This paper deals with what a government funded development agency should do when a developing country imposes restrictions on the development process which discriminate on the basis of gender against some members of the development agency’s staff. The conclusion is that there are circumstances in which development agencies should continue their work in the face of gender discrimination but they should not instigate development projects if doing so would involve them in gender discrimination. A set of procedures for a development (...) agency to follow in these difficult circumstances is outlined. It is argued that an agency is entitled to violate a moral principle when so doing will reduce violations of that same principle. (shrink)

This paper deals with what a government funded development agency should do when a developing country imposes restrictions on the development process which discriminate on the basis of gender against some members of the development agency’s staff. The conclusion is that there are circumstances in which development agencies should continue their work in the face of gender discrimination but they should not instigate development projects if doing so would involve them in gender discrimination. A set of procedures for a development (...) agency to follow in these difficult circumstances is outlined. It is argued that an agency is entitled to violate a moral principle when so doing will reduce violations of that same principle. (shrink)

Protection against bacterial and viral pathogens by antibodies has always been thought to end at the cell surface. Once inside the cell, a pathogen was understood to be safe from humoral immunity. However, it has now been found that antibodies can routinely enter cells attached to viral particles and mediate an intracellular immune response. Antibody‐coated virions are detected inside the cell by means of an intracellular antibody receptor, TRIM21, which directs their degradation by recruitment of the ubiquitin‐proteasome system. In this (...) article we assess how this discovery alters our view of the way in which antibodies neutralise viral infection. We also consider the antiviral function of TRIM21 in the context of its other reported roles in immune signalling and autoimmunity. Finally, we discuss the conceptual implications of intracellular antibody immunity and how it alters our view of the discrete separation of extracellular and intracellular environments. (shrink)

Primary stakeholder pressure has long been considered the main reason that firms engage in responsible behaviors. However, prior studies are generally silent on how industry characteristics reshape the relationships among stakeholders. By integrating information asymmetry in credence goods industries with the stakeholder power framework, we posit that the extent to which consumers can evaluate the qualities of goods alters the dynamics between a firm and its two primary stakeholders, regulators and consumers. Longitudinal data collected on 72 pharmaceutical companies indicate that (...) consumers of pharmaceutical products can only influence firms indirectly through the regulator. Further, contrary to the conventional wisdom that innovative firms are more capable of resisting stakeholder pressure, we find that R&D investment increases the dependency of pharmaceutical firms on the regulator. Lastly, we do not find that lobbying reduces dependency on the regulator except for high R&D firms. These findings provide important theoretical, ethical, and policy implications. (shrink)

William Rowe has put forward four popular evidential arguments from evil. I argue that there was already a prominent distinction between logical and evidential arguments from evil—the IN-IM-distinction, and that its adoption leads to two important results. First, all three non-Bayesian evidential arguments are actually not evidential but logical, while the Bayesian evidential argument genuinely evidential. Second, and most importantly, Rowe’s Bayesian evidential argument is redundant, in the sense that it has the same diculties his three non-Bayesian arguments have. (...) His move from the three earlier non-Bayesian arguments to the Bayesian argument is futile. (shrink)

Two controversial cases in Confucian literature present the demands of filial piety as conflicting with those of impartial justice. Let us call them the Case of Concealment (Analects 18.13) and the Case of Evasion (Mencius 7A53). A dogmatic reading of the texts indicates that both Confucius and Mencius give more weight to filial piety than to justice. This essay, however, provides an alternative reading of the cases: the liberal reading. I argue that the Confucian teachers used the cases as moral (...) dilemmas that force Confucian students to learn how to use a cluster of Confucian virtues, including practical wisdom, discretion, and straight determination, under difficult circumstances. The liberal reading views these moral dilemmas as rhetorical tools; they guide Confucian students in meditative exercises and ultimately transform students’ mode of seeing and being. (shrink)

The German Stranger provides a guide to Leo Strauss that situates his thought in the context of National Socialism; by destroying any middle ground between 'Athens' and 'Jerusalem, ' Strauss undermined modernity's secular bulwark against political theology. Once National Socialism is understood as an atheistic religion re-enacted by post-Revelation 'philosophers, ' the German avatar of Plato's Athenian Stranger can be recognized as its principal theoreticia.

This book assesses how Vatican II opened up the Catholic Church to encounter, dialogue, and engagement with other world religions. Opening with a contribution from the President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, it next explores the impact, relevance, and promise of the Declaration Nostra Aetate before turning to consider how Vatican II in general has influenced interfaith dialogue and the intellectual and comparative study of world religions in the postconciliar decades, as well as the contribution (...) of particular past and present thinkers to the formation of current interreligious and comparative theological methods. Additionally, chapters consider interreligious dialogue vis-à-vis theological anthropology in conciliar documents; openness to the spiritual practices of other faith traditions as a way of encouraging positive interreligious encounter; the role of lay and new ecclesial movements in interreligious dialogue; and the development of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. Finally, it includes a range of perspectives on the fruits and future of Vatican’s II’s opening to particular faiths such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. (shrink)

Leo Strauss is well known for his thesis that there is an irreconcilable conflict between philosophy and “revelation,” i.e. monotheistic revealed religion, which cannot be harmonized. The philosopher qua philosopher cannot be a believer, while the believer qua believer cannot be a philosopher. However, it is less widely recognized that Strauss’ thought about religion as the fundamental alternative to philosophy follows two divergent trajectories. The first emphasizes the unique importance of revealed religion, while the other emphasizes the conflict between philosophy (...) and what he calls “religion in general.” Sometimes, Strauss suggests that revelation poses a unique “challenge” to philosophy, such that the philosopher must refute the mere possibility of revelation in order to justify the legitimacy of philosophy itself. Sometimes, however, he suggests rather that revelation is a religion like any other, not essentially different from e.g. ancient polytheism, which would seem therefore to pose no unique “challenge.” I argue that Strauss ultimately fails to reconcile these two strands of this thought and that this failure is related both to tensions internal to his positive conception of philosophy itself as a middle path between dogmatism and skepticism and to the fact that he begs the question by assuming, rather than proving, that it follows necessarily from “the very idea of revelation” that it cannot be harmonized with philosophy. (shrink)

This book brings together never-before published contributions of leading scholars in Greek and Medieval thought. The list of thinkers examined includes Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, Gregory of Nyssa, Anselm, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Harclay, William of Auvergne, Paulus Soncinas and William of Alnwick.

In this article we focus upon the embodiment of vulnerability as an area in which medicine, society and the humanities can be profitably conjoined. We illustrate our argument with two interrelated case studies of narratives of the embodiment of ageing and longevity. First, we draw upon Leoš Janáček’s opera The Makropulos Case (1926) as a locus for debates about human longevity. Second, we discuss 70-year-old Janáček’s decade of unrequited love for a woman 37 years younger than himself, through an examination (...) of their intimate letters. We suggest that both the opera and elements of Janáček’s biography illuminate the passionate emotions that are often hidden behind ‘the mask of ageing’. Finally, we propose that a focus on the embodiment of vulnerability is a productive catalyst for research on narratives of ageing. (shrink)

Writing in 1935 as "Hugo Fiala," Karl Löwith not only connected Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt to an apparently contentless "decisionism" but drew attention to the fact that his correspondent Leo Strauss had attacked Schmitt—like Heidegger an open Nazi since 1933— from the Right in 1932. In opposition to the views of Peter Eli Gordon, Heidegger's bellicose stance at the Davos Hochschule of 1929 is presented as "political" in Schmitt's sense of the term while Strauss's embrace of Heidegger, never regretted, (...) showed that he ceased to be Nietzsche's "Good European" in his thirtieth year. A more significant "change of orientation" is revealed in Strauss's 1932 version of the "second cave," a pseudo-Platonic image of Verjudung . Revelation had disrupted a nihilistic "natural ignorance" that could only be reversed by an elite's secret decision for a self-contradictory content: only an atheistic religion provides a post-liberal solution to "the theological-political problem.". (shrink)

This chapter focuses on physicist Leo Szilard. Born in Budapest but living and working in Berlin from 1920 to 1933, Szilard was quick to recognize the dangers posed by the Nazis. By July 1932, he began to think of leaving Europe and, early in the new year, he warned his friend, the mathematician Michael Polanyi, ‘Things will get worse under Hitler. Much worse’, and advised his family in Budapest, ‘Leave Europe before it is too late’. He himself left Germany for (...) Vienna on the 30 March. The chapter argues that while in Vienna in April 1933, it was Szilard who lent urgency to Beveridge's discussions, and helped elevate a scholarship scheme for displaced academics into the much wider project of creating an international network to resettle Jewish and left-wing academics beyond the reach of the Nazis. (shrink)

The year Leo Strauss published "Persecution and the Art of Writing" (1941), he prepared a lecture ("German Nihilism") that he never published. An analysis of this lecture shows that Strauss hadn't fully mastered the art of writing he'd discovered in others: his secrets are too exposed. In the context of "German Nihilism," it becomes clear that "Persecution and the Art of Writing" is about liberal persecution of authoritarianism, no the reverse, as liberals would assume. In response to recent apologias presenting (...) Strauss as a liberal who didn't "write between the lines," a Strauss-style reading of "German Nihilism" disproves both claims. (shrink)

Introduction / Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Peter Hitchcock, and Sophia A. McClennen -- Theory and history -- The rights to debt? / Sophia A. McClennen -- Kant at the Federal Reserve : on the aesthetics of quantitative easing / Peter Hitchcock -- Materialism : debt and sensuality / Christopher Breu -- The indebted man's cognitive mapping : boundaries and biohorror in the neoliberal debt economy / Liane Tanguay -- Living in the debt age -- The debt experience / Jeffrey J. (...) Williams -- Paying your debt to society : the neoliberal state and the logic of quid pro quo / Esther Peeren -- Indebted youth and neoliberalism / Tyler J. Pollard -- Austerity politics and the neoliberal target austerity politics and the neoliberal targeting of the body in public education / Kenneth J. Saltman -- Resisting the debt age -- On debt resistance / Jeffrey R. Di Leo -- Debt and financial literacy education : an ethics for capital or the other / Chris Arthur -- Student debt and the social functions of consolidation college / Christopher Newfield -- Confronting the creditor class / Andrew Ross -- Index. (shrink)

This study shows that despite the fact that Leo Strauss published little about Jacobi, the misunderstood thinker about whom he wrote his doctoral dissertation exercised a crucial influence on what is often thought to be Strauss's most enduring achievement: his rediscovery of exotericism. A consideration of several of Strauss's writings that do mention Jacobi but remained unpublished at the time of his death—in particular his studies on Moses Mendelssohn, who was Jacobi's principal target in the Pantheismusstreit —reveal that Strauss considered (...) Jacobi to be an exoteric writer. Appropriately enough, it is only a Straussian-style reading of Strauss's claims that exotericism lapsed after Lessing's death that reveals Jacobi's influence between the lines. Some consideration is given to the question of why Strauss wrote about Jacobi in this secretive way. (shrink)

Citing the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal, the Leo Frank murder trial, and other cases, author William Simon takes a fresh look at the ethics of lawyering.

Responding to volatile criticisms frequently leveled at Leo Strauss and those he influenced, the prominent contributors to this volume demonstrate the profound influence that Strauss and his students have exerted on American liberal democracy and contemporary political thought. By stressing the enduring vitality of classic books and by articulating the theoretical and practical flaws of relativism and historicism, the contributors argue that Strauss and the Straussians have identified fundamental crises of modernity and liberal democracy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Question of Style in Philosophy and the ArtsJeffrey R. Di LeoThe Question of Style in Philosophy and the Arts, edited by Caroline van Eck, James McAllister and Renée van de Vall; xi & 245 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, $49.95.The question, “Should philosophers concern themselves with questions of style?” motivates this rich collection of twelve essays on the interrelatedness of content and its formal representation in (...) both philosophical writing and the arts. Alongside issues such as aestheticized forms of philosophizing and the relationship between method and style, there are articles on Heinrich von Kleist’s Marionettentheater, the graphic works of William Hogarth, Alexis de Tocqueville’s use of metaphor and paradox, the use of ellipses in Johannes Kepler’s astronomical theories, and eclecticism in eighteenth-century English architecture.Style has been an explicit concern for historians and theorists of the arts long before it came to the fore in philosophy. The editors think philosophers can learn a lot not only about the concept of style but also about philosophical style by looking into the practices of musicians, architects, and painters and by thinking about how styles are formed, transformed, and understood in the arts. By comparing the arts and philosophy, we can move toward something lacking in contemporary discussions, namely stylistic categories specific to philosophy. Richard Wollheim’s essay, for example, offers many categories appropriate to painting that could be relevant to philosophical writing.A provocative point traced here is that until the end of the eighteenth century, “style” had little to do with the meaning of a work of art—the term merely denoted an artwork’s place in the hierarchy of art. Before 1800, there was hardly a question of choice among styles: contributions to a practice were regarded not as belonging to one style or another, but as falling within or being alien to a practice. Only in the early nineteenth century did style become a key element in the meaning of a work, when it took the place previously occupied by nature, antiquity, or absolute standards of reason. With the traditional bearers of meaning gone, one could no longer look to content for meaning, and artists turned to style to create meaningful art—style being that aspect of writing, painting, or building traditionally associated with ornament, that could be varied without changing the content. Gradually, the “variable” element in art became the prime bearer of meaning.The claim here is that an analogous transition from stylistic monism to pluralism occurred in philosophy about a century after it did in art. This shift away from the monistic geometrical and mathematical standards of philosophical reasoning established in the late sixteenth century was brought about by philosophers such as Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Lambert Weising suggests that, with Wittgenstein, there is a substitution of style for truth—a point which seems equally true of others, notably Nietzsche. A consequence of this new [End Page 187] pluralism is a loosening of what can be called philosophical reasoning, and an increasing receptiveness to and acceptance of a diversity of philosophical styles. Questions of style do tend to arise in connections with philosophers of the literary sort—Plato or Kierkegaard. Now philosophers have much less difficulty regarding as philosophical a work such as Pascal’s Pensées, which has traditionally been treated more as literature than as philosophy.One of the challenges of this collection is to refute the view of those who deny that the content of their philosophical writing depends at all on style. This would give support to a thesis defended by Martha Nussbaum in this journal in 1983: “No stylistic choice can be presumed to be neutral—not even the choice to write in a flat or neutral style” (p. 146). Beryl Lang, who has addressed this question in other books and articles, argues that style is relevant to all philosophical writing, even that professed to be “style-less.” Lang correctly shows that philosophers’ general disregard for expressiveness, and their belief that the proper philosophical method will lead all who follow it to the same results, has itself become a feature of philosophical writing. So “style-less” writing is a philosophical... (shrink)

Charles W. Curtis is a prominent mathematician who has made important contributions to the field of representation theory. His textbooks in this field have been classics for a long time. In Pioneers of Representation Theory he has set out to present the historical development of the main ideas of the discipline, from the work of Georg Ferdinand Frobenius in the 1890s up to 1960. In addition to Frobenius, the book focuses mainly on three other “pioneers”: William Burnside, Issai Schur, (...) and Richard Brauer.Curtis states that his interest in the history of representation theory arose gradually, and jointly with that of Reiner, in the process of writing their textbooks. Thus, a main aim of the book is to show how the pioneers reached their important results while using only the mathematics then available to them. In order to do so, Curtis presents successive and thorough accounts of the works in which the new and seminal ideas of the pioneers were introduced and then developed. At the same time, however, he simplifies some of the original arguments by translating them into modern terminology.In an attempt to make the book appealing and accessible to a wider circle of potential readers, some of the necessary mathematics is explained. Thus Chapter 1 presents an introduction to the basic ideas and problems of nineteenth‐century algebra and number theory; later on, as the need arises, additional mathematical sections addressed to nonexperts are included. Of course, even this very clear presentation will be accessible only to readers with at least a graduate‐level knowledge of algebra.Curtis also attempts to provide some historical context. He is particularly concerned to clarify the main problems that the work of each of the mathematicians discussed here was originally meant to resolve. In a book of this kind this is surely one of the major benefits that the reader may expect to obtain.There are biographical sketches of the major figures involved, as well as additional information about other participants. Some illuminating documents are quoted, and Curtis supplies brief accounts of the mathematical traditions within which each of the pioneers was educated and worked. He acknowledges, however, that Pioneers of Representation Theory has only a limited claim as a work of historical research. He thus provides references to more historically oriented work that interested readers can consult. In particular, he mentions several articles by Thomas Hawkins; it should be stressed that much of Hawkins's work has recently been published in book form: Emergence of the Theory of Lie Groups: An Essay in the History of Mathematics, 1869–1926 . Curtis's and Hawkins's books complement each other in many important ways, and each should appeal to readers of the other.Charles Curtis has written an impressive, authoritative, and well‐informed book on a difficult subject. Mathematicians and historians of twentieth‐century mathematics with the relevant background will find it difficult but rewarding reading. Along the way, historiographical questions may arise. To what extent is it possible to translate, as Curtis does, the original proofs of the pioneers into more modern terminology and yet remain faithful to the sources? In most cases, however, it will require the technical expertise of the author himself to answer questions like this one properly. We can only hope that the firm starting point this book provides will lead Curtis to further historical research in this and related fields. (shrink)