Drawing from the development of individualism in western philosophy and American history, this book constructs a normative theory called authentic individualism. Using the precepts of that theory, it urges organizational leaders to change the way they think about their organizations and their organizations' social function. Students and scholars of political science, social science, public administration, moral theory and organizational theory will find this a useful work. Contents: Introduction to Individualism; PART ONE: A Model of the Individual from Western Philosophy; The (...) Individual of the Ancients; The Individual of the Dark Ages; The Individual of Modernity; PART TWO: A Model of the Individual in the United States; Rugged Individualism of the Revolutionary U.S.; Rational Individualism After Romanticism and Reform; Radical Individualism from Disillusionment and Loss of Faith; PART THREE: Synthesis of Philosophies Toward a More Socially Responsible Individualist in the Third Millennium; Need for a New World View; Changing the Paradigm; Soul of the Third Administrative State; Notes; Bibliography; Index. (shrink)

This paper explores principles governing the rational balance among an agent's beliefs, goals, actions, and intentions. Such principles provide specifications for artificial agents, and approximate a theory of human action (as philosophers use the term). By making explicit the conditions under which an agent can drop his goals, i.e., by specifying how the agent is committed to his goals, the formalism captures a number of important properties of intention. Specifically, the formalism provides analyses for Bratman's three characteristic functional roles played (...) by intentions [7, 9], and shows how agents can avoid intending all the foreseen side-effects of what they actually intend. Finally, the analysis shows how intentions can be adopted relative to a background of relevant beliefs and other intentions or goals. By relativizing one agent's intentions in terms of beliefs about another agent's intentions (or beliefs'), we derive a preliminary account of interpersonal commitments. (shrink)

Between the affirmative and the negative, the compositional and the oppositional, we need to rethink the difference between difference and contradiction. In this regard, the concept of ‘diplomacy’, as developed by Isabelle Stengers, is of particular significance. Whereas many adherents of an affirmative ontology of difference reduce contradiction to a caveat – ‘of course, antagonism is inevitable, but …’ – diplomacy makes contradiction its fundamental concern. This article explicates the significance of such a conception, via close readings of Stengers’ work (...) in relation to that of Gilles Deleuze, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. However, it also develops diplomacy in new directions, particularly relating the diplomatic ‘fold’ to the sovereign ‘cut’. The fold of coexistence, then, is achieved through diplomacy as a ‘labour of difference’, against ‘facile pluralism’, which takes worldly cohabitation as given. A diplomatic political ontology is neither bellicose nor pacific; rather, it dramatizes the possibility of peace from within a coercive historical reality. (shrink)

This paper explores the truism that people think about what they say. It proposes that, to satisfy their own goals, people often plan their speech acts to affect their listeners' beliefs, goals, and emotional states. Such language use can be modelled by viewing speech acts as operators in a planning system, thus allowing both physical and speech acts to be integrated into plans. Methodological issues of how speech acts should be defined in a planbased theory are illustrated by defining operators (...) for requesting and informing. Plans containing those operators are presented and comparisons are drawn with Searle's formulation. The operators are shown to be inadequate since they cannot be composed to form questions (requests to inform) and multiparty requests (requests to request). By refining the operator definitions and by identifying some of the side effects of requesting, compositional adequacy is achieved.The solution leads to a metatheoretical principle for modelling speech acts as planning operators. (shrink)

Reason and Value collects fifteen brand-new papers by leading contemporary philosophers on themes from the moral philosophy of Joseph Raz. The subtlety and power of Raz's reflections on ethical topics - including especially his explorations of the connections between practical reason and the theory of value - make his writings a fertile source for anyone working in this area. The volume honours Raz's accomplishments in the area of ethical theorizing, and will contribute to an enhanced appreciation of the significance of (...) his work for the subject. (shrink)

The Nature of Concepts examines a central issue for all the main disciplines in cognitive science: how the human mind creates and passes on to other human minds a concept. An excellent cross-disciplinary collection with contributors including Steven Pinker, Andy Clarke and Henry Plotkin.

Philip R. Shields shows that ethical and religious concerns inform even the most technical writings on logic and language, and that, for Wittgenstein, the need to establish clear limitations is both a logical and an ethical demand. Rather than merely saying specific things about theology and religion, major texts from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations express their fundamentally religious nature by showing that there are powers which bear down upon and sustain us. Shields finds a religious view of the (...) world at the very heart of Wittgenstein's philosophy. "Shields argues that the appearance throughout Wittgenstein's writings of such concepts as ritual, limit, transgression, a change of will, pride, temptation, and judgment implies a relation between religion and the logical aspects of Wittgenstein's philosophy."-- Choice "Of the many recent books about Wittgenstein, Logic and Sin is one of the very few that are well worth having"--Fergus Kerr, Modern Theology "What Shields has uncovered in Wittgenstein's religious sensibility is something genuine and profound. . . . Shields has not just written an important book on Wittgenstein but an enlightening work that invites further reflection."--Eric O. Springsted, Cross Currents. (shrink)

Nursing and nursing education face a paradox whereby the world's most trusted profession seems not to trust its own students and practitioners. Much of nursing education has adopted what has been memorably described as the ‘cop shit’ approach. This is the panoply of surveillance, anti‐plagiarism and proctoring technologies that appear to be used more for policing and punishment of an inherently dishonest student body than to develop ethical and scholarly writing among future peers and colleagues. Nurses in practice may experience (...) similar levels of distrust as they face growing micromanagement and control of both their appearance and nursing practice. We propose that these practices of distrust emerge, not from malice, but rather from the omnipresent neoliberalism and managerialism that engulf almost every aspect of health and university life. Neoliberalism's success has been to reformat academia and practice to the point where such ingrained mistrust has become merely a neutral recognition of ‘the real world’. Dismantling nursing and education's ‘cop shit’ culture and replacing it with the trust and respect that the world's most trusted profession is accorded by wider society will not be easy, but it is vital for the future of nursing. (shrink)

De verkenning van God als vreeswekkende rechter is diep verankerd in het werk van Wittgenstein. Hiermee wil hij de grenzen van het menselijk denken aftasten.

This paper argues that there is a counter-productive tendency for many feminist critiques of patriarchy to revert to the same impoverished conception of power that they are critiquing, and thus—despite a commitment to the idea of a social self—inadvertently to valorize the notions of independence, autonomy, and choice that are enshrined in the ideal of the patriarchal individual. An adequate account of power relations between men and women cannot be rendered if we employ a misplaced and reductive model of power, (...) nor if we fail to acknowledge the intersubjective and interdependent nature of human self-consciousness—the deep and varied ways in which our identity and agency are intricately interwoven and wax or wane as a whole. Rightly understood, men are not as powerful and autonomous, nor women as powerless and oppressed, as they seem when viewed through the distorting lens provided by modern liberal individualism. (shrink)

This book presents views of the concept of intention and its relationship to communication from three perspectives: philosphy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. The book is a record of a workshop held in 1987.

Natural selection favors not only more adaptive structural features but also more effective behavioral programs. Crucial for the prospering and very survival of an extremely sophisticated social species like homo sapiens is the biological/psychological program that might be conveniently labeled the human sense of fairness: a feeling often referred to in societies featuring supernaturalized explanations as one's "God given conscience." The sense of fairness and related programs derive a measure of their effectiveness from the fact that, in addition to the (...) pleasure/pain mechanisms reinforcing their implementation, we are programmed to want to want the goals they introduce and to experience repugnance in the face of goals that strongly conflict. (shrink)

The profession of medicine has developed codes of ethical conduct for thousands of years. From the Hippocratic Oath of ancient Greece onward to modern times, a universal and central element of such codes has expressed the imperative that a physician shall “Do no harm.”.

What is involved when a group of agents decide to do something together? Joint action by a team appears to involve more than just the union of simultaneous individual actions, even when those actions are coordinated. We would not say that there is any teamwork involved in ordinary automobile traffic, even though the drivers act simultaneously and are coordinated (one hopes) by the traffic signs and rules of the road. But when a group of drivers decide to do something together, (...) such as driving somewhere as a convoy, it appears that the group acts more like a single agent with beliefs, goals, and intentions of its own, over and above the individual ones. [more]. (shrink)

An experiment was performed to investigate the effects of practice and spacing on retention of Japanese–English vocabulary paired associates. The relative benefit of spacing increased with increased practice and with longer retention intervals. Data were fitted with an activation‐based memory model, which proposes that each time an item is practiced it receives an increment of strength but that these increments decay as a power function of time. The rate of decay for each presentation depended on the activation at the time (...) of the presentation. This mechanism limits long‐term benefits from further practice at higher levels of activation and produces the spacing effect and its observed interactions with practice and retention interval. The model was compared with another model of the spacing effect (Raaijmakers, 2003) and was fit to some results from the literature on spacing and memory. (shrink)

This article examines the political controversy in the United States surrounding a new process for the disposition of human remains, alkaline hydrolysis. AH technologies use a heated solution of water and strong alkali to dissolve tissues, yielding an effluent that can be disposed through municipal sewer systems, and brittle bone matter that can be dried, crushed, and returned to the decedent’s family. Though AH is legal in eight US states, opposition to the technology remains strong. Opponents express concerns about public (...) health and safety and about the dignity of our mortal remains. Proponents focus on AH’s environmental benefits over cremation and earth burial, aligning the technology with the “green burial” movement. Drawing from historical sources, Science, Technology, and Society literature, interviews with funeral professionals, industry literature, and various media sources, this article examines four prominent conceptions of the dead human body as they are deployed by various funeral stakeholders seeking to exercise authority over the dead human body, to influence the trajectory of AH technology in the United States, and to chart a course for US deathcare culture in the twenty-first century. (shrink)