J. H. Lee

Bataille has often been dismissed as an "excremental" philosopher. Recently, however, his writings have garnered more serious attention, especially because of their influence upon contemporary French thought. But Bataille's importance far exceeds his place in the history of ideas. In his notion of communication, Bataille offers us a radically new conception of value. ;Bataille diagnoses utilitarian values as representative of a fundamental selfishness. This selfishness is a result of our placing value on solid things---whether that be the thing desired or the thing that desires---rather than on the movement between beings. Expenditure without return would be the ultimate expression of this non-utilitarian movement. The movement of desire---i.e. communication---is usually recognized only as the means towards a solid end. Reason as teleological is the project of acquisition. In opposition to an economy whose paradigm is acquisition, one which Bataille labels "restricted," Bataille proposes a general economy based on expenditure. ;Life is a movement of luxury. Individuals constantly accumulate resources only to be dissolved in eroticism and in death, in poetry and in tragedy, in laughter and in tears. We vigilantly guard against dissolution, fearing the loss of meaning that comes with the end of separate existence. We close ourselves off to the flux of Being. We deny our intimate participation with the continuity that---to a discontinuous being---can only mean death. But our petty concerns, our worries about the future, our care for self-preservation, lead to a life of niggardly squalor. Separate existences fail to communicate . For Bataille, sovereign value is communication. Both the physical boundaries we maintain and the societal prohibitions we observe---and these two are not unrelated---must be transgressed for a movement of luxury to transfigure lackluster existence and open beings to communication

This project discusses and advocates social change, for plural and radical democracy, by analyzing cyberspace as a heterotopia of contemporary cultural/political geography. This project advances its discussion on two levels: on the analytical level, by advancing cultural geography in conjunction with critical rhetoric, this project discusses the discursivity and the spatiality of cyberspace, in terms of its cultural, political, and economic ramifications. On the theoretical and political level, by advancing critical rhetoric in conjunction with Foucault's notion of discourse and Laclau's notion of hegemony, this project advances its discussion of social change in contemporary society and advocates radical and plural democracy, by deconstructing techno-scientific capitalism, for it is the foundation of contemporary society. ;This project reveals that the history of the Internet shows that there was a gradual transformation of the Internet as a military battlefield to the cyberspace as an e-market. Within this history, a hegemonic alliance of the military-industrial complex played constitutive and ideological roles, within which the CERT/CC and the NIPC serve as academic and governmental nodes, while forming a discursive regime. The discursive regime articulates the truth of cyberspace, by declaring a war, by articulating the clear and present threat of computer viruses and hackers, in defense of safe, clean, and orderly cyberspace for e-commerce. In this discourse, computer hackers and viruses manifest the perfect negativity, constituting a notorious crime, which in turn constitutes a communitas of crisis, constructing the general victim. This hegemonic discourse manifests an extremely commodified version of Cartesian Idealism, Liberalism, and technological optimism, which lacks criticality and democratic participation. However, this articulation is an impossible project due to the undecidability of the subjectivity of hackers. By deconstructing the very ground of hegemonic articulation, this projects compels us to move beyond the contemporary hegemonic imagination of cyberspace, a religio-political battle field where corporate rules dominate, toward cyber-democracy, a space of openness and pluralism, and permanent negotiation between the universal and the particular

This study is promoted as a search for the Asian theological methodologies in the global context. It envisages that, through converging Asian people's socio-historical experience and their cultural religious heritages, Asian theology could contribute to expanding the horizon of the contemporary theological discourse. ;Christian theology in Asia is regarded as a representative phenomenon of the cultural encounter between East and West. This study takes up Koyama as an example of Asian theologians, because his personal career and works span both Eastern and Western worlds. His theological endeavor is designated as Asian-global theology and critically discussed in light of Asian contextual theology. ;A biographical research method is employed to illuminate his epistemological transition from a Westernized Japanese Christian to an Asian theologian. This study aims to prove the inner-connectedness among Asian theologies through investigating Asian roots of Koyama's theology, such as Asian ecumenical theology, interfaith dialogue in multi-religious situations, Asian resources, minjung theology, and the Japanese theological tradition. ;Christian dialogue with Buddhism is one of the most important issues of contemporary theology which voices response to both the global phenomenon and the locality of the Asian context. Reviewing Koyama's interpretation of Buddhism in accordance with John B. Cobb, Jr.'s method of dialogue, the difference between Eastern and Western perspectives regarding inter-faith dialogue is traced. ;Storytelling, contrasting, and inculturation for contextualization are suggested as Koyama's major theological methods. Koyama's hermeneutical principle of culture is categorized as 'Christ-beyond-culture' in light of Richard Niebuhr's typology of the relationship between Christ and culture. ;The whole scale of Koyama's thought is organized under the rubrics of theology and ethics. The Christocentric theology of the cross is the seedbed of Koyama's thought. He draws the universality and validity of the Christian message in the multireligious Asian context from the crucifixion. The particularity of his vision for global theology and ethics lies in the interpretation of the cross in term of self-denial. Finally, both contribution and weakness of the global vision of Koyama are examined, and the methodological vision of Asian contextual theology in the global context is suggested

Der Name Hannah Arendt bezeichnet eine ebenso radikale wie originale Erneuerung der Frage nach der „politischen Freiheit”. Um es gleich zu sagen: Freiheit ist mit dem Politischen identisch und gleichursprünglich. „Der Sinn von Politik ist Freiheit.” Das heißt, die genuin menschliche Freiheit in dieser Welt ist nur politisch vollziehbar, während die Freiheit der einzige Existenz- und Rechtfertigungsgrund der Politik ist. Hannah Arendts Überlegungen über das Kriterium politischer Freiheit konzentrieren sich vor allem auf drei Kategorien: „Identität”, „Pluralität” und „Spontaneität”

Contemporary production of machine-based images relay gradually on the autonomy of computing machines. Autonomous computing machines require the interaction with users like Human-Computer-Interaction technology and other interface technologies, especially computing machine-based images must also ask for viewer as an inter-actor, viewer’s participations. Whether this interaction of viewer-user is with machines or with images, if it is an interaction with each individual that have autonomy or self-organization, its interaction will be the interaction of each ecosystem. And the forms of this environmental interaction are an exchange of energy in natural ecosystem or aesthetic communication in art. Hence the aesthetics of future autonomous machine-based images need to focus on a number of mesh-works and the ways of interactions between the aesthetic individuals and their structures, i.e. aesthetic ecosystems.

Safe first-order formulas generalize the concept of a safe rule, which plays an important role in the design of answer set solvers. We show that any safe sentence is equivalent, in a certain sense, to the result of its grounding—to the variable-free sentence obtained from it by replacing all quantifiers with multiple conjunctions and disjunctions. It follows that a safe sentence and the result of its grounding have the same stable models, and that stable models of a safe sentence can be characterized by a formula of a simple syntactic form.

In his book Reveille for Radicals, Saul Alinsky writes, "Most people are eagerly groping for... some way in which they can bridge the gap between their morals and their practices". Today, many consumers try to bridge that gap by participating in what has been termed ethical consumption: the intentional purchase of products and services that the customer considers to be ethically produced. But what happens if consumer perceptions do not match reality? This study investigates one aspect of ethical consumption by examining consumer perceptions of the term cruelty free. Various definitions of this term exist, and companies can use the term when the product or its ingredients were indeed tested on animals. This exploratory study suggests that many consumers use this term as a moral heuristic in decision-making. As a result, the use of the term creates a halo effect that elevates brand perceptions. When provided with information suggesting the heuristic is flawed, consumers slightly alter perceptions but attitudes remain relatively strong. While some countries have implemented regulation regarding the use of the phrase in some contexts, results suggest that a broader policy is necessary to correct misperceptions and avoid misleading consumers.

Bentham is celebrated by modern animal liberation philosophers for his brief but impassioned defense of animals in the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Yet the details of Bentham's position are seldom discussed today. It is quite a complex position, comprising half a dozen arguments scattered across several texts. While Bentham claims that we have some moral obligations to animals, he also defends many traditional practices---including eating animals, making them work for us, even hunting them. ;This dissertation aims to explicate, and then evaluate, all of Bentham's writings on animals. In support of these goals, it also includes a large amount of background material---both on the historical context in which Bentham wrote, and on his broader ethical position. ;Chapter One describes the treatment of animals in Bentham's day, and how people's ideas about the status of animals were evolving. It also includes some biographical material on Bentham, including his personal fondness for animals. ;Chapter Two provides a different kind of background. It explains the main lines of Bentham's utilitarianism, focusing on his Greatest Happiness Principle. This principle, which enjoins us to maximize net pleasure, is the basis for Bentham's claim that animals should be protected from abuse. Chapter Three is a detailed exegesis of each of Bentham's writings about animals. The best-known text is the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, but there are three others. One is a manuscript called "Cruelty to Animals". Another is a letter he wrote to the editor of a newspaper . The third is the Traites de Legislation Civile et Penale , a French work that Bentham wrote with the assistance of an editor/translator. ;Finally, Chapters Four and Five evaluate the arguments described in Chapter Three. Chapter Four focuses on what he says about causing pain to animals, while Chapter Five is concerned with what he says about killing

The mechanistic model depicts scientific explanations as involving the discovery of multi-level, organized components that constitute a target phenomenon. Meanwhile, sensorimotor enactivism purports to offer a scientifically informed account of perceptual experience as a skill-laden interactive relationship, constitutively involving both perceiver and world, rather than as an agent-bound representation of the world. Insofar as sensorimotor enactivism identifies an empirically tractable phenomenon – skillful agent-world interaction – and mechanistic explanation establishes the subpersonal components of this phenomenon, the two approaches allow for a fruitful division of labor in investigating perceptual experience. On closer inspection, however, two challenges arise. First, the “representation challenge” arises because promising attempts to set out implementational details of our sensorimotor interaction with the world implicate cognitive representations, creating tension with sensorimotor enactivism’s nonrepresentational commitments. Second, the “reconstitution challenge” arises when mechanistic explanation not only uncovers the components of some established phenomenon but plays a role in “reconstituting” this phenomenon. This means that, through investigating mechanisms, perceptual experience may be reconceived such that its constituents are wholly organism-bound. We explore both challenges to the compatibility of mechanism and sensorimotor enactivism and examine possible solutions. The result is a clearer understanding of the tensions and opportunities for learning between the frameworks.

This article examines preparatory labor practices that South Korean farmers had to undertake to use chemical fertilizers in the 1960s. Preparatory labor, such as learning about and acquiring fertilizers, that came prior to the use of chemical fertilizer in the field was mundane and often invisible. However, it was this logistical and emotional labor that was essential for the maintenance of South Korea’s chemical fertilizer system. In the system, which was part of the government’s efforts to establish rural modernity through increased crop productivity, the state looked down on farmers as the subject of edification. Nevertheless, the farmers were crucial maintainers of the state-led agricultural reform, realizing the government’s vision of modernity. To reveal the hidden relationship between farmers, technology, and the state, this article extensively uses diaries written by two farmers – Yoon Heesoo from Daecheon Village and Shin Kwonsik from Daegok Village. By doing so, this article aims to shed light on the voices of farmers and their roles in the agricultural reform of 1960s South Korea and, more broadly, of the Green Revolution.

The mechanism underlying action potentials is routinely used to explicate the mechanistic model of explanation in the philosophy of science. However, characterisations of action potentials often fixate on neurons, mentioning plant cells in passing or ignoring them entirely. The plant sciences are also prone to neglecting non-neuronal action potentials and their role in plant biology. This oversight is significant because plant action potentials bear instructive similarities to those generated by neurons. This paper helps correct the imbalance in representations of action potentials by offering an overview of the mechanism for plant action potentials and highlighting their similarity to those in neurons. Furthermore, it affirms the role of plant action potentials in discovering the evolution and function of mechanisms of action potentials more broadly. We stress the potential of plants for producing generalisations about action potentials and the possible role of plants as experimental organisms.

We prove the preservation theorems for NATP; many of them extend the previously established preservation results for other model-theoretic tree properties. Using them, we also furnish proper examples of NATP theories which are simultaneously TP2 and SOP. First, we show that NATP is preserved by the parametrization and sum of the theories of Fraïssé limits of Fraïssé classes satisfying strong amalgamation property. Second, the preservation of NATP for two kinds of dense/co-dense expansions, i.e. the theories of lovely pairs and of H-structures for geometric theories, and dense/co-dense expansion on vector spaces is proved. Next, we prove the preservation of NATP for the generic predicate expansion and the pair of an algebraically closed field and its distinguished subfield; for the latter, not only NATP, but also the preservation of NTP1 and NTP2 is considered. Finally, we present some proper examples of NATP theories using the results proved in this paper, including the parametrization of DLO and the expansion of an algebraically closed field by adding a generic linear order. In particular, we show that the model companion of the theory of algebraically closed fields with circular orders (ACFO) is NATP.

We examine the effects of taxes on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Employing a tax reform in Korea that imposed a new tax on cash retention, we find that treated firms improved CSR performance after the tax reform was enacted. This result is driven by improvement in environmental and social performance. Moreover, the observed improvement is more pronounced in treated firms that face less severe financial constraints, are afforded fewer investment opportunities, feature large foreign ownership stakes, and employ stronger corporate governance mechanisms. The results suggest that tax increases lead to an increase in CSR investment and the magnitude of the increase depends on firm-level characteristics. As such, our results support the tax-strategic view of CSR in a country that has been a latecomer in incorporating CSR practices into business operations.

This paper presents a rereading of David Little and Sumner Twiss's Comparative Religious Ethics in the context of its initial reception and legacy within the field of religious ethics and argues that we can read it more charitably as a piece of pragmatism rather than as a work of formalism or semi-formalism. If one does not read Little and Twiss as committed positivists concerned with realizing a specific research program associated with the “twilight of logical empiricism,” then their theoretical and methodological recommendations, illustrated in their case studies, appear more pragmatic in nature and less excessively rigid. By rereading Comparative Religious Ethics in this light, we can see more clearly its relevance for the field today, particularly regarding the fundamental importance of the discursive activity of practical reasoning, or the game of giving and asking for reasons, in the study of religious ethics.

Members of the field of philosophy have, just as other people, political convictions or, as psychologists call them, ideologies. How are different ideologies distributed and perceived in the field? Using the familiar distinction between the political left and right, we surveyed an international sample of 794 subjects in philosophy. We found that survey participants clearly leaned left (75%), while right-leaning individuals (14%) and moderates (11%) were underrepresented. Moreover, and strikingly, across the political spectrum, from very left-leaning individuals and moderates to very right-leaning individuals, participants reported experiencing ideological hostility in the field, occasionally even from those from their own side of the political spectrum. Finally, while about half of the subjects believed that discrimination against left- or right-leaning individuals in the field is not justified, a significant minority displayed an explicit willingness to discriminate against colleagues with the opposite ideology. Our findings are both surprising and important, because a commitment to tolerance and equality is widespread in philosophy, and there is reason to think that ideological similarity, hostility, and discrimination undermine reliable belief formation in many areas of the discipline.

This article is to explore whether the achievement of moral character is the ultimate goal of higher education from a cross cultural approach. To discuss this study logically, three major research questions are addressed. First, what are the concepts of moral, ethics, and character? Second, what is the achievement of moral character from the Eastern and the Western perspectives? Third, what is the role of higher education for the achievement of moral character? To defend these research questions, the author uses a descriptive content analysis method, with a cross cultural approach. In order to explore the questions, the researcher in this study sets several limitations. Moral character is generally limited to the ancient Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christianity as well as to the classical Chinese thought and religion. Specifically, the study is mainly focused on not only Plato's "Republic" and Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics," but Confucius' "Analects" and Mencius' "Scripture (The Works of Mengzi)." Additionally, this paper also adjusts the lenses on moral theories, especially moral character, cardinal virtues, social harmony, and the common good. Lastly, higher education is focused on the lenses of Canada and South Korea. The significance of this study is to provide basic theories and valuable resources about moral and character education for educational theorists and practitioners, finding the theories of moral and ethics in the Eastern and the Western thoughts and religions.

Ever since Plato’s ‘Republic’ was written over two thousand years ago, one of the main concerns of social philosophy and later empirical social science was to understand the moral nature of human beings. The faculty to think and act in terms of overarching moral values is as much a defining hallmark of our species as is our intelligence, so _homo moralis_ is no less an appropriate term to describe humans as _homo sapiens_. This volume makes a case for the pivotal role of social psychology as the core discipline for studying morality. The book is divided into four parts. First, the role of social psychological processes in moral values and judgments is discussed, followed by an analysis of the role of morality in interpersonal processes. The sometimes paradoxical, ironic effects of moral beliefs are described next, and in the final section the role of morality in collective and group behavior is considered. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in the social and behavioral sciences concerned with moral behavior, as well as professionals and practitioners in clinical, counseling, organizational, marketing and educational psychology where issues of ethics and morality are of importance.