How Classification Works attempts to bridge the gap between philosophy and the social sciences using as a focus some of the work of Nelson Goodman. Throughout his long career Goodman has addressed the question: are some ways of conceptualizing more natural than others? This book looks at the rightness of categories, assessing Goodman's role in modern philosophy and explaining some of his ideas on the relation between aesthetics and cognitive theory. Two papers by Nelson Goodman are (...) included in the collection and there are analyses of his work by seven leading academics in anthropology, philosophy, sociology and musicology. (shrink)

The first essay, Russell B. Goodman’s “The Colors of the Spirit: Emerson and Thoreau on Nature and the Self,” illustrates the manner in which American philosophy incorporated German idealism and emphasizes the transcendental aspect of nature, which for Emerson and Thoreau, continually is both mediated by and immersed with the human person.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to suggest types of analysis that can help managers effectively choose NGO partners that help them meet their international corporate sustainability and social responsibility goals. NGO partner choices should offer a good fit to corporate goals/objectives and create opportunities to reap the benefits of social responsibility and sustainability efforts, which include public image, environmental protection, customer and stakeholder satisfaction, employee morale, and the completion of work that serves a social responsibility or sustainability goal. Examples (...) of this type of goal include providing income generation activities for persons with HIV/AIDS, and educational opportunities for people who would not normally get them. The paper exploresthree lenses through which partner choice may be viewed: agency theory, transaction cost economics, and resource dependency. Areas for further exploration are suggested, and a comprehensive research agenda/model is discussed. (shrink)

This incisive study concerns the ways in which theological claims about creation's original and final perfection shape social ethics. Schuurman argues that prominent 20th century theologians Emil Brunner and Jurgen Moltmann wrongly envision the eschaton as radically discontinuous with creation, and that this discontinuity coheres with serious inadequacies in their social ethics. His thesis is that continuity between creation and eschaton is necessary if Christian social ethics is to avoid dualistic understandings of love and justice, personal and impersonal values, church (...) and world, revolutionism and conservatism. Schuurman establishes theological groundwork for a social ethic that calls for continuous transformation of social institutions and structures.". (shrink)

Select papers from Oneonta’s Undergraduate Philosophy Conference.

In Aristotle’s On the Soul he considers and refutes two versions of the harmonia theory of the soul’s relation to the body. According to the harmonia theory, the soul is to the body what the tuning of a musical instrument is to its material parts. Though he believes himself to have entirely dismissed the view, he has not. I argue that Aristotle’s hylomorphic account is, in fact, an instance of the harmonia theory.

The sexological research questionnaire, which became a central research tool in twentieth-century sexology, has a methodological-developmental history stretching back into mid-nineteenth century Germany. It was the product of a prolonged, disruptive encounter between sexual scientists constructing sexual case studies along with newly assertive homosexual men supplying self-penned sexual autobiographies. Homosexual autobiographies were intensely interesting to these men of science but lacked the brevity, structure, and discipline of a formal clinical case study. In the closing decades of the century, efforts to (...) harness and regularize this self-penned material resulted in a series of methodological adaptations. By the turn of the century this process had resulted in the first use of a formal sexual research questionnaire. (shrink)

This paper disputes Habermas' accounts of labor as monological expressivist-aesthetic or instrumental action. It shows how tensions in Kant's account of experience, as developed by Fichte and Hegel, enable Marx to formulate two distinct intersubjective models of labor, teleological and structural. Marx elaborates the former in the 1844 Manuscripts, and the latter in the German Ideology. He combines the two models the two models in Capital. Each model has normative implications for theories of intersubjectivity and democracy.

Presents select papers from the State University of New York College at Oneonta’s 1998 Undergraduate Philosophy Conference.

This work investigates the complexity of ethics as a field of inquiry and practice across a principal's career. Fully contextualized, and thus carrying the contradictions and requirements of any school, the issues realistically do not usually lead to a single, beat-all answer, as any solution will likely have positive and negative consequences. Drawn from the authors' experiences and studies of schools over decades, the central figure is a fictional principal of a magnet school, whose dilemmas reflect the questions educators must (...) be prepared for. Each decision takes into account the principal's and staff's identities and values because they are all human and their opinions influence the outcomes. The work injects analytic, virtue, feminist, care, deontological, and critical theory insights as Deweyan ethics provides a lens for examining dilemmas. This accessible work blends reflective theory, the ordinary worlds of schools, and engaging pedagogical practice to guide those planning to enter the education sector. (shrink)

In the mid-1990s, a group of UN officials and nongovernmental organizations gathered to formulate a strategy to promote a controversial international social policy agenda by reinterpreting existing human rights treaties to give them new meanings. At the heart of this strategy was a four-step process to use the six UN human rights treaty monitoring bodies and an interlocking network of UN agencies, UN officials, and NGOs to create an international right to abortion. In the decade that has followed, UN member (...) nations have allowed the strategy to develop to an extensive degree, despite the fact that it undermines their own laws. This study examines the reasons why the process has been able to advance, and analyzes the way the strategy has undermined the treaty monitoring system andchallenged the credibility of the international human rights regime. (shrink)