Corporations in the United States have been starting ethics programs for a variety of reasons both active and passive. Ethics officers are being charged with improving both company image and the level of ethical decision-making by employees. Thirty ethics officers from Fortune 500 firms were surveyed to develop a database of their duties and the companies' commitment to ethical standards. The results suggest much is being done, both in the diversity of responses and the similarities of commitment and duties.

The boundaries of the ethical have traditionally coincided with the boundaries of humanity. This, however, is no longer the case. Scientific developments, such as genetic engineering, stem-cell research, cloning, the Human Genome Project, new paleontological evidence, and the rise of neuropsychology call into question the very notion of human being and thus require a new conceptual map for ethical judgment. The contours of this map may be seen to emerge in works of science fiction (SF), which not only vividly dramatize (...) the implications and consequences of new technologies and discoveries, but also exert a powerful influence on culture, creating a feedback loop of images and ideas. This essay focuses on three SF topoi: the human/animal evolutionary boundary; non-biological subjectivity (AI); and the human/alien interaction. It explores each of these topoi in a selection of SF texts, including novels by H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Stephen Baxter, William Gibson, Stanislaw Lem and others, showing how the boundaries of humanity are expanded and then exploded through the radical subversion of the tenets of liberal humanism. (shrink)

This book traces rabbinic thought on the near-universal phenomenon of legal circumventions, finding licit ways to achieve otherwise illegal outcomes. Rabbinic literature does not fully reject or accept loopholing, but instead determine acceptability based on whether their outcome and their process maintain the values and the integrity of the law.

Engaging with the challenging and controversial reading of Spinoza presented by Gilles Deleuze in Expressionism in Philosophy (1968), this book focuses on Deleuze's redeployment of Spinozist concepts within the context of his own philosophical project of constructing a philosophy of difference as an alternative to the Hegelian dialectical philosophy. Duffy demonstrates that a thorough understanding of Deleuze's Spinozism is necessary in order to fully engage with Deleuze's philosophy of difference.

A renaissance in Spinoza studies took place in France at the end of the 1960s, which gave new impetus to the study of Spinoza’s work and continues to have a marked effect on the direction of research in the field today. The effect of this renewed interest and direction did not remain isolated to France but quickly spread across the continent. Although certain of the figures involved in this event have become rather well known in some academic circles, and their (...) work widely read, the details of these developments and the specific texts that contributed to and sustained this new direction in research have remained largely unknown in the English-speaking world. The aim of this essay, therefore, is to provide a survey of this event, to review the background to these developments, to introduce the main protagonists – along with some of the lesser known but equally important figures – and to single out and asses the key texts, their specific focus and their contribution to the new direction in research. (shrink)

The constructivist turn in the study of world politics provides new impetus to studies of the political deliberations of human agents. The co-constitution of agents and structures implies the non-acceptability of accounts that fail to consider the interpretations human agents provide to structural conditions. But neither can we accept the reverse. Studies of the interpretations of political agents should adequately account for the structural constraints on those interpretations. This paper illustrates how easily agency studies can underestimate structural constraints by reference (...) to a most serious and scholarly account of agency in the Vietnam War commitment decisions, Yuen Foong Khong's AnalogiesatWar:Korea,MunichDienBienPhuandtheVietnamDecisionsof1965. The argumentative burden resides with those who offer accounts that hold or imply that agents acted from non-structural motives. (shrink)

In two experiments we demonstrate a substantial cross‐cultural difference in a mnemonic context effect, whereby a magnitude estimate of a simple stimulus such as a line or circle is biased toward the center of the distribution of previously seen instances of the same class. In support of the hypothesis that Asians are more likely than Americans to disperse their attention to both the target stimulus and its mnemonic context, this effect was consistently larger for Japanese than for Americans. Moreover, the (...) cultural difference was attenuated by an experimentally induced belief in class homogeneity that augmented the context effect itself in both cultures. More important, these belief effects happened in the absence of any objective change in stimulus distribution. Implications for sociocultural shaping of cognition are discussed. (shrink)

This article deals with the representation of identical twins in the films Zed and Two Noughts by Peter Greenaway and Dead Ringers by David Cronenberg. It situates the films in a cultural and political context of the 20th-century controversies surrounding the issues of evolution, reproduction and cloning. The article claims that twinship represents the corporeal economy of the Same, whose ideological meanings have been shaped by the history of eugenics and social Darwinism. Identical twinship inscribes a utopia of the perfect, (...) unchanging and self-identical body, opposed to the unpredictability, confusion and contingency of sexual reproduction and evolutionary history. The films under discussion critique the utopian ideology of twinship and its imaginary cancellation of difference as narcissistic and deadly. (shrink)

College students struggle with the switch from thinking of mathematics as a calculation based subject to a problem solving based subject. This book describes how the introduction to proofs course can be taught in a way that gently introduces students to this new way of thinking. This introduction utilizes recent research in neuroscience regarding how the brain learns best. Rather than jumping right into proofs, students are first taught how to change their mindset about learning, how to persevere through difficult (...) problems, how to work successfully in a group, and how to reflect on their learning. With these tools in place, students then learn logic and problem solving as a further foundation. Next various proof techniques such as direct proofs, proof by contraposition, proof by contradiction, and mathematical induction are introduced. These proof techniques are introduced using the context of number theory. The last chapter uses Calculus as a way for students to apply the proof techniques they have learned. (shrink)

Situating narrative: philosophical and theological context -- Ethical being: the storied self as moral agent -- Reconciled being: narrative and pardon -- Pedagogies of pardon in praxis -- Towards a narrative pedagogy of reconciliation -- Ricoeur's legacy: A Praxis of Peace.

Gilles Deleuze’s engagements with mathematics, replete in his work, rely upon the construction of alternative lineages in the history of mathematics, which challenge some of the self imposed limits that regulate the canonical concepts of the discipline. For Deleuze, these challenges provide an opportunity to reconfigure particular philosophical problems – for example, the problem of individuation – and to develop new concepts in response to them. The highly original research presented in this book explores the mathematical construction of Deleuze’s philosophy, (...) as well as addressing the undervalued and often neglected question of the mathematical thinkers who influenced his work. -/- In the wake of Alain Badiou’s recent and seemingly devastating attack on the way the relation between mathematics and philosophy is configured in Deleuze’s work, Simon Duffy offers a robust defence of the structure of Deleuze’s philosophy and, in particular, the adequacy of the mathematical problems used in its construction. By reconciling Badiou and Deleuze’s seeming incompatible engagements with mathematics, Duffy succeeds in presenting a solid foundation for Deleuze’s philosophy, rebuffing the recent challenges against it. -/- Simon B. Duffy is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Yale-NUS College, Singapore, and Honorary Research Associate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney, Australia. He is the author of The Logic of Expression: Quality, Quantity, and Intensity in Spinoza, Hegel and Deleuze (2006). (shrink)

I would like to raise a pressing issue relating to the World Health Organization which should concern the medical profession throughout the UK. The WHO Charter advocates the provision of health to all—as a human right. It is therefore to be regretted that these Charter obligations have not been exercised with respect to Taiwan whose 23 million citizens still cannot benefit from its protection. This democratic country which is a beacon of human rights in Asia, is still excluded from the (...) WHO. It is expected that in 2005 the island will …. (shrink)

Against the background of greatly improved ecumenical relations between the Lutheran and Roman Catholic Churches, this article discusses Catholic scholarship on Martin Luther, from the four centuries after the reformation, when Luther was subject to consistently hostile distortions of his character, to more positive twentieth century approaches by Joseph Lortz and his followers, who saw Luther as a reluctant dissenter, essentially orthodox on the contested issue of Justification, but forced by circumstances to call for the reform of a corrupt and (...) theologically decadent Church. But more recent reformation scholarship has called into question Lortz's negative view of pre-reformation Catholicism, while some post-Lortzian Catholic Luther scholarship has highlighted the reformer's radical departures from Catholic orthodoxy, consequently entailing a less optimistic reading of the doctrinal divisions between Lutherans and Catholics. (shrink)

Of all twentieth century philosophers, it is Gilles Deleuze whose work agitates most forcefully for a worldview privileging becoming over being, difference over sameness; the world as a complex, open set of multiplicities. Nevertheless, Deleuze remains singular in enlisting mathematical resources to underpin and inform such a position, refusing the hackneyed opposition between ‘static’ mathematical logic versus ‘dynamic’ physical world. This is an international collection of work commissioned from foremost philosophers, mathematicians and philosophers of science, to address the wide range (...) of problematics and influences in this most important strand of Deleuze’s thinking. Contributors are Charles Alunni, Alain Badiou, Gilles Châtelet, Manuel DeLanda, Simon Duffy, Robin Durie, Aden Evens, Arkady Plotnitsky, Jean-Michel Salanskis, Daniel Smith and David Webb. (shrink)

In English, two deictic space-time metaphors are in common usage: the Moving Ego metaphor conceptualizes the ego as moving forward through time and the Moving Time metaphor conceptualizes time as moving forward toward the ego . Although earlier research investigating the psychological reality of these metaphors has typically examined spatial influences on temporal reasoning , recent lines of research have extended beyond this, providing initial evidence that personality differences and emotional experiences may also influence how people reason about events in (...) time . In this article, we investigate whether these relationships have force in real life. Building on the effects of individual differences in self-reported conscientiousness and procrastination found by Duffy and Feist , we examined whether, in addition to self-reported conscientiousness and procrastination, there is a relationship between conscientious and procrastinating behaviors and temporal perspective. We found that participants who adopted the Moving Time perspective were more likely to exhibit conscientious behaviors, while those who adopted the Moving Ego perspective were more likely to procrastinate, suggesting that the earlier effects reach beyond the laboratory. (shrink)

The author uses census data to assess the consequences of two alternative theoretical formulations of care work for understanding the intersections of gender, race, and economic inequalities in paid care. The nurturance conceptualization focuses on care as relationship while the reproductive labor framework includes both relational and nonrelational jobs that maintain and reproduce the labor force. An empirical application of both models to the labor market shows that placing increasing theoretical emphasis on nurturant care privileges the experiences of white women (...) and excludes large numbers of very-low-wage workers from consideration. (shrink)

In the introduction to Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change?, editors, Fiona Jenkins and Katrina Hutchison, note that women in many fields of study feel frustrated, hurt, or merely annoyed at some of their experiences in academia. However, they also note something unusual about these feelings when it comes to philosophy: the feelings have given way “to careful reflection on how to make sense of such experience, how to find an articulation of its form, structure, causes, and potential remedies” (...) . That is the beauty and power of this book. The essays in this collection are not merely stories of women philosophers feeling mistreated , nor are they an angry call to arms for a feminist revolution. The women writing in this collection are careful to look at both data and the stories of women in philosophy to try to find the cause or causes of a problem that is already well-recognized. Moreover, a central question for almost all of the women .. (shrink)

What I plan to do in this paper is to provide a survey of the ways in which Spinoza’s philosophy has been deployed in relation to early modern thought, in the history of ideas and in a number of different domains of contemporary philosophy, and to offer an account of how some of this research has developed. The past decade of research in Spinoza studies has been characterized by a number of tendencies; however, it is possible to identify four main (...) domains that characterize these different lines of research: studies of Spinoza’s individual works, of its problematic concepts, from the point of view of the history of ideas, and comparative studies of Spinoza’s ideas. (shrink)

In the paper “Math Anxiety,” Aden Evens explores the manner by means of which concepts are implicated in the problematic Idea according to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. The example that Evens draws from Difference and Repetition in order to demonstrate this relation is a mathematics problem, the elements of which are the differentials of the differential calculus. What I would like to offer in the present paper is an historical account of the mathematical problematic that Deleuze deploys in his (...) philosophy, and an introduction to the role that this problematic plays in the develop- ment of his philosophy of difference. One of the points of departure that I will take from the Evens paper is the theme of “power series.”2 This will involve a detailed elaboration of the mechanism by means of which power series operate in the differential calculus deployed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition. Deleuze actually constructs an alternative history of mathematics that establishes an historical conti- nuity between the differential point of view of the infinitesimal calculus and modern theories of the differential calculus. It is in relation to the differential point of view of the infinitesimal calculus that Deleuze determines a differential logic which he deploys, in the form of a logic of different/ciation, in the development of his proj- ect of constructing a philosophy of difference. (shrink)

The reconstruction of Leibniz’s metaphysics that Deleuze undertakes in The Fold provides a systematic account of the structure of Leibniz’s metaphysics in terms of its mathematical foundations. However, in doing so, Deleuze draws not only upon the mathematics developed by Leibniz—including the law of continuity as reflected in the calculus of infinite series and the infinitesimal calculus—but also upon developments in mathematics made by a number of Leibniz’s contemporaries—including Newton’s method of fluxions. He also draws upon a number of subsequent (...) developments in mathematics, the rudiments of which can be more or less located in Leibniz’s own work—including the theory of functions and singularities, the Weierstrassian theory of analytic continuity, and Poincaré’s theory of automorphic functions. Deleuze then retrospectively maps these developments back onto the structure of Leibniz’s metaphysics. While the Weierstrassian theory of analytic continuity serves to clarify Leibniz’s work, Poincaré’s theory of automorphic functions offers a solution to overcome and extend the limits that Deleuze identifies in Leibniz’s metaphysics. Deleuze brings this elaborate conjunction of material together in order to set up a mathematical idealization of the system that he considers to be implicit in Leibniz’s work. The result is a thoroughly mathematical explication of the structure of Leibniz’s metaphysics. This essay is an exposition of the very mathematical underpinnings of this Deleuzian account of the structure of Leibniz’s metaphysics, which, I maintain, subtends the entire text of The Fold. (shrink)

As regimes move from illiberal to liberal, post-transition justice methodology has been employed to engender truth and reconciliation. These normative concepts have evolved into a policy of creating truth and reconciliation commissions that trade civil and criminal amnesty with applicants in exchange for information. This bargained-for exchange can be analyzed as an imperfect information game, where the commission attempts to maximize information while the applicant seeks amnesty for the lowest possible price. Using game-theoretic analysis, the authors model the truth-amnesty game (...) and predict the optimal commission strategy. The analysis leads to the recommendation that future transitional justice commissions employ various specific lexicographic ordering strategies to minimize dead weight loss in the transaction. (shrink)

If school districts want to sustain improvements that have been achieved during this period of district transformation, district leaders need to align their district, both vertically and horizontally. Alignment assures that the work of individuals supports their team goals, the work of teams supports their school's goals, the work of schools supports their clusters, and the work of clusters supports the district's strategic direction. This groudbreaking work presents qualitative information about the nature of strategic alignment in school systems and how (...) to create and sustain it. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze maintains that an individual’s power to act is open to “metaphysical” or ontological changes. An individual for Deleuze is limited by the passive affections that it experiences in its interactions with other more composite bodies, which, at any given moment, have the potential to limit its further integration, and, therefore, the further development of its power to act, and by consequence, its actual existence. This limit determines the margin of variation of the expression of the given individual’s power (...) to act, which varies from a minimum, below which it would cease to exist (intensity = 0), to a maximum, which would only be limited by the extent to which its power to act is further integrated at any given moment in more composite relations, expressing the affective life of the individual. The paper will examine the implications of this interpretations of Spinoza, with a view to characterising the role that Spinoza plays in Deleuze’s broader project of constructing a philosophy of difference. (shrink)

The concept of reproductive labor is central to an analysis of gender inequality, including understanding the devaluation of cleaning, cooking, child care, and other “women's work” in the paid labor force. This article presents historical census data that detail transformations of paid reproductive labor during the twentieth century. Changes in the organization of cooking and cleaning tasks in the paid labor market have led to shifts in the demographics of workers engaged in these tasks. As the context for cleaning and (...) cooking work shifted from the dominance of private household servants to include more institutional forms, the gender balance of this reproductive labor workforce has been transformed, while racial-ethnic hierarchies have remained entrenched. This article highlights the challenges to understanding occupational segregation and the devaluation of reproductive labor in a way that analyzes gender and race-ethnicity in an intersectional way and integrates cultural and structural explanations of occupational degradation. (shrink)

Explications of the reconstruction of Leibniz’s metaphysics that Deleuze undertakes in 'The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque' focus predominantly on the role of the infinitesimal calculus developed by Leibniz.1 While not underestimat- ing the importance of the infinitesimal calculus and the law of continuity as reflected in the calculus of infinite series to any understanding of Leibniz’s metaphysics and to Deleuze’s reconstruction of it in The Fold, what I propose to examine in this paper is the role played by other (...) developments in mathematics that Deleuze draws upon, including those made by a number of Leibniz’s near contemporaries – the projective geometry that has its roots in the work of Desargues (1591–1661) and the ‘proto-topology’ that appears in the work of Du ̈rer (1471–1528) – and a number of the subsequent developments in these fields of mathematics. Deleuze brings this elaborate conjunction of material together in order to set up a mathematical idealization of the system that he considers to be implicit in Leibniz’s work. The result is a thoroughly mathematical explication of the structure of Leibniz’s metaphysics. What is provided in this paper is an exposition of the very mathematical underpinnings of this Deleuzian account of the structure of Leibniz’s metaphysics, which, I maintain, subtends the entire text of The Fold. (shrink)