An important thinker who contributed to eighteenth-century debates in epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, Catharine Trotter Cockburn pursued the life of a dramatist and essayist, despite the prevailing social, cultural, and moral prescriptions of her day. Cockburn’s philosophical writings were polemical pieces in defence of such philosophers as John Locke and Samuel Clarke, in which she grappled with the moral and theological questions that concerned them and produced her own unique answers to those questions. Her works are interesting both for (...) their approach to philosophical issues that continue to be debated today and for the way that they inform our understanding of the early-modern period. (shrink)

An important factor that leads governments to engage in public service contracts with nonprofit organizations is the belief that they share similar ethical and value orientations that will allow governments to reduce monitoring costs. However the notion of the existence of similarities in ethical climate has not been systematically examined. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ethical climate in government and nonprofit sectors and to determine the extent to which similarities (and differences) exist in ethical climate dimensions. (...) Using survey data and structural equation modeling technique, the factor structure equivalence and measurement invariance of the ethical climate in the two sectors are tested. Results indicate that while there is a significant overlap in shared perception of ethical climate dimensions, there are also key differences between the two sectors. The outcome of this research provides important preliminary insights for public policy makers in government to better understand the implications of using the nonprofit sector for service delivery. (shrink)

While pain is common among seniors, it is not adequately treated or managed. In particular, pain in seniors with dementia is often undertreated and undermanaged. Although the undertreatment of pain among persons with cognitive impairments represents a serious ethical concern for pain clinicians, most writers in the area explain the undertreatment of pain by focusing on issues related to liability, fears of addiction to opioids, and erroneous beliefs that pain is a normal part of the ageing process. We argue that (...) the philosophical notion of personhood must also be given careful attention when considering the problem of pain undermanagement. In this paper, we consider the undertreatment of pain among seniors with dementia, while focusing on the ontology of relationships and on existential philosophy. Moreover, we outline a series of recommendations to help minimize the probability of pain undertreatment in this population and to encourage considerations relating to personhood when treating people with dementia. (shrink)

Understanding a work of representational art involves more than simply grasping what it represents. We can distinguish at least three types of content that representational works may possess. First, all representational works have explicit representational content. This includes the literal content of a linguistic work and the depictive content of a pictorial work. Second, they often have a conveyed content, which outstrips their explicit representational content, including much that is merely implicit in the work, and may exclude certain aspects of (...) explicit representational content, as when explicit representational content is used for nonliteral forms of representation such as irony, metaphor, symbolism, or allegory. It is part of the conveyed content of Bruegel's The Fall of Icarus (c. 1560) that Icarus has just fallen from the sky, although the landscape does not depict his fall. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to apply Aristotle''s theory of causation to the administrative realm in an attempt to provide the manager/student with a more complete basis for organizational analysis. The authors argue that the traditional approach to administrative case studies limits the manager''s/student''s perspective to the positivistic world view at the expense of a more encompassing perspective which can be achieved through the use of an Aristotelian approach. Aristotle''s four-part theory of causation is juxtaposed with contemporary views of (...) organizational ideology/philosophy, culture, climate and leadership, and staff or personnel. The Mazda automobile plant in Flat Rock, Michigan is provided as a sample case study to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the Aristotelian method in organizational contexts. (shrink)

This chapter examines the concepts of respect, self‐respect, and mastery and servitude to show that Wong does nothing wrong, and in fact something exceedingly noble, in dedicating his life to the service of Doctor Stephen Strange. Manservants and butlers are a notable element of comic book stories. Batman has Alfred, Iron Man and the Avengers have Jarvis, and of course, Doctor Strange has Wong. Wong's servitude leads to a more robust self‐consciousness and awareness of the world, and self‐consciousness is an (...) important foundation for self‐respect, which defeats any accusation of servility. Through his work for Doctor Strange, Wong better understands himself and the role he plays in protecting the world, which in turn makes him more aware of why he is worthy of respect and why the world is worth saving. (shrink)

Within any organization (e.g. a hospital or clinic) the perception of the way things operate may vary dramatically as a function of one’s location in the organizational hierarchy as well as one’s professional discipline. Interorganizational variability depends on organizational coherence, safety, and stability. In this four-nation (Canada, Ireland, Australia, and Korea) qualitative study of 42 nurses, we explored their perception of how ethical decisions are made, the nurses’ hospital role, and the extent to which their voices were heard. These nurses (...) suggested that their voices were silenced (often voluntarily) or were not expressed in terms of ethical decision making. Finally, they perceived that their approach to ethical decision making differed from physicians. (shrink)

The aim of this book is to provide a unified solution to a wide range of philosophical problems raised by fiction. While some of these problems have been the focus of extensive philosophical debate, others have received insufficient attention. In particular, the epistemology of fiction has not yet attracted the philosophical scrutiny it warrants. There has been considerable discussion of what determines the contents of works of fiction, but there have been few attempts to explain how audiences identify their contents, (...) or to identify the norms governing the correct understanding and interpretation of works of fiction. -/- This book answers a wide range of both metaphysical and epistemological questions concerning fiction in a way that clarifies the relations between them. The metaphysical questions include: What distinguishes works of fiction from works of non-fiction?; What is the nature of fictive utterances?; What determines the contents of works of fiction?; What kinds of fictive content are there?; How broad in scope is fictive content?; and What kinds of things are fictional entities? The epistemological questions include: How do audiences identify the contents of authors’ fictive utterances?; How does understanding a work of fiction differ from interpreting it?; and What role does thinking and talking about fiction from an external perspective play in enabling communication through fiction? It develops the first single theory that provides answers to all these questions. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is what, in Art and Illusion, Gombrich calls "the riddle of style". This is the problem of why people at different times and in different cultures have depicted objects in very different ways. An adequate solution to this problem will comprise an explanation of why depiction has a history. The problem seems intractable because of three common assumptions about the history of depiction that, while independently plausible, are inconsistent. First, we assume that this history is (...) a history of realism. Artists from a wide range of cultures and ages seem to have shared the common goal of capturing the visual appearances of the objects they depicted. Secondly, we assume that depictive styles differ from context to context in part because of features internal to the contexts in which they emerged. Finally, we are loathe to accept the claim that differences of style necessarily result from differences in technical capacity. However, these assumptions are in conflict. If artists throughout history sought to capture the appearances of the things they depicted and did not differ markedly in their technical capacities, then surely the pictures each produced should not depend on features internal to the contexts in which they emerged and should instead look more alike. -/- I argue that the history of style is not, in its entirety, a history of realism. Throughout history, pictures have been used to inform viewers about a wide variety of things other than their objects' appearances. Investigating the purposes for which pictures were used in particular historical and cultural contexts will help us to understand why certain styles were appropriate to those contexts. Nevertheless, it will not help us to understand why certain styles were appropriate to just one among a number of contexts in which pictures were used for a single purpose. To understand this, we need to know what cognitive environment was shared by the members of the relevant community. This will enable us to understand why, given the purpose for which pictures were used in that community, a certain style was more informative than another. In addition to cataloguing stylistic changes, therefore, the historian of art has two further tasks: to investigate both the various purposes for which pictures have been used and the cognitive environments of those who used them. (shrink)

Through discourse with international groups of physicians, we conducted a cross-cultural analysis of the types of ethical dilemmas physicians face. Qualitative analysis was used to categorise the dilemmas into seven themes, which we compared among the physicians by country of practice. These themes were a-theoretically-driven and grounded heavily within the text. We then subjected the dilemmas to an analysis of moral intensity, which represents an important theoretical perspective of ethical decision making. These constructs represent salient determinants of ethical behaviour and (...) our cross-cultural sample afforded us the opportunity to consider both the pragmatic aspects of culture, as they are perceived by physicians, as well as the theory-driven concept of moral intensity. By examining both culture and moral intensity, we hope to better elucidate the complexities of ethical decision-making determinants among physicians in their daily practice. Doing so may potentially have practical implications for ethics training of medical students and foreign physicians. (shrink)

Like every great word, “representation/s “ is a stew. A scrambled menu, it serves up several meanings at once. For a representation can be an image—visual, verbal, or aural. Think of a picture of a hat. A representation can also be a narrative, a sequence of images and ideas. Think of the sentence, “Nancy Reagan wore a hat when she visited a detoxification clinic in Florida.” Or, a representation can be the product of ideology, that vast scheme for showing forth (...) the world and justifying its dealings. Think of the sentence, “Nancy Reagan, in her hat, is a proper woman.” In the past twenty years, feminist thinking about representation has broken apart. This fracture is both cause and symptom of the larger collapse of a feminist cultural consensus. Some of the rifts have been thematic. That is to be represented? Others have been theoretical. What is the nature of representation itself? I wish to map these rifts, especially those in the United States, and to wonder about the logic of a new cultural consensus.In the late 1960s, feminists began to share a cultural consensus about the representation of women and gender. Few who built up that consensus were village idiots. Even without being semioticians, everyone more or less knew that the marriages between the signifier and the signified in that odd couple, the sign, were ones of convenience. Everyone more or less knew that the marriages between the sign and the referent, that hubbub out there, or somewhere, were also ones of convenience. Some survived. Others were obsolete, cold, hostile, ending in separation or divorce. Everyone more or less knew that when I exclaimed, “Nancy Reagan wears a hat,” it was easier for a fellow citizen of my linguistic community to understand me than for a stranger to do so. Nevertheless, the consensus offered a rough, general theory of representation that extolled the possibility of a fit between “reality” and its “description” or “image.” Catharine R. Stimpson is professor of English and dean of the Graduate School at Rutgers University. She is presently at work on a book about Gertrude Stein. (shrink)

In Star Wars: Rebels, Sabine Wren's paintings are more than mere decoration that she slaps onto whatever surface happens to be available, and the Syndulla family's Kalikori is hardly some trinket, as it's passed down generations in memory of a long dead ancestor. Sabine's paintings and the Syndulla's Kalikori have a peculiar quality that people only find in works of art, and yet they don't seem to fit traditional accounts of art in terms of representation, expression, or institutional recognition. Neither (...) Sabine's graffiti nor the Kalikori is representational; collaborative works like the Kalikori are difficult to classify as “expressive”; and both works are excluded from the institutions of the Star Wars artworld. So, according to these accounts, Sabine's graffiti and the Kalikoris are not art. Art is a complex social and psychological phenomenon, depending in equal parts on the intentions and talents of the artist and its reception by audiences in the broader social world. (shrink)

Property is a complex sign in semiotics. It is also the source of tension and conflict in law. This paper examines property in triadic terms consisting of what Charles S. Peirce would identify as the icon (firstness), the index (secondness), and the symbol (thirdness). From this perspective the paper explores the ideas of place, space, and time at the iconic level of the sign of property. Discussion addresses the way in which property serves as a coded system for communicating information (...) about a given community’s values and its cultural-interpretive hierarchy. Much like an aboriginal songline, property functions as a way of imprinting the land with impressions of social ordering related to place, space, and time. In the context of global trade we therefore observe property conflicts which are sometimes not so much about the technical language of property as they are about tensions among the embedded values in competing signs of property. (shrink)

This volume of specially written essays by leading philosophers offers to set the agenda for the philosophy of depiction.

There is a variety of epistemic roles to which photographs are better suited than non-photographic pictures. Photographs provide more compelling evidence of the existence of the scenes they depict than non-photographic pictures. They are also better sources of information about features of those scenes that are easily overlooked. This chapter examines several different attempts to explain the distinctive epistemic value of photographs, and argues that none is adequate. It then proposes an alternative explanation of their epistemic value. The chapter argues (...) that photographs play the epistemic roles they do because they are typically rich sources of depictively encoded information about the scenes they depict, and reliable depictive representations of those scenes. It then explains why photographs differ from non-photographic pictures in both respects. (shrink)

From the time when Friedrich Conrads published1 the first systematic study of the method of composition employed by Vergil in the Aeneid it has been recogmzed that Bk. III. is especially involved in the contradictions existing between the various parts of the poem. It is not my purpose in this paper to attempt an exhaustive study of this aspect of Bk. III.; the industry of classical scholars in the last half-century renders needless further repetition of this sort. I wish merely (...) to present a few suggestions which may help to reconcile the passages generally regarded as hopelessly contradictory. (shrink)

Transcriptional repression and silencing have been strongly associated with hypoacetylation of histones. Accordingly, histone deacetylases, which remove acetyl groups from histones, have been shown to participate in mechanisms of transcriptional repression. Therefore, current models of the role of acetylation in transcriptional regulation focus on the acetylation status of histones and designate histone acetyltransferases, which add acetyl groups to histones, as transcriptional coactivators and histone deacetylases as corepressors. In recent years, an accumulation of studies have shown that these enzymes also target (...) non‐histone proteins and that histone deacetylases have clear roles as coactivators at a variety of genes, some of which are key regulators of cell growth and survival. This review summarizes the evidence for histone deacetylases as coactivators and provides models of coactivation mechanisms, some of which integrate roles of acetylated histones and non‐histone proteins in transcription. BioEssays 30:15–24, 2008. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

However, Stein's self-images are more than appropriations of a male identity and masculine interests. Several of them are irrelevant to categories of sex and gender. In part, Stein is an obsessive psychologist, a Euclid of behavior, searching for "bottom natures," the substratum of individuality. She also tries to diagram psychic genotypes, patterns into which all individuals might fit. Although she plays with femaleness/maleness as categories, she also investigates an opposition of impetuousness and passivity, fire and phlegm; a variety of regional (...) and national types; and the dualism of the "dependent independent," who tends to resist. In part, as she puzzles her way towards knowing and understanding, she presents herself as engaged in aural and oral acts, listening and hearing before speaking and telling. That sense of perception as physical also emerges in a passage in which she, as perceiver/describer, first incorporates and then linguistically discharges the world: "Mostly always when I am filled up with it I tell it, sometimes I have to tell it, sometimes I like to tell it, sometimes I keep on with telling it."1 · 1. The Making of Americans: Being a History of a Family's Progress , p. 325. Catharine R. Stimpson, associate professor of English at Barnard College, is the editor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and the author of J.R.R. Tolkien as well as other essays and fiction. See also: "Visual Rhetoric in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" by Paul K. Alkon in Vol. 1, No. 4; "Gertrude Stein, the Cone Sisters, and the Puzzle of Female Friendship" by Carolyn Burke in Vol. 8, No. 3. (shrink)

Depiction is the form of representation distinctive of figurative paintings, drawings, and photographs. Accounts of depiction attempt to specify the relation something must bear to an object in order to depict it. Resemblance accounts hold that the notion of resemblance is necessary to the specification of this relation. Several difficulties with such analyses have led many philosophers to reject the possibility of an adequate resemblance account of depiction. This essay outlines these difficulties and argues that current resemblance accounts succumb to (...) them. It then develops an alternative resemblance account, drawing on Grice's account of nonnatural meaning and its role in determining sentence meaning to argue that something depicts an object if it bears intention-based resemblances to the object that jointly capture its overall appearance. In addition to solving the metaphysical problem of what it is for something to depict an object, this account also sheds significant light on the epistemological issue of how we are able to work out that something depicts an object. This essay argues that our ability to work out that something depicts an object results from both our more general ability to identify intentions from the products of communicative behavior and our knowledge of stylistic conventions. This account avoids the difficulties that face rival attempts to analyze depiction in terms of resemblance. It also clarifies and explains the features that distinguish depictive from nondepictive representation. (shrink)