In this article, I aim at problematizing the implied idea of causality in cognitive evaluations of horizontal justice events. I will draw on theories about retrospective sensemaking and its cognitive foundation in counterfactual belief formation. Issues related to horizontal or intraunit unfairness emerge in situations in which the actions of one employee influence the outcome of another due to relational interdependence. The authors of theories about horizontal unfairness have continued the traditional distinction between the three facets of justice, procedural, distributive, (...) and interactional. However, might employee A blame employee B because she (B) obtained qualitative (e.g., non-monetary appraisal) or quantitative (e.g., monetary compensation) recognition even though the latter did not, directly at least, bring about the event. The problem here is one of causality which asks the question, Can A be blamed by B for bringing about the event of outcome difference? While blame in evaluations of vertical justice certainly presumes causal agency, it might be questioned whether the same goes for horizontal unfairness. Counterfactual belief formation enables a step into the cognitive and retrospective nature of evaluations of horizontal justice events centered on the counterfactual belief “had the unfavorable event X not occurred, another and more favorable event X1 would have occurred.” This is related to the distance between the actual X and the potential event state X), in the sense that the closer the two appear, the more convincing becomes A’s belief to himself. The underlying causality of rewarding processes, however, states that some third party introduces the recognition, for example, a manager, and, therefore, B did not bring about the reward event, the third party did. It seems, then, that to understand this, we should take into consideration: 1) the formation of counterfactual beliefs and 2) the causality of blame. The article concludes that, due to the underlying causality of rewarding processes, one might solely consider one facet of horizontal justice, interactional horizontal justice. However, tapping into the phenomenological dimension of morality might allow one also to address the moral nature of distributive and procedural facets of horizontal justice as the experience of the psychosocial fabric of social reality related with feeling either “as if” one is being treated unfairly or “as if” one is treating others unfairly. (shrink)

The roster of Muslim superheroes in the comic book medium has grown over the years, as has the complexity of their depictions. Muslim Superheroes tracks the initial absence, reluctant inclusion, tokenistic employment, and then nuanced scripting of Islamic protagonists in the American superhero comic book market and beyond. This scholarly anthology investigates the ways in which Muslim superhero characters fulfill, counter, or complicate Western stereotypes and navigate popular audience expectations globally, under the looming threat of Islamophobia. The contributors consider assumptions (...) buried in the very notion of a character who is both a superhero and a Muslim with an interdisciplinary and international focus characteristic of both Islamic studies and comics studies scholarship. Muslim Superheroes investigates both intranational American racial formation and international American geopolitics, juxtaposed with social developments outside U.S. borders. Providing unprecedented depth to the study of Muslim superheroes, this collection analyzes, through a series of close readings and comparative studies, how Muslim and non-Muslim comics creators and critics have produced, reproduced, and represented different conceptions of Islam and Muslimness embodied in the genre characters. (shrink)

Als praktische Philosophie ist der Pragmatismus an Prinzipien und Mechanismen von Gesellschaft interessiert. Es geht im Kern darum, diese Prinzipien und Mechanismen zu verstehen, Handlungsformen und Institutionen mit Blick auf gesellschaftliche Probleme und deren Behebung zu entwickeln und auf diesem Wege Gesellschaft menschlicher, gerechter und demokratischer zu gestalten. Aus diesem Grund scheint der Pragmatismus für die kritische zeitgenössische Sozialwissenschaft von größter Bedeutung. Der vorliegende Band versammelt eine Reihe von Beiträgen, die das Themenfeld pragmatistischer Sozialforschung näher bestimmen. Diese lassen sich in (...) zwei Gruppen einteilen: Beiträge, die pragmatistische Theorien und Methoden mit anderen Denktraditionen oder Forschungsansätzen ins Gespräch bringen, sowie Beiträge, die pragmatistische Perspektiven auf zeitgenössische, gesellschaftliche Problemlagen beziehen. (shrink)

In this special issue, we draw on pragmatist political and social theory and philosophy to illustrate the creative potential of this intellectual tradition for thinking about the numerous crises that haunt liberal democratic societies today. The introduction identifies five overlapping problem constellations (demise of public power, lasting consequences of inequality, pluralization of society, return of authoritarian practices and globalization of the world) that have driven the recent rise of undemocratic or authoritarian patterns of social organization and political rule. Against this (...) backdrop, we conclude that the revitalization of certain dimensions of liberal democracy will not suffice to overcome these problems, which means that democratic practices need radical rethinking and reconceptualization. For this intellectual and political endeavour, we argue, pragmatism provides a suitable framework to identify problems that require resolution and define and mobilize collective problem solving capacities from already existing practices. All eight contributions to this special issue draw on pragmatist political and social theory and philosophy to illustrate to what extent, and to what ends, this intellectual tradition can revitalize the political and social discourse on the past, present and future of democracy. The articles are organized in two sections : (1) Pragmatist critique and the critical potential of pragmatism, (2) pragmatist politics and theories of democratic practice. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to understand institutional violence (IV) in the relationships between health professionals, hospitalized children, and family members. This is a qualitative study developed at the pediatric inpatient unit of a university hospital in the city of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The research participants consisted of 39 health professionals who specialized in pediatrics and 10 family members of hospitalized children. Semi‐structured interviews were the method used for data collection. Using discourse analysis as a basis and taking a (...) Foucauldian perspective, the researchers observed that the expressions of IV could be traced to abusive power relations within the system. We found four discursive forms within the data set: communication problems as IV, violence through inattention and neglect, violence as an action and consequent materialization on the body, and psychological violence as a submission mechanism. Based on these findings, we argue that professionals, managers, the scientific community, and users might be able to better guarantee the safety of children by recognizing IV and effectively intervening in it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (2002) 43-56 [Access article in PDF] Jack London's Medusa of Truth Per Serritslev Petersen FROM THE VERY START of his literary career, Jack London believed that a good fiction writer must also be a good thinker—that fictional authenticity and integrity must somehow be imbedded in philosophical authenticity and integrity. In his early essay "On the Writer's Philosophy of Life," and in his early letters (...) to Cloudsley Johns, his intellectually "slovenly" friend (who also happened to share his literary ambitions and interests), London insists, again and again, on the proper philosophical foundation of the successful writer. This is how poor Cloudsley, who had previously been told to "get in and systematically ground [himself] in history, economics, biology and the kindred branches" 1 gets browbeaten by his self-appointed mentor and master, a veritable Jack of all trades, in a letter dated March 15, 1900: "To be well fitted for the tragedy of existence (intellectual existence), one must have a working philosophy, a synthesis of things. Have you a synthesis of things? Do you write, and talk, and build upon a foundation which you know is securely laid? Or do you not rather build with a hazy idea of 'to hell with the foundation.'" London then proceeds to catechize his friend on scientific principles such as the indestructibility of Matter, the persistence of Force, and the overall "dynamic principle, true of the metamorphosis of the universe"—principles that Cloudsley is urged to study "carefully and painstakingly" before he can ever claim to have "a firm foundation for [his] philosophy of life" (Letters, pp. 170-71).In London's admittedly heavy-handed ad hominem argument, one recognizes the philosophical sledgehammer of Ernest Everhard, the revolutionary hero of The Iron Heel and one of the fictional exponents of "that cold forbidding philosophy, materialistic monism," 2 which also [End Page 43] served as the scientific foundation of London's own philosophy of life. There are, however, not one, but two components to London's philosophy, which, as I shall argue in this essay, together constitute an essentially dialectical construction, a dynamic juxtaposition of and negotiation with, on the one hand, the "cold forbidding" Medusa of Truth and, on the other hand, the life-enhancing Aphrodite of Romance, the second of which is one of several versions of the vital Maia-Lie (Maia being the Buddhist term for the power that creates or re-creates the world as cosmic illusion).Two points need to be stressed from the outset. First, London's work is implicitly aligned with literary naturalism—the "Zolaistic Movement" of modern American fiction that the genteel writer and editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich famously condemned for its "miasmatic breath" 3 —even though London himself would always qualify his own naturalism by insisting that, artistically, he was "an emotional materialist" (Letters, p. 329), and that his realism was, in the words of Martin Eden, one of his fictional alter egos, "an impassioned realism, shot through with human aspiration and faith." 4 Second, London's work is explicitly aligned with philosophical naturalism (as distinct from supernaturalism)—that is, naturalism as the philosophical or epistemological view that, to quote The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995), "everything is natural, i.e. that everything there is belongs to the world of nature, and so can be studied by the methods appropriate for studying that world." In philosophical practice, naturalism and materialism have tended to coalesce, materialism being basically understood as the view that everything is made of matter, which can be studied by the methods of natural science. Like London's philosophical alter ego Ernest Everhard (and also like fictional protagonists such as Wolf Larsen and Martin Eden), London declared himself "a materialistic monist," although, as he admitted to Cloudsley Johns, "there is dam little satisfaction in it." Rhetorically impersonating, as it were, Wolf Larsen, London, in the same letter, asks himself and his correspondent, "what squirming anywhere, damned or otherwise, means anything? That's the question I am always prone to put: What's this chemical ferment called life about? Small wonder that small men... (shrink)

It is widely held that the possibility of value-incomparability between alternatives poses a serious threat to comparativism. Some comparativists have proposed to avoid this problem by supplementing the three traditional value relations with a fourth value relation, variously identified as "roughly equal" or "on a par", which is supposed to hold between alternatives that are incomparable by the three traditional value relations. However, in a recent article in this journal, Nien-he Hsieh has proposed that the comparisons thought to require rough (...) equality or parity could instead be understood in terms of the concept of "clumpiness". Against this suggestion, Martin Peterson has argued that the concept of clumpiness allows agents to be exploited in money-pumps, and thus that there is no way of linking clumpiness to rational choice. This would remove the central appeal of the concept. In this note, I show that Peterson’s argument fails to establish that the concept of clumpiness allows agents to be exploited in money-pumps. (shrink)

In a recent paper in this journal, we proposed two novel puzzles associated with the precautionary principle. Both are puzzles that materialise, we argue, once we investigate the principle through an epistemological lens, and each constitutes a philosophical hurdle for any proponent of a plausible version of the precautionary principle. Steglich-Petersen claims, also in this journal, that he has resolved our puzzles. In this short note, we explain why we remain skeptical.

Non-medical egg freezing is egg freezing for the sake of delaying parenthood. The label ‘non-medical’ can be confusing, since the extraction and freezing of eggs is undeniably a medical procedure. The point is that whereas ‘medical egg freezing’ is done in order to retain capacity to procreate despite a potentially threatening medical condition, ‘non-medical egg freezing’ is done for the sake of getting more time to find a suitable partner and/or to establish a career before embarking on parenthood. One type (...) of argument against NMEF is the individualisation argument, according to which NMEF is problematic in virtue of being an individual solution to a social problem. The underlying problem that ought to be targeted, it is argued, is the patriarchal structures in the labour market, which disprivilege women and make it excessively difficult to combine a work and parenthood. In “Arguments on thin ice”, Thomas Søbirk Petersen helpfully distinguishes between three variants of the individualisation argument: the non-address view, the distraction view and the further oppression view.1 Petersen argues, moreover, that none of these is convincing, and therefore that the rejection of NMEF is unwarranted. According to the non-address view, the reason NMEF ought to be rejected is that “it cannot address the social causes that make it so difficult to balance career and family”2 or that it “does not substantially alter the social structures that have constructed inequalities”3 between women and men. Petersen …. (shrink)

Christian Georg Martin offers an argumentative reconstruction of the whole work, reading it as a critical ontology, namely as the attempt to abstract from all presuppositions and to immanently unfold conceptual determinations characterizing ...

Do free will beliefs influence moral judgments? Answers to this question from theoretical and empirical perspectives are controversial. This study attempted to replicate past research and offer theoretical insights by analyzing World Values Survey data from residents of 46 countries (n = 65,111 persons). Corroborating experimental findings, free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors and support for severe criminal punishment. Further, the link between free will beliefs and intolerance of unethical behavior was moderated by variations in countries’ institutional integrity, (...) defined as the degree to which countries had accountable, corruption-free public sectors. Free will beliefs predicted intolerance of unethical behaviors for residents of countries with high and moderate institutional integrity, but this correlation was not seen for countries with low institutional integrity. Free will beliefs predicted support for criminal punishment regardless of countries’ institutional integrity. Results were robust across different operationalizations of institutional integrity and with or without statistical control variables. (shrink)

Gustaf Wingren (1910-2000) var professor i systematisk teologi i Lund åren 1951-77 och är fortfarande en av Sveriges internationellt mest kända teologer. Han var inte bara en av världens främsta experter på kyrkofadern Irenaeus och reformatorn Martin Luther utan framför allt bibelteolog. Hans drivkraft var viljan att ge en bibliskt grundad och samtidigt verklighetsnära tolkning av den mänskliga tillvaron och klargöra hur evangeliet om Kristus talar rakt in i allas liv. Erik Aurelius bor i Lund, han har (...) tidigare varit biskop i Skara stift och dessförinnan professor i biblisk teologi vid universitetet i Göttingen. Det Wingren har skrivit är laddat med energi. Språket är glasklart och medryckande, ofta med pregnanta formuleringar som fastnar i minnet. Det har bidragit till att ge hans böcker många läsare. Nu utges för första gången ett samlat urval av hans bibelteologiskt inriktade artiklar som tidigare publicerats på olika håll. Efter en inledande framställning om Gustaf Wingrens bibelteologi, författad av Erik Aurelius, tar de olika kapitlen i boken upp ämnen som problemet och poängen med att Bibeln har ett gammalt och ett nytt testamente, Kristi uppståndelse som evangeliets seger över livets krav, innebörden i den kristna friheten, evangeliet och staten, diakonins teori och praktik, Guds Ande i naturen och människolivet. (shrink)

New standards adopted by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International (AACSB) stress business curriculum-wide learning objectives, of which ethics is a critical part. “Knowledge and skills” in ethical responsibilities are required as part of institutionalaccreditation. An exploratory study offers insight into ethics integration, perceived comfort in teaching ethics, and methods used. The main tension presented balances calls for ethics across business curricula with the assertion that ethics instruction, in the hands of an untrained professor, may do more (...) damage than good. Results suggest that while faculty include ethics in their courses, only slightly more than half have received some kind of ethics training. We also explore ethics pedagogies and found differences between methods respondents used in the classroom and desired learning methods for themselves. We offer insights about and possible explanations for the gaps we found in our study, contextualizing them in new literature. We finish with a brief discussion of how our findings impact accreditation assessment. (shrink)

Online supplement, "Mulsow: Additions to Notes drawn from the 2002 edition of Moderne aus dem Untergrund" full versions of nearly 300 notes that were truncated in the print edition. Hosted on H. C. Erik Midelfort's website. Martin Mulsow's seismic reinterpretation of the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany won awards and renown in its original German edition, and now H. C. Erik Midelfort's translation makes this sensational book available to English-speaking readers. In Enlightenment Underground, Mulsow shows that even in (...) the late seventeenth century some thinkers in Germany ventured to express extremely dangerous ideas, but did so as part of a secret underground. Scouring manuscript collections across northern Europe, Mulsow studied the writings of countless hitherto unknown radical jurists, theologians, historians, and dissident students who pushed for the secularization of legal, political, social, and religious knowledge. Often their works circulated in manuscript, anonymously, or as clandestinely published books. Working as a philosophical microhistorian, Mulsow has discovered the identities of several covert radicals and linked them to circles of young German scholars, many of whom were connected with the vibrant radical cultures of the Netherlands, England, and Denmark. The author reveals how radical ideas and contributions to intellectual doubt came from Socinians and Jews, church historians and biblical scholars, political theorists, and unemployed university students. He shows that misreadings of humorous or ironic works sometimes gave rise to unintended skeptical thoughts or corrosively political interpretations of Christianity. This landmark book overturns stereotypical views of the early Enlightenment in Germany as cautious, conservative, and moderate, and replaces them with a new portrait that reveals a movement far more radical, unintended, and puzzling than previously suspected. (shrink)

Shakespeare's Coriolanus is one of the most brilliant political plays ever written. Despite its ancient Roman setting, it remains a perennially relevant study of the relationship between personality and politics. The Introduction to this new edition illuminates its relevance to Shakespeare'sown time and to later ages while also emphasizing the wide range of interpretations that are possible in performance.

Wie wollen wir leben und wie können wir unserem Leben Sinn geben angesichts der drängenden Krisen der Gegenwart? Wie können solche Fragen überhaupt beantwortet werden, wenn eine säkulare Kultur scheinbar nur Antworten auf Fragen nach dem „wie?“, nicht aber nach dem „wozu?“ erlaubt. Martin Kolmar deutet im vorliegenden Buch die gegenwärtigen und bevorstehenden Krisen, allen voran die Klimakrise, als Krise der westlichen Denk- und Wahrnehmungsweisen und versucht einen Ausweg daraus aufzuzeigen. Dazu beginnt er mit einer Analyse westlicher Vorstellungswelten aus (...) der Perspektive des „Erhabenen“. Es zeigt sich, dass das „Erhabene“ als Grenzerfahrung überraschende und relevante neue Perspektiven auf die Gegenwart öffnet und zugleich einen Weg zu einer säkularen, rationalen Form der Sinnerfahrung erkennbar macht. Das Besondere dieses Buches ist die Verknüpfung philosophischer und gesellschafts- und kulturwissenschaftlicher Forschung mit Erkenntnissen der Psychologie und der Neurowissenschaft. Es zeigt auf, dass traditionelle Vorstellungen des „Guten Lebens“ und der Verortung der eigenen Existenz als Teil der Natur, mit moderner Forschung korrespondieren. Ist man bereit, sich hierauf einzulassen, stellt insbesondere die Bedrohung durch die Klimakrise nicht nur ein mögliches Katastrophenszenario und eine große technologische Herausforderung dar, sondern eine Chance für ein besseres Leben, welches aus einer anderen Haltung ihm gegenüber resultiert. (shrink)

It has been over a decade and half since Christof Koch and the late Francis Crick first advocated the now popular NCC project, in which one tries to find the neural correlate of consciousness for perceptual processes. Here we critically take stock of what have actually been learned from these studies. Many authors have questioned whether looking for the neural correlates would eventually lead to an explanatory theory of consciousness, while the proponents of NCC research maintain that focusing on correlates (...) is a strategically sensible first step, given the complexity of the problem. My point here is not to argue whether studying the NCC is useful, but rather, to question whether we are really studying the NCC at all. I argue that in hoping to sidestep the difficult conceptual issues, we have sometimes also missed the phenomenon of perceptual consciousness itself. (shrink)

Prekäres Wissen handelt nicht von den großen Themen der Metaphysik und Epistemologie, sondern von Randzonen wie der Magie und der Numismatik, der Bibelinterpretation und der Orientalistik. Es geht nicht nur um Theorien, sondern auch um Furcht und Faszination, nicht um die großen Forschergestalten, sondern um vergessene und halbvergessene Gelehrte. Es ist ein Buch voller spannender Geschichten, eine andere Ideengeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit und zugleich der ambitionierte Versuch, den Begriff des Wissens selbst im Zeichen des" material turn", des" iconic turn"und der (...) Kommunikations- und Informationsgeschichte neu zu denken. (shrink)

In [6] Messmer and Wood proved quantifier elimination for separably closed fields of finite Ershov invariant e equipped with a (certain) Hasse derivation. We propose a variant of their theory, using a sequence of e commuting Hasse derivations. In contrast to [6] our Hasse derivations are iterative.

The paper deals with such a modification of genuine modal realism as to accommodate impossible worlds into its ontology. First of all, the theory of modal realism is presented. Next, several motivations for the acceptance of impossible worlds are adduced. Further, Lewis’s argument against impossible worlds is presented. It is argued that the argument can be weakened by rejection of one of its premises. Finally, two objections against the proposal are countered. Although my strategy accounts for the Opinion concerning the (...) impossible, it allegedly violates another Opinion which conceives the reality classical. It seems, however, that there is no no-question-begging reason to think that reality is classical. How can we know, after all, which logic describes reality? Without a definite answer to the question, the incredibility objection then simply collapses into a statement of a possibilist dogma. (shrink)

The phenomenon of altruism extends from the biological realm to the human sociocultural realm. This article sketches a coherent outline of multiple types of altruism of progressively increasing scope that span these two realms and are grounded in an ever-expanding sense of “self.” Discussion of this framework notes difficulties associated with altruism at different levels. It links scientific ideas about the evolution of cooperation and about hierarchical order to perennial philosophical and religious concerns. It offers a conceptual background for inquiry (...) into societal challenges that call for altruistic behavior, especially the challenge of environmental and social sustainability. (shrink)

We give modest upper bounds for consistency strengths for two well-studied combinatorial principles. These bounds range at the level of subcompact cardinals, which is significantly below a κ+-supercompact cardinal. All previously known upper bounds on these principles ranged at the level of some degree of supercompactness. We show that by using any of the standard modified Prikry forcings it is possible to turn a measurable subcompact cardinal into ℵω and make the principle □ℵω,<ω fail in the generic extension. We also (...) show that by using Lévy collapse followed by standard iterated club shooting it is possible to turn a subcompact cardinal into ℵ2 and arrange in the generic extension that simultaneous reflection holds at ℵ2, and at the same time, every stationary subset of ℵ3 concentrating on points of cofinality ω has a reflection point of cofinality ω1. (shrink)

Introduction to Wahrheit, Existenz und Realismus.