The rapidly increasing wealth of genomic data has driven the development of tools to assist in the task of representing and processing information about genes, their products and their functions. One of the most important of these tools is the Gene Ontology (GO), which is being developed in tandem with work on a variety of bioinformatics databases. An examination of the structure of GO, however, reveals a number of problems, which we believe can be resolved by taking account of certain (...) organizing principles drawn from philosophical ontology. We shall explore the results of applying such principles to GO with a view to improving GO’s consistency and coherence and thus its future applicability in the automated processing of biological data. (shrink)

There are compelling possibilities for the ways in which creative writing practices can inform qualitative and collaborative research projects, particularly those projects devoted to phenomenological inquiry. This article lays out a specific research methodology based on a creative writing practice that is prompted by words and phrases evocative of a research question. This practice, called “pointing,” is explained through Gadamer's notion of understanding, play, and conversation as well as Heidegger's hermeneutical process. The use of such a practice in a specific (...) collaborative research project on therapists' experience of hopelessness is described and implications for additional projects are proposed. (shrink)

Literary fiction gives us a window into ourselves and into those who may seem most unfamiliar to us. We therefore have a moral imperative to read, just as, as psychotherapists, we have a moral imperative to listen. Literary study teaches us to read closely, to listen for structure as well as content, and it also instructs us about different ways of paying attention. Inversely, because the practice of psychotherapy values connection and process, rather than simply interpretation, it shows us how (...) we can bring ourselves more fully to literature. In this paper I propose ways of engaging the field of phenomenological psychology in this dialectical relationship of literature and psychotherapy. By using as a case study a recent experience of teaching Aimee Bender’s (2000) novel An Invisible Sign of My Own in an interdisciplinary seminar on literature and psychology, I illustrate how literature and clinical discourses can inform and challenge each other as we seek to understand the meaning and lived experience of neuroses. I argue that the very act of reading can give the reader the sense and structure of experience that, if explored in a dialogal context, helps us gain access to phenomena that is neither simply self-generated nor simply observed in the other. I term this access evocation: A response that is a calling forth of the reader’s own lived experiencing. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 12, Special Edition July 2012. (shrink)

For decades, aged care facility residents at risk of pressure ulcers have been repositioned at two-hour intervals, twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week. Yet, PUs still develop. We used a cross-sectional survey of eighty randomly selected medical records of residents aged ≥ 65 years from eight Australian Residential Aged Care Facilities to determine the number of residents at risk of PUs, the use of two-hourly repositioning, and the presence of PUs in the last week of life. Despite 91 per cent of residents identified as (...) being at risk of PUs and repositioned two-hourly 24/7, 34 per cent died with one or more PUs. Behaviours of concern were noted in 72 per cent of residents of whom 38 per cent were restrained. Dementia was diagnosed in 70 per cent of residents. The prevalence of behaviours of concern displayed by residents with dementia was significantly greater than by residents without dementia. The rate of restraining residents with dementia was similar to the rate in residents without dementia. Two-hourly repositioning failed to prevent PUs in a third of at-risk residents and may breach the rights of all residents who were repositioned two-hourly. Repositioning and restraining may be unlawful. Rather than only repositioning residents two-hourly, we recommend every resident be provided with an alternating pressure air mattress. (shrink)

For decades, aged care facility residents at risk of pressure ulcers have been repositioned at two-hour intervals, twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week. Yet, PUs still develop. We used a cross-sectional survey of eighty randomly selected medical records of residents aged ≥ 65 years from eight Australian Residential Aged Care Facilities to determine the number of residents at risk of PUs, the use of two-hourly repositioning, and the presence of PUs in the last week of life. Despite 91 per cent of residents identified as (...) being at risk of PUs and repositioned two-hourly 24/7, 34 per cent died with one or more PUs. Behaviours of concern were noted in 72 per cent of residents of whom 38 per cent were restrained. Dementia was diagnosed in 70 per cent of residents. The prevalence of behaviours of concern displayed by residents with dementia was significantly greater than by residents without dementia. The rate of restraining residents with dementia was similar to the rate in residents without dementia. Two-hourly repositioning failed to prevent PUs in a third of at-risk residents and may breach the rights of all residents who were repositioned two-hourly. Repositioning and restraining may be unlawful. Rather than only repositioning residents two-hourly, we recommend every resident be provided with an alternating pressure air mattress. (shrink)

Book Reviews Jennifer K. Dobe, Kantian Review, FirstView Article.

Jennifer Church presents a new account of perception, which shows how imagining alternative perspectives and possibilities plays a key role in creating and validating experiences of self-evident objectivity. She explores the nature of moral perception and aesthetic perception, and argues that perception can be both literal and substantive.

This is a conversation held at the book launch for Christopher Insole’s Kant and the Divine: From Contemplation to the Moral Law, hosted jointly, in November 2020, by the Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University, and the Australian Catholic University. The conversation covers the claim made by Insole that Kant believes in God, but is not a Christian, the way in which reason itself is divine for Kant, and the suggestion that reading Kant can open up new possibilities for dialogue (...) between Christian thinkers and contemporary forms of secular religiosity. (shrink)

Augustine famously claimed that the virtues of pagan Rome were nothing more than splendid vices. This critique reinvented itself as a suspicion of acquired virtue as such, and true Christian virtue has, ever since, been set against a false, hypocritical virtue alleged merely to conceal pride. _Putting On Virtue_ reveals how a distrust of learned and habituated virtue shaped both early modern Christian moral reflection and secular forms of ethical thought. Jennifer Herdt develops her claims through an argument of (...) broad historical sweep, which brings together the Aristotelian tradition as taken up by Thomas Aquinas with the early modern thinkers who shaped modern liberalism. In chapters on Luther, Bunyan, the Jansenists, Mandeville, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant, she argues that efforts to make a radical distinction between true Christian virtue and its tainted imitations actually created an autonomous natural ethics separate from Christianity. This secular value system valorized pride and authenticity, while rendering graced human agency less meaningful. Ultimately, _Putting On Virtue_ traces a path from suspicion of virtue to its secular inversion, from confession of dependence to assertion of independence. (shrink)

Most epistemologists hold that knowledge entails belief. However, proponents of this claim rarely offer a positive argument in support of it. Rather, they tend to treat the view as obvious and assert that there are no convincing counterexamples. We find this strategy to be problematic. We do not find the standard view obvious, and moreover, we think there are cases in which it is intuitively plausible that a subject knows some proposition P without—or at least without determinately—believing that P. Accordingly, (...) we present five plausible examples of knowledge without (determinate) belief, and we present empirical evidence suggesting that our intuitions about these scenarios are not atypical. (shrink)

Uncovers the truth behind the ideas, struggles, and eventually success of Black and Puerto Rican Nationalists regarding key feminist issues of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s While most people believe that the movement to secure voluntary reproductive control for women centered solely on abortion rights, for many women abortion was not the only, or even primary, focus. Jennifer Nelson tells the story of the feminist struggle for legal abortion and reproductive rights in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s through (...) the particular contributions of women of color. She explores the relationship between second-wave feminists, who were concerned with a woman's right to choose, Black and Puerto Rican Nationalists, who were concerned that Black and Puerto Rican women have as many children as possible “for the revolution,” and women of color themselves, who negotiated between them. Contrary to popular belief, Nelson shows that women of color were able to successfully remake the mainstream women's liberation and abortion rights movements by appropriating select aspects of Black Nationalist politics—including addressing sterilization abuse, access to affordable childcare and healthcare, and ways to raise children out of poverty—for feminist discourse. (shrink)

During this period, when disciples were growing in number, a grievance arose on the part of those who spoke Greek, against those who spoke the language of the Jews; they complained that their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution. When Americans think of ethnic conflict, conflict between blacks and whites comes to mind most immediately. Yet ethnic conflict is pervasive around the world. Azerbijanis and Turks in the Soviet Union; Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland; Arabs and Jews (...) in the Middle East; Maoris and English settlers in New Zealand; Muslims and Hindus in India and Pakistan; French and English speakers in Quebec; Africans, Afrikaaners, and mixed-race people in South Africa, in addition to the tribal warfare among the Africans themselves: these are just a few of the more obvious conflicts currently in the news. We observe an even more dizzying array of ethnic conflicts if we look back just a few years. Japanese and Koreans; Mongols and Chinese; Serbs and Croats; Christians and Buddhists in Viet Nam: these ancient antagonisms are not immediately in the news, but they could erupt at any time. And the history of the early Christian Church recounted in the Acts of the Apostles reminds us that suspicion among ethnic groups is not a modern phenomenon; rather, it is ancient. The present paper seeks to address the problem of ethnic conflict in modern western democracies. How can our tools and traditions of participatory governments, relatively free markets, and the common law contribute to some resolution of the ancient problems that we find within our midst? In particular, I want to focus here on the question of ethnic integration. (shrink)

Testimony is an invaluable source of knowledge. We rely on the reports of those around us for everything from the ingredients in our food and medicine to the identity of our family members. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the epistemology of testimony. Despite the multitude of views offered, a single thesis is nearly universally accepted: testimonial knowledge is acquired through the process of transmission from speaker to hearer. In this book, Jennifer Lackey shows that this (...) thesis is false and, hence, that the literature on testimony has been shaped at its core by a view that is fundamentally misguided. She then defends a detailed alternative to this conception of testimony: whereas the views currently dominant focus on the epistemic status of what speakers believe, Lackey advances a theory that instead centers on what speakers say. The upshot is that, strictly speaking, we do not learn from one another's beliefs - we learn from one another's words. Once this shift in focus is in place, Lackey goes on to argue that, though positive reasons are necessary for testimonial knowledge, testimony itself is an irreducible epistemic source. This leads to the development of a theory that gives proper credence to testimony's epistemologically dual nature: both the speaker and the hearer must make a positive epistemic contribution to testimonial knowledge. The resulting view not only reveals that testimony has the capacity to generate knowledge, but it also gives appropriate weight to our nature as both socially indebted and individually rational creatures. The approach found in this book will, then, represent a radical departure from the views currently dominating the epistemology of testimony, and thus is intended to reshape our understanding of the deep and ubiquitous reliance we have on the testimony of those around us. (shrink)

Philosophers of language have long recognized that in opaque contexts, such as those involving propositional attitude reports, substitution of co-referring names may not preserve truth value. For example, the name ‘Clark Kent’ cannot be substituted for ‘Superman’ in a context like:1. Lois believes that Superman can flywithout a change in truth value. In an earlier paper , Jennifer Saul demonstrated that substitution failure could also occur in ‘simple sentences’ where none of the ordinary opacity-producing conditions existed, such as:2. Superman (...) leaps more tall buildings than Clark Kent does.Accounts focusing on opacity were unable to explain our ‘anti-substitution intuitions’ in such cases.In Simple Sentences, Substitution, and Intuitions, Saul extends her earlier work. She provides a comprehensive presentation and criticism of recent accounts of simple sentence substitution failure, and proposes a new approach drawing on psychological evidence about cognitive processing. Saul's purpose is not merely to solve the substitution puzzle cases, but to make …. (shrink)

The phenomenon of pain presents problems and puzzles for philosophers who want to understand its nature. Though pain might seem simple, there has been disagreement since Aristotle about whether pain is an emotion, sensation, perception, or disturbed state of the body. Despite advances in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine, pain is still poorly understood and multiple theories of pain abound. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting (...) and interdisciplinary subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into nine clear parts: Modelling pain in philosophy Modelling pain in neuroscience Modelling pain in psychology Pain in philosophy of mind Pain in epistemology Pain in philosophy of religion Pain in ethics Pain in medicine Pain in law. As well as fundamental topics in the philosophy of pain such as the nature, role, and value of pain, many other important topics are covered including the neurological pathways involved in pain processing, biopsychosocial and cognitive behavioural models of pain; chronic pain; pain and non-human animals; pain and knowledge; controlled substances for pain; pain and placebo effects; and pain and physician assisted suicide. The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Pain is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and ethics. It will also be very useful to researchers of pain from any field, especially those in psychology, medicine, and health studies. (shrink)

IntroductionThose in mental health-related consumer movements have made clear their demands for humane treatment and basic civil rights, an end to stigma and discrimination, and a chance to participate in their own recovery. But theorizing about the politics of recognition, 'recognition rights' and epistemic justice, suggests that they also have a stake in the broad cultural meanings associated with conceptions of mental health and illness.ResultsFirst person accounts of psychiatric diagnosis and mental health care (shown here to represent 'counter stories' to (...) the powerful 'master narrative' of biomedical psychiatry), offer indications about how experiences of mental disorder might be reframed and redefined as part of efforts to acknowledge and honor recognition rights and epistemic justice. However, the task of cultural semantics is one for the entire culture, not merely consumers. These new meanings must be negotiated. When they are not the result of negotiation, group-wrought definitions risk imposing a revision no less constraining than the mis-recognizing one it aims to replace. Contested realities make this a challenging task when it comes to cultural meanings about mental disorder. Examples from mental illness memoirs about two contested realities related to psychosis are examined here: the meaninglessness of symptoms, and the role of insight into illness. They show the magnitude of the challenge involved - for consumers, practitioners, and the general public - in the reconstruction of these new meanings and realities.ConclusionTo honor recognition rights and epistemic justice acknowledgement must be made of the heterogeneity of the effects of, and of responses to, psychiatric diagnosis and care, and the extent of the challenge of the reconstructive cultural semantics involved. (shrink)

Hurley’s is a difficult book to work through—partly because of its length and the complexity of its arguments, but also because each of the ten essays of which it is composed has a rather different starting point and focus, and because few of her arguments achieve real closure. Essay 2 discusses competing interpretations of Kant, essay 4 articulates nonconceptual forms of self-consciousness, essay 5 offers fresh interpretations of commissurotomy patients’ behavior, essay 6 develops an objection to Wittgenstein on rule following, (...) essay 8 attacks an alleged assumption of externalism, and chapter 10 explores the possibility of combining a “motor theory” and a “control theory” of perception. This is a very rich brew, and at least half the challenge this book presents consists in discerning its central argument and conclusion with enough precision to bring criticism to bear. (shrink)

What is the relationship between negative experience, artistic production, and prudential value? If it were true that (for some people) artistic creativity must be purchased at the price of negative experience (to be clear: currently no one knows whether this is true), what should we conclude about the value of such experiences? Are they worth it for the sake of art? The first part of this essay considers general questions about how to establish the positive extrinsic value of something intrinsically (...) negative. The second part emphasizes the importance of various distinctions within the realm of the negative. We must distinguish between adversity (which is non-mental) and negative mental states, and between negative thoughts (or attitudes) and negative affect. Within the realm of negative affect, we must distinguish between negative emotions and moods, on the one hand, and negative affective perspectives on the other, and then between mildly negative affective perspectives and severely negative ones (for which I reserve the term ‘suffering’). These distinctions matter greatly, since different types of negative experience have very different degrees of prudential disvalue. Although many types of negative experience may be “worth it”—because their positive extrinsic value outweighs their negative value—this is rarely true of severe suffering. (shrink)

Jennifer Lackey presents a ground-breaking exploration of the epistemology of groups, and its implications for group agency and responsibility. She argues that group belief and knowledge depend on what individual group members do or are capable of doing, while being subject to group-level normative requirements.

This book is a concise overview of the relevance and application of moral philosophy to all those involved in business and employment. It is the ideal introduction for beginning students of applied philosophy, business or management ethics.

In her essay collection First, Second, and Other Selves: Essays on Friendship and Personal Identity, well-known scholar of ancient philosophy Jennifer Whiting gathers her previously published essays taking Aristotle's theories on friendship as a springboard to engage with contemporary philosophical work on personal identity and moral psychology. Whiting examines three themes throughout the collection, the first being psychic contingency, or the belief that the psychological structures characteristic of human beings may in fact vary, not just from one cultural context (...) to another, but also from one individual to another. The second theme is the belief that friendship informs an understanding of the nature of the self, an idea that springs from Whiting's uncommon reading of Aristotle's writings on friendship. Specifically, Whiting explains a scenario in which a "virtuous agent" adopts a kind of impersonal attitude both towards herself and towards her "character" friends, loving both because they are virtuous; this scenario ties in with an examination of the Aristotelian concept of the ideal friend as an "other self," or a friendship that evolves from character rather than ego, as well as Whiting's meditation on whether or not a virtuous individual should have a "special" sort of concern for her own future self, distinct in kind from the concern that she has for others. The third theme is that of rational egoism, a concept that Whiting critiques, especially in the context of Aristotle's eudaimonism. The central tenet of the collection is the message that taking "ethocentric" attitudes both towards ourselves and towards our friends sheds light on the nature of personal identity and helps to combat ethnocentric and other objectionable forms of bias, a message that is becoming increasingly urgent in light of the recent deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. (shrink)

Saul_Jennifer, Scepticism and Implicit Bias.

We propose that children employ specialized cognitive systems that allow them to recover an accurate “causal map” of the world: an abstract, coherent, learned representation of the causal relations among events. This kind of knowledge can be perspicuously understood in terms of the formalism of directed graphical causal models, or “Bayes nets”. Children’s causal learning and inference may involve computations similar to those for learning causal Bayes nets and for predicting with them. Experimental results suggest that 2- to 4-year-old children (...) construct new causal maps and that their learning is consistent with the Bayes net formalism. (shrink)

Testimony is a crucial source of knowledge: we are to a large extent reliant upon what others tell us. It has been the subject of much recent interest in epistemology, and this volume collects twelve original essays on the topic by some of the world's leading philosophers. It will be the starting point for future research in this fertile field. Contributors include Robert Audi, C. A. J. Coady, Elizabeth Fricker, Richard Fumerton, Sanford C. Goldberg, Peter Graham, Jennifer Lackey, Keith (...) Lehrer, Richard Moran, Frederick F. Schmitt, Ernest Sosa, and James Van Cleve. (shrink)

Book synopsis: How is our conception of what there is affected by our counting ourselves as inhabitants of the natural world? How do our actions fit into a world that is altered through our agency? And how do we accommodate our understanding of one another as fellow subjects of experience—as beings with thoughts and wants and hopes and fears? These questions provide the impetus for the detailed discussions of ontology, human agency, and everyday psychological explanation presented in this book. The (...) answers offer a distinctive view of questions about “the mind’s place in nature,” and they argue for a particular position in philosophy of mind: naive naturalism. This position opposes the whole drift of the last thirty or forty years’ philosophy of mind in the English-speaking world. Jennifer Hornsby sets naive naturalism against dualism, but without advancing the claims of “materialism,” “physicalism,” or “naturalism” as these have come to be known. She shows how we can, and why we should, abandon the view that thoughts and actions, to be seen as real, must be subject to scientific explanation. (shrink)

Moral abolitionists claim that morality ought to be abolished. According to one of their most prominent arguments, this is because making moral judgments renders people significantly less tolerant toward anyone who holds divergent views. In this paper we investigate the hypothesis that morality’s tolerance-decreasing effect only occurs if people are realists about moral issues, i.e., they interpret these issues as objectively grounded. We found support for this hypothesis (Studies 1 and 2). Yet, it also turned out that the intolerance associated (...) with realism is mediated by moral conviction and perceived consensus. People tend to feel more strongly about those moral issues they ground objectively and, in doing so, are more prone to display the vice of moral smugness toward those who disagree with them. The remedy for this that has been recommended is humility which we found (Study 3) is indeed related to reduced intolerance, in part by predicting a reduction in realism, but also in part through a direct connection to intolerance. These results put pressure on abolitionists’ “argument from intolerance.”. (shrink)

Jennifer Trusted's new book argues that metaphysical beliefs are essential for scientific inquiry. The theories, presuppositions and beliefs that neither science nor everyday experience can justify are the realm of metaphysics, literally `beyond physics'. These basic beliefs form a framework for our activities and can be discovered in science, common sense and religion. By examining the history of science from the eleventh century to the present, this book shows how religious and mystical beliefs, as well as philosophical speculation have (...) had a considerable role in motivating scientists and inspiring scientific inquiry. _Physics and Metaphysics_ presupposes no technical knowledge of either philosophy or science. It is an ideal introduction to science and the important forces that have shaped its history and ideas. (shrink)

Jennifer Trusted's new book argues that metaphysical beliefs are essential for scientific inquiry. The theories, presuppositions and beliefs that neither science nor everyday experience can justify are the realm of metaphysics, literally `beyond physics'. These basic beliefs form a framework for our activities and can be discovered in science, common sense and religion. By examining the history of science from the eleventh century to the present, this book shows how religious and mystical beliefs, as well as philosophical speculation have (...) had a considerable role in motivating scientists and inspiring scientific inquiry. _Physics and Metaphysics_ presupposes no technical knowledge of either philosophy or science. It is an ideal introduction to science and the important forces that have shaped its history and ideas. (shrink)

Skepticism about the epistemic value of intuition in theoretical and philosophical inquiry has recently been bolstered by empirical research suggesting that people’s concrete-case intuitions are vulnerable to irrational biases (e.g., the order effect). What is more, skeptics argue that we have no way to ‘‘calibrate” our intuitions against these biases and no way of anticipating intuitional instability. This paper challenges the skeptical position, introducing data from two studies that suggest not only that people’s concrete-case intuitions are often stable, but also (...) that people have introspective awareness of this stability, providing a promising means by which to assess the epistemic value of our intuitions. (shrink)

Understanding causal structure is a central task of human cognition. Causal learning underpins the development of our concepts and categories, our intuitive theories, and our capacities for planning, imagination and inference. During the last few years, there has been an interdisciplinary revolution in our understanding of learning and reasoning: Researchers in philosophy, psychology, and computation have discovered new mechanisms for learning the causal structure of the world. This new work provides a rigorous, formal basis for theory theories of concepts and (...) cognitive development, and moreover, the causal learning mechanisms it has uncovered go dramatically beyond the traditional mechanisms of both nativist theories, such as modularity theories, and empiricist ones, such as association or connectionism. (shrink)

Jennifer McKitrick offers an opinionated guide to the philosophy of dispositions. In her view, when an object has a disposition, it is such that, if a certain type of circumstance were to occur, a certain kind of event would occur. Since this is very common for this to be the case, dispositions are an abundant and diverse feature of our world.

Philosophical Issues, Volume 31, Issue 1, Page 188-209, October 2021.

Delusions play a fundamental role in the history of psychology, philosophy and culture, dividing not only the mad from the sane but reason from unreason. Yet the very nature and extent of delusions are poorly understood. What are delusions? How do they differ from everyday errors or mistaken beliefs? Are they scientific categories? In this superb, panoramic investigation of delusion Jennifer Radden explores these questions and more, unravelling a fascinating story that ranges from Descartes’s demon to famous first-hand accounts (...) of delusion, such as Daniel Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Radden places delusion in both a clinical and cultural context and explores a fascinating range of themes: delusions as both individually and collectively held, including the phenomenon of folies á deux ; spiritual and religious delusions, in particular what distinguishes normal religious belief from delusions with religious themes; how we assess those suffering from delusion from a moral standpoint; and how we are to interpret violent actions when they are the result of delusional thinking. As well as more common delusions, such as those of grandeur, she also discusses some of the most interesting and perplexing forms of clinical delusion, such as Cotard and Capgras. (shrink)

Recent scholarship (Goodwin & Darley, 2008) on the meta-ethical debate between objectivism and relativism has found people to be mixed: they are objectivists about some issues, but relativists about others. The studies discussed here sought to explore this further. Study 1 explored whether giving people the ability to identify moral issues for themselves would reveal them to be more globally objectivist. Study 2 explored people's meta-ethical commitments more deeply, asking them to provide verbal explanations for their judgments. This revealed that (...) while people think they are relativists, this may not always be the case. The explanations people gave were sometimes rated by outside (blind) coders as being objective, even when given a relativist response. Nonetheless, people remained meta-ethical pluralists. Why this might be is discussed. (shrink)

Ethical codes have been hailed as an explicit vehicle for achieving more sustainable and defensible organizational practice. Nonetheless, when legal compliance and corporate governance codes are conflated, codes can be used to define organizational interests ostentatiously by stipulating norms for employee ethics. Such codes have a largely cosmetic and insurance function, acting subtly and strategically to control organizational risk management and protection. In this paper, we conduct a genealogical discourse analysis of a representative code of ethics from an international corporation (...) to understand how management frames expectations of compliance. Our contribution is to articulate the problems inherent in codes of ethics, and we make some recommendations to address these to benefit both an organization and its employees. In this way, we show how a code of ethics can provide a foundation for ethical sustainability, while addressing management intentions and employees’ ethical satisfaction. (shrink)

A dramatic shift in British and French ideas about empire unfolded in the sixty years straddling the turn of the nineteenth century. As Jennifer Pitts shows in A Turn to Empire, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Jeremy Bentham were among many at the start of this period to criticize European empires as unjust as well as politically and economically disastrous for the conquering nations. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the most prominent British and French liberal thinkers, including John Stuart (...) Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, vigorously supported the conquest of non-European peoples. Pitts explains that this reflected a rise in civilizational self-confidence, as theories of human progress became more triumphalist, less nuanced, and less tolerant of cultural difference. At the same time, imperial expansion abroad came to be seen as a political project that might assist the emergence of stable liberal democracies within Europe. Pitts shows that liberal thinkers usually celebrated for respecting not only human equality and liberty but also pluralism supported an inegalitarian and decidedly nonhumanitarian international politics. Yet such moments represent not a necessary feature of liberal thought but a striking departure from views shared by precisely those late-eighteenth-century thinkers whom Mill and Tocqueville saw as their forebears. Fluently written, A Turn to Empire offers a novel assessment of modern political thought and international justice, and an illuminating perspective on continuing debates over empire, intervention, and liberal political commitments. (shrink)

In Kant’s Organicism, Jennifer Mensch draws a crucial link between these spheres by showing how the concept of epigenesis—a radical theory of biological formation—lies at the heart of Kant’s conception of reason.

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, Moving Up without Losing Your Way looks at the (...) ethical dilemmas of upward mobility—the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity—faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society. -/- Drawing upon philosophy, social science, personal stories, and interviews, Jennifer Morton reframes the college experience, factoring in not just educational and career opportunities but also essential relationships with family, friends, and community. Finding that student strivers tend to give up the latter for the former, negating their sense of self, Morton seeks to reverse this course. She urges educators to empower students with a new narrative of upward mobility—one that honestly situates ethical costs in historical, social, and economic contexts and that allows students to make informed decisions for themselves. -/- A powerful work with practical implications, Moving Up without Losing Your Way paves a hopeful road so that students might achieve social mobility while retaining their best selves. (shrink)

Statements about the behavior of biochemical entities (e.g., about the interaction between two proteins) abound in the literature on molecular biology and are increasingly becoming the targets of information extraction and text mining techniques. We show that an accurate analysis of the semantics of such statements reveals a number of ambiguities that have to be taken into account in the practice of biomedical ontology engineering: Such statements can not only be understood as event reporting statements, but also as ascriptions of (...) dispositions or tendencies that may or may not refer to collectives of interacting molecules or even to collectives of interaction events. (shrink)

While much of our knowledge relies on testimony or the words of others, until recently few philosophers had much to say about the nature of testimony or how we learn from another's words, but testimony has now become a popular topic. Jennifer Lackey's Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge is a useful and intelligent guide, a well informed and appreciative but critical and provocative commentary on a large and growing body of literature.According to Lackey, most of (...) the literature assumes that testimony can spread but not create knowledge, much as memory can be a reminder of old but not a source of new truth. Lackey maintains that the assumption is mistaken and offers an account of testimony, according to which, testimony can give rise to new knowledge as well as transmit old truths from one person to another.In her introduction, Lackey characterizes what she calls the belief view of testimony and suggests that this view dominates today's literature. On the belief view, testimony is a vehicle for expressing belief, and when I tell you that p, I express my belief that p with the intention …. (shrink)

The pressures that led to the evolution of episodic memory have recently seen much discussion, but a fully satisfactory account of them is still lacking. We seek to make progress in this debate by taking a step backward, identifying four possible ways that episodic memory could evolve in relation to simulationist future planning—a similar and seemingly related ability. After distinguishing each of these possibilities, the paper critically discusses existing accounts of the evolution of episodic memory. It then presents a novel (...) argument in favor of the view that episodic memory is a by-product of the evolution of simulationist future planning. The paper ends by showing that this position allows for the maintenance of the traditional view that episodic memory operates on stored memory traces, as well as explaining a number of key features of episodic memory: its being subject to frequent and systematic errors, its neural co-location with the capacity for simulationist future planning, and the potential existence of non-human episodic memory. (shrink)

Abstract: Recent experimental research on the 'Knobe effect' suggests, somewhat surprisingly, that there is a bi-directional relation between attributions of intentional action and evaluative considerations. We defend a novel account of this phenomenon that exploits two factors: (i) an intuitive asymmetry in judgments of responsibility (e.g. praise/blame) and (ii) the fact that intentionality commonly connects the evaluative status of actions to the responsibility of actors. We present the results of several new studies that provide empirical evidence in support of this (...) account while disconfirming various currently prominent alternative accounts. We end by discussing some implications of this account for folk psychology. (shrink)