In the following study we shall investigate the ancient Greek ‘(all-)day runners’ (ήμεροδρόμοι) 2 from a historical as well as from a modern physiological perspective. Hemerodromoi were of some importance in Greek interstate communication, in particular in military long-distance communication, and are, accordingly, a subject of some interest for the study of interaction in the ancient Greek city-state culture. The investigation begins by considering the ancient evidence on these ‘(all-)day runners’ and moves on to a physiological consideration of this evidence, (...) with particular reference to the feat of the Athenian hemerodromos Pheidippides 3 who ran from Athens to Sparta in 490 BC, shortly before the famous battle of Marathon. (shrink)

This paper examines the way in which Ordinary Language Philosophy came to exert an important influence on the work done at Aarhus University’s department of philosophy in the latter half of the 20th century. The first section depicts the rise of Ordinary Language Philosophy as an international movement centered around Oxford in the wake of World War ii. The second section goes on to describe how it was brought to Aarhus by Professor Justus Hartnack, who had been deeply influenced by (...) the movement during stays abroad in the UK and the US. The following three sections move on to describe some of the important ways in which Ordinary Language Philosophy has influenced the work of three of Hartnack’s most prominent students, who have influenced the life of the department in crucial ways from the 1970s until recently. Finally, the paper ends by briefly assessing the legacy and contemporary influence of Ordinary Language Philosophy in Aarhus. (shrink)

The manufacturing industry faces a trend in which employees’ work processes are being redesigned into simple, repetitive tasks that maximize performance and efficiency. This neo-Tayloristic business model reduces social interactions and stifles relationship building, leading to disgruntled employees and raising questions about leaders’ moral obligation as to the mechanisms they use to enhance employees’ performance at work. As an alternative to redesigning work processes, we contend that servant leaders can enhance employees’ overall performance by cultivating positive interpersonal dynamics at work (...) where social connectedness flourishes. Integrating insights from self-determination theory with servant leadership’s moral foundations, we investigate the degree to which servant leadership fosters two elements of a relationally supportive social context, interactional justice climate and coworker support, that facilitate its influence on followers’ intrinsic motivation and, subsequently, their voice and in-role performance. Temporally-separated data collected from a sample of 296 employees and their supervisors situated in 44 teams yielded results that support our hypotheses. Results underscore the importance of servant leadership cultivating a positive relational context to increase employees’ intrinsic motivation and improve their behaviors at work. (shrink)

The shapes of neurons and glial cells dictate many important aspects of their functions. In olfactory systems, certain architectural features are characteristics of these two cell types across a wide variety of species. The accumulated evidence suggests that these common features may play fundamental roles in olfactoryinformation processing. For instance, the primary olfactory neuropil in most vertebrate and invertebrate olfactory systems is organized into discrete modules called glomeruli. Inside each glomerulus, sensory axons and CNS neurons branch and synapse in patterns (...) that are repeated across species. In many species, moreover, the glomeruli are enveloped by a thin and ordered layer of glial processes. Theglomerular arrangement reflects the processing of odor information in modules that encode the discrete molecular attributes of odorant stimuli being processed. Recent studies of the mechanisms that guide the development of olfactory neurons and glial cells have revealed complex reciprocal interactions between these two cell types, which may be necessary for the establishment of modular compartments. Collectively, the findings reviewed here suggest that specialized cellular architecture plays key functional roles in the detection, analysis, and discrimination of odors at early steps in olfactory processing. (shrink)

Background: In modern society, death has become ‘forbidden’ fed by the medical technology to conquer death. The technological paradigm is challenged by a social-liberal political ideology in postmodern Western societies. The question raised in this study was as follows: Which arguments, attitudes, values and paradoxes between modern and postmodern tendencies concerning treatment and care of older persons with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator appear in the literature? Aims: The aim of this study was to describe and interpret how the field of (...) tension concerning older persons with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator – especially end-of-life issues – has been expressed in the literature throughout the last decade. Methods: Paul Ricoeur’s reflexive interpretive approach was used to extract the meaningful content of the literature involving qualitative, quantitative and normative literature. Analysis and interpretation involved naive reading, structural analysis and critical interpretation. Ethical considerations: The investigation complied with the principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki. Findings and discussions: The unifying theme was ‘Normativity under change’. The sub-themes were ‘Death has become legitimate’, ‘The technological imperative is challenged’ and ‘Patients and healthcare professionals need to talk about end-of-life issues’. There seems to be a considerable distance between the normative approach of how practice ought to be and findings in empirical studies. Conclusion: Modern as well as postmodern attitudes and perceptions illustrate contradictory tendencies regarding deactivation of the implantable cardioverter defibrillator and replacement of the implantable cardioverter defibrillator in older persons nearing the end of life. The tendencies challenge each other in a struggle to gain position. On the other hand, they can also complement each other because professionalism and health professional expertise cannot stand alone when the patient’s life is at stake but must be unfolded in an alliance with the patient who needs to be understood and accepted in his vulnerability. (shrink)

A number of philosophers, from Thomas Reid1 through C. A. J. Coady2, have argued that one is justified in relying on the testimony of others, and furthermore, that this should be taken as a basic epistemic presumption. If such a general presumption were not ultimately dependent on evidence for the reliability of other people, the ground for this presumption would be a priori. Such a presumption would then have a status like that which Roderick Chisholm claims for the epistemic (...) principle that we are justified in believing what our senses tell us. (shrink)

The international trading system remains a locus of fierce social conflict. The protesters who besiege gatherings of its managers—most famously on the streets of Seattle at the turn of the millennium—regard it with suspicion and hostility, as a threat to their livelihoods, an enemy of global justice, and their grievances are exploited by populist statesmen peddling their own mercantilist agendas. If we are to support the trading system, we must first assure ourselves that it can withstand moral scrutiny. We must (...) ensure that it works for and not against those whom it envelops; that it serves to emancipate, not ensnare. While there is an extensive literature addressing the economic and legal aspects of trade, the ethical questions its raises have escaped close inspection. This book contributes to resetting the balance. It grapples with moral quandaries relating to world politics, globalization, and international commerce, and recognizes that resolving these problems is essential if we are to move toward a world in which trade justice is a reality. (shrink)

The concept of organizational stigma has received significant attention in recent years. The theoretical literature suggests that for a stigma to emerge over a category of organizations, a “critical mass” of actors sharing the same beliefs should be reached. Scholars have yet to empirically examine the techniques used to diffuse this negative judgment. This study is aimed at bridging this gap by investigating Goffman’s notion of “stigma-theory”: how do stigmatizing actors rationalize and emotionalize their beliefs to convince their audience? We (...) answer this question by studying the stigma over the finance industry since 2007. After the subprime crisis, a succession of events put the industry under greater scrutiny, and the behaviors and values observed within this field began to be publicly questioned. As an empirical strategy, we collected opinion articles and editorials that specifically targeted the finance industry. Building on rhetorical analysis and other mixed methods of media content analysis, we explain how the stigmatizing rhetoric targets the origins of deviant organizational behaviors in the finance industry, that is, the shareholder value maximization logic. We bridge the gap between rhetorical strategies applied to discredit organizations and ones used to delegitimize institutional logics by drawing a parallel between these two literatures. Taking an abductive approach, we argue that institutional contradiction between field and societal-level logics is sufficient, but not necessary to generate organizational stigma. (shrink)

Some philosophers believe that when epistemic peers disagree, each has an obligation to accord the other's assessment the same weight as her own. I first make the antecedent of this Equal-Weight View more precise, and then I motivate the View by describing cases in which it gives the intuitively correct verdict. Next I introduce some apparent counterexamples – cases of apparent peer disagreement in which, intuitively, one should not give equal weight to the other party's assessment. To defuse these apparent (...) counterexamples, an advocate of the View might try to explain how they are not genuine cases of peer disagreement. I examine David Christensen's and Adam Elga's explanations and find them wanting. I then offer a novel explanation, which turns on a distinction between knowledge from reports and knowledge from direct acquaintance. Finally, I extend my explanation to provide a handy and satisfying response to the charge of self-defeat. (shrink)

[W. J. T.] Mitchell focuses on the exemplary status of the Wall of Fame in Sal’s Pizzeria, “an array of signed publicity photos of Italian-American stars in sports, movies, and popular music” . He argues that the Wall “exemplifies the central contradictions of public art” . “The Wall,” he writes, “is important to Sal not just because it displays famous Italians but because they are famous Americans … who have made it possible for Italians to think of themselves as Americans, (...) full-fledged members of the general public sphere” . For Buggin’ Out, the young black customer who angrily objects to the absence of photos of black people, the Wall “signifies exclusion from the public sphere” . Although the streets are saturated with images of “African-American heroes,” those “tokens of self-respect” are not enough for Buggin’ Out, who wants “the respect of whites, the acknowledgment that African-Americans are hyphenated Americans, too, just like Italians” . Mitchell astutely interprets the desired integration of the Wall as merely a symptom of a larger struggle for “full economic participation. As long as blacks do not own private property in this society,” he states, “they remain in something like the status of public art, mere ornaments to the public place, entertaining statues and abstract caricatures rather than full human beings” . By foregrounding the economic implications of the film, Mitchell has surely engaged one of the dominant goals of the man who formed Forty Acres and a Mule Productions and who recently opened the store called Spike’s Joint in New York City. Yet Mitchell’s sympathetic account belies the countercurrents that trouble the ostensible progressiveness of Spike Lee’s ambitious art. Jerome Christensen teaches in the English department at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of books on Coleridge and Hume and one forthcoming on Byron. Currently, he is completing a study of the continued pertinence of the romantic turn of mind called Romantic Theory, Romantic Practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Curative Work:Dana's Two Years Before The MastAllan Christensen (bio)In narrating his voyage out from Boston on the Pilgrim and his voyage home on the Alert, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., encourages an ambivalent interpretation of the experience. As one possibility, contagious sickness and forms of bondage characterize the culture of home, whereas the sailor's condition and less civilized sites offer health, romance, and freedom. But an opposite possibility is (...) that the ship resembles an unhealthy prison and the foreign settings are spoiled, and so hope resides in the curative power still emanating from the civilization of home. The two possibilities may relate to the Goethean-Carlylean pattern of Bildung, whereby the protagonist initially rebels and escapes from home but later repents and returns, recognizing that his America must be "here or nowhere" (Carlyle 1899, 156),1 in Massachusetts rather than in California. Dana indeed desires first to become entirely the sailor but then in terror before that eventuality desires to return to his identity as a Harvard scholar. With respect to the motif of literacy, the initial effort to live fully amid the bracing energies of winds and sea gives way to an appreciation of the curative force of reading and writing books. Yet the two phases are not after all so neatly opposed and divided between two halves of the story. They coexist in a tension that is sometimes also resolved.In 1842, two years after publishing Two Years before the Mast, Dana began to compose "An Autobiographical Sketch, 1815–1841." This "Sketch" (1968) creates a context for the previously published work that justifies the first of the two interpretations. His early life has already featured, in the "Sketch," many incidents of wandering away from home and of rebellion against the restrictions and injustices of society. The turbulent young protagonist especially resents the tyranny of the schoolmasters who administer floggings and later the tyranny of the authorities at Harvard College who unfairly punish a classmate. In response to this latter incident, Dana's own rebellion leads to his suspension from the college for a term, an event that he welcomes as a liberation from an oppressive educational system. The inevitability of his future career as [End Page 219] a lawyer also weighs heavily upon him and probably worsens an incapacitating crisis of 1834. Specifically, the crisis begins with a contagious disease: he catches measles, an illness that triggers a hereditary tendency toward degenerating eyesight, and reading becomes insupportably painful for him. The revulsion against books derives, as Thomas Philbrick suspects, from both physical and psychological causes (1981, 10).2 Dana seeks an occupation that will remove him not only from the necessity of reading but from the debilitating, literate civilization of New England. At this juncture the lure of a sea voyage becomes irresistible:I had many offers of free passage, but I knew a passenger's life would be insupportable without books. Partly from these considerations, but aided very much by the attractiveness of the romance & adventure of the thing, I determined to go before the mast, where I knew that the constant occupation would make reading unnecessary.(Dana 1968, 1:26–27)As opposed to the culture associated with books, the sailor's life offers health as well as romance and freedom. Omitting, then, as unnecessary any account of the intervening events narrated in Two Years before the Mast, the "Autobiographical Sketch" resumes the narrative by restating the opposition:I will take this journal up, again, from the place where my published narration ends. Upon our arrival at Boston on 22 of Sept 1836,... I was very much struck with the pallid & emaciated appearance of the gentlemen I met with, when compared with the rough, sun burnt, hardy faces which I had solely seen for the last five months. If I had been [told] that there had been a famine or fever in the city & that these persons were recovering its effects, I should have said that their appearances indicated it plainly enough. The women looked like mere shades.(Dana 1968, 1:28)In the penultimate chapter of Two Years, one of the pallid, apparently fever-stricken Bostonians had observed, on meeting the... (shrink)

In philosophy, as in many other disciplines and domains, stable disagreement among peers is a widespread and well-known phenomenon. Our intuitions about paradigm cases, e.g. Christensen's Restaurant Case, suggest that in such controversies suspension of judgment is rationally required. This would prima facie suggest a robust suspension of judgment in philosophy. But we are still lacking a deeper theoretical explanation of why and under what conditions suspension is rationally mandatory. In the first part of this paper I will focus (...) on this question. After a critical survey of some recent alternative approaches (diversity as a thread to the reliability, decision problem, acquisition of undercutting defeaters), I will argue that in fact discovering disagreement with an opponent provides me with a rebutting defeater, but only if some further non-trivial conditions are satisfied - among them my acknowledging her as my reliability peer. In the second part of the paper I will explore in more detail the skeptical implications this account has for philosophy. Here, I will defend two claims. First, skepticism about philosophy is mandatory only if the relevant peerness assumption can be justified. Second, in philosophy there is no basis available that would support the relevant peerness assumption. If this is correct, we are not forced into skepticism about philosophy and may rationally retain our philosophical beliefs even in the face of controversy. (shrink)

On Sept 15, 2008, ‘‘Dark Monday,’’ the world witnessed a radical reshaping of Wall Street. Lehman Brothers fell toward bankruptcy; Merrill Lynch was sold to its rival, Bank of America; and AIG pleaded for $40 billion in government relief. Those calamities marched in step with a dismal parade including the US government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bailout of Bear Stearns, and the entire subprime debacle. We rightly blame Wall Street leaders for bungling business decisions, (...) for misestimating risk and overloading banks with single-strategy investments. We now are living with the aftermath of these business mistakes. But how about ethical mistakes? Were they, too, part of the crisis? (shrink)

Batman is allied with modern natural law in the way he relies upon reason to bring about his vision of ‘true justice’, operating as a force external to law. This vision of justice is a protective one, with Batman existing as a guardian—a force for resistance against the corruption of the state and the failures of the legal system. But alongside his rational means, Batman also employs violence as he moves beyond the boundaries of the civilised state into the dark (...) and violent world outside law’s protection. He thus sacrifices his own safety to ensure the safety of others—he is a Dark Knight, a sentinel, fighting the nasty and brutish underworld of criminality in his effort to bring rational order to the world and protect the people of Gotham from criminal harm. This fight for justice is fuelled by a deeply private trauma: the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents: a private desire for vengeance that Batman transcends. In navigating Batman’s jurisprudential dimensions, we are ultimately reminded that private desires and motivations are enfolded within the public structures of justice. (shrink)

For some years now, there has been a dispute in Berlin Pankow about renaming the “Robert-Rössle-Straße.” The pathologist is accused of an opportunistic attitude regarding his behaviour and his scientific work under National Socialism. In his research, especially that on a “pathology of the family,” Robert Rössle is said to have followed the racial-hygienic paradigm of the Nazi era. He is to have used questionable methods and is subject to the reproach of having profited from his adaptation to the system (...) scientifically and as a private citizen. The dispute over the naming of the street can be described as “dissonant memory,” impeding a harmonious culture of remembrance. It is suggested that this dispute – regardless of whether the street is renamed or not – be used productively in the sense of a reflexive historical consciousness to get on Rössle's track and illuminate the factual and personal entanglements of his network from different perspectives. (shrink)

For courses in Business Ethics A fresh approach to the assumptions that underlie business practices Two recent events — the 2008 economic meltdown and the ongoing concentration of the nation's wealth in the hands of a very small percentage of the population — have led many people to question a number of basic assumptions about business, corporations, and the workings of contemporary free-market capitalism in a global economy. Written as a dialogue between Socrates and a hypothetical contemporary CEO,Socrates Comes to (...) Wall Street leads students to think critically about perspectives and practices that are taken as “givens” in most American business schools and corporations. Employing this original and provocative approach, author Thomas White seeks to encourage the next generation of business leaders to be more astute about the implications of their actions, and to act more prudently and more fairly than we have seen in the recent past. (shrink)

“There was something a little unseemly about how the building societies intending to demutualise did so by encouraging their members to vote in favour with the inducement of significant payments in shares”. Should one have no regard for the intentions of those who produced the present capital accumulation, or for the idea of holding reserves in trust for future members? The author is DBM Professor of Corporate Governance at Leeds Business School, Leeds Metropolitan University, Calverley Street, Leeds LS1 3HE.

“There was something a little unseemly about how the building societies intending to demutualise did so by encouraging their members to vote in favour with the inducement of significant payments in shares”. Should one have no regard for the intentions of those who produced the present capital accumulation, or for the idea of holding reserves in trust for future members? The author is DBM Professor of Corporate Governance at Leeds Business School, Leeds Metropolitan University, Calverley Street, Leeds LS1 3HE.

In Daniel Manus Pinkwater's quirkily illustrated book, The Big Orange Splot, a strange accident leads a man to change his life. The book presents an important claim that the existentialists and other philosophers have embraced: That the life of conformity is one that people ought to avoid, despite its attractiveness. Instead of living a life just like everyone else and fulfilling expectations that others have for us, our lives should resemble the transformed facades of all the homes on Mr. Plumbean's (...) street: reflections of our own, individual dreams. (shrink)

Thomas Lynch, called "a cross between Garrison Keillor and William Butler Yeats" (New York Times), reminds us not only of how we die but also of how we live. "The facts of life and death remain the same. We live and die, we love and grieve, we breed and disappear. And between these existential gravities, we search for meaning, save our memories, leave a record for those who will remember us." So writes Thomas Lynch, poet and funeral director, (...) and author of the highly praised The Undertaking, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the National Book Award, as he continues to examine the relations between the "literary and mortuary arts." The essays assembled here explore the human condition at the intersection of millennia, beleaguered by choices and changes, encumbered by merger and acquisition, numbed by maths and technologies, in search of the meaning of life and time, our lives and times. Lynch tenders life and times--sextons, muckrakers, clergy, caskets, condoms, loved poems, a hated cat, the mall, Main Street. In an age that seeks to define human experience in retail, high-tech, or pop-psyche terms, these essays speak to the existentials: between being human and ceasing to be, between birth and death, we are bodies in motion and at rest. (shrink)

The paper covers a period of little more than two years in the early history of the Royal Institution, but it is the period in which the house in Albemarle Street was purchased and Count Rumford devoted all his energies to establishing in it the Institution he had conceived. The house was enlarged and adapted to its new purpose; at first a temporary and later the well-known lecture theatre were built. The first Resident Professor and lecturer in the new (...) theatre was Thomas Garnett, whose brief and unhappy connection with the Royal Institution is recorded. (shrink)

Last June, Moscow was the setting for a Russian‐sponsored conference on business ethics. One of the participants from the USA, Professor Thomas W. Dunfee, here gives his impressions of what was clearly an instructive occasion. Professor Dunfee is Kolodny Professor of Social Responsibility at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania and is an international authority on business ethics.“Older people have an ethics problem. By that, I mean they have ethics. To survive, I can break a (...) law if I need to and if the risks aren't too large. Older people wouldn't even think in such a way.” Dimitri Zotov, explaining why young people are in high professional demand in the new Russia, Wall Street Journal, p.A5, Col.1, 8/2/93.“Shell‐shocked men and women spend their days hacking through the post‐Soviet wilderness in search of a near‐mythical creature, an honest joint‐venture partner.” David Brooks, “Cracking That Post‐Soviet Market”, Wall Street Journal, editorial page, 8/24/93. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Proust and the Phenomenology of MemoryThomas M. Lennon"I still believe that anything that I do outside of literature and philosophy will be so much time wasted." Thus did the twenty-two year old Marcel Proust (1871–1922) write to his father, reluctantly agreeing to consider a career in the foreign service as an alternative to the legal profession otherwise being urged upon him. ("I should vastly prefer going to work for (...) a stockbroker," was his comment.)1 Happily for us all, Proust was obliged to do neither, and in fact was able to do both philosophy and literature. As André Maurois puts it, "[Proust's] great novel is philosophy incarnate."2 Certainly, In Search of Lost Time is saturated with philosophy, the appreciation of which cannot help but enhance our understanding of this great work. The thesis here will be that a loosely phenomenological account of the work's central concept of memory gives us the structure of the work as a whole.The biographical facts suggest such an approach. Proust received a license from the Sorbonne in 1895, and, more importantly, had previously been a student of the philosopher Alphonse Darlu at the Lycée Condorcet. Although he published very little, Darlu was a charismatic, inspirational figure for his students—not least of all for Proust himself, who described him as "the great philosopher whose inspired words, more certain to last than any writing would, gave birth in me as in so many others to thought itself."3 A touching artifact of Proust's time with Darlu is his report card, preserved in the Proust Museum at Illiers-Combray. Not incidentally, it shows a concentration on the classical authors who will be deployed here. We also have a wonderful little text that argues a kind of phenomenalism influenced perhaps by Hume, and certainly by Kant.4 The one author important to our account whose name does not figure as such in any of this material is Malebranche; but we know [End Page 52] that Proust was familiar with the great Oratorian since he quotes him.5 In fact, the only author appearing below who could not have been on Proust's shelf is Kundera, the most philosophical and Proustian of all recent novelists.We begin with a text; it is the most famous of all in French literature, the episode of the madeleine from the Search. The text has become so well known—through hearsay more than from having been read, no doubt—that it has invited "kitchification."6 Even so, it is an exquisite piece of writing, which, in any case, is essential to the thesis here.Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray... had any existence for me, when one day in winter as I came home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, offered me some tea, a thing that I did not ordinarily take.... She sent out for one of those plump little cakes called 'petites madeleines'.... I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body.... And suddenly the memory [le souvenir] returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of 'madeleine' which on Sunday mornings at Combray... my Aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or lime-flower tea.... Immediately the old grey house upon the street rose up like the scenery of a theatre... in a moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.7There are other such episodes of the past springing into being, but not many, and they occur but infrequently, until the very end of this vast work, when they come upon the narrator rapidly and almost... (shrink)

In general little thought is given to the general question of how to implement mathematical objects in set theory. It is clear that—at various times in the past—people have gone to considerable lengths to devise implementations with nice properties. There is a litera- ture on the evolution of the Wiener-Kuratowski ordered pair, and a discussion by Quine of the merits of an ordered-pair implemen- tation that makes every set an ordered pair. The implementation of ordinals as Von Neumann ordinals is (...) so attractive that it is uni- versally used in all set theories which have enough replacement to prove Mostowski’s collapse lemma. I have frequently complained in the past about the widespread habit of referring to implementations of pairs (ordinals etc) as definitions of pairs (etc). My point here is a different one: generally little attention has been paid to the question of what makes an implementation a good implementation. In most cases of interest the merits of the candidates are uncontroversial. What I want to examine here is an example where there are com- peting implementations for ordered pairs, and—although it is clear to the cognoscenti and also (with a bit of arm-waving) plausible to the logician in the street that some of the impossible candidates are impossible, nobody has ever given a satisfactory explanation of why this is so. (shrink)

The Dodd‐Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, signed into law by President Obama in July 2010, included two significant corporate governance mandates: “say‐on‐pay” shareholder voting and the frequency of such votes among all publicly traded companies. The say‐on‐pay rule requires publicly traded companies subject to proxy rules to offer their shareholders an advisory, or nonbinding, vote at least once every three years on the compensation packages of the most highly compensated executives. The actual data for the first (...) five years of say‐on‐pay voting indicates one intractable conclusion: that shareholder say‐on‐pay voting has not verified what many shareholder activists originally believed, i.e., that the majority of shareholders held similar opinions about business executives being significantly overpaid for their managerial performances. During its first five years in effect, the results of say‐on‐pay voting indicate that shareholders are overwhelmingly satisfied with executive compensation packages, as a 92 percent average shareholder say‐on‐pay approval result (i.e., exceeding 70 percent) among companies listed in the Russell 3000 Index attests. (shrink)

Last June, Moscow was the setting for a Russian‐sponsored conference on business ethics. One of the participants from the USA, Professor Thomas W. Dunfee, here gives his impressions of what was clearly an instructive occasion. Professor Dunfee is Kolodny Professor of Social Responsibility at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania and is an international authority on business ethics.“Older people have an ethics problem. By that, I mean they have ethics. To survive, I can break a (...) law if I need to and if the risks aren't too large. Older people wouldn't even think in such a way.” Dimitri Zotov, explaining why young people are in high professional demand in the new Russia, Wall Street Journal, p.A5, Col.1, 8/2/93.“Shell‐shocked men and women spend their days hacking through the post‐Soviet wilderness in search of a near‐mythical creature, an honest joint‐venture partner.” David Brooks, “Cracking That Post‐Soviet Market”, Wall Street Journal, editorial page, 8/24/93. (shrink)

I am the LawIt is hard to imagine two more disparate characters than Judge Joseph Dredd and Hercules J—the one an over-muscular, faceless and heavily armed street judge astride a Lawmaster motorcycle who overidentifies with his role ; the other devoid of any physical presence or image, and structurally decoupled from the execution of law by a fierce determination to maintain the separation of powers and accountability which Dredd so effortlessly ignores. Hercules J is the embodiment of an intellectualised, (...) yet creative, operationalisation of law. To the academic spirit, Hercules is infinitely preferable as a model of judicial activism: his world conjures a contemplative modality, ever alert to the requirements of rights and largely aligned with the temper of the post-Enlightenment. By contrast, Dredd is the personification of the worst aspects of law-and-order as the debased and politicised manifestation of the Rule of Law. His is an intensely visceral presence, the metonymic blindness of Themis replaced by the Dredd’s fractured eyeline: blindness as a signifier of impartiality yields to blindness as a symptom of institutional rage. This article interrogates the characters, actions and values of Hercules J and Dredd J, viewed primarily through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s Force of Law, focusing on the relationship between law and violence as it is exposed in Hercules’s and Dredd’s worlds, and then turning to judicial confrontation with the aporetic: the aporias, identified by Derrida and others, that law must confront. The interrogation continues, finally contemplating the current state of law in the common law world—the world of liberal democracies, suggesting that the high point of democracy may well have passed, and that we are on a Dredd-ward trajectory. (shrink)

Developing work in the theories of action and explanation, Eldridge argues that moral and political philosophers require accounts of what is historically possible, while historians require rough philosophical understandings of ideals that merit reasonable endorsement. Both Immanuel Kant and Walter Benjamin recognize this fact. Each sees a special place for religious consciousness and critical practice in the articulation and revision of ideals that are to have cultural effect, but they differ sharply in the forms of religious-philosophical understanding, cultural criticism, and (...) political practice that they favor. Kant defends a liberal, reformist, Protestant stance, emphasizing the importance of liberty, individual rights, and democratic institutions. His fullest picture of movement toward a moral culture appears in Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, where he describes conjecturally the emergence of an ethical commonwealth.Benjamin defends a politics of improvisatory alertness and consciousness-raising that is suspicious of progress and liberal reform. He practices a form of modernist, materialist criticism that is strongly rooted in his encounters with Kant, Hölderlin, and Goethe. His fullest, finished picture of this critical practice appears in One-Way Street, where he traces the continuing force of unsatisfied desires.By drawing on both Kant and Benjamin, Eldridge hopes to avoid both moralism and waywardness. And in doing so, he seeks to make better sense of the commitment-forming, commitment-revising, anxious, reflective and sometimes grownup acculturated human subjects we are. (shrink)

Smoke and Mirrors is a passionate, richly nuanced work that shows television as a circus, a wishing well, and a cure for loneliness. Ranging from Ed Sullivan to cyberspace, from kid shows to cable, and from the cheap thrills of "action adventure" to the solemn boredom of PBS pledge week, Leonard argues for a whole new way of thinking about television. For Leonard, the situation comedy is a socializing agency, the talk show is a legitimating agency, the made-for-television movie is (...) the last redoubt of social conscience, and television criticism itself is the last refuge of time-serving thugs and postmodernists. Instead of scapegoating television as the cause of crime in our streets, stupidity in our schools, and spectacle rather than substance in our government, Leonard sees something else inside the box: an echo chamber and a feedback loop, a medium neither wholly innocent of nor entirely responsible for the frantic disorder it brings into our homes. (shrink)

A celebration of a distinctly American form of commercial architecture The only comprehensive history of America's 5-&-10-cent stores It was where you went to browse the latest issues of Life and Photoplay, where the folks bought reading glasses, and where your mom took you for a hot dog and a malted. It was the local 5-&-10-cent store, and it was an integral part of everyday life. In this lavishly illustrated homage to the 5-&-10-cent store, architectural historian Bernice Thomas looks (...) at the architectural achievements of the Kress Company. Devoted to bringing outstanding design to Main Street America, Kress supported an architectural division of more than 100 architects and draftsmen. The over 200 stores these people designed and built between 1900 and 1950 set a new standard in commercial architecture. Thomas takes us on an illustrated tour of sites across the United States —from New Orleans to Honolulu, Albuquerque to New York. She introduces us to the architects and how they deftly balanced sound merchandising principles with aesthetics. (shrink)

In late August 2012, artist Paul Thomas and philosopher Timothy Morton took a stroll up and down King Street in Newtown, Sydney. They took photographs. If you walk too slowly down the street, you find yourself caught in the honey of aesthetic zones emitted by thousands and thousands of beings. If you want to get from A to B, you had better hurry up. Is there any space between anything? Do we not, when we look for such (...) a space, encounter a plenitude of other things —a slice of plaster, an old vinyl record, a flattened piece of aluminum, painted metal surfaces, nameless interstitial powder, the reflection of sky, some letters of the alphabet, roughened concrete. Between what we take to be things there exist other things, as if the universe were jammed with entities like clowns in a crowded Expressionist painting. An abyss of things that emanates from them, not a yawning void that threatens to engulf them, but a sunlit nothingness filled with dust that seems to spray out of them like dry mist sparkling with firefly swarms. In these so-called spaces, we encounter the work of causality. Look: someone painted over this crack, some sunlight rippled in a mirage, a hole appeared. When we look for causes and effects, we don't encounter a basement of efficiently whirring machinery. Rather, we encounter these in-between spaces, where we had not thought to look. What we see are stage hands moving the scenery about—they are doing it in plain sight, the best place to hide, right in front of you, in the place we call the aesthetic dimension . In Tibetan Buddhism these spaces are called bardo , which just means the between. There is no such thing as a moment of your life that is not a between, according to this view. There is the between of living. There is the between of dying. There is the between of the transition between lives. There is the between of dreaming. There is the between of meditation. There is the between of two humans holding cameras walking down a street in Sydney. The between of two buildings, a space bursting with objects as if a billion jack in the boxes had exploded at once. Some of the lids are stuck, sometimes a nose bursts out and the hinge won't open any further; at other times, the jack in the box flies right out and pulps against the wall on the opposite side of the room. Time opens up. Each surface is a poem about the past. A myriad stories begin to proliferate, as if a thing were a crisscrossing of books, a whole library of them, each page whispering parts of paragraphs and broken pieces of word. The stories tell us things—they are quite literal, look, this guy painted part of this wall, then they came and stripped off the panel and touched up the holes. Form is the past. When you look at appearance, you are looking at the past. Where is the present? And essence is the future. The hints of unknown, unseen things, the absolute impossibility of grasping everything about this plastic pipe, the way photons entering the camera lens obey a speed limit and splash onto receptors, going into and out of coherence. At the electronic level, it's quite clear that causality is aesthetic. I can't see an electron without deflecting it. Everything is a refrigerator with a light on—or off—inside. For me, for you, for this arrangement of tiles sandwiched between a door and a slab of marble. To a photon, an electron is a refrigerator with a closed door, and a light that might be on—or off—inside. How can you know whether the light is on inside? Why, you open the door of course. But then you are looking at the past. You never see the light in the refrigerator before you open the door. This future is not a predictable future that is a specific number of now-points away. You will never reach it. You will never be able to sneak up from the side and see through the refrigerator. Nor can a photon see through the refrigerator of an electron. Nor can paint see through the refrigerator of this plastic pipe. You take a photo—click—the past appears, another open refrigerator. But the thing you have just made, the photograph, the graphing of the photons—it is another thing, another story. You can read the words, but the meaning always eludes you. It always lurks just off the edge of the sentence, just at the very edge of this ragged slice of paint, just at the edge of this building, between this one and that one. Thousands of secrets, everywhere. Masks that lie and tell the truth at the same time: this pink paint is not blue paint, that's true. But the thing, the thing in itself, that paint sliding off a brush onto that pipe—it is nowhere to be seen, like a light behind a closed door. When you walk too slowly down the street, you start walking into millions of levels of pastness, levels emitted not just by the humans or the dogs and cats, but also by this garbage can, this mottled pink surface pockmarked with nail holes. You walk surrounded by as many futures as there are things. You walk, or rather you occupy a peculiar shifting ground of nowness, created by the relative motion of the past sliding against the future, not touching. You begin to realize that the present does not exist. A thing is a train station where one train is always arriving and one train is always leaving. Hundreds of train stations everywhere, hundreds of relative motions. The idea of a universal, regular, atomic sequence of instants that contains everything is absolutely ludicrous, the philosophers have known this for thousands of years, and to hide the absurdity, to get from A to B, Houston to Sydney, crossing the International Date Line without too much laughter, you have embedded piezoelectric devices in as many pieces of hardware as possible, devices in which quartz talks to electrons, making train stations where the trains seem to run on time. When you walk too slowly down the street, you begin to realize that Zeno had a point. You can seemingly divide each moment, each step, infinitesimally. So perhaps there are no moments, no steps. Or perhaps time is not a box that everything goes in. Perhaps time is, as Einstein argued after all, a way that things send out ripples. Where one house touches another house, there arise hundreds of things, hundreds of meeting places (Old English thing , meeting place). Hundreds of times. I have a thing for you. Come over here, let's do a thing. Stay in the sunlight and shadow between worlds, in the sunlit canyon between this building and that building. See how paint touches this pipe, caressing then leaving, no one will notice if a surface is left exposed, not quite filled in. See how shadows are reflected in pale cream glass—see the luminous abyss of causality spreading out before your very eyes, right in front of security. All kinds of beautiful crimes are committed right here, and as American cars keep telling you, and you never notice, OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR. They are here, or rather, here is them, and now is them. Kissing in the shadow. Tim Morton Rice University. (shrink)

Frost's claim that universal models of reading require linguistically diverse data is relevant and justified. We support it with evidence demonstrating the extent of the bias towards some Indo-European languages and alphabetic scripts in scientific literature. However, some of his examples are incorrect, and he neglects the complex interaction of writing system and language structure with history and cultural environment.

The Council for Secular Humanism identifies Secular Humanism as a "way of thinking and living" committed to rejecting authoritarian beliefs and embracing "individual freedom and responsibility ... and cooperation." The paradigmatic practices of psychiatry are civil commitment and insanity defense, that is, depriving innocent persons of liberty and excusing guilty persons of their crimes: the consequences of both are confinement in institutions ostensibly devoted to the treatment of mental diseases. Black's Law Dictionary states: "Every confinement of the person is an (...) 'imprisonment,' whether it be in a common prison, or in private house, or in the stocks, or even by forcibly detaining one in the public streets." Accordingly, I maintain that Secular Humanism is incompatible with the principles and practices of psychiatry. (shrink)

The Council for Secular Humanism identifies Secular Humanism as a "way of thinking and living" committed to rejecting authoritarian beliefs and embracing "individual freedom and responsibility... and cooperation." The paradigmatic practices of psychiatry are civil commitment and insanity defense, that is, depriving innocent persons of liberty and excusing guilty persons of their crimes: the consequences of both are confinement in institutions ostensibly devoted to the treatment of mental diseases. Black's Law Dictionary states: "Every confinement of the person is an 'imprisonment,' (...) whether it be in a common prison, or in private house, or in the stocks, or even by forcibly detaining one in the public streets." Accordingly, I maintain that Secular Humanism is incompatible with the principles and practices of psychiatry. (shrink)

This article argues for a definition of public philosophy inspired by John Dewey’s understanding of the “supreme intellectual obligation.” The first section examines five strong reasons why more public philosophy is needed and why the growing movement in public philosophy should be encouraged. The second section begins with a review of common understandings of public philosophy as well as some initial challenges that call for widening our conception of the practice. Then, it applies Dewey’s argument in “The Supreme Intellectual Obligation” (...) to public philosophy, which must not be seen simply as a one-way street from intellectuals to the masses but, rather, as the task of fostering the scientific attitude and intellectual habits of mind in all citizens. (shrink)

In this contribution, we draw on findings from a non-formal, community music project to elaborate on the relationship between the concept ofeudaimonia, as defined by Seligman, the interactive dimensions of collective free improvisation, and the concept of collaborative creativity. The project revolves around The Ostend Street Orkestra (TOSO), a music ensemble within which homeless adults and individuals with a psychiatric or alcohol/drug related background engage in collective musical improvisation. Between 2017 and 2019 data was collected through open interviews and (...) video recordings of rehearsals and performances. Participant data was analyzed through inductive analysis based on the principles of grounded theory. One interesting finding was the discrepancy in the participant interviews between social relationships indicative of a negative affect about social group interaction versus strong feelings of group coherence and belonging. Video recordings of performances and rehearsals showed clear enjoyment and pleasure while playing music. Alongside verbal reflection through one-on-one interviews video recordings and analysis of moment-to moment observations should be used, in order to capture the complexity of community music projects with homeless people. The initial open coding was aligned with the five elements of the PERMA model. Overall, we observed more focus on Relationship (sense of belonging), Engagement (flow in rehearsals and performances) and Meaning (belonging to something greater than yourself) and less on Positive Emotion and Accomplishment (goal setting). (shrink)

Recently, Tomas Bogardus (2016), Andreas Mogensen (2017) and – at least on one plausible reconstruction – Sharon Street (2005) have argued that evolutionary theory debunks our moral beliefs by providing higher-order evidence of error. In response, moral realists such as Katia Vavova (2014) have objected that such evolutionary debunking arguments are self-defeating. The literature lacks any discussion of whether this self-defeat objection can be handled. My overall aim is to argue that it cannot, thus filling that lacuna – and (...) vindicating Vavova’s worry. To achieve my aim, I proceed in two steps. First, I propose a novel, prima facie promising strategy for avoiding self-defeat: evolutionary debunkers should reject Conciliationism, as defended by David Christensen (2007, 2009, 2011) and others, and instead explore Thomas Kelly’s (2010) Total Evidence View as their background view on the epistemic significance of higher-order evidence of error. Then, I show that evolutionary debunkers face insuperable difficulties trying to successfully implement that strategy. Depending on the kind of higher-order evidence of error that evolutionary considerations putatively provide, they either struggle with evidential weight or are committed to inconsistent assumptions about evolutionary counterparts. Either way, the evolutionary debunking argument from higher-order evidence of error fails. (shrink)