Suchergebnisse

This paper examines how a person's life may be shaped by living with a sense of the mystery of reality. What virtues, if any, are encouraged by such a sense? The first section rehearses a radical 'doctrine of mystery', according to which reality as it anyway is, independently of human perspectives, is ineffable. It is then argued that a sense of mystery may provide 'measure' for human lives. For it is possible for a life to be 'consonant' with this sense – through exercising humility, for example – and even to emulate mystery. A further section corrects a misunderstanding about the connection between a sense of mystery and the virtues it invites, while a final section considers the relationship between living with mystery and religious faith.

In the modern era, the institution of literature is being reconceived across Europe as a national institution. But the new paradigm of national literatures requires a remaking of literary discourse, including the transformation of critical terminology, and this results in literary discourse becoming politicized. By analyzing the history of the term libozvučnost (melodiousness) in the Czech national literary revival, David L. Cooper demonstrates how this seemingly innocent literary term became a political lightening rod for friends pursuing the same national program. This strongly suggests that, in the formative era of national literatures, using literary issues to discuss politics is not simply a matter of instrumentalizing literary criticism for covert political activity but that discussing literary values is directly political. The example of libozvučnost also reveals how the "borrowed" discourses of Romanticism and nationalism were fundamentally remade to respond to the modern Czech situation.

This paper studies experiments set in a corporate environment where a manager attempts to overcome a history of coordination failure by employees using either financial incentives or communication. I compare the choices of subject managers drawn from a standard undergraduate population with subject managers drawn from the executive MBA (EMBA) program at Case's Weatherhead School of Management. The EMBA subjects are a group of experienced, successful managers; all of the EMBA subjects have at least ten years of work experience, including at least five years in a supervisory role, and have average annual earnings in excess of $120,000. The EMBA subject managers are able to overcome a history of coordination failure significantly faster than the undergraduate subject managers. This superior performance is driven neither by differences in the financial incentives offered to the employees nor by use of an inherently different communications strategy. Instead, EMBA subject managers are significantly more likely to use the same "good" communication strategy as is identified for undergraduate subject managers through systematic coding of manager's messages to employees.

The relationship between the notion of collective responsibility & Thomas Nagel's (1979) concept of moral luck is explored to determine how these concepts can contribute to the realization of reconciliation in cases of collective wrongdoing. After demonstrating the existence of collective responsibility that is not reducible to individual culpability within contemporary thought, Nagel's notion of moral luck is discussed, emphasizing its applicability to determining accountability for wartime atrocities. It is asserted that the highly irrational nature of moral luck ultimately vindicates collective responsibility's capacity to hold all individuals responsible without necessarily placing direct blame on any single person. The extent to which collective responsibility can genuinely resolve relations between offending & victimized groups is then contemplated. Rather than seek punishment against every member of the offending group, it is stated that collective responsibility demands a reconciliatory act (eg, an apology or plea for forgiveness) from the criminal group. It is concluded that acknowledging collective responsibility & remorse for war crimes provides a moral approach to achieving reconciliation. J. W. Parker

Contemporary academic professionalism undercuts the moral imperative of the land-grant tradition in America. The author is primarily concerned with assessing the impact of post-modern modes of thought on both the rise of academic professionalism and the decline of civic engagement at the heart of the land-grant mission. A revitalization of the land-grant tradition, he argues, requires the rebuilding of the social personae of the academic professions not on the logic of commercial free agency or through the spiritually empty traces of theory, but in the language of ethics and through moral praxis.