Institutions create their own internal cultures, including the culture of ethics that pervades scientific research, academic policy, and administrative philosophy. This paper addresses some of the issues involved in institutional enhancement of its culture of research ethics, focused on individual empowerment and strategies that individuals can use to initiate institutional change.

This paper argues that a minimal notion of function and a notion of normal-proper function are used in explaining how bodies and brains operate. Neither is Cummins’ notion, as originally defined, and yet his is often taken to be the clearly relevant notion for such an explanatory context. This paper also explains how adverting to normal-proper functions, even if these are selected functions, can play a significant scientific role in the operational explanations of complex systems that physiologists and neurophysiologists provide, (...) despite a lack of relevant causal efficacy on the part of such functions. (shrink)

Two versions of global supervenience have recently been distinguished from each other. I introduce a third version, which is more likely what people had in mind all along. However, I argue that one of the three versions is equivalent to strong supervenience in every sense that matters, and that neither of the other two versions counts as a genuine determination relation. I conclude that global supervenience has little metaphysically distinctive value.

Community-based mental health care providers are increasingly contacted by external researchers for research study recruitment. Unfortunately, many do not possess the resources or personn...

Au fil des volumes inaugurés par Bardadrac, Gérard Genette, livrant des versions différentes de certains biographèmes, « corrige » sa vie d’une façon qu’on propose d’appeler annotation de soi. L’étude de la figure de « Jacqueline » révèle ainsi un usage très personnel de la note auctoriale, telle que Genette l’avait définie dans Seuils, et qui fait tendre l’ensemble des volumes non seulement vers l’autofiction, mais vers une sorte d’« anti-roman » valéryen.

Although for a long time, Dutch academic philosophy was characterized by a pluralism of – imported – philosophical frameworks and paradigms, in more recent decades, a type of ‘normal philosophy’, in the Kuhnian sense, has become dominant which aims to solve ethical and political problems and dilemmas through rational-normative argumentation. Contrary to what is often claimed, the new 'normal philosophy' amounts not to thinking ‘beyond the analytic-continental divide’ in a fruitful synthesis, but to the subsumption of continental philosophical themes and (...) concepts under the analytic tradition. The potentially critical tenor of continental philosophy threatens to be ‘solved’ by this subsumption. ‘Normal philosophy’, with its emphasis on rational-normative argumentation, risks leading to a state philosophy that fits in with existing policy questions, ignoring systemic and structural power inequalities. I argue that the journal Krisis, in keeping with its original principles, should hang on to critical philosophical reflection, which today is needed more than ever, specifically – pace current right-wing and left-wing populist attacks on identity politics – on systemic, multiple forms of deprivation and oppression. (shrink)

Suppose a certain man, Dion, has his foot amputated, and lives to tell the tale. That tale involves a well-known metaphysical puzzle, for most of us assume that there was, before the operation, an object made up of all of Dion’s parts except those that overlapped with his foot-- ”all of Dion except for his foot”, we might say, or Dion’s “foot-complement”. Call that object Theon. (Anyone who doubts that there is such a thing as Dion’s undetached foot-complement may imagine (...) that ‘Theon’ is a name for Dion’s undetached head. Surely there is such a thing as Dion’s head? And surely Dion could, in principle, survive if his head were detached from the rest of him and kept alive?) It seems obvious that Theon, like Dion, continues to exist after the operation, for you cannot destroy an object merely by changing its surroundings--merely by removing something that was never a part of it. The puzzle, then (which might be called the problem of undetached parts), is how Dion and Theon are related after the operation. The most common answer to this question is that Dion and Theon come to occupy just the same region of space and to be made of just the same matter after the operation. The next-mostpopular answer is that Dion and Theon are made up of temporal parts, and while those of their temporal parts that “occur” before the operation only partly overlap, Dion and Theon have the very same post-operative temporal parts. Much as two roads can merge and have spatial parts in common, Dion and Theon merge and have temporal parts in common. Less popular accounts of the relation between Dion and Theon involve relativizing identity to concepts or times, and denying that there is such a thing as Theon. Michael Burke has recently proposed an intriguing new solution (or resurrected an ancient one) to the problem of undetached parts. [1] He argues that, despite appearances, Theon-- Dion’s foot-complement--ceases to exist when Dion’s foot is removed.. (shrink)

The obesity epidemic among children and adolescents in the United States continues to worsen. The most recent analysis of data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey showed that the prevalence of overweight among children and adolescents – defined as a Body Mass Index at or above the 95th percentile on gender-specific BMI-for-age growth charts developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – increased significantly between 1999-2000 and 2003-2004. Over this period, the prevalence of overweight among children (...) and adolescents aged 2-19 increased 23% – from 13.9% to 17.1%. In 2003-2004, 18.8% of children aged 6-11 and 17.4% of adolescents aged 12-19 were overweight. Roughly comparable proportions of each age group were considered to be at risk of becoming overweight. (shrink)

This article reveals a 91-year-old cognitively intact man’s lived experiences of being cared for in a geriatric context in which the majority of the patients were cognitively impaired. A narrative patient story was analysed phenomenologically. The findings indicate that this patient’s basic needs for ethical care were not met. The staff did not see him as a unique individual with his own preferences, resources and abilities to master his life. In order to survive this lack of ethical care, he played (...) the role of an ‘old cognitively impaired man’, which provided him with at least the understanding and attention the cognitively impaired patients received from the staff. The findings also indicate that ethical care is independent of whether or not older cognitively intact and impaired patients stay or live in the same unit, but it is more dependent on a caregiver’s ability to respect and confirm each and every patient for who he or she is and would like to be. (shrink)

An array of pressing but conceptually perplexing questions in ethics---questions concerning group rights, collective responsibility, and the ethics of nationalism---would seem to require for their resolution answers to the no less perplexing questions of what social groups are and what membership in them amounts to. In this dissertation, I offer an analysis of the concept of what I call an 'ethnic identity group' and argue that questions about ethics and ethnicity or nationality are best understood as questions about such groups (...) and their agency. The main argument for the analysis involves showing its usefulness for understanding how group membership might be involved in personal moral identity and individual agency. ;The analysis I offer makes use of Max Weber's idea that the concept of a social group is analyzable in terms of the possibility that certain kinds of social action will be performed. A Weberian analysis of a kind of social group involves a characterization of the types of social action that are possible in relation to groups of that kind. After responding to Margaret Gilbert's arguments against Weberian analyses of social groups and related phenomena, I suggest that one central social concept is that of a group defined in terms of the availability for group members of standing in a particular relation to an idea of the group, where that idea is, more specifically, an idea of a collective agent. This is the concept of an identity group. What distinguishes members of an identity group from nonmembers is the availability for the former of standing to the group in a relation I call 'moral alignment'. Roughly, an individual aligns herself with a group to the extent that she sees the group's agency as an extension of her own. This concept of moral alignment is a development of Aristotle's view that through shared deliberation and action, friends in a perfect friendship become "other selves" for each other. A group member is socially placed so as to have access to the idea that other members may act for her and she for them. If she aligns herself with the group, the group becomes another self for her, and she may act as a member of the group. An ethnic identity group is a collection of individuals, each of whom may align himself with an idea of the group---where that idea is an idea of a particular collective agent, whose collectivity rests on the shared ancestry of the collected individuals---and each of whom may, therefore, act and respond emotionally as a member of the group. (shrink)

This paper argues that Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility” provides a rich analytic framework for understanding how the many dimensions of aesthe...

Jonas Olson presents a critical survey of moral error theory, the view that there are no moral facts and so all moral claims are false. Part I explores the historical context of the debate; Part II assesses J. L. Mackie's famous arguments; Part III defends error theory against challenges and considers its implications for our moral thinking.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Beyond Personal Identity: Dōgen, Nishida, and a Phenomenology of No-SelfCarl OlsonBeyond Personal Identity: Dōgen, Nishida, and a Phenomenology of No-Self. By Gereon Kopf. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2001. 298 + xx pp.This work of comparative philosophy focuses on the problem of the self by comparing Western existential and phenomenological thought with Zen thinkers such as Dōgen and Nishida. In addition to such thinkers as Jean-Paul Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Edmund (...) Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, the author also includes a discussion of such Western philosophers as Descartes, Kant, Leibniz, Lock, and Hume. The author demonstrates a knowledgeable command of his subjects and the central focus of the book.After discussing the problem of personal identity in the first part of the book, the author uses the second part of the book to place phenomenologists into dialogue with Zen Buddhist thinkers. The second part of the book includes the following topics: selfhood, otherness, continuity of experience, and temporality. In the final part of the book, the author considers the Zen conception of personal identity by discussing a Zen phenomenology of experience and personhood as presencing. Within the context of this final part of the book, Kopf wants to develop terminology that derives from both phenomenology and Zen Buddhism in order to consider the Zen notion of no-self as a process of presencing. This approach gives the author an opportunity to explore the philosophical implications of Zen Buddhist terminology and rhetoric and to suggest a way to theorize and discuss the self beyond personal [End Page 200] identity. Overall, each of the three parts of the book provides a different perspective: a discourse on personal identity, a comparative philosophical perspective, and a Zen viewpoint.This work of comparative philosophy embodies an internal tension between the position of the author and the impermanent nature of the non-self in Zen Buddhism. Kopf acknowledges his basic position in the following way: "It is my thesis that the framing of the question of personal identity already implies the notion of an enduring self" (p. xviii). In contrast, Dōgen rejects the notion of an enduring self or personal identity. The author's stated thesis and that of Zen Buddhism suggests that continuity is a crucial issue for this book.In chapter 4, Kopf elucidates his understanding of the continuity of experience: "The notion of continuity reflects the assumption that the 'I' of human experience is not without a history: It finds itself in the context of past experiences, which the experiental 'I' encounters in memories, as well as in a given situation" (p. 124). In short, a person finds oneself thrown into a situation. After discussing Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, the non-self doctrine in early Buddhism, how the Mahāyāna thinker Vasubandhu attributes continuity of experience to the habit energy produced by karmic activity, and how Nāgārjuna collapses the distinction between sam.sāra and nirvan.a, the author considers the positions of Dōgen and Nishida. The former defines the continuity of experience by two diachronically diverse dharma positions instead of three moments of time. This position suggests that Dōgen views continuity as the process from the present to the present and not as a process that operates from the past into the future. According to Nishida, the I-Thou forms a nonrelative contradictory self-identity, and it exists in the world of expression. This implies that the self is simultaneously continuous and discontinuous.In his chapter on temporality, Kopf distinguishes between abstract time, phenomenal time, lived time, and actual time, which is a fourth dimension suggested by Dōgen and Nishida. Abstract time is rejected because time is inseparable from existence. Grasping time as a dynamic event, the author discusses phenomenal time, in which the self realizes its own temporality and historicity. In contrast to the threefold structure of abstract time, phenomenal time possesses a twofold structure of past and future, whereas lived time embodies an internal unity in which the present unifies the past and future. A fourth dimension of time—actual time—is suggested by the work of Dōgen and Nishida. Actual time expresses a "modality of... (shrink)

his paper argues that the critical doctrine of the necessary unity of the thinking subject propounded in Kant’s Second Paralogism contains an idealist commitment to the metaphysically exceptional nature of the unifying activity of thought. Rather than rejecting Kant’s transcendental framework as necessarily idealist and antagonistic to the current projects of speculative materialism, it is argued that transcendental philosophy should remain an important ingredient of any contemporary metaphysics. The implicit metaphysical idealism of Kantian critical idealism, it is claimed, in the (...) end reveals speculative resources within the architecture of transcendental philosophy that can, if I am right, maintain the importance of the project of determining the epistemological legitimacy of metaphysical knowledge without reducing metaphysics to the subjective idealism of Kantian critical philosophy. (shrink)

Tomasello, Kruger & Ratner relate the evolution of social cognition – the understanding of others' minds – to the evolution of culture. Tomasello et al. conceive of the accumulation of culture as the product of cultural learning, a kind of learning dependent upon recognizing others' intentionality. They distinguish three levels of this recognition: of intention (what isxtrying to do), of beliefs (what doesxthink aboutp), and of beliefs about beliefs (what doesxthinkythinks aboutp). They then tie these levels to three discrete forms (...) of cultural learning – imitative, instructed, and collaborative – which children become capable of when they are 9 months, 4 years, and 6 years old respectively, at least in Western culture where relevant data are available. (shrink)

Many women today prepare for a big meeting by reading a stack of folders and applying lipstick. They order their male colleagues around, then wait for those same men to help them on with their coats. They have higher-status jobs than some of the men they date, yet they never call men socially or ask them out. What's going on? Why such seemingly contradictory behaviors? Have women completely failed feminism--or has feminism failed them? In The Lipstick Proviso , Karen (...) Lehrman--hailed by the New York Times as the "sharpest" of the new feminist thinkers--shows that women today are failing neither feminism nor themselves. Rather, they've entered a new stage of feminism, one in which the personal is not political, differences between the sexes need to be respected, and courtship, chivalry, and the nuclear family don't have to be jettisoned just because they existed before the sixties. Thirty years after the women's movement liberated women from narrowly defined roles, Lehrman argues, we are finally beginning to see which traditionally feminine behaviors are more deeply rooted in biology and which are more heavily influenced by culture. Lehrman asserts that the result--whatever it is--will not undermine feminism as long as women still retain equal rights, opportunities, and responsibilities. Dispensing with the outdated notion of sisterhood, Lehrman offers women a "lipstick proviso": women don't have to sacrifice their complex individuality in order to be equal. As the first book to move beyond a critique of orthodox feminism, The Lipstick Proviso sets a radically new course for the future of the women's movement. While there's still much political work to be done, Lehrman argues that women should now focus on the personal sides of their lives. Women can't rightly be called autonomous if they stay with abusive or even emotionally challenged lovers; say "yes" to sex when they really mean "no"; overeat or undereat to hide their sexuality. With wit and grace, Karen Lehrman offers in The Lipstick Proviso a way to complete the feminist revolution, and clearly establishes herself as the definitive voice of the next generation of feminism. (shrink)

This paper provides a model on repairing re-establishing stakeholder relationships after a firm engages in a moral indiscretion. Depending upon their nature, indiscretions can be classified as mistakes, misconduct, or improprieties. After committing an indiscretion, firms can attempt to reestablish positive stakeholder relationships by strengthening their technical competency (for mistakes), improving their reputation (for misconduct), and enhancing their goodwill with relevant stakeholders (for improprieties). However, a firm’s cultural orientation may result in the misapplication of the stakeholder repair mechanism (competency, reputation, (...) and goodwill) with the applicable indiscretion (mistakes, misconduct, and improprieties). (shrink)

In this commentary we suggest that asymmetries in reasoning associated with moral judgment do not necessarily invalidate a theory-theory account of naïve psychological reasoning. The asymmetries may reflect a core knowledge assumption that human nature is prosocial, an assumption that heightens vigilance for antisocial dispositions, which in turn leads to differing assumptions about what is the presumed topic of conversation.

Oxford Studies in Metaphysics is the forum for the best new work in this flourishing field. Much of the most interesting work in philosophy today is metaphysical in character: this series is a much-needed focus for it.