The so-called Disability Paradox arises from the apparent tension between the popular view that disability leads to low well-being and the relatively high life-satisfaction reports of disabled people. Our aim in this essay is to make some progress toward dissolving this alleged paradox by exploring the relationship between disability and various “goods of life”—that is, components of a life that typically make a person’s life go better for her. We focus on four widely recognized goods of life (happiness, rewarding relationships, (...) knowledge, achievement) and four common types of disability (sensory, mobility, intellectual, and social) and systematically examine the extent to which the four disability types are in principle compatible with obtaining the four goods of life. Our findings suggest that that there is a high degree of compatibility. This undermines the widespread view that disabilities, by their very nature, substantially limit a person’s ability to access the goods of life, and it provides some guidance on how to dissolve the Disability Paradox. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCentral to the mainstream Sikh identity is the concept of ethically-justified force, used as a last resort. There is no place for absolute pacifism in this conception of ethical living. Fighters and martyrs occupy an important place in the Khalsa narrative, and Sikhs are constantly reminded of the sacrifices and heroism of their co-religionists of the past. This article explores how the Sikh warrior identity is manifested in the contemporary world. It examines the Sikhs who, in the 1980s and 1990s, (...) were involved on both sides of the Punjab crisis: those militants who fought for a Sikh homeland and those Sikhs in the Indian army who suppressed the insurgency. The article also looks beyond the militants and soldiers to Sikhs employed in modern security-related professions, the broader issue of Sikh symbols relating to the use of force, and violence within the Sikh diaspora. An examination of the Sikhs in various parts of the world reveals additional uses and consequences of ideology, w... (shrink)

The role of responsible leadership—for each leader and as part of a leader’s collective actions—is essential to global competitive success (Doh and Stumpf, Handbook on responsible leadership and governance in global business, 2005 ; Maak and Pless, Responsible leadership, 2006a . Failures in leadership have stimulated interest in understanding “responsible leadership” by researchers and practitioners. Research on responsible leadership draws on stakeholder theory, with employees viewed as a primary stakeholder for the responsible organization (Donaldson and Preston, Acad Manag Rev 20(1):65–91, (...) 1995 ; Freeman, Strategic management: a stakeholder approach, 1984 ; Mitchell et al., Acad Manag Rev 22:853–886, 1997 ; Phillips and Freeman, Stakeholder theory and organizational ethics, 2003 . We define and operationalize responsible leadership from the perspective of employees and their views of the actions of their leaders. Drawing on a comprehensive survey of 28 Indian and global organizations operating in India, we report the results from 4,352 employees on the relationship between responsible leadership, their pride in and satisfaction with their organization, and retention 1 year later. Strong associations were found among these variables suggesting that responsible leadership—employee perceptions of the support they receive from managers, the HR practices, and corporate socially responsible actions—may be an overarching construct that connects them to the organization. (shrink)

Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), now also known as Dissociative Iden- tity Disorder, raises many questions about the nature of persons, the goals of treatment, the suggestibility of patients, and the reliability of defendant reports of their own mental states. These issues become crucial when courts need to decide whether or not to punish a person with MPD who has committed a crime. This paper will explore that issue and propose a test of when people with MPD should be held criminally (...) responsible. (shrink)

Is Goodness Without God Good Enough contains a lively debate between William Lane Craig and Paul Kurtz on the relationship between God and ethics, followed by seven new essays that both comment on the debate and advance the broader discussion of this important issue. Written in an accessible style by eminent scholars, this book will appeal to students and academics alike.

In this volume specialists of medieval music and philosophy put the medieval 'musica' into the context of ideas and institutions in which it existed. The significance of 'musica' cannot be understood from a modern point of view since 'music' does not match the medieval 'musica'.

If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.

This book provides practical and research-based chapters that offer greater clarity about the particular kinds of teacher reflection that matter and avoids talking about teacher reflection generically, which implies that all kinds of reflection are of equal value.

What is a medium? Why is there always a middle? Can media produce 'immediacy'? Henri Bergson recognized mediation as the central philosophical problem of modernity. This book traces his influence on the 'media philosophies' of Gilles Deleuze, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin and Michel Serres.

Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin's book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin's writings, offering a philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism, and Western Marxism. Wolin provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamin's widely studied writings on Baudelaire, historiography, and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially for this edition, Wolin discusses the (...) unfinished _Arcades Project_, as well as recent tendencies in the reception of Benjamin's work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates about modernity and postmodernity. (shrink)

BackgroundOver the past two decades, Uganda has experienced a significant increase in clinical research driven by both academia and industry. This has been combined with a broader spectrum of research proposals, with respect to methodologies and types of intervention that need evaluation by Research Ethics Committees (RECs) with associated increased requirement for expertise. We assessed the competencies of REC members regarding review of research protocols with complex and emerging research study designs. The aim was to guide development of a training (...) curriculum to improve the quality of scientific and ethical review.MethodsThis was a cross-sectional study design, with quantitative data collection methods. Research Ethics Committee members completed a structured pre-coded questionnaire on current competence with complex and emerging study design. REC members were asked to outline a list of additional topics for which they needed training. Data from coded questions were entered into Epidata Version 3.1 and then exported to STATA Version14.1 for analysis. Descriptive analysis was performed and findings are presented using percentages and frequencies.ResultsWe enrolled 55 REC members from 6 RECs who have a total of 97 members. The majority of whom were males (56.4%, n = 31/55). The level of competence for review of selected study design was lowest for Controlled Human Infection Model (10.9%, n = 6) and reverse pharmacology design (10.9%, n = 6), and highest for cluster randomized study design (52.7%, n = 29) and implementation science research (52.7%, n = 29).ConclusionCompetence for review of research protocols with complex and emerging study design was low among participating REC members. We recommend prioritising training of REC members on complex and emerging study designs to enhance quality of research protocol review. (shrink)

What is the origin of the concept of a law of nature? How much does it owe to theology and metaphysics? To what extent do the laws of nature permit contingency? Are there exceptions to the laws of nature? Is it possible to give a reductive analysis of lawhood, or is it a primitive? -/- Twelve brand-new essays by an international team of leading philosophers take up these and other central questions on the laws of nature, whilst also examining some (...) of the most important intuitions and assumptions that have guided the debate over laws of nature since the concept's invention in the seventeenth century. -/- Laws of Nature spans the history of philosophy and of science, contemporary metaphysics, and contemporary philosophy of science. Contents: 1. Intuitions and Assumptions in the Debate over Laws of Nature, Walter Ott and Lydia Patton 2. Early Modern Roots of the Philosophical Concept of a Law of Nature, Helen Hattab 3. Laws of Nature and the Divine Order of Things: Descartes and Newton on Truth in Natural Philosophy, Mary Domski 4. Leges sive natura: Bacon, Spinoza, and a Forgotten Concept of Law, Walter Ott 5. Laws and Powers in the Frame of Nature, Stathis Psillos 6. Laws and Ideal Unity, Angela Breitenbach 7. Becoming Humean, John W. Carroll 8. A Perspectivalist Better Best System Account of Lawhood, Michela Massimi 9. Laws: An Invariance Based Account, James Woodward 10. How the Explanations of Natural Laws Make Some Reducible Physical Properties Natural and Explanatorily Powerful, Marc Lange 11. Laws and their Exceptions, Stephen Mumford 12. Are laws of nature consistent with contingency?, Nancy Cartwright and Pedro Merlussi. (shrink)

Over the last twenty years, the idea that climate change – and indeed global environmental change more generally – is fundamentally a moral challenge has become mainstream. But most have supposed that the challenge is one of acting morally, rather than to our morality itself. Dale Jamieson is a notable exception to this trend. From the earliest days of climate ethics, he has argued that successfully addressing the problem will involve a fundamental paradigm shift in ethics. In general, Jamieson believes (...) that our current values evolved relatively recently in “low-population-density and low-technology societies, with seemingly unlimited access to land and other resources,” and so are ill-suited to a globalized world. More specifically, he asserts that these values include as a central component an account of responsibility which “presupposes that harms and their causes are individual, that they can be readily identified, and that they are local in time and space.” But, he claims, global environmental problems such as climate change fit none of these criteria, so that a new value system is needed, one which addresses “fundamental questions” about “how we ought to live, what kinds of societies we want, and how we should relate to nature and other forms of life.” In particular, he declares that there is little hope of success without direct appeal to a hitherto underappreciated “duty of respect for nature.” In my view, Jamieson is right to question the adequacy of conventional ethical thinking for addressing global environmental problems. However, I also contend that the situation with respect to responsibility is less clear cut than he suggests. In this paper, I offer several objections to Jamieson’s main arguments, and propose an alternative, less revisionary, account of our predicament. Nevertheless, I also suggest that much of the spirit of Jamieson’s position remains intact, so that my proposal is more of a “friendly amendment” to his view than an outright rejection of it. According to this amendment, climate change involves a failure of our attempts to delegate responsibility to political institutions charged with acting on our behalf. Such failures are jarring, since they throw many of our normal practices into doubt, and threaten to restore to us demanding social burdens to which we have become largely unaccustomed. This situation need not cast doubt on our basic account of ethical responsibility. Indeed, that account helps to illuminate what is going on. Still, it does imply that we face a large (although somewhat familiar) moral and political challenge. (shrink)

Kretzmann and Spade were led by Richard Kilvington’s proposed revisions to the rules of obligations in his discussion of the 47th sophism in his Sophismata to claim that the purpose of obligational disputations was the same as that of counterfactual reasoning. Angel d’Ors challenged this interpretation, realising that the reason for Kilvington’s revision was precisely that he found the art of obligation unsuited to the kind of reasoning which lay at the heart of the sophismatic argument. In his criticism, Kilvington (...) focussed on a technique used by Walter Burley to force a respondent to grant an arbitrary falsehood and similar to Lewis and Langford’s famous defence of ex impossibili quodlibet. Kilvington observes that just as in obligational disputation, one may be obliged to grant a false proposition and deny a true one, so in counterfactual reasoning one may be obliged to doubt a proposition whose truth or falsity one knows, on pain of contradiction. (shrink)

The focus of the paper is a sophism based on the proposition ‘This is Socrates’ found in a short treatise on obligational casus attributed to William Heytesbury. First, the background to the puzzle in Walter Burley’s traditional account of obligations (the responsio antiqua), and the objections and revisions made by Richard Kilvington and Roger Swyneshed, are presented. All six types of obligations described by Burley are outlined, including sit verum, the type used in the sophism. Kilvington and Swyneshed disliked the (...) dynamic nature of the responsio antiqua, and Kilvington proposed a revision to the rules for irrelevant propositions. This allowed him to use a form of reasoning, the “disputational meta-argument”, which is incompatible with Burley’s rules. Heytesbury explicitly rejected Kilvington’s revision and the associated meta-argument. Swyneshed also revised Burley’s account of obligations, formulating the so-called responsio nova, characterised by the apparently surprising thesis that a conjunction can be denied both of whose conjuncts are granted. On closer inspection, however, his account is found to be less radical than first appears. (shrink)

The topic of the democratic public's limited competence has preoccupied students of democracy for centuries. Anecdotal concerns about the problem reached their peak of sophistication in the writings of Walter Lippmann and Joseph Schumpeter. Not until Philip E. Converse's “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics” did statistical research overwhelmingly confirm the worst fears of such democratic skeptics. Subsequent work has tended to confirm Converse's picture of a tiny stratum of well‐informed ideological elites whose passionate political debates find little (...) echo, or even awareness, in the mass public. While a great deal of attention has been devoted to “saving” democratic legitimacy from such findings, the Converse‐inspired work of John Zaller (1992) shows how fruitful Converse's basic ideas can be not only in analyzing real‐world political events, but in pulling together and stimulating new lines of research into what moves the “creative synthesizers” of belief systems; into the factors that affect the small numbers of people who grasp such systems and attempt to transmit them to the public; and into the long‐term psychological or cultural sources of the predispositions with which members of the mass public confront the resulting political messages. (shrink)

Stephen Read - Johannes Buridanus: Summulae de Practica Sophismatum - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.1 157-158 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Stephen Read University of St. Andrews Fabienne Pironet, editor. Johannes Buridanus: Summulae de Practica Sophismatum. Artistarium 10–9. Turnhout: Brepols 2004. Pp. xlix + 193. Paper, €40.00. John Buridan was an unusual figure in fourteenth-century logic and philosophy. Logic was at that time largely the preserve of (...) the young, who would lecture on logic while studying in higher faculties such as theology, before moving on to lecture in their maturity on philosophy and theology. Two notable exceptions are the Englishman Walter Burley and the Frenchman from Picardy, John Buridan. Already active in the Arts Faculty at Paris in the late 1320s, Buridan was still there thirty years later. In the meantime, among other works on metaphysics, ethics, politics, and natural philosophy, he.. (shrink)

Recent books by Harry Collins, Neil Gascoigne and Tim Thornton, and Stephen Turner examine the nature of tacit knowledge and the role it plays in society. Their interpretations are outlined and placed in juxtaposition with the extremely broad understanding of tacit factors in knowing set forth by the originator of the term, Michael Polanyi. I argue that the naturalized version advocated by Turner can best develop the richness of Polanyi’s insights, and I sketch out what some of the aspects (...) of a full account of the tacit might look like. (shrink)

Thomas Bradwardine's solution to the semantic paradoxes, presented in his Insolubilia written in Oxford in the early 1320s, turns on two main principles: that a proposition is true only if things are wholly as it signifies; and that signification is closed under consequence. After exploring the background in Walter Burley's account of the signification of propositions, the question is considered of the extent to which Bradwardine's theory is compatible with the distribution of truth over conjunction, disjunction, negation and the conditional.

Translation theory has faced criticism from professional translators for adopting an ivory tower stance to the ‘real world’ challenges of translation. This article argues that a case can be made for considering the challenges of translation as it takes place in the school classroom. In support of such an argument the pedagogue as translator is seen to occupy a pivotal position, such that the insights from translation theory, understanding translation as an inter-linguistic act, can be combined and bridged with the (...) burgeoning field of translation pedagogy, focusing on how the practice of (inter-linguistic) translation might be taught and learned in the school classroom. Extending the sphere of influence of translation, it is argued that the pedagogue as translator is concerned with teaching pupils in the classroom how to engage in making meaning in their respective subjects. This requires acts of translation from and with something heard or seen with respect to the subject concerned, in order to make into personal knowledge. After an initial presentation of a particular understanding of translation theory inspired by Walter Benjamin's famous essay on ‘The Task of the Translator’, examples of bridging are presented in the teaching of translation skills in two classroom subjects: teaching English as a foreign language and teaching natural science. (shrink)

Paul Klee's art found broad impact upon philosophers of varying commitments, including Hans-Georg Gadamer. Moreover, Klee himself was not only one of the most important artists of aesthetic modernism but one of its leading theoreticians, and much in his work, as in Gadamer's, originated in post-Kantian literary theory's explications of symbol and allegory. Indeed at one point in Truth and Method, Gadamer associates his project for a general "theory of hermeneutic experience" not only with Goethe's metaphysical account of the symbolic (...) but equally with a "rehabilitation" of allegory. In this paper, I examine this position and Gadamer's own use of it in his analysis of Klee's work, contrasting it with that of Walter Benjamin's account of allegory, equally indebted to Goethe and this archive. Finally, I contrast the resulting interpretations of Klee, discussing the implications that evolve for understanding both Gadamer and Benjamin— but equally for understanding Klee's work and, provisionally, the work of art, thus construed, for philosophy. (shrink)

This is a revised version of a paper that was originally presented at the first Kant in Asia international conference (on the theme "The Unity of Human Personhood") in May of 2009. It was published as Chapter 64 in Cultivating Personhood: Kant and Asian Philosophy, ed. Stephen R. Palmquist (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), pp.811-821. I argue that Kant and the Yijing both employ a form of architectonic reasoning, though their respective understandings of the logical structure of human reasoning (...) are incommensurable. A more thoroughly revised version of the paper was later published in the Journal of Chinese Philosophy and was followed by a series of several other articles arguing that there is a way of arranging the Yijing's 64 hexagrams such that their form is compatible with the form of Kant's table of categories. (shrink)

Nick Peim has recently revisited the work of Walter Benjamin; specifically his famous essay on art and mechanical reproduction. In this reply, I too draw upon the inspiration of Benjamin to extend the argument to the question of experience and what might count as knowledge, both in a philosophical sense and also in terms of the curriculum. To exemplify my argument I draw upon the topics of prostitution, gambling and the urban. They were all central to Benjamin's unfinished work 'The (...) Arcades Project'. (shrink)

This is a Lithuanian translation, by Giedrius Sadauskas, of my paper, ‘The Philosopher as a “Secret Agent” for Peace: Taking Seriously Kant’s Revival of the “Old Question” ’, in Valerio Rohden, Ricardo R. Terra and Guido A. de Almeida (eds.), Recht und Frieden in der Philosophie Kants, vol. 4 of Akten des X. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp.601-612. An offprint of the English version is available in the "Kant 4 - Moral and political philosophy articles" section of (...) this website. An online version of the text (in Lithuanian) is available at the link shown below. (shrink)

Nevertheless, Marx's essay ["On the Jewish Question"] has a profound bearing upon The Jew of Malta; their conjunction enriches our understanding of the authors; relation to ideology and, more generally, raises fruitful questions about a Marxist reading of literature. The fact that both works use the figure of the perfidious Jew provides a powerful link between Renaissance and modern thought, for despite the great differences to which I have just pointed, this shared reference is not an accident or a mirage. (...) "On the Jewish Question" represents the nineteenth-century development of a late sixteenth-century idea or, more accurately, a late sixteenth-century trope. Marlowe and Marx seize upon the Jew as a kind of powerful rhetorical device, a way of marshalling deep popular hatred and clarifying its object. The Jew is charged not with racial deviance or religious impiety but with economic and social crime, crime that is committed not only against the dominant Christian society but, in less "pure" form, by that society. Both writers hope to focus attention upon activity that is seen as at once alien and yet central to the life of the community and to direct against that activity the anti-Semitic feeling of the audience. The Jews themselves in their real historical situation are finally incidental in these works, Marx's as well as Marlowe's, except insofar as they excite the fear and loathing of the great mass of Christians. It is this privileged access to mass psychology by means of a semimythical figure linked in the popular imagination with usury, sharp dealing, and ruthless cunning that attracts both the sixteenth-century playwright and the nineteenth-century polemicist.1 · 1. Anti-Semitism, it should be emphasized, is never merely a trope to be adopted or discarded by an author as he might choose to employ zeugma or eschew personification. It is charged from the start with irrationality and bad faith and only partly rationalized as a rhetorical strategy. Marlowe depicts his Jew with the compulsive cruelty that characterizes virtually all his work, while Marx's essay obviously has elements of a sharp, even hysterical, denial of his religious background. It is particularly tempting to reduce the latter work to a dark chapter in its author's personal history. The links I am attempting to establish with Marlowe or the more direct link with Feuerbach, however, locate the essay in a far wider context. Still, the extreme violence of the latter half of Marx's work and his utter separation of himself from the people he excoriates undoubtedly owe much to his personal situation. It is interesting that the tone of the attack on the Jews rises to an almost ecstatic disgust at the moment when Marx seems to be locating the Jews most clearly as a product of bourgeois culture; it is as if Marx were eager to prove that he is in no way excusing or forgiving the Jews. Stephen J. Greenblatt is the Class of 1932 Professor of English Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, and the editor of a collection of essays, New World Encounters. (shrink)

This short essay introduces a set of articles I compiled for a special issue of the Journal of Chinese Philosophy in 2011. Most of the essays are revised versions of papers originally presented at the "Kant in Asia" international conference on "The Unity of Human Personhood", held in Hong Kong in May of 2009, and subsequently published in the collection entitled Cultivating Personhood: Kant and Asian Philosophy (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010). After introducing the papers in the special issue, the (...) essay proposes an unconventional way of mapping the Yijing, according to four "levels of perspectives": 0 + 4 + 12 + (4x12) = 64. I predict that this new map can be used to demonstrate a one-to-one correspondence between the Yijing's 64 gua (hexagrams) and the basic principles of Kant's philosophy. (shrink)

Stephen Turner explores the social dimensions of practices, probing to see if the notion of a shared practice can be understood as a cause or mechanism whereby knowledge arises and is used. When he concludes that practices are not some mysterious collective object but are best explained as individual habits, he thereby rejects an attenuated notion of practice and replaces it with a needlessly atomistic notion in which habits carry the full burden of explanation. Turner makes use of aspects (...) of Polanyi’s thought, but this article suggests ways in which a fuller appropriation of Polanyian insights can salvage a social, telic notion of practices that illuminates human behavior. (shrink)

Duns Scotus's famous proposition was first attacked in a short polemical treatise attributed to Thomas of Sutton. By the time of Ockham, the proposition was known as the propositio famosa, so called by Walter Chatton, Ockham's colleague at Oxford and London, who defended it against Ockham's lengthy critique. At Paris, during the same period, it was called the propositio vulgata and was used approvingly by Francis of Meyronnes, Peter of Navarre and Durandus St. Pourçain. This “famous proposition” was so controverted (...) because on it depended the acceptance, with Duns Scotus, or the rejection, with Ockham, of theology as a strict, propter quid science. As its detractors and defenders must have realized, it also struck at the heart of the divergent philosophical outlooks of Duns Scotus and Ockham. For all of this, Duns Scotus's famous proposition and its history have all but escaped notice. (shrink)