This work offers a possible Foucaultian interpretation of Corporate Compliance Management. It is motivated by the so-called "failure" of ethical training. This research pursues a critical and local perspective. The aim is to endorse and strengthen the ethical potentiality of a Compliance Program. In the first part, metaphors produced by corporate employees are presented. These images symbolize the power relationships with their employers and illustrate some Foucaultian concepts. In the second part, Compliance Management is interpreted as an (...) exercise of corporate power validated by an intentioned discourse. In the third part, Compliance Program is interpreted as a possibility of power resistance. In the fourth part, it provides a discussion with some authors who have tried to rescue Foucault's contribution to business ethics. It is reached to the conclusion that a Compliance Program contains potentialities for the individual´s empowerment. This empowerment is mainly granted through dialogue in training workshops. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of self-documentation in the care of the self. As is well known, Michel Foucault exposes how disciplinary power functions in hospitals, schools, prisons, and other institutions to train the living for productive use. An important tool of disciplinary power is documentation, or the recording and cataloguing of the living that constitutes them as objects of knowledge. I show how documentation creates and extends knowledge to individuals. At the same time, documents become physical appendages (...) of the lives they record, which, while separable from those lives, nevertheless affect those lives. Despite these apparently negative functions, Foucault finds that documentation can also be the means by which the living take over their own disciplining. In writings about both fiction and ancient ethics, Foucault points to self-documentation as a way of objectifying the self before the self, so that the self may train itself according to self-imposed standards. Although disciplinary power may be inescapable, self-documentation offers a technique of counter-discipline that functions alongside and against institutional discipline. (shrink)

This paper investigates the history of systems of thought different from those of the West. A closer look at Japan’s long philosophical tradition draws attention to the presence of uniquely designed acculturation and training techniques designed as kata or shikata, shedding light on kata as a generic technique of self-perfection and self-transformation. By seeing kata as foundational to the Japanese mind and comparing it to Michel Foucault’s research on technologies of the self, the groundwork is laid for a (...) comparative analysis in terms of the principle of ἐπιμελείσθαι σαυτού, an ethical and aesthetic paradigm dating back to European antiquity. Not only does this bring to light their similarities as techniques of individuation, it also reinforces the importance of Watsuji’s relational understanding of human being. (shrink)

In this article, we explore some of the roles of cameras in policing in the United States. We outline the trajectory of key new media technologies, arguing that cameras and social media together generate the ambient surveillance through which graphic violence is now routinely captured and circulated. Drawing on Michel Foucault, we suggest that there are important intersections between this video footage and police subjectivity, and propose to look at two: recruit training at the Washington state Basic Law (...) Enforcement Academy and the Seattle Police Department’s body-worn camera project. We analyze these cases in relation to the major arguments for and against initiatives to increase police use of cameras, outlining what we see as techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic positions. Drawing on the pragmatism of John Dewey, we argue for a third position that calls for field-based inquiry into the specific co-production of socio-techno subjectivities. (shrink)

The practical aspect of ancient philosophy has been recently made a focus of renewed metaphilosophical investigation. After a brief presentation of three accounts of this kind developed by Martha Nussbaum, Pierre Hadot, and Michel Foucault, the model of the therapeutic argument developed by Nussbaum is called into question from the perspectives offered by her French colleagues, who emphasize spiritual exercise (Hadot) or the care of the self (Foucault). The ways in which the account of Nussbaum can be (...) defended are then discussed, including both a ‘negative’ defense, i.e. the indication of the weaknesses of Hadot and Foucault’s proposals, and a ‘positive’ one focused on the points in which Nussbaum can convincingly address doubts about her metaphilosophical account. In response to these analyses, some further remarks made by Hadot and Foucault are discussed in order to demonstrate that their accounts are not as distant from Nussbaum after all. Finally, a recent metaphilosophical study by John Sellars together with a therapeutic (medical) model developed by the author of the present article are suggested as providing a framework for potential reconciliation between all three accounts discussed and a resource for further metaphilosophical studies. (shrink)

Every organization, as they grow has many stakeholders like shareholders, employees, customers, vendors, community, etc. For survival and growth, they have to rely upon healthy relations with all these stockholders. Hence organizations need to provide good returns for shareholders but also good jobs for employees, reliable products for consumers, responsible relations with the community and a clean environment. -/- Business ethics is the application of general ethical principles to business dilemmas and encompasses a broader range of issues and (...) concerns than laws do, as everything that is legal is not ethical. Ethics involves learning what is right or wrong, and then doing the right thing -- but "the right thing" is not nearly as straightforward. -/- Business Ethics has the following purposes: - To give people the tools for dealing with moral complexity in business - Business decisions have an ethical component - Ethical implications must be weighed before acting -/- Corporate governance is concerned with the ownership, control and accountability of companies, and how the corporate pursuit of economic objectives relates to a number of wider ethical and societal considerations. It is the application of best management practices, compliance of law in true letter and spirit and adherence to ethical standards for effective management and distribution of wealth and discharge of social responsibility for sustainable development of all stakeholders. -/- Good Corporate Governance is key to Growing Profits and Reputation. It represents the relationship among stakeholders that is used to determine and control the strategic direction and performance of organizations. Accountability is a key element as well as requirement for corporate governance, fortifying the latter in such a way that it provides a transparent template for governing critical decisions, procedures, and activities. -/- Corporate Governance deals with the questions: (1) Who benefits from corporate decisions/senior management actions? (2) Who should benefit from corporate decisions/senior management actions? -/- There are a number of reasons why businesses should act ethically .As behavior is based on values priorities, a mutual effort at all levels to deal with corporate ethics begins with a clear understanding of core values, both individually and organizationally. -/- Good corporate governance begins with a company's own internal practices and policies. While corporate governance issues are common across organizations, each company requires governance principles that are unique in their approach. Good governance is, ultimately, the sine qua non for continued growth and prosperity. -/- Corporate governance ensures that long term strategic objectives and plans are established and that the proper management structure is in place. Companies that provide good governance, both in terms of practices and results can expect the backing not only of investors but of customers too. -/- Corporate Governance represents the moral framework, the ethical framework and the value framework under which an enterprise takes decisions. In the long run ethical behavior has a positive impact on the company's performance. -/- This paper discusses the elements of corporate governance, inter-relationship between business ethics and corporate governance with reference to some of the Indian companies over the years and their impact in this era of globalization and liberalization. (shrink)

During the current financial crisis, the need for an alternative to a laissez-faire ethics of capitalism (the Milton Friedman view) becomes clear. I argue that we need an order ethics which employs economics as a key theoretical resource and which focuses on institutions for implementing moral norms. -/- I will point to some aspects of order ethics which highlight the importance of rules, e.g. global rules for the financial markets. In this regard, order ethics (“Ordnungsethik”) is the complement of the (...) German conception of “Ordnungspolitik” which also stresses the importance of a regulatory framework. This framework is needed not to tame the market, but to make it more profitable in the long run. -/- The conception of order ethics relies heavily on contractarianism, especially on James Buchanan’s work. Unlike many other conceptions of ethics, it does not start with an aim to achieve, but rather with an account of what the social world – in which ethical norms have to be implemented – is like. Our social world is different from the pre-modern one. Pre-modern societies played zero-sum games in which people could only gain significantly at the expense of others. And the types of ethics that we are still used to today have been developed within these pre-modern societies. -/- Modern societies, by contrast, can be characterised – by economists and other social theorists alike – as societies with continuous growth. This growth has only been made possible by the modern competitive market economy which enables everyone to pursue his own interests within a carefully devised institutional system. In this system, positive sum games are played, which makes it in principle possible to improve the position of every individual at the same time. Most kinds of ethics, however, resulting from the conditions of pre-modern societies, ignore the possibility of win-win-situations and instead require us to be moderate, to share, to sacrifice, as this would have been functional in zero-sum games. These conceptions distinguish – in more or less strict ways – between self-interest and altruistic motivation. Self-interest, more often than not, is ultimately seen as something evil. -/- Such an ethics cannot be functional in modern societies. Ethical concepts lag behind. Within zero-sum games, it was necessary to call for temperance, for moderate profits, or for a condemnation of lending money at interest. Within positive-sum games, however, the morally desired result of a social process cannot be brought about by changes in motivation, by switching from ‘egoistic’ to ‘altruistic’ motivation. The second theoretical element introduced by order ethics is the distinction between actions and rules, which was already mentioned. Traditional ethics concerns actions: It calls directly for changes in behaviour. This is a consequence of pre-modern conditions as reconstructed before: People in the pre-modern world were only able to control their actions, not so much however the conditions of their actions. In particular, rules like laws, constitutions, social structures, the market order, and also ethical norms have remained stable for centuries. In modern societies, this situation has changed entirely. The rules governing our actions have increasingly come under our control. -/- In this situation, ethics has to focus on rules. Morality must be incorporated in incentive-compatible rules. Direct calls for changes in behaviour without changes in the rules lead only to an erosion of compliance with moral norms. Individuals that continue to behave ‘morally’ will be singled out, because the incentives have not been changed. Moral norms which are to be justified cannot require people to abstain from pursuing their own advantage. People abstain from taking ‘immoral’ advantages only if adherence to ethical norms yields greater benefits over the planned sequence of actions than defection in the single case. Thus ‘abstaining’ is not abstaining in the long run, it is rather an investment in expectations of long-term benefits. By adhering to ethical norms, I become a reliable partner for interactions. The norms do indeed constrain my actions, but they simultaneously expand my options in interactions. And people consent to rules only if these rules hold greater advantages for them, at least in the long run. -/- In general, ethics cannot require people to abandon their individual calculation of advantages. However, it may suggest improving one’s calculation, by calculating in the long run rather than in the short run, and by taking into account the interests of our fellows, as we depend on their acceptance for reaching an optimal level of well-being, especially in a globalized world full of interdependence. -/- The problem of implementation can now be placed at the beginning of a conception of order ethics, justified with reference to the conditions of modern societies I have sketched. Under the conditions of pre-modern societies, an ethics of temperance had evolved that posed simultaneously the problems of implementation and justification. The implementation of well-justified norms or standards could then be regarded as unproblematic, because the social structures allowed for a direct face-to-face enforcement of norms. Pre-modern societies not only favored an ethics of temperance, they also had the instrument of face-to-face-sanctions within their smaller and non-anonymous communities. This instrument is no longer functional in modern anonymous societies, and so we have to face up to the problem of implementation right at the start of our ethical conception. Simultaneously, an order ethics relies on the implementation of sanctions for enforcing incentive-compatible rules. In modern societies, rules and institutions, to a large extent, must fulfil the tasks that were, in pre-modern times, fulfilled by moral norms, which in turn were sanctioned by face-to-face sanctions. Norm implementation in modern societies thus works by setting adequate incentives in order to prevent the erosion of moral norms, which would happen if ‘moral’ actors were systematically threatened with exploitation by other, less ‘moral’ actors. -/- This conception of order ethics is then elaborated further in the area of business ethics. -/- . (shrink)

In Foucault, thought is spatial, and unfolds within the density of becoming, in the void that separates the subject and the object. It is ontologically independent from the authority of the contemplating self, the ‘I’. Thought is a being of its own, and comes from the outside – the world of relationships. The present study poses to itself the following question: if thinking indeed comes from the outside, then under what condition thinking can encounter itself – its colour, texture (...) and topography? That is, under what condition can man encounter himself and the world? Since this problem does not have its origin in Foucault’s work, this work does not arrive at any conclusion merely by analysing and evaluating his work alone. Rather, it aims to explore how Foucault has incorporated Kant and Nietzsche into his thinking, on the one hand, and contextualises him within the Western tradition in general and his responses to contemporaries Deleuze and Derrida, in particular, on the other. Consequently, this study is limited by the sheer weight of its own problematisation. However, the problem of ‘under what condition thought encounters itself?’ is here posed not for the sake of constituting a form of knowledge on it, but rather, it is asked from the point of view of ethics. This, in fact, demands a reordering of the forms of ontology that Foucault has developed at different stages of his career. There are three forms of ontology in Foucault’s work: the first analyses man as the subject of truth; the second takes up man as the subject of power; and the third analyses man as an ethical being. The present study reverses the order and examines his work in its totality from the standpoint of his later writings that deal with the problem of truth and ethics. It tries to connect two problems that pop up at different stages of Foucault’s career. The Order of Things asks the question, “what is man?” and in his later writings Foucault labours on the question, “how should I live my life?” This study tries to relate these two questions, as it unfolds itself. (shrink)

This paper explores the level of obligation called for by Milton Friedman’s classic essay “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Profits.” Several scholars have argued that Friedman asserts that businesses have no or minimal social duties beyond compliance with the law. This paper argues that this reading of Friedman does not give adequate weight to some claims that he makes and to their logical extensions. Throughout his article, Friedman emphasizes the values of freedom, respect for law, (...) and duty. The principle that a business professional should not infringe upon the liberty of other members of society can be used by business ethicists to ground a vigorous line of ethical analysis. Any practice, which has a negative externality that requires another party to take a significant loss without consent or compensation, can be seen as unethical. With Friedman’s framework, we can see how ethics can be seen as arising from the nature of business practice itself. Business involves an ethics in which we consider, work with, and respect strangers who are outside of traditional in-groups. (shrink)

In June 2002, Arthur Andersen LLP became the first accounting firm in history to be criminally convicted. The repercussions were immense. From a position as one of the leading professional services firms in the world, with 85,000 staff in 84 countries and revenues in excess of $9 billion, Andersen effectively ceased to exist within a matter of months. Although Andersen’s conviction related specifically to a charge of obstructing justice, public attention focused on the audit relationship between Andersen and its major (...) client, Enron Corporation, particularly the actions (and inactions) that had allowed Enron to post spectacular year-on-year earnings and profit growth. As well as examining events leading up to the demise of Andersen, the case provides an opportunity to consider the broader controversy over accounting and corporate governance practices and, more generally, the pressures found within organisations that can foster unethical conduct. The case was prepared from public sources. (shrink)

This article makes a case for the capacity of "social practice" accounts of agency and freedom to criticize, resist, and transform systemic forms of power and domination from within the context of religious and political practices and institutions. I first examine criticisms that Michel Foucault's analysis of systemic power results in normative aimlessness, and then I contrast that account with the description of agency and innovative practice that pragmatist philosopher Robert Brandom identifies as "expressive freedom." I argue that (...) Brandom can provide a normative trajectory for Foucault's diagnoses of power and domination, helping to resolve its apparent lack of ethical direction. I demonstrate that Foucault, in turn, presents Brandom with insights that might overcome the charges of abstraction and conservatism that his pragmatic inferentialism frequently encounters. The result is a vindication of social practice as an analytical lens for social criticism that is at once both immanent and radical. (shrink)

Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations constitutes an important source and subject for Michel Foucault’s 1981 lectures at the Collège de France, translated into English as Hermeneutics of the Subject. One recurring theme in these lectures is the deployment by Hellenistic/Roman philosophers such as Aurelius of the practice and figure of dance. Inspired by this discussion, the present essay offers a close reading of dance in the Meditations, followed by a survey of the secondary literature on this subject. Overall, I will (...) attempt to show that, despite Aurelius’s self-consciously critical comportment toward dance, dance nevertheless performs a critical function in the construction of what I will term his “political ethics.” This political ethics, I will argue, is composed of an ethics of patient tolerance funded by the generosity that flows from the micro-political power generated by cultivating the god that Aurelius identifies within each of us. (shrink)

“Hay momentos en la vida en los que la cuestión de saber si se puede pensar distinto de como se piensa o percibir distinto de como se ve es indispensable para seguir contemplando o reflexionando” (Foucault, 2003, p. 8). Esta declaración foucaultiana es la que impulsa la voluntad genealógica que presenta este ensayo, así como su pretensión proyectiva para pensar hoy la educación. El momento filosófico crítico consiste en volver sobre las prácticas que día a día llevamos a cabo (...) y configuran nuestras vidas y nuestras instituciones. Este es necesario para realimentar y reorientar la savia de las instituciones, y especialmente la savia de nuestras instituciones académicas, suelo en el cual se teje la sustancia ética que posteriormente dará lugar a la articulación social. Si se aplica el elemento crítico que la actividad filosófica supone a la experiencia de la educación, entendiendo por ella la correlación dentro de una cultura entre campos de saber, tipos de normatividad y formas de subjetividad, podemos preguntarnos: qué es la educación y qué función desempeña hoy con respecto al ejercicio mismo del pensamiento en un contexto atravesado por las nuevas tecnologías y la IA. (shrink)

This paper aims to highlight some major differences between the ethics of “self-becoming”, as it was sketched by Friedrich Nietzsche, and the so-called “aesthetics of existence”, which was developed in Michel Foucault’s late work. Although the propinquity between the two authors is a commonplace in Foucauldian exegesis, my claim is that the two projects of self-creation are dissimilar in four relevant aspects. To support my thesis I will use Foucault’s four-part ethical framework through which I will analyze (...) each of the two projects. Foucault, Nietzsche, self-creation, will to power, aesthetics of existence, ethical substance, mode of subjectification, ethical work, ethical telos, power relations. (shrink)

This work examines Michel Foucault’s critique of the present, through his analysis of our hidden but still active historical legacies. His works from the Eighties are the beginning of what he called a “genealogy of the desiring subject,” in which he shows that practices such as confession—in its juridical, psychological, and religious forms—have largely dictated how we think about our ethical selves. This constrains our notions of ethics to legalistic forbidden/required dichotomies, and requires that we engage in a (...) hermeneutics of the self which consistently fails to discover its imagined authentic self, or to find the happiness and freedom promised by contemporary ethics. In order to think the modern self in different terms, Foucault’s later works analyzed Classical and Hellenistic ethical sources, emphasizing their distance from today. He hoped doing so would allow us to rethink our current assumptions about ethical matters, the truth of oneself, and the relation to others. While Foucault’s genealogical descriptions critically diagnosed contemporary ills such as these, he did not prescribe a cure, preferring to let his readers experiment with new practices of their own design. This work attempts such an experiment, supplying concrete solutions to our ethical ills, in order to help us improve, as well as understand, our ethical selves. To that end, this work demonstrates that a form of subjectivity based on Benedict Spinoza’s ethical and political works avoids the pitfalls of modern ethics as diagnosed by Foucault. Additionally, the practices of the self found in Spinoza can be used to directly counter and displace each central element of “desiring subjectivity,” and thus supplies the kind of effective positive move which should follow after genealogical critique. (shrink)

Explorar la posibilidad de una nueva micropolítica crítica del signo a partir de Foucault, inspirada en la genealogía nietzscheana, y examinar las políticas y estrategias de alfabetización mediática e informacional necesarias para desarrollar competencias digitales en la transformación del ecosistema mediático es una tarea fundamental del quehacer filosófico actual. La pregunta por la posibilidad de la verdad retorna en un contexto en el que el pluralismo semiótico y la conducción mediática son dos elementos que rigen y ordenan la sociedad (...) actual, sociedad que se caracteriza por la abundancia de información y la omnipresencia de los medios de comunicación como tecnologías de poder. Desgranar su significado y vínculo nos conduce directamente al estudio del poder y el signo en relación con los efectos de la verdad de la posverdad. En este marco conceptual, la obra de Foucault proporciona herramientas teóricas valiosas para afrontar esta problemática. (shrink)

This research examines how it is to have tailored training programs to improve behavior at work. It focuses on aspects including interpersonal skills, communication, adaptability, and work ethics. Acknowledging the paucity of empirical research on particular training requirements for these characteristics, the study uses a descriptive-correlational methodology to examine information from ninety production employees at Fine Interiors Trading and Manufacturing Incorporated. To guarantee participation from a range of employment roles, participants were chosen using purposive sampling. Utilizing an extensive survey to (...) evaluate training requirements and demographic data. An assessment of the relationship between training requirements and demographic factors was done using statistical methods such as Chi Square tests and descriptive statistics. The findings indicate that different people have different levels of training demands, and there are strong relationships between the training needs and age, civil status, length of service, educational attainment, assignment area, and employment status. The results highlight the need to tailor training initiatives to particular worker requirements, fostering ongoing enhancement and career advancement. This research adds to the body of knowledge in academia and has real-world implications for businesses looking to get the most out of their training initiatives. (shrink)

This article is a critical examination of the approach to truth in Foucault’s late writing on the topic of ‘parrhesia’. I argue that his 1983 Berkeley seminar on ‘Discourse and Truth’ approaches the topic of truth as a positive value and that this approach presents, at least prima facie, a problem of continuity with his earlier critique of the presumption of an exclusionary relation between truth and power in works such as Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality: (...) An Introduction. Does the ethical notion of ‘parrhesia’ imply a different relation between truth and power than the one developed in the earlier works? And if so, what are we to make of the difference? In particular, 1) what does it mean to say that speaking the truth is dangerous? And 2) Are the two positions on truth compatible? What does it take to reconcile the two perspectives? (shrink)

Finally published 34 years after his death, Foucault's book Confessions of the Flesh sheds new light on the debate about freedom and power that shaped the reception of his works. Many contributors to this debate argue that Foucault's theory of power did not allow for freedom in the 'genealogical phase,' but that he corrected himself and presented a solution to the problem of freedom in his later works, especially through his reflection on ancient ethics and technologies of the (...) self in volumes two and three of History of Sexuality, as well as the concept of parrhesia. In contrast to this view, I argue that Confessions of the Flesh shows that a concept of freedom as self-critical hermeneutics that aims at identifying a foreign power within the subject was only developed in Foucault's analysis of Christian practices of penance and confession. This interpretation of Confessions of the Flesh opens a new field of inquiry into the genealogy of critique and both the repressive and emancipative effects of truth-telling and juridification. (shrink)

There are several strategies for exposing the defects of established moral discourse, one of which is critical argumentation. However, under certain specific historical circumstances, the apparent self-evidence of established moral discourse has gained such dominance, such a capacity of resistance or incorporation, such an ability to conceal its basic vulnerability that its validity simply seems beyond contestation. Notwithstanding the moral subject’s basic discontent, he or she remains unable to challenge the dominant discourse effectively by means of critical argument. Or, to (...) borrow a phrase from Michel Foucault, individuals find themselves faced with a certain rationality, a moral regime that dominates moral discourse to such an extent that they cannot offer any resistance without raising the suspicion of being unreasonable. They (that is, we) find ourselves confronted with a discourse quite unable to recognize its own deficiencies. Although we are forced to accept its basic claims, our chronic discontent nevertheless persists. That is, although we are forced to participate in this discourse, we remain basically ambivalent, and our attitude towards established morality contains both a Yes and a No. Then, all of a sudden, the basic vulnerability of the dominant regime dawns on us or is revealed to us – and this is the experience of laughter. (shrink)

Nuestro frenesí de comunicación e información hace que las cosas des- aparezcan y devengan en no-cosas, también llamadas informaciones (Han, 2021: 10). El marco ontológico presente es resultado de un desplazamiento que va del ocaso de las cosas al consumo rápido y frenético de no-cosas. En este entorno intangible el ser humano ya no maneja ninguna cosa. Las no cosas son aquellas cosas puramente intangibles, que no pueden aprehenderse con las manos. Lo único que le queda de las manos al (...) ser humano que habita este entorno son las yemas de los dedos con las que presiona las teclas para jugar con símbolos (Flusser, 2002: 107). ¿Qué efectos contrae este nuevo paradigma vital en el campo de la educación? ¿Qué significa educar en y trabajar con no-cosas? (shrink)

In this paper I analyze the postmodern condition with particular reference to the ethical and political spheres. Postmodernism attempts a radical break with all of the major strands of post-Enlightenment thought. For postmodernists as the French Jean-François Lyotard and the Italian Gianni Vattimo, the orthodox Enlightenment “meta-narrative” of progress and the “speculative” narrative of Hegel and Marx have lost their explanatory force. In particular, Lyotard speaks about five large meta-narratives of Western culture: 1) Christianity (understood also in the secularized form (...) which its values have taken into modernity); 2) Enlightenment; 3) Idealism as a “theory of progressive freedom in history”; 4) Marxism, and 5) Capitalism. According to Lyotard, one can consider “the incredulity” towards these meta-narratives (méta-récits or grands récits) as postmodern. He points out that after Auschwitz it is impossible to speak of rationality and progress in Western history: In the twentieth century the Nazi genocide showed that history is not a continuous ethical progress towards the best. From the philosophical point of view the precursor of postmodern atmosphere is Friedrich Nietzsche. This German philosopher elaborated a radically anti-metaphysical thought and proposed an ethic of emancipation. Postmodernists refer to Nietzsche’s thought and theorize ethical-political practices aimed at the emancipation of women and socially weak subjects. Postmodernism’s rejection of “totalizing” theories with universal pretentions is complemented by positive celebration of diversity or “difference” and emphasis on the ethical demands of “the other”: this is, for example, the ethical perspective of Michel Foucault. (shrink)

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, issues and crises arise from the quarantine and/or lockdown policy prompting the United Nations to note the Philippines’ “highly militarized response”. In this regard, this paper discusses Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison citing its “the segmented space”, “the surveillance”, “the syndic”, and “the supplice” (henceforth, 4S), and at the same time, weighs the pros and cons constituted from the concrete condition of the citizens. Given the foregoing discourse, this paper (...) sees the relevance of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, maintaining that forty-five years after its publication it can still expound on the logic and context to place communities under quarantine and/or lockdown. Wherefore, the COVID-19 pandemic gives credence to Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish vis-a-vis the philosophical, political, and social discourse that the society is facing. (shrink)

Eleven top Deleuze scholars reclaim Deleuzian philosophy as moral philosophy Ethics plays a crucial, if subtle, role in Gilles Deleuze's philosophical project. Michel Foucault claimed that Anti-Oedipus was `a book of ethics, the first book of ethics to be written in France in quite a long time'. But what is the nature of the immanent ethics that is developed in Deleuze's thought? How does it differ from previous conceptions of ethics? And what paths does it open for future (...) thought, given the ethical challenges facing humanity in so many domains? Each of the eleven essays in this collection explores the ethical dimension of Deleuze's thought along a new and singular trajectory, and in so doing, attempts to reclaim his philosophy as an ethical philosophy. (shrink)

This essay develops a new account of the work the self must perform on itself in disciplinary relations through the cultivation of resources from Foucault’s later work. By tracing the ethical self-relation from Greco-Roman antiquity to the Benedictine monastery, I am able to provide insight into the relationship of self-renunciation that underlies disciplinary docility and obedience. This self-renunciation undermines individuals’ ability to lead themselves and makes them reliant on another who has mastery of the truth through which the subject (...) must be constituted. Disciplinary relations were thus seen to be doubly efficacious in producing relations of domination: they attempt to eliminate the self- leadership of the individual which not only un- dermines the individual’s potential to resist; it leaves them in need of the dominating training that disciplinary relations institute. This insight into the activity of the individual in the produc- tion of their own docility was then used to clarify and develop aspects of two perennially enigmatic but powerful areas of Foucault’s work, his focus on “bodies and pleasures” and his turn to the “aesthetics of existence.”. (shrink)

This paper examines the integration of ethical considerations in management accounting (MA) education. Drawing on the work of Alisdair MacIntyre, it is argued that MA instruments such as performance measurement are not morally neutral, but instead bear moral implications. Therefore, this paper contends that MA students should be trained to take these moral implications into consideration alongside MA's technical aspects. A content analysis is carried out to examine the integration of ethical considerations in top-ranked MA textbooks. The findings indicate that (...) these textbooks, particularly the introductory textbooks, marginally integrate ethical considerations. Furthermore, the findings point to the risk of detaching ethical considerations from the discussion of MA's technical aspects, which may weaken the potential of the ethical considerations and turn them into ‘afterthoughts’. Finally, this paper offers practical suggestions for the improvement of the integration of ethical considerations in MA education and concludes with directions for future research. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Affect Attunement in the Caregiver-Infant Relationship and Across SpeciesExpanding the Ethical Scope of ErosCynthia WillettCompelling glimpses into the ethical capacities of our animal kin reveal new possibilities for ethical relationships encompassing humans with other animal species. Consider the remarkable report of a female bonobo in a British zoo who assists a bird found in her cage by retrieving the fallen bird, and spreading its wings so that this fellow (...) creature might fly away to its freedom. Or the report of a cat in a nursing home who curls up around dying elderly patients, and remains steadily by their side as they, unbeknownst to the medical personnel, pass away.1 Or of a sacred moment of silence by a stream for baboons in East Africa.2 Or of the ethics that spontaneously emerges among wolves at play.3 On the basis of extensive studies, biologist Frans de Waal argues that such anecdotes are far from rare, and that some core elements of moral understanding and compassion occur among a significant range of nonhuman as well as the human animal species. Apes, monkeys, and perhaps all nonhuman animals fail to display a distinctly human capacity for abstract moral reasoning. As de Waal (2006) remarks, it is difficult to tell (173–75). But our furry and feathery kin do without a doubt demonstrate rich elements of ethical response, and they often enough extend their moral concern to creatures beyond their own species. Of course, they will also bite each other’s heads off or eat their own young as well. But this is just to say that animals are neither natural [End Page 111] innocents nor savage brutes. Like us, they belong to what post-Nietzschean philosophers might frame, somewhat ironically, as a postlapsarian world of good and evil.What kind of philosophical approach could account for these postlapsarian genealogies of ethics? Biologists, primatologists, and anthropologists are drawing upon investigations of prosocial behavior to remap the boundaries of ethics, as for example in Isabelle Stengers’s call for cosmopolitical ecologies of relationships (2010, 33). Such a cosmopolitics aims to encompass our kin and kind from diverse species within the ethical boundaries of common worlds. Donna Haraway discovers an opening for Stengers’s ecology of relationships in the intimate encounters among co-evolving species, especially those she calls companion species (2008, 83). She argues, following Derrida, that the abstract reasoning processes of Stoic and Kantian cosmopolitan ethics remain closed to the participation of nonhuman animals as anything more than dependents, failing to observe the ways in which they act as companions, if not moral subjects. But then, what normative force might bind together an ethically attuned biosocial sphere that we as humans co-inhabit with other animal species?To explore this question, this essay takes its cues from well-established research on the responsive, preverbal connection of the human infant and adult caregiver (Bateson 1979; Trevarthen 1984; Stern 1985, 2010; Gibbs 2001, 2010; Hansen 2004; Anderson 2006; Papoulias and Callard 2010; Willett 1995, 2001). To this research we can add new animal studies (Smuts 1999, 2001; Fudge 2002; de Waal 2006, 2009; Bekoff 2007; Molnar 2008; Haraway 2008). These animal studies provide a basis for extending an “ethics of eros” with roots in Luce Irigaray, Michel Foucault, Enrique Dussel, Africana feminism, Freudo-Marxist critical theory, and Plato (for discussions of this tradition, see Bergoffen 1997; Huffer 2009; Willett 2001)—but reconfigured in terms of social bonds across multiple animal species. In this tradition of ethics, the lack of a cognitive-based moral subjectivity that can translate into human terms does not consign nonhuman species to a mute moral status. On the contrary, some more primordial basis for relationship and meaning may weave thin but substantial threads of a postmoral ethics across regions of the biosphere.Given the diverse modes of subjectivity among animal species, and even the lack of what we call a moral subject altogether in many species, neither ordinary modes of empathy nor of moral understanding go very far in forging multispecies social bonds. For this reason, we turn to research on “the attunement of affects” in the infant-caregiver relationship (Stern 1985). As we shall see, this... (shrink)

Notes prises par Jacques Lagrange lors du cours d'anthropologie donné par Michel Foucault en 1954-1955 à l'École Normale Supérieure.

This paper begins by taking seriously former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ response in his What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? to systematic violence and oppression. He claims that direct argumentation is not the ideal mode of resistance to oppression: “At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.” I will focus on a few elements of this playful mode of resistance that conflict with the more straightforward strivings for abstract, universal, objective, convergent, absolute (...) thinking that champions reason over emotion, logic over narrative, and science over lived experience. In contrast, the type of protest employed by people like Douglass can utilize aesthetics and logic, playfulness and seriousness, emotion, even anger, and reason. Douglass provides examples of humorous, sincere parrhesia, oscillating between the lexicon of the dominant sphere and the critical reflection from a trickster on the margins. This will require an analysis of Michel Foucault’s conception of parrhesia: courageous truth-telling in the face of powerful people or institutions. It is a study of humor in the parrhesiastes, an element I think neglected by Foucault. I argue that the humorous parrhesiastes offers a mode of resistance which can subvert oppressive power structures that perpetuate injustice, revealing the fact that humor can be integral in courageous truth-telling. (shrink)

We propose a ‘Moral Imagination’ methodology to facilitate a culture of responsible innovation for engineering and product teams in technology companies. Our approach has been operationalized over the past two years at Google, where we have conducted over 50 workshops with teams from across the organization. We argue that our approach is a crucial complement to existing formal and informal initiatives for fostering a culture of ethical awareness, deliberation, and decision-making in technology design such as company principles, ethics and privacy (...) review procedures, and compliance controls. We characterize some distinctive benefits of our methodology for the technology sector in particular. (shrink)

This paper argues for a distinctive concept of "infopolitics" as a theoretical tool for understanding how new regimes of data are exerting increasing political control of our lives. It seems almost undeniable today that there is a politics at stake in such ubiquitous features of our society as social media interaction, electioneering (and election hacking) through those interactions, cell phone addiction, personal information monetization, the lack of security in personal data markets, and massively-scaled state surveillance. Yet, even if the fact (...) of the politics of these domains is now in view, what is insufficiently understood is how such a politics functions. What characterizes the politics of all of this data that is driving so much of our lives? To put the question in the terms afforded us by the political philosophy of Michel Foucault: what is the modality of power expressed in our contemporary politics of information? In response to these questions, this paper argues that the modality of "infopower" operates on us through the formats of data. (shrink)

Thesis )--University of Stellenbosch, 2010.

Jason Springs’s Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society is a masterful attempt to practice productive conflict and democratic dialogue in the face of static antagonisms and deep‐seated divisions. In my response, I underscore Springs’s insistence on mediating between the moral imagination of Richard Rorty and the prophetic critique of Cornel West. For the author of Healthy Conflict, any hope in the survival of democracy relies on balancing critique of domination with constructive proposals for a more just and equitable world. On (...) the one hand, Springs rejects any strong distinction between moral imagination and socio‐political critique; in fact, he argues for their intertwinement, especially in the work of West. At the same time, there are moments when he suggests an opposition between expanding the moral imagination and engaging in the critical enterprise, especially as he identifies the limits in Foucault regarding normativity and democratic struggle. I respond to this slippage by arguing that Foucault, and critical theory more broadly, open up possibilities for rethinking ethics, politics, and our relationship to the violence that sustains the order of things. (shrink)

According to the Market Failures Approach to business ethics, beyond-compliance duties can be derived by employing the same rationale and arguments that justify state regulation of economic conduct. Very roughly the idea is that managers have a duty to behave as if they were complying with an ideal regulatory regime ensuring Pareto-optimal market outcomes. Proponents of the approach argue that managers have a professional duty not to undermine the institutional setting that defines their role, namely the competitive market. (...) This answer is inadequate, however, for it is the hierarchical firm, rather than the competitive market, that defines the role of corporate managers and shapes their professional obligations. Thus, if the obligations that the market failures approach generates are to apply to managers, they must do so in an indirect way. I suggest that the obligations the market failures approach generates directly apply to shareholders. Managers, in turn, inherit these obligations as part of their duties as loyal agents. (shrink)

As múltiplas psicologias que pretendem descrever o homem dão a impressão de ser tentativas desordenadas. Elas pretendem se construir a partir das estruturas biológicas e reduzem seu objeto de estudo ao corpo ou o deduzem das funções orgânicas; a pesquisa psicológica não é mais que um ramo da fisiologia (ou de um domínio dela): a reflexologia. Ou então elas são reflexivas, introspectivas, fenomenológicas e o homem é puro espírito. Elas estudam as diversidades humanas e descrevem a evolução da criança, as (...) degradações do louco, a estranheza dos primitivos. Ora elas descrevem o elemento, ora pretendem compreender o todo. Às vezes se ocupam exclusivamente com a forma objetiva do comportamento, outras vezes vinculam as ações à vida interior para explicar as condutas, ou ainda pretendem apreender a existência vivida. Algumas deduzem, outras são puramente experimentais e utilizam estruturas matemáticas como forma descritiva. As psicologias diurnas querem explicar a razão da vida do espírito pelos clarões decisivos da inteligência, enquanto as outras visam as inquietantes profundezas da obscuridade interior. Naturalistas, elas traçam os contornos definitivos do homem; humanistas, reconhecem nele algo de inexplicável. Esta complexidade é, talvez, justamente a nossa. Pobre alma (as psicologias que hesitam sobre seus conceitos não sabem sequer nomeá-la), cercada de técnicas, remexida de questões, posta em formulários, traduzida em curvas. Auguste Comte acreditava, com algumas reservas, que a psicologia era uma ciência ilusória, impossível e a menosprezou. Não somos tão ousados. Apesar de tudo, há psicólogos, e que pesquisam. (shrink)

continent. 1.1 : 3-13. / 0/ – Introduction I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville's Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant's critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, (...) has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant's prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land's Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant's normative thought-bureaucracies: Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism. I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it. An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle's non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world. [1] Beyond this, the Kantian scheme of nestling human thinking between our limited empirical powers and transcendental guarantees of categorical coherence, forms of thinking which stretch beyond either appear illegitimate, thereby liquefying both pre-critical metaphysics and the ravings of the mad in the same critical acid. In rejecting the Kantian apparatus we are left with two entities – an unsure relation of thought to reality where thought is susceptible to internal and external breakdown and a reality with an uncertain sense of stability. These two strands will be pursued, against the sane-seal of post-Kantian philosophy by engaging the work of weird fiction authors H.P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti. The absolute inhumanism of the formers universe will be used to describe a Shoggothic Materialism while the dream worlds of the latter will articulate the mad speculation of a Ventriloquil Idealism. But first we must address the relation of philosophy to madness as well as philosophy to weird fiction. /1/ – Philosophy and Madness There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored. Michel Foucault. Madness and Civilization. The moment I doubt whether an event that I recall actually took place, I bring the suspicion of madness upon myself: unless I am uncertain as to whether it was not a mere dream. Arthur Schopenhauer. The World as Will and Idea, Vol. 3. Madness is commonly thought of as moving through several well known cultural-historical shifts from madness as a demonic or otherwise theological force, to rationalization, to medicalization psychiatric and otherwise. Foucault's Madness and Civilization is well known for orientating madness as a form of exclusionary social control which operated by demarcating madness from reason. Yet Foucault points to the possibility of madness as the necessity of nature at least prior to the crushing weight of the church. Kant’s philosophy as a response to madness is grounded by his humanizing of madness itself. As Adrian Johnston points out in the early pages of Time Driven pre-Kantian madness meant humans were seized by demonic or angelic forces whereas Kantian madness became one of being too human. Madness becomes internalized, the external demonic forces become flaws of the individual mind. Foucault argues that, while madness is de-demonized it is also dehumanized during the Renaissance, as madmen become creatures neither diabolic nor totally human reduced to the zero degree of humanity. It is immediately clear why for Kant, speculative metaphysics must be curbed – with the problem of internal madness and without the external safeguards of transcendental conditions, there is nothing to formally separate the speculative capacities for metaphysical diagnosis from the mad ramblings of the insane mind – both equally fall outside the realm of practicality and quotidian experience. David-Menard's work is particularly useful in diagnosing the relation of thought and madness in Kant's texts. David-Menard argues that in Kant's relatively unknown “An Essay on the Maladies of the Mind” as well as his later discussion of the Seer of Swedenborg, that Kant formulates madness primarily in terms of sensory upheaval or other hallucinatory theaters. She writes: “madness is an organization of thought. It is made possible by the ambiguity of the normal relation between the imaginary and the perceived, whether this pertains to the order of sensation or to the relations between our ideas” Kant's fascination with the Seer forces Kant between the pincers of “aesthetic reconciliation” – namely melancholic withdrawal – and “a philosophical invention” – namely the critical project. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis is a combination and reversal of Kant's split, where an aesthetic over engagement with the world entails prolific conceptual invention. Their embrace of madness, however, is of course itself conceptual despite all their rhizomatic maneuvers. Though they move with the energy of madness, Deleuze and Guattari save the capacity of thought from the fangs of insanity by imbuing materiality itself with the capacity for thought. Or, as Ray Brassier puts it, “Deleuze insists, it is necessary to absolutize the immanence of this world in such a way as to dissolve the transcendent disjunction between things as we know them and as they are in themselves”. That is, whereas Kant relied on the faculty of judgment to divide representation from objectivity Deleuze attempts to flatten the whole economy beneath the juggernaut of ontological univocity. Speculation, as a particularly useful form of madness, might fall close to Deleuze and Guattari’s shaping of philosophy into a concept producing machine but is different in that it is potentially self destructive – less reliant on the stability of its own concepts and more adherent to exposing a particular horrifying swath of reality. Speculative madness is always a potential disaster in that it acknowledges little more than its own speculative power with the hope that the gibbering of at least a handful of hysterical brains will be useful. Pre-critical metaphysics amounts to madness, though this may be because the world itself is mad while new attempts at speculative metaphysics, at post-Kantian pre-critical metaphysics, are well aware of our own madness. Without the sobriety of the principle of sufficient reason we have a world of neon madness: “we would have to conceive what our life would be if all the movements of the earth, all the noises of the earth, all the smells, the tastes, all the light – of the earth and elsewhere, came to us in a moment, in an instant – like an atrocious screaming tumult of things”. Speculative thought may be participatory in the screaming tumult of the world or, worse yet, may produce its spectral double. Against theology or reason or simply commonsense, the speculative becomes heretical. Speculation, as the cognitive extension of the horrorific sublime should be met with melancholic detachment. Whereas Kant's theoretical invention, or productivity of thought, is self -sabotaging, since the advent of the critical project is a productivity of thought which then delimits the engine of thought at large either in dogmatic gestures or non-systematizable empirical wondrousness. The former is celebrated by the fiction of Thomas Ligotti whereas the latter is espoused by the tales of H.P. Lovecraft. /2/ – Weird Fiction and Philosophy. Supernatural horror, in all its eerie constructions, enables a reader to taste treats inconsistent with his personal welfare. Thomas Ligotti Songs of a Dead Dreamer. I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve,momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which forever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis H.P. Lovecraft. “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” Lovecraft states that his creation of a story is to suspend natural law yet, at the same time, he indexes the tenuousness of such laws, suggesting the vast possibilities of the cosmic. The tension that Lovecraft sets up between his own fictions and the universe or nature is reproduced within his fictions in the common theme of the unreliable narrator; unreliable precisely because they are either mad or what they have witnessed questions the bounds of material reality. In “The Call of Cthulhu” Lovecraft writes: The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Despite Lovecraft's invocations of illusion, he is not claiming that his fantastic creations such as the Old Ones are supernatural but, following Joshi, are only ever supernormal. One can immediately see that instead of nullifying realism Lovecraft in fact opens up the real to an unbearable degree. In various letters and non-fictional statements Lovecraft espoused strictly materialist tenets, ones which he borrowed from Hugh Elliot namely the uniformity of law, the denial of teleology and the denial of non-material existence. Lovecraft seeks to explore the possibilities of such a universe by piling horror upon horror until the fragile brain which attempts to grasp it fractures. This may be why philosophy has largely ignored weird fiction – while Deleuze and Guattari mark the turn towards weird fiction and Lovecraft in particular, with the precursors to speculative realism as well as contemporary related thinkers have begun to view Lovecraft as making philosophical contributions. Lovecraft's own relation to philosophy is largely critical while celebrating Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. This relationship of Lovecraft to philosophy and philosophy to Lovecraft is coupled with Lovecraft's habit of mercilessly destroying the philosopher and the figure of the academic more generally in his work, a destruction which is both an epistemological destruction and an ontological destruction. Thomas Ligotti's weird fiction which he has designated as a kind of “confrontational escapism” might be best described in the following quote from one of his shortstories, “The human phenomenon is but the sum of densely coiled layers of illusion each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity. That there are persons of any kind when all there can be is mindless mirrors laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream”. Whereas Lovecraft's weirdness draws predominantly from the abyssal depths of the uncharted universe, Ligotti's existential horror focuses on the awful proliferation of meaningless surfaces that is, the banal and every day function of representation. In an interview, Ligotti states: We don't even know what the world is like except through our sense organs, which are provably inadequate. It's no less the case with our brains. Our whole lives are motored along by forces we cannot know and perceptions that are faulty. We sometimes hear people say that they're not feeling themselves. Well, who or what do they feel like then? This is not to say that Ligotti sees nothing beneath the surface but that there is only darkness or blackness behind it, whether that surface is on the cosmological level or the personal. By addressing the implicit and explicit philosophical issues in Ligotti's work we will see that his nightmarish take on reality is a form of malevolent idealism, an idealism which is grounded in a real, albeit dark and obscure materiality. If Ligotti's horrors ultimately circle around mad perceptions which degrade the subject, it takes aim at the vast majority of the focus of continental philosophy. While Lovecraft's acidic materialism clearly assaults any romantic concept of being from the outside, Ligotti attacks consciousness from the inside: Just a little doubt slipped into the mind, a little trickle of suspicion in the bloodstream, and all those eyes of ours, one by one, open up to the world and see its horror [...] Not even the solar brilliance of a summer day will harbor you from horror. For horror eats the light and digests it into darkness. Clearly, the weird fiction of Lovecraft and Ligotti amount to a anti-anthrocentric onslaught against the ramparts of correlationist continental philosophy. /3/ – Shoggothic Materialism or the Formless Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes—viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells—rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile—slaves of suggestion, builders of cities—more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative—Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things? H.P. Lovecraft. “At the Mountains of Madness” On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit. Georges Bataille. “Formless”. The Shoggoths feature most prominently in H.P. Lovecraft's shortstory “At the Mountains of Madness” where they are described in the following manner: It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self -luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. The term is a litmus test for materialism itself as the Shoggoth is an amorphous creature. The Shoggoths were living digging machines bio engineered by the Elder Things, and their protoplasmic bodies being formed into various tools by their hypnotic powers. The Shoggoths eventually became self aware and rose up against their masters in an ultimately failed rebellion. After the Elder Ones retreated into the oceans leaving the Shoggoths to roam the frozen wastes of the Antarctic. The onto-genesis of the Shoggoths and their gross materiality, index the horrifyingly deep time of the earth a concept near and dear to Lovecraft's formulation of horror as well as the fear of intelligences far beyond, and far before, the ascent of humankind on earth and elsewhere. The sickly amorphous nature of the Shoggoths invade materialism at large, where while materiality is unmistakably real ie not discursive, psychological, or otherwise overly subjectivist, it questions the relation of materialism to life. As Eugene Thacker writes: The Shoggoths or Elder Things do not even share the same reality with the human beings who encounter them—and yet this encounter takes place, though in a strange no-place that is neither quite that of the phenomenal world of the human subject or the noumenal world of an external reality. Amorphous yet definitively material beings are a constant in Lovecraft's tales. In his tale “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadatth” Lovecraft describes Azathoth as, “that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe,” that, “last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blashphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity,” who, “gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time”. Azathoth's name may have multiple origins but the most striking is the alchemy term azoth which is both a cohesive agent and a acidic creation pointing back to the generative and the decayed. The indistinction of generation and degradation materially mirrors the blur between the natural and the unnatural as well as life and non-life. Lovecraft speaks of the tension between the natural and the unnatural is his short story “The Unnameable.” He writes, “if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulousity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature?”. Lovecraft explores exactly the tension outlined at the beginning of this chapter, between life and thought. At the end of his short tale Lovecraft compounds the problem as the unnameable is described as “a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory”. Deleuze suggests that becoming-animal is operative throughout Lovecraft's work, where narrators feel themselves reeling at their becoming non-human or of being the anomalous or of becoming atomized. Following Eugene Thacker however, it may be far more accurate to say that Lovecraft's tales exhibit not a becoming-animal but a becoming-creature. Where the monstrous breaks the purportedly fixed laws of nature, the creature is far more ontologically ambiguous. The nameless thing is an altogether different horizon for thought. The creature is either less than animal or more than animal – its becoming is too strange for animal categories and indexes the slow march of thought towards the bizarre. This strangeness is, as aways, some indefinite swirling in the category of immanence and becoming. Bataille begins “The Labyrinth” with the assertion that being, to continue to be, is becoming. More becoming means more being hence the assertion that Bataille's barking dog is more than the sponge. This would mean that the Shoggotth is altogether too much being, too much material in the materialism. Bataille suggests that there is an immanence between the eater and the eaten, across the species and never within them. That is, despite the chaotic storm of immanence there must remain some capacity to distinguish the gradients of becoming without reliance upon, or at least total dependence upon, the powers of intellection to parse the universe into recognizable bits, properly digestible factoids. That is, if we undo Deleuze's aforementioned valorization of sense which, for his variation of materialism, performed the work of the transcendental, but refuse to reinstate Kant's transcendental disjunction between thing and appearance, then it must be a quality of becoming-as-being itself which can account for the discernible nature of things by sense. In an interview with Peter Gratton, Jane Bennett formulates the problem thusly: What is this strange systematicity proper to a world of Becoming? What, for example, initiates this congealing that will undo itself? Is it possible to identify phases within this formativity, plateaus of differentiation? If so, do the phases/plateaus follow a temporal sequence? Or, does the process of formation inside Becoming require us to theorize a non-chronological kind of time? I think that your student’s question: “How can we account for something like iterable structures in an assemblage theory?” is exactly the right question. Philosophy has erred too far on the side of the subject in the subject-object relation and has furthermore, lost the very weirdness of the non-human. Beyond this, the madness of thought need not override. /4/ - Ventriloquial Idealism or the Externality of Thought My aim is the opposite of Lovecraft's. He had an appreciation for natural scenery on earth and wanted to reach beyond the visible in the universe. I have no appreciation for natural scenery and want the objective universe to be a reflection of a character. Thomas Ligotti. “Devotees of Decay and Desolation.” Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure [….] Horror is more real than we are. Thomas Ligotti. “Professor Nobody's Little Lectures on Supernatural Horror”. Thomas Ligotti's tales are rife with mannequins, puppets, and other brainless entities which of replace the valorized subject of philosophy – that of the free thinking human being. His tales such as “The Dream of the Manikin” aim to destroy the rootedness of consciousness. James Trafford has connected the anti-egoism of Ligotti to Thomas Metzinger – where the self is at best an illusion and we plead desperately for someone else to acknowledge that we are real. Trafford has stated it thus, “Life is played out as an inescapable puppet show, an endless dream in which the puppets are generally unaware that they are trapped within a mesmeric dance of whose mechanisms they know nothing and over which they have no control”. An absolute materialism, for Ligotti, implies an alienation of the idea which leads to a ventriloquil idealism. As Ligotti notes in an interview, “the fiasco and nightmare of existence, the particular fiasco and nightmare of human existence, the sense that people are puppets of powers they cannot comprehend, etc.” And then further elaborates that,“[a]ssuming that anything has to exist, my perfect world would be one in which everyone has experienced the annulment of his or her ego. That is, our consciousness of ourselves as unique individuals would entirely disappear”. The externality of the idea leads to the unfortunate consequence of consciousness eating at itself through horror which, for Ligotti, is more real than reality and goes beyond horror-as-affect. Beyond this, taking together with the unreality of life and the ventriloquizing of subjectivity, Ligotti's thought becomes an idealism in which thought itself is alien and ultimately horrifying. The role of human thought and the relation of non-relation of horror to thought is not completely clear in Ligotti's The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. Ligotti argues in his The Conspiracy Against the Human Race,that the advent of thought is a mistake of nature and that horror is being in the sense that horror results from knowing too much. Yet, at the same time, Ligotti seems to suggest that thought separates us from nature whereas, for Lovecraft, thought is far less privileged – mind is just another manifestation of the vital principal, it is just another materialization of energy. In his brilliant “Prospects for Post-Copernican Dogmatism” Iain Grant rallies against the negative definition of dogmatism and the transcendental, and suggests that negatively defining both over-focuses on conditions of access and subjectivism at the expense of the real or nature. With Schelling, who is Grant's champion against the subjectivist bastions of both Fichte and Kant, Ligotti's idealism could be taken as a transcendental realism following from an ontological realism. Yet the transcendental status of Ligotti's thought move towards a treatment of the transcendental which may threaten to leave beyond its realist ground. Ligotti states: Belief in the supernatural is only superstition. That said, a sense of the supernatural, as Conrad evidenced in Heart of Darkness, must be admitted if one's inclination is to go to the limits of horror. It is the sense of what should not be- the sense of being ravaged by the impossible. Phenomenally speaking, the super-natural may be regarded as the metaphysical counterpart of insanity, a transcendental correlative of a mind that has been driven mad. Again, Ligotti equates madness with thought, qualifying both as supernatural while remaining less emphatic about the metaphysical dimensions of horror. The question becomes one of how exactly the hallucinatory realm of the ideal relates to the black churning matter of Lovecraft's chaos of elementary particles. In his tale “I Have a Special Plan for This World” Ligotti formulates thus: A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. Here Ligotti is not discounting metaphysics but implying that if it does exist the fact that we are phenomenologically ill-equipped to perceive that it is nightmarish. For Ligotti, nightmare and horror occur within the circuit of consciousness whereas for Lovecraft the relation between reality and mind is less productive on the side of mind. It is easier to ascertain how the Kantian philosophy is a defense against the diseases of the head as Kant armors his critical enterprise from too much of the world and too much of the mind. The weird fiction of both Lovecraft and Ligotti demonstrates that there is too much of both feeding into one another in a way that corrodes the Kantian schema throughly, breaking it down into a dead but still ontologically potentiated nigredo. The haunting, terrifying fact of Ligotti's idealism is that the transcendental motion which brought thought to matter, while throughly material and naturalized, brings with it the horror that thought cannot be undone without ending the material that bears it either locally or completely. Thought comes from an elsewhere and an elsewhen being-in-thought. The unthinkable outside thought is as maddening as the unthought engine of thought itself within thought which doesn't exist except for the mind, the rotting décor of the brain. /5/ - Hyperstitional Transcendental Paranoia or Self -Expelled Thought Weird fiction has been given some direct treatment in philosophy in the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land. Nick Land along with others in the 1990s created the Cyber Culture Research Unit as well as the research group Hyperstition. The now defunct hyperstitional website, an outgrowth of the Cyber Culture Research Unit, defined hyperstition in the following fourfold: 1-Element of effective culture that makes itself real. 2-Fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device. 3-Coincidence intensifier. 4-Call to the Old Ones. The distinctively Lovecraftian character of hyperstition is hard to miss as is its Deleuzo-Guattarian roots. In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari write, “We have been criticized for over-quoting literary authors. But when one writes, the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into”. The indisinction of literature and philosophy mirrors the mess of being and knowing as post-correlationist philosophy, where philosophy tries to make itself real where literature, especially the weird, aims itself at the brain-circuit of horror. The texts of both Lovecraft and Ligotti work through horror as epistemological plasticity meeting with proximity as well as the deep time of Lovecraft and the glacially slow time of paranoia in Ligotti. Against Deleuze, and following Brassier, we cannot allow the time of consciousness, the Bergsonian time of the duree, to override natural time, but instead acknowledge that it is an unfortunate fact of existence as a thinking being. Horror-time, the time of consciousness, with all its punctuated moments and drawn out terrors, cannot compare to the deep time of non-existence both in the unreachable past and the unknown future. The crystalline cogs of Kant's account of experience as the leading light for the possibility of metaphysics must be throughly obliterated. His gloss of experience in Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics could not be more sterile: Experience consists of intuitions, which belong to the sensibility, and of judgments, which are entirely a work of the understanding. But the judgments which the understanding makes entirely out of sensuous intuitions are far from being judgments of experience. For in the one case the judgment connects only the perceptions as they are given in sensuous intuition [....] Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Here it is difficult to dismiss the queasiness that Kant's legalism induces upon sight for both Badiou and David-Menard. Kant's thought becomes, as Foucault says when reflecting on Sade's text in relation to nature, “the savage abolition of itself”. For Badiou, Kant's philosophy simply closes off too much of the outside, freezing the world of thought in an all too limited formalism. Critical philosophy is simply the systematized quarantine on future thinking, on thinking which would threaten the formalism which artificially grants thought its own coherency in the face of madness. Even the becoming-mad of Deleuze, while escaping the rumbling ground, makes grounds for itself, mad grounds but grounds which are thinkable in their affect. The field of effects allows for Deleuze's aesthetic and radical empiricism, in which effects and/or occasions make up the material of the world to be thought as a chaosmosis of simulacra. Given a critique of an empiricism of aesthetics, of the image, it may be difficult to justify an attack on Kantian formalism with the madness of literature, which does not aim to make itself real but which we may attempt to make real. That is, how do Lovecraft's and Ligotti's materials, as materials for philosophy to work on, differ from either the operative formalisms of Kant or the implicitly formalized images of Deleuzian empiricism? It is simply that such texts do not aim to make themselves real, and make claims to the real which are more alien to us than familiar, which is why their horror is immediately more trustworthy. This is the madness which Blanchot discusses in The Infinite Conversation through Cervantes and his knight – the madness of book-life, of the perverse unity of literature and life a discussion which culminates in the discussion of one of the weird's masters, that of Kafka. The text is the knowing of madness, since madness, in its moment of becoming-more-mad, cannot be frozen in place but by the solidifications of externalizing production. This is why Foucault ends his famous study with works of art. Furthermore extilligence, the ability to export the products of our maligned brains, is the companion of the attempts to export, or discover the possibility of intelligences outside of our heads, in order for philosophy to survive the solar catastrophe. To borrow again from Deleuze, writing is inseparable from becoming. The mistake is to believe that madness is reabsorbed by extilligence, by great works, or that it could be exorcised by the expelling of thought into the inorganic or differently organic. Going out of our heads does not guarantee we will no longer mean we cannot still go out of our minds. This is simply because of the outside, of matter, or force, or energy, or thing-in-itself, or Schopenhauerian Will. In Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zahn” an “impoverished student of metaphysics” becomes intrigued by strange viol music coming from above his room. After meeting the musician the student discovers that each night he plays frantic music at a window in order to keep some horridness at bay, some “impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium”. The aesthetic defenses provided by the well trained brain can bear the hex of matter for so long, the specter of unalterability within it which too many minds obliterate, collapsing everything before the thought of thought as thinkable or at least noetically mutable on our own terms. Transcendental paranoia is the concurrent nightmare and promise of Paul Humphrey's work, of being literally out of our minds. It is the gothic counterpart of thinking non-conceptually but also of thinking never belonging to any instance of purportedly solid being. As Bataille stated, “At the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes there is no longer any room for him” Thought is immaterial only to the degree that it is inhuman, it is a power that tries, always with failure, to ascertain its own genesis. Philosophy, if it can truly return to the great outdoors, if it can leave behind the dead loop of the human skull, must recognize not only the non-priority of human thought, but that thought never belongs to the brain that thinks it, thought comes from somewhere else. To return to the train image from the beginning “a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis” this is the problem of thought, and of thinking thought, of being no longer able to isolate thought, with only a thought-formed structure. [1] One of the central tenets of Francois Laruelle's non-philosophy is that philosophy has traditionally operated on material already presupposed as thinkable instead of trying to think the real in itself. Philosophy, according to Laruelle, remains fixated on transcendental synthesis which shatters immanence into an empirical datum and an a prori factum which are then fused by a third thing such as the ego. For a critical account of Laruelle's non-philosophy see Ray Brassier's Nihil Unbound. (shrink)

The use of language models in Web applications and other areas of computing and business have grown significantly over the last five years. One reason for this growth is the improvement in performance of language models on a number of benchmarks — but a side effect of these advances has been the adoption of a “bigger is always better” paradigm when it comes to the size of training, testing, and challenge datasets. Drawing on previous criticisms of this paradigm as (...) applied to large training datasets crawled from pre-existing text on the Web, we extend the critique to challenge datasets custom-created by crowdworkers. We present several sets of criticisms, where ethical and scientific issues in language model research reinforce each other: labour injustices in crowdwork, dataset quality and inscrutability, inequities in the research community, and centralized corporate control of the technology. We also present a new type of tool for researchers to use in examining large datasets when evaluating them for quality. (shrink)

Until now, philosophical debate about human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research has largely been limited to its ethical dimensions and implications. Although the importance and urgency of these ethical debates should not be underestimated, the almost undivided attention that mainstream and feminist philosophers have paid to the ethical dimensions of hESC research suggests that the only philosophically interesting questions and concerns about it are by and large ethical in nature. My argument goes some distance to challenge the assumption that ethical (...) considerations alone must be foregrounded in philosophical discussions about hESC research by introducing a critical stance on the epistemological and ontological assumptions that underlie and condition it. A central aim of the paper is to show how Foucault's insights into knowledge-power, taken in combination with Hacking's claims about styles of reasoning, can make these assumptions evident, as well as cast light on their potentially deleterious implications for disabled people. Arguing in this way also enables me to draw out constitutive effects of research on stem cells, that is, to indicate how the discursive practices surrounding research on stem cells, as well as the technology itself, contribute to the constitution of impairment. (shrink)

O presente trabalho pretende estabelecer algumas precisões históricas e conceituas em torno da formação da história arqueológica de Michel Foucault, tendo como foco um livro póstumo e recém lançado, intitulado La Question Anthropologique (2022). Esse livro trata de um curso sobre “antropologia” ministrado por Foucault entre 1952 (ou 1951) e 1955, em Lille e na ENS. As precisões históricas e conceituais tratadas aqui são em torno dos seguintes contextos: primeiramente, analisa-se a escassa literatura de comentário anterior ao (...) lançamento do livro em 2022; depois, parte-se ao horizonte de leituras de Foucault na época, especialmente ocorridos em torno da figura de Nietzsche. Essas leituras ocorrem em diversas frentes, tais como as figuras de Heidegger e Jaspers, a importância da história das ciências, a interlocução com Althusser e Jacques Martin em torno de Marx e a questão da loucura e da psicanálise. -/- The present work aims to establish some historical and conceptual clarifications surrounding the formation of Michel Foucault’s archaeological history, considering a recently published posthumous book entitled La Question Anthropologique (2022). This book thematizes a course on “anthropology” given by Foucault between 1952 (or 1951) and 1955, in Lille and at the École Normale Supérieure. The historical and conceptual analysis concerns the following subjects: firstly, the text analyzes the scarce secondary literature published before the book’s launch in 2022; secondly, the article focuses some readings made by Foucault in those years, especially surrounding the figure of Nietzsche. These readings occur on several fronts, such as: the influence of Heidegger and Jaspers, the role of the history of sciences, the dialogue with Althusser and Jacques Martin on Marx and the themes of madness and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

> Tradução do Livro (colaboração com Maurício Pelegrini): Michel Foucault: Devir Do Pensamento E Multiplicação De Práticas (Editora Pontes, 2023) ||| o Capítulo (Inglês – Português): Foucault e a genealogia do saber moderno sobre a sexualidade: De São Paulo às Confissões da Carne | Autor: Daniele Lorenzini ||| Capítulo (Inglês – Português): Os Sujeitos do Capitalismo: De Marx a Foucault | Autor: Johana Oksala ||| o Capítulo (Inglês – Português): A práxis filosófica de Michel (...) class='Hi'>Foucault: Sobre o devir da crítica e da prática | Autor: Bernard E. Harcourt ||| o Capítulo (Espanhol – Português): Da biopolítica às declinações do Bios: Deslocamentos e continuidades do projeto filosófico foucaultiano | Autor: Christina López ||| o Capítulo (Francês – Português): Foucault, o neoliberalismo e o desejo de revolução | Autor: Christian Laval ||| o Capítulo (Francês – Português): Foucault e a mitologia antineoliberal | Autor: Philippe Sabot . (shrink)

Given his view that the modern world is ‘radically evil’, Adorno is an unlikely contributor to business ethics. Despite this, we argue that his work has a number of provocative implications for the field that warrant wider attention. Adorno regards our social world as damaged, unfree, and false and we draw on this critique to outline why the achievement of good work is so rare in contemporary society, focusing in particular on the ethical demands of roles and the ideological (...) nature of management’s self-understanding. Nevertheless, we show that Adorno’s comments on activities such as art and philosophy mean that it is possible to draw on his work in a way that contributes constructively to the conversation about good and meaningful work within business ethics. (shrink)

This essay highlights a methodological weakness in Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism often mistaken for a biographical shift in his philosophy. Naissance de la biopolitique is sometimes interpreted as evidence for Foucault’s conversion to neoliberalism, whereas its lack of critical acuity stems rather from its methodological limitations. Through a discussion of the “neoliberal conversion”-thesis, I highlight those limitations. Though Foucault’s appreciative tone in his neoliberalism lectures is surprising, his aim is mainly to defamiliarize readers from the dominant mode (...) of neoliberal rationality so that they can affirm the creative potential to foster new conducts, new identities, and new rationalities. Foucault did not convert to neoliberalism, but sought to destabilise it by revealing its historical contingency. However, as Foucault’s surprisingly positive tone shows, this strategy is insufficient for combatting neoliberalism. There is an elective affinity between Foucault’s own politics of creative self-reinvention and neoliberalism’s promise of a non-invasive, post-disciplinary government by indirect economic incentives alone. Foucault’s libertine stance toward subjectivity hence seems easily integrated into a neoliberal conduct of conducts. I propose to supplement Foucault’s genealogical method as he deploys it in Naissance de la biopolitique with an immanent critique of neoliberalism from the perspective of the governed. Rather than investigating neoliberal rationality as a promising endeavour for the future, we can study the real-life implementations of neoliberalism and their effects on subjective conducts. Neoliberal rationality is involved in a permanent struggle to shape the conduct of conducts along entrepreneurial and competitive lines, but subjects are refractory living beings whose conducts are not so simply transformed. Neoliberalism has had to give up its post-disciplinary aspirations and turn to the power of discipline and abandonment to enforce neoliberal norms of conduct. Neoliberalism has transformed into a negative biopolitics that sacrifices the lives of unproductive subjects as collateral damage to the overall welfare of the population. Immanent critique thereby reveals how subjects are pushed beyond their limits until neoliberal norms of conduct become unbearable. This intolerability of neoliberalism cannot be directly deduced from the writings of Becker, Friedman, or Hayek.111 It becomes manifest in the confrontation between neoliberal rationality and the material living bodies of finite human beings unable to be stretched in the ways neoliberalism requires. (shrink)

En el marco del V Congreso Internacional «La actualidad de Michel Foucault» celebrado en la Universidad Complutense de Madrid entre el 6 y el 8 de marzo de 2018, sostuvimos una interesante conversación con Daniel Lorenzini, investigador del pensamiento ético y político de Michel Foucault y editor de varios de sus cursos y conferencias publicadas en los últimos años en Francia. Discutimos sobre el estado actual de los archivos de Foucault adquiridos por la Biblioteca Nacional (...) de Francia (BnF), algunos de los diversos proyectos editoriales que se derivan del trabajo de archivo y análisis de los manuscritos del filósofo, la reciente e inesperada publicación de Les aveux de la chair y su relación con el proyecto de la Historia de la sexualidad tal como fue planteado en 1976, la relación de Foucault con Nietzsche respecto a sus lecturas de la subjetivación y el vínculo, no siempre evidente, entre ética y política a la luz de sus investigaciones sobre el filósofo francés. (shrink)

The paper studies two fundamentally different forms in which the concept of care makes its comeback in twentieth-century thought. We make use of a distinction made by Peter Sloterdijk, who argues that the ancient and medieval ‘ascetic’ ideal of self-enhancement through practice has re-emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in the form of a rehabilitation of the Hellenistic notion of self-care (epimeleia heautou) in Michel Foucault’s late ethics. Sloterdijk contrasts this return of self-care with Martin Heidegger’s (...) concept of being-in-the-world as ‘total care’ (Sorge), an utterly ‘secularized’ understanding of the human being as irreducibly world-embedded that rejects the classical ascetic ideal of world-secession. We examine further the historical roots and emergence of these contrasting contemporary reappropriations of care in the Western tradition of thought and show them to be rooted in two different ontologies and ethics of the self as either world-secluded or world-immersed, autonomous or constitutively relational. The historical point of divergence of these two approaches to care, we argue, can be found in the Christian transformation of Hellenistic ethics. (shrink)

Most businesses are aware of the costs associated with sexual harassment and are concerned about limiting its presence in the workplace. Although the business ethics literature contains work on sexual harassment, it has very little to say on chastity or its value in the workplace, even though unchaste behavior underlies the prevalence of sexual harassment. This article begins this investigation into chastity worth having in the workplace, taking typical company policies as a guide for what kind of chastity is (...) worth having in the workplace in particular. The first question asked in this article is: for what reasons is chastity worth having in the workplace? I consider four answers—harm prevention, respect for employee consent/dissent, respect for others’ dignity, and conflict of interest avoidance—and I examine workplace policies that enforce chaste behavior in search for a unified and underlying reason for these policies. In the process of locating the primary reason for the value of being chaste in the workplace in particular, we will be given tools to develop an account of chastity worth having in the workplace, which I will argue is primarily cognitive, rather than volitional or affective. I conclude that chastity is the disposition not to construe a coworker as a satisfier of one’s sexual interest, and I argue that chastity is valuable in the workplace because it secures coworkers’ ability to have their contributions appropriately valued. The hope is that once the reason and locus of chastity is identified, the professionals who know how to train businesspeople in developing virtues will better be able to focus their attention and efforts. (shrink)

These three volumes, entitled Essays On Values, bring together fortyone recent articles by researchers at the Nova Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA). They are a small sample of everything that, in the last four years, the Institute’s researchers have published, in English, in indexed journals and collections of essays with peer review. As a whole, they reflect very well the research work that is done at IFILNOVA. Section I. of Volume 1 gathers six articles that deal directly with the question “what (...) are values?”, the question that guides all the work of the institute’s different laboratories and research groups. The first article, by Susana Cadilha and Vítor Guerreiro, results from work developed in the Laboratory of Ethics and Political Philosophy (EPLab); the second, by João Constâncio, from the Lisbon Nietzsche Group; the third, by Alexandra Dias Fortes, from the Lisbon Wittgenstein Group; the third and fifth, by Nuno Fonseca, and Maria Filomena Molder, from the Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art Group of the Laboratory of Culture and Value (CultureLab); the last, by Erich H. Rast, from the Philosophy of Language and Argumentation Theory Group and the Lisbon Mind, Cognition & Knowledge Group of the Laboratory of Argumentation, Cognition, and Language (ArgLab). Section II. brings together three articles by members of the Lisbon Nietzsche Group. Since 2010, the Lisbon Nietzsche Group has completed several funded projects, and has established itself as a leading international research group on Nietzsche’s thought. The three articles demonstrate the crucial importance of the question of values in Nietzsche’s work, always thought from the perspective of the possibility of a “transvaluation of all values”. Maria João Mayer Branco’s article focuses on the value of introspection, and how Nietzsche anticipates Wittgenstein’s “expressivist” view of the “the Peculiar Grammar of the Word ‘I’” and the impossibility of private languages. Marta Faustino’s article considers the theme of affirmation and the value of life through the interpretation of Nietzsche’s reflection on truthfulness, intellectual honesty and courage in the light of Michel Foucault’s work on parrhesia. Pietro Gori’s article studies how Nietzsche creates a new anthropological ideal based on his enquiry into the values of the “good European”. The area of Wittgenstein studies has had a strong influence on the institute since the time when it was a philosophy of language institute. The Wittgensteinian distinction between facts and values was decisive in defining the question of values as the central issue of IFILNOVA’s research project, replacing the focus on philosophy of language. More recently, the focus of research at the Lisbon Wittgenstein Group has been on epistemic values, in particular in their connection with the question of religious belief. In Section III., Nuno Venturinha’s article examines, in the light of an epistemological standpoint, the way Wittgenstein thinks about the possibility of translation. Robert Vinten’s article argues that Wittgenstein’s thought contains elements for a critique of the concept of justice and of the liberal political visions of both Richard Rorty and Chantal Mouffe, despite the fact that both have drawn inspiration from Wittgenstein. Benedetta Zavatta’s article questions the value of mythology by thinking of it as a disease of language – not only in Wittgenstein, but also in a whole philosophical tradition that preceded him. The existence of a research group in ancient philosophy is a recent but very promising development in the life of IFILNOVA. Section IV. includes two articles by members of the group. Paulo Alexandre Lima’s article considers the critique of misology and the value of discourse in Plato’s Phaedo. Hélder Telo’s article examines the pedagogical and protreptic value of imperfection in Plato’s work. (shrink)