This article aims at putting in context and at pursuing the concept elaborated by the later Putnam of an ethics without ontology, which I associate with certain other contemporary philosophers like Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond; and in general of a philosophy without ontology. Putnam’s ambition is to get rid of ontology by refocusing reflection on ethics in a realistic spirit. This calls for a reappraisal of the entirety of Putnam’s evolution after the 1980s, especially his “Wittgensteinian turn,” which has (...) sometimes been underappreciated. To say that ethics has nothing to do with ontology is to make a claim not only about ethics, but also about realism. That is why Putnam’s later work matters today, especially his radical break with the fact/value distinction. This does not only concern ethics, for as Diamond has said and as Putnam reiterates in his own style and culture, we must refocus reflection on ethics and on the place of ethics in our forms of life and of language. (shrink)

Unites George Herbert Mead and Maurice Merleau-Ponty in a shared rejection of substance philosophy as well as spectator theory of knowledge, in favor of a focus on the ultimacy of temporal process and the constitutive function of social praxis.

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)

In their examination of survey findings, Pierson et al. (2024) illuminate critical insights into the current composition and philosophical perspectives of the bioethics field. Their study addresses...

To understand the significance of Peirce’s self-proclaimed idealism within the context of his metaphysical system, it must be viewed not only in terms of the modifications he makes, but also–perhaps more so–in terms of the alternatives against which they are pitted, for frequently it is his understanding of the shortcomings of these other positions which leads him to find idealism so enticing. Indeed, Peirce’s most clear-cut assertions of idealism arise from a rejection of two other positions which he falsely thinks (...) to exhaust the possibilities, for the alternatives from which he begins are rooted in a tradition of substance and kinds of “stuff,” while his search for an answer stems from an emerging framework of process and function. While Peirce is not an idealist, his flirtation with idealism was a vital force in shaping the character of his philosophy as it moved on to novel terrain. Yet, if he is seen as wedded too closely to idealism, this novel terrain is lost from view. Thus, his self-proclaimed idealism yields both a tool for bringing to light important distinctions and an obstacle which stands in the way of understanding his ultimate commitment to a novel pragmatic synthesis which undercuts the numerous and often contradictory traditional labels by which he attempts to articulate his emerging position. (shrink)

ABSTRACTBesides physiological, behavioural, and affective effects, romantic love also has cognitive effects. In this study, we tested whether individual differences in infatuation and/or attachment level predict impaired interference control even in the absence of a love booster procedure, and whether individual differences in attachment level predict reduced adaptive cognitive control as measured by conflict adaptation and post-error slowing. Eighty-three young adults who had recently fallen in love completed a Stroop-like task, which yielded reliable indices of interference control and adaptive cognitive (...) control. We did not observe the predicted negative association between infatuation or attachment level and interference control. It might be that reduced interference control with love only happens when people are actively thinking about their beloved. In addition, we observed only weak evidence for the prediction t... (shrink)

Collins, John Francis; Carroll, Sandra The publication of the 'Norms for the Formation of Permanent Deacons and Guidelines for the Ministry and Life of Permanent Deacons' by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, in August 2016, has renewed focus on the role of permanent deacon. This article uses a heuristic structure to discuss the role of the permanent deacon in the Catholic Church in Australia. It then provides a historical perspective and background on the worker priest movement from the mid-twentieth (...) century to explore the possibility of its application to the contemporary role of permanent deacon. (shrink)

In the last few years, some attempts have been made to overcome the disparity between environmental ethics and business ethics. However, as the situation now stands the various positions in business ethics have not incorporated any well-developed theoretical foundation for environmental issues, and conversely, environmental ethics is failing to capture an audience that could profit greatly from utilizing its theoretical insights and research. In this paper, we attempt to provide a unified conceptual framework for business ethics and environmental ethics that (...) can further the dialogue that has recently begun, perhaps bringing it to a deeper theoretical level. (shrink)

À la différence du cinéma, les séries TV, genre mineure, regardé dans l’univers domestique, ont mis souvent en avant les femmes. À partir de la série Buffy, leurs héroïnes échappent aux stéréotypes de genre et allient violence, souci des autres et affirmation d’un pouvoir collectif. Au tournant du siècle certaines séries deviennent féministes et accompagnent la transformation de la vision des femmes, de leur âge, de leur orientation sexuelle, de leurs appartenances sociale et raciale. Il y a même des vieilles (...) et des méchantes. L’article détaille ces transformations dans l’évocation concrète des séries de référence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ontological and Other AssumptionsLloyd A. Wells (bio) and Sandra J. Rackley (bio)Fahrenberg and Cheetham have conducted an immensely thought-provoking study of the assumptions about human nature made by 800 students and pose a question about the future impact of these assumptions on individuals’ practice in professions including medicine and psychotherapy.This work represents a branch of “philosophical anthropology,” which considers assumptions people make about human nature. The authors used (...) a questionnaire, much of which was newly designed, to assess the assumptions made by university students studying psychology, philosophy, sciences, and other disciplines. Most of the respondents were studying at Freiburg, but some were sampled at several other universities in both the former East and West Germanies. Questions involved consciousness and the brain, evolution, free will, belief in God, the meaning of life, and theodicy.Given the importance of these beliefs and assumptions in so many peoples’ lives, it is quite surprising that there are so few modern data available, and this study ventures an important first step in assessing these assumptions. However, there are many problems inherent in this study (and any like it).The first, for us, is the validity of the questionnaire itself, an issue that was not specifically addressed in the paper. Face validity is a problem even in the few questions quoted directly in the paper. For example, some statements contain two clauses, and one could well agree with one without agreeing with another: “I do not know whether a God exists and I do not believe it is possible to know.” This is the most relevant answer for a true agnostic, but the assumption that “I do not know whether a God exists” does not necessarily link at all with “I do not believe it is possible to know.” Similarly, a theist might have trouble with the two clauses, “I know God really exists” and “I do not doubt this.” (Technically, knowledge does imply a lack of doubt, but belief certainly does not.) Particularly in the trilemmas, where various patterns of response were analyzed, these multiple-clause statements may have led students to respond in a manner inconsistent with their true beliefs and assumptions. Furthermore, many of the questions contain terms that may have been unfamiliar to first-year university students. The authors explain their rationale in not defining terms, but the lack of clarity about definitions may have led some of the students to not fully understand the questions asked and to perhaps influence the answers they chose.Misunderstanding of the questions may account for some of the disparities reported in the results. Other apparent inconsistencies, however, do not seem to be a result of unclear questions. For example, sixty percent of the students agreed with the statement that “I believe in … existence after death,” whereas forty-seven percent agreed with the statement that “when my brain is dead my consciousness and my person cease to be.” These [End Page 203] findings do not add up, and this study has several similar sets of data. People contradict themselves in long and complex questionnaires, and this may be a simple explanation for these findings, but is this the only explanation? How seriously did the students take the questionnaire, often given as part of their class? How honest were their responses?How generalizable are the findings of this study? It is very difficult even to speculate about this. The statistics are incomprehensible in light of the data given, and one must essentially take them on faith, wherever one falls on the God/theodicy questions. The design has many flaws, but we do learn how a subsample of German university students rate important factors about the meaning of life. Statements are made in the paper that the students’ results correlate with similar results for the general population, but this assertion seems to be based on a very few questions. One would like much more delineation of this apparent correlation, because we wonder about the juxtaposition of developmental factors with the answers the students gave to this questionnaire. First-year university students are at a critical developmental point, and it would be fascinating to follow this large cohort of students over time to see whether... (shrink)

In order to highlight the intimate relationship between imagining, drawing and making worlds, this essay questions the educational meaning of children to initiate in the action of drawing in face of the growing cultural tendency of the body being less and less required to produce senses. The incarnated action of drawing, as an aesthetic action of touching and being touched by the world when transposing the visible limits and entering into the intimacy of worldly invisibility, constitutes an experience that is (...) as recurrent and trivialized in school daily life as it is existentially complex due to its poetic power to enter the invisible and inaugurate worldviews. The historical disqualification of the image and imagination in Western thought, supported by the separation between subjectivity of the body and objectivity of the world, does not allow educational thought to consider the phenomenon of poetic imagination as an existential experience of language insertion in the world from the gesture of drawing. Gesture that finds its specificity in the instant the hand traces and inscribes lines on the surface of the supports as infinitely creative writing. The aesthetic gesture of drawing, temporalized by the rhythm of the body in the emergence of the fabulation that accompanies the repetition of the marks, implies a poetic experience of language that involves the fusion of two senses: that of the gesture in materiality and that of the mark configured in it, marked and cicatrized in the surface of the support by the body’s action that performed it. The approximation between education, arts and childhood allows us to highlight the philosophical and pedagogical tensions that involve the question of poetic imagination and to take another look at the action of drawing in the context of children's education. What emerges, from the dialogue between Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy, is the relevance of the educational intention of caring for the vital function of language as an aesthetic and poetic experience that is constituted in the processuality of the body to make something appear that produces and contains presence, that which promotes and expands the existential density of the real. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Biographical Note The A Priori The Rejection of Phenomenalism The Given in Experience Temporality and Process.

One of the seemingly dominant traits of pragmatic thought is its “antimetaphysical” attitude. And, indeed, the general methodology of pragmatism may seem by its very nature to exclude the possibility of speculative philosophy, for any pragmatic metaphysics must be at once faithful to the limits of meaningfulness and knowledge imposed by a pragmatic epistemology and in harmony with the scientific spirit of pragmatic philosophy in general. The following essay will examine a pragmatic methodology for metaphysics as it emerges when the (...) philosophies of C. S. Peirce and C. I. Lewis are used for mutual clarification. It is not here held that all pragmatists would accept the methodology which will emerge from such a mutual clarification; neither is it held that no pragmatists other than Peirce or Lewis would accept it. Moreover, it is not held that either Peirce or Lewis consciously embraced it in its entirety. This, however, is not to say that the present procedure is arbitrary, for it is justifiable by the intelligibility of the methodology of metaphysics which emerges and the usefulness of this methodology in clarifying the systematic consistency of epistemology and metaphysics in a pragmatically oriented philosophy. Indeed, according to the basic doctrines of pragmatism, no other justification can be offered for this or any interpretive schema. (shrink)