<I>Cosmopolitanism and the Arab Spring: Foundations for the Decline of Terrorism analyzes the role of social media in the Arab Spring within a specific philosophical framework. Kantian cosmopolitanism, enhanced by social media and Internet communications technologies, offers a solid explanation of the political evolution of the Arab Spring. These technologies have given rise to a new cosmopolitanism that rejects alternating dichotomies in favor of an evolving consciousness of our status as citizens of a global commonwealth with a tiered set of (...) duties to everyone within our sphere of influence. Cosmopolitanism as extended through social media has the potential to break down barriers to aid those who suffer under unjust governmental systems and to yield real and sustainable progress toward the amelioration of both tyranny and terrorism. <I>Cosmopolitanism and the Arab Spring is recommended for political philosophy courses as well as interdisciplinary capstone courses exploring problems in the modern world. (shrink)

The first anthology to highlight the problems of environmental justice and sustainable development, Reflecting on Nature provides a multicultural perspective on questions of environmental concern, featuring contributions from feminist and minority scholars and scholars from developing countries. Selections examine immediate global needs, addressing some of the most crucial problems we now face: biodiversity loss, the meaning and significance of wilderness, population and overconsumption, and the human use of other animals. Spanning centuries of philosophical, naturalist, and environmental reflection, readings include the (...) work of Aristotle, Locke, Darwin, and Thoreau, as well as that of contemporary, mainstream figures like Bernard Williams, Thomas Hill, Jr., and Jonathan Glover. Works by Val Plumwood, Bill Devall, Murray Bookchin, and John Dryzek comprise a radical ecology section. Featuring insightful section introductions by the editors, this comprehensive and timely collection of philosophical and environmental writing will inform, enlighten, and encourage debate. (shrink)

This book is a defense of political liberalism as a feminist liberalism. A novel and restrictive account of public reason is defended. Then it is argued that political liberalism's core commitments restrict reasonable conceptions of justice to those that secure genuine, substantive equality for women and other marginalized groups.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a dramatically expanding area of activity for managers and academics. Consumer demand for responsibly produced and fair trade goods is swelling, resulting in increased demands for CSR activity and information. Assets under professional management and invested with a social responsibility focus have also grown dramatically over the last 10 years. Investors choosing social responsibility investment strategies require access to information not provided through traditional financial statements and analyses. At the same time, a group of mainstream (...) institutional investors has encouraged a movement to incorporate environmental, social, and governance information into equity analysis, and multi-stakeholder groups have supported enhanced business reporting on these issues. The majority of research in this area has been performed on European and Australian firms. We expand on this literature by exploring the CSR disclosure practices of a size- and industry-stratified sample of 50 publicly traded U.S. firms, performing a content analysis on the complete identifiable public information portfolio provided by these firms during 2004. CSR activity was disclosed by most firms in the sample, and was included in nearly half of public disclosures made during that year by the sample firms. Areas of particular emphasis are community matters, health and safety, diversity and human resources (HR) matters, and environmental programs. The primary venues of disclosure are mass media releases such as corporate websites and press releases, followed closely by disclosures contained in mandatory filings. Consistent with prior research, we identify industry effects in terms of content, emphasis, and reporting format choices. Unlike prior research, we can offer only mixed evidence on the existence of a size effect. The disclosure frequency and emphasis is significantly different for the largest one-fifth of the firms, but no identifiable trends are present within the rest of the sample. There are, however, identifiable size effects with respect to reporting format choice. Use of websites is positively related to firm size, while the use of mandatory filings is negatively related to firm size. Finally, and also consistent with prior literature, we document a generally self-laudatory tone in the content of CSR disclosures for the sample firms. (shrink)

Is a feminist political liberalism possible? Political liberalism’s regard for a wide range of comprehensive doctrines as reasonable makes some feminists skeptical of its ability to address sex inequality. Indeed, some feminists claim that political liberalism maintains its position as a political liberalism at the expense of securing substantive equality for women. We claim that political liberalism’s core commitments actually restrict all reasonable political conceptions of justice to those that secure genuine substantive equality for all, including women and other marginalized (...) groups. In particular, we argue that political liberalism’s criterion of reciprocity limits reasonable political conceptions of justice to those that eliminate social conditions of domination and subordination relevant to reasonable democratic deliberation among equal citizens and that the criterion of reciprocity requires the social conditions necessary for recognition respect among persons as equal citizens. As a result, we maintain that the criterion of reciprocity limits reasonable political conceptions of justice to those that provide genuine equality for women along various dimensions of social life central to equal citizenship. (shrink)

The advent of conversational agents with increasingly human-like behaviour throws old philosophical questions into new light. Does it, or could it, ever make sense to speak of AI agents built out of generative language models in terms of consciousness, given that they are ‘mere’ simulacra of human behaviour, and that what they do can be seen as ‘merely’ role play? Drawing on the later writings of Wittgenstein, this paper attempts to tackle this question while avoiding the pitfalls of dualistic thinking.

The idea of public reason is central to political liberalism's aim to provide an account of the possibility of a just and stable democratic society comprised of free and equal citizens who nonetheless are deeply divided over fundamental values. This commitment to the idea of public reason reflects the normative core of political liberalism which is rooted in the principle of democratic legitimacy and the idea of reciprocity among citizens. Yet both critics and defenders of political liberalism disagree over whether (...) or not the idea of public reason permits citizens to appeal to their comprehensive conceptions of the good in public deliberation over matters of basic justice. Our aim in this paper is to provide a defense of an exclusive idea of public reason, and at the same time we aim to dispel the underlying concerns of two prominent criticisms of the idea of public reason—the concern of alienation from the political process, as expressed by religiously oriented critics, and the concern over women's equality, as expressed by feminist critics. We argue that inclusive accounts of the idea of public reason are not consistent with political liberalism's core commitments. Further, we claim, inclusive accounts of the idea of public reason deepen feminist concerns. We think that, properly understood, an exclusive account of the idea of public reason can address feminist concerns about political liberalism and avoid alienating (reasonable) religious persons in an unacceptable way. Thus, we conclude that an exclusive account of the idea of public reason is our best hope for reconciliation. (shrink)

My primary target in this paper is a puzzle that emerges from the conjunction of several seemingly innocent assumptions in action theory and the metaphysics of moral responsibility. The puzzle I have in mind is this. On one widely held account of moral responsibility, an agent is morally responsible only for those actions or outcomes over which that agent exercises control. Recently, however, some have cited cases where agents appear to be morally responsible without exercising any control. This leads some (...) to abandon the control-based account of responsibility and replace it with an alternative account. It leads others to deny the intuition that agents are responsible in these troublesome cases. After outlining the account of moral responsibility I have in mind, I look at some of the arguments made against the viability of this theory. I show that there are conceptual resources for salvaging the control account, focusing in particular on the nature of vigilance. I also argue that there is empirical data that supports the control account so conceived. (shrink)

The human body is becoming hot property, a resource to be “mined,” “harvested,” patented, and traded commercially for profit as well as scientific and therapeutic advances. Under the new entrepreneurial approach to the body old tensions take on new dimensions—about consent, the fair distribution of tissues and products developed from them, the individual and cultural values represented by the body, and public policy governing the use of organs and tissues.

This study develops a scale to measure consumer sensitivity to corporate social performance (CSCSP) using the factor analysis procedure to generate a valid and reliable 11-item scale. Results from a U.S. sample of M.B.A. students suggest that women are more sensitive to CSP than men and that Democrats are more sensitive to CSP than Republicans. Future research can use this scale to measure the correlation between attitudes toward CSP and actual behavior.

Recent years have featured a spate of regulatory action pertaining to the development and/or disclosure of corporate governance structures in response to financial scandals resulting in part from governance failures. During the same period, corporate governance activists and institutional investors increasingly have called for increased voluntary governance disclosure. Despite this attention, there have been relatively few comprehensive studies of governance disclosure practices and response to the regulation. In this study, we examine a sample of 50 U.S. firms and their public (...) disclosure packages from 2004. We find a high degree of variability in the presentation and reporting format choices for many elements of the governance structure. This variability includes several items for which disclosure is mandated by regulators or legislative action. In particular, smaller firms offer fewer disclosures pertaining to independence, board selection procedures, and oversight of management (including whistleblowing procedures). There are also trends associated with board characteristics: boards that are less independent offer fewer disclosures of independence and management oversight matters. Moreover, large firms provide more disclosures of independence standards, board selection procedures, audit committee matters, management control systems, other committee matters, and whistleblowing procedures but do not appear to have a strictly superior information environment when compared to smaller firms. The findings raise questions about compliance with regulatory requirements and the degree to which conflicts of interest between managers and directors are being controlled. While there have been notable improvements in the information environment of governance disclosures, there remain structural issues that may possess negative ramifications for stakeholders. (shrink)

This study examines business students’ ethical awareness for two virtues needed to maintain academic integrity, respect, and responsibility. Using the multidimensional ethics survey, five dimensions were measured for six scenarios representing student behaviors using Information Technology . The results indicate that students are ethically aware in respect situations, but are more neutral in responsibility situations. Of the five ethical dimensions, moral equity and relativism appear to be the strongest influences in academic integrity scenarios utilizing IT. This study provides guidance for (...) business professors in their pursuit of ethical excellence in the classroom and for researchers in search of greater understanding of ethical judgments of students. (shrink)

: Because an influenza pandemic would create the most serious hardships for those who already face most serious hardships, countries should take special measures to mitigate the effect of a pandemic on existing social inequalities. Unfortunately, there is little evidence that anybody is thinking about that.

Nanotechnologies are enabling technologies which rely on the manipulation of matter on the scale of billionths of a metre. It has been argued that scientific uncertainties surrounding nanotechnologies and the inability of regulatory agencies to keep up with industry developments mean that voluntary regulation will play a part in the development of nanotechnologies. The development of technological applications based on nanoscale science is now increasingly seen as a potential test case for new models of regulation based on future-oriented responsibility, lifecycle (...) risk management, and upstream public engagement. This article outlines findings from a project undertaken in 2008–2009 for the UK Government’s Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) by BRASS at Cardiff University, involving an in-depth survey both of current corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting in the UK nanotechnologies industry, and of attitudes to particular stakeholder issues within the industry. The article analyses the results to give an account of the nature of corporate social performance (CSP) within the industry, together with the particular model of CSR operating therein (‘do no harm’ versus ‘positive social force’). It is argued that the nature of emerging technologies requires businesses to adopt particular visions of CSR in order to address stakeholder issues, and that the nanotechnologies industry presents specific obstacles and opportunities in this regard. (shrink)

Some proponents of moral bioenhancement propose that people should utilize biomedical practices to enhance the faculties and traits that are associated with moral agency, such as empathy and a sense of justice. The hope is that doing so will improve our ability to meet the moral challenges that have emerged in our contemporary, globalized world. In this paper, we caution against this view by arguing that biomedically inducing more empathy may, in fact, diminish moral agency. We argue that this type (...) of increase in empathy would not be effective for addressing empathy’s vulnerability to the biases that can undermine moral judgment. Furthermore, doing so may undermine the important capacity to regulate empathy. We determine that if the moral enhancement project is to be a serious one, it must address these challenges. (shrink)

Can and should political liberals recognize and otherwise support legal marriage as a matter of basic justice? In this article, we offer a general account of how political liberals should evaluate the issue of whether the legal recognition of marriage is a matter of basic justice. And, we develop and examine some public reason arguments that, given the fundamental interests of citizens, could justify various forms of legal marriage in some contexts. In particular, in certain conditions, the recognition of some (...) form of legal marriage may be the best way to protect the fundamental interests of women as citizens in freely chosen associations. Or, it may be that, in certain conditions, to secure the social conditions necessary for gays, lesbians and bisexuals to be free and equal citizens, some form of legal marriage can or should be recognized. (shrink)

We argue that the core social being system is unlike other core systems in that it participates in frequent, widespread learning. As a result, the social being system is less constant throughout the lifespan and less informationally encapsulated than other core systems. This learning supports the development of the precursors of bias, but also provides avenues for preempting it.

There is a need to explore educational strategies that translate ethics knowledge into ethical behavior. Commonly used pedagogical approaches steeped in traditional normative ethical theory are less powerful than sensemaking in preparing clinicians to respond to ethical problems in practice. This integrative review of 15 articles explores the use of sensemaking as an instructional method for clinical ethics. Whittemore and Knafl’s :546–553, 2005) integrative review method guided a systematic appraisal of data from both qualitative and quantitative research traditions, synthesizing disparate (...) studies in analyzing literature about the use of sensemaking as a pedagogical approach in teaching ethics. Findings supported the use of Weick’s sensemaking theory to develop instructional methods that encourage ethical decision making in students as well as promote ethical response by health care providers. The review reveals important theoretical and training implications for introducing sensemaking as a means to promote ethical action in clinical practice. (shrink)

Recent years have featured a leap in academic and public interest in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities and related corporate reporting. Two main themes in this literature are the exploration of management incentives to engage in and disclose this information, and of the use and value of this information to market participants. We extend the second theme by examining the interest that specific investor classes have in the use of CSR information. We rely on feminist intersectionality, which suggests that gender (...) intersects with other identities to yield different values, experiences, and opportunities that can lead to gender-based preferences for CSR information. Based upon a survey of 750 US-based retail investors, we find that female retail investors have a greater interest in the use of CSR information, relative to male retail investors. Women express greater anticipated future demand for this information than do men. Further, the magnitude of the increase from current use to anticipated future demand is greater for women than men. Age is a significant modifying factor in that the discrepancy between women of any age and older men is greater than that between women and younger men. Finally, women also exhibit greater demand for streamlining of the information flow, consistent with pressures induced by time poverty. It appears that current disclosure practices provide a less than optimal match with the needs of the information consumers that are primarily interested in using this information. This mismatch may result in a systematic disenfranchisement of female investing classes which suggests an ethical need to level the playing field. (shrink)

Although speech categories are defined by multiple acoustic dimensions, some are perceptually weighted more than others and there are residual effects of native-language weightings in non-native speech perception. Recent research on nonlinguistic sound category learning suggests that the distribution characteristics of experienced sounds influence perceptual cue weights: Increasing variability across a dimension leads listeners to rely upon it less in subsequent category learning (Holt & Lotto, 2006). The present experiment investigated the implications of this among native Japanese learning English /r/-/l/ (...) categories. Training was accomplished using a videogame paradigm that emphasizes associations among sound categories, visual information, and players’ responses to videogame characters rather than overt categorization or explicit feedback. Subjects who played the game for 2.5 h across 5 days exhibited improvements in /r/-/l/ perception on par with 2–4 weeks of explicit categorization training in previous research and exhibited a shift toward more native-like perceptual cue weights. (shrink)

The question of ‘who owns genetic information‘ is increasingly a focus of ethical inquiry. Applied to predictive testing, several recent critiques suggest that persons with a genetic disorder have a moral duty to disclose that information to other family members. The justification for this obligation is that genetic information belongs to and may benefit not only a single individual, but also members of a biological kinship. This paper considers this issue from a different vantage point: How does gender intersect with (...) the moral duty to disclose genetic information? Scholars have argued that gender is partly comprised of distinct assignments and assumptions of responsibility. Thus, there is a danger that gendered patterns of socialization will make women feel that they should take primary responsibility for disclosing genetic information to others. This article explores issues of responsibility and disclosure of risk information by drawing on an empirical study of women and men who have undergone genetic testing for hereditary breast/ovarian cancer. The research study suggests that disclosure of genetic information is a gendered activity, with both the benefits and burdens of this task falling primarily on women. It also illustrates that when disclosure is understood contextually, it is a far more complicated matter than when viewed through a theoretical lens. The article considers the relevance of these findings on ethical debate and genetic counselling practices. (shrink)

Multiple acoustic dimensions signal speech categories. However, dimensions vary in their informativeness; some are more diagnostic of category membership than others. Speech categorization reflects these dimensional regularities such that diagnostic dimensions carry more “perceptual weight” and more effectively signal category membership to native listeners. Yet perceptual weights are malleable. When short-term experience deviates from long-term language norms, such as in a foreign accent, the perceptual weight of acoustic dimensions in signaling speech category membership rapidly adjusts. The present study investigated whether (...) rapid adjustments in listeners’ perceptual weights in response to speech that deviates from the norms also affects listeners’ own speech productions. In a word recognition task, the correlation between two acoustic dimensions signaling consonant categories, fundamental frequency and voice onset time, matched the correlation typical of English, and then shifted to an “artificial accent” that reversed the relationship, and then shifted back. Brief, incidental exposure to the artificial accent caused participants to down-weight perceptual reliance on F0, consistent with previous research. Throughout the task, participants were intermittently prompted with pictures to produce these same words. In the block in which listeners heard the artificial accent with a reversed F0 × VOT correlation, F0 was a less robust cue to voicing in listeners’ own speech productions. The statistical regularities of short-term speech input affect both speech perception and production, as evidenced via shifts in how acoustic dimensions are weighted. (shrink)

Robin et al. (1996) suggested a new construct when studying ethical behavioral intention which they entitled PIE (perceived importance). They empirically tested the PIE construct and found it to significantly impact both ethical judgment and behavioral intention. The present study extends and validates Robin et al.s work on PIE using a different context, different scenarios and a different sample. The findings indicate strong support for the validity of Robin et al.s PIE instrument and show PIE to significantly influence ethical judgment (...) (attitude) and behavioral intention. This study also indicates the sex of the individual affects the individuals perception of importance and is a significant influence of ethical judgment and behavioral intention. Future ethical models and studies should include PIE as a possible influence on behavioral intention. (shrink)

Convergence liberalism has emerged as a prominent interpretation of public reason liberalism. Yet, while its main rival in the public reason literature—the Rawlsian consensus account of public reason—has faced serious scrutiny regarding its ability to secure equal citizenship forallmembers of society, especially for members of historically subordinated groups, convergence liberalism has not. With this article, we hope to start a discussion about convergence liberalism and its (in)ability to address group-based social inequalities. In particular, we aim to show that given the (...) core features of the viewandreal-world pluralism, the policies needed to secure gender equality and protect equal citizenship for women will not be justified. We make our case by considering various inequalities that are due to the gendered division of labor and potential convergence liberal responses. (shrink)

One popular theory of moral responsibility locates responsible agency in exercises of control. These control-based theories often appeal to tracing to explain responsibility in cases where some agent is intuitively responsible for bringing about some outcome despite lacking direct control over that outcome’s obtaining. Some question whether control-based theories are committed to utilizing tracing to explain responsibility in certain cases. I argue that reflecting on certain kinds of negligence shows that tracing plays an ineliminable role in any adequate control-based theory (...) of responsibility. (shrink)

Understanding the ethics of enhancement begins with getting clear about the concept, as well as the factors likely to move people to pursue biomedical enhancement. This article first considers the usefulness of the distinction between therapy and enhancement for understanding the ethics of enhancement. Once the conceptual underbrush has been cleared away, we can move on to ethics. The next section examines critically a number of arguments that have been offered to defend biomedical enhancement, or, at least, to claim that (...) efforts to deter it are either ethically or practically mistaken. Finally, the article considers a set of arguments that take the ethics of enhancement to be a serious matter and that gives reasons to question whether some biomedical enhancements, for some purposes, may be ethically suspect. (shrink)

In writing Equal Citizenship and Public Reason, we aimed to show that political liberalism is a feminist liberalism. To that end, we develop and defend a particular understanding of the commitments of political liberalism. Then, we argue that certain laws and policies are needed to protect and secure the interests of persons as free and equal citizens. We focus on the laws and policies that we think are necessary for gender justice. In particular, we apply our view to the contexts (...) of prostitution law, family and marriage law, state support for caregivers, and religious exemptions from generally applicable laws. In this article, we consider some of the challenges made by the thoughtful critics who are part of this symposium. In particular, we address: why the collective enterprise view of liberal democracy requires shared reasons for the justification of certain laws and policies; how we understand substantive equality and why our understanding of substantive equality does not commit us to a comprehensive doctrine; how we avoid defending a particular political conception of justice in showing that political liberalism is a feminist liberalism; and how it is that, given justice pluralism, public reasons can provide stability for the right reasons. (shrink)

Utterances of natural language sentences can be used to communicate not just contents, but also forces. This paper examines this topic from a cross-linguistic perspective on sentential mood. Recent work in this area focuses on conversational dynamics: the three sentence types can be associated with distinctive kinds of conversational effects called sentential forces, modeled as three kinds of updates to the discourse context. This paper has two main goals. First, it provides two arguments, on empirical and methodological grounds, for treating (...) sentential force as part of a compositional dynamic semantics, rather than a dynamic pragmatics. Second, it formulates a minimal dynamic semantic analysis that covers the data at the heart of these arguments, incorporating existing analyses of the three major moods, evidentials and conjunction. A further aim of the paper is to sharpen the distinction between sentential force and utterance force, and discuss its implications. (shrink)

The value relevance of corporate social responsibility performance disclosures for financial markets participants remains uncertain despite advances in the literature and the recent proliferation of CSR disclosures around the world. Using an experimental approach involving MBA students at universities in the United States and Lebanon, we study the value relevance of CSR disclosures by testing whether they affect participants’ personal portfolio management investment decisions. We also examine whether the degree to which the CSR disclosures affect these decisions is influenced by (...) corporate governance quality. To examine these issues, we examine the effect of environmental performance on investment decisions in Experiment 1, and the effect of labor performance on investment decisions in Experiment 2. Results from both experiments show that investment decisions are affected by CSR performance. Analysis shows that governance strength exerts a marginal effect on the investment decision only when CSR performance is strong. Lebanese participants appear to be more sensitive to weak performance than U.S. participants. Overall, our findings extend the CSR disclosures literature by documenting the value relevance of CSR performance for financial markets participants’ decision making. These findings also extend the governance literature by documenting that consistent with attribution theory, the effects of governance quality are contingent upon the information and decision context, and that efforts to decontextualize governance may be counterproductive. (shrink)

The question of ‘who owns genetic information‘ is increasingly a focus of ethical inquiry. Applied to predictive testing, several recent critiques suggest that persons with a genetic disorder have a moral duty to disclose that information to other family members. The justification for this obligation is that genetic information belongs to and may benefit not only a single individual, but also members of a biological kinship. This paper considers this issue from a different vantage point: How does gender intersect with (...) the moral duty to disclose genetic information? Scholars have argued that gender is partly comprised of distinct assignments and assumptions of responsibility. Thus, there is a danger that gendered patterns of socialization will make women feel that they should take primary responsibility for disclosing genetic information to others. This article explores issues of responsibility and disclosure of risk information by drawing on an empirical study of women and men who have undergone genetic testing for hereditary breast/ovarian cancer. The research study suggests that disclosure of genetic information is a gendered activity, with both the benefits and burdens of this task falling primarily on women. It also illustrates that when disclosure is understood contextually, it is a far more complicated matter than when viewed through a theoretical lens. The article considers the relevance of these findings on ethical debate and genetic counselling practices. (shrink)

Is a feminist political liberalism possible? Political liberalism’s regard for a wide range of comprehensive doctrines as reasonable makes some feminists skeptical of its ability to address sex inequality. Indeed, some feminists claim that political liberalism maintains its position as a political liberalism at the expense of securing substantive equality for women. We claim that political liberalism’s core commitments actually restrict all reasonable political conceptions of justice to those that secure genuine substantive equality for all, including women and other marginalized (...) groups. In particular, we argue that political liberalism’s criterion of reciprocity limits reasonable political conceptions of justice to those that eliminate social conditions of domination and subordination relevant to reasonable democratic deliberation among equal citizens and that the criterion of reciprocity requires the social conditions necessary for recognition respect among persons as equal citizens. As a result, we maintain that the criterion of reciprocity limits reasonable political conceptions of justice to those that provide genuine equality for women along various dimensions of social life central to equal citizenship. (shrink)

As new HIV prevention tools are developed, researchers face a number of ethical and logistic questions about how and when to include novel HIV prevention strategies and tools in the standard prevention package of ongoing and future HIV prevention trials. Current Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS /World Health Organization guidance recommends that participants in prevention trials receive ‘access to all state of the art HIV risk reduction methods’, and that decisions about adding new tools to the prevention package be (...) made in consultation with ‘all relevant stakeholders’. The guidance, however, leaves open questions of both process and implementation. In March 2009, the Global Campaign for Microbicides, UNAIDS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention convened a consultation to develop practical answers to these questions. Fifty-nine diverse participants, including researchers, ethicists, advocates and policymakers, worked to develop consensus criteria on when to include new HIV prevention tools in future trials. Participants developed a set of questions to guide decision-making, including: whether the method has been recommended by international bodies or adopted at a national level; the size of the effect and weight of the evidence; relevance to the trial population; whether the tool has been approved or introduced in the trial country; whether adding the tool might lead to trial futility; outstanding safety issues and status of the trial. Further work is needed to develop, implement and evaluate approaches to facilitate meaningful stakeholder participation in this deliberative process. (shrink)

This book combines contributions from many authors who examine a wide range of subjects ranging from overall theoretical considerations to detailed regional ...

This is a commentary on selected texts of Plato concerned with poetry: the Ion and relevant sections of the Republic. It is the first commentary to present these texts together in one volume, and the first in English on Republic 2 and 3 and Ion for nearly 100 years. The introduction sets Plato's views in their Greek context and outlines their influence on later aesthetic thought. An important feature of the commentary is its exploration of the ambivalence of Plato's pronouncements (...) through an analysis of his own skill as a writer. (shrink)

Spirituality and storytelling can be resources in aging successfully and in dying well given the constraints of modern day Western culture. This paper explores the relationship of aging to time and the dynamic process of the life course and discusses issues related to confronting mortality, including suffering, finitude, spirituality, and spiritual closure in regard to death. And, finally, the role of narrative in this process is taken up.

Some of the central questions that have been explored by Latin American and Latinx philosophers are questions of metaphilosophy. "Metaphilosophy" refers to philosophical reflections on the nature of philosophy itself. For example, we might ask: What is the purpose of doing philosophy? How does philosophy compare and contrast with other disciplines, such as science, theology, or literature? And what is the best way of categorizing the different kinds and traditions of philosophy? These are philosophical questions about philosophy as an activity (...) and as a discipline. In this chapter, we discuss some ways that Latin American and Latinx philosophers have addressed these and other metaphilosophical issues. Our focus will be on the following questions: What are the defining characteristics of Latin American philosophy and Latinx philosophy? Do they constitute distinctive traditions of philosophy, and if so, what is especially valuable about these traditions? (shrink)