There might be value in examining the phenomenon of free will, without attempting to solve the debate surrounding its existence. Studies have suggested that diminishing belief in free will increases cheating behavior and that basic physiological states such as appetite diminish free will. These findings, if robust, could have important philosophical and ethical implications. Accordingly, we aimed to critically review methodologies and results in the body of literature that speaks to the two following questions: whether certain factors can change belief (...) in free will or not and whether changes in belief in free will impact different attitudinal or behavioral factors or not. Searching the PubMed and PsycInfo databases with different keyword strategies supplemented with reference section searches, we found 52 relevant papers for review. For each distinct study, we extracted information regarding: sample characteristics and related analyses, procedures and methodology, factors investigated, results, and effect sizes. Overall, we found that the samples were heavily constituted of women, of students and younger participants, with little information about representation of ethnic minorities. Procedures and methodology relied strongly on the use of experimental manipulations and a wide array of scales, including scales created by researchers. Several studies suggest the static and consequential properties of belief in free will. However, these conclusions are restrained by numerous limitations of the supporting body of evidence and the absence of replication studies. (shrink)

Earp and colleagues make a strong case for the complete decriminalization and even the legalization of recreational drug use based on the negative impact of the “War on drugs” on racialized...

Whitehead's response to the epistemological challenges of Hume and Kant, written in a style devoid of the metaphysical intricacies of his later works, Symbolism makes accessible his theory of perception and his more general insights into the function of symbols in culture and society.

Comment interpréter le regain d'intérêt pour les réflexions sur la transcendance, la quête de sens, la morale et l'éthique dans nos sociétés contemporaines? C'est ce sur quoi Lawrence Olivier et Yves Boisvert se sont penchés dans cet ouvrage ; le premier accuse les théoriciens de la postmodernité d'être de grands fabulateurs qui font la promotion de la reconfiguration des systèmes moraux, tandis que le second reproche aux nihilistes d'être de grands nostalgiques de la Vérité qui ont sombré dans un (...) fatalisme total et un individualisme radical face à l'échec du projet de la modernité. Leur désaccord portant principalement sur l'interprétation à donner à ce retour des grands questionnements sur les valeurs et le sens de la vie, l'hypothèse de base est que les individus ont besoin de croire à une certaine forme de transcendance et qu'ils ressentent un profond besoin de donner un sens à leur vie. Invités à se prononcer sur cette question, anthropologues, philosophes, politicologues, sociologues et théologiens livrent ici leurs propres analyses de cette problématique par un riche panorama des réflexions sur la sexualité, la mort, la mode, l'art, les jeunes de la rue, les activités extrêmes, la religion et la pop psycho. Sans épuiser la problématique de la transcendance contemporaine, cet ouvrage stimulera la curiosité de tous les lecteurs intéressés aux nouvelles valeurs culturelles ou aux nouveaux comportements sociétaux. (shrink)

early march 2020: i'm in a french village on the Mediterranean near the Spanish border. The outdoor marché, thronged, is active twice a week. The cafés are crowded. On my morning walk, I am buoyed by the sounds of schoolchildren. The village's only grocery, a small outlet of a major chain, is well-stocked.Mid-March: pandemic. "Non-essential" vendors are banned from the marché. The cafés are shuttered. The school is closed. The little store has depleted shelves. There is a mandate to stay (...) home. Anyone venturing out must carry an attestation certifying the reason for being in public.Fortunately, there is the Internet. There are books. The local wine store offers home delivery. Fortunately, also, I'm in the final... (shrink)

Cet article tente de démontrer que l’un des plus grands défis qui se posent aux conseillers en éthique organisationnelle est l’élaboration d’un projet d’éthique des affaires qui soit assez convaincant pour persuader les entrepreneurs et les gestionnaires de l’intérêt de l’intégrer à la culture de leur entreprise. Un authentique projet d’éthique des affaires devrait être en mesure de faire comprendre aux entrepreneurs que le questionnement sur le sens des valeurs qui guident leurs organisations ne peut plus être différé : la (...) conjoncture contemporaine y est favorable et le contexte politique actuel l’exige. Il ne s’agit cependant plus de concevoir l’éthique comme une simple technique de gestion de l’image corporative, mais d’en intégrer les valeurs à la culture « managériale », à la « culture vécue » des organisations. (shrink)

Hybrid metaethical theories attempt to incorporate essential elements of expressivism and cognitivism, and thereby to accrue the benefits of both. Hybrid theories are often defended in part by appeals to slurs and other pejoratives, which have both expressive and cognitivist features. This paper takes far more seriously the analogy between pejoratives and moral predicates. It explains how pejoratives work, identifies the features that allow pejoratives to do that work, and models a theory of moral predicates on those features. The result (...) is an expressivist theory that, among other advantages, is immune to embedding difficulties and avoids an overlooked difficulty concerning attitude ascriptions that is lethal to most other hybrid theories. (shrink)

Abstract Though it has been claimed that Frege's commitment to expressions in indirect contexts not having their customary senses commits him to an infinite number of semantic primitives, Terrence Parsons has argued that Frege's explicit commitments are compatible with a two-level theory of senses. In this paper, we argue Frege is committed to some principles Parsons has overlooked, and, from these and other principles to which Frege is committed, give a proof that he is indeed committed to an infinite number (...) of semantic primitives?an intolerable result. (shrink)

In ‘The Trouble with Tarski’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 48 (1998), pp. 1–22, Jonathan Harrison attacks ‘Tarski‐style’ truth theories for both formalized and natural languages, on the grounds that (1) truth cannot be a property of sentences; (2) if it could be, T‐sentences would have to be necessary truths, which they are not; and (3) T‐sentences are not necessarily true and can even can be false. I reply that (1) cannot be an objection to Tarskian truth theories, since these can be (...) formulated in terms of whatever truth bearers might be. Thesis (2) is unjustified: Harrison's argument for it depends on an equivocation. Thesis (3) is false, since the right‐hand side of a T‐sentence is a meta‐language translation of the object‐language sentence described on the left‐hand side, and this guarantees its truth. (shrink)

Associée à tort à la pensée libertine, l'œuvre de Lahontan présente les traces indéniables de l'influence huguenote. C'est par l'étude de la controverse religieuse, genre aujourd'hui tombé en désuétude, que l'on arrive à y saisir aussi l'émergence d'un déisme fortuit. Les deux premiers Dialogues, inspirés par le Leviathan de Thomas Hobbes, montrent que Lahontan fait triompher le droit naturel des lois, corps civil artificiel. Ce sont les mêmes Dialogues réécrits par Nicolas Gueudeville qui viennent faire du chef huron Adario un (...) personnage revendicateur, symbole du Rebelle nourrissant la littérature des Lumières, de Voltaire aux Encyclopédistes. Although the work of Lahontan, whose 300th anniversary is celebrated, has wrongly been associated with libertine thought, it actually displays traces of Huguenot influence. By studying the religious controversy - a genre nowadays fallen into disuse - one understands the emergence of a fortuitous deism. The first two Dialogues, that were inspired by Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, show that Lahontan makes triumph natural law over the laws of the artificial Civil Code. In Nicolas Gueudeville's rewritten version of the same Dialogues the Huron chief Adario puts forward his claims. He is the symbol of the rebel who nourishes the Enlightenment literature, from Voltaire to the Encyclopedists. (shrink)

Dans ce texte, les auteurs font l’étude du comportement du conseiller en éthique du gouvernement fédéral, M. Howard Wilson, dans l’affaire de l’Auberge Grand’Mère. Ils en arrivent à la conclusion que le gouvernement fédéral, au nom de l’intégrité, devrait abolir le poste de conseiller en éthique puisque ce dernier, dans les faits, ne joue qu’un rôle de conseiller politique. Les auteurs proposent également, exemples à l’appui, de revitaliser nos démocraties parlementaires et d’en augmenter la transparence par l’entremise d’institutions publiques redevables (...) uniquement au parlement. (shrink)

This article begins by distinguishing force and mood. Then it lays out desiderata on a successful account. It sketches as background the program of truth-theoretic semantics. Next, it surveys assimilation approaches and argues that they are inadequate. Then it shows how the fulfillment-conditional approach can be applied to imperatives, interrogatives, molecular sentences containing them, and quantification into mood markers. Next, it considers briefly the recent set of propositions approach to the semantics of interrogatives and exclamatives. Finally, it shows how to (...) integrate exclamatives and optatives into a framework similar to the fulfillment approach. (shrink)

Hybrid metaethical theories attempt to incorporate essential elements of expressivism and cognitivism, and thereby to accrue the benefits of both. Hybrid theories are often defended in part by appeals to slurs and other pejoratives, which have both expressive and cognitivist features. This paper takes far more seriously the analogy between pejoratives and moral predicates. It explains how pejoratives work, identifies the features that allow pejoratives to do that work, and models a theory of moral predicates on those features. The result (...) is an expressivist theory that, among other advantages, is immune to embedding difficulties and avoids an overlooked difficulty concerning attitude ascriptions that is lethal to most other hybrid theories. (shrink)

The Ancient Mariner’s killing of the albatross is described by Coleridge as a great act of “inhospitality.” The central virtue dealt with in The Odyssey is hospitality.Religious traditions and cultures throughout the world prize hospitality as a major virtue. Philosophy, for some reason, has proven the exception. Hospitalityis missing from just about any philosopher’s list of virtues. Few discussions of ethics pay attention to it. This essay explores why hospitality has been so prominent in literature but ignored in philosophy. What (...) Santayana called the “sedentary city mind,” typical of Modern thought, which replaced the medieval “pilgrim mind,”is seen as a key move leading philosophers to marginalize hospitality. The move to rehabilitate hospitality, I claim, can draw inspiration and sustenance from asurprising source: Jacques Derrida. (shrink)

ISBN 0-7914-3529-6 (hard : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-7914-3530-X (pbk. : alk. paper ) 1. Dewey, John, 1854-1952. I. Title. II. Series: SUNY series in philosophy of education. B945.D4B65 1997 191— dc 21 96-52291 CIP 10 987654321 For Jayne ...

John Dewey's early exposure to Hegel left a "permanent deposit" on his thinking. Dewey's Hegelian side does not emerge in the usual sense of someone predicting the march of Spirit through history. Rather it is as the complete philosopher seeking, above all else, to leave nothing out. Such a philosopher criticized reified abstractions, reinstated the centrality of relations, emphasized the importance of thinking ideas together with their history, and insisted on the interpenetration of individual and social. This Hegelian inheritance, when (...) passed through the filter of praxis, identifies, for some interpreters (I plead guilty) the strength of Dewey's philosophy.Coexisting with this dimension was another .. (shrink)

This essay reads Camus’s novel The Fall as a reductio ad absurdum for two major strands in Western intellectual culture, the hyper-Augustinian “we are all depraved” strand and, more decisively, what I call the “hyper-Sartrean” strand of existentialist humanism. Many commentators have identified Sartre as a target of Camus’s novel, but a detailed exploration of the critique is rarely undertaken. Examining Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism reveals an understanding of the human condition as involving a double disconnection: from nature and (...) from other people. Camus’s protagonist is just such a doubly detached individual. With little subtlety, Camus depicts his protagonist, as “Satanic,” i.e., the fallen one, the universal accuser, the friend of destruction, the enemy of connection. Such a “Fall” into self-isolation represents the all too alluring temptation against which Camus wishes to warn us. (shrink)

This thematic issue addresses questions of constraints on the evolution of form—physical, biological, and technical. Here, form is defined as an embodiment of a specific structure, which can be hierarchically different yet emerge from the same processes. The focus of this contribution is about how developmental biology and paleontology can be better integrated and compared in order to produce hypotheses about the evolution of form. The constraints on current EvoDevo research stem from the disconnect in the focus of study for (...) developmental geneticists and evolutionary morphologists; the former being interested in early developmental events at a molecular level in a model animal, the latter in late developmental events or comparison between adult forms, at a structural level in non-model animals. In order to truly integrate information from both fields in our understanding of evolutionary processes, morphology needs to be reintegrated in the study of gene expression, and its time frame needs to be extended beyond early developmental stages. Gene expression in non-model organisms also needs to be studied in order to gain perspective into primitive patterning at evolutionary nodes. Hypotheses formed by the comparison of expression patterns and morphologies seen in extant species can then be tested against forms found in the fossil record, coming closer to understanding the mechanisms underlying evolution. (shrink)

Cet article se veut une illustration de nos recherches sur les scandales et la production de connaissance concernant les vulnérabilités organisationnelles. Il présente un segment des résultats de l’analyse découlant de la recherche exploratoire faite au sein de la nouvelle administration municipale de la Ville de Laval. Cette recherche voulait valider l’utilité des diagnostics des risques éthiques pour les organisations qui tentent de se sortir de la tourmente d’un scandale. Notre chantier de recherche sur la gestion des risques éthiques dans (...) les organisations publiques a été développé pour pallier les limites du champ d’intervention traditionnel de l’éthique appliquée, c’est-à-dire une éthique purement individuelle qui se limite trop souvent à mettre en doute la responsabilité professionnelle des acteurs et faire la promotion de la stricte compétence éthique des acteurs. Nous embrassons ici plutôt une démarche de recherche orientée vers une éthique dite institutionnelle, c’est-à-dire une éthique qui invite à remettre en question les actions individuelles et collectives en les mettant en contexte dans les situations d’actions. L’éthique institutionnelle qui est sous-jacente à l’approche défendue dans ce texte nous amène à réfléchir tant sur la qualité des conduites professionnelles que sur les facteurs qui, dans l’environnement du travail, ont une incidence négative sur la qualité des conduites. Le but de cet article est de démontrer que la recherche sur l’éthique dans les services publics ne peut plus se faire en vase clos autour de l’analyse des valeurs éthiques et la résolution des dilemmes éthiques, elle doit plutôt s’ouvrir à des analyses plus systémiques en jetant un regard analytique tant sur le cadre normatif, les instances régulatoires, la culture organisationnelle, le design institutionnel et les processus de gestion ; tout cela pour mieux saisir toutes les dimensions institutionnelles qui influencent la qualité des conduites des acteurs organisationnels. (shrink)

Ce texte présente la synthèse des résultats de recherche de notre projet qui portait sur le rôle en matière de prévention des parties prenantes impliquées dans l’offre de jeu organisée au Québec. Dans cette recherche, nous désirions, dans la lignée de nos travaux précédents, tester la faisabilité et l’acceptabilité d’une culture de coresponsabilité chez les acteurs impliqués dans l’offre de jeu aux aînés. Ce texte s’inscrit directement dans le champ de l’éthique publique, car il propose une réflexion critique et pratique (...) sur la place que doit occuper la responsabilité dans l’action publique et dans la gouvernance publique. (shrink)