Carrie Figdor presents a critical assessment of how psychological terms are used to describe the non-human biological world. She argues against the anthropocentric attitude which takes human cognition as the standard against which non-human capacities are measured, and offers an alternative basis for naturalistic explanation of the mind.

This paper presents a constructivist grounded theory on the decision-making process that UK home and alternative educators undertake and the related influencing factors. Twenty-one participants from a diverse range of backgrounds were interviewed between one and three times over a two-year period. Some were current home and alternative educators and others were undecided, or had changed their minds about home educating. The core process is entitled ‘Stepping out of the system?’ It was constructed from three main categories: attitudinal direction, surveying (...) the landscape and negotiating obstacles. Parents have opinions of school that developed before they began to consider how to educate their child; attitudes which are affect laden and guide the process of information gathering. The surveying the landscape stage involves both formal research and informal methods such as hearing the views of others and acting upon their own feelings. The final stage, negotiating obstacles, involves finding practical solutions to barriers they may face. The grounded theory is enriched and deepened by Reddy’s (2010) concept of emotional refuges. (shrink)

The performance appraisal process is increasingly seen as a key link between employee behaviour and an organization’s strategic objectives. Unfortunately, performance reviews often fail to change how people work, and dissatisfaction with the appraisal process has been associated with general job dissatisfaction, lower organizational commitment, and increased intentions to quit. Recent research has identified a number of factors related to reactions to performance appraisals in general and appraisal satisfaction in particular. Beyond the appraisal outcome itself, researchers have found that appraisal (...) reactions are affected by perceptions of fairness and the relationship between the supervisor and the employee. To explain the relationships among these factors, the present article proposes a moral cognition perspective. We suggest that employees judge a performance appraisal from the perspective of its moral justifiability, and that appraisal reactions will be determined, at least in part, by the perceived moral justifiability of the process. The proposal was supported by results from a survey of government employees using measures of performance ratings, leader–member exchange, perceived utility, and organizational justice. (shrink)

Carrie Jenkins presents a new account of arithmetical knowledge, which manages to respect three key intuitions: a priorism, mind-independence realism, and empiricism. Jenkins argues that arithmetic can be known through the examination of empirically grounded concepts, non-accidentally accurate representations of the mind-independent world.

Is the Germanic god Wotan really an archaic archetype of the Spirit? Was the Third Reich at first a collective individuation process? After Friedrich Nietzsche heralded the "death of God," might the divine have been reborn as a collective form of self-redemption on German soil and in the Germanic soul? In _Jung’s Wandering Archetype_ Carrie Dohe presents a study of Jung’s writings on Germanic psychology from 1912 onwards, exploring the links between his views on religion and race and providing (...) his perspective on the answers to these questions. Dohe demonstrates how Jung’s view of Wotan as an archetype of the collective Germanic psyche was created from a combination of an ancient discourse on the Germanic barbarian and modern theories of primitive religion, and how he further employed _völkisch_ ideology and various colonialist discourses to contrast hypothesized Germanic, Jewish and ‘primitive’ psychologies. He saw Germanic psychology as dangerous yet vital, promising rebirth and rejuvenation, and compared Wotan to the Pentecostal Spirit, suggesting that the Germanic psyche contained the necessary tension to birth a new collective psycho-spiritual attitude. In racializing his religiously-inflected psychological theory, Jung combined religious and scientific discourses in a particularly seductive way, masterfully weaving together the objective language of science with the eternal language of myth. Dohe concludes the book by examining the use of these ideas in modern Germanic religion, in which members claim that religion is a matter of race. This in-depth study of Jung’s views on psychology, race and spirituality will be fascinating reading for all academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, religious studies and the history of religion. (shrink)

This essay revisits a debate about literary fiction’s ability to depict the consequences of climate change. Philosopher McKenzie Wark’s 2017 essay, ‘On the Obsolescence of the Bourgeois Novel in the Anthropocene’, offers one of many critiques of climate fiction, such as Amitav Ghosh’s influential book, The Great Derangement. But while Ghosh sees a shortcoming in contemporary novels in their lack of representation of major climate events, Wark emphasises the importance of collective action, conversation, and connection, beyond the limits of literature. (...) Since Wark’s intervention, the global School Strike for Climate in 2019 and 2020 brought more participatory post-literary forms to represent climate change. Jean- Luc Nancy’s theory of participation, that there is no mimesis without participation (methexis), sees a tense relation between the two rather than an opposition or conflict. I argue that Wark, by not undervaluing participation, disrupts a hierarchy that privileges the imitator at the expense of the imitation. To explore this relation, I consider how the slogan ‘there is no Planet B’ forms a snapshot of our twenty- first-century mimetic condition, from which no imitative representation will save us. Can Wark expand the vision of another relational kind of femininity in her later writing to support the demand to take part in transformational action against climate catastrophe, beyond mimetic representation carried in the form of the novel? (shrink)

The paper identifies common barriers and challenges to Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) uptake and offers considerations for state and local public health departments to address barriers and retool infrastructure to increase access to PrEP to new users. Authors identify synergistic opportunities with federal agencies and funders to advance PrEP-related HIV prevention efforts, that prioritize strategies and investments to provide PrEP to people who could benefit from the intervention but are unaware of PrEP or struggle to access it. Barriers discussed and examined (...) include financing strategies to reduce financial burden of PrEP medication, expanding PrEP access and outreach beyond clinical settings, and increasing the network and reach of the provider community to serve people we oppress through policy choices and discourses of racial and socioeconomic inferiority. (shrink)

The article explores the irreflexivity of metaphysical dependence in the physical structure of reality. It stresses that the word dependence denotes quasi-ireflexivity which affects the metaphysical relations of a physical structure. It focuses on the view that irreflexivity assumption has been made without discussion of the dependence relations on the structure of reality.

Existing public relations ethics literature often proves inadequate when applied to social movement campaigns, considering the special communication challenges activists face as marginalized moral visionaries in a commercial public sphere. The communications of counter-hegemonic movements is distinct enough from corporate, nonprofit, and governmental organizations to warrant its own ethical guidelines. The unique communication guidelines most relevant to social movement organizations include promoting asymmetrical advocacy to a greater extent than is required for more powerful organizations and building flexibility into the TARES (...) principles to privilege social responsibility over respect for audience values in activist campaigns serving as ideological critique. (shrink)

I discuss a certain kind of emotionally charged negative reaction to defences of non-monogamous love, which I call collective-identity reactions. Expanding on work by Audrey Yap and Jonathan Ichikawa, who consider defensive reactions grounded in individual identity, I argue that collective-identity reactions are characteristically associated with claims about who we are, and motivated by a sense that the relevant we is in some way under threat. Looking into which we might be threatened by defences of non-monogamy, and why, reveals that (...) this apparently personal subject matter is in fact entangled with global political issues like capitalism and American cultural imperialism. I conclude with some thoughts about ameliorative strategies for situations structurally similar to this one. (shrink)

This paper is centred around a debate taking place among environmental scientists. One camp argues that proof of a causal connection between a chemical and a biological anomaly must be demonstrated in the laboratory. The other contends that actual damage is underestimated in the lab, and that it is therefore necessary to conduct supplemental ecoepidemiological research in order to determine the full impact of toxic chemicals. Members of the former contingent – claiming to be defending scientific rigour – sometimes accuse (...) their peers of practising an inferior science. This paper argues that this contention is supported by a philosophical tradition tending to favour abstract and formal analysis over the close examination of material detail. To the extent that this preference has been adopted by the media, industry, policy analysts, and regulatory bodies, more is at stake than an intellectual squabble. The paper provides a brief overview of the history of the formalist tendency in philosophy, followed by an illustration of the ways in which advocates of a strict laboratory methodology implicitly rely on this foundation. The work and ideas of contemporary ecoepidemiologists are then compared to this imposing edifice of traditional science. (shrink)

This study investigates why successful companies have pursued creating shared value (CSV) during the COVID-19 pandemic and the immediately ensuing post-COVID-19 era. The paper aims to achieve a better understanding of the triggers that induce companies to pursue CSV initiatives. A qualitative thematic analysis of cases of CSV involving 54 companies honored by Fortune magazine within its 2022 Change the World list was investigated and systematically reviewed. Based on the analysis, we identified and classified the motivators of CSV projects according (...) to various internal and external triggers. The qualitative results revealed seven types of internal triggers for CSV initiatives. These are: (1) following founder/leader philosophy or experience, (2) foreseeing customer growth and profit potential, (3) enhancing employee loyalty and commitment, (4) developing a future talent pool, (5) improving operational efficiency and cutting costs, (6) building differentiation weapons, and (7) becoming an industry pioneer. Seven types of external triggers for CSV initiatives were also identified. These comprise (1) economic benefits, (2) environmental protection, (3) human rights, (4) public health, (5) social justice, (6) partnership availability, and (7) government stimuli. This study contributes to the CSV literature by providing analyses of the motivators that have induced CSV initiatives during the COVID-19 era. We conclude by discussing the implications for business academics and practitioners. (shrink)

In "Cognition Beyond the Human Domain", Angel Garcia Rodriguez provides critical commentary on Pieces of Mind: The proper domain of psychological predicates (Oxford UP, 2018). In this reply, I argue that his alternative "No-Core" semantic proposal is not an alternative to the Literalist view I defend, but rather one way of elaborating that position.

A common feature of contemporary policymaking is the sharing and adaptation of policies from other countries. As neo-liberal globalisation continues to impact on the development of policy, such practices are increasingly commonplace. This article considers the current phenomenon of ‘policy borrowing’ with reference to the use of data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the 2010 Schools White Paper The Importance of Teaching. The article also traces the origins of policy borrowing and shows what philosophy of education (...) can bring to its discourse. (shrink)

Many empirically minded philosophers have used neuroscientific data to argue against the multiple realization of cognitive functions in existing biological organisms. I argue that neuroscientists themselves have proposed a biologically based concept of multiple realization as an alternative to interpreting empirical findings in terms of one‐to‐one structure‐function mappings. I introduce this concept and its associated research framework and also how some of the main neuroscience‐based arguments against multiple realization go wrong. *Received October 2009; revised December 2009. †To contact the author, (...) please write to: Department of Philosophy, 260 English‐Philosophy Building, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242; e‐mail: carrie‐[email protected]. (shrink)

Nineteenth-century philosophers, including J.S. Mill, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche, criticized Jeremy Bentham for his supposed aesthetic insensibility to the arts, especially literature. Through analysis of Bentham’s manuscript comments on novelists, both negative and positive, this essay analyzes the pleasure Bentham took in fictional narratives in the context of his advocacy for sexual and gender minorities, disabled persons, colonized and enslaved persons, children, and animals. Drawing from a wide range of Bentham’s papers, the author then focuses on a vivid manuscript (...) proposing ‘a new and improved Drama,’ in which Bentham examines the desire to be immersed in an interactive dramatic experience of one’s favorite works of fiction. (shrink)

Socratic teaching is popularly understood as aggressively questioning randomly called-on students, but this is a model that many educators have moved away from. The focus has shifted to eliciting and facilitating critical dialogue among willing participants. I would argue that this helpful shift still misses an essential element of Socratic teaching that can be gleaned from some of Plato’s early dialogues. The most crucial dimension of Socrates’ pedagogy is the function of the educator as an exemplar. I develop an account (...) of what being an exemplar amounts to, discuss how examples of this activity are present in early Platonic dialogues, and then explain how the insights gleaned from such an examination can animate Socratic pedagogy in the classroom. (shrink)

Next SectionPublic and healthcare professionals differ in their attitudes towards euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS), the legal status of which is currently in the spotlight in the UK. In addition to medical training and experience, religiosity, locus of control and patient characteristics (eg, patient age, pain levels, number of euthanasia requests) are known influencing factors. Previous research tends toward basic designs reporting on attitudes in the context of just one or two potentially influencing factors; we aimed to test the comparative (...) importance of a larger range of variables in a sample of nursing trainees and non-nursing controls. One hundred and fifty-one undergraduate students (early-stage nursing training, late-stage nursing training and non-nursing controls) were approached on a UK university campus and asked to complete a self-report questionnaire. Participants were of mixed gender and were on average 25.5 years old. No significant differences in attitude were found between nursing and non-nursing students. There was a significant positive correlation between higher religiosity and positive attitude toward euthanasia (r=0.19, p<0.05) and a significant negative relationship between internal locus of control and positive attitude toward PAS (r=−0.263, p<0.01). Multivariate analyses revealed differing predictor models for attitudes towards euthanasia and PAS, and confirm the importance of individual differences in determining these attitudes. The unexpected direction of association between religiosity and attitudes may reflect a broader cultural shift in attitudes since earlier research in this area. Furthermore, these findings suggest it possible that experience, more than training itself, may be a bigger influence on attitudinal differences in healthcare professionals. (shrink)

This essay asks why, historically, the politics of postcolonial theory require of poetry that it be anchored in the concrete material conditions of a specific population. What are the parameters of analysis that have been established by overtly committed works? What obligations to contextualize does a poem like Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal impose? Conversely, what pressures does the Cahier place on content-oriented postcolonial approaches? Through a careful examination of the Cahier and the specific political valence it (...) would have acquired when written, I seek to understand poetry's relationship to postcolonial theory as it has developed over time. (shrink)

Internal mechanisms that uphold the reliability of published scientific results have failed across many sciences, including some that are major sources of science news. Traditional methods for reporting science in the mass media do not effectively compensate for this unreliability. I argue for a new conceptual framework in which science journalists and scientists form a complex knowledge community, with science news as the interdisciplinary product. This approach motivates forms of collaboration and training that can improve the epistemic reliability of science (...) news. (shrink)

Understanding why individuals opt out of living donation is crucial to enhancing protections for all living donors and to identify modifiable barriers to donation. We developed an ethical approach to conducting research on individuals who opted out of living kidney donation and applied it in a small-scale qualitative study at one US transplant centre. The seven study participants had varied reasons for opting out, the most prominent of which was concern about the financial burden from lost wages during the postoperative (...) period. Several reported feeling alone during their decision-making process. Although no participants used an alibi, a centre-provided statement of non-eligibility to donate, all believed that centres should offer alibis to help preserve donor autonomy. Given the complexity of participants' decisions and the emotions they experienced before and after deciding not to donate, we suggest approaches for independent living donor advocates to support this population. This study demonstrates that research on individuals who opt out of donation is feasible and yields valuable insight into methods to improve the evaluation experience for potential living donors. (shrink)

At different times in their school career and across different subject areas, some pupils may require additional and/or more complex tasks from their teachers, since they find the work set to be insufficiently challenging. Recommendations for coping with these pupils’ needs are varied, but among other responses, it is common, in the field of ‘gifted and talented’ education, to advocate the use of critical thinking programmes. These can be very effective in providing the missing challenge through helping develop pupils’ facilities (...) for building and defending rational argument. However, the exercises can be just that; mental agility tasks that lack relevant context. When children engage in learning philosophy in school, they benefit from the experience of developing logical, rigorous argument; but the subject can offer more than critical skills practice. Since philosophy attends to questions about things that matter in pupils’ lives, discussions can have an ethical and moral dimension and as such can be more than an intellectual exercise. Pupils of all abilities and propensities can become involved in the discussions, but the open nature of the areas of debate lends itself particularly well to providing challenge for pupils who need enriched and extended tasks in order to remain engaged. Some of the well-rehearsed Philosophy with/for Children methods are also designed to help develop mutual respect and understanding and so philosophy not only appeals to the cognitive and intellectual in children, but places this development in a context that fosters positive personal qualities. (shrink)

This essay analyses how Virginia Woolf's critically under-examined children's story about Nurse Lugton connects the becoming-artistic of writing to animal becomings. Examining the links between creativity and the other-than-human via Gilles Deleuze and Elizabeth Grosz, I claim that the ‘animation’ of the stitched animal figures on Nurse Lugton's ‘canvas’ reveals that art is the enlivenment of vibratory and affective qualities, as opposed to a monumentalising of symbols or concepts. Moreover, the curtain in Woolf's story should be read as creative materiality (...) itself, its folds participating in the self-varying dynamism of the virtual and actual. My analysis of the two published versions of the story, and their accompanying illustrations, outlines an affirmative bio-poetics at the heart of Woolf's aesthetic project and suggests that Woolf's creative sources are embedded in inhuman, biological forces. (shrink)

Plato's Symposium depicts a group of men giving a series of speeches about the nature of love, with themes ranging from religion and metaphysics to medicine and pregnancy. The lone woman in the room, a "flute girl," is sent away as the discussion turns to serious matters; at the same time, the wisest of the men attributes his theories to a woman, the possibly fictional Diotima. Despite their absence from this important intellectual exchange, women are part of Symposium. What can (...) contemporary feminist readers do with this troubling yet immeasurably influential work? In Uninvited historian Carla Nappi and philosopher Carrie Jenkins talk back to Plato in poetry, inspired by the voices of women characters who were not previously permitted to speak. Images and ideas from Symposium are refracted through multiple lenses to reveal a tumult of mystical, intellectual, pedagogical, and sexual ideologies. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrific, these poems dance within and between the lines of Symposium, carving space for new kinds of conversations about love, with themes ranging from gender and voice to power and violence. Designed to be read with or without prior knowledge of Plato, this book invites the uninvited to join a strange, amorphous, and unending conversation on the nature of love and desire - and on the possibilities intellectual and creative activity can offer. (shrink)

This paper argues that the cognitive neuroscientific use of ordinary mental terms to report research results and draw implications can contribute to public confusion and misunderstanding regarding neuroscience results. This concern is raised at a time when cognitive neuroscientists are increasingly required by funding agencies to link their research to specific results of public benefit, and when neuroethicists have called for greater attention to public communication of neuroscience. The paper identifies an ethical dimension to the problem and presses for greater (...) sensitivity and responsibility among neuroscientists regarding their use of such terms. (shrink)

This book unpicks the conceptual, ideological, and metaphysical tangles that get in the way of understanding romantic love. -/- Written for a general audience, What Love Is And What It Could Be explores different disciplinary perspectives on love, in search of the bigger picture. It presents a "dual-nature" theory: romantic love is simultaneously both a biological phenomenon and a social construct. The key philosophical insight comes in explaining why this a coherent—and indeed a necessary—position to take. -/- The deep motivation (...) behind this work is that we have a collective responsibility to figure out romantic love. It is a formidable and potentially dangerous force, its power underwritten by its twin footholds in our biological natures and in our most treasured social practices. Often we pretend that it is incomprehensible and out of control, but this is a way of abdicating our responsibility to understand love and fix it when it's broken. -/- What Love Is And What It Could Be explains that romantic love is currently broken in multiple interlocking ways, but also that we can change this status quo. Once we understand what love is, we will be able to take control of what it could be. (shrink)