The increased usage of questionable environmental marketing claims has become an issue of concern for academics, policy makers and consumers. Much of the research to date, has focused on the accuracy of environmental claims in advertisements, with the information on product packaging being largely ignored. This study uses a content analysis to examine the environmental information on packaging. More specifically it examines the packaging of the population of dishwashing liquid bottles available in grocery stores in a large city in Australia. (...) Evaluation criteria are developed to classify the various types of information and the degree to which the information is "misleading". Seven different informational categories and four accuracy categories are developed. These criteria are developed based on the existing environmental advertising literature and environmental marketing regulations in the U.S. and Australia. It was found that a majority of the packaging information can be classified as being not accurate. (shrink)

In 2001, I experienced severe radial neuropathy, leading to permanent dysfunctions in the fingers of my left hand. In this personal account of nerve damage, medical and surgical treatment, and adaptation, I first describe the sequence of neuropathies, then turn to how through serendipity, the brace enabled other connections—nervelines—with individuals and places. The brace is a metonym of a severed nerve with its associated loss of movement and capacity; it is also both a functional orthotic and an affordance. It carries (...) me forward, activating other nervelines and networks to make things happen. I write of literal and metaphoric nerves, evolving connectivities, and fiber lines, thought lines and collaborations. I then extend the idea of nervelines and networks to global connnections; I emphasize how the organization of labor, the distribution of goods and services, and the expectations of workers shape body histories and life outcomes. (shrink)

In this essay, I analyze pregnancy loss from a feminist phenomenological perspective. I draw upon relational accounts of personhood wherein a person's status and identity are formed through a lived history and the activity of “calling into personhood” a being a woman may seek to know or become. I draw upon the work of Simone de Beauvoir, who advances a feminist phenomenology that grounds the status and identity of women within embodied situations. Her important work sheds light on the varied (...) perceptions and processes that inform experiences of pregnancy and pregnancy loss. (shrink)

The purpose of this dissertation is to present and defend a view regarding the freedom of human action which I call "Causationism," a view which incorporates some of the more fundamental commitments of traditional Determinism while allowing for the possibility of statistically regular actions or components of actions. Premise I of Causationism essentially maintains that all human actions are caused either by statistical regularities or deterministically. The inclusion of statistically regular events or components of actions in a causal account is (...) based on an appeal to the Dretske-Snyder thesis of "Causal Irregularity." Premise II of Causationism is essentially identical to the Incompatibility Thesis of traditional Determinism. My theory then proceeds along traditional Deterministic lines, concluding with the claim that "No one is morally responsible for his or her actions." ;Premise I is defended by appeal to empirical evidence. It is then demonstrated that traditional Libertarian arguments intended to weaken the force of this evidence fail. ;In Chapter III, I consider objections to the Incompatibility Thesis. I argue that a hypothetical reading of "he could have done otherwise" not only fails to capture what we mean when we speak of an individual's "acting freely," but also that a hypothetical reading of this phrase fails to provide a sufficient condition for a morally relevant sense of "freedom." ;In Chapter IV, I argue, by appeal to the concept of "novelty" and to Davidson's Mind/Body Theory, that, contrary to the opinion of some philosophers, an event's being caused does not require that it be predictable or subsumable under statements of probability expectations. ;Chapter V addresses the claim that if all actions are caused, then no action can be rational. A variety of arguments are formulated to demonstrate that various versions of the "Determinist Dilemma" fail. ;Finally, in Chapter VI, I argue that adoption of Causationism does not destroy morality although the denial of moral responsibility significantly alters traditional morality and requires a reanalysis of certain basic ethical terms. I offer the required reanalyses and consider the ramifications of their adoption to ethical theory. (shrink)

The dualism of nature/culture widely present within Western society at large is out of step with an increasingly urbanising world. Building on previous discussions of nature/culture duality, an integrative framework is presented that argues for the embracing of the ‘mundane nature’ found within human landscapes. As over half of the human population interacts with nature primarily within urban landscapes, increasing our awareness of such spaces is critical to understanding our ecological consciousness. The examples of a recent rooftop greening bylaw in (...) the city of Toronto and the social impacts of urban gardening are examined in this context. (shrink)

DAGFINN FØLLESDAL'S essay in defense of twelve theses on the nature of the noema could be thought of as a spring from which a series of papers continues to flow. The paper's portrayal of the noema as "an intensional entity" has, as Føllesdal notes, "consequences [which] go against the usual interpretation." His "unusual" interpretation has been explored, and continues to be developed, in the flow of papers mentioned as well as in a recent collection that presents itself as a "new (...) approach to Husserl [which] provides an ideal introduction to phenomenology for analytic philosophers.". (shrink)

This collection examines the relationship between phenomenology, interpretation, and community, considering the issues from several viewpoints including German idealism, the discourses of the Frankfurt School, and post-structuralist thought.

The creation of a sense of place has emerged as a goal of many community development initiatives. However, little thought has been given to the role of physical spaces in the shaping of possible senses of place. This article examines three Canadian examples of community sustainable development initiatives to demonstrate that sense of place can be shaped and constrained by the geographical and environmental features of the physical space a community occupies. This finding suggests that a 'one-size-fits-all' approach to community (...) sustainable development is unlikely to be successful; a community's sustainable development ethic will be informed by geography. However, there is some evidence that a strong individual sense of place shaped by local space may act as a barrier to the acceptance of new people and ideas. Conversely, a strong sense of place can result in mobilization for sustainable development initiatives. (shrink)

Americans have trillions of dollars invested in public and private companies, yet stock ownership is highly unequal: the wealthiest 1 percent of households possess 40 percent of all wealth, and there is a large and persistent racial wealth gap. What if innovations in distributed technologies allowed for democratic facilitation of new opportunities for wealth and a rebalancing of power within the capital markets? This article proposes using innovative financial technologies to create a “Public Investment Platform”—a public option for participation in (...) capital markets—and a “Public Investment Account” to universalize access to investment opportunities. Capital markets are currently governed by public policies that submerge the role of the public in structuring them and enable an inequitable accumulation of wealth. To democratize finance, new policies are required to democratize participation in investment. (shrink)

Current human/social science research supports Don Ihde’s postphenomenology. In particular, archeology and anthropology support Ihde’s instrumental realism, and history identifies the culture that nourished Platonic and Aristotelian separation of mentality and materiality. Deweyean pragmatism, beginning with his analysis of the reflex arc, supports both instrumental realism and an interrelational ontology that rejects the residual Cartesian dualism in Husserlian phenomenology. Ihde’s acknowledgment of the affinity between postphenomenology and Deweyean pragmatism enables expanding his prevalent epistemological and structural orientation to encompass a normative (...) dimension. Peter-Paul Verbeek’s focus on the ethical dimension of how products are designed and how things interact with humans is an important expansion of pragmatic postphenomenology as well as an expansion of current research on the “4e’s” of cognition—embedded, embodied, enacted, and extended—to include a fifth: ethical. (shrink)

The interpretation of discourse covers a continuum with two extremes: on the one hand, a text considered as an ideal, distant object, and on the other hand, a conversation regarded as a real, present event. On the basis of a distinction between relatively context-invariant propositions and relatively context-dependent statements, it is argued that statements in conversational discourse are easier to interpret than statements in texts, whereas only propositions in symbolic logic can be interpreted with exactitude. In the same way, the (...) interpretation of dialogical arguments proceeds more easily than the interpretation of arguments in texts. While dialogical argumentation requires a dialectical approach, textual argumentation necessitates an imaginative reconstruction of the argument. From this it can be concluded that for different sorts of argumentative discourse diverse sorts of interpretative activities have to be used. (shrink)

Through the lens of feminist theory, Kuo examines the milieu of prostitutes and the role of prostitution in contemporary society, and how the interplay of those two works itself out in practice.

Ethical problems are addressed in various ways within countries in planning for and response to pandemic influenza. Here we report on a qualitative study, in which 46 policymakers in Malawi and Ghana were interviewed on how they identified and resolved ethical problems. The study results revealed that ethical problems involving conflicts of values and choices were raised in reference to the extent and role of resources and nature of public health interventions, including the extent and processes of decision making, reasoning, (...) and justification. There is a need for an ethical framework within pandemic preparedness plans to resolve and avert these problems. (shrink)

Argumentation is a form of communication, rather than an application of(formal) logic, and is used in communicative activity as a means forinquiry, although it is more typically thought of as bringing inquiry toclosure. Thus interpretation is an intrinsic and crucial aspect ofconversational (interactive) argumentation. In order to further thisunderstanding of argumentative activity, I propose a procedure forinterpretation that draws upon hermeneutic phenomenology. In response tocriticisms by argumentation theorists (and others) who understand thistradition as oriented to psychological, perceptual, or textual objects, (...) Iargue that hermeneutic phenomenology supports methods for analysis ofpublic communicative activity. The resulting conception of ’thick argumentation‘ responds to contemporary (postmodern) claims that argumentation valorizes univocity, stasis, and certainty at the expense ofthe pluralism, fluctuation, and range of epistemic results thatcharacterize discourse in the public sphere. (shrink)

This book focuses on what pragmatism tells us about the nature and function of communication.

This article builds on the food sovereignty literature to ask pointed questions about the interplay of market forces and political liberalism. Specifically, we use cuisine as a lens to interrogate the assumption that multiculturalism is compatible with Indigenous food sovereignty. Because multicultural inclusion is the means by which Indigenous Peoples’ gastronomies are commodified and alienated, they experience not gastronomic multiculturalism but culinary colonialism. Accordingly, food sovereignty in colonial contexts must embrace both the active sharing and the mindful withholding of food (...) as political acts, and acknowledge that culinary culture is not simply a market commodity but also a politically-embedded process. In drawing together the threads of this argument, we advocate for a broadening of the discussion on Indigenous food sovereignty to include the resistance and resurgence enacted through gastronomy. (shrink)