A Copernican revolution heralds a grand renovation of a tradition of knowledge. In science—the discipline from which the concept originates—it aptly connotes a paradigm shift from a previously accepted notion of reality. It is upon this conceptualization that John Dewey wrote: “Kant claimed that he had effected a Copernican revolution in philosophy by treating the world and our knowledge of it from the standpoint of the knowing subject.” For the Enlightenment thinker, traditional philosophy construed a rational system of nature and (...) then borrowed from it the features by which to characterize knowledge. He argued that this “borrowing” of a rational system should not be credited to some outworldy power, but to human reason. Thus, his “revolution” was a shift from theological to human authorship and a placing of the locus of intellect in man as a knowing subject. Kant’s work created a new center in philosophy: that it is the mind that knows by means of an equipment of powers complete within itself and that it merely exercises its capabilities upon an antecedent external material equally complete in itself. (shrink)

Obtaining informed consent, an ethical obligation of nurses and other health care providers, occurs routinely when patients make health care decisions. The values underlying informed consent (promotion of patients’ well-being and respect for their self-determination) are embedded in the dominant American culture. Nurses who apply the USA’s cultural values of informed consent when caring for patients who come from other cultures encounter some ethical dilemmas. This descriptive study, conducted with Latino, Chinese and Anglo-American cancer patients in a large, public, west-coast (...) clinic, describes constraints on the informed consent process in a multicultural setting, including language barriers, the clinical environment, control in decision making, and conflicting desired health outcomes for health care providers and patients, and suggests some implications for nursing practice. (shrink)

In this article, we conceptualize the under investigated and under theorized relationship between intimate partner violence (IPV) and business responsibility. As an urgent social issue, IPV—understood as abuse of power within the context of an intimate partner relationship, mainly perpetrated by men and involving a pattern of behavior—has been studied for decades in many disciplines. A less common yet vital research perspective is to examine IPV as it relates to the business and to ask how organizations should engage with IPV. (...) In response to this question, we contribute a framework drawing from two distinctions in the business responsibility scholarship: the assumed role of the organization (responsibility to the firm/market; responsibility to the broader socio-political-economic environment); and the second focused on the approach to conceptualizing ethics (justice/fairness; ethics of care). Thus, we explicate four approaches to business responsibility and IPV, which serve the purposes of mapping three selected contributions, identifying limitations of these approaches, and opening up future research opportunities. (shrink)

This book offers both the theoretical background behind the minority effect, teachers' personal experiences as they experienced being a minority, and their analyses and insights for teaching diverse learners. This book uses real-life experiences of diverse people to illustrate that, if not understood and addressed, situational minorities at school or work are unlikely to perform at their highest potentials.

This article explores the role of limit experiences (Tracy) and linguistic relativity (Whorf) in shaping our ontological and epistemological understandings of the world. Specifically, I trace the transformations in embodied understanding I have undergone in three situations across my life course–in Hawai'i, Solomon Islands, and as an acutely ill and disabled patient in a live-in clinic in Dallas, Texas. I give examples of how our perceptions, conceptions, and proprioceptions are positioned, constrained, opened to interpretation, and even denied by our (...) culture and language. Limit experiences, however, open the possibility for transformation of understanding and recognition that there are probably infinite manifest and unmanifest realities. (shrink)

While seeking novel food sources to feed the increasing population of the globe, several alternatives have been discussed, including algae, fungi or in vitro meat. The increasingly propagated usage of farmed insects for human nutrition raises issues regarding food safety, consumer information and animal protection. In line with law, insects like any other animals must not be reared or manipulated in a way that inflicts unnecessary pain, distress or harm on them. Currently, there is a great need for research in (...) the area of insect welfare, especially regarding species-specific needs, health, farming systems and humane methods of killing. Recent results from neurophysiological, neuroanatomical and behavioral sciences prompt caution when denying consciousness and therefore the likelihood of presence of pain and suffering or something closely related to it to insects. From an animal protection point of view, these issues should be satisfyingly solved before propagating and establishing intensive husbandry systems for insects as a new type of mini-livestock factory farming. (shrink)

This article examines the potential for moral agency in human resource management practice. It draws on an ethnographic study of human resource managers in a global organization to provide a theorized account of situated moral agency. This account suggests that within contemporary organizations, institutional structures—particularly the structures of Anglo-American market capitalism— threaten and constrain the capacity of HR managers to exercise moral agency and hence engage in ethical behaviour. The contextualized explanation of HR management action directly addresses the question of (...) whether HRM is inherently unethical. The discussion draws on MacIntyre’s conceptualization of moral agency within contemporary social structures. In practice, HR managers embody roles that may not be wholly compartmentalized. Alternative institutional structures can provide HR managers with a vocabulary of motives for people-centred HRM and widen the scope for the exercising of moral agency, when enacted within reflective relational spaces that provide milieus for critical questioning of logics and values. This article aims to contribute to and extend debate on whether HRM can ever be ethical, and provide a means of reconnecting business ethics with longstanding concerns in critical management studies. (shrink)

Dans la genese de sa constitution, la philosophie n'a pu faire l'economie d'une confrontation avec la musique qui fournissait aux anciens Grecs les schemes fondamentaux de la culture. De cette confrontation Platon est le temoin. Scindant la musique, il privilegie l'Harmonique, qui en est la partie theorique, sans toutefois lui reconnaitre la titre de science supreme. Correlativement, il condamne comme dysharmonie, tumulte fracassant et perturbateur de l'ordre cosmique, l'harmonie chromaticiste dont il s'emploie, non sans paradoxe, a decrire le detail. Par (...) cette lecture en filigrane des Dialogues de Platon, l'auteur se propose de reconstruire la pensee qui procede de l'harmonie chromaticiste et de montrer son importance dans l'elaboration de la philosophie fondatrice. Au carrefour des disciplines du savoir antique, ce livre s'adresse non seulement aux philosophes, mais aussi a tous ceux qui, musiciens ou stylisticiens, s'interessent a la forme musicale. (shrink)

Intentional collective action -- Collective moral responsibility -- Collective guilt -- Individual responsibility for (and in) collective wrongs -- Collective obligation, individual obligation, and individual moral responsibility -- Individual moral responsibility in wrongful social practice.

We can perceive not only low-level features of events such as color and motion, but also seemingly higher-level properties such as causality. A prototypical example of causal perception is the ”launching effect’: one object moves toward a stationary second object until they are adjacent, at which point A stops and B starts moving in the same direction. Beyond these motions themselves --- and regardless of any higher-level beliefs --- this display induces a vivid visual impression of causality, wherein A is (...) seen to cause B’s motion. Do such percepts reflect a unitary category of visual processing, or might there be multiple distinct forms of causal perception? While launching is often simply equated with causal perception, researchers have sometimes described other phenomena such as ”triggering’ and ”entraining’. We used psychophysical methods to determine whether these labels really carve visual processing at its joints, and how putatively different forms of causal perception relate to each other. Previous research demonstrated retinotopically specific adaptation to causality: exposure to causal launching makes subsequent ambiguous events in that same location more likely to be seen as non-causal ”passing’. Here, after replicating this effect, we show that exposure to triggering also yields retinotopically specific adaptation for subsequent ambiguous launching displays, but that exposure to entraining does not. Collectively, these results reveal that visual processing distinguishes some types of causal interactions. (shrink)

The increasing application of network models to interpret biological systems raises a number of important methodological and epistemological questions. What novel insights can network analysis provide in biology? Are network approaches an extension of or in conflict with mechanistic research strategies? When and how can network and mechanistic approaches interact in productive ways? In this paper we address these questions by focusing on how biological networks are represented and analyzed in a diverse class of case studies. Our examples span from (...) the investigation of organizational properties of biological networks using tools from graph theory to the application of dynamical systems theory to understand the behavior of complex biological systems. We show how network approaches support and extend traditional mechanistic strategies but also offer novel strategies for dealing with biological complexity. (shrink)

Four studies explore the role of perceptual fluency in attenuating bullshit receptivity, or the tendency for individuals to rate otherwise meaningless statements as “profound”. Across four studies, we presented participants with a sample of pseudoprofound bullshit statements in either a fluent or disfluent font and found that overall, disfluency attenuated bullshit receptivity while also finding little evidence that this effect was moderated by cognitive thinking style. In all studies, we measured participants’ cognitive reflection, need for cognition, faith in intuition, and (...) superstitious beliefs. Superstition strongly predicted bullshit receptivity regardless of fluency. Inconclusive results were found for the remaining scales. Potential links for the role of perceptual disfluency in promoting analytic thinking are discussed. (shrink)

This paper explores a philosophical praxis of paying attention, and the importance of bodily comportment, in human-animal interactions. It traces some of the beginnings of the notion of attentiveness as it has arisen in contemporary Western environmental and animal ethics, and its further development into both a philosophical approach and actual practice as a kind of interspecies etiquette. It is informed by the kinds of comportments of openness and responsivity found in diverse examples of practical phenomenology. Through a wide-ranging interdisciplinary (...) discussion, I suggest that a praxis of attentiveness can inspire practical applications of ethical interactions between species. (shrink)

In this paper we consider the prospects for an account of good argument that takes the character of the arguer into consideration. We conclude that although there is much to be gained by identifying the virtues of the good arguer and by considering the ways in which these virtues can be developed in ourselves and in others, virtue argumentation theory does not offer a plausible alternative definition of good argument.

Although many of the congenital syndromes that used to be lethal no longer are, they are still routinely referred to as “lethal anomalies.” But the label is not only inaccurate, it is also dangerous: by portraying as a medical determination what is in fact a judgment about the child's quality of life, it wrests from the parents a decision that only the parents can make.

In three experiments, subjects attempted to track multiple items as they moved independently and unpredictably about a display. Performance was not impaired when the items were briefly (but completely) occluded at various times during their motion, suggesting that occlusion is taken into account when computing enduring perceptual objecthood. Unimpaired performance required the presence of accretion and deletion cues along fixed contours at the occluding boundaries. Performance was impaired when items were present on the visual field at the same times and (...) to the same degrees as in the occlusion conditions, but disappeared and reappeared in ways which did not implicate the presence of occluding surfaces (e.g. by imploding and exploding into and out of existence, instead of accreting and deleting along a fixed contour). Unimpaired performance did not require visible occluders (i.e. Michotte’s tunnel effect) or globally consistent occluder positions. We discuss implications of these results for theories of objecthood in visual attention. (shrink)

Psychologists and philosophers have recently been exploring whether the mechanisms which underlie the acquisition of ‘theory of mind’ (ToM) are best charac- terized as cognitive modules or as developing theories. In this paper, we attempt to clarify what a modular account of ToM entails, and why it is an attractive type of explanation. Intuitions and arguments in this debate often turn on the role of develop- ment: traditional research on ToM focuses on various developmental sequences, whereas cognitive modules are thought (...) to be static and ‘anti-developmental’. We suggest that this mistaken view relies on an overly limited notion of modularity, and we explore how ToM might be grounded in a cognitive module and yet still afford development. Modules must ‘come on-line’, and even fully developed modules may still develop internally, based on their constrained input. We make these points con- crete by focusing on a recent proposal to capture the development of ToM in a module via parameterization. (shrink)

What makes an object the same persisting individual over time? Philosophers and psychologists have both grappled with this question, but from different perspectives—philosophers conceptually analyzing the criteria for object persistence, and psychologists exploring the mental mechanisms that lead us to experience the world in terms of persisting objects. It is striking that the same themes populate explorations of persistence in these two very different fields—e.g. the roles of spatiotemporal continuity, persistence through property change, and cohesion violations. Such similarities may reflect (...) an underlying connection, in that psychological mechanisms of object persistence (especially relevant parts of mid-level visual object processing) may serve to underlie the intuitions about persistence that fuel metaphysical theories. This would be a way for cognitive science to join these two disparate fields, helping to explain the possible origins and reliability of some metaphysical intuitions, and perhaps leading to philosophical progress. (shrink)

Mayr’s proximate–ultimate distinction has received renewed interest in recent years. Here we discuss its role in arguments about the relevance of developmental to evolutionary biology. We show that two recent critiques of the proximate–ultimate distinction fail to explain why developmental processes in particular should be of interest to evolutionary biologists. We trace these failures to a common problem: both critiques take the proximate–ultimate distinction to neglect specific causal interactions in nature. We argue that this is implausible, and that the distinction (...) should instead be understood in the context of explanatory abstractions in complete causal models of evolutionary change. Once the debate is reframed in this way, the proximate–ultimate distinction’s role in arguments against the theoretical significance of evo-devo is seen to rely on a generally implicit premise: that the variation produced by development is abundant, small and undirected. We show that a “lean version” of the proximate–ultimate distinction can be maintained even when this isotropy assumption does not hold. Finally, we connect these considerations to biological practice. We show that the investigation of developmental constraints in evolutionary transitions has long relied on a methodology which foregrounds the explanatory role of developmental processes. It is, however, entirely compatible with the lean version of the proximate–ultimate distinction. (shrink)

The rhetorical function of whataboutism is to redirect attention from the specific case at hand. Although commonly used as a rhetorical move, whataboutisms can appear in arguments. These tend to be weak arguments and are often instances of the tu quoque fallacy or other fallacies of relevance. In what follows, I show that arguments involving a whataboutist move can take a wide variety of forms, and in some cases, they can occur in good arguments. I end by considering how whataboutist (...) arguing in social justice contexts can be harmful to arguers and to the audiences for their arguments. (shrink)

Eight philosophers discuss the works of the best-selling novelist and graphic novelist, including The Graveyard Book, Coraline and Good Omens and reveal their thoughts on the intersection of fantasy and reality and whether the unknown is as ...

_Critical Thinking_ is a much-needed guide to thinking skills and above all to thinking critically for oneself. Through clear discussion, students learn the skills required to tell a good argument from a bad one. Key features include: *jargon-free discussion of key concepts in argumentation *how to avoid confusions surrounding words such as 'truth', 'knowledge' and 'opinion' *how to identify and evaluate the most common types of argument *how to spot fallacies in arguments and tell good reasoning from bad *topical examples (...) from politics, sport, medicine, music *chapter summaries, glossary and exercises _Critical Thinking_ is essential reading for anyone, student or professional, seeking to improve their reasoning and arguing skills. (shrink)

Perhaps the most striking phenomenon of visual awareness is inattentional blindness (IB), in which a surprisingly salient event right in front of you may go completely unseen when unattended. Does IB reflect a failure of perception, or only of subsequent memory? Previous work has been unable to answer this question, due to a seemingly intractable dilemma: ruling out memory requires immediate perceptual reports, but soliciting such reports fuels an expectation that eliminates IB. Here we introduce a way of evoking repeated (...) IB in the same subjects and the same session: we show that observers fail to report seeing salient events’ not only when they have no expectation, but also when they have the wrong expectations about the events nature. This occurs when observers must immediately report seeing anything unexpected, even mid-event. Repeated IB thus demonstrates that IB is aptly named: it reflects a genuine deficit in moment-by-moment conscious perception, rather than a form of inattentional amnesia. (shrink)

In my professional role as anatomy administrator and bequeathal secretary at a large surgical training centre, I am the first point of contact both for people wishing to donate their body, and for newly bereaved relatives telling us that their registered loved-one has died. I am involved in every stage of the process from that first phone call, through to eventual funeral service, cremation of the body and return of the ashes to the family. I am also a registered body (...) donor myself, as I strongly believe in the value of cadaveric training having seen it first hand. When prospective donors and relatives find out that I am also a registered body donor they find this to be very reassuring to know that having ‘behind the scenes’ access has not put me off, and is a good endorsement for the process, …. (shrink)

Successful innovations are deemed to be necessary requisites for enterprise success. On the other hand, works council participation and employee participation are judged differently as either fostering employee and enterprise benefits or only the former or even none. Both forms of participation have found diverging theoretical and empirical argumentations regarding innovations. Here, we argue and show empirically that both forms of participation deliver positive contributions to innovation success, economically and employee-related, substantiated with qualitative reports from 36 process innovation cases and (...) quantitative data from 44 cases. Qualitative case analyses reveal different profiles of works council participation depending on the innovation type. Independent of the innovation types, more successful innovations are marked by more intensive participation. Quantitative examinations of a causal model with path analysis specify how this is achieved: works council and employee participation further the growth of appropriate knowledge and the former also raises the coordination capability; both are essential preconditions for innovation success. A direct impact of works councils on innovation success complements the indirect effects. The slightly modified path analysis explains 53% of the innovation success variance. (shrink)

This volume collects reflections on the role of philosophy in case studies in the history of science. Case studies have played a prominent role in recent history and philosophy of science. They have been used to illustrate, question, explore, or explicate philosophical points of view. Even if not explicitly so, historical narratives are always guided by philosophical background assumptions. But what happens if different philosophies lead to different narratives of the same historical episodes? Can historical case studies decide between competing (...) philosophical viewpoints? What are the criteria that a case study has to fulfill in order to be philosophically relevant? Bringing together leading practitioners in the fields of history and philosophy of the physical and the life sciences, this volume addresses this methodological problem and proposes ways of rendering explicit philosophical assumptions of historical work. (shrink)

Mentoring literature explores the dark side of mentoring as factors such as gender and race and how they affect the overall mentoring experience. The sociocultural context of the nursing and midwifery professions presents unique characteristics warranting a qualitative exploration of negative mentoring experiences. We aimed to characterise the dark side of mentoring based on informal mentoring relationships occurring among nurses and midwives working in hospitals. Utilising semistructured interviews in a qualitative descriptive design and reflexive thematic analysis, we examined the perceptions (...) of 35 nurses and midwives from three public hospitals located in the Western, Northern and North‐western regions of Uganda. Findings emerged in four overarching themes mentoring process deficits, mentoring relational problems, organisational challenges in mentoring and implications of negative mentoring experiences. Our study findings underscore that, while mentoring is frequently beneficial, it can also be interspersed with negative experiences arising from relational dynamics, particular mentoring processes and the overarching hospital environment. Notably, nurses and midwives actively transformed these challenges into opportunities for growth and self‐improvement, while introspectively examining their roles in contributing to these negative experiences. Such a proactive approach highlights their resilience and steadfast commitment to professional development, even in the face of adversity. (shrink)