Ethical concepts are, or purport to be, normative. They make claims on us: they command, oblige, recommend, or guide. Or at least when we invoke them, we make claims on one another; but where does their authority over us - or ours over one another - come from? Christine Korsgaard identifies four accounts of the source of normativity that have been advocated by modern moral philosophers: voluntarism, realism, reflective endorsement, and the appeal to autonomy. She traces their history, showing (...) how each developed in response to the prior one and comparing their early versions with those on the contemporary philosophical scene. Kant's theory that normativity springs from our own autonomy emerges as a synthesis of the other three, and Korsgaard concludes with her own version of the Kantian account. Her discussion is followed by commentary from G. A. Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel, and Bernard Williams, and a reply by Korsgaard. (shrink)

Christine M. Korsgaard is one of today's leading moral philosophers: this volume collects ten influential papers by her on practical reason and moral psychology ...

"First Published in 1998, Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.".

What is the relation between the concept good and more specific or ‘thick’ concepts such as admirable or courageous? I argue that good or more precisely good pro tanto is a general concept, but that the relation between good pro tanto and the more specific concepts is not that of a genus to its species. The relation of an important class of specific evaluative concepts, which I call ‘affective concepts’, to good pro tanto is better understood as one between a (...) determinable and its determinates, whereas concepts such as courageous can be analysed in terms of affective concepts and purely descriptive concepts. (shrink)

Bringing together many of the world's leading political philosophers, this engaging volume reflects the wide-ranging themes in the work of G. A. Cohen. The volume contains essays on a number of key topics, united by questions of social justice, pluralism, equality, and moral duty.

Neo-sentmentalism is the view that to judge that something has an evaluative property is to judge that some affective or emotional response is appropriate with respect to it. The difficulty in assessing neo-sentimentalism is that it allows for radically different versions. My aim is to spell out what I take to be its most plausible version. I distinguish between a normative version, which takes the concepts of appropriateness to be normative, and a descriptive version, which claims that appropriateness in emotions (...) is a matter of correspondence to evaluative facts. I argue that the latter version can satisfy the normativity requirement that follows from Moore's Open Question Argument, that it is superior to the former with respect to the explanatory role of values, and with respect to the Wrong Kind of Reason Objection. Finally, I argue that the circularity that is involved is not vicious: understood epistemically, neo-sentimentalism remains instructive. (shrink)

Le Laboratoire d’ANalyse Cognitive de l’Information (LANCI) effectue des recherches sur le traitement cognitif de l’information. La recherche fondamentale porte sur les multiples conceptions de l’information. Elle s’intéresse plus particulièrement aux modèles cognitifs de la classification et de la catégorisation, tant dans une perspective symbolique que connexionniste. La recherche appliquée explore les technologies informatiques qui manipulent l’information. Le territoire privilégié est celui du texte. La recherche est de nature interdisciplinaire. Elle en appelle à la philosophie, à l’informatique, à la linguistique (...) et à la psychologie. Volume 6, Numéro 2007-02 – Août 2007 Publication du Laboratoire d’ANalyse Cognitive de l’Information Directeurs : Luc Faucher, Jean-Guy Meunier, Serge Robert et Pierre Poirier Université du Québec à Montréal Document disponible en ligne à l’adresse suivante : www.lanci.uqam.ca Tirage : 5 exemplaires Aucune partie de cette publication ne peut être conservée dans un système de recherche documentaire, traduite ou reproduite sous quelque forme que ce soit - imprimé, procédé photomécanique, microfilm, microfiche ou tout autre moyen - sans la permission écrite de l’éditeur. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. / All rights reserved. No part of this publication covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means - graphic, electronic or mechanical - without the prior written permission of the publisher. Dépôt légal – Bibliothèque Nationale du Canada Dépôt légal – Bibliothèque Nationale du Québec.. (shrink)

At a time when neoliberalism and financial austerity are together encouraging academic scientists to seek market alternatives to state funding, this essay investigates why, a century ago, their predecessors explicitly rejected private enterprise and the private ownership of ideas and inventions available to them through the patent system. The early twentieth century witnessed the success of a long campaign by British scientists to persuade the state to assume responsibility for the funding of basic research : their findings would enter the (...) intellectual commons; their rewards would be primarily reputational . The essay summarizes recent research in three separate fields of British technoscience—electricity, aviation, and agricultural botany—all of which were laying claim, at this time, to a heightened commercial or military importance that raised new questions about the ownership of scientific ideas. It suggests that each of the three established an idiosyncratic relationship with the patent system or with other forms of “intellectual property,” which would both influence their emergent disciplines and affect the extent to which commercial enterprise could remain a viable funding strategy. (shrink)

This paper starts off from what seems to be a difficulty of ethics in African Business today. For several years now Transparency International has placed some African countries high on its list of most corrupt countries of the world. The conclusion one draws from this assessment is that either African culture has no regard or concern for ethics, or that there has been a gradual loss of the concept of the ethical and the moral in contemporary African society. Equally problematic (...) is the teaching and promotion of Business ethics in organizations. Western philosophical theories and systems alone have not succeeded in providing access to ethical life of people in modern Africa. This paper is an attempt to inject an orientation that takes into account African manners and customs, their religious convictions and their understanding of the world as a whole, in the teaching of Business Ethics. East and Central Africa have been selected due to their common lingua franca, Kiswahili, and the fact that the author has more teaching experience within that region. (shrink)

To view organismic functioning in terms of integration is a mistake, although the concept has dominated scientific thinking this century. The operative concept for interpreting the organism proposed here is that of ‘articulation’ or decomposition rather than that of composition from segregated parts. It is asserted that holism is the fundamental state of all phenomena, including organisms. The impact of this changed perspective on perceptual theorizing is profound. Rather than viewing it as a process resulting from internal integration of isolated (...) features detected by receptor neurons into a perceptual whole, the new theory suggests that the task of perceptual processing is to break up what initially exists holistically in sense organs into features and eventually perceived objects. Similarly, the goal of perceptual activity is not Sherrington's, that of integrating essentially unrelated organisms with their environmental surround, but rather to generate percepts in which the environment appears as a field of objects and events independent of the perceiver which are available for manipulation. Perception is a process by which organisms use their embeddedness in physical reality as if they were independent of it. There are a number of interesting results of this conceptual reorientation. The binding problem is eliminated because the percept's holistic character is the precondition for neural activity, not its product. The concept of representation can be dispensed with since the fundamental conceptual motivation for its introduction -- the assumed need to produce an internal copy of what was assumed to exist independently outside the organism in order to integrate organismic behaviour with its environmental causes -- is rejected outright. And finally, the issue of perceptual consciousness is addressed: how does the percept acquire its objective status vis-a-vis a perceiver, and what is the basis of the experiential character of perception? (shrink)

On admet en général qu’il y a deux sortes de concepts normatifs : les concepts évaluatifs, comme bon, et les concepts déontiques, comme devoir. La question que soulève cette distinction est celle de savoir comment il est possible d’affirmer que les concepts évaluatifs sont normatifs. En effet, comme les concepts déontiques semblent constituer le coeur du domaine normatif, plus le fossé entre les deux sortes de concepts est grand, moins il paraîtra plausible d’affirmer que les concepts évaluatifs sont normatifs. Après (...) avoir présenté les différences principales entre les concepts évaluatifs et les concepts déontiques, et montré qu’il y a plus qu’une différence superficielle entre les deux sortes de concepts, j’examinerai la question de la normativité des concepts évaluatifs. Il deviendra apparent que même s’il s’agit de concepts ayant des fonctions différentes, il existe un grand nombre de relations entre les concepts évaluatifs, d’une part, et les concepts de devoir et de raison, d’autre part.It is generally accepted that there are two sorts of normative concepts : evaluative concepts, such as good, and deontic concepts, such as ought. The question that is raised by this distinction is how it is possible to claim that evaluative concepts are normative. As deontic concepts appear to be at the heart of normativity, the more there is a gap between evaluative and deontic concepts, the less it appears plausible to say that evaluative concepts are normative. After having presented the main differences between evaluative and deontic concepts, and shown that there is more than a superficial difference between the two sorts of concepts, the paper turns to the question of the normativitity of evaluative concepts. It will become clear that even if these concepts have different functions, there are a great many ties between evaluative concepts, on the one hand, and the concepts of ought and of reason, on the other hand. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World ed. by Beatriz Ilari, Susan YoungAmy Christine BeegleBeatriz Ilari and Susan Young, eds., Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2016)Historically, most studies of children’s musical learning have been informed by stage theories of developmental psychology and focused on school music or private instrumental lesson contexts. Over the past few decades, scholars have conducted research (...) that increasingly explores children’s involvement with music in contexts outside of formal learning settings, utilizing methods and models from ethnomusicology, sociology, social psychology, and/or cultural psychology. Nine individually authored chapters in the volume, Children’s Home Musical Experiences Across the World, edited by Beatriz Ilari and Susan Young, convey results, applications, and extensions of one such project that reaches beyond the conventional ethnographic music education study.The bulk of this collection contains findings and interpretations from a collaborative project called MyPlace, MyMusic, followed by several additional chapters that provide descriptions and narratives from subsequent related projects. The original project included fourteen scholars from the International Society of Music Education-Early Childhood Commission, who conducted in-home observations and interviews with parents and children in order to examine the nature of, influences on, and meaning of musical activities that took place in the homes of middle-class seven-year-olds in diverse locations, including Brazil, Denmark, [End Page 105] Greece, Israel, Kenya, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, Taiwan, the U.K., and the United States.Importantly, the project’s designers attempted to avoid complications of transcultural developments by asking each researcher to select children whose families had not recently migrated to their country/locality. The seventeen participating children from twelve countries were also of the same ethnicity and lived in the same “locality” as each researcher in order to ease communication during in-home observations and interviews. Results shed light on issues of children’s family life, schooling, identity, gender, and social class.This project presents a unique contribution to the field of music education in a number of ways. First, most previous studies of music in the homes of children have centered around preschoolers, toddlers, and infants, whereas the present project focuses on seven-year-old children, whose age places them on the cusp of crossing from early to middle childhood. Second, most previous music education researchers have considered issues of social class, ethnicity, and race as independent variables, but the methodology for this project calls for observation and description of each child in his or her home first, followed by comparison of the “cases” to each other. Third, the researchers utilize a Wiki platform to share and collaboratively interpret data collected from home lives of children (photographs, video and audio recordings, texts, and pdf files) among researchers from different countries.The volume is organized into three major sections. Susan Young and Jèssica Pérez-Moreno set the scene in the first two chapters by describing the theoretical underpinnings and methodology for the MyPlace, MyMusic project. The second section of the book includes four chapters in which several individual researchers interpret the project’s data based upon the themes of children’s private musical worlds; belonging/identity/gendered meanings of children’s music making; perspectives and influences of parents; and the role of social class on children’s musical lives. The last three chapters of the book provide detailed descriptions of projects and extensions that developed after the MyPlace, MyMusic project.Following the introductory chapter, in which Ilari and Young explain the background, rationale, goals, and methods of the MyPlace, MyMusic project and provide a reader-friendly table that presents the cultural background and “sources of musical stimulation in the home” for each participating child,1 Susan Young outlines the theoretical and analytical frameworks for the project in the first chapter. Rather than viewing children’s learning as developing and socializing into adulthood, the project researchers were encouraged to look at children as being instead of becoming, as subjects, rather than objects of research, and as having opportunities for agency that are contextual. This theoretical framework stems from the field of Childhood Studies (as cultivated in Scandinavia [End Page 106] and... (shrink)

Der vorliegende Band enthält Predigten zu 56 Terminen des Jahres 1824 sowie ergänzend 28 dazugehörige Liederblätter Schleiermachers. Mit Ausnahme der zahlreichen Kasualpredigten und zweier im Urlaub gehaltener Kanzelreden ist Schleiermachers Predigttätigkeit damit für das genannte Jahr lückenlos dokumentiert. Die Editionsbasis bilden neben Drucktexten und einem Autograph Schleiermachers mehrheitlich die qualitativ hochwertigen Nachschriften des Theologiestudenten Johann Gottfried Andrae. Zu 22 Terminen existierte bislang keine Predigtveröffentlichung; zu 34 Terminen liegen bereits Drucke vor. Für 12 der insgesamt 15 von Schleiermacher selbst redigierten und (...) publizierten Texte konnte allerdings eine abweichende Vorlage ausgemacht und ediert werden, wodurch ein besonderes Licht auf seine Vorgehensweise bei der Herstellung der literarischen Predigten fällt. (shrink)

In recent years educational policy on gender and achievement has concentrated on boys' underachievement, frequently comparing it with the academic success of girls. This has encouraged a perception of girls as the ?winners? of the educational stakes and assumes that they no longer experience the kinds of gender inequalities identified in earlier studies. However, trying to balance academic achievement with being seen as a ?proper girl? presents girls with difficult challenges, particularly in terms of being accepted and approved of by (...) classmates and securing the attention of teachers. This paper explores the views of a group of high achieving 12? to 13?year?old girls who indicate that being regarded as ?clever? continues to be negotiated within acceptable frameworks of femininity. (shrink)

This chapter describes the development of a workshop series focused on helping students develop research lab ethics guidelines. The workshop was developed through a National Science Foundation-funded project that situates ethics education within the research environment. Students in four departments at a private research university were recruited to join a Student Ethics Committee that collaboratively developed context-specific codes-of-ethics-based guidelines for their departments. These bottom-up developed guidelines were revised in an iterative process, including feedback from faculty, other graduate students, and the (...) original Student Ethics Committee. The goal of the workshops was to promote the cultivation of an ethical culture in experimental laboratories by integrating research stakeholders in a bottom-up approach to developing context-specific guidelines and to identify factors that students consider relevant to the ethical conduct of research. After describing the workshop series, this chapter presents a qualitative content analysis of the guidelines. The guidelines developed by the Student Ethics Committees reflect the current culture of experimental labs in these departments and the ethical issues that students think are important. The content of these guidelines and the ethical issues the students focused on contrast in some key ways with what ethical issues faculty who head research groups saw as paramount. The chapter describes the first two iterations of the ethics education workshop module, a qualitative analysis of the first draft of these guidelines, and finally reflects on future work in this area of in situ ethics education. (shrink)

Student researchers encounter ethical issues daily, but little is known about their unique perspectives. This article presents the results of 30 qualitative semi-structured interviews exploring students’ views and experiences around ethical issues in research groups. During the interviews, students were asked to describe challenges and successes they have encountered in their lab, their conception of what counts as an “ethical issue in research,” and how they handle these issues when they arise. Against this background, the article discusses students’ conceptions of (...) ethical issues in research environments, the types of issues students reported facing, how these issues were ultimately resolved, and finally, the factors, internal qualities, and lessons learned that help students thrive in research environments, as well as some of the challenges students face – especially international students. Many of the ethical challenges interviewees discussed focused on interpersonal issues, highlighting the intense collaboration most graduate students have with their colleagues and supervisors. Findings from this study point to the need for targeted training programs for students and faculty supervisors focusing on building mentoring relationships and finding space in the lab where open communication can occur around ethical research practices. (shrink)

À chacune/chacun, son image de la fille en garçon, et la panoplie vestimentaire qui va avec : complet trois pièces, salopette, cuirasse, strass, smoking, perfecto, bloomer, pourpoint, monocle, lévite de bure, chevelures rases, musculatures gonflées... Qui n'a pas rêvé de Katherine Hepburn dans Sylvia Scarlett et de Greta Garbo en Christine de Suède, de Jeanne Moreau entre Jules et Jim, de Barbara Streisand jouant Yentl, de Sarah Bernhardt faisant l'Aiglon, sans parler d'héroïnes plus...

Socrates expresses at least some interest in the knowledge of knowledge as an ability “to divide things and say that one is knowledge and the other is not knowledge”. If Hugh Benson’s characteristically lucid and careful book succeeds in its portrayal of Socrates as epistemologist, then the Charmides text is perhaps more optimistic than is often conceded. For unlike Gregory Vlastos’s Socrates, who was “no epistemologist, ” Benson’s promises “a philosophically complex, fundamentally coherent, and remarkably influential model of knowledge, ” (...) a model Socrates arrives at, at least in part, by means of a reflective epistemological perspective. (shrink)

Liberals are concerned with the equal moral status of all human beings. This article discusses what flows from this premise for moral cosmopolitans when analysing temporary foreign worker programs for low-skilled workers. Some have hailed these programs as a tool to achieve redistributive global goals. However, I argue that in the example of Live-In-Caregivers in Canada, the morally most problematic aspect is that it provokes vulnerability of individual workers. Once in a situation of vulnerability, important conditions of individual autonomy are (...) jeopardized. Even if these programs provide for redistribution of opportunities on a global scale, the challenge such programs pose to the conditions of autonomy can not outweigh these gains. Instead, they need to be re-assessed and changed to fundamentally express equal moral status of all human beings. (shrink)

In his book Appearances of the Good, Sergio Tenenbaum has offered an impressive new defence of a classical account of practical reason, which marks him as heir to a philosophical tradition going back to Aristotle and Kant or, more recently, to Anscombe and Davidson. This account has come under heavy attack in the past twenty years, and it would be no exaggeration to say that it is now a minority view. This is at least so if one counts the number (...) of living philosophers who deny that strict akratic action is possible. Tenenbaum claims that, minimally, his aim is to show that what he calls after Kant “the scholastic view” still merits a place in the philosophical landscape, and in this respect, it is clear that his enterprise is a success. (shrink)

Using connectionist modelling, Thomas & Karmiloff-Smith (T&K-S) claim that developmental disorders in children are characterised by atypical trajectories and an ultimate functional architecture that is fundamentally different from normal. We argue that there is no empirical evidence for these claims in any developmental disorder and that the available evidence provides support for Residual Normality in both developmental and acquired disorders. We also refute the claim that modular accounts cannot encompass developmental trajectories in children with developmental disorders.

The Cratylus contains Plato's most extensive study of the relation of language to reality and to the pursuit of wisdom. Yet the dialogue has remained relatively neglected in efforts to understand Plato's deepest metaphysical and epistemological commitments. The blame for such neglect lies largely in the dialogue's extensive, difficult, even mysterious etymological section. Recent attempts to make sense of the bulk of the Cratylus are shedding much welcome light on the important roles that the etymological analyses play in the dialogue (...) and in Plato's philosophy more generally. The article outlines three strategies of interpretation before concluding with the author's own proposal. (shrink)