Despite the centrality of sexuality and love to human life, western history's great philosophers have not produced anything like a detailed and systematic approach to these matters. From Plato's emphasis upon the importance of eros, to the insistence by today's feminists on gender equality, philosophy's interpretation of eroticism and love has been as diverse and explosive as the subject itself. It is this imposing variety of approach and interpretation that makes a lucid, comprehensive anthology on the subject essential. Reflecting the (...) trend over the last twenty years to examine more thoroughly the nature of love and sexuality within a philosophical context, this eclectic anthology presents numerous perspectives on sexual roles and norms, eroticism, pornography, feminism, prostitution, perversion, friendship, and familial love. Philosophical Perspectives on Sex and Love is the most up-to-date appraisal of these central human experiences, featuring the work of thinkers from antiquity to the modern era. On the subject of erotic love, the text offers insight from Plato's Symposium, as well as the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Robert Nozick, and Robert C. Solomon. There are also reflections on sexual perversion from Thomas Nagel, Jerome Neu, and Michael Ruse. The views of Aristotle and contemporary authors on the morality of friendship and family are presented in a section wholly devoted to those issues, while David Hume and Immanuel Kant investigate the ethics of sexuality in selections from their writings. Care has been taken to present different positions on the most controversial issues, and most selections are offered in their entirety. Invaluable for courses in social philosophy, sexuality, social ethics, and feminism, no other volume can give students a more comprehensive discussion of love's countless dimensions. (shrink)

Recognizing the influence crises have in shaping global governance nowadays, the present work explores the possible contribution of human development thinking countering the perverse effects of shock-driven responses to major emergencies. This is done by focusing on contributions by Sen, Dreze, Haq and Stewart related to famines, violent conflict and the idea of human security, analyzed using a selection of four criteria, namely, describing the position of crisis inside human development thinking, issues of modeling and measurement, the stance toward (...) agency, and the actors gathered around the discourse. After strengths and weaknesses are considered, the article suggests a tangential involvement through other human concepts, so human development ideas do not get muddled by the logic of shocks and fulfill the great responsibility of helping us avoid the many shortfalls of a security-obsessed view of humanity. (shrink)

There is something embarrassing about money. Everybody is seeking it but at the same time they are reluctant to talk about their bank balances and stock holdings. As a society we have so much of it that we can install 7000 saffron curtains all over Central Park, send tourists into outer space, and analyze the gas on the surface of Titan, yet we fail to spend it on millions of poverty-stricken people who die of disease or starvation each year. We (...) do open our pocketbooks sometimes, but only when television images of massive destruction overwhelm our sensibilities. Money often dominates our consciousness and bombards us in the headlines: Our national debt is 7.7 trillion dollars and it's increasing by more than 2 billion dollars a day; corporate executives of Enron walk away with millions while their employees lose their jobs and their pensions; and we had an endless fascination with Martha Stewart, who is worth millions, but went to jail trying to save a few thousand. (shrink)

Should laws about sex and pornography be based on social conventions about what is disgusting? Should felons be required to display bumper stickers or wear T-shirts that announce their crimes? This powerful and elegantly written book, by one of America's most influential philosophers, presents a critique of the role that shame and disgust play in our individual and social lives and, in particular, in the law.Martha Nussbaum argues that we should be wary of these emotions because they are associated in (...) troubling ways with a desire to hide from our humanity, embodying an unrealistic and sometimes pathological wish to be invulnerable. Nussbaum argues that the thought-content of disgust embodies "magical ideas of contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity that are just not in line with human life as we know it." She argues that disgust should never be the basis for criminalizing an act, or play either the aggravating or the mitigating role in criminal law it currently does. She writes that we should be similarly suspicious of what she calls "primitive shame," a shame "at the very fact of human imperfection," and she is harshly critical of the role that such shame plays in certain punishments.Drawing on an extraordinarily rich variety of philosophical, psychological, and historical references--from Aristotle and Freud to Nazi ideas about purity--and on legal examples as diverse as the trials of Oscar Wilde and the Martha Stewart insider trading case, this is a major work of legal and moral philosophy. (shrink)

Many countries have regulations that require firms to engage in minimum levels of corporate social activities in areas such as the environment and social welfare. In this paper, we argue that changes in a firm’s compliance with CS regulations are reflected in its reputation for corporate social responsibility, which affects the firm’s performance. The performance impacts depend on whether the firm’s CSR reputation in the current and prior periods is positive, neutral, or negative. Our theoretical framework draws on the reputation (...) literature and on the concepts of recency bias, which weights the present more heavily than the past, and negativity bias, which weights negative assessments more heavily than neutral or positive assessments. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 7317 banks over 1992–2007 where we compare a bank’s return on assets with its current and prior compliance ratings under the U.S. Community Reinvestment Act. We find that changes in CSR reputation have predictable, asymmetric, and sizeable impacts on firm performance. For example, for an average bank with $1 billion in assets, gaining a positive CSR reputation translates into a rise in profits of 4.04%; gaining a negative CSR reputation results in a drop in profits of − 7.8%. (shrink)

Background:Dignity experience in the daily lives of people living with dementia is influenced by their relational interactions with others. However, literature reviews show that knowledge concerning crucial interactional qualities, preserving their sense of dignity, is limited.Aim:The aim of this study was to explore and describe crucial qualities of relational interactions preserving dignity experience among people with dementia, while interacting with family, social network, and healthcare professionals.Methodology:The study was founded upon Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, and an exploratory design employing qualitative research interviews (...) was conducted.Participants and research context:A total of 11 individuals diagnosed with mild to moderate dementia, living in their own homes, were recruited from two Hospital Memory Clinics in Norway.Ethical considerations:In recruiting persons with dementia as study participants, sensitivity toward their life history, autonomy, integrity, relationships, and dignity is essential. These standards, and the ethical principles of moral sensitivity to their vulnerability, doing no harm, showing justice, and respecting their personal utility, guided our research.Results:Three main interactional qualities preserving the participants’ dignity experience were found: Experiencing love and confirmation; experiencing social inclusion and fellowship; experiencing humane warmth and understanding within a caring culture, while being met as an equal human being. A total of 10 sub-qualities were identified within these 3 main qualities.Discussion and final considerations:Dignity experience among the participants was preserved when certain interactional qualities were present in their interactions with family, social network, and healthcare professionals. While supporting some of the findings of previous studies, this study adds new knowledge on the subject. Knowledge of relational interactions toward preserving dignity experience should be a fundamental part of future dementia care practice. Based on the results of this study, an empirical–theoretical model was developed for this purpose. (shrink)

This article aims to demonstrate that a careful examination of Peirce's original manuscripts shows that there are five main periods in Peirce's evolution in his mathematical and philosophical conceptualizations of continuity. The aim of this article is also to establish the relevance of Peirce's reflections on continuity for philosophers and mathematicians.

This book presents an original thesis about the notion of sensory experience and of the mind’s architecture, which is grounded in current trends in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Presented in the form of a dialogue, the book explores some of the psychological and philosophical consequences that the author derives from his proposal.

In the last ten years or so there has been some lively discussion of the questions of immortality and resurrection. Within the Christian tradition there has been debate at theological and exegetical level over the relative merits of belief in the immortality of the soul, and belief in the resurrection of the dead as an account of life after death. Further to this, however, there has been the suggestion that there may be good philosophical reasons for preferring the latter to (...) the former. It is just this contention which I propose to discuss. (shrink)

It is of course true that the articulation of religious and theological views depends upon and often masks philosophical presuppositions. For example, those who quote with approval Anselm's ‘credo ut intelligam’, ‘I believe so that I may understand’, seldom follow the good example set by Anselm, and make explicit, as Anselm does in the following sentence, the fact that this principle rests upon a further principle: ‘For I believe this also, that “unless I believe, I shall not understand”’ . This (...) paper is an attempt to track down and expose one very pervasive set of views about the nature of experience which is implicit in a wide range of religious and theological claims. (shrink)

ISBN 1-58477-498-3. Cloth. $125. * The standard one-volume treatise based on classic legal-realist principles.

The ‘managed-metabolism’ hypothesis suggests that a ‘cooperation barrier’ must be overcome if self-producing chemical organizations are to undergo the transition from non-life to life. This dynamical barrier prevents un-managed autocatalytic networks of molecular species from individuating into complex, cooperative organizations. The barrier arises because molecular species that could otherwise make significant cooperative contributions to the success of an organization will often not be supported within the organization, and because side reactions and other ‘free-riding’ processes will undermine cooperation. As a result, (...) the barrier seriously impedes the emergence of individuality, complex functionality and the transition to life. This barrier is analogous to the cooperation barrier that also impedes the emergence of complex cooperation at all levels of living organization. As has been shown at other levels of organization, the barrier can be overcome comprehensively by appropriate ‘management’. Management implements a system of evolvable constraints that can overcome the cooperation barrier by ensuring that beneficial co-operators are supported within the organization and by suppressing free-riders. In this way, management can control and manipulate the chemical processes of a collectively autocatalytic organization, producing novel processes that serve the interests of the organization as a whole and that could not arise and persist in an un-managed chemical organization. Management self-organizes because it is able to capture some of the benefits that are produced when its interventions promote cooperation, thereby enhancing productivity. Selection will therefore favour the emergence of managers that take over and manage chemical organizations so as to overcome the cooperation barrier. The managed-metabolism hypothesis demonstrates that if management is to overcome the cooperation barrier comprehensively, its interventions must be digitally coded. In this way, the hypothesis accounts for the two-tiered structure of all living cells in which a digitally-coded genetic apparatus manages an analogically-informed metabolism.GraphicalOpen image in new window. (shrink)

The classical theory of errors can be divided into stochastic and determinate parts, or branches. The birth of the first of therse became inevitable after Bradley's idea of cultivating astronomy and natural science in general by “regular series of observations and experiments” became universally accepted. Such scholars as Lambert, Simpson, Lagrange, Daniel Bernoulli and Euler were responsible for the development of the stochastic theory of errors while Laplace and Gauss completed its construction. About fifty or sixty years ago it was (...) included into mathematical statistics. (shrink)

Intriguing, and occasionally unsettling, In Defense of Sin is a refreshingly frank exploration of some real facts of life. Portmann gathers an on-target collection of great writers on transgressions large and small. Read about defenses for promiscuity, greed, deceit, gossip, lust, breaking the golden rule, and more--and use this unusual guide to decide for yourself if sin has a place in our contemporary, and virtually unshockable, society. Provocative and illuminating, this book may change how you think about sin, morality, and (...) what's right. Contributors include Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, Anthony Ellis, Jane English, Ludwig Feuerbach, Sigmund Freud, Bernard Mandeville, Jerome Neu, Friedrich Nietzsche, David Novitz, Joyce Carol Oates, David A.J. Richards, Seneca, Jonathan Swift, Richard Wasserstrom, and Oscar Wilde. (shrink)

Even though it is not a methodology on the level of principlism or casuistry, narrative bioethics nonetheless contributes to and guides decision-making in the field of biomedical ethics. However, unlike other methodologies, the narrative approach lacks a set of specific patterns and formal rules for doing so. This deficiency leaves this approach more vulnerable to the influence of historical factors; in fact, the vital history of a person is made up of thousands of scenes, which one must select and group (...) under different norms. Yet the historicity of narrative does not destroy its normative value; rather, it gives rise to a confluence of stories that contradict one another on the basis of their practical consequences. This problem is less severe in traditional cultures, where some stories take precedence over others according to the normative value conferred through the supposed authority of their sources. But it manifests in an intense manner within current multicultural societies. It is imperative to find the thread that leads outside the labyrinth of subjectivity. This paper shows that the end of this thread lies, paradoxically, not in actions but in the subject-actors that perform them—specifically when such subjects are conceived as dramaturgical characters in narrative. (shrink)

This book examines philosophical and scientific implications of Neodarwinism relative to recent empirical data. It develops explanations of social behavior and cognition through analysis of mental capabilities and consideration of ethical issues. It includes debate within cognitive science among explanations of social and moral phenomena from philosophy, evolutionary and cognitive psychology, neurobiology, linguistics, and computer science. Cognitive Science (CS) provides an original corpus of scholarly work that makes explicit the import of cognitive-science research for philosophical analysis. Topics include the nature, (...) structure, and justification of knowledge, cognitive architectures and development, brain-mind theories, and consciousness. (shrink)

Recent writing on the idea of a form of life has tended to be critical of the use made of this notion by writers such as Peter Winch, D. Z. Phillips and Norman Malcolm. Rightly or wrongly these writers have been regarded as meaning by ‘a form of life’, something like ‘a way or style of life’, and recent explicatory work on the notion has largely tended to discount this as a plausible interpretation of what Wittgenstein meant in his use (...) of the expression. The intention of this paper is not that of direct intervention in this particular dispute, though the conclusions drawn, if correct, would have some bearing on it. The intention is rather to develop, in order to make use of it, the idea of a form of life within the context of a number of philosophical difficulties. I should certainly claim to be drawing upon the remarks made by Wittgenstein in his own use of the expression: but I should not claim to be expounding Wittgenstein. Hence I do not wish to enter into the disputes referred to above about what precisely Wittgenstein meant by the expression, though again, what I say, if not wholly misguided, should have some bearing on these disputes. (shrink)

The ‘managed-metabolism’ hypothesis suggests that a ‘cooperation barrier’ must be overcome if self-producing chemical organizations are to undergo the transition from non-life to life. This dynamical barrier prevents un-managed autocatalytic networks of molecular species from individuating into complex, cooperative organizations. The barrier arises because molecular species that could otherwise make significant cooperative contributions to the success of an organization will often not be supported within the organization, and because side reactions and other ‘free-riding’ processes will undermine cooperation. As a result, (...) the barrier seriously impedes the emergence of individuality, complex functionality and the transition to life. This barrier is analogous to the cooperation barrier that also impedes the emergence of complex cooperation at all levels of living organization. As has been shown at other levels of organization, the barrier can be overcome comprehensively by appropriate ‘management’. Management implements a system of evolvable constraints that can overcome the cooperation barrier by ensuring that beneficial co-operators are supported within the organization and by suppressing free-riders. In this way, management can control and manipulate the chemical processes of a collectively autocatalytic organization, producing novel processes that serve the interests of the organization as a whole and that could not arise and persist in an un-managed chemical organization. Management self-organizes because it is able to capture some of the benefits that are produced when its interventions promote cooperation, thereby enhancing productivity. Selection will therefore favour the emergence of managers that take over and manage chemical organizations so as to overcome the cooperation barrier. The managed-metabolism hypothesis demonstrates that if management is to overcome the cooperation barrier comprehensively, its interventions must be digitally coded. In this way, the hypothesis accounts for the two-tiered structure of all living cells in which a digitally-coded genetic apparatus manages an analogically-informed metabolism.GraphicalOpen image in new window. (shrink)

For the last two centuries “Vom Kriege” has been used to justify two different kinds of totalitarianisms: Marxism-Leninism and Nazism. However, during the 1950s liberal thinking also made use of that work. In line with liberal thinking, Raymond Aron’s “Penser la Guerre, Clausewitz” presents Clausewitz’s work as moderate and liberal and underplays its totalitarian connections.

A team of two brothers enters a baking contest. Their cake wins the first-place prize of £500. Will they demand £500 each? Of course not. Winners must split the prize. We often ignore this when we claim credit for team accomplishments. We take more credit than we deserve. I apply this idea to baking competitions and academic production but it applies equally to other arenas with teams of varying sizes.Export citation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the important role played by the feeling of pleasure and the feeling of life (Lebensgefühl) in the Critique of Judgment. It argues that dealing with these issues furthers the Kant’s study in his first two Critiques on the theoretical and the practical subject, and allows us the understanding of the vital background in which the transcendental subjectivity factually inhabits. Finally, it shows that in the case of the human being, his subjectivity cannot (...) be understood without its intimate connection to the body. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 106 Heft: 1 Seiten: 130-134.

Uno de los puntos de mayor interés del pensamiento estético de Hegel procede de sus Lecciones de estética, y es aquel que afirma y tematiza el fin del arte. Para entender el sentido y el alcance de esta idea, presentamos en este trabajo el modo como Hegel trata el problema del arte dentro de su filosofía especulativa y en especial en sus Lecciones de Estética. Por medio de este proceso de contextualización rastreamos finalmente las distintas interpretaciones que se han producido (...) en nuestros días acerca de la provocativa tesis del fin del arte y dejamos planteada también la cuestión del lugar que ocupa o puede ocupar el arte después del mencionado fin del arte. (shrink)

El presente texto ofrece las líneas fundamentales de la interpretación que Julius Ebbinghaus realiza de la filosofía del derecho de Kant. En primer lugar, expone la famosa “tesis de la independencia” presentada en numeroso trabajos por J. Ebbinghaus. En segundo lugar, centra su atención en el diagnóstico que hace J. Ebbinghaus de los casos de “injusticia extrema” y se pone en relación la fórmula de Radbruch con la filosofía del derecho de Kant. Por último, y frente al positivismo jurídico, J. (...) Ebbinghaus sitúa los límites de la dominación política en el derecho de la humanidad. Las consecuencias normativas de dicho derecho se ponen de manifiesto en caso de injusticia extrema, cuyo ejemplo paradigmático lo ofrece la Alemania Nacionalsocialista. A partir la ley de la humanidad, Julius Ebbinghaus ofrece una justificación kantiana del concepto de delitos de lesa humanidad. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo se analizan tres concepciones de la igualdad de oportunidades que G. A. Cohen presenta en ¿Por qué no el socialismo?, a saber, la acepción liberal burguesa, la liberal de izquierdas y la socialista. Este trabajo pretende exponer y discutir estas tres concepciones de la igualdad de oportunidades a través de la filosofía jurídica y política de Kant y al proyecto de una crítica de la economía política de Marx.

Comunicación defendida ante los XV Encuentros de filosofía, Oviedo 26-27 de marzo de 2010.

El presente trabajo ofrece una clara articulación de la compleja relación que guardan el Estado y la sociedad civil tanto en la Enciclopedia las ciencias filosóficas como en los Principios de la Filosofía del Derecho. Primero, se analiza esta relación a través del papel que Hegel otorga a la sociedad civil dentro del Estado moderno libre. Segundo, se presenta esta relación como una “relación de subordinación” en virtud de la cual los intereses de la sociedad civil deben quedar subordinados a (...) los intereses universales del Estado. Finalmente, presentamos el alcance político que tiene esta “relación de subordinación” a la hora de entender la teoría hegeliana del estamento universal, cuya universalidad es siempre una universalidad concreta. (shrink)

Este trabajo tiene por objeto demostrar la importancia de la Ética en las Constituciones políticas y Tratados internacionales desde la teoría de la virtud aristotélica. Dicho objeto es imprescindible debido al aumento de la frivolidad, decadencia institucional y corrupción política en diversos gobiernos y administraciones públicas contemporáneas.