This work examines Aristotle's discussions of definition in his logical works and the Metaphysics, and argues for the importance of definitions of simple ...

Aristotle's remarks about the differences between the sexes have become infamous for their implications for the social status of women. In his observations on female biology, Aristotle claims that "the female nature is, as it were, a deformity." In describing women's role in the public sphere, he claims that women are naturally subordinate because, while they possess a deliberative faculty, that capacity is "without authority." While both claims express the "inferiority" of female bodies/women relative to male bodies/men, it is not (...) self-evident that the defects Aristotle identifies in female biology have cognitive or moral manifestations that would justify the rule of men over women in political life. Marguerite Deslauriers here aims to construct a coherent picture of Aristotle's views on sexual and gender-based difference from these remarks and to show the extent to which his views on female biology and women's role in politics are causally connected. Without exculpating Aristotle from charges of misogyny, Deslauriers contextualizes his explanations of the role and origin of female animals in his biology and the role of women in his political philosophy; she shows how Aristotle developed these views and the importance they hold for his wider philosophical commitments. She then explores how Aristotle might have seen the link between the physiology of sex and the bearing it has on political life. She ultimately argues that in Aristotle's conception of sexual difference in biology and politics, there is a tension between his view of the inferiority of female bodies and women and his commitment to the idea that females and women are valuable both for generation and for the political life characteristic of human beings. In this tension she finds a difference between Aristotle and his predecessors: while previous accounts associate sexual difference with affliction, Aristotle sees sexual difference as a benefit, both to a species and a political community. This volume will be of interest to philosophers and students interested in ancient philosophy, feminist philosophy, as well as those studying moral and political philosophy. (shrink)

Early feminist or pro-woman works often combine the claim that the rational souls of men and women are the same with an argument for the superiority of women. This article considers two such works, Lucrezia Marinella's The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men (Venice, 1601 [1999]) and Marguerite Buffet's In Praise of Illustrious Learned Women, both Ancient and Modern (Paris, 1668), in order to show the continuities and distinctive features of feminist arguments for (...) superiority, to emphasize the differences in the conceptions of reason and physiology that distinguish them, and to demonstrate that claims of superiority persisted even as those defending women's worth began to adopt egalitarian positions. (shrink)

In her recent book, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, Ann Murphy suggests that the philosophical imaginary, in particular that of contemporary continental philosophy, is imbued with images of violence. The concept of the philosophical imaginary is drawn from the work of Michèle Le Dœuff to explore the role of images of violence in philosophy. Murphy sets the language of violence, reflexivity, and critique against that of vulnerability, ambiguity and responsibility. Her concern is that images of violence have become and may (...) become more ‘neutralised, domesticated or eroticised’ in objectionable ways. There is no doubt Murphy has isolated and highlighted a striking feature of the continental imaginary in a clear and thoughtful way. My paper takes Murphy’s argument further by elaborating a Le Dœuffian argument that theorises the reversal of priority from violent language to the violence of language. I take Murphy’s injunction for attention and sensitivity seriously by examining the language of violence and exposing that which is unfamiliar, what has become incorporated and what is revealed by the language that is used. The language of the third Reich and the language of the Rwandan genocide will be briefly compared to demonstrate these points. Our responsibility is to recognise the use of euphemism and metaphor to sometimes cover and sometimes blatantly advertise the horrifying truth. The focus on violence in philosophical language can lead us away from the violence of genocidal language and other violent language that philosophers, like all responsible people, are called to witness. (shrink)

This article examines one of the main epistemological frameworks that feminist theory has used for the past 30 years: essentialism and anti-essentialism. It explores what is at stake by continuing to use such perspectives within the late days of the early 21st century, and how it is linked to a performance of critical sophistication which has specific political consequences. Instead of seeing the body as essentialist, the author draws on two examples — popular musician Kate Bush and ontological ideas about (...) the Goddess — to present the body as immanent flesh. This has implications for thinking through different forms of relational and critical perspectives circulating in the current climate, and the author argues that the recent introduction of affect and the increasing interest in haptic knowledges is part of the immanent flesh’s potential for transforming knowledge and the wider world. (shrink)

Envy and resentment are generally thought to be unpleasant and unethical emotions which ought to be condemned. I argue that both envy and resentment, in some important forms, are moral emotions connected with concern for justice, understood in terms of desert and entitlement. They enable us to recognise injustice, work as a spur to acting against it and connect us to others. Thus, we should accept these emotions as part of the ethical life.

ABSTRACTIn the debate about the worth of women in sixteenth and seventeenth century Italy three pro-woman authors of the period, Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, and Arcangela Tarabotti, develop...

Aristotle claims that the citizens of the best city should be both intelligent and spirited at Politics VII.7 1327b19-38. While he treats intelligence as an unqualified good, thumos is valuable but problematic. This paper has two aims: to consider the political value of spirit in Aristotle’s Politics and in particular to identify the ways in which it is both essential to political excellence and yet insufficient for securing it, and to use this analysis of the role of spirit in the (...) political realm to explain Aristotle’s exclusion of women from political authority, even in the context of the household. I analyze spirit as a physical phenomenon and as a type of desire, before considering its moral and affective aspects. I then return to the role of spirit in political life and examine its importance for the activity of ruling. In the last section I consider the implications of this analysis of spirit for the social and political roles Aristotle assigns to men and women. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:A key factor in the decision to convert a publicly owned company to private status is the expectation that value will be created, providing the firm with rent. These rents have implications regarding the property rights of the firm’s capital-contributing constituencies. We identify and analyze the types of rent associated with the newly private firm. Compared to public firms, going private allows owners the potential to partition part of the residual risk to bond holders and employees, rendering them to be (...) co-residual risk bearers with owners. We propose that new promotion-based contracts with bond holders and employees, reflecting their particular investments, be negotiated as the firm migrates from public to private status. These contracts should acknowledge the firm’s intent to maximize shareholder value and its need to take the risks necessary to do so, but support that the firm’s survival not be undermined due to its possibly opportunistic owners. (shrink)

AbstractMany management theories have descriptive and normative elements, and no management theory used to generate prescriptions can be totally devoid of normative assumptions. Yet, there remain few useful models for assessing the relative strength or utility of the normative frameworks that inform most management theorizing. In this essay, we offer a model from a field of art rather than science. We introduce the poetry of early twentieth century American writer Hart Crane as providing such a model. Crane uses a panorama (...) of consequences to examine modern social phenomena and subject them to normative evaluation. We argue that management theorists can use a similar panorama of consequences method to “test” normative theories by assessing the directional consistency of the normative evaluations the theories generate about an empirical phenomenon or relationship, as well as how extensively the theories’ normative evaluations cover the full scope of a phenomenon’s or relationship’s impact. We explicate an exemplar poem of Crane’s, and then demonstrate how his method might be used to study shareholder activism, a normatively ambiguous management practice, in a way that illuminates the strengths and weaknesses of the relevant normative frameworks. (shrink)

Making decisions can be tough, but how do you know it s the right one and how can you be sure that unconscious biases aren t distorting your thinking? In Risky Business, Anna Withers and Mark Withers draw on decades of research in the fields of psychology, behavioral economics and neuroscience to explain why are so-called rational brains are frequently fooled by over 100 powerful unconscious biases. At the same time they provide a straightforward framework everyone can use, where these (...) biases are embodied into eight memorable characters that help us to avoid these pitfalls and make better decisions.". (shrink)

The Enlightenment was the age in which the world became modern, challenging tradition in favor of reason, freedom, and critical inquiry. While many aspects of the Enlightenment have been rigorously scrutinized—its origins and motivations, its principal characters and defining features, its legacy and modern relevance—the geographical dimensions of the era have until now largely been ignored. Placing the Enlightenment contends that the Age of Reason was not only a period of pioneering geographical investigation but also an age with spatial dimensions (...) to its content and concerns. Investigating the role space and location played in the creation and reception of Enlightenment ideas, Charles W. J. Withers draws from the fields of art, science, history, geography, politics, and religion to explore the legacies of Enlightenment national identity, navigation, discovery, and knowledge. Ultimately, geography is revealed to be the source of much of the raw material from which philosophers fashioned theories of the human condition. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Placing the Enlightenment will interest Enlightenment specialists from across the disciplines as well as any scholar curious about the role geography has played in the making of the modern world. (shrink)

This paper considers the distinctions Aristotle draws (1) between the intellectual virtue of "phronêsis" and the moral virtues and (2) among the moral virtues, in light of his commitment to the reciprocity of the virtues. I argue that Aristotle takes the intellectual virtues to be numerically distinct hexeis from the moral virtues. By contrast, I argue, he treats the moral virtues as numerically one hexis, although he allows that they are many hexeis 'in being'. The paper has three parts. In (...) the first, I set out Aristotle's account of the structure of the faculties of the soul, and determine that desire is a distinct faculty. The rationality of a desire is not then a question of whether or not the faculty that produces that desire is rational, but rather a question of whether or not the object of the desire is good. In the second section I show that the reciprocity of "phronêsis" and the moral virtues requires this structure of the faculties. In the third section I show that the way in which Aristotle distinguishes the faculties requires that we individuate moral virtues according to the objects of the desires that enter into a given virtue, and with reference to the circumstances in which these desires are generated. I then explore what it might mean for the moral virtues to be different in being but not in number, given the way in which the moral virtues are individuated. I argue that Aristotle takes "phronêsis" and the political art to be a numerical unity in a particular way, and that he suggests that the moral virtues are, by analogy, the same kind of unity. (shrink)

The prospect of organic unified knowledge challenges the increasing fragmentation of scientific disciplines which have become narrowly specialized with the accelerating rate of discoveries and the shaky status of many inductively obtained theories. Yet proof checkers which can control the logical correctness of reasoning offer the possibility of developing an integrative, deductive approach encompassing many branches of science within the same framework. The Principia Humanistica, developed by Krzysztof de Werszowec Rey, constitute such an attempt to apply the Mizar system of (...) verification to the human and related sciences as well as theology. Mizar is based on set theory whose terms may define the individual, value choices, the human person, culture, and religion. This essay explores the Mizar framework, including the definition of valuation and religion. It seeks to show the possibilities opened by such an integrated multidisciplinary approach for the study of free will, the definition of courage, and convergence towards unification with God. (shrink)

The newly private corporation challenges scholars to re-examine corporate social responsibility under a markedly different governance system. We theorize regarding the implications of public corporations going private through use of private equity. The new governance system includes few owners and an expert, involved board of directors; combined with a greatly reduced public presence, public-to-private firms are proposed to place greater emphasis on financial performance and lesser emphasis on social performance. Several variables are proposed to moderate the lesser emphasis on social (...) performance. (shrink)

The globalized societies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are de-composing, according to Bernard Stiegler. This decay is expressed by breakdown in the compositional pr...

Czech translation of Marguerite Léna’s Choisir l’ Europe: Constantin Sigov et la dignité humaine.

In the treatise called La nobiltà et l’eccellenza delle donne co’ diffetti et mancamenti de gli uomini Lucrezia Marinella claims that women are superior to men. She argues that men are excessively hot, and that heat in a high degree is detrimental to the intellectual and moral capacities of a person. The aim of this paper is to set out Marinella’s views on temperature differences in the bodies of men and women and the effects of bodily constitution on the capacities (...) necessary for political deliberation and rule. I situate Marinella’s argument in the context of an ongoing debate about physiological differences between the sexes, begun in antiquity and extending into the Renaissance. That debate is important for several reasons: as part of a broader discussion of the nature and worth of women, as determining influential interpretations of ancient authorities on matters of physiology, and as anticipating later discussions of the relation between the sexed body and political roles. This paper considers Marinella in dialogue with a number of interlocutors, elements of whose work can be found in her own: Aristotle, Mario Equicola, Galeazzo Flavio Capra, Ludovico Domenichi and Torquato Tasso. (shrink)