This study examined 153 foodstuff commercials on a popular British television channel. Eighty ‘Daytime’ and 73 ‘Evening’ commercials were separately coded for 11 content categories; constituting attributes pertaining to central advertised figures. Although both sexes were portrayed stereotypically for eight daytime and nine evening content analytic categories, daytime advertisements tended to reveal advertisers' awareness of a female audience which tended to be reflected in greater proportions of non-stereotyped female depictions rather than a salience of female stereotypes. Results are discussed with (...) respect to implicated gender ideologies and their accuracy against the wider sex-role climate in society. (shrink)

Research on linguistic interaction suggests that two or more individuals can sometimes form adaptive and cohesive systems. We describe an “alignment system” as a loosely interconnected set of cognitive processes that facilitate social interactions. As a dynamic, multi-component system, it is responsive to higher-level cognitive states such as shared beliefs and intentions (those involving collective intentionality) but can also give rise to such shared cognitive states via bottom-up processes. As an example of putative group cognition we turn to transactive memory (...) and suggest how further research on alignment in these cases might reveal how such systems can be genuinely described as cognitive. Finally, we address a prominent critique of collective cognitive systems, arguing that there is much empirical and explanatory benefit to be gained from considering the possibility of group cognitive systems, especially in the context of small-group human interaction. (shrink)

Case-based instruction has been regarded by many as a viable alternative to traditional lecture-based education and training. However, little is known about how case-based training techniques impact training effectiveness. This study examined the effects of two such techniques: (a) presentation of alternative outcome scenarios to a case, and (b) conducting a structured outcome evaluation. Consistent with the hypotheses, results indicate that presentation of alternative outcome scenarios reduced knowledge acquisition, reduced sensemaking and ethical decision-making strategy use, and reduced decision ethicality. Conducting (...) a structured outcome evaluation had no impact on these outcomes. Results indicate that those who use case-based instruction should take care to use clear, less complex cases with only a singular outcome if they are seeking these types of outcomes. (shrink)

Our ability to rapidly distinguish new from already stored information is important for behavior and decision making, but the underlying processes remain unclear. Here, we tested the hypothesis that contextual cues lead to a preselection of information and, therefore, faster recognition. Specifically, on the basis of previous modeling work, we hypothesized that recognition time depends on the amount of relevant content stored in long-term memory, i.e., set size, and we explored possible age-related changes of this relationship in older humans. In (...) our paradigm, subjects learned by heart four different word lists written in different colors. On the day of testing, a color cue indicated with a probability of 50% that a subsequent word might be from the corresponding list or from a list of new words. The old/new status of the word had to be distinguished via button press. As a main finding, we can show in a sample of n = 49 subjects, including 26 younger and 23 older humans, that response times increased linearly and logarithmically as a function of set size in both age groups. Conversely, corrected hit rates decreased as a function of set size with no statistically significant differences between both age groups. As such, our findings provide empirical evidence that contextual information can lead to a preselection of relevant information stored in long-term memory to promote efficient recognition, possibly by cyclical top-down and bottom-up processing. (shrink)

Framed within theories of fairness and stress, the current paper examines bystanders’ intervention intention to workplace bullying across two studies based on international employee samples (N = 578). Using a vignette-based design, we examined the role of bullying mode (offline vs. online), bullying type (personal vs. work-related) and target closeness (friend vs. work colleague) on bystanders’ behavioural intentions to respond, to sympathise with the victim (defender role), to reinforce the perpetrator (prosecutor role) or to be ambivalent (commuter role). Results illustrated (...) a pattern of the influence of mode and type on bystander intentions. Bystanders were least likely to support the victim and more likely to agree with perpetrator actions for cyberbullying and work-related acts. Tentatively, support emerged for the effect of target closeness on bystander intentions. Although effect sizes were small, when the target was a friend, bystanders tended to be more likely to act and defend the victim and less likely to reinforce the perpetrator. Implications for research and the potential for bystander education are discussed. (shrink)

BackgroundAlthough a large number of clinical trials on interventions demonstrating efficacy (or lack thereof) are conducted annually, much of this evidence is not accessible to scientists and clinicians.ObjectivesWe aimed to determine the publication rate of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) trials that have been registered in clinical trial registries, and the factors associated with publication.MethodsTrials, completed on January 15, 2015, were identified via the US National Institutes of Health clinical trials registry, the European Union Clinical Trials Register and the WHO International (...) Clinical Trials Registry Platform. A systematic search for publications (published by the end of March 2018) related to each of the registered trials were then performed.ResultsFour hundred and thirty-eight of 1982 potentially eligible trials were included. Only 34% of interventional trials were registered prior to initiation, 9% were registered within 2 months of starting and 20% after trial completion. Of the 438 included trials, 72% had generated peer-reviewed publications, while an additional 7% had disseminated results in some other form (such as on the trial database), 26 months after trial completion. Randomisation of a trial was the only factor individually associated with publication, in logistic regression analysis (p < 0.001). Intervention type, university as sponsor and study registration prior to completion were factors that influenced the time to publication, using Cox regression (p < 0.001).ConclusionsThis study underscores the importance of timely and accurate publication and dissemination of trial results, in order to avoid the potential waste of resources and to ensure research integrity and patient safety. We suggest that authors and journal editors adhere to conditions set out by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and that more diligent data sharing is encouraged through prospective trial registration and trial reporting websites. (shrink)

In the call from papers from childhood & philosophy we hear an invitation to philosophize. But what does such an invitation mean? In what ways does an invitation or invitation to philosophize encourage us to suspension our accepted meanings and empower us to sustain this challenge? These are the questions of two teachers who have, first, accepted the prior invitation to philosophize with children, and have now accepted the invitation to think and write together about that experience. This essay was (...) prompted by two questions posed by the children with whom we philosophize: In writing it, we have experienced other ways of thinking and living educational practice, and, through our encounters with our students, find ourselves challenged to live in more inventive and therefore more childlike ways within the framework of the public school, here understood in the sense of scholé. In order to reflect on the two questions, we set off from the concept of consummation, and we engage in dialogue with both a pedagogy of the question, and the concept of equality of intelligence, in order to open a pathway of thought that addresses them. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose a systematic classification of emotions which can also characterize their nature. The first challenge we address is the submission of clear criteria for a theory of emotions that determine which mental phenomena are emotions and which are not. We suggest that emotions as a subclass of mental states are determined by their functional roles. The second and main challenge is the presentation of a classification and theory of emotions that can account for (...) all existing varieties. We argue that we must classify emotions according to four developmental stages: 1. pre-emotions as unfocussed expressive emotion states, 2. basic emotions, 3. primary cognitive emotions, and 4. secondary cognitive emotions. We suggest four types of basic emotions (fear, anger, joy and sadness) which are systematically differentiated into a diversity of more complex emotions during emotional development. The classification distinguishes between basic and non-basic emotions and our multi-factorial account considers cognitive, experiential, physiological and behavioral parameters as relevant for constituting an emotion. However, each emotion type is constituted by a typical pattern according to which some features may be more significant than others. Emotions differ strongly where these patterns of features are concerned, while their essential functional roles are the same. We argue that emotions form a unified ontological category that is coherent and can be well defined by their characteristic functional roles. Our account of emotions is supported by data from developmental psychology, neurobiology, evolutionary biology and sociology. (shrink)

This paper surveys the recent developments in the area that grew out of attempts to solve an analog of Hilbert's Tenth Problem for the field of rational numbers and the rings of integers of number fields. It is based on a plenary talk the author gave at the annual North American meeting of ASL at the University of Notre Dame in May of 2009.

Empirical studies indicate that business compliance with the UK Modern Slavery Act is disappointing, but they struggle to make sense of this phenomenon. This article offers a novel framework to understand how business organizations construct the meaning of compliance with the UK Modern Slavery Act. Our analysis builds on the endogeneity of law theory developed by Edelman. Empirically, our study is based on the analysis of the modern slavery statements of 10 FTSE 100 (Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index) companies (...) in the food and tobacco sector, backed by interviews with business, civil society, and public officers. We offer a dynamic model that draws attention to the role of compliance professionals in framing ambiguous rules and devising a variety of organizational responses to modern slavery law. Contrary to extant research that tends to praise organizations for going “beyond compliance”, our study underlines the risks of managerialization of modern slavery law, whereby merely symbolic structures come to be associated with legal compliance, even when they are ineffective at tackling modern slavery. (shrink)

This book examines Greek engagements with the past as articulations of memory formulated against the contingency of chance associated with temporality. Based on a phenomenological understanding of temporality, it identifies four memorializing strategies: continuity , regularity , development, and acceptance of chance. This framework serves in pursuing a twofold aim: to reconstruct the literary field of memory in fifth-century bce Greece; and to interpret Greek historiography as a memorializing mode. The key contention advanced by this approach is that acts of (...) memory entailed an “idea of history” that was articulated not only in historiography, but also in epinician poetry, elegy, tragedy, and oratory. The book offers a rich account of poetic conventions and contexts through which each of these genres counterbalanced contingency through the use of exemplary and traditional modes of memory. This fine analysis highlights the grip of the present on the past as a significant feature of both historiographical and nonhistoriographical genres.The essay argues that this work fills a disciplinary gap by extending the reflection on memory to a new period, Greek antiquity. The retrospective positioning of this period at the outset of Western historical thought brings Grethlein's investigation to the center of debates about memory, temporality, and the meaning history. In engaging with the book's argument, the essay suggests that historiographical memory emerged in Greece not as a first-order encounter with time, but as a second-order encounter with forgetting. This confrontation marked a certain separation of historiography from other memorializing genres. Whereas poetic and rhetorical memories were posited against contingency, historiography sought to retrieve those aspects of the past that may otherwise have been irretrievably lost and forgotten. In doing so, it formulated the historiographical imperative as a negation of forgetting that problematized the truth-value of memory and the very act of remembering the past. (shrink)

Recent empirical studies have established that disgust plays a role in moral judgment. The normative significance of this discovery remains an object of philosophical contention, however; ‘disgust skeptics’ such as Martha Nussbaum have argued that disgust is a distorting influence on moral judgment and has no legitimate role to play in assessments of moral wrongness. I argue, pace Nussbaum, that disgust’s role in the moral domain parallels its role in the physical domain. Just as physical disgust tracks physical contamination and (...) pollution, so moral disgust tracks social contamination. I begin by examining the arguments for skepticism about disgust and show that these arguments threaten to overgeneralize and lead to a widespread skepticism about the justifiability of our moral judgments. I then look at the positive arguments for according disgust a role in moral judgment, and suggest that disgust tracks invisible social contagions in much the same way as it tracks invisible physical contagions, thereby serving as a defense against the threat of socio-moral contamination. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide an account of the wrong that is done to women when everyday people fail to believe allegations of sexual assault made by women. I argue that an everyday person wrongs both the accuser and women causally distant from the accuser when they fail to believe the accuser’s allegation. First, I argue that there are responses that we, as everyday members of society, owe to victims of sexual assault. A condition enabling everyday people to respond in (...) the way owed to victims is that they have an outright belief that the accuser was assaulted. Actively suspending judgement about whether a crime occurred is in tension with the ability to respond to the victim in a way that supports and validates them. When an everyday person fails to have an outright belief in the truth of an allegation, they wrong the accuser because they risk failing to satisfy the conditions enabling them to fulfill their obligation to her. Second, I argue that everyday people wrong women who are causally distant from the accuser because in our social context, women are often treated in particular ways – especially in the sexual domain – because they are women. As a result, when women hear that an everyday person fails to believe a particular allegation, they easily project themselves into the accuser’s position and reasonably worry that if they were to be assaulted, they too would be met with doubt and disbelief by the people in their community. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine a special subgroup of emotion: self-referential emo- tions such as shame, pride and guilt. Self-referential emotions are usually conceptualized as (i) essentially involving the subject herself and as (ii) having complex conditions such as the capacity to represent others’ thoughts. I will show that rather than depending on a fully fledged ‘theory of mind’ and an explicit language-based self-representation, (i) pre-forms of self-referential emotions appear at early developmental stages already exhib- iting their (...) characteristic structure of the intentional object of the emotion being identical with or intricately related to the subject experiencing the emotional state and that (ii) they precede and substantially contribute to the development of more complex representations and to the development of a self-concept, to social interaction and to ways of understand- ing of other minds. (shrink)

The philosophical debate over disgust and its role in moral discourse has focused on disgust’s epistemic status: can disgust justify judgments of moral wrongness? Or is it misplaced in the moral domain—irrelevant at best, positively distorting at worst? Correspondingly, empirical research into disgust has focused on its role as a cause or amplifier of moral judgment, seeking to establish how and when disgust either causes us to morally condemn actions, or strengthens our pre-existing tendencies to condemn certain actions. Both of (...) these approaches to disgust are based on a set of assumptions that I call, in what follows, the evidential model of disgust. This paper proposes an alternative model, which I call the response model. Instead of looking at disgust as a cause and justification of judgments of moral wrongness, I will argue that disgust is better understood as a response to wrongness. More precisely, I argue that disgust is a response to norm violations, and that it is a fitting response insofar as norm violations are potentially contagious and therefore pose a threat to the stability and maintenance of norms. (shrink)

The article argues that there are different ways of justifying suspension of judgement. We suspend judgement not only privatively, that is, because we lack evidence, but also positively, that is, because there is evidence that provides reasons for suspending judgement: suspension is more than the rational fallback position in cases of insufficient evidence. The article applies the distinction to recent discussions about the role of suspension for inquiry, Turri's puzzle about withholding, and formal representations of suspension.

While examples of bacteria benefiting eukaryotes are increasingly documented, studies examining effects of eukaryote hosts on microbial fitness are rare. Beneficial bacteria are often called “mutualistic” even if mutual reciprocity of benefits has not been demonstrated and despite the plausibility of other explanations for these microbes' beneficial effects on host fitness. Furthermore, beneficial bacteria often occur in diverse communities, making mutualism both empirically and conceptually difficult to demonstrate. We suggest reserving the terms “mutualism” and “parasitism” for pairwise interactions where the (...) relationship is largely independent of other species and can be verified by measuring the fitness effect experienced by both partners. In hosts with diverse microbial communities, we propose re‐formulating some of the essential questions of symbiosis research – e.g. concerning specificity, transmission mode, and common evolutionary fates – as questions of community ecology and ecosystem function, allowing important biological interactions to be investigated without making assumptions about reciprocity. Understanding the fitness of host‐associated bacteria is a crucial component of investigations into the role of microbes in eukaryote evolution. (shrink)

In this paper, we put forward an interdisciplinary framework describing different levels of self-representations, namely non-conceptual, conceptual and propositional self-representations. We argue that these different levels of self-representation are differently affected by cultural upbringing: while propositional self-representations rely on “theoretical” concepts and are thus strongly influenced by cultural upbringing, non-conceptual self-representations are uniform across cultures and thus universal. This differentiation offers a theoretical specification of the distinction between an independent and interdependent self-construal put forward in cross-cultural psychology. Hence, this does (...) not only allow for a deeper understanding of different self-conceptions, but also for a formulation of new hypotheses regarding the cultural influence on self-representations. As one example, we will highlight the role of the proposed levels of self-representation for emotional experience and formulate some major implications of our interdisciplinary framework for future empirical research. (shrink)

Are WEIRD societies unrepresentative of humanity? According to Henrich et al., they are not useful for generalizing about humans because they are at the extreme end of the distribution for societal formations. In their vision, it is best to stick with the traditional societies for speculations about human nature. This commentary offers a more realistic starting point, and, oddly enough, concludes that WEIRD populations may be more compatible with humans' evolved nature than are most traditional societies.

Genetic and other biotechnologies are starting to impact significantly upon society and individuals within it. Rose and Novas draw on an analysis of many patient groups to sketch out the broad notion of biocitizenship as a device for describing how the empowered and informed individual, group or network can engage with bioscience. In this paper, we examine critically the notion of biocitizenship, drawing on both sociological fieldwork that grounds the debate in the views of a large and varied group of (...) concerned actors. Using work within green politics, we identify shortcomings in the concept of biocitizenship as it has so far been explicated. The value assumptions lying behind an account of biocitizenship, and its tendency to see issues through a reductive lens, are examined. Alternative views of values and goals, which may undermine any alleged rights and duties, are explored using interviews and other ethnographic data that illustrates the complexity of the terrain. The reductive lens of biocitizenship is explored through contrast with the wider scope of concerns emanating from various sources, including many within green politics. If such complexities are not recognised, there is a danger that a concept of biocitizenship may serve to create and amplify inequalities. Problems with identity issues are key: the construction of identity is complex and many groups are explicitly rejecting the ‘biological’ label. We discuss the multiple relations of citizens with the biotech and pharmaceutical industries. Arguably, existing inequalities in power relationships, exploitation, commodification and ownership patterns are being perpetuated in novel ways through the new biosciences. We pose the question of whether it is possible to construct a concept of biocitizenship that overcomes these problems. (shrink)

The article presents an overview of the most interesting ideas, topics, and discussions among those constituting the problem field of social and political philosophy in post-Soviet Russia.

Views of ‘plant consciousness’ in the literature are classified on a scale ranging from descriptions of plant phenomena using consciousness as a metaphor, to explicit statements that plants are conscious beings. The idea of plant consciousness is far from new, but it has received a new impetus from recent claims by psychics to communicate with plants. The literature surveyed is widely scattered and very diverse, but it can teach us much about the views that various segments of society hold on (...) plant consciousness. (shrink)

Eighteenth-Century Stoic Poetics: Shaftesbury, Akenside, and the Discipline of the Imagination offers a fresh perspective on the eighteenth-century poetics of Lord Shaftesbury and Mark Akenside. This book traces the two authors' debt to Roman Stoic spiritual exercises and early modern conceptions of the care of the self, which informs their view of the poetic imagination as a bundle of techniques designed to manage impressions, cultivate right images in the mind and rectify judgement. Alexandra Bacalu traces the roots of this (...) articulation in early modern writings on the imagination, as well as in Restoration and Augustan debates on wit, exploring the fruitful tension between ideas of imaginative enthusiasm and imaginative regulation that it provokes. (shrink)

This introduction to the Focus section “Let’s Get to Work: Bringing Labor History and the History of Science Together” considers the need for and implications of a labor history of science. What would the broad contours of such an approach be? And what new insights, into both the past and the present, could be revealed? The contributions to this Focus section show how a labor history of science broadens our understanding of the practice and practitioners of science. They also use (...) these historical narratives recursively, to reflect on the practice of doing history of science. And they suggest that we come up short in our obligations to the labor of our field’s past and present. This introduction offers a brief overview of the points of intersection between the fields of labor history and history of science and indicates where these intersections might be more profitably developed. (shrink)

Previous research suggested a role of gaze in preference formation, not merely as an expression of preference, but also as a causal influence. According to the gaze cascade hypothesis, the longer subjects look at an item, the more likely they are to develop a preference for it. However, to date the connection between viewing and liking has been investigated predominately with self-paced viewing conditions in which the subjects were required to select certain items from simultaneously presented stimuli on the basis (...) of perceived visual attractiveness. Such conditions might promote a default, but non-mandatory connection between viewing and liking. To explore whether the connection is separable, we examined the evaluative processing of single naturalistic food images in a 2 x 2 design, conducted completely within subjects, in which we varied both the type of exposure (self-paced versus time-controlled) and the type of evaluation (non-exclusive versus exclusive). In the self-paced exclusive evaluation, longer viewing was associated with a higher likelihood of a positive evaluation. However, in the self-paced non-exclusive evaluation, the trend reversed such that longer viewing durations were associated with lesser ratings. Furthermore, in the time-controlled tasks, both with non-exclusive and exclusive evaluation, there was no significant relationship between the viewing duration and the evaluation. The overall pattern of results was consistent for viewing times measured in terms of exposure duration (i.e., the duration of stimulus presentation on the screen) and in terms of actual gaze duration (i.e., the amount of time the subject effectively gazed at the stimulus on the screen). The data indicated that viewing does not intrinsically lead to a higher evaluation when evaluating single food images; instead, the relationship between viewing duration and evaluation depends on the type of task. We suggest that self-determination of exposure duration may be a prerequisite for any influence from viewing time on evaluative processing, regardless of whether the influence is facilitative. Moreover, the purported facilitative link between viewing and liking appears to be limited to exclusive evaluation, when only a restricted number of items can be included in a chosen set. (shrink)

Is there anything wrong with publishing philosophical work which one does not believe (publishing without belief, henceforth referred to as ‘PWB’)? I argue that there is not: the practice isn’t intrinsically wrong, nor is there a compelling consequentialist argument against it. Therefore, the philosophical community should neither proscribe nor sanction it. The paper proceeds as follows. First, I’ll clarify and motivate the problem, using both hypothetical examples and a recent real-world case. Next, I’ll look at arguments that there is something (...) wrong with PWB, and show that none is sound. Then, I’ll give some reasons for thinking a norm against PWB is detrimental to the profession. Do I believe these arguments? If I’m right, it shouldn’t matter. (shrink)

Kant is compared with Socrates because the two philosophers have much in common. Both thinkers were central figures in their time. Kant revolutionised the philosophy of the modern period dealing with questions of ethics and epistemology; Socrates brought about a similar revolution in ancient Greek philosophy. The image of Socrates continues to inspire modern scholars, the main features of this image being rationality and publicity. Socrates is seen as an arch-rationalist and the founder of science and philosophy as a whole. (...) Besides, he practised philosophy publicly, being an antipode of another ancient Greek philosopher, Pythagoras, whose doctrines were secret. Coming together in the image of Socrates, publicity and rationality mutually condition each other. This again is a feature shared with Kant who put forward the concept of the public and private use of reason. Today, the term “publicity” should be replaced by the more accurate term “openness.” Like publicity, openness implies accessibility of knowledge to the largest possible number of people. However, openness is a broader concept: it makes it possible both to explain the interconnection between the freedom of reason and its publicity advocated by Kant and to draw a demarcation line between Socrates and the Sophists who were also public intellectuals. Whereas the Sophists sought personal gain and popularity, Socrates viewed the practice of philosophy as a form of self-sacrifice for the good of society; this led the Sophists to relativism and Socrates to the discovery of rational thinking. The conclusion is that openness, interpreted as accessibility of knowledge and the possibility of its development, constitutes the key component of rationality. (shrink)

A standard view in philosophy is that knowledge entails justification. Yet recent research suggests otherwise. We argue that this admirable and striking research suffers from an important limitation: participants were asked about knowledge but not justification. Thus it is possible that people attributed knowledge partly because they thought the belief was justified. Perhaps though, if given the opportunity, people would deny justification while still attributing knowledge. It is also possible that earlier findings were due to perspective taking. This paper reports (...) further research that directly addresses these questions. Our findings support the hypothesis that knowledge entails justification on the ordinary view. (shrink)

ObjectiveOur research aim is to enrich the conceptualization of high conflict post-divorce co-parenting by understanding the dynamic process involved.BackgroundThe studied phenomena were explored by linking previous scientific knowledge to practice.MethodWe cross-referenced the previous study results with the experiences reported by eight professionals and tried to answer the following research question: how professionals’ experience and previous scientific knowledge contribute to a better understanding of HC post-divorce co-parenting? Individual face to face interviews were conducted and analyzed regarding the qualitative theoretical reasoning of (...) thematic analysis.ResultsAnalysis allowed us to highlight how four main axes are related to HC post-divorce co-parenting: Parents for life, Acting in the child’s best interests, Managing disagreements, and Healing the separation.ConclusionOur findings capture high conflict post-divorce co-parenting as a multidimensional dynamic process. As such, dealing with co-parenting disagreements must be understood as a moment in a process that is influenced by, and influences, other dimensions.ImplicationsInterventions must consider the four dimensions and their reciprocal interactions. The essential elements underlying parents’ difficulties may reside at a multiplicity of levels: inter-relational, contextual, and intrapsychic. Each level contains key potential factors in understanding these families, and in formulating intervention guidelines. (shrink)

Defending first-person introspective access to own mental states, we argue against Carruthers' claim of mindreading being prior to meta-cognition and for a fundamental difference between how we understand our own and others' mental states. We conclude that a model based on one mechanism but involving two different kinds of access for self and other is sufficient and more consistent with the evidence.

Cet article a déjà paru dans Techniques & Culture en ligne, 48-49 | 2007 Résumé : L'œuvre d'André Leroi-Gourhan est traversée par une anthropologie du rythme. Celle-ci ne part pas d'une socialité constituée, de rythmes dits « sociaux », mais inscrit au contraire l'analyse de la rythmicité dans une approche de l'homme comme être vivant, comme totalité indivise. Elle pose en des termes renouvelés le problème classique du groupement des hommes et des liens entre l'individu et son milieu. Avec la (...) question - Anthropologie. (shrink)

Despite our interests in conceptual schemes, paradigms, styles of reasoning, levels of explanation, and populationist modes of theorizing, many philosophers ignore the fact that instruction occurs in situ. This paper highlights the importance of cultural location by reflecting upon the author’s experience as an instructor of modernity at Marshall University, a regional state institution in Huntington, West Virginia. For many Appalachian students, issues barely tolerated by others (as part of their required history sequence) are uniquely resonant. At the same time, (...) existing power structures—and the very real limits established by those structures—discourage Appalachian students from embracing or even entertaining the canonical themes of modernity. Immersing oneself in the regional culture, instead of bemoaning it, enables a philosophy instructor to examine modernity from both the pre- and postmodern perspectives, while also conveying to students that their education matters a great deal to the fate of the region. (shrink)

It has been alleged that Carolus Linnaeus practised Eurocentrism, sexism and racism in naming plant genera after famous botanists, and excluding ‘barbarous names’. He has therefore been said to practise ‘linguistic imperialism’. This paper examines whether Linnaeus applied ‘linguistic imperialism’ to the naming of Chinese plants. On the basis of examples such as Thea (¼Camellia), Urena, Basella, Annona, Sapindus (¼Koelreuteria), and Panax, I conclude that Linnaeus used generic names of diverse origins. However, he misidentified Chinese plants’ habitats, and acted on (...) these misapprehensions. (shrink)

Why do we say that something is unspeakable, even though we know the issue well? We find in many cultural contexts the classification of something as ‘unspeakable'. Using semantics and semiotic theory separating between ‘concept', ‘sign', and ‘reference object of the sign' in several cases where the ‘unspeakable' is described, we will discuss the functions of ‘the unspeakable‘ as a cultural phenomenon. Philosophers use the term frequently with reference to their culture. In our article we will look at the socio-cultural (...) conditions of the concept of ‘the unspeakable'. While it seems that this concept is universal, functions and meanings of this concept vary depending on the cultural settings. We will examine in this article the functions of this concept comparing the use of it in different cultures with religious and mythological impact expressed in this concept. Furthermore, we will look at the linguistic settings that allow us a construction like ‘the unspeakable' to be used as a representation for something not spoken in speech, but existing in another cultural or transcendental sphere. We will show that the expression serves as a semiotic replacement for issues that could be articulated, but due to cultural limits like religion or myths as act of cultural censorship should not be articulated in speech. (shrink)