This essay draws a parallel between Macaulay’s stint as the “lawgiver” of India under the East India Company and the Anglicists-Orientalists debate that he brought to a decisive end on the one hand and on the other the culture/canon wars of the 1980s, and the neoconservative ascendancy that followed it and remained influential during the second Iraq War. Although neo-conservativism’s fierce resistance to a more inclusive liberal arts curriculum in the 1980s and its towering role during the militarization of (...) the US foreign policy in the last decade has established it as the most Eurocentric and logocentric intellectual movement at present, post-colonial studies is yet to take a serious reckoning of this ideological movement. This essay tries to fill this lacuna with an attempt to first establish Macaulayite Whiggism as a precursor of the American neo-conservatism and then to focus on Macaulay’s oedipal hostility with Sir William Temple, who was not just the most accomplished statesman of English Restoration Era (that Macaulay himself considered the golden period of English history and became its historian laureate), but also stood on the exact opposite pole of Macaulay’s Whiggish Eurocentrism. Finally, the essay will briefly consider Temple’s little-known essay “On the Ancient and Modern Learning” and its genuine and uniquely anti-logocentric outlook on non-European cultures and their histories. (shrink)

Research has shown that individuals with high levels of psychopathic personality traits are likely to cause harm to others in the workplace. However, there is little academic literature on the potentially adaptive outcomes of corporate psychopathy, particularly because the “boldness” psychopathy domain has largely been under-acknowledged in this literature. This study aimed to elaborate on past findings by examining the associations between psychopathy, as operationalized using scales from the relatively new triarchic model of psychopathy, and both adaptive and maladaptive workplace (...) behaviors. Participants were 343 working community adults who completed a series of self-report questionnaires that measured psychopathy and various workplace behaviors, including counterproductive work behaviors, tactics of influence, unethical decision-making, leadership strategies, team play, and creativity. Structural equation modeling was used to estimate the associations between latent constructs of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition, and the eight different constructs related to workplace behaviors. It was found that boldness preferentially predicted the use of soft tactics of influence, adaptive leadership, and team play, and negatively predicted passive leadership. Meanness predicted unethical decision-making, poor team play, and hard tactics of influence. Disinhibition positively predicted CWB and passive leadership. Meanness also moderated the association between disinhibition and CWB, in that greater scores on both psychopathy domains indicated greater levels of CWB. These findings provide conceptual support for the triarchic model, including the “boldness” domain, which measures adaptive aspects of psychopathy in addition to maladaptive ones, as well as suggest that not all individuals high on psychopathy would be an overt menace to the workplace. The different psychopathy traits may also interact with each other to predict different types or levels of workplace behaviors. (shrink)

The administration or recognition of religious courts is a form of religious accommodation present in many constitutional states today commonly analysed in legal pluralism terms. This article contributes to the further analysis of the relationship between legal pluralism and rights in religiously diverse societies by examining the status of state religious courts and their interaction with state non-religious courts. In particular, I examine what Cover calls “jurisdictional redundancies” between the courts and conceptualize the allocation of power between religious and non-religious (...) courts as a potentially productive site of interlegality. In doing so, I support concurrent jurisdictional allocations, arguing that exclusive jurisdiction could result in what I call an interlegal gap, whereby instead of inter-penetration of norms and production of reconciliatory principles, there is a justice gap whereby litigants may find themselves unable to obtain appropriate legal recourse including when neither court is willing to assume jurisdiction over the matter. This requires us to see the relationship between religious courts and non-religious courts through the more mundane but more practical lens of jurisdictional overlaps and competition, rather than through the more abstract framing of normative or even civilizational clashes. Accordingly, I argue that concurrent jurisdiction and interlegality have greater potential to strike a balance between individual and group rights and could be more protective of religious diversity. In other words, I argue for a closer, rather than a more separate, relationship between religious and non-religious courts, while denying that a hierarchical relationship where religious courts are subordinated to non-religious courts is the only way to protect rights. (shrink)

Facing the possibility of a surge of COVID-19-infected patients requiring ventilatory support in Intensive Care Units, the Singapore Hospice Council and the Chapter of Palliative Medicine Physicians forward its position on the guiding principles that ought to drive the allocation of ICU beds and its role in care of these patients and their families.

The paper presents an account of the concept of existence that is based on Brentano’s work. In contrast to Frege and Russell, Brentano took ‘exists’ to express a that subsumes objects and explained it with recourse to the non-propositional attitude of acknowledgment. I argue that the core of Brentano’s view can be developed to a defensible alternative to the Frege-Russell view of existence.

This article is concerned with two interrelated questions: what, if anything, distinguishes synthetic from natural organisms, and to what extent, if any, creating the former is of moral significance. These are ontological and ethical questions, respectively. As the title indicates, I address both from a broadly neo-Aristotelian perspective, i.e. a teleological philosophy of life and virtue ethics. For brevity’s sake, I shall not argue for either philosophical position at length, but instead hope to demonstrate their legitimacy through their explanatory power. (...) I firstly argue that synthetic organisms differ in kind from natural organisms and machines, and differ only by degree from genetically modified organisms. I then suggest that this is nevertheless sufficient to give us specific ethical reservations about synthetic biology: namely, that more than any other widely used biotechnology, it is characterised by a drive to mastery that stands opposed to due appreciation of the giftedness of life. (shrink)

Guided by Basic Psychological Need Theory, we investigated the combined associations between need satisfaction and need frustration and their relations with theoretically relevant correlates including mindfulness, physical literacy, physical activity enjoyment, and physical activity. The participants were Singapore-based school students who completed a cross-sectional survey. The results of the latent profile analysis identified four distinct need profiles: profile 1–average satisfaction and frustration ; profile 2–low satisfaction, above average frustration; profile 3–very high satisfaction, very low frustration ; and profile 4–high satisfaction, (...) very high frustration. Among these, profile 3 was the most adaptive one; it had the highest levels of mindfulness, physical literacy, physical activity enjoyment, and moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Experiences of need satisfaction countered the negative effects of need frustration on these correlates. These findings enhance our understanding of students’ psychological need experiences and highlight the need for investigating the combined associations between need satisfaction and need frustration. (shrink)

In this essay I discuss the limits of recent attempts to develop a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethic on the basis of a commitment to ‘ethical naturalism.’ By ‘ethical naturalism’ I mean the view that ethics can be founded on claims about what it is for human beings to flourish qua member of the human species, which is analogous to what it is for plants and other animals to flourish qua member of their particular species. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s account of ‘strong (...) evaluation,’ I argue that there are important features of our ethical life that can only be properly understood from a first-personal or phenomenological standpoint as contrasted with the third-personal standpoint of ethical naturalism: viz., (1) The sense of ‘nobility’ in performing virtuous actions for their own sake as a constitutive part of the good life; (2) The nature and extent of other-regarding concern; and (3) The issue of ‘the meaning of life,’ which also raises the issue of the place of ‘transcendence’ in an account of the good life. While I emphasize the need for a deeper engagement with our first-personal evaluative experience, I also discuss the interdependence of the first-personal and third-personal perspectives in the ethical life. (shrink)

Neo-Confucian influence in early modern Japan was highly intellectual, indicating that Confucian ideals did not change the nature of Japanese norms of social lives. For early modern Japanese intellectuals, the conflict and contradiction between reality and ideals had always been a source of debate and inspiration. Within the theme of Neo-Confucian rites, the contradiction was highlighted owing to the fact that it included a guideline for authentic ancestral worship and religious policy. Once introduced within the Japanese circumstances of the day, (...) Confucian understanding on spirits and proper rites lead Japanese scholars to define what was legitimate worship in the format of state religion: it was necessary to authorize traditional Japanese worship toward domestic shrines. Within thepractical process of policy making, it must be noted that a keen interest toward local beliefs had emerged through the discussion. Arai Hakuseki (1657‐1725) reflects such political interest within his work ‘Kishinron’. In order to understand the impact of Japanese interpretation of Neo-Confucian ideals, it is essential to focus on the interrelationship between religious policy and interest toward local beliefs. (shrink)

This paper aims to do two things. First, it describes the place that Adam Smith actually occupies in current research occurring at the boundaries of new interdisciplinary social-science fields such as evolutionary anthropology, evolutionary psychology, neuro-economics and behavioral economics. Second, it suggests a way in which Smith's place in the debates with which these subjects are concerned may be more properly defined and conceptualized. Specifically, the paper focuses on the controversial new theory of strong reciprocity, and on the reputation effects (...) that its critics think that theory neglects. (shrink)

This paper commemorates thepresentation of the honorary doctorate, in May2001 by the University of ód, toProfessor Andrzej Walicki. On this occasion,the Honorary Graduate delivered a lecturedevoted to his first philosophy teacher –Sergej Iosifovich Hessen, a prominent RussianNeo-Kantian philosopher and a liberal inmatters social and political. I try to analyzethe main features of Hessen''s philosophicalneo-Kantianism, in particular the inevitabilityof a choice between the absolute and therelative both in epistemology and in ethics inthe context of contemporary philosophy.

A figura de Spinoza, com o seu sonho louco de querer desenvolver uma filosofia total “conforme a ordem da geometria”, como se esta ordem fosse intangível e fixa uma vez por todas, cristaliza particularmente bem as dúvidas que o espírito de sistema pode fazer nascer. Não somente ele representa a caricatura de uma metafísica que gostaria de se fazer passar por ciência, mas esta ciência, ela mesma, aparece como a caricatura de uma racionalidade arrogante e dobrada sobre ela mesma. Explicar (...) de que maneira pode-se, hoje, reivindicar este espírito sem cair sobre tais críticas: este será o meu principal objetivo neste artigo. (shrink)

Despite the praise his writing garnered during his lifetime, e.g., from readers such as Einstein and de Broglie, Émile Meyerson has been largely forgotten. The rich tradition of French épistémologie has recently been taken up in some Anglo-American scholarship, but Meyerson—who popularized the term épistémologie through his historical method of analyzing science, and criticized positivism long before Quine and Kuhn—remains overlooked. If Meyerson is remembered at all, it is as a historian of classical science. This paper attempts to rectify both (...) states of affairs by explicating one of Meyerson׳s last and untranslated works, Réel et déterminisme dans la théorie quantique, an opuscule on quantum physics.I provide an overview of Meyerson׳s philosophy, his critique of Max Planck׳s interpretation of quantum physics, and then outline and evaluate Meyerson׳s neo-Kantian alternative. I then compare and contrast this interpretation with Cassirer׳s neo-Kantian program. Finally I show that, while Meyerson believes the revolutionary new physics requires "profoundly" modifying our conception of reality, ultimately, he thinks, it secures the legitimacy of his thesis: that science seeks explanations in the form of what he calls "identification." I hope my research will enable a more general and systematic engagement with Meyerson׳s work, especially with a view to assessing its viability as a philosophical method today. (shrink)

Articulated in the twenties, the doctrines of the exiled Russian ‘Evrazijstvo’ movement are undergoing a renaissance in Russia today. As the ‘Evrazijstvo movement counted among the most original ideological currents of the Russian diaspora, association with its doctrines could well add to the reputation of a given group or groups. This is the case with the journal Elementy which considers itself as the inheritor of ‘classical’ ‘Evrazijstvo’. Is this claim justified? The article is addressed to this question.