Managers tasked with organizational change often face irreconcilable demands on how to enact justice—situations we call _justice conundrums_. Drawing on interviews held with managers before and after a planned large-scale change, we identify specific conundrums and illustrate how managers grapple with these through three prototypical paths. Among our participants, the paths increasingly diverged over time, culminating in distinct career decisions. Based on our findings, we develop an integrative process model that illustrates how managers grapple with justice conundrums. Our contributions are (...) threefold. First, we elucidate three types of justice conundrums that managers may encounter when enacting justice in the context of planned organizational change (the justice intention-action gap, competing justice expectations, and the justice of care vs. managerial-strategic justice) and show how managers handle them differently. Second, drawing on the motivated cognition and moral disengagement literature, we illustrate how cognitive mechanisms coalesce to allow managers to soothe their moral (self-) concerns when grappling with these conundrums. Third, we show how motivated justice intentions ensuing from specific justice motives, moral emotions, and circles of moral regard predict the types of justice conundrums managers face and the paths they take to grapple with them. (shrink)

Nature in the Politics has been most extensively studied in the context of the book 1 argument that the polis is "by nature." Fred Miller's Nature, Justice, and Rights in Aristotle's Politics is a landmark in this respect as in many others, and his discussion of the naturalness of the polis is, I think, definitive, and should put an end to the notion that according to Aristotle people find their natural end functioning as mere parts in some large organic social (...) whole. However, nature in Aristotle's ethical and political works contains complications outside book 1, and I hope that there remain some points to be made and issues to be elucidated. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that neo-Hobbesian contractarianism cannot yield direct moral standing for marginal humans and animals. However, it has been argued that marginal humans and animals can have a form of direct moral standing under neo-Hobbesian contractarianism: secondary moral standing. I will argue that, even if such standing is direct, this account is unsatisfactory because it is counterintuitive and fragile.

Epistemic permissivism is the view that it is possible for two people to rationally hold incompatible attitudes toward some proposition on the basis of one body of evidence. In this paper, I defend a particular version of permissivism – unacknowledged permissivism (UP) – which says that permissivism is true, but that no one can ever rationally believe that she is in a permissive case. I show that counter to what virtually all authors who have discussed UP claim, UP is an (...) attractive view: it is compatible with the intuitive motivations for permissivism and avoids a significant challenge to permissivism: the arbitrariness objection. (shrink)

In this article I address the idea that in Husserl’s eidetic ontology all possibilities are fixed ‘in advance’ so that actual objects and events—despite their contingency—can only ever unfold possibilities that are ‘permitted’ to them by their essences. I show how this view distorts Husserl’s ontology and argue that this distortion stems from a misconstrual of the relations between essences and facts, and between ideal and real possibilities. These ‘local’ misconstruals reflect, I contend, a ‘global’ misunderstanding that mistakes descriptive distinctions (...) for ‘real’ separations, and that remains indebted to a non-Husserlian understanding of the a priori–a posteriori-distinction. In support of this argument, I first lay out the relevant objection to Husserl’s eidetics as I understand it. Then, I clarify the relation between ideal and real possibilities in the context of Husserl’s eidetics as I see it. Finally, I make a general point about the status of Husserl’s ontological differentiations ‘in the midst of life,’ namely in how what they differentiate is effective and (tacitly) manifest ever only as one moment (amongst many) of the complex whole that is a concrete life of consciousness. I end with some remarks on what this might mean for future phenomenological research on the imagination. (shrink)

Definition: considering human beings to be of central importance; the source of value.

An annual publication which publishes original articles, some of substantial length, on a wide range of topics in ancient philosophy, and review articles of major books.

Epistemic utility theory seeks to establish epistemic norms by combining principles from decision theory and social choice theory with ways of determining the epistemic utility of agents’ attitudes. Recently, Moss, 1053–69, 2011) has applied this strategy to the problem of finding epistemic compromises between disagreeing agents. She shows that the norm “form compromises by maximizing average expected epistemic utility”, when applied to agents who share the same proper epistemic utility function, yields the result that agents must form compromises by splitting (...) the difference between their credence functions. However, this “split the difference” norm is in conflict with conditionalization, since applications of the two norms don’t commute. A common response in the literature seems to be to abandon the procedure of splitting the difference in favor of compromise strategies that avoid non-commutativity. This would also entail abandoning Moss’ norm. I explore whether a different response is feasible. If agents can use epistemic utility-based considerations to agree on an order in which they will apply the two norms, they might be able to avoid diachronic incoherence. I show that this response can’t save Moss’ norm, because the agreements concerning the order of compromising and updating it generates are not stable over time, and hence cannot avoid diachronic incoherence. I also show that a variant of Moss’ norm, which requires that the weights given to each agent’s epistemic utility change in a way that ensures commutativity, cannot be justified on epistemological grounds. (shrink)

Prior evidence has shown that aversive emotional states are characterised by an attentional bias towards aversive events. The present study investigated whether aversive emotions also bias attention towards stimuli that represent means by which the emotion can be alleviated. We induced disgust by having participants touch fake disgusting objects. Participants in the control condition touched non-disgusting objects. The results of a subsequent dot-probe task revealed that attention was oriented to disgusting pictures irrespective of condition. However, participants in the disgust condition (...) also oriented towards pictures representing cleanliness. These findings suggest that the deployment of attention in aversive emotional states is not purely stimulus driven but is also guided by the goal to alleviate this emotional state. (shrink)

I describe a suite of reinforcement learning environments in which artificial agents learn to value and respond to moral content and contexts. I illustrate the core principles of the framework by characterizing one such environment, or “gridworld,” in which an agent learns to trade-off between monetary profit and fair dealing, as applied in a standard behavioral economic paradigm. I then highlight the core technical and philosophical advantages of the learning approach for modeling moral cognition, and for addressing the so-called value (...) alignment problem in AI. (shrink)

Recently, macroscopic accounts of chemical kind individuation have been proposed as alternatives to the microstructural essentialist account advocated by Kripke, Putnam, and others. These accounts argue that individuation of chemical kinds is based on macroscopic criteria such as reactivity or thermodynamics, and they challenge the essentialism that grounds the Kripke-Putnam view. Using a variety of chemical examples, I argue that microstructure grounds these macroscopic accounts, but that this grounding need not imply essentialism. Instead, kinds are individuated on the basis of (...) similarity of reactivity between substances, and microstructure explains similarity of reactivity. (shrink)

Methodology is often a point of contention in gender-based salary studies. Although this debate seems at first to be merely about technical issues, it also has an important conceptual dimension. We argue that there are two competing implicit conceptions of discrimination, one institutional and the other individual, that underlie many such debates. We first contrast the preferred methodologies advanced by each side, the policy capturing approach and the flagging approach, and explore the theoretical meaning of their statistical models. We then (...) describe a practical application of both methodological approaches in one specific salary inequity study. In conclusion, we reflect on the implications of such practical statistical choices, discuss how such models can be combined, and make suggestions for sociologists who act as statistical experts or work with them in gender-based salary inequity studies on their own campuses. (shrink)

To the renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein (1882--1960) was the most original innovator, male or female, in the psychoanalytic arena. Klein pioneered psychoanalytic practice with children and made major contributions to our understanding of both psychosis and autism. Along the way, she successfully introduced a new approach to the theory of the unconscious without abandoning the principles set forth by Freud. In her first biography of a fellow psychoanalyst, the prolific Kristeva considers Klein's life and (...) intellectual development, weaving a narrative that covers the history of psychoanalysis and illuminates Kristeva's own life and work. Kristeva tells the remarkable story of Klein's life: an unhappy wife and mother who underwent analysis, and -- without a medical or other advanced degree -- became an analyst herself at the age of 40. In examining her work, Kristeva proposes that Klein's "break" with Freud was really an attempt to complete his theory of the unconscious. Kristeva addresses Klein's numerous critics, and, in doing so, bridges the wide gulf between the clinical and theoretical worlds of psychoanalysis. Klein is celebrated here as the first person to see the mother as the source of not only creativity, but of thought itself, and the first to consider the place of matricide in psychic development. As such, Klein is a seminal figure in the evolution of the provocative ideas about motherhood and the psyche for which Kristeva is most famous. Klein is thus, in a sense, a mother to Kristeva, making this book an account of the development of Kristeva's own thought as well as Klein's. (shrink)

Spoken language consists of a linear sequence of units, from which the existence of particular underlying hierarchical processing mechanisms is inferred. Uddén et al. use graph theory to provide a framework for describing the possible structural relationships that may underlie a linear output sequence. Being more explicit in defining different structures can help identifying and testing for such structures in AGL experiments, as well as help showing how behavioral and neuroimaging data reveals signatures of hierarchical processing in humans.

In this paper, I examine Anne Conway’s ‘argument from love’ in her Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy. This argument, supported by a further argument, the ‘argument from pain’, undermines the dualist dichotomy between mind and matter by appealing to a vitalist similarity principle. My goal is two-fold: first, to contribute to a close systematic reconstruction and analysis of Conway’s arguments, which so far is largely lacking in the literature; second, to show that these arguments are richer and (...) more compelling than commentators have thought. (shrink)

Per definition business sustainability demands the integration of environmental, social, and economic outcomes. Yet, managerial decision-making involving sustainability objectives is fraught with tension and the way managerial decision-makers frame sustainability issues in their mindset influences how sustainability tensions are managed at the organisational level. In the bid to better understand what types of managerial mindsets, or cognitive frames, foster integrative business sustainability practices that simultaneously advance environmental, social, and economic objectives, extant research has focussed on the underlying logics that drive (...) the acknowledgement of sustainability tensions. However, the existing logics-based constructs do not sufficiently explain this link, and it has been suggested that managers perceive and manage sustainability tensions based on the values that they hold. To clarify the roles of managerial values and logics as antecedents in business sustainability decision-making, we integrate Keeney’s value-focussed thinking approach with managerial and organisational cognition perspectives. Drawing on data from a survey with 169 senior procurement managers in Australia we found three types of cognitive frames which demonstrate that stronger sustainability values are associated with a more holistic perception of sustainability tensions and vice versa. We also found that managers’ cognitive framing of sustainability is strengthened by more holistic organisational cognitive frames and discuss according implications for managerial decision-making in theory and practice. (shrink)

This article presents Mencius' concept of human dignity in the Chinese Confucian moral tradition, focused on the context of long-term care. The double nature of Mencius' notion of human dignity as an intrinsic quality of human beings qua being human is analyzed and contrasted with the dominant Western account of human dignity as grounded in personhood. Drawing on the heuristic force of an interview with an elder person in Hong Kong, the insights of the Mencian theory of human dignity are (...) used to provide a moral foundation for long-term care for elder persons in a context of diminishing personhood and shrinking autonomy. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida’s philosophy greatly disrupted traditional Western metaphysics by questioning our understanding of the relationship between language and reality. This paper examines how Derrida deconstructs logocentric and phonocentric perspectives that have influenced Western thought, focusing on his analyses of Plato’s Cratylus and Phaedrus, as well as Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. For Derrida, the meaning in language is always shifting, suggesting that absolute truths, as traditionally conceived in Platonic metaphysics, are inherently unstable. His concept of différance illustrates the (...) fluid nature of meaning and the limitations of language. In his critique of “Plato’s Pharmacy,” he explores the inclusive potential of writing, which contrasts with Plato’s preference for speech and dialectics. While Plato is concerned with texts reaching readers he deems “inappropriate” for not fully grasping their meaning, Derrida views access to texts as positive and equitable. He argues that writing removes hierarchical barriers of interpretation, empowering readers and promoting inclusivity and diverse voices. Through this approach, he not only reshapes Western philosophical thinking but also encourages continuous questioning of the truths we often take for granted, expanding philosophy’s relevance to social and political aspects of everyday life. Derrida believes that philosophy should be accessible to all and not limited to privileged academic circles. He critiques elitism and advocates for philosophy to adapt to new social demands, challenging outdated rhetorical models and institutional authority. Derrida’s deconstruction encourages us to consider perspectives beyond our own backgrounds and experiences. By breaking down barriers that limit which voices are acknowledged and valued, we support more open and equitable intellectual and social systems. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer Text schlägt vor, die Entwicklung kollaborativer audiovisueller Wissenspraktiken in der Anthropologie als situiertes und diffraktives Wissen zu verstehen (Haraway, Barad, Smith). Im Durchgang durch einige historische Stationen der Geschichte kollaborativer und partizipativer Projekte wird vorgeschlagen, dass kollaboratives Filmemachen nicht nur eine Dezentrierung einseitiger Autor:innenschaft und einseitiger Repräsentationsmodi ist, sondern auch eine medienspezifische Wissensform, die an soziale Kontexte gebunden und in diese eingebettet ist. Vor dem Hintergrund des Kolonialfilms werden Stationen der Abgrenzung und Versuche der Dekolonisierung des Films beschrieben. Aktuelle (...) Filmexperimente mit marginalisierten Gruppen haben ihren Ursprung in den „shared anthropologies“ (Rouch) und haben diesen Ansatz durch konsequentere Formen des power sharing in Indigenen Kollaborationen und im Fourth Cinema weiterentwickelt. Film kann so auch Amateur:innenwissenspraktiken in kollaborativen Forschungsprojekten abbilden. (shrink)

Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, _The Severed Head_ unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work--_the power of horror_--and the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred. Kristeva (...) considers the head as icon, artifact, and locus of thought, seeking a keener understanding of the violence and desire that drives us to sever, and in some cases keep, such a potent object. Her study stretches all the way back to 6,000 B.C.E., with humans' early decoration and worship of skulls, and follows with the Medusa myth; the mandylion of Laon (a holy relic in which the face of a saint appears on a piece of cloth); the biblical story of John the Baptist and his counterpart, Salome; tales of the guillotine; modern murder mysteries; and even the rhetoric surrounding the fight for and against capital punishment. Kristeva interprets these "capital visions" through the lens of psychoanalysis, drawing infinite connections between their manifestation and sacred experience and very much affirming the possibility of the sacred, even in an era of "faceless" interaction. (shrink)

Using fractal analyses to study events allows us to capture the scale-independence of those events, that is, no matter at which level we study a phenomenon, we should get roughly the same results because events exhibit similar structure across scales. This is demonstrably true in mathematical fractals but is less assured in behavioral fractals. The current research directly tests the scale-independence hypothesis in the behavioral domain by exploring the fractal structure of aggression, a social phenomenon comprising events that span temporal (...) scales from minutes of face-to-face arguments to centuries of international armed conflicts. Using publicly available data, we examined the temporal fractal structure of four scales of aggression: wars, riots, violent crimes, and body movement during arguments. Our results lend mixed support to the scale-independence hypothesis and provide insight into the self-organization of human interactions. (shrink)

Given the unprecedented scope and stakes of contemporary environmental crisis, ethicists have raised critical questions about whether traditional religious texts can speak in a meaningful way to climate change and other environmental risks in the anthropocene. Building on the ethical urgency of the environmental justice movement, this essay offers a feminist reading of Jewish narratives from the Babylonian Talmud that centers attention on issues of power, privilege, and social inequality in the midst of disaster. Talmudic tales of the destruction of (...) Jerusalem critique the moral oblivion of wealthy residents who failed to act in response to crisis. Articulating a Jewish feminist reconstituative ethics, the author uses these tales to trace the ethical costs of epistemologies of ignorance—the complex strategies and social processes through which privileged communities cultivate ignorance of environmental suffering, maintain social distance from environmental risk, and disown moral culpability for environmental injustice. (shrink)

In her landmark volume _Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body_, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues that the Enlightenment heralded a striking change in the way European and American thinkers conceptualized disability—away from earlier notions of disability as a marvel or wonder, toward a discourse of normalcy and deviance that framed disability as an aberration. Might returning to wonder offer us a path to approach disability differently? This article probes two risks: the way treating disabled people _as_ wondrous can be used to (...) objectify, turning disabled bodies into sites that matter because they spark feeling in others; and the way a call to _experience_ wonder can figure certain feelings or modes of perception as prerequisites for a meaningful life. Considering the way that disabled writers narrate our own experience showcases wonder’s possibilities: new orientations toward beauty, care, interdependence, and a sensuous engagement with the complex present of disabled people’s lives. (shrink)

Si apoyándonos en la evidencia histórica y empírica aceptamos que las bases éticas de una sociedad son el producto de una serie de transacciones consolidadas, y a su vez dichas bases están dirigidas a regular transacciones sociales, debemos dirigir nuestra atención a caracterizar cuáles son las transacciones que han resultado más exitosas en la tarea de desarrollar un entramado ético fuerte y estable.

En esta entrevista, el profesor Volpi reflexiona primero sobre la estrecha relación que existe entre la filosofía aristotélica, el nihilismo y la técnica. Sostiene que el mundo actual está modelado por la tecnociencia y requiere una recuperación del sentido de la acción y de la vida. Dado que estos fueron temas importantes en los escritos tardíos de Heidegger, Volpi valora después la actualidad de sus tesis. Finalmente, expone su visión de la relación entre la literatura y la filosofía, así como (...) el papel de ésta en nuestro mundo. (shrink)

How much violence can a society expect its members to accept? A comparison between the language theories of Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan is the starting point for answering this question. A look at the early stages of language acquisition exposes the sacrificial logic of patriarchal society. Are those forces that restrict the individual to be conceived in a martial imagery of castration or is it possible that an existing society critically questions those points of socialization that leave their (...) members in a state of homelessness? The following considerations should help to distinguish between unavoidable and avoidable forms of violence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fluctus Irarum, Fluctus Curarum: Lucretian Religio in the AeneidJulia T. DysonTantum religio potuit suadere malorum.(De Rerum Natura 1.101)Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem.(Aeneid 1.33)More than formal similarity unites these lines. 1 Lucretius points out the folly of religio, epitomized in Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his own daughter to appease an indifferent goddess; Virgil emphasizes the hardship of founding Rome in the wake of a goddess’s very real persecution. That is, (...) what Lucretius derides as foolish fantasy, Virgil weaves into the fabric of his epic. 2 I argue here that Virgil continually brings to life Epicurean caricatures of religio—that the vengeful gods and fearful mortals whom Lucretius ridicules become the chief actors in the Aeneid.One of Lucretius’ most “revolutionary” inversions of conventional language and assumptions is his paradoxical assertion that religio and pietas are opposites (see Summers 1995, 33). This paradox underlies his philosophical system: men are unhappy and wicked because of their superstitious fear of the gods (religio), and to free them from the “constricting knots of religion” (artis religionum nodis, 4.6–7) is his passionately stated purpose. He asserts that the gods are sublimely indifferent to human affairs and defines pietas as the equanimity that comes from recognizing this indifference, that is, from seeing the folly of conventional religio:O genus infelix humanum, talia divis cum tribuit facta atque iras adiunxit acerbas! quantos tum gemitus ipsi sibi, quantaque nobis vulnera, quas lacrimas peperere minoribu’ nostris! nec pietas ullast velatum saepe videri [End Page 449] vertier ad lapidem atque omnis accedere ad aras nec procumbere humi prostratum et pandere palmas ante deum delubra nec aras sanguine multo spargere quadrupedum nec votis nectere vota, sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri.(DRN 5.1194–1203)For the Epicurean, happiness, wisdom, and pietas all consist in surveying the world with a “peaceful mind.” Virgil shows us a world in which such ataraxia is impossible because the central assumptions of Epicureanism are wrong; in particular, the behavior of Aeneas and of the gods illustrates what Lucretius says should not or cannot happen.Aeneas has long been recognized as a sort of proto-Stoic, struggling with variable success to achieve self-control and obedience to Fate. 3 At the beginning of his journey, however, he momentarily resembles an Epicurean philosopher even as he engages in an act of conventional pietas. When his attempts to uproot a small tree to deck his altar twice cause the bark to drip blood (3.24–29), he tries to discover the hidden cause of this bizarre phenomenon: “mihi frigidus horror membra quatit gelidusque coit formidine sanguis. rursus et alterius lentum convellere vimen insequor et causas penitus temptare latentis ; ater et alterius sequitur de cortice sanguis. multa movens animo Nymphas venerabar agrestis Gradivumque patrem, Geticis qui praesidet arvis, rite secundarent visus omenque levarent.”(Aen. 3.29–36)These lines have a peculiar resonance with one of the most important and controversial passages in the Georgics (2.475–512). In this passage the poet first longs for the ability to explain natural phenomena (like Lucretius), then concedes that if cold fear should prevent him from attaining to this knowledge, he would settle for bucolic seclusion and rustic religio:sin has ne possim naturae accedere partis frigidus obsteterit circum praecordia sanguis, rura mihi et rigui placeant in vallibus amnes, [End Page 450] flumina amem silvasque inglorius. o ubi campi Spercheosque et virginibus bacchata Lacaenis Taygeta! o qui me gelidis convallibus Haemi sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra! felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas, atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum subiecit pedibus strepitumque Acherontis avari; fortunatus et ille deos qui novit agrestis, Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores.(Geo. 2.483–92)It may seem strange that this passage should have anything to do with Aeneas in Thrace, but the verbal echoes and parallels of thought are striking: an image of chilled blood is followed first by a desire to know the underlying causes of things, then, failing that, by an appeal to rustic religio, symbolized (among other things) by rural nymphs. Most readers see a reference to Lucretius in the line felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas (see Dyson 1994... (shrink)