O presente artigo tem por objetivo investigar a noção de corpo no pensamento do filósofo alemão Friedrich Nietzsche, mais especificamente a partir de uma leitura de alguns temas presentes na II Dissertação da Genealogia da Moral, basilares para se mobilizar tal noção. Dentre as questões elencadas encontram-se o papel da consciência, a memória, o esquecimento, o sentimento de culpa e a figura do criminoso que, partindo-se da leitura a que nos propomos, podem ser de fundamental importância para se pensar o (...) corpo em Nietzsche. (shrink)

Background This paper describes the design, implementation, and process outcomes from three public deliberations held in three tribal communities. Although increasingly used around the globe to address collective challenges, our study is among the first to adapt public deliberation for use with exclusively Indigenous populations. In question was how to design deliberations for tribal communities and whether this adapted model would achieve key deliberative goals and be well received.Methods We adapted democratic deliberation, an approach to stakeholder engagement, for use with (...) three tribal communities to respect tribal values and customs. Public deliberation convenes people from diverse backgrounds in reasoned reflection and dialogue in search of collective solutions. The deliberation planning process and design were informed by frameworks of enclave deliberation and community-based participatory research, which share key egalitarian values. The deliberations were collaboratively designed with tribal leadership and extensive partner input and involvement in the deliberations. Each deliberation posed different, locally relevant questions about genomic research, but used the same deliberation structure and measures to gauge the quality and experience of deliberation.Results A total of 52 individuals participated in the deliberations across all three sites. Deliberants were balanced in gender, spanned decades in age, and were diverse in educational attainment and exposure to health research. Overall, the deliberations were positively evaluated. Participant perceptions and external observer datasets depict three deliberations that offered intensive conversation experiences in which participants learned from one another, reported feeling respected and connected to one another, and endorsed this intensive form of engagement.Conclusion The adapted deliberations achieved key deliberative goals and were generally well received. Limitations of the study are described. (shrink)

Understanding the clinical significance of variants associated with hereditary cancer risk requires access to a pooled data resource or network of resources—a “cancer gene variant commons”—incorporating representative, well-characterized genetic data, metadata, and, for some purposes, pathways to case-level data. Several initiatives have invested significant resources into collecting and sharing cancer gene variant data, but further progress hinges on identifying and addressing unresolved policy issues. This commentary provides insights from a modified policy Delphi process involving experts from a range of stakeholder (...) groups involved in the data-sharing ecosystem. In particular, we describe policy issues and options generated by Delphi participants in five domains critical to the development of an effective cancer gene variant commons: incentives, financial sustainability, privacy and security, equity, and data quality. Our intention is to stimulate wider discussion and lay a foundation for further work evaluating policy options more in-depth and mapping them to those who have the power to bring about change. Addressing issues in these five domains will contribute to a cancer gene variant commons that supports better care for at-risk and affected patients, empowers patient communities, and advances research on hereditary cancers. (shrink)

The Protein Ontology (PRO; http://proconsortium.org) formally defines protein entities and explicitly represents their major forms and interrelations. Protein entities represented in PRO corresponding to single amino acid chains are categorized by level of specificity into family, gene, sequence and modification metaclasses, and there is a separate metaclass for protein complexes. All metaclasses also have organism-specific derivatives. PRO complements established sequence databases such as UniProtKB, and interoperates with other biomedical and biological ontologies such as the Gene Ontology (GO). PRO relates to (...) UniProtKB in that PRO’s organism-specific classes of proteins encoded by a specific gene correspond to entities documented in UniProtKB entries. PRO relates to the GO in that PRO’s representations of organism-specific protein complexes are subclasses of the organism-agnostic protein complex terms in the GO Cellular Component Ontology. The past few years have seen growth and changes to the PRO, as well as new points of access to the data and new applications of PRO in immunology and proteomics. Here we describe some of these developments. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 174-177.

Books Christy Mag Uidhir, Art andObjects [Elisa Caldarola, p. 182] • Julie Jaffee Nagel, Melodies of the Mind. Connections Between Psychoanalisis and Music [Michele Gardini, p. 185] • Dominic McIver Lopes, Beyond Art [Filippo Focosi, p. 187] • Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Herta Nagl-Docekal, Erzsébet Ròsza, Elisabeth Weisser-Lohmann, Hegels Ästhetik als Theorie der Moderne [Lorenzo Leonardo Pizzichemi, p. 190] Comments Toward an Integrated Science of Aesthetics. Getting Rid of the Main Misunderstandings in Evolutionary Aesthetics [Mariagrazia Portera, p. 194].

This book is a defense of political liberalism as a feminist liberalism. A novel and restrictive account of public reason is defended. Then it is argued that political liberalism's core commitments restrict reasonable conceptions of justice to those that secure genuine, substantive equality for women and other marginalized groups.

An influential view in the ethics of self-defence is that causal responsibility for an unjust threat is a necessary requirement for liability to defensive harm. In this article, I argue against this view by providing intuitive counterexamples and by revealing weaknesses in the arguments offered in its favour. In response, adherents of the causal view have advanced the idea that although causally inefficacious agents are not liable to defensive harm, the fact that they may deserve harm can justify harming them (...) in the course of defending oneself. I argue that this strategy is ad hoc and leads to more problems than it solves. Once we allow normative facts outside our account of liability to affect a person's moral protection against harm, the lieability verdicts cannot tell us whether there is a relevant moral asymmetry between the victim and the target of defence. In conclusion, the causal view is wrong and causal responsibility for an unjust threat is not a necessary requirement for liability to defensive harm. (shrink)

The selected effects or ‘etiological’ theory of Proper function is a naturalistic and realist account of biological teleology. It is used to analyse normativity in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of medicine, and elsewhere. The theory has been developed with a simple and intuitive view of natural selection. Traits are selected because of their positive effects on the fitness of the organisms that have them. These ‘selected effects’ are the Proper functions of the traits. Proponents argue that this (...) analysis of biological teleology has the unique advantage that the selected effect function of a trait is also a causal explanation of the trait: the trait exists because it performs this function. We show, however, that selected effect functions as currently defined explain the existence of traits only under highly restrictive assumptions about evolutionary dynamics. In many common scenarios in which traits evolve by natural selection, selected effect functions do not explain those traits. This is because definitions of selected effect function extract from any evolutionary scenario only the information that would be explanatorily relevant in the simple evolutionary scenario implicit in those definitions. When applied to more complex scenarios, selected effect functions omit the key information that is explanatorily relevant in those scenarios. The assumptions required for selected effect functions to be explanatory are particularly unlikely to hold in the domain that its proponents care most about—the evolution of representation. A more adequate selected effects theory of Proper functions may be possible, but will require much greater attention to the structure of actual evolutionary explanations. (shrink)

Social cooperation based on reciprocity is the cornerstone of many theories of justice. However, what is central to social cooperation based on reciprocity? How does basing social cooperation on reciprocity structure and constrain theories of justice? In this paper, I consider what is central to reciprocity. I argue that the purpose of reciprocal exchange among persons is important for determining the appropriateness of reciprocal exchanges and that sustaining mutually advantageous relations is not always the point or the only point of (...) reciprocity. This has important implications for theorizing about justice. I show this by outlining two conceptions of justice as reciprocity. (shrink)

The feminization of agriculture narrative has been reproduced in development literature as an oversimplified metric of empowerment through changes in women’s labor and managerial roles with little attention to individuals’ heterogeneous livelihoods. Grounded in feminist political ecology, we sought to critically understand how labor and managerial feminization interact with changing agricultural practices. Working with a local NGO as part of an international, donor-funded research-for-development project, we conducted semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, and participant observation with over 100 farmers in Mid-Western (...) Nepal in 2017. Household structure and headship are dynamic in the context of male out-migration, pushing women to take on new agricultural duties and increasing household labor responsibilities. In this context, decision-making processes related to agricultural management and new cultivation practices illustrate ongoing renegotiations of gender and cultivation practices within and beyond the household. We contend that the heterogeneity of household power dynamics muddies the empowering impacts of migration and emphasize the importance of community spaces as a locus of subjectivity formation and social value. We conclude that FPE can illuminate complexities of power, space, and individual responses to socio-ecological conditions that challenge the current feminization of agriculture framework. (shrink)

In this paper the authors argue that the exploration of the nature of needs and rights should begin with the actually existing organization of care and of justice in society. The authors raise two key concerns with this organization: 1) the invisibility of care to some, and 2) the inaccessibility of rights to others. Recent work by care scholars has called attention to the ways the current organization of care work perpetuates the myth of self-sufficiency for some, while reducing others (...) to mere dependents. Law and Society scholars have demonstrated the problems of uneven access to legal remedies within the current organization of the legal system. Addressing these concerns simultaneously reveals both the problems of the current organization of needs and rights as well as illuminating alternative possibilities. The authors argue, first, that a justice perspective, based on rights is inadequate because its presumed universality is belied by the reality of the inaccessibility of rights to many. Second, the authors argue that a care perspective, currently formulated upon the assumption that only some people have needs, is also flawed because its presumed particularity distorts the human experience and subsequent policies. Instead, the authors need to conceive of care in a public way that permits both rights and needs to be understood as applicable to all. The authors propose some initial thoughts about how to create such a public concept of care. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine a heretofore ignored critic of Descartes on the heterogeneity problem: Anton Wilhelm Amo. Looking at Amo’s critique of Descartes reveals a very clear case of a thinker who attempts to offer a causal system that is not a solution to the mind-body problem, but rather that transcends it. The focus of my discussion is Amo’s 1734 dissertation: The Apathy [ἀπάθεια] of the Human Mind or The Absence of Sensation and the Faculty of Sense in the (...) Human Mind and their Presence in our Organic and Living Body. Amo’s discussion of the interaction, or lack thereof, of the mind and body hinges on the essential feature he identifies for the human mind—apathy, that is, impassivity. In this work, Amo engages explicitly with Descartes’s writing, which allows us to more precisely see the nature of his agreement and disagreement with the Cartesian metaphysics of mind. I proceed by treating Amo’s five stated criteria for spirit-hood which, in turn, reveal the kinds of causal connections that are possible for embodied spirits on his view. My aim is threefold: To lay out what I take to be Amo’s view of and arguments for the five criteria he takes to be required for a substance to be spirit. To locate Amo’s agreement and disagreement with Descartes. To suggest that Amo’s view on mind-body interaction involves a kind of occasional causation. (shrink)

Machine learning methods have recently created high expectations in the climate modelling context in view of addressing climate change, but they are often considered as non-physics-based ‘black boxes’ that may not provide any understanding. However, in many ways, understanding seems indispensable to appropriately evaluate climate models and to build confidence in climate projections. Relying on two case studies, we compare how machine learning and standard statistical techniques affect our ability to understand the climate system. For that purpose, we put five (...) evaluative criteria of understanding to work: intelligibility, representational accuracy, empirical accuracy, coherence with background knowledge, and assessment of the domain of validity. We argue that the two families of methods are part of the same continuum where these various criteria of understanding come in degrees, and that therefore machine learning methods do not necessarily constitute a radical departure from standard statistical tools, as far as understanding is concerned. (shrink)

Culture has been identified as a significant determinant of ethical attitudes of business managers. This research studies the impact of culture on the ethical attitudes of business managers in India, Korea and the United States using multivariate statistical analysis. Employing Geert Hofstede's cultural typology, this study examines the relationship between his five cultural dimensions (individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and long-term orientation) and business managers' ethical attitudes. The study uses primary data collected from 345 business manager participants of Executive (...) MBA programs in selected business schools in India, Korea and the United States using Hofstede's Value Survey Module (94) and an instrument designed by the researchers to measure respondents' ethical attitudes (attitudes toward business ethics in general and toward twelve common questionable practices in particular). Results indicate that national culture has a strong influence on business managers' ethical attitudes. In addition to national culture, respondents' general attitudes toward business ethics are related to their personal integrity; their attitudes toward questionable business practices are related to the external environment and gender, as well as to their personal integrity. A strong relationship exists between cultural dimensions of individualism and power distance and respondents' ethical attitudes toward certain questionable practices. The analysis of the relationship between cultural dimensions of masculinity, uncertainty avoidance and long-term orientation and respondents' ethical attitudes toward questionable practices produced mixed results, likely due to the lack of notable differences in cultural dimension scores among the countries surveyed. (shrink)

It’s an honour to have so many major contributors to the literature respond to our article and we thank them for their thoughtful responses. There are clear shared themes across these commentaries,...

This chapter considers evidence from Spinoza’s Ethics, Theologico-Political Treatise, and correspondence to clarify his account of philosophical pedagogy and his analysis of the shift from imagining, characterized by inadequate ideas and passive affects, to reasoning and intuitive understanding, which consist of adequate ideas and active affects. Central issues in Spinoza’s account of how to make a philosopher include the tasks of teachers, the cultivation of the desire to learn, and the doctrine of the common notions. The chapter reads the Ethics (...) as a theoretical, systematic account of human development and philosophical education and as a practical, pedagogical intervention designed to transform the reader. It looks to Spinoza’s presentation of Christ as intellectual knower and teacher par excellence in the Theologico-Political Treatise and to parallels there with the Ethics. Both Christ and Spinoza himself employ “common and true notions” for philosophical teaching. (shrink)

Positive spillover occurs when changes in one behaviour influence changes in subsequent behaviours. Evidence for such spillover and an understanding of when and how it may occur is still limited. This paper presents findings of a one year longitudinal behaviour change project led by a commercial retailer in the UK & Ireland to examine behaviour change and potential spillover of pro-environmental behaviour, and how this may be associated with changes in environmental identity and perceptions of ease and affordability as well (...) as perceptions of how participation in the project has helped support behaviour change. We draw on both quantitative and qualitative. Study 1 examines quantitative data from the experimental and a matched control group. Study 2 reports qualitative findings from a follow up interview study with participants of the experimental group. As expected, we found significant changes in reported pro-environmental behaviour and identity in the experimental group as well as some indications of behavioural spillover. These changes were not significantly associated with changes in environmental identity. The interviews suggested that group dynamics played an important role in facilitating a sense of efficacy and promote sustained behaviour change and spillover. Moreover, the support by a trusted entity was deemed to be of crucial importance. (shrink)

Blended social impact investment transactions, in which multiple types of capital are combined to support attainment of social impact, are a pervasive, yet not closely examined, feature of the SII market. This paper seeks to describe and understand blended SII transactions through the lens of institutional theory. Specifically, we use the institutional logics theoretical frame to shed light on the implications of combining several institutional logics in SII transactions. Consistent with other SII research, we find that parties to blended SII (...) transactions combine financial/commercial and social welfare logics. However, in blended SII transactions, different combinations of these logics are enacted by different stakeholders in a multi-hybrid-logic structure. As such, we propose that blended SII transactions are hybrids-of-hybrids. We argue that it is this hybrids-of-hybrid characteristic that differentiates blended SII transactions from other forms of SII and increases the potential for significant logical misalignment and resultant conflict and contestation. From a business ethics perspective, blended SII transactions cast light on the critical and often unrecognized role that grants and concessionary capital frequently play in enabling SII in not-for-profit, charitable ventures. We speculate that this can distort understanding of SII with adverse implications at the transaction and field levels. (shrink)

Behavioral research has revealed how normal human cognitive processes can tend to lead us astray. But do these affect economic researchers, ourselves? This article explores the consequences of stereotyping and confirmation bias using a sample of published articles from the economics literature on gender and risk aversion. The results demonstrate that the supposedly ‘robust’ claim that ‘women are more risk averse than men’ is far less empirically supported than has been claimed. The questions of how these cognitive biases arise and (...) why they have such power are discussed, and methodological practices that may help to attenuate these biases are outlined. (shrink)

Global food security challenges demand an understanding of farmers’ gendered practices and perspectives. This research draws on data from a quantitative survey and qualitative methods to explore gender differences related to farmers’ practices, perceptions, and knowledge of pesticides and other pest management practices in tomato growing regions of Ghana and Mali. A pathways approach based on participatory mapping integrates findings and reveals gender differences in labor and knowledge at different stages of tomato production. Farmers in both countries are heavily reliant (...) on pesticides, but there are also differences in pest management knowledge and practices between them. In Mali, farmers are more familiar with Integrated Pest Management practices, but less aware of potential health risks of pesticides and more likely to engage in dangerous agro-chemical practices. In both countries, women are significantly less aware of pesticide dangers and IPM techniques than men and exposed to pesticides though a variety of pathways. We argue that the gender division of labor and differences in access to resources, information, and power between the two sites leads to gendered pesticide exposure pathways that are often unseen by the biological scientists who tend to focus on the field. Gender inequalities in knowledge and unsafe practices were particularly apparent in Mali compared to Ghana, possibly due to the lower literacy rates and decision making power of women and their narrower range of involvement in tomato production. The article concludes with gender sensitive recommendations to improve IPM research methods, trainings, and technology diffusion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aquinas on Efficient Causation and Causal Powers by Gloria FrostJulie Loveland SwanstromFROST, Gloria. Aquinas on Efficient Causation and Causal Powers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. xii + 239 pp. Cloth, $99.99; paper, $32.99; eBook, $32.99Reconstructing Aquinas’s premodern approach to causation in which causation is an ontological rather than logical relationship is Frost’s goal in Aquinas on Efficient Causation and Causal Powers. Uniting components of Aquinas’s discussions of (...) causation across his corpus, Frost focuses on the cause–effect relationship, the ontological elements involved in efficient causation, and complicated cases of efficient causation. [End Page 715]Throughout, Frost provides background information from Aristotle, Avicenna, and other thinkers used by Aquinas while delving deeply into Aquinas’s views. She addresses interpretive issues while remaining focused on Aquinas’s own ideas. Frost identifies topics that prefigure historical and contemporary philosophical debates and interjects Aquinas’s thought into those conversations.In part 1, Frost elucidates Aquinas’s standard efficient causation and the corresponding causal powers. Chapter 1 reviews Aquinas’s theories of efficient causation and briefly compares them with competing theories, identifying eight elements included in per se instances of efficient causation: the agent, the action, the active power, the natural inclination giving rise to the active power, the patient, the passive power of the patient, the motion caused by the agent, and the passion undergone by the patient. Chapter 2 further examines the paradigmatic per se efficient cause, the elemental qualities of hot, cold, wet, and dry adapted from Aristotle and used to explain change, and the ontological (rather than temporal) dependence of effects upon their causes. An agent acts by powers that stem from its nature. Frost addresses several medieval puzzles such as natural causes being considered generally unimpeded and no action being caused at a distance.Active and passive powers feature heavily in Aquinas’s account. In chapter 3, Frost teases out the distinction between potentiality and actuality. The relationship of matter and form in material substances relates to this distinction in various, complex ways. “Actuality” applies to form or to action that completes active potentiality. Frost addresses the communicability of forms, conceptually connecting active powers to nature and goodness. Active powers’ relations to elemental qualities, quantitative forms, and qualitative forms also appear in this chapter. Chapter 5 covers what agents operate on, passive powers in the patient. Frost addresses complexities regarding the relationship of qualities of matter to passive potentiality and adjudicates an interpretive difficulty about the relation of active potentiality and passive potentiality. She clarifies how passive potentialities do not correspond to only one active power and how different qualitative forms can give rise to the same passive potentiality. She also explains the uniqueness of creaturely passive potentiality to undergo divine action. Engaging in interpretive debate, she asserts that the passive potentiality for undergoing action and for existence differ in concept but are the same in reality.In chapter 4, Frost explains natural inclination: An agent’s actions are determined to particular ends by its form. Natural inclination explains causal regularity. Both rational and natural agents possess natural inclination. God, as creator, is the source of natural inclination. Frost notes difficulties with Aquinas’s views, including some later raised by Spinoza.Action and passion are discussed in chapter 6, wherein Frost connects action and passion to motion. Explaining how the patient’s passive potentiality is no longer passive upon actualization, she argues that this [End Page 716] change simply is motion: The mover causes, and the same motion immediately actualizes passive potentiality in the patient. Responding to challenges, Frost argues that “actuality” is an analogous term. Patients experience actuality as completing that in which thing it inheres while agents experience actuality as arising from them. Aquinas makes seemingly inconsistent statements about action and passion in terms of Aristotelian categories. Frost clarifies that if motion in the patient is passion and motion from the agent is action, then the categories explaining how motion belongs to the patient and the agent will be different.Frost turns to nonparadigmatic efficient causation in part 2. In chapter 7, she introduces additional causal scenarios. Preparing causes, advisory causes, and assisting causes highlight the interdependent... (shrink)

O presente estudo é uma proposta de aplicação do triângulo de Pascal às generalizações das possibilidades de valores de verdade das proposições elementares do Tractatus de Wittgenstein. O Objetivo da aplicação desta notação é facilitar a manipulação e a análise de uma grande quantidade de proposições elementares preservando o escopo de possibilidades de verdade, algo que a notação das tabelas de verdade de Wittgenstein não é capaz de satisfazer. Para realizar esta tarefa, executo os seguintes passos: introduzo a teoria da (...) figuração, apresento como o autor expressa as possibilidades de verdade das proposições, além de expor o método e a notação de generalização das possibilidades de verdade. Em seguida, defino e exemplifico o triângulo de Pascal como notação alternativa e, por fim, verifico a validade da notação do triângulo no contexto das definições de número, soma e produto aritmético do Tractatus, de modo a preservar a consistência da notação com o pensamento do filósofo. (shrink)

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, founded July 1, 1978, at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, was established by the American scholar, industrialist, and philanthropist Obert Clark Tanner. Lectureships are awarded to outstanding scholars or leaders in broadly defined fields of human values and transcend ethnic, national, religious, or ideological distinctions. Volume 32 features lectures given during the academic year 2011–2012 at the University of Michigan; Princeton University; Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Utah; and Yale University. (...) This volume includes the following lectures:_ John Broome_, “The Public and Private Morality of Climate Change”_John Broome is the Whites Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Corpus Christi College in Oxford. He has written six books. John M. Cooper_, “Ancient Philosophies as Ways of Life”_John Cooper is the Henry Putnam University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. His books include _Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus _and _Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers_. Stephen Greenblatt_, “Shakespeare and the End of Life History”_Stephen Greenblatt is the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, including the 2012 Pulitzer Prize–winning _The Swerve: How the World Became Modern _and _Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare_. Lisa Jardine_, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: C. P. Snow and J. Bronowski” and “Science and Government: C. P. Snow and the Corridors of Power”_Lisa Jardine is a professor of Renaissance studies at University College London, where she is the director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Research in the Humanities and the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. She has published more than fifty scholarly articles and seventeen books, including _Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory_. Samuel Scheffler_, “The Afterlife”_Samuel Scheffler is University Professor and a professor of philosophy and law at New York University. He has published four books in the areas of moral and political philosophy, including _Equality and Tradition_. Abraham Verghese_, “Two Souls Intertwined” Abraham Verghese is a professor of medicine and senior associate chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford University. He has published widely across disciplines, including _My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story _and the novel _Cutting for Stone_. He is perhaps best known for his deep interest in bedside medicine and work in the medical humanities. (shrink)

These essays define transformation by blending the familiar with the conflicted and plural. Transformation refers to the shifting ground in our present culture between the familiar and the unfamiliar. These essays are viewed as examples of new intellectual 'genres' rather than 'theories.' If they do belong to a post-theoretical, intellectual genre of writing, it is because they blend philosophical vocabularies with expressions of curiosity, novelty and plurality.

_Threshold Concepts on the Edge_ explores new directions in threshold concept research and practice and is of relevance to teachers, learners, educational researchers and academic developers.

The Quietist affair at the end of the seventeenth century has much to teach us about theories of the will in the period. Although Bossuet and Fénelon are the names most famously associated with the debate over the Quietist conception of pure love, Malebranche and his erstwhile disciple Lamy were the ones who debated the deep philosophical issues involved. This paper sets the historical context of the debate, discusses the positions as well as the arguments for and against them, and (...) opens up investigation of important material that is all but ignored in the English literature and only incompletely addressed in the French. (shrink)

As much as we can be squeamish and angry over what was being done in these studies, they force us to consider how we tell these stories and the policy we make now, as so much of our research is global and the risks and benefits of experimentation always in need of recalibration.Susan M. ReverbyA growing distrust exists among Latin American populations as past abuses in medical research have rightly been publicized, and as researchers continue to intentionally and unintentionally circumvent (...) the systems of regulation and oversight. Beyond the cultural gaps between researcher and subject, the Latin American people have their own perspectives about responsible conduct of research formed by sociopolitical thought and familial and community identity, which may be overlooked or ignored by the U.S. and other foreign nations. Just as the Havasupai Tribe in Arizona have challenged us to think about the role of culture and the need for improved regulations and practices in conducting research within the United States, through past abuses in human experimentation and the emergence of discourse between our Latin American neighbors, similar challenges confront us. (shrink)

Social media platforms have been vested with hope for their potential to enable ‘ordinary citizens’ to make their judgments public and contribute to pluralized discussions about organizations and their perceived legitimacy :60–97, 2018). This raises questions about how ordinary citizens make judgements and voice them in online spaces. This paper addresses these questions by examining how Western citizens ascribe responsibility and action in relation to corporate misconduct. Empirically, it focuses on modern slavery and analyses online debates in Denmark on child (...) slavery in the cocoa industry. Conceptually, it introduces the notion of cosmopolitanism as a general disposition of care and responsibility towards distant others, conceived as a prerequisite for the critical evaluation of corporate responsibility in the Global South. The analysis of online debates shows that citizens debate child slavery in terms of individual consumer responsibility rather than corporate responsibility. Corporations are not considered potential agents of change. As a consequence, online citizen debates did not reflect a legitimacy crisis for the cocoa industry, as debates over responsibility were overwhelmingly concerned with the agency of the Western individual, the individual agency of the speakers themselves. Participants in debates understood their agency strictly as consumer agency. (shrink)

The necessity of incorporating societal and environmental concerns into publicly funded agricultural initiatives in research, extension, and practice is increasingly evident. Agriculturalists are urged to acknowledge and respond to societal concerns before an insensitive and largely ill-informed urban majority assumes a dominant posture in agricultural policy. In recent history, the availability of unrealistically cheap energy encouraged the evolution of a form of commercial agriculture unfettered by sound ecological principles. At present, external, resource-intensive intervention of increasing magnitude is needed to compensate (...) for the apparent ecological instability generated by practices such as intensive cereal management or conservation tillage practices. Polarization of the enterprises of plant and animal agriculture to enable centralized, concentrate-intensive, confinement feeding has disrupted the natural cycling of nutrients and carbon in the soil, encouraged the withdrawal of perennial forages from crop rotations, and invoked a widely ramifying network of agricultural and societal problems. Solutions to these problems must evolve from a holistic and far-reaching appraisal of causes, rather than from a piecemeal approach to individual symptoms. (shrink)

My goal in this essay will be to show, contra Parfit, that the separateness of human persons—although metaphysically shallow—has a moral significance that should not be overlooked. Parfit holds that his reductionist view of personal identity lends support to consequentialism; I reject this claim because it rests on the assumption that the separateness of human persons has an arbitrariness that renders it morally insignificant. This assumption is flawed because this separateness is grounded in our 'person practices', which reflect some of (...) the morally relevant aspects of our nature: if we imagine a species of person whose members are not naturally separate from each other, it is reasonable to suppose that the morality of this different species of person would be drastically different from human morality. Thus, if consequentialists aim to offer a human moral theory, they overlook the separateness of human persons with peril. (shrink)

The contributors to this issue focus on legal internationalism, including hybrid mixes with nationalist forms. They have provoked us as editors to think more about these sites and forms of engagement. Sankey shows how civic participation in the ECCC has played a key role in surfacing the gendered harms of separation and starvation. Turan highlights the problems with ICC exclusion of the experience of men and boys from sexual violence. Peroni expresses her hesitations over the Istanbul Convention given an association (...) between assumed vulnerability and migrant women, while admiring its uncoupling of violence and culture. Cruz’s interview with Wendy Brown contextualizes and expands on these themes as they consider, with other participants, the future of feminist theory in the context of neo-liberal capturing of rights and legal space. Thinking more about internationalism and commitment in this context also helps us hold a mirror up to ourselves as we reflect more critically on our own naming of FLS as an ‘international’ journal. Together these contributions, and the reviews of new work, play a role in fleshing out an editorial commitment to enacting the journal as a living thing that ‘hangs together somehow’ even as it is known differently in different places. (shrink)

Hume’s discussion of pride and sympathy in the _Treatise_ shows direct engagement with Malebranche’s discussion of ‘imitation’ in the _Search_. For Malebranche, imitation—both of passions and belief—and our tendency to judge ourselves by comparison, generate the passion of pride or grandeur, which plays a useful social role. However, as both cause and effect of the admiration of others, grandeur is ungrounded and thus imaginary. Hume disagrees. He invokes the principle of sympathy to explain how the evaluations of others can support (...) pride by indicating, without constituting, grounds for pride. Hume’s argument depends on his underappreciated claim that sympathy can communicate the evaluative opinions as well as the passions of others. Working with the Malebranchean inventory of principles—sympathy and comparison—Hume refines their characterization, thereby redeeming the human tendency to feel pride and humility by characterizing it as corrigible and subject to social regulation. (shrink)

It is often said that computer simulations generate new knowledge about the empirical world in the same way experiments do. My aim is to make sense of such a claim. I first show that the similarities between computer simulations and experiments do not allow them to generate new knowledge but invite the simulationist to interact with simulations in an experimental manner. I contend that, nevertheless, computer simulations and experiments yield new knowledge under the same epistemic circumstances, independently of any features (...) they may share. (shrink)

Non-reductive physicalism is committed to two theses: first, that mental properties are ontologically autonomous, and second, that physicalism is true. Jaegwon Kim has argued that this view is unstable – to honor one thesis, one must abandon the other. In this paper, I present an account of property realization that addresses Kim’s criticism and that explains how the two theses are indeed comfortably compatible.

Universities around the world are undergoing a marketisation process in order to respond to consumer-oriented demands. Despite priority shifts, universities have remained traditionally hierarchical and elitist. Moreover, a new and growing generation of academic researchers has found it increasingly difficult to integrate in academia. Systems and patterns of behaviour breeding cultural narcissism, intended as a value and cultural system characterised by an investment in false self-projections backed by Machiavellian attainment, exist and appear to thrive in academic institutions. This organizational adaptation (...) for survival is now embedded in higher education and interlinked with mobbing, workplace bullying and academic misconduct. The problematics we are witnessing today in many academic settings (high rates of mental health issues, widespread research misconduct scandals and loss of credibility of academic research) are a by-product of an organizational narcissistic culture. Amidst economic shifts, it might seem reasonable to adopt measures aimed at increasing assets, invest in highly entrepreneurial academics who attract financial resources to universities and use any means to salvage the reputations of educational institutions. Yet these strategies might be promoting and perpetuating value systems that are undermining academic integrity, and therefore contributing to the scientific credibility crisis and failure of these institutions. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Innova dies nostros, sicut a principio:Novelty and Nostalgia in Thomas of Celano's First and Second Lives of St. FrancisBarbara Newman (bio)IntroductionIn his sixth-century compendium of hagiography, Gregory of Tours argued that one should always speak of the vita patrum or vita sanctorum in the singular. According to Pliny, he noted, grammarians did not believe the noun vita had a plural. More to the point, although "there is a diversity (...) of merits and virtues among [the saints], … the one life of the body sustains them all in this world."1 Just as the Church, the body of Christ, is one, so too the saints. Their project of imitatio Christi re-presents the one and only life of Christ for each new generation. As a literary genre, hagiography fleshes out this insight, for no other genre is so steeped in self-citation. Every vita is such a tissue of biblical verses that, to edit a saint's Life before Google, one had to know Scripture by heart or spend endless hours with a concordance. After the Bible, quotations from a few classic vitae were constantly recycled: Athanasius' Life of St. Antony, Sulpicius Severus' Life of St. Martin, Gregory the Great's Life of St. Benedict. With the passage of time, newer classics joined older ones to produce one vast, self-referential monument, incarnate in the Acta Sanctorum: Gregory's vita sanctorum multiplied ad infinitum. So deep did this tendency run that, when an obscure saint needed a vita to justify a cult, shameless hagiographers would plagiarize whole paragraphs, plundering stories and miracles from earlier vitae to serve their turn.2 [End Page 169]It is small wonder, then, that the hagiographic genre is so often characterized as "traditional" or "conservative." It is nostalgic, too, in the sense that each saint's words and deeds bring a glorious Golden Age back to life—most often the apostolic age or the time of the Desert Fathers, but sometimes the graced beginnings of a religious order. Such memorials enabled later generations to idealize their glorious founders. This tendency to exalt the new as a renovation of the old has deep roots in Christianity; even the evangelist Matthew systematically represents Jesus as a new Moses. In the same vein, it is not unusual to find a saint identified as a new Jacob or a second David. On the other hand, many saints' Lives make an insistent claim to newness, renovatio. For the saints were, and are, extraordinary—not merely good men and women, but radical figures whose words and deeds shocked those around them, beginning with their parents. Like Jesus, they had not only admirers, but detractors in plenty. If their publicists held them up as exemplars of virtue, theirs was no ordinary kind, for the heroic virtue that gave saints their charisma could look much like madness. Despite the precedents of earlier vitae, their ascetic feats and challenging behavior often struck observers as new and unheard-of. In hagiography, therefore, claims of novelty play a key role that balances the familiar topoi. Sometimes the newness of a saint's charism is cause for joyful celebration. Jesus, after all, had declared ecce nova facio omnia (Rev 21:5). But "novelties" also had to be handled with care, for they could easily be condemned as heresies or extreme practices deviating from the tradition of the elders.This tension between novelty and nostalgia emerges most clearly in the vitae of saints who founded genuinely new forms of religious life. In this paper I will explore the way it plays out in two early Lives of Francis of Assisi, perhaps the most popular saint of all time. After his death in 1226, Francis set a speed record for canonization—one that would be surpassed in the Middle Ages only by his disciple, St. Anthony of Padua, and by the Dominican martyr Peter of Verona.3 Aside from his charisma and the exponential growth of the Franciscan Order, the fast-track canonization is due to Pope Gregory IX, who as Cardinal Hugolino had been personally close to Francis and supported his movement. For the ceremony in July 1228, less than two years after the... (shrink)

Motivated by disparities in gun violence, sharp increases in gun ownership, and a changing gun policy landscape, we conducted a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults (n=2,778) in 2021 to compare safety-related views of white, Black, and Hispanic gun owners and non-owners. Black gun owners were most aware of homicide disparities and least expecting of personal safety improvements from gun ownership or more permissive gun carrying. Non-owner views differed. Health equity and policy opportunities are discussed.