This paper takes meals, rather than food itself, as its focus. Meals incorporate the project of nutrition into human life, but it is a contingent matter that we nourish ourselves in this way. This paper defends the importance of meals as meaning-makers and contrasts them with art in that regard. Meals and art represent interestingly different extremes with respect to how needs for meaning are met. Artworks ask for coordination of experience, understanding and appreciation: the meaning of art is to (...) be experienced. The meaning of meals is enacted and accumulates collectively, but need not be experienced. (shrink)

Kit Fine and Gideon Rosen propose to define constitutive essence in terms of ground-theoretic notions and some form of consequential essence. But we think that the Fine–Rosen proposal is a mistake. On the Fine–Rosen proposal, constitutive essence ends up including properties that, on the central notion of essence (what Fine calls ‘the notion of essence which is of central importance to the metaphysics of identity’), are necessary but not essential. This is because consequential essence is (roughly) closed under logical consequence, (...) and the ability of logical consequence to add properties to an object’s consequential essence outstrips the ability of ground-theoretic notions, as used in the Fine–Rosen proposal, to take those properties out. The necessary-but-not-essential properties that, on the Fine–Rosen proposal, end up in constitutive essence include the sorts of necessary-but-not-essential properties that, others have noted, end up in consequential essence. (shrink)

Hartry Field’s epistemological challenge to the mathematical platonist is often cast as an improvement on Paul Benacerraf’s original epistemological challenge. I disagree. While Field’s challenge is more difficult for the platonist to address than Benacerraf’s, I argue that this is because Field’s version is a special case of what I call the ‘sociological challenge’. The sociological challenge applies equally to platonists and fictionalists, and addressing it requires a serious examination of mathematical practice. I argue that the non-sociological part of Field’s (...) challenge amounts to a minor reformulation of Benacerraf’s original challenge. So, I contend, Field’s challenge is not an improvement on Benacerraf’s. What is new to Field’s challenge is as much a problem for the fictionalist as it is for the platonist. (shrink)

We employ a Layers of Workplace Influence theory to guide our study of whistleblowing among public accounting audit seniors. Specifically, we examine professional commitment, organizational commitment versus colleague commitment (locus of commitment), and moral intensity of the unethical behavior on two measures of reporting intentions: likelihood of reporting and perseverance in reporting. We find that moral intensity relates to both reporting intention measures. In addition, while high levels of professional identity increase the likelihood that an auditor will initially report an (...) observed violation, the auditor's commitment to the organization drives perseverance in reporting. Results may assist organizations and researchers in their understanding of antecedents to whistleblowing as a form of corporate governance and of the effect of these antecedents on whistleblowing perseverance. (shrink)

In “Mathematical Truth,” Paul Benacerraf raises an epistemic challenge for mathematical platonists. In this paper, I examine the assumptions that motivate Benacerraf’s original challenge, and use them to construct a new causal challenge for the epistemology of mathematics. This new challenge, which I call ‘Gödel’s Gap’, appeals to intuitive insights into mathematical knowledge. Though it is a causal challenge, it does not rely on any obviously objectionable constraints on knowledge. As a result, it is more compelling than the original challenge. (...) It is also more general; the challenge applies equally to platonistic and non-platonistic accounts of mathematical truth. And it can be generalized beyond the case of mathematical knowledge to pose a challenge for, e.g., moral knowledge. (shrink)

English Introduction, Volume 8, n°2, 2017.

The application of constructivism to “nature” and “wilderness” is intellectually and politically objectionable. Despite a proclivity for examining the social underpinnings of representations, constructivists do not deconstruct their own rhetoric and assumptions; nor do they consider what socio-historical conditions support their perspective. Constructivists employ skewed metaphors to describe knowledge production about nature as though the loaded language use of constructivism is straightforward and neutral. They also implicitly rely on a humanist perspective about knowledge creation that privileges the cognitive sovereignty of (...) human subject over nature. Politically, the constructivist approach fails to take the scientific documentation of the biodiversity crisis seriously; it diverts attention toward discourses about the environmental predicament, rather than examining that predicament itself; and it indirectly cashes in on, and thus supports, human colonization of the Earth. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for the use of Deleuzian theories in educational contexts. In particular, I am interested in the use of the concept of rhizomes, and the analysis of texts as rhizomes, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's work in A Thousand Plateaus (1987). I discuss the possibilities for using rhizomatics in educational contexts through an exploration of the construction of an 'apparatus of social critique' (Buchanan, 2000). I then describe a rhizomatic understanding of the relationships between teachers and (...) policy texts, which can disrupt commonsense understandings of these relations. I provide examples from my own research (Honan, 2001) of a rhizo-textual analysis of policy texts. This rhizo-textual analysis involved an exploration of the construction of the subject position, teacher, within one policy text, as well as a mapping of two teachers' readings of this text. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for using Deleuzian theory in educational contexts, implications for both policy developers and educational researchers. (shrink)

This book attempts to reframe abortion rights by focusing not on a woman's right to choose abortion, but rather on a woman's right to consent to pregnancy. Drawing on legal, medical, and philosophical definitions of pregnancy, it disaggregates the consent to sexual intercourse from the consent to pregnancy and argues that men and women have equal right to bodily integrity, which is defined as the freedom from nonconsensual bodily intrusion. The work provides the grounds for a woman's right to an (...) abortion and state funding of abortions. (shrink)

In this study, we argue that contemporary nursing care has been overtaken by new public management strategies aimed at curtailing budgets in the public hospital sector in Australia. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 15 nurses from one public acute hospital with supporting documentary evidence, we demonstrate what happens to nursing work when management imposesroundingas a risk reduction strategy. In the case study outlined rounding was introduced across all wards in response to missed care, which in turn arose as a result (...) of work intensification produced by efficiency, productivity, effectiveness and accountability demands. Rounding is a commercially sponsored practice consistent with new public management. Our study illustrates the impact that new public management strategies such as rounding have on how nurses work, both in terms of work intensity and in who controls their labour. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Disagreements about art are considered here for their potential to pose questions about reality beyond the artwork. The project of assessing artistic value is useful for bringing complex questions to light. The ambitiousness of the cognitive stock, in Richard Wollheim's term, that can be relevant to understanding an artwork may mean that confident evaluation will elude us. Thinking about artistic value judgment in this way shifts its centrality as the point of artistic interpretation and evaluation; the goal of judging (...) a work's meaning and value is a useful tool for prompting us to understand a work. But if we fail to reach that goal, that does not mean we have failed to engage with the work appropriately. The artistic value judgment, and achieving consensus on that value, can be secondary in importance to grasping the problems a work poses that are not immediately resolvable. Examples drawn from literary and philosophical imagining, in the work of Grace Paley and Mary Mothersill, and from Toni Morrison's literary criticism are used to illustrate and support the fruitfulness of this approach. (shrink)

Appeals to imagination to distinguish fiction from nonfiction have been persuasively challenged by philosophers such as Derek Matravers and Stacie Friend. This essay aims to uphold the importance of the fiction/nonfiction distinction by other means. Instead of relying on contrasting roles for imagination and belief, can we isolate kinds of experience that are paradigmatically sustained by fiction? Can status as fiction encourage, and help to explain, certain tendencies and qualities of experience? Several common aspects of experience, of what it is (...) like to experience something as fiction, are proposed: the experience of individuals as representative; a linked epistemic and aesthetic interest in detail; and openness to evaluative judgement. Nonfictional works can support these experiences, but they make most sense ethically and epistemically in the context of fiction. (shrink)

Creationism and evolutionism are taken to typify a fundamental opposition among the diverse beliefs about creation to be found in the United Kingdom and the United States. A comparison between the two types and the two countries suggests that people may be more concerned about the credibility and consequences of belief in an alternative account of our origins than about the actual method by which we were created. Examples of concern include interpretations of the Bible, ethical implications, and the epistemological (...) standings of revelation and/or science that are thought to follow from acceptance of a particular belief concerning how we got here. (shrink)

Essays link Gaian science to such global environmental quandaries as climate change and biodiversity destruction, providing perspectives from science, ...

As working arrangements become more flexible and many people work remotely, the risk of social isolation rises. Coworking spaces try to prevent this by offering not only a workplace, but also a community. Adopting a person-environment fit perspective, we examined how the congruence between workers' needs and supplies by coworking spaces relate to job satisfaction and intent to leave. We identified five needs (i.e., community, collaboration, amenities, location, and cost), of which community was expected to be the central need. An (...) online questionnaire was distributed among coworkers in Germany and Austria, resulting in a sample of 181 coworkers. Results showed that needs-supplies fit regarding community was related to job satisfaction and intent to leave in coworking spaces. Findings for the other needs, however, did not show that congruence is associated with outcomes. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of community fit in coworking and offer insights for workers and entrepreneurs in this area. (shrink)

Among the most characteristic effects of the onset of "romanticism" in the eighteenth century was the underinining of the "classical" ethics, based on rational selfdiscipline, by the "romantic" or humanitarian ethics, based on benevolism. A useful indication of the point at which this change in ethics occurred is the moment in which the institution of Negro slavery was attacked by benevolistic theory. As Trevelyan says, the anti-slavery movement was "the first successful propagandist agitation of the modern type" ; years before (...) the eighteenth century there had been sporadic objection against Negro slavery, especially religious objection because Negro slaves were commonly not considered "children of God." But until Francis Hutcheson's System of Moral Philosophy , no writer formulated ethical principles inimical to slavery as an institution. (shrink)

Through the personal stories of managers running global business, this book takes an inside look into the dilemmas of managers who are asked to make profits ethically according to the dictates of their company's ethics code. It examines what companies `think" they are doing to help managers in those situations and how those managers are actually affected. Thanks to the boost from the 1991 Sentencing Guidelines which minimizes penalties for companies with ethics codes caught in ethical wrongdoing, more than 85% (...) of US companies and two thirds of all Canadian companies and half of all European companies now have Codes of Ethics. Yet, over and over, we hear of stories of personal dilemmas and conflicts experienced by individual managers navigating those business waters in other cultures. "Eileen Morgan does an excellent job of mapping the course for navigating the previously uncharted global ethical waters. By identifying best practices, she leads the reader on a journey from Surviving, to Understanding to Knowing the ethical issues that frequently confront international business people. This is a must read for anyone who wants to successfully compete in world markets." -Michael J. Litwin, Executive Vice President, Chief Credit Officer, Heller Financial, Inc. "Eileen Morgan has combined the pragmatic concerns of the individual manager with the moral concerns that come from personal-life history, cultural roots, and corporate ethical culture …This book focuses on the constructive task of formulating and using an "ethical map," and is sure to be a tonic to conscientious managers who want to navigate cross-cultural commerce with integrity. It has done a superb job of creating order out of the complexity of cross-cultural moral experience by insisting that the complexity must be honored and appropriated rather than ignored or suppressed." -Dr. Richard Beauchamp, Professor of Ethics, Christopher Newport University "In this groundbreaking book, Eileen Morgan has provided scores of real-life examples and developed a framework for approaching ethical leadership in international business. This is mandatory reading for anyone involved in global management today...This is an important book on an important subject." -Stephen H. Rhinesmith, Ph.D. Author, A Manager's Guide to Globalization "Eileen Morgan provides us with a much needed roadmap for how to walk the path of ethical leadership with practical feet. She reminds us that ethical decision-making is a critical aspect of every day leadership, and that we can all choose to be 'ethical pioneers' in our companies and our communities. Every leader engaged in global business can benefit from the lessons and stories included in this book." -Christi A. Olson, Ph.D. Chair, Telecommunications Management Department, Golden Gate University "Eileen Morgan's thoughtful analysis of 'ethical capital' should be read by anyone who does business in a global environment…Morgan's book presents the issue clearly, comprehensively and compellingly, demonstrating that ethics is an indispensable aspect of individual leadership and organizational credibility. …It provides a clear roadmap for business leaders who need to communicate their commitment to integrity and accountability to their employees, their partners, and their customer, making their 'ethical capital' one of their most valuable assets." -Nell Minnow, Principal, Lens, The Corporate Governance Investors "Eileen Morgan gives excellent insight into ethical practices. She focuses on business but her insights have general application. This book also describes differences in ethical interpretation that can arise between diverse cultures. Ms. Morgan has made an excellent contribution to understanding the benefit of positive ethical practices." -David C. Lincoln, Sponsor, Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, College of Business, Arizona State University President, Arizona Oxides, LLC · First in-depth look at how managers in global companies actually bridge the gap between their organizations and their daily decisions · Explains the need for internal and external ethical operations¦and how organizations often create confusion rather than clarity with the label of "ethics". (shrink)

Building on research that analyzes how social relations and networks shape the Chinese market, this article asks a less-studied question: How is the market changing guanxi? The authors trace the transformation of guanxi from communal, kin-based ties to a cultural metaphor with which diverse individuals build flexible social relationships in late-socialist China. As a “generalized particularism,” this cultural metaphor provides something analogous to the culture of civility in Western societies. The authors discuss the political potential of guanxi in terms of (...) its dual tendency toward the “publicization” and “privatization” of power. The development of guanxi civility suggests the diverse cultural origins of civility and serves as a reminder of the particularistic roots in the universalistic assumption of Western civility. (shrink)

Do poems provide “scripts” for reader’s thoughts? Kendall Walton’s account of poets as thoughtwriters, in which poems can serve to express readers’ thoughts without positing an expressive thinker in the poem, is considered from various angles. While it seems a minimal expressive thinker needs to be posited, this leaves open other questions about poems as the stuff of thought. Can poems be fully thought, and do readers take ownership of the thinking that poetry prompts? Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” is (...) discussed as a poem that allows the reader a chance to separate aspects of content and control of thought. (shrink)

The standard argument for the existence of distinctively mathematical objects like numbers has two main premises: some mathematical claims are true, and the truth of those claims requires the existence of distinctively mathematical objects. Most nominalists deny. Those who deny typically reject Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment. I target a different assumption in a standard type of semantic argument for. Benacerraf’s semantic argument, for example, relies on the claim that two sentences, one about numbers and the other about cities, have (...) the same grammatical form. He makes this claim on the grounds that the two sentences are superficially similar. I argue that these grounds are not sufficient. Other sentences with the same superficial form appear to have different grammatical forms. I offer two plausible interpretations of Benacerraf’s number sentence that make use of plural quantification. These interpretations appear not to incur ontological commitments to distinctively mathematical objects, even assuming Quine’s criterion. Such interpretations open a new, plural strategy for the mathematical nominalist. (shrink)

This article examines Mary Wollstonecraft's public reception in American newspapers from 1800 to 1869. Wollstonecraft was portrayed to the American public as a philosopher of women's rights, a new model of femininity, and a pioneer of women's political activism. Although these iconic uses of Wollstonecraft were regularly negative, they grew more positive as the women's rights movement gained steam alongside the abolition movement.

Re-reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) in the context of the international politics after the start of the French Revolution in 1789 and before the rise of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 leads to three discoveries in the history of European ideas. First, her reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was advertised, discussed, and rumoured to be the work of a woman in London papers days earlier in November 1790 than previously (...) documented. Second, Wollstonecraft’s first known instances of public reception beyond Britain were in a major Jamaican newspaper from January to March 1791. Thirdly, and most notably, in February 1791, the Kingston Daily Advertiser published a lengthy excerpt from her Rights of Men that called for the abolition of slavery and the realization of justice for the poor and oppressed. Long before Hegel probably developed his master-slave dialectic in response to journalistic accounts of the independence of Haiti in 1804, there was Wollstonecraft’s actual reception in the international news in Jamaica, amid the spread of reports of the rise of slave unrest in the broader post-revolutionary Caribbean. (shrink)

Heidegger's history of hermeneutics discovered nothing more than a “diluted” understanding of hermeneutics in Schleiermacher and Dilthey. In contrast, Gadamer's and Ricoeur's histories of hermeneutics placed little or no emphasis on the premodern period, focusing instead on the rise of the “hermeneutic problem” in Schleiermacher's work and the development of that problematic in works by Dilthey and Heidegger. Ricoeur added Gadamer to that list, recognizing that Gadamer was instrumental in the way he had received and perceived the problem in question. (...) Charles R. Bambach argues that it was, in fact, Karl Barth's “crisis theology” that had inspired Heidegger's “destructive” alternative to the conventional view of historical research. He revealed that he had followed Hegel when writing his history of hermeneutics, noting that his decision to do so had consequences for the way he depicted the rise of hermeneutics; and the way his history of hermeneutics ended. (shrink)

This chapter explores what Emma and Austen might have to say about human agency and autonomy. Considered and challenged are Christine Korsgaard’s use of Austen’s characters (Emma Woodhouse and Harriet Smith) to exemplify a species of defective autonomous action. Austen's novel persistently addresses and clarifies the nature and sources of defective action. Harriet Smith’s happy subordination to Emma’s will, as Korsgaard maintains, is obviously problematic. But it is most often Emma Woodhouse herself, and not Harriet, whose conduct Austen presents as (...) compromised, and Emma’s behavior is not defective in such a way as to suggest an abdication of will. Moreover, it is evident that considering what another thinks one should do and allowing that to inform one’s conduct is not a course of action that is invariably deplored in Emma. The chapter investigates the light Austen’s novel can shed on defects in action and the inevitability (or not) of their connection with autonomy. (shrink)

As time goes by we will increasingly be marked more by abstract, distanced and imaginative renditions of the traumatic historical rupture of the Holocaust than by any personal or tangible connection - this article explores a bookwork/filmwork by artist Daniel Blaufuks engaging questions of what that might mean for us.