Cet article vise à éclairer le concept d’« essence générique » (Gattungswesen) contenu dans les Manuscrits de 1844 de Karl Marx. Procédant d’abord à une critique du commentaire de Michel Henry à ce sujet, nous reconstruisons ensuite la filiation de ce concept de Ludwig Feuerbach à Marx en passant par Moses Hess. Nous insistons ainsi sur le sens spécifique et original qu’il revêt chez Marx, soit comme capacité inventive reconnue à l’activité humaine ou encore comme détermination de nouveaux objets d’usage (...) auxquels correspondent toujours de nouvelles pratiques de production et de consommation. (shrink)

The role of followers in financial statement fraud has not been widely examined, even though these frauds typically involve collusion between followers and destructive leaders. In a study with 140 MBA students in the role of followers, we examined whether two follower personality traits were associated with behavioral intentions to comply with the demands of an unethical chief executive officer to be complicit in committing financial statement fraud. These personality traits are self-sacrificing self-enhancement, a form of maladaptive narcissism characterized by (...) seemingly altruistic behaviors that are actually intended to boost self-esteem and proactivity, a trait characterized by behaviors reflecting efforts to positively change one’s environment. As predicted, follower SSSE was positively associated with follower behavioral intentions to comply with CEO pressure to commit fraud, while follower proactivity was negatively associated with fraud compliance intentions. Also as predicted, follower SSSE interacted with follower proactivity, such that followers high in SSSE and high in proactivity reported greater intentions to resist pressure from the unethical CEO to commit fraud compared to low-SSSE followers. Implications for future research and corporate governance are discussed. (shrink)

Most accounts of why physicians have a duty to treat patients during a pandemic look to the special ethical standards of the medical profession. An adequate account must be deeper and broader: it must set the professional duty alongside other individual commitments and broader social values.

Management plays an important role in reinforcing ethics in organizations. To support this aim, managers must use incentive and goal programs in ethical ways. This study examines experimentally the potential ethical costs associated with incentive-driven and goal-induced employee behavior from a managerial perspective. In a quasi-experimental setting, 243 MBA students with significant professional work experience evaluated a hypothetical employee’s ethical behavior under incentive pay systems modeled on a business case. In the role of the employee’s manager, participants evaluated the ethicality (...) of the employee’s incentive-driven and goal-induced ethical/unethical behavior and the outcomes of behavior, with consequences that were either favorable or unfavorable to the organization. The results indicated that participants discounted the ethical considerations of incentive-driven and goal-induced behavior when consequences were favorable to the organization. Participants’ morals and outcome orientations were also significantly related to their ethical judgments and intentions to intervene. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

The process by which auditors consider fraud risk in assessing management’s motivation and character remains under-addressed. This is problematic given the rising tide of narcissism, as well as recent research documenting that both self- and other-perceptions of narcissism influence an array of judgments. While a skeptical attitude is fundamental to the auditor’s gatekeeper role, it remains unclear how auditors form and act on perceptions of client narcissism. With a large sample of experienced accountants as participants, we leverage insights from current (...) narcissism and perceiver effects research to predict (and find) that auditor skepticism responds in a divergent manner to both the auditor’s (1) own antagonistic versus agentic narcissism and (2) perceptions of the client’s antagonistic and agentic narcissism. We discuss the observed opposing behavioral externalities related to these distinct forms of grandiose narcissism, particularly in dynamic interactions between clients and auditors. (shrink)

There is much to admire in this book. It is written in a pleasingly straightforward style, and offers insight on a wide range of important issues.

A very clear and powerfully argued defence of a most important and surprisingly neglected view."--Derek Parfit, All Souls College, Oxford. "If Dr. Olson is right, we are living animals and what goes on in our minds is wholly irrelevant to questions about our persistence through time....[Should] transform philosophical thinking about personal identity."--Peter van Inwagen, University of Notre Dame.

Management plays an important role in reinforcing ethics in organizations. To support this aim, managers must use incentive and goal programs in ethical ways. This study examines experimentally the potential ethical costs associated with incentive-driven and goal-induced employee behavior from a managerial perspective. In a quasi-experimental setting, 243 MBA students with significant professional work experience evaluated a hypothetical employee’s ethical behavior under incentive pay systems modeled on a business case. In the role of the employee’s manager, participants evaluated the ethicality (...) of the employee’s incentive-driven and goal-induced ethical/unethical behavior and the outcomes of behavior, with consequences that were either favorable or unfavorable to the organization. The results indicated that participants discounted the ethical considerations of incentive-driven and goal-induced behavior when consequences were favorable to the organization. Participants’ morals and outcome orientations were also significantly related to their ethical judgments and intentions to intervene. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

Most philosophers writing about personal identity in recent years claim that what it takes for us to persist through time is a matter of psychology. In this groundbreaking new book, Eric Olson argues that such approaches face daunting problems, and he defends in their place a radically non-psychological account of personal identity. He defines human beings as biological organisms, and claims that no psychological relation is either sufficient or necessary for an organism to persist. Olson rejects several (...) famous thought-experiments dealing with personal identity. He argues, instead, that one could survive the destruction of all of one's psychological contents and capabilities as long as the human organism remains alive--as long as its vital functions, such as breathing, circulation, and metabolism, continue. (shrink)

The paradox of increase in an ancient argument purporting to show that nothing can grow by acquiring new parts. If it is sound, similar reasoning leads to the more general conclusion that nothing can ever change its parts. After discussing the implicationsof this principle, the paper lays out the paradox in a way that reveals the premises that figure in it. It emerges that the paradox has no easy solution, and can be resisted only by taking on one of five (...) serious metaphysical commitments. (shrink)

This paper is about the neglected question of what sort of things we are metaphysically speaking. It is different from the mind-body problem and from familiar questions of personal identity. After explaining what the question means and how it differs from others, the paper tries to show how difficult it is to give a satisfying answer.

From the time of Locke, discussions of personal identity have often ignored the question of our basic metaphysical nature: whether we human people are biological organisms, spatial or temporal parts of organisms, bundles of perceptions, or what have you. The result of this neglect has been centuries of wild proposals and clashing intuitions. What Are We? is the first general study of this important question. It beings by explaining what the question means and how it differs from others, such as (...) questions of personal identity and the mind-body problem. It then examines in some depth the main possible accounts of our metaphysical nature, detailing both their theoretical virtues and the often grave difficulties they face. The book does not endorse any particular account of what we are, but argues that the matter turns on more general issues in the ontology of material things. If composition is universal--if any material things whatever make up something bigger--then we are temporal parts of organisms. If things never compose anything bigger, so that there are only mereological simples, then we too are simples--perhaps the immaterial substances of Descartes--or else we do not exist at all (a view Olson takes very seriously). The intermediate view that some things compose bigger things and others do not leads almost inevitably to the conclusion that we are organisms. So we can discover what we are by working out when composition occurs. (shrink)

The Standard View of personal identity says that someone who exists now can exist at another time only if there is continuity of her mental contents or capacities. But no person is psychologically continuous with a fetus, for a fetus, at least early in its career, has no mental features at all. So the Standard View entails that no person was ever a fetus--contrary to the popular assumption that an unthinking fetus is a potential person. It is also mysterious what (...) does ordinarily happen to a human fetus, if it does not come to be a person. Although an extremely complex variant of the Standard View may allow one to persist without psychological continuity before one becomes a person but not afterwards, a far simpler solution is to accept a radically non-psychological account of our identity. (shrink)

The Standard View of personal identity says that someone who exists now can exist at another time only if there is continuity of her mental contents or capacities. But no person is psychologically continuous with a fetus, for a fetus, at least early in its career. has no mental features at all. So the Standard View entails that no person was ever a fetus---contrary to the popular assumption that an unthinking fetus is a potential person. It is also mysterious what (...) does ordinarily happen to a human fetus, if it does not come to be a person. Although an extremely complex variant of the Standard View may allow one to persist without psychological continuity before one becomes a person but not afterwards, a far simpler solution is to accept a radically non-psychological account of our identity. (shrink)

[First paragraph] For a long time philosophers thought material objects were unproblematic. Or nearly so. There may have been a problem about what a material object is: a substance, a bundle of tropes, a compound of substratum and universals, a collection of sense-data, or what have you. But once that was settled there were supposed to be no further metaphysical problems about material objects. This illusion has now largely been dispelled. No one can get a Ph.D. in philosophy nowadays without (...) encountering the puzzles of the ship of Theseus, the statue and the lump, the cat and its tail complement', amoebic fission, and others. These problems are especially pressing on the assumption that we ourselves are material objects. (shrink)

The extended-mind thesis says that mental states can extend beyond one’s skin. Clark and Chalmers infer from this that the subjects of such states also extend beyond their skin: the extended-self thesis. The paper asks what exactly the extended-self thesis says, whether it really does follow from the extended-mind thesis, and what it would mean if it were true. It concludes that the extended-self thesis is unattractive, and does not follow from the extended mind unless thinking beings are literally bundles (...) of mental states. (shrink)

Many philosophers say that time involves a kind of passage that distinguishes it from space. A traditional objection is that this passage would have to occur at some rate, yet we cannot say what the rate would be. The paper argues that the real problem with time’s passage is different: time would have to pass at one second per second, yet this is not a rate of change. This appears to refute decisively not only the view that time passes, but (...) any tensed theory of time. (shrink)

Constitutionalism says that qualitatively different objects can be made of the same matter at once. Critics claim that we should expect such objects to be qualitatively indistinguishable. E.J. Lowe thinks this complaint is based on the false assumption that differences in the way things are at a time must always be grounded in how things are at that time, and that we can answer it by pointing out that different kinds of coinciding objects are subject to different composition principles. I (...) argue that he is mistaken on both counts. (shrink)

Conjoined twinning is said to show that the number of human people—the number of us—can differ from the number of human organisms, and hence that we are not organisms. The paper shows that these arguments either assume the point at issue, rely on dubious and undefended assumptions, or add nothing to more familiar arguments for the same conclusion.

In this essay I explore the idea that the solution to some important problems of personal identity lies in the philosophy of language: more precisely in the nature of first-person reference. I will argue that the “linguistic solution” is at best partly successful.

What is a temporal part? Most accounts explain it in terms of timeless parthood: a thing's having a part without temporal qualification. Some find this hard to understand, and thus find the view that persisting things have temporal parts--fourdimensionalism--unintelligible. T. Sider offers to help by defining temporal parthood in terms of a thing's having a part at a time. I argue that no such account can capture the notion of a temporal part that figures in orthodox four-dimensionalism: temporal parts must (...) be timeless parts. This enables us to state four-dimensionalism more clearly. (shrink)

Was sind wir? Wie immer man sich zu dieser Frage stellt, eines scheint offenkundig: Wir sind Tiere, genauer gesagt: menschliche Tiere, Mitglieder der Art Homo sapiens. Dabei mag es überraschen, daß viele Philosophen diese vermeintlich banale Tatsache abstreiten. Plato, Augustinus, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant und Hegel, um nur einige herausragende zu nennen, waren alle der Meinung, wir seien keine Tiere. Es mag zwar sein, daß unsere Körper Tiere sind. Doch sind wir nicht mit unseren Körpern gleichzusetzen. Wir sind etwas (...) anderes als Tiere. Kaum anderer Meinung sind Denker nicht-westlicher Traditionen. Und rund neun von zehn Philosophen, die heutzutage über Probleme der personalen Identität nachdenken, vertreten Ansichten, die ausschließen, daß wir Tiere sind. (shrink)

The Epicurean view is that there is nothing bad about death, and we are wrong to loathe it. This paper distinguishes several different such views, and shows that while some of them really would undermine our loathing of death, others would not. It then argues that any version that did so could be at best vacuously true: If there is nothing bad about death, that can only be because there is nothing bad about anything.

It seems evident that things sometimes get bigger by acquiring new parts. But there is an ancient argument purporting to show that this is impossible: the paradox of increase or growing argument.i Here is a sketch of the paradox. Suppose we have an object, A, and we want to make it bigger by adding a part, B. That is, we want to bring it about that A first lacks and then has B as a part. Imagine, then, that we conjoin (...) B to A in some appropriate way. Never mind what A and B are, or what this conjoining amounts to: let A be anything that can gain a part if anything can gain a part, and let B be the sort of thing that can become a part of A, and suppose we do whatever it would take to make B come to be a part of A if this is possible at all. Have we thereby made B a part of A? It seems not. We seem only to have brought it about that B is attached to A, like this. (shrink)

Personal identity deals with questions about ourselves qua people (or persons). Many of these questions are familiar ones that occur to everyone at some time: What am I? When did I begin? What will happen to me when I die? Discussions of personal identity go right back to the origins of Western philosophy, and most major figures have had something to say about it. (There is also a rich literature on personal identity in Eastern philosophy, which I am not competent (...) to discuss. Collins 1982 is a good source.). (shrink)

Sydney Shoemaker argues that the functionalist theory of mind entails a psychological-continuity view of personal identity, as well as providing a defense of that view against a crucial objection. I show that his view has surprising consequences, e.g. that no organism could have mental properties and that a thing's mental properties fail to supervene even weakly on its microstructure and surroundings. I then argue that the view founders on "fission" cases and rules out our being material things. Functionalism tells us (...) little if anything about personal identity. (shrink)

This chapter considers the view that we are literally brains. It argues that the view is best supported by the claim that brains are the primary subjects of mental properties, giving a “thinking‐brain problem” analogous to the thinking‐animal problem that supports animalism. The brain view is shown to have implausible consequences about our identity through time, and to presuppose that something is a part of a thinking being if and only if it is directly involved in that being's mental processes. (...) It is then argued that the notion of direct involvement is too interest‐relative to give this principle any useful content, and that the principle is in any case unfounded. (shrink)

Many philosophers say that two or more people or thinking beings could share a single human being in a split‐personality case, if only the personalities were sufficiently independent and individually well integrated. I argue that this view is incompatible with our being material things, and conclude that there could never be two or more people in a split‐personality case. This refutes the view, almost universally held, that facts about mental unity and disunity determine how many people there are. I suggest (...) that the number of human people is simply the number of appropriately endowed human animals. (shrink)

Substance dualism says that all thinking beings are immaterial. This sits awkwardly with the fact that thinking requires an intact brain. Many dualists say that bodily activity is causally necessary for thinking. But if a material thing can cause thinking, why can’t it think? No argument for dualism, however convincing, answers this question, leaving dualists with more to explain than their opponents.

The view that we are human animals, " animalism ", is deeply unpopular. This paper explains what that claim says and why it is so contentious. It then argues that those who deny it face an awkward choice. They must either deny that there are any human animals, deny that human animals can think, or deny that we are the thinking things located where we are.

The Human Animal is an extended defense of what its author calls the Biological Approach to personal identity: that you and I are human animals, and that the identity conditions under which we endure are those which apply to us as biological organisms. The somewhat surprising corollary of this view is that no sort of psychological continuity is either necessary or sufficient for a human animal—and thus for us—to persist through time. In challenging the hegemony of Psychological Approaches to personal (...) identity, Olson offers a number of inventive and original arguments which are certain to evoke discussion and debate. (shrink)

It is often said that the same particles can simultaneously make up two or more material objects that differ in kind and in their mental, biological, and other qualitative properties. Others wonder how objects made of the same parts in the same arrangement and surroundings could differ in these ways. I clarify this worry and show that attempts to dismiss or solve it miss its point. At most one can argue that it is a problem we can live with.

Trust me: my chair isn't big enough for two. You may doubt that every rational, conscious being is a person; perhaps there are beings that mistakenly believe themselves to be people. If so, read ‘rational, conscious being’ or the like for 'person'.

The apparent fact that each of us coincides with a thinking animal looks like a strong argument for our being animals (animalism). Some critics, however, claim that this sort of reasoning actually undermines animalism. According to them, the apparent fact that each human animal coincides with a thinking body that is not an animal is an equally strong argument for our not being animals. I argue that the critics' case fails for reasons that do not affect the case for animalism.

According to a view attractive to both metaphysicians and ethicists, every period in a person’s life is the life of a being just like that person except that it exists only during that period. These “subpeople” appear to have moral status, and their interests seem to clash with ours: though it may be in some person’s interests to sacrifice for tomorrow, it is not in the interests of a subperson coinciding with him only today, who will never benefit from it. (...) Or perhaps there is no clash, and a subperson’s interests derive from those of the person it coincides with. But this makes it likely that our own interests derive from those of other beings coinciding with us. (shrink)

Philosophers disagree about whether there could be “zombies”: beings physically identical to normal human people but lacking consciousness. Establishing their possibility would refute physicalism. But it is seldom noted that the popular “constitution view” of human people implies that our bodies actually are zombies. This would contradict several widely held views in the philosophy of mind.

Eric Martin and Daniel N. Osherson present a theory of inductive logic built on model theory. Their aim is to extend the mathematics of Formal Learning Theory to a more general setting and to provide a more accurate image of empirical inquiry. The formal results of their study illuminate aspects of scientific inquiry that are not covered by the commonly applied Bayesian approach.

It is often said that the same particles can simultaneously make up two or more material objects that differ in kind and in their mental, biological and other qualitative properties. Others wonder how objects made of the same parts in the same arrangement and surroundings could differ in these ways. I clarify this worry and show that attempts to dismiss or solve it miss its point. At most one can argue that it is a problem we can live with.

ABSTRACTMany philosophers say that the nature of personal identity has to do with narratives: the stories we tell about ourselves. While different narrativists address different questions of personal identity, some propose narrativist accounts of personal identity over time. The paper argues that such accounts have troubling consequences about the beginning and end of our lives, lead to inconsistencies, and involve backwards causation. The problems can be solved, but only by modifying the accounts in ways that deprive them of their appeal.

Personal identity deals with philosophical questions that arise about ourselves by virtue of our being people (or, as lawyers and philosophers like to say, persons). This chapter first surveys the main questions of personal identity, and then focuses on the one that has received most attention in recent times, namely our persistence through time. There is no single problem of personal identity, but rather a wide range of questions that are at best loosely connected. The familiar ones include: who am (...) I, what is it to be a person, and what does it take for a person to persist from one time to another. There are three main sorts of answers to the persistence question in the literature: the most popular psychological‐continuity views, according to which the holding of some psychological relation is necessary or sufficient (or both) for one to persist; brute‐physical views; and anticriterialism. (shrink)