Human motor skills are exceptional compared to other species, no less than their cognitive skills. In this perspective paper, we suggest that “movement matters!,” implying that motor development is a crucial driving force of cognitive development, much more impactful than previously acknowledged. Thus, we argue that to fully understand and explain developmental changes, it is necessary to consider the interaction of motor and cognitive skills. We exemplify this argument by introducing the concept of “embodied planning,” which takes an embodied cognition (...) perspective on planning development throughout childhood. From this integrated, comprehensive framework, we present a novel climbing paradigm as the ideal testbed to explore the development of embodied planning in childhood and across the lifespan. Finally, we outline future research directions and discuss practical applications of the work on developmental embodied planning for robotics, sports, and education. (shrink)

As conflict between multinational corporations and local communities escalates, scholars, executives, activists, and community leaders are calling for companies to become more accountable for the impact of their activities on external stakeholders. In order for business to do so, managers must first understand the causes of conflict with local communities, and communities must understand what courses of action are available to challenge activities they deem harmful to their interests. In this article, I present a framework for examining the factors that (...) contribute to multinational and community conflict including stakeholder power inequality, stakeholder perception gaps and cultural context. Moreover, I describe some of the ways that communities can increase their leverage in conflict situations. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze the moral responsibili- ties that companies have with regard to the development of their sector, especially when there are path dependences that can lead sectors on more or less morally accept- able paths, e.g., with regard to market access for disad- vantaged groups. The interdependencies between companies in a sector are underexplored in the literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR). Reflections on the normative status of profit-seeking and on the normative bases of CSR, however, provide (...) us with reasons for seeing sector-related responsibilities as an important component of CSR. Based on a case study of a financial institution, I analyze various morally relevant ways in which the strategic decisions of companies relate to those of other companies in their sector. I argue that companies have a co-responsibility to contribute to the development of the moral dimensions of their sectors, especially when they deal with vulnerable customers. (shrink)

With its wealth of readily and often publicly available information about Web users’ lives, the Web has created new opportunities for conducting online research. Although digital data are easily accessible, ethical guidelines are inconsistent about how researchers should use them. Some academics claim that traditional ethical principles are sufficient and applicable to online research. However, the Web poses new challenges that compel researchers to reconsider concerns of consent, privacy and anonymity. Based on doctoral research into the investigation of online medicine (...) purchasing, this article presents a case study involving online forums, and reviews the existing ethical guidance surrounding the Web. The suggestion is that new ethical guidelines, particularly in relation to informed consent and participants’ own perceptions of what is public or private, are needed owing to the unique challenges of online research. (shrink)

New mechanisms to ensure that counter ter ror ism ac t ivit ies do not contravene international law or ethical values and principles will require careful design. Apart from the ethical and legal grounds, there are good practical rea-sons to design more effective counterter-rorism measures. Preventable harms to population health contribute to mistrust and instability and undermine the stated objectives of the intelligence services.

Examination of the fluidity of communal and individual identity in the Middle East and North Africa suggests that such identities are not stable, singular or mutually exclusive but shaped by circumstances, particularly political and economic duress. An approach that adopts the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics may be more productive in understanding identity politics in the region and in general.

Popular interest in the topic of food has exploded in the past decade. Due in part to books by Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Eric Schlosser and films such as Food, Inc., Super Size Me, and Forks over Knives, people are starting to think critically about where their food originates, how it is processed, and how their consumption choices affect the environment, nonhuman animals, and other people. At the same time, there is rising concern about the dangers of obesity. Although (...) the voices raising these concerns are by no means monolithic, one of the most common solutions offered to various food-related issues is the suggestion that people educate themselves and make.. (shrink)

Drees makes a strong case for the importance of the humanities in the university, providing an excellent resource for anyone in the Western Academy. Its usefulness for those who want to work outside the West is limited, however, because he does not engage with literature that challenges its methods and disciplines. If we are to have a positive global impact, we need to do more than clarify existing boundaries, we need to blur them, beginning with an examination of inherent biases (...) reflected in its history, structure, and content. This article focuses on one critique, a decolonial critique of the Western view that ontology precedes epistemology (an external reality produces knowledge). Outside the modern Western Academy, epistemologies create ontologies (epistemic creations/stories about the world give us a sense of the world and its materiality). I describe a relational understanding of knowledge and how this changes our understanding of the humanities and our epistemic responsibilities. (shrink)

Accountability is viewed as a civilizing element in society, with professional accountability formalized in most cases as duties dating to the Greeks and Socrates; journalists must find their own way, without formal professional or government regulation or licensing. Three scholars look at the process in a line from the formal professional discipline to suggesting problems the journalism fraternity faces without regulation to suggesting serious internal ethics conferences as 1 solution to the problem.

“It is certainly true, as nominalists have been concerned to acknowledge, that judgements about kinds are determined in part by human interests, projects, and practices. But the possibility that human interests, projects, and practices sometimes develop as they do because the real (physical or social) world is as it is suggests that this sort of dependence is not by itself an argument against essentialism.” -Susan Babbitt (1996, 146).

In this thesis, I examine recent proposals for the creation of African and Native American forms of Indigenous philosophy and show how the discussions and debates in these fields challenge the disciplinary boundaries of modern Academic Western philosophy. With regard to African philosophy, I critique the debates in the Anglophone literature, teasing out those aspects of the debates which pose substantial epistemological challenges to mainstream [Western] philosophy, focusing, in particular, on assumptions about the intersections between philosophy, culture, science, and universality (...) which manifest themselves in the Euro-traditional critiques the "Professional" school philosophers make of the Afri-traditional approach of the "Ethnophilosophy" school philosophers. Looking at the works of such "Ethnophilosophers" as Kagame, Mbiti, Wright, and Gyeke and the critiques made of them by "Professional" school philosophers such as Wiredu, Bodunrin, Oruka, and Appiah, I present and critique both sides of the universal European argument, the literacy argument, the objective individual male argument, and the logical-scientific vs. magical-religious arguments, highlighting the epistemological implications of each. With regard to Native American Philosophy, I discuss recent proposals being made by Native American academic philosophers, and also do a philosophical analysis of traditional Native American culture as expressed in a variety of Native-authored sources. I argue, based on the works of Native authors, that three main methodological problems condition the formulation of Native American philosophy, namely 'problems of conquest,' 'problems of translation,' and 'problems of identity' and that each of these problems manifest as epistemological problems. I then go on to make proposals for five possible beginning points for the formulation of Native American philosophy by identifying themes which recur in the works of philosophers Deloria, Cordova, and Hester; traditional sages such as Black Elk, and Lame Deer; critical theorists such as Warrior, Guerrero, Gunn-Allen, Durham, and Forbes; and novelists Silko and King. I argue that both African and American forms of Indigenous philosophy provoke a reevaluation of many of the epistemic frames heretofore assumed to be universal in modern academic philosophy. (shrink)

How do we switch between “playing along” and treating robots as technical agents? We propose interaction breakdowns to help solve this “social artifact puzzle”: Breaks cause changes from fluid interaction to explicit reasoning and interaction with the raw artifact. These changes are closely linked to understanding the technical architecture and could be used to design better human–robot interaction (HRI).

Drawing primarily from the work of Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, the author suggests that a postmodern approach to identity can be used to challenge the essentialism that pervades both feminist empiricism and standpoint theory, and thus move feminist psychology in a more emancipatory direction. A major premise of this paper is that an engagement with postmodernism redirects our attention to symbolic constructions of femininity and to the sociopolitical grounding of experience.

Concerns about a “crisis of expertise” have been raised recently in both scholarship and public debate. This article asks why there is such a widespread perception that expertise is in crisis, and why this “crisis” has posed such a difficult puzzle for sociology to explain. It argues that what has been interpreted as a crisis is better understood as a transformation: the dissolution of a regime of expertise organized around practices of social integration, and its displacement by a new regime (...) organized around practices of expulsion. This article introduces a new framework that envisages expertise as an historically constituted phenomenon, which is the outcome of relational networks (which I call alliances). It argues that this approach, in which expertise(s) are understood as the historically contingent outcome of alliances between knowledge producers, problems, and modes of intervention, can better account for recent shifts. It does this by enabling us to reinterpret what has been described as a general crisis of expertise as, instead, the observed effects of the dissolution of specific alliances of knowledge and practice. This article demonstrates the power of this relational approach through two case studies: the dissolution of the expert alliances organized around the rehabilitative approach to crime and the counterinsurgency approach to irregular political violence. In each these cases, it finds that, as alliances of social expertise, characterized by policies and interventions that attempted to discipline problem actors and integrate them into society, unraveled, they were displaced by new alliances that sought to manage problems through practices of exclusion. The paper concludes with a theory of why the field of sociology has had such difficulty explaining the crisis of expertise. (shrink)

Levinas’s Humanism of the Other may be seen as a meditation of King Lear. His philosophy offers what a critique of traditional and modern anti-humanism urgently needs: an ethics that precedes being. It provides a necessary ethical foundation needed to investigate questions of the human and humanity that Shakespeare examines so thoroughly in this powerful tragedy. Prefiguring Levinas’s later philosophy, Shakespeare dramatizes this humanism of the other through the suffering and vulnerability of the body. Lear’s and Gloucester’s parallel journeys are (...) both grounded in this vulnerability of the body and fragility of the mind that lead them to a humanism of the other. Moreover, the ethical good that precedes ontology, the saying, is profoundly staged through the characters of Cordelia and Edgar. This vision of King Lear, therefore, underlies and informs Levinas’s radical critique of traditional humanism and contemporary anti-humanism in his insistence on a humanism of the other. (shrink)

The Law is a grim, unsmiling thing, Not Justice, though. Justice is witty and whimsical and kind and caring.Rohinton Misuy, A Fine Balance;When the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the conviction and twelve-year sentence of Regina McKnight, it affirmed that state 's commitment to bring the full force of the law to the punishment of pregnant women who use drugs. Prosecutors linked the delivery of Ms.McKnight 's stillborn baby to her use of cocaine, and argued successfully for a finding of (...) homicide by child abuse. The McKnight judgment follows the South Carolina Supreme Court decision in the case of Cornelia Whitner. Whitner was sentenced to prison for illegal drug use during pregnancy on the grounds that the viable fetus is a child under the state s criminal child endangerment statute.On the basis of constitutional concerns such as due process and privacy, worries that criminal prosecutions may thwart public policy goals such as keeping families together and promoting the health of women and children, and findings that legislatures did not intend to include the fetus in the scope of drug laws or child abuse and neglect laws, criminal prosecution has been resisted in most jurisdictions. (shrink)

Historically, judicial enforcement of constitutional rights to health care has played a fairly limited role in enabling access to health care, a trend particularly prevalent in North America, and reflected in many other regions. This trend is due in part to judicial resistance to recognizing socioeconomic rights like health as appropriately legal, or as appropriately enforceable in light of the doctrine of separation of powers. This resistance is evident in judicial deference to social and economic policy, a reluctance to view (...) socioeconomic claims as invoking “fundamental values” that courts consider themselves authorized to protect: and a real reluctance to recognize and enforce “positive” obligations pertaining to social welfare. As a result, health has often fallen largely into the political rather than legal sphere, and domestic courts have been relatively reluctant to review health policies from a human rights perspective, given the belief that doing so would exceed the appropriate democratic function of the judiciary. (shrink)

In the last 30 years the bushmeat trade has led to the slaughter of nearly 90 percent of West Africa’s bonobos, perhaps our closest relatives, and has recently driven Miss Waldron’s red colobus monkey to extinction. Earth was once rich with primates, but every species—except one—is now extinct or endangered because of one primate—_Homo sapiens_. How have our economic and cultural practices pushed our cousins toward destruction? Would we care more about their fate if we knew something of their individual (...) lives and sufferings? Would we help them if we understood how our choices threaten their existence? This anthology helps to answer these questions. The first section of _Primate People _introduces forces that threaten nonhuman primates, such as the entertainment and “pet” industries, the bushmeat trade, habitat destruction, and logging. The second section exposes the exploitation of primates in research facilities, including the painful memories of an undercover agent, and suggests models of more enlightened scientific methods. The final section tells the stories of those who lobby for change, educate communities, and tenderly care for our displaced cousins in sanctuaries. Sometimes shocking and disturbing, sometimes poignant and encouraging, _Primate People _always draws the reader into the lives of nonhuman primates. Activists around the world reveal the antics and pleasures of monkeys, the tendencies and idiosyncrasies of chimpanzees, and the sufferings and fears of macaques. Charming, difficult, sensitive—these testimonies demonstrate that nonhuman primates and human beings are, indeed, closely related. Woven into the anthology’s lucid narratives are the stories of how we harm and create the conditions that endanger primates, and what we can and _must _do to prevent their ongoing suffering and fast-approaching extinction. (shrink)

This paper analyses the Australian Values Education Program (VEP) within the framework of late-classical political economy. Using analytical methods from systemic functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis, we demonstrate that the VEP is an unwitting restatement of the principles of ideology as developed by the likes of Destutt de Tracy and the Young Hegelians. We conclude that the sudden shock of globalisation and the post-national cultures this has entailed is in many ways similar to the shock of formal nationalism that (...) emerged in the late-Seventeenth and early-Eighteenth centuries. The overall result of the VEP for the Australian school system is a massive procedural burden that is unlikely to produce the results at which the program is aimed. (shrink)

Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Lisa’s StoryLisa P. (wife of patient) and Jeanne KerwinMy husband suffered from sudden onset of heart failure with a very low ejection fraction and was on IV Milrinone at the age of 47. One of the most powerful things he told me was that he was not afraid to die and therefore did not want to move forward with Milrinone. He eventually “did it for the kids.” After (...) the Milrinone drip was no longer working, he was offered an LVAD (left ventricular assist device) to keep him alive. He refused, but the doctor again convinced him to “do it for your kids” and said, “we put these devices in 80-year-olds.” He did not have time to explore any other options and reluctantly accepted the LVAD. It was implanted in May of 2014 in a very long and complicated surgery with a long and difficult recovery. He was in the hospital for a long time, and then he refused to go to rehab upon discharge, making it difficult for our family to manage, as he was extremely weak and needed care of his wound dressing. He worried about the financial [End Page 7] impact of a heart transplant and the medications required, as we were already struggling with the medical bills. He refused to have more surgery with the potential complications and never agreed to get on the transplant waiting list.After the implanted LVAD, my husband was not able to do most of what he loved in life. He couldn’t work (he was a truck driver), he couldn’t go fishing or swimming in the ocean, he couldn’t go hunting and fishing, and his overall physical condition was so poor that he couldn’t cook, garden and, most aggravating to him, he could not take a regular hot shower. The LVAD had to be covered with plastic in order to avoid getting the drive-line area wet, so bathing was a complicated process. He had trouble with stairs, had neuropathic pain in his legs from diabetes, and because of the pain medications, he felt cloudy and dizzy and slept most of the day in his recliner. I took care of him, even after I had to go back to work, and at the same time, I managed our two children (ages 9 and 12 at the time of LVAD).After almost two years of living with the LVAD, multiple hospitalizations for GI bleeds then seizures, more medications, and weekly blood draws for INR1, my husband requested that the LVAD be de-activated and that he be allowed to die of his heart failure. He described his life as “miserable.” He watched as his misery impacted his children and me. He suffered daily and had none of the joys that made life worth living for him. When we approached the cardiac team that implanted and monitored his LVAD with his request, they said “no.” They would not de-activate the LVAD because it was working. It was keeping him alive and he had no other terminal illness. His palliative doctor, who was treating his pain, also heard his request and told us to call for an “ethics consult” to determine if he would be “allowed” to have the LVAD de-activated. We got the number and called on March 31, 2016.At the time of the call to Ethics, we had no idea what “Ethics” was, other than a general definition of the word ethics as in professional behaviors and such. We did not know what to expect but we called. We would never have known to call “Ethics” if the palliative doctor had not advised us to do so, and my husband might have suffered a longer, more painful life both mentally and physically prolonged by the LVAD.We explained the request to the ethics consultant. She listened to my husband describe his daily living and his dissatisfaction with the quality of his life, his physical and emotional suffering, and his wish to rid himself of the LVAD and allow nature to take its course. There was actually no decision to be made on his part. He had already made up... (shrink)

Delusions are a common symptom of schizophrenia and dementia. Though most English dictionaries define a delusion as a false opinion or belief, there is currently a lively debate about whether delusions are really beliefs and indeed, whether they are even irrational. The book is an interdisciplinary exploration of the nature of delusions. It brings together the psychological literature on the aetiology and the behavioural manifestations of delusions, and the philosophical literature on belief ascription and rationality. The thesis of the book (...) is that delusions are continuous with ordinary beliefs, a thesis that could have important theoretical and practical implications for psychiatric classification and the clinical treatment of subjects with delusions. By bringing together recent work in philosophy of mind, cognitive psychology and psychiatry, the book offers a comprehensive review of the philosophical issues raised by the psychology of normal and abnormal cognition, defends the doxastic conception of delusions, and develops a theory about the role of judgements of rationality and of attributions of self-knowledge in belief ascription. Presenting a highly original analysis of the debate on the nature of delusions, this book will interest philosophers of mind, epistemologists, philosophers of science, cognitive scientists, psychiatrists, and mental health professionals. (shrink)

This volume presents cutting-edge theory and research on emotions as constructed events rather than fixed, essential entities. It provides a thorough introduction to the assumptions, hypotheses, and scientific methods that embody psychological constructionist approaches. Leading scholars examine the neurobiological, cognitive/perceptual, and social processes that give rise to the experiences Western cultures call sadness, anger, fear, and so on. The book explores such compelling questions as how the brain creates emotional experiences, whether the "ingredients" of emotions also give rise to other (...) mental states, and how to define what is or is not an emotion. Introductory and concluding chapters by the editors identify key themes and controversies and compare psychological construction to other theories of emotion. (shrink)

The world of wage labour seems to have become a soulless machine, an engine of social and environmental destruction. Employees seem to be nothing but 'cogs' in this system - but is this true? Located at the intersection of political theory, moral philosophy, and business ethics, this book questions the picture of the world of work as a 'system'. Hierarchical organizations, both in the public and in the private sphere, have specific features of their own. This does not mean, however, (...) that they cannot leave room for moral responsibility, and maybe even human flourishing. Drawing on detailed empirical case studies, Lisa Herzog analyses the nature of organizations from a normative perspective: their rule-bound character, the ways in which they deal with divided knowledge, and organizational cultures and their relation to morality. The volume examines how individual agency and organizational structures would have to mesh to avoid common moral pitfalls and develops the notion of 'transformational agency', which refers to a critical, creative way of engaging with one's organizational role while remaining committed to basic moral norms. The volume goes on to explore the political and institutional changes that would be required to re-embed organizations into a just society. Whether we submit to 'the system' or try to reclaim it, Herzog argues, is a question of eminent political importance in our globalized world. (shrink)