In the Spring 1997 issue of the journal, Ronald M. Green's affiliation was inaccurately listed. Although he did serve at the Office of Genome Ethics at the National Institutes of Health, in correspondence prior to pub lication of his paper “Parental Autonomy and the Obligation Not to Harm One's Child Genetically,” he requested that his affiliation only be listed at the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth College. He wanted to avoid any appearance of speaking on behalf of NIH. The editors regret (...) the confusion this oversight caused Professor Green personally and journal readers. (shrink)

In the Spring 1997 issue of the journal, Ronald M. Green's affiliation was inaccurately listed. Although he did serve at the Office of Genome Ethics at the National Institutes of Health, in correspondence prior to pub lication of his paper “Parental Autonomy and the Obligation Not to Harm One's Child Genetically,” he requested that his affiliation only be listed at the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth College. He wanted to avoid any appearance of speaking on behalf of NIH. The editors regret (...) the confusion this oversight caused Professor Green personally and journal readers. (shrink)

In the Spring 1997 issue of the journal, Ronald M. Green's affiliation was inaccurately listed. Although he did serve at the Office of Genome Ethics at the National Institutes of Health, in correspondence prior to pub lication of his paper “Parental Autonomy and the Obligation Not to Harm One's Child Genetically,” he requested that his affiliation only be listed at the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth College. He wanted to avoid any appearance of speaking on behalf of NIH. The editors regret (...) the confusion this oversight caused Professor Green personally and journal readers. (shrink)

Conversations in Metaphysics: Ever Ancient, Ever New introduces students to metaphysics through a set of contemporary readings based on classical metaphysical texts, thinkers, and concepts. It challenges readers to consider and seek possible answers to questions of metaphysics relative to human knowledge and the nature of reality. Organized historically, the readings endeavor to define and probe the concepts of metaphysics, existence, being, God, evil, and morality from antiquity to the present. The historical lens provides students with deeper context for the (...) contemporary readings and helps them establish a basic knowledge of metaphysics and its place within philosophical tradition. In later readings, students are invited to explore how metaphysics relates to religion, science, and technology in the modern world, as well as how metaphysics has shaped and continues to shape the reality of our universe. Rich with engaging material and endless opportunities for critical thought, Conversations in Metaphysics is an ideal ancillary text for courses in philosophy that call attention to metaphysics and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

We employ a Layers of Workplace Influence theory to guide our study of whistleblowing among public accounting audit seniors. Specifically, we examine professional commitment, organizational commitment versus colleague commitment (locus of commitment), and moral intensity of the unethical behavior on two measures of reporting intentions: likelihood of reporting and perseverance in reporting. We find that moral intensity relates to both reporting intention measures. In addition, while high levels of professional identity increase the likelihood that an auditor will initially report an (...) observed violation, the auditor's commitment to the organization drives perseverance in reporting. Results may assist organizations and researchers in their understanding of antecedents to whistleblowing as a form of corporate governance and of the effect of these antecedents on whistleblowing perseverance. (shrink)

Public accounting firms can build integrity within their organizations through early detection of fraud. One way to reduce and detect fraud is to encourage whistleblowing as a prosocial behavior. We explore the impact of mentoring on intention to report fraud. A survey with 120 responses from the US public accountants suggests that quality mentoring relationships, a common feature in the profession, and caring ethical climate positively relate to internal reporting of fraud. Two intermediate variables, trust and affective commitment, mediate these (...) effects. Mentor-relationship quality also increases perceptions of caring ethical climate. The study contributes to two bodies of research by finding extended benefits from mentoring, beyond those typically discussed in academic literature; and identifying a previously unexplored firm intervention capable of positively influencing prosocial behavior and combating fraud. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Mary Shelley (1797–1851) developed a ‘Romantic Spinozism’ from 1817 to 1848. This was a deterministic worldview that adopted an ethical attitude of love toward the world as it is, must be, and will be. Resisting the psychological despair and political inertia of fatalism, her ‘Romantic Spinozism’ affirmed the forward-looking responsibility of people to love their neighbors and sustain the world, including future generations, even in the face of seeming apocalypse. This history of Shelley’s reception of Spinoza begins with (...) the fragment of the otherwise lost translation of the Theologico-Political Treatise (1670) on which she collaborated. It extends through her journals, letters, poetry, and her second great work of speculative fiction after Frankenstein (1818): a post-apocalyptic novel set in the year 2100, The Last Man (1826). Through a creative synthesis of Spinoza with Plato, Cicero, Wollstonecraft, and Glasite Christianity, Shelley developed an anti- apocalyptic conception of love as apocatastasis: a cyclical restoration of an ethical attitude of stewardship toward the whole world and its necessity. Through this recovery of a vital chapter in the history of European ideas, Shelley emerges as a central figure in Spinozan philosophy, especially the ethics and political philosophy of love. (shrink)

This article examines Mary Wollstonecraft's public reception in American newspapers from 1800 to 1869. Wollstonecraft was portrayed to the American public as a philosopher of women's rights, a new model of femininity, and a pioneer of women's political activism. Although these iconic uses of Wollstonecraft were regularly negative, they grew more positive as the women's rights movement gained steam alongside the abolition movement.

ABSTRACTWe trace Susan Moller Okin’s reception of Mary Wollstonecraft with respect to the relationship between religion and feminist liberalism, by way of manuscripts housed at Somerville College, Oxford and Harvard University. These unpublished documents – dated from 1967 to 1998 – include her Somerville advising file, with papers dated from 1967 to 1979; her 1970 Oxford B.Phil. thesis on the feminist political theory of Wollstonecraft, William Thompson, and J.S. Mill; her teaching notes on Wollstonecraft originating in 1978, for her (...) course ‘Gender and Political Theory’ held at Brandeis and Stanford in the 1980s and 1990s; and her correspondence with John Rawls, dated from 1985 to 1998. A consistently secular feminist liberal, Okin had a blind spot with regard to religion, which led her to misinterpret Wollstonecraft’s theology as contradictory to her consequentialist arguments for women’s rights. Wollstonecraft virtually disappeared from Okin’s published corpus, overshadowed by the secular utilitarian feminist liberal J.S. Mill. Wollstonecraft nevertheless remained a deep philosophical source for both the method and the principle behind Okin’s distinctive brand of feminist liberalism. Okin’s reception of Wollstonecraft suggests that the fissures caused by religious conflict in modern politics have not only generated multiple liberalisms, as Rawls argued, but also multiple feminist liberalisms. (shrink)

How can women’s rights be seen as a universal value rather than a Western value imposed upon the rest of the world? Addressing this question, Eileen Hunt Botting offers the first comparative study of writings by Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. Although Wollstonecraft and Mill were the primary philosophical architects of the view that women’s rights are human rights, Botting shows how non-Western thinkers have revised and internationalized their original theories since the nineteenth century. Botting explains why (...) this revised and internationalized theory of women’s human rights—grown out of Wollstonecraft and Mill but stripped of their Eurocentric biases—is an important contribution to thinking about human rights in truly universal terms. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Methodological Challenges to Justifying the Inclusion of Specific Women in Our Histories of Philosophy: The Case of Marie de Gournay Gournay's Text and the Querelle des Femmes Gournay's Method The Skeptical Challenge of Nurture to the Argument from Nature The Skeptical Challenge to the “Might Makes Right” Argument The Skeptical Challenge to the Argument from Woman's Creation The Skeptical Challenge from God's Privileges against the Vanity of Man Concluding Remarks Notes.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s visionary treatise, originally published in 1792, was the first book to present women’s rights as an issue of universal human rights. Ideal for coursework and classroom study, this comprehensive edition of Wollstonecraft’s groundbreaking feminist argument includes illuminating essays by leading scholars that highlight the author’s significant contributions to modern political philosophy, making a powerful case for her as one of the most substantive political thinkers of the Enlightenment era. No other scholarly work to date has examined as (...) closely both the ideological moorings and the enduring legacy of Wollstonecraft’s courageous discourse. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Disagreements about art are considered here for their potential to pose questions about reality beyond the artwork. The project of assessing artistic value is useful for bringing complex questions to light. The ambitiousness of the cognitive stock, in Richard Wollheim's term, that can be relevant to understanding an artwork may mean that confident evaluation will elude us. Thinking about artistic value judgment in this way shifts its centrality as the point of artistic interpretation and evaluation; the goal of judging (...) a work's meaning and value is a useful tool for prompting us to understand a work. But if we fail to reach that goal, that does not mean we have failed to engage with the work appropriately. The artistic value judgment, and achieving consensus on that value, can be secondary in importance to grasping the problems a work poses that are not immediately resolvable. Examples drawn from literary and philosophical imagining, in the work of Grace Paley and Mary Mothersill, and from Toni Morrison's literary criticism are used to illustrate and support the fruitfulness of this approach. (shrink)

Re-reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) in the context of the international politics after the start of the French Revolution in 1789 and before the rise of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 leads to three discoveries in the history of European ideas. First, her reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was advertised, discussed, and rumoured to be the work of a woman in London papers days earlier in November 1790 than (...) previously documented. Second, Wollstonecraft’s first known instances of public reception beyond Britain were in a major Jamaican newspaper from January to March 1791. Thirdly, and most notably, in February 1791, the Kingston Daily Advertiser published a lengthy excerpt from her Rights of Men that called for the abolition of slavery and the realization of justice for the poor and oppressed. Long before Hegel probably developed his master-slave dialectic in response to journalistic accounts of the independence of Haiti in 1804, there was Wollstonecraft’s actual reception in the international news in Jamaica, amid the spread of reports of the rise of slave unrest in the broader post-revolutionary Caribbean. (shrink)

This article explores the debate on the equality of men and women in early modern Europe. It suggests that both scepticism and Cartesianism provided new arguments to establish the equal capabilities and entitlements of women and men. In this debate, traditional metaphysics was seen once again to support prejudices rather than evidence-based arguments. This article describes some of the most prominent feminist works during this period, including those of Anne Thérèse de Lambert, Gabrielle Suchon, François Poullain De La Barre, and (...) Marie De Gournay. (shrink)

There has been a rising interest in the study of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) in philosophy, political theory, literary studies and the history of political thought in recent decades. The Wollstonecraftian Mind seeks to provide a comprehensive survey of her work, not only placing it in its historical context but also exploring its contemporary significance. Comprising 38 chapters by a team of international contributors this handbook covers: the background to Wollstonecraft’s work Wollstonecraft’s major works the relationship between Wollstonecraft and other (...) major philosophers Wollstonecraftian philosophy Wollstonecraft’s legacy Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, Wollstonecraft’s work is central to the study of political philosophy, literature, French studies, political thought, and feminism. (shrink)

Project MUSE - Journal of the History of Philosophy - Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination Project MUSE Journals Journal of the History of Philosophy Volume 46, Number 2, April 2008 Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination Journal of the History of Philosophy Volume 46, Number 2, April 2008 E-ISSN: 1538-4586 Print ISSN: 0022-5053 DOI: 10.1353/hph.0.0014 Reviewed by Alice SowaalSan Francisco State University Patricia Springborg. Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University (...) Press, 2005. Pp. xix + 372. Cloth, $80.00. Scholars have recently begun to expand research in early modern philosophy to include “minor” figures, especially those who contributed to the foundations of the scientific revolution. Simultaneously and separately, other scholars have begun examination of the female figures of the period. Prominent here are Eileen O’Neill’s series of articles, Jacqueline Broad’s Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century , and Sarah Hutton’s Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher . Patricia Springborg, a political scientist, now contributes to this literature with Mary Astell: Theorist of.. (shrink)

Project MUSE - Journal of the History of Philosophy - Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination Project MUSE Journals Journal of the History of Philosophy Volume 46, Number 2, April 2008 Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination Journal of the History of Philosophy Volume 46, Number 2, April 2008 E-ISSN: 1538-4586 Print ISSN: 0022-5053 DOI: 10.1353/hph.0.0014 Reviewed by Alice SowaalSan Francisco State University Patricia Springborg. Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University (...) Press, 2005. Pp. xix + 372. Cloth, $80.00. Scholars have recently begun to expand research in early modern philosophy to include “minor” figures, especially those who contributed to the foundations of the scientific revolution. Simultaneously and separately, other scholars have begun examination of the female figures of the period. Prominent here are Eileen O’Neill’s series of articles, Jacqueline Broad’s Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century , and Sarah Hutton’s Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher . Patricia Springborg, a political scientist, now contributes to this literature with Mary Astell: Theorist of.. (shrink)

Project MUSE - Journal of the History of Philosophy - Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination Project MUSE Journals Journal of the History of Philosophy Volume 46, Number 2, April 2008 Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination Journal of the History of Philosophy Volume 46, Number 2, April 2008 E-ISSN: 1538-4586 Print ISSN: 0022-5053 DOI: 10.1353/hph.0.0014 Reviewed by Alice SowaalSan Francisco State University Patricia Springborg. Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom from Domination. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University (...) Press, 2005. Pp. xix + 372. Cloth, $80.00. Scholars have recently begun to expand research in early modern philosophy to include “minor” figures, especially those who contributed to the foundations of the scientific revolution. Simultaneously and separately, other scholars have begun examination of the female figures of the period. Prominent here are Eileen O’Neill’s series of articles, Jacqueline Broad’s Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century , and Sarah Hutton’s Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher . Patricia Springborg, a political scientist, now contributes to this literature with Mary Astell: Theorist of.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, and: Anne Conway: A Woman PhilosopherJane DuranWomen Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, by Jacqueline Broad; 204 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. $65.00. Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, by Sarah Hutton; 280 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. $75.00.Recent work on women philosophers has, in general, approached the topic from two vantage points: on the one hand, a number of anthologies have (...) been published, wherein commentators present a small portion of the woman thinker's work, often without the background necessary for a fuller understanding. On the other hand, some few women philosophers have been the subject of full-length works, but these have tended, by and large, to be women thinkers of the twentieth century, with whose work we are already familiar. Two recent books, one by Jacqueline Broad and the other by Sarah Hutton, go a long way toward improving the situation.Work by Eileen O'Neill, Sarah Hutton and Margaret Atherton, among others, has helped familiarize us with the notion that the seventeenth century—that era so commonly associated with Descartes and the rise of modern philosophy—was also a time of rich theorizing by women philosophers. Jacqueline Broad's book possesses many virtues: it has the finely-tuned style of the careful historian, while at the same time not failing to demonstrate acquaintance with a range of contemporary feminist commentary. Part of the problem in addressing women thinkers of the past is another version of what we are now tempted to call the essentialism problem: does it make sense to think that there is a style that might be demarcated as "feminine," or that might, in some way, pertain uniquely to women theorists? These are difficult issues, but a partial response to the question is to try to remember that it is not for no reason that women thinkers have, indeed, been left out of the canon. As Broad herself says, women philosophers "are now mere footnotes to the standard historical-intellectual accounts of the early modern period" (p. 1).Broad does a superb job of navigating between the need to set out the plain tenets of the thinker's philosophy, and the desire to try to tie it into these larger questions. In six chapters, she addresses the work of Elizabeth of Bohemia, [End Page 200] Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Damaris Masham and Catharine Trotter Cockburn The chapters on Elizabeth, Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell are particularly strong—here part of the difficulty is that we do have familiar commentaries addressing the work of these women, and it is hard to try to see them in a new light. We are accustomed, for example, to think of Elizabeth merely as Descartes's correspondent. As is the case with information that is currently coming to bear on the question of Harriet Taylor Mill's input into the work of John Stuart Mill, it is difficult for us to see Elizabeth as a thinker in her own right, or, indeed, to give her the credit that Descartes himself gave her; as Broad notes, he had described her as "the only person I have so far found who has completely understood all my previous works" (p. 13). Margaret Cavendish's reputation has suffered from the somewhat scattered approach of her writings, and Broad cites her "reputation for eccentricity" (p. 38). Nevertheless, the sheer volume of her work and its allusion to the problems addressed by the Cambridge Platonists (areas also worked on by Anne Conway) demands that she be taken far more seriously than she has in the past. Astell has become known largely for her more overtly feminist works, such as A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, but she was also the author of several other pieces addressing issues in metaphysics, and again the amount of her work and its citation during her own time would militate against the notion that it should not receive thorough examination.Broad does a wonderful job of setting out the main philosophical questions found in these theorists' works, and she excels at pitting their views against those of the various male philosophers whose work—according to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Gaia, Gender, and Sovereignty in the AnthropoceneDanielle SandsIn a 2011 lecture addressing ecological crisis, sociologist Bruno Latour advanced James Lovelock’s Gaia model as a way of re-conceptualizing nature in an Anthropocene or “postnatural” (Latour 2011, 9) world.1 For Latour, Gaia, a mythological goddess reinvented by Lovelock as a scientific metaphor, embodies the collision between discourses, “this mix up of science and politics” (Latour 2011, 8), which the Anthropocene represents. (...) In its deviation from benevolent images of Mother Nature, Gaia provides an alternative account of the human relationship with the natural world, one that implies that our response to the Anthropocene crisis should not derive from a solely scientific framework. Latour seizes upon the image of Gaia with fervor, celebrating “her” not only as an assemblage of different discourses, but, in “her” disunity and non-sovereignty, as an alternative political paradigm. Of less political interest for Latour is the gendering of Gaia; like Lovelock before him, Latour regards the feminizing of Gaia as an affective metaphorical device and not a political issue.2It is hard not to view Latour’s “Gaia politics” (Latour 2004, 5) as part of a broader tendency to revivify conservative frameworks in the face of crisis, here a crisis of a hitherto unknown scale.3 As Claire Colebrook wryly notes of post-apocalyptic narratives: “it is easier to imagine the end of the world […] than it is to think outside the structuring fantasies of gender.” Where Latour stops short—just—of endorsing what Colebrook calls “an active male heroism driven by a female fragility that appears to hold the promise of the future” [End Page 287] (Colebrook 2014 v.2, 150), his restraint does not extend to all advocates of Gaia-led theories. Witness, for example, Eileen Crist’s feverish call to arms: “[T]his is our moment. It is the moment to face the root of the terrible trouble we have unleashed for the biosphere and for ourselves: our expansionism, arrogance, and domination within the biosphere. In acts of beauty, and without fear, this is our moment to put Gaia first” (Crist 2010, 330). In Crist’s hands, Gaia—and the Anthropocene framework that is presupposed but here disavowed—not only offers an alibi for apocalyptic language and discredited narratives, but more importantly, unwittingly endorses the very worldview—uncritical, narcissistic, and heavily gendered—that it purports to replace.4The Anthropocene compels us to question the literal and metaphorical place of the human. In projecting human maternity onto the earth, the figure of Gaia and that of Mother Earth before her restrict thought to an immobile narcissism. In this article, I shall first address the way in which a purportedly progressive feminized figure of Gaia actually absents woman, denying female agency in favor of male sovereignty. I shall frame this discussion both within ecofeminist debates and in light of recent Anthropocene rhetoric. Secondly, I shall contextualize Gaia within the broader problem of figuring the female, asking whether an Anthropocene framework necessarily inclines us toward the replication of gender stereotypes.Gendering Gaia and the Woman-Nature ConnectionA clear aim of James Lovelock’s adoption of the name Gaia as a metaphor for “the living planet” earth (Lovelock 1988, 19) was to stimulate humans to accept their previously neglected environmental responsibilities. By according Gaia an identity, one that chimed both with ancient narratives and 1970s sensibilities, Lovelock invited humans to acknowledge that there was a living victim of their environmental misdemeanors. For Lovelock, speaking of the earth as Gaia counters proprietorial conceptions stemming from the damaging notion of human stewardship and undermines the notion of earth as a passive or inert object upon which human agents act. Assessing Lovelock’s approach, Mary Midgley asks: “Was it necessary to use language that apparently personified the earth?” (Midgley 2007, 8) and concludes affirmatively, asserting that the concept of a mechanistic universe is so deeply ingrained in human thought that Lovelock needed to name the earth in order to facilitate such an imaginative leap.By framing the earth as female, Lovelock capitalized on age-old tensions in the concept of the female: Gaia is nurturing but ruthless, fragile... (shrink)

In recent years a number of books have been published that offer short autobiographical essays of academics, focusing on their research and how their life history affected their scholarly development. These could be labeled as "intellectual journey narratives." Some volumes focus on philosophers and their religious faith or lack thereof (e.g., Clark, 1997, Antony, 2007). Psychology has its own version of the intellectual journey narrative, in T. S. Krawiec's (1972, 1974, 1978) multivolume set of autobiographical essays by contemporary psychologists. In (...) 1987, Rosemary Pilkington edited her first volume of essays entitled Men and Women of Parapsychology: Personal Reflections, Esprit Volume 1. It contains autobiographical essays by Jule Eisenbud, Montague Ullman, Jan Ehrenwald, Eileen Coly, Joseph H. Rush, Gertrude R. Schmeidler, Emilio Servadio, Renée Haynes, Hans Bender, Karlis Osis, George Zorab and Bernard Grad. The second (2013) volume contains autobiographical essays by Mary Rose Barrington, Eberhard Bauer, William Braud (now deceased), Stephen Braude, Richard S. Broughton, Larry Dossey, Sally Rhine Feather, Erlendur Haraldsson, Arthur Hastings, Stanley Krippner, Lawrence LeShan, Roger Nelson, John Palmer, Guy Leon Playfair, William G. Roll (now deceased), Serena Roney-Dougal, Stephan A. Schwartz, Rex G. Stanford, Russell Targ, Charles T. Tart, and Walter von Lucadou. Between the two volumes almost every significant contemporary parapsychologist is represented, with the major exceptions being the late John Beloff and the late Ian Stevenson. (shrink)

The Supreme Court seems poised to overrule Roe v. Wade and hold that there is no constitutional right to choose abortion. The reversal of Roe seems to run counter to public opinion in the United St...

Preservationism is a dominant account of the justification of beliefs formed on the basis of memory. According to preservationism, a memory belief is justified only if that belief was justified when it was initially held. However, we now know that much of what we remember is not explicitly stored, but instead reconstructed when we attempt to recall it. Since reconstructive memory beliefs may not have been continuously held by the agent, or never held before at all, a purely preservationist account (...) of memory does not allow for justified reconstructed memory beliefs. In this essay, I show how a process reliabilist account can maintain preservationism about reproductive memory beliefs while accommodating the justification of reconstructive memory beliefs. I argue that reconstructive memory is an inferential process, and that therefore the beliefs it produces are justified in the same way that other inferential beliefs are justified. Accordingly, my process reliabilist account combines a preservationist account of reproductive memory with an inferential account of reconstructive memory. I end by defending this view against objections. (shrink)

This article explores the contributions of women scholars, writers and artists to our understanding of the medieval past. Beginning with a contemporary artists book by Liz Mathews that draws on one of Boethius‘s Latin lyrics from the Consolation of Philosophy as translated by Helen Waddell, it traces a network of medieval women scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries associated with Manchester and the John Rylands Library, such as Alice Margaret Cooke and Mary Bateson. It concludes by examining the (...) translation of the Old English poem, The Wife‘s Lament, by contemporary poet, Eavan Boland. The art of Liz Mathews and poetry of Eavan Boland and the scholarship of women like Alice Cooke, Mary Bateson, Helen Waddell and Eileen Power show that women‘s writing of the past – creative, public, scholarly – forms a strand of an archive of women‘s history that is still being put together. (shrink)

This is the first critically evaluative study of Gaston Bachelard's philosophy of science to be written in English. Bachelard's professional reputation was based on his philosophy of science, though that aspect of his thought has tended to be neglected by his English-speaking readers. Dr Tiles concentrates here on Bachelard's critique of scientific knowledge. Bachelard emphasised discontinuities in the history of science; in particular he stressed the ways of thinking about and investigating the world to be found in modern science. This, (...) as the author shows, is paralleled by those debates among English-speaking philosophers about the rationality of science and the 'incommensurability' of different theories. To these problems Bachelard might be taken as offering an original solution: rather than see discontinuities as a threat to the objectivity of science, see them as products of the rational advancement of scientific knowledge. Dr Tiles sets out Bachelard's views and critically assesses them, reflecting also on the wider question of how one might assess potentially incommensurable positions in the philosophy of science as well as in science itself. (shrink)

""Serious philosophy is not an attempt to construct a system of beliefs, but the activity of awakening, the conversation passionately pursued. Only if professional philosophy reclaims this paradigm and finds ways to embody it, will it achieve an active place in the thought and life of our culture."" --James Conlon, ""Stanley Cavell and the Predicament of Philosophy."" This book is a collection of serious philosophical essays that aim to awaken readers, teachers, and students to a desire for conversation passionately pursued. (...) The essays in this volume speak about sex, movies, poetry, and politics, in short, about those things contemporary Americans passionately discuss. These are the subjects that were taught for forty-three years in James Conlon's classroom at Mount Mary University, a Catholic urban university for women in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This volume celebrates Conlon's work while calling to all who continue to teach and learn about philosophy in contemporary times with the message that relevant philosophy deals with life as it is lived in the moment. ""Dr. Conlon made it his life's work to bring to consciousness an often unconscious awareness that accepts the way things are as the measure of what is real, normative, and moral. His commitment to awakening people to the wonder of common experience made a profound contribution to the mission of Mount Mary. The essays in this volume are a testament to the way he engaged students in the process of living a fully human life."" --Joan Penzenstadler, SSND, Mount Mary University ""True to the spirit of Professor Conlon's teaching, this collection illustrates how his approach made philosophy a genuine dialogue, brought diverse viewpoints and perspectives to bear on any problem, and engaged generations of women in the philosophical conversation."" --Kathleen Poorman Dougherty, Alma College ""This collection of always thoughtful and often provocative essays by James Conlon, his colleagues, and students honors Conlon's decades-long career at Mount Mary University dedicated to teaching the practice of philosophy... Both new and experienced teachers of philosophy will find insights and inspiration in this volume!"" --Donna Engelmann, Alverno College ""Just in Time celebrates the work of the philosopher James Conlon. It also honors the pedagogy of inquiry that has had a profound impact on the students he taught for over 40 years. Conlon's essays are paired with ones from his students and colleagues--testaments to the influence that his teaching has had. Readers will be challenged to pursue passionate conversations and inspire others to engage in thoughtful inquiry about the relevant topics of today."" --Eileen Schwalbach, Former president, Mount Mary University Jennifer Hockenbery Dragseth is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Mary University. She is the author of Thinking Woman: A Philosophical Approach to the Quandary of Gender and the editor of The Devil's Whore: Reason and Philosophy in the Lutheran Tradition. James Conlon is Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus at Mount Mary University where he taught for forty-three years. He is the author of numerous philosophical articles. (shrink)

On the Horizon of World Literature compares literary texts from asynchronous periods of incipient literary modernity in different parts of the world: Romantic England and Republican China. These moments were oriented alike by "world literature" as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. World literature thus provided-and continues to provide-a condition of possibility for conversation between cultures as well as for their mutual provincialization. The book offers readings of a selection (...) of literary forms that serve also as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms of life. The literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel function as testing grounds for questions of both literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages and activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang explore the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds. Sun's book brings to light the disciplinary-historical impact world literature has had in shaping literary traditions and practices around the world. The book renews the practice of close reading by offering the model of a deprovincialized close reading loosened from confinement within monocultural hermeneutic circles. By means of its own focus on England and China, the book provides methods useful for comparatists working between other Western and non-Western languages. It establishes the critical significance of Romanticism for the discipline of literary studies and opens up new paths of research in global Romanticism and global nineteenth-century studies. And it offers a new approach to analyzing the cosmopolitan character of the literary and cultural transformations of early twentieth-century China. (shrink)

Published in 1982, Carol Gilligan's _In a Different Voice_ proposed a new model of moral reasoning based on care, arguing that it better described the moral life of women. ____An Ethic of Care__ is the first volume to bring together key contributions to the extensive debate engaging Gilligan's work. It provides the highlights of the often impassioned discussion of the ethic of care, drawing on the literature of the wide range of disciplines that have entered into the debate. _Contributors:_ Annette (...) Baier, Diana Baumrind, Lawrence A. Blum, Mary Brabeck, John Broughton, Owen Flanagan, Marilyn Friedman, Carol Gilligan, Catherine G. Greeno, Catherine Jackson, Linda K. Kerber, Mary Jeanne Larrabee, Zella Luria, Eleanor E. Maccoby, Linda Nicholson, Bill Puka, Carol B. Stack, Joan C. Tronto, Lawrence Walker, Gertrud Nunner-Winkler. (shrink)

Emotions are often portrayed as subjective judgments that pose a threat to rationality and morality, but there is a growing literature across many disciplines that emphasizes the centrality of emotion to moral reasoning. For engineers, however, being rational usually means sequestering emotions that might bias analyses—good reasoning is tied to quantitative data, math, and science. This paper brings a new pedagogical perspective that strengthens the case for incorporating emotions into engineering ethics. Building on the widely established success of active and (...) collaborative learning environments, in particular the problem-based learning philosophy and methodology, the paper articulates new strategies for incorporating emotion into engineering ethics education. An ethics education pilot study is analyzed to explore how PBL can engage students’ emotions. Evidence suggests that PBL empowers students to cultivate value for engineering ethics and social responsibility, and in doing so, redefine the societal role of the engineer. Taking students’ emotions seriously in engineering ethics offers an effective strategy to meaningfully engage students in ethical learning. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, and: Anne Conway: A Woman PhilosopherJane DuranWomen Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, by Jacqueline Broad; 204 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. $65.00. Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, by Sarah Hutton; 280 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. $75.00.Recent work on women philosophers has, in general, approached the topic from two vantage points: on the one hand, a number of anthologies have (...) been published, wherein commentators present a small portion of the woman thinker's work, often without the background necessary for a fuller understanding. On the other hand, some few women philosophers have been the subject of full-length works, but these have tended, by and large, to be women thinkers of the twentieth century, with whose work we are already familiar. Two recent books, one by Jacqueline Broad and the other by Sarah Hutton, go a long way toward improving the situation.Work by Eileen O'Neill, Sarah Hutton and Margaret Atherton, among others, has helped familiarize us with the notion that the seventeenth century—that era so commonly associated with Descartes and the rise of modern philosophy—was also a time of rich theorizing by women philosophers. Jacqueline Broad's book possesses many virtues: it has the finely-tuned style of the careful historian, while at the same time not failing to demonstrate acquaintance with a range of contemporary feminist commentary. Part of the problem in addressing women thinkers of the past is another version of what we are now tempted to call the essentialism problem: does it make sense to think that there is a style that might be demarcated as "feminine," or that might, in some way, pertain uniquely to women theorists? These are difficult issues, but a partial response to the question is to try to remember that it is not for no reason that women thinkers have, indeed, been left out of the canon. As Broad herself says, women philosophers "are now mere footnotes to the standard historical-intellectual accounts of the early modern period" (p. 1).Broad does a superb job of navigating between the need to set out the plain tenets of the thinker's philosophy, and the desire to try to tie it into these larger questions. In six chapters, she addresses the work of Elizabeth of Bohemia, [End Page 200] Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Damaris Masham and Catharine Trotter Cockburn The chapters on Elizabeth, Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell are particularly strong—here part of the difficulty is that we do have familiar commentaries addressing the work of these women, and it is hard to try to see them in a new light. We are accustomed, for example, to think of Elizabeth merely as Descartes's correspondent. As is the case with information that is currently coming to bear on the question of Harriet Taylor Mill's input into the work of John Stuart Mill, it is difficult for us to see Elizabeth as a thinker in her own right, or, indeed, to give her the credit that Descartes himself gave her; as Broad notes, he had described her as "the only person I have so far found who has completely understood all my previous works" (p. 13). Margaret Cavendish's reputation has suffered from the somewhat scattered approach of her writings, and Broad cites her "reputation for eccentricity" (p. 38). Nevertheless, the sheer volume of her work and its allusion to the problems addressed by the Cambridge Platonists (areas also worked on by Anne Conway) demands that she be taken far more seriously than she has in the past. Astell has become known largely for her more overtly feminist works, such as A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, but she was also the author of several other pieces addressing issues in metaphysics, and again the amount of her work and its citation during her own time would militate against the notion that it should not receive thorough examination.Broad does a wonderful job of setting out the main philosophical questions found in these theorists' works, and she excels at pitting their views against those of the various male philosophers whose work—according to... (shrink)

After we die, our persona may live on in the minds of the people we know well. Two essential elements of this process are mourning and acts of commemoration. These behaviors extend well beyond grief and must be cultivated deliberately by the survivors of the deceased individual. Those who are left behind have many ways of maintaining connections with their deceased, such as burials in places where the living are likely to return and visit. In this way, culturally defined places (...) often serve as metaphors of social association and shared experience. Humans are the only kind of animal that buries their dead, and this gesture is preserved in Paleolithic sites as early as 120,000 years ago. Though not the only method of honoring the dead in human cultures, the emergence of burial traditions in the Middle Paleolithic implies that both Neandertals and early anatomically modern humans had already begun to conceive of the individual as unique and irreplaceable. Claims of primitive mortuary behavior in earlier periods than the Middle Paleolithic fall short in that they lack any signs of positive social-spatial associations between the deceased and survivors. The archaeological evidence for burial behavior in the Middle Paleolithic provides the first clear translation of mourning into a stereotypical action. These burials therefore may represent the first ritualized bridge between the living and the deceased in human evolutionary history. (shrink)

This chapter is Mary Whiton Calkins’ articulation and defense of the personalistic conception of reality.

We hypothesize that effective collaboration is facilitated when individuals and environmental components form a synergy where they work together and regulate one another to produce stable patterns of behavior, or regularity, as well as adaptively reorganize to form new behaviors, or irregularity. We tested this hypothesis in a study with 32 triads who collaboratively solved a challenging visual computer programming task for 20 min following an introductory warm‐up phase. Multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis was used to examine fine‐grained (i.e., every 10 (...) s) collective patterns of regularity across team members' speech rate, body movement, and team interaction with the shared user interface. We found that teams exhibited significant patterns of regularity as compared to shuffled baselines, but there were no systematic trends in regularity across time. We also found that periods of regularity were associated with a reduction in overall behavior. Notably, the production of irregular behavior predicted expert‐coded metrics of collaborative activity, such as teams' ability to construct shared knowledge and effectively negotiate and coordinate execution of solutions, net of overall behavioral production and behavioral self‐similarity. Our findings support the theory that groups can interact to form interpersonal synergies and indicate that information about system‐level dynamics is a viable way to understand and predict effective collaborative processes. (shrink)

In the wake of Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission, more companies are spending heavily on political speech, but the moral implications of doing so are not clear. Few business ethicists have directly addressed the moral legitimacy of corporate political speech and the conditions under which it may be morally permissible. My goal here is to outline the moral hazards associated with engaging in corporate political speech. I argue that whether one takes a narrow Friedman-style shareholder primacy view of (...) managerial duty, a broader stakeholder view, or an even more wide-ranging political corporate social responsibility view of the moral duties of business, various moral hazards must be taken into account in determining the moral legitimacy of corporate political speech. I discuss a number of moral hazards endemic to corporate political speech and suggest ways in which business practitioners might avoid those moral hazards. (shrink)

In this much-anticipated work, distinguished authors Mary Beth Ingham and Mechthild Dreyer present an accessible introduction to the philosophy of the thirteenth century Franciscan John Duns Scotus.

Neuropalliative care developed to address the needs of patients living with life‐limiting neurologic disease. One critical consideration is that disease‐related changes to cognition, communication, and function challenge illness experiences and care practices. We conducted an ethnography to understand neuropalliative care as a phenomenon; how it was experienced, provided, conceptualized. Personhood served as our conceptual framework; with its long philosophical history and important place in nursing theory, we examined the extent to which it captured neuropalliative experiences and concerns. Personhood contextualized complex (...) losses, aligning the impact of functional and relational changes. Cognition, communication, and functional alterations stretched conceptions of personhood, insinuating it can be relational, fluid, adaptive. Although normative conceptions of personhood guided research and decision‐making, ethical considerations suggested personhood could be transformed, remade. We consider the implications of our findings through three themes. First, we examine how literature on illness experience fails to integrate the realities of people living with and dying from neurologic disease; we counter this by interrogating the concept of experience. Second, we turn to Ricoeur's work on recognition to illuminate relational conceptions of personhood to inform care practices. Finally, we reflect on how personhood can bridge the gap left by functional changes, enhance relational engagement, and promote dignity at the end of life. (shrink)