It does not seem terribly unfair to say that studies of both rhetoric and dialogue have tended, by and large, to pass over listening in favor of speaking. In scholarly as well as quotidian parlance, it would appear that both rhetoric and dialogue are principally concerned with speech, banishing listening to the silent subservience of rhetoric's other. Whichever way it is glossed—as rhetoric, dialogue, language, or argumentation—the Western conception of logos emphasizes speaking at the expense of listening. And the problem (...) with conceiving of logos in terms of speech and speaking is not only that it ignores the importance of listening but also that it obscures how listening makes the ethical response possible. Drawing on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, this article examines the ethical exigency of the face and its relation to primordial discourse in order to disclose the otherwise hidden ethical significance of listening and its vocation as a form of co-constitutive communicative action that can “listen persons to speech.”. (shrink)

Philosophy of Communication Ethics is a unique and timely volume that creatively examines communication ethics, philosophy of communication, and "the other.".

I would like to get this published somewhere; but who would publish it?

In her provocative discussion of the challenge posed to the traditional impartialist, justice-focused conception of morality by the new-wave care perspective in ethics, Annette Baier calls for ‘a “marriage” of the old male and newly articulated female... moral wisdom,’ to produce a new ‘cooperative’ moral theory that ‘harmonize[s] justice and care.’ I want in this paper to play matchmaker, proposing one possible conjugal bonding: a union of two apparently dissimilar modes of what Nel Noddings calls ‘meeting the other morally,’ a (...) wedding of respect and care. (shrink)

section 1. Conceptual underpinnings -- section 2. Relevance and strategies of Nai Talim -- section 3. Mainstreaming Nai Talim -- section 4. Explorations and applications of Nai Talim -- section 5. Focus on Nai Talim in specific sectors -- section 6. Models of Nai Talim -- section 7. Nai Talim in the reckoning.

This article describes Syrianus' teachings on the One, as found in his testimonia on the Parmenides . In order to preserve the transcendence of the One, while still providing a fluid universe connected to the One, Syrianus shows how the nature of the One is seen in the structure of the Parmenides itself: the first hypothesis of the Parmenides outlines the primal God, while the intelligible universe is the subject of the second hypothesis, in so far as the intelligible universe (...) is a product of the One. Thus, whatever is negated of the One in the first hypothesis contains a positive analogue in the second hypothesis. With this description of the One in the Parmenides , Syrianus is able to create a complete, fluid universe. Readings of two lemmata, in particular, illuminate Syrianus' manner of interpreting the Parmenides to show how the One is both transcendent and connected to the universe. In his interpretations of Parmenides 137d and 138a, Syrianus shows how the One is partless with respect to itself, but contains parts with respect to the rest of the universe; and that the One is in itself and in another, again, with respect to itself and with respect to the rest of the universe. With his interpretation of the Parmenides , moreover, one can see how Syrianus differs from the interpretations of Porphyry and Iamblichus, and how he paves the way for Proclus' reading of the dialogue. (shrink)

This article explores the characteristics of research sites that scientists have called “natural experiments” to understand and develop usable distinctions for the social sciences between “Nature’s or Society’s experiments” and “natural experiments.” In this analysis, natural experiments emerge as the retro-fitting by social scientists of events that have happened in the social world into the traditional forms of field or randomized trial experiments. By contrast, “Society’s experiments” figure as events in the world that happen in circumstances that are already sufficiently (...) “controlled” to be open for direct analysis without reconstruction work. (shrink)

Our study presents an overview of the issues that were brought forward by participants of a moral case deliberation (MCD) project in two elderly care organizations. The overview was inductively derived from all case descriptions (N = 202) provided by participants of seven mixed MCD groups, consisting of care providers from various professional backgrounds, from nursing assistant to physician. The MCD groups were part of a larger MCD project within two care institutions (residential homes and nursing homes). Care providers are (...) confronted with a wide variety of largely everyday ethical issues. We distinguished three main categories: ‘resident’s behavior’, ‘divergent perspectives on good care’ and ‘organizational context’. The overview can be used for agendasetting when institutions wish to stimulate reflection and deliberation. It is important that an agenda is constructed from the bottom-up and open to a variety of issues. In addition, organizing reflection and deliberation requires effort to identify moral questions in practice whilst at the same time maintaining the connection with the organizational context and existing communication structures. Once care providers are used to dealing with divergent perspectives, inviting different perspectives (e.g. family members) to take part in the deliberation, might help to identify and address ethical ‘blind spots’. (shrink)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and John Dewey were both pragmatists who recognized the need to restructure the environment to bring about social progress. Gilman was even more of a pragmatist than Dewey, however, because she addressed problems he did not identify-much less confront. Her philosophy is in accord with the spirit of Dewey's work but in important ways, it is more consistent, more comprehensive and more radical than his instrumentalism.

Adrian Piper argues that the Humean conception can be made to work only if it is placed in the context of a wider and genuinely universal conception of the self, whose origins are to be found in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. This conception comprises the basic canons of classical logic, which provide both a model of motivation and a model of rationality. These supply necessary conditions both for the coherence and integrity of the self and also for unified agency. (...) The Kantian conception solves certain intractable problems in decision theory by integrating it into classical predicate logic, and provides answers to longstanding controversies in metaethics concerning moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification that the Humean conception engenders. In addition, it sheds light on certain kinds of moral behavior – for example, the whistleblower – that the Humean conception is at a loss to explain. (shrink)

Inflectional morphology has been taken as a paradigmatic example of rule-governed grammatical knowledge (Pinker, 1999). The plausibility of this claim may be related to the fact that it is mainly based on studies of English, which has a very simple inflectional system. We examined the representation of inflectional morphology in Serbian, which encodes number, gender, and case for nouns. Linguists standardly characterize this system as a complex set of rules, with disagreements about their exact form. We present analyses of a (...) large corpus of nouns which showed that, as in English, Serbian inflectional morphology is quasiregular: It exhibits numerous partial regularities creating neighborhoods that vary in size and consistency. We then asked whether a simple connectionist network could encode this statistical information in a manner that also supported generalization. A network trained on 3,244 Serbian nouns learned to produce correctly inflected phonological forms from a specification of a word's lemma, gender, number, and case, and generalized to untrained cases. The model's performance was sensitive to variables that also influence human performance, including surface and lemma frequency. It was also influenced by inflectional neighborhood size, a novel measure of the consistency of meaning to form mapping. A word-naming experiment with native Serbian speakers showed that this measure also affects human performance. The results suggest that, as in English, generating correctly inflected forms involves satisfying a small number of simultaneous probabilistic constraints relating form and meaning. Thus, common computational mechanisms may govern the representation and use of inflectional information across typologically diverse languages. (shrink)

The theory that practical reasoning is wholly instrumental says that the only practical function of reason is to tell agents the means to their ends, while their ends are fixed by something other than reason itself. In this essay I argue that Hume has an instrumentalist theory of practical reasoning. This thesis may sound as unexciting as the contention that Kant is a rationalist about morality. For who would have thought otherwise? After all, isn't the ‘instrumentalist’ line in contemporary discussions (...) of this topic descended directly from Hume himself? Contrast the following recent comment from Robert Audi's book on practical reasoning, holding the standard line, with the comment from Christine Korsgaard following it:Hume's conception of practical reasoning, so far as we can formulate it, can be located within … the foundationalist account of motivation in which reason plays the instrumentalist role … by virtue of arousing and directing our desires. (shrink)

Peter S. Fosl offers a radical interpretation of Hume as a thoroughgoing sceptic on epistemological, metaphysical and doxastic grounds. He first contextualises Hume's thought in the sceptical tradition and goes on to interpret the conceptual apparatus of his work - including the Treatise, Enquiries, Essays, History, Dialogues and letters.

I want to examine critically a certain strategy of moral justification which I shall call instrumentalism. By this I mean the view that a moral theory is rationally justified if the actions, life-plan, or set of social arrangements it prescribes can be shown to be the best means to the achievement of an agent's final ends, whatever these may be. Instrumentalism presupposes a commitment to what I shall call the Humean conception of the self. By this I mean a certain (...) way of conceiving the motivational and structural constituents of the self. Briefly, the self on this conception is motivated by its desires for states of affairs that are temporally or spatiotemporally external to the self. And it is structured by the normative requirements of instrumental rationality: The self is conceived as rationally coherent to the extent that theoretical reason calculates and schedules the satisfaction of as many of its desires as possible, with the minimum necessary costs. The motivational and structural elements of the Humean conception of the self combine to form a familiar explanatory model of human agency: We make sense of an agent's behavior by ascribing to her the desire to achieve the ends that she does in fact achieve, and the theoretically rational belief that, given the information and resources available to her, behaving as she did was the most efficient way to do so. I shall want to argue that to the extent that instrumentalism is successful in providing an objective justification of a moral theory - and I shall contend that it cannot be completely successful - it cannot provide a moral justification. But when we attempt to modify it so as to produce a specifically moral justification, we see that either it is impossible to do this, or else the Humean notion of instrumental rationality is doing no justificatory work. (shrink)

There is a famous saying, whose origin is uncertain, that no good deed goes unpunished. Although not cited by him, this was no doubt the thought that inspired George Mavrodes’s (1986) well-known article “Religion and the Queerness of Morality.” In it he argued that although not logically incoherent, a certain sort of world in which moral obligations existed would be “absurd . . . a crazy world” (Mavrodes 1986, 581). The world he had in mind was what he called “Russellian,” (...) after a notorious passage in Bertrand Russell’s essay “The Free Man’s Worship” (Russell 1903). There, Russell portrayed us as living in a wholly materialistic universe governed by impersonal forces and “accidental collocations of atoms,” with no objective purpose or meaning to existence. The greatest of human achievements would ultimately be buried “beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.” We could only, concluded Russell, safely build the “soul’s habitation” [sic] on a “firm foundation of unyielding despair” (Russell 1903, 32). In such a world, according to Mavrodes, the performance of moral obligations does, at least sometimes, lead to no net Russellian benefit, that is, any benefit to the agent that is possible within a Russellian world. Indeed, such actions sometimes confer a net Russellian loss. “We have,” he says, “moral obligations whose fulfillment will result in a net loss of good to the one who fulfils them” (Mavrodes 1986, 581). That such a world would be “queer,” “crazy” and “absurd,” according to Mavrodes, should only strike those who believe that moral obligations are wholly objective and run deep in the fabric of reality. He does not purport to address the sceptic, the subjectivist, the expressivist, the nihilist or the existentialist. His aim is at those who believe in a rational moral.. (shrink)

The idea for this paper started with an image that is likely wholly imaginary but interesting nonetheless. It's the late 1920s in New York City. John Dewey, after a busy day of teaching and working through the notes that will eventually become Individualism Old and New, leaves his office at Columbia University. Instead of turning south toward home, he turns north and east, into Harlem. He strolls for a bit, turns up 7th Ave., and stops in front of the Regent (...) Theatre. He goes inside, takes off his coat, and catches the early showing of The Lights of New York. Fifty-seven minutes later, he leaves the Regent. He heads home, has a bite to eat with his daughter, but still feels restless. After dinner, he puts on his .. (shrink)

Although there is no more iconic, stalwart, and eloquent defender of liberty and representative democracy than J.S. Mill, he sometimes endorses non-democratic forms of governance. This article explains the reasons behind this seeming aberration and shows that Mill actually has complex and nuanced views of the transition from non-democratic to democratic government, including the comprehensive and parallel material, cultural, institutional, and character reforms that must occur, and the mechanism by which they will be enacted. Namely, an enlightened despot must cultivate (...) democratic virtues such as obedience, industriousness, spirit of nationality, and resistance to tyranny in the population and simultaneously prepare the way for his own demise and secure his own legitimacy by transitioning to the rule of law. This challenges recent scholarship that paints Mill’s non-democratic views as crudely and uncritically imperialist, because it fails to recognize and engage seriously with his sophisticated (if ultimately problematic) theory of individual and institutional development under enlightened colonialism. (shrink)

Derek Allen, Richard Boyd, and Alan Gilbert have suggested that Marx’s normative political views should be reconstructed as a sophisticated version of moral consequentialism. This paper investigates whether Marx’s ostensible anti-moralism differs in any interesting way from Mill’s sophisticated utilitarianism plus some Marxist social science. I present an account of the social meaning and implications of moral language and argument, based on Marx’s description of morality as a social practice based on distinctive motives, emotions and sanctions, to explain why Marx (...) would reject moral consequentialism. This account will explain how Marx can consistently reject morality yet retain a normative basis for his social criticism. (shrink)

In this article I seek to explain Hegel’s significance to contemporary meta-ethics, in particular to Kantian constructivism. I argue that in the master–slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit , Hegel shows that self-consciousness and intersubjectivity arise at the same time. This point, I argue, shows that there is no problem with taking other people’s reasons to motivate us since reflection on our aims is necessarily also reflection on the needs of those around us. I further explore Hegel’s contribution to (...) the debate about internal and external reasons. I end by arguing that we should understand reasons as historically constructed in the sense that who counts as an intrinsic bearer of value changes over time. I thus argue that the struggle for recognition is in fact the beginning of the long march toward the idea of recognition and the Kantian kingdom of ends. This march, however, is driven by the need to overcome injustice as it is instantiated at the beginning of history by the master’s absolute domination of the slave. (shrink)

Bredo C. Johnsen1 misconceives my strictures concerning acceptance of the following principle : If A both knows that p and knows that p entails q, then A can come to know that q.Johnsen seems unaware that my criticism was intended to apply only after is made to appear in its most plausible light; that is, only after its consequent is interpreted as: ’It is logically possible for A to know that q.’ Without this interpretation might be dismissed simply on the (...) grounds that A suffers from some physical or psychological disability that prevents him from drawing inferences from what he knows.Properly interpreted, remains acceptable as long as the propositions substituted for p and q are such that it is at least logically possible for A to get evidence enough to make them known. Agreement on this point is itself enough to render Johnsen's own examples irrelevant. For instance, even though it may be physically impossible for A to get adequate evidence that in the constellation Andromeda there is a planet intermediate in size between Venus and Earth, the foregoing is still a fit substitution instance for q; but since such a q does not suffice to falsify the consequent of, it does nothing to generate any skeptical argument, either. (shrink)

Remembering forgetting : Maladies de la Mémoire in nineteenth-century France -- Dying of the past : medical studies of nostalgia in nineteenth-century France -- Hysterical remembering -- Trauma, representation, and historical consciousness -- Trauma : a dystopia of the spirit -- Falling into history : Freud's case of 'Frau Emmy von N.' -- Why Freud haunts us -- Why Warburg now? -- Classic postmodernism : Keith Jenkins -- Ebb tide : Frank Ankersmit -- The art of losing oneself : Anne (...) Carson and decreation -- Inquiry as hope : Richard Rorty -- Photographic ambivalence -- Why photography matters to the theory of history -- Ordinary film : Péter Forgács's The Maelstrom -- Graves of the insane, decorated -- On a certain blindness in teaching -- Beyond critical thinking -- Good and risky : on the promise of a liberal education. (shrink)

it is easy to think that he did. Clifford certainly had one. In a celebrated essay he argued for the thesis that “it is wrong always, everywhere and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence“; and his title was “The Ethics of Belief.” Clifford was not alone, for Huxley, also, was of that same opinion. For him, such belief was not just wrong: it was “the lowest depth of immorality.” With that opinion, and with those advocates of it, James (...) was locked in a struggle throughout his life; and it is a reasonable suspicion that the opponent of one ethics of belief is himself an ethicist with a rival ethics of belief of his own. That suspicion, moreover, appears to be confirmed by James's best known essay. He himself came to the view that his The Will to Believe would have been better named The Right to Believe, and it is a commonplace that “right” is a word of the ethical vocabulary. In short, there are obvious signs pointing to a positive answer to our question. (shrink)

This paper examines how the concepts of utility, impartiality, and universality worked together to form the foundation of Adam Smith's jurisprudence. It argues that the theory of utility consistent with contemporary rational choice theory is insufficient to account for Smith's use of utility. Smith's jurisprudence relies on the impartial spectator's sympathetic judgment over whether third parties are injured, and not individuals' expected utility associated with individuals' expected gains from rendering judgments over innocence or guilt.

This paper analyses the National Populist Challenges to Europe’s Center Right. It assesses the cases of the UK, Germany and France. It poses three questions for Europe: How will political integration be achieved and maintained? What policies will foster economic inclusion in the Eurozone? And, third, what are the best means to achieve economic solvency and growth. The paper make a case that neoliberal economic policies over the past decades have undermined some nations' public sector and have also contributed to (...) tensions between the geographical east and west of Europe. (shrink)

The intensive process of differentiation of knowledge that has in the past decade come to include philosophy has had the results, inter alia, that ethics, esthetics, and empirical sociology have undergone a kind of secondary "branching off" from the philosophy of society and culture . On the level of teaching this had the consequence that a department of esthetics and ethics was carved out of the department of historical materialism at the Philosophical Faculty of Moscow University, and was subsequently divided (...) into departments of esthetics and ethics, respectively. It was thus that the independent department of ethics made its appearance for the first time in the history of Moscow University. This occurred in 1969, and recently the department of Marxist- Leninist ethics marked its modest first decade. (shrink)

Le mot «milieu» est précieux pour souligner que les installations humaines – l’architecture, la ville – tiennent compte de leur environnement, naturel ou bâti. Avant de configurer «un monde», l’art humain configure un lieu et même l’élit et le transfigure en le métamorphosant, faisant de milieux donnés des «lieux» habitables voire mémorables aux multiples formes de délimitations, d’échanges et de devenir. La notion de milieu habité est mise en perspective et pensée en termes de limites, passages, liens et métamorphoses.