Between the face and the voice: Bakhtin meets Levinas

The essay draws on a little-known fragment from M.M. Bakhtin’s Draft Exercise Notebooks of 1943 to highlight both the affinities and the divergences of the respective philosophical projects of Bakhtin and Emmanuel Levinas. The first part of the discussion follows their parallel itineraries through several points of convergence, from a sense of profound philosophical disenchantment to a conception of the ethical subject as living on borderlines, facing the other, irremediably vulnerable and infinitely responsible. The second part focuses on the “dialogic impasse” and its attempted resolution through gestures of triangulation, evidenced in Levinas’s “third” and Bakhtin’s “superaddresee.” The third part of the discussion, beginning with Bakhtin’s and Levinas’s different readings of Dostoevsky, focuses on the ultimate divergence of their philosophical positions, and suggests that Bakhtin’s discursive conception of subjectivity may point the direction towards a more viable thinking of a post-metaphysical ethics.

A Survey of Management Educators’ Perceptions of Unethical Faculty Behavior

To help academic associations in management develop, refine, and implement a code of ethics, we conducted a survey of management educators’ perception of the ethicality of 142 specific behaviors in teaching, research, and service. The results of the survey could be used to inform ethics committees of these associations regarding the level of acceptability of such conduct. The potential value of our study for the Academy of Management or similar management associations lie in our (1) systematically involving the members in building support for the code of ethics, (2) assessing members’ ethical judgments on both cross-sectional and longitudinal bases so as to identify areas needing particular attention in ethical training, (3) providing an extensive list of specific examples of questionable and potentially unethical behaviors so as to make it easier to implement the code, and (4) providing a template survey document for potential use in involving more stakeholder groups in the development of codes of ethics.

Functional hemispheric differences for the categorization of global and local information in naturalistic stimuli

Up to now functional hemispheric asymmetries for global/local processing have mainly been investigated with hierarchical letters as stimuli. In the present study, three experiments were conducted to examine whether corresponding visual-field (VF) effects can also be obtained with more naturalistic stimuli. To this end, images of animals with a pattern placed on their body were displayed as stimuli. The task for the global level and for the local level was to categorize the animals and the patterns, respectively. As a result, VF-effects were also found for these stimuli and tasks. It is concluded that the hemispheric differences observed for hierarchical letters also hold for naturalistic stimuli.     

Building a Better WarBot: Ethical Issues in the Design of Unmanned Systems for Military Applications

Unmanned systems in military applications will often play a role in determining the success or failure of combat missions and thus in determining who lives and dies in times of war. Designers of UMS must therefore consider ethical, as well as operational, requirements and limits when developing UMS. I group the ethical issues involved in UMS design under two broad headings, Building Safe Systems and Designing for the Law of Armed Conflict, and identify and discuss a number of issues under each of these headings. As well as identifying issues, I offer some analysis of their implications and how they might be addressed.

我国伦理委员会建设和发展的若干思考

伦理委员会进入我国近二十年,发展的速度非常快,也逐渐向国际接轨。简述了我国伦理委员会的发展趋势;重点列举了在实际内部工作中以及在访问其他省市伦理委员会时遇到的一些问题,提出了相关的建议;最后在宏观层面上阐述几个热点话题,提出了更高层面发展伦理委员会的建议。     

Predictors of perceived susceptibility to sport-related injury

Little is known about factors associated with perceptions of susceptibility to sport-related injuries. The purpose of the present study was to examine previous experiences with injury and personality factors as predictors of rugby players’ perceived susceptibility to injury. In line with an individual-based approach, it was hypothesized that neuroticism and global self-esteem would be related to perceived susceptibility to sport injuries over and above previous experiences with injuries. Rugby players (N = 235) were asked to report about previous experiences with injury and were administered measures of neuroticism and global self-esteem. Multiple regression analysis revealed that previous experiences with injury were positively related to perceived susceptibility to sport-related injuries. Analyses also supported that neuroticism and global self-esteem are of crucial importance in colouring perceptions of susceptibility to sport-related injury, while statistically controlling for previous injuries. Of particular interest, neuroticism predicted perceived susceptibility, over and above global self-esteem and previous experiences with injury. This study is the first to focus on determinants of perceived susceptibility to sport-related injury and supports the potential role of personality factors and individual dispositions in shaping perceived susceptibility to health problems.     

Lateralized cognition: asymmetrical and complementary strategies of pigeons during discrimination of the "human concept"

This study was aimed at revealing which cognitive processes are lateralized in visual categorizations of "humans" by pigeons. To this end, pigeons were trained to categorize pictures of humans and then tested binocularly or monocularly (left or right eye) on the learned categorization and for transfer to novel exemplars (Experiment 1). Subsequent tests examined whether they relied on memorized features or on a conceptual strategy, using stimuli composed of new combinations of familiar and novel humans and backgrounds (Experiment 2), whether the hemispheres processed global or local information, using pictures with different levels of scrambling (Experiment 3), and whether they attended to configuration, using distorted human figures (Experiment 4). The results suggest that the left hemisphere employs a category strategy and concentrates on local features, while the right hemisphere uses an exemplar strategy and relies on configuration. These cognitive dichotomies of the cerebral hemispheres are largely shared by humans, suggesting that lateralized cognitive systems already defined the neural architecture of the common ancestor of birds and mammals.     

Ethics,Alterity, and Psychotherapy: A Levinasian Perspective

Current psychologies of religion reflect the modernist context in which they are situated. Religion is reduced to what is researchable, generalizable, individual and “thin.” This essay suggests that a psychology of religion which takes seriously the implications of Emmanuel Levinas’s emphasis on ethics and the alterity of the Other would result in a different model of psychotherapy. Levinas’s view of the Other as the trace of the transcendent radically changes our understanding of the client within the therapeutic relationship. Levinas begins with ethics and so healing would be, by implication, an ethical enterprise. In a highly secularized, individualized, objectivized culture, a therapy which recognizes the sacred, which models how to view the Other as transcendent, and which does not presume to know, is a gift to the client.