In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 221-223 [Access article in PDF] John J. Conley. The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers in Neoclassical France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 222. Cloth, $39.95. The rediscovery of forgotten women philosophers began in the 1970s and has yielded important results by broadening substantially the intellectual history of early modern Europe. In The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers (...) in Neoclassical France, John J. Conley expands even more the corpus of philosophical texts written by women to include five authors whose work has never been considered in this context. Five salonnières, traditionally considered the authors of light literature, are the subject of Conley's book. By expanding the "map of philosophy sites and genres" (159), Conley has looked beyond the university setting and beyond the female philosophers associated with the major male figures of [End Page 221] the period. He argues that the salon produced important female philosophers whose intellectual power was especially revealed in their highly original consideration and discussion of virtue and whose work provides an alternative to the philosophy produced by the canonical male authors of the seventeenth century.As he explores the moral philosophies of Sablé, Deshoulières, Sablière, Vallière, and Maintenon, Conley shows us how the salon promoted experimentation with alternative methods of philosophical analysis. Specifically, the salon produced philosophical arguments that were "characterized more by debate and by epigrammatic commentary than by the lecture and the treatise" (158). It promoted new methods of argument and focused thematically on moral issues.The works of the Jansenist Madame de Sablé rely on the maxime, the literary genre associated most closely with salon culture. In her Maximes, Sablé engages in moral psychology to offer a critique of aristocratic society. She writes about the pride and self-interest that defines this milieu, and she draws a clear distinction between a physical aristocracy (based on blood and rank) and a spiritual aristocracy of the virtuous. For this author, the essential trait of the individual is moral identity, not family or heritage.The poetry and philosophy of Madame Deshoulières is rooted in naturalism and inspired by the works of Lucretius and Gassendi. For her, virtue involves "an ecological reverence for the material world" (49). She addressed the vice and confusion that come from human misconceptions about nature. In particular, the human refusal to accept mortality reflects a broader refusal to accept the materialist nature of human beings. The belief in human superiority and immortality constitutes an attack on nature and explains human efforts to dominate nature. The belief in human immortality in turn raises issues of morality because it produces in humans hubris and the consequent mistreatment of the animal world and material environment. For Deshoulières virtue involves reverence for the material world.With Sablière the ethical person is the "redeemed saint, the sinner freed to a life of charity by the sovereign action of God and summoned to a particular set of moral duties in the midst of austere prayer" (94-95). Her maxims refer ultimately to spiritual abandonment to the will of God, and Sablière combines a deeply mystical piety, shaped by contact with Quietism, and the idea of the sovereignty of God, derived from Augustinian theology. The individual is dependent upon God's grace, and to live a moral life requires serious contemplation and communication with God and pyschological detachment from self, a relationship that springs from God's initiative.La Vallière also interprets virtue in an Augustinian vein, but her approach to virtue does not insist on abandonment of the world. She writes about knowing God through the experiences of repentance and conversion. Her Reflections on the Mercy of God is a dialogue with God on the part of repentent female voice. Her voice is definitely gendered, and she witnesses to God's mercy.Finally, Conley shows us in turn that the salonnières brought to their discussion of virtue an interest in etiquette and manners that derived from the distinctive experiences of women. Here the... (shrink)

Interview by Klasien Horstman on gender and genetics. 'Unlike many gender theorists, I do not view the body as socially constructed; nor do I share postmodern and deconstructionist disquiet at the notion of a unified subject. Frankly, I think these constructions get in the way of political action and are bad for women’s rights.' -/- .

“When Species Meet is a breathtaking meditation on the intersection between humankind and dog, philosophy and science, and macro and micro cultures.” —Cameron Woo, Publisher of Bark magazine In 2006, about 69 million U.S. households had pets, giving homes to around 73.9 million dogs, 90.5 million cats, and 16.6 million birds, and spending over $38 billion dollars on companion animals. As never before in history, our pets are truly members of the family. But the notion of “companion species”—knotted from human (...) beings, animals and other organisms, landscapes, and technologies—includes much more than “companion animals.” In When Species Meet, Donna J. Haraway digs into this larger phenomenon to contemplate the interactions of humans with many kinds of critters, especially with those called domestic. At the heart of the book are her experiences in agility training with her dogs Cayenne and Roland, but Haraway’s vision here also encompasses wolves, chickens, cats, baboons, sheep, microorganisms, and whales wearing video cameras. From designer pets to lab animals to trained therapy dogs, she deftly explores philosophical, cultural, and biological aspects of animal-human encounters. In this deeply personal yet intellectually groundbreaking work, Haraway develops the idea of companion species, those who meet and break bread together but not without some indigestion. “A great deal is at stake in such meetings,” she writes, “and outcomes are not guaranteed. There is no assured happy or unhappy ending—socially, ecologically, or scientifically. There is only the chance for getting on together with some grace.” Ultimately, she finds that respect, curiosity, and knowledge spring from animal-human associations and work powerfully against ideas about human exceptionalism. One of the founders of the posthumanities, Donna J. Haraway is professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Author of many books and widely read essays, including The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness and the now-classic essay “The Cyborg Manifesto,” she received the J. D. Bernal Prize in 2000, a lifetime achievement award from the Society for Social Studies in Science. (shrink)

This study examines the impact of a social desirability response bias as a personality characteristic (self-deception and impression management) and as an item characteristic (perceived desirability of the behavior) on self-reported ethical conduct. Findings from a sample of college students revealed that self-reported ethical conduct is associated with both personality and item characteristics, with perceived desirability of behavior having the greatest influence on self-reported conduct. Implications for research in business ethics are drawn, and suggestions are offered for reducing the effects (...) of a socially desirable response bias. (shrink)

Electrifying, provocative, and controversial when first published thirty years ago, Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" is even more relevant today, when the divisions that she so eloquently challenges--of human and machine but also of gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and location--are increasingly complex. The subsequent "Companion Species Manifesto," which further questions the human-nonhuman disjunction, is no less urgently needed in our time of environmental crisis and profound polarization.Manifestly Haraway brings together these momentous manifestos to expose the continuity and ramifying force (...) of Haraway's thought, whose significance emerges with engaging immediacy in a sustained conversation between the author and her long-term friend and colleague Cary Wolfe. Reading cyborgs and companion species through and with each other, Haraway and Wolfe join in a wide-ranging exchange on the history and meaning of the manifestos in the context of biopolitics, feminism, Marxism, human-nonhuman relationships, making kin, literary tropes, material semiotics, the negative way of knowing, secular Catholicism, and more.The conversation ends by revealing the early stages of Haraway's "Chthulucene Manifesto," in tension with the teleologies of the doleful Anthropocene and the exterminationist Capitalocene. Deeply dedicated to a diverse and robust earthly flourishing, Manifestly Haraway promises to reignite needed discussion in and out of the academy about biologies, technologies, histories, and still possible futures. (shrink)

Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse explores the roles of stories, figures, dreams, theories, facts, delusions, advertising, institutions, economic arrangements, publishing practices, scientific advances, and politics in twentieth- century technoscience. The book's title is an e-mail address. With it, Haraway locates herself and her readers in a sprawling net of associations more far-flung than the Internet. The address is not a cozy home. There is no innocent place to stand in the world where the book's author figure, FemaleMan, encounters DuPont's controversial laboratory rodent, OncoMouse. (...) Haraway sees the world of contemporary technoscience as a drama. Information sciences and life sciences are at the center of the dramatic action. Scenes are set in landscapes where maps of human genetic differences are stored in databases, racialized bodies are reconfigured by morphing for photographs in popular magazines, and transgenic mice important to breast cancer research are patented intellectual property. The actors are many, and not all are human. Beginning with the Modest Witness, the key figure in the Science Revolution, Haraway shows us the trouble lurking in race and gender- marked practices for attesting to matters of fact. In later scenes, Haraway explores the kinship relations among the many cyborg creatures produced in the late twentieth-century--in nuclear research, genetic engineering, reproductive technologies, computer-mediated representational practices, and mutations in biological approaches to "race.". (shrink)

What constitutes better schooling for today's youth? In 1984 educational theorist Theodore R. Sizer formulated nine Common Principles to answer this question and launched The Coalition of Essential Schools, an organization of schools attempting to change their own structure, curriculum, pedagogy, and power relations according to Sizer's Principles. This important book, the first comprehensive look at Coalition schools, charts the course of reform at eight charter member schools. The Coalition now counts over 900 private, parochial, public, urban, suburban, and rural (...) secondary schools among its affiliates nationwide. Donna E. Muncey and Patrick J. McQuillan, experts in anthropology as well as education, conducted a five-year ethnographic study to understand what happened in Coalition schools. The authors looked at curricular and pedagogical developments; how changes affected individual students, teachers, administrators, and other school personnel; and how American cultural beliefs influenced efforts to change. The schools' reform experiences differed: some efforts were sustained when others stalled, change divided some faculties while others found a sense of shared purpose, and the principals of some schools facilitated change while others clearly inhibited it. This compelling book, written for all who are concerned with education in America, offers a wealth of insights into the complexities of change efforts in individual schools and in classrooms. (shrink)

A response to Kavita Shah's article Selecting Barrenness.

Donna Haraway's work has transformed the fields of cyberculture, feminist studies, and the history of science and technology. Her subjects range from animal dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History to research in transgenic mice, from gender in the laboratory to the nature of the cyborg. Trained as an historian of science, she has produced a series of books and essays that have become essential reading in cultural studies, gender studies, and the history of science. The Haraway Reader (...) brings together a generous selection of Donna Haraway's work. Included is her "Manifesto for Cyborgs," in which she famously wrote that she "would rather be a cyborg than a goddess." Other selections are taken from her three major works, Primate Visions, Modest Witness , and Simians, Cyborgs and Women , as well as some of her more recent writing on animals. For readers in cultural studies, feminist theory, science studies, and cyberculture, Donna Haraway is one of our keenest observers of nature, science, and the social world. This volume is the best introduction to her thought. (shrink)

Most opponents of somatic cell nuclear transfer and embryonic stem cell technologies base their arguments on the twin assertions that the embryo is either a human being or a potential human being, and that it is wrong to destroy a human being or potential human being in order to produce stem cell lines. Proponents’ justifications of stem cell research are more varied, but not enough to escape the charge of obsession with the status of the embryo. What unites the two (...) warring sides in ‘the stem cell wars’ is that women are equally invisible to both: ‘the lady vanishes.’ Yet the most legitimate property in the body is that which women possess in their reproductive tissue and the products of their reproductive labour. By drawing on the accepted characterisation in the common law of property as a bundle of rights, and on a Hegelian model of contract as mutual recognition, we can lessen the impact of the tendency to regard women and their ova as merely receptacles and women’s reproductive labour as unimportant. (shrink)

The study assesses how a social desirability (SD) bias influences the relationship between several independent and dependent variables commonly investigated in ethics research. The effect of a SD bias was observed when a questionnaire was administered under varying conditions of anonymity and with different measurement techniques for the SD construct. Findings reveal that a SD bias is present in the majority of relationships studied, and it most frequently plays a moderating role. While the measure of SD influences the strength and (...) type of relationship, condition of anonymity has relatively little effect on the level of SD. (shrink)

Background: Nurses are confronted daily with ethical issues while providing patient care. Hospital ethical climates can affect nurses’ job satisfaction, organizational commitment, retention, and physician collaboration. Purpose: At a metropolitan academic medical center, we examined nurses’ perceptions of the ethical climate and relationships among ethical climate factors and nurse characteristics. Design/participants: We used a descriptive correlational design and nurses ( N = 475) completed Olson’s Hospital Ethical Climate Survey. Data were analyzed using STATA. Ethical considerations: Approvals by the Nursing Research (...) Council and Institutional Review Board were obtained; participants’ rights were protected. Results: Nurses reported an ethical climate total mean score of 3.22 ± 0.65 that varied across factors; significant differences were found for ethical climate scores by nurses’ age, race, and specialty area. Conclusion: These findings contribute to what is known about ethical climate and nurses’ characteristics and provides the foundation to develop strategies to improve the ethical climate in work settings. (shrink)

Abstract Gender and Ethics Committees: Where’s the Different Voice? -/- Prominent international and national ethics commissions such as the UNESCO Bioethics Commission rarely achieve anything remotely resembling gender equality, although local research and clinical ethics committees are somewhat more egalitarian. Under-representation of women is particularly troubling when the subject matter of modern bioethics so disproportionately concerns women’s bodies, and when such committees claim to derive ‘universal’ standards. Are women missing from many ethics committees because of relatively straightforward, if discriminatory, demographic (...) factors? Or are the methods of analysis and styles of ethics to which these bodies are committed somehow ‘anti-female’? It has been argued, for example, that there is a ‘different voice’ in ethical reasoning, not confined to women but more representative of female experience. Similarly, some feminist writers, such as Evelyn Fox Keller and Donna Haraway, have asked difficult epistemological questions about the dominant ‘masculine paradigm’ in science. Perhaps the dominant paradigm in ethics committee deliberation is similarly gendered? This article provides a preliminary survey of women’s representation on ethics committees in Eastern and Western Europe, a critical analysis of the supposed ‘masculinism’ of the principlist approach, and a case example in which a ‘different voice’ did indeed make a difference. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis engages with the difficult subjects in life, but it has been slow to address climate change. Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics draws on the latest scientific evidence to set out the likely effects of climate change on politics, economics and society more generally, including impacts on psychoanalysts. Despite a tendency to avoid the warnings, times of crisis summon clinicians to emerge from comfortable consulting rooms. Daily engaged with human suffering, they now face the inextricably bound together crises of (...) global warming and massive social injustices. After considering historical and emotional causes of climate unconsciousness and of compulsive consumerism, this book argues that only a radical ethics of responsibility to be "my other s keeper" will truly wake us up to climate change and bring psychoanalysts to actively take on responsibilities, such as demanding change from governments, living more simply, flying less, and caring for the earth and its inhabitants everywhere. Linking climate justice to radical ethics by way of psychoanalysis, Donna Orange explores many relevant aspects of psychoanalytic expertise, referring to work on trauma, mourning, and the transformation of trouble into purpose. Orange makes practical suggestions for action in the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic communities: reducing air travel, consolidating organizations and conferences, better use of internet communication and education. This book includes both philosophical considerations of egoism as problematic, together with work on shame and envy as motivating compulsive and conspicuous consumption. The interweaving of climate emergency and massive social injustice presents psychoanalysts and organized psychoanalysis with a radical ethical demand and an extraordinary opportunity for leadership. Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics will provide accessible and thought-provoking reading for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as well as philosophers, environmental studies scholars and students studying across these fields. ". (shrink)

Previous studies have shown that misperceptions and illusory experiences can occur if sensory stimulation is withdrawn or becomes invariant even for short periods of time. Using a perceptual deprivation paradigm, we created a monotonous audiovisual environment and asked participants to verbally report any auditory, visual or body-related phenomena they experienced. The data (analysed using a variant of interpretative phenomenological analysis) revealed two main themes: (1) reported sensory phenomena have different spatial characteristics ranging from simple percepts to the feeling of immersion (...) in a complex multisensory environment and (2) the active contribution of the perceiver where participants report engaging in exploratory processes even when there is nothing to find. Detailed analysis of the qualitative data further showed that participants who reported more perceptual phenomena were more likely to report internal bodily sensations, move more during the experiment and score higher on the Revised Hallucination Scale than those reporting fewer percepts explicitly linking perceptual deprivation to somatic phenomena. The results demonstrate how the variety of sensory experiences induced by perceptual deprivation can give further insight into the factors mediating conscious awareness and may suggest ways in which the brain imposes meaning on the environment under invariant sensory conditions. (shrink)

Interview on the commodified body with Donna Dickenson by Alana Cattapan.

The concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is being supplanted by a new term—corporate citizenship (CC). For many reasons, it’s not a bad idea to replace the CSR term. But the core content of CSR is also gradually being replaced in a significant portion of the literature by a narrower, voluntaristic concept of corporate community service. This is not a viable replacement for the broad ethics-based and problem-solving norms of social reciprocity that are represented by CSR. A more legitimate successor-term (...) is needed so that corporate community relations and philanthropy take their rightful place among the larger set of rights, duties, stakeholder relationships, and opportunities accruing to business organizations.Therefore, we develop a working theory of business citizenship (BC), a more palatable term, and a concept designed to capture the core moral and social content of CSR. In this article we extract and synthesize several key ideas about individual citizenship that have evolved over several thousand years. We then transpose these ideas from the level of individual members of a polity to the level of organizations within society. In a companion article, we extend the business citizenship concept from its single-polity boundaries to the institutional and global levels of analysis. This approach allows a view of business citizenship that accommodates strong moral guidance, structural and institutional realities, and the flexibility necessary to respond to the structures and dynamics of particular company-stakeholder relationships. (shrink)

It is an honor and also a pleasure to respond to the three philosophers who have devoted so much time and careful attention to reading and critiquing my paper "Nations of Immigrants: Do Words Matter?" As an interdisciplinary scholar who interacts more often with specialists in the social sciences, history, and Italian studies than with philosophers, I was unsure what to expect from the Coss Dialogue. Would it be possible to find words common enough to all that we could begin (...) to address the complex issues raised by national mythology about the United States as a nation of immigrants? I believe that our panel discussions revealed the common ground we rather quickly found. But they also uncovered a few gaping chasms. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate responses to sentence (“yes-no”) questions in Greek dialogue which are neither a clear-cut ‘yes’ nor a ‘no’. I describe, classify, and discuss a range of patterns for expressing this strategy of indirectness, beginning with an example termed μέση ἀπόκρισις in the commentary of Olympiodorus to Plato Gorgias. Ancient rhetorical sources also discuss strategies for evading clear-cut non-polar responses to sentence questions in sections on the notion of ἀπόκρισις (and ἐρώτησις) without a fixed terminology. The fabricated (...) and quoted examples which these ancient sources give, serve as a point of departure for my classification of patterns in occurrences collected from literary dialogues (selections from Plato, and a corpus study of the Greek comedies of Aristophanes and Menander). The analysis of mechanisms for these non-polar responses draws on philological as well as linguistic scholarship from Greek antiquity through contemporary dialogue analysis, and refers also to contexts and conventions of characterization in Ancient Greek sources. (shrink)

With a unique blend of clinical compassion and philosophical reflection, Donna M. Orange illuminates the nature and process of psychoanalytic understanding within the intimate and healing human context of treatment. Moving away from objectivist empiricism and its polar opposite, constructivist relativism, her work details a paradigm shift to a perspectival realism that does justice to the concerns of both. Laying the groundwork for a fuller, more encompassing view of psychoanalytic practice, Emotional Understanding is enlightening reading for all mental health (...) professionals interested in psychodynamic theory and treatment. (shrink)

There were three broad categories of academic responses to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin, 1948): method; findings; and broader reflections on the book’s place in American social life and democracy. This article focuses primarily on archival academic responses to Kinsey’s work that appeared in the year following the book’s publication. Many academics agreed that some aspects of Kinsey’s method were flawed and that his interpretations sometimes overreached his raw data. Nonetheless, they also agreed (...) that no one else had gathered such a diverse sampling of interviewees whose behaviors Kinsey could use to create new interpretive models of human sexuality. As Kinsey’s research was deliberately interdisciplinary, his research and statistical methodologies began to catch on in the human sciences and to encourage academics and intellectuals to rethink their human science practices. As academics reflected on the volume’s larger meaning in American life, several of them thought it exemplified the worst American values (emphases on money and size) while others saw the very existence of the Male volume as an excellent example of the ability of free citizens to pursue and to publish research on any topic. While members of the American intelligentsia championed the Male volume and its findings as democratic, the reception of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin and Gebhard, 1953), published at an intense moment of the cold war, was viewed as a communist threat to American security for revealing the sexual secrets of the public. (shrink)

For every uncountable regular cardinalκ and any cardinalλ≧κ,P κ λ denotes the set $\left\{ {x \subseteqq \lambda :\left| x \right|< \kappa } \right\}$ . Furthermore, < denotes the binary operation defined inP κ λ byx (...) + denotes the setP κ λ−I, andI * the filter dual toI.An idealI overP κ λ is said to benormal iff every functionf:P κ λ→λ with the property that {x∈P κ λ:f(x)∈x}∈I + is constant on a set inI +.I is said to bestrongly normal iff every functionf:P κ λ→P κ λ with the property that {x∈P κ λ:x∩xκ≠Ø∧f(x)shrink)

Business and society academics face an ongoing dilemma between the rigorous demands of good scholarship and the personal and pragmatic demands of constituencies and themselves. This dilemma is, above all, an ethical one, but it is partially solvable by paying closer attention to theory and methodology while acknowledging individual biases and desires and helping others in the field to do the same.

Mental time travel is defined as projecting the self into the past and the future. Despite growing evidence of the similarities of remembering past and imagining future events, dominant theories conceive of these as distinct capacities. I propose that memory and imagination are fundamentally the same process – constructive episodic simulation – and demonstrate that the ‘simulation system’ meets the three criteria of a neurocognitive system. Irrespective of whether one is remembering or imagining, the simulation system: acts on the same (...) information, drawing on elements of experience ranging from fine-grained perceptual details to coarser-grained conceptual information and schemas about the world; is governed by the same rules of operation, including associative processes that facilitate construction of a schematic scaffold, the event representation itself, and the dynamic interplay between the two ; and is subserved by the same brain system. I also propose that by forming associations between schemas, the simulation system constructs multi-dimensional cognitive spaces, within which any given simulation is mapped by the hippocampus. Finally, I suggest that simulation is a general capacity that underpins other domains of cognition, such as the perception of ongoing experience. This proposal has some important implications for the construct of ‘MTT’, suggesting that ‘time’ and ‘travel’ may not be defining, or even essential, features. Rather, it is the ‘mental’ rendering of experience that is the most fundamental function of this domain-general simulation system enabling humans to re-experience the past, pre-experience the future, and also comprehend the complexities of the present. (shrink)

Beginning by reading a 1992 feminist appropriation of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam – in a cartoon in which the finger of a nude Adamic woman touches a computer keyboard, while the god-like VDT screen shows a disembodied fetus – ‘Virtual Speculum’ argues for a broader conception of ‘new reproductive technologies’ in order to foreground justice and freedom projects for differently situated women in the New World Order. Broadly conceptualized reproductive practices must be central to social theory in general, and to (...) technoscience studies in particular. Tying together the politics of self help and women's health movements in the United States in the 1970s with positions on reproductive freedom articulated within the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the NAACP in the 1990s, the paper examines recent work in feminist science studies in several disciplinary and activist locations. Statistical analysis and ethnography emerge as critical feminist technologies for producing convincing representations of the reproduction of inequality. Untangling the semiotic and political–economic dialectics of invisibility and hypervisibility, ‘Virtual Speculum’ concludes by linking the well-surveyed amniotic fluid of on-screen fetuses and the off-frame diarrhea of uncounted and underfed infants in regimes of flexible accumulation and structural adjustment. (shrink)

Policies promoted and adopted for allocating ventilators during the COVID-19 pandemic have often prioritised healthcare workers or other essential workers. While the need for such policies has so far been largely averted, renewed stress on health systems from continuing surges, as well as the experience of allocating another scarce resource—vaccination—counsel revisiting the justifications for such prioritisation. Prioritising healthcare workers may have intuitive appeal, but the ethical justifications for doing so and the potential harms that could follow require careful analysis. Ethical (...) justifications commonly offered for healthcare worker prioritisation for ventilators rest on two social value criteria: instrumental value, also known as the ‘multiplier effect’, which may preserve the ability of healthcare workers to help others, and reciprocity, which rewards past usefulness or sacrifice. We argue that these justifications are insufficient to over-ride the common moral commitment to value each person’s life equally. Institutional policies prioritising healthcare workers over other patients also violate other ethical norms of the healthcare professions, including the commitment to put patients first. Furthermore, policy decisions to prioritise healthcare workers for ventilators could engender or deepen existing distrust of the clinicians, hospitals and health systems where those policies exist, even if they are never invoked. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, the life philosophy of Henri Bergson summoned the _élan vital_, or vital force, as the source of creative evolution. Bergson also appealed to intuition, which focused on experience rather than discursive thought and scientific cognition. Particularly influential for the literary and political Négritude movement of the 1930s, which opposed French colonialism, Bergson's life philosophy formed an appealing alternative to Western modernity, decried as "mechanical," and set the stage for later developments in postcolonial theory and vitalist (...) discourse. Revisiting narratives on life that were produced in this age of machinery and war, Donna V. Jones shows how Bergson, Nietzsche, and the poets Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire fashioned the concept of life into a central aesthetic and metaphysical category while also implicating it in discourses on race and nation. Jones argues that twentieth-century vitalism cannot be understood separately from these racial and anti-Semitic discussions. She also shows that some dominant models of emancipation within black thought become intelligible only when in dialogue with the vitalist tradition. Jones's study strikes at the core of contemporary critical theory, which integrates these older discourses into larger critical frameworks, and she traces the ways in which vitalism continues to draw from and contribute to its making. (shrink)

Men’s hunting has dominated the discourse on energy capture and flow in the past decade or so. We turn to women’s roles as critical to household formation, pair-bonding, and intergenerational bonds. Their pivotal contributions in food processing and distribution likely promoted kinship, both genetic and affinal, and appear to be the foundation from which households evolved. With conscious recognition of household social units, variable cultural constructions of human kinship systems that were sensitive to environmental and technological conditions could emerge. Kinship (...) dramatically altered the organization of resource access for our species, creating what we term “kinship ecologies.” We present simple mathematical models to show how hunting leads to dependence on women’s contributions, bonds men to women, and bonds generations together. Kinship, as it organized transfers of food and labor energy centered on women, also became integrated with the biological evolution of human reproduction and life history. (shrink)

New developments in biotechnology radically alter our relationship with our bodies. Body tissues can now be used for commercial purposes, while external objects, such as pacemakers, can become part of the body. Property in the Body: Feminist Perspectives transcends the everyday responses to such developments, suggesting that what we most fear is the feminisation of the body. We fear our bodies are becoming objects of property, turning us into things rather than persons. This book evaluates how well-grounded this fear is, (...) and suggests innovative models of regulating what has been called 'the new Gold Rush' in human tissue. This is an up-to-date and wide-ranging synthesis of market developments in body tissue, bringing together bioethics, feminist theory and lessons from countries that have resisted commercialisation of the body, in a theoretically sophisticated and practically significant approach. (shrink)

"I experience language as an intensely physical process," writes Donna Haraway. "I cannot not think through metaphor... Biochemistry and language just don't feel that different to me." Since the appearance of her monumental Primate Visions and the now classic essay "A Manifesto for Cyborgs," feminist historian of science Donna Haraway has created a way of thinking about culture, science, and the production of knowledge that has made her one of the most highly regarded theorists in America. She is (...) admired for her passion and rigor, her wicked ironies, and her deep commitment to issues of gender and race, as well as species. The author of four seminal works on science and culture, Donna Haraway here speaks for the first time in a direct and non-academic voice. Thyrza Nichols Goodeve leads her subject through conversation about Haraway's intellectual development, theories and influences, the role of Catholicism in her thinking, and how her ethical stands have mirrored issues in her personal life. For readers who have admired and struggled with the rich and complex performances of her earlier works, How Like a Leaf will be a welcome inside view of the author's thought. At the same time, this work makes Haraway's contribution to modern thought available to a much wider audience who cares about the issues she addresses. This is a highly personal introduction to a major thinker's body of work. (shrink)

This innovative textbook provides a systematic approach to developing practices of perception, reflection and inquiry to facilitate sound ethical action in organizational settings. Now in its second edition, Donna Ladkin's Mastering Ethics in Organizations invites readers to reflect and experiment on ethical behaviors with targeted activities in unique organizational contexts. Key features of the second edition include: A step-by-step approach to developing ethical astuteness Brand new case studies on companies including Volkswagen, Amazon and Boeing Art-based pedagogical material, including unique (...) storytelling approaches through mythology and film Guided and informed discussions about contemporary ethical issues concerning the use of social media, artificial intelligence and human-centred design. Offering curated contextualised insights into the field, this textbook will be ideal reading for MBA business ethics courses, as well as Masters courses in leadership. It will also benefit Continuing Professional Development audiences dealing with ethical situations. (shrink)

Human–wildlife coexistence is critical for sustainable and healthy ecosystems as well as to prevent human and wildlife suffering. In this paper, an intersubjective approach to human–wildlife interactions is proposed as a lens toward human decentering and emergent mutual evolution. The thesis is developed through a secondary data analysis of a research study on wildlife care and philosophical analysis using the work of Bernard Lonergan and Edmund Husserl. The study was conducted using the theory of transcendent pluralism, which is grounded in (...) human and ecological dignity, including the dignity of beyond‐human beings. Deeper interpretation of the original data suggests that human–wildlife interactions are mutually conscious, embodied, and hold spatial–temporal dimensions. The affective realm is an integral dimension of human–wildlife intersubjectivity. These findings inform an approach toward human–wildlife relations in which human persons and the beyond‐human multitude can all flourish in dignity. (shrink)

This article reports a study of how leading U.S. business schools incorporate one important dimension of corporate citizenship—corporate involvement in community economic development (CI/CED)—in their curricula and programs. Corporate citizenship, or social responsibility, is shown to have several important and unexpected locations in business education. In addition, the authors develop a rationale forwhy and howspecific topics such as CI/CED as well as the general topic of corporate citizenship are appropriate for business school attention.

The author says that physics & metaphysics are the two sides of the same coin. While physics deals with the objective/physical side of life, metaphysics deals with the mental/subjective side. THE PHYSICS OF METAPHYSICS traces the evolution of physics & metaphysics from their captivity in organized religion, from 2,000 years ago to the present, & explains the role of each. Physics & metaphysics were regarded as one discipline until separated in the 17th century by the Christian Church. Since the beginning (...) of the 20th century, with the introduction of the quantum & relativity theories, the two disciplines have been moving together again. The result is a new paradigm of the universe which encompasses our entire lives & provides answers to questions which have long demanded to be resolved. (shrink)