The construct of flexibility has been a focus for research and theory for over 100 years. However, flexibility has not been consistently or adequately defined, leading to obstacles in the interpretation of past research and progress toward enhanced theory. We present a model of socioemotional flexibility—and its counterpart rigidity—at three time scales using dynamic systems modeling. At the real-time scale (micro), moment-to-moment fluctuations in affect are identified as dynamic flexibility. At the next higher meso-time scale, adaptive adjustments to changes in (...) context are characterized as reactive flexibility. At the macro scale is flexibility that occurs across months or years, reflecting flexibility due to developmental or life transitions. Implications of the model and suggestions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Controversy surrounds the ‘intrusion’ of the discourse of rights into workplace relationships. This is explored by examining the nature of rights through the analysis of the idea of a ‘right to manage’. Purported justifications of the right to manage in terms of either property or contract are shown to be inadequate, thus illustrating the need to incorporate a degree of consequentialism in the articulation and justification of rights. The value of a rights-approach is argued to lie in the identification of (...) the morally relevant interests affected by management decisions and the correlative obligations of those involved in the workplace, rather than in the introduction of a special set of moral considerations distinctively connected with the idea of rights. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIlya Somin's Democracy and Political Ignorance uses a by-now familiar rational-choice lens with which to explain and analyze Americans’ widespread political ignorance. Unlike some scholars who tout rational choice on purely predictive or heuristic grounds, Somin claims that it also offers a more accurate description of reality, in this case better explaining the findings of empirical public-opinion research. In this essay, I compare Somin's central concept of rational ignorance and the related concept of “rational irrationality” with the earlier explanatory approach (...) taken by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in his classic study, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. While Schumpeter developed his description of the mass democratic citizenry over 70 years ago—prior to any of the significant empirical studies of American public opinion—its broad approach remains at least as persuasive as Somin's. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Life and Death: Philosophical Essays in Biomedical Ethics. By Dan W. Brock.

Since 1989, widely circulating statistics on gay teen suicide in the United States have acted as catalysts for institutional reforms, scientific research, and the creation of an identity category “gay youth.” While one figure has been replicated scientifically, these numbers originated not from a scientific research study but as risk estimates developed by a social worker and published in a government document. Many people within the public took up these original numbers, attributing their author the status of scientific researcher. In (...) effect, the numbers became “black boxed,” often traveling without citation. Drawing on Ian Hacking’s “dynamic nominalist” perspective, this article utilizes interviews with the author of these statistics and other key claimants, along with textual analysis, to trace the origins, uptake, and effects of these figures. While making vital policy contributions, the numbers have led to some ironic consequences including the fostering of gay youth identification with suicide as a potential correlate of their identity and the potential antigay redeployment of decontextualized numbers. They have also led to a reaction in the form of “resilience” narratives. (shrink)

This dissertation consists of four essays, all having in common the theme of nondelimited unity. The first essay, "Mystical Unity," characterizes the introvertive and extrovertive mystical unitive experiences and gives a phenomenological description of how extrovertive unity can develop from introvertive unity. The second essay, "Mystical Nonduality," defends the non-dualist interpretation of the mystical experience of introvertive unity against the criticisms of L. Stafford Betty . The third essay, "Unity as a Metaphysical Paradigm," offers an extensive characterization of nondelimited unity (...) as a metaphysical paradigm and then gives a series of arguments for the paradigm. The final essay, "The Metaphysics of Corporate Social Responsibility," takes the paradigm developed in the third essay and applies it to the problem of corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

This article develops a new way of understanding the integration of emotions in practical life and the practical appraisal of emotions, drawing on insights from both J-P. Sartre and R. G. Collingwo...

This article looks at the Indian canonical sources for Mādhyamika Buddhist refusals to personally endorse truth claims, even about customary matters. These sources, on a natural reading, seem to suggest that customary truth is only widespread error and that the Buddhist should do little more than duplicate, or acquiesce in, what the common man recognizes about it. The combination of those Indian canonical themes probably contributed to frequent Indo-Tibetan Madhyamaka positions on truth, i.e., that the customary is no more than (...) surface level truth, mere consensus amongst the mistaken, or, similarly, that there can be no right answers or truth claims to endorse about customary matters, as there are no sources of knowledge that have them as objects. Tsong kha pa and the dGe lugs pa, by contrast, adopted what I consider to be a philosophically more promising stance, one that recognized the need for a robust normativity: things customary are not just reduced to accepted errors; there are right answers about them that should be endorsed and may well defy current consensus of opinion. Not surprisingly, however, they needed a quite different and even strained exegesis of that same Indian textual legacy. (shrink)

Let us begin with a fundamental realization: No amount of thinking and no amount of public policy have brought us any closer to understanding and solving the problem of crime. The more we have reacted to crime, the farther we have removed ourselves from any understanding and any reduction of the problem. In recent years, we have floundered desperately in reformulating the law, punishing the offender, and quantifying our knowledge. Yet this country remains one of the most crime‐ridden nations. In (...) spite of all its wealth, economic development, and scientific advances, this country has one of the worst crime records in the world.With such realization, we return once again—as if starting anew—to the subject of crime, a subject that remains one of our most critical indicators of the state of our personal and collective being. If what is to be said seems outrageous and heretical, it is only because it is necessarily outside the conventional wisdom both of our understanding of the problem and of our attempt to solve it. (shrink)

The work of Ezequiel Di Paolo and Hanne De Jaegher has helped to transform the enactive approach from relative obscurity into a hotly debated contender for the future science of social cognition and cognitive science more generally. In this short introduction I situate their contributions in what I see as important aspects of the bigger picture that is motivating and inspiring them as well as the rest of this young community. In particular, I sketch some of the social issues that (...) go beyond mere academic debate, including how the methods and assumptions that inform orthodox cognitive science are intrinsically related to the critical state of affairs in our world today. I conclude with some personal recollections in order to give an idea of the context in which their ideas, and mine as well, came to fruition. (shrink)

Charles Darwin found much in Australia to challenge and inform his thinking. This book explores the impact that Darwin’s short visit to Australia in 1836 had on the man himself and on the emerging nation. Now, more than 170 years later, Darwin continues to influence Australian attitudes to life and living.

Java offers exciting opportunities to trace human–cattle relations in a Southeast Asian context. By foregrounding inscriptions, court poems (kakavin), and other textual and iconographic sources, we aim to unearth some historical and cultural aspects of pre-Islamic cattle management and milk consumption, paying special attention to the words used for different breeds, dairy products, and other bovine terminology. Contacts with the Indian subcontinent heralded the introduction of larger cows and eventually milk-based economies, despite the conventional wisdom that the early Javanese avoided (...) dairy products. When read critically and comparatively, Old Javanese texts reveal that locally domesticated cattle (sapi) had a relatively low status and were often used for heavy work. South Asian zebus (lǝmbu), by contrast, enjoyed more prestige and were valued for their holy profile and superior lactation. The consumption and ritual use of dairy products was especially prevalent in Hindu circles, but appears to have had an impact on rural village life more broadly. When the religious hegemony of Brahmins decreased, the production of milk and butter generally ceased to be seen as a worthwhile investment. As a result, the bovine landscapes reconstructed in this article gradually changed beyond recognition in Islamic, colonial, and postcolonial times. (shrink)

In this paper, I tackle Aquinas’s notion of ‘natural inclinations’, specifically as it occurs in his seminal elaboration of the natural law in Summa Theologiae I-II. Question 94. Article 2. Maintaining that it constitutes a departure from Aristotle’s terminology, and is hence puzzling, I go on to investigate a raft of modern, mainly Anglophone, interpretations of the concept. Beginning with Jacques Maritain, I move through the broadly chronological sequence of John Finnis, Jean Porter, Steven Jensen, Justin Matchulat and Stephen Brock. (...) In each case, I argue that – despite these scholars’ philosophical ingenuity and textual facility – there are crucial problems with their respective approaches and construals. I end the paper by outlining my own construal of ‘natural inclinations’, which, even if not bolstered by heavy textual scholarship, is at least coherent and, moreover, avoids the philosophical pitfalls of the above interpretations. (shrink)

Varela's enactive approach to cognitive science has been elaborated into a theoretical framework of agency, sense-making, and sociality, while his key methodological innovation — neurophenomenology (NP) — continues to inspire empirical work. We argue that the enactive approach was originally expressed in NP as three core tenets: (1) phenomenological pragmatics, (2) embodied cognition, and (3) conscious efficacy. However, most efforts in NP have focused on applying tenet 1, while tenet 2 has received notably less attention, and there is even explicit (...) distancing from tenet 3. By way of a critical review of four case studies, we show how NP thereby falls short of its full potential. Crucially, it needs to demonstrate that the first-person perspective matters, not only as a source of correlations with third-person data, but because lived experience, as such, makes a difference in its own right to the living body's dynamics. Given that methods for improving subjective reports have become accepted in human neuroscience (tenet 1), and given the increasing availability for recording multi-scalar organismic activity during embodied action (tenet 2), we propose it is time to integrate these research strands by using this issue of conscious efficacy as a pivot point (tenet 3). The development of genuinely experience-involving accounts of neurophysiological activity during embodied action holds promise for rebooting neurophenomenology in stronger form. (shrink)

In Greg Bear’s critically acclaimed science fiction novel Darwin’s Radio, the activation of an endogenous retrovirus (SHEVA), ironically located in a “noncoding region” of the human genome, causes extreme symptoms in women worldwide, including miscarriages. In the United States, a task force is assembled to control the pandemic crisis and to find out how SHEVA operates at the genomic level. However, as the story unfolds, it becomes manifest that SHEVA is too complex to decode in this way and, moreover, that (...) it is not a disease at all. Biologist Kay Lang speculates that SHEVA is triggered by signals from the environment, and that newborn SHEVA children will be a new variation or species of Man. In this essay I analyze Bear’s literary experiment with science along Deleuze and Guattari’s important, but largely overlooked, concepts of State science and nomad science. Bear’s novel gives narrative form to nomad-scientific ideas about life, notably Lynn Margulis’s theory of endosymbiogenesis, which holds that a species’ DNA is an assemblage of many genomes acquired in symbiotic relations. The import of Bear’s informed speculations, I argue, is not crass prediction but a nomadic vision of life as always already different (impure, infected) and in becoming—a counterpoint to the image of the double helix as the bedrock of human identity. Darwin’s Radio is a key example of how fiction can be an excellent partner for science, technology, and society, analyzing and intervening in debates about life and laying bare epistemological and biopolitical tensions of technoscience. (shrink)

A distinction has been drawn between basic conversation analysis and applied CA. Applied CA has become especially beneficial for informing areas of practice such as health, social care and education, and is an accepted form of research evidence in the scientific rhetoric. There are different ways of undertaking applied CA, with different foci and goals. In this article, we articulate one way of conducting applied CA, that is especially pertinent for practitioners working in different fields. We conceptualise this as Reflective (...) Interventionist CA. We argue that this approach to applied CA is important because of its emphasis on the reflective stance that is valuable to an understanding of research data, its commitment to collaboration with practitioners, and its inductive style. In this paper, we outline the core premises and benefits of this approach and offer empirical examples to support our argument. To conclude, we consider the implications for evidence-based practice. (shrink)

The recent concern with hermeneutics, which stems above all from Truth and Method, should not be allowed to obscure the fact, to which Gadamer certainly is sensitive, that this topic has a long philosophical lineage, extending back into the tradition at least to Aristotle. In particular, it seems rarely to have been noticed that although their thought is notoriously difficult, the major members of the German idealist tradition provided not only the positions themselves, but a theory of their interpretation. The (...) latter point is important since, if evaluation is to be fair, positions must be measured against standards which are their own and not against extrinsic criteria. Yet for idealism this has rarely been done, in part because little attention has so far been directed to the idealist view of how theory is to be interpreted. Accordingly, my task in this paper will be twofold: to discuss the idealist theory of hermeneutics, and to test that theory in the interpretation of one of the major idealist positions. In consequence, the paper will come full circle, since the idealist theory of hermeneutics will be both expounded and put to the test provided by the hermeneutics of idealism. (shrink)

Marx est un grand penseur et, selon divers critères, un des plus importants des temps modernes. L’enjeu ici est de cerner ce que Marx peut nous apporter aujourd’hui sur le plan philosophique. Le déclin soudain du marxisme officiel présente une occasion de faire ressortir le côté philosophique de Marx. Or voici quatre conditions afin de cerner la philosophie marxienne. Ces conditions relèvent du marxisme, de Hegel, de l’économie politique, et du modèle marxien de la société industrialisée moderne.

Despite the attacks on metaphysics in the 20th century, the field remains surprising alive, not less robust, less interesting, nor ready to be consigned to the dustbin of history. The essays assembled in this volume, which come from all areas of the metaphysical tradition, are all by authors who are committed to the kind of metaphysics which Hume and later Kant recommended, although naturally they regard what good metaphysics is in very different ways. Contributors include D. P. Chattoppadhyaya, Fred Dretske, (...) Ludger Honnefelder, Peter van Inwagen, Jay F. Rosenberg, David-Hillel Rubin, and Loretta Torrago. Author abstracts are provided for each paper and a complete name index is provided. (shrink)

Aimed at specialists, as well as graduate students and select undergraduates, this study centers on Hegel's important, but neglected, theory of knowledge. Professor Rockmore interprets Hegel as reacting to the Kantian effort to reformulate epistemology in the wake of what Kant contends is the failure of earlier, dogmatic theories. Recent work has shown that Hegel's epistemology is a good deal more respectable than has usually been thought. Rockmore's aim is to continue that work in order to bring Hegel into the (...) main discussion of knowledge. Rockmore's main argument for the relevance of Hegel's theory to the problem of knowledge is that in the absence of foundationalism, Hegel's antifoundationalist theory of knowledge as perspectival and historical supplies two items helpful to advance the epitemological discussion. (shrink)

“Materialism,” which is central for Marxism, is apparently less important for Marx, who, after the “Theses on Feuerbach,” only rarely mentions it. In Capital, Marx mentions “materialism” only two times: in a passage on Giambattista Vico, an important eighteenth Italian philosopher, and in the Afterword to the second German edition in the famous comment on Hegelian dialectic. This paper concerns the reference to Vico. This reference is important in two ways: in calling attention to a basic similarity between Marx’s position (...) and Vico’s constructivist approach to knowledge, and in suggesting Marx’s position is not science but rather a particular kind of philosophy. (shrink)

The article has two aims: firstly, it provides a holistic account of Zygmunt Bauman’s oeuvre, and secondly, it presents an extensive up-to-date and multilingual bibliography of his published writings. The authors discuss Bauman’s prolificacy, as well as the stylistic, formal and substantive heterogeneity of his work. Taking this into account, they reflect on the curious reception of his oeuvre in the wider disciplinary field of sociology. The bibliography attached to the paper provides the most complete account of Bauman’s writings. Building (...) on previous bibliographies, and drawing on archival research in the Janina and Zygmunt Bauman Papers at the University of Leeds, the bibliography spans 63 years from his first publication to his most recent. Many of these papers – both in English and Polish – are presented for the first time in the list of his works. (shrink)