The introduction of Women and Gender Studies in Polish universities is intrinsically connected with the systemic transformation following 1989. This change was marked by the rejection of the communist past with its nominal sexual equality and acceptance of a conservative culture legally restricting women’s rights. Since the mid-nineties, Women and Gender Studies programs have been instituted in many state and private universities albeit on an auxiliary, extramural bases or as “specialization” within other degrees (e.g., sociology, or cultural studies). Since the (...) mid-2000s, gender studies in Poland include studies of masculinity, gender identity formation and queer theory in addition to the traditional women studies program. After Poland joined the EU, the introduction of European legal standards started to influence the progress in Poland’s gender politics towards greater recognition of minority rights. Gender Studies are in the foreground of these changes in teaching and training students and colleagues in gender issues seen as crucial for building a democratic inclusive society. (shrink)

Marc Hauser puts forth the theory that humans have evolved a universal moral instinct, unconsciously propelling us to deliver judgments of right and wrong independent of gender, education, and religion. Combining his cutting-edge research with the latest findings in cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics, and anthropology, Hauser explores the startling implications of his provocative theory vis-à-vis contemporary bioethics, religion, the law, and our everyday lives.

What Robots Can and Can't Be (hereinafter Robots) is, as Selmer Bringsjord says "intended to be a collection of formal-arguments-that-border-on-proofs for the proposition that in all worlds, at all times, machines can't be minds" (Bringsjord, forthcoming). In his (1994) "Précis of What Robots Can and Can't Be" Bringsjord styles certain of these arguments as proceeding "repeatedly . . . through instantiations of" the "simple schema".

To what extent do moral judgments depend on conscious reasoning from explicitly understood principles? We address this question by investigating one particular moral principle, the principle of the double effect. Using web-based technology, we collected a large data set on individuals' responses to a series of moral dilemmas, asking when harm to innocent others is permissible. Each moral dilemma presented a choice between action and inaction, both resulting in lives saved and lives lost. Results showed that: (1) patterns of moral (...) judgments were consistent with the principle of double effect and showed little variation across differences in gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, religion or national affiliation (within the limited range of our sample population) and (2) a majority of subjects failed to provide justifications that could account for their judgments. These results indicate that the principle of the double effect may be operative in our moral judgments but not open to conscious introspection. We discuss these results in light of current psychological theories of moral cognition, emphasizing the need to consider the unconscious appraisal system that mentally represents the causal and intentional properties of human action. (shrink)

: To what extent do moral judgments depend on conscious reasoning from explicitly understood principles? We address this question by investigating one particular moral principle, the principle of the double effect. Using web-based technology, we collected a large data set on individuals’ responses to a series of moral dilemmas, asking when harm to innocent others is permissible. Each moral dilemma presented a choice between action and inaction, both resulting in lives saved and lives lost. Results showed that: patterns of moral (...) judgments were consistent with the principle of double effect and showed little variation across differences in gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, religion or national affiliation and a majority of subjects failed to provide justifications that could account for their judgments. These results indicate that the principle of the double effect may be operative in our moral judgments but not open to conscious introspection. We discuss these results in light of current psychological theories of moral cognition, emphasizing the need to consider the unconscious appraisal system that mentally represents the causal and intentional properties of human action. (shrink)

In his groundbreaking book, Marc Hauser puts forth a revolutionary new theory: that humans have evolved a universal moral instinct, unconsciously propelling us to deliver judgments of right and wrong independent of gender, education, and religion. Combining his cutting-edge research with the latest findings in cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, economics, and anthropology, Hauser explores the startling implications of his provocative theory vis-à-vis contemporary bioethics, religion, the law, and our everyday lives.

The thesis we develop in this essay is that all humans are endowed with a moral faculty. The moral faculty enables us to produce moral judgments on the basis of the causes and consequences of actions. As an empirical research program, we follow the framework of modern linguistics.1 The spirit of the argument dates back at least to the economist Adam Smith (1759/1976) who argued for something akin to a moral grammar, and more recently, to the political philosopher John Rawls (...) (1971). The logic of the argument, however, comes from Noam Chomsky’s thinking on language specifically and the nature of knowledge more generally (Chomsky, 1986, 1988, 2000; Saporta, 1978). If the nature of moral knowledge is comparable in some way to the nature of linguistic knowledge, as defended recently by Harman (1977), Dwyer (1999, 2004), and Mikhail (2000; in press), then what should we expect to find when we look at the anatomy of our moral faculty? Is there a grammar, and if so, how can the moral grammarian uncover its structure? Are we aware of our moral grammar, its method of operation, and its moment-to-moment functioning in our judgments? Is there a universal moral grammar that allows each child to build a particular moral grammar? Once acquired, are different moral grammars mutually incomprehensible in the same way that a native Chinese speaker finds a native Italian speaker incomprehensible? How does the child acquire a particular moral grammar, especially if her experiences are impoverished relative to the moral judgments she makes? Are there certain forms of brain damage that disrupt moral competence but leave other forms of reasoning intact? And how did this machinery evolve, and for what particular adaptive function? We will have more to say about many of these questions later on, and Hauser (2006) develops others. However, in order to flesh out the key ideas and particular empirical research paths, let us turn to some of the central questions in the study of our language faculty.. (shrink)

The coherence objection to the doctrine of the Incarnation maintains that it is impossible for one individual to have both the attributes of God and the attributes of a human being. This article examines Thomas Aquinas’s answer to this objection. I challenge the dominant, mereological interpretation of Aquinas’s position and, in light of this challenge, develop and defend a new alternative interpretation of Aquinas’s response to this important objection to Christian doctrine.

What are the brain and cognitive systems that allow humans to play baseball, compute square roots, cook soufflés, or navigate the Tokyo subways? It may seem that studies of human infants and of non-human animals will tell us little about these abilities, because only educated, enculturated human adults engage in organized games, formal mathematics, gourmet cooking, or map-reading. In this chapter, we argue against this seemingly sensible conclusion. When human adults exhibit complex, uniquely human, culture-specific skills, they draw on a (...) set of psychological and neural mechanisms with two distinctive properties: they evolved before humanity and thus are shared with other animals, and they emerge early in human development and thus are common to infants, children, and adults. These core knowledge systems form the building blocks for uniquely human skills. Without them we wouldn’t be able to learn about different kinds of games, mathematics, cooking, or maps. To understand what is special about human intelligence, therefore, we must study both the core knowledge systems on which it rests and the mechanisms by which these systems are orchestrated to permit new kinds of concepts and cognitive processes. What is core knowledge? A wealth of research on non-human primates and on human infants suggests that a system of core knowledge is characterized by four properties (Hauser, 2000; Spelke, 2000). First, it is domain-specific: each system functions to represent particular kinds of entities such as conspecific agents, manipulable objects, places in the environmental layout, and numerosities. Second, it is task-specific: each system uses its representations to address specific questions about the world, such as “who is this?” [face recognition], “what does this do?” [categorization of artifacts], “where am I?” [spatial orientation], and “how many are here?” [enumeration]. Third, it is relatively encapsulated: each uses only a subset of the information delivered by an animal’s input systems and sends information only to a subset of the animal’s output systems. (shrink)

Since the 1860s, petroleum companies, through their influence on local governments, port authorities, international actors and the general public gradually became more dominant in shaping the urban form of ports and cities. Under their development and pressure, the relationships between industrial and urban areas in port cities hosting oil facilities evolved in time. The borders limiting industrial and housing territories have continuously changed with industrial places moving progressively away from urban areas. Such a changing dynamic influenced the permeability of these (...) borders. Port cities are nodes and logistic points where various flows of commodities, wealth, and knowledge gathered before further re‐distribution. These flows affected port cities by changing their spatial organization and the availabiity of space between borders. The main question here is: How did industrial and urban borders evolve through time in port cities? Through a historical analysis, the article explores the settlements of oil facilities and the influence of oil companies over local, regional, and national governments in creating borders and how it influenced the porosity of port cities. This article, through the petroleum narrative, illustrates the impacts of past borders on the contemporary urban form through the evolution of the French port city of Dunkirk, in the North of France. As a historical study, the article analyzes the changing relationships between petroleum industrial sites and housing areas in the city of Dunkirk, using aerial pictures, archival sources, and regulations of different periods. The importance of this analysis lies in knowing that former oil sites previously located on the periphery of Dunkirk, that were forgotten by the authorities are now located within the current urban tissue. This process demonstrates the importance of historical developments to understand current challenges in the urban planning of industrial port cities. (shrink)

Corruption continues to represent a tenacious challenge to internationally active companies. According to prevailing international anti-corruption standards, a company can be held criminally liable if it does not put all necessary and reasonable organizational measures in place to prevent corruption. The regular training of employees is considered one of the most effective ways to prevent corruption. Employee training is considered helpful in efforts to minimize the risk of employees becoming involved in corrupt behavior. With this idea in mind and building (...) on the fraud triangle model and neutralization theory, this paper examines whether business professionals who have undergone anti-corruption training are more likely to reject prevailing justifications of corrupt practices than are those who have not undergone such training. The empirical analysis in this paper is based on regression models using data obtained from a unique dataset that includes 200 business professionals. The findings provide evidence that training is positively linked to the likelihood of rejecting justifications of corruption. However, the research also suggests that methods of training must become more specific in order to tackle challenging questions regarding the gray areas of ethics and compliance. (shrink)

Thomistic Hylomorphists claim that we human persons have rational or intellective souls which can continue to exist separately from our bodies after we die. Much of the recent scholarly discussion of Thomistic Hylomorphism has centered on this thesis and the question of whether human persons can survive death along with their souls or whether only their souls can survive in this separated, disembodied, post-mortem state. As a result, two rival versions of Thomistic Hyomorphism have been formulated: Survivalism and Corruptionism. This (...) chapter makes a new contribution to the debate between Survivalists and Corruptionists by identifying a heretofore undiscussed problem for Corruptionist Thomistic Hylomorphism. In particular, it is argued that if Corruptionists were right that human persons cannot survive their deaths along with their souls, this would undermine the grounds on which all Thomistic Hylomorphists, including Corruptionists, rely to justify their belief that our souls can continue to exist after our deaths. Given this, it is argued that Thomistic Hylomorphists have grounds for thinking that our souls can continue to exist after our deaths only if they allow, as Survivalists do and Corruptionists do not, that we human persons can continue to exist after our deaths, with souls but no bodies. (shrink)

Researchers are concerned about whether manipulations have the intended effects. Many journals and reviewers view manipulation checks favorably, and they are widely reported in prestigious journals. However, the prototypical manipulation check is a verbal (rather than behavioral) measure that always appears at the same point in the procedure (rather than its order being varied to assess order effects). Embedding such manipulation checks within an experiment comes with problems. While we conceptualize manipulation checks as measures, they can also act as interventions (...) which initiate new processes that would otherwise not occur. The default assumption that manipulation checks do not affect experimental conclusions is unwarranted. They may amplify, undo, or interact with the effects of a manipulation. Further, the use of manipulation checks in mediational analyses does not rule out confounding variables, as any unmeasured variables that correlate with the manipulation check may still drive the relationship. Alternatives such as nonverbal and behavioral measures as manipulation checks and pilot testing are less problematic. Reviewers should view manipulation checks more critically, and authors should explore alternative methods to ensure the effectiveness of manipulations. (shrink)

According to the doctrine of the Incarnation, one person, Christ, has both the attributes proper to a human being and the attributes proper to God. This claim has given rise to the coherence objection, i.e., the objection that it is impossible for one individual to have both sets of attributes. Several authors have offered responses which rely on the idea that Christ has the relevant human properties in virtue of having a concrete human nature which has those properties. I show (...) why such responses should be rejected and, in light of that, propose an alternative response to the coherence objection. (shrink)

What kind of challenge does sexual and racial difference pose for postmodern ethics? What is the relation between ethical obligation and feminist interpretations of embodiment, passion, and eros? How can we negotiate between ethical responsibility for the Other and democratic struggles against domination, injustice, and equality, on the one hand, and internal conflicts within the subject, on the other? We cannot address such questions, Ziarek argues, without putting into dialogue discourses that have hitherto been segregated: postmodern ethics, feminism, race theory, (...) and the idea of radical democracy. Addressing a constellation of diverse thinkers - including Emmanuel Levinas, Patricia Williams, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray - the author proposes a new conception of ethics, an ethics of dissensus that rethinks the relation between freedom and obligation in a double context of embodiment and antagonism. (shrink)

Joint attention is characterized by openness: when two agents jointly attend to an object, they are immediately and fully aware of each other's attentional states. Existing accounts of openness involve a mental picture in which two agents attend to the same object and where openness is then 'added'. I argue that the experience of openness comes first. Young infants operate under a tacit assumption of openness: they behave as if attentional states were open even when they aren't. The ability to (...) engage in joint attention doesn't arise when infants begin to experience openness, but rather when they can limit these experiences to open interactions. For this, they depend on cognitive processes that detect non-open interactions. Some of these processes develop early and don't require the representation of others' mental states. Other processes develop later and require the infant to differentiate between herself and others as subjects of attentional states. (shrink)

Despite the increasing inclusion of ethics and compliance issues in corporate training, the business world remains rife with breaches of responsible management conduct. This situation indicates a knowledge–practice gap among professionals, i.e., a discrepancy between their knowledge of responsible management principles and their behavior in day-to-day business life. With this in mind, this paper addresses the formative, developmental question of how companies’ ethics and compliance training programs should be organized in a manner that enhances their potential to be effective. Drawing (...) on both the qualitative analysis of existing ethics and compliance training and the conceptual literature on behavioral ethics, a framework is proposed that consecutively aligns various types of training into a comprehensive ethics and compliance training program. The strengths and limitations of the suggested framework are discussed. (shrink)

Phenomenal transparency was once widely believed to be necessary for cognitive extension. Recently, this claim has come under attack, with a new consensus coalescing around the idea that transparency is neither necessary for internal nor extended cognitive processes. We take these recent critiques as an opportunity to refine the concept of transparency relevant for cognitive extension. In particular, we highlight that transparency concerns an agent’s employment of a resource – and that such employment is compatible with an agent consciously apprehending (...) (or attending to) a resource. This means it is possible for an object to be transparent and opaque to an agent, even at a single moment in time. Once we understand transparency in this way, the detractors’ claims lose their bite, and existing arguments for transparency’s necessity for cognitive extension return to apply with full force. (shrink)

In a series of publications spanning over two decades, William Hasker has argued both that (1) human beings have souls and (2) these souls are not directly created by God but instead are produced by (or “emergent from”) a physical process of some sort or other. By contrast, an alternative view of the human person, endorsed by the contemporary Catholic Church, maintains that (1) human beings have souls but that (2*) each human soul is directly created by God rather than (...) produced by any kind of physical process. Hasker argues that given what we know from evolutionary biology, (2*) is a much less plausible position for believers in souls to take than (2) is. If Hasker is right, then there is a serious tension between the Church’s teaching about the human person and evolutionary biology. In this article, I challenge Hasker’s reasoning. I argue that those who hold the Catholic view that each human soul is directly created by God face no more difficulty reconciling their view with evolutionary biology than those who maintain, as Hasker does, that human souls are instead produced by some kind of physical process. (shrink)

Hauser defends the proposition that our languages of thought are public languages. One group of arguments points to the coincidence of clearly productive (novel, unbounded) cognitive competence with overt possession of recursive symbol systems. Another group relies on phenomenological experience. A third group cites practical and methodological considerations: Occam's razor and the "streetlight principle" (other things being equal, look under the lamp) that motivate looking for instantiations of outer languages in thought first.

Experimental emotion inductions provide the strongest causal evidence of the effects of emotions on psychological and physiological outcomes. In the present qualitative review, we evaluated five common experimental emotion induction techniques: visual stimuli, music, autobiographical recall, situational procedures, and imagery. For each technique, we discuss the extent to which they induce six basic emotions: anger, disgust, surprise, happiness, fear, and sadness. For each emotion, we discuss the relative influences of the induction methods on subjective emotional experience and physiological responses. Based (...) on the literature reviewed, we make emotion-specific recommendations for induction methods to use in experiments. (shrink)

Hauser considers John Searle's attempt to distinguish acts from movements. On Searle's account, the difference between me raising my arm and my arm's just going up (e.g., if you forcibly raise it), is the causal involvement of my intention to raise my arm in the former, but not the latter, case. Yet, we distinguish a similar difference between a robot's raising its arm and its robot arm just going up (e.g., if you manually raise it). Either robots are rightly (...) credited with intentions or it's not intention that distinguishes action from mere movement. In either case acts are attributable to robots. Since the truth of such attributions depends not on the speaker's "intentional stance" but on "intrinsic" features of the things they are not merely figurative "as if" attributions. Gunderson allows that internally propelled programmed devices (Hauser Robots) do act but denies that they have the mental properties such acts seem to indicate. Rather, given our intuitive conviction that these machines lack consciousness, such performances evidence the dementalizability of acts.Hauser replies that the performances in question provide prima facie warrant for attributions of mental properties that considerations of consciousness are insufficient to override. (shrink)

We give an optimal lower bound in terms of large cardinal axioms for the logical strength of projective uniformization in conjuction with other regularity properties of projective sets of real numbers, namely Lebesgue measurability and its dual in the sense of category . Our proof uses a projective computation of the real numbers which code inital segments of a core model and answers a question in Hauser.

First published in 1959, this book is concerned with the methodology of art history, and so with questions about historical thinking; it enquires what scientific history of art can accomplish, what are its mean and limitations? It contains philosophical reflections on history and begins with chapters on the scope and limitations of a sociology of art, and the concept of ideology in the history of art. The chapter on the concept of "art history without names" occupies the central position in (...) the book — thoroughly discussing the basic philosophical outlook for the whole work. There are also further chapters on psychoanalysis, folk art and popular art. The chapter on the role of convention in the history of art points the way for further study. (shrink)

Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women's literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women's transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek's political and aesthetic investigations (...) concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women's literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism's experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art's emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles. (shrink)

It is proved that in the absence of proper class inner models with Woodin cardinals, for each n ε {1,…,ω}, ∑3 + n1 absoluteness implies there are n strong cardinals in K (where this denotes a suitably defined global version of the core model for one Woodin cardinal as exposed by Steel. Combined with a forcing argument of Woodin, this establishes that the consistency strength of ∑3 + n1 absoluteness is exactly that of n strong cardinals so that in particular (...) projective absoluteness is equiconsistent with the existence of infinitely many strong cardinals. It is also argued how this theorem is to be construed as the first step in the long range program of showing that projective determinacy is equivalent to its analytical consequences for the projective sets which would settle positively a conjecture of Woodin and thereby solve the last Delfino problem. (shrink)

This paper explores the metaphysical roots of Cantor’s conception of absolute infinity in order to shed some light on two basic issues that also affect the mathematical theory of sets: the viability of Cantor’s distinction between sets and inconsistent multiplicities, and the intrinsic justification of strong axioms of infinity that are studied in contemporary set theory.

I examine various claims to the effect that Cantor's Continuum Hypothesis and other problems of higher set theory are ill-posed questions. The analysis takes into account the viability of the underlying philosophical views and recent mathematical developments.

Convinced that the classically undecidable problems of mathematics possess determinate truth values, Gödel issued a programmatic call to search for new axioms for their solution. The platonism underlying his belief in the determinateness of those questions in combination with his conception of intuition as a kind of perception have struck many of his readers as highly problematic. Following Gödel's own suggestion, this article explores ideas from phenomenology to specify a meaning for his mathematical realism that allows for a defensible epistemology.

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 479-491.

Essentialists claim that at least some individuals or kinds have essences. This raises an important but little-discussed question: how do we come to know what the essence of something is? This paper examines Aristotle’s answer to this question. One influential interpretation (viz., the Explanationist Interpretation) is carefully expounded, criticized, and then refined. Particular attention is given to what Aristotle says about this issue in DA I.1, APo II.2, and APo II.8. It is argued that the epistemological claim put forward in (...) DA I.1 differs from that put forward in APo II.2 and II.8, contrary to what has been claimed by Explanationists, and that each of these distinct epistemological claims rests on a distinct non-epistemological thesis about essence. Consequently, an ‘Enriched Explanationist Interpretation’ is developed which takes into account both of the aforementioned elements in Aristotle’s epistemology of essence. The paper concludes by highlighting an insight the preceding exegetical discussion offers to contemporary essentialists seeking to explain how we come to know what something’s essence is. (shrink)

In the face of massively increased technological complexity, it is striking that so many of today’s computational and networked things follow design ideals honed decades ago in a much different context. These strong ideals prescribe a presentation of things as useful tools through design and a withdrawal of aspects of their functionality and complexity. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century, we trace this ‘withdrawal program’ as it has persisted in the face of increasing computational complexity. Currently, design is in a dilemma (...) where computational products can be seen as brilliantly designed and engaging to use yet can also be considered very problematic in how they support hidden agendas and often seem less than trustworthy. In this article, we analyse factors shaping this emergent ethical dilemma and reveal the concept of _a widening rift_ between what computational _things actually are and do_ and _the ways in which they are presented as things for use_. Against this backdrop, we argue that there is a need for a new orientation in design programs to adequately address this deepening rupture between the aesthetics and ethics in the design of computational things. (shrink)

The Chinese room argument is a thought experiment of John Searle (1980a) and associated (1984) derivation. It is one of the best known and widely credited counters to claims of artificial intelligence (AI)—that is, to claims that computers do or at least can (someday might) think. According to Searle’s original presentation, the argument is based on two key claims: brains cause minds and syntax doesn’t suffice for semantics. Its target is what Searle dubs “strong AI.” According to strong AI, Searle (...) says, “the computer is not merely a tool in the study of the mind, rather the appropriately programmed computer really is a mind in the sense that computers given the right programs can be literally said to understand and have other cognitive states” (1980a, p. 417). Searle contrasts strong AI with “weak AI.” According to weak AI, computers just simulate thought, their seeming understanding isn’t real understanding (just as-if), their seeming calculation is only as-if calculation, etc. Nevertheless, computer simulation is useful for studying the mind (as for studying the weather and other things). (shrink)

(2009). Mellow Monday and furious Friday: The approach-related link between anger and time representation. Cognition & Emotion: Vol. 23, No. 6, pp. 1166-1180.

Firms operating in developing economies are increasingly expected to implement CSR practices aligned with recognized global standards. Drawing on extensive field study data in four Latin American countries, we contribute to business ethics scholarship by making visible and explaining firm shortcomings across social, environmental, and governance goals and activities of CSR. Building on and extending sensemaking literature, we find that leaders and managers responsible for their firms’ CSR activities make sense of and justify CSR shortcomings. We specify that justification based (...) on individual, organizational/industry, and macro-environmental influences serves as a mechanism that decouples firms’ actual CSR practices from recognized CSR standards. Further, we propose that detachment, involving disconnection from the local operating environment, underlies the CSR shortcomings of firms. We develop a theoretical multi-level model that specifies justification as a mechanism and detachment as an underlying driver of CSR shortcomings. (shrink)

One of the most distinctive and intriguing developments of modern set theory has been the realization that, despite widely divergent incentives for strengthening the standard axioms, there is essentially only one way of ascending the higher reaches of infinity. To the mathematical realist the unexpected convergence suggests that all these axiomatic extensions describe different aspects of the same underlying reality.

Hauser defends the proposition that public languages are our languages of thought. One argument for this proposition is coincidence of productive (i.e., novel, unbounded) cognitive competence with overt possession of recursive symbol systems. Another is phenomenological experience. A third is Occam's razor and the "streetlight principle.".