We are immersed within an odorous sea of chemical currents that we parse into individual odors with complex structures. Odors have been posited as determined by the structural relation between the molecules that compose the chemical compounds and their interactions with the receptor site. But, naturally occurring smells are parsed from gaseous odor plumes. To give a comprehensive account of the nature of odors the chemosciences must account for these large distributed entities as well. We offer a focused review of (...) what is known about the perception of odor plumes for olfactory navigation and tracking, which we then connect to what is known about the role odorants play as properties of the plume in determining odor identity with respect to odor quality. We end by motivating our central claim that more research needs to be conducted on the role that odorants play within the odor plume in determining odor identity. (shrink)

What is intellectual humility? In this essay, we aim to answer this question by assessing several contemporary accounts of intellectual humility, developing our own account, offering two reasons for our account, and meeting two objections and solving one puzzle.

This paper extends several themes from recent work on norms of assertion. It does as much by applying those themes to the speech act of asking. In particular, it argues for the view that there is a species of asking which is governed by a certain norm, a norm to the effect that one should ask a question only if one doesn’t know its answer.

This paper argues that questions can be bullshit. First it explores some shallowly interrogative ways in which that can happen. Then it shows how questions can also be bullshit in a way that’s more deeply interrogative.

In a world which can be increasingly described as a “society of organizations,” it is incumbent upon organizational researchers to account for the role of organizations in determining the well-being of societies and the individuals that comprise them. Workplace spirituality is a young area of inquiry with potentially strong relevance to the well-being of individuals, organizations, and societies. Previous literature has not examined ethical dilemmas related to workplace spirituality that organizations might expect based upon the co-existence of multiple ethical work (...) climates, nor has previous literature accounted for the relevance of the cosmopolitan source of moral reasoning in the ethical treatment of workplace spirituality. The purpose of this paper is to address these gaps by articulating two such ethical dilemmas related to workplace spirituality: the “quiet desperation” dilemma and the instrumentality dilemma. Moreover, I propose two theoretical contexts that foster “both-and” rather than “either-or” thinking, thereby mitigating the relationships between climate combinations and conflictual aspects of the ethical dilemmas. For the “quiet desperation” dilemma, I propose a person–organization fit perspective to emphasize diversity of individual preferences instead of a managerially prescribed uniformity of spirituality. For the instrumentality dilemma, I propose a multiparadigm approach to workplace spirituality research to avoid the privileging of one research interest over another. I conclude with suggestions for future research. (shrink)

This article connects value-sensitive design to Gibson’s affordance theory: the view that we perceive in terms of the ease or difficulty with which we can negotiate space. Gibson’s ideas offer a nonsubjectivist way of grasping culturally relative values, out of which we develop a concept of political affordances, here understood as openings or closures for social action, often implicit. Political affordances are equally about environments and capacities to act in them. Capacities and hence the severity of affordances vary with age, (...) health, social status and more. This suggests settings are selectively permeable, or what postphenomenologists call multistable. Multistable settings are such that a single physical location shows up differently – as welcoming or hostile – depending on how individuals can act on it. In egregious cases, authoritarian governments redesign politically imbued spaces to psychologically cordon both them and the ideologies they represent. Selective permeability is also orchestrated according to business interests, which is symptomatic of commercial imperatives increasingly dictating what counts as moral and political goods. (shrink)

In 1967, the superior general of the Society of Jesus, Pedro Arrupe, sent a memorandum on the American “racial crisis” to the Jesuit priests, brothers, and social institutions of the United States. Through appeals to the American legal and Catholic moral traditions, On the Interracial Apostolate articulated why Jesuits should strive to achieve racial equality, initiating a historic period of expansion in Jesuit civil rights programs. Given scholars’ limited engagement with On the Interracial Apostolate’s distinctive rhetorical features, this article explains (...) why the document was framed within the discursive framework of prophetic indictment by uncovering the influence of William J. Kenealy, a Jesuit legal scholar, on the document’s drafting. In light of this drafting history, this article concludes by suggesting that the emergence of twentieth-century “Jesuit anti-racism” can, in part, be explained by how questions about racial equality came to be understood as discrete expressions of broader debates about the American legal tradition’s moral foundations. (shrink)

In this collection, a leading sociologist brings his distinctive method of social criticism to bear on some of the most significant ideas, political and social events, and thinkers of the late twentieth century. In the first section, the author examines several concepts that have figured prominently in recent political-ideological controversies: capitalism, rationality, totalitarianism, power, alienation, left and right, and cultural relativism/ multiculturalism. He considers their origins, historical shifts in their meaning and the myths surrounding them, and their resonance beyond their (...) formal definitions. The second section highlights the author's lifelong interest in the relation of intellectuals to social classes and institutions. The author assesses the notion of a 'New Class', considers the implications for class structure of the increasing centring of intellectual life in the university, and assesses the relation of sociology to professional jargon. (shrink)

Fairness of Artificial Intelligence decisions has become a big challenge for governments, companies, and societies. We offer a theoretical contribution to consider AI ethics outside of high-level and top-down approaches, based on the distinction between “reality” and “world” from Luc Boltanski. To do so, we provide a new perspective on the debate on AI fairness and show that criticism of ML unfairness is “realist”, in other words, grounded in an already instituted reality based on demographic categories produced by institutions. Second, (...) we show that the limits of “realist” fairness corrections lead to the elaboration of “radical responses” to fairness, that is, responses that radically change the format of data. Third, we show that fairness correction is shifting to a “domination regime” that absorbs criticism, and we provide some theoretical and practical avenues for further development in AI ethics. Using an ad hoc critical space stabilized by reality tests alongside the algorithm, we build a shared responsibility model which is compatible with the radical response to fairness issues. Finally, this paper shows the fundamental contribution of pragmatic sociology theories, insofar as they afford a social and political perspective on AI ethics by giving an active role to material actors such as database formats on ethical debates. In a context where data are increasingly numerous, granular, and behavioral, it is essential to renew our conception of AI ethics on algorithms in order to establish new models of responsibility for companies that take into account changes in the computing paradigm. (shrink)

In this article I develop Heidegger's phenomenology of poetry, showing that it may provide grounds for rejecting claims that he lapses into linguistic idealism. Proceeding via an analysis of the three concepts of language operative in the philosopher's work, I demonstrate how poetic language challenges language's designative and world-disclosive functions. The experience with poetic language, which disrupts Dasein's absorption by emerging out of equipmentality in the mode of the broken tool, brings Dasein to wonder at the world's existence in such (...) a way that doubt about its reality cannot enter the picture. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 550-573, July 2022.

Three types of objections have been raised against sweatshops. According to their critics, sweatshops are (1) exploitative, (2) coercive, and (3) harmful to workers. In “The Ethical and Economic Case Against Sweatshop Labor: A Critical Assessment,” Powell and Zwolinski critique all three objections and thereby offer what is arguably the most powerful defense of sweatshops in the philosophical literature to date. This article demonstrates that, whether or not unregulated sweatshops are exploitative or coercive, they are, pace Powell and Zwolinski, harmful (...) to workers. (shrink)

Very soon after I began working on the identity of magic-workers in classical antiquity, I realized that it was necessary to come to terms with a thesis about depictions of erotic magic-working in Greek and Roman literature. It asserted that male writers engaged in a systematic misrepresentation of the realities of magic-working in portraying erotic magic as an exclusively female preserve; the reality was that men were the main participants in this form of magic-working. The thesis is based on the (...) supposition that the truth about erotic magic and the people who performed it is to be found in the formularies or spell-books preserved in papyrus and in defixiones. These two sources of information are said to show us that erotic magic was performed by men and not by the women who are the persons depicted engaging in love-magic in literature. The scholar who first presented the thesis was the late John Winkler. A version of it is to be found in Fritz Graf's general account of Greek and Roman magic. There is agreement over what are taken to be the facts, but views diverge over their interpretation. Winkler appeals to the Freudian notion of denial and transference to offer an explanation not only of the discrepancy between life and literature, but of what he took to be the belief held by the young men who cast erotic spells that the girls who were the objects of their spells were as sexually eager as they were: men, when overwhelmed by sexual desire for unattainable women, through a process of denial transfer that feeling to women, whether old or young, whom they fondly imagine suffer the same intense sexual longings as themselves. (shrink)

Introduction: the figure of this world -- 1. The question of political ontology -- 2. The poetic experience of the world -- 3. The myth of the earth -- 4. The unbearable -- 5. The creature before the law -- 6. The animal for which animality is an issue -- 7. Understanding the happy -- 8. The picture and its captives -- 9. The passing of the figure of this world.

Recent decades have seen a revived interest in super-substantivalism, the idea that spacetime is the only fundamental substance and matter some kind of aspect, property or consequence of spacetime structure. However, the metaphysical debate so far has misidentified a particular variant of super-substantivalism with the position per se. I distinguish between a super-substantival core commitment and different ways of fleshing it out. I then investigate how general relativity and alternative spacetime theories square with the different variants of super-substantivalism.

This book represents a considerable revision and expansion of Public Choice II. Six new chapters have been added, and several chapters from the previous edition have been extensively revised. The discussion of empirical work in public choice has been greatly expanded. As in the previous editions, all of the major topics of public choice are covered. These include: why the state exists, voting rules, federalism, the theory of clubs, two-party and multiparty electoral systems, rent seeking, bureaucracy, interest groups, dictatorship, the (...) size of government, voter participation, and political business cycles. Normative issues in public choice are also examined including a normative analysis of the simple majority rule, Bergson–Samuelson social welfare functions, the Arrow and Sen impossibility theorems, Rawls's social contract theory and the constitutional political economy of Buchanan and Tullock. (shrink)

Abstract: Contemporary analytic philosophers of the “reactive attitudes” tend to share a simple conception of guilt as “self-directed blame”—roughly, an “unpleasant affect” felt in combination with, or in response to, the thought that one has violated a moral requirement, evinced substandard “quality of will,” or is blameworthy. I believe that this simple conception is inadequate. As an alternative, I offer my own theory of guilt’s logic and its connection to morality. In doing so, I attempt to articulate guilt’s defining thought (...) or proposition through an extended investigation and analysis of guilt’s many competing metaphors, which I trace from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament to Shakespeare to contemporary vernacular. My interpretation of this literary genealogy offers a way to understand guilt’s seemingly disparate metaphors in terms of a single master-image that illuminates our self-conceptions and our relationship to morality. I conclude by making a very brief start toward a moral vindication of guilt against the backdrop of Nietzschean and Freudian analyses that explicitly call guilt’s place in a healthy social and personal life into question. I suggest that once guilt’s logic is made explicit, we can see that it makes sense of, honors, and addresses some of our deepest aspirations and needs. (shrink)

I argue that, contrary to folklore, Einstein never really cared for geometrizing the gravitational or the electromagnetic field; indeed, he thought that the very statement that General Relativity geometrizes gravity "is not saying anything at all". Instead, I shall show that Einstein saw the "unification" of inertia and gravity as one of the major achievements of General Relativity. Interestingly, Einstein did not locate this unification in the field equations but in his interpretation of the geodesic equation, the law of motion (...) of test particles. (shrink)

As interpreted by Pattee, von Neumann’s Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata has proved to be a useful tool for understanding some of the difficulties and paradoxes of molecular biosemiotics. But is its utility limited to molecular systems or is it more generally applicable within biosemiotics? One way of answering that question is to look at the Theory as a model for one particular high-level biosemiotic activity, human language. If the model is not useful for language, then it certainly cannot be generally (...) useful to biosemiotics. Beginning with the Universal Turing Machine and continuing with von Neumann’s Theory and Pattee’s interpretation, the properties of universality, programmability, underspecification, complementarity of description/construction, and open-ended evolutionary potential are shown to be usefully applicable to language, thus opening a new line of inquiry in biosemiotics. (shrink)

In this highly original work, Mathew A. Foust breaks new ground in comparative studies through his exploration of the connections between Confucianism and the American Transcendentalist and Pragmatist movements. In his examination of a broad range of philosophers, including Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Charles Peirce, William James, and Josiah Royce, Foust traces direct lines of influence from early translations of Confucian texts and brings to light conceptual affinities that have been previously overlooked. Combining resources (...) from both traditions, Confucianism and American Philosophy offers fresh insights into contemporary problems and exemplifies the potential of cross-cultural dialogue in an increasingly pluralistic world. (shrink)

Striking similarities across ape gestural repertoires suggest shared phylogenetic origins that likely provided a foundation for the emergence of language. We pilot a novel approach for exploring possible semantic universals across human and nonhuman ape species. In a forced‐choice task, n = 300 participants watched 10 chimpanzee gesture forms performed by a human and chose from responses that paralleled inferred meanings for chimpanzee gestures. Participants agreed on a single meaning for nine gesture forms; in six of these the agreed form‐meaning (...) pair response(s) matched those established for chimpanzees. Such shared understanding suggests apes' (including humans') gesturing shares deep evolutionary origins. (shrink)

I discuss the relationship between different versions of the equivalence principle in general relativity, among them Einstein's equivalence principle, the weak equivalence principle, and the strong equivalence principle. I show that Einstein's version of the equivalence principle is intimately linked to his idea that in GR gravity and inertia are unified to a single field, quite like the electric and magnetic field had been unified in special relativistic electrodynamics. At the same time, what is now often called the strong equivalence (...) principle, related to the local validity of special relativity, can also be found in Einstein's writings, albeit by a different name and clearly separated from what he calls the equivalence principle. I discuss both the development of Einstein's thoughts on the different versions of the equivalence principle, their relationship to the relativity principle, as well as later reflections and variants proposed. (shrink)

Research in public relations ethics has focused primarily on moral philosophy and applied normative ethics. Although these efforts may help to theoretically "ground" ethical behavior, they offer little help in understanding the complex processes by which public relations practitioners reason through moral decisions. This article is designed to introduce moral reasoning theories into public relations ethics research by using the Defining Issues Test to generate baseline data for future research.

There is congruence between Nietzsche’s philosophy of life and the biopolitical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. For both philosophers the human animal possesses a divided relationship to its being alive. For both philosophers this division is of a political nature, such that membership in political community as we know it is conditional on the human animal’s alienation from its biological being. Both philosophers are also concerned with the possibility of transformation and, because of the connection they establish between politics and animality, (...) link this possibility to a change in the relationship between humans and their being alive. Yet both philosophers end up with an entirely different understanding of the nature of this change, and of its potential scope. This paper is an attempt at clarifying this disagreement between Nietzsche and Agamben, and with using it to come to a better understanding of the latter’s political ontology. It presents a reading of Kafka’s “The Burrow” in an attempt to show how Agamben’s concept of the anthropological machine challenges the Nietzschean program of the affirmation of life as will to power. (shrink)

This book foregrounds postcolonial theory as a lens through which to explore the concept of 'global heritage' and argues that the meso-level spaces of institutional ethos and cultural pedagogy must take an active role in the pursuit of cultural equality. Through interviews and accounts of observational, eampirical data, chapters draw attention to how the cultural capital of Global Majority students is institutionally positioned as a racialised and inferior cultural capital that is constantly required to 'prove itself' in the Western school. (...) Ultimately, the book contributes to international discussion on decolonising education and the spaces within in order to enact change, further the field, and more precisely to recognise the importance of global heritage as vital to a transformative understanding of the West's cultural identity within a globalised world. This book will appeal to scholars, researchers, and post-graduate researchers in the fields of multicultural education, school leadership, management and administration, and education policy and politics more broadly. Those interested in social justice, ideas of cultural and racial equality, and the sociology of education more broadly will also benefit from the volume. (shrink)

This paper empirically re(dis)covers a moment of conjuncture within Leicester when an opportunity opened up through multicultural/anti-racist education for schools and colleges to develop their ‘multicultural capital’. It does this through the thematic analysis of the key proximate document Report of the Working Party on Multicultural Education as well as drawing on interview data provided by two important agents who helped to implement Leicester’s/Leicestershire’s moment of multicultural education. This moment generated a symbolic, ideational, and conceptual shift within Leicester’s education provision (...) toward a more culturally inclusive position that began to recognise the cultural capital of non-white students. However, this moment was to be lost in the ‘neoliberal epoch’. It is argued in this paper that neoliberal education policy/practice has become an enabling mechanism for renascent colonial ideology. By re(dis)covering this vision for the official recognition of non-white cultural capital, this paper demonstrates the possibilities for alternative directions within Leicester’s schools and colleges that can challenge neoliberal and colonial conceptions of education. It suggests that there are still spaces and structures that can be re(dis)covered in order for this vision to be enabled. (shrink)

Recent studies indicate that mammalian chromosomes contain discretecis‐acting loci that control replication timing, mitotic condensation, and stability of entire chromosomes. Disruption of the large non‐coding RNA gene ASAR6 results in late replication, an under‐condensed appearance during mitosis, and structural instability of human chromosome 6. Similarly, disruption of the mouse Xist gene in adult somatic cells results in a late replication and instability phenotype on the X chromosome. ASAR6 shares many characteristics with Xist, including random mono‐allelic expression and asynchronous replication timing. (...) Additional “chromosome engineering” studies indicate that certain chromosome rearrangements affecting many different chromosomes display this abnormal replication and instability phenotype. These observations suggest that all mammalian chromosomes contain “inactivation/stability centers” that control proper replication, condensation, and stability of individual chromosomes. Therefore, mammalian chromosomes contain four types ofcis‐acting elements, origins, telomeres, centromeres, and “inactivation/stability centers”, all functioning to ensure proper replication, condensation, segregation, and stability of individual chromosomes. (shrink)

In this important collection of essays Dennis Thompson argues for a more robust conception of responsibility in public life than prevails in contemporary democracies. He suggests that we should stop thinking so much about public ethics in terms of individual vices and start thinking about it more in terms of institutional vices. Combining theory and practice with many concrete examples and proposals for reform, these essays could be used in courses in applied ethics or political theory and will be (...) read by professionals and graduate students in schools of political science, public policy, law, public health, journalism and business. (shrink)

I describe how relativistic field theory generalizes the paradigm property of material systems, the possession of mass, to the requirement that they have a mass–energy–momentum density tensor T µ associated with them. I argue that T µ does not represent an intrinsic property of matter. For it will become evident that the definition of T µ depends on the metric field g µ in a variety of ways. Accordingly, since g µ represents the geometry of spacetime itself, the properties of (...) mass, stress, energy, and momentum should not be seen as intrinsic properties of matter, but as relational properties that material systems have only in virtue of their relation to spacetime structure. (shrink)

When it originated in the late 19th century, psychometrics was a field with both a scientific and a social mission: psychometrics provided new methods for research into individual differences, and at the same time, these psychometric instruments were considered a means to create a new social order. In contrast, contemporary psychometrics - due to its highly technical nature and its limited involvement in substantive psychological research - has created the impression of being a value-free discipline. In this article, we develop (...) a contrasting characterization of contemporary psychometrics as a value-laden discipline. We expose four such values: that individual differences are quantitative (rather than qualitative), that measurement should be objective in a specific sense, that test items should be fair, and that utility of a model is more important than its truth. Our goal is not to criticize psychometrics for employing these values, but rather to bring them into the open and to show that these values are not inevitable and are in need of systematic evaluation. (shrink)

In this article, we contend that due to their size and emphasis upon addressing external social concerns, the corporate relationship between social enterprises, social awareness and action is more complex than whether or not these organisations engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR). This includes organisations that place less emphasis on CSR as well as other organisations that may be very proficient in CSR initiatives, but are less successful in recording practices. In this context, we identify a number of internal CSR (...) markers that may be applied to measuring the extent to which internal CSR practices are being observed. These considerations may be contrasted with the evidence that community based CSR activities is often well developed in private sector small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) (Observatory of European SMEs, 2002), a situation which may be replicated in social enterprises especially those that have grown from micro-enterprises embedded in local communities. We place particular emphasis upon the implications for employee management. Underpinning our position is the Aristotelian-informed capabilities approach, a theory of human development and quality of life, developed by Sen (1992; 1999) and Nussbaum (1999) which has been developed further, in an organisational context, (e.g., Cornelius, 2002); Cornelius and Gagnon, 2004; Gagnon and Cornelius, 1999; Vogt, 2005. We contend that the capabilities approach offers additional insights into CSR in social enterprises in general and internal CSR activity in particular. Our article concludes with proposals for future research initiatives and reflections upon social enterprise development from a capabilities perspective. (shrink)

To evaluate the overall good/welfare of any action, policy or institutional choice we need some way of comparing the benefits and losses to those affected: we need to make interpersonal comparisons of the good/welfare. Yet sceptics have worried either: that such comparisons are impossible as they involve an impossible introspection across individuals, getting ‘into their minds’; that they are indeterminate as individual-level information is compatible with a range of welfare numbers; or that they are metaphysically mysterious as they assume the (...) existence either of a social mind or of absolute levels of welfare when no such things exist. This article argues that such scepticism can potentially be addressed if we view the problem of interpersonal comparisons as fundamentally an epistemic problem – that is, as a problem of forming justified beliefs about the overall good based on evidence of the individual good. (shrink)

In this paper I take up the claims of a number of recent commentators who have argued that there is no rational basis for a moral judgment against cannibalism because no successful argument against it can be articulated within the dominant consequentialist or neo-Kantian deontological approaches in normative ethics. While I think cannibalism is clearly morally repugnant, it is surprisingly difficult to explain why. I argue not only that a rational justification of the moral wrongness of cannibalism can be given (...) in terms of a broadly Aristotelian virtue ethics, but also that this requires a broader conception of moral value, and corresponding moral obligations, than is typical within the dominant approaches. (shrink)

While the consequences of mathematically-based software, algorithms and strategies have become ever wider and better appreciated, ethical reflection on mathematics has remained primitive. We review the somewhat disconnected suggestions of commentators in recent decades with a view to piecing together a coherent approach to ethics in mathematics. Calls for a Hippocratic Oath for mathematicians are examined and it is concluded that while lessons can be learned from the medical profession, the relation of mathematicians to those affected by their work is (...) significantly different. There is something to be learned also from the codes of conduct of cognate but professionalised quantitative disciplines such as engineering and accountancy, as well as from legal principles bearing on professional work. We conclude with recommendations that professional societies in mathematics should sponsor an (international) code of ethics, institutional mission statements for mathematicians and syllabuses of ethics courses for incorporation into mathematics degrees. (shrink)