The elections of Harold Washington and Wilson Goode, along with the near election of Mel King, have generated new speculations about black urban adminstrations. The tacit assumptions here concern the significance of these administrations for racial democracy in the U.S. The fact that a black or Hispanic candidate is elected mayor is taken as evidence of “progress.” Presumably, if an electorate selects a candidate, that candidate must have been able to transcend previously insurmountable boundaries to galvanize a winning coalition. This (...) view, of course, does not account for the fact that blacks tend overwhelmingly — unless black candidates are woefully pock-marked politically — to vote black and whites are just as likely to vote white. (shrink)

Afro-American social thought lost its critical thrust in the 1970s, when the American state incorporated the organizing principles of civil rights/black power politics. Since that time the protest activism grounding black social thought has floundered in a contradiction. On the one hand, protest requires an alienated outsider evoking the specter of disruptive mobilization. On the other hand, racial politics has assumed the character of negotiated agreements among elites whose legitimacy derives from official positions within the corporate-state nexus, but neither what (...) is negotiated nor the negotiators themselves are amenable to mass mobilization. The former generally are not mass issues (e.g., magnitude of minority set-asides in contract letting), and the latter, structured in the environment of officialdom and rational administration, shrink from popular participation. (shrink)

Plato seems to have been pessimistic about how most people stand with regard to virtue. However, unlike the Stoics, he did not conclude that most people are vicious. Rather, as we know from discussions across several dialogues, he countenanced decent ethical conditions that fall short of genuine virtue, which he limited to the philosopher. Despite Plato's obvious interest in this issue, commentators rarely follow his lead by investigating in detail such conditions in the dialogues. When scholars do investigate what kind (...) of virtue, if any, Plato thinks is open to non-philosophers, they typically look to the Republic. But in the Republic Plato sets out an ideal city; therefore, the virtue available to non-philosophers there is likely different from what he thinks is available to them in the real world. If we want to determine Plato's thoughts about the virtue of actual non-philosophers, we must look elsewhere. In this paper, I set my sights on the Phaedo. (shrink)

Abstract:This article elaborates a normative Stakeholder Management Theory (SHMT) from a critical theory perspective. The paper argues that the normative theory elaborated by critical theorists such as Habermas exhibits important advantages over its rivals and that these advantages provide the basis for a theoretically more adequate version of SHMT. In the first section of the paper an account is given of normative theory from a critical theory perspective and its advantages over rival traditions. A key characteristic of the critical theory (...) approach is expressed as a distinction between three different normative realms, viz., legitimacy, morality, and ethics. In the second section, the outlines of a theory of stakeholder management are provided. First, three basic tasks of a theoretically adequate treatment of the normative analysis of stakeholder management are identified. This is followed by a discussion of how a critical theory approach to SHMT is able to fulfill these three tasks. (shrink)

Although numerous studies have been devoted to it, the history of wall painting in Late Antiquity is still very imperfectly known. This holds true especially where the chronology and stylistic development of late antique wall painting is concerned. Therefore, any serious study that seeks to advance our knowledge in this particular area is more than welcome, especially when it considers the most important corpus of wall paintings at our disposal, namely the painted cubicula and arcosolia that have survived in the (...) catacombs of Rome. The book under review here is such a study. It is a detailed a carefully-researched work that represents the revised version of a doctoral dissertation written at the University of Munich under the guidance of J.G. Deckers, himself a well known authority in the study of late antique art and archaeology. (shrink)

The practice whereby terminally ill patients choose to end their own lives painlessly by ingesting a drug prescribed by a physician has commonly been referred to as physician-assisted suicide. There is, however, a strong trend forming that seeks to deny that this act should properly be termed suicide. The purpose of this paper is to examine and reject the view that the term suicide should be abandoned in reference to what has been called physician-assisted suicide. I argue that there are (...) no good conceptual or philosophical reasons to avoid the suicide label. I contend that intending one’s death is essential to the nature of suicide, and this intention is normally required on the part of the terminally ill patient when she knowingly takes a life-ending drug. Additionally, the analysis shows that any plausible strategy that avoids the term suicide is counteracted by the way in which advocates of the practice want to make it legal. (shrink)

This article compares the information processing and dynamical systems perspectives on problem solving. Key theoretical constructs of the information-processing perspective include “searching” a “p...

This chapter contains sections titled: Early Career The Harlem Renaissance Contemporary Interpretations of Locke's Legacy.

Adolf Menzel was one of the most important German artists of the 19th century, yet he is scarcely known outside his native land. In this study a leading art historian argues that Menzel deserves to be recognized not only as one of the greatest painters and draftsmen of his century but also as a master realist whose work engages profoundly with an extraordinary range of issues - artistic, scientific, philosophical and socio-political. Michael Fried explores Menzel's large and fascinating oeuvre, and (...) in so doing seeks to make the artist's achievement accessible to a wide audience. (shrink)

I agree with Professor ter Meulen that there is no need to make a forced choice between “justice” and “solidarity” when it comes to determining what should count as fair access to needed health care. But he also asserts that solidarity is more fundamental than justice. That claim needs critical assessment. Ter Meulen recognizes that the concept of solidarity has been criticized for being excessively vague. He addresses this criticism by introducing the more precise notion of “humanitarian solidarity.” However, I (...) argue that these notions are still not precise enough and are in need of behavioral translation, especially in relation to the problem of fair health care rationing. More specifically, I argue that translation ought to take the form of a well-ordered process of rational democratic deliberation, which I describe and defend in this essay. Such a process is what is required to construct a working model of just solidarity as opposed to a merely abstract idealization of just solidarity. (shrink)

In the age of the `return to the empirical' in which the theoretical disputes of an earlier era seem to have fallen silent, we seek to excavate the intellectual conditions for reviving theoretical debate, for it is upon this recovery that deeper understanding of the nature and purpose of empirical social science depends. We argue against the all too frequent turn to ontology, whereby critical realists have sought an epistemological guarantor of sociological validity. We seek, to the contrary, to crystallize (...) a culturally-based, hermeneutic account of a rational social science. Derived from disputes within the sociology of culture, on the one hand, and the long-standing concerns of interpretive philosophy, on the other, we offer a cultural-sociological approach to epistemology. We view the production of truth in social science as a reading of a meaningful social world, and as a performance of truth-claims that is constrained by evidence, but whose success depends on other contextual factors. We conclude that the rationality of social science can be achieved only by forgoing ontology. Theories are abstractions of investigators' meanings that allow the interpretation of social meanings in turn, whether those are actions, relations, or structures. Successful explanations are those that intertwine these meaning structures of investigators and actors in an effective way. (shrink)

L. T. Hobhouse was fundamental to the New Liberal movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He authored many important works in the fields of philosophy, economics and social liberalism. First published in 1896, _The Theory of Knowledge_ considers the content and validity of knowledge, and the conditions on which our understanding of knowledge is based. It is a rich and important classic, which remains of value to students and academics with an interest in sociology, anthropology and the (...) philosophy of logic. (shrink)

Un modelo de la macrofilosofía es un intento de pensar la unidad de la filosofía, su actualidad para la cultura universal. Filosofía, como cualquier forma creativa de cultura, es un conocimiento en evolución, que puede ser apreciado según su capacidad de reflejar el espíritu humano. Un tal modelo macrofilosófico mediría, también, la evolución de la forma de la filosofía y tendría la relevancia de una metafilosofía. La macrofilosofía de G. Mayos supone la razón dialéctica; por consiguiente, la determinación de lo (...) dialéctico prepara la reflexión sobre la cualidad dialéctica del concepto en macrofilosofía. G. Mayos ve en la dialéctica hegeliana un paradigma para la macrofilosofía, porque es una dialéctica del concepto, adecuada para un pensamiento filosófico macrocategorial. Por otra parte, dos problemas básicos determinan la actitud filosófica de Adorno frente a la filosofía de Hegel: el concepto dialéctico y la relación espíritu-individuo. El pensamiento filosófico es modelo, pero el objeto de este modelo es inmanente, porque, para Adorno, todo es socialidad. Sin embargo, el sentido de la crítica que Adorno hace a Hegel es macrofilosófico. A partir de todas estas consideraciones, propondremos un modelo disciplinario de la macrofilosofía y, en consecuencia, un debate para una teoría actual de la razón dialéctica. (shrink)

We consider a proportional-prize contest to forecast future events, and show that, in equilibrium, this mechanism possesses perfect forecasting ability for any group size when the contestants share common knowledge about the probabilities by which future events realize. Data gathered in a laboratory experiment confirm the performance invariance to group size. By contrast, when realization probabilities are not common knowledge, there are some differences across group sizes. The mechanism operates marginally better with three or four compared to two players. However, (...) this effect is mainly driven by players’ behavior rather than by differences in the beliefs they form about the realization probabilities. (shrink)

Emotion Review, Ahead of Print. The question “what is emotion?” has long been at the core of theoretical debates. The IAC-E is a useful framework for understanding relationships among responses in emotional situations. However, this approach cannot address the nature of emotion. Researchers determine what counts as emotion in the IAC-E, and this decision impacts the relationships detected and inferences made. The assumptions of researchers about emotion change the output. Further, the model is not theoretically agnostic and is best suited (...) to examine emotion perception/knowledge, as in the simulations presented. According to some theories, experienced emotion is qualitatively different than situations that involve perceiving others' emotion or semantic knowledge. Addressing the nature of emotion requires empirical examination of the assumptions made in each theory. (shrink)