We think that certain of our mental states represent the world around us, and represent it in determinate ways. My perception that there is salt in the pot before me, for example, represents my immediate environment as containing a certain object, a pot, with a certain kind of substance, salt, in it. My belief that salt dissolves in water represents something in the world around me, namely salt, as having a certain observational property, that of dissolving. But what exactly is (...) the relation between such states and the world beyond the surfaces of our skins? Specifically, what exactly is the relation between thecontentsof those states, and the world beyond our bodies? (shrink)

Several decades of scholarship on international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have established their important role in leading cosmopolitan political projects framed around moral ideals of global justice. But contemporary legitimacy crises in international liberalism call for a reexamination of NGOs’ global justice activism, considering how they should navigate the real-world moral contestations and shifting power dynamics that can impede their pursuit of justice. Recent work by deliberative-democratic theorists has argued that NGOs can help resolve disputes about global justice norms by facilitating (...) legitimate communicative exchanges among the diverse political voices of subjected global communities on the correct interpretation and implementation of global justice norms. In response, this essay argues for an expanded account of the political roles of NGOs in global justice activism, which reflects greater sensitivity to the multifaceted political dynamics through which power in real-world global politics is constituted and contested. It is shown that in some NGOs’ real-world operational contexts, structural power imbalances and social division or volatility can undercut the operation of the ideal deliberative processes prescribed by democratic theory—calling for further attention to work focused on mitigating power imbalances, building solidarity, and organizing power in parallel or as a precursor to deliberative-democratic processes. (shrink)

An introduction to a special issue of Symposium on normativity and freedom.

This article argues that the courts, not the Home Secretary, should be empowered to issue Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures. It explains that at the heart of the debate are three questions: whether measures like TPIMs should be viewed primarily from the perspective of security or liberty; how we should conceive the executive and the courts; and the empirical question of how these two arms of government answer these questions. The non-mechanistic nature of legal reasoning means that legal reasons may (...) be constructed to fit one’s normative viewpoint on each of the first two questions. Importantly, however, the case law on judicial scrutiny of control orders consistently demonstrates that the courts themselves regard TPIMs as being primarily a restriction on liberty, which require a fair hearing before an independent court. Whilst this does provide some protection of individual rights, the nature of law as an unfinished practice means that for stable protection of individual rights judicial independence must be promoted and nurtured in both the legal and political realms. The failure of the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures Act 2011 to vest the power to issue TPIMs in the courts thus represents a missed opportunity to secure political endorsement of enhanced legal protection of individual liberty in cases involving national security. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of normativity in Hegel by examining the role of ‘undialectical’ resistance to dialectical development. Beginning with a general overview of dialectical normativity and what it might mean to be ‘undialectical,’ the focus then shifts to a privileged example in Hegel’s writings: Sophocles’ Antigone. The central claim of the paper is the following: The very contradictions that fuel dialectical normativity can also trap individuals within an obsolete actuality, without immediate hope of escape. Indeed, the irreducible dependence (...) of dialectical thinking upon the actions and decisions of individual consciousness expose it to the threat of continual stasis or regression. This ineliminable possibility of failure is what is here called the ‘undialectical’ moment of the dialectic, which Hegel understands rather as a negative condition of possibility of freedom and rationality. (shrink)

This paper is about the differences between probabilities and beliefs and why reasoning should not always conform to probability laws. Probability is defined in terms of urn models from which probability laws can be derived. This means that probabilities are expressed in rational numbers, they suppose the existence of veridical representations and, when viewed as parts of a probability model, they are determined by a restricted set of variables. Moreover, probabilities are subjective, in that they apply to classes of events (...) that have been deemed (by someone) to be equivalent, rather than to unique events. Beliefs on the other hand are multifaceted, interconnected with all other beliefs, and inexpressible in their entirety. It will be argued that there are not sufficient rational numbers to characterise beliefs by probabilities and that the idea of a veridical set of beliefs is questionable. The concept of a complete probability model based on Fisher's notion of identifiable subsets is outlined. It is argued that to be complete a model must be known to be true. This can never be the case because whatever a person supposes to be true must be potentially modifiable in the light of new information. Thus to infer that an individual's probability estimate is biased it is necessary not only to show that the estimate differs from that given by a probability model, but also to assume that this model is complete, and completeness is not empirically verifiable. It follows that probability models and Bayes theorem are not necessarily appropriate standards for people's probability judgements. The quality of a probability model depends on how reasonable it is to treat some existing uncertainty as if it were equivalent to that in a particular urn model and this cannot be determined empirically. Bias can be demonstrated in estimates of proportions of finite populations such as in the false consensus effect. However the modification of beliefs by ad hoc methods like Tversky and Kahneman's heuristics can be justified, even though this results in biased judgements. This is because of pragmatic factors such as the cost of obtaining and taking account of additional information which are not included even in a complete probability model. Finally, an analogy is drawn between probability models and geometric figures. Both idealisations are useful but qualitatively inadequate characterisations of nature. A difference between the two is that the size of any error can be limited in the case of the geometric figure in a way that is not possible in a probability model. (shrink)

In several avenues of contemporary research, much attention is devoted to the contrast between the real authority of institution and their formal power, in the analysis of institutional funtionings; also in the study of the relationships between institutions on the one hand, rules, principles or norms on the other hand. Such a contrast appears to be based on familiar observations: the capacity of institutions to get their preferred outcomes is sometimes loosely connected with the hierarchical prerogatives of the considered institutions. (...) More particularly, current studies of the „migration authority” bring out possible shitts in real authority while there is no changein the formal structure of power. This article will partly consist in the explanation of recent results of common reaserch in project „Delicom”, in which a formal treatment of the distinction has been put foward. This approach will be set against the background of recent contributions in political science or economics. The revelance of the problematic for the study of competence delegation among institutions will be stressed all along. (shrink)

Many nongovernmental forms of business regulation aim at reducing ethical violations in commerce. We argue that such nongovernmental ethics standards, while often laudable, raise their own ethical challenges. In particular, when such standards place burdens upon vulnerable market participants (often, though not always, SMEs), they do so without the backing of traditional legitimate political authority. We argue that this constitutes a structural analogy to wars of humanitarian intervention. Moreover, we show that, while some harms imposed by such standards are desirable, (...) others are best thought of as a form of collateral damage. We thus look at the well-developed literature on just war theory for inspiration and find that the principles of jus ad bellum and jus in bello contain many insights that can be fruitfully adapted to the case of nongovernmental standard-setting. Consequently, we propose the Ius ad Normam—a set of principles that should guide would-be standard-setters in assessing whether imposing those burdens is ethically justifiable in particular cases. We also discuss how powerful multinational businesses often act simultaneously as standard-takers and standard-setters and explore the normative implications of this dual role. (shrink)

It is a familiar view in the philosophy of mind and action is that for a thought or attitude to constitute a reason for an action is for it to render intelligible, in the light of norms of rationality or reason, that action. However, I can make sense of your actions in this way by crediting you with attitudes that I myself do not hold. Equally, you can do this for my actions. So not all reasons for one’s actions are (...) one’s own reasons. What more is involved in a reason’s being one’s own reason for acting? (shrink)

The global justice movement has often been associated with opposition to the broad programme of ‘neoliberalism’ and associated patterns of ‘corporate globalisation’, creating a widespread impression that this movement is opposed to liberalism more broadly conceived. Our goal in this article is to challenge this widespread view. By engaging in critical interpretive analysis of the contemporary ‘corporate accountability’ movement, we argue that the corporate accountability agenda is not opposed to the core values of a liberal project. Rather, it is seeking (...) to reconfigure the design of liberal institutions of individual rights-protection, adjusting these for new material conditions associated with economic globalisation, under which powerful corporations alongside states now pose direct and significant threats to individual rights. This activist agenda is, therefore, much less radical in its challenge to the prevailing liberal global order than it may initially appear, since it functions to buttress rather than corrode many core normative commitments underpinning the liberal political project.Keywords: liberalism; corporate accountability; business regulation; human rights; global justice movement. (shrink)

This article outlines a new approach to answering the foundational question in democratic theory of how the boundaries of democratic political units should be delineated. Whereas democratic theorists have mostly focused on identifying the appropriate population-group – or demos – for democratic decisionmaking, it is argued here that we should also take account of considerations relating to the appropriate scope of a democratic unit’s institutionalized governance capabilities – or public power. These matter because democratically legitimate governance is produced not only (...) through the decision-making agency of a demos, but also through the institutionally distinct sources of political agency that shape the governance capabilities of public power. To develop this argument, the article traces a new theoretical account of the normative and institutional sources of collective agency, political legitimacy, and democratic boundaries, and illustrates it through a democratic reconstruction of the classical body politic metaphor. It further shows how this theoretical account lends strong prescriptive support to pluralist institutional boundaries within democratic global governance. (shrink)

Over the last several years, democratic citizens and theorists have been grappling with an upsurge in political commentary on the crisis and decline of democratic legitimacy around the world. Increasingly, theoretical attention is turning from the philosophical justification of ambitious moral ideals of democracy, to the interpretation of potentials within existing political practice for democratic renewal and repair. This review article examines three new books at the forefront of this theoretical turn towards engagement with the real-world political dynamics of democratic (...) crisis and revival: Open Democracy by Hélène Landemore; Hope for Democracy by John Gastil and Katherine Knobloch; and Mending Democracy by Carolyn Hendriks, Selen Ercan and John Boswell. It begins by surveying the new contributions of these books – highlighting the importance all attribute to creative political agency as a source of revival in democratic practice. It then discusses several questions left unresolved by these books – concerning the problem of democratic legitimacy, the normativity of democratic standards and the power dynamics undergirding democratic agency – which jointly mark out an important agenda for future theoretical work on pathways out of democratic crisis. (shrink)

In this article, I address the question: what kind of normative principles should regulate the governance processes through which migration across international borders is managed? I begin by contrasting two distinct categories of normative controversy relating to this question. The first is a familiar set of moral controversies about justice within border governance, concerning what I call the ethics of exclusion. The second is a more theoretically neglected set of normative controversies about how institutional capacity for well functioning border governance (...) can best be achieved, concerning what I call the constitution of control of international borders. I argue that progress can be made in resolving controversies of the latter kind by applying a new normative theory of political legitimacy, distinct from the moral theories of justice routinely applied to ethics of exclusion controversies. On the ‘collective agency’ model of political legitimacy that I propose here, principles of political legitimacy have the regulatory role of combating complex collective action problems that may otherwise impede an institution’s collectively valuable functions. Through applying this theory, I sketch some provisional prescriptions for the design of international border governance institutions that may follow from the demand for strengthening their political legitimacy. (shrink)

It is a familiar view in the philosophy of mind and action is that for a thought or attitude to constitute a reason for an action is for it to render intelligible, in the light of norms of rationality or reason, that action. However, I can make sense of your actions in this way by crediting you with attitudes that I myself do not hold. Equally, you can do this for my actions. So not all reasons for one’s actions are (...) one’s own reasons. What more is involved in a reason’s being one’s own reason for acting? (shrink)

Globalization has brought people around the world closer together in ways that have created greater uncertainty in their identity politics. This has sometimes strengthened local identities, despite attempts to create ‘universal’ forms of identity that impose one standard of appropriate conduct in the face of difference. Drawing from Dialogical Self Theory and from cosmopolitanism, we propose that adequately responding to the ethical and identity challenges presented by globalization requires having Global Consciousness: “a knowledge of both the interconnectedness and difference of (...) humankind, and a will to take moral actions in a reflexive manner on its behalf”. We argue that this approach can ground a distinctively normative psychology of globalization. We consider negative and positive aspects of the golden rule in equal and close relationships, and benevolence in unequal power relationships as behaviour guides for global consciousness, and theorize about institutional leadership that supports the provision of public goods. We offer empirical tests of this approach. (shrink)

In this article, we introduce the project developed in this special issue: a search for principles of ‘real-world’ justice in international migration that can offer practical guidance on real political problems of migration governance. We begin by highlighting two sources of divergence between the principal topics of theoretical controversy within literatures on migration justice and the animating sources of political controversy within real national and international publics. These arise first in the framing of the problems on which normative theory is (...) purported to offer guidance, and second in the character of the normative reasons that are invoked as grounds for settling the controversies. In response to these divergences, we propose that the development of action-guiding normative theories of international migration can be supported with resources from broadly ‘realist’ approaches to political theory. We outline three key dimensions in which the ‘real-world’ theoretical approaches developed in this collection of papers connect up with important themes in the wider theoretical literature on political ‘realism’: first, a problem-centred methodological strategy; second, a focus on the value of political legitimacy; and third, a commitment to reconciling systematic engagement with real political problems and circumstances with a critical normative orientation towards political problems. (shrink)

Neuropalliative care developed to address the needs of patients living with life‐limiting neurologic disease. One critical consideration is that disease‐related changes to cognition, communication, and function challenge illness experiences and care practices. We conducted an ethnography to understand neuropalliative care as a phenomenon; how it was experienced, provided, conceptualized. Personhood served as our conceptual framework; with its long philosophical history and important place in nursing theory, we examined the extent to which it captured neuropalliative experiences and concerns. Personhood contextualized complex (...) losses, aligning the impact of functional and relational changes. Cognition, communication, and functional alterations stretched conceptions of personhood, insinuating it can be relational, fluid, adaptive. Although normative conceptions of personhood guided research and decision‐making, ethical considerations suggested personhood could be transformed, remade. We consider the implications of our findings through three themes. First, we examine how literature on illness experience fails to integrate the realities of people living with and dying from neurologic disease; we counter this by interrogating the concept of experience. Second, we turn to Ricoeur's work on recognition to illuminate relational conceptions of personhood to inform care practices. Finally, we reflect on how personhood can bridge the gap left by functional changes, enhance relational engagement, and promote dignity at the end of life. (shrink)

I agree with Gibbs that the message of the base rate literature reads differently depending on which null hypothesis is used to frame the issue. But I argue that the normative null hypothesis, H0: “People use base rates in a Bayesian manner,” is no longer appropriate. I also challenge Adler's distinction between unused and ignored base rates, and criticize Goodie's reluctance to shift research attention to the field. Macchi's arguments about textual ambiguities in traditional base rate problems suggest that empirical (...) testing is needed to tease apart the effects of problem clarification and problem framing. Macdonald's, Fletcher's and Snow's skepticism about the value of Bayesian methods in real world judgment tasks is treated as a challenge for the next generation of empirical base rate studies. (shrink)

This volume is a comprehensive survey of contemporary thought on a wide range of issues and provides students with the basic background to current debates in metaphysics.

This study focuses on examining the thematic landscape of the history of scholarly publication in business ethics. We analyze the titles, abstracts, full texts, and citation information of all research papers published in the field’s leading journal, the Journal of Business Ethics, from its inaugural issue in February 1982 until December 2016—a dataset that comprises 6308 articles and 42 million words. Our key method is a computational algorithm known as probabilistic topic modeling, which we use to examine objectively the field’s (...) latent thematic landscape based on the vast volume of scholarly texts. This “big-data” approach allows us not only to provide time-specific snapshots of various research topics, but also to track the dynamic evolution of each topic over time. We further examine the pattern of individual papers’ topic diversity and the influence of individual papers’ topic diversity on their impact over time. We conclude this study with our recommendation for future studies in business ethics research. (shrink)

This article examines popular cinema’s interactions with digital culture, focusing on cinema and social structure. A product of technological and social developments, digital culture has introduced the creation of cyberspace, the emergence and spread of social media, and the formation of virtual communities. This article focuses on a specific period (1980 – 2010) to examine the evolution in cinema of portrayals of digital culture. The analysis includes four influential films: WarGames (1983, by John Badham), Perfect Blue (1997, by Satoshi Kon), (...) Pulse (2001, by Kiroshi Kurosawa), and Life in a Day (2011, by Kevin Macdonald, Loressa Clisby, and Tegan Bukowski). The article provides a guide to popular cinema's interaction with and use of the possibilities offered by digital culture, revealing how the four selected films reflect digital culture themes. Each film demonstrates different aspects and dynamics of digital culture at a particular time, offering a unique look at that period's social and technological landscape through its portrayal of technological developments, human relations, cultural values, and social norms. Each film evaluates the impact of the digitization process on cinema from different perspectives, depicting how cinema adapts and responds to technological changes. (shrink)

The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) is responsible for the Code of Professional Conduct that governs the actions of CPAs. In 1988, the Code was revised by the AICPA, but a number of issues still remain unresolved or confounded by the new Code. These issues are examined in light of the profession''s stated commitment to the public good, a commitment that is discussed at length in the new Code.Specifically, this paper reviews the following issues: (1) client confidentiality and (...) whistleblowing, (2) limited liability, and (3) auditor independence. We argue that, in each of these areas, the AICPA promotes a position that is potentially harmful to the public good. (shrink)

The increasing use of online simulations as replacements for animal dissection in the classroom or lab raises important questions about the nature of simulation itself and its relationship to embodied educational experience. This paper addresses these questions first by presenting a comparative hermeneutic-phenomenological investigation of online and offline dissection. It then interprets the results of this study in terms of Borgmann’s (1992) notion of the intentional “transparency” and “pliability” of simulated hyperreality. It makes the case that it is precisely encumbrance (...) and disruption—elements that are by definition excluded from simulations and interfaces—which give dissection its educational value. (shrink)

Há um discurso teórico que denuncia a igualdade formal presente no ideal de Estado de Direito como um manto ideológico a serviço do conservadorismo. Por debaixo desse manto, as profundas desigualdades sociais e relações de opressão seriam legitimadas como se fossem simplesmente fruto da aplicação imparcial das regras jurídicas a que todos estariam igualmente submetidos. Embora essa crítica sirva quando direcionada ao modelo de Estado de Direito defendido por Hayek, que apresenta falsamente as regras oriundas dos costumes e dos precedentes (...) como isentas de posições políticas, ela não atinge da mesma maneira o modelo de Estado de Direito centrado na supremacia da legislação. Apesar de todas as limitações que podem ser reconhecidas no ideal de igualdade formal, a sua recusa parece antes permitir novas e mais graves formas de opressão do que as suprimir. (shrink)

The Oxford English Dictionary defines fulfilment as ‘satisfaction or happiness as a result of fully developing one's potential or realizing one's aspirations; self-fulfillment’. Not only has the idea of fulfilment underpinned ‘approximately twenty centuries of philosophy’ as Lefebvre notes, it plays an indispensable role in both popular and scholarly accounts of education and upbringing. Experiences of education, of upbringing and of ‘life lessons’, however, are so often not about the fulfilment of oneself, about the discovery and actualisation of one's full (...) potential. Such experiences instead involve moments of sometimes irreparable failure and loss—a matter that has not received a great deal of attention in educational research and theory. After briefly examining the way that fulfilment is favourably framed both in humanistic psychology and in neo-humanist Bildungstheorie, this paper considers some of the exceptions to the nearly ubiquitous identification of education with fulfilment: Arthur Schopenhauer's view of the irrationality of human (developmental) experience and Ludwig Wittgenstein's use of the term ‘conditioning’ (Abrichtung) in some of his accounts of learning and socialisation. We then focus on failure and loss in education through an overview of the pedagogical theory of O.F. Bollnow. Bollnow, as is gradually being recognised in English-language scholarship, saw moments of uncertainty, disorientation and above all crisis as indispensable in educational experience—for both student and teacher. In this way, we show that instead of being the pursuit of self-fulfilment, education is unavoidably a matter of difficulty, disruption and also failure. It reshapes us, and this reshaping can be seen as being as much about formation as it is about deformation. (shrink)

What is pedagogy, exactly? Merriam-Webster defines it simply as “the art, science, or profession of teaching.” In contemporary academic discourse, however, pedagogy is generally left undefined — with its apparent implicit meanings ranging anywhere from a specific “model for teaching” (e.g., behaviorist or progressivist instruction) to a broadly political philosophy of education in general (most famously, a “pedagogy of the oppressed”). In this paper, Norm Friesen and Hanno Su follow the Continental pedagogical tradition in giving pedagogy a general but (...) explicit definition. They do so by looking at how pedagogy arises both in everyday life and in school as unavoidably ethical activity undertaken primarily for the sake of the young person or child. Such activities, the authors maintain, are structured not so much by processes, methods, and outcomes, but by irresolvable oppositions and the tensions between them. They illustrate this inductively through a series of images and examples — moving gradually from ones involving parenting and early childhood to ones from elementary and secondary schooling. In this way, Friesen and Su show that pedagogy is not so much one or more ideologically focused or evidence-based instructional or psychological approaches to be mastered by a professional or teaching specialist. It is instead an independent but ethically informed practical perspective — one that can (and has) been extended to form a distinctively pedagogical theory and discipline. As such, it is something that is not only a part of our everyday life and culture, but arguably of all human cultures. (shrink)

Domination consists in subjection to the will of others and manifests itself both as a personal relation and a structural phenomenon serving as the context for relations of power. Domination has again become a central political concern through the revival of the republican tradition of political thought . However, normative debates about domination have mostly remained limited to the context of domestic politics. Also, the republican debate has not taken into account alternative ways of conceptualizing domination. Critical theorists, liberals, feminists, (...) critical race theorists, and postcolonial writers have discussed domination in different ways, focusing on such problems as imperialism, racism, and the subjection of indigenous peoples. This volume extends debates about domination to the global level and considers how other streams in political theory and nearby disciplines enrich, expand upon, and critique the republican tradition’s contributions to the debate. This volume brings together, for the first time, mostly original pieces on domination and global political justice by some of this generation’s most prominent scholars, including Philip Pettit, James Bohman, Rainer Forst, Amy Allen, John McCormick, Thomas McCarthy, Charles Mills, Duncan Ivison, John Maynor, Terry Macdonald, Stefan Gosepath, and Hauke Brunkhorst. -/- Front matter and First chapter available for download. (shrink)

We attempt to identify and evaluate the association between key characteristics of not-for-profit hospitals and market concentration, as measured by the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index, using data available from the American Hospital Association, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the Internal Revenue Service Form 990. Our goal is to provide decision support to policy makers on factors that contribute to market competitiveness, which has been linked to improvements in efficiency, costs, and access to health care. We find that contributions are (...) positively associated with market concentration. This could indicate that well-run NP hospitals are rewarded both financially as well as with increased market share. We also find that a higher percentage of Medicare patients is positively correlated with market concentration. This could be explained by the fact that Medicare reimbursement rates are generally lower than those paid by private insurers ; thus, hospitals might not necessarily choose to operate in areas with high Medicare populations. Further, median income is negatively associated with market concentration. One explanation for this effect could be the fact that a population with a higher median income is in a better position to pay for services, making them attractive to hospitals as a potential market. Finally, we find that the presence of managers with voting rights on the boards of directors has no significant impact. (shrink)

Using a policy-capturing approach with a broad student sample we examine how individuals’ economic, social and environmental values influence their propensity to engage in a broad range of sustainability-related corporate actions. We employ a multi-dimensional sustainability framework of corporate actions and account for both the positive and negative impacts associated with corporate activity—termed strength and concern actions, respectively. Strong economic values were found to increase the propensity for concern actions and the willingness to work in controversial industries. Individuals with balanced (...) values were as likely as those with strong economic values to pursue positive economic outcomes, but without the same downside potential for concern actions. We also found significant gender effects, with females being less likely to engage in concern actions and more supportive of social and environmental strength actions. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 5, June 2020, Page 72-74.

The Indigenous Māori of Aotearoa New Zealand have a knowledge system embedded with understandings related to consciousness, soul, and spirit. Although the effects of colonization are vast and ongoing, these knowledges have not been completely lost, and endure as an essential part of Māori comprehensions about the nature of everyday life and reality. We provide an overview of the socio-historical context of Māori, before briefly summarizing Māori cosmogony. We then discuss some of the more popularized ways the constructs of consciousness, (...) soul, and spirit are interpreted from an Indigenous Māori perspective, while importantly highlighting that there are no single words in the Māori language that readily translate to these concepts, making the task of elucidating what the terms mean for Māori somewhat complex. Our articulations are intended as a brief overview, rather than an extensive extrapolation. (shrink)

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

This book offers new perspectives on the origins and development of John Ruskin’s political thought. Graham A. MacDonald traces the influence of late medieval and pre-Enlightenment thought in Ruskin’s writing, reintroducing readers to Ruskin’s politics as shaped through his engagement with concepts of natural law, legal rights, labour and welfare organization. From Ruskin’s youthful studies of geology and chemistry to his back-to-the-land project, the Guild of St. George, he emerges as a complex political thinker, a reformer—and what we would (...) recognize today as an environmentalist. John Ruskin’s Politics and Natural Law is a nuanced reappraisal of neglected areas of Ruskin’s thought. (shrink)

This volume explores the ethical dimensions of a wide selection of philosophical and theological topics in Aquinas's texts.

Classical archaeology in the service of the state and national identity is not a new concept, although it is one that is seen less, or at least less blatantly, in modern Europe. This particular use of the classical past is still very much in use in the region of Macedonia, both the Greek province and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Nationalism uses archaeology and the imagery of the ancient world to claim legitimacy in the modern world. By claiming the (...) ancient past and projecting it into the present, nations can create a strong national identity. By tying the present day inhabitants of an area to a strong cultural past, the nation itself becomes more legitimate. Problems arise when two nations seek to claim the same past as in the case in the Greek province of Macedonia and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. This competition and issues surrounding the claim of ownership of a particular national past can be seen through the examples of the tumulus at Vergina and the differing traditions of the symposion in Macedonia and Athens. The projection of the past into the present can be seen in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia flag, in three pamphlets on the “Macedonian Question” from Greece, and in the recent rebuilding of Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’s capital, Skopje. (shrink)