Realism and constructivism, two key contemporary theoretical approaches to the study of international relations, are commonly taught as mutually exclusive ways of understanding the subject. Realist Constructivism explores the common ground between the two, and demonstrates that, rather than being in simple opposition, they have areas of both tension and overlap. There is indeed space to engage in a realist constructivism. But at the same time, there are important distinctions between them, and there remains a need for a constructivism that (...) is not realist, and a realism that is not constructivist. Samuel Barkin argues more broadly for a different way of thinking about theories of international relations, that focuses on the corresponding elements within various approaches rather than on a small set of mutually exclusive paradigms. Realist Constructivism provides an interesting new way for scholars and students to think about international relations theory. (shrink)

Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise is a landmark both in democratic political theory and in the history of biblical interpretation. Spinoza championed liberty of thought, speech and writing by discrediting the Bible as the standard for truth and a source of public law. Applying a new historical criticism, he showed that biblical teaching and law were irrelevant for a modern pluralistic state and its intellectual life. J. Samuel Preus highlights Spinoza's achievement by reading the Treatise in the context of a literary (...) conflict among his contemporaries about biblical interpretation - a conflict fraught with political implication. Preus's exposition of neglected primary sources surrounding Spinoza's work offers evidence regarding his rhetorical strategy and intent in the Treatise. The book provides not only a valuable contribution to Spinoza scholarship but an important account of the origins of modern methods of biblical interpretation. (shrink)

Early modern analysis of religion as imaginative construct played a pivotal role in the theoretical development of the study of religion as a discipline detached from theology. Spinoza and vico applied this analysis to the classic western mythological texts--The bible and the homeric epics, Respectively. Moreover, Vico drew more heavily upon the work of spinoza than has been previously recognized. This dependence appears not only in vico's conceptualization of the "imaginative ((as contrasted to rational() universal," but in his critical canons (...) for interpreting ancient texts and in his recognition that concepts and institutions are inseparable in the formation of archaic religion. (shrink)

Near the end of his Euboean Discourse, Dio attacks prostitution because it encourages men to seek sexual pleasure from other sources as well, including youths from noble households. While some scholars find no evidence in this diatribe for Dio's revulsion against male-male sexual relations per se, others conclude that it does indeed reflect Dio's contempt for all sexual relations between men. This study considers afresh Dio's treatments of sexual relations between men in his Discourses, and concludes that Dio may endorse (...) both male-male and male-female sexual relations when the agent initiating sexual contact pursues philia and eunoia. On the other hand, Dio expresses his disgust when the agent uses sexual relations self-indulgently for pleasure. The content and form of his arguments illustrate his familiarity with both Stoic doctrine and the forms of popular moralizing discourse. The paper first examines Dio's remarks in the third Discourse on Kingship, where he praises sexual relations in a measured way, indicating his familiarity with Stoic teachings on eros. Second, it considers Dio's remarks in the Euboean Discourse and supports John Winkler's argument that Dio objects to prostitution because it is rooted in self-indulgent pleasure-seeking. Dio's rhetorical approach reflects his awareness of popular teachings against self-indulgence typical of Cynic-Stoic diatribe. Third, the essay argues that Dio's remarks in the First Tarsian oration condemn adult male sexual passivity, not all aspects of sexual relations between males. Fourth, brief remarks in his Borystheniticus are not to be taken as evidence for Dio's hostility to sexual relations between men, though they possibly indicate his discomfort with how he imagines non-Greeks engage in sex. (shrink)

The widespread critical evidence surrounding executive compensation of listed corporations has boosted shareholder activism in recent decades. The say-on-pay (SOP) mechanism—a vote in which shareholders express their (dis)agreement with executive pay designs—is one of the corporate governance mechanisms that has led to this activism among listed firms. Merging agency and socioemotional wealth (SEW) arguments, this paper analyzes how effective SOP voting results are among listed family firms in terms of CEO compensation efficiency and equity. Using a sample of UK listed (...) firms from 2011 to 2018, our results show that SOP effectiveness is positively influenced by family ownership and is strongly moderated by family involvement in management and in governance as well as by family generation. Our findings stress the strong family effect and the ethical perceptions of family shareholders on SOP voting, showing how family participation in the firm encourages fairer and more aligned CEO compensation packages. SOP institutional and practical implications oriented to preserve shareholder value and family wealth are finally outlined. (shrink)

Primarily focused on the theoretical aspects of International Organization, this book provides an in-depth examination of competing theories through thematic chapters. Intended to fill the gap between introductory textbooks and primary sources of theory, International Organization , is useful for upper-level international relations courses with a significant emphasis on theory.

At the core of Kant's ethics lies the claim that if there is a supreme principle of morality then it cannot be a principle based on utilitarianism or Aristotelian perfectionism or the Ten Commandments. The only viable candidate for such a principle is the categorical imperative. This book is the most detailed investigation of this claim. It constructs a new, criterial reading of Kant's derivation of one version of the categorical imperative: the Formula of Universal Law. This reading shows this (...) derivation to be far more compelling than contemporary philosophers tend to believe. It also reveals a novel approach to deriving another version of the categorical imperative, the Formula of Humanity, a principle widely considered to be the most attractive Kantian candidate for the supreme principle of morality. This book will be important not just for Kant scholars but for a broad swathe of students of philosophy. (shrink)

Public health and service delivery programmes, interventions and policies (collectively, ‘programmes’) are typically developed and implemented for the primary purpose of effecting change rather than generating knowledge. Nonetheless, evaluations of these programmes may produce valuable learning that helps determine effectiveness and costs as well as informing design and implementation of future programmes. Such studies might be termed ‘opportunistic evaluations’, since they are responsive to emergent opportunities rather than being studies of interventions that are initiated or designed by researchers. However, current (...) ethical guidance and registration procedures make little allowance for scenarios where researchers have played no role in the development or implementation of a programme, but nevertheless plan to conduct a prospective evaluation. We explore the limitations of the guidance and procedures with respect to opportunistic evaluations, providing a number of examples. We propose that one key missing distinction in current guidance is moral responsibility: researchers can only be held accountable for those aspects of a study over which they have control. We argue that requiring researchers to justify an intervention, programme or policy that would occur regardless of their involvement prevents or hinders research in the public interest without providing any further protections to research participants. We recommend that trial consent and ethics procedures allow for a clear separation of responsibilities for the intervention and the evaluation. (shrink)

The target article “Thinking Through Other Minds” (TTOM) offered an account of the distinctively human capacity to acquire cultural knowledge, norms, and practices. To this end, we leveraged recent ideas from theoretical neurobiology to understand the human mind in social and cultural contexts. Our aim was bothsynthetic– building an integrative model adequate to account for key features of cultural learning and adaptation; andprescriptive– showing how the tools developed to explain brain dynamics can be applied to the emergence of social and (...) cultural ecologies of mind. In this reply to commentators, we address key issues, including: (1) refining the concept of culture to show how TTOM and the free-energy principle (FEP) can capture essential elements of human adaptation and functioning; (2) addressing cognition as an embodied, enactive, affective process involving cultural affordances; (3) clarifying the significance of the FEP formalism related to entropy minimization, Bayesian inference, Markov blankets, and enactivist views; (4) developing empirical tests and applications of the TTOM model; (5) incorporating cultural diversity and context at the level of intra-cultural variation, individual differences, and the transition to digital niches; and (6) considering some implications for psychiatry. The commentators’ critiques and suggestions point to useful refinements and applications of the model. In ongoing collaborations, we are exploring how to augment the theory with affective valence, take into account individual differences and historicity, and apply the model to specific domains including epistemic bias. (shrink)

This book examines the use, principally in economics, of the concept of the invisible hand, centering on Adam Smith. It interprets the concept as ideology, knowledge, and a linguistic phenomenon. It shows how the principal Chicago School interpretation misperceives and distorts what Smith believed on the economic role of government. The essays further show how Smith was silent as to his intended meaning, using the term to set minds at rest; how the claim that the invisible hand is the foundational (...) concept of economics is repudiated by numerous leading economic theorists; that several dozen identities given the invisible hand renders the term ambiguous and inconclusive; that no such thing as an invisible hand exists; and that calling something an invisible hand adds nothing to knowledge. Finally, the essays show that the leading doctrines purporting to claim an invisible hand for the case for capitalism cannot invoke the term but that other nonnormative invisible hand processes are still useful tools. (shrink)

We consider various curious features of general relativity, and relativistic field theory, in two spacetime dimensions. In particular, we discuss: the vanishing of the Einstein tensor; the failure of an initial-value formulation for vacuum spacetimes; the status of singularity theorems; the non-existence of a Newtonian limit; the status of the cosmological constant; and the character of matter fields, including perfect fluids and electromagnetic fields. We conclude with a discussion of what constrains our understanding of physics in different dimensions.

In recent scholarship, the science and religion debate has been historicized, revealing the novelty of the concepts of science and religion and their complex connections to secularization and the birth of modernity. This article situates this historicist turn in the history of philosophy and its connections to theology and Scripture, showing that the science and religion concept derives from philosophy's earlier tension with theology as it became an academic discipline centered in the medieval, then research university, with the centrality of (...) Scripture changing under the influence of historical criticism. Looking at Thomas Aquinas and Friedrich Schleiermacher on theology and Scripture's connection to science, it offers a new framework for theorizing science and religion as part of the history of philosophy. (shrink)

An investigation of public support for coastal adaptation options and public finance options in Florida evaluated stakeholder judgments and how they changed through a participatory engagement process. The study found that public finance mechanisms that imposed fiscal burdens on those who directly benefit from hazard reduction were rated as more acceptable than others. Significantly, visualisations and data on local economic damage and return on investment of potential adaptation options further increased acceptability ratings. The question of whether a development fee for (...) adaptation or any other public purpose supported by private funds is a legal issue that depends on a test called the rational nexus. One concern of this article is to explore options for such fees to cover adaptation to climate change. This raises issues about the potential conflict with the community-wide and intergenerational nature of long-term adaptation. We also explore the relevance of environmental attitudes using the ‘new environmental paradigm’ (NEP) scale and political party affiliation. Results have implications for infrastructure improvements that require public approval for financing. (shrink)

Opponents of commerce in organs sometimes appeal to Kant’s Formula of Humanity to justify their position. Kant implies that anyone who sells an integral part of his body violates this principle and thereby acts wrongly. Although appeals to Kant’s Formula are apt, they are less helpful than they might be because they invoke the necessity of respecting the dignity of ends in themselves without specifying in detail what dignity is or what it means to respect it, and they cite the (...) wrongness of an agent’s treating another merely as a means without clarifying conditions under which this occurs. This paper crystallizes two different approaches to the Formula of Humanity and probes when, according to them, the principle would imply that it is wrong to engage in “live donor” transactions, in which someone chooses to undergo a kidney extraction in exchange for money. (shrink)

In Kant and Modern Political Philosophy, Katrin Flikschuh pursues two main aims. She tries to show that Kant’s theory of Right [Recht] is grounded in Kantian metaphysics. For example, we do not really understand Kant’s thought on property rights and cosmopolitanism unless we have in view its metaphysical underpinnings. Second, Flikschuh attempts to demonstrate the relevance of Kant’s theory of Right, especially as it is presented in Kant’s notoriously difficult Rechtslehre, to contemporary political concerns. In pursuing these aims she brings (...) to bear wide-ranging knowledge of scholarly work on Kant’s political and legal thought. (shrink)

The threat of bioterrorism, the emergence of the SARS epidemic, and a recent focus on professionalism among physicians, present a timely opportunity for a review of, and renewed commitment to, physician obligations to care for patients during epidemics. The professional obligation to care for contagious patients is part of a larger "duty to treat," which historically became accepted when 1) a risk of nosocomial infection was perceived, 2) an organized professional body existed to promote the duty, and 3) the public (...) came to rely on the duty. Physicians' responses to epidemics from the Hippocratic era to the present suggests an evolving acceptance of the professional duty to treat contagious patients, reaching a long-held peak between 1847 and the1950's. There has been some professional retrenchment against this duty to treat in the last 40 years but, we argue, conditions favoring acceptance of the duty are met today. A renewed embrace of physicians' duty to treat patients during epidemics, despite conditions of personal risk, might strengthen medicine's relationship with society, improve society's capacity to prepare for threats such as bioterrorism and new epidemics, and contribute to the development of a more robust and meaningful medical professionalism. (shrink)

In this book, I give a topic-based, modular introduction to philosophy. The book has 16 chapters: 7 in theoretical philosophy and 9 in practical philosophy. Each topic is introduced by means of a concrete question; the main positions on this question are then developed and criticized in turn. I try to avoid taking sides; instead, I emphasize that students must think through the issues for themselves.

In the Paraplegia Case, we must choose either to preserve the life of a paraplegic for 10 years or that of someone in full health for the same duration. Non-consequentialists reject a benefit-maximising view, which holds that since the person in full health will have a higher quality of life, we ought to save him straightaway. In the Unequal Lifespan Case, we face a choice between saving one person for 5 years in full health and another for 25 years in (...) full health. Frances Kamm has recently unfurled an Equal Respect Argument in an effort to support the position that while we ought to give each person a 50% chance of being saved in the Paraplegia Case, we are morally permitted to save straightaway the person who would live longer in the Unequal Lifespan case. The article tries to show that a Kant-inspired account of the dignity of persons is far more successful than Kamm's argument in supporting this position. The Kant-inspired account owes this success to its conceiving of respect for persons not primarily as respect for their pursuit of what is of value for them, but rather as respect for the value in them. (shrink)

Providing another key contribution to the immensely popular field of law and economics, this book, written by the doyen of the history of economic thought in the US, explores the dynamic relationship between economics, law and polity. Combining a selection of old and new essays by Warren J. Samuels that chart a number of key themes, it provides an important commentary on the development of an academic field and demonstrates how policy is structured and manipulated by human social construction. The (...) areas covered include: the role of manufactured belief power the nature and sources of rights the construction of markets by firms and governments and the problem of continuity and change in the form of the question of the selectively defined _status quo_ and its status the absolutist character of government, rights, markets and legal principles and the accepted ideational structure of law. _The Legal-Economic Nexus_ is an essential read both economists and legal professionals as well as those researching the history of economic thought and the social construction of law. (shrink)

Samuel J. Kerstein develops a new, broadly Kantian account of the ethical issues that arise when a person treats another merely as a means. He explores how Kantian principles on the dignity of persons shed light on pressing issues in modern bioethics, including the distribution of scarce medical resources and the regulation of markets in organs.

In The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard affirms that Enlightenment morality is true: humanity is valuable. To many of us few claims seem more obvious. Yet Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant do not limit themselves to affirming that humanity is valuable. They appeal to reason in an effort to establish it. They try to show that, in some sense, we are rationally compelled to recognize the value of humanity. Korsgaard joins in this effort. She champions the claim that unless we (...) take humanity to be valuable, we condemn ourselves to complete practical skepticism, i.e., to the view that we have no reason to do anything at all.Korsgaard discusses two arguments that, she believes, support this claim. The first she attributes directly to Kant in a series of influential papers on his ethics. The second argument, which she calls a ‘fancy new model’ of the first, she constructs under her own name in The Sources of Normativity. I will defend the view that neither of these arguments succeeds. In doing so, I will not be trying to show that we are mistaken in believing humanity to be valuable. (shrink)

Previous literature has shown contradictory results regarding the relationship between economic liberalism at the country level and firms’ engagement in corporate social action. Because liberalism is associated with individualism, it is often assumed that firms will engage in mostly symbolic rather than substantive social and environmental actions; in other words, they will practice “greenwashing.” To understand how cultural beliefs in the virtues of liberalism affect the likelihood of greenwashing, we disentangle the effects of the distinct and co-existing beliefs in the (...) virtues of economic liberalism. We begin by conducting an exploratory qualitative analysis of managers’ sentiments on this matter, based on a focus group methodology. We then use these investigative elements to articulate a comparison of the conflicting theoretical arguments: in liberal contexts, are firms, as social entities, inherently selfish or pro-active when it comes to CSA? We empirically test our hypotheses on a large-scale dataset. Finally, we show paradoxically that in countries where beliefs in the virtues of competition are strong, firms are more likely to greenwash, while in countries where beliefs in the virtues of individual responsibility are prominent, firms are more likely to focus on concrete actions. These findings suggest that in contexts where weak governments are seen as ideal, firms might feel the need to step into fill institutional voids, in contexts in which competitive mindsets dominate, this tendency is counterbalanced. (shrink)

A theoretical structure for multiattribute decision making is presented, based on a dynamical system for interactions in a neural network incorporating affective and rational variables. This enables modeling of problems that elude two prevailing economic decision theories: subjective expected utility theory and prospect theory. The network is unlike some that fit economic data by choosing optimal weights or coefficients within a predetermined mathematical framework. Rather, the framework itself is based on principles used elsewhere to model many other cognitive and behavioral (...) data, in a manner approximating how humans perform behavioral functions. Different, interconnected modules within the network encode (a) attributes of objects among which choices are made, (b) object categories, (c) and goals of the decision maker. An example is utilized to simulate the actual consumer choice between old and new versions of Coca-Cola. Potential applications are also discussed to market decisions involving negotiations between participants, such as international petroleum traders. (shrink)

The processes underwriting the acquisition of culture remain unclear. How are shared habits, norms, and expectations learned and maintained with precision and reliability across large-scale sociocultural ensembles? Is there a unifying account of the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of culture? Notions such as “shared expectations,” the “selective patterning of attention and behaviour,” “cultural evolution,” “cultural inheritance,” and “implicit learning” are the main candidates to underpin a unifying account of cognition and the acquisition of culture; however, their interactions require greater (...) specification and clarification. In this article, we integrate these candidates using the variational (free-energy) approach to human cognition and culture in theoretical neuroscience. We describe the construction by humans of social niches that afford epistemic resources called cultural affordances. We argue that human agents learn the shared habits, norms, and expectations of their culture through immersive participation in patterned cultural practices that selectively pattern attention and behaviour. We call this process “thinking through other minds” (TTOM) – in effect, the process of inferring other agents’ expectations about the world and how to behave in social context. We argue that for humans, information from and about other people's expectations constitutes the primary domain of statistical regularities that humans leverage to predict and organize behaviour. The integrative model we offer has implications that can advance theories of cognition, enculturation, adaptation, and psychopathology. Crucially, this formal (variational) treatment seeks to resolve key debates in current cognitive science, such as the distinction between internalist and externalist accounts of theory of mind abilities and the more fundamental distinction between dynamical and representational accounts of enactivism. (shrink)

This paper concerns Kant's view of the relations between an actions's moral permissibility and its moral worth. In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant holds that only morally permissible actions can have moral worth. By restricting moral worth to morally permissible actions, Kant generates an asymmetrical account of how two kinds of failure affect an actions's moral worth. While failure to judge correctly whether one's action is morally permissible precludes it from having moral worth failure to attain the (...) end of one's action does not. I argue that this asymmetrical account is implausible. Kant, I claim, should acknowledge that morally permissible actions can have moral worth. After addressing objections to this claim, I consider Kant's position in a later work: the Metaphysics of Moreals. I argue that though he does not go far enough, Kant moves toward recognizing that some morally impermissible actions can have moral worth. (shrink)

In Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein notes that he has ‘not yet made the role of miscalculating clear’ and that ‘the role of the proposition: “I must have miscalculated”…is really the key to an understanding of the “foundations” of mathematics.’ In this paper, I hope to get clear on how this is the case. First, I will explain Wittgenstein's understanding of a ‘foundation’ for mathematics. Then, by showing how the proposition ‘I must have miscalculated’ differentiates mathematics from the (...) physical sciences, we will see how this proposition is the key to understanding the foundations of mathematics. (shrink)