In recent decades, concepts of group agency and the morality of groups have increasingly been discussed by philosophers. Notions of collective or joint duties have been invoked especially in the debates on global justice, world poverty and climate change. This paper enquires into the possibility and potential nature of moral duties individuals in unstructured groups may hold together. It distinguishes between group agents and groups of people which – while not constituting a collective agent – are nonetheless capable of performing (...) a joint action. It attempts to defend a notion of joint duties which are neither duties of a group agent nor duties of individual agents, but duties held jointly by individuals in unstructured groups. Furthermore, it seeks to illuminate the relation between such joint duties on the one hand and individual duties on the other hand. Rebutting an argument brought forward by Wringe, the paper concludes that it is not plausible to assume that all humans on earth can together hold a duty to mitigate climate change or to combat global poverty given that the members of that group are not capable of joint action. (shrink)

Young netizens are an emerging generator of online content, engaging in an increasing number of online flaming interactions. This shortened communication mode has incorporated power amplifiers, enabling the inclusion of both verbal and non-verbal triggers, thereby initiating abuses akin to cyberbullying. Cyberbullying has emerged as an extremely unstable hot issue, which is difficult to regulate upstream, severely impacting inexperienced young netizens. This Machiavellian apparatus proves to be sophisticated, given its powerful nature, and results in its victims being ensnared in a (...) cyber net from which they see very little escape. Laws have been enacted to combat cyberbullying, which is rampant among netizens, highly naive or actively aggressive in their use of various social media platforms. (shrink)

Anne Conway was an extraordinary figure in a remarkable age. Her mastery of the intricate doctrines of the Lurianic Kabbalah, her authorship of a treatise criticising the philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza, and her scandalous conversion to the despised sect of Quakers indicate a strength of character and independence of mind wholly unexpected (and unwanted) in a woman at the time. Translated for the first time into modern English, her Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy is (...) the most interesting and original philosophical work written by a woman in the seventeenth century. Her radical and unorthodox ideas are important not only because they anticipated the more tolerant, ecumenical, and optimistic philosophy of the Enlightenment, but also because of their influence on Leibniz. This fully annotated edition includes an introduction which places Conway in her historical and philosophical contexts, together with a chronology of her life and a bibliography. (shrink)

It is argued that there are ways of individuating the objects of perception without using sortal concepts. The result is an moderate anti-sortalist position on which one can single out objects using demonstrative expressions without knowing exactly what sort of thing those objects are.

Focusing on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) implementation process, we analyze how institutional complexity that arises from tensions between social and environmental elements and economic and technical concerns is managed by CSR managers. We further question how these micro-level processes interact with organizational-level processes over time. Our research is a 24-month qualitative process study in which we followed CSR managers. The study’s results allow us to distinguish between four strategies that CSR managers use to promote CSR implementation and to cope (...) with tensions. Our results further indicate that organizational characteristics influence the intensity with which these strategies are applied and that the intensity of strategy application affects organizational behavior in the course of time. Through the discussion of these findings, our study contributes to the research on micro-level processes that occur in response to complex institutional demands as well as to the development of a comprehensive, multilevel approach to CSR implementation. (shrink)

Qualitative research should strive for knowledge translation toward the goal of closing the gap between knowledge and practice. However, it is often a challenge in nursing to identify knowledge translation strategies able to illustrate the usefulness of qualitative results in any given context. This article defines storytelling and uses pragmatism to examine storytelling as a strategy to promote the knowledge translation of qualitative results. Pragmatism posits that usefulness is defined by the people affected by the problem and that usefulness is (...) promoted by modalities, like storytelling, that increase sensitivity to an experience. Indeed, stories have the power to give meaning to human behaviors and to trigger emotions, and in doing so bring many advantages. For example, by contextualizing research results and appealing to both the reason and the emotions of audiences, storytelling can help us grasp the usefulness of these research results. Various strategies exist to create stories that will produce an emotional experience capable of influencing readers’ or listeners’ actions. To illustrate the potential of storytelling as a knowledge translation strategy in health care, we will use our story of discovering this strategy during a qualitative study in a nursing home as an example. (shrink)

Is there a link between how a firm manages its internal and external stakeholders? More specifically, are firms that give employees stock ownership and more say in running the enterprise more likely to engage with external stakeholders? This study seeks to answer these questions by elaborating on mechanisms that link employees to external stakeholders, such as the community, suppliers, and the environment. It tests these relationships using a sample of 347 private, mostly small-to-medium size firms, which completed a stakeholder impact (...) assessment organized by the non-profit B Lab. The results support the hypotheses that both employee ownership and employee involvement are positively associated with external stakeholder engagement. Further, we found that certification plays a role, as employee ownership contributes to external stakeholder engagement only in certified B Corporations, and not in firms that merely completed the B Lab Impact assessment. Our findings have import for stakeholder engagement frameworks, as we show that there is interplay between internal employee stakeholders and external stakeholders that may be important to overall firm–stakeholder management. (shrink)

Everett’s main claim is that language is a “cultural tool”, created by hominids for communication and social cohesion. I examine the meaning of the expression “cultural tool” in terms of the influence of language on culture or of the influence of culture on language. I show that these hypotheses are not well-supported by evidence and that language and languages, rather than being “cultural tools” as wholes are rather collections of tools used in different language games, some cultural or social, some (...) cognitive. I conclude that the coincidence between language and culture is due to the fact that both originate from human nature. (shrink)

Management and organization researchers are being called to conduct research that is more caring, yet the concept of care and how to practice it within the profession is undertheorized. Adopting a feminist epistemology and methodology, we develop the concept of care by weaving the personal, ethical, and political into the research process. First, we reflect critically on how aspects of care—attentiveness, responsibility, competence, and responsiveness (Tronto, Moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care, Routledge, 1993; Tronto, Caring democracy: (...) markets, equality, and justice, New York University Press, 2013)—unfolded in our personal research experiences, and secondly, we conduct a review of articles published in management and organization studies and analyse expressed or concealed conceptions of care in scholars’ accounts of research purpose and ethics. We find three ethical sensibilities at the heart of enacting care: encountering the ‘other’, interpreting roles and responsibilities, and deliberating needs and resources. We contribute to a feminist research ethics by highlighting issues related to care that are concealed in dominant ethos guiding management and organization research. Further, we develop methodological insights for implementing an ethic of care as an alternative ethical standpoint in business research ethics. Finally, we provide suggestions for how to embed more care within research ethics practices in academic institutions. (shrink)

The question of what kind of city we are trying to have is an urgent one as the world continues its dramatic urbanization. Urban Visions presumes that an understanding of our urban experience is a prerequisite for envisioning what the city could be. In assembling work by distinguished authors from different disciplines and countries, Urban Visions offers a patient examination of what urban experience is and of the city’s necessity, with explicit and implicit propositions about what it could be. The (...) book is illustrated in full color. (shrink)

In recent years, an increasing number of medical books and papers attempting to analyse the concepts of health and disease from the perspective of evolutionary biology have been published.This paper introduces the evolutionary approach to health and disease in an attempt to illuminate the premisses and the framework of Darwinian medicine. My primary aim is to analyse to what extent evolutionary theory provides for a biological definition of the concept of disease. This analysis reveals some important differences between functional explanations (...) in the field of evolutionary biology and functional explanations in the field of medicine. Moreover, I shall argue that the biological functions relevant to the health of an organism cannot be determined on the basis of evolutionary theory. Accordingly, it seems that Darwinian medicine does not provide for the definition of a biological concept of disease. Still,Darwinian medicine may suggest why we are susceptible to certain diseases; it might also prove a suggestive heuristic on the basis of which new hypotheses concerning relevant treatments of various diseases might be advanced. (shrink)

William Reddy, professeur d’histoire et d’anthropologie culturelle à l’université Duke, auteur du livre The Navigation of Feeling, est un pionnier de l’histoire des émotions. Son dernier ouvrage, The Making of Romantic Love, est le résultat de dix années de recherche. Il y traite des origines de l’amour courtois dans une perspective comparatiste, ayant trait à l’histoire globale. Son ouvrage ambitieux s’adresse à la fois aux étudiants et aux chercheurs qui s’intéressent au genre, à l’amour, a...

The word ‘empowerment’ has become a popular term, widely used as an important claim, also within the health services. In this paper the concept's philosophical roots are traced from Freire and his ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ to the philosophical thoughts of Hegel, Habermas, and Sartre. An understanding of the concept, as a way to facilitate coping and well‐being in patients through reflection and dialogue, emerges. Within an empowerment strategy the important claim on the nurse and the patient will be to (...) reveal the patient's own resources and limitations in times with sickness and reduced functionality to promote the patient's choice to act and cope. From this point of view an education‐programme for the frail elderly is outlined. If the nurse wants to empower the elderly patient she has to be willing to be educated through the dialogue with the patient, and to look for the patient's own meaning of being frail and elderly. The coping and self‐care solutions for the patient may then even be different from the preferences of the nurse, and this does not mean that the empowerment strategy is a failure or that the patient then has to continue without the assistance from the nurse. Within an empowerment strategy, in the Freirerian sense, the important thing is that both the patient and the nurse together critically reflect on the meanings of the sickness so that the patient can be able to make his own conscious choices. (shrink)

The book argues for the relevance of Mary Wollstonecraft’s intellectual legacy for the contemporary debate on ethics. The study is based on the whole of Wollstonecraft’s literary corpus and is char...

We have recently found that nondirective meditation facilitates stress reduction. This supplementary study investigated whether defensive functioning would moderate these beneficial effects. We explored the occurrence of defense mechanisms and the impact of defensive functioning on the outcome of companies’ stress management programs regarding worries nervousness, mental distress, sleep problems, and muscle pain. The sample was a population of active, working professionals recruited from Norwegian companies. The intervention group obtained significant benefits on all outcome measures, but there were no effects (...) in the control group. We analyzed defensive functioning with the self-report questionnaire, Life Style Index, at four time points. The healthy adults who participated had a low level of defense scores at the outset. There was a significant reduction in the level of defenses in both groups over the study period, 6 months. Defensive functioning significantly moderated the change of the outcome measures from baseline to follow-up in the intervention group, but not in the control group. (shrink)

This third volume completes the text of the cycle of 294 English Wycliffite sermons; the first two volumes appeared in 1983 and 1987 respectively. The 120 sermons here were intended to provide material for all the weekday occasions for which the Sarum rite offers a separate gospel reading; such complete coverage of ferial days is unparalleled in English medieval homiliaries, and seems unknown elsewhere in contemporary European cycles of sermons. The introduction to the present book, which is intended to be (...) used along with the material in the previous volumes, describes the state of the text in these manuscripts and their relation to each other. Two further chapters consider questions relating to the whole cycle: the fidelity of the biblical translation in the sermons to the Vulgate texts; and the complicated issue of the relation between these English sermons and the Latin sermons of John Wyclif himself. A fourth volume will provide a commentary on the individual sermons, consider the recurrent issues discussed within them, and offer suggestions concerning the origins of the collection. (shrink)

Ask a non-philosopher whether it’s rational to be moral, and she will likely think the answer is relatively clear: intuitively, what is moral is often at odds with what is rational. For example, although giving a dollar to a needy stranger would be a moral thing to do, the rational thing to do would be to keep it for yourself. Among professional philosophers, by contrast, the answer is not so obvious. Philosophers have subtle views of rationality and morality. Seldom, if (...) ever, do they understand norms of rationality as straightforwardly implying that we single-mindedly pursue our own self-interest, narrowly construed, and seldom, if ever, do they understand norms of morality as straightforwardly implying that we should always help others, regardless of our circumstances. -/- Among philosophers, then, the proposal that it is rationally permissible, or even required, to be moral, is not dismissed out of hand in light of apparent counterexamples. I propose that philosophers should take the same open-minded attitude to the proposal that virtue is compatible with, or even necessary for, well-being. Philosophers have sometimes denied that virtue is necessary for well-being on much the same grounds that our envisioned person on the street dismissed the possibility that morality may be rationally required: by pointing out apparent counterexamples (Haybron 2007: 5–11; see Chapter 15 by Besser-Jones, this volume). But, just like the question “is it rational to be moral?” the question “is virtue compatible with, or even required for, well-being?” cannot be dismissed so easily, because apparent counterexamples depend on only intuitive, commonsense, pre-theoretical understandings of virtue and well-being. -/- Any claim about the relationship between virtue and well-being must take the form of a con- ditional—for example: if this account of virtue and this account of well-being are correct, then virtue is necessary for (or compatible with, or the best bet for achieving, etc.) well-being.2 This point sets the structure for this chapter. In this chapter, I will (1) sketch an account of virtue, (2) develop a specific sense in which one might argue that virtue is necessary for well-being, and (3) explore the prospects for the proposal that virtue is necessary for well-being, discussing some of the main accounts of well-being in turn. I will argue that on some (though not all) accounts of well-being, there is reason to think that, when we more fully develop an account of the (fundamental, direct, intrinsic) contributors to well-being, we may discover that virtue is indeed necessary for well-being. (shrink)

José Ortega y Gasset définit l’histoire comme une succession non préréglée d’événements où vient peu à peu se former l’identité de l’homme. Pourtant, il insiste : là où l’événement semble faire césure, et alors même qu’aucun sens prédéfini ne vient l’organiser, l’histoire forme une continuité stricte. Comment, dès lors, concilier la dimension irréductiblement événementielle de l’histoire avec cette continuité qui, au-delà de son avènement dans le récit, doit apparaître au sein de l’histoire effective?

Research has demonstrated that how teachers spend their time is an important educational issue. In this paper it is argued that there is a good case for examining teachers’ personal and professional time simultaneously in order to enhance the quality of teaching, learning and teachers’ lives.

Sea-level rise (SLR) is a threat to coastal areas and there is growing interest in how social values, risk perception and fairness can inform adaptation. This study applies these three concepts to an urban community at risk of SLR in Botany Bay, Australia. The study engaged diverse groups of residents via an online survey. Cluster analysis identified four interpretive communities: two groups value work-life balance, are concerned about SLR and would likely engage in collective adaptation. The third group value everything (...) about Botany Bay and are active in organisations that could prove to be an important outreach. The fourth group were older men, disengaged from both SLR and policy but could respond to individual consultation and targeted communication. Thus, multifarious approaches can engage diverse communities in fair decision-making and transform community-facilitated adaptation. (shrink)

Objective: Body checking (BC) and avoidance (BA) form the behavioral component of body image disturbance. High levels of BC/BA have often been documented to hold a positive and potentially reinforcing relationship with eating pathology. While some researchers hypothesize, that patients engage in BC/BA to prevent or reduce levels of anxiety, little is known about the mediating factors. Considering the great comorbidity between eating disorders and in particular social anxieties, the present study investigated whether socially relevant types of anxiety mediate the (...) relationship between eating pathology and BC/BA. Method: 83 participants reporting an eating disorder and 323 healthy participants (14-25 years) took part in an online survey. Eating pathology was measured with the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire and Body Checking and Avoidance Questionnaire. Trait and social anxiety were assessed by means of the State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI-T), the Fear of Negative Evaluation (FNE) and the Social Appearance and Anxiety Scale (SAAS). Separate mediation analyses were carried out with eating pathology as independent variable, BC/BA as dependent variable and STAI, FNE and SAAS as mediating variables. Results: Anxieties correlated highly positive with eating pathology in both groups. SAAS mediated the relationship between ED pathology and BC/BA in participants with ED and mediated the relationship between ED pathology and BA in healthy participants. FNE mediated the relationship between eating pathology and BA for participants with eating pathology. Discussion: SAAS mediated the relationship between eating pathology and BC/BA. Being afraid of bodily evaluations may represent a particular relevant fear that triggers safety behaviors. (shrink)

PstS and DING proteins are members of a superfamily of secreted, high‐affinity phosphate‐binding proteins. Whereas microbial PstS have a well‐defined role in phosphate ABC transporters, the physiological function of DING proteins, named after their DINGGG N termini, still needs to be determined. PstS and DING proteins co‐exist in some Pseudomonas strains, to which they confer a highly adhesive and virulent phenotype. More than 30 DING proteins have now been purified, mostly from eukaryotes. They are often associated with infections or with (...) dysregulation of cell proliferation. Consequently, eukaryotic DING proteins could also be involved in cell–cell communication or adherence. The ubiquitous presence in eukaryotes of proteins structurally and functionally related to bacterial virulence factors is intriguing, as is the absence of eukaryotic genes encoding DING proteins in databases. DING proteins in eukaryotes could originate from unidentified commensal or symbiotic bacteria and could contribute to essential functions. Alternatively, DING proteins could be encoded by eukaryotic genes sharing special features that prevent their cloning. Both hypotheses are discussed. (shrink)