Discussion of the need for moral guidelines in business; suggestions for communication in the workplace.

As we begin to witness a new phase in the integration of digital social media platforms with educational institutions, we ought to ask how learning exchanges may be altered as a result. Looking to transformations in knowledge exchanges outside of formal education, we find that these technologies have already modified the ways in which communities engage with each other. Gerlitz and Helmond explain that the Like Economy built into all major social media platforms flattens exchanges between users to engagement metrics. (...) With online communities increasingly isolated from each other thanks to inscrutable recommendation algorithms, the most frequent cross-community exchanges manifest in outbursts of rage, producing a so-called ‘Dislike Society’. Practitioners would rather briefly unite to tear down other ways of living than to build new ones. Within the Dislike Society, any form of knowledge that could shape new communities is lost to the governance of algorithms in what Bernard Stiegler calls ‘proletarianisation’. To re-apply knowledge to the improvement of life, as suggested by Whitehead, the attention of learners needs to be shaped in response to new technological conditions. This is best achieved within the educational institutions that now face a reorganisation by the same companies that brought us the Dislike Society. (shrink)

To claim that there is a politics to or expressed within media technology is of course by no means new, but it remains controversial and not always well understood. Walter Benjamin’s (1986b) essay from 1936 on the political import of media technology is often regarded as the starting point of such discussions, since it foregrounds a key theme in critical theory, namely the politics of perception. In what follows, I would like to review the importance of the politics of (...) perception by first outlining Benjamin’s political analysis of cinema and then engaging with a critique of Benjamin by recent American cognitivist philosophy. This will allow a consideration of the competing phenomenological cognitive science of embodied cognition that I argue offers a better account of the mind and cognition than cognitivism. As a result of this analysis of cognition, I conclude that the philosophy of embodied cognition supports Benjamin's political theory of media technology. (shrink)

Commentators agree that Derrida's criteria for an event were stringent: it had to be unique, unpredictable and unanticipatable; it must come as a surprise that defies all conceptualization, comprehension, appropriation. Can any historical occurrence pass such rigorous tests and be considered an event? The question now extends to whether Derrida's writings or life should constitute an event. This article traces Derrida's use of the word ‘event’ or ‘événement’ from ‘Signature Event Context’ and early readings of Nietzsche, Blanchot, and Benjamin (...) through his 2001 paper, ‘The Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event’. Analysis shows that where Derrida appears to concede the independent existence of past events this illusion is created linguistically by supplements, the future anterior tense, and speech acts. His unsuccessful attempt to exemplify ‘events’ that were distinguishable from merely ‘what happens’ assimilates them into the latter category, which he likened to ‘rain’, a banal, minimal catachresis of nothing. The implication is that what we call history resembles a Beckett-like condition of apparent insight that reverts, on reflection, to emptiness. (shrink)

Though underexplored in contemporary scholarship, the Victorian attempts to turn aesthetics into a science remain one of the most fascinating aspects of that era. In The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan approaches this period of innovation as an important origin point for current attempts to understand art or beauty using the tools of the sciences. Moving chronologically from natural theology in the early nineteenth century to laboratory psychology in the early twentieth, Morgan draws on little-known archives of Victorian intellectuals such (...) as William Morris, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and others to argue that scientific studies of mind and emotion transformed the way writers and artists understood the experience of beauty and effectively redescribed aesthetic judgment as a biological adaptation. Looking beyond the Victorian period to humanistic critical theory today, he also shows how the historical relationship between science and aesthetics could be a vital resource for rethinking key concepts in contemporary literary and cultural criticism, such as materialism, empathy, practice, and form. At a moment when the tumultuous relationship between the sciences and the humanities is the subject of ongoing debate, Morgan argues for the importance of understanding the arts and sciences as incontrovertibly intertwined. (shrink)

Im Zentrum des vorliegenden Sammelbandes steht die Frage nach dem Bösen in Religionen, die als monotheistisch verstanden werden oder für die zumindest die Herrschaft des Hauptgottes über alle anderen Götter und Mächte ein entscheidendes Anliegen ist. Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf dem sich formierenden Judentum und Christentum sowie dem Alten Testament. Besonderes Interesse gilt den Texten aus Qumran, und darüber hinaus erfolgt ein Blick auf mittelalterliche Heiligenlegenden. Die Beiträge des Bandes zeigen, dass es in den antiken jüdischen und christlichen Texte eine (...) große Vielfalt von Verkörperungen des Bösen gibt, sei es extern als Dämon oder Teufel, sei es intern als die menschliche Fähigkeit, Böses zu tun. Außerdem stellt sich heraus, dass in der jüdisch-christlichen Literatur Dualismus nicht grundsätzlich abgelehnt wird, aber nur Formen von Dualismus vorkommen, in denen das Böse Gott und dem Guten letztlich untergeordnet ist. Mit Beiträgen von: Jörn Bockmann, Miryam T. Brand, Jan Dochhorn, Matthew Goff, Erkki Koskenniemi, Michael Morris, Hector M. Patmore, Susanne Rudnig-Zelt, Markus Saur, Ryan E. Stokes, Oda Wischmeyer, Benjamin Wold. (shrink)

Sedlakova and Trachsel (2023) discuss the ethical concerns associated with employing what they term conversational artificial intelligence as therapist substitutes. Given their apprehensions, they...

Many people believe the global economy is unjust, but they don't know what to do about it. What responsibilities do American consumers have to workers in China making their iPhones? Should they still buy clothes made in Bangladesh's sweatshops? Offering an overview of how neoliberalism orients us to the world, Benjamin L. McKean shows the practical shortcomings of neoliberal approaches to the world and develops an alternative way of thinking and acting guided by a compelling new account of freedom. (...) Disorienting Neoliberalism offers a framework for understanding the politics of the global economy and shows how we can act in solidarity to promote justice. (shrink)

Various causal details of the genetic process of translation have been singled out to account for its privileged status as a ‘code'. We explicate the biological uses of coding talk by characterizing a class of special causal processes in which topological properties are the causally relevant ones. This class contains both the process of translation and communication theoretic coding processes as special cases. We propose a formalism in terms of graphs for expressing our theory of biological codes and discuss its (...) utility in understanding biological systems. *Received May 2007; revised May 2008. †To contact the authors, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Baker Hall 135, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213; e-mail: [email protected] or [email protected]. (shrink)

This paper applies an approach that the author calls Subjective Personal Introspection to the self-reflective examination, inward-looking understanding, and impressionistic evocation of his own consumption experiences as the keeper of a kitten named Rocky Raccoon. Three-dimensional photographs in the form of stereo pairs provide corroborative evidence for the interpretations suggested. In this reflexive, anecdotal, narrative account, Rocky the Cat emerges as a focal point in the author's experiential consumption.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 126-127 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment T. J. Hochstrasser. Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii + 246. Cloth, $54.95. In a worthy addition to Cambridge's Ideas in Context series, T. J. Hochstrasser undertakes an excavation. His aim is to provide a description, and to (...) demonstrate the importance within the German Frühaufklärung, of a largely forgotten philosophical approach: eclecticism. Hochstrasser argues that the triumph of Wolffian rationalism in the Protestant universities in the middle of the eighteenth century occluded the importance of eclecticism for Kant, who in turn occluded it for everyone afterward. But the price of forgetting eclecticism is high. Not only are we left with no account--or a skewed account--of the development of German thought from the first stirrings of the Enlightenment to the emergence of the Critical philosophy, but our understanding of the development of the historiography of philosophy is badly compromised. For among their many accomplishments--in natural jurisprudence, in university reform--the eclectics were the first critical historians of philosophy, their distinctive genres being historically aware treatises on natural law and Whig histories of natural jurisprudence. Hochstrasser's study traces the development of eclecticism, from the work of its founders, Samuel Pufendorf and Christian Thomasius, through a devolution in the hands of Thomasius's later disciples, to the eventual oblivion in the middle of the eighteenth century. This review will focus on the beginning of this narrative, as Pufendorf is the leading figure in the book.Eclecticism began with Pufendorf's attempt, in his mature work on natural law, to reconcile his conflicting inheritances from Grotius and Hobbes without simply endorsing the work of either. He was impressed both by Grotius's explanation of the law of nations in terms of human sociability--but also by Hobbes's criticisms of Grotius, rooted in the latter's analysis of the state of nature. At the same time, he wished to reject Grotius's method of induction from sociological observation and Hobbes's minimally constrained voluntarism. Contributing further to his perplexity was his increasing disaffection from the geometric approach he had adopted in his Elementa Jurisprudentiae Universalis.The way out of this impasse, Hochstrasser contends, was revealed to Pufendorf in correspondence with Hermann Conring, the leading constitutional lawyer of his time, and Johann Böcler, Grotius's most erudite commentator. Böcler chastised Pufendorf for his neglect of history, and both of Pufendorf's correspondents pointed out his need for some non-Hobbesian criterion by which he could validate his first principles, whatever they turned out to be. Stung particularly by Böcler's remarks, Pufendorf returned to the Stoics and there discovered a via media between Hobbes's pessimism and Grotius's optimism: a synthesis anticipating Kant's doctrine of "unsocial sociability." For the purposes of Hochstrasser's study, the key aspects of Pufendorf's solution are these: first, it avoids mere voluntarism; second, it does this by means of a moral epistemology that sharply distinguishes natural law [End Page 126] from moral theology; finally, the validating criterion for Pufendorf's first principles is located in critical appropriation of the history of moral philosophy. These were to be hallmarks of Pufendorf's school.On the first and second points, Hochstrasser seems to me substantively correct, though I think he misunderstands the nature of Pufendorf's escape from mere voluntarism and thereby underplays the religious dimensions of Pufendorf's theory. Among recent Anglo-American commentators on Pufendorf, only Robert Adams has in my view properly construed Pufendorf's thought: that it involves a command theory of obligation proper, but posits the natural advantageousness of some hierarchies as a buttress against mere voluntarism. Hochstrasser is thus right to insist, against Leibniz, that Pufendorf's account of obligation is coherent. But he is wrong to suggest that "there was nothing in Pufendorf's theory... to oblige him to introduce fear of punishment by a superior... " (105). He is... (shrink)

Naturalistic explanations for religious beliefs, in the form of the cognitive science of religion, have become increasingly popular in the contemporary sphere of philosophy and theology. Some...

Century has requested me to answer for his readers. I comply; but, to be frank, I find it a difficult task. If the editor or one of his contributors had only suggested a reason why I should be anything other than an Anarchist, I am sure I should have no difficulty in disputing the argument. And does not this very fact, after all, furnish in itself the best of all reasons why I should be an Anarchist – namely, the impossibility (...) of discovering any good reason for being anything else? To show the invalidity of the claims of State Socialism, Nationalism, Communism, Single taxism, the prevailing capitalism, and all the numerous forms of Archism existing or proposed, is at the same blow to show the validity of the claims of Anarchism. Archism once denied, only Anarchism can be affirmed. That is a matter of logic. (shrink)

Experience has shown that the application of ethical guidelines developed for research in developed countries to research in developing countries can be, and often is, impractical and raises a number of contentious issues. Various attempts have been made to provide guidelines more appropriate to the developing world context; however, to date these efforts have been dominated by the fields of bioscience, medical research and nutrition. There is very little advice available for those seeking to undertake collaborative social science or natural (...) science research in developing countries and what is there tends to be held within disparate sources. Charting the development of a set of ethics documentation for future use by the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) programme research community, this paper outlines past and present attitudes towards ethics procedures amongst this community and suggests ways in which ethics procedures might be made more relevant and user-friendly to researchers working in this area. (shrink)

The article scrutinises the semantics of canonical property designators of the forms ‘the property of being F’ and ‘F-ness’. First it is argued that, as their form suggests, the former are definite definitions, albeit of a special sort. Secondly, the prima facie plausible classification of the latter as proper names (which is often met in philosophical writings) is rejected. The semantics of such terms is developed and it is shown how its proper understanding yields important consequences about the concepts expressed (...) by these terms. (shrink)

Though much philosophical and theological debate centres on various aspects of religious life, the very definition of a religious life in any given tradition is often unclear. This paper focuses on Christianity and asks, what does it mean to be a Christian? Kierkegaard‟s authorship offers an insightful conception of Christian being. An ontological account of being in „correct relation‟ and an ethical imperative to imitate Christ and love one‟s neighbour constitute Kierkegaard‟s idea of what it means to be a Christian. (...) This paper will also discuss whether Kierkegaard over-emphasises the individual aspect of religious life at the expense of the communal aspect. What will be affirmed throughout is that Kierkegaard‟s ontological and ethical conception of Christian being illuminates the issue today as it did for 19th century Danish religion. (shrink)

Bioconvergence is a growing area within the evolving bioeconomy that seeks out synergistic opportunities at the intersection of engineering and the life sciences (Greenbaum 2023). One example is th...

us, I go at once to the heart of the subject, taking my stand on these propositions: That the right to cooperate is as unquestionable as the right to compete; that the right to compete involves the right to refrain from competition; that co operation is often a method of competition, and that competition is always, in the larger view, a method of co operation; that each is a legitimate, orderly, non invasive exercise of the individual will under the social (...) law of equal liberty; and that any man or institution attempting to prohibit or restrict either, by legislative enactment or by any form of invasive force, is, in so far as such man or institution may fairly be judged by such attempt, an enemy of liberty, an enemy of progress, an enemy of society, and an enemy of the human race. (shrink)

What is the status of the dichotomy proposed and the nosological validity of the contrasting pathologies described in the target article? How plausibly can dysregulated imprinting explain the array of features described, compared with other genetic models? We believe that considering alternative models is more likely to lead in the long term to the correct classification and explanation of the component behaviours.