The Ethics Program at General Dynamics was evaluated relative to its stated objectives and its implied objectives. The program was found to have met its specific objectives which require employees to follow rules and standards of conduct. The program did not apparently meet its implied objectives which would have created a more humanistic work environment for employees. This result apparently stemmed from program planners' intentions to use the hope for better working conditions as a motivation for employees to follow company (...) standards. A substantial conflict was found between the philosophical bases for ethics programs and work environment improvement programs. (shrink)

Genomic research projects that collect tissues from deceased organ and tissue donors must obtain the authorization of family decision makers under difficult circumstances that may affect the authorization process. Using a quasi-experimental design, the Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues (ELSI) substudy of the Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project compared the recall and understanding of the donation authorization process of two groups: family members who had authorized donation of tissues to the GTEx project (the comparison group) and family members who had authorized (...) organ and tissue donations in years previous, who subsequently participated in two different mock-authorization processes that mimicked the GTEx authorization process (the intervention groups). Participants in the comparison and intervention groups were matched on key demographic characteristics.We found that participants in the intervention groups who experienced a mock-authorization process demonstrated better recall of the tissue donation request than members of the comparison group. Our data indicate that the stress associated with the loss of a loved one limited the ability of family members to recall details about the GTEx project. However, we found a similar lack of knowledge in both the comparison and the intervention group participants, suggesting lack of knowledge may be due to the complexity and unfamiliarity of the information presented to them during the authorization process. We discuss these findings in the context of everyday clinical decision making in cognitively challenging conditions. (shrink)

Tragedy and Citizenship provides a wide-ranging exploration of attitudes toward tragedy and their implications for politics. Derek W. M. Barker reads the history of political thought as a contest between the tragic view of politics that accepts conflict and uncertainty, and an optimistic perspective that sees conflict as self-dissolving. Drawing on Aristotle's political thought, alongside a novel reading of the Antigone that centers on Haemon, its most neglected character, Barker provides contemporary democratic theory with a theory of tragedy. (...) He sees Hegel's philosophy of reconciliation as a critical turning point that results in the elimination of citizenship. By linking Hegel's failure to address the tragic dimensions of politics to Richard Rorty, John Rawls, and Judith Butler, Barkeroffers a major reassessment of contemporary political theory and a fresh perspective on the most urgent challenges facing democratic politics. Derek W. M. Barker is a program officer at the Kettering Foundation. (shrink)

In 2020, the Christmas book charts in the UK made headlines: Barack Obama’s eagerly awaited autobiography, The Promised Land, was beaten to the top spot by The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman, a debut cosy crime novel set in a retirement village. Not only did Osman’s book beat the former US president’s expected bestseller, it also broke records, becoming the fastest-selling debut crime novel of all time. Although Osman has a certain level of fame in the UK from (...) his TV appearances on shows such as Pointless, his celebrity status does not entirely explain the novel’s huge sales. This article tracks the acquisition, publication, and promotion journey of The Thursday Murder Club in order to understand the industry and cultural context of its success and to interrogate the role of celebrity in the creation of author brands. The findings suggest that the unexpected scale of the success of the book owed to a number of factors, including in-depth editing by the novel’s agent, editor, and author to tighten up the plot, an extensive and strategic promotional campaign, the pandemic, and the quality of the writing. We find that the book’s success was accentuated by Osman’s celebrity status rather than being entirely reliant on it. This research adds to the growing scholarship on celebrity authorship by means of an in-depth case study and provides insight into the processes behind publishing a ‘celebrity’ book and launching a megabrand author. (shrink)

English ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and writer Richard Dawkins opens Chapter 2 of his bestseller The God Delusion by saying that the God of the Old Testament is "arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction" and goes on to list nineteen negative character traits. Now in God : the Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, Dan Barker, a former ordained minister and current atheist, proves that Dawkins was right."--Jacket.

Despite the burgeoning interest in new and more complex accounts of the organism-environment dyad by biologists and philosophers, little attention has been paid in the resulting discussions to the history of these ideas and to their deployment in disciplines outside biology—especially in the social sciences. Even in biology and philosophy, there is a lack of detailed conceptual models of the organism-environment relationship. This volume is designed to fill these lacunae by providing the first multidisciplinary discussion of the topic of organism-environment (...) interaction. It brings together scholars from history, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, medicine, and biology to discuss the common focus of their work: entangled life, or the complex interaction of organisms and environments. (shrink)

Mereological challenges have recently been raised against the endurantist. For instance, Barker and Dowe (2003) have argued that eternalist endurantism entails (1) persisting objects are both 3D and 4D, and that (2) the lives of persisting objects last longer than they actually do. They also argue that presentist endurantism also entails, albeit in a tensed way, that (3) the lives of persisting objects last longer than they actually do. While they’ve further argued (2005) that the objections raised by McDaniel (...) (2003) and Beebee and Rush (2003) fail, here I show that such objections are tenable without requiring further significant metaphysical commitments; I argue that such endurantist defences are tenable, contra to prior analyses. (shrink)

We show that the theory of the partial ordering of the computably enumerable degrees in any given nontrivial interval is undecidable and has uncountably many 1-types.

This paper explores the ethical obligations of pharmaceutical companies to charge fair prices for essential medicines. The moral issue at stake here is distributive justice. Rawls'' framework is especially germane since it underlines the material benefits everyone deserves as Kantian persons and the need for an egalitarian approach for the distribution of society''s essential commodities such as health care. This concern for distributive justice should be a critical factor in the equation of variables used to set prices for pharmaceuticals.

This paper uses two recentworks as a springboard for discussing theproper contours of intellectual propertyprotection. Professor Lessig devotes much ofThe Future of Ideas to demonstrating howthe expanding scope of intellectual propertyprotection threatens the Internet as aninnovation commons. Similarly, ProfessorLitman''s message in Digital Copyright isthat copyright law is both too complicated andtoo restrictive. Both authors contend that asa result of overprotecting individual rights,creativity is stifled and the vitality of theintellectual commons is in jeopardy. It isdifficult to evaluate the claims and policyprescriptions (...) of these books without someappreciation for the moral foundations ofintellectual property. The utility and labordesert theories remain the two most prominentin the Anglo-American tradition. Afterexploring those theories, we argue for a secureregime of protection based on the Lockeanvision that property rights are justly deservedas a reward for labor that creates value. However, as Locke''s famous proviso implies,even a natural property right is not absoluteand must be balanced by regard for the publicdomain. But a natural right cannot besacrificed simply to advance technologicalinnovation or to achieve marginal social andeconomic gains. While we agree with Lessig andLitman that recent legislation goes too far weconclude the essay by attempting to illustratethat some of their policy recommendations errin the opposite direction by underprotectingvalid property rights. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Language of the CaveA. Serge KapplerThe Language of the Cave, by Andrew Barker and Martin Warner; vi & 198 pp. Edmonton: Academic Printing & Publishing, 1993, $54.95 cloth, $21.95 paper.The scholarly essays in this collection focus on the tension between Plato’s expressed views about style, poetry, and intellectual discourse on the one hand and his own practice on the other. Why does a man fiercely hostile (...) toward [End Page 266] literature and poetry write works that are themselves mimetic? Why does he repeatedly resort to story telling to make a point? Why do some of his works fail to fit his own prescriptions of clarity and unity? Six of the eight essays in this collection propose exonerating answers to these and similarly troubling questions.In stimulating counterpoint to this massive rescue operation, John Gould (“Plato and Performance”) argues that Plato’s attack on the irrationality of Greek literature and poetry has irrational roots in Plato himself. The reality defined by literary art, Gould suggests, is one of contradiction and conflict; its “incorrigible plurality”—the “drunkenness” of things as they are—is something that “Plato, at least in the puritanical mood of the Republic and the Phaedo, would not have wished to feel” (p. 25).Gould bases his contentions largely on a negative assessment of Plato’s arguments in the Republic. For him, the poverty and fierceness of those arguments strongly suggest an existential agenda at work. Implicitly supportive of this position, Penelope Murray (“Inspiration and Mimesis in Plato”) shows that the picture Plato paints of poets in the grip of irrational frenzy, in the Republic and elsewhere, far from being the traditional truth he purports it to be, is his own creation. It is a “far cry,” she convincingly argues, from the images of the poet that we find in pre-Platonic literature” (p. 46).The most original defense of Plato is offered by Mary Margaret McCabe in “Myth, Allegory and Argument in Plato.” She proposes that logical arguments in Plato’s text stand in a dialectical relation to stories and allegories elsewhere in the text. Mere logic presents too lean a picture of reality, while myths and allegories present one that is, from an Ockhamite perspective, too rich. The responsibility for finding the right theoretical balance lies with the reader.Now were it true that Plato’s famous images have no genuine heuristic value in the contexts in which they are offered, then McCabe’s thesis might be in some trouble. Yet that is precisely the claim of Manuela Teçusan (“Speaking about the Unspeakable: Plato’s Use of Imagery”), who reassures readers that because Plato resorts to poetic devices primarily in order to illustrate conclusions that are independently supported, he is not really guilty of an inconsistency needing to be explained away.If Plato’s complaints against literature are typically understood as presupposing extravagant metaphysical theses of his own, one possibility is to show that he is not actually committed to those theses. Christopher Rowe (“Reflections of the Sun: Explanation in the Phaedo”) and Michael Stokes (“Plato and the Sightlovers of the Republic”) weigh in with carefully argued versions of that time-honored project. Rowe can discover no reference in the Phaedo to the unhypothesized Good of the Republic, while Stokes discerns no genuine Platonic commitment to a two-world theory in Republic 5.Finally, Richard Rutherford (“Unifying the Protagoras”) diagnoses that dialogue’s notorious lack of unity as reflecting the disorganized minds and unsocratically competitive impulses of its Sophist participants, and Martin [End Page 267] Warner (“Dialectical Drama: The Case of Plato’s Symposium”) proposes that, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, all of the Symposium displays both substance and unity.Reading these well-researched, engaging essays, one may find oneself wishing that their authors would occasionally wonder aloud whether Plato had any choice but to express himself through the poetic/dramatic medium which he criticizes. Perhaps he could have invented the straightforward philosophical prose style, but perhaps he was too busy building its conceptual and cultural foundations.A. Serge KapplerSkidmore CollegeCopyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE BARTH LEGACY: NEW ATHANASIUS OR ORIGEN REDIVIVUS? :A RESPONSE TO T. F. TORRANCE RICHARD A. MULLER Fuller Theological Semma1·y Pasadena, California I I N A SERIES of papers, essays, and introductions reaching back some twenty years, T. F. Torrance has provided an interpretation of the place arnd of the importance of Karl Barth not only in the theological debates of the twentieth cent- -bury but also and (...) more importantly in the who1e of the history of doctrine. According to Torrance, Barth is not only the greatest theologian since Schleiermacher and the most important thinker of our own times, he is also the greatest theologian since Athanasius, the heir of the Reformers, and the thinker on whose insights our theological future must rest.1 In these essays by Torrance, the characterization of Barthian thought as "neo1 Cf. Karl Barth, Theology and Church: Shorter Writings, 1920-1928, trans. Louise Pettibone Smith, with an introduction (1962) by T. F. Torrance (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 7, 9-10; T. F. Torrance, Theology in Reconstruction (London: SCJ'vf, 1965), pp. 99, 103-105, 111-115; idem, ReaUty and Evangelical Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982),,pp. 14-15; idem, Transformation and Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), pp. vii-x, 279-283; idem, "The Legacy of Karl Barth (1886· 1986)," in Scottish Journal of Theology, 39 (1986): 289-308 and "Karl Barth and the Latin Heresy," in 39 (1986): 461-482. The latter two essays draw together themes from the earlier words..Although the term "Latin heresy" does not seem to have been used by Torrance in any of his previous writings, it does represent a continuation of the attack on medieval and postReformation theology :first presented in his introduction to The School of Faith: The Oatechisms of the Reformed Ohi1rch (N.Y.: Harper, 1959), pp. lxx-lxxix, and elaborated in Space, Time and IncM'nation (London: Oxford, 1969). 673 674 RICHARD A, MULLER orthodox" takes on a new meaning. Barth himself rejected the term, just as (we might guess) Calvin or Chemnitz would have!'ejected any claim that their great dogmatic projects were the proper basis for a new orthodoxy in the sixteenth century. Both Calvin and Chemnitz stood for right teaching, for ortho-doxy, but neither would have presented their own views-no matter how correct they believed their exegesis and interpretation to be-as a final ground for the establishment of future theological formulations. Both in the Reformation aind in the twentieth century, it has been the next generation, the generation of the students of the great teaicher, that has moved definitely from the system of the teaicher to the establishment of a new orthodoxy. And in all fairness to the Protestant orthodox of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we must l'ecognize that they neither exalted the theology of the Reformation to the status of a new orthodoxy (ovcer against the faith of the church throughout the centuries) nor identified any single theological system, whether that of Calvin or that of Chemnitz or of a later, more fully "orthodox" and "scholastic" thinker like Polanus or Gerhard, as an exhaustive statement of theological Ol1thodoxy for the chmch.2 In the writings of Torrance, we encounter this second-generation sense of orthodoxy but, I believe, without the caution characteristic of the Protestant orthodox of the seventeenth century. In the following essay, I propose to examine the origin and the subsequent trajectory of Torrance's views on Barth's relationship to the tradition, with attention to his view of Barth's patristic roots and of Barth's position over against the western theological mind. In the concluding sections of the essay, I will try to provide a corrective to Torrance's approach to the history of 1Christian doctrine and, on the basis of that correc-. tive, an alternative view of the lega1cy of Karl Barth. Torrance's pronouncements concerning the role of Barth in 2 Cf. Richard A. Muller, " Scholasticism Protestant and Catholic: Francis Turretin on the Object and Principles of Theology," in Ohuroh Historv, 55 ( 1986) ; 19::!-205, THE BARTH LEGACY 675 the history of Christian doctrine and, therefore, in its future development a11e based on an... (shrink)

In Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick seeks to demonstrate that principles of justice in acquisition and transfer can be applied to justify the minimal state, and no state greater than the minimal state. That approach fails to acknowledge the critical role that forced exchanges play in overcoming a range of public goods and coordination problems. These ends are accomplished by taking property for which the owner is compensated in cash or in kind in an amount that leaves him better (...) off (by his own lights) than before the transaction. Forced exchanges use coercion to form the state, but the just compensation requirement guards against redistribution state imposed redistribution for collateral purposes. Once these forced exchanges are allowed to form a state, then they may be used thereafter to justify the powers of taxation and eminent domain used to support infrastructure (roads, sewers, public utilities) that neither the minimal state nor private markets can supply. Footnotesa I have benefited from comments at the workshop at the Social Sciences Division of the California Institute of Technology. My thanks to Justin Herring and Eric Murphy, The University of Chicago Law School, for their usual capable research assistance. (shrink)

Stimulated by these three brilliant target essays this commentary raises a few questions about the universality of the “emotions,” the cultural psychology of “natural kinds,” and the analytic deconstruction of the idea of an emotion.

Posner characterizes the current preoccupation with moral and constitutional theory as an evasion of the real need of American law, which is for a greater understanding of the social, economic, and political facts out of which great legal controversies arise, and advocates a rebuilding of the law on the basis of systematic empirical inquiry.

Because little is known about the human trait of affiliation, we provide a novel neurobehavioral model of affiliative bonding. Discussion is organized around processes of reward and memory formation that occur during approach and consummatory phases of affiliation. Appetitive and consummatory reward processes are mediated independently by the activity of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopamine (DA)–nucleus accumbens shell (NAS) pathway and the central corticolimbic projections of the u-opiate system of the medial basal arcuate nucleus, respectively, although these two projection (...) systems functionally interact across time. We next explicate the manner in which DA and glutamate interact in both the VTA and NAS to form incentive-encoded contextual memory ensembles that are predictive of reward derived from affiliative objects. Affiliative stimuli, in particular, are incorporated within contextual ensembles predictive of affiliative reward via: (a) the binding of affiliative stimuli in the rostral circuit of the medial extended amygdala and subsequent transmission to the NAS shell; (b) affiliative stimulus-induced opiate potentiation of DA processes in the VTA and NAS; and (c) permissive or facilitatory effects of gonadal steroids, oxytocin (in interaction with DA), and vasopressin on (i) sensory, perceptual, and attentional processing of affiliative stimuli and (ii) formation of social memories. Among these various processes, we propose that the capacity to experience affiliative reward via opiate functioning has a disproportionate weight in determining individual differences in affiliation. We delineate sources of these individual differences, and provide the first human data that support an association between opiate functioning and variation in trait affiliation. Key Words: affiliation corticolimbic-striatal networks; appetitive and consummatory reward; dopamine; oxytocin; personality; social bonds; social memory; u-opiates. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.3 (2003) 407 [Access article in PDF] Reply By Margaret J. Osler and Richard A. Watson In his comments on our historiographical Notes in the October 2002 issue of JHP, A. P. Martinich misrepresents our position by erroneously claiming that we presume a sharp dichotomy between the analytic history of philosophy and the historical history of philosophy. Neither of us accepts such (...) a premise. Once that misreading is eliminated there are few disagreements between each of us and Martinich.We agree that any meaningful history of philosophy must be both philosophically sophisticated and historically grounded. History without philosophy would be nothing but chronicle; history of philosophy without historical context would describe a series of moves, but explain nothing. A desideratum of both history and philosophy is careful reading, exposition, and analysis of texts.... (shrink)

Written and set on the banks of the Neva, St Petersburg Dialogues is a startlingly relevant analysis of the human prospect in the twenty-first century. As the literary critic George Steiner has remarked, "the age of the Gulag and of Auschwitz, of famine and ubiquitous torture... nuclear threat, the ecological laying waste of our planet, the leap of endemic, possibly pandemic, illness out of the very matrix of libertarian progress" is exactly what Joseph de Maistre foretold. In the Dialogues Maistre (...) addressed a number of topics that are discussed briefly or not at all in his other works already available in English. These include an apologetic for traditional Christian beliefs about providence, reflections on the social role of the public executioner and the "divinity" of war, a critique of John Locke's sensationalist psychology, meditations on prayer and sacrifice, and a mini-course on "illuminism." The literary form is that of the "philosophical conversation" – one that allowed Maistre to be deliberately provocative and to indulge his taste for paradox, a "methodical extravagance" that he judged particularly appropriate for the eighteenth-century salon. Translator and editor Richard Lebrun provides a full scholarly edition of this classic work, complete with an introduction, chronology, critical bibliography, and generous explanatory notes. The Dialogues will be of interest to scholars of literary history as well as the history of ideas. (shrink)

In his clear-sighted, humane, and provocative way, Richard Falk calls for a revolution in thinking about the future of world order. Explorations at the Edge of Time develops the idea that a major cultural shift from modernism to postmodernism is under way, creating both new difficulties and new opportunities in the domain of global public policy. The author observes, "A postmodem possibility implies the human capacity to transcend the violence, poverty, ecological decay, oppression, injustice, and secularism of the modern (...) world." Recognizing that the concepts of "progress" and "development" have changed due to the breakdown of the modernist consensus, Falk contends that most problems have transnational dimensions. He proposes a commitment to grassroots globalism, and he challenges aspiring "citizen pilgrims" to think and act in ways that will enhance their feeling of identity with the rest of creation. Falk's "rooted utopianism" challenges our political imagination in relation to pressing global problems and helps forge an overall vision of the future. What is at stake is the building of political understanding amidst the appreciation of unity and diversity for a hopeful entry upon the 21st Century. Author note: Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice at Princeton University. He has published more than twenty books, including The Promise of World Order (Temple). (shrink)