book essential reading for all biologists looking for an accessible introduction to the historical, philosophical and practical dimensions of the species problem. (shrink)

I offer a qualified defence of Kant’s natural teleological argument, that is, his inference from the (un)naturalness of an act to its (im)morality. Though I reject many of Kant’s conclusions, I think the form of argument he uses to support these conclusions is not as wrong-headed as it might at first appear. I consider and answer two objections: first, that the argument is inconsistent with Kant’s moral rationalism; and second, that the argument is inconsistent with post-Kantian developments in science. I (...) argue that both objections rest on a common mistake, namely, the assumption that the account of (human) nature on which Kant’s argument relies is theoretical. On the contrary, the relevant account is practical: informed by science, but not determined by it. Once we appreciate the practical character of Kant’s naturalism, we can see not only that Kant can be a naturalist and a rationalist, but contemporary Kantians can be as well. (shrink)

A review essay of three recent publications that focus in different ways on the evolution­ary basis of religion. Asma focuses on the ways in which “religion” energizes the emotional needs of humans. Torrey pays close attention to the evolutionary stages of brain development that are necessary for the emergence of religious concepts and the attitudes that accompany them. Finally, Turner et al. develop a complex theory of different types of selection that they regard as necessary in order to account for (...) the institu­tionalization of religion: they think that biological natural selection, even though building human capacities, is insufficient to explain the sociological facts about religion. (shrink)

Insufficient attention has been paid to the ways in which Newtonian conceptualizations of time encourage the view in contemporary psychology that only efficient causal explanations are viable, explanations that ultimately render meaningful, purposive, morally rich human actions and relationships illusory. In short, psychology’s pervasive adoption of Newtonian assumptions about time and causation renders the discipline incapable of understanding human behavior, its primary focus of study, in any but fundamentally inhuman ways. This paper aims (1) to provide a critique of the (...) Newtonian conception of time and its commitment to efficient causality, particularly as commonly present in contemporary psychological theory and practice, and (2) to examine the phenomenological account of time provided in the work of Emmanuel Levinas. Specifically, we will explore some of the ways in which Levinas’ account of time as fundamentally intersubjective provides an alternative conceptual grounding for understanding the therapeutic relationship as one of infinite ethical responsibility. (shrink)

We applaud Sedlakova and Trachsel’s work and their description of conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) as possessing a hybrid nature with features of both a tool and an agent (Sedlakova and...

v. 1. 1929-1936 -- v. 2. 1936-1946 -- v. 3. 1948-1955 -- v. 4. 1923-1952.

23andMe not only sells genetic testing but also uses customer data in its R&D activities and commercial partnerships. This raises questions about transparency and informed consent. Based on a online survey conducted in 2017–18, we examine attitudes of 368 customers of 23andMe toward the company's use of their data. Our findings point at divides in the context of customers' awareness of the two-sided business model of DTC genetics and their attitudes toward consent. While most of our respondents (68%) were aware (...) that 23andMe could store their data and use it for certain purposes without their consent, over 40% were not aware that using and sharing customer data was part of the business model. Views were also divided regarding what type of consent was most appropriate. We explore the implications of these divides for participatory research and for the importance of transparency and trust in commercially-driven scientific knowledge production. (shrink)