Moral or ethical questions are vital because they affect our daily lives: what is the best choice we can make, the best action to take in a given situation, and ultimately, the best way to live our lives? Health ethics has contributed to moving ethics toward a more experience-based and user-oriented theoretical and methodological stance but remains in our practice an incomplete lever for human development and flourishing. This context led us to envision and develop the stance of a “living (...) ethics”, described in this inaugural collective and programmatic paper as an effort to consolidate creative collaboration between a wide array of stakeholders. We engaged in a participatory discussion and collective writing process known as instrumentalist concept analysis. This process included initial local consultations, an exploratory literature review, the constitution of a working group of 21 co-authors, and 8 workshops supporting a collaborative thinking and writing process. First, a living ethics designates a stance attentive to human experience and the role played by morality in human existence. Second, a living ethics represents an ongoing effort to interrogate and scrutinize our moral experiences to facilitate adaptation of people and contexts. It promotes the active and inclusive engagement of both individuals and communities in envisioning and enacting scenarios which correspond to their flourishing as authentic ethical agents. Living ethics encourages meaningful participation of stakeholders because moral questions touch deeply upon who we are and who we want to be. We explain various aspects of a living ethics stance, including its theoretical, methodological, and practical implications as well as some barriers to its enactment based on the reflections resulting from the collaborative thinking and writing process. (shrink)

It is widely recognized that workplace sexual harassment has significant negative psychological and personal consequences, and employees facing harassment suffer reductions in productivity. Our contribution is to propose a novel measure of workplace sexual harassment risk and provide a fuller estimation of the firm value impact of sexual harassment. In contrast to recent studies that focus on short-run market reactions to media announcements of harassment scandals, we use employee job reviews to identify low-profile harassment incidents that better reflect the pervasive, (...) toxic environment pertaining to sexual harassment than do newsworthy scandals, and we measure the longer-term effect on firm value starting from the date when harassment risk affects employee morale. We identify firm harassment risk by analyzing employee job reviews and estimate the sexual harassment score (SH) through textual analysis of online job reviews. Our sample of high-SH firms, or firms with unusually high-SH scores, exhibits significant reductions in future stock performance and profitability. For example, firms with a top 2% SH score earn a value-weighted risk-adjusted stock return of − 17% in the 1-year period after high-SH classification, and this damage is concentrated in firms with higher investor attention. Furthermore, high-SH firms experience a decline in operating profitability and an increase in labor costs during a 5-year period around high-SH classification. Our evidence suggests that sexual harassment can cause greater damages to firm value than previously documented. (shrink)

The overall aim of this thesis is to assess the legitimacy of constitutional laws and bills of rights within the framework of procedural epistemic democracy. The thesis is divided into three sections. In the first section, I discuss the relevance of an epistemic argument for democracy under the circumstances of politics: I provide an account of reasonable disagreement and explain how usual approaches to the authority of decision-making procedures fail to take it seriously. In the second part of the thesis, (...) I provide an account of the epistemic features of democracy and of the requirements of democratic legitimacy. I develop a revised pragmatist argument for democracy which relies on three presumptive aims of decision-making: justice, sustainability and concord. In the third and last section, I first argue for the desirability of constitutionalism. I then explain why constitutionalism, as it is usually understood, is incompatible with my procedural epistemic account of democratic legitimacy. In the last chapter, I offer a two-pronged solution to the apparent incompatibility of constitutionalism and epistemic democracy. I first argue for the appropriateness of political constitutionalism, as opposed to legal constitutionalism, in understanding the relationship between rights and democracy. I then provide an account of rights protection and judicial review compatible with epistemic democratic legitimacy. Finally, I use the notion of pragmatic encroachment to explain how constitutional laws can achieve normative supremacy through the increased epistemic credentials of the procedure. (shrink)

This chapter contributes to a more general research programme on the social epistemology of think tanks by exploring the issue of how the production and transmission of knowledge by think tanks can best be evaluated. Most evaluations of think tanks take each organization as a unit. The goal of the assessment becomes a ranking of organizations according to a set of criteria meant to capture what an ideal think tank would look like, most often in terms of impact or transparency. (...) Although organizational-level evaluations can be valuable, we propose to evaluate think tanks at the level of ecosystems rather than at the level of individual organizations. Moreover, whereas existing evaluations conflate excellence with concerns such as ‘impact,’ we propose to evaluate them on the basis of their epistemic excellence. Thus, with the help of examples from Canada and elsewhere, this chapter illustrates how think tanks can be evaluated as ecosystems and on epistemic grounds. This chapter also concentrates on one specific component of epistemic excellence: the ways in which think tanks can hinder or foster epistemic justice. The chapter first lays out the benefits of an ecosystemic evaluation, then explains how a conception of epistemic excellence can apply to think tank ecosystems before exploring characteristics of ecosystems that can be conducive or detrimental to epistemic excellence. (shrink)

The Code for Global Ethics: Ten Humanist Principles By Dr Rodrigue Tremblay Prometheus Books -/- The world faces a crisis of civilization, which is in reality a moral crisis. The modern moral worldview that has evolved since the 18th Century Age of Enlightenment seems to be weathering. There is a recrudescence of the old moral formulas that encourage conflicts and wars. Humanity is in need of a new moral revival, free of sectarian references, in order to pursue its long (...) march for survival in a climate of progress and liberty. -/- The Code for Global Ethics proposes an imperative and more explicitly universal code of rights and obligations for all individuals, whether they be ordinary citizens or leaders of countries, of corporations, or religious organizations. It outlines the principles of rational humanism to be applied within the global context of a shrinking and a politically and economically interdependent world. Such a universal and global code of conduct is then compared to alternative moral codes—codes usually based on sectarian religious systems—with a demonstration of why such narrow or ethnically centered moral systems have failed humanity in the past. In our view, humanism is about idealism, compassion, and mutual tolerance, in a true spirit of humanity. It is a truly universal vision of humankind. http://www.amazon.com/The-Code-Global-Ethics-Principles/dp/1616141727/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_3 -/- . (shrink)

Andréanne Turgeon | : La littérature normative, lorsqu’il est question d’étudier les pratiques religieuses passées, est souvent perçue comme limitative pour le chercheur ; en effet, les prescriptions morales contenues dans ce type d’écrits témoignent davantage des attentes du clergé en matière de moeurs et de piété que des pratiques effectives qui avaient cours parmi les fidèles. Au cours des dernières décennies, cette littérature a généralement été exclue du corpus documentaire de nombreux chercheurs qui s’intéressaient à la religion « (...) vécue », afin d’éviter de transposer sur celle-ci une image biaisée, véhiculée par des productions ecclésiastiques. Au Québec, la notion de « réveil religieux », et le débat historiographique qu’elle a suscité au cours des années 1990, fournit un excellent exemple de catégorie, puisque cette notion s’est construite et fortifiée en l’absence d’une riche documentation qui, pourtant, encadrait la pratique que l’on comptabilisait et dont on cherchait à interpréter le sens. Cet article vise à montrer que la littérature normative peut donc s’avérer indispensable pour expliquer les transformations socioreligieuses d’une époque, et que c’est la prise en compte de cette documentation, dans les études historiques récentes, qui a mené à l’éclatement de la catégorie de « réveil religieux ». | : Historians often perceive normative literature as restricting the scholarly study of past religious practices : the moral precepts contained in those writings inform readers about the clergy’s expectations related to piety and morality, but do not tell much about effective practices that prevailed among the faithful. In the last decades, many scholars interested in the religion as experienced by people have excluded normative literature from their documentary corpus, in an attempt to avoid transposing the biased image conveyed by ecclesiastical productions into their research. The concept of “religious revival” and the ensuing historiographical debate in Québec during the 1990s provides a good example of such a problem, this category being created and reinforced without taking into consideration the normative documentation underlying the religious practices historians were trying to explain. This article intends to demonstrate that normative literature may be crucial in explaining past socioreli- gious transformations, and that its use in recent historical studies has even contributed to invalidate the concept of “religious revival.”. (shrink)

This paper assesses James M. Buchanan's claim of following a positive approach in stark contrast to the normative approach to public finance of Richard A. Musgrave. The goal of this paper is to shed light on the foundations of modern American public finance by analysing one aspect of the methodology of its two most prominent fathers. I show (1) that it is difficult to distinguish Musgrave's and Buchanan's theories of public goods along the positive/normative dividing line and (2) that Buchanan's (...) theory can also be considered normative. In the first three parts, I follow the Weberian methodological tradition in looking for value judgements in the theories, and by reflecting on the nature of ideal types. In the last part, I propose a broader interpretation of Buchanan's methodological stance within the academic context of the 1960s. (shrink)

On doit à l’économiste américain d’origine allemande, Richard A. Musgrave, la formulation des critères d’Équité Horizontale (ÉH) et d’Équité Verticale (ÉV). Étant donnée une base fiscale, l’ÉH veut que les égaux soient traités également, alors que l’ÉV exige que les inégaux soient traités inégalement (par exemple que les plus riches payent proportionnellement plus d’impôts). Musgrave opère en 1959 une redescription créative de considérations d’équité qui ont une longue histoire de Hobbes à Buchanan, en passant notamment par la fameuse maxime de (...) Adam Smith. La reconstruction généalogique montre que l’ÉV et l’ÉH relèvent de la justice distributive au sens aristotélicien du terme. Un critère purement formel, l’équité en matière d’impôt signifie l’égalité proportionnelle dans la répartition des charges communes à tous les individus membres d’une communauté politique. À défaut d’un consensus théorique sur la manière de conceptualiser les contribuables, l’ÉH conserve tout de même une valeur de principe régulateur dans le cadre non idéal de débats de réforme fiscale.Codes JEL : H20, B11, B12, B20, B40, D63. (shrink)

L'ouvrage présente, à partir d'une thèse empruntée à chacun, quinze auteurs qui ont contribué - et pour la plupart contribuent encore - au débat ...

This paper examines Epictetus’ use of athletic imagery as a pedagogical tool and what this tells us about his views on what philosophers can learn from athletes. This paper argues that this imagery...

This paper offers a revised political conception of human rights informed by legal pluralism and epistemic considerations. In the first part, I present the political conception of human rights. I then argue for four desiderata that such a conception should meet to be functionally applicable. In the rest of the first section and in the second section, I explain how abstract human rights norms and the practice of specification prevent the political conception from meeting these four desiderata. In the last (...) part of the paper, I argue that full-fledged tolerance in the international order – that is tolerance-as-non-intervention and tolerance-as-respect – should be attached to (1) compliance with jus cogens norms and to; (2a) a political community recognizably organized as a community of inquiry that is; (2b) committed to the specification and incorporation or expression of the idea of human rights within its local legal system. (shrink)

This paper aims to deflate the idea that democracy would be in essence a privileged locus of civic trust. Three claims are defended: (1) there is nothing specific to democracy regarding the affirmation that trust is required for social cooperation; (2) democracy, when conceived discursively, depends on guarded epistemic trust and; (3) popular control may require, in some contexts, institutions that express and foster distrust towards a specific section of the population. The conclusion to be drawn is that the appropriateness (...) of trust for the achievement of popular control over government depends on a contextual and realist assessment. (shrink)

This paper presents a conception of corruption informed by epistemic democratic theory. I first explain the view of corruption as a disease of the political body. Following this view, we have to consider the type of actions that debase a political entity of its constitutive principal in order to assess corruption. Accordingly, we need to consider what the constitutive principle of democracy is. This is the task I undertake in the second section where I explicate democratic legitimacy. I present democracy (...) as a procedure of social inquiry about what ought to be done that includes epistemic and practical considerations. In the third section, I argue that the problem of corruption for a procedural conception of democracy is that the epistemic value of the procedure is diminished by corrupted agents’ lack of concern for truth. Corruption, according to this view, consists in two deformities of truth: lying and bullshit. These deformities corrupt since they conceal private interests under the guise of a concern for truth. In the fourth section, I discuss the difficulties a procedural account may face in formulating solutions to the problem of corruption. (shrink)

Leibniz’s philosophy enjoyed a Russian fandom that endured from the eighteenth century to the death of the last exiled Russian philosophers in the twentieth century. There was, to begin with, Leibniz’s direct impact on Peter the Great and on the scientific development of Saint Petersburg. Then there was, still in the eighteenth century, Mikhail Lomonosov, who was sent to study with Christian Wolff in Marburg, and who came back to Saint Petersburg with a watered-down Leibnizian worldview, which he applied to (...) the study of chemistry and physics. Another eighteenth century philosopher, Alexander Radishchev, who studied in Leipzig, displayed acquiescence with a number of key elements from Leibniz’s philosophy. Russian Lebnizianism as a continuous philosophical movement was considerably reinvigorated in the 1870s when the Leibnizian German philosopher Gustav Teichmüller took a position at the University of Dorpat (nowadays Tartu, Estonia), which was then located within the Russian Empire. Teichmüller influenced a number of Russian philosophers into adopting a “Teichmüllerian” version of Leibnizianism. Among these philosophers were Evgeny Bobrov and Alexei Kozlov. In Saint Petersburg, Kozlov influenced his own son, Askoldov, and the latter’s friend — Nikolai Lossky. In the meanwhile, in Moscow Lev Lopatin, Nikolai Bugaev, and Petr Astafiev developed their own Leibnizianism in seemingly relative independence from Teichmüller’s influence and presumably, in some cases, under the partial influence of Vladimir Solovyov. Despite this relative independence, however, the fact remains that there was in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russia a network of more or less loosely interconnected Leibnizian philosophers who read each other and wrote about each other, who exchanged ideas, and who constituted a movement that we might characterize as “Russian Leibnizianism” or “Russian Neo-Leibnizianism.” In this chapter, I tell the story of the intellectual lineage of Russian Leibnizianism. (shrink)

Researchers studying health systems in low-income countries face a myriad of ethical challenges throughout the entire research process. In this article, we discuss one of the greatest ethical challenges that we encountered during our fieldwork in West Africa: the difficulty of protecting the confidentiality of participants while locally disseminating results of health systems research to stakeholders. This reflection is based on experiences of authors involved in conducting evaluative research of interventions aimed at improving health systems in West Africa. Our observation (...) and collaboration with the research projects’ stakeholders informed our analysis. Examples from two research projects illustrate the issues raised. We found that in some cases there is a risk that local stakeholders may be able to identify research participants, or at least groups of participants, during the dissemination of results, even if they are anonymized. Four factors can interact and influence this challenge: 1) hierarchical structure, 2) small milieu, 3) immersion in a few sites, and 4) vested interests of decision-makers. For example, local stakeholders can sometimes find out when and where the data were collected. Moreover, health systems, especially rural healthcare centres, in West African countries can be small settings, so people often know each other. Some types of participants have unique characteristics or positions in the health system that may make them more easily identifiable by local stakeholders familiar with the environment. We identified a number of potential strategies that can help researchers minimize this difficulty and improve ethical research practices. These strategies pertain to the development of the study design, the process of obtaining informed consent, the dissemination of results, and the researchers’ reflexivity. Researchers must develop and adopt strategies that enable them to respect their promise of confidentiality while effectively disseminating sometimes sensitive results. Reflections surrounding ethical issues in global health research should be deepened to better address how to manage competing ethical responsibilities while promoting valuable research uptake. (shrink)

The politics of reconciliation, in Canada, finds its origin in judgements of the Supreme Court affirming the objective of reconciling the sui generis authority and continued distinct existence of I...

Yann Allard-Tremblay ,Aude Bandini | : Les théories épistémiques et délibératives de la démocratie soulignent l’importance du processus de la délibération quand l’objectif poursuivi est de parvenir à de bonnes décisions. Dans cet article, nous nous intéresserons aux différents mécanismes grâce auxquels une délibération publique à la fois ouverte, libre et inclusive, peut parvenir à de bonnes décisions, avant d’envisager ce que la délibération peut apporter en cas de désaccord. Nous nous concentrerons plus particulièrement ici sur la fonction constructive (...) de la démocratie, c’est-à-dire sur cette capacité qu’a la démocratie délibérative d’identifier et de formuler, de manière épistémiquement instructive, les problèmes de justice auxquels doit faire face le corps politique. Il faudra donc d’abord expliquer comment la démocratie permet de colliger l’information et de la mettre à disposition de chacun, afin d’expliquer ensuite comment la délibération peut permettre l’émergence d’accords entre les individus. Nous verrons alors que la délibération a des limites, et pourquoi elle se révèle incapable de surmonter certains désaccords. Nous tâcherons enfin d’expliquer le rôle qu’elle joue dans la formulation des désaccords politiques. Sur ce point, nous montrerons que la délibération permet d’éviter que ne surgissent des désaccords politiques insoutenables, qui mettraient en péril l’intégrité du corps politique. | : Deliberative epistemic theories of democracy highlight the importance of deliberation for the achievement of correct decisions. The aims of this paper are to discuss the mechanisms which allow an open, free and inclusive forum of deliberation to achieve correct decisions and to discuss the impact of deliberation on disagreement. I concentrate on the constructive function of democracy which designates the capacity of deliberative democracy to identify and frame the problems of justice faced by a polity in epistemically positive ways. I first explain how democracy can pool information. This is then used to explain how deliberation can enable agreement to emerge. This is followed by a discussion of the limits of deliberation and how it is unable to resolve some disagreements. The final element of my discussion is an explanation of the role of deliberation in framing political disagreements. I argue that deliberation helps in avoiding unsustainable political disagreements which could bring about political decay. (shrink)

This essay takes, as its starting point, Andreas Malm’s effort, in How to Blow Up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire, to legitimize and normalize property destruction in the context of the climate movement. The sabotage of energy infrastructures, I counter, cannot make sense, for it poses a threat to coherence, removing without replacing the material and discursive conditions that grant the climate movement its meaning and purpose within late capitalism and late liberalism. Recent protests entailing (...) the defacement of paintings share with ecocriticism an investment in an essentially liberal, pedagogical and moral covenant, one that urges witnesses to undergo an individual process of reflection in order to acquire or affirm values and priorities friendlier to the environment. Sabotage, by contrast, violates this covenant; blowing up a pipeline may be said to have met its goals by reducing and slowing the supply of oil, regardless of what the public learned from sabotage’s mediatization. Drawing on psychoanalytic accounts of aesthetic education, I argue that sabotage introduces absurdity into a category—action—that the climate movement otherwise insists is self-identical. Sabotage does this by subtracting the world wherein putatively future-bound actions, including having and raising a child, mean what they do. I test out this claim in a reading of Nell Zink’s novel The Wallcreeper and Benedikt Erlingsson’s film Woman at War (Kona fer í stríð), two absurdist comedies that formally amplify the semiotic crisis induced by sabotage and, in so doing, enable us to confront the necessary dislocation of politics from sense. (shrink)

En 1937, le philosophe russe Simon Frank (1877-1950) publia la Connaissance et l’être, une traduction française abrégée de Predmet znanija, auprès de la maison d’édition parisienne Fernand Aubier. Grâce à cette traduction, il attira l’attention de philosophes francophones, parmi lesquels se trouvait le suisse Pierre Thévenaz (1913-1955), qui donna une présentation s’intitulant « Connaissance et être d’après Simon Frank » à une rencontre de la Société romande de philosophie à Lausanne le 7 décembre 1940. Ce qui suit est une transcription (...) du texte manuscrit de cette présentation. Dans ce texte, Thévenaz s’appuie principalement sur la Connaissance et l’être afin d’exposer la pensée de Frank. Cependant, son objectif n’est pas seulement de résumer la pensée de ce dernier, mais aussi d’en dégager quelques problèmes philosophiques. Le texte est précédé d’une introduction qui présente Thévenaz et qui décrit le contexte de sa réception de la philosophie de Frank. (shrink)

The following text is a translation of Semyon Frank’s “L’intuition fondamentale de Bergson” published in Henri Bergson: Essais et témoignages inédits, edited by Albert Béguin and Pierre Thévenaz, Neuchâtel: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1941. In this article, Frank addresses Bergson’s notion of intuition, his anti-intellectualism, his mysticism, his closeness to Lebensphilosophie, the notion of lived experience, the distinction between intuition as pure contemplation and intuition as living knowledge, the distinction between cognition of the atemporal essence of reality and cognition of (...) the world of becoming, pragmatism, the disinterested and open intuitive spiritual attitude vs the utilitarian attitude of social groups closed in on themselves, the transrational vs the irrational, spiritual life, psychic life, the Absolute, and the temporal flux. The article contains criticisms of Bergson on the issues of time and intuition: the durée, the intuitive time, is incomprehensible without an atemporal foundation. Therefore, according to Frank, Plato was correct—contra Bergson—to define time as the moving image of eternity. And, if there is such an atemporal foundation, then, contrary to what Bergson seems to think, intuition as living knowledge cannot be the sole mode of intuition. Moreover, unlike what Bergson appears to think, an intuition of the Absolute would be an intuition of the transrational rather than of the irrational. The translation is preceded by an introduction tracing the genesis of the article, which was commissioned by the Swiss philosopher Pierre Thévenaz. (shrink)

En 2012, le CR10 « Les temps sociaux » avait placé notre rencontre à Rabat sous la thématique de « la déstabilisation des temps sociaux ». Depuis 2012 et le dernier congrès de l’AISLF de nouvelles perspectives ont émergé. D’abord la question des innovations, qui a été au centre de nos travaux en 2016 à Montréal. Les nouvelles technologies ont permis le développement de nouvelles pratiques dans certains secteurs d'activité : le télétravail, les espaces de coworking, qui réduisent les déplaceme...

Le mot anagogia, « anagogie » serait une mauvaise traduction latine du grec a. L'équivalent latin serait, selon les philologues, sursumductio. D'abord conçue comme un voyage, l'anagogie prendra le sens d'ascension, de montée. Le mot anagogie est plus fréquemment employé pour désigner le quatrième sens de l'Écriture, le terme s'inscrit dans l'histoire de l'exégèse sacrée et plus généralement de l'herméneutique.Les études qui composent cet ouvrage (sur l'obscénité, Alfred Jarry, Georges Bataille, René Daumal, Pierre Klossowski, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Guyotat, Jean-Noël Vuarnet (...) ou Platon) traitent, de près ou de loin, de cette ascension, souvent entendue ici comme transgression : l'esprit sursoit aux limites de la matière, dont il ne s'émancipe jamais totalement, dans un mouvement vers le sommet (mort, rire divin, « communication », révélation, soleil). (shrink)

Pour soutenir les élèves du primaire dans leur apprentissage de la langue et des disciplines scolaires, tant en contexte de français langue d’enseignement que de français langue seconde, l’élaboration d’une liste de vocabulaire dit « transdisciplinaire » (Hiebert et Lubliner 2008) s’avère nécessaire. Il n’existe en effet pas de liste de référence pour l’enseignement ciblé des mots qui apparaissent fréquemment dans les matières scolaires au primaire en français et qui ont comme caractéristiques : soit d’être utilisés dans un même sens (...) quelle que soit la matière (souligner, examiner, répondre, expliquer, premièrement, enfin, etc.), soit de posséder des sens différents dans les différentes disciplines et dans la langue (nombre, base, somme, résultat, valeur, représenter, etc.). Dans cet article, nous rendons compte d’un projet de recherche ayant mené 1) à la constitution d’un corpus de plus de 4 millions de mots, à partir de manuels scolaires en usage au Québec pour tous les cycles du primaire, dans cinq disciplines (français, mathématiques, sciences, univers social, éthique et culture religieuse) et 2) à la sélection d’une liste de vocabulaire transdisciplinaire de plus de 2 000 vocables à des fins d’enseignement de la langue et des disciplines scolaires. (shrink)

This is a translation from the Russian of Nikolai Lossky’s review of Henri Bergson, Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (1932). The review was published in the Parisian émigré journal Новый Град (Cité nouvelle) in 1932. In this review, Lossky criticizes Bergson for leaving some key problems of the philosophy of religion unresolved, namely that of God’s relation to the world (theism vs. pantheism), that of immortality, as well as that of evil. He also criticizes Bergson’s (...) “extreme biologism” in his explanation of morality, which, in his view, subjectivizes the objects of religion. For Lossky, the symbolic images of the Christian religion are not subjective “fabulations,” but real symbols through which God reveals himself to us. Likewise, according to Lossky, true morality cannot be explained in terms of biological adaptation, but must rely on the foundation of an objective, i.e., Platonic, axiological sphere. (Frédéric Tremblay). (shrink)

How should a political society be structured so as to legitimately distribute political power? One principle advanced to answer this question is the principle of subsidiarity. According to this principle, the default locus of political power is with the lowest competent political unit. This article argues that subsidiarity is a structural principle of a conception of political legitimacy informed by epistemic considerations. Broadly, the argument is that political societies organised according to the principle of subsidiarity can more effectively achieve political (...) decisions that can justifiably appear to be correct from the point of view of those subject to them. The article presents two considerations in order to establish a pro tanto case for acting separately before presenting five additional epistemic considerations that establish a prima facie case for acting separately. The article then shows that political legitimacy and the epistemic aim of decision-making can sometimes be served more effectively and efficiently by allowing higher-level political units to assist lower-level political units. (shrink)

This article provides an exploration of the relationships between a procedural account of epistemic democracy, illegitimate laws and judicial review. I first explain how there can be illegitimate laws within a procedural account of democracy. I argue that even if democratic legitimacy is conceived procedurally, it does not imply that democracy could legitimately undermine itself or adopt grossly unjust laws. I then turn to the legitimacy of judicial review with regard to these illegitimate laws. I maintain that courts do not (...) have a moral privilege on the overthrow of illegitimate laws; in this respect the refusal of royal assent has the same status. I also explain how the rule of the clear mistake fails to restrict the action of courts to only illegitimate laws. Finally, I argue for the positive epistemic inputs of weak judicial review. (shrink)

I aim to explain why majority voting can be assumed to have an epistemic edge over lottery voting. This would provide support for majority voting as the appropriate decision mechanism for deliberative epistemic accounts of democracy. To argue my point, I first recall the usual arguments for majority voting: maximal decisiveness, fairness as anonymity, and minimal decisiveness. I then show how these arguments are over inclusive as they also support lottery voting. I then present a framework to measure accuracy so (...) as to compare the two decision mechanisms. I go over four arguments for lottery voting and three arguments for majority voting that support their respective accuracy. Lottery voting is then shown to have, compared to majority voting, a decreased probability of discrimination. That is, I argue that with lottery voting it is less probable under conditions of normal politics that if the procedure selects X, X is reasonable. I then provide two case scenarios for each voting mechanism that illustrate my point. (shrink)

This paper argues that Epictetus’ ethics involves three features which are also present in Aristotle’s discussion of akrasia in the Nicomachean Ethics: 1) A major problem for agents is when they fail to render a universal premise effective at motivating a particular action in accordance with that premise. 2) There are two reasons this occurs: Precipitancy and Weakness. 3) Precipitancy and Weakness can be prevented by gaining a fuller understanding of our beliefs and commitments. This comparison should make clear that (...) akrasia is certainly not absent from Epictetus. Rather a very Aristotelian understanding of why we fail to act in accordance with what we take to be in our own best interests remains at the center of his ethics. (shrink)

Nicolai Hartmann was one of the most prolific and original, yet sober, clear and rigorous, 20th century German philosophers. Hartmann was brought up as a Neo-Kantian, but soon turned his back on Kantianism to become one of the most important proponents of ontological realism. He developed what he calls the “new ontology”, on which relies a systematic opus dealing with all the main areas of philosophy. His work had major influences both in philosophy and in various scientific disciplines. The contributions (...) collected in this volume from an international group of Hartmann scholars and philosophers explore subjects such as Hartmann's philosophical development from Neo-Kantianism to ontological realism, the difference between the way he and Heidegger overcame Neo-Kantianism, his Platonism concerning eternal objects and his interpretation of Plato, his Aristotelianism, his theoretical relation to Wolff's ontology and Meinong's theory of objects, his treatment and use of the aporematic method, his metaphysics, his ethics and theory of values, his philosophy of mind, his philosophy of mathematics, as well as the influence he had on 20th century philosophical anthropology and biology. (shrink)

The Russian philosopher Nikolai Onufrievich Lossky considered himself a Leibnizian of sorts. He accepted parts of Leibniz’s doctrine of monads, although he preferred to call them ‘substantival agents’ and rejected the thesis that they have neither doors nor windows. In Lossky’s own doctrine, monads have existed since the beginning of time, they are immortal, and can evolve or devolve depending on the goodness or badness of their behavior. Such evolution requires the possibility for monads to reincarnate into the bodies of (...) creatures of a higher level on the scala perfectionis. According to this theory, a monad can evolve by being progressively reincarnated multiple times through a sort of process of metamorphosis from the level of the most elementary particles all the way up to the level of human beings or even higher. Lossky argues that the works of Leibniz contain scattered elements of such a systematic doctrine of reincarnation. He attempts to reconstitute this doctrine in an article that appeared both in Russian and German in 1931. The Russian version, ‘Ученiе Лейбница о перевоплощенiи какъ метаморфозѣ’, was published in the Сборникъ Русскаго института въ Прагѣ, vol. 2, 1931, pp. 77–88. The German version appeared under the title ‘Leibniz’ Lehre von der Reinkarnation als Metamorphose,’ in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 40, n. 2, 1931, pp. 214–226. The content of the Russian and German versions is roughly the same, except for the omission, in the German version, of a mention of David Hume in the second sentence and of one paragraph and a half at the end of the article. The following is a translation of this article. I translated the text from the Russian version, which was in all appearances written first, but I also took the German version into account. The original pagination is added in angle brackets. Angle brackets are used wherever the additions are mine. — Frédéric Tremblay. (shrink)

More than 200 million children under the age of 5 years are affected by malnutrition worldwide according to the World Health Organization. The Barbados Nutrition Study (BNS) is a 55-year longitudinal study on a Barbadian cohort with histories of moderate to severe protein-energy malnutrition (PEM) limited to the first year of life and a healthy comparison group. Using quantitative electroencephalography (EEG), differences in brain function duringchildhood(lower alpha1 activity and higher theta, alpha2 and beta activity) have previously been highlighted between participants (...) who suffered from early PEM and controls. In order to determine whether similar differences persisted intoadulthood, our current study used recordings obtained during a Go-No-Go task in a subsample of the original BNS cohort [population size (N) = 53] at ages 45–51 years. We found that previously malnourished adults [sample size (n) = 24] had a higher rate of omission errors on the task relative to controls (n= 29). Evoked-Related Potentials (ERP) were significantly different in participants with histories of early PEM, who presented with lower N2 amplitudes. These findings are typically associated with impaired conflict monitoring and/or attention deficits and may therefore be linked to the attentional and executive function deficits that have been previously reported in this cohort in childhood and again in middle adulthood. (shrink)

This article introduces the 2012 Montréal FRAN-HOMA corpus, collected in the Francophone neighborhood of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, and how it relates to the heritage corpora of Montréal French collected since the 1970s. We discuss the methodological choices made regarding the composition of this corpus including the historical and demo-linguistic information that led to the selection of the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighborhood for fieldwork. A presentation of the socially stratified sample and criteria for participant selection is followed by a discussion on data collection and the (...) sociolinguistic interview. After a brief review of the transcription protocol and the advantages of audio-aligned transcription, we provide two illustrations of the revival of research on linguistic variation made possible by this new corpus. (shrink)

This article elaborates a conceptual framework to systematize the epistemic evaluation of social systems. This framework can be used to structure an evaluation or to characterize and assess existing ones. The article then uses the framework to assess four representative evaluations of think tanks. This meta-evaluation exemplifies how the framework can play its structuring role. It also leads us to general conclusions about the existing evaluations of think tanks. Most importantly, by focusing on the organizational level, existing evaluations miss factors (...) that are situated at the network and ecosystemic levels and that significantly determine how well think tanks serve society in producing and disseminating knowledge relevant to public policy. This conclusion suggests the need for epistemic evaluations of think tank ecosystems. (shrink)

Using a new typology based on information available from the Labour Force Survey, the authors analyse how job quality evolved in Québec for both women and men over the last decade (1997-2007). Results show that family situation and educational attainment are two important factors in the determination of gender inequality in the labour market. The analysis emphasizes the very significant decline in gender differences with regard to job quality (from 23% to 35% according to groups), especially for persons without children (...) and individuals who achieved higher education. The changes represent a definite progress in the status of women in general, although some indicators also reveal degradation with respect to job quality in some of the sub-groups. (shrink)

Several lines of evidence indicate that rapid target-aiming movements, involving both the eyes and hand, can be biased by the visual context in which the movements are performed. Some of these contextual influences carry-over from trial to trial. This research indicates that dissociation between the dorsal and ventral systems based on speed, conscious awareness, and frame of reference is far from clear.