Is Joseph Margolis a member of the often neglected school of “Columbia naturalism”? Columbia naturalism promoted a distinctive non-reductive nationalism in mid-twentieth-century America. Inspired by pragmatism, and Dewey in particular, its members included Ernest Nagel, John Herman Randall, Joseph Blau, Herbert Schneider, and Justus Buchler. Margolis received his degree from Columbia in 1953. Neither his early work in aesthetics nor his mature attempt to justify pragmatic themes in an uncompromising dialogue with analytic and continental philosophy seems particularly “Columbian.” (...) Neither does his radical endorsement of a kind of relativism. However, Margolis is after all some kind of naturalist. Furthermore, the Columbians shared a forgotten doctrine, called “objective relativism.” If the combination of naturalism and relativism is a Columbian fruit, Margolis may have has fallen closer to the tree than first appears. (shrink)

An action is a pair of sets, C and S, and a function \. Rothschild and Yalcin gave a simple axiomatic characterization of those actions arising from set intersection, i.e. for which the elements of C and S can be identified with sets in such a way that elements of S act on elements of C by intersection. We introduce and axiomatically characterize two natural classes of actions which arise from set intersection and union. In the first class, the \-actions, (...) each element of S is identified with a pair of sets \\), which act on a set c by intersection with \ and union with \. In the second class, the \-biactions, each element of S is labeled as an intersection or a union, and acts accordingly on C. We give intuitive examples of these actions, one involving conversations and another a university’s changing student body. The examples give some motivation for considering these actions, and also help give intuitive readings of the axioms. The class of \-actions is closely related to a class of single-sorted algebras, which was previously treated by Margolis et al., albeit in another guise, and we note this connection. Along the way, we make some useful, though very general, observations about axiomatization and representation problems for classes of algebras. (shrink)

Following Dorothy Gale over Thomas Wolfe, there’s no place like Clark, and it is a great pleasure to come home today, in a panel organized by one of my teachers, Gary Overvold, chaired by another, Bernie Kaplan, with yet another, Walter Wright, in attendance, not to mention my friend Bob Scharf, to comment on the work of an admired colleague, Joe Margolis. I will add to the standard list of Clark boosterisms by noting that Charles Peirce—a figure important for (...) Joe, and for me, as will be obvious—wrote in 1900 that “the Clark University... has perhaps the most elevated ideal of any university in the world....” I gratefully thank Gary for the invitation to this elevation, and Joe Margolis for sending me a lot of free material to criticize. (shrink)

Abstract:The organization is importantly different from both the nation-state and the individual and hence needs its own ethical models and theories, distinct from political and moral theory. To develop a case for organizational ethics, this paper advances arguments in three directions. First, it highlights the growing role of organizations and their distinctive attributes. Second, it illuminates the incongruities between organizations and moral and political philosophy. Third, it takes these incongruities, as well as organizations’ distinctive attributes, as a starting point for (...) suggesting an agenda for an ethics of organizations. (shrink)

Nativism as a theory that interprets certain abilities and ideas as innate [The contexts we will consider prefer to speak precisely of innateness in the sense of New European philosophical discussions and avoid the notion of “a priori”/“a posteriori”, respectively, and we will stick to this terminological pair.], is considered by some contemporary philosophers as an echo of outdated philosophical approaches. Critics for the most part reproach it for being unscientific and metaphysical. In one of its most extreme forms, nativism (...) is accused of mysticism and lack of evidence. At the same time, a number of very authoritative thinkers openly call themselves nativists and defend this trend in philosophy, cognitive sciences, linguistics and other fields of knowledge (Chomsky, McGinn, Lawrence and Margolis). The main aim of this paper is to analyse the contemporary polemic between empiricists and nativists. It will be shown that the main polemical knot around which the debate unfolds can be easily untied through a transcendentalist interpretation of nativism. In particular, an appeal to phenomenology can help to notice the importance of the idea of the non-essentiality of the source of experience to experience. Phenomenology, which preserves the idea of this non-essentiality, has in mind a radical break with the ontology of natural objects, and will not, in particular, deduce innate knowledge from evolutionary mechanisms, nor will it place it within the biological structure of organisms (e.g., the brain or the neural processes in it). It remains to be shown that most of the positions and refutations of modern nativism are based on a misunderstanding of the classical “overcoming” of the dispute between empiricism and rationalism by transcendentalism and transcendental phenomenology, as well as the requirement of transcendentalism and transcendental phenomenology not to place the source of experience in the same world in which we locate experience itself. The study is to consider what the modern nativist view must look like in its transcendentalist interpretation in order to be a worthy opponent to modern empiricism. (shrink)

Abstract:Psychological forces in play across individual, group, and organizational levels of analysis increase the likelihood that people in business organizations will engage in misconduct. Therefore, it is argued, we must turn our attention from dominant normative and empirical trends in business ethics, which revolve around boundaries and constraints, and instead concentrate on methods for promoting ethical behavior in practice, exploiting psychological forces conducive to ethical conduct. This calls for a better understanding of how organizations and their inhabitants function, and, in (...) turn, it points to pragmatic solutions. Ethical conduct can be promoted by (1) normatively justifying vivid aims worthy of pursuit alongside economic objectives, and (2) empirically identifying the conditions and practices that advance those aims in firms. This approach challenges us to bring empirical and normative inquiry together—in ways unsettling to both. It pushes us to move beyond an empirical preoccupation with decision making and judgment, and it requires us to cope with political liberalism’s legitimate qualms about discussions of the good. (shrink)

Social analysis of transplant organ demand often focuses on either small-scale (familial) tyrannies of the gift or large-scale (global) markets. Media accounts of the scandalous in transplant medicine stress the latter, a homogeneous model of flows of biovalue down gradients of economic and social capital. This article examines particular globalizations of tissue demand organized as much around claims of social similarity as gradients of social difference. To engage apparent ‘diasporic’ networks of organ purchase — Non-Resident Indians traveling to India and (...) Overseas Chinese to China — I elaborate a concept of bodily supplementarity. Supplementarity in this account is the ability of an individual or population to secure longevity through the mobilization or acquisition of the organic form of others. Diasporic tissue circuits are analyzed in the context of ‘experiments’ in supplementarity that proliferate with the transformation of the molecular conditions for supplementarity. The emergence of powerful immunosuppressants renders the scale of tissue recruitment flexible and contingent, and allows clinics to develop alternatives to brain death. These circuits emerge as situations that reorder the relation of the familial and the global in transplantation, in the service not only of migrant supplementarity but also efforts to reimagine the challenges of emigrant belonging within particular configurations of racialized life and its government. (shrink)

There is a considerable effort in current theorizing about psychological phenomena to eliminate minds and selves as a vestige of folk theories. The pertinent strategies are quite varied and may focus on experience, cognition, interests, responsibility, behavior and the scientific explanation of these phenomena or what they purport to identify. The minimal function of the notion of self is to assign experience to a suitable entity and to fix such ascription in a possessive as well as a predicative way. It (...) is usually argued that Hume formulated an empiricist account of experience that obviated the need for reference to selves; and recent arguments mustered by Derek Parfit claim to show how to preserve experience, interest, responsibility usually assigned selves and persons without invoking any such entities. The argument here advanced demonstrates that Hume actually concedes the minimal use of the notion of self, that there appear to be no convincing grounds for eliminating it, that there are critical uses for the notion that render it ineliminable, that admission is neutral regarding the nature of selves, and that Parfit''s arguments in particular fail. There appear, therefore, to be no empiricist or materialist grounds for the eliminative move. A large recent literature that favors various eliminative strategies is canvassed and shown to be inadequate to its task and unlikely (for principled reasons) to be able to achieve its eliminative objective. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper we shall prove that l-rings are categorally equivalent to the MV*-algebras, a subcategory of perfect MV-algebras. We shall use this equivalence in order to characterize l-rings as quotients of certain semirings of matrices over MV*-algebras. We shall establish a relation between l-ideals in l-rings and some ideals in MV*-algebras. This edlows us to study the MV* f-algebras, a subclass of the MV*-algebras corresponding to the f-rings.

One of six commentaries on “Obesity: Chasing an Elusive Epidemic,” by Daniel Callahan, from the January‐February 2013 issue.

Although Jonathan Herington, Angus Dawson, and Heather Draper offer valuable insights on how to conceptualize health hazards and understand their effects on populations, I resist the label “public health emergency” for obesity, and here is why. It is important—politically and pragmatically—to be judicious with words that have legal and real‐world consequences. Once a concept is stretched to encompass a broad swath of events, it loses its power. The broader the application of the term “public health emergency,” the more it loses (...) the core idea of an emergent event. Thus, framing a long‐simmering health hazard such as obesity as an emergency would mute the voices of public health authorities seeking a surge response to a truly emergent event, such as a rapidly spreading novel disease or a natural or man‐made disaster. (shrink)

Donnellan's distinction between the referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions is shown not to cover exhaustive and exclusive alternatives but to fix the termini of a continuum of cases. in fact, donnellan's distinction rests on a mixed classification: the referential use, concerned with intended referents regardless of what speakers may say about them; the attributive use, concerned with definite descriptions used in using sentences, that something or other may satisfy. given this feature of his account, it is easy to (...) construct counterexamples of a hybrid nature. related views (stalnaker's, kaplan's, stampe's) are briefly canvassed. (shrink)

La plupart des recherches entreprises sur la philosophie de Michel Foucault ont visé jusqu’à maintenant à définir et assigner son travail à une étiquette politique définie. Foucault est pour les uns anarchiste, pour les autres nihiliste ou encore simple militant de gauche. Ce qui est étonnant avec cet effort, c’est que malgré la multiplicité des lectures, elles peuvent toutes se justifier et trouver quelques appuis dans son oeuvre. Par contre, en entreprenant la recherchedu politique de cette façon, c’est-à-dire en posant (...) à Foucault la question programmatique du « ce qu’il faut faire », nous tombons dans un piège que lui-même a toujours souhaité éviter, celui d’« unidimensionnaliser » sa pensée. Mais alors, comment lire son oeuvre sans nous-mêmes appliquer cette morale d’État civil demandant à chaque philosophe ses papiers politiques? En quoi, si nous refusons cette question, la pensée de Foucault peut-elle demeurer une pensée politique? Notre thèse est la suivante : en examinant la manière avec laquelle Foucault ré????léchit le politique dans son cours au Collège de France Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres, nous p ouvons m ontrer c omment, vers la fin de sa vie, il a changé l’angle de la question. En effet, dans ce cours, l’activité politique n’est plus envisagée à partir de la question du « ce qu’il faut faire », mais à partir de l’expérience du pouvoir elle-même, c’est-àdire comment sommes-nous en mesure d’exercer le pouvoir sur les autres. La tâche du philosophe n’est donc plus celle du « donneur de leçon » pense Foucault dans ce cours, mais celle de faire de sa vie un exemple où parole et acte, discours et vérité sont intimement reliés. (shrink)

Abstract:Why does it matter that every negative thought you have had about car salespeople, they have likely had about you? The answer to this question opens up the distinctive challenges, and opportunities, facing business ethics. Those challenges and opportunities emerge from the significant bearing organizational reality has upon individuals’ conduct. As we consider how to assign responsibility for misconduct; how to provide guidance to organizational actors about what they ought to do; and how to develop responsive ethical theory, we need (...) to take psychological and social forces into account. Organizations shape human behavior in ways that pose unavoidable questions about responsibility, practical guidance, and the enterprise of business ethics itself. Adopting the agents’ perspective suggests that business ethics can take a leading role in addressing these vexing questions that confront ethical inquiry and social science more broadly. (shrink)

The topic of this thesis is the nature of human concepts understood as mental symbols or representations. ;Many discussions in this area presuppose an inferential model of concepts taken together with what I call the standard model of concept learning. An inferential model of concepts says that a concept's identity depends upon its participating in inferential dispositions linking it to certain other concepts. For example, one might think that part of what makes a mental symbol the concept BIRD is that (...) it participates in an inferential disposition linking it to the concept ANIMAL. The standard model of concept learning says that learning a concept involves assembling it from previously available concepts. For example, one might think that the concept BIRD is learned by putting together the concept ANIMAL with concepts like WING, FLIES, and so on, yielding a more complex structure. The standard model of concept learning presupposes a form of the inferential model of concepts. Thus one of the reasons many people endorse the inferential model is that they are committed to a broadly empiricist picture of the mind; they assume that most concepts are learned, so they must also assume that most concepts have the sort of structure that the model presupposes. ;My thesis challenges both of these points with respect to a class of concept that has been of central interest in philosophy and cognitive science, namely, the lexical concepts . I argue that the independent evidence for the inferential model in this case is no good and consequently that the standard model of concept learning doesn't work. Still, it remains plausible that many lexical concepts are learned. What we need are new learning models, ones that depart in significant ways from the standard model. I end the thesis by outlining a proposal that may work for the natural kind concepts. (shrink)

Pregledujem sedanje slepe ulice zahodne filozofije in predlagam nov začetek. V sedanjem trenutku prevladujejo tri najmočnejše pojmovne opcije; skepticizem, kognitivni privilegij in historicizem. Prvi je škandal, drugega zavračajo vse strani, tretji pa je trenutno dokaj zanemarjen. Historicizem ali zgodovinskost - pojem, daje mišljenje notranje historizirano, da je mišljenje zgodovina - je edini velik nov prispevek moderne filozofije k glavnim pojmovnim virom zahodne tradicije. Sodobna filozofija, posebno angloameriška analitična filozofija, je v bistvu nadaljevanje filozofije 17. stoletja in predkantovske filozofije 18. stoletja, (...) ki ju begajo »nepomembnosti« 19. stoletja; kontinentalna filozofija, v glavnem francoska in nemška, pa se je zdaj pripravljena prilagoditi ahistoricizmu analitične filozofije. Predlagam ponovno odkritje historicizma in prepoznam številne različne strategije, ki dajejo prednost taki politiki, za katero napovedujem, da bo še enkrat prišla na vrsto v naslednjem stoletju. Še posebej skrbno raziskujem vidike prve filozofije, zaprtih sistemov, rešitev problemov reference in predikacije, odnos med naravo in kulturo, odnos med realizmom in idealizmom in naravo ter funkcijo osebe ali sebstva. Ugotavljam, da se sodobna filozofija mora spoprijeti s prispevki Kantovega konstruktivizma in Heglove simbioze in iti preko obeh. Med dokazovanjem orišem splošno krivuljo zahodne filozofije vse do današnjih časov. (shrink)

The molecular signals that determine the position and timing of the furrow that forms during mammalian cell cytokinesis are presently unknown. It is apparent, however, that these signals are generated by the mitotic spindle after the onset of anaphase. Recently we have described a structure that bisects the cell during telophase at the position of the cytokinetic furrow. This structure, the telephase disc, appears to the templated by the motitc spindle during anaphase, and precedes the formation of the cytokinetic furrow. (...) The relationship of the telephase disc to the myosin and actin based furrowing mechanism is discussed here. We propose that the telophase disc may determine the position and timing of cleavage by recruitment and alignment of myosin. (shrink)

In this paper, the author argues that within the current philosophical debate, pragmatism has a distinct advantage over its rivals—on the one hand, Anglo-American analytic philosophy and, on the other hand, continental philosophy. By refusing to succumb to ‘naturalizing’ tendencies, pragmatism is able to overcome scientistic tendencies in contemporary analytic philosophy. At the same time, by emphasizing the ‘natural’, pragmatism provides a helpful correction to metaphysical tendencies in continental philosophy.