'Human Diversity in Context' is a joint research project of the Academia Europaea and the Department of Humanities of the University of Trieste which aims to develop new, distinctive strategies to integrate the form and content of 'knowledge' and to awaken the sense of responsibility for social prejudices and 'us/them' dichotomies, by conveying a socially contextualised understanding of the complexity of the real world and its cultural and religious structures, facets, objects and of course, groups. Taken as a (...) whole, this collection of essays shows how differences can manifest, articulate and actualise the potential of identity when these two poles, identity and difference, are not taken to extremes in abstract, pre-judicial ways, as mutually opposed and challenging, but are seen and examined in their concrete, living interplay within a variety of contexts. These studies provide a multifaceted critical examination of the ways, tools and strategies through which European societies have historically envisioned and now confront, construct and conceptualise their perception, representation and evaluation of the unity of humankind within its contextualised diversity. As a distinctive compendium of scholarship reflecting the current state and different fields of studies of identity, otherness and processes of othering, the editor and research coordinator, together with the authors, hope to have produced a valuable contribution to current debates. What integrates the Academia Europaea's mission and vision with the research strategies and educational objectives of the Department of Humanities of the University of Trieste is the capacity to inspire new thinking to address contemporary challenges"--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Raising the war on political correctness to a new and higher intellectual level, Philip Devine sheds fresh light on the whole question of cultural standards and the fashionable notion of multiculturalism. While acknowledging the diversity of ways of life and the differing belief systems that arise from and justify those ways of life, the author attacks the current exploitation of diversity to justify a militantly intolerant relativism. His wide-ranging and erudite work connects cultural issues to our real-world existence (...) as biological and historical beings, pulling together ideas of bioethics, education, and the structure and purpose of families. This work will be of interest to those fighting the culture wars across the humanities and social and behavioral sciences. (shrink)

This short and accessible book is designed for those learning about the search for ethical rules that can apply despite cultural differences. Robert Audi looks at several such attempts: Aristotle, Kant; Mill; and the movement known as "common-sense" ethics associated with W.D. Ross. He shows how each attempt grew out of its own time and place, yet has some universal qualities that can be used for an ethical framework. This is a short, accessible treatment of a major topic in ethics (...) by a senior and highly-respected figure. (shrink)

While the existence of human cognitive and behavioral diversity is now widely recognized, it is not yet well established how to explain this diversity. In particular, it is still unclear how to determine whether any given instance of human cognitive and behavioral diversity is due to a common psychology that is merely “triggered” differently in different bio-cultural environments, or whether it is due to deeply and fundamentally different psychologies. This paper suggests that, to answer this (...) question, we need to employ subtle theoretical considerations of theory choice—especially the consideration of the complexity-weighted differential predictive successes of the two accounts. To make this clearer, the paper develops a novel analysis of the observed differences in human sharing dispositions. (shrink)

While the existence of human cognitive and behavioral diversity is now widely recognized, it is not yet well established how to explain this diversity. In particular, it is still unclear how to determine whether any given instance of human cognitive and behavioral diversity is due to a common psychology that is merely “triggered” differently in different bio-cultural environments, or whether it is due to deeply and fundamentally different psychologies. This paper suggests that, to answer this (...) question, we need to employ subtle theoretical considerations of theory choice—especially the consideration of the complexity-weighted differential predictive successes of the two accounts. To make this clearer, the paper develops a novel analysis of the observed differences in human sharing dispositions. (shrink)

In Welfare, Happiness, and Ethics, L. W. Sumner argues that theories of well-being must not pick out some kinds of human lives as richer in prudential valuethan others. I argue that we should reject this methodological stricture, but should embrace his insight that many kinds of lives are good for people to live. I also reject his claim that a theory of well-being would fail if it took the form of a list of things that are good for us. (...) Nonetheless, I argue, if we construct such a list in a way that caters to the diversity of good human lives, we will be led to the conclusion that they are united by their relationship to the flourishing of our natural capacities. I distinguish between bottom-up and top-down strategies for defending this Aristotelian conception of well-being, and argue in favor of a bottom-up approach. (shrink)

The 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico included innovative practices and technological knowledge of human biology. The first time that cytogenetic techniques had been applied to athletes was in the 1966 European Athletics Championship in Budapest and used on Olympic athletes for the first time in Mexico in 1968. The Genetics and Human Biology Program was created for this purpose in 1966 in close collaboration with the Local Organizing Committee, by Mexican geneticists Alfonso León de Garay and Rodolfo Félix (...) Estrada who led the project. The main objective was to study the genetic and anthropological components which determine an Olympic athlete’s abilities. This investigation studied 1,265 game participants and included family studies, cytological analyses, research on single genes, and the study of sex determination. In terms of influence beyond Mexico, this Program was significant as a site of transnational collaboration. It mobilized cognitive and financial resources, scientific practices, and material culture to set up a clinical laboratory in the Olympic Village. The Program also hosted three international seminars in Mexico City, two before the games, to calibrate clinical trials and anthropological tests. One in 1969 to analyze the results and proceed to their publication in 1974. This manuscript will focus on the PGBH to show how its work fits in the larger tapestry of post-1945 human biological studies. Also, to explore how the Olympic athlete populations studied can be considered laboratories of knowledge production or sites of cognition conceived as specific entities for scientific inquiry, standardization of medical practices, and the production or application of medicines. Finally, through the narrative of the different trajectories and collaborations of the leaders of the PGBH, this manuscript will show how contact between their scientific practices brought cytogenetics and sports together. (shrink)

What must I do to be saved? And is what I must do the same as what you must do? The Philippian jailor in the book of Acts received a most peculiar answer to the question: ‘Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ’, said St Paul, ‘and you will be saved.’ In the context, this hardly seems appropriate. The jailor was not asking how he could be assured of a place in the next world, or how he could be reconciled to (...) God or have his sins forgiven. His was a cry of quite unreligious desperation: was there any alternative to suicide, now that his prison was no longer secure and he had failed in his duty? The curious thing about the story is that it is recorded, not as an example of over–zealous bad manners, but as ultimately the right answer for even the jailor's situation. When Paul instructed him further, he and his household were baptized: the writer clearly intended the story to show that Paul's initial response was exactly right, and that belief in Christ brought salvation to the jailor and his family. (shrink)

This article shows that Johann Gottlieb Steeb supported different aspects of Kant's theory of race. Despite the growing research on Kant's racial and biological theory, one finds no mention of Steeb in these interpretations. However, his work is relevant because of his attempt in 1785 to synthesize Kant's preformationist terminology with Blumenbach's epigenetic theory. This article aims at understanding this synthesis. Recent interpreters of Kant presuppose that preformationism excluded epigenesis. But already in 1785 Steeb saw the possibility of integrating Kant's (...) germs into a discourse that was to a large extent dominated by Blumenbach. Steeb's synthesis primarily implied that the concepts of germs and race could be amended to Blumenbach's understanding of human diversity. (shrink)

He argues that an adequate idea of human rights must take such a diversity seriously, and unlike the UN Declaration, it must not presuppose Western institutions and values.

This article explores the topic of persons, community and human diversity. Tracing the roots of the western conception of persons to the Greek and Christian traditions, the author develops a conception of persons as agents and as free and flourishing in mutuality with other persons. Arguing that persons are both individual and social, the author considers persons in intimate communities, societies and religious communities. He argues that seeking to live in relation to others in ways that enable self (...) and other to flourish provides an ontological ground for human behavior that is presupposed in our particular ethical traditions and provides a moral basis for human behavior that may be shared by diverse religious and non-religious persons. (shrink)

We are living in the transmodern era. Now we could detect beyond the similarities and the differences between the modernism and the postmodernism the common search for the human integrality. Only this time we are not beginning with the proclaimed human unity, but with the human diversity. The Human Being has a non generic universality. The unity is purpose before being ground.

In everyday language as well as scientific language, there are but few terms and concepts with such a comprehensive negative meaning and connotation as the term "disease." Disease is a universal evil. Nobody wants disease and everybody would agree that disease should be defeated and eradicated. But what if disease strikes one's own body and mind? What if the imperative of disease eradication targets properties of the body, which is me? This is the reality for many patients with psychiatric diagnoses (...) and their families. This is the reality of psychiatry. Psychiatry is a clinical discipline in the borderland between natural sciences and humanities. Psychiatric concepts of mental health and disease affect the self-image and self-worth of patients and their families in a very pervasive manner. Therefore, it is important to reflect on what we mean with psychiatric diagnoses, how we define it and how we delineate phenomena we would regard as unusual but healthy from those we would consider reflecting a disease. In this paper, the different meanings of the concept of normality will be presented. I will briefly discuss if or not there is a generally accepted concept of what a disease is. Then I will address the definition of what a psychiatric disorder is. Based on the example of autism, I will finally illustrate that phenomenologically identical medical syndromes can be regarded as well as a norm variant, as a psychological disorder, and as a psychiatric disease. This comprehensive perspective on the diverse phenomena of body and mental functioning illustrates that many if not most of the present psychiatric diagnoses cannot be considered as names of diseases, but as umbrella terms for a wide range of differently caused mental phenomena. (shrink)

This article reviews the arguments in the separate schools debate in an attempt to present a view of the matter which would be acceptable in a liberal democracy. Although the case for common or inclusive schools is treated sympathetically, the burden of the argument is that public sponsorship of separate schools can be defended once certain conditions are met.

This paper recounts the pedagogical benefits of the Hobbes Game to introduce students to Hobbes' social contract theory. The author introduces a modified version of John Immerwahr's Hobbes Game and organizes the activities according David Kolb's typology of learning styles. The game provides students with a concrete experience of thought experiments from the text and encourages reflective observation of the theory itself. Since the game mimics the experience of the Hobbesian state of nature students are able to see Hobbes' arguments (...) from different points of view along with abstract conceptualization in an active experimentation. (shrink)

This paper recounts the pedagogical benefits of the Hobbes Game to introduce students to Hobbes' social contract theory. The author introduces a modified version of John Immerwahr's Hobbes Game and organizes the activities according David Kolb's typology of learning styles. The game provides students with a concrete experience of thought experiments from the text and encourages reflective observation of the theory itself. Since the game mimics the experience of the Hobbesian state of nature students are able to see Hobbes' arguments (...) from different points of view along with abstract conceptualization in an active experimentation. (shrink)

In this article, I am concerned with the public engagements of Julian Huxley, Lancelot Hogben, and J. B. S. Haldane. I analyze how they used the new insights into the genetics of heredity to argue against any biological foundations for antidemocratic ideologies, be it Nazism, Stalinism, or the British laissez-faire and class system. The most striking fact—considering the abuse of biological knowledge they contested—is that these biologists presented genetics itself as inherently democratic. Arguing from genetics, they developed an understanding of (...) diversity that cuts across divisions of race, class, or gender. Human diversity rightly understood was advantageous for societal progress. Huxley, Hogben, and Haldane did not hold identical political ideals, but they all argued for democratic reforms and increased planning geared toward greater social equality, and they did so under the label of scientific humanism. Huxley took issue with the notion that evolutionary history does not carry any moral lessons for human societies. Rather than being its antithesis, evolution was the basis of human sociality. In fact, the entire future progress of individuals and communities toward a democratic world order needed to be founded on the cosmic principles of evolution—a process that had to be guided by the biological expert with a strong sense of social responsibility. (shrink)

Now available in three thematic volumes, the second edition of Moral Issues in Global Perspective is a collection of the newest and best articles on current moral issues by moral and political theorists from around the globe. Each volume seeks to challenge the standard approaches to morality and moral issues shaped by Western liberal theory and to extend the inquiry beyond the context of North America. Covering a broad range of issues and arguments, this collection includes critiques of traditional liberal (...) accounts of rights, justice, and moral values, while raising questions about the treatment of disadvantaged groups within and across societies affected by globalization. Providing new perspectives on issues such as war and terrorism, reproduction, euthanasia, censorship, and the environment, each volume of Moral Issues in Global Perspective incorporates work by race, class, feminist, and disability theorists. Human Diversity and Equality, the second of the three volumes, examines issues of equality and difference and the effects, within and across borders, of kinds of discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, disability, class, and sexual orientation. Nine essays are new, four of which were written especially for this volume. (shrink)

Now available in three thematic volumes, the second edition of _Moral Issues in Global Perspective_ is a collection of the newest and best articles on current moral issues by moral and political theorists from around the globe. Each volume seeks to challenge the standard approaches to morality and moral issues shaped by Western liberal theory and to extend the inquiry beyond the context of North America. Covering a broad range of issues and arguments, this collection includes critiques of traditional liberal (...) accounts of rights, justice, and moral values, while raising questions about the treatment of disadvantaged groups within and across societies affected by globalization. Providing new perspectives on issues such as war and terrorism, reproduction, euthanasia, censorship, and the environment, each volume of _Moral Issues in Global Perspective_ incorporates work by race, class, feminist, and disability theorists. _Human Diversity and Equality_, the second of the three volumes, examines issues of equality and difference and the effects, within and across borders, of kinds of discrimination on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, disability, class, and sexual orientation. Nine essays are new, four of which were written especially for this volume. _Moral Issues in Global Perspective_ is available in three separate volumes—_Moral and Political Theory_, _Human Diversity and Equality_, and _Moral Issues_. (shrink)

Victorian anthropologists have been nicknamed ‘armchair anthropologists’. Yet some of them did set foot in the field. Edward Burnett Tylor's first published work, Anahuac, or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern, described his youthful travels in Mexico. Tylor's confrontation with the ‘field’ revealed significant tensions between the different beliefs and attitudes that Tylor held towards Mexican society. Contrasts between the evidence of Mexico's history (prior to European contact) and the present-day society of the 1850s led Tylor to see both (...) progress and degeneration in Mexico, both ‘authentic’ culture and deep cultural mixture. In order to show that he was capable of uncovering the ‘authentic’ Mexican society, Tylor portrayed himself as a professional traveller-ethnographer, even though he was an anthropological novice. The embodied confrontation with the physical field also created tensions in Tylor's relationship to Mexico. Despite Tylor's mainly ethnocentric vision of foreign societies, his experiences of physically navigating the Mexican land and environment led him towards an empathetic relativism with respect to material culture and social practice. At the same time, his role as a traveller encouraged him to see the field as a fluid entity with no clear boundaries, even as he searched for a bounded and untouched Mexican society amidst cultural mixture. Drawing out the tensions resulting from a Victorian traveller's confrontation with the foreign field allows for a more balanced engagement with the works of these Victorian scholars of human diversity, which have often been portrayed as naively ethnocentric. (shrink)

In his seminal essay “The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century Racism”, Richard Popkin argued that, when one looks more closely at some of the Enlightenment’s most important thinkers, one is c...

Summary: The article explores deployment of the Darwinian narrative of the “natural history of humanity” in Russian physical anthropology in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It traces two narratives developed by the leading Russian school of physical anthropology: one narrative advanced a universalist vision of collective scholarly enterprise working toward clarifying the missing links in the a priori accepted developmental evolutionary model. The other constructed a new language that undermined the idea of species/subspecies/races/nations/ as stable, externally bounded, (...) and internally homogeneous units and attempted to rationalize imperial hybridity. The article's main focus is on the latter classificatory narrative, its relational methodology, and the protostructuralist units of comparison that it produced. (shrink)

The development of modern science has depended strongly on specific features of the cultures involved; however, its results are widely and trans-culturally accepted and applied. The science and technology of electricity provides a particularly interesting example. It emerged as a specific product of post-Renaissance Europe, rooted in the Greek philosophical tradition that encourages explanations of nature in theoretical terms. It did not evolve in China presumably because such encouragement was missing. The trans-cultural acceptance of modern science and technology is postulated (...) to be due, in part, to the common biological dispositions underlying human cognition, with generalizable capabilities of abstract, symbolic and strategic thought. These faculties of the human mind are main prerequisites for dynamic cultural development and differentiation. They appear to have evolved up to a stage of hunters and gatherers perhaps some 100 000 years ago. However, the extent of the correspondence between some constructions of the human mind and the order of nature, as revealed by science, is a late insight of the last centuries. Quantum physics and relativity are particularly impressive examples. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to examine how workgroup diversity can be managed through specific strategic human resource management systems. Our review shows that ‘affirmative action’ and traditional ‘diversity management’ approaches have failed to simultaneously achieve business and social justice outcomes of diversity. As previous literature has shown, the benefits of diversity cannot be achieved with isolated interventions. To the contrary, a complete organizational culture change is required, in order to promote appreciation of individual (...) differences. The paper contributes to this discussion by exploring the implications of this change for human resource management, and explaining how the systems of practices should be changed when they are directed to diverse groups. The model designed to test this notion includes: (1) demographic and human capital diversity as independent variables, (2) group performance (measured as innovation outcomes) as the dependent variable and, (3) the orientation of the strategic human resource management system as a potential moderator of this relationship. The main conclusion of the empirical analysis developed is that different patterns of human resource management practices can be used, depending on the type of diversity that the organization faces, and the specific effects that it wishes to manage. Concretely, three alternative management systems are identified in this paper, with different moderating effects. This result has interesting implications for human resource management professionals, explained in the last section. The limitations of this study are also discussed, as well as some issues that future research in this field should address. (shrink)

Gene retrocopies are generated by reverse transcription and genomic integration of mRNA. As such, retrocopies present an important exception to the central dogma of molecular biology, and have substantially impacted the functional landscape of the metazoan genome. While an estimated 8,000–17,000 retrocopies exist in the human genome reference sequence, the extent of variation between individuals in terms of retrocopy content has remained largely unexplored. Three recent studies by Abyzov et al., Ewing et al. and Schrider et al. have exploited (...) 1,000 Genomes Project Consortium data, as well as other sources of whole‐genome sequencing data, to uncover novel gene retrocopies. Here, we compare the methods and results of these three studies, highlight the impact of retrocopies in human diversity and genome evolution, and speculate on the potential for somatic gene retrocopies to impact cancer etiology and genetic diversity among individual neurons in the mammalian brain. (shrink)

Human culture is uniquely complex compared to other species. This complexity stems from the accumulation of culture over time through high- and low-fidelity transmission and innovation. One possible reason for why humans retain and create culture, is our ability to modulate teaching strategies in order to foster learning and innovation. We argue that teaching is more diverse, flexible, and complex in humans than in other species. This particular characteristic of human teaching rather than teaching itself is one of (...) the reasons for human’s incredible capacity for cumulative culture. That is, humans unlike other species can signal to learners whether the information they are teaching can or cannot be modified. As a result teaching in humans can be used to support high or low fidelity transmission, innovation, and ultimately, cumulative culture. (shrink)