Social norms – rules governing which behaviours are deemed appropriate or inappropriate within a given community – are typically taken to be uniquely human. Recently, this position has been challenged by a number of philosophers, cognitive scientists, and ethologists, who have suggested that social norms may also be found in certain non-human animal communities. Such claims have elicited considerable scepticism from norm cognition researchers, who doubt that any non-human animals possess the psychological capacities necessary for normative cognition. However, there is (...) little agreement among these researchers about what these psychological prerequisites are. This makes empirical study of animal social norms difficult, since it is not clear what we are looking for and thus what should count as behavioural evidence for the presence (or absence) of social norms in animals. To break this impasse, we offer an approach that moves beyond contested psychological criteria for social norms. This approach is inspired by the animal culture research program, which has made a similar shift away from heavily psychological definitions of ‘culture’ and to become organized around a cluster of more empirically tractable concepts of culture. Here, we propose an analogous set of constructs built around the core notion of a normative regularity, which we define as a socially maintained pattern of behavioural conformity within a community. We suggest methods for studying potential normative regularities in wild and captive primates. We also discuss the broader scientific and philosophical implications of this research program with respect to questions of human uniqueness, animal welfare and conservation. (shrink)

Accession Number: ATLA0001712130; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 226-235.; Language(s): English; General Note: Bibliography: p 234-235.; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

Let us give voice to this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values should itself, for once, be examined. -Friedrich NietzscheAnyone who, stimulated by education, has come to feel the force of the various obligations in life, at some time or other comes to feel the irksomeness of carrying them out, and to recognize the sacrifice of interest involved; and, if thoughtful, he inevitably puts to himself the question: “Is there really a reason (...) why I should act in the ways in which hitherto I have thought I ought to act? … Should I not really be justified in simply trying to have a good time?” -H.A. Prichard. (shrink)

The Just War principle of jus ad bellum explicitly requires a reasonable prospect of success; the prevailing view about personal self-defence is that it can be justified even if the prospect of success is low. This chapter defends the existence of this distinction and goes on to explore the normative basis of this difference between defensive war and self-defence and its implications. In particular, the chapter highlights the rationale of the ‘success condition’ within Just War thinking and argues that this (...) condition is grounded in assumptions about the nature of political authority and responsibility that do not apply to personal self-defence. This important difference is commonly ignored or side-lined by contemporary theorists who regard the principles of these two types of conflict as very closely aligned and the moral differences between them as matters of degree only. (shrink)

La tension entre le non-dualisme et le dualisme domine toute l’histoire du Vedanta. En face de l’advaita de Śaṅkara, le système de Madhva, auquel cette étude est consacrée, représente l’extrême dualisme, dvaita. Cependant Madhva, après avoir posé la réalité irréductible de la différence entre Dieu et le monde, a comme compensé cette scission de l’être par l’affirmation que tout être autre que l’Être absolu est dépendant de celui-ci, seul Dieu ne dépendant que de lui-même. L’originalité du système de Madhva est (...) d’inventer une relation nouvelle entre l’Être et les êtres. Seul l’Être est capable de faire exister des êtres différents de lui et totalement dépendants de lui ; Dieu permet à toute réalité d’être, et d’être ce qu’elle est. (shrink)

What happens when we blur time and allow ourselves to haunt or to become haunted by ghosts of the past? Drawing on archaeological, historical, and ethnographic data, Blurring Timescapes, Subverting Erasure demonstrates the value of conceiving of ghosts not just as metaphors, but as mechanisms for making the past more concrete and allowing the negative specters of enduring historical legacies, such as colonialism and capitalism, to be exorcised.

In this chapter, I offer an overview of current scholarly debates on Plato's Lysis. I also argue for my own interpretation of the dialogue. In the Lysis, Socrates argues that all love is motivated by the desire for one’s own good. This conclusion has struck many interpreters as unattractive, so much so that some attempt to reinterpret the dialogue, such that it either does not offer an account of interpersonal love, or that it offers an account on which love is, (...) in fact, an other-regarding state. Others, notably Vlastos, criticize Socrates’ theory as implausibly and repellently egoistic. I maintain, against the first group, that Socrates is indeed offering an egoistic theory of love. I argue, against the second, that, while Socrates’ theory may be repellent, it possesses considerable explanatory power and avoids certain weaknesses which infect contemporary approaches to love. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to defend negligence as a legitimate basis for moral and criminal culpability. In so doing, I also hope to demonstrate how philosophical and jurisprudential perspectives on responsibility can mutually inform each other. While much of the paper focuses on criminal negligence, my aim is to show how attention to certain doctrines and concepts in criminal law can shed light on our understanding of moral culpability including culpability for negligence. It is often taken to be (...) a fundamental principle of criminal law that an act cannot be guilty unless it is accompanied by a culpable state of mind or mens rea. This has led to scepticism regarding negligence as a legitimate basis for desert-based criminal sanction because it is not clear that negligence picks out any mental state at all, much less a culpable one. In this paper I articulate and defend a unified account of moral and criminal culpability that rejects the standard view of mens rea that underlies negligence-skepticism. Specifically, I hold that the mens rea element of a crime does not function to inculpate, as is standardly held, but to partly determine the description under which an action counts as wrongful. While I agree that we should be especially cautious about criminalizing negligence, the relevant question, on my view, is not whether a given mens is sufficiently culpable but whether the mens-cum-actus is sufficiently wrongful to warrant the attention of criminal justice. (shrink)

Country music critics and scholars have noticed an apparent contradiction between the practical identity of country music with the image of the male country singer as the 'rhinestone cowboy'. In this case, the problem is one of how we can make sense of the rural, working-class, ruggedly masculinity persona common to the genre with its elaborately embroidered, brightly colored, and highly embellished male fashion. The intractability of this problem has led some to argue that the simplest solution is to just (...) deny the legitimacy of country music authenticity discourse altogether. That is, all the genre’s talk of the rural working class is inauthentic and should be discarded. Here, I argue that by accounting for country music authenticity in terms of the genre being a dual character concept, we can fully address the skeptic's worries. Beyond merely being compatible with the Nudie suit however, this notion of authenticity is also our best way of understanding the aesthetic value of the rhinestone cowboy image at all. The resulting picture, in which the suit primarily serves as an epistemic signifier of one’s standing in the country music community, allows for the Nudie suit to function as a class, and sometimes queer, commentary on mainstream culture. (shrink)

What are the moral challenges that confront doctors as they manage healthcare institutions? How do we build trust in medical organisations? How do we conceptualize moral action? Based on accounts given by senior doctors from organisations throughout the UK, this book discusses the issues medical leaders find most troubling and identifies the moral tensions they face. Moral Leadership in Medicine examines in detail how doctors protect patients' interests, implement morally controversial change, manage colleagues in difficulty and rebuild trust after serious (...) medical harm. The book discusses how leaders develop moral narratives to make sense of these situations, how they behave while balancing conflicting moral goals and how they influence those around them to do the right thing in difficult circumstances. Based on empirical ethical analysis, this volume is essential reading for clinicians in leadership roles and students and academics in the fields of healthcare management, medical law and healthcare ethics"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Interviews met tien hedendaagse Nederlandse filosofen over hun manier van denken.

"Reason is not passion's slave." Rather, the author argues, reason appraises the cultural appropriateness of passion, thus directing our attitudinal behaviour. He refutes those theories of value which correspond philosophically to societies described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau: societies of "honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, pleasure without happiness." His argument, which takes into account traditional philosophic positions, is divided into five parts: Attitudes, Evaluation, Characterization, Culture, Morality.

Shard cinema tells an expansive story of how moving images have changed in the last three decades, and how they have changed us along with them, rewiring the ways we watch, fight, and navigate an unsteady world. In a set of interrelated essays that range from the writings of early factory workers to the distributed sight of contemporary surveillance, Williams argues for deep links between the images we see and the hidden labors frozen into them, exploring how even the apparently (...) trivial or spectacular carries unique opportunities to detect and process the social frictions of their making. Spanning film, video games, radical history, architecture, visual effects, and war, the book crosses the twentieth century into our present to confront a new order of seeing and making that slowly took shape: the composite image, where no clean distinction can be made between production and post-production, filmed and animated, material and digital. Giving equal ground to costly blockbusters, shaky riot footage, disaster photography, and early cinema, Williams leads us from computer-generated 'shards' of particles and debris to the broken phone screens on which we watch these digital storms, looking for the unexpected histories lived in the interval between"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan ...

In his Confessions, Saint Augustine narrates the intense struggle of a self divided and dissociated from itself in the throes of becoming other than what it is. His attempts at conversion and self-transformation involve a struggle with his habituated self; his habits, ever resistant to change, impede his becoming. Insofar as Augustine disavows the significance of his self ’s multiplicity to enabling his capacity to convert, he comes short of providing us with an account of the self ’s capacity for (...) change. It is on this point that reading Confessions with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “the body without organs” (a term that describes creative experimentation with forms of life and subjectivity) helps deepen our insights into the self ’s becoming. Such a minor reading of Confessions can be achieved by extracting the concept of “formless matter” (a term Augustine uses to designate the primacy of the capacity for mutability in creation) from his reading of Genesis in order to bring it to bear on thinking through the work of the self that enables his capacity for conversion. Beneath the theological account that privileges heaven, because of its changeless “cleaving to God,” over the ever-transient creatures of the earth, there lies an ontological account wherein formless matter, the capacity to change, plays a pivotal role in ethical becoming and capacitation. In his process of conversion, Augustine breaks his habituated patterns of sensing and makes himself into a “body without organs” in order to be capacitated by alterity, and in so doing enables a becoming different that takes place with and through difference. (shrink)

Contesting Extinctions: Decolonial and Regenerative Futures critically interrogates the discursive framing of extinctions and how they relate to the systems that bring about biocultural loss. The chapters in this multidisciplinary volume examine approaches to ecological and social extinction and resurgence from a variety of fields, including environmental studies, literary studies, political science, and philosophy. Grounding their scholarship in decolonial, Indigenous, and counter-hegemonic frameworks, the contributors advocate for shifting the discursive focus from ruin to regeneration. -/- .

The Educational Significance of Human and Non-Human Animal Interactions explores human animal/non-human animal interactions from different disciplinary perspectives, from education policy to philosophy of education and ecopedagogy. The authors refute the idea of anthropocentrism (the belief that human beings are the central or most significant species on the planet) through an ethical investigation into animal and human interactions, and 'real-life' examples of humans and animals living and learning together. In doing so, Rice and Rud outline the idea that interactions between (...) animals and humans are educationally significant and vital in the classroom. (shrink)

Sophists were active participants in ancient discussions about being or what-is at the most general level. This chapter discusses the contributions of Gorgias, Protagoras, Xeniades, and Lycophron in the context of the Eleatic philosophers Parmenides, Zeno, and Melissus. All of these figures share a serious commitment to ontological inquiry as well as a concern with the problems that arise when discussing being or what-is. They also share an approach to these problems that is at times paradoxical and self-undermining. -/- The (...) chapter begins with a brief discussion of Parmenides’ poem, a work that serves as an important backdrop for later ontology. It then covers Gorgias’ On Not-Being, a response to the Eleatics and a unique contribution in its own right. Gorgias’ work is then compared with that of Zeno and Melissus. Finally, the more limited evidence we have of Protagoras, Xeniades, and Lycophron’s ontological theorizing is discussed. (shrink)

" L'expérience esthétique, n'est autonome, écrit Adorno, que lorsqu'elle se débarrasse du goût culinaire, la voie qui y conduit passe par le désintéressement.... ", à ce lointain écho de la rupture transcendantale au sein de l'Esthétique du goût, à ce déni pur et simple de la sensibilité et du plaisir " sensuel et grossier ", comme principes du goût, on préfèrera, ici, une présentation non morale, ou non kantienne, de la notion de goût ; une réflexion qui, de Voltaire et (...) Montesquieu à Brillat-Savarin, prend en compte le goût " lui-même " et non seulement sa métaphore ; on cherchera le raffinement et la délicatesse du goût non seulement dans les sphères supérieures de l'existence, mais aussi dans les relations primordiales de la vie, celle de la consommation, de la préparation et de la production, ainsi que le voulait Charles Fourier, (beau) frère de Brillat-Savarin. Dans les deux essais, ici étudiés, s'impose, en effet, la dimension organique et sensuelle mais néanmoins esthétique du goût, dans les choses de la nature et de l'art. L'Essai sur le goût de Montesquieu et La Physiologie du goût de Brillat-Savarin, témoignent, dans des domaines distincts mais étroitement liés, de l'Esthétique comme " science de la sensibilité ". Par leur rapprochement, on entend montrer que le goût n'est pas une " chose mentale " mais l'affaire de tous les sens, que l'âme qui goûte est l'âme qui sent. On cherchera à dépasser le divorce, qui semble s'être installé, entre le jugement esthétique et le plaisir esthétique, on tentera par là, de restaurer la continuité entre les deux pôles de la sensibilité gustative et de redonner, par une réévaluation du goût culinaire, une assise réelle, vitale et réconfortante à la notion de goût, comme sentiment délicat. (shrink)

It is time to bring the rich resources of these traditions into the contemporary debate about the nature of self. This volume is the first of its kind.

"In recent years, we have grown accustomed to philosophical language that is intensely self-conscious and rhetorically thick, often tragic in tone. It is enlivening to read Bergson, who exerts so little rhetorical pressure while exacting such a substantial effort of thought.... Bergson's texts teach the reader to let go of entrenched intellectual habits and to begin to think differently—to think in time.... Too much and too little have been said about Bergson. Too much, because of the various appropriations of his (...) thought. Too little, because the work itself has not been carefully studied in recent decades."—from Thinking in Time Henri Bergson, whose philosophical works emphasized motion, time, and change, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. His work remains influential, particularly in the realms of philosophy, cultural studies, and new media studies. In Thinking in Time, Suzanne Guerlac provides readers with the conceptual and contextual tools necessary for informed appreciation of Bergson's work. Guerlac's straightforward philosophical expositions of two Bergson texts, Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory, focus on the notions of duration and memory—concepts that are central to the philosopher's work. Thinking in Time makes plain that it is well worth learning how to read Bergson effectively: his era and our own share important concerns. Bergson's insistence on the opposition between the automatic and the voluntary and his engagement with the notions of "the living," affect, and embodiment are especially germane to discussions of electronic culture. (shrink)

This research aims to explore the relationship between corporate governance and CSR: What are the major factors that play a direct role in the establishment of this relationship? How does context and institutional background impact upon the relationship between CSR and Governance? Using in-depth semi-structured interviews from two types of governance systems in three countries over three years, this study has demonstrated that in practice, within different settings, CSR is being used both as a strategy as well as a reaction (...) to different drivers. We call this adaptive governance where governance can be defined as a flexible system of action incorporating strategic and monitoring activities that determines the way a company enacts its responsibilities to its shareholders and stakeholders and which is determined at any given time by the interrelationship of institutional drivers and behavioural norms. Governance systems and their interrelationships with CSR are demonstrated as fluid according to the national and institutional context, economic situation and industry impact. In the eyes of practitioners corporate governance includes both structural and behavioural factors as well as responsibilities and actions towards shareholders and stakeholders. Contextual factors that this research highlights to be important to the incorporation of CSR into governance include the economic environment, national governance system, regulation and soft law, shareholders, national culture, behavioural norms and industry impacts. Hypotheses on the impact of institutional contexts, industry impacts and economic situations on different types of CSR actions are proposed for further research. (shrink)

This paper puts forth a class of algebraic structures, relativized Boolean algebras (RBAs), that provide semantics for propositional logic in which truth/validity is only defined relative to a local domain. In particular, the join of an event and its complement need not be the top element. Nonetheless, behavior is locally governed by the laws of propositional logic. By further endowing these structures with operators—akin to the theory of modal Algebras—RBAs serve as models of modal logics in which truth is relative. (...) In particular, modal RBAs provide semantics for various well-known awareness logics and an alternative view of possibility semantics. (shrink)

This edited volume brings together contributions from prominent scholars to discuss new approaches to Plato's philosophy, especially in the burgeoning fields of Platonic ontology and psychology. Topics such as the relationship between mind, soul and emotions, as well as the connection between ontology and ethics are discussed through the analyses of dialogues from Plato's middle and late periods, such as the Republic, Symposium, Theaetetus, Timaeus and Laws. These works are being increasingly studied both as precursors for Aristotelian philosophy and in (...) their own right, and the analyses included in this volume reveal some new interpretations of topics such as Plato's attitude towards artistic imagination and the possibility of speaking of a teleology in Plato. Focusing on hot topics in the area, Psychology and Ontology in Plato provides a good sense of what is happening in Platonic scholarship worldwide and will be of interest to academic researchers and teachers interested in ancient philosophy, ontology and philosophical psychology. (shrink)

Finding Oz tells the remarkable story behind one of the world’s most enduring and best-loved books. Offering profound new insights into the true origins and meaning of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 masterwork, it delves into the personal turmoil and spiritual transformation that fueled Baum’s fantastical parable of the American Dream. Before becoming an impresario of children’s adventure tales, the J. K. Rowling of his age, Baum failed at a series of careers and nearly lost his soul before setting out on (...) a journey of discovery that would lead to the Land of Oz. Drawing on original research, Evan Schwartz debunks popular misconceptions and shows how the people, places, and events in Baum’s life gave birth to his unforgettable images and characters, from the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City to the dual view of witches that reflected the life of Baum’s mother-in-law, the radical women’s rights leader Matilda Joslyn Gage. A narrative that sweeps across late-nineteenth-century America, Finding Oz ultimately reveals how failure and heartbreak can sometimes lead to redemption and bliss, and how one individual can ignite the imagination of the entire world. (shrink)

Finding Oz tells the remarkable story behind one of the world’s most enduring and best-loved books. Offering profound new insights into the true origins and meaning of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 masterwork, it delves into the personal turmoil and spiritual transformation that fueled Baum’s fantastical parable of the American Dream. Before becoming an impresario of children’s adventure tales, the J. K. Rowling of his age, Baum failed at a series of careers and nearly lost his soul before setting out on (...) a journey of discovery that would lead to the Land of Oz. Drawing on original research, Evan Schwartz debunks popular misconceptions and shows how the people, places, and events in Baum’s life gave birth to his unforgettable images and characters, from the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City to the dual view of witches that reflected the life of Baum’s mother-in-law, the radical women’s rights leader Matilda Joslyn Gage. A narrative that sweeps across late-nineteenth-century America, Finding Oz ultimately reveals how failure and heartbreak can sometimes lead to redemption and bliss, and how one individual can ignite the imagination of the entire world. (shrink)

: This essay examines the increasing commodification of the body with respect to tissues, gametes, and embryos. Such commodification contributes to a diminishing sense of human personhood on an individual level, even as it erodes commitments to human flourishing at the societal level. After the case for social harm resulting from the increasing commodification of the body is made, the question becomes whether that harm is best remedied by following any of three approaches by which government traditionally seeks to promote (...) the flourishing of its citizens. The author concludes that it is not, and that what is needed is a pragmatic and somewhat casuistic approach to the regulation of contested commodities--that which legal scholar Margaret Jane Radin calls "incomplete commodification.". (shrink)