Career transitions and their causes: A country‐comparative perspective

This empirical paper investigates how individuals conceptualize causes of career transitions, focusing on the three European countries of Austria, Serbia, and Spain in comparison to the USA and China. Collectively, these countries represent four separate cultural regions according to Schwartz. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with members of three occupational groups: business people, nurses, and blue‐collar workers. Analysis of the data generates greater insight about the existence of both region‐specific patterns as well as potentially universalistic tendencies regarding perceived causes of career transitions. Perceptions of internal (to the person) drivers of career transitions as activating forces are evident in all five countries. The overall results support contemporary notions of occupational careers that are highly individualized, a characterization strongly emphasized in the current career literature. In the European culture clusters, causes of career transitions are attributed internally and externally. China, representing the Confucian cultural region, stresses external causes for career transitions. By contrast, in the USA only internal attributions of causes are reported.     

Physical Action Without Interaction

In “Action without interaction” (2005) I showed that one might act on a physical system (there, a particle), without interacting with it, by the procedure of making it disappear. This paper presents further extensions and a critique of that result. These extensions show why physical actions without interaction are possible, while underscoring the philosophical fertility of a characteristic approach to the actual infinite inaugurated by Benardete.

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Male risk-taking as a context-sensitive signaling device

Evolutionary theorists have suggested that sex differences in risk-taking are due ultimately to greater intrasexual competition among men (compared with women) over access to mating opportunities. The current work provides one of the first direct tests of the hypothesis that risk-taking serves self-presentational functions associated with mating. Results of an experimental study indicated a strong positive relationship between sexual arousal and risk-taking, but only in men exposed to a romantically available female confederate who purportedly would view their risk-taking performance. Findings suggest that risk-taking can serve as a signaling device in the context of mating, that this function is sex-specific, and that it is highly sensitive both to the situational context and to the current psychological state of the risk-taker. This research highlights the utility of an evolutionary approach in understanding the proximate social psychological determinants of risky decision-making.     

Redeeming, Ruling, and Reaping: British Missionary Societies, the East India Company, and the India-to-China Opium Trade

At the end of the 19th century, British missionaries campaigned to abolish the India-to-China opium trade, whose profits were crucial for British ambitions in Asia. This challenge by the missionaries had been slow to emerge, however, and focusing only on that well-known opposition masks the preceding half-century of accommodations and compromises with the opium traffic, both on the production end (Bengal) and on the receiving end (in Macau and Canton). Our research addresses the subjective calculus that was at work for the missionaries and asks how their reading of that calculus affected their movement across the spectrum from unconcern to outrage about opium. At the core of their enterprise from beginning to end was their unwavering commitment to the evangelical "Great Commission," which spelled out the obligation to bring the Christian gospel to unsaved multitudes around the world. We argue that they consistently embraced whatever was pragmatically necessary to advance that goal and resisted whatever threatened to block movement toward it. Beneath changeability on the surface, a thread of value-rational coherence ran through a century of calculated and strategic missionary activity. The same thread is likely to be in evidence in other theaters of global evangelism where missionaries were (are) involved in secular controversies.     

Tales of two subjects: Narratives of career counseling

Narratives, often quite complex, are at the core of subjective careers. Tools and methodology have been adapted from narratology to analyze career stories thoroughly. This article presents four career counselors’ narratives of client that have been analyzed with Greimas’ actantial model and semiotic square. This methodology proves to be of value as it brings forth the main issues with which the client and the counselor are dealing. Furthermore, it gives the counselor a means to analyze and reflect on counseling practice.     

Manifest Invalidity: Neil Tennant's New Argument for Intuitionism

In Chapter 7 of The Taming of the True, Neil Tennant provides a new argument from Michael Dummett's ``manifestation requirement' to the incorrectness of classical logic and the correctness of intuitionistic logic. I show that Tennant's new argument is only valid if one interprets crucial existence claims occurring in the proof in the manner of intuitionists. If one interprets the existence claims as a classical logician would, then one can accept Tennant's premises while rejecting his conclusion of logical revision. Thus, Tennant has provided no evidence that should convince anyone who is not already an intuitionist. Since his proof is a proof for the correctness of intuitionism, it begs the question.     

Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: The Use and Abuse of Examples

The philosophical debate over the compatibility between causaldeterminism and moral responsibility relies heavily on ourreactions to examples. Although we believe that there is noalternative to this methodology in this area of philosophy, someexamples that feature prominently in the literature are positivelymisleading. In this vein, we criticize the use that incompatibilistsmake of the phenomenon of ``brainwashing,' as well as the Frankfurt-styleexamples favored by compatibilists. We provide an instance of thekind of thought experiment that is needed to genuinely test thehypothesis that moral accountability and causal determinism arecompatible.     

Philosophy as Anti-Religion in the Work of Alain Badiou

The Heideggerian rupture in the history of philosophy in the name of a phenomenological and poetic ontology has provided an opening which many of the key figures in twentieth century continental thought have exploited. However, this opening was marked by Heidegger himself as an ambiguous one, insofar as metaphysics was perhaps integrally ‘onto-theology,’ that is, ultimately continuous with the world-historical capture of the thought of being. This piece argues that the philosophy of Alain Badiou, which departs from the recognition that Heidegger is the ‘last universally recognised philosopher’, provides the means for a radical reconsideration of the philosophy-theology relationship in its specifically Heideggerian form, involving as it does further questions of science and technology, the status of the poem, and the nature of ontological thought as such. We argue that, through the deployment of mathematics as ontology, the Gordian knot of onto-theology and its legion of consequences can be cut, and a new assemblage of many of the key Heideggerian motifs can be put into play: the poem, history, and philosophy itself.

R34D1NG W0RD5 W1TH NUMB3R5

Letter identities and number identities are usually thought to imply different cortical mechanisms. Specifically, the left fusiform gyrus responds more to letters than to digits (T. A. Polk et al., 2002). However, a widely circulated statement on the internet illustrates that it is possible to use numbers (leet digits) as parts of words, 4ND TH3 R35ULT1NG S3NT3NC3 C4N B3 R34D W1TH0UT GR34T 3FF0RT. Two masked priming lexical decision experiments were conducted to determine whether leet digits produce (automatic) lexical activation. Results showed that words are identified substantially faster when they are preceded by a masked leet word (M4T3R14L-MATERIAL) than when they are preceded by a control condition with other letters or digits. In addition, there was only a negligible advantage of the identity condition over the related leet condition. This leet-priming effect is not specific to numbers: A prime in which leet digits are replaced by letter-like symbols (M(Delta symbol)T(euro symbol)R!(Delta symbol)L - MATERIAL) facilitates word processing to the same degree as an identity prime. Therefore, the cognitive system regularizes the shape of the leet digits and letter-like symbols embedded in words with very little cost.