For centuries, humanists have celebrated and cherished the limitless potential of humankind and its irrepressible spirit. For its efforts to develop rational solutions to human problems rather than invoking supernatural intervention, humanism has been rewarded with a rich and distinguished heritage whose contributors include many of the brightest minds of intellectual history. Advocating reason, critical intelligence, free and objective inquiry, democratic institutions, and moral values based on human experience, humanism stands in steadfast opposition to the moral, political, and social oppression (...) perpetrated by all who would have us swear unquestioned allegiance to authoritarian power, be it temporal or divine. But if humanism is to remain fresh and vibrant, alert and ever vigilant, it must continuously assess and evaluate its goals in light of new experience. In The Question of Humanism, 23 contributors investigate the meaning of humanism today, its range of perspectives, and how humanists can deal with the challenges of contemporary life and those it will face as the new century approaches. This absorbing collection of original essays examines the abundant variety of historical and contemporary humanist philosophies, with special emphasis on the work of Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault. Focusing on the need for an awareness of humanist tradition, these essays offer blunt, progressive self-appraisals to illustrate how humanism will continue to grow as a vital and compelling intellectual force. Featured are essays by Cecil Abrahams, Zygmunt Adamczewski, Samuel Ajzenstat, Martin Andic, Allan Booth, Richard Brown, Michael Cardy, Kenneth Dorter, Richard Francis, David Goicoechea, Danny Goldstick, Calvin Hayes, Marsha Hewitt, Monica Hornyansky, Paul Kurtz, James Lawler, John Luik, Robert McLaughlin, Graeme Nicholson, Zaid Orudjev, Robert Perkins, Charles Scott, and Edward A. Synan. The challenges of the past have served to strengthen humanists' resolve. Humanism, in all of its variations, is now ready for a new era. (shrink)

Marketers must first perceive ethics and social responsibility to be important before their behaviors are likely to become more ethical and reflect greater social responsibility. However, little research has been conducted concerning marketers' perceptions regarding the importance of ethics and social responsibility as components of business decisions. The purpose of this study is to develop a reliable and valid scale for measuring marketers' perceptions regarding the importance of ethics and social responsibility. The authors develop an instrument for the measurement of (...) the perceived role of ethics and social responsibility (PRESOR). Evidence that the scale is valid is presented through the assessment of scale reliability, as well as content and predictive validity. Finally, future research needs and the value of this construct to marketing are discussed. (shrink)

Business ethics and leadership play an increasingly important role for contemporary organizations as employers and employees search for new ways to cope with ongoing changes in organizational environments. Research attention to date has focused upon how to improve process and structural configurations, while there has been scant attention devoted to an examination of the ethical and leadership perspective. This article breaks new ground by exploring the applicability of the Rule of St. Benedict (RSB) to modern employment relationships. A significant proportion (...) of the RSB is directly relevant for today's leaders, as it contains crucial lessons dealing with leadership issues such as ethics, cultivating a consultative climate, encouraging the virtues of humility, obedience ("servant" leadership), justice, discretion, prudence, discernment, and personnel-related issues such as discipline and termination. (shrink)

Two important debates have characterized mainstream epistemology in recent years. The first is the debate between foundationalists and anti-foundationalists. The second is the debate over the details of a naturalized epistemology. Both debates have meant that traditional concepts of rationality and justification are now understood in a new light. Both debates have helped focus attention on the future direction of epistemology, its goals and its limitations.

European philosophy from the late seventeenth century through most of the eighteenth is broadly conceived as the "Enlightenment," a period of empricist reaction to the great seventeeth century Rationalists. This volume begins with Herbert of Cherbury and the Cambridge Platonists and with Newton and the early English Enlightenment. Locke is a key figure, as a result of his importance both in the development of British and Irish philosophy and because of his seminal influence in the Enlightenment as a whole. British (...) Philosophy and the Age of the Enlightenment includes discussion of the Scott Enlightenment and its influence on the German Aufklaring , and consequently on Kant. The French Enlightenment, which in turn affected the late radical Enlightenment, especially Bentham, is also considered here. This survey brings together clear, authorative chapters from leading experts and provides a scholarly introduction to this period in the history of philosophy. It includes a glossary of technical terms and a chronological table of important political, philosophical, scientific and other cultural events. (shrink)

The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy examines the debate that began as modern science separated itself from natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book specifically explores the two dominant approaches to causation as a metaphysical problem and as a scientific problem. As philosophy and science turned from the ideas of Aristotle that dominated western thought throughout the renaissance, one of the most pressing intellectual problems was how to replace Aristotelian science with its doctine of the four causes. (...) This is the first book to look at the historical discussion as a debate that surrounds certain themes and ideas, and combines classical discussions of causation with recent thinking on the topic. (shrink)

The first British New Left formed in response to a crisis in international and British socialism. Although never a formal movement, its associated members set themselves the tasks of, first, confronting the rapid change transforming social life at both global and national scales, and second, articulating a new political culture able to accommodate the good and resist the bad of it. As part of this process, a series of intense debates took place on the role of the socialist intellectual in (...) stimulating such a culture. In this article, I consider three of the NL’s main protagonists, EP Thompson, Stuart Hall, and Raphael Samuel, and the different positions they took on this issue. I argue here that while all made important contributions to the argument, Samuel’s practice as an intellectual, currently the least well known of the three, is worth closer attention for its relevance to contemporary educational debates. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The First British New Left formed around two journals, The New Reasoner edited by E.P.Thompson and John Saville, and the Universities and Left Review edited by Stuart Hall, Gabriel Pearson, Raphael Samuel and Charles Taylor. Both sought a ‘new’ socialism which, based on a loose concept of socialist humanism, restored the role of the individual and revitalised a popular left movement. Early commentators critiqued its lack of robust theory and organisational structure. More recently, others have proposed that, particularly amongst (...) the ULR cohort, with this ‘new’ socialism emerged a ‘new’ activist politics. Building on this, I examine the ULR’s activism as a performative politics which stressed active participation over theory and dissolved any distinction between means and ends. Whilst Thompson and Hall have tended to be considered the main protagonists in shaping this, I argue that it was Samuel, an experienced organiser, who was most responsible for shaping their early agenda. His role has been neglected because he wrote no ‘position piece’ but, appropriately for an activist politics, expressed his ideas through his actions. ‘Reading’ his performances, then, illuminates more fully both the scope and the limits of this activist politics. (shrink)

Introducing the practices of Eastern Hinduism, Shintoism, Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, a lavishly illustrated volume is complemented by full-color reproductions of sacred art, architecture, symbols, landscapes, ceremonies, and festivals.

What one is acquainted with has always been important for the rejection or acceptance of any ontological description. Yet the relevance of acquaintance to ontology has not always been clearly stated. Some philosophers have held that they were acquainted with the simple entities of ontological analysis. They also held that if they were not acquainted with such entities, their analysis would be inadequately supported. In this paper I argue that acquaintance with ontological simples cannot be a reason for accepting or (...) rejecting any ontological analysis. At the same time, I examine what I believe to be the relevance of acquaintance to ontological description. (shrink)

In the last years, a series of automated self-representational social media sites have emerged that shed light on the information ethics associated with participation in Web 2.0. Sites like Zoominfo.com, Pipl.com, 123People.com and Yasni.com not only continually mine and aggregate personal information and biographic data from the web and beyond to automatically represent the lives of people, but they also engage algorithmic networking logics to represent connections between them; capturing not only who people are, but whom they are connected to. (...) Indeed, these processes of 'auto-biography' are 'secret' ones that for the most part escape the user's attention. This article explores how these sites of auto-biography reveal the complexities of the political economy of Web 2.0, as well as implicate an ethics of exposure concerning how these processes at once participate in the erosion of privacy, and at the same time, in the reinforcement of commodification and surveillance regimes. (shrink)

Neodevelopmental patent regimes aim to facilitate local actors’ access to knowledge and also encourage incremental innovations. The case of pharmaceutical patent examination in Brazil illustrates political contradictions between these objectives. Brazil’s patent law includes the Ministry of Health in the examination of pharmaceutical patent applications. Though widely celebrated as a health-oriented policy, the Brazilian experience has become fraught with tensions and subject to decreasing levels of both stability and enforcement. I show how one pillar of the neodevelopmental regime, the array (...) of initiatives to encourage incremental innovations, has fostered the acquisition of innovative capabilities in the Brazilian pharmaceutical sector, and how these new capabilities have altered actors’ policy preferences and thus contributed to the erosion of the coalition in support of the other pillar of the neodevelopmental regime, the health-oriented approach to examining pharmaceutical patents. The analysis of capability-derived preference formation points to an endogenous process of coalitional change. (shrink)

Property transaction reports are a hybrid genre that combines the characteristics of news reports and advertisements. However, they are different from the traditional hybridity of advertorials, which carry a full-blown label of ‘advertisement’ or ‘promotional material’ and may repeat the name of a product or service many times. Property transaction reports, as an emerging genre in Hong Kong property magazines, combine the voices of property agencies and journalists in a very subtle and sophisticated manner, which is partly made possible by (...) the ambiguous local citing framework. Although the genre is a more successful mix of voices than advertorials, this is not the result of a conscious attempt to mix two genres. Indeed, it is the result of how two ‘communities of practice’ accommodate their practices to accomplish their tasks. This highlights the importance of ‘practice’ in understanding the complex issue of intertextuality. (shrink)

This text demonstrates that symbolic representation and related problem-solving methods offer significant opportunities to clarify and articulate concepts of design.

Both the Athenian wrestler and the Florentine clerk, it turns out, demonstrate a persistent concern with the moral problematic--that is, the tendency of human beings to do what they want to do at the cost of that which they ought to do. Both thinkers see man's vulnerability to fortune as a symptom of this tendency, and they agree as to its ultimate cause: the inability of men to accurately weigh that which is present here and now against that which is (...) far removed in time and space. Machiavelli does not part company with Plato until it is time to suggest a remedy. Here he indeed accomplishes a radical innovation--perhaps as radical as was suggested above. Whereas Plato resolves the problematic by founding the soul on that which is, and which is better than and prior to man, Machiavelli supposes that man, starting from scratch, can construct his own foundations. Nonetheless, the Florentine walks a long way with the Athenian before he takes his leave; it may be best, then, to interpret Machiavelli's writing less as a monologue than as a dialogue, the dramatis personae of which include himself and Plato. (shrink)

This is a study of how ambiguous identities are interactionally managed in network marketing discourse. Network marketing, as an enterprise `using' friendship to promote products, has been notorious for its exploitative use of interpersonal meaning. In this study, the interactions between supervisors and subordinates in network marketing firms have been studied and their relationship was found to be ambiguous and conflicting. On the one hand, they are `friends' because of the strong emphasis on rapport and harmony in the philosophy of (...) network marketing; on the other hand, the supervisors have to regulate their downlines, which unfortunately lacks the legitimacy found in traditional business firms, as neither of them is an employee of their company. These ambiguous and conflicting identities motivate the participants to mobilize pertinent identities so as to manage conflicts, justify themselves and resume control. Previous research has shown that identities are both interactionally and retrospectively constructed. This study adds to our understanding that identities are not only products of interactions but that they are also interactional resources, which can be mobilized by participants to achieve their goals, although the identity mobilization does not always result in harmony owing to the inherent incompatiblity of the identities invoked. Implications for identity formation in contemporary firms are also drawn. (shrink)