This article addresses a discourse on visual culture and its comparability to visual arts in school curriculum; it focuses initially on Kevin Tavin’s 2005 history of popular and visual culture in relation to visual-art education.1 In the second part, I also discuss contributions to this discourse by Kerry Freedman2 and Paul Duncum.3 There are two concerns that I raise here about arguments made against visual-arts curriculum in this discourse. First, they are generally lacking in rigor, making generalized criticisms (...) of different writers from different sources, in an effort to describe a coherent new discipline that circulates around different names, such as “visual culture,” “popular culture,” “visual literacy,” and... (shrink)

This article proposes to elucidate Wilfrid Waluchow’s notion of constitutional morality by explaining how it relates to the classical common law idea of artificial reason. It examines how Waluchow’s effort to reconcile insights from the thought of H.L.A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin through the idea of constitutional morality is both reminiscent of the artificial reason of the common law and distinct from it. It shows that constitutional morality evokes the subtle union of custom and reason found in artificial reason, but (...) also that it proposes, under the influence of Hart’s notion of rule of recognition, a narrower understanding of law’s foundation in established practices, and that it gives, consistent with Dworkin’s vision of law as integrity, a greater theoretical scope to law’s rationality. (shrink)

This paper advances the conception of social entrepreneurs as caring entrepreneurs. We argue that the care ethics of social entrepreneurs, implying the pursuit of caring goals through caring processes, can be challenged when they engage in the process of scaling up their ventures. We propose that social entrepreneurs can sustain their care ethics as the essential dimension of their venture only if they are able to build a caring enterprise. Organizational care designates the set of organizing principles that facilitate the (...) embedding of care ethics at an organizational level, beyond the imprinting induced by social entrepreneurs’ personal ethics. (shrink)

Many have claimed that whenever an investigation might provide evidence for a claim, it might also provide evidence against it. Similarly, many have claimed that your credence should never be on the edge of the range of credences that you think might be rational. Surprisingly, both of these principles imply that you cannot rationally be modest: you cannot be uncertain what the rational opinions are.

David Bohm is a physicist with a broad range of other interests including religion, philosophy, education, art, and linguistics. This book surveys Bohm's physical theories including the quantum potential theory and the implicate order or holomovement theory.

Increasingly, frontiers between business and philanthropy seem to be blurred. Reward-Based Crowdfunding platforms contribute to this blurring of lines since they propose funders to support both for-profit and philanthropic projects. Our empirical paper explores the case of Ulule, the leading crowdfunding platform in Europe. Our results, based on a statistical analysis of more than 3000 projects, show that crowdfunding platforms foster specific kinds of relationships relying on reciprocal giving, beyond the usual opposition between altruistic and selfish motivations. We use the (...) work of Marcel Mauss to account for this process of reciprocal giving, and we argue that Maussian theory of gift can be used more generally to describe funding activities in the context of early stage entrepreneurship. (shrink)

"Mystic Maybe's": the title comes from Augustine Birrill's words on the death of Matthew Arnold. Is it true that Richard Kearney's philosophy of religion, like Arnold's reflections on the Bible, are "mystic maybe's," mere flirtations with possibility? In order to answer this question I seek to understand Kearney's expression "the God who may be" and to see if it fits into a non-metaphysical philosophy of religion. The expression is clarified by way of comparisons with Wolfhart Pannenberg's eschatological understanding of God (...) and Eberhard Jungel's theology of possibility. One weak point in Kearney's philosophy of religion, it is argued, is its avoidance of theology in the name of the philosophy of religion. A sound philosophy of religion needs to engage with theology. /// "Mystic Maybe's" (Possibilidades místicas): Este titulo deriva das palavras de Augustine Birrill acerca da morte de Mathew Arnold. O autor do artigo pergunta até que ponto a filosofia da religião de Richard Kearney não será, tal como as reflexões de Arnold acerca da Bíblia, um mew "místico talvez", um simples namoro com a possibilidaãe. Em ordem a responder à questão, o autor procura compreender o sentido da expressão de Richard Kearney acerca do "Deus que pode ser" de modo a avaliar até que ponto a expressão se adequa a uma filosofia não-metafísica da religião. O artigo clarifica a expressão de Kearney mediante uma comparação quer com a compreensão escatológica de Deus de Wolfhart Pannenberg quer com a teologia da possibilidade de Eberhard Jüngel. Mostra-se, desta forma, que um dospontos maisfracos na filosofia da religião de Richard Kearney consiste na sua tentativa de escapar à teologia em nome da filosofia da religião. Com efeito, argumenta o autor do artigo, uma autêntica filosofia da religião não pode deixar de estar num diálogo eficaz com a teologia. (shrink)

David Bohm's thinking has become widely publicized since the 1982 performance of a form of the Einstein‐Podolsky‐ Rosen (EPR) experiment. Bohm's holomovement theory, in particular, tries to explain the nonlocality that the experiment supports. Moreover, his theories are close to his metaphysical and religious thinking. Fritjof Capra's writings try something similar: supporting a theory (the bootstrap theory) because it is close to his religious beliefs. Both Bohm and Capra appear to use their religious ideas in their physics. Religion, their source (...) for physical hypotheses, provides the motivation to develop and uphold them. (shrink)

This paper argues that John Hick's commitment to the moral principle of altruism undermines his pluralistic claim that all of the major world religions are equally efficacious from a soteriological perspective. This argument is placed in a context of a discussion evaluating the theoretical virtues of various hypotheses about religious diversity. (Published Online April 7 2006).

Proof and perception : the context of the argumentum cartesianum -- Refutations of atheism : ontological arguments in English philosophy, 1652-1705 -- Being and intuition : Malebranche's appropriation of the argument -- An adequate conception : the argument in Spinoza's philosophy -- Ontological arguments in Leibniz and the German enlightenment -- Kant's systematic critique of the ontological argument -- Hegel's reconstruction of the argument.

Traces Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's engagement with deconstructive thought from his early work in the 1960s to the present, examining his key concepts - infancy, Voice, potentiality, sovereignty, bare life, messianism - in relation to key texts and concepts in Jacques Derrida's work.

The Covid-19 pandemic has presented major challenges to society, exposing preexisting ethical weaknesses in the modern social fabric’s ability to respond. Distrust in government and a lessened authority of science to determine facts have both been exacerbated by the polarization and disinformation enhanced by social media. These have impaired society’s willingness to comply with and persevere with social distancing, which has been the most powerful initial response to mitigate the pandemic. These preexisting weaknesses also threaten the future acceptance of vaccination (...) and contact tracing, two other tools needed to combat epidemics. Medical ethicists might best help in this situation by promoting truth-telling, encouraging the rational adjudication of facts, providing transparent decision-making and advocating the virtue of cooperation to maximize the common good. Those interventions should be aimed at the social level. The same elements of emphasizing cooperation and beneficence also apply to the design of triage protocols for when resources are overwhelmed. A life-stages approach increases beneficence and reduces harms. Triage should be kept as simple and straightforward as reasonably possible to avoid unwieldly application during a pandemic. (shrink)

This chapter presents what people think about God and how one should act in this world. It discusses how people should pray, and that, if possible, one could pray through poetry. It also discusses why poetry is considered as sacrament, on how its writings reflect one's belief. It focuses on “Lachrimae”, a poem that exemplifies sacramental manner.

The Ceci et al. article is consistent with tenure being a necessary condition for controversial research. In the absence of tenure, as in the United Kingdom, professors have been fired and suspended for politically controversial issues. There are a variety of reasons why tenure does not ensure that professors will engage in controversial research, including career interests and the desire to be liked. (Published Online February 8 2007).

The most fundamental issue in pedagogy is the question of what should be taught. The need to specify the content of learning applies at every stage of instruction from kindergarten to postgraduate school and at every level of curriculum from the institutional course catalogue to the daily class or lesson plan. On the broadest scale, implementation of one or another set of priorities on this matter will tend to dictate the direction of our entire educational system. Indeed, for well over (...) a century now a schism has existed between those on the one hand who maintain that specialized, preprofessional training is the necessary and proper goal of higher education and those on the other who advocate a generalist... (shrink)

Two prominent theoretical frameworks in moral psychology, Moral Foundations and Dual Process Theory, share a broad foundational assumption that individual differences in human morality are dispositional and in part due to genetic variation. The only published direct test of heritability, however, found little evidence of genetic influences on moral judgments using instrumentation approaches associated with Moral Foundations Theory. This raised questions about one of the core assumptions underpinning intuitionist theories of moral psychology. Here we examine the heritability of moral psychology (...) using the moral dilemmas approach commonly used in Dual Process Theory research. Using such measures, we find consistent and significant evidence of heritability. These findings have important implications not only for understanding which measures do, or do not, tap into the genetically influenced aspects of moral decision-making, but in better establishing the utility and validity of different intuitionist theoretical frameworks and the source of why people differ in those frameworks. (shrink)

Belief revision theory aims to describe how one should change one’s beliefs when they are contradicted by newly input information. The guiding principle of belief revision theory is to change one’s prior beliefs as little as possible in order to maintain consistency with the new information. Learning theory focuses, instead, on learning power: the ability to arrive at true beliefs in a wide range of possible environments. The goal of this paper is to bridge the two approaches by providing a (...) learning theoretic analysis of the learning power of belief revision methods proposed by Spohn, Boutilier, Darwiche and Pearl, and others. The results indicate that learning power depends sharply on details of the methods. Hence, learning power can provide a well-motivated constraint on the design and implementation of concrete belief revision methods. (shrink)

The anthropic principle, that the universe exists in some sense for life, has persisted in recent religious and scientific thought because it derives from cosmological fact. It has been unsuccessful in furthering our understanding of the world because its advocates tend to impose final metaphysical solutions onto what is a physical problem. We begin by outlining the weak and strong versions of the anthropic principle and reviewing the discoveries that have led to their formulation. We present the reasons some have (...) given for ignoring the anthropic implications of these discoveries and find these reasons wanting—a real phenomenon demands real investigation. Theological and scientific solutions of the problem are then considered and criticized; these solutions provide dead ends for explanation. Finally, we pursue the path that explanation must follow and look at the physical details of the problem. It seems clear that the anthropic principle has been poorly framed. Removing the ambiguities surrounding the meaning of “life” may lead to more profitable investigations. (shrink)

In this paper I identify a new group of aesthetic norms, which I call norms of cultivation. Judgments of taste are often accompanied by forecasts or expectations about future aesthetic satisfaction. When we find something beautiful, we expect to find it beautiful in the future. Forecasting is at play in all sorts of aesthetically motivated behavior. Yet psychologists have observed an unreliability in such forecasts. As a result of forecasting error, what we take as our taste can be an unreliable (...) guide in our aesthetic lives. Compensating for the unreliability of taste are norms of cultivation, implicit rules for engaging objects, such as avoiding overexposure to favored objects or exposure under unfavorable conditions. Norms of cultivation help to regularize aesthetic experience, mitigating unreliability in forecasts, and fostering the ongoing stability and coherence of taste. (shrink)

The nature of the sales manager/salesperson relationship is examined. Our study investigates the level of agreement between sales managers and salespeople on the importance of the salesperson having specific internal virtues in order to do their job properly. Unlike external virtues that can be codified into codes of conduct, internal virtues are traits that cannot be codified but rather are part of the spiritual makeup of the person. Findings suggest that the level of agreement between sales managers and salespeople in (...) this area drives satisfaction with the sales manager and organizational commitment. Further, contrary to studies which use a summated job satisfaction measure, which consists of several facets of job satisfaction, satisfaction with the sales manager has a direct relationship with turnover intent. (shrink)

While the fields of biomedical ethics and environmental ethics have received a great deal of philosophical attention in recent years, the intersection of these fields—environmental health ethics—ha...

The concept of an intrinsically immoral act is unattractive and widely rejected in modern moral theory, with some even going so far as to suggest that no such thing can exist. Such thinkers insist that two distinct realms exist: the moral law and the individual conscience. However, Veritatis splendor expressly rejects this stance and accurately foresees its incoherence and the threat accepting it poses to the credibility of Catholic moral teaching. This article examines the writings of Thomas Aquinas as well (...) as several other important church documents to show that personal conscience cannot be separated from the objective moral law. (shrink)