The _Nicomachean Ethics_ is one of Aristotle’s most widely read and influential works. Ideas central to ethics—that happiness is the end of human endeavor, that moral virtue is formed through action and habituation, and that good action requires prudence—found their most powerful proponent in the person medieval scholars simply called “the Philosopher.” Drawing on their intimate knowledge of Aristotle’s thought, Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins have produced here an English-language translation of the _Ethics_ that is as (...) remarkably faithful to the original as it is graceful in its rendering. Aristotle is well known for the precision with which he chooses his words, and in this elegant translation his work has found its ideal match. Bartlett and Collins provide copious notes and a glossary providing context and further explanation for students, as well as an introduction and a substantial interpretive essay that sketch central arguments of the work and the seminal place of Aristotle’s _Ethics_ in his political philosophy as a whole. The _Nicomachean Ethics_ has engaged the serious interest of readers across centuries and civilizations—of peoples ancient, medieval, and modern; pagan, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish—and this new edition will take its place as the standard English-language translation. (shrink)

European and North American scholars explore the political philosophy of Aristotle, with particular attention to questions arising from the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics.

In 2004, the United States Sentencing Commission amended the Federal Sentencing Guidelines to allow firms that create “effective compliance and ethics programs” to receive better treatment if prosecuted for fraud. Effective compliance and ethics, however, appear to be limited to activities focused on complying with the firms’ internal legal and ethical standards. We explored a potential connection between the firms’ external corporate social responsibility (CSR) behaviors and internal compliance: Is there an organizationally valid relationship between these two firm activities? That (...) is, when organizations demonstrate CSR with behaviors external to the firm, such as employee volunteerism, are their employees more likely to demonstrate uncompromised legal and ethical compliance behavior internally? We collected data from 164 working professionals enrolled in a top-tier MBA program in the southeastern United States regarding their employer-sponsored volunteer activities and their intentions to comply in various organizational compliance vignettes. We found that employer-sponsored volunteerism is associated with uncompromised compliance choices in one of the three vignettes. This finding indicates preliminary support for further inquiry into the relationship within the firm between external CSR behaviors and policies regarding organizational compliance. Post hoc analyses suggest that employer-sponsored volunteerism is strongly associated with a positive organizational identity, but organizational identity is not associated with the significant compliance vignette. This evidence suggests that the underlying mechanism that connects external CSR behaviors and internal compliance intentions is complex and requires future study. (shrink)

In confronting the insalubrious ramifications of globalization, human rights scholars and activists have argued for greater national and international responsibility pursuant to the human right to health. Codified seminally in Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the right to health proclaims that states bear an obligation to realize the “highest attainable standard” of health for all. However, in pressing for the highest attainable standard for each individual, the right to health has been ineffective in (...) compelling states to address burgeoning inequalities in underlying determinants of health, focusing on individual medical treatments at the expense of public health systems. This article contends that the paradigm of individual health, focused on a right to individual medical care, is incapable of responding to health inequities in a globalized world and thereby hampers efforts to operationalize health rights through public health systems. While the right to health has evolved in international discourse over time, this evolution of the individual right to health cannot address the harmful societal ramifications of economic globalization. Rather than relying solely upon an individual right to medical care, envisioning a collective right to public health – a right applied at the societal level to address underlying determinants of health – would alleviate many of the injurious health inequities of globalization. (shrink)

This article seeks to provide insights into appropriate FDA oversight of nanotechnology. This commentary identifies limitations in the methodology employed and concludes that the analysis would be stronger with a more in-depth institutional dimension based on administrative law and political science research.

This study was designed to address the issue of whether there is a general processor for the perception of emotion or whether there are separate processors. We examined the relationships among three channels of emotional communication in 100 healthy right-handed adult males and females. The channels were facial, prosodic/intonational, and lexical/verbal; both identification and discrimination tasks of emotional perception were utilised. Statistical analyses controlled for nonemotional perceptual factors and subject characteristics (i.e. demographic and general cognitive). For identification, multiple significant correlations (...) were found among the channels. For discrimination, fewer correlations were significant. Overall, these results provide support for the notion of a general processor for emotional perceptual identification in normal adult subjects. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 547-548, July 2012.

I would like to end this questioning of canonical origins by returning to my point of departure, [Lawrence] Lipking’s notion of a “poetics of abandonment.” Lipking’s article was included in an issue of Critical Inquiry entitled Canons, in which it seemingly was held to represent a feminist perspective on canon formation. Lipking centers his attention on literary theory, a domain that has been granted new prominence, sometimes even the status of literature, in the most recent reformulation of the canon. It (...) may be, as Viktor Shklovsky suggested in Zoo, or Letters Not about Love, that literary theory is the novel’s successor, in which case the resurrection of Ovid’s abandoned women would make generic sense. Furthermore, for the first time in the history of literary criticism, there are today numbers of influential female literary critics, many of whom have called for a major reorganization of literary canons. Given the strategies deployed during previous moments of canon formation, it is perhaps inevitable that some of today’s male literary critics would instigate a debasement of theoretical mothers. Contemporary literary critics are no longer attempting to consign women writers to abandonment. However, even as they promote the cause of women writers, some may also be responding in a manner that reveals their perception that feminist literary theory has provided the most forceful recent challenge not only to literary canons but to critical canons as well.In the final development in his attempt to prove that a mimetic investment in female pain is the basic theoretical strategy deployed by all female readers, Lipking provides an analysis of recent feminist theorists ending with this characterization of the authors of The Madwoman in the Attic: “Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar gaze at the mad and outcast heroines of the nineteenth century as if into a mirror” . Thus Gilbert and Gubar—Lipking also cites the examples of Kate Millett and Ellen Moers—become the most recent incarnations of the abandoned literary woman, the literary critic whose views originate in her fear of abandonment. If my analysis of strategies of canon formation deployed in earlier centuries is correct, then the pronouncement from Lipking’s article with which I opened this essay may be a red herring. “In the absence of mothers, a father must raise the right issues.” Lipking may be calling for “a poetics of abandonment” not in response to a perceived maternal deficiency, but in order to consign strong female critics to abandonment, out of a Phaeton complex, a fear that, unless female theorists are cast off, critical sons may have an increasingly difficult time proving their legitimacy. Joan DeJean is professor of French at Princeton University. Her most recent book is Literary Fortifications: Rousseau, Laclos, Sade, and she is currently at work on a study to be titled Fictions of Sappho: Sappho’s Presence in French Literature, 1546-1937. (shrink)

This volume brings together leading scholars to examine Darwinian perspectives on morality from widely ranging disciplines: evolutionary biology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and theology. They bring not only varied expertise, but also contrasting judgments about which, and to what extent, differing evolutionary accounts explain morality. They also consider the implications of these explanations for a range of religious and non-religious moral traditions. The book first surveys scientific understandings of morality. Chapters by Joan Silk and Christopher Boehm ask what primatology and (...) anthropology tell us about moral origins. Daniel Batson and Stephen Pinker provide contrasting accounts of how evolution shapes moral psychology, and Jeffrey Schloss assesses a range of biological proposals for morality and altruism. Turning to philosophical issues, Martha Nussbaum argues that recognizing our animal nature does not threaten morality. Stephen Pope and Timothy Jackson explore how Darwinian accounts of moral goodness both enrich and require understandings outside the sciences. Hilary Putnam and Susan Neiman ask whether Darwin is truly useful for helping us to understand what morality actually is and how it functions. The book is a balanced effort to assess the scientific merits and philosophical significance of emerging Darwinian perspectives on morality. (shrink)

How are beliefs efficacious? One answer is: via rational intentional action. But there are other ways that beliefs are efficacious. This dissertation examines these other ways, and sketches an answer to the question of how beliefs are efficacious that takes into account how beliefs are involved in the full range of behavioral disciplines, from psychophysiology and cognition to social and economic phenomena. The account of how beliefs are efficacious I propose draws on work on active accounts of perception. I develop (...) an account based on a proposal sketched by the cognitive scientist Ulrich Neisser. Neisser sketched an active account of perception, on which dynamic anticipatory schemata direct an organism's exploration and action, and are in turn revised as a result of exploration and action. This notion of schema has roots in nineteenth century neurophysiology and in Frederick Bartlett's subsequent work on memory. Neisser appealed to it to unite what he thought was right about information-processing accounts of perception with what he thought was right about ecological accounts of perception. The point that we must anticipate in order to perceive has been recognized by philosophers in the form of the "theory-ladenness of observation." I extend the concept of anticipatory schema to include its role in social perception and social interaction; the concept of anticipatory schema provides a more interactive account of the role of expectations in the maintenance and existence of social institutions, and can be used to enrich the account of convention David Lewis provided. I also show that the concept of rational expectations, which explains the neutrality of money in terms of the efficacy of anticipatory expectations, is compatible with the proposed account of how beliefs are efficacious. I discuss how the proposal accounts for the three main modes by which beliefs can be efficacious: via their role in causing intentional action, via their role in causing economic phenomena and the existence and maintenance of social institutions, and via their role in causing unintentional physiological responses, including anticipatory physiological responses that can enable perception, cause involuntary actions and give rise to the placebo effect. (shrink)

Joan Rothschild. The Dream of the Perfect Child. x + 343 pp., bibl., index. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. $24 .; Charis Thompson. Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies. x + 360 pp., figs., bibl., index. Cambridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 2005. $40.

Susan B. Levin argues that the human confidence that an ageless body would be better is irrational. She offers a Kantian-inspired argument to show that human understanding cannot rationally access the experiences of a post-human and ageless existence. We challenge this rationale with a three-step argument: first, an ageless body does not have to be post-human. One should distinguish between the transhumanist projects of life extension and accounts focused on enhancing well-being and quality of life. An existence without aging (...) does not require a radical change in one's temporal intuitions, which makes rational discussion possible. Second, we defend that biological aging does not entail any valuable goods. These goods refer to the chronological dimension of aging. Finally, we argue that biological aging is indeed negative and one may need biotechnological interventions in aging to achieve internal transcendence. Thus, we rationally argue that an ageless body would be better. (shrink)

Joan Scott’s ‘fantasy echo’ is deployed to analyse the trope of the mother/daughter relationship in contemporary laments about feminism’s failures, exemplified by Susan Faludi’s ‘American Electra: Feminism’s Ritual Matricide’ (2010). I demonstrate that Faludi’s primary argument – that young feminists do not respect the generations that precede them and therefore halt feminist progress – unreflectively relies upon a feminist maternal fantasy and ignores the prominent role spectacle culture plays in the circumscription of contemporary feminism. Building upon Scott’s attention (...) to literature to interrupt fantasy echoes and their inert visions of how feminism should appear, the article interprets The Portrait of a Lady (1908) through the tools of Scott’s historiography. I argue that Henry James’s novel, focused on an American ‘New Woman’, is an early account of how young women are sold fantasies of feminist freedom through spectacle culture and troubles the assumption that older women only forge benevolent relationships with younger women out of generosity. (shrink)

Throughout, the emerging theory of aspect is extensively compared with alternative theories, and the book concludes with general reflections on the semantic ...

The Question of the Self Perhaps the clearest access to the question of the self in Dogen lies in the fascicle of Shobogenzo entitled "Genjo-koan. ...

In this study, Levin explores Plato's engagement with the Greek literary tradition in his treatment of key linguistic issues. This investigation, conjoined with a new interpretation of the Republic's familiar critique of poets, supports the view that Plato's work represents a valuable precedent for contemporary reflections on ways in which philosophy might benefit from appeals to literature.

What were the historical and cultural processes by which Cyril of Alexandria was elevated to canonical status while his opponent, Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, was made into a heretic? In contrast to previous scholarship, Susan Wessel concludes that Cyril's success in being elevated to orthodox status was not simply a political accomplishment based on political alliances he had fashioned as opportunity arose. Nor was it a dogmatic victory, based on the clarity and orthodoxy of Cyril's doctrinal claims. Instead, it (...) was his strategy in identifying himself with the orthodoxy of the former bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, in his victory over Arianism, in borrowing Athanasius' interpretive methods, and in skilfully using the tropes and figures of the second sophistic that made Cyril a saint in the Greek and Coptic Orthodox Churches. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper traces the changing fortunes of natural theology in two generations of an English family. The group is represented in the first generation by the Unitarian radical, William Frend, and in the second by the spiritualist Sophia Frend De Morgan and her husband, the mathematician Augustus De Morgan. The Frend/DeMorgans were distinguished from the naturalistic Darwins by their commitment to reason; they were a quintessentially urban group whose impulses to natural theology flowed from a God they encountered through their (...) minds. For William Frend, natural theology was rooted in a tightly disciplined, linguistic view of reason that linked theological and mathematical understandings; in the De Morgan's generation, however, understandings of mathematics and of language changed in ways that undercut the power of Frend's reasoned approach. In its rise and fall this family story of reasoned theology is co-temporal with the natural theology that was wrecked on the rocks of Darwinian evolutionary theory. (shrink)