This article addresses the question of whether the relation of moral preference is transitive. I argue, following Larry Temkin and Stuart Rachels, that any ethical theory complex enough to be even minimally plausible allows us to generate intransitive sets of preferences. Even act utilitarianism cannot avoid this predicament unless we accept its least plausible version. We must reevaluate the assumption that an ethical theory must be transitive in order to be rational. This problem amounts to a foundational crisis in (...) ethics. However, it has not been taken seriously for two reasons—the belief that the problem has limited scope; and the claim that arguments against transitivity are 'merely' Sorites arguments. This article responds to both of these objections. I also point out some connections between intransitivity and the debate surrounding skepticism about the moral significance of numbers. (shrink)

Hickman situates Dewey’s critique of technological culture within the debates of 20th-century Western philosophy by engaging the work of Richard Rorty, Albert Borgmann, Jacques Ellul, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and Martin ...

A theoretical model is presented for pattern formation in an epithelium. The epithelial model consists of a thin, incompressible, viscoelastic membrane on an elastic foundation (substrate), with the component cells assumed to have active contractile properties similar to those of smooth muscle. The analysis includes the effects of large strains and material nonlinearity, and the governing equations were solved using finite differences. Deformation patterns form when the cells activate while lying on the descending limb of their total (active + passive) (...) stress-stretch curve. Various one-dimensional and two-dimensional simulations illustrate the effects of spatial and temporal variations in passive stiffness, as well as the effects of foundation stiffness and stretch activation. The model can be used to examine the mechanical aspects of pattern formation in morphogenetic processes such as angiogenesis and myocardial trabeculation. (shrink)

Unethical conduct has reached crisis proportions in business :A1–A10, 2011) and on today’s college campuses :58–65, 2007). Despite the evidence that suggests that more than half of business students admit to dishonest practices, only about 5 % of business school deans surveyed believe that dishonesty is a problem at their schools :299–308, 2010). In addition, the AACSB which establishes standards for accredited business schools has resisted the urging of deans and business experts to require business schools to teach an ethics (...) class, and fewer than one-third of businesses schools now teach a business ethics course at the graduate or undergraduate levels. In this paper we briefly introduce the status of business ethics education and report the results of a survey of business students, deans of the top business schools, and business ethics subject matter experts about ten ethical outcomes. We then offer five specific recommendations to encourage business ethics faculty and decision makers to improve the teaching of business ethics. (shrink)

Sassen is Interested in what she terms “conceptually subterranean trends” that are for the most part invisible to current analytical methods but visible, or in her words, “legible,” to other, newer sorts of analytical tools that she herself is developing. She thus emphasizes suspension of accepted methods and development of certain “analytic tactics” that function, as she puts it, “before method.” What this means more specifically is that she is not so much analyzing the structures of existing institutions but instead (...) pursuing a more functional approach, that is, seeking to determine how they are assembled, dis-assembled, and re-assembled. Her focus is thus on the making of non-material conditions, that is, their .. (shrink)

John Dewey (1859-1952), hailed during his lifetime as "America's Philosopher," is now recognized as one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century.

This title presents not two, but three questions. The third question, the one that lies behind and is obscured by the two more obvious ones, concerns the nature of American philosophy. What qualifies as “American” philosophy? Is it, as some have suggested, philosophy as it is practiced in any of the Americas – North, Central, or South? Or is it perhaps philosophy as it is pursued by practitioners living in North America, or even in a more restricted sense, by practitioners (...) living in the Unite... (shrink)

Into the not so tranquil atmosphere of American race relations blew Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life proclaiming the emergence of a New Class of the “cognitive elite” and an underclass of the cognitively unfit. Public response has been both extensive and contradictory. Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman have compiled the most comprehensive anthology of these responses, which they appropriately describe as a “gale in the Zeitgeist.” Many of the selections are (...) critical because, as they point out, the book fairly reflects the weight of published opinion thus far. As for themselves, they feel the work “gives a sophisticated voice to a repressed and illiberal sentiment: a belief that ruinous divisions in society are sanctioned by nature itself (p. ix). (shrink)

This essay argues that "the family" should be understood in functional terms:whatever functions as a family should have the legal status of a family. Theauthor's argument thus avoids two extreme positions. The first is the position ofthe hard-line "platonic" essentialists who, on grounds of nature, supernature, orcultural history, argue that a family unit must comprise heterosexual partners.The second is the position of the radical relativist, who argues that there are noessences whatsoever or that essences are purely arbitrary. Treating the family (...) infunctionalist terms, the author argues, would have positive consequences thatwould strengthen the social fabric. (shrink)

This chapter presents an edited e-mail discussion based on the philosophical conversations at a conference held in Cologne, Germany, in December 2001. The discussion proceeds in three steps. First, the contributors discuss selected questions about their contributions, roughly following the sequence of the chapters in Part II of this book. Second, the contributors ask more general questions about Dewey, Pragmatism, and constructivism. Finally, the chapter ends with brief statements about why Dewey is still an indispensible thinker for them. As they (...) clarify their differences and seek common ground, they articulate concepts such as power, truth, relativism, inquiry, and democracy from Pragmatist and interactive constructivist vantage points, in ways designed to render the preceding essays even more accessible. In their views, the concluding discussion demonstrates both the enduring relevance of classical Pragmatism and the challenge of its reconstruction from the perspective of the Cologne program of interactive constructivism. (shrink)

Despite revisions to curriculum in ethics education in business schools, there continues to be high profile examples of unethical decision making regularly spotlighted in the media. Rather than simply teaching about behaviors and how they might impact decision makers and stakeholders, we describe a suite of activities used to highlight various behaviors and biases that impact the decisions individuals might make. These activities are intertwined with course materials regarding ethics and corporate governance to remind and help students better understand how (...) decision making can be influenced and challenged by personal ethics. We provide lesson planning suggestions including adapting to remote delivery, and student handouts. This suite of activities can be incorporated into any undergraduate or graduate level course that has content dealing with ethical decision making. (shrink)

Diese Abhandlung untersucht die Erkenntnisse über globale Ethik, die Dewey während seiner internationalen Reisen, insbesondere während seines zweijährigen Aufenthalts in China 1919–1921, gewonnen hat. Ich behaupte, dass Deweys Naturalismus, welcher auf einem Verständnis der Möglichkeiten basiert, Charles Darwins Arbeit in den Geisteswissenschaften anzuwenden, Modelle für interkulturelle Diskussionen liefert. Ich weise darauf hin, dass ei nige der Hindernisse, Deweys Beitrag zur globalen Ethik anzuerkennen, in falschem Lesen und falscher Deutung seiner Arbeit liegen, so wie jene, die von Roberto Unger avanciert wur (...) den. Letztendlich behaupte ich, dass das Auftreten einer globalen Ethik solange unwahrscheinlich sein wird, bis die Menschen die engen supernaturalistischen und nicht-naturalistischen Dogmen überschreiten und sich die naturalistischen Weltansichten zueigen machen. (shrink)

Postmodernism -- Classical pragmatism : waiting at the end of the road -- Pragmatism, postmodernism, and global citizenship -- Classical pragmatism, postmodernism, and neopragmatism -- Technology -- Classical pragmatism and communicative action : Jürgen Habermas -- From critical theory to pragmatism : Andrew Feenberg -- A neo-Heideggerian critique of technology : Albert Borgmann -- Doing and making in a democracy : John Dewey -- The environment -- Nature as culture : John Dewey and Aldo Leopold -- Green pragmatism : reals (...) without realism, ideals without idealism -- Classical pragmatism -- What was Dewey's magic number? -- Cultivating a common faith : Dewey's religion -- Beyond the epistemology industry : Dewey's theory of inquiry -- The homo faber debate in Dewey and Max Scheler -- Productive pragmatism : habits as artifacts in Peirce and Dewey. (shrink)

In this commentary on Evan Selinger’s book Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde, I begin with Carl Mitcham’s claim that with respect to Don Ihde’s “postphenomenology” there are “challenges both to and from pragmatism.” I discuss four points on which postphenomenology and pragmatism seem to be in agreement, and then two points on which I believe pragmatism offers a program that socially thicker.

_Contract Theory_ examines the logical and conceptual structures that arise in the process of making, honoring, and enforcing contracts. The touchstone of Anglo-American contract law is the determination of contractual intent. Two theories have competed for center stage: the subjective theory of the "meeting of the minds" and the objective theory in which the parties' manifestations and the transaction's contextual factors became the means for contract interpretation and enforcement. The implementation of the objective theory of contract is the "reasonable person (...) standard." Larry DiMatteo focuses on the development, construction, and application of the reasonable person standard. He undertakes a study of the origins of the reasonable person in the disciplines of philosophy, theology, and psychology and concludes with an examination of the interplay between this objective standard and the subjectivity of judgment. The importance of the synthesis of the objective and subjective elements of contracts is crucial for a complete understanding of contract law. (shrink)

Appraisal theories of emotion generally presuppose that emotions are “directed at” various items. They also hold that emotions have motivational properties. However, although it coheres well with their views, they have yet to seriously develop the idea that the function of emotional direction is to guide those properties. I argue that this “guidance hypothesis” can open up a promising new field of research in emotion theory. But I also argue that before appraisal theorists can take full advantage of it, they (...) must drop their further assumption that to determine an emotion's direction, one need only retrace the process that caused it. Contrary to this “retracing view,” I argue for an “independence thesis”: directed emotions are produced by two functionally independent sub-processes. The first, “affect-causation,” functions in part to produce a state with certain motivational properties given certain representations. The second, “affect-direction,” has the function of optimally guiding those motivational properties by associating them with representations that may properly be quite dissimilar from the causal ones. By provisionally adopting the independence thesis and empirically testing the guidance hypothesis, I argue that appraisal theorists stand a good chance of significantly increasing the explanatory power of their theories. (shrink)

[This paper was presented at the APA Eastern Division Conference in New York City, January 2024] -/- Can one reasonably doubt that one is voluntarily making a commitment, even when one is doing so? Given that one voluntarily makes a commitment if and only if one (personally) knows that one is doing so, the answer appears to be “No.” After all, knowing implies justifiably believing, and it seems impossible that one could (synchronically and from a single personal perspective) reasonably doubt (...) what one justifiably believes. Indeed, assuming that one reasonably doubts that P only if one has sufficient evidence to believe that not-P, traditional epistemologists may hold that such “epistemic ambivalence” entails one’s believing a contradiction, while some Bayesians should hold that it entails violating “probabilism” (the norm that credences must conform to the axioms of probability). However, I argue that in at least some cases of romantic commitment-making, such ambivalence may not only be epistemically permissible, but even required, and perhaps best dealt with pragmatically. (shrink)

After summarizing what I take to be the main contribution of Norton’s book––his proposal for a new vocabulary for public discourse as it pertains to environmental stability––I attempt to locate his work among some of the current debates regarding sustainability and public policy. I detail some of the ways in which this work constitutes a further development of themes he presented in 1991 in Toward unity Among Environmentalists. I discuss his prescriptions for defusing confrontations regarding environmental policy by functionalizing issues (...) in ways that cut across historically entrenched interest groups. From the standpoint of method, I␣argue that Norton has stacked a Habermas- type proceduralism on top of a pragmatic experimentalist platform (and I add that if he had constructed his method the other way around it would not have worked.) In all this I find Norton’s proposals both imaginative and full of promise. (shrink)

Michela Bella & Matteo Santarelli – What was the state of Pragmatism studies when you first encountered pragmatism? Larry A. Hickman – After completing my undergraduate degree in psychology I decided that I wanted to study philosophy. In order to prepare for graduate school, I spent a year taking philosophy courses at the University of Texas in Austin. The faculty included Charles Hartshorne, who was co-editor of the Peirce Collected Papers. There was also David L. Miller and George Gentry, (...) b... (shrink)

Jo Ann Boydston, 2 July 1924 - 25 January 2011Jo Ann Boydston enjoyed a distinguished career as general editor of the Collected Works of John Dewey and director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Born in Poteau, Oklahoma of Choctaw Indian heritage, she graduated summa cum laude from Oklahoma State University in 1944. She received an M.A. from Oklahoma State (1947), a Ph.D. from Columbia University (1950), and honorary doctorates from Indiana University (1994) and Southern (...) Illinois University (2004).In 1961, Boydston joined the staff of a modest research project at Southern Illinois University called "Co-operative Research on Dewey Publications" as assistant to project .. (shrink)

"... a comprehensive canvass of Dewey’s logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, philosophy of history, and social thought."—Choice "... a major addition to the recent accumulation of in-depth studies of Dewey." —Journal of Speculative Philosophy "Larry Hickman has done an exemplary job in demonstrating the relevance of John Dewey’s philosophy to modern-day discussions of technology."—Ethics.

This brief essay examines James A. Good’s argument that the Hegel of the young Dewey was functionalist, historicist, instrumentalist, and practicalist—in short, the Hegel of “centrist” Hegelians such as those then active in St. Louis and of contemporary interpreters such as Good himself and Terry Pinkard. Good’s claims are examined in terms of possible conflicts with what is known of William James’s influence on Dewey, and in the light of recently published correspondence in which Dewey comments on the Hegelian “deposit” (...) in his work. (shrink)

In 1947 America’s premier philosopher, educator, and public intellectual John Dewey purportedly lost his last manuscript on modern philosophy in the back of a taxicab. Now, sixty-five years later, Dewey’s fresh and unpretentious take on the history and theory of knowledge is finally available. Editor Phillip Deen has taken on the task of editing Dewey’s unfinished work, carefully compiling the fragments and multiple drafts of each chapter that he discovered in the folders of the Dewey Papers at the Special Collections (...) Research Center at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He has used Dewey’s last known outline for the manuscript, aiming to create a finished product that faithfully represents Dewey’s original intent. An introduction and editor’s notes by Deen and a foreword by Larry A. Hickman, director of the Center for Dewey Studies, frame this previously lost work. In Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, Dewey argues that modern philosophy is anything but; instead, it retains the baggage of outdated and misguided philosophical traditions and dualisms carried forward from Greek and medieval traditions. Drawing on cultural anthropology, Dewey moves past the philosophical themes of the past, instead proposing a functional model of humanity as emotional, inquiring, purposive organisms embedded in a natural and cultural environment. Dewey begins by tracing the problematic history of philosophy, demonstrating how, from the time of the Greeks to the Empiricists and Rationalists, the subject has been mired in the search for immutable absolutes outside human experience and has relied on dualisms between mind and body, theory and practice, and the material and the ideal, ultimately dividing humanity from nature. The result, he posits, is the epistemological problem of how it is possible to have knowledge at all. In the second half of the volume, Dewey roots philosophy in the conflicting beliefs and cultural tensions of the human condition, maintaining that these issues are much more pertinent to philosophy and knowledge than the sharp dichotomies of the past and abstract questions of the body and mind. Ultimately, Dewey argues that the mind is not separate from the world, criticizes the denigration of practice in the name of theory, addresses the dualism between matter and ideals, and questions why the human and the natural were ever separated in philosophy. The result is a deeper understanding of the relationship among the scientific, the moral, and the aesthetic. More than just historically significant in its rediscovery, Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy provides an intriguing critique of the history of modern thought and a positive account of John Dewey’s naturalized theory of knowing. This volume marks a significant contribution to the history of American thought and finally resolves one of the mysteries of pragmatic philosophy. (shrink)

This dissertation focuses on psychological and epistemological issues related to our practice of accepting first-person reports of emotional state as knowledgeable. It concerns the epistemic warrant of beliefs having the form "I'm feeling X about Y" and "Y is making me feel X about Z", where X refers to an affective state, and Y and Z refer to situations. On the assumption that such "emotion-based" beliefs are true if and only if they accurately represent the "situation-directed" emotions they are about, (...) much attention is given to the initial issue of what an emotional state is. A feeling-centered, componential view of emotion is defended, one in which occurrent emotions are held to be extrinsically related combinations of affective and cognitive aspects. While the view is held to be consistent with current appraisal theories of emotion, such theories are criticized as being formally incomplete. It is argued that an adequate theory of the emotional system must distinguish between the two independent sub-processes of "affect-causation" and "affect-direction", but that appraisal theory is concerned only with the former. The model of a single emotional system with two sub-processes is defended against the objection that "affect-program" and "higher cognitive" emotions must be produced by different psychological systems. ;A notion of emotional rationality is defended that is consistent both with a feeling-centered, componential view of emotion, and with the modularity of the emotional system. It is argued that both the rationality and modularity of emotion help to facilitate the noninferential production of emotion-based beliefs. A reliabilist approach to the warrant of such beliefs is defended against its main "constitutivist" alternative, and a general entitlement to such beliefs is outlined. In the course of outlining the conditions of noninferential emotion-based knowledge, the notion of an "emotion-based equivalent" is developed: a relevant alternative state of affairs that can defeat a claim to such knowledge even when all other epistemic conditions are satisfied. However, it is argued that there is no convincing reason to think that these defeating conditions are prevalent enough to prevent us from having noninferential emotion-based knowledge in most cases. (shrink)