Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we used a novel futures-oriented and participatory approach that asked what future envisioned knowledge systems might need to look like and how we might get there. Findings suggest that envisioned future systems will need (...) to be much more collaborative, open, diverse, egalitarian, and able to work with values and systemic issues. They will also need to go beyond producing knowledge about our world to generating wisdom about how to act within it. To get to envisioned systems we will need to rapidly scale methodological innovations, connect innovators, and creatively accelerate learning about working with intractable challenges. We will also need to create new funding schemes, a global knowledge commons, and challenge deeply held assumptions. To genuinely be a creative force in supporting longevity of human and non-human life on our planet, the shift in knowledge systems will probably need to be at the scale of the enlightenment and speed of the scientific and technological revolution accompanying the second World War. This will require bold and strategic action from governments, scientists, civic society and sustained transformational intent. (shrink)

There are many cases in which people collectively cause some morally significant outcome (such as a harmful or beneficial outcome) but no individual act seems to make a difference. The problem in such cases is that it seems each person can argue, ‘it makes no difference whether or not I do X, so I have no reason to do it.’ The challenge is to say where this argument goes wrong. My approach begins from the observation that underlying the problem and (...) motivating the typical responses to it is a standard, intuitive assumption. The assumption is that if an act will not make a difference with respect to an outcome, then it cannot play a sig- nificant, non-superfluous role in bringing that outcome about. In other words, helping to bring about an outcome requires making a difference. I argue that the key to solving the problem is to reject this assumption. I develop an account of what it is to help to bring about an outcome, where this does not require making a difference, and I use this explain our reasons for action in the problem cases. This account also yields an error theory that explains why the standard assumption is so tempting, even though it is mistaken. (shrink)

In 2009, Greenpeace launched an aggressive campaign against Nestlé, accusing the organization of driving rainforest deforestation through its palm oil suppliers. The objective was to damage the brand image of Nestlé and, thereby, force the organization to make its supply chain more sustainable. Prominent cases such as these have led to the prevailing view that sustainable supply chain management is primarily reactive and propelled by external pressures. This research, in contrast, assumes that SSCM can contribute positively to the reputation of (...) an organization as a “good citizen” and, thereby, counter the impression that external stakeholder pressure is the only driver of SSCM. The study draws on Resource Dependence Theory in analyzing the three competing models of the potential stakeholder, SSCM and the corporate sustainability performance relationship. A dataset of 1,621 organizations allows the statistical comparison of these three models. Findings suggest that stakeholder pressure and SSCM both contribute to an organization’s sustainability performance. Thus, supply chain managers will perceive benefits from SSCM other than merely the reduction of risk from reputational damage through stakeholder activism. (shrink)

Managers tasked with organizational change often face irreconcilable demands on how to enact justice—situations we call _justice conundrums_. Drawing on interviews held with managers before and after a planned large-scale change, we identify specific conundrums and illustrate how managers grapple with these through three prototypical paths. Among our participants, the paths increasingly diverged over time, culminating in distinct career decisions. Based on our findings, we develop an integrative process model that illustrates how managers grapple with justice conundrums. Our contributions are (...) threefold. First, we elucidate three types of justice conundrums that managers may encounter when enacting justice in the context of planned organizational change (the justice intention-action gap, competing justice expectations, and the justice of care vs. managerial-strategic justice) and show how managers handle them differently. Second, drawing on the motivated cognition and moral disengagement literature, we illustrate how cognitive mechanisms coalesce to allow managers to soothe their moral (self-) concerns when grappling with these conundrums. Third, we show how motivated justice intentions ensuing from specific justice motives, moral emotions, and circles of moral regard predict the types of justice conundrums managers face and the paths they take to grapple with them. (shrink)

Twenty-five years after her death, we are still coming to terms with the controversial figure of Hannah Arendt. Interlacing the life and work of this seminal twentieth-century philosopher, Julia Kristeva provides us with an elegant, sophisticated biography brimming with historical and philosophical insight. Centering on the theme of female genius, _Hannah Arendt_ emphasizes three features of the philosopher's work. First, by exploring Arendt's critique of Saint Augustine and her biographical essay on Rahel Varnhagen, Kristeva accentuates Arendt's commitment to recounting (...) lives and narration. Second, Kristeva reflects on Arendt's perspective on Judaism, anti-Semitism, and the "banality of evil." Finally, the biography assesses Arendt's intellectual journey, placing her enthusiasm for observing both social phenomena and political events in the context of her personal life. Drawing on fragments of Arendt's most intimate correspondence with her longtime lover Martin Heidegger and her husband Heinrich Blucher, excerpts from her mother's "Unser Kind" (a diary tracking Hannah's formative years), and passages from Arendt's philosophical writings, Kristeva presents a luminous story. With a thorough thematic index and bibliographical references, _Hannah Arendt_ is a major breakthrough in the understanding of an essential thinker. (shrink)

In recent years, theories of social understanding have moved away from arguing that just one epistemic strategy, such as theory-based inference or simulation constitutes our ability of social understanding. Empirical observations speak against any monistic view and have given rise to pluralistic accounts arguing that humans rely on a large variety of epistemic strategies in social understanding. We agree with this promising pluralist approach, but highlight two open questions: what is the residual role of mindreading, i.e. the indirect attribution of (...) mental states to others within this framework, and how do different strategies of social understanding relate to each other? In a first step, we aim to clarify the arguments that might be considered in evaluating the role that epistemic strategies play in a pluralistic framework. On this basis, we argue that mindreading constitutes a core epiststrategy in human social life that opens new central spheres of social understanding. In a second step, we provide an account of the relation between different epistemic strategies which integrates and demarks the important role of mindreading for social understanding. (shrink)

Linguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist, Julia Kristeva is one of the most influential and prolific thinkers of our time. Her writings have broken new ground in the study of the self, the mind, and the ways in which we communicate through language. Her work is unique in that it skillfully brings together psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, literature, linguistics, and philosophy. In her latest book on the powers and limits of psychoanalysis, Kristeva focuses on an intriguing new dilemma. Freud (...) and psychoanalysis taught us that rebellion is what guarantees our independence and our creative abilities. But in our contemporary "entertainment" culture, is rebellion still a viable option? Is it still possible to build and embrace a counterculture? For whom--and against what--and under what forms? Kristeva illustrates the advances and impasses of rebel culture through the experiences of three twentieth-century writers: the existentialist John Paul Sartre, the surrealist Louis Aragon, and the theorist Roland Barthes. For Kristeva the rebellions championed by these figures--especially the political and seemingly dogmatic political commitments of Aragon and Sartre--strike the post-Cold War reader with a mixture of fascination and rejection. These theorists, according to Kristeva, are involved in a revolution against accepted notions of identity--of one's relation to others. Kristeva places their accomplishments in the context of other revolutionary movements in art, literature, and politics. The book also offers an illuminating discussion of Freud's groundbreaking work on rebellion, focusing on the symbolic function of patricide in his _Totem and Taboo_ and discussing his often neglected vision of language, and underscoring its complex connection to the revolutionary drive. (shrink)

Our ability to understand others is one of the most central parts of human life, but explaining how this ability develops remains a controversial issue, exercising psychologists and philosophers alike. Within this literature the Paradox of False Belief Understanding remains one of the main open challenges. Based on an up to date overview of the empirical and theoretical literature, this book highlights the significance of this paradox for our understanding of the development of social cognition and provides a new explanation (...) of it in the form of the Situational Mental File Account. Central features of the account are, firstly, identitfying three distinct stages in the development of belief understanding and, secondly, elaborating the role of both cognitive and situational factors as well as their interaction in the development of belief understanding. This account is also applied to the related phenomenon of pretend play, demonstrating the potential for a wider application of the account. This account generates both new empirical predications and a framework for further theoretical work, thereby providing a fruitful ground for further interdisciplinary research in this area. (shrink)

Climate change evokes different emotions in people. Recently, climate emotions have become a matter of normative scrutiny in the public debate. This phenomenon, which we refer to as the normativization of climate emotions, manifests at two levels. At the individual level, people are faced with affective dilemmas, situations where they are genuinely uncertain about what is the right way to feel in the face of climate change. At the collective level, the public debate reflects disagreement about which emotions are appropriate (...) to feel in the climate context. The aim of this paper is to examine the normative reasons in favour of different climate emotions by combining normative criteria from philosophy and psychology, such as rationality-based and consequentialist ones. We conclude that these criteria provide partial reasons for or against different climate emotions and that the suitability of each criterion will depend on various considerations, including the specific object that the emotion is directed to. We suggest that emotional disagreement in climate contexts may generate distrust, potentially hindering cooperation for climate action. We propose that we can ease challenges like this if we come to terms with the complex nature of climate emotions and their normative justification. (shrink)

Although Gilbert Ryle published on a wide range of topics in philosophy (notably in the history of philosophy and in philosophy of language), including a series of lectures centred on philosophical dilemmas, a series of articles on the concept of thinking, and a book on Plato, The Concept of Mind remains his best known and most important work. Through this work, Ryle is thought to have accomplished two major tasks. First, he was seen to have put the final nail in (...) the coffin of Cartesian dualism. Second, as he himself anticipated, he is thought to have argued on behalf of, and suggested as dualism's replacement, the doctrine known as philosophical (and sometimes analytical) behaviourism. Sometimes known as an “ordinary language”, sometimes as an “analytic” philosopher, Ryle—even when mentioned in the same breath as Wittgenstein and his followers—is considered to be on a different, somewhat idiosyncratic (and difficult to characterise), philosophical track. (shrink)

In the Appendix to the Treatise, Hume argues that there is a significant problem with his earlier account of personal identity. There has been considerable debate about what this problem actually is. I develop a new version of an internal inconsistency reading, where I argue that Hume realised that his original account of the connexion between perceptions in terms of an association of the ideas of the perceptions was not a viable means of explaining the connexion between perceptions as it (...) leads to an infinite regress of ideas of perceptions. This is only stopped by accepting that the mind perceives a connexion between perceptions. This, however, is something Hume cannot accept. As a result, Hume is left without a positive account of the self, as he has no account of the connexion between perceptions. (shrink)

Trust and corporation (extracts) / by F.W. Maitland -- Respublica Christiana -- by J.N. Figgis -- Society and state / by R.M. MacIver -- The discredited state / by E. Barker -- Conflicting social obligations / by G.D.H. Cole -- Community is a process / by M.P. Follett -- The eruption of the group / by E. Barker -- The masses in a representative democracy / by M. Oakeshott -- The atavism of social justice / by F.A. von Hayek -- (...) Collective entities and moral rights / by V. van Dyke -- Capitalism, citizenship and community / by S. Macedo -- Liberalism and the politicization of ethnicity / by W. Kymlicka -- Are there any cultural rights? / by C. Kukathas -- The civil society argument / by M. Walzer. (shrink)

Deprivations normally give rise to undeserved inequality. It is commonly thought that one way of improving a situation with respect to equality is by reducing the incidence of deprivations. In this paper I argue that there is at least one respect in which reducing the incidence of deprivations can make things worse from the point of view of equality. While eliminating deprivations leads to the elimination of inequalities, reducing the incidence of deprivations leads to an uneven distribution of the pairwise (...) relations of inequality of a population, which leads to the concentration of pairwise relations of inequality in the worse off. If my argument is correct, egalitarians have reasons to broaden their dimensions of concern: egalitarians should not only be concerned about the unequal distribution of goods, but also about the unequal distribution of pairwise relations of inequality of a population. (shrink)

Although the literature on organizational justice enactment is becoming richer, our understanding of the role of the deontic justice motive remains limited. In this article, we review and discuss theoretical approaches to and evidence of the deontic justice motive and deontic justice enactment. While the prevalent understanding of deontic justice enactment focuses on compliance, we argue that this conceptualization is insufficient to explain behaviors that go beyond the call of duty. We thus consider two further forms of deontic behavior: humanistic (...) and supererogatory behavior. Drawing on the concepts of situation strength and person strength, we further argue that the reduced variance in behavior across morally challenging situations makes deontic justice enactment visible. We thus observe deontic justice enactment when an actor’s deontic justice motive collides with strong situational cues or constraints that guide the actor to behave differently. We formulate propositions and develop a theoretical model that links the deontic justice motive to moral maturation and deontic justice enactment. (shrink)

In this paper I will examine two responses to the argument from marginal cases; the argument from kinds and the similarity argument. I will argue that these arguments are insufficient to show that all humans have moral status but no animals do. This does not prove that animals have moral status but it does shift the burden of proof onto those who want to maintain that all humans are morally considerable, but no animals are.

O teórico Michael Löwy afirmou que o campo científico é social e politicamente condicionado, não sendo viável estabelecer um distanciamento entre ciência e ideologia. No atual momento, é possível visualizar a clareza dessa afirmação, na medida em que o campo científico se demonstra obstruído diante do cenário político vivenciado. O pensamento crítico e problematizador é tido como um perigo eminente perante a conjuntura conservadora e antidemocrática que se acentua. Com isso, a produção de pensamento crítico e o posicionamento de resistência, (...) diante da formação conservadora, assume a denominação de doutrinação, e o debate gerador de reflexão tende a ser calado, sobretudo se não confirmar a lógica dominante. Ao compreendermos a necessidade de reafirmar o teor questionador da produção de conhecimento, como elemento central na formação social, entende-se sua relevância na construção de um caminho democrático do pensamento social. Neste trabalho, buscamos levantar reflexões a partir de uma revisão bibliográfica, procurando entender produção de conhecimento em um período de anti-intelectualismo. Em contraposição ao conceito positivista de neutralidade do conhecimento, pretende-se investigar a relação dialética entre representação política e formação intelectual. Nossa concepção de pesquisa científica situa-se em um campo que não é neutro, mas permeado de diferentes concepções de mundo, de ser humano e de conhecimento, bem como engendrada por relações que ocorrem entre sujeitos, que propendem a produzir conhecimentos científicos a partir do seu lugar social, um lugar suficientemente privilegiado. Este trabalho se propõe examinar essas questões, ao referenciar a formação social como aspecto determinante na produção de conhecimento. Aponta-se à figura do intelectual orgânico como elemento essencial para pensar essa questão, ao salientar a contraposição ao retrocesso científico imposto no último período e a valorização do pensamento crítico, mais do que nunca como pensamento que resiste no campo da pesquisa e diante do sistema produtivista que o concebe. (shrink)

Until relatively recently, researchers believed that synaesthetic sensations and their triggers were arbitrarily paired, and entirely idiosyncratic from one synaesthete to the next. Put differently, they believed that no two synaesthetes would have similar experiences from the same set of triggers, unless this had occurred by chance. This position likely arose because, prior to the internet, it was extremely difficult to recruit more than a small handful of synaesthete participants, and on the surface, synaesthetes do tend to disagree on their (...) associations when compared one-on-one. However, recent advances in communication have allowed researchers access to far larger groups of synaesthete participants, and this has changed our opinion about how similar synaesthetes might in fact be. A dedicated body of research has now shown that synaesthetic associations are built, to some extent, on a set of unconscious 'rules', shared across synaesthetes. These rules dictate the choice of sensation for certain triggers, and allow us to see patterns emerging which, although not absolute, provide a type of coherence across synaesthetes as a whole. I shall also show that some of these underlying rules operate in the population at large, to allow all individuals to make intuitive pairings across the senses. This chapter describes some of these rules, across a range of different modalities, and across different variants of synaesthesia. (shrink)

Gilbert Ryle was one of the most important and controversial philosophers of the Twentieth century. Long unavailable, Critical Essays: Collected Papers Volume 1 includes many of Ryle’s most important and thought-provoking papers. This volume contains 20 critical essays on the history of philosophy, with writing on Plato, Locke and Hume as well as important chapters on Russell and Wittgenstein. It also includes three essays on phenomenology, including Ryle’s famous review of Martin.

The essays in this volume convince me of something which, until now was only a hypothesis of mine. Academic discourse, and perhaps American university discourse in particular, possesses an extraordinary ability to absorb, digest, and neutralize all of the key, radical or dramatic moments of thought, particularly, a fortiori, of contemporary though. Marxism in the United States, though marginalized, remains deafly dominant and exercises a fascination that we have not seen in Europe since the Russian Proletkult of the 1930s. Post-Heideggerian (...) "deconstructivism" though esoteric, is welcomed in the United States as an antidote to analytic philosophy or, rather, as a way to valorize, through contrast, that philosophy. Only one theoretical breakthrough seems consistently to mobilize resistances, rejections and deafness: psychoanalysis—not as the "plague" allowed by Freud to implant itself in America as a "commerce in couches" but rather as that which, with Freud and after him, has led the psychoanalytic decentering of the speaking subject to the very foundations of language. It is this latter direction that I will be exploring here, with no other hope than to awaken the resistances and, perhaps, the attention of a concerned few, after the event .For I have the impression that the "professionalism" discussed throughout the "Politics of Interpretation" conference is never as strong as when professionals denounce it. In fact, the same preanalytic rationality unites them all, "conservatives" and "revolutionaries"—in all cases, jealous guardians of their academic "chairs" whose very existence, I am sure, is thrown into question and put into jeopardy by psychoanalytic discourse. I would therefore schematically summarize what is to follow in this way:1. There are political implications inherent in the act of interpretation itself, whatever meaning that interpretation bestows. What is the meaning, interest, and benefit of the interpretive position itself, a position from which I wish to give meaning to an enigma? To give a political meaning to something is perhaps only the ultimate consequence to he epistemological attitude which consists, simply, of the desire to give meaning. This attitude is not innocent but, rather, is rooted in the speaking subjects' need to reassure himself of his image and his identity faced with an object. Political interpretation is thus the apogee of the obsessive quest for A Meaning.2. The psychoanalytic intervention within Western knowledge has a fundamentally deceptive effect. Psychoanalysis, critical and dissolvent cuts through political illusions, fantasies, and beliefs to the extent that they consist in providing only one meaning, an uncriticizable ultimate Meaning, to human behavior. If such a situation can lead to despair within the polis, we must not forget that it is also a source of lucidity and ethics. The psychoanalytic intervention is, from this point of view, a counterweight, an antidote, to political discourse which, without it, is free to become our modern religion: the final explanation.3. The political interpretations of our century have produced two powerful and totalitarian results: fascism and Stalinism. Parallel to the socioeconomic reasons for these phenomena, there exists as well, another, more intrinsic reason: the simple desire to give a meaning to explain, to provide the answer, to interpret. In that context I will briefly discuss Louis Ferdinand Céline's texts insofar as the ideological interpretations given by him are an example of political delirium in avant-garde writing.Julia Kristeva,professor of linguistics at the University of Paris VII and a regular visiting professor at Columbia University, is the author of Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art and About Chinese Women.Margaret Waller, a doctoral candidate in French at Columbia University, is currently translating Kristeva's Revolution du langage poétique. (shrink)

German theologian F. D. E. Schleiermacher's doctrine of God-the first to be developed in the post-Kantian era-fundamentally changed the course of Christian theology. The degree to which his doctrine of God was influenced by the philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza remains in dispute, however. This study examines the ways in which Schleiermacher actively adopted elements of Spinoza's thought in the development of his own theological doctrine of God. Julia Lamm's analysis of little-known but seminal essays by Schleiermacher reveals his (...) young creative genius in daring to go beyond the neo-Spinozism of Herder and the post-Kantianism of Fichte by developing his own post-Kantian Spinozism. Schleiermacher's unique simultaneous appropriation of Kant and Spinoza is characterized by four themes: an organic monism, an ethical determinism, a critical realism, and a nonanthropomorphic view of God, which Lamm traces through his two major theological works, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers and The Christian Faith. Ultimately, Lamm finds that Schleiermacher departs from Spinoza in significant ways. Most notably, he talks about "the living God" who is best expressed through the divine attributes of love and wisdom. This living God is what Schleiermacher refers to as the "third alternative" to, on the one hand, the anthropomorphized God of orthodox Protestantism and, on the other hand, Spinoza's natura naturans. (shrink)

Warum sind unsere Daten und das Private schützenswert? Diese Frage stellt sich insbesondere in Zeiten der vierten Industriellen Revolution, des Internets der Dinge und des politischen Wandels. Julia Maria Mönig zeigt, dass Hannah Arendts Anliegen, das Private unbedingt zu bewahren, von ihrem Verständnis des antiken Haushalts bis hin zur Verletzung der informationellen Privatheit im Totalitarismus aufschlussreiche Einsichten in aktuelle Debatten - etwa über Cybermobbing - liefert. Das Buch richtet sich an Philosoph_innen ebenso wie an Datenschützer_innen und Privatheitsforscher_innen verschiedener Disziplinen (...) sowie an alle, die sich über die Zukunft und Gegenwart der Demokratie Gedanken machen. (shrink)

This essay argues that the logical significance of most natural language expressions is indefinitely elastic. This, it is argued, undermines the idea that the meaning of a word is an item for which it stands, and puts pressure on the methods of conceptual analysis and theoretical elucidation that require context-invariant stable application conditions. Furthermore, it is argued that the insistence that such semantic content is needed which—impervious to local pragmatic concerns—remains stable and available for reasoning, gets things back to front. (...) For in order to determine the correct inflection of any given use of an expression, its inferential relations—in the context of an utterance—must already be discerned. The lack of contextually independent content, however, presents no mystery about language use. For the ability to understand what is said is explained not only by shared practices and common interests, but also by the capacity for interlocutors to ask questions and explain what they mean. (shrink)

Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, _The Severed Head_ unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work--_the power of horror_--and the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred. Kristeva (...) considers the head as icon, artifact, and locus of thought, seeking a keener understanding of the violence and desire that drives us to sever, and in some cases keep, such a potent object. Her study stretches all the way back to 6,000 B.C.E., with humans' early decoration and worship of skulls, and follows with the Medusa myth; the mandylion of Laon (a holy relic in which the face of a saint appears on a piece of cloth); the biblical story of John the Baptist and his counterpart, Salome; tales of the guillotine; modern murder mysteries; and even the rhetoric surrounding the fight for and against capital punishment. Kristeva interprets these "capital visions" through the lens of psychoanalysis, drawing infinite connections between their manifestation and sacred experience and very much affirming the possibility of the sacred, even in an era of "faceless" interaction. (shrink)

Methodology is often a point of contention in gender-based salary studies. Although this debate seems at first to be merely about technical issues, it also has an important conceptual dimension. We argue that there are two competing implicit conceptions of discrimination, one institutional and the other individual, that underlie many such debates. We first contrast the preferred methodologies advanced by each side, the policy capturing approach and the flagging approach, and explore the theoretical meaning of their statistical models. We then (...) describe a practical application of both methodological approaches in one specific salary inequity study. In conclusion, we reflect on the implications of such practical statistical choices, discuss how such models can be combined, and make suggestions for sociologists who act as statistical experts or work with them in gender-based salary inequity studies on their own campuses. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper aims at exposing a strategy to organize the debate around physicalism. Our starting point is the pre-philosophical notion of physicalism, which is typically formulated in the form of slogans. Indeed, philosophers debating metaphysics have paradigmatically introduced the subject with aid of slogans such as “there is nothing over and above the physical”, “once every physical aspect of the world is settled, every other aspect will follow”, “physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical”. These ideas are very (...) intuitive but they are, of course, far from being a satisfactory metaphysical conception of Physicalism. For that end, we will begin with the definition of physicalism as the thesis that everything is physical, following Stoljar, we should be able to respond to one central question: how to interpret the physicalist claim that everything in physical. (shrink)

Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) and Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) are two of the most commonly used health measures to determine resource prioritization and the population burden of disease, respectively. There are different types of problems with the use of QALYs and DALYs for measuring health benefits. Some of these problems have to do with measurement, for example, the weights they ascribe to health states might fail to reflect with exact accuracy the actual well-being or health levels of individuals. But even (...) if these weights represent accurately the well-being levels of individuals, there is room for questioning whether these measures capture everything that we care about in these cases, or whether there are important issues that they leave out, including considerations of fairness or equality. In this regard, the measures have been criticized for treating the aggregation of small benefits as greater than the aggregation of fewer but bigger benefits,1for disregarding fair chances in favor of utility maximization,2and for raising problems when applied in the context of variable population size.3Perhaps one of the most pervasive ethical issues that has been associated with the use of these measures is the fact that they seem to discriminate against disabled people.4Since the measures assume that disabled people have lower well-being and a shorter life span, treating a disabled person’s medical condition contributes less to the maximization of years of life with good health than treating a non-disabled patient’s medical condition. (shrink)

With the rise of modernity, traditional moral concepts such as 'selfless love' have come to appear oppressive or utopistic. Selfless Love and Human Flourishing in Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch puts such a judgment to the test and reconsiders the grounds on which selfless love may in fact be crucial to human flourishing. It argues that Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch sought to sustain the link between selfless love and human flourishing by capitalising on the very deconstruction of the self (...) that contributed to the demise of selfless love. (shrink)

Confucius became a subject for visual representation after the Han court formally endorsed his teachings, and his earliest images appeared in schools and offering shrines. As his official cult evolved, and until the 1530 ritual reform, iconic portraits of Confucius and his disciples received offerings in temples throughout China. During the Song period, his portrayals became more diverse, and some reproduced pictures kept by his Kong descendants in Qufu曲阜and Quzhou衢州. Attributions to the Tang painter Wu Daozi 吳道子became customary and persistent, (...) despite tenuous connections. Until the 20th century, images of Confucius primarily concerned the literate elite, for whom he was an exemplar of moral cultivation. Pictorial biographies of Confucius, made in considerable numbers from the middle Ming onward, brought him more vividly to life and to a wider range of society. In recent decades, new images of Confucius have evolved to serve a range of contemporary purposes. (shrink)

Reviews the book 'The Mechanical Mind - A Philosophical Introduction to Minds, Machines and Mental Representation,' by Tim Cranes.

Este trabajo aborda algunos de los últimos registros de Rubén Darío, para señalar cómo su obra socava la modernidad latinoamericana, más allá de cómo se ha entendido y se ha practicado tradicionalmente, incluso por él mismo, suturando mundos que seguimos sin consolidar.

Today, the centenary of the “Philosophy Steamer” does not feel like a hundred-year-old event. Most contemporaries learned about it little more than thirty years ago from Literaturnaia gazeta, which...

This article discusses development of the content of the concept “Philosophy Steamer,” which refers to the 1922 expulsion from Russia of a group of intelligentsia who sharply criticized the authorities. The author shows that the group of exiled philosophers was united both by their previous philosophical and social activity and by their joint activity as émigrés. She analyzes the concepts of “historical collective individuality,” “collective person,” and “communal person” introduced by Lev P. Karsavin in order to determine the holistic nature (...) of this exiled social group and its characteristic self-consciousness, behavior, aspirations, and feelings (moods). Examining the event known as the “Philosophy Steamer” through the concepts listed above allows the author to cognize the historical, social, and cultural reality more broadly and productively. The article demonstrates that the concept of a collective person can also be applied to other social groups, thereby extending the methodology of human-studies cognition beyond the study of facts and statistical data. (shrink)

Community-supported agriculture (CSA) is a grassroots response to the threat the global industrial agri-food system poses to smallholders. The degrowth community, calling for a radical transformation away from the environmentally destructive and socially unjust primacy of economic growth in current societies, has started to pay tribute to CSA, commonly considering it an embodiment of degrowth ideas. However, the CSA movement does not reciprocate the interest of the degrowth community. This article therefore undertakes a systematic analysis of the potential for a (...) coalition between CSA and degrowth in Germany. We draw on social movement theories to compare both movements’ ideological and strategic alignment, as well as the conducive and/or hindering factors for coalition building. We find that the ideologies and political strategies of the two movements are not aligned, which manifests in their main frames and action repertoires, among other areas, which are articulated at different levels of abstraction; CSA has a practical focus on the safeguarding of smallholder agriculture, while degrowth more abstractly centres on the growth-dependent economy. Scarce resources, differing forms of internal organisation, and a lack of knowledge about degrowth on the side of CSA represent further obstacles to entering a coalition. At the same time, our analysis shows existing social ties and an initial ideological alignment between the CSA movement and sufficiency-oriented degrowth. We conclude that, despite prevailing differences, the two movements seem complementary, and that entering a coalition would bring with it the benefits of combining practice- and discourse-driven social change. (shrink)

Firms are increasingly integrating sustainability into their supply chain management (SCM) practices. The goal is to achieve sustainable flows of products, services, information and capital to provide maximum value to all corporate stakeholders. Prior research on SCM integration has insufficiently addressed sustainability. The objective of this research is to provide for a coherent and testable model of sustainable supply chain management integration (SSCMI). By drawing on four cases from the German manufacturing industry, we seek to identify the most important factors (...) that enable or impede the integration of sustainability into SCM. (shrink)

Increasing complexity and specialisation of modern sciences has led to increasingly collaborative publications, as well as the involvement of commercial services. Modern integrative taxonomy likewise depends on many lines of evidence and is increasingly complex, but the trend of collaboration lags and various attempts at ‘turbo taxonomy’ have been unsatisfactory. We are developing a taxonomic service in the Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance to provide fundamental data for new species descriptions. This will also function as a hub to connect a global (...) network of taxonomists, assembling an alliance of scientists working on potential new species to tackle both the extinction and inclusion crises we face today. The current rate of new species descriptions is simply too slow; the discipline is often dismissed as old fashioned, and there is a crisis level need for taxonomic descriptions to come to grips with the scale of Anthropocene biodiversity loss. Here, we envision how the process of describing and naming species would benefit from a service supporting the acquisition of descriptive data. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/E8q3KJor_F8. (shrink)

The article analyzes the rationale for S.I. Hessen’s idea of transcendental empiricism, which highlights the issue of the individual and makes it “the fundamental bedrock of truth.” The author also discusses Hessen’s understanding of individual causality and its forms in the process of cognition of historical reality.