In this important collection of essays, Rochet examines the causes of banking crises around the world in recent decades, focusing on the lender of last resort; prudential regulation and the management of risk; and solvency regulations.

Annette Baier sets the title, the genre, and the task of her book from Hume’s essay "Of Moral Prejudices." Rather than arguing from or towards general principles, these essays call upon a wide range of reading, observation, and experience: we are not only meant to be enlightened, but also invited to adopt the reflective habits of mind they exemplify. Like Hume, Baier analyzes and evaluates our attitudes and customs; like him, she finds that our foibles and our strengths are closely (...) linked; and like him, she is both a proponent and a model of good sense. When she is unfairly prejudiced— as she is against what she sees as the harsh and narrow rigors of Kant—she is, with all the bonnehommie of Hume, more ready to tease than to demolish. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss nurses' ongoing difficulty in engaging with politics and address the persistent belief that political positioning is antithetical to quality nursing care. I suggest that nurses are not faced with choosing either caring for their patients or engaging with politics. I base my discussion on the assumption that such dichotomy is meaningless and that engaging with issues of relationships firmly grounds nursing in the realm of politics. I argue that the ethical merit of nursing care relies (...) instead on positioning nurses squarely at the centre of care activities, experiences, and functions. Such positioning makes possible what Foucault called ‘practices of self‐formation’, that is, micro‐level processes that balance out the ubiquitous economic, cultural, legal, and scientific technologies that steadily constitute subjects in this era of modernity. Nurses, then, become not a group that needs to be controlled and governed, but individuals who must care for their self before they may care for anyone else. (shrink)

We are all ambivalent at every turn. “Should I skip class on this gorgeous spring day?” “Do I really want to marry Eric?” Despite being uncomfortable and unsettling, there are some forms of ambivalence that are appropriate and responsible. Even when they seem trivial and superficial, they reveal some of our deepest values, the self-images we would like to project. In this paper, I analyze collaborative ambivalence, the kind of ambivalence that arises from our identity-forming close relationships. The sources and (...) resolutions of collaborative ambivalence reveal how much of our thinking—and so also of our motivational structure—emerges from the details of our collaborative and dialogical engagements. The imaginative skills and strategies exercised in remaining justifiably of two minds—of preserving appropriate ambivalence—are central to practical reasoning. Because these skills provide models for addressing conflicts in the public sphere, because they prompt shared deliberation, they are among the civic virtues. (shrink)

Upon his controversial and successful publication of Words of a Believer, Lamennais became one of the most influential thinkers in Europe and America. Lamennais’s other works, such as Modern Slavery, have received surprisingly less attention, considering that with it he made a re-description of the concept people and consequently of democracy. Lamennais’s presentation of the antagonism between liberty and tyranny, between a few oppressors and the majority of the oppressed turned him into a key reference for the democratic, republican, and (...) socialist political cultures. We can then speak of a “Lamennais moment” as opposed to the “Guizot moment,” which offered conflicting world views. This article combines an analysis of the translations and circulation of Modern Slavery in Spain and Latin America with the study of the new meanings of the concept people. (shrink)

The essays in this volume form a commentary on Descartes' _Meditations_. Following the sequence of the meditational stages, the authors analyze the function of each stage in transforming the reader, to realize his essential nature as a rational inquirer, capable of scientific, demonstrable knowledge of the world. There are essays on the genre of meditational writing, on the implications of the opening cathartic section of the book on Descartes' theory of perception and his use of skeptical arguments; essays on the (...) theory of ideas and their role of Descartes' reconstructive analytic method; essays on the proofs for the existence of God, on the role of the will in the formation and malformation of judgments; and the essays on the foundations of the science of extension and on Descartes' account of the union of mind and body. (shrink)

The challenge of explaining the emotions has engaged the attention of the best minds in philosophy and science throughout history. Part of the fascination has been that the emotions resist classification. As adequate account therefore requires receptivity to knowledge from a variety of sources. The philosopher must inform himself of the relevant empirical investigation to arrive at a definition, and the scientist cannot afford to be naive about the assumptions built into his conceptual apparatus. The contributors to this volume have (...) approached the problem of characterizing and classifying emotions from the perspectives of neurophysiology, psychology, and social psychology as well as that of philosophical psychology. They discuss the difficulties that arise in classifying the emotions, assessing their appropriateness and rationality, and determining their function in motivating moral action. (shrink)

Students of philosophy, psychology, sociology, and literature will welcome this collection of original essays on self-deception and related phenomena such as wishful thinking, bad faith, and false consciousness. The book has six sections, each exploring self-deception and related phenomena from a different perspective.

In this volume, thirteen philosophers contribute new essays analyzing the criteria for personal identity and their import on ethics and the theory of action: it presents contemporary treatments of the issues discussed in Personal Identity, edited by John Perry (University of California Press, 1975).

Essays on Aristotle's Rhetoric offers a fresh and comprehensive assessment of a classic work. Aristotle's influence on the practice and theory of rhetoric, as it affects political and legal argumentation, has been continuous and far-reaching. This anthology presents Aristotle's Rhetoric in its original context, providing examples of the kind of oratory whose success Aristotle explains and analyzes. The contributors—eminent philosophers, classicists, and critics—assess the role and the techniques of rhetorical persuasion in philosophic discourse and in the public sphere. They connect (...) Aristotle's Rhetoric to his other work on ethics and politics, as well as to his ideas on logic, psychology, and philosophy of language. The collection as a whole invites us to reassess the place of rhetoric in intellectual and political life. (shrink)

While cultural identification --cultural essentialism and reification-- can play an important liberating role. it is also internally oppressive; it denies the dynamics of intra cultural divisions.

Aristotle's _Nicomachean Ethics_ deals with character and its proper development in the acquisition of thoughtful habits directed toward appropriate ends. The articles in this unique collection, many new or not readily available, form a continuos commentary on the _Ethics_. Philosophers and classicists alike will welcome them.

There is more akrasia than meets the eye: it can occur in speech and perception, cognitively and emotionally as well as between decision and action. The lures of akrasia are the same as those that are exercised in ordinary psychological and cognitive inferential contexts. But because it is over-determined and because it occurs in opaque intentional contexts, its attribution remains highly fallible.

This article discusses the impact of the local context on the implementation of a teaching practice observation protocol. It explores the methodological adaptations made within the framework of a collaborative research in professional didactics in French Polynesia. This research, aimed at involving teachers in the shared analysis of their own teaching activity of “Polynesian languages and culture”, required taking into account their context of engagement in order to reinvent a research approach meeting the needs of the researcher as well as (...) those of the teachers. Taking into account their respective cultural backgrounds, it allowed a conceptual widening of the theoretical field founding the approach. (shrink)

‘Our passions are psychological instruments,’ Rousseau says, ‘with which nature has armed our hearts for the defence of our persons and of all that is necessary for our well-being. [But] the more we need external things, the more we are vulnerable to obstacles that can overwhelm us; and the more numerous and complex our passions become. They are naturally proportionate to our needs.’.

A close and sympathetic reading of the tensions between naturalism and non-naturalism in Hume's theory shows us something of the ideological issues involved, issues rooted in the differences between the political and social conditions which make naturalism and non-naturalism seem plausible analyses of normative discourse. If we read Hume as a transitional figure, who documented and analyzed a shift in the paradigms of moral situations and problems, we see that the naturalistic controversy is not the sort of disagreement that forces (...) us to choose between the two positions. Hume shows us one way in which the two theories can be bridged and made compatible in a "unified" theory: that is why he can, without being inconsistent, be read as a non-naturalist by some interpreters, and as a naturalist by others. (shrink)

Aristotle’s phronimos is a model of the virtues: he fuses sound practical reasoning with well formed desires. Among the skills of practical reasoning are those of finding the right words and arguments in the process of deliberation. As Aristotle puts it, virtue involves doing the right thing at the right time and for the right reason. Speaking well, saying the right thing in the right way is not limited to public oratory: it pervades practical life. Aristotle’s phronimos must acquire the (...) habits that are engaged in rhetorical persuasion. (shrink)

This article interrogates the extent to which institutional discourses on the governance of religious minorities are useful to think about the complexity of how religion gets negotiated in the quotidian. It takes as its starting point the exploration of the discourse on religious governance in the province of Quebec organized around the notion of request for accommodations. Through an analysis of public policy documents, it examines facets of this discourse of request, including the role it plays in delimiting what we (...) imagine the religious to be and how we imagine it to work. Second, drawing on interviews with self-identified Muslims in Montreal, the article explores how piety gets negotiated in their everyday. These narratives are approached as fertile sites to think differently about the recognition of difference. This two-pronged perspective acts as an invitation to think more broadly about not only what institutional discourses “produce” but also what they “obscure.”. (shrink)