This study challenges the conventional boundaries of philosophy by asserting that organizations can function as legitimate subjects within philosophical discourse. Western philosophy, epitomized by Descartes, has long assumed that individual human beings are the fundamental units of thought and moral agency. However, in a significant oversight, this belief overlooks the idea that organizations can think independently, leading to both virtuous and malevolent results. Epistemology lacks a clear prioritization of morally sound knowledge over potentially harmful knowledge. The advent of artificial intelligence (...) (AI) has also transformed the landscape of cognition from a primarily individual human endeavor into a joint undertaking where humans collaborate with AI entities in collective thinking and decision-making. Nevertheless, AI lacks the innate ability to discern between ethical and unethical actions. This symbiosis creates organizations as fundamental philosophical subjects, marking a significant shift in philosophical emphasis where the organization takes the center stage. Accordingly, within this emerging field, we advance four propositions as the core subjects of organization philosophy: organizations can think, organizations can create knowledge, AI can be part of an organization, and humans in the organization control moral discipline. These propositions guide the ethical coexistence of AI and human agents in organizations, emphasizing the importance of ethical deliberation in knowledge use. Moreover, the malicious use of profound knowledge hinders human progress, as illustrated in this study by an ethical examination of military institutions within organization philosophy. (shrink)

"Consacrée dans des intitulés de cours, mobilisée dans les nomenclatures des organismes internationaux, prometteuse de débroussaillages très vites décevants ou de synthèses faussement structurantes, l'appellation objectivante communication internationale ne présente aucune valeur scientifique, sinon en tant qu'objet de recherche. Pour autant, la référence produit des effets de sens, qu'il est urgent de mettre en perspective, tant elle prête le jeu à des constructions discursives à géométrie variable, en fonction des intérêts croisés et souvent masqués d'acteurs de plus en plus nombreux (...) à l'échelle planétaire, et des espaces politico-culturels de diffusion de ces productions tactiques. La première option de repérage éclairant passe par le fil conducteur d'une discipline, académiquement reconnue. Précisément, la constitution depuis la France des sciences de l'information-communication en 1978 ouvre à un corpus d'approches théoriques et de questionnements épistémologiques déjà signifiant, même ainsi territorialisé. Prenant acte, -- quel que soit le continent cette fois -- des productions et des collaborations scientifiques transfrontières multiples et parfois concurrentes, l'interrogation croisée révèle des inflexions épistémologiques, théoriques, conceptuelles et méthodologiques justificatives d'un état, provisoire, de la recherche. Alors, la Communication-monde, esquissée par Armand Mattelart et érigée dans l'ouvrage au rang de concept structurant, permet de lire les enjeux communicationnels planétaires à l'aube du troisième millénaire, jusqu'à provoquer le décentrement contre les risques permanents d'ethnocentrisme de la pensée."-- Fourni par l'éditeur. (shrink)

I present an argument that propositional attitudes are not mental states. In a nutshell, the argument is that if propositional attitudes are mental states, then only minded beings could have them; but there are reasons to think that some non-minded beings could bear propositional attitudes. To illustrate this, I appeal to cases of genuine group intentionality. I argue that these are cases in which some group entities bear propositional attitudes, but they are not subjects of mental states. Although propositional attitudes (...) are not mental states, I propose that they are typically co-instantiated with mental states. In an attempt to explain this co-instantiation, I suggest that propositional attitudes of minded beings are typically realized by mental states. (shrink)

In today’s society of humans and machines, automation, animation, and ecosystems are terms of concern. Categories of life and technology have become mixed in governmental policies and drive economic exploitation and the pathologies of everyday life. This book both curiously and critically advances the term that underlies these new developments: machine.

The history of Western foreign policy in the Middle East has long assimilated Arab culture to sickness. Specifically, the biological episteme of “contamination” has shaped American foreign policy in the Gulf for decades. In so doing, the US Government continually borrowed references from the natural sciences to frame its foreign policy, leading some commentators to claim that biology supplanted philosophy and religion as the primary political category. The article analyses the semantics of Iraqnophobic metaphors, from the British experience of “nursing” (...) Arabs at the close of the First World War to the recent “shock doctrine” of American therapists. First, the paper will concentrate its attention on the metaphors of disinfection and surgical resection. Second, it will address the metaphors of lustration, State-rearing and scientific recovery. Finally, it will explore Iraqis’ rebellion against their self-appointed tutors and doctors. Elaborating on the belligerents’ nursing and biomedical metaphors, the following pages address the life cycle of foreign “legal transplantation”, “antibody” resistance and “immunosuppressant” counterinsurgency in Iraq. (shrink)

This article describes the historical abandonment of the distinctive conception of the social dimensions of cognition, emotion and behavior embraced by American social psychologists in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is suggested that part of the reason why the original conception of the social was abandoned by American psychologists was because of its association with theories of the “group mind,” the apparent threat it posed to cherished principles of rationality and autonomy, and the impoverished conception of the (...) social inherited from European crowd theorists that came to inform the experimental study of social groups. It is suggested that while these factors partly explain the neglect of the social in American social psychology, none represent particularly good reasons for abandoning the original conception of the social. Consequently there are in principle no impediments to the revival of the theoretical and experimental study of the social dimensions of cognition, emotion and behavior in contemporary American social psychology. (shrink)

The paper discusses the problem of the possible relation between psychoanalytic concepts and social critique in the perspective of Adorno's social thought. The title refers to Adorno's idea that psyche as individual spontaneity has now lost the weight it used to have in the liberal era. As a brief introductory remark, I clarify the status of theory for Adorno, i.e., the circularity between interpretation and description as grounded by the nature of the social object itself. Then I analyse his core (...) idea of “social objectivity” as an impersonal mechanism which is at the same time produced by men and reified, heteronomous for them, and I argue that, for Adorno, the discontinuity existing between individual and society prevents an immediate shift of psychoanalytic concepts to the social world: the example of fascism clearly proves that the determining social forces today, while instrumentally exploiting deep psychical materials, are not themselves psychological. In the final part, I show how, for Adorno, psychology and sociology nevertheless need to be mediated with each other, while avoiding the superficial synthesis the so-called “revised psychoanalysis” aims to, and I point out some similarities between psychoanalytic practice and social critique as conceived by him. (shrink)

:This paper explores a form of corporeal copying which it terms mimetic communication, and explores the way it is not limited to human communication but can and does operates across species. Focusing on the way movement and vision can be seen to be at work in this kind of mimetic communication, the paper argues that it constitutes an important form of affective knowledge about both human and non-human others. Taking the work of early twentieth-century documentary filmmaker Jean Painlevé, who worked (...) extensively with marine creatures, as a case in point, it explores the way in which certain technologies – in this case, cinema – can make use of mimesis as a communicational strategy which comprises the key feature of an aesthetic practice. It examines the implications of this for the way we conceive of affective spectatorship in cinema and for the way we understand our relations with animals, especially as we seek to study them. (shrink)

Sometimes retracted or refuted scientific information is used and propagated long after it is understood to be misleading. Likewise, retracted news items may spread and persist, despite being publi...

:This paper explores a form of corporeal copying which it terms mimetic communication, and explores the way it is not limited to human communication but can and does operates across species. Focusing on the way movement and vision can be seen to be at work in this kind of mimetic communication, the paper argues that it constitutes an important form of affective knowledge about both human and non-human others. Taking the work of early twentieth-century documentary filmmaker Jean Painlevé, who worked (...) extensively with marine creatures, as a case in point, it explores the way in which certain technologies – in this case, cinema – can make use of mimesis as a communicational strategy which comprises the key feature of an aesthetic practice. It examines the implications of this for the way we conceive of affective spectatorship in cinema and for the way we understand our relations with animals, especially as we seek to study them. (shrink)

Von der Mehrzahl der Dimensionen kollektiver Identität erkundet diese Arbeit die Identität als rhetorisches Werkzeug. Die Identitätsmarke steht für einen für die pragmatische Effektivität relevanten Fall. Um eine solche Macht zu erläutern, wird ein hypothetisches Modell der Identitätskategorien dargeboten. Dessen Bestandsmodule formen vier Basisdimensionen: Position, Entindividualisierung, Ausschließung sowie kognitive Abschirmung. Eine so deskribierte narrative Identität wird zum Äquivalent der informellen Ideologie . Als konstitutive Rhetorik überführt die narrative Identitätskonstruktion die selbstreferenzielle Tautologie in die Strategien der Diskriminierung, Säuberung und Ausrottung der (...) Anderheitsvertreter. Die Massenvernichtungen des zurückliegenden Jahrhunderts – Totalitarismus, Kolonialismus, Ethnonationalismus – sind Fabrikate des Identitätsparadigmas. (shrink)

The paper critically reconstructs the crowd psychological heritage in phenomenological and social science emotion research. It shows how the founding figures of phenomenology and sociology uncritically adopted Le Bon’s crowd psychological imagery as well as what I suggest calling the disease model of emotion transfer. Against this background, it can be examined how Le Bon’s understanding of emotional contagion as an automatic, involuntary, and uncontrollable mechanism has remained a dominant force in emotion research until today. However, a closer look at (...) phenomenological descriptions and empirical investigations of how emotion’s spread shows that there is little evidence supporting Le Bon’s crowd psychological framework. Thus, I suggest that the disease model should be dismissed in favor of more plausible approaches to interpersonal emotion dynamics. (shrink)

A review of the paradigms of social influence – suggestion, imitation, normalization, conformity, compliance, conversion – leads me to diagnose a triple malaise: the shrinkage of paradigms to cognitive dual-processing theories of information; the dominant methodology of laboratory experiments falls short of the reality of (mass) communication; and the focus of social influence on inter-subjectivity is only half of the story. I will suggest two extensions of social influence theory to include mass media communication and the inter-objectivity of artefacts. We (...) need to be able to conceptualize the modalities of why, how and to what effect somebody might put up a wall to influence neighbours instead of contenting themselves with putting up a public note ‘Do not trespass!’. Social influence by fait accompli needs to be within the remit of social psychology, otherwise it loses its relevance in a technological society where artefacts mediate most inter-personal relations. (shrink)