L’article interroge la trajectoire psychique d’une patiente infertile qui réclame de choisir sa donneuse d’ovocytes elle-même, en ligne, comme cela peut se faire à l’étranger. L’hypothèse retenue consiste à interpréter sa démarche comme un contre-investissement de la position passive de réception qu’implique un don d’ovocytes au profit d’une logique d’emprise, de marchandisation et de dévalorisation de la donneuse d’ovocytes. Un fantasme sous-jacent nous paraît émerger de l’étude d’un cas clinique : « cracher sur la main qui me donne ». À (...) travers un panorama du don d’ovocytes aux États-Unis, l’auteur s’interroge également sur les limites de la rhétorique du don et de l’altruisme en matière de don de gamètes. Sa méthodologie du cas unique s’appuie sur une approche complémentariste qui fait appel à des données sociologiques et économiques. (shrink)

This book offers cutting edge research on the modifications and disruptions of bodily experience in the context of anxiety, depression, trauma, chronic illness, pain, and aging. It presents original contributions in applied phenomenology, biomedical ethics, and the use of medical technologies.

Movements like the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the Tea Party embody some of our deepest intuitions about popular politics and 'the power of the people'. They also expose tensions and shortcomings in our understanding of these ideals. We typically see 'the people' as having a special, sovereign power. Despite the centrality of this idea in our thinking, we have little understanding of why it has such importance. Imagined Sovereignties probes the considerable force that 'the people' exercises on our (...) thought and practice. Like the imagined communities described by Benedict Anderson, popular politics is formed around shared, imaginary constructs rooted in our collective imagination. This book investigates these 'imagined sovereignties' in a genealogy traversing the French Enlightenment, the Haitian Revolution, and nineteenth-century Haitian constitutionalism. It problematizes taken-for-granted ideas about popular politics and provokes new ways of imagining the power of the people. (shrink)

This essay explores the unique temporal experience in anxiety. Drawing on first-person accounts as well as examples from literature, I attempt to show how anxiety not only disrupts our physiological and cognitive timing but also disturbs the embodied rhythms of everyday social life. The primary goal, however, is to articulate the extent to which human existence itself is a temporally structured event and to identity the ways that anxiety disrupts this structure. Using Martin Heidegger’s account of human existence as a (...) point of departure, I show how the mood of anxiety has the power to alter our self-interpretations by closing down or constricting our experience of the future. I argue that a constricted future impedes our ability ‘to be’ because it closes off the range of projective meanings that we would ordinarily draw on to create or fashion our identities. (shrink)

Carter and Leslie's Doomsday Argument maintains that reflection upon the number of humans born thus far, when that number is viewed as having been uniformly randomly selected from amongst all humans, past, present and future, leads to a dramatic rise in the probability of an early end to the human experiment. We examine the Bayesian structure of the Argument and find that the drama is largely due to its oversimplification.

Throughout his ministry, Jesus spoke frequently and unabashedly on the now-taboo subject of money. With nothing good to say to the rich, the New Testament -- indeed the entire Bible -- is far from positive towards the topic of personal wealth. And yet, we all seek material prosperity and comfort. How are Christians to square the words of their savior with the balances of their bank accounts, or more accurately, with their unquenchable desire for financial security? While the church has (...) developed diverse responses to the problems of poverty, it is often silent on what seems almost as straightforward a biblical principle: that wealth, too, is a problem. By considering the particular context of the recent economic history of Ireland, this book explores how the parables of Jesus can be the key to unlocking what it might mean to follow Christ as wealthy people without diluting our dilemma or denying the tension. Through an engagement with contemporary economic and political thought, aided by the work of Karl Barth and William T. Cavanaugh, this book represents a unique and innovative intervention to a discussion that applies to every Christian in the Western world. (shrink)

Bayesian reasoning has been applied formally to statistical inference, machine learning and analysing scientific method. Here I apply it informally to more common forms of inference, namely natural language arguments. I analyse a variety of traditional fallacies, deductive, inductive and causal, and find more merit in them than is generally acknowledged. Bayesian principles provide a framework for understanding ordinary arguments which is well worth developing.

The dominance of agency theory can reduce our collective scope to analyse private equity in all its diversity and depth. We contribute to theorisation of private equity by developing a contrasting perspective that draws on a rich tradition of virtue ethics. In doing so, we juxtapose 'private equity' with 'public good' to develop points of rhetorical and analytical contrast. We develop a typology differentiating various forms of private equity, and focus on the 'take private' form. These takeovers are where private (...) equity funds are used to buy all a firm's publicly listed shares. Take private deals reduce reporting requirements and lessen the amount of public scrutiny a firm comes under. They allow greater control of a firm's assets and resources but also have effects in terms of the wider social fabric. The 'public good' and virtue ethics offer an alternative basis for theorisation of these deals. This provides a needed contrast to accounts of private equity based on agency theory. (shrink)

Adolf Meyer-Abich spent his career as one of the most vigorous and varied advocates in the biological sciences. Primarily a philosophical proponent of holistic thought in biology, he also sought through collaboration with empirically oriented colleagues in biology, medicine, and even physics to develop arguments against mechanistic and reductionistic positions in the life sciences, and to integrate them into a newly disciplinary theoretical biology. He participated in major publishing efforts including the founding of Acta Biotheoretica. He also sought international contacts (...) and worked for long stretches in Chile, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and the United States. His career straddled the Nazi period, which led him into a complex dance of support for and resistance to the regime. Despite the relative failure of his conceptual innovations to catch on, his ideas and writings sit squarely within the trajectory of thought and argument that has led to today’s reinvigoration of thought about conceptual integration in evolutionary developmental biology. (shrink)

We further develop the mathematical theory of causal interventions, extending earlier results of Korb, Twardy, Handfield, & Oppy, (2005) and Spirtes, Glymour, Scheines (2000). Some of the skepticism surrounding causal discovery has concerned the fact that using only observational data can radically underdetermine the best explanatory causal model, with the true causal model appearing inferior to a simpler, faithful model (cf. Cartwright, (2001). Our results show that experimental data, together with some plausible assumptions, can reduce the space of viable explanatory (...) causal models to one. (shrink)

ABSTRACTA recent line of argument insists that replacing democracy with markets would improve social decision making due to markets’ superior use of knowledge. These arguments are flawed by unrealistic assumptions, unfair comparisons, and a neglect of the epistemic limits of markets. In reality, the epistemic advantages of markets over democracy are circumscribed and often illusory. A recognition of markets’ epistemic limits can, however, provide guidance for designing institutions in ways that capture the advantages of both.

This book fills an important gap in previous Husserl scholarship by focusing on intersubjectivity and empathy (i.e., the experience of others as other subjects) and by addressing the related issues of validity, the degrees of evidence with which something can be experienced, and the different senses of 'objective' in Husserl's texts. Despite accusations by commentators that Husserl's is a solipsistic philosophy and that the epistemologies in Husserl's late and early works are contradictory, Hermberg shows that empathy, and thus other subjects, (...) are related to one's knowledge on the view offered in each of Husserl's Introductions to Phenomenology. Empathy is significantly related to knowledge in at least two ways, and Husserl's epistemology might, consequently, be called a social epistemology: (a) empathy helps to give evidence for validity and thus to solidify one's knowledge, and (b) it helps to broaden one's knowledge by giving access to what others have known. These roles of empathy are not at odds with one another; rather, both are at play in each of the Introductions (if even only implicitly) and, given his position in the earlier work, Husserl needed to expand the role of empathy as he did. Such a reliance on empathy, however, calls into question whether Husserl's is a transcendental philosophy in the sense Husserl claimed. (shrink)

This paper examines how ethically significant assumptions and values are embedded not only in environmental policies but also in the language of the environmental sciences. It shows, based on three case studies associated with contemporary pollution research, how the choice of scientific categories and terms can have at least four ethically significant effects: influencing the future course of scientific research; altering public awareness or attention to environmental phenomena; affecting the attitudes or behavior of key decision makers; and changing the burdens (...) of proof required for taking action in response to environmental concerns. The paper argues that deliberative forums, research-ethics training, and conceptual work by environmental philosophers could all promote more ethically sensitive responses to these features of scientific language. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, several consistent procedures have been designed to infer causal conclusions from observational data. We prove that if the true causal network might be an arbitrary, linear Gaussian network or a discrete Bayes network, then every unambiguous causal conclusion produced by a consistent method from non-experimental data is subject to reversal as the sample size increases any finite number of times. That result, called the causal flipping theorem, extends prior results to the effect that causal discovery (...) cannot be reliable on a given sample size. We argue that since repeated flipping of causal conclusions is unavoidable in principle for consistent methods, the best possible discovery methods are consistent methods that retract their earlier conclusions no more than necessary. A series of simulations of various methods across a wide range of sample sizes illustrates concretely both the theorem and the principle of comparing methods in terms of retractions. (shrink)

Internalist theories of epistemic justification supposedly have trouble explaining what justifies beliefs that are both stored in memory and currently out of mind. This is the problem of stored beliefs. This chapter provides a preliminary defence of stored/dispositional appearances and suggests that they provide a straightforward solution to the problem of stored beliefs.

This article describes how the building of the Panama Canal by the US military in 1904-14 was used within the socialist movement as an exemplar of socialist labour organization. Focussing on the British guild socialist, S.G. Hobson, it demonstrates the survival into guild socialism of Fabian ideas of the inevitability of large-scale enterprise, organizational hierarchy and the indispensability of the expert. It also reveals a militarist inflexion which is here traced to sources including Fourier, Ruskin, Bellamy and Wells. This was (...) underpinned by the idea of collective labour as a form of contest with 'nature'. Hobson's colonialist ideas and work experiences are also considered in evaluating his conception of the guild. These hitherto largely unexplored aspects of guild socialism are seen as providing insights into later attachments to Soviet Russia and the idea of a labour corps in inter-war Britain. (shrink)

Magical ersatzism is the view that possible worlds are primitive abstract entities. In On the Plurality of Worlds, David Lewis presented what appeared to many to be a devastating argument against magical ersatzism. In this paper, I show that Lewis’ central argument does not succeed. Magical ersatzism remains a viable theory of possible worlds.

In this follow-up study of an earlier investigation (Marjoribanks, 2002a), relationships were examined between adolescents' educational aspirations and young adults' educational attainment, after taking into account measures of family background, individual characteristics and proximal learning settings. Data were collected as part of a longitudinal survey of Australian youth (3772 females and 3476 males). The findings from the two analyses suggest that: (a) family background, individual characteristics and proximal learning settings combine to have large associations with adolescents' aspirations, and these aspirations (...) have the largest relationship with young adults' eventual educational attainment; and (b) there are ethnic group differences in the linear and curvilinear nature of relationships involving measures of individual characteristics, adolescents' educational aspirations and young adults' educational attainment. An 'aspiration 2 attainment 2 background' model is proposed to examine the ongoing and different interactions between aspirations and academic outcomes for students from various family backgrounds. (shrink)

C. S. Lewis called for spiritual formation long before the term became popular: “Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else”. Lewis's call to become little Christs recalls Paul's exhortation to “put off” the old self and “put on” Christ. This paper explores what this change of costume involves from the perspective of what a “theodramatic” approach to theology that I have developed in The Drama of Doctrine and Faith (...) Speaking Understanding. I there argue that the role of doctrine is to indicate what is in Christ and direct those in Christ to participate in Christ by playing their parts in the drama of redemption. This theatrical model raises an important issue concerning the disciple's self-understanding: Is it healthy for Christians to think in terms of “acting out” what is “in Christ” or does this encourage a false sense of self – a “put on”? I respond to this question in four steps where I present a theodramatic anthropology, describe discipleship as the project of growing into/putting on Christ, consider three objections to my previous work about the relationship between persons/roles and role-playing, and respond to the objections by offering a dogmatic description of putting on Christ in soteriological, pneumatological, and eschatological terms. (shrink)

In the absence of any institution for imposing legal liability on global business, the idea of instituting a cosmopolitan court for international corporate offenses is advocated. The proposal is then critically examined and defended in light of a number of key objections. Having both civil and criminal jurisdiction, such a tribunal could benefit domestic and international legal systems, multinational corporations, and victims of transnational and international corporate misdeeds. By laying down minimal global standards of corporate liability, resolving conflicts between the (...) regulatory activities of national legal systems, and affording redress for aggrieved parties in countries with inadequate legal infrastructures, the tribunal would promote the objectives of compensatory, distributive, procedural and retributive justice at the global level. Moreover, the court would assist corporations by translating compliance with minimum ethical standards to the bottom line. Ethical corporations will gain competitive advantage relative to unscrupulous firms, since the latter'ss activities will be sanctioned. The international community need not leave obedience to basic norms up to the voluntary good-will and discretion of multinational firms. (shrink)

What philosophical motivations lay behind the emergence of the genealogical method in Foucault’s thought? Pace traditional interpretations, I argue that genealogy is best construed as a supplementary addition to the archaeological mode of investigation. It addresses an issue that arose within the problematic to which the archaeological method responds, but which that method was not designed to solve: the problem of “transcendental genesis” as this issue was defined within the unique parameters set forth by the French phenomenological tradition.

I believe that Sartre's theory of groups, coupled with the suppressed social ontology of BN, does provide an account of how positive and constructive social relations are possible, theoretically and practically. This explicates and makes intelligible the aspect of his concept of authentic existence that requires us to act on behalf of the freedom of all. Sartre's theory of the group does provide a basis for practical union and common effort in our social world, whereby "common" individuals can enrich their (...) concrete freedom. (shrink)

My goal in this chapter is to consider the connection between an agent’s moral character and those actions that she is capable of freely performing. Most of these connections hold for all moral agents, but my particular focus will be on the specific case of divine agency. That is, I’m primarily interested in the connection between God’s moral character and His exercise of His free agency. As I will argue, even if an agent’s character determines her choices or actions, that (...) doesn’t threaten the agent’s freedom so long as her character is formed in the right way.1 (Or, perhaps more accurately, so long as it’s not formed in the wrong way. And I do not see how God’s character could be formed in such a way that would undermine the exercise of His agency.) I proceed as follows. First, I explore the relationship between what an agent freely chooses to do and her moral character in general. I then address the relationship between God’s character, His reasons, and His freedom, on the assumptions of Perfect Being Theology.2 In the third section, I turn to the compatibility question, and show how an incompatibilist could agree with everything I say in the first two sections. That is, I argue that the considerations to which I appeal regarding divine freedom do not force the Perfect Being theologian to endorse compatibilism (though they also don’t prove incompatibilism). (shrink)

Freedom of information requests are increasingly used in sociology, criminology and other social science disciplines to examine government practices and processes. University ethical review boards in Canada have not typically subjected researchers’ FOI requests to independent review, although this may be changing in the United Kingdom and Australia, reflective of what Haggerty calls ‘ethics creep’. Here we present four arguments for why FOI requests in the social sciences should not be subject to formal ethical review by ERBs. These four arguments (...) are: existing, rigorous bureaucratic vetting; double jeopardy; infringement of citizenship rights; and unsuitable ethics paradigm. In the discussion, we reflect on the implications of our analysis for literature on ethical review and qualitative research, and for literature on FOI and government transparency. (shrink)

Fair trade (FT) is of growing interest to those carrying out research into ethical decision making. In this paper, we report findings from a recent survey of FT purchasing among 688 retail shoppers in the United Kingdom. We examined the relationship between individual differences, in terms of gender and age, and three outcome measures: purchasing, word of mouth (WOM) recommendation and social advocacy. Though age appeared to have no significant effects, we found evidence of gender difference in each outcome measure. (...) Females in our sample were more likely to purchase FT goods, to recommend them by WOM, and to advocate FT purchasing to friends and family. We discuss the implications of these findings in terms of the literature on ethical decision making and gender difference. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Journal of Ancient History Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 2 Seiten: 323-356.