When nurses have active and untreated addictions, patient safety may be compromised and nurse-health endangered. Genuine responses are required to fulfil nurses' moral obligations to their patients as well as to their nurse-colleagues. Guided by core elements of relational ethics, the influences of nursing organizational responses along with the practice environment in shaping the situation are contemplated. This approach identifies the importance of consistency with nursing values, acknowledges nurses interdependence, and addresses the role of nursing organization as moral agent. By (...) examining the relational space, the tension between what appears to be opposing moral responsibilities may be healed. Ongoing discourse to identify authentic actions for the professional practice issue of nursing under the influence is called upon. (shrink)

The purpose of this text is to draw attention to eight forgotten heroes: William C. Bagley, Charles DeGarmo, David Felmley, William Torrey Harris, Isaac L. Kandel, Charles McMurry, William C. Ruediger, and Edward Austin Sheldon. They have been marginalized from our profession, and drawing upon their legacy is the best hope for restoring the profession of teaching today. This work also includes a chapter at the end of the book entitled "John Dewey's Forgotten Essays." The audience for this book (...) includes: 1) classroom teachers, 2) school administrators, 3) teacher educators, 4) deans and other university administrators, 5) college and university presidents, 6) legislators, 7) historians of education, 8) curriculum specialists, 9) specialists in teacher training, and 10) the general public. (shrink)

This case study emphasizes the process of concept-testing, pre-feasibility analysis, and branding of an agriculturally based niche product within the broadercultural context of the Native American community. The focus is not value-added, but rather cultural values added.

This volume is both a state-of-the-art display of current thinking on second language development as a complex system. It is also a tribute to Diane Larsen-Freeman for her decades of intellectual leadership in the academic disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition. The chapters therein range from theoretical expositions to methodological analyses, pedagogical proposals, and conceptual frameworks for future research. In a balanced and in-depth manner, the authors provide a comprehensive and interdisciplinary understanding of second language development, with (...) a wealth of insights that promise to break the status-quo of current research and take it to exciting new territory. The book will appeal to both seasoned and novice researchers in applied linguistics, second language acquisition, bilingualism, cognitive psychology, and education, as well as to practitioners in second or foreign language teaching of any language. (shrink)

Corporate abuse is a dehumanizing attitude built into the policies, structures and operations of a business. This text explains how this attitude is a natural outcome of the transition from a manufacturing to an information-based economy.

Since the turn of the millennium Jürgen Habermas's contributions to social and political theory have been increasingly turning toward matters of religious and theological relevance. This article weighs up the import and coherence of Habermas's recent reflections on religious belief and its relationship to reason and modernity in Western philosophical culture. At the forefront of the analysis stands Habermas's conception of appropriate “limits” and “boundaries” between the domains of knowledge and faith and the possibility and desirability of a process of (...) “discursive translation” of contents of religious language into forms of secularized, universalizing moral argument. The article defends the thesis that Habermas's project of a rapprochement between contents of religious language and norms of scientific thinking founders on its attempt to reconcile too many different, conceptually centrifugal tendencies. However, these difficulties and inconsistencies in Habermas's recent thinking remain instructive and ought to continue to engage the interest of scholars concerned today with the question of how far the philosophy of the social sciences can and cannot accommodate commitments to theism in the practice of research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kendall L. Walton FICTION, FICTION-MAKING, AND STYLES OF FICTIONALITY Both objectsandactions are said to have styles. Styles eire attributed to works of art, bathing suits, neckties, and automobiles. But we also think of styles as ways of doing things. There are styles of teaching, styles of chess playing, styles of travel. The primary notion of style is the one which attaches to actions. When we speak of die style (...) of a poem or a portrait or em automobile we do so with reference to an action or actions associated with the object, usually the action or actions which appear to have been performed in die making of it. I will not argue now for this claim about style except to note that style attributions eure peculietrly alien to objects which are not products of human action. What is the style of a tulip, or an alpine meadow, or a pristine lake in the high Sierras? Are the Grand Canyon and Yosemite Valley in the same style or different ones? Sunsets in the tropics are very different from sunsets in the arctic, but is die difference a stylistic one? We might allow that in unusual cases natured objects can have styles. A chorus ofchirping birds might, just conceivably, chirp in the style of Haydn. But die notion of style here is obviously parasitic on diat which is applied to man-made eirtifacts. To think of an object as having a style is to mink of it as a product of human action.1 If actions are the primary possessors of style, to understand styles of fictionality we must look at die action of fiction-meddng emd its relation to works of fiction. I will concentrate on the very basic question ofwhat fiction is, what it is for something to be a work of fiction, and on attempts to answer this question in terms of die action offiction-making. It has been especially fashionable to utilize die notion ofspeech acts introduced by John Austin in tackling this problem. The fictional status of a work is, supposedly, to be accounted for by what illocutionary actions were or were not performed by the artist producing it, or by connections between what the artist did and certain illocutionary actions. My assessment of mis program will be mostly negative. Speech-act theory is remarkably unhelpful in explaining what fiction is. We have here something ofa "Have dieory, will travel" syndrome. There is a tendency for theorists, when 78 Kendall L. Walton79 faced with a new problem, to dust off an old theory which they know emd love, one devised with other questions in mind, shove it into die breach, and pray mat it will fit. In this case it does not fit, and the result is confusion radier dian illumination. Lest I step on toes other man the ones I am aiming at, let me empheisize that my present concern is not with the viability of speech-act theory as a dieory of language. Nor do I mean to deny that speech-act theory can be used fruitfully to illuminate important features of literary fictions. I am now addressing only die basic question of what fiction is, how works of fiction are to be differentiated from odier things. Whatever the other merits of speech-act theory, its applications to this question have been distinctly infelicitous. From our discussion of such applications em even stronger conclusion will emerge, the conclusion that the nature of fiction is not to be explicated in terms of acts of fiction-making at all. The notion of fiction is in diis respect contrary to that of style, and certain consequences about styles of fictionality follow. I Speech-act theory has been brought to bear on the problem of the nature of fiction in a number of rather different ways. I will look at four of them. The first is the idea that works of fiction are simply texts (or other representations ) which are not vehicles of illocutionary acts. It is true mat in writing fiction an author typically does not perform the illocutionary acts that a person who uses the setme words in a nonfictional setting is likely to be performing... (shrink)

Mistake-making is a common feature of life; it can be given a rigorous theoretical framework. The theory, though, faces a challenge from the ‘functions debate’. Perhaps mistakes are merely malfunctions, so a theory of mistakes requires a stance on functions. However, mistake theory views mistakes as distinct phenomena, not just malfunctions. The functions debate is largely separate from the concept of biological mistakes. While the selected effects theory, for instance, may retain its place within a pluralistic view of function, embracing (...) a robust concept of normativity that goes beyond a relatively narrow conception of function can drive future experimental research. (shrink)

This article explores the much neglected work of the German philosopher and cultural theorist Hans Blumenberg, a figure still relatively little known in the Anglophone world. The thesis is defended that Blumenberg's conception of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966) offers valuable resources for addressing some important questions about the philosophical self-understanding of the modern social sciences in relation to theological and religious sources of thought and language. The article begins with an assessment of the contemporary relevance of Blumenberg's (...) critique of the idea of modern scientific culture as a merely `secularized form' of theological thinking. This critique is then compared with Blumenberg's account of the relationship of theoretico-scientific inquiry to mythological consciousness in his second major philosophical monograph of 1979, Work on Myth. The article concludes with a range of reflections on ways in which Blumenberg's work helps us understand how certain explanatory constructs and devices employed in the modern social sciences can be said to incorporate, assimilate, and at the same time critically transform figures of thought and language that display a mythic, religious and theological context of historical origination, provenance or genealogy. (shrink)

This article reviews the history of marketing thought in relation to social responsibility and business ethics. The main objective of the article is to show that business can be profitable and socially responsible at the same time by practising the societal marketing concept. More specifically, it presents the development of a marketing philosophy, discusses the influence of consumerism on the marketing concept and deals with ethics and social responsibility in marketing. It is argued that organisations who adopt the societal marketing (...) concept will be the ones most likely to make long-run profits as well as be beneficial to society as a whole. (shrink)

Challenging the posthumanist canon which celebrates the pre-eminence of matter, Ruth Miller, inFlourishingThoughtargues that what nonhuman systems contribute to democracy is thought. Drawing on recent feminist theories of nonhuman life and politics, Miller shows that reproduction and flourishing are not antithetical to contemplation and sensitivity. After demonstrating processes of life and processes of thought are indistinguishable, Miller finds that four menacing accumulations of matter and information--global surveillance, stored embryos, human clones, and reproductive trash--are politically productive rather than threats to democratic (...) politics. As a consequence, she questions the usefulness of individual rights such as privacy and dignity, contests the value of the rational metaphysics underlying human-centered political participation, and re-evaluates the gender relations that derive from this type of participation. Ultimately, in place of these human-centered structures, Miller posits a more meditative mode of democratic engagement. Miller's argument has shattering implications for the debates over the proper use and disposal of embryonic tissue, alarms about data gathering by the state and corporations, and other major ethical, social, and security issues. (shrink)

Dostoevsky is one of Russia's greatest novelists and a major influence in modern debates about religion, both in Russia and the West. This collection brings together Western and Russian perspectives on the issues raised by the religious element in his work. The aim of this collection is not to abstract Dostoevsky's religious 'teaching' from his literary works, but to explore the interaction between his Christian faith and his writing. The essays cover such topics as temptation, grace and law, Dostoevsky's use (...) of the gospels and hagiography, Trinitarianism, and the Russian tradition of the veneration of icons, as well as reading aloud, and dialogism. In addition to an exploration of the impact of the Christian tradition on Dostoevsky's major novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, there are also discussions of lesser-known works such as The Landlady and A Little Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree. (shrink)

And faster growth must be seen to improve opportunities for the population as a whole. Further, setting out the evidence--as this book does for Scotland--is vital to overcoming entrenched institutional barriers to policy reform.

On standard accounts of responsibility, one is thought to be responsible for one's own actions or affairs. Levinas' philosophy speaks of a responsibility that goes beyond my actions and their consequences to an infinite, irrecusable, asymmetrical responsibility for the other human. In the dissertation, I present a defense of Levinasian responsibility and argue that distinctive of Levinas' thought as an ethics is the manner in which it maintains the absolute and unexceptionable character of responsibility, while simultaneously putting into question every (...) possible ground or justification for this claim. The central chapters of the dissertation consider the connection between the formal structure of transcendence and the deformalization of this notion as responsibility. After discussing the notions of transcendence employed in the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, I examine Levinas' criticism that transcendence in their sense remains an immanence insofar it continues to tie the conditions of intelligibility to modes of understanding and comprehension. Levinas' reconception of transcendence as a relation to exteriority and absolute alterity is then examined as it is developed first in his early writings , and then in Totality and Infinity through the tropes of the idea of infinity, metaphysical desire, and the face. The aim of these chapters is not only to elucidate in detail the conception of transcendence, but to examine why Levinas thinks that transcendence is already an ethical event. While commentators have sometimes claimed that ethics in Levinas' sense is neither normative nor descriptive, I show that the question of normativity--of how ethical claims are binding on us--is central to the problematic of responsibility, though in a way which ultimately forces us to revise our understanding of both normativity and ethics. Levinas contests the possibility of decisive evidence that would prove the truth of our ethical obligations. What I show is how the call for proof or justification always already distorts and passes over the meaning of responsibility. (shrink)

Despite differences between them, Gadamer and Habermas both argue that in order to understand the practices and beliefs of other cultures and periods of history fully and critically, researchers should enter into imaginary ‘dialogue’ with their subjects about the nature of the world. Objectivity of understanding in their view consists not in prior suppression of our contemporary preconceptions and interests but in a process of actively seeking agreement with others over appropriate world-views and normative beliefs. This paper challenges Gadamer's and (...) Habermas' thesis on three fronts. It argues that, the notion of 'dialogue' with past personages and abstract social totalities is not clear, even when qualified as 'imaginary'; to derive normative Verständigung from descriptive Verstehen is not conceptually well-founded, nor pertinent to the thematic goals of research; and however deeply interpreters remain tied to the culture of their upbringing, they are not thereby licensed to incorporate value-judgments into the research process. Rather than providing any methodological norms for research, dialogue ought best be seen as characterising certain moral and political responsibilities of scientists in relation to civil society and the public sphere. (shrink)

Recent writing in social theory has seen a renewed preoccupation with questions of religion, secularization and civilizational difference. This article reappraises the work of one early twentieth-century thinker in relation to these issues: the German historical theologian and close colleague of Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923). The article concentrates particularly on Troeltsch’s late writings on Europe and ‘Europeanism’. The thesis is defended that Troeltsch offers an important gloss on Weber’s famous assertion of the ‘universal significance and validity’ of occidental rationalism. (...) Troeltsch offers a thicker, more concretized reading of Weber’s statement that serves as a precursor to contemporary thinking about ‘multiple modernities’ and also as a fund of trenchant counter-responses to the claims of recent post-colonial critics about Eurocentrism in western social science. Troeltsch’s writings give us one example among many of a current of cosmopolitan reflexivity in European social thought between the wars that avoided both nationalism and chauvinism, on the one hand, and nihilism and obscurantism, on the other. (shrink)

The article explores a range of motifs in the writing of the Austrian émigré novelist and essayist Hermann Broch, that point to themes in the sociological thought of Max Weber. Although explicit citations of Weber’s name appear rarely in Broch’s writings, the thematic and stylistic contents of Broch’s first novel of 1930-1 The Sleepwalkers indicate a plethora of ways in which the Austrian author engages with ideas he can only have first assimilated by means of a more or less conscious (...) programme of reading in texts by Weber and by other thinkers of the same milieu and generation, including Wilhelm Dilthey and Heinrich Rickert. Most notably in the ‘Excursus on the Disintegration of Values’, in Part III of The Sleepwalkers, Broch elaborates what might be seen as a certain poetic extension of the Weberian vision of modernity in terms of rationalization, disenchantment and the fragmentation of value-spheres. (shrink)

The text comprises a translation of Georg Simmel’s article, ‘Europa und Amerika: eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung’, first published in Das Berliner Tagblatt in July 1915, with a short introduction by the translator. The article is the counterpart to Simmel’s better-known essay ‘The Idea of Europe’, first published in March 1915, reprinted in 1917 in lightly revised form in Simmel’s collection of texts on Germany and the First World War, Der Krieg und die geistigen Entscheidungen. In both essays, Simmel develops a vision (...) of the future of Europe after the destruction of the war as a fragile cultural totality that both encompasses national identities and at the same time transcends them. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida's vision of 'messianicity' in his book Specters of Marx and the essay 'Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Alone' has been widely appreciated by scholars. Yet little fundamentally critical engagement appears to have been made with some important historical-sociological questions raised by Derrida's ideas in these texts. Drawing on earlier reference-points in 20th-century critical theory and sociology, the present article argues for some objections to Derrida's presentation of the significance of religious (...) messianism in modern Western social and political thought. The central claim defended is that Derrida invidiously marginalizes some important non-messianistic idioms, sources and traditions of thinking about religious history and its bearing on contemporary social and political self-understanding. (shrink)

Gadamer and Habermas both argue that some earlier theorists of interpretation in the human sciences, despite recognizing the meaningful character of social reality, still succumb to objectivism because they fail to conceive the relation of interpreters to their subjects in terms of cross-cultural normative “dialogue.” In particular, Gadamer and Habermas claim that the most prominent nineteenth-century philosopher of the human sciences, Wilhelm Dilthey, fell prey to a misleading Cartesian outlook which sought to ground the objectivity of interpretation on complete transcendence (...) of the interpreter’s present cultural and historical situation. This article challenges Gadamer’s and Habermas’s claim by arguing that new research on nineteenth-century hermeneutic thought reveals Dilthey to be much more aware of the reflexive, present-centered nature of historical research than they maintain and further that their own “dialogical” model of interpretation suffers from notable obscurities which Dilthey’s work itself helps expose. (shrink)

Criticism of ‘the West’ and of ‘Western civilization’ in Germany in the early 20th century is generally most familiar today as a conservative force of the age. It is well-known that at the outbreak of war in August 1914 a longstanding German complex of resentment of the Western European powers exploded in a call to arms. Yet it needs to be stressed that not all prominent German bourgeois writers endorsed a wholly militant reading of the motif of German national-cultural ‘protest (...) at the West’. By 1918 an array of voices could come to discern another kind of salient work of contention that refused apology for any kind of violent Kulturkrieg. The thesis defended in this article is that in sophisticated humanistic writing of the era, a German mood of antagonism with the West represents not a regressive ideology but the productive and intelligent outcome of a longstanding preeminence of philosophical questioning in German academic life since the later 19th century about European world pictures and their claims to universal validity on the stage of world history. A range of statements are shown here to anticipate debates of the present day about ‘late’, ‘reflexive’ or ‘post-Eurocentric’ conditions of Western modernity. (shrink)