In this extraordinary introduction to the study of the philosophy of technology, Andrew Feenberg argues that techonological design is central to the social and political structure of modern societies. Environmentalism, information technology, and medical advances testify to technology's crucial importance. In his lucid and engaging style, Feenberg shows that technology is the medium of daily life. Every major technical changes reverberates at countless levels: economic, political, and cultural. If we continue to see the social and technical domains as being seperate, (...) then we are essentially denying an integral part of our existence, and our place in a democratic society. Questioning Tecchnology convinces us that it is vital that we learn more about technology the better to live with it and to manage it. (shrink)

In 15 insightful essays, Jacques Derrida and an international group of scholars of religion explore postmodern thinking about God and consider the nature of forgiveness in relation to the paradoxes of the gift. Among the themes addressed by contributors are the possibilities of imagining God as unthinkable, imagining God as non-patriarchal, imagining a return to Augustine, and imagining an age in which praise is far more important than narrative. Questioning God moves readers beyond the parameters of metaphysical reason and modernist (...) rationality as it attempts to think the questions of God and forgiveness in a postmodernist context. Contributors include John D. Caputo, Jacques Derrida, Mark Dooley, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, Robert Gibbs, Jean Greisch, Kevin Hart, Richard Kearney, Cleo McNelly Kearns, John Milbank, Regina M. Schwartz, Michael J. Scanlon, and Graham Ward. Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion—Merold Westphal, general editor. (shrink)

Background: Nurses are often faced with complex situations that made them to make ethical decisions; and to make such decisions, they need to possess the power of moral reasoning. Studies in Iran show that the majority of nursing students lack proper ethical development. Socratic teaching is a student-centered method which is strongly opposed to the lecturing method. Objectives: This study was conducted to evaluate the impacts of Socratic questioning on the moral reasoning of the nursing students. Research design: In a (...) quasi-experimental study, Crisham’s Nursing Dilemma Test was used to evaluate the results of three groups before, immediately after, and 2 months after intervention. The data were analyzed using the SPSS statistical software (v 15). Participants and research context: Through random allocation, 103 nursing students were divided into three groups. In experiment group 1 (37 students), intervention consisted of Socratic questioning-based sessions on ethics and how to deal with moral dilemmas; experiment group 2 (33 students) attended a 4-h workshop; and the control group (33 students) was not subject to any interventions. Signed informed consent forms: This research was approved by the Ethics Committee of the University. All the participants signed written informed consents. Findings: There were significant differences between experiment group 1 and experiment group 2’s pre-test and post-test scores on moral reasoning (p ≤ 0.001, p ≤ 0.001), nursing principled thinking (p ≤ 0.001, p ≤ 0.001), and practical considerations (p ≤ 0.001, p ≤ 0.031). Discussion: Both the teaching approaches improved the subjects’ moral reasoning; however, Socratic questioning proved more effective than lecturing. Compared to other similar studies in Iran and other countries, the students had inadequate moral reasoning competence. Conclusion: This study confirms the need for the development of an efficient course on ethics in the nursing curriculum. Also, it appears that Socratic questioning is an effective method to teach nursing ethics and develop nursing students’ competence of moral reasoning. (shrink)

I defend a proposition-directed, sui generis account of agnosticism, according to which being agnostic about some proposition, P, involves a sceptical or questioning mental stance towards both the truth and falsity of P. Call this the questioning-attitude account. The questioning-attitude account contrasts with the question-directed attitude account of Jane Friedman, which holds that the object of agnosticism is a question rather than a proposition. I argue that the questioning-attitude account not only avoids a major weakness of Friedman’s question-directed attitude account, (...) but it also displays the following three attractive features: (1) it offers an explanation of why ascriptions of agnosticism often take an interrogative compliment, (2) it offers a univocal account of the content of all three doxastic attitudes, and (3) it fleshes out the claim that agnosticism is sui generis by describing what makes agnosticism distinct from both belief and disbelief. (shrink)

The Turing Test is best regarded as a model to test for intelligence, where an entity’s intelligence is inferred from its ability to be attributed with ‘human-likeness’ during a text-based conversation. The problem with this model, however, is that it does not care if or how well an entity produces a meaningful conversation, as long as its interactions are humanlike enough. As a consequence, the TT attracts projects that concentrate on how best to fool the judges. In light of this, (...) I propose a new version of the TT: the Questioning Turing Test. Here, the entity has to produce an enquiry rather than a conversation; and it is parametrised along two further dimensions in addition to ‘human-likeness’: ‘correctness’, evaluating if the entity accomplishes the enquiry; and ‘strategicness’, evaluating how well the entity accomplishes the enquiry, in terms of the number of questions asked. (shrink)

This paper argues that corporate Codes of Ethics lose their ability to further moral responsiveness because of the narrow instrumental purposes that inform their adoption and use. It draws on Jacques Derrida's reading of Emmanuel Levinas to argue that, despite the fact that all philosophical language entails a certain violence, corporate Codes of Ethics could potentially play a more meaningful role in furthering ethical questioning within corporations. The paper argues that Derrida's reading of Levinas' notion of 'the third' could precipitate (...) the emergence of a broader sense of ethical responsibility towards multiple others within corporations. Codes may also present the opportunity for corporations to engage in the reconsideration of their own purposes in the light of questions of justice towards multiple others. How these changes in the establishment and use of Codes may be accomplished is explored towards the end of the paper. (shrink)

This article introduces the special issue on questions, questioning, and institutional practices. We begin by considering how questioning as a discursive practice is a central vehicle for constructing social worlds and reflecting existing ones. Then we describe the different ways questions and question have been defined, typologized, and critiqued, in general and within seven institutions including policing, the courts, medicine, therapy, research interviews, education, and mediated political exchanges. The introduction concludes with a preview of the articles in the special issue.

Bioethicists have virtually assumed that Tarasoff generated a duty to warn the sexual partners of an HIV‐positive man that they risked infection. Yet given the views of sex and of AIDS that have evolved in the gay community, in many cases the parallels to Tarasoff do not hold. Bioethicists should at the least attend to the community's views, and indeed should go beyond doing mere “professional ethics” to participate in the moral self‐exploration in which these views are located.

The journal is delighted to include the following suite of articles on the theme of ‘Questioning Progress in Times of “No Future”: Orientations for Education’.

This paper seeks to defend the thesis that this American project of military hegemony has a variety of global security costs of such combined magnitude that there is a strong prima facie case against the resort to armed force by the United States, so that its wars might be wrong even when there is a just cause. My thesis is based on the jus ad bellum principle of proportionality.

There are norms for asking questions. Inquirers should not ask questions to which they know the answer. The literature on the norms of asking has focused on such speaker-centered norms. But, as I argue, there are addressee-centered norms as well: inquirers should not ask addressees who fall short of a certain epistemic status. That epistemic status, I argue here, is knowledge.

Given the many differences among women, can feminist theory even speak in terms of the category "woman?" This is the question that currently dominates feminist theory. Theorists who subscribe to traditional feminism argue that feminism must, for political and philosophic reasons, employ the category "woman." Those who take a poststructuralist approach, however, assert that invoking "woman" is an oppressive tactic that advances an essentialist ideal that is oppressive to women no matter what the content of that ideal. Even a "feminist" (...) understanding of "woman" does violence to difference, they charge. Based on the many different ways in which any abstraction manifests itself concretely, they determine that the abstraction is a myth and reality is in fact radically contingent and discursively constructed; it is an ever-shifting field. We can never claim to "know" woman because to know her is only to know she is not knowable. Knowledge has no connection to any stable "being." ;This branch of feminist theory has gained increasing ascendance; currently, the charge of "essentialism" is almost enough to undermine the legitimacy of any feminist theory, no matter what other merits it may possess. But many feminists are uneasy with poststructuralism's depiction of reality and its implications: the impossibility of knowledge and the impossibility of political discourse which invokes an understanding of truth or the good. Yet neither do these traditional feminists wish to foreclose continued questioning. Some feminists try to combine the insights of poststructuralism, and the preservation of questions, with more traditional understandings of knowledge, the subject and reality. They assert that we must somehow combine both contingency and stability in our understanding of "woman." But they do not fully articulate of how both contingency and stability coexist, or how difference and unity coexist. These issues are addressed at length by Aristotle in his Metaphysics, from which feminists can learn a great deal about these tensions. Aristotle is not "traditional" in the simplistic way that he is often portrayed to be. His understanding of being combines many of the insights claimed by poststructuralism without severing the connection between knowledge and being. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate whether the pursuit of group-based social equality should constitute a political goal or not. I explain that social equality refers to the mechanism for horizontal presentation of opportunities to individuals in a given society to express their abilities. It could also mean the right to vie, contest, compete or take advantage of certain opportunities or even to the freedom to pursue or obtain certain opportunities among free citizens in any society. I argue that the position (...) of the mainstream European South African population seems to be that this should be an individual-based exercise since the sectional policy of apartheid has been disestablished. However, the majority of native South Africans appear to hold that since the post-apartheid South African society is heavily lopsided that the pursuit of social equality, especially by the natives who experience great economic disadvantage as a political goal, should be group-based in order to address comprehensively the social and economic ills of apartheid. This groupbased approach is challenged by European South Africans who argue that it introduces another form of inequality that places them at a disadvantage. I will analyze the arguments on both sides and attempt to justify the group-based approach in the light of the post-apartheid peculiar circumstances of native South Africans. Keywords: social equality, political goal, individual, group, South African society, apartheid. (shrink)

In the literature on African moral philosophy, it is common to find normative conclusions about the way we ought to act directly drawn from purported metaphysical facts about the nature of ourselves and the world. For example, Kwame Gyekye, the most influential sub-Saharan political philosopher, attempts to defend moderate communitarianism, roughly the view that agents have strong duties to support others in ways that do not violate human rights, by contending that it follows from the dual nature of the self (...) as both social and individual. In this article, I critically analyze this sort of rationale, and contend that it is unsound. I propose several reconstructions, but conclude that they cannot plausibly bridge the ‘is-ought gap’, and that similar arguments found in the field of African ethics, such as the frequent claim we must treat nature with respect since everything in the universe is interdependent, also fail to do so. (shrink)

This article addresses the issue of asking questions as an important element of international business negotiation where there are differences in cultural background. A Dutch-Spanish difference in questioning was related to differences between the two parties in uncertainty reduction and negotiation goals. All 480 questions in 8 simulated Kelley game negotiations were reviewed: both monocultural and intercultural, i.e. 2 cultures and 3 languages. This analysis may also allow an illustration of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which holds, at least in its weak (...) version, that culture frames language and language frames culture. It may also be possible to determine the extent to which intercultural differences between Dutch and Spanish questioning behaviours - assuming they can be ascertained in comparison with monocultural Dutch and Spanish behaviour - are language bound. In other words, do negotiators use a different typology of questions in their native language than in a neutral language? A comparison of the monocultural and intercultural data makes it possible to illustrate the above hypothesis, and to establish how far the L1-culture connection differs from that of the L2-culture. For another similar test on culture-language relations in South African mathematics texts and their readers, see Prins and Ulijn. The uncertainty reduction theory of Berger and the negotiation models developed by Fisher and Ury and Mastenbroek are related to question behaviour, which is analysed with the Verbal Response Mode Taxonomy of Stiles. Pre- and post-negotiation questionnaires were developed and administered to relate the results of the linguistic analysis to the perceptions of the negotiators in order to test the ecological validity of UR. Asking questions appeared to be a critical success factor in both monocultural and intercultural business negotiation on the basis of their relation with UR variables and Kelley game profit levels, but in a different sense to Gudykunst et al., who suggest that questions reduce uncertainty by increasing attributional confidence in a general way, seemingly irrespective of a national cultural background. In this study the Dutch, starting from a higher level of issue-related global confidence, used questions significantly less than the Spanish to attribute confidence to the person, indicating a cultural difference. Most questioning differences appeared to be language - as well as culture-bound. The Spanish asked significantly more for acknowledgement, and the Dutch asked more indirect questions with disclosure, but the two groups did not differ in global uncertainty and attributional confidence after their negotiations. They seemed to reduce uncertainty by adopting a passive, unobtrusive observation strategy. It may be that the type of information needed to become more confident depends on the communicator's personality rather than on his or her cultural background. Dutch and Spanish managers would therefore be advised to balance openness and vagueness to reach their negotiation goals in maximizing profits by using a combination of clear and ambiguous questions and answers and to be aware of the linguistic differences in questioning between Spanish and Dutch, which may even be carried over to English when it is used as a tool of communication. (shrink)

A resilient issue in research ethics is whether and when a placebo-controlled trial is justified if it deprives research subjects of a recognized treatment. The clinicians' moral duty to provide the best available care seems to require the use of ‘active’ controlled trials that use an established treatment as a control whenever such a therapy is available. In another regard, ACTs are supposedly methodologically inferior to PCTs. Hence, the moral duty of the clinical researcher to use the best methods will (...) favor PCTs. In this target article, I analyze the three reasons for believing that ACTs are inferior to PCTs namely: 1) ACTs lack ‘assay sensitivity’; 2) ACTs do not measure absolute effect size; and 3) ACTs require more participants; and I contend that none are acceptable. Consequently the tension between clinical and research ethics dissolves: the moral duty of the clinician to avoid PCTs is unopposed by methodological considerations. (shrink)

This is a controversial work of applied legal theory, addressing urgent contemporary questions about law and the state, about the character of the UK as a state, and about the juridical character of the European Union.

Many attempts of contemporary philosophers to reduce ‘mind’ to ‘body’ notwithstanding, where the ‘body’ is understood in the Cartesian framework, the continental philosophers in general repeatedly remind us that body has a significance that goes beyond its materiality as a bio-chemical physical substance. In “questioning body,” we wish to take up the philosophical underpinnings of the significance of body as a framework or tool to understand ‘technology’. By doing so, we are able to see the link between technology and body (...) as more than a fortuitous relation. Relying on the writings of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Ihde, the paper attempts to show how a “sense of body,” particularly the notion of “agentive body” as distinguished from the “symbolic body,” hermeneutically evolves from the way in which it is entangled in the technological matrix. (shrink)

This paper reassesses the domain of the business ethics curriculum and, drawing on recent shifts in the business environment, maps out some suggestions for extending the core ground of the discipline. It starts by assessing the key elements of the dominant English-language business ethics textbooks and identifying the domain as reflected by those publications as 'where the law ends' and 'beyond the legal minimum'. Based on this, the paper identifies potential gaps and new areas for the discipline by drawing on (...) four main aspects. First, it argues that the domain of business ethics requires extensions dependent on the particular geographic region where the subject is taught. A second factor for broadening the scope is the impact of recent scandals, which arguably direct the focus of ethical inquiry towards the nature of the business systems in which individuals and corporations operate. Third, the impact of globalization and its result on growing corporate involvement in regulatory processes is discussed. Fourth and finally, business ethics reaches beyond the traditional constituencies of 'economic stakeholders' as new actors from civil society enter the stage of ethical decision making in business. We conclude by suggesting that a reconsideration of the domain of business ethics, especially in Europe, is timely, but that to do so represents a major challenge to business ethics educators. (shrink)

This article engages with the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralist gender theory by comparing and contrasting the questioning of the symbolic phallus (function) undertaken by Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler. The debate takes place through Lacan’s 1958 paper “The Signification of the Phallus,” to which Butler responded critically in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, published in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Lacan explains that the symbolic phallic function is the “anchor”’ from and around which the symbolic works and (...) ties the discussion to the question of sexual difference by explaining that men and women are positioned differently in relation to it. Butler charges that Lacan’s schema is heteronormative—because it is limited to the male/female schema—and patriarchal because within that heteronormative framework it affirms the masculine perspective. Rather than follow the usual route taken by recent Lacanian scholarship on this issue and focus on Lacan’s later works, especially Seminar XX on female sexuality, I appeal to the contents of two works written in the same year (1958) as “The Signification of the Phallus”—Seminar V and “Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality”—to offer a qualified defense of Lacan that accepts that his early framework is heteronormative but questions the patriarchal charge by showing that within these pre-Seminar XX texts he explicitly works to undermine that logic. (shrink)

This major discussion takes a look at some of the most important ethical issues confronting us today by some of the world’s leading thinkers. Including essays from leading thinkers, such as Jurgen Habermas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Julia Kristeva and Paul Ricoeur, the book’s highlight – an interview with Jacques Derrida - presents the most accessible insight into his thinking on ethics and politics for many years. Exploring topics ranging from history, memory, revisionism, and the self and responsibility to democracy, multiculturalism, feminism (...) and the future of politics, the essays are grouped into five thematic sections: * hermeneutics * deconstruction * critical theory * psychoanalysis * applied ethics. Each section considers the challenges posed by ethics and how critical thinking has transformed philosophy today. Questioning Ethics affords an unsurpassed overview of the state of ethical thinking today by some of the world’s foremost philosophers. (shrink)

Considerable demand for academic research and publications is not a new subject of discussion in the academic field. In Indonesia, there is increasing challenge and pressure to conduct scientific publications, making it a very competitive field for academics, particularly for lecturers and postgraduate students. The present study examines Indonesian scholars’ perceptions of academic publishing as a demand from institutions and the government, as well as their understanding of academic misconduct. We conducted a survey with open-ended questions to 55 scholars. The (...) results suggest that Indonesian scholars are knowledgeable about academic publishing and believe that this obligation is inevitable and beneficial for them. To what extent academic misconduct in publications falls under their understanding, though, is still unclear. When presented with information on academic misconduct, in particular using unethical publication services, they show an ambiguous and inconsistent manner, as if the misconduct is understandable. Interestingly, they also reveal other ethically dubious behaviors that appear to be common among Indonesian scholars. The findings indicate that the issue of academic misconduct is still addressed ambiguously by using publication demands as a scapegoat to justify certain unethical publication practices. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to critically explore whether crowdsourced Big Data enables an inclusive humanitarian response at times of crisis. We argue that all data, including Big Data, are socially constructed artefacts that reflect the contexts and processes of their creation. To support our argument, we qualitatively analysed the process of ‘Big Data making’ that occurred by way of crowdsourcing through open data platforms, in the context of two specific humanitarian crises, namely the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and (...) the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. We show that the process of creating Big Data from local and global sources of knowledge entails the transformation of information as it moves from one distinct group of contributors to the next. The implication of this transformation is that locally based, affected people and often the original ‘crowd’ are excluded from the information flow, and from the interpretation process of crowdsourced crisis knowledge, as used by formal responding organizations, and are marginalized in their ability to benefit from Big Data in support of their own means. Our paper contributes a critical perspective to the debate on participatory Big Data, by explaining the process of in and exclusion during data making, towards more responsive humanitarian relief. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that readers will resist imagining that a character in a story did something morally wrong, even if the story endorses this judgement. This paper argues, first, that readers will not resist if the question of whether that act was wrong is not salient as they read; and, second, that asking a certain question can be part of correctly appreciating a story—even if that question is not in the foreground of the story, and even if the story (...) itself discourages readers from asking it, as is common in some forms of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. (shrink)

The author argues that Quijano’s conceptualization of race within the theory of coloniality of power is limited and theoretically insufficient given its lack of elaboration regarding the role of anti-Blackness in Spanish colonization. This article contrasts the idea of coloniality of power with Cedric Robinson’s elaboration of racial capitalism to demonstrates how Robinson has a more complex and historically rich analysis of race that centers the expansion of racial capitalism with the invention of the Negro subject. The article closes with (...) an attempt to bridge the history of anti-Blackness and the idea of coloniality using Sylvia Wynter’s adaptation of the idea of coloniality, which is attentive to the Portuguese expeditions prior to Columbus and how coloniality disproportionally affected people of African descent in the Américas. (shrink)

This article looks at the practice of educational questioning using the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans‐Georg Gadamer. It first looks at questions and statements from a hermeneutic perspective, demonstrating some of the differences and similarities between the two. It then details Gadamer's notion of the ‘true question’, asking whether it is possible for teachers to ask ‘true questions’. Then, it turns to some concrete ways to rethink educational questioning. Three themes are proposed, themes to keep in mind when educational questions are (...) used: non‐superficiality, humility, and circuitry. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Questioning the Motives of Habituated Action:Burke and Bourdieu on PracticeDana AndersonThe British official's habit, in the Empire's remotest spots, of dressing for dinner is in effect the transporting of an idol, the vessel of a motive that has its sanctuary in the homeland.—Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 44In his recent Kenneth Burke and the Conversation after Philosophy, Timothy Crusius locates Burke in the context of "PostPhilosophical" thought by (...) describing Burke's expansive Dramatistic project as a praxis—as a program encompassing "any act whatsoever, including symbolic action (i.e., expression, whether artistic or discursive), in behalf of a better life." When praxis is conceived broadly as a dialectical perspective on human action—that agents and structures interact in mutually determining ways—the term becomes, in fact, an accurate summary of the entire Burkean corpus: "If we understand it as Burke does," Crusius continues, "all that he wrote is praxis" (1999, 198). This panoramic scope of Burke's dialectical inquiry is certainly one reason it remains rhetorical theory's perhaps most flexible and productive framework for considering human action; the Dramatistic pentad and its ratios for discussing the attribution of motive continue to invite theoretical "ways of placement" as multifaceted as human motives themselves.Speaking of Burke's work in terms of praxis, however, at least in the term's contemporary critical usage,1 raises a question regarding a cognate concept that the idea of praxis entails: in what sense is Burke's pentadic grammar of action equipped to consider the habituated actions characteristic of human practice?Practice, as a conceptual descendant of Marxian praxis, retains a connection with what Marx called "human sensuous activity" (1968, 28-30).2 In its most general sense, practice refers to the regular and repeated activities of agents that, in their quotidian enactment, dialectically [End Page 255] constitute an agent's sense of self and of reality in relation to external conditions of existence. While the activities of agents will tend to reify the dominant external conditions in which agents act, these external conditions are nonetheless open to change inasmuch as the evolving practices of individuals might come to challenge them. This perspective of the determined, yet determining nature of human practice is aptly summarized in The German Ideology, where Marx and Engels famously argue that "circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances" (2000, 189).3 As Michel de Certeau's seminal studies of practice have demonstrated (de Certeau 1984; de Certeau, Giard, and Mayol 1998), the power of this relationship of mutual constitution between individuals and their worlds of external circumstances owes directly to the banality of the actions through which such constitution is accomplished—actions ranging from the way bread is served in a given household, to the way cosmetics are purchased in department stores, to the general "ways of operating" in urban spaces, including simply walking in one's own neighborhood (de Certeau, Giard, and Mayol 1998; Mayol 1998, 7-13). As Judith Butler very poignantly summarizes, it is through precisely such "embodied rituals of everydayness," however "taken-for-granted" they may be, that "a given culture produces and sustains belief in its own 'obviousness' " (1999, 113-14).The constitutive dynamics of such practical actions should surely figure prominently into any conception of Burke's work as praxis. Indeed, this dynamic is already implicit in the fact that, for Burke, it is only through the possibility of mutually transforming both ourselves and our worlds through actions material and symbolic that we might begin to move toward a better life. But while Dramatism and practice rest on similar perspectives of the dialectically constitutive nature of human action, several aspects of the grammar through which Burke investigates motive might appear to limit, or even to preclude, the Dramatistic examination of practice as a kind of motivated action. More specifically, Burke's consistent "anti-Behaviorist" emphasis on the conscious or purposive nature of action questions the extent to which Dramatism can account for the dispositional and habituated actions characteristic of practice, actions for which agents would be least able to articulate conscious purposes. To cast the issue in the context of my epigraph above... (shrink)