In The History of Sexuality, Volume One, Michel Foucault ostensibly sets out to reject the “repressive hypothesis” as an inadequate characterization of the relationship between sex, power and knowledge. Given the obliqueness of his polemical attack against this hypothesis and its representatives, however, some commentators have attempted to elucidate and assess his position by situating Herbert Marcuse’s critique of sexual repression within the ambit of Foucault’s argument. The following essay contributes to this investigation by highlighting Foucault’s implicit and explicit remarks (...) against Marcuse in the first volume of The History of Sexuality and the series of interviews surrounding the publication of this text. I will concentrate on his claim that, by reducing power to a purely “negative,” repressive force exercised against the majority of individuals, Marcuse misses the “positive” or “productive” operations of power that constitute the sexual subject. To address this charge, I depart from the usual procedure of explicating Marcuse’s analysis of sexual repression in Eros and Civilization and turn, instead, to his later work on “repressive desublimation” in One-Dimensional Man, where his emphasis on the productive dimension of repressive power comes into full view. By challenging Foucault’s dismissal of the “repressive hypothesis” on the basis of a more faithful reading of Marcuse, I hope to open up a space for further inquiry into the connections between these two seemingly irreconcilable positions. (shrink)

This research aims to understand how two basic schemas—vigilante and reparation—influence online public complaining. Drawing on two experiments, a longitudinal field study and content analysis of online complaints, the current research makes three core contributions. First, we show that for similar service failures, each schema is associated with different justice motivations, which have different moral implications for consumers. Second, vigilante and reparation complainers write complaints in a different manner and are drawn to different online platforms; this information is helpful to (...) identify complainers using each schema. Third, the schemas moderate the process leading to different post-complaint benefits. Specifically, perseverance has a greater effect on obtaining a resolution for reparation complainers compared to vigilantes. Additionally, whereas a recovery leads to an increase in positive affect for reparation complainers, vigilantes experience a high level of positive affect simply by posting their complaint. The theoretical, ethical, and managerial implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

This article considers how a generalized signalling game may self-assemble as the saliences of the agents evolve by reinforcement on those sources of information that in fact lead to successful action. On the present account, generalized signalling games self-assemble even as the agents co-evolve meaningful representations and successful dispositions for using those representations. We will see how reinforcement on successful information sources also provides a mechanism whereby simpler games might compose to form more complex games. Along the way, I consider (...) how an old game might be appropriated to a new context by reinforcement on successful associations between old and new saliences. (shrink)

In the egoism philosophical framework, it is contended that when organizations focus on their long-term interests, they, without knowing it, advance the interests of society as a whole, which is perceived as ethical. In this research, this premise is challenged using data collected from the social media outlets of 29 randomly selected companies from the 2013 Fortune 500 list. Through qualitative comparative analysis, the exact opposite was found. In fact, the organizations that focused on striving for their long-term success are (...) perceived as unethical. It was also found that socially responsible organizations are perceived as ethical whereas those that misrepresent their positions and attempt to influence the decisions of others are perceived as unethical. Implications for managers are discussed, and future directions are suggested. (shrink)

A resolution of the quantum measurement problem would require one to explain how it is that we end up with determinate records at the end of our measurements. Metaphysical commitments typically do real work in such an explanation. Indeed, one should not be satisfied with one's metaphysical commitments unless one can provide some account of determinate measurement records. I will explain some of the problems in getting determinate records in relativistic quantum field theory and pay particular attention to the relationship (...) between the measurement problem and a generalized version of Malament's theorem. (shrink)

Ryan Tonkens has issued a seemingly impossible challenge, to articulate a comprehensive ethical framework within which artificial moral agents satisfy a Kantian inspired recipe—"rational" and "free"—while also satisfying perceived prerogatives of machine ethicists to facilitate the creation of AMAs that are perfectly and not merely reliably ethical. This series of papers meets this challenge by landscaping traditional moral theory in resolution of a comprehensive account of moral agency. The first paper established the challenge and set out autonomy in Aristotelian terms. (...) The present paper interprets Kantian moral theory on the basis of the preceding introduction, argues contra Tonkens that an engineer does not violate the categorical imperative in creating Kantian AMAs, and proposes that a Kantian AMA is not only a possible goal for Machine ethics research, but a necessary one. (shrink)

In this introduction to Part 1 of “Contextualism—the Next Generation: Symposium on the Future of a Methodology,” the editor of Common Knowledge, a “journal of left-wing Kuhnian opinion,” reports that the new symposium responds to contextualist criticism of the previous CK symposium, which was on xenophilia. The content of the earlier symposium met with objections, from contextualists, on the grounds of methodology, and the new symposium questions the methodology of contextualism for the limits that it places on content as well (...) as on normative aims and degree of focus. Tracing the origins of contextualism to Kuhn and his theory that paradigms of scientific knowledge are incommensurable, this essay then argues that Kuhnian method is formal, with scant concern for content, and that Kuhn’s work was vatic, more than philosophical or historical. Kuhn’s depiction of his sudden, blinding realization that Aristotelian physics is correct in its own context is assessed as an ironic application of biblical scenes of revelation to what is, essentially, a process of scrupulous, piecemeal scholarship. What Kuhn unknowingly wanted, the essay concludes, was a combination of contextualism and phenomenology, as a means of knowing what it was like to believe in Aristotelian, as opposed to modern, concepts of matter, quality, space, void, position, change, and motion. The essay then introduces the first contribution to the new symposium: a monograph retrieving geometrical and taxonomic—Euclidean and Theophrastan—idioms of discourse about fictional characters and inquiring into their changing affective content. (shrink)

Deflationsism about truth is a pot-pourri, variously claiming that truth is redundant, or is constituted by the totality of 'T-sentences', or is a purely logical device (required solely for disquotational purposes or for re-expressing finitarily infinite conjunctions and/or disjunctions). In 1980, Hartry Field proposed what might be called a 'deflationary theory of mathematics', in which it is alleged that all uses of mathematics within science are dispensable. Field's criterion for the dispensability of mathematics turns on a property of theories, called (...) conservativeness. I present some technical results, some of which may be found in Tarski (1936), concerning the logical properties of truth theories; in particular, concerning the conservativeness of adding a truth theory for an object level language to any theory expressed in it. It transpires that various deflationary truth theories behave somewhat differently from the standard Tarskian truth theory. These results suggest that Tarskian theories of truth are not redundant or dispensable. Finally, I hint at an analogy between the behaviour of mathematical theories and of standard (Tarskian) theories of truth with respect to their indispensability to, as Quine would put, our 'scientific world-view'. (shrink)

Recent developments, both in the cognitive sciences and in world events, bring special emphasis to the study of morality. The cognitive sciences, spanning neurology, psychology, and computational intelligence, offer substantial ad- vances in understanding the origins and purposes of morality. Meanwhile, world events urge the timely synthesis of these insights with traditional ac- counts that can be easily assimilated and practically employed to augment moral judgment, both to solve current problems and to direct future action. The object of the following (...) paper is to present such a synthesis in the form of a model of moral cognition, the ACTWith model of conscience. The purpose of the model is twofold. One, the ACTWith model is intended to shed light on personal moral dispositions, and to provide a tool for actual human moral agents in the refinement of their moral lives. As such, it relies on the power of personal introspection, bolstered by the careful study of moral exemplars available to all persons in all cultures in the form of literary or religious fig- ures, if not in the form of contemporary peers and especially leadership. Two, the ACTWith model is intended as a minimum architecture for fully func- tional artificial morality. As such, it is essentially amodal, implementation non-specific and is developed in the form of an information processing control system. There are given as few hard points in this system as necessary for moral function, and these are themselves taken from review of actual human cognitive processes, thereby intentionally capturing as closely as possible what is expected of moral action and reaction by human beings. Only in satisfying these untutored intuitions should an artificial agent ever be properly regarded as moral, at least in the general population of existing moral agents. Thus, the ACTWith model is intended as a guide both for individual moral develop- ment and for the development of artificial moral agents as future technology permits. (shrink)

Jeff McMahan rejects the relevance of desert to the morality of self-defense. In Killing in War he restates his rejection and adds to his reasons. We argue that the reasons are not decisive and that the rejection calls for further attention, which we provide. Although we end up agreeing with McMahan that the limits of morally acceptable self-defense are not determined by anyone’s deserts, we try to show that deserts may have some subsidiary roles in the morality of self-defense. We (...) suggest that recognizing this might help McMahan to answer some unanswered questions to which his own position gives rise. (shrink)

The dearth of philosophical contributions to medicine has recently been discussed in a series of articles in this journal. The present article focuses on physicians' lack of training in philosophy as a part of the explanation of the scarcity of works in philosophy of medicine. In section I I outline two philosophy courses which would be reasonable additions to the medical school curriculum required of all medical students. In section II I suggest two other philosophy courses as electives in a (...) medical education. All four courses are in the fields of epistemology and metaphysics, and so will help others see the relevance to medicine of philosophical fields other than ethics. (shrink)

Mark Wicclair’s defense of conscientious objection is grounded in an effort to respect the core moral beliefs of health care providers. While such a theoretical schema has merit, this paper argues that core moral beliefs should not serve as the basis of conscientious objection in health care because we, as a community, lack reliable access to a person’s core moral beliefs and because individuals are prone to be confused about the scope and extent of their core moral beliefs. Furthermore, a (...) person’s confusion over their core moral beliefs is likely to be exacerbated when they lack time to investigate those beliefs and are under heightened external pressure to do so—both conditions frequently encountered by health care providers. Finally, the paper considers whether grounding conscientious objection in core moral beliefs might have the unintended consequence of further entrenching the practical problems that the move is aiming to solve. (shrink)

Discussion of, and reference to, properties pervades contemporary metaphysics, physics (e.g., the electron has charge), and ordinary language (the lion is sublime). But only a specialized group of a few hundred philosophers discuss the very specific details of what is involved in..

Guided by photographer Jeff Jones's sure and well-developed vision, Arctic Sanctuary leads the reader on a remarkable journey that few of us will ever take in real life: a trek deep into Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. By turns celebratory and contemplative, emotionally evocative and beautifully fierce, this collection of lyrical essays and stunning panoramic photographs pays homage to a vast and remote land that remains untamed by technology and undisturbed by human development. A rare window into a world that (...) is whole, ecologically intact, and still driven by ancient evolutionary energies, Arctic Sanctuary invites us to examine our own ideas of the wilderness ethic in the modern world. (shrink)

We are concerned here with explaining how successful rule-following behavior might evolve and how an old evolved rule might come to be successfully used in a new context. Such rule-following behavior is illustrated in the transitive judgments of pinyon and scrub-jays (Bond et al., Anim Behav 65:479–487, 2003). We begin by considering how successful transitive rule-following behavior might evolve in the context of Skyrms–Lewis sender–receiver games (Lewis, Convention. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1969; Skyrms, Philos Sci 75:489–500, 2006). We then consider (...) two ways that an agent might come to use an old evolved rule in a new context. The first involves the agent evolving successful dispositions for one concrete type of experience, then associating a new type of experience with the old evolved dispositions. The second involves the agent evolving dispositions that represent a general inferential schema, then composing these dispositions with others in a way that allows the agent to make inferences concerning a new concrete type of experience. (shrink)

Seitzer seeks to provide a more effective criticism of Schmitt than commentaries that focus on Schmitt's treatment of key works and concepts in legal and ...

Considered together, Butler and Whitehead draw from a wide palette of disciplines to develop distinctive theories of becoming, of syntactical violence, and creative opportunities of limitation. The contributors of this volume offer a unique contribution to and for the humanities in the struggles of politics, economy, ecology, and the arts.

The first four chapters of Pippin's elegant volume on Nietzsche were originally delivered as a series of lectures at the Collège de France in 2004. In a certain respect, the context of these lectures defines the parameters of Pippin's reading of Nietzsche: he advocates an interpretation very close to Bernard Williams in emphasizing the psychological aspects and motifs of Nietzsche's thought over and against certain contemporary French appropriations . In over-emphasizing the deconstructive capacity of Nietzsche's text, Pippin holds, these interpretations (...) conclude that Nietzsche's thought provides no philosophical insight—that "Nietzsche's texts always seem to take away with one hand what they appear to have given with the other". In sharp contrast, Pippin claims that Nietzsche's thought is extremely relevant philosophically insofar as it deals with the genealogy of human desires and actions. Put differently, Nietzsche's philosophical teaching is first and foremost a psychology. For this reason, Pippin's book amounts to a sustained attempt to "present a comprehensive interpretation of what Nietzsche means by 'psychology,' what the relationship is … between psychology and traditional. (shrink)

Joseph Margolis, a relativist with respect to aesthetic qualities, has argued that nonrelativists must produce a theory of perception capable of providing a basis for the distinction between an object’s actually possessing a specified aesthetic quality and an object’s only seeming to possess it. Although I think Margolis is probably right on the point, my concern is not with the need for the non relativist to produce such a theory; rather, it is with the need for the relativist to give (...) an account of the perception of aesthetic qualities. (shrink)

This book is the first to explore the varied ways in which invented languages can be used to teach languages and linguistics in university courses. Renowned scholars and junior researchers show how using invented languages can appeal to a wider range of students, and can help those students to develop the fundamental skills of linguistic analysis.