In Plato's Apology, Socrates says he spent his life examining and questioning people on how best to live, while avowing that he himself knows nothing important. Elsewhere, however, for example in Plato's Republic, Plato's Socrates presents radical and grandiose theses. In this book Sandra Peterson offers a hypothesis which explains the puzzle of Socrates' two contrasting manners. She argues that the apparently confident doctrinal Socrates is in fact conducting the first step of an examination: by eliciting his interlocutors' reactions, (...) his apparently doctrinal lectures reveal what his interlocutors believe is the best way to live. She tests her hypothesis by close reading of passages in the Theaetetus, Republic and Phaedo. Her provocative conclusion, that there is a single Socrates whose conception and practice of philosophy remain the same throughout the dialogues, will be of interest to a wide range of readers in ancient philosophy and classics. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the central ontological presupposition in the philosophy of sport is the ‘sport-as-play’ paradigm. In reconstructing its archaeological origins, a normative narrative is...

Recent reflection on the professional knowledge of teachers has been marked by a shift away from more reductive competence and skill-focused models of teaching towards a view of teacher expertise as involving complex context-sensitive deliberation and judgement. Much of this shift has been inspired by an Aristotelian conception of practical wisdom (phronesis) also linked by Aristotle to the development of virtue and character. This has in turn led recent educational philosophers and theorists – inspired by latter-day developments in virtue ethics (...) and virtue epistemology – to investigate the contribution of various forms of virtue to the effective practice of teaching. In this light, the present paper undertakes further exploration of the logical geography of virtue, character and practical deliberation in teaching. (shrink)

The convergence of increasingly efficient high throughput sequencing technology and ubiquitous Internet use by the public has fueled the proliferation of companies that provide personal genetic information (PGI) direct-to-consumers. Companies such as 23andme (Mountain View, CA) and Navigenics (Foster City, CA) are emblematic of a growing market for PGI that some argue represents a paradigm shift in how the public values this information and incorporates it into how they behave and plan for their futures. This new class of social networking (...) business ventures that market the science of the personal genome illustrates the new trend in collaborative science. In addition to fostering a consumer empowerment movement, it promotes the trend of democratizing information—openly sharing of data with all interested parties, not just the biomedical researcher—for the purposes of pooling data (increasing statistical power) and escalating the innovation process. This target article discusses the need for new approaches to studying DTC genomics using social network analysis to identify the impact of obtaining, sharing, and using PGI. As a locus of biosociality, DTC personal genomics forges social relationships based on beliefs of common genetic susceptibility that links risk, disease, and group identity. Ethical issues related to the reframing of DTC personal genomic consumers as advocates and research subjects and the creation of new social formations around health research may be identified through social network analysis. (shrink)

This work runs counter to the traditional interpretations of Peirce's philosophy by eliciting an inherent strand of pragmatic pluralism that is embedded in the very core of his thought and that weaves his various doctrines into a systematic ...

Advances in technology are accelerating the momentum for change in all sectors of society. There is at present a lag time between the actual development and implementation of new technology and the public consciousness of the issues involved. The rapid rate of social change, however, emphasizes the critical role of the educational system and the need to continually estimate and evaluate direction to best serve the common good. Forty-five influential Minnesota leaders in education, business/industry and government were interviewed on issues (...) related to education and the changing economy. (shrink)

Previous accounts of hedges assume that they cause language to become vague or fuzzy ; however, hedges can actually sharpen numerical concepts by giving explicit information about approximation, especially where bare numbers appear misleadingly round or precise. They can also tell hearers about the direction of approximation. This article provides a first empirical account of interactions between hedging and rounding in numerical expressions. We demonstrate that hedges occur more commonly with round numbers than with non-round ones. However, we also provide (...) evidence from user studies that in the absence of hedges, readers interpret round numbers as approximations and non-round ones as precise; and that placing a hedge before a round number has no effect on its interpretation, whereas placing it before a non-round number shifts people’s interpretations from precise towards approximate. We attempt to explain this conundrum. (shrink)

I propose a theory of popular power, according to which a political order manifests popular power to the extent it robustly maintains an egalitarian basic structure. There are two parts to the theory. First, the power of a political order lies in the basic structure's robust self-maintenance. Second, the popularity of the political order’s power lies in the equality of relations between the society's members. I will argue that this theory avoids the perverse consequences of some existing radical democratic theories (...) of popular power which focus on mass expression, either in plebiscites or in social movements, as popular power's canonical instances. In particular, my theory does not valourise momentary expression over durable effect, and it offers a ready framework for conceptualising the sometimes-oligarchic substructure of the supposedly canonical instances of popular power. I will show that this theory has strong precedents within a certain republican tradition of political philosophy. (shrink)

Meta-governance is Earth system governance for dealing with the global commons. This article develops a whole network approach to meta-governance to explore the potential for collective action for sustainable development by a loosely coupled network of networks. Networked corporate social responsibility governance has emerged around corporate sustainability and responsibility in the first years of the 21st century. Growing agreements and interactions among CSR initiatives suggest the development, structure, and governance of networked CSR governance as a network that can analytically be (...) viewed as a whole and as a platform for learning about systemic change. Using the evolution of CSR initiatives from about 1990 to 2014, the authors differentiate four developmental stages: independent and fragmented multistakeholder networks as CSR governance, collaborative CSR governance, networked CSR governance, and integrated networked CSR governance. The authors then present a framework to analyze networked CSR governance as a whole network experimenting with meta-governance. (shrink)

Résumé L’article interroge l’approche familiale des adolescents nouvellement immigrés ayant subi de nombreux traumatismes de guerre. Il montre que la consultation familiale peut être une voie d’accès aux soins. Au travers de cas cliniques, la question du fraternel est interrogée dans cette période de reconstruction d’un passé difficile, pendant l’adolescence où confrontation au réel et à la loi symbolique du père et recherche identitaire peuvent s’exacerber. Les difficultés d’apprentissage, les problèmes identitaires, les symptômes multiples au sein de la même famille (...) sont étudiés. (shrink)

We analyze the hereditarily ordinal definable sets $\operatorname {HOD} $ in $M_n[g]$ for a Turing cone of reals x, where $M_n$ is the canonical inner model with n Woodin cardinals build over x and g is generic over $M_n$ for the Lévy collapse up to its bottom inaccessible cardinal. We prove that assuming $\boldsymbol \Pi ^1_{n+2}$ -determinacy, for a Turing cone of reals x, $\operatorname {HOD} ^{M_n[g]} = M_n,$ where $\mathcal {M}_{\infty }$ is a direct limit of iterates of $M_{n+1}$, (...) $\delta _{\infty }$ is the least Woodin cardinal in $\mathcal {M}_{\infty }$, $\kappa _{\infty }$ is the least inaccessible cardinal in $\mathcal {M}_{\infty }$ above $\delta _{\infty }$, and $\Lambda $ is a partial iteration strategy for $\mathcal {M}_{\infty }$. It will also be shown that under the same hypothesis $\operatorname {HOD}^{M_n[g]} $ satisfies $\operatorname {GCH} $. (shrink)

This essay articulates two aspects of a changing Social Issues in Management (SIM) Division of the Academy of Management (AOM). First, the essay highlights the ways in which SIM’s central focus has shifted and changed over the years. Then, it briefly looks at the forces that are currently shaping SIM within AOM, particularly in spreading what used to be the central core of SIM throughout AOM, and discusses some of the implications of this shift. This devolution of content suggests the (...) need for further change that paradoxically does two things seemingly at odds with each other: brings SIM back to its normative roots and begins to articulate the type of distinctive orientation to business operating within society that might continue to differentiate SIM from other divisions within AOM in the future. (shrink)

As understood today, political correctness aims at preventing social discrimination by curtailing offensive speech and behaviour towards underprivileged groups of individuals. The core proponents of political correctness often draw on post-modernism and critical theory and are notorious for their scepticism about objective truth and scientific rationality. Conversely, the critics of post-modern political correctness uphold Enlightenment liberal principles of scientific reasoning, rational truth-seeking and open discourse against claims of relativism and oppression. Yet, both the post-modern proponents and their Enlightenment liberal critics (...) make up two sides of the same phenomenon of political correctness. Both sides intend to protect a liberal value system from illiberal truth-claims, which is the function of politically correct regulation. While post-modern advocates attempt to promote liberating tolerance, Enlightenment liberals place liberal values above the open-ended search for truth. Despite appearances to the contrary, this socio-academic debate is not about two sides favouring and opposing political correctness. In fact, it is a debate about the type of politically correct regulation that can better guard liberal values. (shrink)

Parmenides contrasts with Plato's other works in several ways. For example, Socrates is depicted as “very young perhaps fifteen or nineteen.” Parmenides questions Socrates, who contradicts himself; in other dialogues of question and answer, Socrates typically questions others, who contradict themselves. The article deals with the philosophical dialogues had take place between Socrates and Zeno. Parmenides refutes Socrates on the topic of forms, items such as justice itself and good itself, while the older Socrates of other dialogues presents forms as (...) central to philosophy; the dialogue thus raises the question whether its criticism of forms signals Plato's revision of views expressed in previous writings. The article also elaborates on the dialogue between Socrates and Zeno, which gradually unravels a discourse on form and likeness. Parmenides speaks of “something beautiful and just and good.” As it proceeds, the article unravels a debate that rages over things becoming like and unlike in a respect and to an extent. Both of them through their individual dialogues unfold a series of philosophical theories and treatise. (shrink)

Adaptation to novel visuomotor transformations for example when navigating a cursor on a computer monitor by using a computer mouse, can be explicit or implicit. Explicit adjustments are made when people are informed about the occurrence and the type of a novel visuomotor transformation and intentionally modify their movements. Implicit adjustments, in contrast, are made without reportable knowledge of a novel visuomotor transformation and without a change intention. The relation of implicit adjustments to explicit adjustments needs further clarification. Here we (...) show that these two types of adjustment occur at the same time and remain functionally independent. The size of total adjustment turned out to be the sum of explicit and implicit adjustments measured in isolation, even when both processes produce opposite outcomes. In perspective our results demonstrate that automatic, implicit processes of motor control are not superseded by intentional, explicit ones, but only superposed. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungWährend die Implementierung und Nutzung von Ethikberatung in deutschen Krankenhäusern in den letzten 20 Jahren vorangeschritten ist, entstehen erst in den letzten Jahren zunehmend Ethikberatungsangebote im außerklinischen Bereich. In den Landkreisen Traunstein und Berchtesgadener Land in Südost-Bayern wurde 2012 eine außerklinische Ethikberatung etabliert. Um im Rahmen einer ersten Evaluation wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse über den Bedarf, die Inanspruchnahme und die Zufriedenheit mit diesem Beratungsangebot zu gewinnen, wurde eine Dokumentenanalyse und eine Fragebogenerhebung unter den Hausärzten der beiden Landkreise durchgeführt. Insgesamt nahmen 58 der (...) 195 angeschriebenen Hausärzte an der Umfrage teil.Die Auswertung der Dokumentation der außerklinischen Ethikberatung zeigte, dass die meisten Anfragen von betreuenden Angehörigen und aus Pflegeheimen kamen. Den Ergebnissen der Fragebogenerhebung zufolge sahen sich die Hausärzte mit vielfältigen ethischen Fragestellungen konfrontiert. Das Angebot einer ethischen Fallbesprechung zur Lösung dieser Konflikte wurde bislang jedoch nur von 17 Hausärzten in Anspruch genommen. Als Hauptgründe für die fehlende Nutzung des Angebots wurde der mangelnde Bekanntheitsgrad, der fehlende Bedarf und der organisatorische bzw. zeitliche Aufwand angeführt. Gleichzeitig äußerten Hausärzte, die eine ethische Fallbesprechung in Anspruch genommen haben, zu einem Großteil Interesse an einer erneuten Beratung und empfanden das Ergebnis der Ethikberatung als hilfreich. Damit verdeutlichen die Ergebnisse der Studie, dass Hausärzte zwar vielfältige ethische Fragestellungen in ihrem Arbeitsalltag wahrnehmen, aber bislang nur vergleichsweise selten ein externes Beratungsangebot zur Entscheidungsunterstützung in Betracht ziehen. (shrink)

The question of whether perception can be penetrated by cognition is in the limelight again. The reason this question keeps coming up is that there is so much at stake: Is it possible to have theory-neutral observation? Is it possible to study perception without recourse to expectations, context, and beliefs? What are the boundaries between perception, memory, and inference (and do they even exist)? Are findings from neuroscience that paint a picture of perception as an inherently bidirectional and interactive process (...) relevant for understanding the relationship between cognition and perception? We have assembled a group of philosophers and psychologists who have been considering the thesis of cognitive (im)penetrability in light of these questions (Abdel Rahman & Sommer, 2008; Goldstone, Landy, & Brunel, 2011; Lupyan, Thompson-Schill, & Swingley, 2010; Macpherson, 2012; Stokes, 2011). Rather than rehashing previous arguments which appear, in retrospect, to have been somewhat ill-posed (Pylyshyn, 1999), this symposium will present a thesis of cognitive (im)penetrability that is at once philosophically satisfying, empirically testable, and relevant to the questions that cognitive scientists find most interesting. (shrink)

This policy report arises from the research project Augmented Reality: Ethics, Perception, Metaphysics, conducted at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience between November 2021 and November 2023. It was funded by a grant from the Royal Society of Edinburgh. The project brought together experts in various academic fields, with partners from industry and regulatory bodies, to explore the nature of augmented and mixed reality technology, the theories underpinning them, and the ethical and legal questions prompted (...) by new technology in this domain. (shrink)

A countably infinite relational structure M is called absolutely ubiquitous if the following holds: whenever N is a countably infinite structure, and M and N have the same isomorphism types of finite induced substructures, there is an isomorphism from M to N. Here a characterisation is given of absolutely ubiquitous structures over languages with finitely many relation symbols. A corresponding result is proved for uncountable structures.

The goal of this article is to better understand the diffusion of environmentally preferable manufacturing technology (as distinct from pollution control technology) in small-and medium-sized firms (SMEs) and the influence of technical assistance programs on the diffusion of these technologies. The authors draw their insights from the printing industry, a sector where small firms predominate. They find that smaller firms lag slightly in the adoption of environmental technologies. With regard to technical assistance, they find that printers identify suppliers and other (...) industry sources as more useful than government in providing information that leads to active exploration of new environmental technologies. In addition, in comparison to larger firms, smaller firms reported to be less familiar with government-sponsored programs and perceived some of the programs to be less useful. They point to several ways in which regulatory agencies are experimenting to make government sponsored programs more effective. (shrink)

This essay compares and contrasts pragmatic naturalism with the more well known position of epistemological naturalism on several pivotal issues, in the process offering a pragmatic critique of the latter. It highlights their common rejection of both foundationalism and a priori methods and their positive claims that: what needs examination is not our concept of knowledge but knowledge itself; knowledge must be understood as tied to the world and as a natural phenomenon to be examined in its natural setting; the (...) epistemic endeavor involves unifying its three traditional projects of giving an account of what knowledge is, explaining how knowledge is possible, and providing useful epistemic advice, thus involving normative considerations; and the method of gaining knowledge in general is continuous with the method of science. Yet, there are very great divergences between the two naturalisms concerning the answers offered, and these are explored and evaluated in the development of the essay. (shrink)

Although much recent work in Anglo-American aesthetics on tragedy has focused exclusively on the ‘problems’ of tragic pleasure, in the long tradition of reflection on tragedy philosophers have focused more on tragedy as a genre of particular moral and political-philosophical significance. In this paper, we investigate the tragedy of our day in light of these latter concerns in order to determine what works of this genre reveal about the sense of the terrible necessities or near-necessities with which our contemporary Western (...) culture must grapple. We do this by focusing on cinematic tragedies since film is a medium that has become more popular than theatre. Surprisingly, contemporary aestheticians do not have a good definition of tragedy as it has developed to the present. Thus, we start with some definitional work taking Aristotle as a base. After adumbrating some plausible necessary conditions for tragedy, we note that there are not many films today that are genuine cinematic tragedies. Many contemporary films partially court a tragic structure but operate much more in the mode of melodrama. We shall categorize such films that share the pathos and suffering protagonists of the tragic genre but which generally eschew the tragic ending as part of what we call the ‘silver-lining genre’, a sub-genre of melodrama. Finally, we turn to a film that constitutes a genuine, contemporary cinematic tragedy, Into the Wild (dir. Sean Penn, 2007) and offer an analysis that reveals what this film says about our culture’s most serious and possibly intractable ethical and political problems. (shrink)

Both the organization and recruiter provide signals to candidates that ultimately affect organizational attraction. Ethics is an important area that communicates vital information to candidates. Drawing on social identity theory, signaling theory, and person–organization fit, this study finds that ethical signals during the recruitment process do affect applicant attraction. Additionally, two important moderators, self-importance of moral identity and firm performance were examined. Using a robust laboratory study, this research found results generally consistent with the hypothesized relationships.

An unlinked seroprevalence study of HIV and other viruses was conducted on pregnant women on the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1994. Investigators were from both the developed world and the Grenadian Ministry of Health . There was then no board on Grenada to protect research subjects or review ethical aspects of studies. Nurses from the MOH were asked to verbally inform their patients about the study, and request that patients become subjects of the study and give blood for screening. (...) If consent was given nurses took blood and administered a survey about each subjects' knowledge of HIV transmission routes. Nurses shared a spoken dialect and cultural heritage with prospective subjects and were probably more effective than foreign researchers at informing subjects. Informed consent was obtained with a simplified consent form supplemented by conversation with each prospective research subject. Facilitating discussion between people with common cultural backgrounds helps apply the Western approach to informed consent to communities in the developing world. Researchers must disclose all information to nurses or other mediators, and ensure that nurses disclose as much information as possible to prospective subjects. So modified, informed consent maintains respect for persons and becomes applicable and relevant to various cultures. (shrink)

Kehinde Wiley became a household name and widely recognized as one of the most important living American artists with the 2018 unveiling of his official Smithso.

In January 2018, the Trump administration established the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division within the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights with the explicit goal of intensifying legal protection of religious and conscience objections in health care. The establishment of OCR’s new division illustrates the significant powers of administrative agencies to mold the substance of law without seeking legislative action. The mere formation of a division dedicated to protecting conscience rights is already having a significant impact; (...) it is causing health care entities, including hospitals, research organizations, and clinics, to change policies and practices to comply with the declared enforcement strategy. Administrative agencies also shape the law in what they decide not to pursue. For example, OCR has suspended enforcement of the Affordable Care Act prohibition against gender‐identity discrimination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of HumanismSandra Rudnick LuftImperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, by Tzvetan Todorov; 254 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002, $45.00.Tzvetan Todorov begins Imperfect Garden with an arresting premise: that the greatest achievement of the modern age—the moderns' assertion of the freedom of the human will, unlimited by allegiances to God, nature, or reason—was the fruit of a pact with the devil. Though a familiar (...) idea, Todorov uses this premise to provide a richly detailed map of the intellectual currents of the age, illuminating in the process the dangers inherent in the age's acceptance of this pact.The price to be paid for human free will would become apparent only in the following centuries—a separation from God, leading to secularism and materialism; a separation from other humans, culminating in a loss of sociality and a fall into radical isolation; ultimately, a loss of self, its unity dispersed into an "anomalous collection of impulses." Todorov delineates the age's four responses to this bargain, and the acquisition of human autonomy. They account for the four families whose interrelations characterize modernity: the conservative, which considers the three-fold price of autonomy too high, rejecting it for the authority of tradition; the scientistic—a diverse set of responses derived from modern science, historicism, Marxism, Darwinism, all of which deny the existence of human freedom and emphasize some form of determinism based on the laws of nature, reason, or history; the individualist, for which the "loss" of God, society, and self represents merely an extension of human liberation; and the humanist, which, while valuing human autonomy, does not want to [End Page 425] pay its price. Believing it can maintain communal existence, shared values, and responsible selfhood while acting out of an autonomous will, the humanist family wants to have its cake and eat it too, a desire Todorov clearly shares.Todorov delineates the views of these four families through close readings of their representative figures. Limiting himself to French authors, he includes Bonald and Tocqueville as conservatives; Condorcet, Diderot, the Encyclopedists as scientistic types; Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, De Sade, and Helvetius as individualists. Among the humanists, who are his focus, he emphasizes Montaigne, Descartes, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Constant, and Tocqueville again. While for me the primary value of Imperfect Garden is its contribution to the history of ideas of French humanism from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, Todorov himself has a larger, more ideological goal. His interest is not primarily historical, but typological. He wants to crystallize the insights of his authors, distilling an ideal type whose characteristics include the ability of humans to initiate their own actions, which he calls the "autonomy of the 'I'," the ability to make another person the end of one's acts, which he calls the "finality of the 'you'," and the belief that every human has these abilities, that is, the "universality of the 'they'." Together they constitute an anthropology based on sociality, which insures the compatibility of human autonomy with social existence, shared values, and the stability of the self. He associates this "type" with a politics which provides the institutional structure for the exercise of these abilities. This latter point, the compatibility of humanism with democratic political structures, is the subtext running through the book. Humanism is, for Todorov, the modern family most compatible with democracy, just as democracy is the political institution most able to retain the positive aspects of human autonomy (pp. 29–32). This is his defense of humanism, subjected, as it currently is, to challenges which suggest the devil is trying to collect on the debt.Todorov argues his case by taking up each of the "losses" supposedly suffered when the moderns asserted the autonomy of human will. If the strength and value of his book are Todorov's close readings of his representative authors—readings rich in insights for the educated generalist, however much scholars of individual authors may differ with particular interpretations—ultimately his defense of humanism's ability to "have it all" is far less satisfying.The first price to be paid for the autonomy of the will is the social world, the fall... (shrink)