Dans un environnement organisationnel instable et concurrentiel, l'usage des outils de groupware serait tributaire de la convergence entre, d'une part, les formes de communication permises par ces outils et, d'autre part, les stratégies relationnelles mises en oeuvre pour développer la confiance entre les acteurs. Les pratiques de collaboration qui font appel aux technologies informatiques de travail en groupe dépendraient alors de cette logique d'usage. Une recherche empirique, réalisée dans des entreprises et des centres de recherche de la Silicon Valley, conforte (...) ces hypothèses.In a changing and competitive organizational environment, the use of groupware tools seems to rely on the convergence of the communication allowed by these tools and the relational strategies necessary to develop trust. Consequently, computer supported collaborative practices would depend on this logic of use. Empirical research realised in firms and in research centres in Silicon Valley tends to confirm these hypotheses. (shrink)

Le Précis de philosophie des sciences vise à présenter, de manière pédagogique, l'état actuel des grandes questions et des grands domaines de la philosophie des sciences. C'est un ouvrage de niveau "intermédiaire", entre les ouvrages d'initiation et les ouvrages de recherche. Il peut être utilisé comme manuel pour des cours de philosophie des sciences au niveau Master, ainsi que dans le cadre de la préparation aux nouvelles épreuves d'épistémologie des CAPES scientifiques. Il a notamment pour vocation de servir de support (...) de cours pour des enseignements en épistémologie et philosophie des sciences de niveau L3, M1 et M2. (shrink)

En posant avec clarté des questions de philosophie de l’esprit, d’ontologie et d’épistémologie, ce livre témoigne à la fois de l’intérêt réel de la danse comme objet philosophique et du rôle unique que peut jouer la philosophie dans une meilleure compréhension de cet art. Qu’est-ce que danser ? Que nous apprend le mouvement dansé sur la nature humaine et la relation entre le corps et l’esprit ? À quelles conditions une œuvre est-elle correctement interprétée par les danseurs et bien identifiée (...) par les spectateurs ? (shrink)

Interest in the political relevance of the emotions is growing rapidly. In light of this, Hannah Arendt’s claim that the emotions are apolitical has come under renewed fire. But many critics have misunderstood her views on the relationship between individuals, emotions and the political. This paper addresses this issue by reconstructing the conceptual framework through which Arendt understands the emotions. Arendt often describes the heart – where the emotions reside – as a place of darkness. I begin by tracing this (...) metaphor through her work to demonstrate that it is meant to convey the inherently uncertain nature of emotions rather than a devaluation of them. I proceed to challenge the notion that Arendt adopts the Enlightenment dichotomy between reason and emotion. In fact, she rejects both as a basis for politics. However, she does identify some constructive roles for the emotions. I argue that fear is intrinsically connected to courage – the principal political virtue – in Arendt’s philosophy. In ligh... (shrink)

Empirical evidence indicates that bereaved spouses are surprisingly muted in their responses to their loss, and that after a few months many of the bereaved return to their emotional baseline. Psychologists think this is good news: resilience is adaptive, and we should welcome evidence that there is less suffering in the world. I explore various reasons we might have for regretting our resilience, both because of what resilience tells us about our own significance vis-à-vis loved ones, and because resilience may (...) render us incapable of comprehending how things really stand, valuewise. I also compare our actual dispositions to extreme alternatives (“sub-resilience” and “super-resilience”), and consider whether we might endorse (plain) resilience as a kind of mean. (shrink)

Some medical services have long generated deep moral controversy within the medical profession as well as in broader society and have led to conscientious refusals by some physicians to provide those services to their patients. More recently, pharmacists in a number of states have refused on grounds of conscience to fill legal prescriptions for their customers. This paper assesses these controversies. First, I offer a brief account of the basis and limits of the claim to be free to act on (...) one’s conscience. Second, I sketch an account of the basis of the medical and pharmacy professions’ responsibilities and the process by which they are specified and change over time. Third, I then set out and defend what I call the “conventional compromise” as a reasonable accommodation to conflicts between these professions’ responsibilities and the moral integrity of their individual members. Finally, I take up and reject the complicity objection to the conventional compromise. Put together, this provides my answer to the question posed in the title of my paper: “Conscientious refusal by physicians and pharmacists: who is obligated to do what, and why?”. (shrink)

We have some of our properties purely in virtue of the way we are. (Our mass is an example.) We have other properties in virtue of the way we interact with the world. (Our weight is an example.) The former are the intrinsic properties, the latter are the extrinsic properties. This seems to be an intuitive enough distinction to grasp, and hence the intuitive distinction has made its way into many discussions in philosophy, including discussions in ethics, philosophy of mind, (...) metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of physics. Unfortunately, when we look more closely at the intuitive distinction, we find reason to suspect that it conflates a few related distinctions, and that each of these distinctions is somewhat resistant to analysis. (shrink)

Several authors believe that there are certain facts that are striking and cry out for explanation—for instance, a coin that is tossed many times and lands in the alternating sequence HTHTHTHTHTHT…. According to this view, we have prima facie reason to believe that such facts are not the result of chance. I call this view the striking principle. Based on this principle, some have argued for far-reaching conclusions, such as that our universe was created by intelligent design, that there are (...) many universes other than the one we inhabit, and that there are no mathematical or normative facts. Appealing as the view may initially seem, I argue that we lack sufficient reason to accept it. (shrink)

Preface Part One Buddhism and Phenomenology Ch.1Buddhism and Phenomenology Ch.2 Husserl and Merleau-Ponty Part Two The Four Basic Buddhist Models in India Introduction Ch.3 Model One: The Five Skandhas Ch.4 Model Two: Pratitya-samutpada Ch.5 Model Three: Tridhatu Ch.6 Model Four: Sila-Samadhi-Prajna Ch.7 Asamjni-samapatti and Nirodha-samapatti Ch.8 Summary of the Four Models Part Three Karma, Meditation, and Epistemology Ch.9 Karma Ch.10 Madhyamikan Issues Ch.11 The Privilaging of Prajna-paramita Part Four Trimsika and Translations Ch.12 Texts and Translations Part Five The Ch’eng Wei-Shih (...) Lun and the Problem of Psychosophical Closure: Yogacara in China Ch.13 Ch.14 Seven Trajectories Ch.15 The Legend of the Transmission of the Ch’eng Wei-Shih Lun Ch.16 Alterity: Parinama Ch.17 Why Consciousness in Not Empty Ch.18 On Rupa Ch.19 Externality Ch.20 The Four Conditions Ch.21 Mirror Knowing: Soteric Alterations Ch.22 Language, Avijnapti-Rupa and Vijnapti-Rupa Ch.23 Is What is Ultimately Real Itself Ultimately Real? Conclusions Appendices Bibliography Index. (shrink)

Our main aim in this paper is to show that constructing an adequate theory of communication involves going beyond Grice’s notion of speaker’s meaning. After considering some of the difficulties raised by Grice’s three-clause definition of speaker’s meaning, we argue that the characterisation of ostensive communication introduced in relevance theory can provide a conceptually unified explanation of a much wider range of communicative acts than Grice was concerned with, including cases of both ‘showing that’ and ‘telling that’, and with both (...) determinate and indeterminate import. (shrink)

This commentary uses the dynamic of identity-protective cognition to pose a friendly challenge to Jussim (2012). Like other forms of information processing, this one is too readily characterized as a bias. It is no mistake, however, to view identity-protective cognition as generating inaccurate perceptions. The “bounded rationality” paradigm incorrectly equates rationality with forming accurate beliefs. But so does Jussim's critique.

This paper examines the notion of tolerance in education. In general, tolerance is perceived as a means to resist hostility, raise awareness of cultural differences, mitigate violence, and maintain liberal and democratic values. In education, there are various initiatives, such as the International Day for Tolerance (UNESCO in Declaration of principles on tolerance, 1995), that aim to build resilience against different forms of hate and cultivate openness and acceptance of the other. Yet the idea of tolerance includes different understandings and (...) interpretations. This paper argues that cultivating an embodied sense of tolerance among students, in particular in divisive communities, requires us to move beyond deliberative interpretations of tolerance and to advance a pragmatic understanding of tolerance through an agonistic lens. This paper starts with a review of several dominant interpretations of tolerance. The heart of the paper focuses on interpreting Dewey’s pragmatism as a theoretical basis for advancing tolerance. The final part of the paper explores how pragmatism through an agonistic lens can support a more flexible and humane approach to dealing with political conflicts. (shrink)

The leader–member relationship has been identified as a key determinant of successful working relationships and business outcomes in China. A high-quality leader–member relationship helps managers and employees to meet the demands they face and gives them the opportunity to develop socially, emotionally and morally. Such relationships form the basis of the overall well-being and success of the organisation. This article contributes to relationally oriented leadership theories and more specifically to the leader–member exchange theory by examining the theory in the context (...) of Western expatriate managers and Chinese employees in China. The first aim of the study is to analyse the similarities and differences between the LMX theory, which owes its origins to Western corporate experience, and the social and moral norms of guanxi, a crucial element in the Chinese value system. Since Westerners and Chinese people can give different interpretations to guanxi, the second aim of the article is to discuss the ethical challenges to the Western manager arising from guanxi. The findings of this study have implications not only for China, but also for other Chinese communities where guanxi is endorsed and practised. (shrink)

This essay defends a novel interpretation of the term xìng 性 as it occurs in Chinese texts of the late Warring States period (roughly 320–221 BCE). The term played an important role both in the famous controversy over the goodness or badness of people’s xìng and elsewhere in the intellectual discourse of the period. Extending especially the work of A.C. Graham, the essay stresses the importance for understanding xìng of early Chinese assumptions about spontaneity, continuity, health, and (in the human (...) case) motivation. These assumptions make xìng fundamentally different from the contemporary nature concepts with which it is often equated. In particular, people’s xìng is not a near-equivalent of human nature or (in modern Chinese) of rénxìng 人性. (shrink)

Framed as a consideration of the other contributions to the present volume of the Journal of Indian Philosophy, this essay attempts to scout and characterize several of the interrelated doctrines and issues that come into play in thinking philosophically about the doctrine of svasaṃvitti, particularly as that was elaborated by Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. Among the issues thus considered are the question of how mānasapratyakṣa (which is akin to manovijñāna) might relate to svasaṃvitti; how those related doctrines might be brought to (...) bear with respect to some problems addressed with reference to the further doctrine (also closely related to svasaṃvitti) concerning pramāṇaphala; and the distinctiveness of Dharmakīrti’s sahopalambhaniyama argument for svasaṃvitti. A question recurrently considered throughout the essay has to do with whether (following Akeel Bilgrami) svasaṃvitti reflects a perceptual or a constitutive understanding of self-awareness. (shrink)

Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen’s (1996) influential account of “cultures of honor” speculates that honor norms are a socially-adaptive deterrence strategy. This theory has been appealed to by multiple empirically-minded philosophers, and plays an important role in John Doris and Alexandra Plakias’ (2008) antirealist argument from disagreement. In this essay, I raise four objections to the Nisbett-Cohen deterrence thesis, and offer another theory of honor in its place that sees honor as an agonistic normative system regulating prestige competitions. Since my (...) account portrays honor norms as radically different from liberal ones, it actually strengthens Doris and Plakias’ case in some respects: cultures of honor are not merely superficially different from Western liberal ones. Nonetheless, the persistent appeal of honor’s principles, and their moral plausibility in certain contexts, suggests not antirealism, but pluralism—a reply on behalf of realism that itself has considerable empirical support. (shrink)

In a range of contexts, individuals arrive at collective decisions by sharing confidence in their judgements. This tendency to evaluate the reliability of information by the confidence with which it is expressed has been termed the ‘confidence heuristic’. We tested two ways of implementing the confidence heuristic in the context of a collective perceptual decision-making task: either directly, by opting for the judgement made with higher confidence, or indirectly, by opting for the faster judgement, exploiting an inverse correlation between confidence (...) and reaction time. We found that the success of these heuristics depends on how similar individuals are in terms of the reliability of their judgements and, more importantly, that for dissimilar individuals such heuristics are dramatically inferior to interaction. Interaction allows individuals to alleviate, but not fully resolve, differences in the reliability of their judgements. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of confidence and collective decision-making. (shrink)

It is widely recognized that prioritizing health care resources by their relative cost-effectiveness can result in lower priority for the treatment of disabled persons than otherwise similar non-disabled persons. I distinguish six different ways in which this discrimination against the disabled can occur. I then spell out and evaluate the following moral objections to this discrimination, most of which capture an aspect of its unethical character: it implies that disabled persons' lives are of lesser value than those of non-disabled persons; (...) it constitutes “double jeopardy” or violates Frances Kamm's non-linkage principle; it conflicts with equality of opportunity; it conflicts with fairness, which requires ignoring (some/most) differential impacts of treatment; it wrongly gives lower priority to disabled persons for equally effective treatment; it conflicts with giving all persons an equal chance to reach their full potential; and, it is in conflict with giving priority to the worse off. (shrink)

I argue for the merits of studying historical moral revolutions to inform moral and political philosophy. Such a research program is not merely of empirical, historical interest but has normative implications. To explain why, I situate the proposal in the tradition of naturalized epistemology. As Alison M. Jaggar and other scholars have argued, a naturalistic approach is characteristic of much feminist philosophy. Accordingly, I argue that the study of moral revolutions would be especially fruitful for feminist moral and political philosophers.

The concept of performance has gradually become established in health policies. Presented as necessary and positive, it is often reduced to efficiency, which results in policies and management styles aimed at optimisation. While they are supposed to guarantee the sustainability of our healthcare systems, these practices have made them fragile. Insights from the life sciences help us understand why. Indeed, biologists observe that living beings do not prioritise optimisation but robustness. To cope with fluctuations, a robust organisation operates with redundancies, (...) apparent waste, heterogeneity, organised fluctuations, slowness, and hesitation. It functions sub‐optimally. This article offers a theoretical reflection and management directions for more robust healthcare systems. (shrink)

In this article I shall analyse and evaluate analytic theists’ views of what it takes to be a person of faith. I suggest that the subject can be approached by posing requirements a person must allegedly fulfil in order to count as a person of faith. These requirements can be referred to as aspects of faith. According to my analysis, four different aspects of faith can be distinguished: the cognitive, the evaluative-affective, the practical, and the interpersonal. There have been divergent (...) assessments about which aspects are indispensable for faith and how they should be understood. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against Nancy Cartwright's claim that we ought to abandon what she calls "fundamentalism" about the laws of nature and adopt instead her "dappled world" hypothesis. According to Cartwright we ought to abandon the notion that fundamental laws apply universally, instead we should consider the law-like statements of science to apply in highly qualified ways within narrow, non-overlapping and ontologically diverse domains, including the laws of fundamental physics. For Cartwright, "laws" are just locally applicable refinements of (...) a more open-ended concept of capacities. By providing a critique of the dappled world approach's central notion of open ended capacities and substituting this concept with an account of properties drawn from recent writing on the subject of structural realism I show that a form of fundamentalism is viable. I proceed from this conclusion to show that this form of fundamentalism provides a superior reading of case studies, such as the effective field theory program in quantum field theory, than the "dappled world" view. The case study of the EFT program demonstrates that ontological variability between theoretical domains can be accounted for without altogether abandoning fundamentalism or adopting Cartwright's more implausible theses. (shrink)

A standard view about criminal law distinguishes between two kinds of offenses, “mala in se” and “mala prohibita.” This view also corresponds to a distinction between two bases for criminalization: certain acts should be criminalized because they are moral wrongs; other acts may be criminalized for the sake of promoting overall welfare. This paper aims to show two things: first, that allowing for criminalization for the sake of promoting welfare renders the category of wrongfulness crimes largely redundant. Second, and more (...) importantly, accepting welfare as a legitimate ground for criminalization implies a certain view about legitimate state action, which makes criminalization for wrongfulness more difficult to justify. If I am right, the view that keeps the two categories of criminalization as largely separate is untenable. I conclude with some remarks about the advantages of welfare as the basis for criminalization. (shrink)

Competent adults should be permitted to determine the course of their own lives. We may try to influence them. We may ask them, perhaps even implore them, to change their minds. But in the end, they are in charge of their lives. They get to choose their careers, whether and whom to marry, whether to exercise, and whether to have surgery.This emphasis on respect for patients’ autonomy may seem to imply that allowing patients to make their own decisions should always (...) take precedence over other considerations. Given this presumption, there has been almost no discussion in the medical literature or elsewhere about how important this value is and whether it should sometimes be balanced against and give way to other values. This absence of guidance is especially problematic in cases where respect for patient autonomy conflicts with promoting patients’ clinical interests. (shrink)

Similar case analysis (SCA) is an essential topic in legal artificial intelligence, serving as a reference for legal professionals. Most existing works treat SCA as a traditional text classification task and ignore some important legal elements that affect the verdict and case similarity, like legal events, and thus are easily misled by semantic structure. To address this issue, we propose a Legal Event-Context Model named LECM to improve the accuracy and interpretability of SCA based on Chinese legal corpus. The event-context (...) integration mechanism, which is an essential component of the LECM, is proposed to integrate the legal event and context information based on the attention mechanism, enabling legal events to be associated with their corresponding relevant contexts. We introduce an event detection module to obtain the legal event information, which is pre-trained on a legal event detection dataset to avoid labeling events manually. We conduct extensive experiments on two SCA tasks, i.e., similar case matching (SCM) and similar case retrieval (SCR). Compared with baseline models, LECM is validated by about 13% and 11% average improvement in terms of mean average precision and accuracy respectively, for SCR and SCM tasks. These results indicate that LECM effectively utilizes event-context knowledge to enhance SCA performance and its potential application in various legal document analysis tasks. (shrink)

English ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and writer Richard Dawkins opens Chapter 2 of his bestseller The God Delusion by saying that the God of the Old Testament is "arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction" and goes on to list nineteen negative character traits. Now in God : the Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, Dan Barker, a former ordained minister and current atheist, proves that Dawkins was right."--Jacket.

This article proposes a model for conceptualizing advertising ethics theory based on a distinction between philosophical and occupational ethical systems and the assumption that the fundamental goal of occupational ethics is to address the imbalance of power between the practitioner group and the community or communities they serve through practices that cultivate a relationship of trust. An analytical model is proposed as the basis for future empirical research to test and clarify the suggested relationships. It is suggested that a more (...) refined theoretical meta-model could provide a common framework within which research in specific advertising ethics issues might be revisited. (shrink)

In this account, we explain the meaning of a priori voting power and outline how it is measured. We distinguish two intuitive notions as to what voting power means, leading to two approaches to measuring it. We discuss some philosophical and pragmatic objections, according to which a priori (as distinct from actual) voting power is worthless or inapplicable.

Writers on human dignity roughly divide between those who stress the social origins of this concept and its role in marking rank and hierarchy, and those who follow Kant in grounding dignity in an abstract and idealized philosophical conception of human beings. In these lectures, Jeremy Waldron contrives to combine attractive features of both strands. In the first lecture, Waldron presents a conception of dignity that preserves its ancient association with rank and station, thus allowing him to tap rich historical (...) resources while avoiding what many perceive as the excessive abstraction and dubious metaphysics of the Kantian strand. At the same time he argues for a conception of human dignity that amounts to a generalization of high status across all human beings, and so attains the appealing universality of the Kantian position. The second lecture focuses particularly on the importance of dignity - understood in this way - as a status defining persons' relation to law: their presentation as persons capable of self-applying the law, capable of presenting and arguing a point of view, and capable of responding to law's demands without brute coercion. Together the two lectures illuminate the relation between dignity conceived as the ground of rights and dignity conceived as the content of rights; they also illuminate important ideas about dignity as noble bearing and dignity as the subject of a right against degrading treatment; and they help us understand the sense in which dignity is better conceived as a status than as a kind of value. (shrink)

It is natural to think of legal positivism and jurisprudential naturalism as intellectually allied ideas. Legal positivism is associated with the idea that law is a matter of social fact; naturalism is a philosophical tenet that, among other things suggests the importance of scientific findings and methods to philosophy. At the very least, there seems to be a close family resemblance between the two views. In this essay, I challenge this view from a naturalistic perspective. I show that the best-known (...) proponents of legal positivism in the twentieth century all rejected naturalism. I dedicate most of my discussion to H.L.A. Hart’s version of legal positivism, as it appears superficially friendly to naturalism. I show that throughout his career and in writings on a wide range of topics, Hart consistently argued against the applicability of the methods of science to the explanation of social phenomena. This is not a small matter: I argue that it is this anti-naturalistic stance that contributed to his descriptively faulty account of adjudication. After reviewing more briefly the work of other leading legal positivists, I argue in my conclusion that those seeking to advance a naturalistic approach to law should turn their backs of much of twentieth-century legal positivism, which in various guises has been hostile to naturalism. (shrink)

This paper examines some Indian philosophical arguments that are understandable as transcendental arguments—i.e., arguments whose conclusions cannot be denied without self-contradiction, insofar as the truth of the claim in question is a condition of the possibility even of any such denial. This raises the question of what kind of self-contradiction is involved—e.g., pragmatic self-contradiction, or the kind that goes with logical necessity. It is suggested that these arguments involve something like practical reason—indeed, that they just are arguments against the primacy (...) of “theoretical reason.” This characterization illuminates a characteristically Indic appeal to ordinary language. (shrink)

Summary Kant's critique of corpuscular theory created a tabula rasa situation in natural philosophy and opened up a vast new field of research, particularly related to the study of heat, light, electricity and magnetism. ?rsted introduced Kantian epistemology in Scandinavia and made friends with J. W. Ritter, an outstanding experimenter who was the first to make dynamical philosophy productive. The ?rsted?Ritter partnership aimed at the construction of a cosmology based on dynamical philosophy as well as galvanic interpretations of the Lichtenberg (...) and Chladni patterns. It is suggested that Kantian critique and dynamical cosmology provided the framework within which ?rsted and Ritter made their epochal discoveries as well as their bold speculations. Finally, it is argued that the Romantics widened the scope of natural philosophy itself. (shrink)

Most people don’t want their teachers, scientists, or journalists to be too ideological. Calling someone an “ideologue” isn’t a compliment. But what is ideology and why exactly is it a threat? I propose that ideology is fruitfully understood in terms of three ingredients: a basic moral claim, a worldview built on top of that claim, and the attempt to politicize this worldview by injecting it into social institutions. I further argue that the central danger of ideology is that activating these (...) three ingredients tends to undermine liberal social institutions. And yet a certain amount of ideology is both unavoidable and desirable, as I show, since it supplies us with important goods like social cohesion and mobilization. This means the best we can do is to try and set boundaries on ideology. (shrink)