In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bookmarks Raman Selden's A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory is now published in the United States by the University Press of Kentucky ($17.00 cloth, $7.00 paper). It is a discerning introduction for students (and anyone else) to the current state of "theory"—a word which in this context seems for the present to have lost its neutral sense. Given the tendentious climate of literary studies, Selden's book is all (...) the more remarkable for its sober, equable attitude. Whether he is describing Russian formalism, Lacan, the Frankfurt School, reader-response theory, or Gerald Prince's "narratee," he is always a fair guide, generous without descending to the breathlessness "theory" so often incites. While I miss a detailed or persuasive account ofArnoldian, New Critical, or Leavisite criticism to serve as a foil for his discussion of poststructuralism, Seiden does nevertheless usually give some idea of what or who the enemy is for each of his theorists. Selden's quotations are well chosen, and he is adroit in elucidating the internal problems of theories, as, for example, when he says that Cixous's approach runs the risk of "driving women into an obscure unconscious retreat where silence reigns interrupted only by uterine 'babble.' " This is a danger, according to Seiden, well understood by Kristeva, who views women writers as "caught." He makes the point by citing Kristeva. "On the one hand," he says, "as writers they inevitably collude with [what Kristeva describes as] 'phallic dominance, associated with the privileged father-daughter relationship, which gives rise to the tendency towards mastery, science, philosophy, professorships, etc....' " On the other hand, Kristeva continues, "we flee everything considered 'phallic' to find refuge in the valorisation of the silent underwater body, thus abdicating any entry into history." Raman Seiden does not attempt to dazzle, but there is substance for thought on almost every one of the 146 pages in his book. Far weightier are two literary theory anthologies which have come our way. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle have edited Critical Theory Since 1965 (Florida State University Press, $29.95 paper). It resembles a telephone book and widi two-column pages it packs a lot in. The book begins with Stanley Cavell's 325 326Philosophy and Literature splendid essay "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy," and continues with Chomsky, John Searle, Kermode, Derrida and his American followers, Ingarden, Foucault,Jauss, Frye (a figure Seiden has chosen to ignore), Girard, Cixous and various feminists, Culler, Abrams—and on it goes. It was a pleasant surprise to find Clifford Geertz's "Blurred Genres" here; curiously missing is any contribution from Richard Rorty. And though the tide says the material starts in '65, Adams and Searle actually take us back farther. The main text ends with Said on page 622, but we are dien given a 233-page appendix—an anthology in itself—which begins with Frege and Peirce and goes through selections from various linguists and philosophers from Saussure, Bakhtin, and Whorf, to Heidegger on Hölderlin, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, and Lacan. Adams and Searle have contributed good introductions for each author, as well as a wide-ranging general introduction (Adams) and an afterword (Searle). In the last paragraph of his opening remarks, Adams says, "The theme of poststructuralism in its deconstructive phase is that poems resist interpretation. Demonstration of how this is so has been important (though not as new as some have thought), but repeated demonstration of this has already eventuated in its own form of reduction and thematization. Every text submitted to deconstruction considered as a critical method will yield the same theme, which may be true enough but remains only that story: the allegory of uninterpretability. It quickly becomes a repetition of the older formalist discovery that every text is about itself. It is no wonder that there has been a stirring—not so much a resistance to deconstruction (there has been that too, of course)—that expresses a desire to go beyond it. There has even been the idea of returning to Kant and trying again." Critical Theory Since 1965 is a big, useful book. On the somewhat more trim and basic side is Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: An Introductory Anthology... (shrink)

John Searle first made his name with his work in the philosophy of language on speech acts, but cemented his place at the centre of contemporary philosophy with his arguments against computational theories of mind. A rare academic, who writes original work for both general and specialist readers, he has more recently focused on the construction of social reality. He is the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

If Christian theology is that enterprise whose essential purpose is to understand the faith of the Christian Church, then it must approach that faith from the perspective not only of its transcendent source, but also as a human achievement, a creative interpretation of those events in which transcendent reality discloses itself for appropriation. Few theologians would deny that theology has to do primarily with the ways in which ultimate reality becomes manifest in human beings' faithful responses, in belief and trust, (...) to its self-disclosures, preparatory and decisive. But the implications of such a view are not always confronted straightforwardly, especially for the suitable normative principles by which theology must assess the adequacy of the church's expressions of its faith. This essay seeks to probe how an account of the Christian faith could proceed whose norm derives not from the revelatory source of faith but from the dynamic of human creativity within which alone faith's source, in being interpreted, becomes clear, cogent, and decisive for conscious existence. (shrink)

The literatures on both authentic leadership and behavioral integrity have argued that leader integrity drives follower performance. Yet, despite overlap in conceptualization and mechanisms, no research has investigated how authentic leadership and behavioral integrity relate to one another in driving follower performance. In this study, we propose and test the notion that authentic leadership behavior is an antecedent to perceptions of leader behavioral integrity, which in turn affects follower affective organizational commitment and follower work role performance. Analysis of a survey (...) of 49 teams in the service industry supports the proposition that authentic leadership is related to follower affective organizational commitment, fully mediated through leader behavioral integrity. Next, we found that authentic leadership and leader behavioral integrity are related to follower work role performance, fully mediated through follower affective organizational commitment. These relationships hold when controlling for ethical organizational culture. (shrink)

John Searle's Speech Acts (1969) and Expression and Meaning (1979) developed a highly original and influential approach to the study of language. But behind both works lay the assumption that the philosophy of language is in the end a branch of the philosophy of the mind: speech acts are forms of human action and represent just one example of the mind's capacity to relate the human organism to the world. The present book is concerned with these biologically fundamental capacities, (...) and, though third in the sequence, in effect it provides the philosophical foundations for the other two. Intentionality is taken to be the crucial mental phenomenon, and its analysis involves wide-ranging discussions of perception, action, causation, meaning, and reference. In all these areas John Searle has original and stimulating views. He ends with a resolution of the 'mind-body' problem. (shrink)

By John R. Searle Copyright John R. Searle I. Naturalizing Language I believe that the greatest achievements in philosophy over the past hundred or one hundred and twenty five years have been in the philosophy of language. Beginning with Frege, who invented the subject, and continuing through Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Austin and their successors, right to the present day, there is no branch of philosophy with so much high quality work as the philosophy of language. In my view, (...) the only achievement comparable to those of the great philosophers of language is Rawls’s reinvention of the subject of political philosophy (and therefore implicitly the subject of ethics). But with this one possible exception, I think that work in the philosophy of language is at the top of our achievements. Having said that, however, I have to record a serious misgiving I have about the subject. The problem is that its practitioners in general do not treat language as a natural phenomenon. This may seem a strange charge to make, given that so many contemporary and recent philosophers of language are anxious to emphasize the empirical character of their theories of language. Quine and Davidson are striking examples of resolute empiricism. My objection is that few contemporary and recent philosophers of language attempt to treat language as a natural extension of non-linguistic biological capacities. Language is not seen as continuous with, nor as an extension of, the rest of our specifically human biological inheritance. I think there is a deep reason, both historically and intellectually, why language has not been treated naturalistically. It is.. (shrink)

John Searle's forthcoming book ‘Rationality in Action’ presents a sophisticated and innovative account of the rationality of action. In the book Searle argues against what he calls the classical model of rationality. In the debate that follows Barry Smith challenges some implications of Searle's account. In particular, Smith suggests that Searle's distinction between observer-relative and observer–independent facts of the world is ill suited to accommodate moral concepts. Leo Zaibert takes on Searle's notion of the gap. (...) The gap exists between the reasons that we have for acting and our actions. According to Searle, whenever there is no gap, our actions exhibit irrationality. Zaibert points out a certain obscurity in Searle's treatment of the gap, particularly in connection with Searle's notion of ‘recognitional rationality’. Finally, Josef Moural examines the interactions between Searle's theory of institutions and his theory of rationality, with emphasis on the connections between intentionality and Searle's notion of the ‘background’. (shrink)

This is a formal and systematic study of the logical foundations of speech act theory. The study of speech acts has been a flourishing branch of the philosophy of language and linguistics over the last two decades, and John Searle has of course himself made some of the most notable contributions to that study in the sequence of books Speech Acts, Expression and Meaning and Intentionality. In collaboration with Daniel Vanderveken he now presents the first formalised logic of a (...) general theory of speech acts, dealing with such things as the nature of an illocutionary force, the logical form of its components, and the conditions of success of elementary illocutionary acts. The central chapters present a systematic exposition of the axioms and general laws of illocutionary logic. (shrink)

In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle argues that there are two kinds of facts--some that are independent of human observers, and some that require..

John Searle : Le courant analytique, dans lequel je me situe, est pour une large part un ensemble de réactions à l’oeuvre de Gottlob Frege. Nous ne faisons que commencer à prendre la mesure de l’importance considérable de Frege, non seulement pour ce qui est de ses propres théories, mais aussi des directions de recherches qu’il a fourni à Russell, à Wittgenstein, et à Austin, qui fut mon professeur à Oxford.1 Donc, en un sens, j’appartiens à la révolution fregéenne. (...) A première vue, cette révolution consiste en la réinvention de la logique : Frege a créé.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 10.2 (2000) 171-174 [Access article in PDF] Bioethics Inside the Beltway The Oversight of Human Gene Transfer Research LeRoy Walters Jesse Gelsinger's death last September in a gene transfer study being conducted at the University of Pennsylvania has helped to spark a national debate. In part, this debate parallels the broader discussion of how human subjects research should be reviewed and regulated in (...) the United States. However, human gene transfer research is one of a handful of biomedical technologies that seem to deserve special attention, at least in the early years of their development.The major participants in the national debate on human gene transfer include the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, members of Congress, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies, disease-oriented advocacy groups, reporters, and academics. At the December 1999 meeting of the NIH Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee (RAC), the protocol that involved Jesse Gelsinger was a central focus of discussion, but other topics emerged as well. One ad hoc panel reviewed adverse events that had occurred in other research protocols using adenovirus vectors, while a second proposed changes in the general system for reporting adverse events to NIH and the RAC.During the first several months of the year 2000, the United States Congress also became involved in the human gene transfer debate. In February, Senator Bill Frist (R-TN) convened a hearing to which Jesse Gelsinger's father, representatives of NIH and FDA, and several other witnesses were invited. At approximately the same time, the House Commerce Committee and its Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations initiated their own inquiries, asking the Office of Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services to review the oversight roles of NIH and FDA. In March and April, the House committee also wrote directly to the NIH Director, the FDA Commissioner, and the President of the University of Pennsylvania, requesting extensive documentation on gene transfer, in general, and the trial in which Jesse Gelsinger was involved, in particular. Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) have also raised questions and proposed solutions in multiple letters to the NIH Director and the Secretary of Health and Human Services. [End Page 171]The major general questions that have emerged from this discussion are the following:(1) What kinds of information about adverse events should be reported by researchers or sponsors during the course of human gene transfer trials?(2) To what group or groups should adverse-event information be reported? How often and in what ways should the information be analyzed?(3) Should the information about adverse events remain confidential, or should it be discussed publicly?(4) How can the disclosure and consent process in gene transfer trials be improved?(5) Which federal agency should have primary responsibility for overseeing human gene transfer research, and how can it best fulfill its oversight role?How these questions are answered will have immediate relevance to the field of human gene transfer research as it enters into its next phase. At the same time, the models that are created for this important cutting-edge field also may be useful in other complex or controversial arenas of biomedical research, for example, xenotransplantation or human embryonic stem-cell research. In addition, the lessons learned from this one important area of human subjects research may suggest ways to improve protections for all the volunteers who make clinical research--and medical progress--possible.In the remainder of this article, I will turn from reporting, in as objective a way as possible, on the status of the public policy debate about human gene transfer research to suggesting measures for improving the current oversight system for such research. My initial general recommendation is that we should not expect a single regulatory agency to be solely responsible for a field as large and dynamic as human gene transfer research. Rather, there should be some helpful redundancy or, to change the metaphor, checks and balances in the public oversight of this field. Thus, an... (shrink)

In this article, the co-editors of the Leadership and Ethics: Quantitative Analysis section of the journal outline some of the key issues about conducting quantitative research at the intersection of business, ethics, and leadership. They offer guidance for authors by explaining the types of papers that are often rejected and how to avoid some common pitfalls that lead to rejection. They also offer some ideas for future research by drawing upon the opinions of four noted experts in the field to (...) consider the types of research questions we should be asking, the types of theory we should be building, the types of models we should be testing, and the types of methods we should be using. (shrink)

The last quarter of the twentieth century has given rise to reproductive technologies and arrangements that in the earlier part of the century could only be dreamed of by the authors of science fiction. We stand in the middle of this reproductive revolution, trying to cope with the developments that have already occurred but with an uneasy sense that the future may be even more complicated ethically than the past and the present. In this brief essay, I will survey recent (...) ethical and public-policy discussions of two reproductive techniques (assisted insemination and in vitro fertilization) and one reproductive arrangement (surrogate motherhood). After distinguishing three phases in the normative debate, I will briefly comment on some of the characteristics of, and continuing ambiguities in, the ethical debate of the past 25 years. At the conclusion of the essay, I will attempt to anticipate three future issues in ethics and reproduction. (shrink)

The individualism and restless mobility of modernity have become disorienting and frightening. Our nostalgia for premodern times when natural bonds to kith and kin were unshakable continues to surface, most recently in the popular phenomenon of support groups. On Community examines this crucial philosophical issue of community for the postmodern mind by presenting 13 readable, original essays by some of the top experts currently working on this problem. The first four essays, by Eliot Deutsch, R. W. Hepburn, Hilary Putnam, and (...) Leroy S. Rouner, examine philosophies of community, emphasizing metaphysical analysis and definition of the nature of community. The second section considers the theme in a cross-cultural context. Merry I. White, Katherine Platt, Benjamin Schwartz, and Huston Smith illustrate in this section the various ways in which community is understood and experienced in Japan, North Africa, China, and India. The final section, which contains contributions by Patrick Hill, Jurgen Moltmann, Catherine Keller, and George Rupp, explores the future of community, focusing on community building in Western societies. While the authors represent diverse interests, they also share common ground. Virtually all agree that a creative community needs some form of individualism in order to make a community effective. And there is a consensus among the essays that community is a good thing and that the quest for community in our time is a significant fact. Finally, the contributors suggest that the critique of the liberal view of the autonomous individual, in vogue in recent years, now seems to have waned. (shrink)

The title of The Rediscovery of the Mind suggests the question "When was the mind lost?" Since most people may not be aware that it ever was lost, we must also then ask "Who lost it?" It was lost, of course, only by philosophers, by certain philosophers. This passed unnoticed by society at large. The "rediscovery" is also likely to pass unnoticed. But has the mind been rediscovered by the same philosophers who "lost" it? Probably not. John Searle is (...) an analytic philosopher, with some of the same notions as the positivists and behaviorists who rejected consciousness and "lost" the mind in the first place, but he also does not sound like the kind of reductionist who would have joined that crowd. His views, indeed, are sensible enough, and some of his insights so important, that it is a shame to find his thought profoundly limited by some of the same mistakes and prejudices that ruined philosophy, and not just philosophy of mind, under the influence of those positivists and behaviorists. There is enough of genuine value in his treatment, that it can easily be taken up and, with relatively slight modification, added to what is of permanent value in the history of philosophy. (shrink)

An introduction to the major questions of philosophy by one of America's greatest and best-known philosophers. A practical guide to philosophical theory and how it applies to your life.