Although previous ethical analyses of management buyouts have presented useful insights, they have been flawed in three major ways. First, they define the transaction too narrowly, emphasizing the going private aspect and ignoring the leveraged aspect. Leveraging alters the nature of the transaction substantially and warrants additional ethical analysis. Second, these previous analyses ignore the impact of buyouts on non-stockholder constituents of the firm, an omission which renders their implicit utilitarian approach incomplete. Third, these analyses do not include Rawlsian, libertarian, (...) or Kantian perspectives on ethics. This paper addresses these shortcomings and finds the ethical status of leveraged management buyouts to be highly suspect. (shrink)

Free will is often said—by compatibilists and incompatibilists alike—to be a power (or complex of powers) of agents. This paper offers proposals for, and examines the prospects of, a powers-conception of free will that takes the powers in question to be causal dispositions. A difficulty for such an account stems from the idea that when one exercises free will, it is up to oneself whether one wills to do this or that. The paper also briefly considers whether a powers-conception that (...) invokes powers of a different kind, such as agent-causal or noncausal powers, might fare better with respect to this problem. (shrink)

Arthur Danto is the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and the most influential philosopher of art in the last half century. As an art critic for The Nation for 25 years and frequent contributor to other widely read outlets such as the New York Review of Books, Danto also has become one of the most respected public intellectuals of his generation. He is the author of some two dozen important books, along with hundreds of articles and reviews (...) which have been the center of both controversy and discussion. In this volume Danto offers his intellectual autobiography and responds to essays by 27 of the keenest critics of his thought from the worlds of philosophy and the arts. The book includes 16 pages of color art reproductions. Danto is the author dozens of books on art, philosophy, the philosophy of art, and art criticism. He is a rare philosopher who is also a public intellectual. (shrink)

T.J. Reed's study has long established itself as the standard work in English on Thomas mann, and offers as comprehensive a view of Mann's fiction and thought as is available in any language. It is based on a coherent close reading of Mann's oeuvre, literary and political, and also on manuscripts and sources, and was part of the first phase of literary scholarship that opened up the resources of the Zurich Thomas Mann Archive. Further documents that have (...) appeared since then - Mann's diaries, notebooks, and other correspondences - have not fundamentally altered the individual interpretations or the overall picture the study offers, and in some respects have emphatically confirmed them. A further chapter added to this edition covers the new documentation, gives a vigorous account of the main curents in Mann scholarship and criticism over the last two decades suggesting how we should now see the writer, the man, and the political figure, and above all the complex relationship between the three. (shrink)

Epistemic circularity occurs when a subject forms the belief that a faculty F is reliable through the use of F. Although this is often thought to be vicious, externalist theories generally don't rule it out. For some philosophers, this is a reason to reject externalism. However, Michael Bergmann defends externalism by drawing on the tradition of common sense in two ways. First, he concedes that epistemically circular beliefs cannot answer a subject's doubts about her cognitive faculties. But, he argues, subjects (...) don't have such doubts, so epistemically circular beliefs are rarely called upon to play this role. Second, following Thomas Reid, Bergmann argues that we have noninferential, though epistemically circular, knowledge that our faculties are reliable. I argue, however, that Bergmann's view is undermined by doubts a subject should have and that there is no plausible explanation for how we can have noninferential knowledge that our faculties are reliable. (shrink)

Epistemic circularity occurs when a subject forms the belief that a faculty F is reliable through the use of F. Although this is often thought to be vicious, externalist theories generally don't rule it out. For some philosophers, this is a reason to reject externalism. However, Michael Bergmann defends externalism by drawing on the tradition of common sense in two ways. First, he concedes that epistemically circular beliefs cannot answer a subject's doubts about her cognitive faculties. But, he argues, subjects (...) don't have such doubts, so epistemically circular beliefs are rarely called upon to play this role. Second, following Thomas Reid, Bergmann argues that we have noninferential, though epistemically circular, knowledge that our faculties are reliable. I argue, however, that Bergmann's view is undermined by doubts a subject should have and that there is no plausible explanation for how we can have noninferential knowledge that our faculties are reliable. (shrink)

The hallmark of implicit learning is that complex knowledge can be acquired unconsciously. The second order conditionals of Reed and Johnson were developed to be complex, and they are popular materials for implicit learning research. Recently, it was demonstrated that in a sequence made noisy , shared features of the SOCs may be learned explicitly . What are these shared features? We hypothesized that low reversal frequency may play a significant role. We have varied reversal frequency, and discovered that (...) reversal frequency affected response times, inclusion exclusion behavior, and recognition ratings. Not only does it appear to be important to distinguish implicit and explicit knowledge, but also to distinguish what the knowledge is of. (shrink)

In conventional identity politics subjective differences are understood negatively, as gaps to be overcome, as lacks of sameness, as evidence of failed or incomplete unity. In _Alterity Politics _Jeffrey T. Nealon argues instead for a concrete and ethical understanding of community, one that requires response, action, and performance instead of passive resentment and unproductive mourning for a whole that cannot be attained. While discussing the work of others who have refused to thematize difference in terms of the possibility or impossibility (...) of sameness—Levinas, Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Zizek, Jameson, Heidegger, Bakhtin—Nealon argues that ethics is constituted as inexorable affirmative response to different identities, not through an inability to understand or totalize the other. _Alterity Politics_ combines this theoretical itinerary with crucial discussions of specific and diverse sites of literary and cultural production—the work of William S. Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Andy Warhol, Ishmael Reed, Rush Limbaugh, and Vincent Van Gogh—along with analyses of the social formation of subjects as found in identity politics, and in multicultural and whiteness studies. In the process, Nealon takes on a wide variety of issues including white male anger, the ethical questions raised by drug addiction, the nature of literary meaning, and the concept of “becoming-black.” In seeking to build an ethical structure around poststructuralist discourse and to revitalize the applied use of theoretical concepts to notions of performative identity, _Alterity Politics_ marks a decisive intervention in literary theory, cultural studies, twentieth-century philosophy, and performance studies. (shrink)

How should we think about synthetic biology—about the potential benefits and risks of these applications as well as the very idea of designed, extensively genetically modi­fied organisms? The lead article in this report sets out our thinking, but the article is rounded out with nine commentaries that sometimes expand on and sometimes argue with our perspective. Jonathan Wolff, a philosopher at the University College of London and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, and Mark Bedau, a philosopher at (...) Reed College and a participant in several projects aimed at de­veloping artificial cells, discuss the potential consequences of synthetic biology and suggest some reasons for a precau­tionary approach to deliberating about the consequences. Jane Calvert, reader in science, technology, and innovation studies at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics working party on emerging biotechnologies, recommends, however, that deliberation about the governance of emerging technologies focus less on consequences than on aims and purposes.Gigi Gronvall, senior associate at the Center for Health Security in the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and David Relman, a microbiologist and immunologist at the Stanford School of Medicine, offer contrasting per­spectives about a question we raise concerning “the eth­ics of knowledge”—the values at stake in generating and disseminating potentially dangerous information. Gaymon Bennett offers some ruminations on the questions we raise about how synthetic biology might change the human re­lationship to nature in morally significant ways. He argues, too, that we can think about the ethics of synthetic biology more effectively by getting “upstream” in another way—by sitting next to the bioengineers doing the work and study­ing their “everyday practice” rather than by paying attention only to what is thought and said about their work. Colleen Grogan, professor at the University of Chicago's School of Social Administration and an expert on democratic partici­patory processes in governance, builds on our comments about the challenge of creating a meaningful public dialog about synthetic biology. Jim Thomas, a researcher with the ETC Group, challenges our view of how the public debate about synthetic biology is trending. And Sarah Carter, a policy analyst with the J. Craig Venter Institute, puts our discussion about synthetic biology in the context of debates about other new products and technologies. (shrink)

When one depends on a belief source in sustaining a belief that that very belief source is trustworthy, then that belief is an epistemically circular belief. A number of philosophers have objected to externalism in epistemology on the grounds that it commits one to thinking EC-beliefs can be justified, something they view as an unhappy consequence for externalism. In my 2004, I defend externalism against this sort of charge by explaining why this consequence needn’t be an unhappy one. In the (...) course of doing so, I appeal to what Thomas Reid calls ‘common sense’—a faculty or belief source by which we know noninferentially such things as that our faculties are trustworthy. In his 2006, Baron Reed raises what he takes to be serious objections to what I say about both epistemic circularity and common sense. In what follows, I’ll respond to his objections, explaining why I side with Reid against Reed. (shrink)

"In the 25 essays that comprise this grimly fascinating volume, Reed shines a light into some very dark corners. From its opening tale of South African baboons with a taste for human babies to a thoroughly icky account of a middle-aged woman's seduction of young boys, these are literary snapshots of the world at its worst."--Amazon.com.

Big Ideas for Little Kids includes everything a teacher, a parent, or a college student needs to teach philosophy to elementary school children from picture books. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book explains why it is important to allow young children access to philosophy during primary-school education. Wartenberg also gives advice on how to construct a "learner-centered" classroom, in which children discuss philosophical issues with one another as they respond to open-ended questions by saying whether they agree (...) or disagree with what others have said. (shrink)

According to recent commentators like Paul Guyer, Kant agrees with Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion that physico-theology can never provide knowledge of God and that the concept of God, nevertheless, provides a useful heuristic principle for scientific enquiry. This paper argues that Kant, far from agreeing with Hume, criticizes Hume's Dialogues for failing to prove that physico-theology can never yield knowledge of God and that Kant correctly views Hume's Dialogues as a threat to, rather than an anticipation of, his own (...) view that the concept of God provides a useful heuristic principle for science. The paper concludes that Kant's critique of physico-theology reflects Kant's deep dissatisfaction with Hume's manner of argumentation and suggests that Kant's attempt to provide a more successful critique of physico-theology merits continued philosophical attention. (shrink)

Redrawing the Lines,the first book to focus on that interaction, brings together ten essays by key figures who have worked to connect literary theory and philosophy and to reassess the relationship between analytic and Continental ...

In this paper I investigate Socrates as a friend in Plato's 'Phaedo'. I begin by setting out his friends' request for reassurance of how they will fare after Socrates dies. I argue that by structuring the discussion as he does, Socrates provides one final opportunity for his friends to prepare themselves for life without him, thus offering them the best kind of reassurance they could ask for.

In this paper, we present a survey of the development of the technique of argument diagramming covering not only the fields in which it originated - informal logic, argumentation theory, evidence law and legal reasoning – but also more recent work in applying and developing it in computer science and artificial intelligence. Beginning with a simple example of an everyday argument, we present an analysis of it visualised as an argument diagram constructed using a software tool. In the context of (...) a brief history of the development of diagramming, it is then shown how argument diagrams have been used to analyze and work with argumentation in law, philosophy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

People are unable to report how they decide whether to move backwards or forwards to catch a ball. When asked to imagine how their angle of elevation of gaze would change when they caught a ball, most people are unable to describe what happens although their interception strategy is based on controlling changes in this angle. Just after catching a ball, many people are unable to recognise a description of how their angle of gaze changed during the catch. Some people (...) confidently choose incorrect descriptions that would guarantee failure of interception demonstrating unconscious knowledge co-existing with systematically different conscious beliefs. Where simple solutions to important evolutionary problems exist, unconscious perception needs to be impervious to conscious beliefs. (shrink)

v. 1. Editorial introduction -- v. 2. The English and Latin texts (i) -- v. 3. The English and Latin texts (ii).