Management scholars view workplace spirituality as an effective means of improving employee well-being and organizational productivity. However, a spiritual work environment may also be beneficial for controlling employees’ experiences of uncivil behaviors in the workplace. Drawing on conservation of resources theory and cognitive appraisal theory, we proposed and explored the linkage between workplace spirituality and incivility experienced from supervisors and colleagues in the workspace. We also investigated the moderating effect of the dark triad on the relationship. The data collected from (...) two different samples industry, N = 220) provided support for our hypotheses. In both studies, we found a significant negative correlation between workplace spirituality and incivility experienced from the two sources. While only psychopathy moderated the linkage between workplace spirituality and supervisor incivility in Sample 1, the moderation effect of all three dark traits was significant in case of colleague incivility. In Sample 2, each member of the dark triad moderated the association between workplace spirituality and incivility experienced from seniors and peers. The findings provided support for the cognitive appraisal theory by explaining how the practice of workplace spirituality alters employees’ perceptions of uncivil behaviors shown by their superiors and peers. The study makes a significant contribution to theory, research, and practice by presenting workplace spirituality as a solution to the ever-rising epidemic of incivility in the workplace. (shrink)

The author argues that the free society should not be seen as a hierarchy of superior and subordinate authorities but an archipelago of competing and overlapping jurisdictions. Kukathas has produced the book that no one with an interest in multiculturalism can afford to ignore.

I shall advance the thesis that if there are any moral rights at all, it follows that there is at least one natural right, the equal right of all men to be free. H.L.A. Hart, “Are There Any Natural Rights?”.

1 A New Departure 'No commanding work of political theory has appeared in the 20th century.' So said Isaiah Berlin, writing in 1962 . ...

A challenge for educators is how to teach in a “post-truth” world. Lies, fake news, and a gleeful disregard for facts – what I collectively term mis/information – all seem to undermine the very project of education. The pragmatism of Richard Rorty holds promise to address such issues. I first argue that Rorty’s philosophy of education is of limited use, whereas his broader thoughts on a philosophy without foundations are more relevant. I then suggest that a way forward is to (...) evade the fight against post-truth dynamics altogether. An insistence on rational objectivity and foundational truth are at the root of the challenges of mis/information. We can instead embrace uncertainty and doubt, shifting our educational goals to help students of diverse backgrounds avoid alienation and humiliation at the hands of schooling. Education can instead affirm the dignity of each student through an acculturation into inclusive, coherent narratives, replacing the self-defeating quest for finding the right truths with the more uplifting purpose of forging a common cultural commitment to reducing human suffering. (shrink)

In the history of modern liberal thought, the work of F.A. Hayek stands out as among the most significant contributions since that of J.S. Mill. In this book, Kukathas critically examines the nature and coherence of Hayek's defense of liberal principles, attempting both to identify its weaknesses and to show why it makes an important contribution to contemporary political theory. Kukathas argues that Hayek's defense of liberalism is unsuccessful because it rests on presuppositions which are philosophically incompatible. In his view, (...) the unresolved dilemma of Hayek's political philosophy is how to mount a systematic defense of liberalism if one emphasizes the limited capacity of human reason. Hayek's social philosophy, he argues, offers a significant theory of the nature of social processes, and is therefore an important account of how this must constrain our choice of political principles. (shrink)

A bottom-up approach grounded in micro-level understanding of the thinking, feeling, behavioral, and social aspects of living with low income and associated low literacy can lead to greater understanding and improvement of interactions in the health arena. This paper draws on what we have learned about marketplace interactions in subsistence economies to inform innovations in medical education, design and delivery of healthcare for lowincome patients, outreach education, and future micro-level research at the human-healthcare interface.

The birth of modern gynecology in the USA is preceded by experimental exploitations of Black women’s bodies in the mid-nineteenth century, entailing a long-drawn extraction of “reproductive knowledge” from enslaved patients. Charly Evon Simpson’s Behind the Sheet (2019) stages the history of medical bondage of Black enslaved women in antebellum South, reconstructing the events that led to the surgical innovation for vesico-vaginal fistula. Scrutinizing Simpson’s dramatization of the event, this paper prompts inquiries into the interplay of power and consent between (...) the physician and the enslaved patient in plantation healthcare, highlighting the need to reexamine bioethical principles. Using the theoretical framework of medical gaze propounded by Foucault and further developed by Susan Greenhalgh, the paper analyzes the operation of white patriarchal power and the construction of physician heroism in the medical sphere. Investigating the realm of bodily autonomy in the context of medical bondage, the paper attempts to render a “herstorical” standpoint on the contributions of enslaved Black women to the field of gynecology. (shrink)

This article considers the question of the responsibility of present generations for injustices committed by previous ones. It asks whether the descendants of victims of past injustice have claims against the descendants of the perpetrators of injustice. Two modes of argument are examined: the individual responsibility approach, according to which descendants cannot have claims against other descendants, and the collective responsibility approach, according to which descendants do have strong claims. Both approaches are criticized, but for different failings. An alternative view, (...) building on the individualist approach, is defended. This view argues that some people may have to bear responsibility for past injustice if lines of responsibility can clearly be drawn. This is most likely when certain kinds of corporate agents persist over generations, even after original members of such corporations have ceased to exist. Key Words: responsibility • justice • injustice • aborigines • history. (shrink)

Presidential power has provoked increasingly vigorous debate since the turn of this century. In recent years, scholars and lawyers have been grappling with how Congress’s dictates may limit the president’s Commander-in-Chief power to detain enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, to fight wars abroad, and to conduct intelligence activities at home. But policymakers have not yet explored the many possibilities for invoking the president’s “Take Care” power to change health care policy.This article explores the scope and limits of President Barack Obama’s (...) ability to invoke his executive authority to reform health care. Specifically, it identifies ways the Obama Administration can use directives to: expand Medicaid and State Children’s Health Insurance Program coverage through section 1115 waivers; test quality initiatives through Medicare demonstration authority; expand health information technology; allow drug reimportation and experiment with contracting power under Medicare; enhance patient protections and private coverage requirements; lift coverage restrictions on Medicaid and SCHIP; and build on the health insurance program for federal employees. Consistent with the mission of the Legal Solutions in Health Reform project, this article does not endorse a particular policy. Instead of recommending “what,” it explains “how.”. (shrink)

Contributed papers presented at a seminar organized by Department of Philosophy, Budge Budge College.

Contributed articles presented at a seminar.

Both dowry and domestic violence are manifestations of the socially subordinate position of women in India, in particular of women in relation to and within the institution of marriage. Studies reveal how the socio economic changes ushered in by modernisation have interacted with traditional norms to sustain these practices and through them, the subordination of women. The women’s movement began addressing these social problems through law, and has through the years continued to critique the law for its failure to deliver. (...) The critiques and debates arising from this concern have periodically generated recommendations for law reform, higher sentencing, widening the net of criminalisation, creation of special women’s police stations and courts in addition to strategies for raising gender awareness amongst the judiciary and the police. This article attempts to suggest that the shortcomings of the decades of women’s engagement with the law is not merely because of flaws and gender bias within the law, but more importantly, because of the expectations from the law and the centrality placed on its role in social transformation. (shrink)

Containing Both Intellectually Stimulating And Academically Entertaining Essays And Papers Presented At The Fifteenth International Congress Of Vedanta In The United States, This Book Honours The Congress Founder, Professor Rama Rao Pappu. This Volume Analytically Discusses The Ideologies Of Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhva, Vallabha, Tyagaraja And Satya Sai Baba.

The political pursuit of global justice is not a worthy goal, and our aims in establishing international legal and political institutions should be more modest. The pursuit of justice in the international order is dangerous to the extent that it requires the establishment of powerful supranational agencies, or legitimizes greater and more frequent exercise of political, economic, and military power by strong states or coalitions. The primary concern in the establishment and design of all legal and political institutions should be (...) not to secure justice but to limit power. It is a mistake to think that a distinction can be drawn between power created to do good and power created to do evil, or that we are capable of devising institutions that can honor the distinction. a Footnotesa For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay, I would like to thank Jerry Gaus, David Miller, Dan Greenwood, Peggy Battin, Leslie Francis, Erika George, Cindy Stark, and Deen Chatterjee, as well as my fellow contributors to this volume. For especially detailed and helpful editorial comments and advice, I would like to thank Ellen Paul. (shrink)

The primary concern of this essay is with the question “What is a political community?” This question is important in its own right. Arguably, the main purpose of political philosophy is to provide an account of the nature of political association and, in so doing, to describe the relations that hold between the individual and the state. The question is also important, however, because of its centrality in contemporary debate about liberalism and community.

This article evaluates the political implications of Thomas Hobbes’s extensive treatment of religion by taking up the motif of the Eucharist (and accompanying doctrine of transubstantiation) in Leviathan. Hobbes holds out transubstantiation as an exemplar of absurdity and an historical outgrowth of Christianity’s inauspicious meeting with pagan practices. At the same time, Leviathan contains allusions to eucharistic imagery in its narration of the generation of the “Mortal God,” the commonwealth, as the incorporation of a civil body. These conflicting sentiments are (...) illustrative of a wider tension running through Hobbes’s thought. Although Hobbes’s repudiation of superstition is well-known, it stands in stark contrast to Leviathan’s treatment of Christianity as an exemplar of “true” religion. The varied allusions to eucharistic doctrine illustrate how proper use might be made of a persistent “natural religiosity.” Both in its consonance with reason and its political logic, Christianity remains a politically constructive expression of “power invisible.”. (shrink)

The libertarian first principle—a belief in individual freedom—can lead to two different and not necessarily acceptable societies from the standpoint of liberty. One is the “Union of Liberty,” in which communities, associations, and intermediate bodies are held to rigorous standards of voluntariness . In the other, the “Federation of Liberty,” they are not .While in any free society individuals may voluntarily join together and waive some of their rights , hard questions arise when nonconsenting children are born into restrictive environments (...) that their parents may have voluntarily created. An adult who gives up all of his or her property to a communal religious body upon conversion has made a voluntary choice, but what about the child born into that religious community later on? Thus, the Federation of Liberty can, in theory, turn out to contain no communities that actually value or respect liberty; and even slavery might have a lawful place within it. The Union of Liberty, on the other hand, can, in principle turn out to be society ruled by a strong authority with little respect for dissenting moral traditions, including some self-styled libertarian moral traditions.Libertarians face a stark choice between these “two constructions of libertarianism”; there is no third way, theoretically speaking. Libertarians must choose one of them. Given the necessity to choose one of these constructions, the Federation of Liberty is arguably preferable to the Union of Liberty. (shrink)

Against scepticism from thinkers including John Rawls and Thomas Nagel about the appropriateness of justice as the concept through which global ethical concerns should be approached, Amartya Sen argues that the problem lies not with the idea of justice, but with a particular approach to thinking of justice, namely a transcendental approach. In its stead Sen is determined to offer an alternative systematic theory of justice, namely a comparative approach, as a more promising foundation for a theory of ?global justice.? (...) But in the end Sen offers no such thing. He does not develop a theory of justice and this is all to the good; for if values are plural in the way Sen suggests, then justice is not a master idea but one value among many, and it should be neither the first virtue of social institutions, nor the notion that frames all our reflections on ethical and political life. (shrink)

The foundations of biology have been a topic of debate for the past few decades. The traditional perspective of the Modern Synthesis, which portrays organisms as passive entities with limited role in evolutionary theory, is giving way to a new paradigm where organisms are recognized as active agents, actively shaping their own phenotypic traits for adaptive purposes. Within this context, this article raises the question of whether contemporary biological theory is undergoing a cognitive revolution. This inquiry can be approached in (...) two ways: from a theoretical standpoint, exploring the centrality of the cognitive sciences in current theoretical biology; and from a historical perspective, examining the resemblance between the current state of theoretical biology and the Cognitive Revolution of the mid-20th century. Both inquiries yield affirmative answers, though important nuances will be emphasized. The cognitive sciences' explanatory framework is employed to elucidate the agentic characteristics of organisms, establishing a clear parallelism between the Cognitive Revolution and the present state of theoretical biology. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has cast welcome light on the political relevance of Hobbes’s extensive treatment of theology and sacred history. Building on extant contributions, this article argues that God’s historical founding of a Kingdom lends insights into well-known difficulties attaching to Hobbes’s exposition of the Commonwealth by Institution. Although there are evident discrepancies between sacred history and man's natural estate, Abraham and Moses each faced political challenges that persist into the present. Acting as God’s authorized representatives not only allowed them to (...) assuage epistemic uncertainty, it enabled Moses to wield sovereign authority while preserving a claim to natural equality. I argue that Leviathan suggests this model of prophetic authority – conceived of as a particular kind of prudence – is key to meeting the challenges arising from the anthropological vulnerabilities of ignorance and fear. Hobbes’s interest in the role of founding prophets also helps to explain Leviathan’s novel inclusion of representation. This explication of prophetic authority reveals institution to be marked by a greater attention to legitimacy, epistemic authority, and divine sanction, and sheds light on the importance of sacred history for Hobbes’s broader political project. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper argues that a central explanatory role for the concept of Umwelt in theoretical biology is to be found in developmental biology, in particular in the effort to understand development as a goal-directed and adaptive process that is controlled by the organism itself. I will reach this conclusion in two (interrelated) ways. The first is purely theoretical and relates to the current scenario in the philosophy of biology. Challenging neo-Darwinism requires a new understanding of the various components involved (...) in natural selection processes. An important prerequisite for the explanation is the ability to understand development in a teleological way. Here, the concept of Umwelt plays a crucial role: if organisms are responsible for generating adaptive variation in specific environments, we need a theory that explains the context-dependent nature of adaptively oriented processes. The Umwelt is thus a central element in determining the goal that an adaptive process pursues. The second path in my analysis also has a historical dimension. I will present Karl Ernst von Baer’s reflections on teleological development and his influence on von Uexküll's thinking. I will present various ideas developed by von Baer, such as the distinction between Ziel and Zweck and the use of musical metaphors, which can help to understand development teleologically and give von Uexküll’s theory a central place in this framework. (shrink)

Disputes about the causal structure of natural selection have implications for teleosemantics. Etiological, mainstream teleosemantics is based on a causalist view of natural selection. The core of its solution to Brentano’s Problem lies in the solution to Kant’s Puzzle provided by the Modern Synthesis concerning populational causation. In this paper, I suggest that if we adopt an alternative, statisticalist view on natural selection, the door is open for two reflections. First, it allows for setting different challenges to etiological teleosemantics that (...) arise if a statisticalist reading of natural selection is right. Second, by providing a different solution to Kant’s Puzzle based on individual causes of evolution, statisticalism promotes a different answer to Brentano’s Problem, what I label as Agential Teleosemantics. (shrink)

The field of the philosophy of biology is flourishing in its aim to evaluate and rethink the view inherited from the previous century ---the Modern Synthesis. Different research areas and theories have come to the fore in the last decades in order to account for different biological phenomena that, in the first instance, fall beyond the explanatory scope of the Modern Synthesis. This thesis is anchored and motivated by this revolt in the philosophy of biology. -/- The central target in (...) this context is the possibility of naturalizing teleology, a classical nightmare for the history of biology itself. This requires, principally, understanding the causes of teleological explanations without assuming an unfashioned backward causation of sorts. As the riddles of teleological explanations are about their temporal dimension, I analyze different temporal scales of biological processes: evolutionary, developmental, and physiological. -/- The first one is the one defended in the context of the Modern Synthesis. As expected, one of the aims of this thesis is to evaluate the adequacy of an evolutionary account of teleological explanation. The scrutiny is negative. Evolutionary explanations in the context of the Modern Synthesis lack the necessary causal roots to naturalize teleology. Concerning the physiological scale, a long tradition pushed up by Kant and the organicist movement in the 20th century allows us to better understand how teleological explanations can be naturalized in physiological process. The key notions in this temporal scale are self-organization and the recursive, looped character of physiological process. While the physiological scale may be suitably accounted by contemporaries views, such as Autonomous Systems Theory, different central teleological phenomena remain unexplained from a purely physiological perspective. In particular, different issues concerning the (adaptive) construction of organism ---such as plasticity, robustness, variation, novelty, inheritance--- deserve an ontogenetic analysis. -/- The principal aim of this thesis is to provide a theory of teleological development that falls beyond the Modern Synthesis' framework and is prompted by different insights from the history of biology. I call it Agential Teleosemantics. It rests on two central pillars. First, that developmental processes, beyond any gene-centered stance, can be understood in informational terms; i.e. developmental processes are about the interaction of developmental resources conveying biological information. The second ingredient is agentivity, namely the idea that development is regulated by an agentive system according to the adaptiveness of the phenotypic outcomes produced. The role of agency in Agential Teleosemantic is equivalent to the role of genes in the Modern Synthesis: it is responsible for explaining the order and the adaptive complexity in the living realm. -/- The second target of this thesis regards the possibility of naturalizing intentional explanations in cognitive science. The central project involved in such an aim is known as teleosemantics. Classical teleosemantics however is etiological: it explains the teleofunctions of representational systems in terms of evolutionary processes. The different disputes in the contemporary philosophy of biology provide two insights to analyze teleosemantics in cognitive science. First, the challenges against the Modern Synthesis must be extended to the evolutionary approach of etiological teleosemantics. Second, as Agential Teleosemantics suggests an alternative source for teleofunctions ---ontogeny, I offer an attempt to integrate Agential Teleosemantics into cognitive science in order to provide an alternative teleosemantic project to understand intentional explanations in cognitive science. (shrink)

This collection brings together the most important published papers on Rawls' work. In addition to a general introduction, the set includes introductions to each volume which help guide the reader through the material. The thematically organized volumes include: * Vol. 1: Foundations and Method * Vols. 2-3: Principles of Justice I and II * Vol. 4: Political Liberalism and the Law of Peoples.