The precautionary principle (“the Principle”) has been widely embraced as the new paradigm for contending with biological and environmental risk in the context of emerging technologies. Increasingly, it is being incorporated into domestic, supranational, and international legal regimes as part of a general overhaul of health and environmental regulation.1 Codifications of the Principle typically are vague, with their content intentionally left for scholars to debate, decision makers to interpret, and the courts to flesh out through case law. Generally speaking, the (...) Principle holds that scientific uncertainty will not be a bar to preventive regulatory action, and that decision makers should err on the side of .. (shrink)

In book 3 of his Republic, Plato has Socrates undertake an assessment of the educational curriculum that the city (which is being constructed by him in speech) will implement for its youth. Consequently we see that Socrates assigns to poetry a crucial importance; by their imitation of it, poetry shapes the citizens with an initial formation, casts them within a certain orientation, and places them on a path leading in an already conceived direction, toward some unarticulated good. Thus, in forming (...) this city and the souls of its citizens, Socrates first conducts a censorship of the content of the formative myths of the city in an attempt to orchestrate a certain fail-safe against ambiguity and against falling off .. (shrink)

I gratefully acknowledge and respond here to four reviews of my recent book, Cosmology from Alpha to Omega. Nancey Murphy stresses the importance of showing consistency between Christian theology and natural science through a detailed examination of my recent model of their creative interaction. She suggests how this model can be enhanced by adopting Alasdair MacIntyre's understanding of tradition in order to adjudicate between competing ways of incorporating science into a wider worldview. She urges the inclusion of ethics in my (...) model and predicts that this would successfully challenge the competing naturalist tradition in contemporary society. John F. Haught weighs the alternatives of viewing divine action as objective versus subjective and of divine action at one level in nature or at all levels. He asks whether physics is fundamental to nature, arguing instead that metaphysics should be considered as fundamental. Michael Ruse assesses occasional versus universal divine action, the problems raised to divine action when it is related to quantum mechanics, and the way these relations exacerbate the challenge of natural theodicy. As an alternative he suggests viewing God as outside time and acting through unbroken natural law. Willem B. Drees discusses my use of the bridge metaphor for the relation between theology and science, the implications when science is inspired by theology, the role of contingency and necessity in the anthropic principle/many-worlds debate, and the challenge of cosmology to eschatology with the ensuing problem of theodicy. (shrink)

This essay pursues an interpretation of epagôgê in Aristotle in order to challenge the current claims in the scholarship that Aristotle’s method of discovery is, on the one hand, empirical or, on the other hand, a priori. In contrast to these claims, this essay offers a reading of the Analytica in conjunction with the Physics in order to propose the following: if we are to think through Aristotle’s method of discovery, we must first unhinge ourselves from the oppositional paradigm of (...) empirical contra conceptual. Through the example of Aristotle’s inquiry into nature, it is shown that Aristotle’s method of discovery is, at once, one intimately betrothed to “conceptual” (or, more properly, “dialogical”) resources, while also subtended by a comportment itself wakeful and perceptive of the being undergoing inquiry. (shrink)

What is perhaps most remarkable in regard to both Socialism and Anarchism is the association of a widespread popular movement with ideals for a better world. The ideals have been elaborated, in the first instance, by solitary writers of books, and yet powerful sections of the wage-earning classes have accepted them as their guide in the practical affairs of the world. In regard to Socialism this is evident; but in regard to Anarchism it is only true with some qualification. Anarchism (...) as such has never been a widespread creed, it is only in the modified form of Syndicalism that it has achieved popularity. Unlike Socialism and Anarchism, Syndicalism is primarily the outcome, not of an idea, but of an organization: the fact of Trade Union organization came first, and the ideas of Syndicalism are those which seemed appropriate to this organization in the opinion of the more advanced French Trade Unions. But the ideas are, in the main, derived from Anarchism, and the men who gained acceptance for them were, for the most part, Anarchists. Thus we may regard Syndicalism as the Anarchism of the market-place as opposed to the Anarchism of isolated individuals which had preserved a precarious life throughout the previous decades. Taking this view, we find in Anarchist-Syndicalism the same combination of ideal and organization as we find in Socialist political parties. It is from this standpoint that our study of these movements will be undertaken. (shrink)

This article examines the practices of international business in the South Pacific island nation of Fiji. After an investigation of past practices of international businesses and the ways these have helped to shape the major social challenges confronting the nation today, the article turns to an exploration of those challenges, especially poverty and race relations. It is argued that there are two paramount responsibilities for international business operating in a context like Fiji: to conduct their business operations in ways that (...) genuinely add economic value locally; and to make a concerted and informed effort to avoid doing social harm. In order to meet these responsibilities, managers will have to do much better than their predecessors in terms of concern for and understanding of the unique social and cultural attributes of Fijian society. (shrink)

This paper investigates the relationship between James’ radical empiricism and Deleuze’s study of the genesis of sense without a transcendental subject as necessary condition. It shows that James’ concept of pure experience changes the form of relation between mind and world. Considering how to conceptualize experience without a fixed metaphysical or transcendental subject destabilizes ontological identity, leads to a founding conceptual divergence from traditional phenomenology, and motivates Deleuze’s efforts towards transcendental empiricism. The paper reads Deleuze’s work on the genesis of (...) sense in this context, arguing that one important result is an ontological pluralism. Such pluralism is crucial in considering how meaning can be made between and across differences and is in keeping with radical empiricism’s openness to life’s complexity. (shrink)

When subordinates have suffered an unfairness, managers sometimes try to compensate them by allocating something extra that belongs to the organization. These reactions, which we label asmanagerial Robin Hood behaviors, are undertaken without the consent of senior leadership. In four studies, we present and test a theory of managerial Robin Hoodism. In study 1, we found that managers themselves reported engaging in Robin Hoodism for various reasons, including a moral concern with restoring justice. Study 2 results suggested that managerial Robin (...) Hoodism is more likely to occur when the justice violations involve distributive and interpersonal justice rather than procedural justice violations. In studies 3 and 4, when moral identity (trait or primed) was low, both distributive and interpersonal justice violations showed similar relationships to managerial Robin Hoodism. However, when moral identity was high, interpersonal justice violations showed a strong relationship to managerial Robin Hoodism regardless of the level of distributive justice. (shrink)

A beloved Buddhist teacher and a psychologist specializing in Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT) provide practical methods for living a life filled with compassion. A life overflowing with compassion. It sounds wonderful in theory, but how do you do it? This guide provides practical methods to living with this wonderful quality, based on traditional Buddhist teachings and on methods from modern psychology particularly a technique called Compassion-Focused Therapy (CFT). The methods presented by the two authors--a psychotherapist and a Tibetan Buddhist nun--turn out (...) to have a good deal in common. In fact, they complement each other in wonderful ways. Each of the 64 short chapters ends with a reflection or exercise for putting compassion into practice in various life situations. (shrink)

Concern with material equality as the central form of distributive justice is a very modern idea. Distributive justice for Aristotle and many other writers for millennia after him was a matter of distributing what each ought to get from merit or desert in some sense. Many, such as Hume, thought material equality a pernicious idea. In the medieval village life of Bodo, villagers knew enough about each other to govern relations through norms, including, when necessary, a norm of charity. In (...) more complex modern societies, economic destitution cannot so well be handled by individual charity, but now it can be handled by states. Hence, we begin to conceive of the idea of distributive justice as driven essentially by concern for material equality. The difference in state capacities is largely epistemological: states today can know much more about their citizens. (shrink)

Since early 1997, when the creation of Dolly the sheep by somatic cell nuclear transfer was announced in Nature, numerous government reports, essays, articles and books have considered the ethical problems and policy issues surrounding human reproductive cloning. In this article, I consider what response a modern liberal society should give to the prospect of human cloning, if it became safe and practical. Some opponents of human cloning have argued that permitting it would place us on a slippery slope to (...) a repugnant future society, comparable to that portrayed in Aldous Huxley’s novel, Brave New World.I conclude that, leaving aside concerns about safety, none of the psychological or social considerations discussed in this article provides an adequate policy justification for invoking the state’s coercive powers to prevent human cloning. (shrink)

Recent work on the early development of episodic memory in my laboratory has been fuelled by the following assumption: if episodic memory is re-experiential memory then Kant’s analysis of the spatiotemporal nature of experience should constrain and positively influence theories of episodic memory development. The idea is that re-experiential memory will “inherit” these spatiotemporal features. On the basis of this assumption, Russell and Hanna (Mind and Language 27(1):29–54, 2012) proposed that (a) the spatial element of re-experience is egocentric and (...) (b) that the temporal element of re-experiencing involves order/simultaneity. The first of these assumptions is immediately problematic for two reasons. In the first place, if we assume that early episodic recall mediated by processing in the hippocampus, then (a) is clearly in tension with the fact that spatial coding in the hippocampus is allocentric/environment-centred. Second, two of our own recent experiments (described here) show that when only egocentric cues are available in a What/When/Where episodic memory task it is not possible to distinguish young children’s performance from semantic memory. I argue that this tension should be resolved by recognising that the egocentric coding of the original experience as being of an objective scene relies upon allocentric representations and these are preserved in re-experiential memory, allowing a recollection of the objective nature of the scene on which one takes a subjective view. (shrink)

Wittgenstein: From Mysticism to Ordinary Language presents the Tractatus as a work of mystic theology intended to direct the reader to a transcendental plane from which human existence can be viewed from the divine perspective. More than any other work on Wittgenstein, this study integrates text material with personal biographical information, especially information dealing with his spiritual and psychological states. The result is a fresh, coherent, and extremely illuminating picture of Wittgenstein, successfully avoiding the pitfalls of either psychological reductionism or (...) unfaithfulness to the text. It is bold without being reckless, passionately argued without being doctrinaire, and makes a very powerful and persuasive case for its main thesis. (shrink)

The British philosopher's 1926 treatise on the values of intellectual and moral education.

The “nation” has been the primary unit of political membership in modernity, typically stronger than “region” (the American 1865) and almost always stronger than “class” (the European 1914). Membership in the nation has meant citizenship, the basis of civil rights and civic responsibility within the rule of law. However “nation” is also related to the “people,” the source of all democratic power. The “people” was the population in the age of the democratic revolutions before anything like contemporary mass immigration. While (...) the Enlightenment notion of “the people” was not an ethnic definition, the romanticization of the term and its metamorphosis.. (shrink)

Critiques of liberalism are a dime a dozen. With every generation they come in and out of fashion like changing lipstick colors. This does not mean, however, that all is well in a context of perennial cyclic crisis alternating liberalism and conservatism. As Siegel shows in his account of liberalism's recent authoritarian involution, the latest developments mark a sharp departure from some of the better American political traditions. Specifically, the disintegration of pragmatism as a result of the Vietnam fiasco and (...) racial strife in the 1960s contributed to the concretization of what were at least latent anti-democratic tendencies into a procedural elitism oblivious to substantive realities and the human dimension. (shrink)

“Community” has long been a companion of Critical Theory, but it has always pointed in two diametrically opposed directions. One path leads us to communitarian dreams of a genuine sociability and a full life. Romantic sensibility, anxious about the modern experience of cold rationality and mechanical organization, elaborates counter-models of authentic living, embedded in organic communities deemed genuine. While the Enlightenment legacy appears to abandon us to alienated isolation—no matter how much it proclaims the importance of public discourse—the romantic community (...) provides an existential alternative, an opportunity to reclaim a human authenticity. Ferdinand Tönnies's famous conceptual binary named this drama:.. (shrink)