(Updated 5/23/24) This unpublished paper, which readers should feel free to cite, is posted primarily for the historical record. In recent work that has, deservedly, received some attention, Paul R. Daniels presents and defends a non-standard theory of persistence that he dubs transdurantism, according to which persisting objects are temporally extended simples. This is exactly what I do in work dating back to Spring 2004. (This work includes this version of this paper, as well as later version that was presented (...) to the University of Rochester's Philosophy Department in 2005.) While this might be a total coincidence, I doubt that it is, especially given that 'transdurantism' appears as a name for a theory of persistence associated with me in at least two places in the literature, one of which includes a citation of this paper. The paper begins with a discussion of what I call 'locative relations' (the relations borne by material objects to the regions of space and time they occupy), which draws relevant distinctions that others have failed to draw. The results of this discussion are then used in constructing spatial analogues for the three established theories of persistence--endurantism, perdurantism, and exdurantism--as well as for transdurantism. Next, these four views concerning persistence are explicitly formulated and a defense of their formulation is offered. Finally, transdurantism's advantages and disadvantages relative to the other theories are discussed. The main goal of the paper is to challenge the trichotomy between the established theories by arguing that transdurantism is also a viable view concerning persistence through time. [Note: Befitting its status as a historical document, with the exception of some light editing to fix typos that might impede understanding, no changes have been made to the paper.]. (shrink)

I argue against the Primary Sound Account of Echoes (PSAE) – the view that an echo of a sound just is that sound. I then argue that if my case against PSAE is successful, distal theories of sound are false. The upshot of my arguments, if they succeed, is that distal theories are false. Towards the end, I show how some distal theories can be modified to avoid this conclusion and note some open questions to which the modified theories give (...) rise. (shrink)

In this essay, Miriam argues for a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach to the radical feminist theory of sex-right and compulsory heterosexuality. Against critics of radical feminism, she argues that when understood from a phenomenological’ hermeneutic perspective, such theory does not foreclose female sexual agency. On the contrary, men's right of sexual access to women and girls is part of our background understanding of heteronormativity, and thus integral to the lived experience of female sexual agency.

This article contributes to the development of a professional responsibility theory of public relations ethics. Toward that end, we examine the roles of a public relations practitioner as a professional, an institutional advocate, and the public conscience of institutions served. In the article, we review previously suggested theories of public relations ethics and propose a new theory based on the public relations professional's dual obligations to serve client organizations and the public interest.

This study explores the relationship between board environmental committees and corporate environmental performance. We propose that board environmental committees will be positively associated with CEP. Moreover, we argue that the composition of the committee as well as the presence of a sustainability manager will influence this relationship. Our results find support for a positive association between board environmental committees and CEP. Further, the presence of a senior-level environmental manager positively moderates this relationship, but is not effective in isolation. Unexpectedly, no (...) support was found for the influences of stakeholder representation. (shrink)

Paul frequently refers to the traditions of his ancestors as ‘the scriptures’, or with introductory formula such as ‘it is written’. Such references have often been taken as self-explanatory in that it was assumed that these were references to the writings which in Jewish and Christian tradition have acquired the status of canonicity. Since such a perception of the scriptures as canonical is anachronistic for the first century, the question needs to be asked to what does Paul actually refer when (...) he refers to the Scriptures. Which parts of which canon encompassed ‘the holy scriptures’ which Paul refers to e.g. in Rom 1:2? In addition to issues of divergent interpretations of scriptural texts could there also have been issues under debate concerning which written traditions were perceived as ‘scripture’? The issue of the fluidity of the collection as well as of the text deemed ‘holy’ in first-century Judaism has an impact on the question of how the authority of such a collection is perceived, particularly since Paul clearly aims at enculturating gentile Christ-followers into the world of the Scriptures. The mysterious reference in 1 Cor. 2:9 is explored as a test case for Paul’s understanding of the collection and text which he deemed to be ‘scripture’. (shrink)

Yoga is thousands of years old, but because of its current popularity, some people wrongly dismiss it as just another exercise fad made fashionable by celebrities. In fact, as author Kathy Phillips demonstrates in this large, beautifully illustrated book, yoga is a gentle but powerful means of achieving strength, flexibility, serenity, and a healthy balance between body and mind. Originating on the Indian subcontinent at the dawn of civilization, yoga is now accepted worldwide as an effective way to deal (...) with physical and emotional stress. The Spirit of Yoga is a sensible introduction for beginners, and a source of inspiration for current practitioners who would like to learn more. It explains differences among the various yoga disciplines, enabling readers to make a considered choice that best fits their needs. The author uses her experience as a yoga teacher to describe exercises and postures-also shown in color photos-that can promote physical health and body flexibility while inducing emotional tranquility. Yoga positions are suggested as effective remedies for physical ailments and for discomforts produced by everyday stress. The author's witty approach to her subject demystifies today's yoga hype while offering readers sound guidance and emphasizing the entirely real benefits they can derive from this honorable discipline. The book's foreword is by the international fashion model Christy Turlington. Hundreds of color photos and illustrations. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Good Days, Bad Days: The Self in Chronic Illness and Time. By Kathy Charmaz.

Employee attributions and emotional reactions to unethical behavior of top leaders in an organization recently involved in a highly publicized ethics scandal were examined. Participants (n = 76) from a large southern California government agency completed an ethical climate assessment. Secondary data analysis was performed on the written commentary to an open-ended question seeking employees' perceptions of the ethical climate. Employees attributed the organization's poor ethical leadership to a number of causes, including: lack of moral reasoning, breaches of trust, hypocrisy, (...) and poor ethical behavior role modeling. Emotional reactions to corruption included cynicism, optimism, pessimism, paranoia and fear, and were targeted at top leaders, organizational practices (i.e., the old boy network, nepotism, and cronyism) and ethics interventions. Implications for leadership training and other organizational ethics interventions are discussed. (shrink)

Animals are used in biomedical research to study disease, develop new medicines, and test them for safety. As the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics’ review Normalising the Unthinkable acknowledges, many great strides in medicine have involved animals. However, their contribution has not always been positive. Decades of attempts to develop treatments for diseases including asthma, cancer, stroke, and Alzheimer’s using animals have failed to translate to humans, leaving patients with inadequate treatments or without treatments at all. As Normalising the Unthinkable (...) points out, we have to confront the fact that animal research may have hindered progress, at least in some respects. For example, animal tests have been shown to have very little ability to predict the safety of medicines for human patients. A dramatic illustration of this failing is TGN1412, which almost killed 6 clinical trial volunteers in 2006, after crab-eating macaques showed the drug to be safe, even at massive doses. This failing contributes to adverse drug reactions, which are now one of the world’s leading causes of death, killing hundreds of thousands of people every year and hospitalizing millions. A revolution in science and technology has produced a new generation of more relevant and predictive tools, which could be used to create safer medicines more quickly and at less cost: a win-win situation that should be supported by everyone. The obstacle preventing this from happening is governments’ continued insistence on animal testing. Yet the evidence is clear that reliance on animals as surrogate humans puts patients at risk, can delay medical progress, and can cause effective treatments to be wrongly discarded. There is a compelling case to be made that animal research is an ethical issue for humans as well as for animals. (shrink)

The Public Relations Society of America adopted its first code of ethics in 1950, 2 years after PRSA was formed. During the next 50 years, the code was revised and updated several times to keep pace with industry practices and increased expectations for ethical performance. In 2000 a new code was adopted to heighten awareness of ethical issues and address concerns regarding code enforcement. In this article I trace the 50-year evolution of PRSA's codes of ethics and related code-enforcement activities.

Since its inception, the concept of `intersectionality' — the interaction of multiple identities and experiences of exclusion and subordination — has been heralded as one of the most important contributions to feminist scholarship. Despite its popularity, there has been considerable confusion concerning what the concept actually means and how it can or should be applied in feminist inquiry. In this article, I look at the phenomenon of intersectionality's spectacular success within contemporary feminist scholarship, as well as the uncertainties and confusion (...) which it has generated. Drawing upon insights from the sociology of science, I shall show how and why intersectionality could become a feminist success story. I shall argue that, paradoxically, it is precisely the concept's alleged weaknesses — its ambiguity and open-endedness — that were the secrets to its success and, more generally, make it a good feminist theory. (shrink)

What remains as an ongoing project, Weeks contends, is creating a theory of the constitution of subjects to account for the processes of social construction. This book presents one such account.

There is a fear of death that persistently eludes adequate explanation by contemporary philosophers of death. The reason for this is their focus on mortal harm issues, such as why death is bad for the person who dies. Claims regarding the fear of death are assumed to be contingent on the resolution of questions about the badness of death. In practice, however, consensus on some mortal harm issues has not resulted in comparable clarity on mortal fear. I contend we cannot (...) do justice to fear of death unless we detach it from theories about the badness of death, including the overwhelmingly-popular deprivation theory. The case for this involves disambiguation of certain aspects of mortal harm, a broad conception of what is involved in accounting for an emotion, and close attention to the nature of the fear in question. The source of fear of death is our departure from a context in which self-directed emotions have coherent application; our attitudes become ‘unmoored,’ in Samuel Scheffler’s phrase. While this does not result in a fear that is sui generis, it does demand that we remove the object of fear from the realm of well-being in order to make sense of it. (shrink)

When Philip Sidney defends poetry by defending the methods used by poets and lawyers alike, he relies on the traditional association between fiction and legal procedure--an association that begins with Aristotle. In this study Kathy Eden offers a new understanding of this tradition, from its origins in Aristotle's Poetics and De Anima, through its development in the psychological and rhetorical theory of late antiquity and the Middle Ages, to its culmination in the literary theory of the Renaissance. Originally published (...) in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This article undertakes a critical analysis of the work of Gisèle Sapiro, with reference to sociology of literature. From 1999 (Sapiro, 2014a), Sapiro has developed the Bourdieusian research tradition, amplifying especially Bourdieu’s theory of crisis. Focusing on the antagonisms between literary “prophets” and “priests”, she has drawn on a rich sample of 184 writers to elucidate the struggles inherent in World War II between writers from different field positions and literary habitus. Further, her historical analyses of the ethical commitments of (...) nineteenth century writers via a fresh microsociology of literary trials (Sapiro, 2011) has reminded us of the importance of popular poets in articulating the suffering of the subordinate classes. Her most recent book (Sapiro, 2018) has expanded on her earlier themes, whilst identifying the recuperation of certain 1930s’ fascist worldviews within contemporary literature. This article notes that there is a telling divergence between Bourdieu and Sapiro on the issue of interests behind disinterestedness, exemplified in the case of Zola. On this issue, Sapiro’s reading (Sapiro, 2011) is found convincing. Finally, the dialectic of avant-garde consecration and routinisation is questioned as a universal structure. It is suggested that certain avant-garde – the Harlem Renaissance, for example – did not undergo swift consecration or routinisation, although this contention deserves greater research. The paper concludes by showing that Sapiro’s conception of writers’ responsibility owes its origins less to Sartre than to the Durkheimian/ Bourdieusian notion of the expertise of the “specific intellectual”. It welcomes Sapiro’s concern for literature as a potential force for social change. (shrink)

‘Any reason for living is an excellent reason for not dying’ (Steven Luper-Foy, 'Annihilation'). Some claims seem so clearly right that we don’t think to question them. Steven Luper-Foy’s remark is like that. It borders on the ‘trivially true’ (i.e. so obviously true as to be uninteresting). If I have a reason to live, surely I likewise have a reason not to die. It may then be surprising to learn that so many philosophers disagree with this claim—either directly or by (...) implication. I will look at some of the things people say that stand in opposition to Luper-Foy’s claim. I will also consider what is needed in order to agree with it. The views canvassed cover broad issues concerning life and death, and what matters to us with respect to both. (shrink)

New standards adopted by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International (AACSB) stress business curriculum-wide learning objectives, of which ethics is a critical part. “Knowledge and skills” in ethical responsibilities are required as part of institutionalaccreditation. An exploratory study offers insight into ethics integration, perceived comfort in teaching ethics, and methods used. The main tension presented balances calls for ethics across business curricula with the assertion that ethics instruction, in the hands of an untrained professor, may do more (...) damage than good. Results suggest that while faculty include ethics in their courses, only slightly more than half have received some kind of ethics training. We also explore ethics pedagogies and found differences between methods respondents used in the classroom and desired learning methods for themselves. We offer insights about and possible explanations for the gaps we found in our study, contextualizing them in new literature. We finish with a brief discussion of how our findings impact accreditation assessment. (shrink)

This book defends morality against the critiques of egoims, subjectivism, and relativism. It argues that we can and should construe some moral standards as objective and that justice and self-development are the cornerstones of healthy morality. Opening with a dialogue meant to tease and provoke the reader, the book's subsequent chapters treat misconceptions about morality, the possibility of unselfish action, the nature of free will and moral responsibility, and the identity of moral right and wrong.

In this article I consider five anonymous quotations in Stephanus of Byzantium. The first is very probably an overlooked fragment of early mythography. The other four are much less likely to be early, but theoretically could be and are included for the sake of completeness.

Probably the most interesting feature of the 40-year history of biomedical biotechnology is the extent to which it has been open to – and influenced by – concerns over social values and the public’s voice. Good intentions notwithstanding, however, benchmarks and best practices are woefully lacking for informing the policy-making process with public values. This is particularly true in the United States where the call for “public debate” is often heard but seldom heeded by policy-making bodies. Geneforum, an Oregon-based non-profit, (...) has developed a practical and working model designed to encourage deliberative democratic processes for addressing the ethical and social issues raised by emerging biotechnologies. Ordinary citizens do not need to be scientists to understand the important implications of the new technological advances. When factual information and basic principles are conveyed in linguistically and culturally appropriate ways, the scene is set for a shift from monologue to dialogue, from “I-thinking” to “We-thinking,” to occur. This paper describes the Geneforum model structured to intensify the democratization of policy decision-making, in general, using genomic science, in particular, as one example of its application. (shrink)