This chapter contains sections titled: Classical Theories of Success Morris's 3‐D Approach to Life Lance Discovers His Positive Talents Lance Develops His Talents: Pre‐Cancer Lance Develops His Talents: Post‐Cancer Lance Deploys His Talents Notes.

Writing in 2007, French social philosopher André Gorz was remarkably prophetic, foretelling the international economic meltdown of 2008: “The real economy is becoming an appendage of the speculative bubbles sustained by the finance industry—until that inevitable point when the bubbles burst, leading to serial bank crashes and threatening the global system of credit with collapse and the real economy with a severe, prolonged depression.” This prescient article is collected in _Ecologica _alongside many of Gorz’s final writings and interviews, which together (...) offer practical and often path-breaking set of solutions to our current economic and political problems. In his writings Gorz condemns the speculative global economic system and anatomizes its terminal crisis. Advocating an exit from capitalism through the self-limitation of needs and the networked use of the latest technologies, he outlines a practical, democratically based solution to our current predicament. Compiled by Gorz, _Ecologica_ is intended as a final distillation of his work and thought, a guide to the survival of our planet. It is a work of _political, _rather than scientific ecology—Gorz aruges that the key to planetary survival is not a surrender to environmental experts and eco-technocrats, but a switch to non-consumerist modes of living that would amount to a type of cultural revolution. Praise for André Gorz “To my mind the greatest of modern French social thinkers.”—Herbert Gintis, author of _Schooling in Capitalist America_ “Gorz’s work was always within the Utopian tradition—a label he welcomed but which was used pejoratively by his opponents.... Many of his derided early warnings about globalization and environmental degradation have become commonplace discourses in political debates today. Ultimately, Gorz’s Utopianism was expressed in a very practical sense—we never know how far along the road we are if we have no idea of the destination.”—_Independent _ __. (shrink)

In recent years, social workers have raised a new concern about the appearance of a new category among the working poor. Even employed, there are people so overburdened by the cost of living and so under compensated that they cannot afford a place to sleep. Contrary to popular opinion, according to the website for the Coalition for the Homeless, forty-four percent of the homeless in first world countries actually have jobs. In _No Fixed Abode_, Marc Augé’s pathbreaking ethnofiction—a fictional ethnography—a (...) man named Henri narrates his strange existence in the margins of Paris. By day he walks the streets, lingers in conversation with the local shopkeepers, and sits writing in cafés, but at night he takes shelter in an abandoned house. From here, we see a progressive erosion of Henri’s identity, a loss of bearings, and a slow degeneration of his ability to relate to others. But then he meets the artist Dominique, whose willingness to share her life with him raises questions about who he has become and about what a person needs in order to be a part of society. This is a book about how we live in geographical space and how work and patterns of domicile affect our status and our inner being. Despite the apparent simplicity of the fictional premise, Augé’s book asks serious questions about the nature of our culture. (shrink)

Context: The evolution of perceptual systems and hence of observers remains largely disconnected from the question of the emergence of classical objects and spacetime. This disconnection between the biosciences and physics impedes progress toward understanding the role of the “observer” in physical theory. Problem: In this article we consider the problem of how to understand objects and spacetime in observer-relative evolutionary terms. Method: We rely on a comparative analysis using multiple formal frameworks. Results: The eigenform construct of von Foerster is (...) compared to other formal representations of observer-environment interactions. Eigenforms are shown to be encoded on observer-environment interfaces and to encode fitness consequences of actions. Space and time are components of observational outcomes in this framework; it is suggested that spacetime constitutes an error-correcting code for fitness consequences. Implications: Our results contribute to an understanding of the world in which neither objects nor spacetime are observer-independent. Constructivist content: The eigenform concept of von Foerster is linked to the concepts of decoherence and holographic encoding from physics and the concept of fitness from evolutionary biology. (shrink)

It has historically been assumed that comparative and superlative quantifiers can be semantically analysed in accordance with their core logical–mathematical properties. However, recent theoretical and experimental work has cast doubt on the validity of this assumption. Geurts & Nouwen have claimed that superlative quantifiers possess an additional modal component in their semantics that is absent from comparative quantifiers and that this accounts for the previously neglected differences in usage and interpretation between the two types of quantifier that they identify. Their (...) semantically modal hypothesis has received additional support from empirical investigations. In this article, we further corroborate that superlative quantifiers have additional modal interpretations. However, we propose an alternative analysis, whereby these quantifiers possess the semantics postulated by the classical model and the additional aspects of meaning arise as a consequence of psychological complexity and pragmatic implicature. We explain how this model is consistent with the existing empirical findings. Additionally, we present the findings of four novel experiments that support our model above the semantically modal account. (shrink)

© The Author 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected] article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model...This is a clear and extremely stimulating book in which the authors present a series of innovative, even unorthodox, views on the relation between language and biology. It treats the study of language, and human cognition in general, as a matter of (...) biology. More bluntly: linguistics is biology at a suitable level of abstraction.Given that it is a biological fact that human beings have language, we might expect there to be a Darwinian explanation of the evolution of language. The puzzle is that there seems to be no biological function of language that could not be fulfilled by a species lacking language. So why... (shrink)

"Guanxi" involves interpersonal obligations, which may conflict with other obligations people have that are based on general or abstract moral considerations. In the West, the latter have been widely accepted as the general source of obligations, which is perhaps tied to social changes associated with the rise of capitalism. Recently, Western ethicists have started to reconsider the extent to which personal relationships may form a distinct basis for obligation. In administration and management, salient bases for decision-Making include deontological, consequentialist and (...) personalist ethics. The first may be reflected in a bureaucratic approach, the second in a price system, and the third in arrangements like "guanxi". Each has positive and negative aspects, but problems arise when they lead to conflicting obligations, as may occur for an office holder who has some obligations based in deontological considerations and others based in personal relationships. This is a type of conflict of interest. Such conflicts have been considered in the West, and remedies proposed. Problems arise especially in cases where it is not clear how to prioritise different obligations, and this has been noted as a difficulty in the Chinese legal system. Questions that need to be answered include not only questions about how to deal with conflicting obligations, but also questions about what institutions to accept as giving rise to obligations. Institutions themselves may be problematic not only because of their consequences for economic productivity, but because they are internally incoherent, and this may be manifested in frequent conflicts faced by office holders. (shrink)

Feminist scholars have identified how race and gender discourses influence the creation and implementation of school-based sexual health education and the provision of health care, yet there are few studies that examine how race and gender work in sexual health promotion as it occurs through community-based public health efforts. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research in a low-income Puerto Rican community, this article demonstrates how a gendered racial project of essentializing Latinx culture surrounding young women’s sexuality and reproduction works (...) to both obscure and reinforce race and racism in sexual health promotion. Professional stakeholders mobilize culture as an explanation for high birth rates among young Latinas in the city and reproduce a “Latino culture narrative” in which Latina gender and sexuality is understood as deterministic and homogenous. Simultaneously, an ideology of colorblindness enables the uncritical promotion of long-acting reversible contraception and obscures the history of reproductive oppression experienced by women of color. I consider how colorblindness and culture narratives allow stakeholders to abdicate responsibility for gendered racial inequality and conclude by advocating for the incorporation of racial and reproductive justice frameworks in sexual health promotion. (shrink)

There are differences among forms of impression management that are relevant to its ethical evaluation. Sometimes, moral appraisal is to do with impression management as a tactic of influence, but not about deception. In other cases, an audience is given a true or a false impression, and ethical questions of deception arise, but they are made more complex by the need to consider the responsibility of an audience in reaching its conclusions. Cases where that is an issue blend into a (...) third category in which impression management is joint social performance. Such cases raise additional possibilities of the problematic influence of one agent by another, but also begin to move ethical concerns from the behaviour of an individual agent to the social practices that sustain their expectations. Such social practices invite ethical appraisal because they may impose constraints. But they may also provide opportunities for achievement and pursuit of excellence. (shrink)

Organisational politics can raise the problem of “dirty hands,” illustrated in this paper by an example drawn from a textbook on organisation theory. The initial question is whether the main character has different ethical and political obligations, but this leads on to the question to what extent we can distinguish various different categories of obligation. The example may be of special interest because of the importance of close personal relationship in organisational politics, which brings the dirty hands problem together with (...) the question to what extent friendships generate distinctive obligations. However, it is doubtful whether the allocation of obligations to different categories can be sustained in a useful way. It may be that we can put aside loyalty to an organisation, as a consideration which does not generate any distinctive obligation, but balancing other factors against one another may require the sort of judgment that has sometimes been called “political wisdom,” and sometimes “moral imagination.”. (shrink)

Elementary Recursive Nonstandard Analysis, in short ERNA, is a constructive system of nonstandard analysis proposed around 1995 by Patrick Suppes and Richard Sommer, who also proved its consistency inside PRA. It is based on an earlier system developed by Rolando Chuaqui and Patrick Suppes, of which Michal Rössler and Emil Jeřábek have recently proposed a weakened version. We add a Π₁-transfer principle to ERNA and prove the consistency of the extended theory inside PRA. In this extension of ERNA a σ₁-supremum (...) principle 'up-to-infinitesimals', and some well-known calculus results for sequences are deduced. Finally, we prove that transfer is 'too strong' for finitism by reconsidering Rössler and Jeřábek's conclusions. (shrink)

The concept of argumentation in AI is based almost exclusively on the use of formal, abstract representations. Despite their appealing computational properties, these abstractions become increasingly divorced from their real world counterparts, and, crucially, lose the ability to express the rich gamut of natural argument forms required for creating effective text. In this paper, the demands that socially situated argumentation places on knowledge representation are explored, and the various problems with existing formalisations are discussed. Insights from argumentation theory and social (...) psychology are then adduced as key contributions to a notion of social context which is both computationally tractable and suitably expressive for handling the complexities of argumentation found in natural language. (shrink)

This article addresses a discourse on visual culture and its comparability to visual arts in school curriculum; it focuses initially on Kevin Tavin’s 2005 history of popular and visual culture in relation to visual-art education.1 In the second part, I also discuss contributions to this discourse by Kerry Freedman2 and Paul Duncum.3 There are two concerns that I raise here about arguments made against visual-arts curriculum in this discourse. First, they are generally lacking in rigor, making generalized criticisms of different (...) writers from different sources, in an effort to describe a coherent new discipline that circulates around different names, such as “visual culture,” “popular culture,” “visual literacy,” and... (shrink)

The aim of this article is to clarify the role of self-interest in Moist thought and by doing so to refute the Self-Interest Thesis. Toward these ends, I will examine passages from the Mozi bearing on the role of self-interest in Moist ethics and psychology and show that, in each case, an alternative interpretation explains them better than the Self-Interest Thesis does. I will argue that the Moists recognize the obvious truth that self-interest figures among people’s basic motives, but they (...) believe people also have other important sources of motivation. (shrink)

In this article I shall examine how some recent work on equality has thrown light on the thorny issue of how equality relates to the recognition of difference. It has been argued that, whilst equal...

Chris Turner argues that Stephen Harper's attack on basic science, science communication, environmental regulations, and the environmental NGO community is the most vicious assault ever waged by a Canadian government on the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment. From the closure of Arctic research stations as oil drilling begins in the High Arctic to slashed research budgets in agriculture, dramatic changes to the nation's fisheries policy, and the muzzling of government scientists, Harper's government has effectively dismantled Canada's long-standing scientific tradition. (...) Drawing on interviews with scientists whose work has been halted by budget cuts and their colleagues in an NGO community increasingly treated as an enemy of the state, The War on Science paints a vivid and damning portrait of a government that has abandoned environmental stewardship and severed a national commitment to the objective truth of basic science as old as Canada itself. (shrink)

Applying Grice's account of conventional and conversational implicature, and Frankfurt's account of bullshit, shows that Donald J. Trump's language falls into a category beyond Frankfurt's own.

The modern literature on responding to global poverty is over fifty years old and has attracted the attention of some of the most prominent analytical political theorists of the age, including Brian Barry, Charles Beitz, Simon Caney, Thomas Pogge, John Rawls, and Peter Singer. Yet in spite of this extraordinary concentration of brainpower, the problem of global poverty has quite clearly not been solved or, indeed, adequately defined. We are therefore entitled to ask two questions of any new contribution to (...) this literature: first, what does it have to offer that past work does not; and second, what reason is there to think that, this time, it will truly make a difference. These questions will be posed below, but before undertaking this task it may be useful to offer an overview of the field, with particular attention to why the problem of global poverty seems so intractable. (shrink)

This book highlights both the relation between technology and care, and the normative aspects of economic analyses in health care. A series of concrete examples from various clinical fields (prenatal diagnosis, genetic tests, digital imaging in psychiatry, tube feeding in care for the elderly, and palliative sedation) helps the authors to consider how to integrate these technologies in a care context aimed upon humaneness. Each topic is analysed by leading European clinicians and health care ethicists.

Some recent hostile responses to the rapid growth of Libertarianism have depicted it as a febrile spin-off from the post-hippy 'Me Decade'. In fact we are the inheritors of an illustrious centuries old tradition, largely overlooked by the myopic current fashions in the history of ideas. Liberals like J. S. Mill and Jeremy Bentham receive plenty of attention in college courses, but the libertarian tradition as a whole is largely ignored, and misrepresented where touched upon. Mill and Bentham constitute one (...) aspect - in many ways the feeblest - of liberalism. Dozens of thinkers and activists who embodied the most systematic or radical elements in Libertarianism have been consigned to the Memory Hole. (shrink)

A course focusing on ethical issues in physics has been taught to undergraduate students at Eastern Michigan University since 1988. The course covers both responsible conduct of research and ethical issues associated with how physicists interact with the rest of society. Since most undergraduate physics majors will not have a career in academia, it is important that a course such as this address issues that will be relevant to physicists in a wide range of job situations. There is a wealth (...) of published work that can be drawn on for reading assignments. (shrink)

In his book Liberalism Without Perfection, Jonathan Quong challenges liberal perfectionists to show whether their favoured doctrine is capable of generating distinctive distributive principles whilst retaining a valid conception of personal responsibility. In this article I develop this challenge into a dilemma and show that liberal perfectionists can escape by illustrating how arguments for the value of personal autonomy may entail a specific and distinct treatment of choice and responsibility. I develop this claim into a sufficientarian approach to the promotion (...) of autonomy as self-authorship. In doing so I show how differing conceptions of both autonomy and the person employed by liberal perfectionists and political liberals entail different distributive outcomes. (shrink)

In his wide-ranging study of architecture and cultural evolution, Chris Abel argues that, despite progress in sustainable development and design, resistance to changing personal and social identities shaped by a technology-based and energy-hungry culture is impeding efforts to avert drastic climate change. The book traces the roots of that culture to the coevolution of Homo sapiens and technology, from the first use of tools as artificial extensions of the human body to the motorized cities spreading around the world, whose (...) uncontrolled effects are fast changing the planet itself. Advancing a new concept of the meme, called the 'technical meme', as the primary agent of cognitive extension and technical embodiment, Abel proposes a theory of the 'extended self' as a complex and diffuse outcome of that coevolution. Challenging conventional ideas of the self as a separate and autonomous being, the extended self, he explains, encompasses material and spatial as well as psychological and social elements, including the built environment and artifacts, and now reaches out into the virtual world of cyberspace. Drawing upon research into extended cognition and embodied minds from philosophy, psychology and the neurosciences, the book presents a new approach to environmental and cultural studies. N.B. This book was the winner of the International Committee of Architectural Critics 2017 Bruno Zevi Book Award by unanimous decision of the international jury. (shrink)

Drawing from my previous experiences as an Approved Social Worker and my current experiences as a social work educator, this paper will explore the issues that mental health professionals, and specifically social workers, will face when confronted with the requirement to make decisions that are contrary to the emancipatory values that may have been inculcated in them during their period of training. The controlling nature of statutory social work in particular will be investigated and an assessment of its impact will (...) be offered. The legislative system in the United Kingdom dictates that one piece of legislation can override another in certain instances. In applying this phenomenon, the argument will be made that social workers are increasingly required to override certain values to accomplish the desired outcomes of their position. Ethical issues and the concept of care versus control will be assessed in an attempt to rationalize the problems faced by many of today's mental health social workers. (shrink)

Expanding his collected essays on architectural theory and criticism, Chris Abel pursues his explorations across disciplinary and regional boundaries in search of a deeper understanding of architecture in the evolution of human culture and identity formation. From his earliest writings predicting the computer-based revolution in customised architectural production, through his novel studies on 'tacit knowing' in design or hybridisation in regional and colonial architecture, to his radical theory of the 'extended self', Abel has been a consistently fresh and provocative (...) thinker, contesting both conventions and intellectual fashions. This revised third edition includes a new introduction and six additional chapters by the author covering a broad range of related topics, up to recent concerns with genetic design methods and virtual selves. Together with the former essays, the book presents a unique global perspective on the changing cultural issues and technologies shaping human identities and the built environment in diverse parts of the world, both East and West (from the book cover). (shrink)

One of the most important problems faced by the United States is addressing its broken criminal justice system. This collection of essays offers a thorough examination of incarceration as a form of punishment. In addition to focusing on the philosophical aspects related to punishment, the volume's diverse group of contributors provides additional background in criminology, economics, law, and sociology to help contextualize the philosophical issues. The first group of essays addresses whether or not our current institutions connected with punishment and (...) incarceration are justified in a liberal society. The next set of chapters explores the negative effects of incarceration as a form of punishment, including its impact on children and families. The volume then describes how we arrived at our current situation in the United States, focusing on questions related to how we view prisons and prisoners, policing for profit, and the motivations of prosecutors in trying to secure convictions. Finally, Rethinking Punishment in the Era of Mass Incarceration examines specific policy alternatives that might offer solutions to our current approach to punishment and incarceration. (shrink)

The original article was published without an acknowledgment section. The complete acknowledgment section is given.

Although a ?realist? stance is sometimes contrasted with a ?principled? one, this article argues that realism is, of itself, an important ethical principle. Acknowledging the problems that exist in defining ?reality?, and the fact that the nature of reality is contested, the article nevertheless insists on an ?out there? reality. It asserts that the existence of this external reality is, in practice, generally accepted, and indeed must be accepted if we are to make the important distinction between truth and falsehood. (...) The article proposes that discourse which is not grounded in the concrete reality of the specific situations in which social work is practised is potentially harmful because it results in a decoupling of language from what it is supposed to represent and creates a potential for language to be used to deceive. The article then discusses ?Realism about Outcomes? and ?Realism about Context? as two out of a number of different areas in which realism is important in practice and policy making. It concludes that genuinely ethical social work practice and policy making require that we attempt to engage with the world as it actually is. (shrink)

The derivation of a category of ‘environmental rights’ (as argued in this journal by Margaret DeMerieux) from certain cases heard in the European Court of Human Rights is examined. Opposing the majority judicial opinion of that court, there is emerging a dissenting view which is reluctant to extend a rights perspective to those nuisances which can, in theory, be avoided by relocation of the family home. This critique is then extended to Marcic v Thames Water Utilities in which the claimant (...) used the Human Rights Act 1998 (as well as common law) to secure damages for an environmental threat (flooding) to his home. It is further argued that any ‘rights’ dimension currently attached to environmental intrusion on private life will give way to policy imperatives once the effects of climate change come to be recognized. (shrink)

This edited collection of essays brings together the leading experts in the field of cultural and philosophical studies to tackle many of the questions still being asked about Jean Francois Lyotard. Contributors include Barry Smart, John O'Neill and Victor J. Seidler with subjects ranging from Lyotard's writings on justice and politics of difference, on feminism, youth, judaism as well as a chapter devoted to his early writings.