We shape our surroundings; form the rooms we live in, so that we feel comfortable in them. This shows parts of our personality – it can be inferred from our environment. In this study, we created stereotypical desks embodying different personality styles and let 190 students choose which desk fits – in their subjective perspective - the most to their personality. To determine their personality style, the Personality Style and Disorder Inventory (PSSI) was used. Correspondence (...) analysis was conducted to investigate the relationship between personality styles and choice of desks. Results did not show convergence of personality styles and desks. Contrary to the popular scientific idea, personality and creation of surroundings were not related; regarding our study, the relation is uninterpretable suggesting an individual’s desk choice is not statistically dependent on one's individual’s highest PSSI subscale. The study can be regarded as a pilot project for desk designs as classification tool for personality. (shrink)

Building relationships is crucial for satisfaction and success, especially when entering new social contexts. In the present paper, we investigate whether attempting to improve others’ feelings helps people to make connections in new networks. In Study 1, a social network study following new networks of people for a twelve-week period indicated that use of interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) strategies predicted growth in popularity, as indicated by other network members’ reports of spending time with the person, in work and non-work interactions. (...) In Study 2, linguistic analysis of the tweets from over 8000 Twitter users from formation of their accounts revealed that use of IER predicted greater popularity in terms of the number of followers gained. However, not all types of IER had positive effects. Behavioral IER strategies (which use behavior to reassure or comfort in order to regulate affect) were associated with greater popularity, while cognitive strategies (which change a person’s thoughts about his or her situation or feelings in order to regulate affect) were negatively associated with popularity. Our findings have implications for our understanding of how new relationships are formed, highlighting the important the role played by intentional emotion regulatory processes. (shrink)

The popularity of theodicy over the past several decades has given rise to a countermovement, “anti-theodicy”, which admonishes attempts at theodicy for various reasons. This paper examines one prominent anti-theodical objection: that it is hubristic, and attempts to form an approach to theodicy which evades this objection. To do so I draw from the work of Eleonore Stump, who provides a framework by which we can glean second-personal knowledge of God. From this knowledge, I argue that we can derive a (...) theodicy which does not utilise the kind of analytic theorising anti-theodicists accuse of intellectual hubris. (shrink)

What is the self? And how does it relate to the body? In the second edition of Personal Identity, Harold Noonan presents the major historical theories of personal identity, particularly those of Locke, Leibniz, Butler, Reid and Hume. Noonan goes on to give a careful analysis of what the problem of personal identity is, and its place in the context of more general puzzles about identity. He then moves on to consider the main issues and arguments which are the subject (...) of current debate, including the work of Bernard Williams and Derek Parfit, and makes new and challenging interpretations of them. This new edition contains additional material assessing the biological approach which has become increasingly popular in recent years, and extends the treatment of indeterminate identity to take account of the epistemic view of vagueness. This book covers the problem of personal identity from its origin in Locke's work to the most recent debates in the philosophical literature, and will be invaluablereading for any student of the topic. (shrink)

This work raises the philosophical implications of the contemporary Taiwanese as a Chinese cultural people that socio-philosophically defined herself as a moral or ethical person. The political history of Taiwan has been marked by her struggle for self-determination. Self-determination based and reflected on a self-affirmation and self-identification that is internationally recognized and legitimized. This, no doubt, beyond the generalized bent by all nations towards globalization and multi-culturalism, there has been a more and more openness to the western nations. As she (...) looks towards the West, she ipso facto looks away from the Main Land China. This work is neither an investigation in political science nor a historical critique and reconstruction. It is rather a philosophical critique on the philosophical anthropology of a people that is fundamentally ethical, that is now facing and open to climes of which their philosophical anthropology is not in essence ethical. Put differently, it is an evaluation on the notion of “the Taiwanese person”. An evaluation on how “the Taiwanese person” from the standpoint of philosophical anthropology could still be claimed to be a Confucian. The question is: could the Taiwanese person today be said to be「仁者」, if Confucian philosophical anthropology asserts, 「仁者人也」? Hence, this work will attempt to respond to this question by a philosophical analysis of the notion of 「仁者」as an ethical person based on Karol Wojtyłian notion of the ethical person. To understand the notion of the “ethical” or “moral” person, the concept of “ethics” or “moral” and “person” ought to be exposed. Therefore, in this work Wojtyłian philosophy shall be employed as the epistemological foundation for the definition and explication of the concepts: ethics, moral and person. The writer considers the philosophy of Karol Wojtyłian as a plausible paradigm amongst the western philosophies in the exposition of Confucian ethics and philosophical anthropology. The conception of person as “Person-revealed-in-action” or as it is popularly known, the “Acting Person”, underpins properties of the human person that are very fundamental in the Confucian conception of the person. This “person- revealed-in-action”, is an ethical person, as 「仁者」is 「人」in the Confucian Philosophy. This is as a result of the similarity in the fundamental claims maintained both in the Confucian ethics and philosophical anthropology and in that of Karol Wojtyła. Thus, this work is executed as follows: 1. Exposition of the Problematic. 2. Exposition of Confucian Philosophical Anthropology. 3. Exposition of Karol Wojtyła Ethical Person. 4. A Wojtyłain Reconstruction of 「仁者」and the Notion of Ethical Person. 5. Critique of the Taiwanese Person as「仁者」and Conclusion. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of ‘the sovereign’, ‘state of exception’ and ‘bare life’ have been used by political theorists, particularly since the declaration of the Global War on Terror and during the more recent age of wars of humanitarian intervention, to conceptualize the sovereignty exercised by security states. These state processes have been mirrored by absolutization within some branches of political theory, conflating Foucauldian concepts of biopolitical sovereignty and circulatory governmentality with notions of absolutist rule, and narrowing optics for interpreting (...) class='Hi'>popular mobilizations around gendered ‘human security’ projects, emergency regimes and moralizing repression. Suggesting more productive directions for theory, this article generates a close reading of female activists working in an unexpected industry in Egypt who have struggled to invert and subvert absolutist and moralizing framings and have generated their own theory through practice. The ‘Natashas of Cairo’ – well organized and transnationally linked belly dancers – successfully promoted gendered popular sovereignty in remarkable campaigns between 2002 and 2006, utilizing personal-rights litigation to create frameworks to render the absolutist state more accountable; establish labor solidarities that crossed international boundaries as well as class boundaries; and articulate an alternative moral regime for dance work that rejected both ‘pornification’ and the ‘respectability politics’ of professionalization. (shrink)

Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of ‘the sovereign’, ‘state of exception’ and ‘bare life’ have been used by political theorists, particularly since the declaration of the Global War on Terror and during the more recent age of wars of humanitarian intervention, to conceptualize the sovereignty exercised by security states. These state processes have been mirrored by absolutization within some branches of political theory, conflating Foucauldian concepts of biopolitical sovereignty and circulatory governmentality with notions of absolutist rule, and narrowing optics for interpreting (...) class='Hi'>popular mobilizations around gendered ‘human security’ projects, emergency regimes and moralizing repression. Suggesting more productive directions for theory, this article generates a close reading of female activists working in an unexpected industry in Egypt who have struggled to invert and subvert absolutist and moralizing framings and have generated their own theory through practice. The ‘Natashas of Cairo’ – well organized and transnationally linked belly dancers – successfully promoted gendered popular sovereignty in remarkable campaigns between 2002 and 2006, utilizing personal-rights litigation to create frameworks to render the absolutist state more accountable; establish labor solidarities that crossed international boundaries as well as class boundaries; and articulate an alternative moral regime for dance work that rejected both ‘pornification’ and the ‘respectability politics’ of professionalization. (shrink)

In France a difference has been established between cultural popularization and cultural democracy. The former is aimed at spreading works of art in as large a way as possible; the latter emphasizes the participation of the public. From there, we argue that moving from cultural popularization towards cultural democracy can lead to a shift in responsibilities from professionals towards the general public. With reference to the theoretical background of reception, appropriation and participation, we lead a participant observation on three (...) different fields in order to understand what facilitates and what constrains this shift. This leads us to stress the importance of developing an adequate organizational framework. (shrink)

In France a difference has been established between cultural popularization and cultural democracy. The former is aimed at spreading works of art in as large a way as possible; the latter emphasizes the participation of the public. From there, we argue that moving from cultural popularization towards cultural democracy can lead to a shift in responsibilities from professionals towards the general public. With reference to the theoretical background of reception, appropriation and participation, we lead a participant observation on three (...) different fields in order to understand what facilitates and what constrains this shift. This leads us to stress the importance of developing an adequate organizational framework. (shrink)

A twenty‐person working group convened to discuss the ethical and policy considerations of the controversial intervention called “growth attenuation,” and if possible to develop practical guidance for health professionals. A consensus proved elusive, but most of the members did reach a compromise.

One of the most important Stoic philosophers is Epictetus. Epictetus (c. 50 - 135 CE) was a Greek enslaved person who established an important school of Stoic philosophy in Rome. Epictetus is appreciated for his clear, good-humored way of explaining difficult ideas and his focus on daily life rather than metaphysics. This may be because he did not write down his lectures and discourses, as Marcus and Seneca did-rather, he delivered them aloud and they were carefully recorded by his students. (...) Thus we should not refer to them as "writings" but as "works." The complete oeuvre consists of his popular handbook on virtue (enchiridion), also known as "The Art of Living," a set of discourses, and a number of fragments. This set of translations, framed by an introduction and notes, is geared expressly to general readers and students, though it will be enormously helpful to scholars as well. (shrink)

Advancements in machine learning have fuelled the popularity of using AI decision algorithms in procedures such as bail hearings, medical diagnoses and recruitment. Academic articles, policy texts, and popularizing books alike warn that such algorithms tend to be opaque: they do not provide explanations for their outcomes. Building on a causal account of transparency and opacity as well as recent work on the value of causal explanation, I formulate a moral concern for opaque algorithms that is yet to receive a (...) systematic treatment in the literature: when such algorithms are used in life-changing decisions, they can obstruct us from effectively shaping our lives according to our goals and preferences, thus undermining our autonomy. I argue that this concern deserves closer attention as it furnishes the call for transparency in algorithmic decision-making with both new tools and new challenges. (shrink)

Rather than "transitional," the American interwar years constituted a contiguous and seminal era during which the social, religious, and aesthetic consequences of a changed environment, modernity, became powerful forces in shaping the patterns in recent popular culture. Increased literacy and affluence, media technologies, and changes in work and leisure encouraged a mass marketplace of ideas. Popular intellectuals, namely D. W. Griffith, Bruce Barton, John B. Watson, Edward Bernays, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Edward L. Bernays, George Creel, Pearl Buck, John (...) Steinbeck, and Gilbert Selders helped Americans reimagine entire areas of existence for the new context. They illuminate important cultural shifts regarding the nature of self in a rationalized, urban world, the legitimacy of religion in the shadow of skeptical empiricism, and the qualities and social role of art in the age of science, alienation, and political apathy. ;Many of our persistent forms of popular expression can be understood as cultural exchanges over the problem of modernity, evidence of the obtuse ways in which modernism has affected the general culture. Griffith's mawkish melodrama is, upon serious scrutiny, deeply informed by modern fears of personal anomie, naturalism, and the aloof power of the new state. New concepts of "personality" and the "masses," based on behavioristic assumptions, envisioned both self and society as malleable and helped mitigate feelings of alienation with promises of empowerment and self-transformation. With Fosdick and Barton, mainstream Protestantism absorbed "positive thinking" and therapeutic conceptions of religion's role in modern life, and in the process redefined the nature of God, self, and the Church, Buck and Steinbeck reshaped melodramatic formulae into response to modern tensions with a blend of brutal naturalism and sentimental romanticism, a vision of an embattled "human spirit." In these thinkers, we can see Americans confronting the century's most compelling issues, disorder, naturalism, scientism, and relativism. Each phenomenon was a way of admitting modern change while imagining techniques for manipulating it. The relentless pursuit in popular culture for social connectedness, mastery of environment, spiritual assurance, managerial order, and personal power can best be understood as multifarious compensatory strategies for our ambivalence with modernity. (shrink)

Every day, in professional work and in our personal lives, we reproduce by words and behaviors particular understandings of life and how it works. This includes understandings about what is ‘normal’ and ‘not normal’ masculinity and who are ‘normal’ and ‘not normal’ boys and men. Being marginalized or outcast from the norm is rarely a free choice. The language that constructs normal and abnormal is not innocent and does not simply arrive in our minds transparently reflected in our behavior (...) or in our client advice or student education. Examining words and behaviors from adolescent boys and from media sources, this research explores the role of cultural discourses in producing normative and marginalized masculinities. It builds upon recent scholarship that questions cultural prescriptions for masculinity and traditional male norms. Feminist, poststructural, psychoanalytic discourse analysis and multiple methods were used to explore links between cultural discourses of masculinity and performativity of masculinity. Practices of heterosexuality, homophobia, athleticism, economic privilege, toughness, and violence provided pathways toward achieving and/or maintaining status as the hegemonic masculine norm in adolescence. ‘Popularity’ signified the norm and ‘outcasts’ from the norm signified marginalized masculinities. (shrink)

Most advanced industrial societies are ‘work-centered,’ according high value and prestige to work. Indeed, belief in an interpersonal moral duty to work is encoded in both popular attitudes toward work and in policies such as ‘workfare’. Here I argue that despite the intuitive appeal of reciprocity or fair play as the moral basis for a duty to work, the vast majority of individuals in advanced industrialized societies have no such duty to work. For current economic conditions, labor markets, and (...) government policies entail that the conditions for a reciprocity-based argument to apply to most workers are not usually met. More specifically, many workers fail to provide valuable goods through working or their working does not result in net social benefit. Concurrently, many workers do not receive adequate benefits from working in that they neither have their basic needs met or do not even enjoy an improvement in welfare thanks to working. Hence, workers neither provide nor receive the benefits needed for a reciprocity-based duty to work to apply to them. Furthermore, these conditions are conditions over which workers themselves have very little control. Most workers therefore could not fulfill their ostensible duty to work even if they made conscientious efforts to do so. In most cases, a person who fails to work morally wrongs no one, and in the case of any particular individual or worker, the defeasible presumption ought to be that she has no duty to work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 23-42 [Access article in PDF] Overcoming the Grip of Consumerism Stephanie KazaUniversity of VermontFor fifteen years the Worldwatch Institute of Washington, D. C. has been publishing a review of the declining condition of the global environment (Brown et al. 1998). For the most part, the picture is not good. Much of the deterioration can be traced directly to human activities--urban expansion equates to species loss, (...) industrial manufacturing to air pollution, factory farming to water pollution, chemical agriculture to poisoned soil. Accelerating these environmental impacts are rapidly rising population numbers, increasingly efficient technologies, and consumption rates beyond the planet's capacity. These three have been linked by the equation I=PAT, or environmental impact=population size multiplied by affluence (or degree of consumption) multiplied by technology. Reduce any one of these and the impact drops; increase one or all three, and the impact rises, in some cases dramatically.Much of the conversation among scientists and technologists has focused on the P (population) and T (technology) parts of the equation, with grave concerns that rising population numbers are swamping earth systems, yet often with buoyant optimism that technological breakthroughs will solve everything. These two perspectives dominated political discussion for much of the 1960s and 1970s (Ehrlich et al. 1977 and Lovins 1977, among others). But by the 1980s the facts were incontrovertible: high rates of consumption were driving environmental destruction just as fast if not faster than rising population. At the 1992 Rio Summit in Brazil, representatives of southern countries demanded that high-consuming northern countries examine their own contribution to the environmental crisis rather than placing blame elsewhere. It is our obligation in the North to respond to these serious requests.How much do people in northern industrialized countries consume? Here are some indicator figures: Americans consume their average body weight (120 pounds) every day in materials extracted and processed from farms, mines, range lands, and forests (Ryan and Durning 1997, 5). In the United States, the number of shopping malls (close to 35,000) eclipsed the number of high schools in 1987 (Dunning 1992, 130). Since 1950 the per capita consumption of energy, meat, and lumber has doubled, use of plastic has increased five times, use of aluminum seven times, and average airplane miles per person has soared 33-fold (Durning 1992, 29). As products have proliferated, we see the swelling ecological footprint behind each new thing: clear-cut forests replacing paper plantations in Thailand, toxic oil polluting native lands of Ecuador, women earning poverty wages assembling computer chips in [End Page 23] Malaysia--the stories are not as pretty as the products. Materials extraction, production, distribution, use, and waste disposal--all of these have ecological costs, many of which are life threatening.Why should Buddhists and Christians address consumption? For starters, it is a nonsectarian issue; responsibility cuts across denominations and religious belief systems. Collaboration of all kinds is needed to take apart this juggernaut of complex causes and conditions. I believe the Buddhist tradition has powerful analytical tools and spiritual practices which may be helpful in this undertaking. These may aid or inspire similar efforts explored through the Christian heritage. A survey of the landscape and the literature shows it is shockingly clear: the challenge here is enormous. It will require all the spiritual insight, dedication, and sheer stamina we can bring to it. This work cannot be done alone; we need each other's help to keep going through the many obstacles.To date, Buddhist initiatives in this conversation have been modest. Several popular books have brought Buddhist perspectives to bear on consumption issues, most notably E. F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful (1975) and Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild (1990). Both works popularize practices of simplicity and restraint, flavored by the exotic Western fascination with Eastern thought. Several Buddhist teachers in the U.S. have taken up particular sub-themes addressing over-consumption. Philip Kapleau has sounded an ethical call for vegetarianism based on the first precept, "no killing" (1982). Robert Aitken has taken a stand for reducing wants and needs to simplify... (shrink)

_Purpose._ The article aims to analyse the consciousness of masses in the communication system of the 20th century projecting the individual level onto the social one. _Theoretical basis._ In the fields of philosophy and other humanities since the middle of the last century there has dominated an opinion that the category of mass and its communication are second-rate and non-elitist phenomena. Condensing the experience of human history (especially – the nineteenth century – the time of the bourgeois revolutions and the (...) two world wars), such parameters were set by the creators of social psychology Gustave Le Bon and Sigmund Freud in their basic research "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind", "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego". Since ancient times the masses have really resembled immoral emotional neoformations, which minimized the individual qualities of the components of the whole and showed the features of a predominantly animal nature. It is no coincidence that those masses were called emotional, or just a crowd, regardless of the topos of existence: streets and squares, or the infospace of the first mass media (newspapers, radio, cinema, television). However, analysing the crowd, the scientists noted that this is only an extreme modification of the mass, and, in addition to it, there may be others – quite the opposite in their nature. With the advent of the World Wide Web, the situation has changed: scientists and futurists have been talking about the mass of intellectuals, which seems to be formed and combined in the field of information technology. And it surpasses the traditional elite in many respects. _Originality._ Having analysed the works of classic and modern researchers, we came to the conclusion that in fact the masses, like individuals (according to C. G. Jung), are divided into four types. Correspondingly, each of them has its own behaviour, psychology, philosophy etc. This article focuses on beliefs and ideological positions as the basis for the functioning of emotional, sensory, intuitive and rational masses in the context of 20th century philosophy. The object of our analysis was the philosophical schools of neo-positivism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, existentialism, pragmatism, anthropology, phenomenology, and others. _Conclusions._ According to our assumption, regardless of the type of mass and direction of modern philosophy as a field of its implementation, rationalism comes to the fore everywhere (as a primary source and theoretical basis or motivation). Thus, it can be concluded that the rational mass now dominates, not emotional (which was thoroughly described by Le Bon and Freud). And this is quite natural in the age of digital technology. (shrink)

This interview – conducted by Peter Beilharz and Trevor Hogan with Clinton Walker over the course of three months between Melbourne and Sydney via email and Skype – explores the questions of Australian popular culture writing with, against, and of the culture industries themselves. Walker is a leading freelance Australian cultural historian and rock music journalist. He is the author of seven books, five about Australian music. He has been a radio DJ and TV presenter. He compiled and produced (...) four double CD album collections of Australian music – Inner City Sound, Buried Country, Long Way to the Top, and Studio 22. He has been a key writer in several multi-media projects, including the Powerhouse Museum Real Wild Child exhibition and CD-Rom and ABC TV’s hit documentary series/CD/DVD Long Way to the Top. In 2006, a new US edition of his first book Inner City Sound was published. His Golden Miles: Sex, Speed and the Australian Muscle Car has been published in a revised edition in 2009. In 2012, his eighth book, The Wizard of Oz, will be published. Walker is currently writing with Beilharz and Hogan a book called The Vinyl Age: The History of Australian Rock Music, 1945–1995. The interviewers invited Walker to reflect critically on his 35-year ‘career’ as pop avatar, independent writer and critic in the post-war to post-modern Australian popular culture industries. Going from journalism to his path-finding books and television documentaries, the article traces this work’s development both in personal terms and as a symptom of the broader cultural evolution, from the suburbs to pop to art and rock and back again; between London and the provincial cultures of Oz; from one-way American consumerism to local DIY egalitarianism, analogue to digital to global dialogue, youth culture to multi-culturalism, and from the putative low brow to the legimitization process itself of popular culture. (shrink)

Usually, when we determine the authenticity of a performer in popular music then we do so either through their biography or their inherence within a tradition. The question of authenticity then becomes one of betrayal. This article argues that there might be a unique way of approaching authenticity through affects, where authenticity is impersonal rather than personal. It uses the work of Pierre Schaeffer to describe the difference between indexes and signs on the one hand, and affects on the (...) other, to develop a concept of abstract subjectivity, which is not the same as the individual. It explains abstract subjectivity through Will Oldham’s description of his performance. Finally, it compares this method of listening to popular music with Blanchot’s description of literature as free indirect discourse, speaking without a first person. It is abstract subjectivity that allows popular music to resist its own commodification, which is the very opposite of authenticity. (shrink)

This article analyzes selected short stories in Cecelia Ahern’s thirty-narrative collection Roar to see how the perspectives of posthuman and postfeminist critique can be incorporated via the common dystopic umbrella into the mainstream female readership of romance literature. The dystopic worlds created by Ahern in Roar portray inequality and power imbalances with regard to gender and sex. The protagonists are mostly middle-aged women whose family and personal lives are either regulated by dystopic realities or acquire a “dystopic” dimension, the solutions (...) to which are provided by, among other tropes, “posthuman” transformations. Roar introduces other-than-human elements, mostly corporeal alterations, in which the female bodies of Ahern’s characters become de-formed and re-formed beyond androcentric systems of value. The article raises the question of whether feminist and, to some extent, “posthuman” approaches, need to be popularized in such an abridged way as Ahern does in her volume. The answer depends upon the identification of the target audience and their expectations. Ahern’s Roar represents popular literature intended to be sold to as many readers as possible, regardless of their education, state of knowledge, etc. Viewed from that perspective, what some critics could perceive as the collection’s structural weaknesses constitutes its utmost marketing asset. The essay argues that despite not being a structurally innovative work of art, Ahern’s book fulfils the basic requirements of the popular fiction genre, intermittently providing some extra, literary gratification and popularizing rudimentary elements of the posthuman and postfeminist thought. (shrink)

This book illuminates the aesthetically underrated meaningfulness of particular elements in works of art and aesthetic experiences generally. Beginning from the idea of "hooks" in popular song, the book identifies experiences of special liveliness that are of enduring interest, supporting contemplation and probing discussion. When hooks are placed in the foreground of aesthetic experience, so is an enthusiastic “grabbing back” by the experiencer who forms a quasi-personal bond with the beloved singular moment and is probably inclined to share (...) this still-evolving realization of value with others. This book presents numerous models of enthusiastic “grabbing back” that are art-critically motivated to explain how hooks achieve their effects and philosophically motivated to discover how hooks and hook appreciation contribute to a more ideally desirable life. Framing hook appreciation with a defensible general model of aesthetic experience, this book gives an unprecedented demonstration of the substantial aesthetic and philosophical interest of hook-centered inquiry. (shrink)

The enormous amount of work on Vico published in English during the past 25 years speaks of the contemporary importance of Vico's ideas. This edition updates the first edition, A Bibliography of Vico in English 1884-1984, by extending coverage to 1994. More than 2,300 citations are included. Part I lists books, articles, dissertations and theses, reviews in English of works on Vico in other languages, and entries in reference works. It also documents Vico's appearance in late 20th-century (...) class='Hi'>popular culture and the public press. Part II includes translations of Vico's works into English, along with reviews in English of Vico's works in other languages. Part III is a collection of mentions, citations, and short discussions of Vico in English, including recent important fiction in which Vico appears. The appendix lists bibliographies on Vico, and the name index includes authors, editors, translators of works on Vico, and all persons, including fictional characters, named in the entries. Authors of works citing Vico are also indexed. (shrink)

Received by the British press with equal acclaim and indignation, this book sets out to define and defend high culture against the world of pop, corn, and popcorn. It shows just why culture matters in an age without faith, and gives an extended argument, drawing on philosophy, criticism, and anthropology, against the "post-modernist" world-view. Scruton offers a penetrating attack on deconstruction, on Foucault, on Nietzschean self-indulgence, and on the "culture of repudiation" which has infected the modern academy. But his book (...) is not only negative. It is a celebration of the true heroes of modern culture and a call to the higher life. The American edition of this famous and notorious work has been revised to take account of the controversy which it has inspired, and contains new material specially directed to Americans. (shrink)

In terms of income and wealth (and a variety of other measures), citizens of the United States are significantly less equal than their peers in Canada and Europe. In addition, American society is becoming increasingly less equal. Some theorists argue that this inequality is inefficient. Others claim that is unjust. Many Americans, however, are less concerned with the potential inefficiency and injustice of growing inequality. Distinguishing as Milton Friedman does between equality of result and equality of opportunity, many claim that (...) American inequality is greater because our social and political institutions hold individuals responsible for their decisions. There is nothing unjust about holding individuals responsible for their choices or preferences. This political philosophy builds from the popular idea that, in the words of Dennis Prager of the Heritage Foundation, “American individualism and the Judeo-Christian notion of personal accountability gave us the extraordinary nation that we built here.” At least since the publication of the Republican Party’s Contract with America, every prominent Republican (and many Democrats) has affirmed the importance of personal responsibility. The idea of personal responsibility plays a central role in debates over how to structure U.S. society. For these reasons, this paper considers a group of theories that Elizabeth Anderson labels “luck egalitarian.” These theories remain the most influential philosophical attempts to incorporate personal responsibility into a theory of justice. This essay takes as its staring point Anderson’s widely discussed criticisms for these theorists, and considers several of the best and most sustained responses to these criticisms (and related claims by Samuel Scheffler, Jonathan Wolff, and others). The goal is not to provide a summary of different luck egalitarian accounts of justice, a task others have performed admirably (Knight 2009, Knight and Stemplowska 2011). Furthermore, this paper will not attempt to decide which luck egalitarian theory best withstands these criticisms. Instead, this paper makes a philosophically and empirically informed case regarding how policy makers ought to utilize a principle that plays a prominent role in current American public policy debates: the role of personal responsibility. In order to make this case, I must weave normative and empirical analysis, and consider the ways in which social position in the status quo United States does not trace personal responsibility. From this analysis, I suggest three policy priorities for those interested in redeeming the oft-celebrated claim about American society: that an individual is responsible for her social position. This work promises to be of interest to any theorist or policy maker concerned with the practical implications of recent work in the moral and political philosophy of personal responsibility, or, really, anyone interested in making American society comparatively just. (shrink)

While the varied theoretical frameworks of second wave feminism made possible critical interrogation of societal patterns of domination and oppression in view of the transformative goal of liberation, Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of power shifts contemporary feminist thought away from this binary field of relations towards more fundamental questions about gender constitution. Indeed, from the perspective of popular culture it would seem that challenges to rigid gender roles were a thing of the past, to which freedom and certain kinds of (...) gender malleability were intrinsically tied. In fact gender roles continue to be defined in strict opposition to each other and sexist attitudes and practices continue, although increasingly disguised and unacknowledged. If liberation from the strictures of patriarchy is nothing but a lost illusion from the second wave, is there nonetheless a need for a resurgent feminist consciousness today? In this paper, I argue that this is the case, and attempt to show that “the work of the intellect” described by Foucault, must first be catalyzed by an experiential disruption, leading to recognition of what pragmatist philosopher John Dewey described as the “problematic situation.” While both Foucault and Dewey emphasize the necessity of problematization, Dewey’s methodology includes focus on envisioning desired outcomes. Here, my aim is not to resurrect an old idea of unconditioned liberation, but merely to reconsider whether and how experiential disruption and subsequent consideration of the problem might lead to a shift in social and self-consciousness, and create the possibility for change. (shrink)

“Democratization” has recently become a popular trope in Western public discourses on medicine, where it refers to patient participation in the gathering and distribution of health-related data using various digital technologies, in order to improve healthcare technically and socially. We critically analyze the usage of the term from the perspective of the “politics of buzzwords.” Our claim is that the phrase works primarily to publicly justify the dramatic increase in the application of information and data technologies in healthcare (...) and therefore fosters the corresponding industry. As a buzzword, “democratizing healthcare” is characterized by vagueness, which is why it receives meaning only through a word collective—a group of words that provide it with a context and are often used together with it. We examine key terms associated with “democratization” in the healthcare discourse—participation, empowerment, and personalized medicine—and show that the buzzword receives rhetorical power through the ambiguous reference to these concepts. As a consequence, the idea of “democracy” becomes diluted into meaning merely “access to,” and “healthcare” is reduced to the notion of a preventive, nonacute, monitored form of medical care. (shrink)

Keith Haartman argues that childrearing practices distinctive of the English middle class in the 18th century produced a type of personality structure characterized by excessive splitting. Methodism proved popular because the Methodist experience providing a way of confronting and working through the conflicts generated by this sort of personality structure. Unfortunately, although Haartman's argument is plausible, there is little or no evidence to support his central contention: that the individuals who found Methodism most appealing were associated with (...) the childhood experiences he posits. A somewhat different psychoanalytic interpretation of the same data that Haartman presents emerges when we pay attention to things, like the orality that pervaded the Methodist experience and the intended goal of the Methodist conversion experience, that Haartman ignores. This article concludes by suggesting that when psychoanalytic investigators study large-scale historical patterns, they would do well to recognize the limits of psychoanalytic explanation in this area. (shrink)

The booming popularity of the Internet, and particularly increasing use of personal Web sites, social networking sites, and blogging, raises questions regarding the ethical use of psychology graduate students' personal online information for academic purposes. Given rising controversies such as use of such information to screen applicants, I refer to the principles and standards of the Ethics Code of the American Psychological Association (2002) to examine ethical concerns associated with graduate students' personal information on the Internet, namely, the protection of (...) privacy, use of informed consent, consideration of autonomy, and implications for students' clinical work. Finally, I make several recommendations for graduate training faculty and graduate students as they consider placing and using information on and from the Internet. (shrink)

This paper investigates the work of Frank Miller, particularly his Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, in light of Nietzschean aesthetics and social commentary. A graphic novelist, and thus nominally an entertainer of the masses, Miller uses the comic medium to challenge, aesthetically and intellectually. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns explores the struggles of an ageing Batman to redefine the relationship between the dictates of the government and his own will and capacity to control his environment. Through text and image, Miller (...) emphasises the personal impotence of those agents of order who are working to restrain Batman, and the essential similarities between Batman and the criminals he fights, both of whom exist outside of that social order. Quintessentially Nietzschean themes – sickness and health, self-created and imposed identities, and irresolvable conflict between the true individual and society – recur throughout the work. Miller's work is triply subversive. First, it subverts generic expectations that the superhero will uphold the social order; second, it both challenges and supports Nietzsche's contention that art was the province of the noble singular artist and a product of ‘high culture', rather than of the masses; thirdly, it repositions Nietzsche within popular culture, subverting his expectations of his reception. This phenomenon of at one appropriating and challenging Nietzsche makes Miller an instructive example of an alternative way in which we can confront Nietzschean ideas about art and life. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 26 (1) 2007: pp. 96-108. (shrink)

The chief difficulty with most social and psychological studies of violence lies in their assumption that violence is essentially a simple act of aggression that can be treated outside of a more complex moral and dramatic context. This may be the case with news reports of war, murder, assault, and other forms of violent crime, but it is certainly not a very adequate way to treat the fictional violence of a western, a detective story, or a gangster saga. It is (...) true that one can count and catalog the number of violent acts that occur in a day or a week of television and produce distressing statistics about the number of murders and assaults per minute on the typical television show. One can, like the redoubtable Dr. Wertham, amass specific instances where a young person has imitated or thinks he has imitated an act of violence he saw on television, though we should not forget that it can also be said without much fear of contradiction that the literary work which has directly caused more violence in the history of Western civilization than any other is the Bible. One can also construct laboratory experiments in which various groups are shown short films of violent acts and demonstrate that in certain circumstances this experience will cause further aggressive behavior. With procedures such as this, the evidence of a correlation between media violence and aggressive behavior becomes more and more persuasive. But do such studies tell us anything more than that this is a violent age and that there is probably some connection between the violence of actuality and the representation of violence in the media? John G. Cawelti, author of Apostles of the Self-made Man, Six-Gun Mystique, and Focus on Bonnie and Clyde, is professor in the Department of English and chairman of the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. (shrink)

The main contribution of this work is to develop the account of material constitution presented in Spatially Coinciding Objects (Ratio 24, 1982) and a series of related articles. This account was merely ‘analytical’ in that it applied generously to ‘putative’ examples of distinct entities (individuals, pluralities and masses of stuff) in the same place at the same time. The account herein is ‘critical’ in that it seeks justification for recognizing the existence of entities constituted in addition to the entities that (...) allegedly constitute them. While the earlier account used examples such as a clay statue and the clay of the statue for purposes of illustrating material constitution, the present account would consider ‘reducing’ the statue to the clay, and seeks justification for how to resist this and admit the existence of generable and perishable natural objects in general. The justification sought is ‘deep’ in the sense that (unlike the popular ‘method of cases) it does not belong to ‘descriptive’ metaphysics (in Strawson’s sense) but is sufficiently potent to counter ‘revisionist’ views. Transcendental arguments, beginning with austere assumptions of justification itself, are thereby employed. Suggestions are made about what to conclude about our own identity, which amount to supporting animalism. (shrink)

The personality of Metropolitan Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania has been extremely complex, first of all due to the various domains of his work - literature, essays, art history, theology and biblical theology -, and secondly due to his relation to politics, especially his connections with the Legionary Movement and with Communism. Despite having been incarcerated as a political prisoner in some of Bolshevik Romania's famous prisons (Jilava, Pitești, Aiud), Bartolomeu Valeriu Anania is still accused of having collaborated with the political (...) police of Ceaușescu's regime, Securitatea . The present text analyses the writer's work in order to explain the relationship between religion, literature, and politics, stressing both their connections, as well as his journey from being a writer to being the theologian commenting on and revising the translation of the Holy Scripture. The analysis is therefore oriented towards Valeriu Anania's literary works, namely his poetry, prose, and theatre, so as to underline its religious background, be it either theological or alluding to Romanian popular religiosity; furthermore, it focuses on his theology, from icon to biblical theology, stressing the associations with literature and the importance of literary workmanship. Finally, based on the cultural analyses which unveil his deep affection for the Romanian spirituality and considering several politically controversial episodes of his biography, the text will attempt to argue in favour of the lack of sufficient and reliable evidence that could prove his collaboration with the political police of Communist Romania. (shrink)

Face transplants have been performed, in a small number, since 2005. Popular concern over the morality of the face transplant has tended to focus on the role that one’s face plays in one’s sense of self or one’s personal identity. In order to address this concern, the current paper will explore the significance of face transplants in the light of a theory of the self that draws on symbolic interactionism, narrative theory, and accounts of embodiment. The paper will respond (...) to certain presuppositions concerning personal identity made by Huxtable and Woodley. A theory of the self will be articulated that draws on the work of Merleau-Ponty and G. H. Mead, in order to place embodiment and social interaction centrally to an understanding of self-identity. This will allow an account of the nature of the suffering that a face transplant seeks to remedy, and its worth as an operation, and crucially the impact that it may have on the sense of personal identity of the recipient of the transplant. The conclusion will review the treatment in the context of the prejudices that members of contemporary societies may hold against those with disfigurements. (shrink)

This book provides a philosophical assessment of the idea of personhood advanced in popular self-help literature. It also traces, within academic philosophy and philosophical scholarship, a self-help culture where the self is brought forth as an object of improvement and a key to meaning, progress and profundity. Unlike other academic treatments of the topic of self-help, this book is not primarily concerned with providing a critique of popular self-help and self-transformative practices. Rather, it is concerned with how they (...) work to shape contemporary forms and ideals of moral personhood and are conductive to moral renegotiation and change. The book consists of two parts with somewhat different argumentative strategies. Part 1 consists of an overview and reassessment of popular self-help literature and its sociological and journalistic critics, written from a moral philosophical perspective. Part 2 opens with discussion of the current attraction, among a range of philosophers, to self-transformative themes. The chapters assess the strand of self-transformative philosophy found in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot, Stanley Cavell and Iris Murdoch. Finally, the book concludes with a discussion of the theme of social change and moral renegotiation in contemporary societies, which is a central but underestimated undercurrent in discussions on contemporary self-transformative practices. The book's dual perspective-on both popular self-help and self-transformative currents in philosophy-enables a cultural and moral philosophical analysis of contemporary ethical ideals of personhood, as well as reflection on the literatures available for its development. The Making of the Good Person will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in moral philosophy, history of philosophy, psychology, sociology and literary studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hope for Common Ground: Mediating the Personal and the Political in a Divided Church by Julie Hanlon RubioBrian StiltnerHope for Common Ground: Mediating the Personal and the Political in a Divided Church Julie Hanlon Rubio washington, dc: georgetown university press, 2016. 264 pp. $89.95 / $29.95Julie Hanlon Rubio wrote Hope for Common Ground to address divisions over ethical and political issues within the Catholic Church. Rubio writes in (...) a spirit of hope, affirming that it is possible for Catholics to find common ground by drawing on resources within their tradition and within themselves. She proposes that "the potential for seeing and developing common ground is particularly strong if we focus on what can be done in the 'local' sphere—that is, in the space between" the personal and the political (xvii). Localized focus is recommended by the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which means working on social problems from the bottom up through the small- and medium-sized [End Page 195] groups that matter greatly for people's well-being, such as families, churches, and neighborhoods.Rubio's project is vital because civic spaces have become so fraught. Although this book was published early in 2016, these words are even more apt in 2017: "In both popular and academic Catholic circles, politics has become a very uncomfortable space. … Catholics are more divided than at any point in their history, and in this they mirror society rather than providing an alternative to it" (xiv–xv). If Catholic Christians, claiming a common life and common Lord, are as divided as society itself, they testify poorly to their values. By contrast, if they redirect some of their energies from the personal and the political to the local, then "instead of fighting each other, Catholics can participate more, agree on more, and, consequently, build up more" (229).Part 1 of the book draws on Church tradition and ethics texts to articulate a vision of what it means to be a faithful citizen. Divisions within the Catholic community are shaped in part by interpretations of Church teaching that discourage Catholics from thinking they should cooperate with others who think differently. In recent years, the American bishops have pushed Catholic citizens to consider some political issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, as more important than others. Rubio aims to right such imbalances by showing that Catholic teaching supports pluralism, appreciates the pragmatic side of politics, and holds a nuanced account of how people can act conscientiously in an imperfect world. She offers "a social ethic for ordinary Christians" (58), equally focused on faithfulness and effectiveness.The payoff in part 2 of the book is excellent. Rubio enters the culture-war debates over the family, poverty, abortion, and end-of-life care; elsewhere she briefly but insightfully examines white privilege, sweatshop clothing, and police violence. In each of these cases, Rubio describes the current divide, provides background analysis that cuts through misconceptions and slanted data, and suggests ways that Catholics can find common ground and build up the common good in church and society. Here is one small example of the kind of applications she makes: "A Catholic Charities center in my city included a conversation on advance directives in the agenda for a weekly meeting of mothers in a poor neighborhood. Though the instruction was quite simple, it gave the women a chance to talk about their faith, experiences, fears, and hopes in relation to death and dying. … These women are now better equipped than many for the tough conversations that are surely ahead" (218).Rubio practices what she preaches, exhibiting a conversational tone and capacious vision throughout. While focused on Catholic sources and issues, Hope for Common Ground is by no means narrow. Not only other Christians but also all [End Page 196] people have to face the social issues discussed here, and it matters to all citizens how religious communities are addressing them. Therefore, this book is a great launching point for honest conversations in college courses, while scholars in the field will do well to engage with Rubio's theory of local action. The book deserves a wide readership within and outside Catholic circles.Brian StiltnerSacred... (shrink)

Through a discussion of the work of Marie Cardinal and Annie Ernaux, this article aims to problematize the anglophone academic world's tendency to associate French feminisms predominantly with avant-garde or highly theoretical texts. The work of Ernaux and Cardinal is presented alongside a discussion of its reception by readers and critics in France, and by academics in English-speaking countries. The first part of the article identifies aspects of Ernaux's and Cardinal's works which cannot be encompassed within a critical framework (...) based on the dichotomy between naïve realism on the one hand and the politically and linguistically radical text on the other. Ernaux's plain language, for instance, is clearly very unlike the linguistic experimentation of ‘feminine writing’; nonetheless the emphasis on social class in her writing constitutes a political intervention which is at least equally valid. The reception study in the second part of the article provides further evidence of the relevance to gender politics in France of Cardinal's The Words to Say It (1975) and texts published by Annie Ernaux in the 1980s and 1990s. The ambivalent response of critics seems to indicate the troubling nature of writing which combines the codes of realism and autobiography (or autobiographical fiction in Cardinal's case) with the depiction of taboo subjects such as menstruation, or a daughter's response to her mother's debilitating illness and death. The article also charts the widespread popularity of these texts in France, particularly with women readers, and gives some examples of the pleasures described in letters to the authors. In conclusion, we argue that the ambivalent space between popular and high culture occupied (albeit differently) by Ernaux and Cardinal may be particularly effective in terms of gender politics, and that even in the late 1990s, the personal may be as political as ever. (shrink)

This paper grew out of a larger study designed to investigate the usage patterns and effects of the introduction of the personal computer and the Internet in both the contemporary workplace and the home. During the course of analysis of the data collected several paradoxes associated with this usage emerged. The first, and in many ways the most important, was the paradox between the ability of Internet-based communication and software computer programs to facilitate the educational process while at the same (...) time altering the learning patterns of the student users, affecting writing, and potentially affecting their cognitive processing. Secondly, while the usage of these technologies fulfilled the early expectations for creating a more efficient work place, it also created a new demand for increased production. This new expectation has blurred the line between professional and personal time with the usage of these technologies entering domestic space and has created the potential for anxiety and disjuncture. Thirdly, in research endeavors, these technologies have allowed people to collect and evaluate data in newer and quicker ways; however the demand for increased productivity has also altered the research function as attention is directed toward the production of papers and not the development of grander explanatory theories. Also, while the use of many Internet-based communication modalities promotes mobility, their constant use can also contribute to the avoidance of personal contact, isolation, and egocentric behavior. This paper describes these paradoxes and concludes by examining the emerging trends and patterns that these paradoxes have come to reinforce. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps, and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely (...) copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This research synthesizes social exchange, organizational culture, and social identity theories to explore the boundary conditions of the relationship between high-performance work systems and employee organizational citizenship behavior. In particular, it draws on the China-specific management context. In this country, in spite of the wide use of a long-term-oriented and loose-control-focused Western-styled strategic human resource management model, a short-term-focused and tight-control-oriented error aversion culture is still popular. The study uses multi-source individual-level survey data in a large state-owned enterprise to (...) test the hypotheses. It is found that employee-experienced, Western-styled high-performance work systems positively impact a China-specific employee’s organizational citizenship behavior, and the—joint—moderation effects of employee-perceived error aversion culture and organizational identification are significant. The research findings deepen the understanding of the HRM-OCB relationship by demonstrating that culture and identity can jointly adjust the effects of HRM on OCB. The findings also challenge an established argument in the HRM-OCB literature that compatibility between employees’ personalities and organizational values – organizational identification – can enhance OCB. (shrink)

I interpret Dostoevskij’s religious concepts in terms of mythogenesis and mythopoesis. Dostoevskij’s religious concepts arose on the basis both of his personal emotional experience and of the discourse of popular Orthodoxy. They demonstrate the antinomial nature of Russian spirituality, and are typified by his conception of the family, which illustrates the communal basis of the individual personality. The antimomial idea of the family is most fully developed in Dostoevskij’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, in which the four models of (...) fatherhood correspond to Isaac the Syrian’s concepts of physical, spiritual, mental and divine fatherhood. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Practical Pursuits: Religion, Politics, and Personal Cultivation in Nineteenth-Century JapanStephen G. CovellPractical Pursuits: Religion, Politics, and Personal Cultivation in Nineteenth-Century Japan. By Janine Tasca Sawada. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004. Pp. xi + 387.In Practical Pursuits: Religion, Politics, and Personal Cultivation in Nineteenth Century Japan, her follow-up volume to Confucian Values and Popular Zen, Janine Sawada breaks new ground and sets a high mark for future (...) studies on Japanese religions. Practical Pursuits pulls down the sectarian barriers that have defined scholarly and sectarian studies of Japanese religions by looking at the common practice of personal cultivation through a detailed investigation that demonstrates the manner in which members of various groups—from Rinzai Zen to physiognomy movements— [End Page 512] engaged each other directly or indirectly in a conversation that came to shape religious practice in the modern period. The uncovering of what might be called a "common religion" is similar to the work of Ian Reader and George Tanabe in their book Practically Religious. Yet, in the process of exploring the contours of personal cultivation discourse, Sawada also sheds light on shifting lay and clerical identities, state-religion relations, and the development of new religions. The first half of the book is dedicated to an analysis of precedents set in the Tokugawa (Edo) period (1603-1868) and lays the groundwork for later changes during the Meiji period (1868-1912), which are the subject of the second half of the book.Sawada begins with the provocatively titled first chapter, "Dead Words." While this term derives specifically from eighteenth-century Nativist arguments, it is revealed in the course of the book to be a central theme in Japanese religious discourse. "Dead words" refers to the reaction by Nativists, Confucian scholars, Buddhist priests, and practitioners of various religious movements to what they perceived to be an overemphasis on obtaining a purely intellectual understanding of texts rather than realizing through practice the practical and moral implications of the texts. Here, Sawada introduces us to what she terms the "grammar" of personal cultivation, namely a framework of Confucian language upon which dialogue between often vastly different communities could take place. This "grammar" provided the foundation for broad and diverse conversations about personal cultivation, the content of which may have differed dramatically even as the language used was similar. Sawada also carefully traces the manner in which definitions of "learning" and "cultivation" changed over time, how religion and learning came to be viewed separately in the modern period, and the reactions of religious organizations to these fluctuations in definition.The "grammar" Sawada describes was used by a broad spectrum of elites and, as she demonstrates, was mediated by leaders of new religious movements. This mix of actors—Rinzai Zen priests, Shingaku leaders, Shintō practitioners, and others—"created their own interpretive conclaves, negotiated between textual systems of knowledge with which they had been imbued and the reality of their social and religious experience" (p. 27). This book brings to light the overlapping conversations between these different groups and peels back the multiple layers of their relations in which conversations over personal cultivation served as a bond between political, religious, and social elites.For students of Buddhism, the two chapters related to koji (lay) Zen are of particular interest. In these chapters Sawada details the interaction between those using the "grammar" she identifies earlier. In so doing, she begins to clarify how the clergy and elite lay practitioners negotiated new understandings of the boundaries dividing lay from professional practitioners. Sawada introduces evidence to counter the standard view that Zen clergy engaged in an "outreach" effort to expand lay practices in order to overcome the financial difficulties faced by temples in the Meiji period. While she gives evidence that finances were indeed a critical issue, she also shows us that, at least in some cases, the effort was more of an "inreach" by lay members seeking to gain or regain what they believed were traditional personal cultivation [End Page 513] practices. In such cases, Sawada shows, the clergy's reaction varied from resistance to passive acceptance.It is hard to find points to critique about this very enjoyable book. That... (shrink)

This paper proposes a philosophically informed decision-making methodology, inspired by Aristotle, that encourages constructive discussions amongst employers and employees; is directed towards shared higher-level goals; is consistent with planning frameworks already in place in many businesses; can be amended over time without disruptive disputes; and accounts for the particularities of each industry, enterprise, workplace, and job. It seeks to establish a more fundamental basis for discussions about remote vs. in-person office work: specifically, the purpose and nature of the work of (...) those affected. If these matters can be decided, then subsequent discussions might be focused more upon the shared outcomes to which stakeholders are committed and less upon individual preferences and ‘hunches.’. (shrink)

Insights into the role of body feelings in the development of our personalities.