Using a base of philosophical athropology, this article suggests that an ethical analysis of persuasion must include not just the logic human response, but culture and experience as well. The authors propose potential maxims for ethical behavior in advertising and public relations and applies them to two case studies, political advertising and the Bridgestone/Firestone controversy.

This article traces the competing meanings of "master narrative" in current theoretical debates over history and culture. The phrase "master or meta narrative" has grown popular for describing stories which seem to assimilate different cultures into a single course of history dominated by the West. Master narrative, like its predecessors Universal History and speculative philosophy of history, has become something to avoid. But our increasingly global situations demand stories that can describe and explain the worldwide interactions of diverse cultures and (...) communities. From this convergence--a growing wariness of global stories coupled with situations which seem to demand them--has emerged a popular new double plot of world history in which cultural differentiation and cultural homogenization go hand in hand. The development has led to some surprising homologies and contrasts among the new histories created by thinkers from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-François Lyotard to James Clifford and Francis Fukuyama. But our new "postmodern" distinctions between master and local narratives have carried over the venerable antinomy of people with and without history, and the search for timeless formal principles differentiating "historical" and "nonhistorical" modes of discourse and ways of being threatens to create new varieties of essentialism. (shrink)

Complex tensions define us, and that is why rational evaluative analysis and the deliberate application of principles to cases can, at best, claim to account for only a limited register in the full compass of ethical voice. Close analysis of brief texts from the "Mencius" and Dante's "Inferno" discloses in both an approach to ethical reflection that aims to expand the capacity for virtue, the ethical skillfulness exercised in response and evaluation, through affective engagement of the reader. This approach, a (...) kind of "re- flexive tropology," may involve us in a Han-tan walk. Nevertheless, if virtue and models of the self are interconnected, then right self-understanding is where the foundations of virtue are laid. Because the religious orientation calls into question the false fixities that inform ordinary activities and ordi- nary models of the self, it is crucial to the work of distinguishing among true and false forms of virtue. (shrink)

James K. A. Smith’s Awaiting the King is the most effective popularization of Augustine’s political thought currently available, but its reliance on the work of Oliver O’Donovan obscures uncomfortable elements of Augustine’s thought, and it does not adequately address how the racial and socioeconomic composition of Christian communities is itself formative.

A social responsibility (SR) theory of the press has emerged in various democratic societies worldwide since World War II. The Hutchins Commission in the United States is the source of this paradigm in some cases, but a similar emphasis on serving society rather than commerce or government has also arisen in parallel fashion without any connection to Hutchins. Professionalism and codes of professional ethics are too narrow to serve as the framework for a global SR paradigm of the 21st century. (...) Instead, universal ethical principles are the most appropriate framework, and the cross-cultural axis around which these principles revolve is the sacredness of human life. Embedded in the protonorm of human sacredness are such ethical principles as human dignity, truthtelling, and nonmaleficence. These principles are citizen ethics rather than professional ethics; they are set in the social domain where SR gets its rationale. They provide a frame of reference internationally for assessing local news media practices and formulating codes of ethics. (shrink)

This new translation of _De Novo Hierosolyma Et Ejus Doctrina Coelesti_ by Emanuel Swedenborg presents the ideas of this Swedish visionary in simple, modern English. In the short work, Swedenborg discusses our motivations and inner natures, love and selfishness, and ways in which we can develop ourselves as spiritual people. He also covers different aspects of religion, such as the Bible, observances like baptism and the Holy Supper, the nature of heaven and hell, and how we can apply all these (...) ideas to our daily lives. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently proposed several alleged cases of “knowledge from falsehood,” i.e., cases of inferential knowledge epistemised by an inference with a false crucial premise. This paper examines such cases and argues against interpreting them as cases of knowledge from falsehood. Specifically, I argue that the inferences in play in such cases are in no position to epistemise their conclusions.

According to the Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts, we can understand concepts in terms of norms or rules that bind those who apply them, and the application of a concept requires that the concept-user be sensitive to the norms governing its application. But this view faces some serious objections. In particular, according to Rosen, Glüer and Wikforss, this view leads to a vicious regress of norms. The purpose of this paper is to defend a version of the Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts (...) against this objection. I argue that we can deal with this problem along the lines of a coherentist account of justification. (shrink)

Capturing the essence of the origin and evolution of the so-called "degeneracy debates," over whether the flora and fauna of America (including Native ...

Securities lending has been a lucrative business for mutual funds and exchange-traded funds over the past decade. Unfortunately for investors, the sponsors of these funds have not been very transparent with the details of their securities lending programs, and consequently most investors in these funds are unaware of their exposure to the risks inherent in securities lending. Interestingly, most funds do not return the full profits from securities lending activities to their investors. In this paper, we examine and discuss the (...) ethical considerations related to the securities lending activities of mutual funds and ETFs and offer a series of best practices that we believe will provide better transparency of these activities to fund investors. (shrink)

Some cases show that counterfactual conditionals (‘counterfactuals’ for short) are inherently ambiguous, equivocating between forward-tracking and backtracking counterfactu- als. Elsewhere, I have proposed a causal modeling semantics, which takes this phenomenon to be generated by two kinds of causal manipulations. (Lee 2015; Lee 2016) In an important paper (Hiddleston 2005), Eric Hiddleston offers a different causal modeling semantics, which he claims to be able to explain away the inherent ambiguity of counterfactuals. In this paper, I discuss these two semantic treatments (...) and argue that my (bifurcated) semantics is theoretically more promising than Hiddleston’s (unified) semantics. (shrink)

It has been a popular theory in English, Japanese, and Chinese scholarship that a “victory of Confucianism” occurred during the Han dynasty. Some members of these academic communities challenge this theory. However, it has long been overlooked that they do so by adopting different terminology and research frameworks. English scholarship uses the expression “victory/triumph of Confucianism” to refer to the dominance or growth of Confucianism during that period, while the Japanese use “the establishment of Confucian doctrine/religion as the state doctrine/religion” (...) and the Chinese use “dismissing the hundred schools and revering only the Confucian arts”. The expressions, as the current issue illustrates, exemplify three different ways of studying the history of Han Confucianism. (shrink)

Baudrillard's fatalism could be interpreted as a unique synthesis of poststructuralism and Eastern philosophy. It may be construed as an effort to integrate the critique of the political economy of the sign with a romantic anthropology of symbolic exchange that is partly influenced by Taoist philosophy. As a whole, it comprises a type of countercultural response to a burgeoning simulacral order. This is a response that draws upon some aspects of Taoist thought because it ideally provides a non-Marxist approach to (...) the critique of the sign, but is insufficiently developed to consider the problem of agency in Taoist non-causal action. This paper surveys the general direction of Baudrillard's writings and suggests possible areas of research emerging from the ambiguities of fatal theory. (shrink)

It is usual to read nomina, with which three interpretations are possible. The stronger arrogates to himself the titles of moderation and justice. So in the excellent Rumanian translation of 1871 by Gavrilu J. Munteanu: ‘Cându are sâ decida pumnulu, celu mai tare si atribue titlu de moderatu şi de onestu.’.

Eric Voegelin’s Asian Political Thought brings together scholars from both Asia and the West to reflect upon the political philosopher’s thought about China, Japan, Korea, Central Asia, and India, showing how Voegelin’s approach can illuminate the region but also what are the possibilities that Asia offers in the twentieth-first century.

According to a Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts, we can understand concepts in terms of norms or rules that bind those who apply them, and the use of a concept requires that the concept-user be sensitive to the relevant conceptual norms. Recently, Ginsborg raises two important objections against this view. According to her, the normativity Brandom ascribes to concepts lacks the internalist or first-person character of normativity that Kant’s view demands, and the relevant normativity belongs properly not to concepts as such, (...) but rather to belief or assertion. The purpose of this paper is to defend a Kantian-Brandomian view of concepts against these objections. (shrink)