Is the Internet an appropriate medium to use when attempting to resolve conflicts over ethical issues in business? The research reported on in this paper focuses on internet versus face-to-face negotiations as a component of applied discourse ethics. Although internet negotiation has serious restrictions, it also has specific qualities. It enhances reflection and plays down emotion. Important qualities when handling complex and delicate ethical issues.

When several agents together produce suboptimal outcomes, yet no individual could have made a difference for the better, Act Consequentialism counterintuitively judges that all involved agents act rightly. I address this problem by supplementing Act Consequentialism with a requirement of modal robustness: Agents not only ought to produce best consequences in the actual world, but they also ought to be such that they would act optimally in certain counterfactual scenarios. I interpret this Modally Robust Act Consequentialism as Act Consequentialism plus (...) a requirement of moral virtue, namely, to reliably act rightly and to act rightly for the right reasons. (shrink)

Relying on aesthetic testimony seems problematic. For instance, it seems problematic for me to simply believe or assert that The Velvet Underground's debut album The Velvet Underground and Nico (1964) is amazing solely because you have told me so, even though I know you to be an honest and competent music critic. But why? After all, there do not seem to be similar reservations regarding testimony from many other domains. In this paper, I will argue that relying on aesthetic testimony (...) seems problematic because we are attached to an ideal of aesthetic authenticity and feel that living up to this ideal is anathema to simply relying on aesthetic testimony. (shrink)

Recently, Jennifer Saul (“Racial Figleaves, the Shifting Boundaries of the Permissible, and the Rise of Donald Trump”, 2017; “Racist and Sexist Figleaves”, 2021) has explored the use of what she calls “figleaves” in the discourse on race and gender. Following Saul, a figleaf is an utterance that, for some portion of the audience, blocks the conclusion that some other utterance, R, or the person who uttered R is racist or sexist. Such racial and gender figleaves are pernicious, says Saul, because, (...) among other things, they can shift the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable to think or say. This paper expands on Saul’s picture in a threefold way: It is first argued that appeals to statistics can function as figleaves. It is then argued that—as far as figleaves go—there is reason to believe that statistics-as-figleaves are especially pernicious. Finally, the paper explores some strategies for counterspeech. (shrink)

As a scientific discipline and profession, law has been for centuries at the heart of social and political power of many Western societies. Professors of law, as influential representatives of the profession, are important powerbrokers between academia, politics and the corporate world. Their influence is based on scientific reputation, institutional mandates inside and outside academia or privileged network connections with people in powerful positions. In this study, based on a full sample of all Swiss law professors in the years 1957, (...) 1980 and 2000, we contrast two theories of the distribution of power among law professors: Bourdieu’s thesis on the trade-off between scientific reputation and -academic institutional power vs. the thesis of an opposition between a group of established incumbents and socio-demographically marginal challengers who try to gain access to the profession. We show that among Swiss law professors the endowment with scientific capital is not opposed to the possession of institutional power within academia. Our findings reveal rather an opposition between a challenging group of professors devoid of resources and an incumbent fraction with a high amount of scientific, institutional and social capital alike. In the conclusion we discuss a series of explanations of this specific power structure, including the specific status scientific reputation and social capital can have for law professors. (shrink)

A pesar de la voluntad de ruptura y el deseo por ocultar sus fuentes, Descartes forja su reflexión sobre las pasiones en base al trabajo previo de una serie de pensadores que durante los siglos XVI y XVII fueron los responsables de iniciar ...

El presente trabajo intenta reflexionar sobre la importancia pedagógica del afecto y del cuidado, no sólo en tiempos de pandemia, sino como elemento clave, aunque olvidado, del proceso educativo. Para ello, se expondrán las consecuencias de la pandemia y el confinamiento para la salud de la ciudadanía, en un contexto dominado por el Global Educational Reform Movement. A continuación, señalamos que las preocupaciones de las administraciones y organizaciones internacionales durante el confinamiento han estado centradas en la ‘mantener’ la presión sobre (...) el aprendizaje, mantener la máquina del aprendizaje, intentando mejorar el acceso y la conectividad online, y olvidando otras cuestiones como la situación de las familias y el alumnado. En este sentido, mostramos cómo la preocupación por el otro (familias y alumnado) ha sido una preocupación constante en muchos docentes, por encima incluso del curriculum establecido y del aprendizaje. Por último, y como complemento de las mejores prácticas educativas, analizamos qué supone el cuidado y el afecto para el proceso pedagógico, indicando que no se puede volver a la antigua normalidad, sino recrear una _nueva normalidad _basada en la ética del cuidado y en la justicia afectiva. (shrink)

This round table discussion takes the diversity of discourse and practice shaping modern knowledge about childhood as an opportunity to engage with recent historiographical approaches in the history of science. It draws attention to symmetries and references among scientific, material, literary and artistic cultures and their respective forms of knowledge. The five participating scholars come from various fields in the humanities and social sciences and allude to historiographical and methodological questions through a range of examples. Topics include the emergence of (...) children's rooms in US consumer magazines, research on the unborn in nineteenth-century sciences of development, the framing of autism in nascent child psychiatry, German literary discourses about the child's initiation into writing, and the sociopolitics of racial identity in the photographic depiction of African American infant corpses in the early twentieth century. Throughout the course of the paper, childhood emerges as a topic particularly amenable to interdisciplinary perspectives that take the history of science as part of a broader history of knowledge. (shrink)

This paper is about what we call Deontically-flavored Nominal Constructions (DNCs) in English, such as "No ice cream" or "Dogs on leash only". DNCs are often perceived as commands and have been argued to be a type of non-canonical imperative, much like root infinitives in German or Russian. We argue instead that DNCs at their core are declaratives that cite a rule but can be used performatively in the right context. We propose that DNCs contain an elided deontic modal, i.e., (...) allowed, whose presence explains their distributional restrictions and interpretational properties. Among other things, we speculate on the licensing conditions of DNCs (the presence of 'only' or the negative determiner 'no'), suggesting that these are tied to the properties of discourses in which rules can be used naturally. (shrink)

El presente artículo se centra en el estudio de la exégesis que lleva a cabo Plotino en torno a la significación de la inefabilidad del uno, planteada en el Parménides platónico al hilo de la primera hipótesis. Este ubica a este primer uno inefable en el centro mismo de su sistema, lo que tendrá fuertes implicaciones tanto a nivel ontológico como por lo que respecta a la comprensión del lenguaje. la concepción de la realidad que se deriva de esta inefabilidad (...) del primer principio, de un lado, y las implicaciones en la naturaleza del lenguaje filosófico que abre este postulado, de otro, ocuparán la centralidad de nuestras reflexiones. Atenderemos a los textos originales en los que se plantea la cuestión, apoyándonos en la labor de la crítica, discutiendo los puntos fundamentales a fin de esclarecer la posición que encontramos en las Enéadas. Tomaremos, asimismo, en consideración la actualidad que tiene esta posición y su capacidad de ir más allá de la crítica heideggeriana a la metafísica. (shrink)

The fifth and sixth volume of the _Adagia_ (Proverbs) of the Amsterdam edition of the Latin texts of Erasmus give an introduction in German and a critical edition of the Latin text of the third thousand _Adages_.

In speaking of empirical science as a self-correcting process one implies that a proposition accepted in accordance with the rules of procedure may have to be eliminated later according to these very rules. Taking this for granted one realizes that a particular empirical science, say physics, should be defined in terms of rules of method rather than as a system of propositions representing our knowledge at a given time. Obviously both the science of Galileo and Newton and the science of (...) Einstein and Bohr are called ''physics'' and we do not regard this as a mere equivocation. It may, however, be objected that a definition of a science in terms of rules of method is incompatible with the view that a science consists of a set of propositions. To meet this objection I propose that we distinguish between the structure of a science as defined in terms of the rules of method and the corpus of this science at a given time, i.e., the set of propositions accepted at this time in accordance with the rules of method of this science. The relation between the structure of a science and the corpus of a science is similar to that obtaining between the structure of a legal order, e.g., American law, which is defined by the rules of the process of legislation in the broadest sense and the legal norms which are the corpus of law at a given time. It should then be noted that the assertion that a certain proposition belongs to a given science is incomplete without a time-index. The scientist changes the corpus of his science either by introducing new propositions to it or by eliminating propositions which were previously accepted and did not stand further control. The significance of whatever else he does in the course of his inquiry can be determined only in the light of this selection. There are two stages in this process of selection. The first is exclusively concerned with meanings as such. The scientist has to ascertain that a given aggregate of words represents a proposition, that this proposition contains only objective meanings, that it is not self-contradictory, that it belongs to the subject-matter of the particular science. The second phase of the selection, exhibited in scientific procedure in the strict sense, applies only to such propositions which have passed this preexamination. We shall call those rules of method in terms of which the first stage of selection is defined rules of the language of science and those rules in terms of which the second stage is defined rules of the procedure of science. In this paper I shall try to show how important it is to distinguish clearly between these two types of rules. I shall first deal with the rules of the language of science and confine myself to sciences dealing with the physical world. (shrink)

In this article, I examine the inversion of essential cultural values, such as physical perfection and the sports spirit, in 20th-century Europe. Periods emerged when physical perfection, once celebrated, morphed into tools for eugenics, racial theories, and ideological segregation. Similarly, the sports spirit became entangled in political and ideological conflicts. I approach this through the Marxist lens of ‘base—superstructure’ relations, focusing on the biological ‘base’, often misinterpreted through social Darwinism. This base is not subject to dialectical changes, does not develop (...) spirally but remains a constant fundament of human existence. It anchors pre-human and human interactions centered on physical fitness and interpersonal competition rooted in sexual selection. From this premise, I propose a philosophical model progressing from the general to the specific, built on four levels. At its foundation lies the unchanging physicality-agonistic ‘base’. From this base emerge three enduring cultural ‘structures’: physical culture, agonistic culture, and the uniting of these two sports cultures. These structures produce two cardinal values—physical perfection and sports spirit—while also giving rise to inversive superstructures that veer toward cultural distortions. I connect these inversions to the influence of elite groups shaping public opinion, aligning this analysis with Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. In this last stage, this perspective finds synergy with traditional Marxism, highlighting the role of elites in steering societal values and cultural frameworks. (shrink)

Team reflexivity has gained increasing research attention as an effective response to the core challenge of constant learning, innovation, and adaptation in teams due to changing circumstances. Under the right conditions, empirical studies have found that team reflexivity can improve team performance, team learning, team innovation, team creativity, and team member well-being. Thus, research shows that team reflexivity is an effective means to improve teamwork and team outcomes. This book addresses the problem that team reflexivity research is focused too narrowly (...) on improving these empirical team outcomes while neglecting the importance of normative principles and values in good teamwork, such as the do no harm principle. Therefore, this book proposes that the team reflexivity concept needs broader reframing and deeper reflection to realize normative principles and values in teams as a precondition for good teamwork, e.g., do no harm. It further presents two team reflexivity tools and applies them in the cases of burnout prevention and speaking up freely in teams to illustrate the point of this book: Do no harm in teams requires team reflexivity, and vice versa, team reflexivity requires do no harm. (shrink)

Sebastian Grève interviews Felix Mühlhölzer on his work on the philosophy of mathematics.