The “atemporal” character of Kirzner’s notion of alertness and discovery, and his insistence that entrepreneurship is independent of factor ownership have attracted many criticisms from within the Austrian camp. However, it is precisely these elements of his theory of entrepreneurship that offer important insights for the analysis of the relation between shareholders and management in the modern corporation. First of all, the Kirznerian perspective allows us to view both groups as entrepreneurial. Secondly, and contrary to modern agency theory and the (...) Rothbardian strand of Austrian economics, it highlights the entrepreneurial role of management in introducing innovation. Finally, we argue that the Kirznerian perspective on the division of the entrepreneurial roles in the corporate firm shares some important ideas with the “resource based view” of the firm.Le caractère “atemporel” des notions kirzneriennes de vigilance et de découverte et l’insistance que met Kirzner à séparer l’activité entrepreneuriale de la propriété des facteurs lui ont valu de nombreuses critiques de la part des économistes autrichiens. Cependant, ce sont précisément ces éléments de sa théorie de l’entrepreneur qui éclairent de manière importante l’analyse de la relation entre actionnaires et gestionnaires dans l’entreprise moderne. Premièrement, la perspective kirznerienne nous permet de considérer que les deux groupes participent de l’activité entrepreneuriale. Deuxièmement, et contrairement à la théorie moderne de l’agence et la variante rothbardienne de l’économie autrichienne, elle met l’accent sur le rôle entrepreneurial de la gestion dans l’émergence d’innovations. Enfin, nous suggérons que la perspective kirznerienne à propos du partage des rôles entrepreneuriaux dans la firme présente des analogies importantes avec la théorie de la firme vue comme un “vivier de ressources”. (shrink)

Background: Previous research has linked missed nursing care to nurses’ work environment. Ethical climate is a part of work environment, but the relationship of missed care to different types of ethical climate is unknown. Research objectives: To describe the types of ethical climate in adult in-patient cancer care settings, and their relationship to missed nursing care. Research design: A descriptive correlation design was used. Data were collected using the Ethical Climate Questionnaire and the MISSCARE survey tool, and analyzed with descriptive (...) statistics, Pearson’s correlation and analysis of variance. Participants and research context: All nurses from relevant units in the Republic of Cyprus were invited to participate. Ethical considerations: The research protocol has been approved according to national legislation, all licenses have been obtained, and respondents participated voluntarily after they have received all necessary information. Findings: Response rate was 91.8%. Five types identified were as follows: caring (M = 3.18, standard deviation = 1.39); law and code (M = 3.18, standard deviation = 0.96); rules (M = 3.17, standard deviation = 0.73); instrumental (M = 2.88, standard deviation = 1.34); and independence (M = 2.74, standard deviation = 0.94). Reported overall missed care (range: 1–5) was M = 2.51 (standard deviation = 0.90), and this was positively (p < 0.05) related to instrumental (r = 0.612) and independence (r = 0.461) types and negatively (p < 0.05) related to caring (r = −0.695), rules (r = −0.367), and law and code (r = −0.487). Discussion: The reported levels of missed care and the types of ethical climates present similarities and differences with the relevant literature. All types of ethical climate were related to the reported missed care. Conclusion: Efforts to reduce the influence of instrumental and independence types and fostering caring, law and code, and rules types might decrease missed nursing care. However, more robust evidence is needed. (shrink)

Background: In the face of scarcity, nurses may inevitably delay or omit some nursing interventions and give priority to others. This increases the risk of adverse patient outcomes and threatens safety, quality, and dignity in care. However, it is not clear if there is an ethical element in nursing care rationing and how nurses experience the phenomenon in its ethical perspective. Objectives: The purpose was to synthesize studies that relate care rationing with the ethical perspectives of nursing, and find the (...) deeper, moral meaning of this phenomenon. Research design: A systematic review and thematic synthesis of qualitative studies was used. Searching was based on guidelines suggested by Joana Brigs Institute, while the synthesis has drawn from the methodology described. Primary studies were sought from nine electronic databases and manual searches. The explicitness of reporting was assed using consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative research. Nine studies involving 167 nurse participants were included. Synthesis resulted in 35 preliminary themes, 14 descriptive themes, and four analytical themes (professional challenges and moral dilemmas, dominating considerations, perception of a moral role, and experiences of the ethical effects of rationing). Discussion of relationships between themes revealed a new thematic framework. Ethical consideration: Every effort has been taken, for the thoroughness in searching and retrieving the primary studies of this synthesis, and in order for them to be treated accurately, fairly and honestly and without intentional misinterpretations of their findings. Discussion: Within limitations of scarcity, nurses face moral challenges and their decisions may jeopardize professional values, leading to role conflict, feelings of guilt, distress and difficulty in fulfilling a morally acceptable role. However, more research is needed to support certain relationships. Conclusions: Related literature is limited. The few studies found highlighted the essence of justice, equality in care and in values when prioritizing care—with little support to the ethical effects of rationing on nurses. Further research on ethical dimension of care rationing may illuminate other important aspects of this phenomenon. (shrink)

Most scholars have focused on The Second Sex and Simone de Beauvoir’s fiction, concentrating on gender issues but ignoring her broader emancipatory vision. Though Beauvoir’s political thinking is not as closely studied as her feminist works, it underpinned her activism and helped her navigate the dilemmas raised by revolutionary thought in the postwar period. In Emancipatory Thinking Elaine Stavro brings together Beauvoir’s philosophy and her political interventions to produce complex ideas on emancipation. Drawing from a range of work, including novels, (...) essays, autobiographical writings, and philosophic texts, Stavro explains that for Beauvoir freedom is a movement that requires both personal and collective transformation. Freedom is not guaranteed by world historical systems, material structures, wilful action, or discursive practices, but requires engaged subjects who are able to take creative risks as well as synchronize with existing forces to work towards collective change. Beauvoir, Stavro asserts, resisted the trend of anti-humanism that has dominated French thinking since the 1960s and also managed to avoid the pitfalls of voluntarism and individualism. In fact, Stavro argues, Beauvoir appreciated the impact of material, socio-economic, institutional forces, without forgoing the capacity to initiate. Applying Beauvoir’s existential insights and understanding of embodied and situated subjectivity to recent debates within gender, literary, sociological, cultural, and political studies, Emancipatory Thinking provides a lens to explore the current political and theoretical landscape. (shrink)

Non-Humean accounts of the metaphysics of nature posit either laws or powers in order to account for natural necessity and world-order. We argue that such monistic views face fundamental problems. On the one hand, neo-Aristotelians cannot give unproblematic power-based accounts of the functional laws among quantities offered by physical theories, as well as of the place of conservation laws and symmetries in a lawless ontology; in order to capture these characteristics, commitment to governing laws is indispensable. On the other hand, (...) ontologies that entirely exclude some kind of power ascription to worldly entities face what we call the Governing Problem: such ontologies do not have the resources to give an adequate account of how laws play their governing role. We propose a novel dualist model, which, we argue, has the resources to solve the difficulties encountered by its two dominant competitors, without inheriting the problems of either view. According to the dualist model, both laws and powers are equally fundamental and irreducible to each other, and both are needed in order to give a satisfactory account of the nomological structure of the world. The dualist model constitutes thus a promising alternative to current monistic views in the metaphysics of science. (shrink)

The literature on ‘academic capitalism’ and the ‘entrepreneurial university’ has paid little attention to the role and function of bureaucracy or has considered it something different from the New Public Management (NPM) that has accompanied neoliberal reforms in higher education over the last decades. Following a brief account of the theory and history of bureaucracy, the article examines the institutional, intellectual, pedagogic, and psychic repercussions of the NPM that was introduced in Danish universities in 2003, and turned them into what (...) has been often called ‘knowledge companies’ (vidensvirksomheder). As a result of these reforms, the paper shows, academicians have been transformed into competitive entrepreneurial clerks, striving for assignments and resources, bound by contracts, thoroughly surveilled for their productivity and performance through special software, and entangled in a web of bureaucratic relations which has removed all spaces of logos that distinguish a university, according to its European tradition. (shrink)

This paper advances the thesis of methodological mechanism, the claim that to be committed to mechanism is to adopt a certain methodological postulate, i.e. to look for causal pathways for the phenomena of interest. We argue that methodological mechanism incorporates a minimal account of understanding mechanisms, according to which a mechanism just is a causal pathway described in the language of theory. In order to argue for this position we discuss a central example of a biological mechanism, the mechanism of (...) cell death, known as apoptosis. We argue that this example shows that our philosophically deflationary account is sufficient in order to have an illuminating account of mechanisms as the concept is used in biology. (shrink)

Vast research has sought to better understand the origins and development of rape myth beliefs given the problematic influence of such misconceptions throughout global societies and criminal justice pathways. The current research aims to build on this body of literature by examining the contribution that psychopathic personality traits (affective responsiveness, cognitive responsiveness, interpersonal manipulation, egocentricity) and emotional intelligence may have upon rape myth beliefs. Furthermore, this study will investigate the extent to which sociodemographic characteristics (age, gender, ethnicity, education), and prior (...) experience of sexual victimisation, contribute to variance in rape myth acceptance scores. In total 251 participants (M Age = 31.66) completed an online, self-report questionnaire which included contemporary measures of psychopathy and rape myth acceptance, never previously tested in combination. Results of a hierarchical multiple regression analysis indicate that egocentricity, age, and gender were significantly associated with rape myth beliefs. Emotional intelligence, as well as affective and interpersonal traits of psychopathy, were not directly related with rape mythology. Findings are interpreted alongside previous research, where we suggest there is an urgent need for larger, nationally representative samples, systematically recruited from the general population to help clarify uncertainty in existing literature emerging from small-scale opportunistic datasets. (shrink)

How do non-Humean laws govern regularities in nature? According to the Inference Problem, non-Humean accounts of governing face a central problem: it is not clear how such laws do perform their governing function. Recently, Jonathan Schaffer has argued that the introduction of a law-to-regularity axiom is sufficient to solve the Inference Problem. The authors argue that Schaffer’s solution faces a devastating dilemma: either the required axiom cannot, on its own, differentiate the non-Humean account from a Humean account of laws or, (...) if more content is added to the primitive governing posit, it should be shown how and why the ‘outfitted’ posit obtains in the world. Furthermore, the authors show that those cases that Schaffer presents to motivate his approach are not analogous to the case of lawhood and so they cannot provide justification for his axiomatic solution. (shrink)

Evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-Devo) is a new and rapidly developing field of biology which focuses on questions in the intersection of evolution and development and has been seen by many as a potential synthesis of these two fields. This synthesis is the topic of the books reviewed here. Integrating Evolution and Development (edited by Roger Sansom and Robert Brandon), is a collection of papers on conceptual issues in Evo-Devo, while From Embryology to Evo-Devo (edited by Manfred Laubichler and Jane Maienschein) (...) is a history of the problem of the relations between ontogeny and phylogeny. (shrink)

Die vorliegende Arbeit ist die teilweise überarbeitete Fassung meiner Dissertation, die im Wintersemester 1994/95 von der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität zu Köln angenommen wurde (Tag des Rigorosums war der 5. Februar 1995). Zur ursprünglichen Fassung (Einleitung und Kommentar) ist später die kritische Ausgabe des Textes hinzugefügt worden. Die Veröffentlichung der Arbeit wurde aus verschiedenen Gründen verschoben. Ich habe allerdings versucht, die inzwischen erschienene Literatur, soweit es mir möglich war, zu berücksichtigen. In der Einleitung werden alle Fragen ausführlich behandelt, auf eine (...) Diskussion über die Beziehung Platons zu Thukydides wurde aber verzichtet. Diesem Problem werde ich an anderem Ort nachgehen. Im Kommentar wurde bewußt besonderes Gewicht sowohl auf auf textkritische als auch auf historische Fragen gelegt, nicht jedoch die zahlreichen rhetorischen Figuren, da sie schon in der Dissertation von Th. Berndt übersichtlich zusammengestellt sind. Betreut wurde die Arbeit von Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. RudolfKassel. Seine große Gelehrsamkeit und wissenschaftliche Strenge haben meine Arbeit stark gefördert. Für seine Kritik, fiir seine zahlreichen Hinweise und nicht zuletzt fiir seine Geduld möchte ich ihm sehr herzlich danken. Mein Dank gilt auch all jenen, die mir während meines Studiums in Deutschland und bei der Entstehung dieser Arbeit geholfen haben: Prof. Dr. K. Bormann hat bereitwillig das Korreferat übernommen; Prof. Dr. P. Funke hat den Teil über den Korinthischen Krieg gelesen und einige nützliche Hinweise beigesteuert; Prof. Dr. G. A. Lehmann hat mein Studium der Alten Geschichte stets freundlich begleitet; Prof. Dr. D. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Scaena Feralium Nuptiarum: Wedding Imagery In Apuleius’ Tale Of Charite ( Met. 8.1–14)Stavros FrangoulidisThe implicit presence of wedding imagery in the servant’s narrative regarding the tragic end of Charite in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (8.1–14) 1 has received little scholarly attention. 2 In the tale of Charite, her unsuccessful suitor, Thrasyllus, devises a scheme to kill her husband, Tlepolemus, during a hunt and to marry the widowed Charite. After the (...) ghost of Tlepolemus has exposed to his wife the actual circumstances of his death, the heroine devises a scheme for exacting vengeance on Thrasyllus, both for his cunning in killing her husband in the boar hunt and for his sexual ambitions toward her. The former is revealed in the similarities between Charite’s revenge scheme and Thrasyllus’ plot to bring about Tlepolemus’ death; the latter emerges from Charite’s clever exploitation of aspects of the wedding ritual in her revenge scheme. To be persuasive, the (fictional) marriage ritual, like the hunting scheme before it, requires role playing 3 and a reversal in gender roles such that [End Page 601] the heroine punishes her opponent most appropriately for his actions within the tale’s narrative. This wedding imagery is further sustained in the conclusion of the tale: Charite’s suicide on her husband’s tomb is represented as (re)marriage to her husband in death, since it reenacts several aspects of the wedding ritual from the earlier narrative of Tlepolemus’ liberation of his bride from her captivity in a robbers’ cave, and their subsequent marriage. 4 In the end, Thrasyllus’ suicide by starvation is also represented as a marriage in death, as Charite herself foreshadows in her angry speech as she prepares to attack him in his sleep.Our object here is to explore the ways in which Apuleius artfully designs the narrative of the latter portion of Charite’s story: the wedding imagery enhances her scheme for revenge, which is based both on Thrasyllus’ murderous plot against her husband and on Thrasyllus’ amatory designs upon her, and also intensifies the tragedy of the narrative, as all three marriages, Tlepolemus’, Charite’s, and Thrasyllus’, are fulfilled only in death. 5There are a number of intriguing resonances between the story of Charite and the tale of Cupid and Psyche that features so centrally in the novel as a whole. Space here does not permit much development of comparisons between the two narratives, but particularly striking points of similarity or contrast are indicated in the notes as we proceed.In the servant’s tale, Thrasyllus, the unsuccessful suitor, assumes the persona of a trusted friend in order to gain admission to the house of the married couple. After being forbidden access to Charite, he tricks his rival, Tlepolemus, into going hunting. Their departure on the hunt marks a spatial shift, from the interior of Tlepolemus’ home to the open space of wild nature, where Thrasyllus works his scheme.Charite has forbidden Tlepolemus to hunt horned and tusked animals (except mountain goats), a request that reveals her concern for her husband’s safety. Her apprehensions about his vulnerability also suggest a female aspect to Tlepolemus’ identity, an ambivalence of gender role that adumbrates her later worship of him as Liber/Dionysus, with both male and female characteristics. [End Page 602]For the tale’s authorial audience, Thrasyllus’ invitation to go hunting also recalls his own earlier advice to some robbers, to go on a hunt to collect animals for a sacrifice to their patron deity, Mars the Companion (7.10). In contrast to Tlepolemus’ earlier success in a hunt (which led to Charite’s liberation from captivity in the robbers’ den, and his marriage to her), Thrasyllus’ hunting scheme brings about Tlepolemus’ death, putting a violent end to Charite’s marriage. 6In a wedding context, Tlepolemus’ death may be interpreted as a prenuptial sacrifice for Thrasyllus’ planned marriage to Charite. Thrasyllus’ “sacrifice” here mirrors Tlepolemus’ earlier sacrifices of various animals at temples and public places in connection with the symbolic abduction of his bride from her parental home, at the opening of the Charite complex (4.26, ad nuptias... templis et aedibus publicis victimas [End Page 603] immolabat... (shrink)

Alcmaeon, a philosopher-cum-doctor from Croton, offers the earliest known definition of health and disease. The aim of this paper is to examine the formulation of his medical theory in terms of political organization, namely the polarity between one-man rule and egalitarianism , by taking into account contemporary philosophical and medical texts, as well as the historical context. The paper is divided into four sections. I first overview the compendium in which this medical theory is reported, trace the doxographical layers, and (...) analyse the terminology employed . I then focus on the key aspects of this medical theory, including the constitution of the body, the interaction of opposites, and the aetiology of disease . I suggest that Alcmaeon's notion of equality can be understood in various ways, and discuss the possible interpretations in the light of early Greek philosophy and medicine. The most likely interpretations are that there exists a kind of equilibrium between pairs .. (shrink)

This essay discusses the changes promoted in European universities by the ‘Bologna Process’ and the ‘European Higher Education Area’. Through an analysis of the main policy documents and mechanisms, the paper demonstrates that the European Higher Education Area is designed to dismantle academic autonomy across the continent. Before setting out to examine this transnational policy process, the paper specifies in its first part the meaning of academic autonomy – a particular European creation, as it argues – through an overview of (...) the historical material. (shrink)

The issue of interpersonal comparisons of utility is about the possibility (or not) of comparing the utility or welfare or the mental states in general, of different individuals. Embedded in the conceptual framework of utilitarianism, interpersonal comparisons were admissible in economics as part of the theoretical justification of welfare policies until the first decades of the twentieth century. Under the strong influence of the scientific philosophy of positivism as reflected in the works of early neoclassical economists and as epitomized by (...) Lionel Robbins, utility comparisons were subsequently rejected as a value judgement. Robbins’ methodological stance is still prevalent among mainstream economists. Despite the explicit rejection of comparability by the majority of economists, interpersonal comparisons are necessary for many key policy issues, such as progressive taxation, social welfare policies, GDP-based welfare comparisons, cost–benefit analysis, and public goods provision. In this paper, the case of interpersonal utility comparisons is discussed as an illustrative example of the usefulness of the study of the role of value judgements, and generally of the interrelationship between ethics and economics. It is argued that the current tension between theory and policy practice might be resolved through the efforts of prominent economists and philosophers to challenge positivism, and especially its problematic treatment of value judgements and of ethical assumptions in general. The discussion also provides more strength to the view that policy makers and their economic advisers cannot avoid ethical questions in their analysis of the workings of the economic system. (shrink)

In this chapter we examine the relation between mechanisms and laws/counterfactuals by revisiting the main notions of mechanism found in the literature. We distinguish between two different conceptions of ‘mechanism’: mechanisms-of underlie or constitute a causal process; mechanisms-for are complex systems that function so as to produce a certain behavior. According to some mechanists, a mechanism fulfills both of these roles simultaneously. The main argument of the chapter is that there is an asymmetrical dependence between both kinds of mechanisms and (...) laws/counterfactuals: while some laws and counterfactuals must be taken as primitive (non-mechanistic) facts of the world, all mechanisms depend on laws/counterfactuals. (shrink)

Main figures in Byzantium after the Byzantium were Ioannis Zygomalas (1498-1584) and his son and fellow Theodosius (1544-1607) who drew a spiritual path that left many and rich traces and presumptions. They served in the Patriarchate of Constantinople in key positions. There they taught the ancient Greek language and they copied and distributed manuscripts of works of ancient and byzantine writers. Their mailing correspondence with European scholars and travelers is well known. Thanks to that, the humanistic Europe met not only (...) the Greek scholars of the 16th c. but also their spoken language of that era, as a continuation of the Greek classical times and the Byzantine world. The historical information concerning them that has been saved is of interest to many categories of specialists of human sciences: Theology and Philosophy, Social History, History of Law and Institutions, Literature and Linguistics, Palaeography and Codicology, Letter-writing. Authors: Hans Eideneier, Ernst Gamillscheg, Christian Gastgeber, Andreas Rhoby, Dora E. Solti, D. G. Apostolopoulos, Athanasios E. Karathanasis, Vassilis Katsaros, R. Georgios D. Metallinos, Machi Paizi-Apostolopoulou, Stavros Perentidis, Konstantinos Pitsakis, Georgios Steiris, Notis Toufexis, Andronikos Falaggas. (shrink)

For many years poststructuralist feminists have denounced Simone de Beauvoir as a `universal humanist' who denies sexual difference and inscribes woman in a masculine discourse. Returning to the original exchanges between de Beauvoir and the French feminists of difference, where this dismissive attitude began, it is seen that de Beauvoir circulates in their discourse as representative of a bygone eraan embodiment of all that has been surpassed. Their criticisms of de Beauvoir prove for the most part, glib and disingenuous and (...) not grounded in a careful reading of The Second Sex. In this article the author defends de Beauvoir from their charges of universalism, phallocentrism and being a dupe of Sartre. Her particular form of universal humanism is not `indifferent to difference', but produces historically and socially nuanced insights. De Beauvoir does not valorize a Sartrean rational masculine subject as a model for feminist struggles, rather she theorizes an embodied, relational, situated subject. Furthermore, her theory of Otherness is able to accommodate the psychic register of subjectivity without psychologizing the socioeconomic or political world, a shortcoming of her French poststructuralist opponents. (shrink)

Research in Critical Discourse Studies has for long recognised the central role that both direct and indirect communicative strategies play in the reproduction of social inequality, but a main proponent of this approach has expressed scepticism with regard to the contribution that theories of pragmatics which specifically focus on speaker intentions can make to its agenda. This paper sets out to examine how relevance theory’s theoretical machinery can be applied to the critical discussion of ideology in discourse, by offering insights (...) that overcome the limitations imposed by this concentration of its precursors on speaker intentions. More specifically, I discuss how the cognitive perspective that relevance theory adopts can inform our understanding of the way in which ideological effects automatically arise during spontaneous utterance interpretation. After accounting for the derivation of these effects, I briefly suggest how it can additionally be taken to underlie the propagation of ideologies through discursive practice. (shrink)

The past few years have seen quite a bit of speculation over relevance theorists’ commitment to Fodorian semantics as a means to account for the notion of encoded lexical meaning that they put forth in their framework. In this paper, I take on the issue, arguing that this view of lexical semantics compromises Relevance Theory’s aim of psychological plausibility, since it effectively binds it with the ‘literal first’ hypothesis that has been deemed unrealistic from a psycholinguistic viewpoint. After discussing the (...) incompatibility of Fodor’s philosophical account with the perspective that relevance theorists adopt, I briefly suggest ways in which further behavioural research on the semantics/pragmatics distinction could help advance more cognitively-oriented accounts of encoded lexical meaning. (shrink)

Although most of the marginalist economists' methodology was influenced by nineteenth-century classical physics, the work of Francis Ysidro Edgeworth represents the highest point of classical physics influence to the development of mainstream economic methodology. Subsequent leading theorists were not as explicit, although economic theory continued to be influenced by physics as the work of Pareto, Fisher and Samuelson indicates. However, the physics methodological framework has made a recent reappearance in the relatively new field of econophysics. Although there are a few (...) methodological similarities, there are also many important differences between mainstream economics and econophysics. Econophysicists' emphasis to statistical mechanics rather to mechanical models, their reservations towards rational agent theory and their rejection of many standard assumptions of mainstream economics are examples of such differences. The paper examines the above from a methodological viewpoint. It also discusses the p.. (shrink)

Conventional economic theory portrays privatization as a transformative event for a company, even when it is partial and the state maintains control. According to this view, private investors have stronger incentives than voters to monitor management performance and constrain side-payments to political allies of the government. But how exactly can private investors discipline managers they cannot fire? Proponents of privatization place their hopes on disclosure obligations under securities laws, triggered by privatized companies’ stock exchange listings. They argue that, because company (...) disclosures can reveal side-payments to government allies and cause private investors to abandon the stock, management should avoid political favoritism after a stock exchange listing. The Article explores whether investors responded to indications of political favoritism as the above theory would predict. Case study evidence comes from major privatizations in Greece during the last two decades in telecommunications, energy, and gaming. The Article examines the public disclosures of partially privatized companies in two key areas where the risk of political side-deals and corruption remains high: contracts with suppliers and relationships with labor. Greek companies’ disclosure documents included clear indications that payouts to suppliers and labor continued to increase during the period of partial privatization. However, these companies’ stocks remained attractive to investors. (shrink)

Recent work by Matthew Bedke and Max Hayward develops a new attack on metaethical non-naturalists: that they are committed to an immoral state of mind, because they must be willing to change their mind about the moral importance of certain actions given possible evidence about the layout of the non-natural realm. For example, they must be willing to decrease their credence that torturing babies is bad, if they ever get evidence that torturing babies is not in the extension of a (...) non-natural property. The present paper aims to both develop the strongest version of this argument and propose a response to it. The first section argues that the strongest version of this attack does not depend on whether accepting non-naturalism commits one to believing a certain kind of conditional proposition. Rather, it depends on whether accepting non-naturalism commits one to having a certain kind of conditional credences. Moreover, the moral criticism at hand does not hinge on the causal inertness of non-natural properties. And in so far as the argument does not depend on causal inertness, the people threatened by immorality are not just non-naturalists, but metaethicists in general (Sect. 2). This is because the worry hinges instead on particular relationships of epistemic dependence between our metaethical and some of our ethical views. But it is not clear that those relationships obtain; we could adopt metaethical methodologies that preclude morally problematic dependence of relevant first order views on evidence about our metaethical theories (Sect. 3). (shrink)

The cis-regulatory hypothesis is one of the most important claims of evolutionary developmental biology. In this paper I examine the theoretical argument for cis-regulatory evolution and its role within evolutionary theorizing. I show that, although the argument has some weaknesses, it acts as a useful example for the importance of current scientific debates for science education.

This paper corroborates the claim that soft hate speech develops argumentative inferences that justify discriminatory hatred, all the while helping establish a common ground of exclusionary and denigrating attitudes in society. Through the prism of Critical Discourse Studies, we synthesise ideas coming from the domains of Argumentation Theory and Cognitive Pragmatics, while drawing on examples from a corpus of comments made in response to LGBTQI + -related articles in Greek news portals. On the one hand, we employ the Argumentum Model (...) of Topics, which enables us to break down how standpoint-argument couplings are inferred in discourse, showcasing how, despite not being overtly argumentative, the relevant discourses can be taken to still manifest an inherent argumentativity that justifies the development of discriminatory stances. Turning, on the other, to Relevance Theory and more specifically its specific approach to communication, which underlines the automaticity by which contextual interpretation takes place, we present a way in which, even though not directly communicated, the denigrated attitudes that are embedded in instances of soft hate speech still manage to creep in an audience’s cognitive environment. (shrink)

The paradoxes of globalization and the efforts toward the establishment of a consolidated healthcare ministry have caused tensions while affording the possibility for true ecumenical dialogue. As today's societies become more pluralistic, Orthodox Christian healthcare ministry finds itself amongst these paradoxes and tensions. The content of Orthodox healthcare chaplaincy, which is centered in its Eucharistic expression, maintains a sense of catholicity and unity. This though differs from a “psychological” understanding of pastoral care, which has developed. Therefore, there is a question (...) of the chaplain's identity, a crisis of theology and ecclesiology, which must be faced so that true unity can be attained. This article explains the content of Orthodox healthcare chaplaincy and addresses the issues of pastoral identity, theology and psychology, together with the crisis of ecclesiology. It is written with a true agony for unity. (shrink)