Can business ethics textbooks and modules prepare business students to manage ethical challenges if they bypass students’ personal ethics? This paper is an academic reflection by a Higher Education, business ethics tutor in the UK and Ireland. It charts a pedagogic journey of moving away from lecturing based on the contents of the standard, “impersonal”, business ethics textbook, to moving towards facilitating interaction among students about their ethics in all parts of life, and especially “at work” in their part-time employment. (...) The rationale for this pedagogic shift is supported by excerpts from Journal of Business Ethics Education (JBEE) articles and by current, UK, Higher Education (HE), quality frameworks. Qualitative student feedback on their experience of this more personal design of a business ethics module is included. Ten exercise suggestions and resources are offered. Business ethics textbook authors and tutors are recommended to begin their content with exercises in personal ethics. (shrink)

The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) organelle is the key intracellular site of both protein and lipid biosynthesis. ER dysfunction, termed ER stress, can result in protein accretion within the ER and cell death; a pathophysiological process contributing to a range of metabolic diseases and cancers. ER stress leads to the activation of a protective signalling cascade termed the Unfolded Protein Response (UPR). However, chronic UPR activation can ultimately result in cellular apoptosis. Emerging evidence suggests that cells undergoing ER stress and UPR (...) activation can release extracellular signals that can propagate UPR activation to target tissues in a cell non‐autonomous signalling mechanism. Separately, studies have determined that the UPR plays a key regulatory role in the biosynthesis of bioactive signalling lipids including sphingolipids and ceramides. Here we weigh the evidence to combine these concepts and propose that during ER stress, UPR activation drives the biosynthesis of ceramide lipids, which are exported and function as cell non‐autonomous signals to propagate UPR activation in target cells and tissues. (shrink)

he World Wide Web is not just an electronic display of text and information. To navigate the WWW, readers need to make decisions about how to pursue and translate their decisions into physical actions. The Web is an interface. -/- Because the WWW shares common ground with both papertext writing and with software interfaces, theories and research from interface design, human-computer interaction, and cognitive science can be used to improve web page interfaces and make the design and presentation of information (...) more effective and usable for the reader. -/- One important similarity between writing and interface design is that both emphasize the need for a thorough audience analysis to determine the tasks, goals, and needs of the reader or user. Writers can apply their knowledge of techniques used to focus their writing on the needs of the user, such as reader analysis and reader-response criticisms, to the interface of the WWW document. (shrink)

First, we question whether Cramer et al.'s proposed network model can provide a viable scientific foundation for investigating comorbidity without invoking latent variables in some form. Second, the authors' claim that the network perspective is radically different from a latent variable perspective rests upon an undemonstrated premise. Without being demonstrated, we think the premise is potentially misleading.

This edition includes, in addition to the most pertinent sections of The Fable's two volumes, a selection from Mandeville's An Enquiry into the Origin of Honor and selections from two of Mandeville's most important sources: Pierre Bayle and the Jansenist Pierre Nicole. Hundert's Introduction places Mandeville in a number of eighteenth-century debates--particularly that of the nature and morality of commercial modernity--and underscores the degree to which his work stood as a central problem, not only for his immediate English contemporaries, but (...) for such philosophers as Hume, Rousseau, and Kant. The selections are substantive enough to faithfully represent Mandeville the social theorist, and compact enough to be used in courses that can afford to spend no more than a week on his work. (shrink)

These lectures outline the project of a general organology, which is to say an account of life when it is no longer just biological but technical, or when it involves not just organic matter but organized inorganic matter. This organology is also shown to require a modified Simondonian account of the shift from vital individuation to a three-stranded process of psychic, collective and technical individuation. Furthermore, such an approach involves extending the Derridean reading of Socrates's discussion of writing as a (...) pharmakon, so that it becomes a more general account of the pharmacological character of retention and protention. By going back to Leroi-Gourhan, we can recognize that this also means pursuing the history of retentional modifications unfolding in the course of the history of what, with Lotka, can also be called exosomatization. It is thus a question of how exteriorization can, today, in an epoch when it becomes digital, and in an epoch that produces vast amounts of entropy at the thermodynamic, biological and noetic levels, still possibly produce new forms of interiorization, that is, new forms of thought, care and desire, amounting to so many chances to struggle against the planetary-scale pharmacological crisis with which we are currently afflicted. (shrink)

In the aftermath of the First World War, the poet Paul Valéry wrote of a "crisis of spirit", brought about by the instrumentalization of knowledge and the destructive subordination of culture to profit. Recent events demonstrate all too clearly that the stock of mind, or spirit, continues to fall. The economy is toxically organized around the pursuit of short-term gain, supported by an infantilizing, dumbed-down media. Advertising technologies make relentless demands on our attention, reducing us to idiotic beasts, no longer (...) capable of living. Spiralling rates of mental illness show that the fragile life of the mind is at breaking point. Underlying these multiple symptoms is consumer capitalism, which systematically immiserates those whom it purports to liberate. Returning to Marxʹs theory, Stiegler argues that consumerism marks a new stage in the history of proletarianization. It is no longer just labour that is exploited, pushed below the limits of subsistence, but the desire that is characteristic of human spirit. The cure to this malaise is to be found in what Stiegler calls a "pharmacology of the spirit". Here, pharmacology has nothing to do with the chemical supplements developed by the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmakon, defined as both cure and poison, refers to the technical objects through which we open ourselves to new futures, and thereby create the spirit that makes us human. By reference to a range of figures, from Socrates, Simondon and Derrida to the child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, Stiegler shows that technics are both the cause of our suffering and also what makes life worth living. -- Publisher description. (shrink)

Conscious perception, like the sight of a coffee cup, seems to involve the brain identifying a stimulus. But conscious input activates more brain regions than are needed to identify coffee cups and faces. It spreads beyond sensory cortex to frontoparietal association areas, which do not serve stimulus identification as such. What is the role of those regions? Parietal cortex support the ‘first person perspective’ on the visual world, unconsciously framing the visual object stream. Some prefrontal areas select and interpret conscious (...) events for executive control. Such functions can be viewed as properties of the subject, rather than the object, of experience – the ‘observing self’ that appears to be needed to maintain the conscious state. (shrink)

Intentionalism is the claim that the phenomenological properties of a perceptual experience supervene on its intentional properties. The paper presents a counter-example to this claim, one that concerns visual grouping phenomenology. I argue that this example is superior to superficially similar examples involving grouping phenomenology offered by Peacocke (Sense and Content, Oxford: Oxford University Press), because the standard intentionalist responses to Peacocke’s examples cannot be extended to mine. If Intentionalism fails, it is impossible to reduce the phenomenology of an experience (...) to its content. (shrink)

This is a detailed, sophisticated and comprehensive treatment of autonomy. Moreover it argues for a quite different conception of autonomy from that found in the philosophical literature. Professor Berofsky claims that the idea of autonomy originating in the self is a seductive but ultimately illusory one. The only serious way of approaching the subject is to pay due attention to psychology, and to view autonomy as the liberation from the disabling effects of physiological and psychological afflictions. A sustained critique of (...) concepts such as moral autonomy, self-realisation, ideal autonomy, and identification is offered. The author replaces these with an alternative model that reveals how spontaneity, vitality and competence enable human beings to act in the real world. (shrink)

How I became a philosopher -- To love, to love me, to love us.

Today’s question concerning technology involves asking about both the post-pandemic world and the post-data-economy world, in a situation where resentments and scapegoats are easily generated. We c...

This article addresses the question under what conditions it is still possible to think in today’s era of the Anthropocene, in which the human has become the key factor in the evolution of the biosphere, considering the fact, structurally neglected by philosophy, that thinking is thoroughly conditioned by a technical milieu of retentional dispositives. The Anthropocene results from modern technology’s domination of the earth through industrialization that is currently unfolding as a process of generalized, digital automation, which tends to eliminate (...) reflection and to block any genuine questioning of its own development, producing a state of generalized entropy at all levels—ecological, psychic, social, economic, and, in particular, the noetic or thinking. The radical undermining of the very possibility of thinking and questioning, thought by Martin Heidegger in terms of Enframing, should be understood as a pharmacological situation that calls for a therapeutic reversal of the toxicity of current digital technologies into a remedial instrument for realizing a negentropic turn beyond the Anthropocene and toward the Neganthropocene. This requires that thinking starts to understand itself as caring, i.e., as a taking care of itself by taking care of the technical pharmaka that thoroughly constitute and condition it and that can render human life as noetic life both deeply unlivable and profoundly worthwhile. (shrink)

We argue that emotion cannot only be conceived of as a short-lived and intrapersonal phenomenon. Rather, based on five theoretical arguments, we propose that the social sharing of an emotional experience forms an integral part of the emotional processes. A series of six studies investigated different aspects of this hypothesis. Study 1 showed that an overwhelming majority of people reported sharing their emotional experiences and that the memories of these experiences tended to come back spontaneously to their consciousness. No difference (...) was found among emotions. Using a different procedure, Studies 2 and 3 replicated these findings in two different populations. In addition, these studies provided indications that women share their experiences with a wider array of individuals than do men. The first three studies did not find any differences among emotions, but they did not include shame. It could be argued that people are less inclined to socially share shame experiences which are typically elicited by breaking social rules. Study 4 specifically investigated this hypothesis. No differences among shame and other emotions were found except for the delay of the first sharing of the experience. Study 5 constituted a first investigation of whether the social sharing of emotion is also a significant process in now Western cultures. A comparison between Dutch and Surinamese people failed to reveal any significant difference. Based on the findings of the first five studies, a correlational model was designed in Study 6. It tested the interrelationships among disruptiveness of the emotion, social sharing, mental rumination, and recovery from the emotion disruption. A coherent pattern of findings emerged, showing that social sharing can be conceived as a bi-dimensional concept defined by features of amount and delay of sharing. In addition, both social sharing and mental rumination varied according to the disruptiveness of the emotion. Surprisingly, however, recovery could not be related to social sharing, mental rumination, or to the time elapsed since the episode. (shrink)

The cybernetic definition of a living individual proposed previously (Korzeniewski, 2001) is very abstract and therefore describes the essence of life in a very formal and general way. In the present article this definition is reformulated in order to determine clearly the relation between life in general and a living individual in particular, and it is further explained and defended. Next, the cybernetic definition of a living individual is confronted with the real world. It is demonstrated that numerous restrictions imposed (...) on the cybernetic definition of life by physical reality imply a number of particular properties of life that characterize present life on Earth, namely: (1) a living individual must be a dissipative structure (and therefore a low-entropy thermodynamic system out of the state of equilibrium); (2) spontaneously-originated life must be based on organic compounds; (3) evolutionarily stable self-dependent, free-living individuals must have some minimal level of complexity of structure and function; (4) a living individual must have a record of identity separated from an executive machinery; (5) the identity of living individuals must mutate and may evolve; (6) living individuals may collect and accumulate information in subsequent generations over very long periods of time; (7) the degree of complexity of a living individual reflects the degree of complexity of its environment (ecological niche) and (8) living individuals are capable of supple adaptation to varying environmental conditions. Thus, the cybernetic definition of a living individual, when confronted with the real physical world, generates most of the general properties of the present life on Earth. (shrink)

Williamson (2000) [Knowledge and its Limits, Oxford: Oxford University Press] argues that attempts to substitute narrow mental states or narrow/environmental composites for broad and factive mental states will result in poorer explanations of behavior. I resist Williamson.

A revision of the author's thesis, Columbia University, 1963.

Recently at the J. Craig Venter Institute, a microorganism has been created through synthetic biology. In the future, more complex living beings will very probably be produced. In our natural environment, we live amongst a whole variety of beings. Some of them have moral status — they have a moral importance and we cannot treat them in just any way we please —; some do not. When it becomes possible to create artificially living beings who naturally possess moral status, will (...) this artificiality modify their status? Many people contend that it will, but I am not of the same mind and will develop three arguments against it. (shrink)

For some decades, the concept of human dignity has been widely discussed in bioethical literature. Some authors think that this concept is central to questions of respect for human beings, whereas others are very critical of it. It should be noted that, in these debates, dignity is one component of a long-lasting and widespread conceptual construct used to support a stance on the ethical question of the moral status of an action or being. This construct has been used from Modernity (...) onward to condemn slavery and torture as violations of human dignity. In spelling it out, we can come to a better understanding of what “dignity” means and become aware that there exists a quite useful place for this notion in our ethical thought, albeit a modest one. (shrink)

I present evidence that humans have evolved convergently to social insects with regard to a large suite of social, ecological, and reproductive phenotypes. Convergences between humans and social insects include: (1) groups with genetically and environmentally defined structures; (2) extensive divisions of labor; (3) specialization of a relatively restricted set of females for reproduction, with enhanced fertility; (4) extensive extramaternal care; (5) within-group food sharing; (6) generalized diets composed of high-nutrient-density food; (7) solicitous juveniles, but high rates of infanticide; (8) (...) ecological dominance; (9) enhanced colonizing abilities; and (10) collective, cooperative decision-making. Most of these convergent phenotypic adaptations stem from reorganization of key life-history trade-offs due to behavioral, physiological, and life-historical specializations. Despite their extensive socioreproductive overlap with social insects, humans differ with regard to the central aspect of eusociality: reproductive division of labor. This difference may be underpinned by the high energetic costs of producing offspring with large brains. (shrink)

In the case of an actual proper name such as ‘Aristotle’ opinions as to the Sinn may differ. It might, for instance, be taken to be the following: the pupil of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. Anybody who does this will attach another Sinn to the sentence ‘Aristotle was born in Stagira’ than will a man who takes as the Sinn of the name: the teacher of Alexander the Great who was born in Stagira. So long as the (...) Bedeutung remains the same, such variations of Sinn may be tolerated, although they are to be avoided.. (shrink)

The 3rd batch of 6 books in this series on the Greatest Philosophers by acclaimed specialists writing for the General reader. From Aristotle to Wittgenstein, from Democritus to Derrida, this series provides a lucid and consise survey of philosophers ancient and modern. Each volume is by an acknowledged expert briefed to address the adventurous but non specialist reader.

Among the four components proposed by Sbarra and Coan to guide the research aimed at understanding the role of emotion in the connection between social relationship and health, I view the fourth one, labeled “transactional dimensions,” as offering particularly rich promises in this regard. To illustrate, I sketch the example of individual, interpersonal, and collective effects entailed by the process of social sharing of emotion. The example rests on the bidirectional flow of transactions that develops continuously between these three levels.

Two main schemes explain how a system adapts to its environment. Evolutionary models are grounded on three usual processes (variation, transmission, selection) acting at the population level. Learning models are concerned with the endogenous search for a better performance at the individual level. The first ones were initially favored by biology and the second well illustrated by game theory. The article examines first how game theory went to evolution and how biology later considered learning. It shows some examples of a (...) hybrid use of models of each type. It finally proposes a common framework for both types of models. (shrink)