By logic I mean the subject Aristotle started in Prior Analytics. Logic studies demonstration and everything necessary for demonstration, and also many things that come to mind in the course of such studies—including axiomatic method as described in my short “Axiomatic method”. By young I mean less than about 40 years old. By logicians I mean people who have dedicated their lives to advancing and criticizing logic: to discovering and establishing new additions and also to clarifying and correcting what has (...) or had been accepted. More specifically, my advice is for people who have already embarked on their careers: from fresh PhDs, instructors, and assistant professors to young professors looking forward to reaping the fruits of their long years of study and research. My advice is for people who have mastered logic and who want to improve their mastery. I would write something very different for students, something along the lines of my “Logic teaching in the 21st century”. Some of the things I recommend you have already done. Please do not think that my recommending something suggests that I think you have not already done it. Moreover, I am fully aware that other retired logicians are as qualified as I to give advice that will help you make the most of your remaining years as an active logician. I hope you seek their advice. I can tell you with certainty that some of their advice will conflict with mine and that some of their advice will serve you better. Temperaments vary; this advice will not be suitable for all temperaments. Be careful whose advice you accept. The lessons of my paper “Critical thinking and pedagogical license” apply here. I recommend that you consider its implications for career decisions. (shrink)

As the title of the present article shows, it highlights the three philosophically integrated areas – (1) pramāṇa-epistemology (theory of comprehensive knowledge involving both perception and inference), (2) logic (although a part of pramāṇa-epistemology, it has two modes, namely, inductive reasoning and deductive reasoning), and (3) language (or semantics, i.e. the double negation theory of meaning, which falls under inference). These are interconnected as well as overlapping within the Buddhist mainstream tradition of the process philosophy as opposed to the substantialist (...) philosophy. The same is the case with the three celebrated Buddhist thinkers – Vasubandhu, Dignāga (also spelt as Diññāṇa), and Dharmakīrti – who develop their radical and critical views focusing on these areas in historical-cum-philosophical order. It is worth noting that within the same mainstream Buddhist tradition, each one of the three thinkers picks up the problematic issues from their predecessors – from the Buddha to their immediate predecessors respectively – for their solutions against the backdrop of the two conflicting mainstream traditions – Buddhist and non-Buddhist. The central focus of these thinkers is first to identify the crucial issues, doctrinal principles, terminology, and methodology in their own ways and conceptual frameworks, which generate not only the mutual conflicts in the course of dialogues but also strengthen their positions by means of their new radical ideas, innovations, terminologies, methodologies, and doctrinal principles. As a result, the three selected areas and their crucial issues are explained, elaborated, and interpretated for better understanding. All of which are rooted in the Buddha’s path of wisdom, ethics, and liberation from the human predicament (duḥkha-nivṛtti). In this grand project of the deepest concerns, the Buddha utilized multiple strategies like understanding and controlling the problematic nature of the mind (Pāli citta, manasa) and its concomitance (Pāli cetasika, dhammā) by means of the concentrative meditation (Pāli jhāna, Sanskrit (hereafter Skt., dhyāna), cultivation of knowledge (Pāli vijjā, Skt. vidyā) and conduct/moral purity (Pāli caraṇa, Skt. ācaraṇa), destruction of afflictions/defilements (Pāli kilesa, Skt. kleśa), critical and logical thinking with valid arguments, and so on. His disciples also treat him as the possessor of valid method, arguments, meaning, practice, and purpose (Skt. pramāṇabhūta, the term used by Dignāga). He believed in the common humanity as the community of sufferers and the autonomy of every human being (Pāli attakāra), but strongly rejected the hierarchy of humanity on the basis of caste, birth, and dogmatic religious identity. For these reasons, following the Buddha and his celebrated followers like Vasubandhu, Dignāga, and Dharmakīrti, my task in this article is how to clearly and elaborately discuss the above identified issues and theories, first to understand them for myself and then logically prove the whole process of knowledge and the designed purpose through communication to those who have the intention to hear and understand the framework of common language for their benefits. I wish the readers like students and young teachers benefit from my research work. Further, since my learning of the Tibetan language is zero, but comfortable in Sanskrit and Pāli, I have been heavily dependent on three great modern thinkers who have widely written independently and also translated the Buddhist Tibetan texts, which were translated from the original Sanskrit texts now lost, into English in the areas of Buddhist epistemology, logic, and semantics. These modern scholars are Masaaki Hattori, Shoryo Katsura, and Richard Hayes. Besides them, I have also little benefitted from some other scholars who have worked in the same areas. (shrink)

This innovative text reinvigorates argumentation studies by exploring the experience of argument across cultures, introducing an anthropological perspective into the domains of rhetoric, communication, and philosophy. The Anthropology of Argument fills an important gap in contemporary argumentation theory by shifting the focus away from the purely propositional element of arguments and onto how they emerge from the experiences of peoples with diverse backgrounds, demonstrating how argumentation can be understood as a means of expression and a gathering place of ideas and (...) styles. Confronting the limitations of the Western tradition of logic and searching out the argumentative roles of place, orality, myth, narrative, and audience, it examines the nature of multi-modal argumentation. Tindale analyzes the impacts of colonialism on the field and addresses both optimistic and cynical assessments of contextual difference. The results have implications for our understanding of contemporary argumentative discourse in areas marked by deep disagreement, like politics, law and social policy. The book will interest scholars and upper-level students in communication, philosophy, argumentation theory, anthropology, rhetoric, linguistics, and cultural studies. (shrink)

The discussion concerning the patenting of academic knowledge is already closed for many people. It has become a type of credo, solemnly intoned at all levels: universities must commercially valorize the knowledge that they generate as extensively as possible.The public means that are reserved for universities can never increase at the same rate as the mounting costs for highly specialized research. So universities, if they want to work at the top level, must increasingly appeal to private resources. Universities are increasingly (...) forced to aim at contract research, sponsorships, commercialised service, the patenting of technical findings, and spin-offs: Cash for knowledge!The pressure for the unfettered commercialisation of academic knowledge does not only come from within the universities. The message also comes from the politicians and those who are committed to economic prosperity. They argue that the commercialisation of intellectual property contributes to new employment because it makes new industrial developments possible and reinforces the competitiveness of ventures. They make it seem that universities form the motor of the knowledge economy.In a country without considerable natural resources and with extremely high personnel costs, innovation is of vital importance. Few convictions are equally as expressly avowed at so many differing forums. The direction of the march seems clear.It was once different. The knowledge that was acquired, deepened, preserved, and transmitted within the universities was not for sale. In fact, its sale could present difficulties because academic knowledge has never answered to the properties of a marketable thing. Use does not deplete knowledge and if you consider it your mission to bring to light knowledge, you do not want to exclude anyone from making use of it.Academic knowledge could thus not be an object of trade, at least so long as nobody was intent on keeping that knowledge secret, and so long as nobody appealed to regulations, whereby one could restrict the legal use of that knowledge. Today neither of these strategies are taboo within academic centres. The patenting of all forms of qualifying knowledge is even encouraged.A patent assumes, on the one hand, that one makes public the knowledge upon which a technique rests, while one, on the other hand, can grant use of that technique exclusively to who one gives a licence, whether or not for a fee. This system is put forth as attractive for all parties. The researchers can keep up with technical details, and the entrepreneur can commercialise the finding. Everyone is happy.Or perhaps not? Are there reasons to be concerned that universities must increasingly submit themselves to the laws of the market? Are there arguments for evaluating academic performance differently than the performance of entrepreneurs? Must one regret that knowledge is commercialised as much as possible?The proponents of the commercial orientation point out that all kinds of new incentives will give a new impetus to the old academic system and will increase the relevance of academic research. They seem to dismiss resistance to the renewal as a nostalgic outpouring of a privileged group that used to have it too good, a group that for too long knew to retreat too safely back into a series of unworldly problems.The opponents of the economically oriented approach fear that the proper character of the academic mission will be lost. They fear that the loss of academic autonomy will make the specific function that a university fulfils within society impossible. In what sense?In our society, there is not one type of sphere, and there is not one valid set of standards, the basis upon which performances are evaluated, functions are judged, or objectives commended. There are strongly divergent spheres and each have their own specific function. The laws that apply in one sphere do not necessarily have authority in another sphere, and the standards that apply in one sort of relationship often have little or no meaning in another relationship.Each sphere recognises its own standards and answers to its own system of exchange for compensation, approval, and recognition. What applies in the sphere of law does not necessarily apply in the sphere of someone’s personal friendships, or is not applicable among family members. What applies in trade does not necessarily apply in the sphere of art.Even more, things go wrong when the autonomy of these spheres is not respected. Within the domain of art, love and friendship, monetary laws are not valid, at least in a healthy situation. That is not to say that the rules that apply within the free market would be wrong or unethical – far from it. It seems self evident that these laws are valid under the condition that they apply in the environment to which they belong, and that one respects these limits.This applies for all spheres. It would be unjust if one would apply the standards of friendship to the spheres of jurisprudence or education. Manifestly, it seems self evident not to define justice as a univocal principle that must be extended with the same consistency in every type of sphere. Rather, it is just to respect the individual character of the normative relationship that applies in the diverse spheres of life, and to prevent one sphere from colonising another.Justice assumes that one prevents the political sphere from stipulating what must be said, or concealed, within the academic sphere. Academics must answer alone to that which is expected of them within the academic sphere. Political pressure may exert no influence on this. Why cannot one say the same about economic pressure?Do we run the risk that the economic sphere will colonise the academic sphere just as the economic sphere previously colonised the sphere of media? What must one imagine in this supposed risk? In what sense should economic laws threaten the academic sphere?In the academic sphere, it is traditional to follow one’s own interests and investigate anything whatsoever without having to ask if this knowledge is useful for something or how the fruits of this research fit within the economic context. The academic search for a better understanding of everything has an unconditional character.The manner in which researchers evaluate the performance of each other seldom has to do with the economic effects that their findings have, but with their reliability, the meticulousness with which they were checked, the scrupulousness with which the sources were collected, and the honesty with which they were communicated. The function of the academic is to collect and refine knowledge, and to bring to light the truth.By doing so, universities offer a type of foot-hold within society. They make it possible that a place exists where one can be obedient to what lets itself appear most truthfully today. Nobody has to fear, at least as long as the autonomy of the academic sphere is respected, that the communication of a particular subject was rhetorically coloured in function of a commercial interest, was applied according to the wishes of the sponsor, was brought into conformity with what was agreed upon by the financiers, or answered to the demands of a patent.It is possible that the influence of the commercial sphere shall be less dramatic than pessimistic academics imagine, but nothing indicates the opposite. Today we are giving a new strategy power, and nobody knows how the magician’s apprentice will bring it off.This forms the context of the questions that we shall try to answer together this number of Ethical Perspectives, and we will restrict our discussion to patents. We are aware that the discussion about patents illuminates just one part of the problems, which have to do with the relation of the worlds of academia and commerce. But there is a reason for confining oneself to an aspect of this problematic relationship. If one were to broaden the scope of inquiry further, one would risk missing the complexity of the subject matter already covered, and be consigned to a far too general and aimless debate.We have brought together a number of specialists, jurists, ethicists, and people with practical experience with the field. They shall introduce us into the problematic, confront us with their points of view, and help to answer our questions: Are there moral limits to the patenting of academic knowledge? Is patenting always the most efficient strategy? Does not perhaps the university sell its soul if it gradually leaves itself subject to the laws of the market?We will begin by asking how in particular a university should proceed with the patenting of knowledge. Modern universities were inspired by the ideals of the Enlightenment, which was characterised by the open distribution of unselfishly pursued knowledge.The privatisation and commercialisation of knowledge would seem to conflict with this traditional vision. Jürgen Mittelstrass and Bart Pattyn provide a theoretical and historical basis for protecting the autonomy of university research from the corrupting aspects of the market economy.But, are there reasons for giving up the traditional outlook? Few or no universities have not chosen to patent discoveries, but how is one to proceed within the framework of the university, once one has obtained patent protection? Can one pursue a policy of using these protected intellectual rights to secure the fruits of knowledge for financially weaker groups, or do circumstances compel the universities to be exclusively driven by market forces?Those are the kinds of questions that Gilles Capart and Geertrui Van Overwalle of the KU Leuven will deal with.Sigrid Sterckx of the university of Ghent will answer the question: can patents be morally justified?Paul Belleflamme of the Université Catholique de Louvan La Neuve writes concerning the economic evidence of patents, and the real effect of incentives. Are there any economic facts that can demonstrate the effectiveness of patenting?Then we give the floor to Christopher May of the University of Lancaster, who looks at the question of how universities have to deal with the global information society. (shrink)

Sophists’ apologia. -/- Sophists were the first paid teachers ever. These ancient Greek enlighteners taught wisdom. Protagoras, Antiphon, Prodicus, Hippias, Lykophron are most famous ones. Sophists views and concerns made a unified encyclopedic system aimed at teaching common wisdom, virtue, management and public speaking. Of the contemporary “enlighters”, Deil Carnegy’s educational work seems to be the most similar to sophism. Sophists were the first intellectuals – their trade was to sell knowledge. They introduced a new type of teacher-student relationship – (...) the mutually beneficial communication on equal terms. They taught pupils how to think independently and how to persuade others, which was inseparably connected with the rise of democracy in the most advanced Greek polices. Sophists were the first to proclaim that all people are naturally equal. They put forward the idea of natural rights and social contract, working out the fundamentals of the present-day law. In addition, they developed the basics of philology, psychology, logic, and gave a scientific explanation to the origins of religions. They embodied definite positive ideals of their epoch. Sophistry flourished in the second half of the Vth through he first third of the IVth centuries B. C. The period coincides with the heyday of the entire Greek history – the so called Greek Miracle epoch. Sophists expressed some present-day concepts of Ancient Greek ideology and mentality, characteristic of its Golden Age times. The Ancient Athens of the times of Periclus were similar to the Florence of Renaissance as to the type of social structure. That is why (?) the art of eloquence (public speaking) was highly respected in Florence. The two cities had a lot of features of the present-day capitalist society, which was due to their role as the main centres of industry of their “worlds-economies”. During the subsequent Hellenic period, the Old Order was restored, based on the feudal rent recipients’ rule. The degradation of society resulted in the decline of sophistry. Sophistry represents the highest point in the evolution of Greek philosophy. It is also the most prominent school as to the novelty of its ideas. That was owing to the common propensity for innovation typical of Periclus’ Golden Age, which in its turn resulted from the establishment of the individualistic and rationalistic thinking similar to present-day mentality. Among other aspects, close attention was paid to ethnic issues; some humanistic ideas such as Master and Servant ethics and Enlightment as the primary condition of man’s freedom, received scientific grounding. The genre of philosophical dialogue was developed, as well as the rationalistic scientific gnoceology, aimed at consistently opposing any religion. Dialectics, the most outstanding achievement of the Antiquity, was also worked out by the sophists. Zeno of Helleas was one of the sophists. Democrites’ ideas were, too, quite close to dialectics. Socrates’ contemporaries regarded him ironically, as shown, for example, in the Aristophanes’ comedy “Clouds”. Nevertheless, this scholar can still be referred to as a sophist, although of somewhat weird personality. Socrates’ popularity, which came later, should be attributed to the fact that he was the first philosopher ever to have been sentenced and executed by law, rather than to any valuable scientific contributions. Sophistry as such, rather than Socrates, marks the line between pre-Socratic and post- Socratic schools. Plato, with the exception of his latest works, is considered to belong to the same philosophical school. Specifically, there are valid reasons to believe that he was paid fees by his disciples. In Plato’s Dialogues, all points of view will be proven and then disproved, so that an integral philosophical system is hard to observe. Plato’s “Idealism” is but one of the many possible theories. His ideal philosophy is a high-minded argument of wise men. As late as towards the end of his life, Plato betrayed the ideals of sophistry, turning into the world’s first proponent of totalitarianism. Sophistry is Greek classical literature. Later on, philosophy, as well as the entire Greek civilization, started to fall into decline. Over 500 subsequent years, Hellenistic-Roman scholars never came up with anything novel. The entire process of antique philosophical evolution can be subdivided into the following six stages: Phoenician (IX–VIIth centuries B. C.), archaic (VIth – the first half of IVth century B. C., classic (the epoch of sophistry: the second half of the Vth through the first decades of the IIIrd centuries B. C.), late antique (middle of the IIIrd – first decades of the VI th centuries B.C.) The fact that early in the VIth century B. C. sophistry was rejected in Athens, has a lot to do with the consequences of their defeat in Peloponnesian war, a social catastrophe. Ever since, the prevalent part of the criticism of sophistry is a criticism of sophists’ immoral ways of life and personalities, rather than the essentials of their philosophy. For instance, Aristotle’s criticism primarily concerns their pragmatism and tendency to make a profit out of teaching. However, Aristotle himself taught his disciples along similar lines, showing them how to “be able to prove both opposites”. It was Aristotle who summed up sophists’ century-long elaborations. The traditional modern interpretation of sophists as shown in Plato’s dialogues appears to be groundless. The truth of the matter is that Plato regards sophists as more serious philosophers than Socrates was. It becomes especially clear in the dialogue titled “Protagoras”, which shows the latter as gaining an undoubted victory over Socrates. Generally speaking, Plato’s works never regard sophists as weak or worthless opponents. A common opinion as to the essence of sophists’, in particular, Protagoras’s philosophy, has hitherto not been worked out. Many researchers renounce the very existence of any specific philosophical position in sophistry. The term “relativism” itself now has a bad name. However, it should be borne in mind that Protagoras doctrine emerged as a result of an attempt to get out of the ontological dead-end to which the entire Greek natural philosophy had come. To this purpose, he employed Anaxagoras’s idea about everything comprising everything, whereupon he built his physical-ontological theory, and Zeno of Helleas’s concept that all objects are such and different at the same time in the same respect. According to Protagoras’s philosophy, every object does not only seem, but is different from every other object, including human beings. Therefore, every person is his or her own measure of all other entities. The objective reality is the Ego’s relations with the outer world. Every object’s essence is defined through its interaction with ourselves. Nothing remains stagnant – every existence already contains non-existence, and vice-versa. However, the relativity of being is not to be regarded as absolute. That means, that relatively stable and therefore relatively cognizable entities do exist, among them the words we say. Doubt is not considered absolute by relativists either, which differentiates them from skeptics and agnostics. They dare to believe. Uncertainty is Godly – here, Protagoras becomes very close to the concept of apathetic theology. Gorgius shared Protagoras’s views and tried to prove them applying the same method as Zeno applied when upholding Parmenidis’s philosophy. He argued that if one accepts the opposite point of view and agrees that nothing can exist and not exist at the same time, one is bound to come to an the absurd conclusion that nothing is cognizable and nothing exists. To prove that there is a universal contradiction within the Existence itself, Protagoras and his followers in their turn put forward a number of special logical arguments, called rules of contraries, or sophisms. The most well-known of them is the Euathle’s sophism, which proves that an object can be such and different at the same time in the same respect. Generally speaking, all relationships of any entity are extraneous. The idea that all entities, including concepts, exist and do not exist at the same time, was also accepted by Plato. It should be stressed, that Plato’s philosophy as a whole is relativists’ greatest achievement. In his dispute against relativism, Aristotle put forward the main concepts of his ontology: the existence falls into the existence in possibility and the existence in reality, or substance and accidence – the ever changing “sublunary” world and the stable world of divine heavenly bodies. This division made his system self-contradictory to the point of absurd. Aristotle quite realized, that the direct disproof of relativism is hardly possible, which fact makes his criticism a mere tautology. It is very indicative in this respect that materialists, idealists and even skeptical agnostics applied the same arguments do disprove relativism. That demonstrates that the inner contradiction between any forms of “absolutism” and relativism is the most fundamental philosophical problem. Relativist ideas were repeatedly renewed throughout history, provided the social conditions were favourable. In variations, the concepts were advanced by Tzuan Tsi and ancient Chinese sophists, apostle Paul, Nicolas of Cusa, Galileo, Rene Descartes, G. Berkley, D. Hume, Ch. S. Pierce, E. Mach, A. Bogdanov, F. de Saussure, N. Bore, P. Feuerabend, U. Quain and others. However, no consistent relativist ontological system was developed after Protagoras. Meanwhile, a valid relativist theory could provide a clue to a fuller and more adequate general physical concept of the world, and to a deeper understanding of quantum mechanics. -/- Relativism as an ontological system of beliefs. -/- The relativist principle of relativity of all that exists is fundamental for the entire system of philosophy. Absolutely everything exists, but, at the same time, no existence is absolute. Anything is possible, but those entities only exist for us with which we interact this way or another, i. e., reality is interaction, “I interact – hence, I exist”. However, an overly close relationship between entities leads to non-existence – in other words, there is a certain existential optimum. For all of us, information, or perceptible heterogeneities, is real. Each of us is the center of a definite system of interactions with the world. If God is an endless Possibility, then the World is but the man’s dialogue with God. However, the ties that bind us with the world are of some definite kind, which predetermines our reality. The principle of relativity constrains itself, as any relativity is relative. On the one hand, that calls forth the Evil – caused by our own weakness. On the other hand, it makes our world relatively stable and cognizable. Generally speaking, the world is what we are. Everybody has an own Universe, but since people are fairly similar, our universes can be regarded as one Universe with common laws and regulations. It is possible for us to change the degree of objects’ existence in relation to ourselves and one another. It is equally important, though, to remain ourselves (keep following our “warrior’s path”). Since everything exists and no existence is absolute, the process of cognition should involve a criticism of everything but never a complete rebuttal of anything. The criterion of verity for any theory then is in its capacity to build itself upon a bigger number of diverse statements than in any other theory. Theoretically, all philosophies should ideally be complementary. The question of what in fact happened is meaningless unless we specify the “we”, the “where” and the “when”. The past can only exist as part of the present. When we change, our past undergoes corresponding qualitative objective changes, all of which are irreversible. The contemporary physics regards all objects of the Universe as existing for one another, which results in absurd conclusions. In fact, only what we interact with, exists. The so called “speed of light in vacuum” c is the maximum speed of direct interaction and direct exchange of signals. Specifically, at the oncoming speed c with a significant blue parallax the gamma-quantum is unable to interact with the matter. When this speed is reached, the gravitational mass of objects in relation to one another becomes equal to zero (imaginary), whereas their inertial mass equals infinity. Further acceleration will bring us into an entirely different Universe. That means that the Universe is an open system, which fact destroys all present-day cosmological models. Anything is possible in this world. Our reality is magic. Every bit of space contains a potentially limitless number of bits of other, however virtual, universes, as well as an infinite number of particles, which are still virtual for us (as postulated by quantum mechanics). In other words, there exists an infinity of different realities. With all the above in mind, the different levels of entities’ existence, in particular, of Life and Reason, should be taken into consideration. For example, to which extent a live system exists in relation to the inanimate forms of being is very indefinite, as what life is has to be determined by living creatures. An even greater compass of levels of existence can be brought about through interaction – that is the core idea of Godel’s theorem. As a result, the range of forms of existence tends towards infinity – the evolution of matter through super-intelligence will bring us up to God’s heights. A more generalized mathematical model of the physical world, including a universal operator of the co-existence of objects, can be developed based on the above considerations. The bonds between objects become weaker owing to 1) a high speed, 2) acceleration, 3) rotation, 4) strong gravity, 5) strong fields of other kinds, 6) the difference of levels of existence , 7) phase shifts. Yet, there always is an existential optimum. Such mathematical model is to operate certain non-transitive algebras. Relativist ontology assumes that the notion of “temperature” is relative, thus making it possible to ignore the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In its turn, that will allow for phase shifts. A perpetual motion machine of the second type will become a reality. Rotation could presumably be used to increase inertial and decrease gravitational mass, slowing down the time. An experimental research could shed light on the mentioned effects. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name for (...) threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ministers of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal AuthorityThomas J. BushlackMinisters of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal Authority Jean Porter Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010. 368 pp. $30.00Jean Porter’s most recent book is the fruit of her participation with the Emory Center for the Study of Law and Religion since 2005. In this project she undertakes two interrelated tasks. First, she provides compelling (...) reasons for Christian ethicists to engage in questions internal to the discipline of jurisprudence. Second, she demonstrates how a natural law theory grounded in the work of the medieval scholastics can address some of the questions of contemporary jurisprudence. Readers familiar with her previous work will be delighted that she has extended her constructive account of natural law into the realms of jurisprudence and in the process also engages cultural psychology, rhetoric, political philosophy, and international law.Porter begins her engagement with jurisprudence in chapter 1 by noting a paradox recognized by many legal philosophers in the Anglophone world. Legal systems, as they have developed in the West, are characterized by a high degree of autonomy and independence vis-à-vis other social dynamics such as politics or morality. At the same time, however, no legal system can function in complete isolation from considerations of politics and morality. How can we account for the paradoxical autonomy of legal authority? Porter suggests that a scholastic account of natural law can provide a rationally defensible solution to this paradox by developing an account of natural authority (in chapter 2).The force of Porter’s argument rests on the capacity of her account to justify political and legal authority as a natural expression of the authority that any community exercises vis-à-vis its individual members. A community’s authority over its members is justified on the grounds that in prescribing or prohibiting particular acts, it must appeal to claims that could potentially be recognized as justifiable by any rational member of that community. The concept that creates this important hinge between an individual’s good and the good of the community is, of course, the common good. Scholars interested in the concept of the common good will find that her reflection upon it is both rooted deeply in the Christian tradition and applied with fresh insight to the realm of politics (chapter 3) and law (chapter 4). [End Page 210]One potential objection to Porter’s account of natural law could arise in response to her insistence that natural inclinations “underdetermine” the normative content of a natural law morality, leaving her account open to charges of cultural relativism or of being merely descriptive as opposed to normative. However, in this work she is able to turn these criticisms into assets for her account of natural law. She shows (successfully, I believe) how her theory of natural law is able to account for the plurality of moral, political, and legal systems that exist in our world today while still providing normative grounds for critiquing existing social systems. And in chapter 5 she demonstrates how nonderogable, jus cogens principles can be developed from her account of natural law and applied to the field of international law and human rights. In fact, the final section left me hungry for further development of her insights regarding the relationship between natural and international law.This book is written with the same rigorous logic and careful research that has made Porter one of the leading scholars of natural law theory in the field today. As such, this book would be suitable for academics in a wide variety of fields, such as law, political theory, and of course Christian ethics, or for advanced graduate students. It is most certainly a groundbreaking work for demonstrating how a theological account of natural law can engage in constructive dialogue with legal theory and politics at both a theoretical and a practical level.Thomas J. BushlackUniversity of St. ThomasCopyright © 2012 The Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Empirical research in bioethics has developed rapidly over the past decade, but has largely eschewed the use of technology-driven methodologies. We propose “design bioethics” as an area of conjoined theoretical and methodological innovation in the field, working across bioethics, health sciences and human-centred technological design. We demonstrate the potential of digital tools, particularly purpose-built digital games, to align with theoretical frameworks in bioethics for empirical research, integrating context, narrative and embodiment in moral decision-making. Purpose-built digital tools can engender situated (...) engagement with bioethical questions; can achieve such engagement at scale; and can access groups traditionally under-represented in bioethics research and theory. If developed and used with appropriate rigor, tools motivated by “design bioethics” could offer unique insights into new and familiar normative and empirical issues in the field. (shrink)

The ethical principle of ‘respect for persons’ in clinical research has traditionally focused on protecting individuals’ autonomy rights, but respect for participants also includes broader, although less well understood, ethical obligations to regard individuals’ rights, needs, interests and feelings. However, there is little empirical evidence about how to effectively convey respect to potential and current participants. To fill this gap, we conducted exploratory, qualitative interviews with participants in a clinical genomics implementation study. We interviewed 40 participants in English or Spanish (...) about their experiences with respect in the study and perceptions of how researchers in a hypothetical observational study could convey respect or a lack thereof. Most interviewees were female, identified as Hispanic/Latino or non-Hispanic white, reported annual household income under US$60 000 and did not have a Bachelor’s degree ; 30% had limited health literacy. We identified four key domains for demonstrating respect: personal study team interactions, with an emphasis on empathy, appreciation and non-judgment; study communication processes, including following up and sharing results with participants; inclusion, particularly ensuring materials are understandable and procedures are accessible; and consent and authorisation, including providing a neutral informed consent and keeping promises regarding privacy protections. While the experience of respect is inherently subjective, these findings highlight four key domains that may meaningfully demonstrate respect to potential and current research participants. Further empirical and normative work is needed to substantiate these domains and evaluate how best to incorporate them into the practice of research. (shrink)

Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning explores the links between Humanities and the Social Sciences, with theories including, decision and action theory as well as cognitive sciences, economy, sociology, law, logic, and philosophy of sciences. It’s two main ambitions are to develop a theoretical framework that will encourage and enable interaction between disciplines as well as to federate the Humanities and Social Sciences around their main contributions to public life: using informed debate, lucid decision-making and action based on reflection. The series welcomes (...) research from the analytic and continental traditions, putting emphasis on four main focus areas: • Argumentation models and studies • Communication, language and techniques of argumentation • Reception of arguments, persuasion and the impact of power • Diachronic transformations of argumentative practices The Series is developed in partnership with the Maison Européenne des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société (MESHS) at Nord - Pas de Calais and the UMR-STL: 8163 (CNRS). Proposals should include : • A short synopsis of the work or the introduction chapter • The proposed Table of Contents • The CV of the lead author(s) • If available: one sample chapter We aim to make a first decision within 1 month of submission. In case of a positive first decision the work will be provisionally contracted: the final decision about publication will depend upon the result of the anonymous peer review of the complete manuscript. We aim to have the complete work peer-reviewed within 3 months of submission. The series discourages the submission of manuscripts that contain reprints of previous published material and/or manuscripts that are below 150 pages / 85,000 words. (shrink)

In order for higher education to provide students with up-to-date knowledge and relevant skillsets for their continued learning, it needs to keep pace with innovative pedagogy and cognitive sciences to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all. An adequate implementation of flipped learning, which can offer undergraduates education that is appropriate in a knowledge-based society, requires moving from traditional educational models to innovative pedagogy integrated with a playful learning environment (PLE) supported by information and communications technologies (ICTs). In this (...) paper, based on the design-based research, a task-driven instructional approach in the flipped classroom (TDIAFC) was designed and implemented for two groups of participants in an undergraduate hands-on making course in a PLE. One group consisting of 81 students as the experimental group (EG) received flipped learning instruction, and another group of 79 students as the control group (CG) received lecture-centered instruction. The EG students experienced a three-round study, with results from the first round informing the customized design of the second round and the second round informing the third round. The experimental results demonstrated that students in the EG got higher scores of summative tests and final scores than those in the CG. In particular, students’ learning performance in three domains (i.e., cognitive, affective, and psychomotor) differ significantly between the two groups. (shrink)

This essay proposes a design perspective on argumentation, intended as complementary to empirical and critical scholarship. In any substantive domain, design can provide insights that differ from those provided by scientific or humanistic perspectives. For argumentation, the key advantage of a design perspective is the recognition that humanity’s natural capacity for reason and reasonableness can be extended through inventions that improve on unaided human intellect. Historically, these inventions have fallen into three broad classes: logical systems, scientific methods, and disputation frameworks. (...) Behind each such invention is a specifiable “design hypothesis”: an idea about how to decrease error or how to increase the quality of outcomes from reasoning. As problems in contemporary argumentation practice become more complex, design thinking rises in relevance and importance. A design research agenda in argumentation would focus on theorizing design innovations and on evaluating design hypotheses. (shrink)

Multimodal communication research focuses on how different means of signalling coordinate to communicate effectively. This line of research is traditionally influenced by fields such as cognitive and neuroscience, human-computer interaction, and linguistics. With new technologies becoming available in fields such as natural language processing and computer vision, the field can increasingly avail itself of new ways of analyzing and understanding multimodal communication. As a result, there is a general hope that multimodal research may be at the “precipice of greatness” due (...) to technological advances in computer science and resulting extended empirical coverage. However, for this to come about there must be sufficient guidance on key (theoretical) needs of innovation in the field of multimodal communication. Absent such guidance, the research focus of computer scientists might increasingly diverge from crucial issues in multimodal communication. With this paper, we want to further promote interaction between these fields, which may enormously benefit both communities. The multimodal research community (represented here by a consortium of researchers from the Visual Communication [ViCom] Priority Programme) can engage in the innovation by clearly stating which technological tools are needed to make progress in the field of multimodal communication. In this article, we try to facilitate the establishment of a much needed common ground on feasible expectations (e.g., in terms of terminology and measures to be able to train machine learning algorithms) and to critically reflect possibly idle hopes for technical advances, informed by recent successes and challenges in computer science, social signal processing, and related domains. (shrink)

This book uses the example of informed consent guidelines for international research on human subjects to demonstrate how a philosophical analysis can assist in understanding how underlying concepts affect public policy; how and why such policies are exclusionary; and what methodology can be used to remedy injustices in public policy and practice. Epidemics, such as AIDS, have resulted in an increase in medical research in less developed countries. In an attempt to be more globally applicable, current international guidelines for research (...) on human subjects have attempted to acknowledge the importance of community. This book explains how these attempts fail to adequately acknowledge the importance community has for many people in less developed countries, and how these guidelines fail to attend to constraints to autonomy that oftentimes get magnified once community is involved in the informed consent process. The book further explains how these problems can be traced to a mistaken underlying notion of autonomy and what policymakers can do to remedy these problems . (shrink)

This volume investigates Eric Weil’s innovative conceptualization of the place of violence in the philosophical tradition with a focus on violence’s relationship to language and to discourse. Weil presents violence as the central philosophical problem. According to this reading, the western philosophical tradition commonly conceptualizes violence as an expression of error or as a consequence of the weakness of will. However, by doing so, it misses something essential about the role that violence plays in our conceptual development as well as (...) the place violence holds in our discursive practices. The author draws comparisons between Weil’s work and that of Robert Brandom. Brandom’s inferentialism creates a sophisticated program at the junction of pragmatics and semantics, philosophy of language, logic, and philosophy of mind. The monograph builds on these insights in order to show how an inferentialist reading of Eric Weil is fruitful for both Weilian studies and for inferentialism. This volume will notably be of interest to scholars in philosophy, argumentation theory, and communication studies. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo assess the scientific and ethical basis for clinical innovation in psychopharmacology.MethodsWe conducted a literature review, utilizing MEDLINE search and bibliographic cross-referencing, and historical evidence regarding the discovery and development of new medications in psychiatry. Clinical innovation was defined as use of treatments in a clinical setting which have not been well-proven in a research setting.ResultsEmpirical data regarding the impact of clinical innovation in psychopharmacology are lacking. A conceptual and historical assessment of this topic highlights the ethical (...) and scientific importance of clinical innovation. Ethically, it touches a borderline that, in our judgment, is not adequately framed in contemporary mainstream bioethics. Currently, research is viewed as not at all benefiting the patients who participate in it, while clinical care is viewed as being solely for the benefit of patients. Clinical innovation straddles these two worlds, uncomfortably at times. While many argue that clinical innovation should either be avoided or folded into research projects, we argue that clinical innovation is necessary for progress in psychopharmacology research, and that it can prosper best when guided by the following ethical principles: 1.) The treatment should be based on a viable hypothesis. 2.) Whenever possible, one's clinical observations should be reported so they can be evaluated by the scientific community. 3.) One should be willing to report unexpected observations of drug effects. 4.) A high standard of informed consent should be maintained. Again, this proposal goes against the standard view among bioethicists that research and clinical care are categorically opposed activities, as made clear by the either-or dichotomy of the Belmont Report on bioethics. This approach has so polarized our profession into clinicians versus researchers, that many clinicians will not apply new knowledge produced by clinical research until it eventually gets incorporated into formal treatment guidelines, while researchers have little to guide them as to what kind of new knowledge it is most important to provide.SummaryClinical innovation brings out the ambiguities in our current ethical conceptions of research versus clinical care. Yet, historically, clinical innovation has been an important contributor to progress in psychopharmacology. We argue that clinical innovation should not be discouraged, but rather it should occur under certain ethical conditions."Almost everyone can and should do research...because almost everyone has a unique observational opportunity at some time in his life which he has an obligation to record....If one considers the fundamental operations or methods of research, one immediately realizes that most people do research at some time or another, except that they do not call their activity by that name. There are seven operations....In simple language they are counting, sorting, measuring, comparing, nature-study, guess testing, and reappraisal....Guess testing is of course what most people think of when the word research is mentioned; except that it is bad manners to call a guess a guess. It should be called an hypothesis. Let us make one plea. Guessing becomes merely a game unless it is done in the context of a plan for action. It is a waste of time elaborating untestable hypotheses [1]."John Cade. (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu was the most influential sociologist of the later 20th Century. The framework he developed continues to inspire countless researchers across the globe and provokes intense debates long after his death. Novel concepts, innovative applications and countless elaborations spring up every day, bulking out and shaping a distinct, if not always entirely consistent, body of work that might be characterised as a recognisable tradition. For those coming to Bourdieu for the first time, therefore, and interested in using his ideas (...) in their own research, it no longer makes sense to confine oneself to the ideas of the man himself. An overview of the varied ways his concepts and arguments have been deepened and updated to make sense of new times or to fill certain gaps, and how insights on seemingly disconnected topics weave together into a bigger picture, is not just desirable but essential. Bourdieu and After aims to provide exactly this overview. Working closely with Bourdieu's own writings, but also covering a wide range of research and literature inspired by him, it aims to guide the reader through the key principles, the major and minor concepts and the concrete findings of Bourdieusian sociology as clearly and comprehensively as possible. It explains the difficult and often overlooked philosophical foundations, walks through the logic of famous terms like 'field', 'habitus' and 'capital' and demonstrates how they have been or can be used to provide powerful accounts of colonialism, the emergence of nation states and the rise of global social relations. It covers topics that Bourdieu was famous for analysing, like class and educational inequality, yet also traverses subjects that he said little on but which others influenced by him have tackled in depth, such as ethnicity, sexuality and family. Along the way Atkinson seeks to undermine some of the common criticisms levelled at Bourdieu while identifying remaining gaps and limitations. Rather than simply recognise the problems, however, Atkinson proposes possible solutions too - solutions that are facilitated, he argues, by characterising Bourdieusian sociology as what he calls 'relational phenomenology'. (shrink)

The study of social, ethical, and political issues from a naturalistic perspective has been pervasive in social sciences and the humanities in the last decades. This articulation of empirical research with philosophical and normative reflection is increasingly getting attention in academic circles and the public spheres, given the prevalence of urgent needs and challenges that society is facing on a global scale. The contemporary world is full of challenges or what some philosophers have called ‘existential risks’ to humanity. Nuclear wars, (...) natural and/or engineered pandemics, climate change, global totalitarianism, and emergent technologies, are some of the challenges mentioned by many authors devoted to the study of long-term potential risks for the survival of the human species. However, while there are many reasons to be a pessimist about the future of humanity, there is also a lot of ink wasted in showing that the world today is far better than we had in the past and also that there have been many instances of social and moral progress in the last centuries. Some authors have even claimed that “we have made more progress over the last 100 years than in the first 100,000”. According to ‘our world in data’, some of the most relevant advances of humanity in the last centuries have to do with the reduction of poverty and/or inequality, better health and security, the decline of violence and war, and the development of democracy and institutional mechanisms to guarantee individual freedom and rights. Yet, there is a more concrete concern that our world faces nowadays, and requires a particularly detailed analysis. In a few words, the advance in information and communication technologies, the huge volume of people migration because of prevalent instances of global inequality, and the reality of an interconnected world that just mirrors an extensive history of massive human intergroup relations open the question about the feasibility of social and moral progress in the contexts of diverse, multicultural, and unequal societies. This makes it crucial to reflect not only on whether human societies may keep advancing on a path of social progress, but how this can be achieved by addressing the challenges of inequality and potential intergroup conflict. This concern closely relates to the further consolidation of democratic values and the achievement of a more generalized consideration of the equal moral value of human individuals far from group, ethnic, or collective distinctions. This vision of progress follows the moral convictions that have been considered right and worthy to be pursued by most ethical theories explored by philosophers and social scientists so far. This work aims to contribute to the study of the mechanisms and feasibility of social and moral progress grounded on the precept of human equality and is guided by the idea that social and moral progress in a plural world requires the accomplishment of a more democratic and tolerant society. These forms of progress have already been defined by philosophers Allen Buchanan and Russel Powell as inclusivist forms of moral progress. According to these authors, inclusivist moral progress is featured by the transformation of moral judgments, motivations, and norms guided by the rejection of “group-based restrictions on moral standing and moral status” (2018). The work of Buchanan and Powell is fundamental for the argumentation developed in this work since they have pioneered a more complex debate in the field of evolutionary social sciences and philosophical anthropology. In brief, these authors have inquired how human nature, conceptualized by the advances in evolutionary thinking and the empirical sciences, is related to our moral convictions and the possibilities that we have to establish certain forms of social and moral progress. The work of Buchanan and Powell contributes to the debate on moral progress by incorporating empirically-informed concepts and arguments. With this objective in mind, they develop their discussion around a generalized tension between exclusivist and inclusivist forms of moral progress. This tension revolves around the question of whether and to what extent human moral concerns, motivations, and norms, are limited or bounded by social identities, group thinking, or collective values. This question is at the center of this work. In other words, I aim to answer whether and to what extent the nature of our social and moral cognition hinders or enables the development of inclusivist forms of morality and moral progress. As I mentioned so far, the distinction between exclusivist and inclusivist forms of morality has a practical implication and facilitates the reflection on the mechanisms and feasibility of concrete forms of progress based on the precept of human equality, which is the road to progress that we should follow according to most ethical theories. The distinction between exclusivist and inclusivist morality is not used here as a form of summarizing highly divergent descriptive approaches to morality, but as a way to address the practical implications of morality research, particularly around the question of the feasibility of social forms of progress based on the precept of equality and tolerance. My objective then has less to do with offering a conceptualization of human morality or with the proposition of a new ethical perspective. Instead, I aim to identify, from an empirically informed perspective, what enables the achievement of egalitarian forms of social progress, to subsequently offer a normative reflection about what we should do if we want to accomplish such inclusivist forms of progress. This task is of great relevance, having in mind that some theoretical proposals on the matter have claimed that human prosocial behavior and morality are constrained by exclusivist fixed tendencies as a product of our evolutionary history. According to these views, human morality is a group-centered cognitive and behavioral expression that has severe limits in its scope and extent, which hinders in the end the emergence of inclusivist forms of moral concerns and behaviors. These claims align with the philosophical intuition about the ‘dissociation of empathy’, or the fact that human individuals tend to express empathy and sympathy preferably for members of their group whereas their empathic and moral concern and recognition for outgroup individuals tend to be reduced or eliminated in real-life social interactions. Multiple theorists have expressed, however, that these assumptions are wrong for empirical and philosophical reasons, which results in a serious challenge to the conception of human morality as exclusivist by nature. Furthermore, simple intuition and practical experience constantly show us that human individuals can develop and endorse a broad spectrum of moral considerations and adopt an arguably inclusivist stance concerning the kind of persons or agents that deserve moral concern. Moreover, and adopting a historical perspective, the expansion of cultural and commercial exchanges, the consolidation of democracy, the development of welfare states, or the emergence of institutions based on the concept of universal human rights, have partially driven human progress based on the impartial concern for the well-being of persons. These historical instances of cultural evolution and institutional design have shown that it is feasible to promote behaviors and attitudes grounded in impersonal prosocial and inclusivist principles. This optimistic perspective, however, still begs the question of the exact relationship between social, cultural, and historical contexts, and the emergence of certain behavioral expressions of inclusivist morality. This is crucial since a great number of human individuals around the world still do not make part of these instances of social progress, and some authors have suggested that such instances of social and moral progress are particularly favored by the contexts of the WEIRD world, that is the world of Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies. Some of these approaches consider moral inclusivity a ‘luxury good’ and follow the ‘dependency thesis’ according to which the expression of moral inclusivity depends on the presence of very concrete material conditions that trigger inclusivist and impersonal prosocial tendencies that human beings are not able to express in threatening contexts without physical security. This thesis is problematic for various reasons and has led to incomplete explanations about the enabling and causal factors of inclusivist moral progress, as well as unsatisfactory suggestions about what we should do to foster the accomplishment of more generalized instances of progress based on inclusivist concerns. In an attempt to contribute to this debate, the main objective of this thesis is to offer an alternative proposal about the nature of human morality and a more detailed reflection on what we should do if we want to further accomplish such instances of progress. More precisely, this work adopts a particular developmental and constructivist vision of human morality to answer the question of how feasible it is to reach generalized forms of social progress based on the precepts of moral inclusivity. Furthermore, it offers some ideas about what are the most adequate and favorable conditions to foster such progress both at the individual and the collective level. At this point, a preliminary clarification of some starting points is necessary. In the first place, and contrary to what other authors have proposed when debating moral progress from an empirically-based approach, my perspective adopts a radical developmental and constructivist perspective, following particularly the conceptual and empirical ideas of the social-domain theory in moral psychology. From this perspective, morality is a domain of normative and social knowledge that develops and emerges in human interactions. Moral concerns, judgments, and norms are not only the result of the expression of innate adaptive intuitions, nor the product of social conformity and a simple process of mirroring the normativity that communities have established to organize their social life. Human individuals, instead, construct moral concerns and judgments during their situated interactions. More specifically, the constructivist tradition claims that we need to research how moral concerns, judgments, and reasons emerge in social interactions and how human beings construct the content of their moral knowledge in the first place. Based on these ideas, morality is defined here as the result of a constructive process through which human individuals, by the means of constant interactions on a background of mutual respect and recognition, develop evaluative concerns about how we ought to treat others, and how to ‘care’ and ‘respect’ others’ well-being, needs, and vulnerabilities. This developmental-constructivist theory of human psychology contributes to an alternative understanding of the origins of moral variability and informs a very particular normative stance about the most desirable contexts needed for the urgent accomplishment of inclusivist forms of morality in contemporary societies. This is so given that the very same definition of morality adopted presupposes the feature of inclusivity. The main objective of this work is then to argue, based on a developmental perspective, what are the most favorable conditions to foster the development of moral inclusivity and what we should do to accomplish concrete instances of moral progress that truly help us to overcome our most urgent moral challenges. The whole thesis is organized as follows. In part I, I show how received visions about human social evolution have informed conceptions of morality as an adaptive function evolved to solve the challenges of cooperative life. Based on these assumptions, some theories argue that human morality is limited by the boundaries of group thinking, and always obeys the mandates of collective interests and the will of the majority. However, this conception has problematic implications from a normative and ethical perspective. The aim of Chapter 1 is to present this introductory debate in detail. In chapter 2, I consider a relevant amount of scientific evidence that helps to consolidate a more optimistic and inclusivist perspective about the starting conditions of human prosocial behavior. Later, I will summarize some ideas offered to explain the possible evolutionary mechanisms that led to the consolidation of these inclusivist capacities. However, I will also show how evolutionary theories that share the same adaptationist foundations but initially seem relevant to explain the feasibility of moral inclusivity, result incomplete when considering the complexity of moral behavior and its ethical implications. Part II is devoted to presenting a developmental alternative to the adaptationist versions around the starting conditions of morality. In this section, I first summarize the epistemological, conceptual, and empirical basis of a constructivist perspective already proposed by several authors in the last decades. This is the goal of chapter 3. More precisely, I adopt the conceptualization of morality established by the social-domain theory school and clarify its conception of the situated development of moral concerns, motivations, and norms. All these ideas are essential for my argumentation on the feasibility of inclusivist moral progress offered later. Chapter 4 provides a more detailed idea of constructivist thinking about moral development, by analyzing one particular dimension: the development of moral concerns for fairness and the sense of justice in distributive dilemmas. In Part III, I assume a constructivist perspective on morality to contribute to the philosophy of moral progress. In particular, I discuss the implications of such a perspective for the conceptualization of human moral nature and discuss what are the most favorable conditions for moral inclusivity to emerge. Answering that question is of enormous relevance since favoring the transition of human societies towards more inclusivist forms of moral concern and behavior supposes a more generalized accomplishment of our most urgent moral convictions. Previous developmental or culturally-sensible attempts to explore this issue are already on the market. As mentioned before, most authors have approached the topic by situating the cultural evolution and development of (inclusivist) moral progress in the WEIRD world. For instance, some of these authors claim that very concrete material conditions (mostly present in the Western World) have been necessary for triggering inclusivist and impersonal prosocial tendencies that human beings are not able to express in threatening contexts without physical security. Despite their interest in explaining inclusivist morality and the feasibility of inclusivist forms of progress following a naturalistic and culturally situated approach, these theories are problematic for two main reasons. In the first place, most of the authors that explain moral progress tend to focus exclusively on the consolidation of liberal values in the Western world and the underlying adoption of laws, social-epistemic practices, and public narratives about tolerance and inclusivity, as unequivocal signs of inclusivist morality. Nevertheless, there is an enormous distance between the institutional and public support of inclusivist moral values or the construction of public images of tolerance and inclusivity, and the real materialization of impersonal moralities in situated social interactions. Secondly, the variability of human moral behavior is far bigger than most of the theories in moral psychology and moral progress tend to assume. Accordingly, inclusivist and exclusivist forms of morality may develop simultaneously in similar or divergent geographical and socio-ecological environments, including those with harsh conditions such as competition for scarce resources, potential intergroup conflict, and risks of disease transmission. In addition, harsh environmental conditions are usually present in almost all societies around the globe, and the presence of socio-ecological conditions such as physical security and prosperity, predominant in highly resourced populations, do not prevent the existence of exclusivist moral tendencies. My model explores a different perspective on the relationships between cultural, institutional, and historical factors, and the situated development of human morality. This supposes a clear distinction from previous approaches to the matter since it offers a different view on what we should do to pursue further instances of inclusivist social progress. In the fifth chapter, I first analyze the proposals of some defenders of the ‘dependency’ theory. The attention is focused on the ‘Evolutionary Developmental Model’ proposed by Buchanan and Powell (2018). Based on a critique of this approach, I will argue that to explain the evolution and development of human morality in its multiple manifestations, it is essential to put focus on social interactions. This also involves a different perspective on human-environment relations that in line with a constructivist worldview makes an innovative contribution to the philosophy of moral behavior and moral progress. Later, in the sixth chapter, I will define my alternative relational view of inclusivist morality and I will offer my view on how to establish favorable conditions that make inclusivist morality possible. Complementing the constructivist approach, my conception is based on the essential role of equality and individuality and on how moral inclusivity is favored if moral concerns do not develop driven by the accomplishment of group-centered, binding, and communitarian concerns and values. In brief, my relational model suggests that the accomplishment of moral inclusivity not only depends on the overall achievement of certain levels of physical security or economic prosperity. Instead, its development is favored by transforming the interactional contexts in which moral concerns towards autonomy and individuality emerge. In arguing so, I will need to start with a critique of contemporary situated and embodied approaches in ethics. Then, I will show how societies guided by the accomplishment of group-centered values of power, dominance, and relational inequality tend to express exclusivist moral behaviors, while individualistic societies tend to be more inclusivist. Starting from this diagnosis, my final attempt is then to reflect on which are the best conditions for the moral valuation of individuality to emerge and what we should do to promote the accomplishment of moral inclusivity at the societal level. (shrink)

Studies focusing on debate as pedagogy have been gaining attention recently. However, most research has employed policy debate, which is a traditional debate style. Parliamentary debate, which is an impromptu debate style, has been recently gaining popularity worldwide. As minimal research exists on parliamentary debate as pedagogy, the present study examined the correlations between parliamentary debate participation, communication competence, communication apprehension, argumentativeness, and willingness to communicate. Moreover, this study aimed to investigate the unique characteristics of communication variables and correlations with (...) the experience of participating in a parliamentary debate in a Japanese context, an area that interests many scholars. The results showed some differences in correlations between Japanese and United States samples, which was explained by analyzing a trait of Japanese culture that is characterized as highly contextual. Regarding the correlations between communication variables and parliamentary debate participation, significant differences were found for all variables except for communication competence, where less communication apprehension, more argument approach, less argument avoidance, and more willingness to communicate were observed compared to non-debaters. Finally, the study findings revealed that those with parliamentary debate experience obtained lower scores for communication apprehension and higher scores for argumentative approaches compared with those who did not have such experience; the effect sizes were smaller in women than men. These findings suggest that parliamentary debate participation is an effective way to foster communication variables. (shrink)

This study analyzed the argumentative writing behavior of Iranian graduate learners of English as Foreign Language in their English essays. Further, the correlations between the use of argument elements and overall writing quality as well as soundness of produced arguments were investigated. To this end, 150 essays were analyzed. The sample essays were found to be predominantly deductive in terms of rhetorical pattern. Moreover, they mainly utilized ‘data’ and ‘claim’ most frequently with secondary elements of argument as the least produced (...) elements. Overall writing quality co-varied significantly positively with the uses of claims, data, counterargument claims, counterargument data, rebuttal claims, and rebuttal data. Essays rated high in terms of overall writing quality were further rated for soundness and relevance of the arguments. The results demonstrate that even for advanced language learners good surface structure cannot necessarily guarantee well thought-out logical structure. The pedagogical implications for writing instruction and research are discussed. (shrink)

Context: The interest of communication scholars in constructivism is fuelled by the need to radically rethink the theoretical assumptions that have governed most media and communication research for the past three or four decades. Problem: On at least two points, constructivism poses difficulties that need to be overcome by scholars of communication. These are the attitudes of many radical constructivists towards “reality” and the constructivist position with regard to “society.” The article seeks to clarify the constructivist position with regard to (...) social interaction and society by determining how successful communication among individuals is possible, despite their cognitive autonomy. Method: In order to contribute to a discussion about the current situation in communication and media studies, the article takes up the author’s argument that communication cannot be understood unless models describing it are centred on the individual. Based on this conceptualisation, considerations about the ontological assumptions of constructivism and the constructivist position with regard to social interaction are revisited. Results: It is argued that cognition is not pure self-reference; society cannot be considered simply as an individual construct; self-organisation also occurs at the supra-individual level, where shared knowledge and socio-cultural meanings emerge in the operatively closed motion of the successive communicative elements. Implications: Clarifying the constructivist position with regard to society can contribute to innovative theory building and research in communication science, and in the social sciences more broadly. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 66.4 (2005) 541-556 [Access article in PDF] Historical Priorities Nancy S. Struever Johns Hopkins University One of the morals of Christopher Celenza's excellent The Lost Italian Renaissance is, simply, that an impoverished sense of philosophy delivers an impoverished history of philosophy. Salvatore Camporeale's enriched sense of philosophy, responsive to his strong positions on philosophy of religion, invests his brilliant work on Lorenzo Valla; (...) the work marks a historiographical advance, for the innovative account of Valla makes a new case for the seriousness, intrinsic merit of humanistic thought of the fifteenth century.I will argue that Camporeale's early focus in Umanesimo e teologia on Valla's rhetorical investments is crucial to his later accounts of Valla's strong contributions to Renaissance thought. Here Camporeale's devotion to the task of defining a "rhetorical theology" or a "humanistic theology" is an exemplary instance of a much broader initiative in intellectual history: an initiative that exploits the very rich resources of the rhetorical tradition for considering, and contesting, the positions of traditional philosophy.In the same work, Celenza raises another pertinent, major issue when he contends that a history of serious inquiry requires a pragmatic sense of inquiry as both responsive to and intrusive in surrounding dispositions and actions; it must give an account of what a mode of inquiry does, in time—its applications and its failures—misfires.1 Celenza proposes a combination of social and intellectual historical methods, thus developing a sense of intellectual communities and their allegiances and contests: focusing, for example, on the constraints of orthodoxy and the temptations of honor.Celenza's historiographical survey gives a wonderfully detailed context for Camporeale's work. While Camporeale rarely indulged in programmatic statements, a pragmatic bent, a basic pragmatic allegiance informs both the topics and procedures of his account of Renaissance classicism. I suggest an analogue: just as modern intellectual history adds pragmatic value to "internalist" history of philosophy, so rhetoric encases, motivates the vital philosophical [End Page 541] critique Camporeale finds in Valla. The investigative "agency" of humanist rhetorical philologues co-opts the activity of modern intellectual historians in focusing on response, effect, appropriatenesss, and application. The opposition—"history of philosophy/intellectual history"—gains new life in the discussions of Renaissance humanism. For the philosopher, it is the distressing case that the intellectual historian is not so much too little disciplined in philosophy as too humanistic, too engaged with moral-aesthetic affect.I would contend that Camporeale's pragmatic historical effort represents another degree of interest: it is itself ambitious as serious inquiry in that it takes its place in a historical chain of classical replications: the originary Hellenic stipulation of rhetoric as the "practical" dialogic partner of "pure" philosophy; the humanist retrieval of classsical rhetorical pragmatic aspirations and techniques; and Camporeale's retrieval of the retrieval. In his use of humanist rhetorical hermeneutic as strategy in his reformist philosophy of religion, his practice is making a case for the case the humanists made.And, as I have argued earlier, there is a sense in which Camporeale's is a retrieval of an earlier twentieth-century retrieval. Camporeale's narrative of Renaissance rhetorical innovation and inclusion fits with a particular twentieth-century narrative that revises the standard history of Hellenic thought to reorder the historical relations of rhetoric, logic, and dialectic.2 Thus, in the Summer Semester 1924 lectures, "Die Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie," Martin Heidegger employs Aristotle's Rhetoric to gloss the major philosophical texts of metaphysics, physics, politics, and ethics. Heidegger hypothesizes an "original argument" as transpiring within the political discourse of the courts, assemblies, and the oratory of the games; and, the original discipline that studied and regulated this discourse was rhetoric. With the Aristotelian definition of man as the political animal possessing language, with language as the mode of political capacity and action, rhetoric becomes Heidegger's "first fundamental hermeneutic of the dailyness (timefullness) of living together."3 Rhetoric illumined the domain of Dasein, of being-in-the-world, of historically specific existence. Heidegger claimed this Hellenic rhetoric functioned entirely within... (shrink)

The article begins with a selective outline of social theories of crisis. Such crisis diagnosis is important for general, societal argumentation. The current article positions normative-critical theories and Luhmann’s own version of system theory on opposite sides of the societal argument about the future of Europe and, generally, postnational society. The former supports moral and ethical visions of egalitarian pluralism, and the latter emphasizes the need to conform to the functional, communication logics of self-organizing social systems. It is then proposed (...) that if rival social theoretical traditions, the above named and others, are to engage in meaningful normative argument with one another, they must develop a minimal, shared understanding of what should constitute the theory of society. In pursuit of this goal, the article advances a shared, minimal, theoretical framework that addresses both the full spectrum of the normative culture of modernity and its critique, no matter from which social standpoint or theoretical tradition the latter is advanced. In conclusion, asserting its own normative standpoint, it is argued that both a European cultural model and a constitutional order based on cosmopolitan solidarity are needed. Such a model should assert moral principles of justice, equality, responsibility, and legitimacy that would adequately respect and include the full variety of milieus and associational forms in contemporary European society, not just those of the present elite. Such a model should not simply be abstractly asserted, though that is an essential first step, but its conditions of possibility should be supported by appropriate social research that would investigate capacities for transnational democratic innovation and the formation of substantive moral principles among European publics. (shrink)

It Is My Pleasure To Introduce this discussion of Naoko Saito's American Philosophy in Translation. We have contributions from three experts in American philosophy, all of whom have been in conversation with the author for many years: Jim Garrison, Vincent Colapietro, and Steven Fesmire. Prior to their contributions, I would like to set the scene with some brief remarks to introduce the book and to explain something of its background.Over the past two decades, I have worked closely with Saito on (...) a number of projects, and I have been familiar with her ideas for this book since its inception. In some respects, the book is the product of studies in American philosophy that go back to her time as an undergraduate in Tokyo in the 1980s, ideas that were advanced considerably when she did an MA at Harvard, taking classes with Stanley Cavell and Hilary Putnam, and subsequently when she completed her PhD at Teachers College, with René Arcilla as her advisor and Cavell as a member of her committee. It was against this background that, in 2006, Saito published her first singly authored book, The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson. As that title indicates, she was already exploring the relation between Dewey and pragmatism, on the one hand, and American transcendentalism, on the other. Her sense back then of some separation between these traditions of thought, and of the nature of the tensions between them, has been refined and, for the most part, strengthened in the years since that earlier publication. No doubt she has been influenced in this by Cavell, who, in one essay, for example, asks: “What's the use of calling Emerson a pragmatist?” In any case, her account of this relationship is extended and altered significantly in American Philosophy in Translation.Through the course of her research, Saito has been conscious of the fact that she is studying American philosophy from a distance—a distance that is geographical, cultural, and linguistic—and she retains a thoughtful humility in relation to this. But she also sees here a possible opening to the perception and release of untapped aspects of these traditions of thought, in ways that might fertilize and extend the ground in which the inheritance of American philosophy has flourished. This is very much the line that she pursues in this book. In the light of this, and as the book's title indicates, there is a particular focus on language and translation. It is important that the latter term is understood not merely as an attractive metaphor for change and transformation: crucial to her developing argument is the experience of translating between languages and the reality of the experience in the lives of so many today, within the academy and without. In the course of this experience, one is sometimes confronted, quite self-consciously, with a word or phrase that resists translation. But sometimes—more often in the life of the accomplished or habituated speaker of the foreign language in question—the experience persists as an undercurrent, subtly opening a world that is other in some respects from the one that comes to light in the mother tongue.By contrast, to the many (especially Anglophone) monolingually minded, the need for translation can appear as an unwanted barrier, something of a nuisance, a problem to be solved. This is by no means a response confined, however, to the uneducated (or the Anglophone or the monolingual). There is also a sophisticated variant of this narrowness of outlook where faith is placed in an artificial or technical language with the power, the fantasy runs, to overcome the vagaries of natural language. Hilary Putnam recalls how Rudolf Carnap, whose stature as a thinker and as a human being he does not doubt, felt strongly that “for all x, planned x is better than unplanned x” and was drawn to the idea of a common world language: Thus the idea of a socialist world in which everyone spoke Esperanto (except scientists, who, for their technical work, would employ notations from symbolic logic) was one which would have delighted him. And I recently had a conversation with a student who remarked quite casually that it would not be a bad idea if there were only one language and one literature: “We would get used to it, and it might help to prevent war.” (Putnam 185)Putnam does not deign to respond to the latter assertion. What is foregrounded in his discussion is that monolingualism is likely to hide the plurality of goods that is realized in different cultures. The importance of that plurality is surely something that the luminaries of American philosophy bring to light. Indeed, Putnam's key point of reference in making these remarks is William James.The undercurrent of translation in the experience of the more accomplished speaker of a foreign language can act then as a sensitization to cultural difference, to different possibilities of thought and being. But in fact, this shifting of thought can apply within any language itself, not just inter- but intra-lingually, opening an insight that is close to the heart of American philosophy. If one can hear the cry of the rooster, then one may be wakened also by Thoreau's turn of expression in the idea of the “father tongue”: through a maturing experience of the language we are brought up with, we come to “a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak” (Thoreau 69). This renewed investment in language, this continual return to our words, is what opens them to new thought and gives them interest. It is first an inheritance from the culture we are brought up in, but it dies in our speech and thinking if we do not turn it to something new. To build, we must begin by borrowing an axe, but we can return it sharper than when we borrowed it.If translation is operative in our language as a whole, as Saito's argument shows, this points to the many little rebirths within ourselves and in our interactions with one another. In fact, the point becomes political in that democracy depends upon this renewal of our words. This renewal resists not only the allure of ideology but also the now familiar etiolated rhetoric of “political realism.” Moreover, it points beyond the reliance, within the politics of recognition, on the defining of groups and categories toward a politics of acknowledgment.In this vein, Saito's outsider perspective is in tune with what Richard Bernstein has called the “global resurgence of American pragmatism.” The borderline or outsider perspective can have a powerful effect on thought, in relation to which Saito invites the reader to recall that America's past was itself an outsider-past: it was outside Europe, a relation with which it was bound to struggle, but it was also ready, as Emerson and Thoreau demonstrate, to draw from greater cultural distances, where it found congenial aspects in East Asian thought.Saito stresses the anti-foundationalist character of American philosophy as of critical importance for both philosophy and politics, and again her discussion of language is crucial to this. Dewey's emphasis on communication, with his relatively flat style of prose, is contrasted with the stylistic experiment and invention that she finds in Emerson, Thoreau, and Cavell. She sees the style of these writers, in some contrast to that of Dewey, as having a salutary, destabilizing effect. She wants to destabilize Dewey. It is entirely consonant with her position, furthermore, that she raises doubts about the bland acceptance of a politics of inclusion. Not only can this become a surreptitious form of discipline and control: it can engender the conformism that Emerson worked so hard to prevent.The book finishes on a more aesthetic note, taking up lines of thought in Dewey's aesthetics but turning this toward the more extravagant elision, in Thoreau, of the functional and the beautiful. The thematization of the aesthetic in this way is, she tries to show, crucial to our (political) world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.3 (2002) 223-243 [Access article in PDF] Style, Rhetoric, and Postmodern Culture Bradford Vivian Modern rhetoricians habitually avoid the canon of style. The reasons for this avoidance should be familiar to those versed in the disciplinary lore of rhetoric. Since the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. E., when oratorical virtuosos like Gorgias proclaimed that "Speech is a powerful lord, which by means of the finest (...) and most invisible body effects the divinest works" (41), the suspicion that rhetorical style amounts to irrational verbal excess has dogged those who would argue for the moral integrity of the art. Most recently, twentieth-century rhetoricians, Toulmin (1958) and Perelman (1969, 1979, 1982) in particular, realigned rhetoric with the study of argumentation after its apparent reduction, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to innocuous matters of form and taste by the elocutionist and belletristic movements. Consequently, the aesthetic capacities of rhetoric have received scant attention from modern rhetoricians, who resign considerations of style largely to supposedly regrettable episodes in the history of the discipline. For better or worse, then, modern rhetorical theory lacks a contemporary rationale and methodology for the study of style. 1Beyond unfortunate equations of rhetoric with grandiloquence, this scarcity in recent rhetorical scholarship corresponds to general humanistic and social scientific prejudices against the topic of style. Robert Hariman posits, "Established academic conceptions of style hardly prepare one to take seriously the aesthetic dimension of political experience" (7). As evidence for this claim, he cites Stuart Ewen's reflections on the "frustration" peculiar to research on style: "It seemed to be a universal category," Ewen writes, "transcending topical boundaries, an accolade applied to people, places, attitudes and things... a subject that was, at best, amorphous" (quoted in Hariman, 7-8). Yet the social ubiquity of style—"[o]n news magazines, sports magazines, music-oriented magazines, magazines about [End Page 223] fashion, architecture and interior design, automobiles, and sex"—indicates that it offers "a key to understanding the contours of contemporary culture" (qtd. in Hariman, 7-8). Hence, the paradox of style as a scholarly topic: that which exhibits its cultural importance makes it seem intellectually vacuous.Hariman's treatise on political style offers the most noteworthy attempt in rhetorical studies to remedy these trends; brief consideration of his insights will suggest further objectives for the study of rhetoric and style. 2 In Hariman's estimation, "style ultimately is a significant dimension of every human experience" because "relations of control and autonomy are negotiated through the artful composition of speech, gesture, ornament, decor, and any other means for modulating perception and shaping response. In a word, our political experience is styled" (3, 2). The distinctive contribution of rhetorical inquiry into political style involves "understanding the dynamics of our social experience or the relationship between rhetorical appeals and political decisions" rather than merely "cataloging discursive forms in the artistic text alone" (Hariman, 8).Accordingly, Hariman acknowledges that one must recognize the substantive social and political influences of style apart from its traditional connotations of individual artistic performance. "In this context," he explains, "although style still highlights aesthetic reactions it no longer enforces artistic autonomy. Style becomes an analytic category for understanding a social reality; in order to understand the social reality of politics, we can consider how political action involves acting according to a particular political style" (9). Thus, for Hariman, rhetorical choices in political style need not amount to a valorization of "artistic autonomy": "each political style draws on universal elements of the human condition and symbolic repertoire but organizes them into a limited, customary set of communicative designs... Each is thoroughly conventional, yet the means for personal improvisation and intelligent, innovate responses to unique problems" (11-12). His treatise therefore appears to dissociate style from its outmoded definitions while recommending the utility of rhetorical principles to the study of political culture.What Hariman calls the "cautious postmodernism" (6) of his project, however, hinders its innovative aspirations. The postmodern portion of his work endorses the study of style according to the aesthetic dimensions of social relations rather than "artistic autonomy" alone; but its... (shrink)

Dear Readers,Welcome to this issue of our beloved Bangladesh Journal of Bioethics! In this sweltering heat we are all seeking for some cool and comfort. We bring this issue of BJB on different ethical practices and bring up related questions. Are we respecting the rights of every human being when we are either doing research or practicing health service provision? What are the minimum norms and standards to be maintained or are we circumventing those? The issue looks into different issues (...) and provides us with indepth information, queries, fears and reservations.In the article on Knowledge, attitude and practice of medical ethics among medical intern students in a Medical College in Kathmandu, Ramesh P Aacharyaand Yagya L Shakya, report on a Knowledge Attitude and Practice survey of 46 medical undergraduate interns of Maharajgunj Medical Campus. The result of the survey is quite interesting. ‘Doctors know the best irrespective of patients’ opinion was agreed upon by 35 %, ‘Confidentiality cannot be kept in modern era and should be abandoned’ was strongly disagreed by 34.8% and disagreed by 60.9%. The Authors hope that the findings will assist the faculties to strengthen the teaching of medical ethics and guiding the interns for ethical professional conduct. In the article titled Organizational Justice and Employee’s Service Behavior in the Healthcare Organizations in Bangladesh is an agenda for Research, Md. Nuruzzaman and Md. Humayun Kabir Talukder present a conceptual framework and a set of hypotheses regarding the relationships among distributive justice, procedural justice, interactional justice, employee’s citizenship behaviour, role prescribed behaviour and counterproductive behavior in the healthcare organizations in Bangladesh. The authors state that the purpose is to assist the policy makers and service providers in identifying desirable and undesirable HRM practices in order to maintain optimum level of employee commitment for ensuring quality and efficient service delivery to the communities. Though the article is theoretical it may be useful for the policy makers and service providers. If an operational research could be carried out to test the hypothesis the practical utility of the concept could be tested in Bangladesh.Zoheb Rafique in the article Ethical Justification of Conducting Research Trials in Lower and Middle Income Countries Including Pakistan: The Responsibilities of Research Enterprises explores the ethical aspects of research sponsored by commercial agencies. He looks into the factors that influence selection of a study site for a sponsored trial particularly in traditional countries like Pakistan where cultural values add to the problem in assuring that research is conducted in an ethical manner. In this paper, the Author discusses the responsibilities of researchers and funders in low and middle income countries like Pakistan and the ethical justifications of doing research trials in developing countries. He concludes that research participants should be fully informed about the research trial and their participation and it is their right to know all risks and benefits so that they have the option of rejecting participation.The article on Ethical aspects of Dhaka University Tele-medicine System by Ahmed Raihan Abir provides and analysis of the tele- medicine system in Dhaka University. The Author is a member of an extended group at Dhaka University (DU) which has been developing telemedicine equipment and data acquisition software to promote telemedicine practice in Bangladesh. Recently the Telemedicine group of DU and a local NGO named SAMAMA with support from Service innovation fund (SIF) of the Prime Minister Office (PMO) of Bangladesh took the initiative to establish eight rural telemedicine centers and one expert center for the field trial of telemedicine in Bangladesh. The aim of this paper is to examine the ethical challenges of such health care system and the effort to overcome these problems before starting the field trial. The author looks into the details of Data confidentiality and security, Responsibilities of Doctor and Rural Technician, Quality of service and Implications of telemedicine in Bangladesh. He concludes that DU telemedicine project will essentially bring the services of qualified medical experts to the doorsteps of the common people throughout the country, even in the remote rural areas. Although a telemedicine cannot match a face to face consultation, DU tele-medicine system is much better than no consultation at all.Sifat Rahman in the article on Ethical Issues of Fair Subject Selection in Research provides an overview of the criterion for maintaining ethical standards for conducting research. The Author reviews the three fundamental conditions to be met for adhering to strict ethical standards which are: Respect for Persons by protecting the autonomy of people, treating them with courtesy and respect and obtaining informed consent.; Beneficence which incorporates the philosophy of "Do no harm" while maximizing benefits for the research project and minimizing risks to the research subjects; and Justice by ensuring that reasonable, non-exploitative, and well-considered procedures are administered fairly. Finally the Author concludes that Researchers must be truthful and conduct no deception.Dear Readers, as you can see from the above ethics and maintaining the values in research and services are of utmost importance in the improvement of the quality of life. Through our queries, questions and sense of respect for every living being can our endeavors to ensure ethics in all spheres of development be successful.Dear Readers, please keep on sending your articles, notes or thoughts to us. Your participation will make a difference in the quality of our lives.Best regardsTahera AhmedEditor. (shrink)

This new volume on logic follows a recognizable format that deals in turn with the topics of mathematical logic, moving from concepts, via definitions and inferences, to theories and axioms. However, this fresh work offers a key innovation in its ‘pyramidal’ graph system for the logical formalization of all these items. The author has developed this new methodology on the basis of original research, traditional logical instruments such as Porphyrian trees, and modern concepts of classification, in which pyramids are (...) the central organizing concept. The pyramidal schema enables both the content of concepts and the relations between the concept positions in the pyramid to be read off from the graph. Logical connectors are analyzed in terms of the direction in which they connect within the pyramid. Additionally, the author shows that logical connectors are of fundamentally different types: only one sort generates propositions with truth values, while the other yields conceptual expressions or complex concepts. On this basis, strong arguments are developed against adopting the non-discriminating connector definitions implicit in Wittgensteinian truth-value tables. Special consideration is given to mathematical connectors so as to illuminate the formation of concepts in the natural sciences. To show what the pyramidal method can contribute to science, a pyramid of the number concepts prevalent in mathematics is constructed. The book also counters the logical dogma of ‘false’ contradictory propositions and sheds new light on the logical characteristics of probable propositions, as well as on syllogistic and other inferences. (shrink)

Background: By organizing and activating our passions with both hormones and experiences, the heart and mind of sexual behavior, sexual motivation, and sexual preference is the brain, the organ of learning. Despite decades of progress, this incontrovertible truth is somehow lost in the far-too-often biologically deterministic interpretation of genetic, hormonal, and anatomical scientific research into the biological origins of sexual motivation. Simplistic and polarized arguments are used in the media by both sides of the seemingly endless debate over sexual orientation, (...) equality, and human rights with such catch phrases as ‘‘born gay’’ contrasted against attempts of ‘‘reparative therapy’’ or ‘‘pray the gay away’’. Though long abandoned in practically every other area of psychology, this remnant of the nature-nurture controversy remains despite its generally acknowledged insufficiency in explaining any adult aspect of the human condition within the scientific community. Methods: This theoretical review article identifies three factors: 1) good intentions with regard to the argument from immutability; 2) false dichotomies limiting intellectual progress by oversimplification of theory and thus hypothesis, and most dangerously, interpretation and; 3) Tradition: a historical separation of the disciplines of biology and psychology, which, to this day, interferes with the effective translation of well-conducted science into good public understanding and policy. Results: Studies clearly demonstrate that progress toward sexual-orientation equality is being made, if slowly, despite the apparent irrelevance of the ‘‘born gay’’ argument from immutability. Evidence is further provided supporting the inadequacy of polarized, dichotic theories of sexual development, particularly those pitting ‘‘blank slate learning’’ against a fated, deterministic biological perspective. Results of this review suggest that an emerging interactionist perspective will promote both better scientific progress and better public understanding, hopefully contributing to progress toward nondiscriminatory public policy. Conclusion: Accepting that the brain is a highly plastic, modularly dimorphic, developmentally biased organ of learning, one which is organized and activated by both hormones and experiences across the lifespan, is essential for doing ‘‘good science’’ well. Interactionist theories of psychosexual development provide an empirically sound, strong, yet modifiable foundation for testable hypotheses exploring biologically biased sexual learning. Keywords: Brain; conditioning; controversy; dichotomy; differentiation; discrimination; equality; sex; sexual; orientation; learning; learned sexuality; born gay; hedonic evaluation; immutability; imprinting; incentive motivation; interactionism; predispositions; theory; therapy (Published: 15 March 2012) Citation: Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology 2012, 2 : 17334 - DOI: 10.3402/snp.v2i0.17334. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Athenian Religion: A HistorySusan Guettel ColeRobert Parker. Athenian Religion: A History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. xxix 1 370 pp. Cloth, $55.Parker begins by acknowledging Durkheim’s claim that “religion is something eminently social” (1), but he is not interested in demonstrating how ritual activity was embedded in Athenian social relationships or even how traditional rituals colored Athenian political life. His target is not Athenian society itself, and his project (...) is not an analysis of the ways and means by which ritual created or defined community. His real interest, in fact, is not religion at all, but rather the administration of public ritual.Parker admits that issues of topography and the organization of space are important for understanding Attic ritual, but his preference for Athenian literature and epigraphical sources inevitably shapes his view of a “web of religious life in Attica... spun by the spider at the centre” (25). The calendar of the Salaminians is more important to his argument as a source on institutions than it is as a source for administration of ritual at the edges of Attica. This preference for center over hinterland overcomes even the lack of sources. Solon’s calendar of festivals and that shadowy ghost, the Attic genos, assume more importance than the great sanctuaries at Eleusis and Brauron.Recognizing archaeological material when relevant, Parker is nevertheless skeptical about current work that claims a relationship between material culture and the expression of polis identity (citing in particular Snodgrass, De Polignac, and Morgan). For Parker the “polis” is an abstraction, and an abstraction, he claims, cannot have a history. He does comment on issues of identity and community organization, but these issues are important only in the context of the community’s regulation of ritual, where Parker prefers the written word, preferably inscribed, to the material artifact.The history of Athenian religion, as laid out here, is a history of collective decision making and collective ritual. Parker begins with mountain rituals of Zeus, chiefly because Mount Hymettos preserves our earliest Attic inscriptions, but his interests and chronological range are otherwise limited by the evidence for Attic public record keeping. His interests are also limited by a narrow definition of collective ritual, conditioned perhaps by modern notions of political autonomy and an exaggerated affection for the institutions of Athenian democracy. His targeted time period therefore begins rather conventionally with Solon’s calendar of “sacrifices from the kurbeis” (Lys. 30.17) and ends with the latest evidence for tribe and deme decrees, evidence that trails off in the middle [End Page 293] of the third century b.c. In between we have chapters arranged chronologically, on hereditary priesthoods and the Attic genos, the sixth century and the organization of festivals, democracy and empire, new gods in the fifth century, the trial of Socrates, and the ritual innovations of the fourth century. This looks like a conventional list of topics, but with Parker’s interest in public institutions this sequence is actually only a chronological framework for his real project, the administration of ritual. Seen in this context the Attic genos is not, as once argued, a relic of archaic aristocratic institutions or a privileged group within the phratry, but an administrative solution to an organizational problem. In Parker’s view, the genos provided priests for public cults. Expansion of political rights in the fifth century eventually required ritual by committee, and although, he argues, the genos, as an institution, did not go out of existence, the privileged families that controlled the traditional priesthoods had to yield to the boards of officials that now supervised some of the more important public rituals.Innovations, perhaps because they are more easily detectable in the kind of evidence Parker prefers, stand out more than tradition. Ritual innovations of the fifth century included rites modeled on those elsewhere in Greece (Artemis Agrotera, Pan, and Boreas, for example). Parker explains these innovations in political terms, describing their introduction as a reflection of Athenian pride in overcoming the Persian threat. Religious innovations of the second half of the fifth century (rituals associated with Adonis, Sabazius, and Cybele, for instance) are treated not as an incoming surge of foreign influence (as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionStuart J. Youngner (bio), Laura A. Siminoff (bio), and Renie Schapiro (bio)This issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal (KIEJ) centers on a piece of empirical research. The motivation behind the study of Laura Siminoff, Christopher Burant, and Stuart Youngner (2004) was to find out more about what the general public understands and believes about when a person is dead. More specifically, the study tried to determine how (...) members of the public define death, especially their acceptance and interpretation of the medical concept of "brain death," and their attitudes toward the so-called "dead donor rule," an informal but powerful social and legal norm insisting that the taking of organs for transplantation not cause the death of the source of those organs.As the demand for organs increases and the waiting list grows, the United States has explored multiple ways to expand the pool of potential donors. One approach has been to gerrymander (coherently or not) the line between life and death to shift patients who are extremely compromised but traditionally considered to be in the living category into the dead category. In this way, the dead donor rule remains technically intact. This reasoning is explicit in the report of the Harvard Medical School Ad Hoc Committee (1968) that "introduced" "brain death" to the American culture. Since then, other efforts to redraw the line have been proposed and rejected.One alternative to gerrymandering is to consider under what conditions, if any, it is morally acceptable to violate the dead donor rule. Some would argue that this alternative is the more "honest" approach. Rather than sidestepping moral problems by calling people dead, it brings the moral problems to the surface where the necessity of sticking to the rule can be considered on its own merits. However, when the Journal of the American Medical Association printed a position paper that proposed making anencepahlic newborns an exception to the dead donor rule, along with arguments about why this was acceptable, the outcry was so great that the proposal was retracted (AMA 1995).Clearly, our society has identified organ transplantation as a priority, although two papers in this volume (those by Courtney Campbell and by Megan Crowley-Matoka and Robert Arnold) take issue with that prioritization. The fact that the donor pool has remained relatively stable (and inadequate) despite massive efforts [End Page 211] to increase it speaks, at least in part, to the cultural and legal resistance to "new" ways to procure more organs. Voluntarism seems to have peaked. Financial incentives clash with the heavily endorsed notion of the "gift of life" and seem to many to violate the dignity of the human body. Presumed consent or eminent domain, in which the community has a greater claim to a person's organs than that person or his/her family, go against the grain of American individual freedom and the ethos of patient autonomy.Abandoning the dead donor rule generally is regarded as an even tougher sell to the American public and its legislators. The study by Siminoff and colleagues attempts, among other things, to gauge just how tough this sell would be. What the data actually demonstrate is a matter of interpretation, and this issue of the KIEJ is devoted to some of those interpretations. The authors, with the exception of Daniel Hausman, came together for a meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, during which the study's methods and data were presented with time for questions, clarifications, and general discussion. The authors then worked with the editors to generate the papers printed in this volume.The issue begins with a presentation of the study conducted by Siminoff and colleagues. The same paper also appears in the journal Social Science and Medicine, where it includes the conclusions of the authors (Siminoff, Burant, and Youngner 2004). In the current volume, we present only the methodology of and data from the study, allowing a number of distinguished commentators to offer their own conclusions and reflections.The first response comes from Tracy Schmidt, Executive Director of Intermountain Donor Services, one of our nation's organ procurement organizations (OPOs). For years, organ procurement professionals have reported anecdotal stories about families who wished to donate organs of... (shrink)

Greek, Indian and Arabic Logic marks the initial appearance of the multi-volume Handbook of the History of Logic. Additional volumes will be published when ready, rather than in strict chronological order. Soon to appear are The Rise of Modern Logic: From Leibniz to Frege. Also in preparation are Logic From Russell to Gödel, The Emergence of Classical Logic, Logic and the Modalities in the Twentieth Century, and The Many-Valued and Non-Monotonic Turn in Logic. Further volumes will follow, including Mediaeval and (...) Renaissance Logic and Logic: A History of its Central. In designing the Handbook of the History of Logic, the Editors have taken the view that the history of logic holds more than an antiquarian interest, and that a knowledge of logic's rich and sophisticated development is, in various respects, relevant to the research programmes of the present day. Ancient logic is no exception. The present volume attests to the distant origins of some of modern logic's most important features, such as can be found in the claim by the authors of the chapter on Aristotle's early logic that, from its infancy, the theory of the syllogism is an example of an intuitionistic, non-monotonic, relevantly paraconsistent logic. Similarly, in addition to its comparative earliness, what is striking about the best of the Megarian and Stoic traditions is their sophistication and originality. Logic is an indispensably important pivot of the Western intellectual tradition. But, as the chapters on Indian and Arabic logic make clear, logic's parentage extends more widely than any direct line from the Greek city states. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that for centuries logic has been an unfetteredly international enterprise, whose research programmes reach to every corner of the learned world. Like its companion volumes, Greek, Indian and Arabic Logic is the result of a design that gives to its distinguished authors as much space as would be needed to produce highly authoritative chapters, rich in detail and interpretative reach. The aim of the Editors is to have placed before the relevant intellectual communities a research tool of indispensable value. Together with the other volumes, Greek, Indian and Arabic Logic, will be essential reading for everyone with a curiosity about logic's long development, especially researchers, graduate and senior undergraduate students in logic in all its forms, argumentation theory, AI and computer science, cognitive psychology and neuroscience, linguistics, forensics, philosophy and the history of philosophy, and the history of ideas. (shrink)

ABSTRACT I argue that this examination and appreciation for the shift to abductive reasoning should be extended to the intersection of neuroscience and novel brain-computer interfaces too. This paper highlights the implications of applying abductive reasoning to personalized implantable neurotechnologies. Then, it explores whether abductive reasoning is sufficient to justify insurance coverage for devices absent widespread clinical trials, which are better applied to one-size-fits-all treatments. INTRODUCTION In contrast to the classic model of randomized-control trials, often with a large number of (...) subjects enrolled, precision medicine attempts to optimize therapeutic outcomes by focusing on the individual.[i] A recent publication highlights the strengths and weakness of both traditional evidence-based medicine and precision medicine.[ii] Plus, it outlines a tension in the shift from evidence-based medicine’s inductive reasoning style (the collection of data to postulate general theories) to precision medicine’s abductive reasoning style (the generation of an idea from the limited data available).[iii] The paper’s main example is the application of precision medicine for the treatment of cancer.[iv] I argue that this examination and appreciation for the shift to abductive reasoning should be extended to the intersection of neuroscience and novel brain-computer interfaces too. As the name suggests, brain-computer interfaces are a significant advancement in neurotechnology that directly connects someone’s brain to external or implanted devices.[v] Among the various kinds of brain-computer interfaces, adaptive deep brain stimulation devices require numerous personalized adjustments to their settings during the implantation and computation stages in order to provide adequate relief to patients with treatment-resistant disorders. What makes these devices unique is how adaptive deep brain stimulation integrates a sensory component to initiate the stimulation. While not commonly at the level of sophistication as self-supervising or generative large language models,[vi] they currently allow for a semi-autonomous form of neuromodulation. This paper highlights the implications of applying abductive reasoning to personalized implantable neurotechnologies. Then, it explores whether abductive reasoning is sufficient to justify insurance coverage for devices absent widespread clinical trials, which are better applied to one-size-fits-all treatments.[vii] ANALYSIS I. The State of Precision Medicine in Oncology and the Epistemological Shift While a thorough overview of precision medicine for the treatment of cancer is beyond the scope of this article, its practice can be roughly summarized as identifying clinically significant characteristics a patient possesses (e.g., genetic traits) to land on a specialized treatment option that, theoretically, should benefit the patient the most.[viii] However, in such a practice of stratification patients fall into smaller and smaller populations and the quality of evidence that can be applied to anyone outside these decreases in turn.[ix] As inductive logic helps to articulate, the greater the number of patients that respond to a particular therapy the higher the probability of its efficacy. By straying from this logical framework, precision medicine opens the treatment of cancer to more uncertainty about the validity of these approaches to the resulting disease subcategories.[x] Thus, while contemporary medical practices explicitly describe some treatments as “personalized”, they ought not be viewed as inherently better founded than other therapies.[xi] A relevant contemporary case of precision medicine out of Norway focuses on the care of a patient with cancer between the ventricles of the heart and esophagus, which had failed to respond to the standard regimen of therapies over four years.[xii] In a last-ditch effort, the patient elected to pay out-of-pocket for an experimental immunotherapy (nivolumab) at a private hospital. He experienced marked improvements and a reduction in the size of the tumor. Understandably, the patient tried to pursue further rounds of nivolumab at a public hospital. However, the hospital initially declined to pay for it given the “lack of evidence from randomised clinical trials for this drug relating to this [patient’s] condition.”[xiii] In rebuttal to this claim, the patient countered that he was actually similar to a subpopulation of patients who responded in “open‐label, single arm, phase 2 studies on another immune therapy drug” (pembrolizumab).[xiv] Given this interpretation of the prior studies and the patient’s response, further rounds of nivolumab were approved. Had the patient not had improvements in the tumor’s size following a round of nivolumab, then pembrolizumab’s prior empirical evidence in isolation would have been insufficient, inductively speaking, to justify his continued use of nivolumab.[xv] The case demonstrates a shift in reasoning from the traditional induction to abduction. The phenomenon of ‘cancer improvement’ is considered causally linked to nivolumab and its underlying physiological mechanisms.[xvi] However, “the weakness of abductions is that there may always be some other better, unknown explanation for an effect. The patient may for example belong to a special subgroup that spontaneously improves, or the change may be a placebo effect. This does not mean, however, that abductive inferences cannot be strong or reasonable, in the sense that they can make a conclusion probable.”[xvii] To demonstrate the limitations of relying on the abductive standard in isolation, commentators have pointed out that side effects in precision medicine are hard to rule out as being related to the initial intervention itself unless trends from a group of patients are taken into consideration.[xviii] As artificial intelligence (AI) assists the development of precision medicine for oncology, this uncertainty ought to be taken into consideration. The implementation of AI has been crucial to the development of precision medicine by providing a way to combine large patient datasets or a single patient with a large number of unique variables with machine learning to recommend matches based on statistics and probability of success upon which practitioners can base medical recommendations.[xix] The AI is usually not establishing a causal relationship[xx] – it is predicting. So, as AI bleeds into medical devices, like brain-computer interfaces, the same cautions about using abductive reasoning alone should be carried over. II. Responsive Neurostimulation, AI, and Personalized Medicine Like precision medicine in cancer treatment, computer-brain interface technology similarly focuses on the individual patient through personalized settings. In order to properly expose the intersection of AI, precision medicine, abductive reasoning, and implantable neurotechnologies, the descriptions of adaptive deep brain stimulation systems need to deepen.[xxi] As a broad summary of adaptive deep brain stimulation, to provide a patient with the therapeutic stimulation, a neural signal, typically referred to as a local field potential,[xxii] must first be detected and then interpreted by the device. The main adaptive deep brain stimulation device with premarket approval, the NeuroPace Responsive Neurostimulation system, is used to treat epilepsy by detecting and storing “programmer-defined phenomena.”[xxiii] Providers can optimize the detection settings of the device to align with the patient’s unique electrographic seizures as well as personalize the reacting stimulation’s parameters.[xxiv] The provider adjusts the technology based on trial and error. One day machine learning algorithms will be able to regularly aid this process in myriad ways, such as by identifying the specific stimulation settings a patient may respond to ahead of time based on their electrophysiological signatures.[xxv] Either way, with AI or programmers, adaptive neurostimulation technologies are individualized and therefore operate in line with precision medicine rather than standard treatments based on large clinical trials. Contemporary neurostimulation devices are not usually sophisticated enough to be prominent in AI discussions where the topics of neural networks, deep learning, generative models, and self-attention dominate the conversation. However, implantable high-density electrocorticography arrays (a much more sensitive version than adaptive deep brain stimulation systems use) have been used in combination with neural networks to help patients with neurologic deficits from a prior stroke “speak” through a virtual avatar.[xxvi] In some experimental situations, algorithms are optimizing stimulation parameters with increasing levels of independence.[xxvii] An example of neurostimulation that is analogous to the use of nivolumab in Norway surrounds a patient in the United States who was experiencing both treatment-resistant OCD and temporal lobe epilepsy.[xxviii]Given the refractory nature of her epilepsy, implantation of an adaptive deep brain stimulation system was indicated. As a form of experimental therapy, her treatment-resistant OCD was also indicated for the off-label use of an adaptive deep brain stimulation set-up. Another deep brain stimulation lead, other than the one implanted for epilepsy, was placed in the patient’s right nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum region given the correlation these nuclei had with OCD symptoms in prior research. Following this, the patient underwent “1) ambulatory, patient-initiated magnet-swipe storage of data during moments of obsessive thoughts; (2) lab-based, naturalistic provocation of OCD-related distress (naturalistic provocation task); and (3) lab-based, VR [virtual reality] provocation of OCD-related distress (VR provocation task).”[xxix] Such signals were used to identify when to deliver the therapeutic stimulation in order to counter the OCD symptoms. Thankfully, following the procedure and calibration the patient exhibited marked improvements in their OCD symptoms and recently shared her results publicly.[xxx] In both cases, there is a similar level of abductive justification for the efficacy of the delivered therapy. In the case study in which the patient was treated with adaptive deep brain stimulation, they at least had their neural activity tested in various settings to determine the optimum parameters for treatment to avoid them being based on guesswork. Additionally, the adaptive deep brain stimulation lead was already placed before the calibration trials were conducted, meaning that the patient had already taken on the bulk of the procedural risk before the efficacy could be determined. Such an efficacy test could have been replicated in the first patient’s cancer treatment, had it been biopsied and tested against the remaining immunotherapies in vitro. Yet, in the case of cancer with few options, one previous dose of a drug that appeared to work on the patient may justify further doses. However, as the Norwegian case presents, corroboration with known responses to a similar drug (from a clinical trial) could be helpful to validate the treatment strategy. (It should be noted that both patients were resigned to these last resort options regardless of the efficacy of treatment.) There are some elements of inductive logic seen with adaptive deep brain stimulation research in general. For example, abductively the focus could be that patient X’s stimulation parameters are different from patient Y’s and patient Z’s. In contrast, when grouped as subjects who obtained personalized stimulation, patients X, Y, and Z demonstrate an inductive aspect to this approach’s safety and/or efficacy. The OCD case holds plenty of abductive characteristics in line with precision medicine’s approach to treating cancer and as more individuals try the method, there will be additional data. With the gradual integration of AI into brain-computer interfaces in the name of efficacy, this reliance on abduction will continue, if not grow, over time. Moving forward, if a responsive deep brain stimulation treatment is novel and individualized (like the dose of nivolumab) and there is some other suggestion of efficacy (like clinical similarities to other patients in the literature), then it may justify insurance coverage for the investigative intervention, absent other unrelated reasons to deny it. III. Ethical Implications and Next Steps While AI’s use in oncology and neurology is not yet as prominent as its use in other fields (e.g., radiology), it appears to be on the horizon for both.[xxxi] AI can be found in both the functioning of the neurotechnologies as well as the implementation of precision medicine. The increasing use of AI may serve to further individualize both oncologic and neurological therapies. Given these implications and the handful of publications cited in this article, it is important to have a nuanced evaluation of how these treatments, which heavily rely on abductive justification, ought to be managed. The just use an abductive approach may be difficult as AI infused precision medicine is further pursued. At baseline, such technology relies on a level of advanced technology literacy among the general public and could exclude populations who lack access to basic technological infrastructure or know-how from participation.[xxxii] Even among nations with adequate infrastructure, as more patients seek out implantable neurotechnologies, which require robust healthcare resources, the market will favor patient populations that can afford this complex care.[xxxiii] If patients already have the means to pay for an initial dose/use of a precision medicine product out of pocket, should insurance providers be required to cover subsequent treatments?[xxxiv] That is, if a first dose of a cancer drug or a deep brain stimulator over its initial battery life is successful, patients may feel justified in having the costs of further treatments covered. The Norwegian patient’s experience implies there is a precedent for the idea that some public insurance companies ought to cover successful cancer therapies, however, insurance companies may not all see themselves as obligated to cover neurotechnologies that rely on personalized settings or that are based on precision/abductive research more than on clinical trials. CONCLUSION The fact that the cases outlined above rely on abductive style of reasoning implies that there may not be as strong a justification for coverage by insurance, as they are both experimental and individualized, when compared to the more traditional large clinical trials in which groups have the same or a standardized protocol (settings/doses). If a study is examining the efficacy of a treatment with a large cohort of patients or with different experimental groups/phases, insurance companies may conclude that the resulting symptom improvements are more likely to be coming from the devices themselves. A preference for inductive justification may take priority when ruling in favor of funding someone’s continued use of an implantable neurostimulator. There are further nuances to this discussion surrounding the classifications of these interventions as research versus clinical care that warrant future exploration, since such a distinction is more of a scale[xxxv] than binary and could have significant impacts on the “right-to-try” approach to experimental therapies in the United States.[xxxvi] Namely, given the inherent limitations of conducting large cohort trials for deep brain stimulation interventions on patients with neuropsychiatric disorders, surgically innovative frameworks that blend abductive and inductive methodologies, like with sham stimulation phases, have traditionally been used.[xxxvii] Similarly, for adaptive brain-computer interface systems, if there are no large clinical trials and instead only publications that demonstrate that something similar worked for someone else, then, in addition to the evidence that the first treatment/dose worked for the patient in question, the balance of reasoning would be valid and arguably justify insurance coverage. As precision approaches to neurotechnology become more common, frameworks for evaluating efficacy will be crucial both for insurance coverage and for clinical decision making. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This article was originally written as an assignment for Dr. Francis Shen’s “Bioethics & AI” course at Harvard’s Center for Bioethics. I would like to thank Dr. Shen for his comments as well as my colleagues in the Lázaro-Muñoz Lab for their feedback. - [i] Jonathan Kimmelman and Ian Tannock, “The Paradox of Precision Medicine,” Nature Reviews. Clinical Oncology 15, no. 6 (June 2018): 341–42, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41571-018-0016-0. [ii] Henrik Vogt and Bjørn Hofmann, “How Precision Medicine Changes Medical Epistemology: A Formative Case from Norway,” Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 28, no. 6 (December 2022): 1205–12, https://doi.org/10.1111/jep.13649. [iii] David Barrett and Ahtisham Younas, “Induction, Deduction and Abduction,” Evidence-Based Nursing 27, no. 1 (January 1, 2024): 6–7, https://doi.org/10.1136/ebnurs-2023-103873. [iv] Vogt and Hofmann, “How Precision Medicine Changes Medical Epistemology,” 1208. [v] Wireko Andrew Awuah et al., “Bridging Minds and Machines: The Recent Advances of Brain-Computer Interfaces in Neurological and Neurosurgical Applications,” World Neurosurgery, May 22, 2024, S1878-8750(24)00867-2, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wneu.2024.05.104. [vi] Mark Riedl, “A Very Gentle Introduction to Large Language Models without the Hype,” Medium (blog), May 25, 2023, https://mark-riedl.medium.com/a-very-gentle-introduction-to-large-language-models-without-the-hype-5 f67941fa59e. [vii] David E. Burdette and Barbara E. Swartz, “Chapter 4 - Responsive Neurostimulation,” in Neurostimulation for Epilepsy, ed. Vikram R. Rao (Academic Press, 2023), 97–132, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-323-91702-5.00002-5. [viii] Kimmelman and Tannock, 2018. [ix] Kimmelman and Tannock, 2018. [x] Simon Lohse, “Mapping Uncertainty in Precision Medicine: A Systematic Scoping Review,” Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 29, no. 3 (April 2023): 554–64, https://doi.org/10.1111/jep.13789. [xi] Kimmelman and Tannock, “The Paradox of Precision Medicine.” [xii] Vogt and Hofmann, 1206. [xiii] Vogt and Hofmann, 1206. [xiv] Vogt and Hofmann, 1206. [xv] Vogt and Hofmann, 1207. [xvi] Vogt and Hofmann, 1207. [xvii] Vogt and Hofmann, 1207. [xviii] Vogt and Hofmann, 1210. [xix] Mehar Sahu et al., “Chapter Three - Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Precision Medicine: A Paradigm Shift in Big Data Analysis,” in Progress in Molecular Biology and Translational Science, ed. David B. Teplow, vol. 190, 1 vols., Precision Medicine (Academic Press, 2022), 57–100, https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.pmbts.2022.03.002. [xx] Stefan Feuerriegel et al., “Causal Machine Learning for Predicting Treatment Outcomes,” Nature Medicine 30, no. 4 (April 2024): 958–68, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-024-02902-1. [xxi] Sunderland Baker et al., “Ethical Considerations in Closed Loop Deep Brain Stimulation,” Deep Brain Stimulation 3 (October 1, 2023): 8–15, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdbs.2023.11.001. [xxii] David Haslacher et al., “AI for Brain-Computer Interfaces,” 2024, 7, https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.dnb.2024.02.003. [xxiii] Burdette and Swartz, “Chapter 4 - Responsive Neurostimulation,” 103–4; “Premarket Approval (PMA),” https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfpma/pma.cfm?id=P100026. [xxiv] Burdette and Swartz, “Chapter 4 - Responsive Neurostimulation,” 104. [xxv] Burdette and Swartz, 126. [xxvi] Sean L. Metzger et al., “A High-Performance Neuroprosthesis for Speech Decoding and Avatar Control,” Nature 620, no. 7976 (August 2023): 1037–46, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06443-4. [xxvii] Hao Fang and Yuxiao Yang, “Predictive Neuromodulation of Cingulo-Frontal Neural Dynamics in Major Depressive Disorder Using a Brain-Computer Interface System: A Simulation Study,” Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience 17 (March 6, 2023), https://doi.org/10.3389/fncom.2023.1119685; Mahsa Malekmohammadi et al., “Kinematic Adaptive Deep Brain Stimulation for Resting Tremor in Parkinson’s Disease,” Movement Disorders 31, no. 3 (2016): 426–28, https://doi.org/10.1002/mds.26482. [xxviii] Young-Hoon Nho et al., “Responsive Deep Brain Stimulation Guided by Ventral Striatal Electrophysiology of Obsession Durably Ameliorates Compulsion,” Neuron 0, no. 0 (October 20, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2023.09.034. [xxix] Nho et al. [xxx] Nho et al.; Erik Robinson, “Brain Implant at OHSU Successfully Controls Both Seizures and OCD,” OHSU News, accessed March 3, 2024, https://news.ohsu.edu/2023/10/25/brain-implant-at-ohsu-successfully-controls-both-seizures-and-ocd. [xxxi] Awuah et al., “Bridging Minds and Machines”; Haslacher et al., “AI for Brain-Computer Interfaces.” [xxxii] Awuah et al., “Bridging Minds and Machines.” [xxxiii] Sara Green, Barbara Prainsack, and Maya Sabatello, “The Roots of (in)Equity in Precision Medicine: Gaps in the Discourse,” Personalized Medicine 21, no. 1 (January 2024): 5–9, https://doi.org/10.2217/pme-2023-0097. [xxxiv] Green, Prainsack, and Sabatello, 7. [xxxv] Robyn Bluhm and Kirstin Borgerson, “An Epistemic Argument for Research-Practice Integration in Medicine,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine 43, no. 4 (July 9, 2018): 469–84, https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/jhy009. [xxxvi] Vijay Mahant, “‘Right-to-Try’ Experimental Drugs: An Overview,” Journal of Translational Medicine 18 (June 23, 2020): 253, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12967-020-02427-4. [xxxvii] Michael S. Okun et al., “Deep Brain Stimulation in the Internal Capsule and Nucleus Accumbens Region: Responses Observed during Active and Sham Programming,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry 78, no. 3 (March 1, 2007): 310–14, https://doi.org/10.1136/jnnp.2006.095315. (shrink)

The global village is under pressure. In order to protect local communities and their traditions, walls, real and symbolical, are erected across the globe. In Turkey, Russia and China cosmopolitanism seems to be giving way to rediscoveries of tradition like Ottomanism, Eurasianism and Confucianism.0In 'Embedding Technopolis', Sheikh rethinks modernity and tradition and gives insight into their complex relationship. From state-led capitalism in East Asia to democracy in India and German industry, Sheikh shows how ancient traditions surprisingly persist in our contemporary (...) world and thrive symbiotically with modernity. At the same time, he develops an innovative method of psychopolitics to analyze the logic of how societies deal with modernization. Haroon Sheikh (1980) studied Public administration, Political science and Philosophy in Leiden and Oxford. He teaches philosophy at VU University in Amsterdam and he is head of research at Dasym, an independent investment firm from the Netherlands. At Dasym, Sheikh works with a multidisciplinary team to study the impact of changing global relations and the implementation of technology in daily life. Sheikh regularly writes for several Dutch media and his work has been featured in 'Foreign Affairs' and the 'Financial Times'. (shrink)

The scientific community has debated the importance of “return” activities after ethnobiological studies. This issue has provoked debate because it touches on the ethics of research and the relationships with the people involved in these studies. This case study aimed to investigate community perception of an ethnobotany research project that was carried out in the semi-arid region of northeastern Brazil. Furthermore, we reported how the residents of this rural community felt about participating in the activities of “return” that arose from (...) the projects. Our findings demonstrate that “return” activities should be planned from the design phase of the research until its closure as a lifelong process that allows the communities involved to gradually take ownership of the information and actions that are being generated. Similarly, we argue that such activities must be negotiated with the people of the community so that they have decision-making power and autonomy to decide what is most relevant to their lives. (shrink)

This research explores the adaptation strategies employed by Betawi traditional art performers in Jakarta amidst the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the transition to the "New Normal Era." Through direct observations, comprehensive literature reviews, and structured questionnaires disseminated to 211 Betawi traditional art performers, this study investigates how performers have adjusted their practices to adhere to health protocols while continuing to preserve and promote ASEAN's intangible cultural heritage. Statistical analysis, including Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), was employed to assess (...) the relationship between performers' adaptability and various latent variables such as conformity, innovation, ritualism, retreatism, rebellion, authority (AUT), education (EDU), tools (TOOL), health protocols (HEAP), social media (SOCMED), and suitability of performance (SP). The results indicate that Betawi traditional art performers have demonstrated resilience and flexibility by leveraging digital platforms, embracing innovation, and diversifying their income sources. These adaptive strategies not only contribute to the preservation of intangible cultural heritage but also align with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 8 (Decent Work and Economic Growth) and 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities). Furthermore, the study underscores the broader implications of Betawi performers' adaptability for ASEAN countries, highlighting the promotion of cultural diversity, intercultural dialogue, and economic prosperity within the region. Overall, the findings emphasize the importance of supporting and sustaining traditional art forms in the face of evolving societal challenges, ultimately enriching the cultural landscape and fostering regional solidarity within ASEAN. (shrink)

Architecture and Deconstruction Case of Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi -/- Introduction Towards deconstruction in architecture Intensive relations between philosophical deconstruction and architecture, which were present in the late 1980s and early 1990s, belong to the past and therefore may be described from a greater than before distance. Within these relations three basic variations can be distinguished: the first one, in which philosophy of deconstruction deals with architectural terms but does not interfere with real architecture, the second one, in which (...) a collaboration between Jacques Derrida and a group of architects interested in his concepts is commenced, and the third one, in which completed or only designed objects or new concepts of deconstruction created by architects gain their supremacy over philosophy. The following book analyses these three possible ways, first of all with the reference to Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. -/- Peter Eisenman -/- Misreading… and Other Errors -/- The issue of relations between Peter Eisenman’s work and philosophy of deconstruction may be referred to his activity more than ten years preceding his direct collaboration with Jacques Derrida (in 1985) and organisation of the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture at Museum of Modern Art in New York (in 1988). As soon as at the stage of designing the first houses (House I-III, 1967-1970), which almost entirely inscribed in formalistic aesthetics of Modernism, the architect analysed the problem of architecture dependence on its assumptions. All his later designs may be treated as consequence of this initial interest in relations between practice and theory, and at the same time as an introduction to manipulations later on led at the level of metaphysics of architecture. Beginning with the issue of presence, considered in comments to House VI (1972), the number of ideas having their analogies in philosophy of deconstruction increased. The text entitled The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, The End of the End (1984), in which Eisenman criticised questions of representation in architecture, its delusive strive for truth and comparably unattainable attempts at ultimate definition of elementary rules, should be acclaimed the breaking point. This attitude was extended by numerous strategies disturbing architecture rules defined at metaphysical level in an essay Moving Arrows, Eros, and Other Errors: an Architecture of Absence (1986). The issue of Eisenman’s passage from formalism to deconstruction has already been much discussed in the literature (Rosalind Krauss, Thomas Patin among others), still it should be mentioned that the threads similar to Derrida’s concept included in Eisenman’s writing reveal untranslatability of architecture and philosophy. -/- Choral Works or Separate tricks -/- In 1985-1986 a series of seven disputes between Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman took place. The pretext for them were designs concerning Parc de la Villette in Paris. The situation of many months of collaboration between a notable philosopher of the second half of the 20th c. and an architect that already had a huge theoretical oeuvre, ended up with a publication of a large volume entitled Chora L Works and it became at the same time a vast study area for historians of contemporary architecture and philosophers. Derrida’s contribution to concept works were his considerations over the idea of chôra, the properties related to this concept were about to be reflected in shapes of the park. Therefore, Chora L Works became an example of the abilities of contemporary art, both in its capability of translation from philosophical ideas to artistic forms and its resistance to tradition of representing in architecture some phenomena and values originating outside this discipline. In the final period of their collaboration both interlocutors started to polemicise with each other more decidedly, what became a separate part of their thought exchange. The exchange of letters between Derrida and Eisenman at the turn of 1989 ended up the period of their direct contacts, nevertheless, at this time precisely a large group of experts in issues of deconstruction joined the discussion and extended the revealed in the former dispute problems into more than ten years of further considerations and publications. Except for a long text by Jeffrey Kipnis, who had participated in the meetings of the philosopher and the architect, there appeared also comments of researchers of artistic theories (K. Michael Hays, Thomas Patin), philosophers (Andrew Benjamin), and even experts in Greek literature (Maria Theodorou or Ann Bergren). Following these debates a contemporary reflection on architecture has saturated with indeed numerous concepts originating in philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Architecture which imitates mute philosophy -/- The series of Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman meetings, which took place in the period of 1985-1987, induced many authors to make comments. Some of them (Jeffrey Kipnis, Ann Bergren, Maria Theodorou) developed the subject of chôra which was introduced to the discussion by Derrida. The problem that was about to be solved was the question of tying up the concept of chôra with architecture, including Eisenman’s architecture and the series of meetings within frames of Chora L Works project. Kipnis on this occasion paid attention to chôra and its character of anachronia which infects any being created within chôra. In other words any event has its counterpart (analogon) in another, earlier event. He demonstrated the similarity of structure of many events and statements from the times of Derrida and Eisenman’s meetings to the almost identical behaviour of figures in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus. The loss of beginning present in this phenomenon was appropriate to both features of chôra and the effects of typical analyses of philosophy of deconstruction. Bergren’s analyses focused on accentuating gender of chôra, which, according to this author, had been neglected hitherto in discussions. She collated chôra descriptions with characteristics of women in myths, early Greek epic and philosophy and she arrived at a conclusion that chôra has features of a single woman and a married one at the same time. And yet Theodorou’s studies showed that in the Homeric epics chôra is not treated as an idea but is related with single things and events. The other part of the comments (represented by Andrew Benjamin and K. Michael Hays’ utterances) concerns Eisenman’s attitude to tradition which was treated as a variety of iteration understood philosophically. Benjamin commenced his considerations at the point of closeness between a definition of tradition and a concept of chôra understood as perpetuation (placement). A problematic issue was for him Eisenman’s complex relation to tradition based on its contest and affirmation at the same time. Overcoming the simple subordination to tradition – according to Benjamin – was based on awareness of the role of repetition in culture not known before. Hays made an attempt to explain the pleasure and torment of repetition with the support of Sigmund Freud and Roland Barthes’ concepts. According to Hays repetitions are attempts of a single being to a certain primal state perceived as free of any tension. In a similar way Rosalind Krauss explained a motif of a grate present in Modernistic art and also exceptionally frequent in Eisenman’s work. -/- Annex Architecture is still writing Balzac novels. Peter Eisenman and literature -/- Architecture’s approach to writing, script or literature, present within Peter Eisenman’s work, is an exceptional phenomenon, furthermore a complex one. The article considers four possible relations. The first one relates to Eisenman’s characteristics as a person extremely gifted with the ability to wordplay, which very ‘play’ reveals skills to create architectural images. In the second approach the attention has been paid to Eisenman’s interests – in the first period of his oeuvre – in linguistic works by Noam Chomsky and his transformational-generative grammar. The third kind of relations applied to overcoming the need for autonomy of architecture (and of modernist aesthetics at the same time) and renew interests in questions of meaning in architecture. The fourth sort of relations occurred when Eisenman started to create reflections of historic or literary narrations in architecture – ‘stone stories’ and architectural fictions of their kind. -/- Bernard Tschumi -/- From perversion to deconstruction In Bernard Tschumi’s writings from the 1970s and 1980s we can find a transposition of important threads of post-structuralist ideas deriving from Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida’s works. The analysis of the architect’s writings also shows roots in Phillippe Sollers, Michel Foucault and Denis Hollier’s works. The analysis of borrowed elements from the beginnings of Tschumi’s theoretical activity may be helpful in explaining the contents of his later writings motre inspired by philosophy of deconstruction. The set of his earliest views was inspired by Marxism, Neo Marxism and French Structuralism, mainly by the writings of Henri Levebre and Guy Debord. From the thought of Levebre Tschumi took interest for city as not only a question of urbanistics but also a political issue. From Debord’s concepts he borrowed a conviction about the role of situational violation for changes in the society structure. Some of these beliefs were preserved in his own concepts of architecture as an event. From this period derived also his will to change conservative elements of social structure not by means of political revolution but of theoretical and creative activity. Tschumi acknowledged that the effective way of the proceedings towards achieving his aims would be accepting the role of both a critical intellectualist and architecture expert who would not hide away his left-wing orientation. The speculations defined by the architect as ‘revolting analyses’ were about to characterise contradictions which tear the society apart, penetrate architecture and constitute the basis of culture. Spreading away of the conscience of false assumptions hidden away in various disciplines could have weakened cohesion of a conservative society and influence the will to change among the elites. This way the beginnings of political revolution were rooted in philosophy of architecture. In 1977 Tschumi published his text entitled The Pleasure of Architecture inspired by Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, it also included some concepts derived from Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida. First of all the author used Barthes’s concept which made an assumption that literary activity is pervaded by the spirit of resistance towards social rules, and Tschudi transferred this remark onto architecture. From the ideas of Bataille, acquainted via Holier’s work, he derived his belief that two concepts of space, a conceptual one (defined as Pyramid) and a sensual one (defined as Labirynth), not losing their distinct features, they join in the concept of experienced space which exceeds contradictions. The exceeding itself was defined as the basic rule of architecture and it was referred to situations in which architecture not only negates social needs, but also disavows its own tradition. Crossing the borders applies not only to political issues or permanent rules of the very discipline but also interfering with other fields (especially literature and film). The fact that architecture is associated with organising events turned Tschumi’s attention to questions of violence that result from upsetting architectural order of a given building by its users and the one hand, and on the other from forcing the users to specific acts imposed by this very order. The analysis of the concepts used by Tschumi in his early writings indicates that they are close to definitions that would occur in his reflection in the following years influenced by philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Approaching deconstruction Tschumi in his theories developed in the 1980s presumed that the current social world had undergone a deep process of decay, and the reaction against which ought to be based on ordering-up actions, and also preserving the main outline of disintegration of the whole and its elements in the state of conflict. The statements concerning the nature of the contemporary to Tschumi social relations were applied by him to the world of architecture, this led him to coming up with designing strategies that took into consideration the destabilised character of conditions in which works of architecture were created. New ways of conduct invented by Tschumi drew their inspiration from literature and research on literature, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, structuralism and post structuralism, and eventually also deconstruction philosophy. The proposed methods were opposed by their author both to functionalism continuity trends and postmodern architecture. Tschumi’s proposals contradicted any forms of conservatism or traditionalism in political sphere as well as in reference to tendencies in architecture. They were not simple contradictions of social or architectural rules, they intrude them from the inside, weaken or escalate the already existing incongruities, they move the boundaries between the areas. Revolutionary illusions about the possibility of radical changes were replaced with strategies which completed, tainted or test former rules in the series of formal games of permutation and combination. Quite different from avant-garde formalism Tschumi’s games were not about maintaining the autonomy of a given area, but on the contrary – polluting it with other areas’ influences. Tschumi enjoyed demonstrating illusions of architecture concerning simple relations between form and function, or between form and meaning. Making use of Freud, Lacan and Foucault’s research he introduced a category of “madness” into architecture allowing an observation that the recognised norms are nothing but merely ones of many possible principles of behaviour, and their recognised status resulted from unjustified hindering innovativeness which is crucial for architecture. To reborn architecture’s capability of changing Tschumi also made use of Barthes’s discoveries concerning rules of narration and works by writers who applied in their writing knowledge on linguistics. Making a work’s author unclear by various mechanical transformations of its elements was however apparent only, and formal rigours imposed on the process of designing liberated possibilities difficult to obtain in more traditional creative action. Another mode of acting introduced by Tschumi was combining his work of elements deriving from outside architecture; joining space records with notation of motion and events accompanying architectural objects among others. These architectural and extra-architectural elements were not unified, on the contrary their heterogenous and conflictual character was stressed. This is how shock, anxiety and instability, typical for live in great metropolises, infiltrated architecture. Taking some ideas of deconstruction philosophy as a pattern Tschumi also took into critical consideration in his essays traditional in architecture oppositions between form and figuration, or theory and practice. By combining various inspirations he eventually worked out an idea of architectural event, which he understood as a series of actions contesting its own field, redefining its sources, principles and elements. An event, understood in this way, was not so much producing works as rather creating conditions of their production and at the same time designing the society different from a hierarchic one. -/- Park of deconstruction Among numerous philosophical strategies of deconstruction most frequently used was questioning the practice of strong opposition of two reasons. In many cases Bernard Tschumi’s writings just consider functioning of the conflict juxtaposition of the ideas of structure and ornament or theory and practice in history of architecture. Violation of traditional relations between terms of this kind, both old and modern, raised Jacques Derrida’s objections, when he was induced for the first time to co-operate with architects’ milieu. During this long lasting thought exchange the philosopher eventually acknowledged Bernard Tschumi’s arguments for reasoning the encroachment of architecture’s fundamental rules. Deconstruction applied in architecture was not a simple transposition or analogy of practices that had been applied by philosophy of deconstruction. We may even say that considering architectural terms became an important formula of deconstruction. Architecture understood in philosophical way became something beyond the practice and theory of its own discipline, a sort of metaphysics of both philosophy and architecture. The deliberate encroachment of simplicity of dividing architecture into theory and practice, for the first time became a clear aim for Tschumi in his drawings and texts entitled The Manhattan Transcripts. The contents of this series of works was a record of characteristic features of this New York district in such a way that not only objects were the subject of the record but also relations between objects, people and events. The record was about to take into consideration a conflict character of elements of this representation and at the same time to avoid applying to them the rule of mimetism. The record became a form of reflection over the very record by an increased control over the ways of representation. Architecture which was considered in the The Manhattan Transcripts was not directed to fulfill the needs of inhabitation or production, it was rather related with hitherto usually marginalised liminal situations: building ostentatiously big monuments, religious cult, war etc. Architecture operating in these relations focused also the attention on the included in it continuous tendency to overpass its own restrictions, the role of violence as its not recognised factor, or the meaning of excess and shock in its operation. Architecture moving from reason towards madness became even more visible in the design of Parisian Parc de la Villette, whose pavilions were defined as folies (in French it means both small park buildings and follies). The park was supposed to be on the one hand a reflection of traditional society disintegration while on the other it questioned basic rules of producing a work of architecture. The traditional rules of designing, based on ordering up, were replaced with the strategies of dysfunction and dissociation. In Tschumi’s opinion methods of this kind may be equivalent of what Derrida named différance. Instead of aiming at mergence, any diversity, plays or variations were strengthen. Tschumi’s texts, in which he explained his attitude, were completed by Derrida’s extent statement entitled Point de folie – Maintenant l’architecture. Derrida’s article is the most significant of all his statements on architecture as a form of thinking and activity. According to the philosopher, architecture should divide space (in French defined as espacement), what enables both thinking and action – it arranges the space of an event. Tschumi’s buildings, defined as folies, in an essential way destabilise any created order, and at the same time they refresh it. Derrida’s statement suggests that architecture may become both metaphor of an order merging a language or a society but also of inner forces which deconstruct and reconstruct it. Therefore architecture is at the same time a construction, a deconstruction and a reconstruction. Parc de la Villette stands out in this system with its attempt to step beyond the scheme of an easy repetition and its heading for chances of achieving more radical otherness. -/- Conclusion Destruction as construction. Paradoxes of deconstruction in architecture -/- Scepticism about persistence and common importance of fundamental values of human culture evinced in philosophers and writers’ works as early as in Greek antiquity, nevertheless it was not expressed so strongly as in the second half of the 20th century. Especially in Heidegger’s work Being and Time (although originated in 1927, still influential in all later philosophy) the following states were characterised: the state of losing the ground (Abgrund), of being out of sight (Unheimlichkeit) and of being out of dwelling (Un-zuhause-sein) – as the basis of self-confidence of conscious being there (Dasein). The entire criticism of philosophy of home and dwelling draws the inspiration from this early writing of the German philosopher, it combines crisis of basic terms of metaphysics with social conditions which are dictated by living in large metropolis. The crisis of both metaphysical foundation and home appears to be similar to the situation of weakening the relations between a man and his dwelling in extensively expanding cities. Whereas philosophy, as well as many disciplines of social sciences, have diagnosed for a long time the destabilisation of fundamental ideas of Western culture and crucial changes in the ways of dwelling, architecture itself occurred to be “the last fortress of metaphysics” (J. Derrida). Among contemporary architects, Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi were the ones who engaged most decidedly in the issues of critical analysis of architecture foundation and its social role. Both the architects noticed new formulas of contemporary social and individual existence, tremendously different from the entire history, and at the same time they affirmed lack of adequacy of architecture concepts to new situations. Both Eisenman and Tschumi used to describe the existing architecture as a tool for consolidation of highly integrated and hierarchised societies, and also as a discipline extremely uncoincidental with the current character of social life based on ideas of freedom and diversity. The means to transform architecture and make a factor of further social changes out of it, was a concept that accentuated revealing the inner contradictions of this discipline, and considering them in designing strategies. Eisenman’s activity, in regard of what has just been noticed, was focused on questioning the basic rules of traditionally comprehended architecture, especially the rule of purpose. The American architect noticed that the concept of architecture as fulfilment the need of location, hides away the fact that the location has to be constantly reconsidered, and hence it is overtaken by change (dislocation). Therefore new concept of architecture propounded architectural activity to translocate the concept of location – more than before – but also to change its status perpetually. Such comprehended architecture should claim, as its main purpose, the constant revision of this purpose and create itself anew permanently. Even Eisenman’s earliest designs of houses nos. I-IV broke with such values as the sense of safety, closeness and familiarity, and just on the contrary they accentuated senses of strangeness, homelessness and loss of confidence. The contradictions within architecture noticed by Tschumi referred to combination of intellectual and sensual values in architecture, when their non-appropriation was defeated by an additional condition, namely the way of experience based on pleasure of excess, marked by insanity. The features of folly were especially visible in his designs of gardens, where the order of planning was mixed with sensual experience introduced by particular elements (both the ones created by nature, and the buildings defined as folies). Parc de la Villette designed by the French architect in Paris put in question not only the common understanding of purpose in architecture but also the ideas of order and integrity, as its plan was based on the combination of independent layers with records of grids of points, various lines and planes. The architecture that collides inadequate elements with each other was supposed to be a kind of an event with no beginning and no end. The architecture treated as an event became a form of a space weakened articulation that maintains its diversity and lack of accordance of the elements building it up. The analyses of Eisenman and Tschumi’s theoretical writings indicate how much the aims of architecture have actually changed; instead of supporting social persistence, the architecture is rather intensifying contradictions, and instead of providing people with the sense of safety, it sublimes danger. From simple acts of defamiliarisation, increasing the distance to itself and enhancing the role of theory, through discomfort, anxiety, not feeling someone at home, weirdness, excess, shock and violence, architecture reached the edge of stability and uncertainty, only to make an attempt at penetrating what is impossible and unutterable, and recording what cannot become the subject of any records. -/- . (shrink)

This paper reviews the history of AI & Law research from the perspective of argument schemes. It starts with the observation that logic, although very well applicable to legal reasoning when there is uncertainty, vagueness and disagreement, is too abstract to give a fully satisfactory classification of legal argument types. It therefore needs to be supplemented with an argument-scheme approach, which classifies arguments not according to their logical form but according to their content, in particular, according to the roles that (...) the various elements of an argument can play. This approach is then applied to legal reasoning, to identify some of the main legal argument schemes. It is also argued that much AI & Law research in fact employs the argument-scheme approach, although it usually is not presented as such. Finally, it is argued that the argument-scheme approach and the way it has been employed in AI & Law respects some of the main lessons to be learnt from Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument. (shrink)

Analytic metaphysics is usually considered a contemporary form of traditional, pre-Cartesian metaphysics. This paper examines the epistemic legitimacy of analytic metaphysics in the face of scientific dominance. While naturalized metaphysics has found its place within science, analytic metaphysics remains challenged. To meet the challenge, I propose interpreting analytic metaphysics as a form of logical inquiry, positioning logic as its foundation, similarly to how science grounds naturalized metaphysics. The argument is developed through three key points: (1) tracing the historical connection between (...) science and naturalized metaphysics on the one hand, and analytic metaphysics and philosophical logic on the other hand, (2) highlighting similarities between logic and metaphysics, and (3) demonstrating that contemporary analytic metaphysics often operates as a logical inquiry. I show that this strategy preserves classical options at the meta-metaphysical level, arguing that a view of logic as grounded in language is in a better position to safeguard the autonomy from science and the collapse into naturalized metaphysics. (shrink)

[186 pages] Just as the six branches of a snow crystal converge in regular proportions toward their common center, the six contributions to this book point toward a future philosophy of cosmic life. In this sense, this edited volume represents a multidisciplinary and transcultural polylogue of distinguished authors from three continents, which aims to establish highly innovative perspectives and open new frontiers of developing philosophical reflections and scientific foundations for the emergence of a common cosmic consciousness, for an integral ecology, (...) and for a cooperative planetary civilization of humanity. John B. Cobb, Jr. uses a process-philosophical foundation to describe life as living events expressing novelty and the cosmos as a process of self-enriching and self-evolving “Life Itself.” Chandra Wickramasinghe unfolds his scientific and philosophical perspective on cosmic life in twelve successive steps, offering a wide range of arguments and insights that support an up-to-date theory of panspermia. Attila Grandpierre presents the "Cosmic Life Principle" and the comprehensive science based upon it that is inextricably linked to the healthy and cooperative civilization, to the biological laws of nature, to the laws of logic, to the uplifting of the well-being of people and ecological communities. Chunyou Yan introduces the approach of his holographic philosophy, according to which the universe must be understood as a vast living entity, every aspect of which represents life. Bei Peng shows that the proportions of energy meridians in traditional Chinese medicine correspond to musical intervals, and on this basis she demonstrates the analogy of the human body to macrocosmic phenomena. David Bartosch offers an examination of three important systematic foundations for a poly-contextural, transcultural philosophy of cosmic life with roots in Greek, Chinese, South and West Asian, and European traditions of thought. (shrink)

The science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) classroom is an ideal site for implementing community-based ethics resources. Doing so fulfills programmatic requirements in the social reality of science and demonstrates increased applicability of science concepts to issues of immediate community concern. This chapter elaborates on the Re-envisioning Ethics Access and Community Humanities (REACH) initiative at Salisbury University, its community research methodology, and the implementation of community-sourced ethics cases in the biology classroom. Preliminary student and instructor feedback is summarized. As opposed (...) to using more traditional ethics resources, such as cases sourced from the national media or case-based ethics readers, the use of community-based cases demonstrates promise in increasing student engagement in discussion, the applicability of course content, and a sense of the social importance of science in addressing contemporary ethics issues. We end with future implications of this pedagogical approach for revising ethics instruction in the STEM classroom. (shrink)

The progress and development of the new era has given commercial illustration a new vitality, expanding and enhancing its commercial value and cultural connotation.However, under the influence of traditional mechanistic philosophical thought, there is a tendency of utilitarianization, mechanization, absolutization and fragmentation in China's commercial illustration in general, resulting in various reform measures facing difficulties and resistance, especially not conducive to the healthy and comprehensive development of packaging design.Ecological philosophy, as a systematic, holistic, processual and connected idea, is now being (...) widely used to deal with the relationship between human beings and society.By analyzing the close relationship between commercial illustration, which is an important design graphic language for cultural and creative packaging design, and cultural and creative product packaging, this paper tries to propose how commercial illustration is applied in cultural and creative packaging design under the ecological philosophy perspective.It summarizes the role of commercial illustration in cultural creative packaging design, elaborates the research on the innovation strategy of commercial illustration in cultural creative packaging design under the ecological philosophy perspective, and demonstrates the charm of commercial illustration in cultural creative packaging design. (shrink)

As a committee of the National Academy of Engineering recognized, ethics education should foster the ability of students to analyze complex decision situations and ill-structured problems. Building on the NAE’s insights, we report about an innovative teaching approach that has two main features: first, it places the emphasis on deliberation and on self-directed, problem-based learning in small groups of students; and second, it focuses on understanding ill-structured problems. The first innovation is motivated by an abundance of scholarly research that (...) supports the value of deliberative learning practices. The second results from a critique of the traditional case-study approach in engineering ethics. A key problem with standard cases is that they are usually described in such a fashion that renders the ethical problem as being too obvious and simplistic. The practitioner, by contrast, may face problems that are ill-structured. In the collaborative learning environment described here, groups of students use interactive and web-based argument visualization software called “AGORA-net: Participate – Deliberate!”. The function of the software is to structure communication and problem solving in small groups. Students are confronted with the task of identifying possible stakeholder positions and reconstructing their legitimacy by constructing justifications for these positions in the form of graphically represented argument maps. The argument maps are then presented in class so that these stakeholder positions and their respective justifications become visible and can be brought into a reasoned dialogue. Argument mapping provides an opportunity for students to collaborate in teams and to develop critical thinking and argumentation skills. (shrink)

‘Byzantine logic diagrams’ have been used since at least late antiquity, and became popular in Europe in the 16th century. However, since the criticism of W. Hamilton and J. Venn in the 19th century, Byzantine diagrams have been largely dismissed as obsolete. This paper challenges this prevailing view. Initially, we provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of research pertaining to these diagrams, illustrating their applicability in analyzing assertoric syllogisms. Subsequently, we propose that the expressive capacity of these diagrams (...) extends far beyond their traditional use. In particular, we demonstrate that the expressivity of these diagrams is not limited to checking the validity of syllogisms. Rather, we show that there are various extensions of Byzantine diagrams, including opposition relations, modal logic, particular instances, n-term diagrams and logical connectives. These extensions are compositional and can therefore be combined to create very complex Byzantine diagrams that go far beyond what has been commonly believed since Hamilton and Venn. (shrink)

This discussion paper responds to two recent articles in Biology and Philosophy that raise similar objections to cultural attraction theory, a research trend in cultural evolution putting special emphasis on the fact that human minds create and transform their culture. Both papers are sympathetic to this idea, yet both also regret a lack of consilience with Boyd, Richerson and Henrich’s models of cultural evolution. I explain why cultural attraction theorists propose a different view on three points of concern for our (...) critics. I start by detailing the claim that cultural transmission relies not chiefly on imitation or teaching, but on cognitive mechanisms like argumentation, ostensive communication, or selective trust, whose evolved or habitual function may not be the faithful reproduction of ideas or behaviours. Second, I explain why the distinction between context biases and content biases might not always be the best way to capture the interactions between culture and cognition. Lastly, I show that cultural attraction models cannot be reduced to a model of guided variation, which posits a clear separation between individual and social learning processes. With cultural attraction, the same cognitive mechanisms underlie both innovation and the preservation of traditions. (shrink)

It is argued here that large-scale organization and networked computing enable new divisions of communicative work aimed at shaping the content, direction, and outcomes of societal conversations. The challenge for argumentation theory and practice lies in attending to these new divisions of communicative work in constituting contemporary argumentative realities. Goffman’s conceptualization of participation frameworks and production formats are applied to articulate the communicative work of organizations afforded by networked computing that invents and innovates argument in all of its senses—as product, (...) process, and procedure. Communicative work, however, may be scaffolding argumentative contexts and practices that are quite different than what has constituted past argumentative realities. The computerization of argument happens as organizations invent and innovate argument practice relative to the demands and opportunities of interorganizational communication. The cases and examples examined here suggest that argument practice is evolving around the logic of conversation and the principle of personalization. The analysis challenges argumentation theory to seriously engage with the construction of communicative contexts and the realization of ideas about disagreement management in organizational practice and information infrastructures. Directions for integrating insights from a design perspective on argument with insights from organizational and information systems theory are proposed for coming to terms with an era of large-scale organization and computerization, in particular the evolution of argument practice, the inscription of argument in the built environment, and the absorption of socio-cultural argument practices by organizations and computation. (shrink)

My first paper on the Is/Ought issue. The young Arthur Prior endorsed the Autonomy of Ethics, in the form of Hume’s No-Ought-From-Is (NOFI) but the later Prior developed a seemingly devastating counter-argument. I defend Prior's earlier logical thesis (albeit in a modified form) against his later self. However it is important to distinguish between three versions of the Autonomy of Ethics: Ontological, Semantic and Ontological. Ontological Autonomy is the thesis that moral judgments, to be true, must answer to a realm (...) of sui generis non-natural PROPERTIES. Semantic autonomy insists on a realm of sui generis non-natural PREDICATES which do not mean the same as any natural counterparts. Logical Autonomy maintains that moral conclusions cannot be derived from non-moral premises.-moral premises with the aid of logic alone. Logical Autonomy does not entail Semantic Autonomy and Semantic Autonomy does not entail Ontological Autonomy. But, given some plausible assumptions Ontological Autonomy entails Semantic Autonomy and given the conservativeness of logic – the idea that in a valid argument you don’t get out what you haven’t put in – Semantic Autonomy entails Logical Autonomy. So if Logical Autonomy is false – as Prior appears to prove – then Semantic and Ontological Autonomy would appear to be false too! I develop a version of Logical Autonomy (or NOFI) and vindicate it against Prior’s counterexamples, which are also counterexamples to the conservativeness of logic as traditionally conceived. The key concept here is an idea derived in part from Quine - that of INFERENCE-RELATIVE VACUITY. I prove that you cannot derive conclusions in which the moral terms appear non-vacuously from premises from which they are absent. But this is because you cannot derive conclusions in which ANY (non-logical) terms appear non-vacuously from premises from which they are absent Thus NOFI or Logical Autonomy comes out as an instance of the conservativeness of logic. This means that the reverse entailment that I have suggested turns out to be a mistake. The falsehood of Logical Autonomy would not entail either the falsehood Semantic Autonomy or the falsehood of Ontological Autonomy, since Semantic Autonomy only entails Logical Autonomy with the aid of the conservativeness of logic of which Logical Autonomy is simply an instance. Thus NOFI or Logical Autonomy is vindicated, but it turns out to be a less world-shattering thesis than some have supposed. It provides no support for either non-cognitivism or non-naturalism. (shrink)

Réseau LACTO (Langage, Argumentation et Cognition dans les Traditions Orales) Quatrième Rencontre du Réseau Lacto CELHTO, bureau de l'Union Africaine, Niamey, Niger, du 22 au 25 septembre 2015 : JEU ET ORALITE DANS LES SOCIETES A TRADITION ORALE According to the main stream approaches to epistemic notions, knowledge and belief are understood as propositional operators. Thus, • Gildas believes that there is a witch in his village is understood as expressing a proposition. Moreover, • Gildas knows that Gödel proved the (...) completeness of first-order logic, expresses a proposition too. The difference between both is that a belief-proposition can be true if it is " factually " false: in our case the proposition can be true in relation to Gildas's belief, that is, despite the fact that there is no witch in his village. Furthermore, assuming that there is not witch in his village, the following proposition is false • Gildas knows that there is a witch in his village. If the latter is false, from the point of view of the mainstream, there was not knowledge at all, rather it was from the start a belief that has not been verified. 1 The present paper is part of an ongoing project in the context of the research-program Argumentation, Decision, Action (ADA) and the project Logique, Argumentation et Cognition dans les Traditions Orales (LACTO) both supported by the Maison Européenne des Sciences de l' Homme et de la Société-USR 318 and by the laboratory UMR 8163: STL. (shrink)

For the purpose of advancing the feminist commitment to inclusion and nonliberal articulations of pluralism, in this essay I conceptualize the Native account of individual autonomy that itself evolves from a commitment to pluralism. I demonstrate that Native individual autonomy is concurrently strong and feminist in nature—what I call “radical-cum-relational.” That is, Native autonomy is more radical than the traditional liberal conception and is simultaneously grounded in relationality, which is the basis of much of feminist ethics. I demonstrate that the (...) Native conception of autonomy is radical and promotes the highest degree of individual self-determination and independence qua individuality and particularity. Yet this radical self-determination depends on intense social interdependency. The grounding metaphysics and epistemology of the Native framework are conceived entirely in terms of ethical relationships between and responsibilities to other individuals, animals, and the Earth. That is, no part of the Native paradigm can be understood outside of the ethical connections persons have by virtue of their primary position as community members. It is by situating radical autonomy against a background of ethical social interdependence, together with thebackground condition of gender equality of Native practices, that the radical construal of Native individual freedom is feminist. To shore up and illustrate the connection between Native autonomy and feminism, I argue that an identification between the Native social practice of gifting and feminist reciprocity can be made, specifically Iris Marion Young’s notion of asymmetrical reciprocity. Finally, I argue that this connection avoids the problem of incommensurability and so is theoretically possible, responsible, and fits the criterion of respectfulness also at the foundation of the Native framework. Broadly speaking, the problem of incommensurability is concerned with theorists’ inability to recognize foundational incompatibilities between paradigms and their forced attempts to mergethem, often at the price of ignoring inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and contradictions that result from impossible translations and conversions. Historically and to the present day, Western philosophy has been egregiously guilty of distorting Native theories and practices. In this essay I argue that since translation takes place at the level of praxis rather than at the level of language, my argument circumvents problems that arise from failed attempts to map cultural concepts onto others that do not share similar foundations. (shrink)

In this article we take the use of examples as a means to explore the processes of persuasion and consensus-construction involved in the legitimation of popular management knowledge. Examples, as concrete instances or events used to substantiate a wider argument, have been variedly regarded in different research traditions. Classical logic and rhetoric have considered them an inferior form of argument, useful for pedagogic or public debate but inadequate for higher forms of thought. This spirit still permeates much psychological research on (...) communication, where the great persuasive import of examples has been contrasted with more scientific and formal resources for argumentation. Considered in this light, the contingent and episodic nature of examples seems to make them cognitively inferior to explicit statements of general rules. However, various strands of research on the nature of scientific knowledge have shown that implicit forms of knowledge are an integral part of scientific expertise. Examples may thus be more central to disciplinary thought than the conventional normative view seems to allow. In this spirit, we explore the use of examples in a hotly contested field, that of popular discourse on business and management. The profusion of examples in this kind of writing has been often noted, and almost as often criticized. We seek to explore more fully how these examples are deployed, examining the discursive devices that mark examples within the development of the text, their function as rhetorical moves, and their role in presenting arguments that are never otherwise made explicit. (shrink)

In Speaking for the Dying: Life‐and‐Death Decisions in Intensive Care, Susan Shapiro attempts to penetrate and organize the chaotic communications between physicians and family members who are making medical decisions for people who have lost the capacity to make their own medical decisions. The work is based on observations undertaken by Shapiro and a coresearcher of one thousand encounters between physicians and the family members of two hundred patients too sick to participate. Their ethnographic work, which is both traditional and (...) innovative, leads to stunning findings. They reveal an inadequacy among surrogates that is undeniable, vast, and potentially tragic—if measured by the questionable standard of adhering to the patient's preferences. Further confirming research would be helpful, but what Shapiro has recognized already should shake the foundations of advance care planning. (shrink)