From a celebrated scholar on race, a book on ways of seeing, and seeing through, whiteness.

Reflections by leading Latin American and African American philosophers on their identity within the field of philosophy.

By demonstrating the uniformity and universality of the principles of valid interpretation of verbal texts of any sort, this closely reasoned examination provides a theoretical foundation for a discipline that is fundamental to virtually all humanistic studies. It defines the grounds on which textual interpretation can claim to establish objective knowledge, defends that claim against such skeptical attitudes as historicism and psychologism, and shows that many confusions can be avoided if the distinctions between meaning and significance, interpretation and criticism are (...) correctly understood. It provides perhaps the first genuinely comprehensive account of hermeneutic theory to appear in English and the first systematic presentation of the principles of valid interpretation in any language. Mr. Hirsch, associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of _Wordsworth and Schelling _and _Innocence and Experience: An Introduction to Blake._ “Here is a book that brings logic to the most unruly of disciplines, literary interpretation. Viewing this subject within the tradition of hermeneutics, Mr. Hirsch is able to trace its origins and development with brilliant insight. The result is a lucidly systemic and authoritative account of the premises and procedures applicable to the interpretation of a literary text. Mr. Hirsch has performed a monumental service thereby that of reinstating the credentials of objectivism and defining the limits of the aesthetics of truth. This study is a necessary took for anyone who wants to talk sense about literature.”—_Virginia Quarterly Review_ “Professor Hirsch demonstrates convincingly that objectivity is attainable in humane studies, and that it is not identified with the subject but with the evidence. A valid interpretation is not necessarily a correct one, but one which is more probably than any other on the basis of existing evidence. He makes a subtle and important distinction between a text’s ‘meaning’ and its ‘significance’, and brilliantly relates meaning to understanding and interpretation to explanation…” In short, this is a work which future students of literary theory cannot afford to neglect.”—_Notes and Queries_ E.D. Hirsch, Jr., is professor of English at the University of Virginia. (shrink)

It is an undeniable reality that workplace spirituality has received growing attention during the last decade. This fact is attributable to many factors, socioeconomic, cultural and others [Hicks, D.A. 2003: Religion and the Workplace. Pluralism, Sprtituality, Leadership (Cambridge University press, Cambridge)]. However the field is full of obscurity and imprecision for the researcher, the practitioner, the organisational analyst and whoever attempts to systematically approach this relatively new inquiry field. This article attempts to provide a critical review of the literature on (...) workplace spirituality by examining the underlying rationale of the main trends regarding spirit at Work and by negotiating their strengths and weaknesses. Current approaches to workplace spirituality are distinguished to the exploratory, contextual and the consequential, acontextual ones. Particular attention is given to ‚Respectful Pluralism’ proposed by Douglas Hicks, as it is suggested that this theoretical framework is the most well-founded, elaborated and systematic up to date. However, it is proposed that even ‚Respectful Pluralism’ fails to fully capture the complexity of such a multidimensional phenomenon as spirituality. Drawing on mainstream ethical and philosophical traditions (deontology, utilitarianism, virtue ethics) supporting alternative value-systems, it is suggested that a more inclusive and philosophically affluent framework needs to be developed. Finally, some propositions and thoughts are made towards this direction. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Most of the revolutionaries who turned toward anarchism as a consequence of 1848 did so by virtue of hindsight, but one man at least, independently of Proudhon, made his defense of the libertarian attitude during the Year of Revolutions itself. “Anarchy is order; government is civil war.” It was under this slogan, as willfully paradoxical as any of Proudhon’s, that Anselme Bellegarrigue made his brief, obscure appearance in anarchist history. Bellegarrigue appears to have been a man of some education, but (...) little is known of his life before the very eve of 1848; he arrived back in Paris on February 23 from a journey in the United States, where he had met President Polk on a Mississippi steamer and had developed an admiration for the more individualistic aspects of American democracy. According to his own account, he was as little impressed as Proudhon by the revolution that broke out on his first morning back in Paris. A young National Guardsman outside the Hôtel de Ville boasted to him that this time the workers would not be robbed of their victory. “They have robbed you already of your victory,” replied Bellegarrigue. “Have you not named a government?”. (shrink)

With theories of political obligation based on consent now generally discredited because most people have not actually consented, certain theorists attempt to rescue consent by proposing mechanisms through which individuals could consent to government. Various mechanisms are examined, including ‘consent-or-leave’ and Michael Walzer's proposal that citizens who refuse to consent be allowed a lesser status, analogous to that of ‘resident aliens at home’. All these mechanisms confront insuperable difficulties concerning essential public goods. Because resident aliens at home will continue to (...) receive public goods, the alternatives are that they be allowed to receive them cost-free or that they incur obligations, even though they explicitly refused to consent. (shrink)

Award-winning author, scholar, and social visionary George Yancy brings together the greatest minds of our time to speak truth to power and welcome everyone into a conversation about the pursuit of justice, equality, and peace.

We say that A≤LRB if every B-random set is A-random with respect to Martin–Löf randomness. We study this relation and its interactions with Turing reducibility, classes, hyperimmunity and other recursion theoretic notions.

This piece offers a retrospective review of a plenary speech at the 1969 Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association by the leading environmentalist of the Nixon administration, attorney and judge Russell Train. Train's talk, titled “Prescription for a Planet,” can be seen as an early argument for uniting environmental health and public health as the two main determinants of both individual and population health and for the inclusion of these fields in the then‐new field of “bioethics.”.

When it was first released in 1962, The Shape of Time presented a radically new approach to the study of art history. Drawing upon new insights in fields such as anthropology and linguistics, George Kubler replaced the notion of style as the basis for histories of art with the concept of historical sequence and continuous change across time. Kubler’s classic work is now made available in a freshly designed edition. “ The Shape of Time is as relevant now as (...) it was in 1962. This book, a sober, deeply introspective, and quietly thrilling meditation on the flow of time and space and the place of objects within a larger continuum, adumbrates so many of the critical and theoretical concerns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. It is both appropriate and necessary that it re-appear in our consciousness at this time.”—Edward J. Sullivan, New York University. (shrink)

Cantor's diagonal argument provides an indirect proof that there is no one-one function from the power set of a set A into A. This paper provides a somewhat more constructive proof of Cantor's theorem, showing how, given a function f from the power set of A into A, one can explicitly define a counterexample to the thesis that f is one-one.

Smith's famous invocation of the invisible hand -according to which self-interest promotes the greater good — has popularly been seen as a fundamental challenge to business ethics, a field committed to the opposite premise that the public interest cannot be advanced unless economic egoism is restrained by a more socially conscious mindset, one that takes into account the legitimate needs of stakeholders and the reciprocity inherent in networked relationships. Adam Smith has been brought into the discipline to show that his (...) authority cannot be summoned to fully support the free market sceptics of business ethics. Little has been done, however, to illustrate that Smith's moral writings actually contain the fundamentals of a business ethics teaching for managers who necessarily work within a variety of networks. This article analyses his moral thought to infer a Smithean framework of business ethics for managers. Smith believes that self-interest should be subordinated to moral imperatives, even in the business world. However, Smith rejects the principles of corporate social responsibility on the argument that benevolent impulses cannot be expected to prevail in the commercial arena. Instead of consciously trying to advance the social good, Smith's ideal manager will endeavour to personally live up to the standards enforced by an impartial spectator of his conduct, a theoretical entity reflecting the ethical requirements posed by the manager's social networks and stakeholder relationships. While this internalized onlooker expects a limited degree of benevolence, the overriding demand is for the manager to abide by the dictums of justice and prudence. (shrink)

Social epistemology studies knowledge and justified belief acquisition through organized group cooperation. To do this, the way such group cooperation is structured has to be modeled. The obvious way of modeling a group structure is with a directed graph; unfortunately, most types of social cooperation directed at epistemological aims are variably implementable, including in their structural expression. Furthermore, the frequency with which a practice is implemented in a certain way can vary with topology. This entails that the topology of social (...) practices directed toward epistemological ends has to be modeled by a set of directed graphs, or their equivalent, together with a probability distribution over that set. In theory, this is eminently possible; however, there are considerable practical obstacles to the specification of a practice’s topology in this way. This paper examines these practical difficulties and concludes that todays sampling protocols are either far too slow to handle pratices with 10 or more participants, or else prone to produce misleading evaluations. (shrink)