The question naturally arises: Is public art inherently violent, or is it a provocation to violence? Is violence built into the monument in its very conception? Or is violence simply an accident that befalls some monuments, a matter of the fortunes of history? The historical record suggests that if violence is simply an accident that happens to public art, it is one that is always waiting to happen. The principal media and materials of public art are stone and metal (...) sculpture not so much by choice as by necessity. “A public sculpture,” says Lawrence Alloway, “should be invulnerable or inaccessible. It should have the material strength to resist attack or be easily cleanable, but it also needs a formal structure that is not wrecked by alterations.”12 The violence that surrounds public art is more, however, than simply the ever-present possibility of an accident—the natural disaster or random act of vandalism. Much of the world’s public art—memorials, monuments, triumphal arches, obelisks, columns, and statues—has a rather direct reference to violence in the form of war or conquest. From Ozymandias to Caesar to Napoleon to Hitler, public art has served as a kind of monumentalizing of violence, and never more powerfully than when it presents the conqueror as a man of peace, imposing a Napoleonic code or a pax Romana on the world. Public sculpture that is too frank or explicit about this monumentalizing of violence, whether the Assyrian palace reliefs of the ninth century b.c., or Morris’s bomb sculpture proposal of 1981, is likely to offend the sensibilities of a public committed to the repression of its own complicity in violence.13 The very notion of public art as we receive it is inseparable from what Jürgen Habermas has called “the liberal model of the public sphere,” a dimension distinct from the economic, the private, and the political. This ideal realm provides the space in which disinterested citizens may contemplate a transparent emblem of their own inclusiveness and solidarity, and deliberate on the general good, free of coercion, violence, or private interests.14 12. Lawrence Alloway, “The Public Sculpture Problem,” Studio International 184 : 124.13. See Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, “The Forms of Violence,” October, no. 8 : 17-29, for an important critique of the “narrativization” of violence in Western art and an examination of the alternative suggested by the Assyrian palace reliefs.14. Habermas first introduced this concept in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence . First published in 1962, it has since become the focus of an extensive literature. See also Habermas’s short encyclopedia article, “The Public Sphere,” trans. Sara Lennox and Frank Lennox, New German Critique 1 : 49-55, and the introduction to it by Peter Hohendahl in the same issue, pp. 45-48. I owe much to the guidance of Miriam Hansen and Lauren Berlant on this complex and crucial topic. W. J. T. Mitchell, editor of Critical Inquiry, is Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Service Professor of English and art at the University of Chicago. His recent book is Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. (shrink)

Circumscribed delusional beliefs can follow brain injury. We suggest that these involve anomalous perceptual experiences created by a deficit to the person's perceptual system, and misinterpretation of these experiences due to biased reasoning. We use the Capgras delusion (the claim that one or more of one's close relatives has been replaced by an exact replica or impostor) to illustrate this argument. Our account maintains that people voicing this delusion suffer an impairment that leads to faces being perceived as drained of (...) their normal affective significance, and an additional reasoning bias that leads them to put greater weight on forming beliefs that are observationally adequate rather than beliefs that are a conservative extension of their existing stock. We show how this position can integrate issues involved in the philosophy and psychology of belief, and examine the scope for mutually beneficial interaction. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: I Aristotle and Early Modern Philosophy II Medieval Thought in Early Modern Scholasticism III The Philosophical Textbook IV Conclusions.

A model of information technology (IT) ethical work climates is presented. Using these ethical work climates and data collected from a national mail survey of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) members, empirical measures were developed and evaluated. A mailing of 2446 questionnaires was sent to ACM members and 136 usable responses were returned (5.6%). Using these data, an exploratory factor analysis was performed using principle components analysis to identify the IT ethical work climates from the data. Six of these work (...) climates were identified as predicted by the model. Two ethical work climates that were combinations of the proposed climates were also identified.From the results of the exploratory factor analysis, a confirmatory factor analysis was performed using Calis in PC SAS version 8. The purpose of this analysis was to evaluate the overall fit of these measures to the data and evaluate the psychometric properties of the measures. The fit of the IT ethical work climates model was acceptable. The psychometric properties of these measures were good. Based on these results, conclusions, limitations of the study, and directions for future research are proposed. (shrink)

This paper will survey and assess the ways in which moral thinkers in the early modern tradition of casuistry considered a range of cases of conscience (casus conscientiae) relating to lying, deception, and witholding the truth. Arguing that the position of the casuists has been unjustly maligned — not least by Pascal's brillant yet partizan Les Proviniciales — casuistical theories of lying and simulation will be placed in a broad intellectual context which will examine attihules to mendacity among early modern (...) medical writers, political theorists, anbl philosophers. Contrasting casuistical theoriessuch as equivocation and mental reservation with the approach to lying of other early modern writers, the lecture will advancfcahe view that the casuists promulgated a conceptual outlook on the differences betweefc lying and deception which is of inherent interest, and which helps to clarify some of the salient issues that attend a philosophical account of lying. (shrink)

Public Health Science and practice expanded during the course of the 20th century. Initially focused on controlling infectious disease through basic public health programs regulating water, sanitation and food, by 1988 the Institute of Medicine broadly declared that “public health is what we, as a society, do collectively to. assure the conditions for people to be healthy.” Commensurate with this definition, public health practitioners and policymakers today work on ;in enormous range of issues. The 2002 policy agenda of the American (...) Public Health Association reflects positions on genomics’ role in public health; national health and safety standards for child care programs; sodium in Americans’ diets; the health and safety of emergency rescue workers; and war in Central Asia and the Persian Gulf. (shrink)

This paper provides a retrospective and prospective overview of TU Delft’s approach to engineering ethics education. For over twenty years, the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology Section at TU Delft has been at the forefront of engineering ethics education, offering education to a wide range of engineering and design students. The approach developed at TU Delft is deeply informed by the research of the Section, which is centered around Responsible Research and Innovation, Design for Values, and Risk Ethics. These theoretical (...) approaches are premised on the notion that technologies are inherently value-laden, and as such contain the possibility of fostering or hindering moral values. Each of these approaches encourages students to take a proactive attitude with respect to their projects and profession, thinking creatively about – and taking responsibility for – how to both prevent harm and do good via the technologies they help develop. To explain how this is put into practice, this paper sketches a brief history of ethics teaching at TU Delft, outlines current activities, and presents future plans for Bachelor and Master’s level engineering ethics education at TU Delft. (shrink)

Applied Christian Ethics addresses selected themes in Christian social ethics. Part one shows the roots of contributors in the realist school; part two focuses on different levels of the significance of economics for social justice; and part three deals with both existential experience and government policy in war and peace issues.

Two recent collections of papers—Social Equality: On What It Means to Be Equals, edited by Carina Fourie, Fabian Schuppert, and Ivo Wallimann-Helmer and The Equal Society: Essays on Equality in Theory and Practice, edited by George Hull —demonstrate well the wide diversity of perspectives on egalitarianism within political theory today. But there are unifying themes amidst all this diversity. In particular, these collections make plain the extent to which contemporary egalitarianism in all forms is indebted to Rawls. This debt is (...) reflected, for example, in the luck egalitarianism/social egalitarian debate which plays a central role in both books. It is also reflected in the concern so many contemporary egalitarians have for respect and its social basis. But while egalitarianism today owes much to Rawls, this does not mean that Rawls has nothing left to contribute to the conversation. This essay will argue that a return to Rawls can help contemporary egalitarians avoid taking their debates in certain unproductive directions. (shrink)

From starting his intellectual career as a surrealist, communist and co-founder of the Collège de Sociologie in 1937, Jules Monnerot (1911?95) ended it as a candidate for the Front National in 1989.In this article I offer an explanation for the unexpected trajectory of this thinker whose work is little known in the English-speaking world. Without overlooking the idea that the infamous College encouraged such tendencies, I argue that the notion of ?secular religion?, as Monnerot developed it in his Sociology of (...) Communism (1949), goes some way to explain his gradual radicalization from Cold Warrior to fascist, a path that otherwise seems unlikely for a French intellectual after World War II. In order to emphasize the unusualness of Monnerot's case, I contrast it with that of his erstwhile collaborator, Georges Bataille. I show that accusations of fascism often levelled against Bataille should be more accurately directed at Monnerot, indeed that the fascism inherent within the College of Sociology was brought out not by Bataille but by Monnerot. Monnerot's case is unsettling first because his definition of ?secular religion? contributed to his pro-fascist stance; and second, because it forces us tore think what is meant by ?philosophy after Auschwitz.? This term usually brings to mind scholars such as T.W. Adorno, Emil Fackenheimor Emmanuel Levinas. Monnerot provides a rare example of a thinker whose fascism only developed after the Holocaust, a shocking response that demands the attention of all those interested in the relationship between religion and politics. (shrink)