Impartialist political philosophy must show how and why the priority of impartial justice can be reconciled with a belief in the permanence of pluralism. Although the argument from epistemological abstinence explains the permanence of pluralism, it cannot explain why justice should have motivational priority. It delivers only, and at most, a modus vivendi defence of toleration. The way to attain a defence that is more than a modus vivendi is to ground political impartialism in moral impartialism.

A genuine inquirer seeks the truth; pseudo-inquirers, to make a case for some proposition determined in advance: the sham reasoner, for some proposition his commitment to which is already evident; the fake reasoner, for some proposition to the truth-value of which he is indifferent, but advancing which he believes will benefit himself. Our preposterous environment, in which "everyone shall produce written research in order to live, and it shall be decreed a knowledge explosion" (Barzun) hinders genuine inquiry, encourages the sham (...) and the fake. It has encouraged the factitious despair of the possibility of honest inquiry articulated in much recent philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to revise the meaning of politics today in light of the full range of meanings of the ancient Greek word politeia. In Plato’s Republic (Politeia), we see a careful intenveaving of this range of meanings as Socrates’ discusses the means and ends of justice. Socrates elaborates a basic meaning of justice: the well-functioning coordination of peoples’ various skills (technai). Enacting justice in this sense enables people to meet their needs. In addition, Socrates points to (...) a further political aim that justice in this basic sense should serve, one that first qualifies enacting justice to be an end in itself rather than only a technical means to afurther end beyond it. In this essay, I explore especially the importance of this additional aim in relation to the first. (shrink)

Franz Brentano took exception to the classic statement of the correspondence theory of truth, the thesis: veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus. His reasons for objecting to it, and his proposed revision of the thesis, are interesting considered in themselves as well as for the light they shed on Brentano's view of the relation between the thinker and the world. With regard to the former, it is shown how Brentano analyzes the adaequatio thesis word by word in order to demonstrate (...) what he takes to be its fundamental incoherence. With regard to the latter, it becomes apparent, by contrast with the Thomistic understanding of the adaequatio thesis, that Brentano's revision of it in the direction of a phenomenological theory of truth also involves a revised understanding of the nature of the thinker or knower. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the value of self-doubt in moral inquiry and in moral education. Using John Patrick Shanley’s play, Doubt: A parable, as illustration, it shows how self-doubt initiates and extends moral inquiry, highlights one’s epistemic fallibility and connects the inquirer to the virtue of humility. The essay draws on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, Hullett, Nussbaum, Thayer-Bacon and Elbow to support the idea that the question ‘Am I wrong?’ is important for moral inquiry and for moral education.

This essay looks at the way in which the end of the world syndrome manifests itself regularly as a form of human consciousness. It makes us alert to the possibility of our own instant expiry, causing us both to introspect, as well as to imagine the future of the species. Digitalization and digitization of trauma permits us to see the normality of death as an every present occurrence. Within this context, words have tremendous power, showing us that at each moment (...) we are being ushered into a space not necessarily of our own making. While it frightens us, yet the choices we have are limited to the class and ethnic locations of our everyday survival. While we live, we dream. Negation does not end ambition, it only proves the ephemerality of individual existence and makes us seek to use time as best as our imagination and survival capabilities allow. Our sadness about corporeality is mitigated by the dream we have of species continuity. (shrink)

This paper examines the potential limitations of professional wisdom alongside those of society more generally with respect to upholding the well-being of vulnerable and marginalized people. It presents the dangers, referring to four well-documented illustrations of professional failure, that services and service systems pose when both professionals and society at large do not demonstrate sufficient measures of positive values and ethics to ensure the protection of vulnerable people within care systems. While it argues that reform of service systems and the (...) repair of such breaches are always possible, even such system reform may fail if it is not ultimately guided by wisdom not only from professionals but society itself. Several recent international examples of this wisdom are noted. It sees such wisdom as being located in the inherited values and social ethics of a society and the power of these to guide human conduct in the face of the profound and ongoing limitations of human nature. (shrink)

When surgeons transplant animal organs into humans, people who did not receive the organs incur risks. These third parties may stand near or far in time or space. No one knows the likelihood, breadth, or nature of the risks in question. The common wisdom among infectious-disease specialists is that in the best of xenotransplant conditions, such third-party risk may be minimized but not eliminated.

usually brings to mind images of picket signs held by laborers striking for better wages and benefits. Collective action, however, need not be limited to the withholding of labor. Nor need it involve only the working or middle classes, as airline pilots have recently demonstrated. Finally, collective action need not have as its only purpose the self-interest of the group. Collective action does, however, always involve a joining together of individuals united by common goals or interests in order to consolidate (...) power for the purpose of negotiating with another group or entity. Examples of collective action obviously include striking, other withholding labor actions, and slowdowns, but can also include many other activities. for example, have been threatened or used by house officer organizations in the past. In a paper strike, patient care continues but without documentation, and thus, the institution suffers from absent or delayed financial remuneration. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica - Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies / Revue de l'Association Internationale de Sémiotique Volume: 2013 Issue: 196 Pages: 513-519.

The question of being in today's global communication-production system concerns all life forms over the planet. Global semiotics describes life and semiosis as converging and in this framework faces the question of ontology. Three contexts for a critical approach to the study of signs include the socio-economic, the phenomenological, and the ontological. These are closely interconnected and in this paper are considered from the perspective of global semiotics and semioethics. Politics, war, communication, and subjectivity are critiqued in terms of a (...) dialogic approach to life, signs, and human relations, where dialogism is not only viewed as a cultural but also a biosemiosic phenomenon implying detotalization and otherness beyond the logic of short-sighted identity. (shrink)

Ethics involves an organized, reasoned approach to gathering and processing data in order to arrive at decisions about what to do, what to value, and/or what virtues to cultivate. A model is proposed for conceptualizing this complex dynamic, which incorporates elements of both rule-and-principle ethics and the ethic of care. The model suggested here has two levels. The first level identifies the components that comprise philosophical reasoning; the second contextualizes and operationalizes the model in relation to the processor’s philosophical stance (...) on the nature of knowing. Three philosophical stances are identified and described: science-dominant, person-dominant, and science-person equilibrium. Physicians tend to process patients from first perspectives, nurses from second. Hence, health team collaboration in moral problem solving is critically important. (shrink)

Les publications sur le thème de l’histoire de la jeunesse française au xxe siècle sont aujourd’hui nombreuses. Les premières s’intéressaient aux jeunes intellectuels, aux mouvements de jeunesse durant la période d’entre-deux-guerres, et à la jeunesse sous le régime de Vichy, tandis que les plus récentes se sont penchées sur les années après 1945, et plus particulièrement sur les Trente Glorieuses et les années soixante. Ces ouvrages expliquent comment la jeunesse française est devenue la cib...

Welby’s correspondence with Peirce began with his review of What is Meaning? (1903), a contribution not only to spreading Peirce’s later thinking, but also to reproposing Welby’s “significs.” This is encounter between the pragmatist Peirce’s approach to semiotic and Welby’s significs oriented by mother-sense. A dialogue between two conceptions of meaning which, notwithstanding differences, meet in a participative contribution to constructing the sign sciences – from Peirce to semiotics, from Welby to significs. Their focus does not only concern signs but (...) also values which are inextricably interconnected. In this encounter, significs doubtlessly exerts a non-negligible influence on semiotics. If with (Peirce’s) “play of musement” we are endowed to imagine different worlds from the present, a male-dominated world, to resist the world as-it-is and construct new worlds presupposes what Welby calls mother-sense. In human signifying processes the epistemological dimension is clearly not separable from the axiological, aesthetic or ideological-political. (shrink)

My aim in this article is to further work on building bridges of communication between Indigenous and Western worldviews through 'magical consciousness', a pan-human participatory and analogical orientation of mind. In a bid to overcome the many cultural differences that have justified the discrimination and genocide of Indigenous peoples worldwide, and the near hegemony of a science based solely on logical knowledge, I seek by comparison a common ground for mutual understanding. Searching out similarities and differences between the world of (...) the Dreaming of Paddy Compass Namadbara, an Australian 'clever man' of north-west Arnhem Land, and the prophetic mythologies of English eighteenth-century artist and poet William Blake, I suggest that it might be possible to find points of conversation and acceptance through stories and mythologies that could aid the healing of differences. (shrink)