Résumé éditeur : "Nous avons perdu les deux repères qui permettaient autrefois de nous définir entre les dieux et les bêtes. Nous ne savons plus qui nous sommes, nous autres humains. De nouvelles utopies en naissent. D'un côté, le post-humanisme prétend nier notre animalité et faire de nous des dieux promis à l'immortalité par les vertus de la technique. D'un autre côté, l'animalisme veut faire de nous des animaux comme les autres et inviter les autres animaux à faire partie de (...) notre communauté morale. Alors forgeons une nouvelle utopie à notre mesure. Ne cherchons plus à nier les frontières naturelles - celles qui nous séparent des dieux ou des animaux - et défendons un humanisme conséquent, c'est-à-dire un cosmopolitisme sans frontières.". (shrink)

ABSTRACT Unexpected but vivid and compelling memories are a wide‐spread experience in late life. The experience has often been described in literature, and in recent years has been the object of extensive gerontological research under the label ‘life review’. Such memories often include a reversal of judgment about a past act, relationship, event, etc. What earlier was judged to be so is, in the retrospect of late life, judged not to have been so after all. This presents a question: which (...) judgment—the earlier or the later—has better epistemological credentials in such cases? Some obvious possible answers are considered and rejected. It would seem that the issue is not resolvable on epistemological grounds. A parallel dilemma seems to appear in other dimensions of experience. An example from aesthetic experience is briefly considered. (shrink)

In this paper, we outline some of the connections between the literatures of organizational storytelling, spirituality in the workplace, organizational culture, and authentic leadership. We suggest that leader storytelling that integrates a moral and spiritual component can transform an organizational culture so members of the organization begin to feel connected to a larger community and a higher purpose. We specifically discuss how leader role modeling in authentic storytelling is essential in developing an ethically and spiritually based organizational culture. However, we (...) also acknowledge a potential dark side to leader storytelling. Implications for authentic storytelling research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis provoked an organizational ethics dilemma: how to develop ethical pandemic policy while upholding our organizational mission to deliver relationship- and patient-centered care. Tasked with producing a recommendation about whether healthcare workers and essential personnel should receive priority access to limited medical resources during the pandemic, the bioethics department and survey and interview methodologists at our institution implemented a deliberative approach that included the perspectives of healthcare professionals and patient stakeholders in the policy development process. Involving (...) the community more, not less, during a crisis required balancing the need to act quickly to garner stakeholder perspectives, uncertainty about the extent and duration of the pandemic, and disagreement among ethicists about the most ethically supportable way to allocate scarce resources. This article explains the process undertaken to garner stakeholder input as it relates to organizational ethics, recounts the stakeholder perspectives shared and how they informed the triage policy developed, and offers suggestions for how other organizations may integrate stakeholder involvement in ethical decision-making as well as directions for future research and public health work. (shrink)

I argue that some perceptual experiences are vague. To do so, I identify a characteristic feature of vagueness and show that some perceptual experiences have this feature. These include blurry experiences, experiences of color under low lighting, and experiences of number, as in the case of the speckled hen. The conclusion that these experiences are vague has two noteworthy consequences. First, it presses us to see whether and how existing theories of vagueness can be extended to perceptual experience. Second, it (...) sheds light on several puzzles in the philosophy of perception. (shrink)

Ethics training has been highlighted as essential for building and fostering business ethics in organizations. National and international trends show that over 40% of businesses have some form of business ethics training. We use data collected from 199 firms to examine the presence of ethics training in top Canadian companies and found that the presence varied by region and firm size, and that the Canadian average (35%) lags other countries.

This article explores a case study of a mindfulness teacher, Beth, and her experiences of teaching mindfulness to 11- to 16-year-olds in several English schools. It shows why Beth was drawn to teaching mindfulness, which was both to alleviate the stress amongst her pupils and improve her own mental health. It illustrates how and why she became a confident, successful mindfulness teacher: she learnt about mindfulness at various classes, retreats and teacher-education training sessions, spending thousands of pounds on her own (...) training. It argues that her positioning as a mindfulness teacher in an unmindful school system created an overwhelming demand for her services, but also huge stress upon her. It develops McCaw’s conceptions of ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ mindfulness (2020), arguing that while Beth began by practising ‘thin’ mindfulness – seeing it as a way of solving exam stress amongst her pupils – she became increasingly a ‘thick’ practitioner; her experiences of mindfulness led to profound personal change and, ultimately, to her becoming very disillusioned about teaching mindfulness in an unwelcoming educational, ‘unmindful’ environment. (shrink)

This paper explores how sustainability has been integrated into and communicated in Canadian Master’s of Business Administration programs. We content analyzed university, business school, and MBA program mission and values statements; communicated strategic priorities; and relevant academic calendar content, as well as sustainability rankings and select media depictions of sustainable MBA programs and practices. We explore the potential for greenwashing practices in relation to the integration of sustainability in business education. We found some evidence of a decoupling between university and/or (...) business school mission and claims, and MBA policies and practices. We conclude with a discussion of our findings, study limitations and some relevant implications for academia. (shrink)

How people react emotionally to the positive or negative events that they experience in their lives depends in part on whether particular outcomes are perceived to be deserved or undeserved. For ex...

A simple propositional operator is introduced which generalizes pairwise equivalence and occurs widely in mathematics. Attention is focused on a replacement theorem for this notion of generalized equivalence and its use in producing further generalized equivalences.

Whenever justification of classroom punishment has been attempted it has usually been on grounds that punishment acts either appropriately pedagogically, teaching students how to behave morally, or is a necessary evil that enables the practical running of the school so that it may carry out its educational business. By itself the first justification leaves punishment in schools as only an extension of wider social attitudes about the virtue of punishing perceived moral wrongdoing, rather than providing any distinct argument for punishment (...) specific to the special circumstances of the school. By highlighting an entanglement between the moral and the conventional, and between discipline and punishment, within the context of the school, I shall argue that the essentially contested nature of education and its purpose, and the related question of the school’s suitability as a venue for it, means that the school’s most promising defence of its use of punishment—that punishment of students might somehow be necessary for enabling the important educative business of the school—becomes undone. Schooling and education are not necessarily synonymous, and as schools provide only one vision of education—and this vision is contestable—then upholding the business of any one school in order for it to achieve its particular unsettled and disputed purpose is not a morally sufficient reason to coerce a student’s compliance through regimes of ‘harm intended as harm’. (shrink)

Co-published with the University of Queensland Press. HPC holds rights in North America and U. S. Dependencies. Since its first publication in 1976, Alan Chalmers's highly regarded and widely read work--translated into eighteen languages--has become a classic introduction to the scientific method, known for its accessibility to beginners and its value as a resource for advanced students and scholars. In addition to overall improvements and updates inspired by Chalmers's experience as a teacher, comments from his readers, and recent developments in (...) the field, this fourth edition features an extensive chapter-long postscript that draws on his research into the history of atomism to illustrate important themes in the philosophy of science. Identifying the qualitative difference between knowledge of atoms as it figures in contemporary science and metaphysical speculations about atoms common in philosophy since the time of Democritus offers a revealing and instructive way to address the question at the heart of this groundbreaking work: What is this thing called science? (shrink)

Concerning beauty, order, harmony, design.--Concerning moral good and evil.

THE LIFE Of FRANCIS BACON, LORD HIGH CHANCELLOR OF ENGLAND. THE ancient Egyptians had a law, which ordained that the actions and characters of their dead ...

Managers often ask why their firm should have an ethics program, especially if no one has complained about unethical behavior. The pursuit of business ethics can cost money, they say. It can lose sales to less scrupulous competitors and can drain management time and energy. But as Harvard business professor Francis Aguilar points out, ethics scandals (such as over Beech-Nut's erzatz "apple juice" or Sears's padded car repair bills) can severely damage a firm, with punishing legal penalties, bad publicity, (...) and irreparably injured customer relations. Equally important if less obvious, unethical behavior can undermine a firm's organizational spirit. On the other hand, Aguilar argues, in a well run firm, ethical programs can actually enhance corporate performance, strengthening the company at every level and supercharging employee risk taking and innovation. In Managing Corporate Ethics, Aguilar shows managers how to create ethical programs within their organizations that not only discourage large-scale wrongdoing, but can contribute substantially to the achievement of corporate excellence. Aguilar's program is down-to-earth and comprehensive, and based on his extensive research on highly successful, ethical companies, both large and small. He recommends action on three fronts: first, get senior management to provide effective ethical leadership; second, set up an ethics program that promotes concern for the interests of people affected by the firm's operations and that provides safeguards against corrupting business pressures; and third, staff the company with ethical people and surround the organization with ethical advisors (including legal, financial, accounting, tax, and marketing consultants). To illuminate this three-step program, Aguilar incorporates the lessons learned in his in-depth study of ten prominent firms with proven successful ethics programs--among them Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Nucor Steel, Cray Research, ServiceMaster, and Texas Instruments. He examines Lincoln Electric's attention to compensation and job security to ensure quality products and to reduce the pressure or temptation to act unethically. He shows how General Mills, while pushing product line managers to compete aggressively, uses corporate staff units to guard against illegal or unacceptable claims (testing cake recipes, for example, to see if a product's quality fails under the less-than-perfect conditions of a normal kitchen). And he details how Armstrong World Industries uses pep talks, inspirational stories, role models, and ready access to management to promote ethical standards among employees. Throughout, Aguilar demonstrates convincingly that an ethical program pays dividends: that employees, suppliers, customers, and the community at large know when they are being treated in a positive and constructive manner, and are likely to respond in kind. Packed with real life examples of successful (and failed) ethical programs, Managing Corporate Ethics is a valuable roadmap to an often overlooked source of business success. (shrink)

This is the third of four volumes presenting all of Francis Ellingwood Abbot's major published articles. Any scholar or library interested in American philosophy, religious thought, and social and intellectual history should find this edition of his essays a useful addition to the collection. Francis E. Abbot was a noted American philosopher and champion of Free Religion. He was a member of C.S. Peirce's Metaphysical Club, the first American philosopher to support Charles Darwin, the founding editor of The (...) Index, a founder of the Free Religious Association, and the founding President of the National Liberal League of America. In addition to over six hundred articles, he was the author of Scientific Theism (1885), The Way Out of Agnosticism, Or The Philosophy of Free Religion (1890), and The Syllogistic Philosophy, or Prolegomena to Science (1906). (shrink)

Objections to functional explanations of awareness assert that although functional systems may be adequate to explain behavior, including verbal behavior consisting of assertions of awareness by an individual, they cannot provide for the existence of phenomenal awareness. In this paper, a theory of awareness is proposed that counters this assertion by incorporating two advances: (1) a formal definition of representation, expressed in a functional notation: Newell's Representation Law, and 2) the introduction of real time into the analysis of awareness. This (...) leads to the definition of phenomenal awareness as existing whenever an object contains an autonomously updated configuration satisfying the Representation Law with respect to some aspects of its environment. The relational aspect of the Representation Law permits the development of multiple levels of awareness, which provides for the existence of illusions and hallucinations, and permits the identification of a new measure, accuracy of awareness . The relational perspective also permits the incorporation of referential concepts into the framework. Qualia can then be identified with referentially opaque elements of awareness. The functional form of the Representation Law is linked to neurophysiology and the underlying phenomena of chemistry and physics by phenomena involving activity-dependent connectivity. (shrink)

An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (1728), jointly with Francis Hutcheson’s earlier work Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), presents one of the most original and wide-ranging moral philosophies of the eighteenth century. These two works, each comprising two semi-autonomous treatises, were widely translated and vastly influential throughout the eighteenth century in England, continental Europe, and America. -/- The two works had (...) their greatest impact in Scotland and influenced many well-known Scottish philosophers, particularly those writing after the last Jacobite upheaval, in 1745. This can be seen in the concern of the post-1745 generation with analyzing human nature as the foundation of moral theory, with the “moral sense” and moral epistemology more generally, with the impartial spectator and the calm passions, and with the independence of benevolence from self-interest. In addition to the influence of his writings, Hutcheson was also a famed teacher whose Glasgow students, notably Adam Smith, held sway over generations of Scottish moral philosophers. -/- Despite their impact on Scottish letters, the four treatises were in fact written in Dublin, and the philosophers to whom Hutcheson responded and with whom he debated were in the main not Scottish but English, Irish, French, Roman, and Greek. Consequently, part of Hutcheson’s legacy was a cosmopolitan outlook among enlightened Scots, who learned to turn their eyes far from home. (shrink)