This book is a collection of secondary essays on America's most important philosophic thinkers—statesmen, judges, writers, educators, and activists—from the colonial period to the present. Each essay is a comprehensive introduction to the thought of a noted American on the fundamental meaning of the American regime.

The challenges associated with the issue of migration have led to growing conflicts over the distribution of resources and have put the existing legal order in peril. This has also created dilemmas when it comes to matters of religion. These circumstances have called into question the theory of contemporary liberalism in Germany. In order to show this, I will analyze a few representatives of contemporary liberal theory. Among them are the philosophers John Rawls, with his „Theory of Justice“; Ronald (...) Dworkin and his proposal to further develop Rawls’ theory through the creation of an equal starting position; Michael Walzer and his counter to Rawls’ theory found in the book „Spheres of Justice“ in which he presents the idea of a complex equality; as well as Charles Taylor and his theoretical analysis. Based on this analysis, I will present a new concept-proposal of a liberal theory. (shrink)

As the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology works to encourage greater genuine dialogue among proponents of disparate philosophical positions and traditions related to psychology, I am pleased for the second time in three years to have the opportunity to publish another set of commentaries on a paper previously published in Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology , together with the author's reply. I am also delighted to know that the future of the Journal has been placed in the wise (...) and energetic care of Thomas Teo, but more of that in the announcement to follow. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Nothing seems to follow strictly from 'X believes that p'. But if we reinterpret it to mean: 'X can consistently be described as consistently believing p'--which roughly renders, I think, Hintikka's notion of "defensibility"--we can get on with the subject, freed from the inhibitions of descriptive adequacy. But defensibility is neither necessary nor sufficient for truth: it tells us little, therefore, about the concept of belief on which it is based. It cannot, in particular, specify necessary conditions for the consistent (...) ascription of belief--as opposed to rational belief. If there are no such conditions, all belief ascriptions must be treated as atomic: which is implausible. If there are some, they must be settled on before an account of consistency can be complete. The reason is simple: it is that we have beliefs about our own beliefs. A set of first order beliefs is consistent if they can all be true together; but it is a lesson of Moore's paradox that consistency of second-order beliefs requires additional constraints. If someone both believes that p and that he does not believe that p, the propositions he believes might all be true together, yet he is inconsistent. And the characterization of second order consistency will remain incomplete, so long as nothing is said about the consistency of first order belief ascriptions. Suppose someone says and believes: "I am inconsistent: I believe both p and ~p." This is "indefensible": but is it insight, or nonsense? Breast-beating of this sort is guaranteed success: something he believes is bound to be false. But that remains diagnostically frustrating: is he inconsistent because what he said is true, or on the contrary because it is inconsistent? (shrink)

The inner ecology: Buddhist ethics and practice -- A Buddhist perspective on animal rights -- Pollution and the environment: some radically new ancient views -- Animals for dinner: a Karmic tale -- Our relationship with nature: a Buddhist exploration -- Environmental issues: a Buddhist perspective -- Human spiritual potential and the environmental crisi -- The need for ethical guidelines to protect us from the very real dangers of a technological world -- Looking at hi-tech through the lens of the five (...) moral precepts -- Science and Buddhism: a critical comparison -- Genetic engineering: a Buddhist assessment -- Redesigning the world: ethical questions about genetic engineering -- Some ethical challenges posed by the Internet and digital social media: a Buddhist perspective -- Where are we going - digitally? (shrink)

Introduction -- Tales of dominion -- The plow and the gun -- Picturing the West, 1883-1893 -- American idol, 1898 -- The end of nature -- African romance -- The dark continent -- When cowboys go to heaven -- Transplanting Africa -- Of ape-men, sex, and cannibal kings -- Adventures in monkeyland -- Nature, the film -- The world scrubbed clean.

The many difficulties the book contains are not due to its translator; Miss Freeman's well-marshalled English seldom leaves us in search of the intended sense. They are due rather to the complex character of the author's mind and to the exigencies of the thesis he is defending. One encounters flights of imagination in which lyrical transports alternate or combine with bold dialectical constructions offered as sober interpretations, and multiple quotations from ancient thinkers and modern critics, confusingly blended with our author's (...) own comments. Signor Untersteiner displays an ability like that of the anatomist Cuvier, and can reassemble the entire structure of a lost sophistic writing from a single bone. He exhumes from the works of many other writers--Thucydides, Plato, Theophrastus, Demosthenes, Sextus Empiricus, Cicero--major conceptions, chapters, or whole treatises, mistakenly incorporated there by later editors, or borrowed without acknowledgment; these and sundry anonymous writings on relevant themes he confidently assigns to this or that beneficiary among the sophists. As the inevitable consequence of this process other thinkers, notably Socrates and Plato, are sadly diminished. Socrates becomes, indeed, almost a superfluity, in whose absence the history of Greek thought would have remained unimpaired. Plato's works serve as happy hunting-grounds for supposed incorporations of sophistic insights; for the rest, he is shown as stone-and-gravel blind to the merits of these rival thinkers. Now, some discounting of Plato's satirical portrayal of the sophists may be admitted as legitimate and necessary. Untersteiner, however, has so far exceeded his allowance here as to reach the counter-absurdity, of which his interpretation of Thrasymachus in the ne plus ultra: to a proper reading, we are told, Thrasymachus is far from being a cynical denier of the claims of moral obligation. On the contrary, he is a broken-hearted idealist, and in calling justice "the advantage of the stronger" he is offering not his own conception of justice but, out of his bitter disillusion, describing what men in their tragic folly have made of that noble virtue. (shrink)

To date, research on bullying has largely employed empirical methodologies, including quantitative and qualitative approaches. Through this research we have come to understand bullying as both a dyadic and peer group phenomenon, primarily situated in the heads of those involved, or in a lack of skill or expertise, or in the delinquency of a bully who needs to be reformed. This research has largely directed its strategies toward problem students using individual and peer group approaches. And yet school bullying continues (...) to be a crucial educational issue affecting millions of students each year. In this project I introduce a missing philosophical perspective. Analyzing the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer I am led to conclude that typical anti-bullying strategies at times simply train bullies to be better at bullying. Gadamer invites us to think about bullying in new ways. While certainly involving the thinking and skills of the bully and the victim, Gadamer contends that bullying does not fundamentally result from a problem within the participants, but is fostered by certain spaces between them; terrains that cultivate specific experiences of an. (shrink)

We shall construct a smooth category of mice and embeddings in the core model for measures of order 0. The existence of such a category implies that the global principle □ holds in K. We then prove a much stronger, the so-called condensation-coherent version of global □. The key tool of the whole construction is a new criterion on preserving soundness under condensation.

Research indicates that upwards of 80% of our students experience the devastation of bullying during their school years. To date, research on bullying has mainly employed empirical methodologies, including quantitative and qualitative approaches. This research has largely concluded that bullying is situated in a lack of skill, understanding, or self-control and involves intentional action directed toward status dominance. Based upon these assumptions current anti-bullying strategies focus on training students toward more appropriate avenues of status acquisition and social interaction. Against the (...) backdrop of an actual bullying encounter this paper employs a psychoanalytic philosophical lens to offer a fresh perspective on this enduring educational issue. Employing the philosophical work of Adam Phillips, Jessica Benjamin, and Emmanuel Ghent I ask the question: What is the desire to bully a desire for? Here I consider what is sought and what is at stake in the typical bullying encounter. Through careful analysis I argue that the domination represented in bullying is not simply situated in a lack of social skills or in disregulated aggression––skill deficiencies that require training. Instead, or perhaps in addition to these possibilities, I contend that bullying is foundationally a move toward establishing identity, a self. On this view bullying becomes an activity of self construction through attempted omnipotence. I argue that the status dominance inherent in bullying should be seen not as an end (a tool to secure resources or privilege), but as a means to something more foundational. I conclude that status dominance becomes a means toward the end of providing a secure place for the self to stand. Hence, instead of advocating that we train students to get along better this paper outlines the futility, as well as the insatiability of bullying, opening up new territory focused upon a re-construction of the bully through the relational bonding and differentiation available in the concrete Other. (shrink)

Despite tensions between Tillich's category of belief-ful realism and a view of science that embraces metaphysical and epistemological realism, a constructive relationship can be developed between the two. Both are based on common understandings about reality. Belief-ful or theonomous realism, thus, affirms scientific realism. On the other hand, scientific realism is open to the ecstatic, self-transcending elements of belief-ful realism. Finally, Tillich's formulation of the relationship between culture and religion can be reformulated specifically to include scientific and technological culture.

The plot of the Cratylus, like that of the Protagoras, involves a striking contrast between the position which Socrates first appears to be defending, and the position he is maintaining at the end. And the intermediate sections share this mobility. No statement about the doctrine of the Cratylus can be truer than its contradiction, unless it is grounded in a recognition of this primary fact. Accordingly, a brief charting of the dialogue, in what I take to be its major divisions, (...) will be my first task. (shrink)

It would be hard to find a more effective visual source for understanding the political ideology that underscores Dante's relationship to Boniface VIII in the Divina Commedia than the frescoes that line the walls of the Oratorio di San Silvestro in the Basilica of the Santi Quattro Coronati in Rome. These frescoes, which depict episodes from the life of St. Sylvester and his relationship to the emperor Constantine, express as their clear subtext the thirteenth-century papacy's view of the proper relationship (...) between ecclesiastical and secular power . Their vivid dramatization of these events synthesizes and, more importantly, interprets two well-known literary sources: the life of St. Sylvester that was thought to have been composed by Eusebius of Caesarea and the text of the Donation of Constantine, the Constitutum Constantini. The account of the life of St. Sylvester that is contained in the Golden Legend also provides a readily accessible point of reference for the cycle, since it is roughly contemporaneous with it and is itself a compilation based on these earlier texts. (shrink)

"This book takes a new angle on a much-studied phenomenon, focusing on the role of domination and identity construction, understanding and self-knowledge, moral transformation and the social community, systems of training and hierarchy used ...

The value of a company’s ethical reputation has become a focal point for management researchers. We seek to join this conversation and extend the research centered on a firm’s ethical reputation. We accomplish this by shifting our focus away from its impact on external stakeholders to its impact on internal stakeholders. To this end, we rely on signaling theory to explain why a firm’s ethical reputation matters to its employees in an effort to bridge the macro–micro research gap. Across two (...) studies, we propose and demonstrate that a firm’s ethical reputation impacts employee subjective career success in form of career opportunities and work–life balance. Given our signaling theory framework, we also identify and explain when two industry-level characteristics operate as boundary conditions that distort a firm’s ethical reputation signaling properties. Specifically, the results demonstrate that a firm’s ethical reputation is positively related to employees’ perceptions of career opportunities and work–life balance. The results of our studies also demonstrate that the relatively high levels of industry competition and industry regulation weaken the positive impact of a firm’s ethical reputation on career opportunities and work–life balance. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

School bullying continues to plague students around the globe. Bullying research to date has largely employed empirical methodologies, including both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Using a philosophical lens, this paper seeks to better understand the intentionality of bullying by considering the satisfaction derived in the tears of another. Specifically, current bullying research takes seriously the notion that bullying is primarily a problem between a bully and a victim (i.e. that the bully does not like the victim). In this paper I (...) suggest that the bully is bullshitting us and her/his project is far bigger than the victim s/he targets. In the final analysis bullying prevention, as well as education itself, requires us to take seriously not only the activities of students, but the desires (i.e. the ?I likes?) that help us understand when we are being bullshitted and when we are not. (shrink)

At that crucial moment in the Roman de la Rose when Faus Semblant and Astenance Contrainte set off in the guise of pilgrims to silence Male Bouche, Astenance Contrainte, disguised as a beguine, is compared to.

The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) uses various mechanisms to ensure that only properly folded proteins enter the secretory pathway. For proteins that oligomerize in the ER, the proper tertiary and quaternary structures must be achieved before their release. Although some proteins fold before oligomerization, others initiate oligomerization cotranslationally. Here, we discuss these different strategies and some of the unique problems they present for the ER quality control system. One mechanism used by the ER is thiol retention. Thiol retention operates by monitoring (...) the redox state of specific cysteine residue(s) and was discovered in studies on the assembly of IgM, a complex oligomeric glycoprotein. This system is also involved in retaining other unassembled proteins in the ER. Mutations that result in uneven numbers of cysteine residues can subject yet other proteins to thiol retention, altering their oligomerization status and function. The implications of these results on the effects of thiol retention on protein function and cell fate are discussed. BioEssays 20:546–554, 1998. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons Inc. (shrink)