The ?values of sport? is a concept that is often used to justify actions and policies by a range of agents and agencies from coaches and teachers to governing bodies and educational institutions. From a philosophical point of view, these values deserve to be analysed with great care to make sure we understand their nature and reach. The aim of this paper is to critically examine the values carried by the educational conception of sport that Pierre de Coubertin developed and (...) to see how they relate to certain values in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. To be able to understand in depth the moral construct of de Coubertin's system, it is essential to delve into the entire system he builds in order to develop athletic participants closer to his ideal of what a human should be. This in turn rests on his conception of Man, which is comprised of body, spirit and character. An understanding of his structure opens the way to a broader awareness of de Coubertin's educational system, of which sport was only part. We will then see that the values are a consequence of this pedagogical search for the ideal human. It is argued that this ideal of a human is similar to the one described by Nietzsche as the Übermensch . A philosophical case study is conducted, taking as its object the story of the first recipient of the Pierre de Coubertin medal, which rewards fair play among Olympic competitors. Judging the story through Nietzschean eyes allows for his thoughts to be put into practice. His lesser-known texts such as Homer and Competition on the emulation of creative powers shed light on today's sports. Concepts such as guilt, excellence, will to power and effectiveness help us compare these two authors and understand that competition is not necessarily about dominating others, but more about generating human excellence. (shrink)

A critical, philosophical engagement of the psychological structures that propagate the continued oppression of women. In this book, the Italian feminist thinker Lea Melandri argues that systemic violence against women has deep psychoanalytic roots. Drawing inspiration from the work of Freud and the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Elvio Fachinelli, along with feminist practices of consciousness-raising, Melandri demonstrates how male dominance and female subservience are established by society through a binary and oppositional understanding of sex and gender. This understanding—and the oppression and (...) violence against women that results—is inscribed in the psyches of both men and women, and is replicated anew from generation to generation. Melandri analyzes women in media, politics, philosophy, and literature to show how this plays out, and calls for awareness of these deep psychic structures and expectations formed within the dynamics of society and primary family relations. Lea Melandri is one of Italy’s best-known feminist thinkers and activists. She is the author of many books and continues to write and advocate for women’s rights. In 2012, she was awarded by the city of Milan the Ambrogino d’oro, one of the city’s highest honors. Antonio Calcagno is Professor of Philosophy at King’s University College at Western University, Canada. He the editor of Contemporary Italian Political Philosophy and the coeditor (with Inna Viriasova) of Roberto Esposito: Biopolitics and Philosophy, both also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

Scholars have long been aware of striking similarities between a crucial passage in Book II of Plato’s Republic and the longest papyrus fragment surviving from Antiphon’s On Truth. Previous scholarship has identified some views common to both texts but has not explained how these views hang together in a unified and coherent ethical outlook. A deeper investigation into these two texts turns up a blueprint for Greek immoralist arguments, a finding which should be of considerable interest to scholars of ancient (...) Greek ethics and political philosophy. The paper argues that both texts include an argument whose demonstrandum is that it is by nature good or advantageous to commit injustice when one can do so undetected; that this argument in each case involves a set of background premises that constitute a blueprint for immoralist arguments in Classical Athens; and that the immoralist ethical theory of Republic II is an outline distilled from several more detailed theories, including the one belonging to On Truth. (shrink)

This article analyses the teleological argument justifying historical progress in Kant's Guarantee of Perpetual Peace. It starts by examining the controversies produced by Kant's claim that the teleology of nature supports the idea of a providential development of humanity towards moral progress and the possibility of achieving a cosmopolitan political constitution. It further illustrates how Kant's teleological argument in Perpetual Peace needs to be assessed with reference to two systematically relevant issues: first, the problem of coordination linked to the necessity (...) of realizing the ‘highest good’ as a historical end of practical reason, and secondly the problem of continuity posed by the temporal limitation of all individual efforts to cultivate moral dispositions. To illustrate the implications of both issues for the teleological argument in Perpetual Peace, the article draws attention to some important developments in Kant's analysis of teleology following the Critique of Judgment. (shrink)

It is often argued that multinational companies and other foreign developers have a responsibility to improve the material conditions of the people in whose territories they operate. As a matter of distributive justice it is thought that these companies should be sharing the acquired wealth with these people through the creation of ‘collective goods’ , infrastructure development and compensation disbursements aimed at their benefit. Recently “stakeholder theory” and even legislative changes in the first world have sought to impress on the (...) corporate world the necessity to share the profits with affected “non‐shareholder” groups. Many see these developments as possible advancements for indigenous peoples, indigenous rights and the cause of distributive justice for aboriginal groups. However, it can be shown that the attribution of such ‘imperfect’ duties to corporations results in the generation of excessive costs and of unrealistic expectations on the part of stakeholders. Distributive justice is more efficiently achieved by public sector involvement at the level of policy and project management. (shrink)

In this paper, I specifically consider the issue of corporate governance and normative stakeholder theory. In doing so, I arguethat stakeholder theory and responsibilities to non-shareholder constituencies can be made more intelligible by reference to Kant’sconception of perfect and imperfect duties. I draw upon Onora O’Neill’s (1996) work, Towards Justice and Virtue: A Constructivist Account of Practical Reasoning. In her text O’Neill underlines a number of relevant issues including: the integration of particularist and universalist accounts of morality; the priority of (...) obligations over rights; the importance of the distinction between imperfect and perfect duties; and the relation between the virtues and imperfect duties. On the basis of the foregoing analysis, the paper argues that business ethicists should avoid recommending the institutionalising of stakeholder responsibilities in terms of legally defined sets of stakeholder rights. Instead, we should regard stakeholder responsibilities as uniformalised imperfect duties. Conceiving responsibilities to all stakeholder groups in this manner, allows the firm the freedom to perfect these duties in ways appropriate to cultural and societal setting, and in accordance with the capacity to do so. (shrink)

This book focuses on a question issued from The Architectonic of Pure Reason, one of the most important sections of Kant's first Critique: what is the human being? It suggests that the answer to this question is tied to a particular account of the unity of reason - one that stresses its purposive character.

Libertarians often invoke the principle of self-ownership to discredit distributive interventions authorized by the more-than-minimal state. But if one takes a democratic approach to the justification of ownership claims, including claims of ownership over oneself, the validity of the self-ownership principle is theoretically inseparable from the normative justification of the state. Since the idea of the state is essential to the very assertion (not just the positive enforcement) of the principle of self-ownership, invoking the principle to discredit a distribution of (...) ownership authorized by the state commits libertarians also to weakening that principle's validity. Put differently, appealing to the self-ownership principle to circumscribe the state's power to distribute property is problematic when the state is necessary to assert the validity of that principle. This is because anytime the self-ownership principle is used to undermine a state-based distribution of property it is also implicitly eroding the ground for asserting its own validity.1. (shrink)

Models of category learning have been extensively studied in cognitive science and primarily tested on perceptual abstractions or artificial stimuli. In this paper, we focus on categories acquired from natural language stimuli, that is, words. We present a Bayesian model that, unlike previous work, learns both categories and their features in a single process. We model category induction as two interrelated subproblems: the acquisition of features that discriminate among categories, and the grouping of concepts into categories based on those features. (...) Our model learns categories incrementally using particle filters, a sequential Monte Carlo method commonly used for approximate probabilistic inference that sequentially integrates newly observed data and can be viewed as a plausible mechanism for human learning. Experimental results show that our incremental learner obtains meaningful categories which yield a closer fit to behavioral data compared to related models while at the same time acquiring features which characterize the learned categories. (shrink)

Partnerships can play an important role in addressing environmental concerns and fostering environmental improvement. In this context, we argue that a more elaborate understanding is needed of how partners intend to reach beyond the partnership boundaries and target stakeholders at the firm, industry, supply-chain, or societal levels. As environmental improvement is intertwined with the process of change, we build on the theory of planned change to explain how the focus on selected partnership mechanisms may help partners anticipate and overcome barriers (...) when targeting environmental improvement at these different levels. We test our framework, using a sample of 566 environmental partnerships formed in the USA, and provide rich insights into how partners intend to reach beyond the partnership boundaries. From a practical perspective, these insights may inform corporate managers’ decision to configure environmental partnerships in terms of the target group and suitable partnership mechanism. From a theory perspective, the study helps develop a more systematic understanding of what partners intend to do and when partnerships may provide benefits in addressing level-specific change barriers. These insights provide a first step in positioning partnerships in the broader context of environmental change and encourage future research to move from the intentions to the actual outcomes. (shrink)

This essay compares the thoughts of Kant and Marx on revolution. It focuses in particular on two issues: the contribution of revolutionary enthusiasm to the cause of emancipatory political agents and its educative role in illustrating the possibility of progress for future generations. In both cases, it is argued, the defence of revolution is offered in the context of illustrating the possibility of moral progress for the species, even if not for individual human beings, and brings out the centrality of (...) collective agency in moving toward universal moral goals. Discussing the implications of these points is of significant historical interest: it allows us to defend an interpretation of Kant’s political thought which is sensitive to the material conditions of historical development and to rescue Marx from an amoral reading of his philosophy of history. Reflecting on the role and preconditions of transformative collective agency is also of normative interest: it allows us to better evaluate the significance of political events that, firstly, re-shape the boundaries of political feasibility and, secondly, play a crucial educative role in motivating future progressive initiatives. (shrink)

It is widely believed that the ancient Greeks thought that Thales was the first philosopher, and that they therefore maintained that philosophy had a Greek origin. This paper challenges these assumptions, arguing that most ancient Greek thinkers who expressed views about the history and development of philosophy rejected both positions. I argue that not even Aristotle presented Thales as the first philosopher, and that doing so would have undermined his philosophical commitments and interests. Beyond Aristotle, the view that Thales was (...) the first philosopher is attested almost nowhere in antiquity. In the classical, Hellenistic, and post-Hellenistic periods, we witness a marked tendency to locate the beginning of philosophy in a time going back further than Thales. Remarkably, ancient Greek thinkers most often traced the origins of philosophy to earlier non-Greek peoples. Contrary to the received view, then, I argue that (1) vanishingly few Greek writers pronounced Thales the first philosopher; and (2) most Greek thinkers did not even advocate a Greek origin of philosophy. Finally, I show that the view that philosophy originated with Thales (along with its misleading attribution to the Greeks in general) has roots in problematic, and in some cases manifestly racist, eighteenth-century historiography of philosophy. (shrink)

In international human rights law ‘jurisdiction’ is the centre of the debate on extraterritorial obligations. The purpose of the present paper is to a) analyse how facts and principles contribute t...

Many challenges to economic and social well-being require close collaboration between business, government, and civil-society actors. In this context, the involvement of multiple companies rather than a single company may enhance such cross-sector social partnerships’ outcomes. However, extant literature cautions about the tensions arising from companies’ competitive interests and the detrimental effects on the CSSP’s social outcome. Similarly, studies analyzing simultaneous collaboration and competition suggest shielding off competitive elements from the collaboration. Based on insights into two multi-company CSSPs, we conversely (...) find that government and NGO partnership managers deliberately leveraged competition through the CSSP design. They used similar segmentation mechanisms to enhance CSSP contributions, but differed in the way they integrated collaborative and competitive elements, leading to sustained corporate commitment in one CSSP and unmet promises in the other. These insights expose the paradoxical nature of coopetition at the interface of social and economic goals, and advance current research by indicating competition’s positive effects and the respective partnership design implications. On this basis, our study helps reveal and better understand sustainability-related tensions and opportunities at the inter-organizational level. (shrink)

Philosophical treatments of the self in a range of different traditions have positioned it outside the realm of ordinary worldly objects. This paper argues that part of the explanation for this seemingly widespread and persistent temptation to mystify the self is that the epistemic properties of I-thought are apt to give rise to an illusion of transcendence about their objects—that is, about ourselves.

Why are people interested in money? Specifically, what could be the biological basis for the extraordinary incentive and reinforcing power of money, which seems to be unique to the human species? We identify two ways in which a commodity which is of no biological significance in itself can become a strong motivator. The first is if it is used as a tool, and by a metaphorical extension this is often applied to money: it is used instrumentally, in order to obtain (...) biologically relevant incentives. Second, substances can be strong motivators because they imitate the action of natural incentives but do not produce the fitness gains for which those incentives are instinctively sought. The classic examples of this process are psychoactive drugs, but we argue that the drug concept can also be extended metaphorically to provide an account of money motivation. From a review of theoretical and empirical literature about money, we conclude that (i) there are a number of phenomena that cannot be accounted for by a pure Tool Theory of money motivation; (ii) supplementing Tool Theory with a Drug Theory enables the anomalous phenomena to be explained; and (iii) the human instincts that, according to a Drug Theory, money parasitizes include trading (derived from reciprocal altruism) and object play. (Published Online April 5 2006) Key Words: economic behaviour; evolutionary psychology; giving; incentive; money; motivation; play; reciprocal altruism. (shrink)

In clinical practice, evidence suggests that teaching ethics using normative ethical theory has little influence on the ethical actions of providers in practice. Thus, new training methods are needed that improve clinician response to ethical problems. A sensemaking approach to ethics training has demonstrated promise as an evidence-based pedagogical method to improve ethical reasoning and response. Project ECHO is theoretically linked to improved sensemaking. This study examines the effectiveness of ECHO and training in use of sensemaking approaches to ethical response (...) by clinicians. A quasi-experimental design study using univariate linear regression was used to examine the effect of the three types of ethics training on ethical response self-efficacy scores, while controlling for participant characteristics of years in practice, discipline and sex. We found evidence that training in sensemaking through participation in ECHO promotes improved ethical response self-efficacy of clinicians. However, results also suggest that a traditional ECHO format that does not explicitly introduce sensemaking strategies into the training does not result in the same learning outcomes as measured through an ethical response self-efficacy survey. This study found important preliminary results to support use of sensemaking approaches in clinical ethics training. (shrink)

This article explores the justification of states' territorial rights. It starts by introducing three questions that all current theories of territorial rights attempt to answer: how to justify the right to settle, the right to exclude, and the right to settle and exclude with reference to a particular territory. It proposes a ‘permissive’ theory of territorial rights, arguing that the citizens of each state are entitled to the particular territory they collectively occupy, if and only if they are also politically (...) committed to the establishment of a global political authority realizing just reciprocal relations. The article is developed by introducing some key features of the permissive theory and by explaining how such an account addresses the questions of settlement, exclusion and particularity in ways that significantly improve on existing rival accounts (most prominently: acquisition theories, legitimacy-based theories and nationalist theories). (shrink)

Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency offers a fresh, nuanced example of political theory in an activist mode. Setting the debate on global justice in the context of recent methodological disputes on the relationship between ideal and nonideal theorizing, Ypi's dialectical account shows how principles and agency really can interact.

In the wake of contemporary controversies in France over feminist misandry, this article reflects on claimed hatred of men as a feminist discursive resource. I use the reception of Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto by some radical French feminists of the 1970s as a privileged case study, along with historian Colette Pipon’s study on misandry within French second-wave feminist movements and Judith Butler’s works on stigma reversal. I contend that in a seemingly paradoxical way, misandry is both an anti-feminist stigma and (...) a feminist discursive strategy: the inhibiting effects of such injurious term on feminist politics – the aggressive, castrating and hateful feminist you should at all cost avoid to become – can be managed, if not neutralized, by means of feminist misandry. From that point, I argue that claimed hatred of men can open fruitful political venues in challenging the stifling effects of respectability politics. (shrink)

Second person social cognition cannot be restricted to dyadic interactions between two persons (the and the ). Many instances of social communication are triadic, and involve a third person (the ), which is the object of the interaction. We discuss neuropsychological and brain imaging data showing that triadic interactions involve dedicated brain networks distinct from those of dyadic interactions.

Historically the professions have maintained a commitment to what MacIntyre calls the “internal goods of practice” as opposed to the external goods of practice associated with monetary compensation and activities directly related to monetary compensation. This paper argues that the growing financialization of the economy has fostered a climate of managerial control exemplified in the proliferation of auditing and procedures associated with auditing. Accordingly professionals, whose organizational function includes responsibility for the internal goods, are thereby frustrated in so far as (...) they have been forced to become preoccupied with performance indicators and the goals of financial efficiency imposed by hierarchies founded on managerial expertise rather than professional achievement and competence. A reaffirmation of professional commitment to the internal goods may well require a communitarian approach that entails a reorganization of society around the common good rather than the efficiency ethos that has displaced it. (shrink)

En partant d’un passage précisément circonscrit, et souvent cité, des « Réflexions sur Kafka » d’Adorno (« Kafka, c’est l’Enfer, vu depuis la perspective de la rédemption »), nous tentons d’en scruter les différents sens, et les multiples enjeux – à la fois pour ce qui est de l’interprétation adornienne, et de ce qu’elle nous dit, ou nous cache, du texte kafkaïen lui-même. Nous y isolons pour cela une double thématique : celle de la photographie, et celle du négatif. Que (...) recouvre cette perspective kafkaïenne selon laquelle le monde semble être renversé ; et en quoi cela nous permet-il de regarder le pays de Kafka comme une photographie? L’article tente de montrer que le négatif, à partir de cette signification photographique et en tant qu’il la dépasse, permet à Adorno de tenir ensemble les différents champs de son interprétation (le négatif étant tantôt compris dans sa dimension philosophique, religieuse, esthétique, ou encore historique). (shrink)

En este trabajo se pide suponer que algo está mal con el colonialismo, con lo cual se hace una revisión de las principales posturas que intentan justificarlo, para mostrar que no resuelven correctamente ciertos cuestionamientos.

This paper makes the case for amnesty of irregular migrants by reflecting on the conditions under which a wrong that is done in the past can be considered superseded. It explores the relation between historical injustice and irregular migration and suggests that we should hold states to the same stringent standards of compliance with just norms that they apply to the assessment of the moral conduct of individual migrants. It concludes that those standards ought to orient migrants and citizens’ moral (...) assessment of how their states handle questions of irregular migration and to inform political initiatives compatible with these moral assessments. (shrink)

This article examines Kant’s and Marx’s analysis of religion in its relation to human emancipation. It highlights some important affinities in their accounts of human nature and their critique of religious authority including: the emphasis on freedom as distinguishing human beings from other species, the relation between moral and political progress, the critique of revealed religion, the role of political community and the importance of ethical community to achieve moral emancipation.

Kamm’s sore throat case gives us a choice: save one life, or save a distinct life and cure a sore throat. We defend the fairness explanation of the judgement that one should flip a coin to decide whom to save: it is disrespectful to let a sore throat act as a tie-breaker, because an individual would be forced to forgo a 50% fair chance of living (given to them by a coin flip), which cannot be outweighed by any number of (...) sore throats. We show that this explanation of when and why claims can permissibly break ties generates new problem cases for theories of aggregation, including theories that have been thought to accommodate the judgement that one should flip a coin in Kamm’s sore throat case. We then generalise the fairness explanation to cases involving multiple groups. (shrink)

Do we think in a language-like format? Taking the marker of language-like formats to be the property of unconstrained systematicity, this paper considers the following master argument for the claim that we do: language is unconstrainedly systematic, if language is unconstrainedly systematic then so is thought, so thought is unconstrainedly systematic. It is easy to feel that there is something right about this argument, that there will be some way of filling in its details that will vindicate the idea that (...) our thought must be unconstrainedly systematic given that the language in which we express it is. Clearly, however, the second premise needs support—we need a principled reason for moving from the unconstrained systematicity of language to the unconstrained systematicity of thought. This paper gives three passes at formulating such a principle. This turns out to be much harder than it might seem. We should, I conclude, resist falling too easily for the lure of this master argument for the language-like format of thought. (shrink)

Suppose that the following describes an intelligible scenario. A subject is wired up to another's body in such a way that she has bodily experiences ‘as from the inside’ caused by states and events in the other body, that are subjectively indistinguishable from ordinary somatosensory perception of her own body. The supposed intelligibility of such so-called crossed wire cases constitutes a significant challenge to the claim that our somatosensory judgements are immune to error through misidentification relative to uses of the (...) first person pronoun. After all, the subject in this case is liable to commit precisely the sort of error ruled out by such a claim. In this paper I argue that the proponent of this challenge must establish at least two things: that the subject is committing an error of misidentification, and that her judgement shares its epistemic grounds with our ordinary somatosensory judgements. Neither condition, I argue, can be reached from the stipulations permitted into the starting descriptions of the cases. (shrink)

A well-known debate in normative ethics is that between proponents of Act Consequentialism and Rule Consequentialism. Given the structural similarities between Rule Consequentialism and existing forms of Contractualism, one might expect a similar debate to arise among contractualists. However, this is not the case. Some, following T. M. Scanlon, even argue that this question is “misconceived” – that there is something deeply mistaken about considering the possibility of an act-based form of contractualism. In this paper, I challenge this claim.

James Tully sees the emergence of modern constitutionalism as the intellectual legacy of writers such as Hobbes, Bodin and Locke. For Tully, modern constitutionalism not only centralizes authority, it also excludes diversity. Tully’s work represents a significant part of the growing antipathy towards uniformity and the universalising tendencies of the modern organization, which, he believes, underwrite a loss of local empowerment. In this respect his thinking and that of the communitarians is consistent with contemporary disenchantment with, not to mention resistance (...) to globalization. Globalization, or the tendency to inter‐national uniformity in culture and increasing integration into a global system of economics and power, appears to promote an analogous universalising conformity across borders, while centralizing economic if not political power and control in certain trans‐national corporations. Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, gives us a very different perspective on the motley of overlapping jurisdictions and argues that diversity of systems, customs and rules with respect to property has conspired to maintain the entrenched poverty of the developing world. He argues that it is the unified, codified and integrated systems of the West that have allowed these societies to mobilize capital to escape the endemic widespread poverty of the pre‐capitalist age. In the course of this paper I seek to compare and evaluate the competing claims of Tully and de Soto. (shrink)

In this article, we shed light on the emergence, diffusion, and use of socio-technological future visions. The artificial intelligence future vision of the German federal government is examined and juxtaposed with the respective news media coverage of the German media. By means of a content analysis of frames, it is demonstrated how the German government strategically uses its AI future vision to uphold the status quo. The German media largely adapt the government´s frames and do not integrate alternative future narratives (...) into the public debate. These findings are substantiated in the framing of AI futures in policy documents of the German government and articles of four different German newspapers. It is shown how the German past is mirrored in the German AI future envisioned by the government, safeguarding the present power constellation that is marked by a close unity of politics and industry. The German media partly expose the government´s frames and call for future visions that include fundamentally different political designs less influenced by the power structures of the past and present. (shrink)

A surprising feature of the White Rose anti-Nazi resistance pamphlets is their appeal to a foundational classical Chinese text, the Laozi (otherwise known as the Daodejing), to buttress their critique of fascism and authoritarianism. I argue that from the perspective of a 1942 educated readership, the act of quoting the Laozi functioned as a subtle and pointed nod to anti-fascist intellectuals in pre-war Germany, many of whom had interpreted the Laozi as an anti-authoritarian and pacifist text. To a sympathetic reader, (...) the Laozi therefore constituted an apt reference point for critiquing National Socialism. I then introduce a complication for this wartime reading of the Laozi from the perspective of its ambiguous reception in ancient Chinese political thought. I more specifically discuss an ancient line of interpretation of the Laozi that points in the direction of authoritarianism — in stark tension with the White Rose message of passive resistance and popular revolt. (shrink)