Abstract It would be puzzling if the morally best agents were not so good after all. Yet one prominent account of the morally best agents ascribes to them the exact motivational defect that has famously been called a “fetish.” The supposed defect is a desire to do the right thing, where this is read de dicto . If the morally best agents really are driven by this de dicto desire, and if this de dicto desire is really a fetish, then (...) the morally best agents are moral fetishists. This is puzzling. I resolve the puzzle by showing that on a proper understanding of the interaction between de dicto and de re moral motivation, it is not only not fetishistic, but quite possibly desirable, to be motivated by a de dicto desire to do the right thing. My argument relies partly on an appeal to a non-buck-passing account of moral rightness, according to which rightness is itself an additional reason-giving property over and above the right-making properties of an action. If this account of moral rightness is correct, then we would expect the morally best agents to exhibit de dicto moral motivation. However, since their de dicto desire acts in concert with de re desires, there is no reason to consider it a fetish. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-19 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9825-z Authors Vanessa Carbonell, Philosophy Department, University of Cincinnati, P.O. Box 210374, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0374, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

Since the last decades of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, the use of metaphysics by philosophers when approaching conceptual problems in biology has increased. Some philosophers call this tendency in philosophy of biology ‘Metaphysics of Biology’. In this paper, I aim at characterizing Metaphysics of Biology by paying attention to the diverse ways philosophers use metaphysics when addressing conceptual problems in biology. I will claim that there are two different modes of doing Metaphysics of Biology, namely (...) Metaphysics for Biology and Metaphysics in Biology. (shrink)

ObjectivesThis paper aims to identify potential areas for refinement in existing theoretical models of suicide, and introduce a new integrative theoretical framework for understanding suicide, that could inform such refinements.MethodsLiterature on existing theoretical models of suicide and how they contribute to understanding psychological processes involved in suicide was evaluated in a narrative review. This involved identifying psychological processes associated with suicide. Current understanding of these processes is discussed, and suggestions for integration of the existing literature are offered.ResultsExisting approaches to understanding (...) suicide have advanced the current knowledge of suicide in various ways. They have guided valuable research in the following areas: motivations for suicide and the psychological distress which influences suicide attempts; ambivalence about suicide; suicidal individuals’ focus of attention; and ways in which individuals who contemplate suicide differ from individuals who attempt suicide. We outline a new theoretical framework as a means to integrating all of these concepts into the three principles of control, conflict, and awareness. Within this framework, suicide is regarded as occurring due to a long standing conflict between an individual’s personal goals, culminating in an episode of acute loss of control. The new framework posits that the individual then strives to regain control through the means of suicide because of a narrowed awareness of consequences of their actions on other valued goals. This psychological mechanism of limited awareness is posited to be the common pathway by which individuals make a suicide attempt, regardless of which risk factors are present.ConclusionThis article introduces a theoretical framework that generates several hypotheses for future research, and focuses on psychological processes occurring during immediate crisis. One of the key hypotheses resulting from our predictions on how individuals progress from contemplating to attempting suicide will be tested in an ongoing program of research: Individuals who attempt suicide have a significantly reduced awareness of consequences of suicide, which would negatively impact on their important life goals, values, principles, or ideals, compared to individuals who contemplate suicide. Therapy guided by the new framework may be more flexible, immediate, and client-focused than other therapies for suicidal individuals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 135-136 [Access article in PDF] Alastair Hannay. Kierkegaard: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi + 496. Cloth, $39.95. In the opening pages of this carefully crafted biography, Hannay states that he has no intention of making matters easy for his reader. By this, he means that "final judgments" will not be forthcoming on a number of key (...) issues surrounding Kierkegaard and his works: the nature of his relation to Christianity, the motives leading him to collide with The Corsair, and the meaning and wisdom of his final attack on Bishop Jakob Mynster and the established Danish Church. This is not to say that Hannay presents Kierkegaard either through rose-colored lenses or through narrowly intellectualist ones. Indeed, one of the book's central virtues is that it combines a philosopher's long-standing interest in Kierkegaard's writings with other guiding passions: a fascination with the sources of human creativity, the twists and turns of nineteenth-century European intellectual history, and the drama of one man's sustained grappling with the meaning of (his) life and the degree to which this meaning could be forged and sustained in his own writing.Hannay raises the curtain on Kierkegaard's life at the intellectual debut of the latter. In his first public appearance before the Student Union at the University of Copenhagen, Kierkegaard took issue with a student colleague's espousal of liberal reform. Hannay sees in Kierkegaard's performance signs of things to come: (1) the attempt to gain the notice and approval of the leading cultural lights, such as Danish literary icon Johan Ludvig Heiberg, and (2) a habit of seeking unity and definition through opposition and controversy. In his subsequent discussion of Fear and Trembling, Hannay notes the inescapable fact that Kierkegaard's philosophic positions are often tailor-made justifications for his private [End Page 135] behavior. The classic example is de Silentio's celebration of Abraham's teleological suspension of the ethical, a celebration which would, as often noted, vindicate equally Isaac's sacrifice by Abraham and Regine's "sacrifice" by Kierkegaard. Already on the occasion of his address to the Student Union, Kierkegaard's thought lines up nicely with his self-interest. But Hannay's work is hardly a reductive exposé. His ear for the varied leitmotifs of the authorship, their development and integration, is unrivaled. Regarding Kierkegaard's first skirmish in the academic arena, Hannay alerts his reader to emergent themes: (1) the valorization of personal unity, and the assertion that such unity must emerge from a life rather than be imposed upon it, and (2) a corresponding respect for the power of lived experience and a critique of any life or movement which is either primarily reactive or abstracted from individual existence. While personal unity remains a desideratum throughout his life, the integrity of lived experience is ultimately placed in question by Kierkegaard's construal of Christianity, which he comes increasingly to see as opposed to the humanism which underlies both Enlightened and Romantic thought.Hannay's biography focuses primarily on the development of Kierkegaard's thought as expressed in his journals and published writings. As such, his biography tends to emphasize the continuity of the authorship over its internal tensions. Hannay views, for example, thehumanistic stance of Climacus's Religiousness A as propadeutic to the radical transcendenceof the godhead embraced by Religiousness B. This is a topic open to dispute, since Kierkegaard himself went out of his way to record, and perhaps exhibit, the offensiveness of Christian demands to (fallen) human nature. Hannay acknowledges Kierkegaard's lifelong ambivalencetoward Christianity, but he does not show how this ambivalence echoes in the authorship. Ifhis Kierkegaard is a less divided character than the original, Hannay nevertheless challenges those who would minimize either (1) the depth of Kierkegaard's breach with humanistic thought or (2) the degree to which "the religious life-view [is] persistently in the offing" (Hannay, "Something on Hermeneutics and Communication in Kierkegaard After All," forthcoming in Kierkegaard and the Word, Poul Houe and Gordon D. Marino... (shrink)

Nietzsche coins the enigmatic term homo natura to capture his understanding of the human being as a creature of nature and tasks philosophy with the renaturalisation of humanity. Following Foucault's critique of the human sciences, Vanessa Lemm discusses the reception of Nietzsche's naturalism in philosophical anthropology, psychoanalysis and gender studies. She offers an original reading of homo natura that brings back the ancient Greek idea of nature and sexuality as creative chaos and of the philosophical life as outspoken and (...) embodied truth, perhaps best exemplified by the Cynics' embrace of social and cultural transformation. (shrink)

The Enlightenment saw a critical engagement with the ancient idea that music carries certain powers - it heals and pacifies, civilizes and educates. Yet this interest in musical utility seems to conflict with larger notions of aesthetic autonomy that emerged at the same time. In Enlightenment Orpheus, Vanessa Agnew examines this apparent conflict, and provocatively questions the notion of an aesthetic-philosophical break between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

There has been an exponential rise in use of the term vulnerability across a number of political and policy arenas, including child protection, sexual offences, poverty, development, care for the elderly, patient autonomy, globalisation, war, public health and ecology. Yet despite its increasing deployment, the exact meaning and parameters of this concept remain somewhat elusive. In this article, we explore the interaction of two very different strategies—one in which vulnerability is relied upon by those seeking improved social justice as a (...) mechanism by which to identify, problematise and compel state responses to a universal condition of precarious dependency, and the other in which it is used as a category of neo-liberal governance which legitimates state encroachment whilst constructing ‘vulnerable’ individuals as ‘risk-managers’ who must behave ‘responsibly’ in the face of disadvantage. We suggest that the co-existence of these divergent approaches highlights the fluidity and malleability of the concept of vulnerability. Using sex work as a specific case study, we explore the ways in which vulnerability bears multiple meanings, and has been used in recent times in the furtherance of moralistic and regressive agendas, which collude with, rather than challenge, state power. Without seeking to reject the label or normative import of vulnerability, we call, therefore, for a more circumspect approach to its usage, and a more critical evaluation of recent claims which hail it as a mechanism, preferable to the conventional use of equality paradigms, by which to secure progressive feminist outcomes. (shrink)

Emotional development is one of the largest and most productive areas of psychological research. For decades, researchers have been fascinated by how humans respond to, detect, and interpret emotional facial expressions. Much of the research in this area has relied on controlled stimulus sets of adults posing various facial expressions. Here we introduce a new stimulus set of emotional facial expressions into the domain of research on emotional development—The Child Affective Facial Expression set (CAFE). The CAFE set features photographs of (...) a racially and ethnically diverse group of 2- to 8-year-old children posing for six emotional facial expressions—angry, fearful, sad, happy, surprised, and disgusted—and a neutral face. In the current work, we describe the set and report validity and reliability data on the set from 100 untrained adult participants. (shrink)

In the first half of the twentieth century the attention of American and European researchers was drawn to the area of ‘extreme physiology’, partly because of expeditions to the north and south poles, and to high altitude, but also by global conflicts which were fought for the first time with aircraft, and involved conflict in non-temperate zones, deserts, and at the freezing Eastern front. In an attempt to help white Euro-Americans survive in extreme environments, physiologists, anthropologists, and explorers studied indigenous (...) people’s bodies, cultures, and technologies. This paper will sketch an outline of the science of white survival in three ‘extreme’ environments: the Antarctic and Arctic; high-altitude; and the Australian desert, with a particular focus on the ways in which indigenous populations were studied, or in some cases ignored, by Western biomedical scientists—despite their crucial and systematic contributions to the success of experiments and expeditions. Particularly focusing on altitude, and on blood in both its symbolic and literal sense, the article shows how assumptions about race, indigeneity, civilisation, and evolution shaped the ways White Westerners understood their own bodies as well as those of the people they encountered in cold, high and hot places on the earth. Despite new discoveries in physiology and evolutionary science, old racialised assumptions were maintained, especially those that figured the temperate body as civilised and the tropical body as primitive; and in at least one case it will be shown that these racialised assumptions significantly altered, if not retarded, the science of respiratory physiology. (shrink)

We know that microbes contribute to the production of odors that some animals use to communicate, but how common is this phenomenon? Recent studies capitalizing on new molecular technologies are uncovering fascinating associations between microbes and odors of wild animals, but causality is difficult to ascertain. Fundamental questions about the nature of these unique host‐microbe interactions also remain unanswered. For instance, do microbes benefit from signaling associations with hosts? How does microbial community structure influence signal production? How do hosts regulate (...) microbes in order to generate appropriate signals? Here, we review the current state of knowledge on microbially produced signals in animals and discuss key research foci that can advance our understanding of microbial‐based signaling in the animal world. (shrink)

ABSTRACTHedonic deficits are linked to protracted dysphoric affect in depression, a disorder characterised by emotion context insensitivity. Recent findings from daily life studies contradict the ECI view. This study longitudinally investigated DA across laboratory and daily life contexts and the conditions associated with discrepancies in DA reactivity. Thirty-three healthy controls and 41 adults with major depressive disorder provided responses to neutral and positive films viewed in the laboratory and daily events recorded over the course of three days using ecological momentary (...) assessment methodology. The current study reports on participants’ appraisals of films and events and their subsequent DA, both rated individually after each task and daily event. Despite large group similarities in appraisals of the positive film and life events, MDDs appraised the neutral film and neutral life events as less important and less pleasant (film: d =... (shrink)

I argue for the existence of a ‘ratcheting-up effect’: the behavior of moral saints serves to increase the level of moral obligation the rest of us face. What we are morally obligated to do is constrained by what it would be reasonable for us to believe we are morally obligated to do. Moral saints provide us with a special kind of evidence that bears on what we can reasonably believe about our obligations. They do this by modeling the level of (...) sacrifice a person can realistically bear. Exposure to moral saints thus ‘ratchets-up’ our obligations by combating a type of ignorance that would otherwise defeat those obligations. (shrink)

From the point of view of a theorist in ethics, the interest in public policy usually centres on the policy outcomes. But this point of view does not take much account of the roles and practices through which public policies are enacted. What additional ethical focuses for the policy agent might these entail? I outline four features of policy making, centred on the agent's performance of their role in the process, that raise ethical issues. These features are: the nature of (...) the policy process; the definition of the public; the treatment of policy agents; and accounting for public policy decisions. Brief examples are used to illustrate the nature of the issues and support the conclusion that these present additional ethical focuses for agents in public policy roles. (shrink)

The feminist movement remains fundamentally divided over the issue of surrogacy. Within the confines of this article it is argued that the inadequacy of positions on both sides of the debate rests upon their common tendency to deal with the ethical consequences of surrogacy for isolated agents, without sufficient concern for the broader social implications for all pregnant women in society. In order to clarify the issues involved, feminist theorists must consider the implications of surrogacy in a broader social spectrum. (...) Such an analysis will illustrate that the two-person dichotomous model of the maternal-foetal relationship proposed by the surrogacy arrangement has hugely prejudicial effects on the treatment received by non-contract mothers when they interact with agents of certain social institutions whose prior contact with surrogate mothers has made them more susceptible to conceiving the maternal-foetal relationship as fundamentally disconnected. In a climate of increased medical surveillance and intervention in the non-clinical context of pregnancy, the dangers of adopting this dichotomous model are palpable. Given the oppressive physical and psychological effect that this would have upon the liberty of the majority of pregnant women in society, this article argues that the feminist movement must abandon any promotion of the abstracted model of the mother-foetus relationship that is implicit in its arguments in favour of surrogacy. (shrink)

A survey on the knowledge and attitudes towards the Austrian organ donation legislation (an opt-out solution) of selected groups of the Austrian population taking into account factors such as age, gender, level of education, affiliation to healthcare professions and health related studies was conducted.

Susan Wolf famously claimed that the life of the moral saint is unattractive from the “point of view of individual perfection.” I argue, however, that the unattractive moral saints in Wolf’s account are self-defeating on two levels, are motivated in the wrong way, and are called into question by real-life counter-examples. By appealing to a real-life case study, I argue that the best life from the moral point of view is not necessarily unattractive from the individual point of view.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 62.2 (2001) 265-279 [Access article in PDF] The Physiological Sublime: Burke's Critique of Reason Vanessa L. Ryan The eighteenth-century discussion of the sublime is primarily concerned not with works of art but with how a particular experience of being moved impacts the self. The discussion of the sublime most fully explores the question of how we make sense of our experience: "Why (...) and how does this object move me?" Focusing on the perceiving subject, most critics cast the British discussion of the sublime as reflecting a gradual shift towards a Kantian focus not on the object judged, but on the judging mind. Certainly, eighteenth-century thinkers move away from understanding the sublime as a set of qualities that are presumed to be internal to a given object, and shift their attention to the mental effects of those objects. Yet the increasing interest in the perceiving subject in eighteenth-century British thought should not be understood as necessarily anticipating a Kantian perspective. In his classic work on the sublime Samuel H. Monk claims that this aspect of the British debate provides a preliminary discussion of the Kantian "autonomy of the subject" and that it constitutes a movement towards the "subjectivism of Kant." 1 This reading of British aesthetics exclusively in [End Page 265] terms of a preparation for the Kantian description of the subject obscures the differences between the British and the German traditions. It thereby fails to accommodate the reluctance of British thinkers to give up the social and ethical when faced with the sublime: instead of explaining the commonality of the aesthetic experience by positing a "disinterested" and "autonomous" subject, thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Dennis, and Edmund Burke subordinate the freedom of the individual subject in an attempt to reconcile the aesthetic affect with moral conduct.The teleological and Kantian understanding of British eighteenth-century aesthetic theory is largely the result of the central position that has been given to its most famous theorist, Edmund Burke. Although Burke's conception of the sublime differs in some points markedly from that of his British contemporaries, his treatment of the sublime in the Philosophical Enquiry (1757) has come to represent eighteenth-century British thought, and as such it is routinely compared to Kant's analytic of the sublime. Yet at the point where the British tradition seems to come closest to the Kantian, namely, in the writings of Burke, it also most clearly marks its distance from it. Burke is in some ways the least Kantian of eighteenth-century British thinkers. Whereas Kant holds that the sublime allows us to intuit our rational capacity, Burke's physiological version of the sublime involves a critique of reason. The sublime for Burke is a question not of the subject's increasing self-awareness but of the subject's sense of limitation and of the ultimate value of that experience within a social and ethical context.One of the most intransigent problems in distinguishing the strains of thought on the sublime is that the relationship between the object and its sublime effect--between the object taken to arouse heightened response and the affective quality of such a response--is so variously conceived. The sublime experience is seen as leading, on the one hand, to an overpowering of the self and, on the other hand, to an intense self-presence and exaltation, sometimes even to self-transcendence. The central question is thus not to what extent the sublime is located in the subject, but in what way the experience of the sublime affects the perceiving subject: Does the sublime enlarge us, or diminish us? 2 Does the sublime annihilate our sense of self, or does it affirm and heighten our sense of identity? These two opposing views of the effect of the sublime on the self can be seen in the contrast between Kant and Longinus, whose theories exerted an enormous influence in Britain, especially on Burke. Whereas Longinus emphasizes that the sublime overpowers and dominates the self, Kant holds that the feeling of... (shrink)

In Violence and the Sacred (henceforth, V&S), Rene Girard remarks that when we think of siblings, we often think of affectionate relationships.1 He then proposes, however, that the stories that have come down to us through mythology and sacred scriptures often tell us otherwise. Warring siblings are embedded deeply in history, religion, and literature: Girard lists Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Eteocles and Polyneices, Romulus and Remus, Richard the Lionheart and John Lackland as just a few examples of the (...) fraternal rivalry in our collective consciousness. We might add the biblical Isaac and Ishmael and Joseph and his brothers to this list. The rivalries are so pervasive that Girard declares: “the theme itself is .. (shrink)

RESUMO O objetivo do artigo é proceder a uma análise da personagem Alison, esposa de Bath, na obra Os contos de Canterbury, de Geofrey Chaucer. Para isso, com base em Bakhtin (2010, 2018), em particular a partir da perspectiva da carnavalização, somada à teoria da performatividade de gênero de Butler (1988, 2017), pretendemos mostrar como a referida personagem subverte, carnavalizadamente, certos textos bíblicos referentes ao papel da mulher no matrimônio. Dessa forma, nesse estudo, para efeito de análise, tomamos da obra (...) chaucereana o prólogo da esposa de Bath visto que nele a personagem elabora, de modo mais evidente, sua relação tensa e, ao mesmo tempo cômica, com a Bíblia. Da análise feita, concluímos, assim, que a esposa de Bath, de maneira carnavalizada, performatiza o gênero feminino em pleno período medieval, mostrando-se subversiva aos estereótipos da época ao profanar certas orientações bíblicas, tanto do Velho como do Novo Testamento, relativamente ao que é ser mulher e esposa. (shrink)

Depuis un peu plus de cinq ans, il existe dans le nord du Brésil des tensions sociales autour de la construction d’un projet de développement. La construction du barrage hydroélectrique de Belo Monte est un parfait exemple, à la fois pour illustrer la relation confuse entre le pouvoir public et les entreprises privées, durant la réalisation d’un ouvrage d’infrastructures et pour étudier comment cette relation influence l’« acceptabilité sociale » du projet. Pour Belo Monte, le gouvernement a mis en place (...) une politique d’investissements locaux par l’intermédiaire d’un plan de développement durable, parallèle à la construction de l’ouvrage civil. Le plan, pionnier dans son format, est financé par des ressources publiques et privées et distribue des financements pour divers projets proposés par la société civile et les gouvernements locaux. Il vise une meilleure insertion sociale du projet et son acceptation à l’échelle locale. Néanmoins, ce plan est aussi accusé, par les opposants au barrage, d’être une tentative de coopter la population locale. La situation que nous exposons vise à remettre en question le rôle de l’État dans l’acceptabilité sociale. Nous proposons d’aborder le croisement entre les sphères publiques et privées en ce qui concerne l’implémentation de services et de projets d’intérêts publics, en nous posant plusieurs questions : comment la gestion de l’acceptabilité sociale se fait-elle au Brésil, dans un cadre officiellement démocratique, mais où les pratiques sont historiquement populistes? Quelle place reste-t-il pour les populations locales et leurs représentants et comment survivent les mouvements sociaux désireux de faire entendre leur voix dans le débat et la gestion du projet? Les questions démontrent la nécessité d’inclure le rôle central de l’État et son influence dans les débats sur l’« acceptabilité sociale », élargissant la littérature, jusqu’alors trop souvent exclusivement centrée sur le binôme entreprise-population concernée. (shrink)

This is an introduction to a series of essays, originally a panel at the iCHST conference in 2017, which explore the moral economy of physiology in the modern period, focusing particularly on issues of race, place and nation. By examining a series of interconnected, but not interchangeable, concepts, these papers offer a broader context for the understanding of physiology, physical anthropology, and fertility studies, particularly by moving from Europe to South America and from there with explorers and scientists across the (...) globe. Starting with Malthusian discussions in the early nineteenth century, working through to post-colonial debates about race and belonging, the papers argue for an increased focus on cross-century histories of these topics, showing a continuity in beliefs and practices, and highlighting the interdisciplinary and inherently political nature of these researches. (shrink)

Identifying the antecedents of unethical corporate behavior remains a priority among management scientists. Among the many causes that have been explored, the influence of celebrity and legacy has not been examined. This paper contributes to the existing research by focusing attention on how celebrity and legacy encourage unethical behavior and suggests practices that can diffuse the negative influence of these factors.

Networked global learning communities build partnership programs between higher education institutions and high schools which allow students, teachers and professors to attend and work in college preparation programs located in countries outside of their native lands. These educational programs help to promote development of transnational policies and procedure reforms to provide access to universities in other countries, as well as provide exposure to global learning strategies, structures, and emerging technologies among teachers and educational leadership. Transnational High School-University Bridge programs also (...) allow the student to adjust to a new culture and work to improve their second language skills, while potentially earning college credit in a dual credit, high school environment. (shrink)

Countless studies have reported that individuals detect threatening/angry faces faster than happy/neutral faces. Two classic views have been used to explain this phenomenon—that negative valence drives the effect, or conversely, that low-level perceptual characteristics of the stimuli are responsible for their rapid detection. In the current review, I question whether dichotomous perspectives are the most parsimonious way to explain a large and inconsistent literature. Further, I argue that nondichotomous, multicomponent accounts for the detection of emotionally valenced stimuli might help take (...) us beyond traditional approaches to visual detection research, and I suggest various ways in which future research can use these newer approaches to more effectively elucidate the mechanisms underlying the rapid detection of emotionally valenced stimuli. (shrink)

Note: I asked undergraduate students, graduate students as well as assistant professors about how they would explain philosophical expertise. So don’t be surprised to find also statements of undergraduate students about philosophical expertise on this website. An analysis of the anonymous answers given on my website revealed that undergraduate students mentioned other abilities when it comes to philosophical expertise than assistent professors. Quite a few assistant professors agreed to answer some more detailed questions. They are, however, still working on that. (...) I will add their answers to this website as soon as I receive it. (shrink)

Após uma breve retomada da tese bergsoniana da inadequabilidade da linguagem para exprimir o real, a qual está presente ao longo de toda sua obra, este trabalho procura mostrar de que modo Matéria e Memória contempla uma reflexão mais profunda sobre esta temática ao apresentar a noção de “aparelho motor”, que permite vislumbrar o fundamento corporal dos hábitos da prática e aponta para o problema de transpô-los sem crítica ao âmbito do pensamento especulativo. Em linhas gerais, procuramos entender de que (...) modo a concepção de linguagem de Bergson – com base na definição da palavra como entidade de ordem motora ou mais explicitamente como aparelho motor – anuncia um acesso extralingüístico ao real. (shrink)

Harold Kincaid in Individualism and the Unity of Science postulates a model of unity-without-reduction in order to accurately describe the relation between individualism and macroeconomics. I present this model and apply it to the description of the relation between chemistry and quantum mechanics. I argue that, when it comes to the description of molecular structure, chemistry and quantum mechanics are unified in Kincaid’s sense. Specifically, the two disciplines contribute to the formation of a unified body of knowledge with respect to (...) molecular structure. (shrink)

Liberalism is a critically important topic in the contemporary world as liberal values and institutions are in retreat in countries where they seemed relatively secure. Lucidly written and accessible, this book offers an important yet neglected Russian aspect to the history of political liberalism. Vanessa Rampton examines Russian engagement with liberal ideas during Russia's long nineteenth century, focusing on the high point of Russian liberalism from 1900 to 1914. It was then that a self-consciously liberal movement took shape, followed (...) by the founding of the country's first liberal (Constitutional-Democratic or Kadet) party in 1905. For a brief, revelatory period, some Russians - an eclectic group of academics, politicians and public figures - drew on liberal ideas of Western origin to articulate a distinctively Russian liberal philosophy, shape their country's political landscape, and were themselves partly responsible for the tragic experience of 1905. (shrink)

Many of today’s most disruptive challenges are the result of rare yet highly impactful events. Their characteristics are largely at odds with prevailing management research paradigms, thus stymieing efforts toward societally relevant guidance. New approaches are needed to ensure sustainable businesses and societies.

If the traditional problem of demandingness is that a theory demands too much of all agents, for example by asking them to maximize utility in every decision, then we should ask whether there is a related problem of “differential demandingness”, when a theory places vastly different demands on different agents. I argue that even according to common-sense morality, the demands faced by particular agents depend on a variety of contingent factors. These include the general circumstances, the compliance of others, the (...) available resources, the agent’s relevant relationships, the agent’s psychological constitution, and the agent’s knowledge. Some agents, for instance, find themselves in a “sacrifice hazard”: a situation where morality calls for a huge unforeseen sacrifice. I argue that if moral demands are differential, it is harder than one might think to assess a theory’s general level of demandingness in the abstract. (shrink)

The assessment of nanotechnology applications such as nanocarrier-based targeted drug delivery has historically been based mostly on toxicological and safety aspects. The use of nanocarriers for TDD, a leading-edge nanomedical application, has received little study from the angle of experts’ perceptions and acceptability, which may be reflected in how TDD applications are developed. In recent years, numerous authors have maintained that TDD assessment should also take into account impacts on ethical, environmental, economic, legal, and social issues in order to lead (...) to socially responsible innovation. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with French and Canadian researchers and research trainees with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and involved in research related to emerging technologies. The interviews focussed on scenarios presenting two types of TDD nanocarriers in two contexts of use. Content and inductive analyses of interviews showed how facets of perceived impacts such as health, environment, social cohabitation, economy, life and death, representations of the human being and nature, and technoscience were weighed in acceptability judgments. The analyses also revealed that contextual factors related to device, to use, and to user influenced the weighting assigned to perceived impacts and thus contributed to variability in interviewees’ judgments of acceptability. Giving consideration to researchers’ perspective could accompany first steps of implementation and development of nanomedicine by producing a first, but wide, picture of the acceptability of nanocarrier-based TDD. (shrink)

Resumo Neste artigo, vamos considerar o recente debate na metafísica da evolução, no que diz respeito tanto à persistência como à “mudança” em espécies biológicas, segundo a tese que considera a espécie como o agregado de indivíduos. Centrar-nos-emos na proposta de Thomas Reydon, que argumenta que em biologia, o termo “espécie” refere-se a duas entidades biológicas, por si denominadas evolverons e phylons, que desempenham vários papéis epistemológicos em pelo menos duas disciplinas diferentes, nomeadamente na biologia sistemática e na biologia evolutiva. (...) Em particular, analisamos criticamente a alegação de Reydon, que estas duas entidades biológicas geraram um problema para a tese que sustém a equivalência entre duas teorias de persistência, desenvolvidas pela metafísica analítica contemporânea: o tri–Dimensionalismo e tetra–Dimensionalismo. Neste artigo, pretende-se restaurar a tese da equivalência metafísica, recorrendo a uma tripla estratégia: promover a ideia de que os evolverons e os “phylons” são duas dimensões de uma mesma realidade; recorrer a uma noção menos problemática noção de endurantismo e, por último, destacar alguns problemas que surgem dos exemplos biológicos empregues por Reydon para basear o desenvolvimento dos seus argumentos. Palavras-chave : conceito de espécie, endurantismo, equivalência metafísica entre 3D e 4D, espécies biológicas sincrónicas e diacrónicas, persistênciaIn this paper we revise a recent debate on the metaphysics of evolution pertaining to both the persistence and change of biological species, and the species-as-individuals thesis. We focus on Thomas Reydon’s proposal that, in biology, the term “species” refers to two different biological entities, which he calls evolverons and phylons, and plays different epistemological roles in at least two different disciplines in which it is used, namely, evolutionary and systematic biology. In particular, we critically revise Reydon’s claim that these two biological entities raise a problem for the thesis of the equivalence between the two theories of persistence developed in contemporary analytic metaphysics: three–dimensionalism and four–dimensionalism. In this paper, we aim to reinstate the thesis of metaphysical equivalence by a threefold strategy: motivation of the idea that evolverons and phylons are two dimensions of the same entity, shifting to a less problematic notion of endurance, and an exploration of doubts about the particular biological examples upon which Reydon bases his arguments. Keywords : 3D / 4D metaphysical equivalence, endurantism, persistence, species concept, synchronic and diachronic biological species. (shrink)