A model is developed which identifies and describes various factors which affect ethical and unethical behavior in organizations, including a decision-maker's social, government and legal, work, professional and personal environments. The effect of individual decision maker attributes on the decision process is also discussed. The model links these influences with ethical and unethical behavior via the mediating structure of the individual's decision-making process.

The deaths of those on whom our practical identities rely generate a sense of disorientation or alienation from the world seemingly at odds with life being meaningful. In the terms put forth in Cheshire Calhoun’s recent account of meaningfulness in life, because their existence serves as a metaphysical presupposition of our practical identities, their deaths threaten to upend a background frame of agency against which much of our choice and deliberation takes place. Here I argue for a dual role for (...) grief in addressing this threat to life’s meaningfulness. Inasmuch as grief’s object is the loss of our relationship with the deceased as it was prior to their death, grief serves to alert us to the threat to our practical identities that their deaths pose to us and motivates us to defuse this threat by revising our practical identities to reflect the modification in our relationship necessitated by their deaths. Simultaneously, the emotional complexity and richness of grief episodes provides an abundance of normative evidence regarding our relationship with the deceased and our practical identities, evidence that can enable us to re-establish our practical identities and thereby recover a sense of our lives as meaningful. (shrink)

Because of the difficulty posed by the contrast between the search for truth and truth itself, Michael Polanyi believes that we must alter the foundation of epistemology to include as essential to the very nature of mind, the kind of groping that constitutes the recognition of a problem. This collection of essays, assembled by Marjorie Grene, exemplifies the development of Polanyi's theory of knowledge which was first presented in Science, Faith, and Society and later systematized in Personal Knowledge. Polanyi (...) believes that the dilemma of the modern mind arises from the peculiar relation between the positivist claim for total objectivity in scientific knowledge and the unprecedented moral dynamism characterizing the social and political aspirations of the last century. The first part of Knowing and Being deals with this theme. Part two develops Polanyi's idea that centralization is incompatible with the life of science as well as his views on the role of tradition and authority in science. The essays on tacit knowing in Part Three proceed directly from his preoccupation with the nature of scientific discovery and reveal a pervasive substructure of all intelligent behavior. Polanyi believes that all knowing involves movement from internal clues to external evidence. Therefore, to explain the process of knowing, we must develop a theory of the nature of living things in general, including an account of that aspect of living things we call "mind." Part Four elaborates upon this theme. (shrink)

This book presents the first critical examination of the overlapping ethical, sociocultural, and policy-related issues surrounding disasters, global bioethics, and public health ethics. These issues are elucidated under the conceptual rubric: Public health disasters. The book defines PHDs as public health issues with devastating social consequences, the attendant public health impacts of natural or man-made disasters, and latent or low prevalence public health issues with the potential to rapidly acquire pandemic capacities. This notion is illustrated using Ebola and pandemic influenza (...) outbreaks, atypical drug-resistant tuberculosis, and the health emergencies of earthquakes as focal points. Drawing on an approach that reckons with microbial, existential, and anthropological realities; the book develops a relational-based global ethical framework that can help address the local, anthropological, ecological, and transnational dynamics of the ethical issues engendered by public health disasters. The book also charts some of the critical roles that relevant local and transnational stakeholders may play in translating the proposed global ethical framework from the sphere of concept to the arena of action. This title is of immense benefit to bioethics scholars, public and global health policy experts, as well as graduate students working in the area of global health, public health ethics, and disaster bioethics. (shrink)

In a rich and thought-provoking paper, Lambros Malafouris argues that taking material culture seriously means to be ‘systematically concerned with figuring out the causal efficacy of materiality in the enactment and constitution of a cognitive system or operation’ (Malafouris 2004, 55). As I understand this view, there are really two intertwined claims to be established. The first is that the things beyond the skin that make up material culture (in other words, the physical objects and artefacts in which cultural networks (...) and systems of human social relations are realized) may be essential to the enactment of, and be partly constitutive of, certain cognitive systems or operations. The consequence of establishing this claim is supposed to be that we have a mandate to recast the boundaries of the mind so as to include, as proper parts of the mind, things located beyond the skin. Thus, in talking about the contribution of the world to cognition, Malafouris (2004, 58) concludes that ‘what we have traditionally construed as an active or passive but always clearly separated external stimulus for setting a cognitive mechanism into motion, may be after all a continuous part of the machinery itself; at least ex hypothesi’. This is the position that, in philosophical circles, is known increasingly as the extended mind hypothesis (Clark & Chalmers 1998; Menary forthcoming). Henceforth I shall refer to this hypothesis as EM. A stock example will help bring the idea into view. Rumelhart et al. (1986) note that most of us solve difficult multiplication problems by using ‘pen and paper’ as an external resource. This environmental prop enables us to transform a difficult cognitive problem into a set of simpler ones, and to temporarily store the results of certain intermediate calculations. For the fan of EM, the distributed combination of this external resource and certain inner psychological processes constitutes a cognitive system in its own right. (shrink)

From 1801–1807 Schelling continued to refine his early attempts at Naturphilosophie in the metaphysical framework of a transcendental Spinozism that he initially called Identity Philosophy. While mathematics and geometry provided the model for identity and its quantitative differentiation in early versions of identity theory, from 1804–1807, logic and theory of language offered a model of identity capable of unknotting persistent Spinozistic puzzles such as the connection between natura naturans and natura naturata—the absolute and its potencies—and the ontological status of the (...) individual. Schelling’s initial concepts of identity as “indifference” or “the identity of identity and difference,” themselves the offshoot of meditations on polarity and repeating structure in the philosophy of nature, make way for logical concepts such as “expression” or “affirmation” and the propositional operator “bond” or “Position” found in the copula. The new essays approach ultimate reality through Spinoza’s disjunction of God or nature, or productive and produced nature; so in addition to identity theory, a general metaphysics of nature prefaces treatments of specific natural phenomena. These dual metaphysics of God and nature inject a dynamic or expressive movement into identity that is not yet the unfolding of identity as grounding-and-division that Schelling will articulate in the 1809 Freedom Essay, but it carries a sense of motion and differentiation—or evolution and unfolding—not found in his earlier attempts. The entire identity philosophy period is best viewed as a step in Schelling’s lifelong project of reworking Spinoza by adding life and spirit to nature. (shrink)

Exercises designed to stimulate further talking and to indicate further dimensions of the topics are posed throughout the book to encourage a more advanced ...

New brain-computer interface and neuroimaging techniques are making differentiation less ambiguous and more accurate between unresponsive wakefulness syndrome patients and patients with higher cognitive function and awareness. As research into these areas continues to progress, new ethical issues will face physicians of patients suffering from total locked-in syndrome, characterized by complete loss of voluntary muscle control, with retention of cognitive function and awareness detectable only with neuroimaging and brain-computer interfaces. Physicians, researchers, ethicists and hospital ethics committees should be aware of (...) and prepared to handle ethical issues unique to these totally locked-in patients. Several thought experiments are discussed, to highlight potential ethical dilemmas surrounding surrogate decision-making, autonomy, end-of-life care, and pediatric care, which will be unique to total LIS patients. These, along with other ethical problems especially relevant to total LIS patients, merit further discussion among physicians, researchers, ethicists and hospital ethics committees, to facilitate consensus regarding these issues, and improve patient care. (shrink)

Empathy and Democracy argues that empathy plays a crucial role in enabling democratic deliberation to function the way it should.

in The Cambridge Companion to Locke’s Essay, edited by Lex Newman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Essays on Japan is a compilation of Professor Michael F. Marra’s essays written in the past ten years on the topics of Japanese literature, Japanese aesthetics, and the space between the two subjects.

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV Notes Bibliography.

First paragraph: When we perform bodily gestures, are we ever literally thinking with our hands (arms, shoulders, etc.)? In the more precise, but correspondingly drier, technical language of contemporary philosophy of mind and cognition, essentially the same question might be asked as follows: are bodily gestures ever among the material vehicles that realize cognitive processes? More precisely still, is it ever true that a coupled system made up of neural activity and bodily gestures counts as realizing a process of thought, (...) in such a way that the gross bodily movements concerned should be granted cognitive status along with, and in essentially the same sense as, the neural activity? (shrink)

In this paper we argue that the protocols of subjects recalling the names of their high school classmates, as well as an army of traditional memory phenomena, can be understood from an information processing analysis which interprets retrieval as a problem‐solving process. This characterization of retrieval focuses on the reconstructive and recursive nature of the process of remembering. Retrieval is viewed as a process in which some information about a target item is used to construct a description of the item (...) and this description is used in attempts to recover new fragments of information. A new description i s formed and the process continues recursively. Three subprocesses are identified: FIND A CONTEXT, in which a proper environment for conducting a search i s established: SEARCH, in which bits and pieces of information appropriate to the context are recovered until an adequate description can be formed within the search context; and VERIFY, in which recovery information is checked for consistency.From the perspective this characterization, we examine the protocols of subjects asked to think aloud while recalling the names of their classmates. Subjects' retrievals continued for a surprisingly long period and were characterized by the phenomena of overshoot, systematic hypothesizing, fabrications, establishment of search contexts, self‐corrections, and the use of a number of basic search strategies. The view of memory as a problem‐solving process not only leads us to the identification of these phenomena but also to a framework for a coherent interpretation for them. (shrink)

This is the second of three volumes of posthumously collected writings of G. A. Cohen, who was one of the leading, and most progressive, figures in contemporary political philosophy. This volume brings together some of Cohen's most personal philosophical and nonphilosophical essays, many of them previously unpublished. Rich in first-person narration, insight, and humor, these pieces vividly demonstrate why Thomas Nagel described Cohen as a "wonderful raconteur." The nonphilosophical highlight of the book is Cohen's remarkable account of his first trip (...) to India, which includes unforgettable vignettes of encounters with strangers and reflections on poverty and begging. Other biographical pieces include his valedictory lecture at Oxford, in which he describes his philosophical development and offers his impressions of other philosophers, and "Isaiah's Marx, and Mine," a tribute to his mentor Isaiah Berlin. Other essays address such topics as the truth in "small-c conservatism," who can and can't condemn terrorists, and the essence of bullshit. A recurring theme is finding completion in relation to the world of other human beings. Engaging, perceptive, and empathetic, these writings reveal a more personal side of one of the most influential philosophers of our time. (shrink)

Against arealist background, the paper starts by demonstrating the horror of the very popular doctrine, “Worldmaking”, according to which a known world is partly constructed by our imposition of concepts. The rest of the paper aims to make worldmaking hard. (i) It rejects the usual episternological and semantic paths to Worldmaking arguing that they use the wrong methodology and proceed in the wrong direction. (ii) It considers the relation between Worldmaking and the response-dependency theory of concepts. Philip Pettit has proposed (...) a global version of that theory: all our concepts are response-dependent. The paper argues that this theory provides an example of the semantic path to Worldmaking and for that reason alone should be rejected. (shrink)

Daniel, Michael E Review(s) of: Benedict XVI: A guide for the perplexed, by Tracey Rowland, London: T and T Clark International, 2010, pp.160, $29.95.

In this book, Michael Clifford lays the groundwork for the formalization of political genealogy as a recognized methodology of theoretical inquiry. Appealing to scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, this book looks to our future by focusing on the history of our present and on what being a political subject will be like in a post-representational world.

Uncovers the disturbing underlying principle that American universities reach decisions on economic grounds. Cf. blurb.

Introduction: Western Marxism in Educational Philosophy and Theory -- Ideology and Schooling -- Marxism and Education: Will the Doctrine Bear the Weight? -- Education and Cultural Disadvantage -- Illich and Anarchism -- Knowledge and Ideology in the Marxist Philosophy of Education -- Liberal Education and Social Change -- The Continuing Conflicts Between Capitalism and Democracy: Ramifications for Schooling -- Luce Irigaray: Women becoming subjects for a divine economy -- The Nature and Limits of Critical Theory in Education -- Class Dismissed? (...) Historical materialism and the politics of 'difference' -- A Brief Commentary on the Hegelian-Marxist Origins of Gramsci's 'Philosophy of Praxis' -- Hope, political imagination, and agency in Marxism and beyond: Explicating the transformative worldview and ethico-ontoepistemology -- Knowledge socialism: the rise of peer production - collegiality, collaboration, and collective intelligence. (shrink)

This book isolates three moments within the epidemic—‘the Science,’ non-pharmaceutical intervention, and pharmaceutic remedies—and shows how each of these unities came to immunise itself against alternative proposals. Michael Lewis demonstrates the auto-immune and counter-productive effects of this approach.

Who is the 'Devil'? And what is he due? The Devil is anyone who disagrees with you. And what he is due is the right to speak his mind. He must have this for your own safety's sake because his freedom is inextricably tied to your own. If he can be censored, why shouldn't you be censored? If we put barriers up to silence 'unpleasant' ideas, what's to stop the silencing of any discussion? This book is a full-throated defense of (...) free speech and open inquiry in politics, science, and culture by the New York Times bestselling author and skeptic Michael Shermer. The new collection of essays and articles takes the Devil by the horns by tackling five key themes: free thought and free speech, politics and society, scientific humanism, religion, and the ideas of controversial intellectuals. For our own sake, we must give the Devil his due. (shrink)

Written by well-known professor and author Michael Boylan, Morality and Global Justice is an accessible examination of the moral and normative underpinnings of ...

Introduction. Le problème de l’imagination artificielle Après les images photographiques et cinématographiques, puis les images de synthèse des effets spéciaux numériques, des films d’animation et des jeux vidéo, des images d’un nouveau genre apparaissent dans l’espace public. Celles-ci sont également produites automatiquement, mais cette fois-ci à partir d’algorithmes d’« intelligence artificielle générative », de sorte que ce n’est plus à partir du paramétrage mécanique ou logiciel d’une ma...

In “The Ascription of Responsibilities and Rights,” H. L. A. Hart introduces two ideas, which he takes to be importantly related: ascriptive sentences and defeasible concepts. Hart's purpose is to dispel certain confusions that he nds in the philosophy of action; but I argue that Hart's ideas are equally pertinent to epistemology. Knowledge is a matter of epistemic authority; and authority is a matter of rights and responsibilities. But Hart's “ascriptivism” has attracted serious criticism and stands in need of clarification, (...) elaboration and even correction. The overall aim of the paper is to present a form of epistemic ascriptivism, in which justification emerges as a defeasible concept in Hart's sense. (shrink)

This essay describes a general approach to building perturbation-tolerant autonomous systems, based on the conviction that artificial agents should be able to notice when something is amiss, assess the anomaly, and guide a solution into place. This basic strategy of self-guided learning is termed the metacognitive loop; it involves the system monitoring, reasoning about, and, when necessary, altering its own decision-making components. This paper (a) argues that equipping agents with a metacognitive loop can help to overcome the brittleness problem, (b) (...) details the metacognitive loop and its relation to our ongoing work on time-sensitive commonsense reasoning, (c) describes specific, implemented systems whose perturbation tolerance was improved by adding a metacognitive loop, and (d) outlines both short-term and long-term research agendas. (shrink)