Any convincing theory of self-awareness must do the following: (a) avoid what Henry terms “ontological monism” (OM), the belief that there is only one kind of awareness, namely, object-awareness; for as long as we stick to OM, we remain wedded to the reflection theory of self-awareness and its well-known difficulties (the infinite regress being the worst). And, (b) account for the concrete personal facts about self-awareness: familiarity, unity, identity, etc. First, I go through the tradition, starting with Descartes, of (...) accounts of self-awareness which fail to satisfy constraint (a). Second, I discuss the standard solution to the problem of self-awareness found in Sartre’s pre-reflective self. I argue that Sartre’s pre-reflective self contains a residue of the bias of “ontological monism,” therefore satisfying neither (a) nor (b). Third, I suggest an alternative in Kant’s transcendental subject, which possesses self-awareness independently of a cognitive attitude in the traditional sense of object-intentionality, and thereby intimates the beginnings of a phenomenology of the invisible. (shrink)

"At its core, Yoga invites practitioners to live fully in the midst of hardship while staying open to the possibility of being transformed by life experiences of all kinds. A seasoned Yoga teacher and writer, the author confronts the ways in which modern Yoga has strayed from its original purposes, challenging current perspectives of practice, balance and peace. Drawing on the foundations of Yoga philosophy, this book provides guideposts for living a resilient life through deepening the understanding and experience of (...) Yoga. To redefine the popular understanding of Yoga, chapters provide practical and applicable tools to reclaim practice as a way to be fully alive and aware, thereby unpacking the resistance, judgment and impatience that stand in the way of living a resilient life."-Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Intended for high school and college students studying ancient Greece and Rome as part of a larger world history curriculum, this book's coverage of key wars and battles; important leaders, armies, organizations, and weapons; and other aspects of conflict will enable readers to better understand the complex role warfare played in ancient Western civilization.

Using traditional meta-analytic techniques, we compile relevant research to enhance conceptual appreciation of ethical climate theory (ECT) as it has been studied in the descriptive and applied ethics literature. We explore the various treatments of ethical climate to understand how the theoretical framework has developed. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive picture of how the theory has been extended by describing the individual-level work climate outcomes commonly studied in this theoretical context. Meta-analysis allows us to resolve inconsistencies in previous findings as (...) well as confirm the central tenets of the overall ethical climate framework. In addition, we consider the ethical climate relationships in the larger context of the␣theoretical framework, using path analysis to test the structural relationships. Overall, our results provide evidence of the relationships between ethical climate perceptions and individual-level work outcomes. Based on our analyses, we offer future research directions important for further development of ECT. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Despite widespread attention to corruption and organizational change in the literature, to our knowledge, no research has attempted to understand the linkages between these two powerful organizational phenomena. Accordingly, we draw on major theories in ethics, sociology, and management to develop a theoretical framework for understanding how organizational change can sometimes generate corruption. We extend anomie theory and ethical climate theory to articulate the deinstitutionalization of the normative control system and argue that, through this deinstitutionalization, organizations have the potential to (...) become incubators for corruption. We qualify this process by proposing conditions more ripe for anomie and under which this deinstitutionalization is more likely to occur, propounding moderating relationships that influence organizational reconfiguration. Examples of turbulence in the contemporary business environment that can trigger change highlight our discussion. We conclude with managerial implications, offering means by which the deleterious effects of corruption may be arrested or controlled. (shrink)

Research has documented that individuals consider outcomes, intentions, and transgressor negligence when making morally relevant judgments (Nobes, Panagiotaki, & Engelhardt, 2017). However, less is known about whether individuals attend to both victim and transgressor negligence in their evaluations. The current study measured 3‐ to 6‐year‐olds (N = 70), 7‐ to 12‐year‐olds (N = 54), and adults' (N = 97, ages 18–25 years) moral judgments about scenarios in which an accidental transgression occurred involving property damage or physical harm. Participants were either (...) assigned to conditions where the victim or the transgressor was negligent. Results revealed attention to negligence among all participants across a range of different moral judgment measures (including acceptability judgments, punishment judgments, and attributions of blame), with age‐related increases in attention to negligence evident. Results provide novel evidence that children and adults consider not just outcomes and intentions, but also the role of negligence in both victims and transgressors, when making social decisions. (shrink)

For over three decades, clinical ethicists in the United States have recorded their consulting activities to supplement documentation in the medical record, often using locally developed instrument...

Postural instability in Parkinson’s disease (PD) is characterized by impaired postural responses to transient perturbations, increased postural sway in stance and difficulty transitioning between tasks. In addition, some studies suggest that loss of dopamine in the basal ganglia due to PD results in difficulty using proprioceptive information for motor control. Here, we quantify the ability of subjects with PD and age-matched control subjects to use and re-weight sensory information for postural control during steady-state conditions of continuous rotations of the stance (...) surface or visual surround. We measure the postural sway of subjects in response to a pseudorandom, surface-tilt stimulus with eyes closed, and in response to a pseudorandom, visual-tilt stimulus. We use a feedback control model of the postural control system to interpret our results, focusing on sensory weighting as a function of stimulus amplitude. We find that subjects with PD can re-weight their dependence upon sensory information in response to changes in surface- or visual-stimulus amplitude. Specifically, subjects with PD behaved like age-matched control subjects by decreasing proprioceptive contribution to stance control with increasing surface-tilt amplitude, and decreasing visual contribution with increasing visual-tilt amplitude. However, subjects with PD do not decrease their reliance on proprioception as much as age-matched controls for small increases in surface-stimulus amplitudes. Levodopa medication did not affect sensory re-weighting behaviors for postural control. The impairment in PD subject’s ability to respond differently to small changes in surface rotation amplitudes is consistent with an increased threshold for perceiving proprioceptive signals, which may result from decreased signal-to-noise in the dopaminergic pathways associated with sensory processing and/or sensory integration. (shrink)

In this paper, the authors respond to a recent critique of their Journal of Business Ethics article, which provided a meta- analytic review of ethical climate theory research. They review basic principles of meta- analytic research and discuss the methodological context of their work, which was not discussed in the recent reply article. Additional methodological and practical evidence is presented in support of Martin and Cullen, including a discussion of the paper’s findings and its contribution to ethical climate theory and (...) research. (shrink)

‘Apologetics’ is hardly a word to be used without apology in the present dispensation. And to speak of anything like a neglected avenue or opportunity in religious apologetics might almost seem as if one were speaking of an opportunity in just such an enterprise as no self-respecting philosopher would nowadays wish even to be associated with. For all of their avoidance of the term, however, the thing designated by the term is something with which not a few philosophers of recent (...) years have been not above dabbling in, albeit usually under other names and other labels. After all, religious language has now come to be recognized as not just a legitimate, but even a fashionable object of philosophic attention. And a concern with religious language has often brought with it a concern with religious attitudes, religious behaviour, religious argumentation — yes, even to the point of occasionally becoming a concern with the very religious realities themselves that religious language, religious attitudes, religious behaviour, and religious argument are presumably all about. True, religious realities in this sense are to today's garden of philosophy pretty much what the tree of knowledge once was to the garden of Eden. In fact, one even suspects that there could be a serpent about somewhere, for cases have been reported of an occasional philosopher Adam or philosopher Eve having yielded to temptation: a consideration of God-talk has been known to lead to cautious admissions that such talk might be cognitively meaningful; a consideration of God-experiences to the admission that such experiences under certain circumstances could be veridical; or, even more rarely, a consideration of proofs for God's existence to the gingerly admission that at least some of these proofs might just possibly be valid. Needless to say, though, such a yielding to temptation on the part of some few contemporary philosophers, while it may not have led to any manifest sewing together of fig-leaves, has certainly brought with it the danger, if not always the reality, of a supercilious expulsion from the glorious Eden of contemporary professional philosophy. (shrink)

Childhood obesity has become a public health epidemic, and currently a battle exists over how to frame and address this problem. This paper explores how public policy approaches can be employed to address obesity. We present the argument that obesity should be viewed as the consequence of a “toxic environment” rather than the result of the population failing to take enough “personal responsibility.” In order to make progress in decreasing the prevalence of obesity, we must shift our view of obesity (...) away from the medical model to a public health model . At the same time, we must be sensitive to the problem of weight bias.Potential obstacles to taking a public policy approach are identified, as well as suggestions on how to overcome them. (shrink)

After years of near total neglect, the problem of childhood obesity is now in the limelight. Terms like “epidemic,” “crisis,” and “emergency” are used frequently when describing the trend. Progress is defined with strong language and fueled by statistics such as the observation that this generation of children will be the first to live shorter lives than their parents. Multi-disciplinary journals such as the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics have dedicated symposiums to the issue, and conferences have been convened (...) not only by health professionals but by government agencies, the food industry, and even professionals who market to children. The seriousness of childhood obesity is no longer in doubt, and finally attention has turned to the more complex question – what must be done? (shrink)

The progression of research and scholarly inquiry does not occur in isolation and is wholly dependent on accurate reporting of methods and results, and successful replication of prior work. Without mechanisms to correct the literature, much time and money is wasted on research based on a crumbling foundation. These guidelines serve to outline the respective responsibilities of researchers, institutions, agencies, and publishers or editors in maintaining the integrity of the research record. Delineating these complementary roles and proposing solutions for common (...) barriers provide a foundation for best practices. (shrink)

“Modern ethics,” so-called, has only in the most recent years come under some very sharp and telling, not to say even devastating, criticism. And what is it that one should understand by this term, “modern ethics”? Well, it is a term used largely by very recent critics to designate that whole tradition in ethics, in part utilitarian and in part Kantian in character, that has quite dominated the study of ethics, at least in Anglo-American philosophy, for upwards of three-quarters of (...) a century and more now. (shrink)

Evolutionary changes in traits that affect both ecological divergence and mating signals could lead to reproductive isolation and the formation of new species. Insect cuticular hydrocarbons (CHCs) are potential examples of such dual traits. They form a waxy layer on the cuticle of the insect to maintain water balance and prevent desiccation, while also acting as signaling molecules in mate recognition and chemical communication. Because the synthesis of these hydrocarbons in insect oenocytes occurs through a common biochemical pathway, natural or (...) sexual selection on one role may affect the other. In this review, we explore how ecological divergence in insect CHCs can lead to divergence in mating signals and reproductive isolation. We suggest that the evolution of insect CHCs may be ripe models for understanding ecological speciation. (shrink)

It is with these words that Alan Gewirth opened his 1972 Lindley Lecture at the University of Kansas. And he immediately followed up his opening words with a more or less blanket indictment of almost the entire group of contemporary writers on meta-ethics, who, he would aver, while claiming to be "rationalists" in the matter of the rational justification of moral principles, and while making much of how far they have distanced themselves from the old-line emotivists in this very regard, (...) have nevertheless just not brought it off, so far as their own provision for any such rational justification is concerned. Thus while the emotivists had tended to hold that such reasons as a person might give in support of moral principles could not really function as reasons, but only as causes that might impel or compel acceptance of such principles, the latter-day "rationalists," as Gewirth calls them, insist that good reasons are always in order and logically relevant, so far as any moral or even evaluative judgment is concerned. Indeed, merely to call a thing good, or to judge an action right or wrong, already implies that such a judgment is put forward as one that is universalizable and for which good reasons can be given. Unfortunately, however,—Gewirth goes on to insist—reasons and justifications of this sort turn out, even on the admission of the rationalists themselves, to be valid only on the prior assumption of what might be called "the moral point of view.". (shrink)

Timely, unbiased scientific advice is essential for effective public policy, but the system now operating in the United States is in a state of dangerous disrepair. The danger takes two forms. First, we are missing critical benefits in health, education, economic productivity, national security, and many other areas that more effective management of science could deliver. Second, we risk being overtaken by dangers that could have been avoided or for which we could have been much better prepared, given stronger support (...) for analysis. It is easy to say that all of these problems could be easily corrected with a few elections. But in fact the difficulties are deep and structural. It will not be easy to rebuild the apparatus of science and technical advice in a way that can serve the needs of twenty-first century America. The discussion that follows will review the history of science and technology policy advice and use the lessons learned to propose a practical path forward. Indeed, there are a number of practical paths forward that build on strategies that have proved to be effective in the past and structures already in place. (shrink)