This paper evaluates the current use of the Principal Agent Model (PAM) in accounting and finance, focusing on the agent'ss use of private information. The agent'ss behavioral norms in the the PAM deviate from commonly held ethical values in society, from models of man in conventional economic theory, and also from behavioral foundations of related business school fields like corporate strategy, business ethics, and human resource management. Still, it would be unwise to reject the PAM solely because of its distasteful (...) ethical assumptions. The model does appear to have predictive power, but its descriptive or normative qualities remain unexplored. The popularity of the PAM, with its extreme model of man, raises fundamental questions about the impact of this model on business school stakeholders and society at large. (shrink)

Objective: To analyse medical students’, graduate students’ and doctors’ and medical teachers’ perceptions of research contributions as criteria for authorship in relation to the authorship criteria defined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors .Design: Medical students with or without prior instruction on ICMJE criteria, graduate students/doctors and medical teachers rated the importance of 11 contributions as authorship qualifications. They also reported single contributions eligible for authorship, as well as acceptable combinations of two or three qualifying contributions.Results: Conception and (...) design, Analysis and interpretation and Drafting of article formed the most important cluster in all four groups. Students without prior instruction rated Critical revision and Final approval lower than the other three groups. “Final approval” was a part of the least important cluster in all groups except among students with instruction.Conclusions: Conception and design, Analysis and interpretation and Drafting of article were recognised as the most important of the ICMJE criteria by all participants. They can be considered independent of previous instruction or experience. Final approval and Critical revision should be actively taught as important authorship criteria to future scientists. (shrink)

This article seeks to highlight and present two seemingly different conceptions of the philosophy of mind belonging to Ludwig Wittgenstein and Richard Rorty. In this context, we first consider Wittgenstein’s critique of private languages, which is then used to reject and deconstitute the privacy of consciousness. In addition, the paper follows the evolving and deconstitutive character of Rorty’s philosophy of mind, showing how the American philosopher constantly defined consciousness, mind, or later selfhood – using naturalistic methods. The authors maintain and (...) justify the thesis that both philosophers have a common denominator which manifests itself in the rejection of traditional and metaphysical conceptions of consciousness and identity, but they also try to point out certain shortcomings and inconsistencies within the two conceptions of the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This paper discusses an important phase in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analytic philosophy through a comparative examination of the profound correspondences that exist between his concept of silence and the poetics of another crucial authorial figure of the 20th century: James Joyce. Based on the hypothesis that there are striking resemblances between their early works, that is, between Joyce’s realistic short-story collection Dubliners and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the article employs mostly close-reading, analytical-interpretative and comparative methods. It argues that silence was an intentional (...) intellectual, aesthetic and ethical choice of both these authors, their way to preserve the autonomy of metaphysics and to honour the beauty of the unspoken. Starting from their common critical treatment of the habitual and largely alienated speech, the discussion connects Wittgenstein’s philosophical attitudes regarding the imprecision and inadequacy of every-day language and Joyce’s notion of ‘spiritual paralysis’ of the city-life, which he saw as the main motive for writing his collection about fin-desiècle Dublin. On the grounds of their shared views about the limits of words, behind which there are worlds that cannot be properly uttered, the idea of silence – or the highly significant narrative absence – grows to permeate the work of both. In the case of Wittgenstein, it is a call for a new philosophy, or anti-philosophy, which in negating metaphysics in effect preserves its independence from a discursive speech which cannot express it, whereas in the case of Joyce, correspondingly (and almost simultaneously), it is a quest for a new literary mode that will foreground a particular Modernist allusiveness, rhetoric of omission and deliberately incomplete, gnomonical narrative structures. (shrink)

Orwell, as he himself remarked, came from a lower, professional-service fraction of the English and imperial ruling class that was ‘simultaneously dominator and dominated’ (Raymond Williams), so that a combination of state and monopoly power became his abiding nightmare. His horizon was, as of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, a revolutionary socialism committed to freedom and equality, opposed both to Labourite social democracy and to Stalinist pseudo-communism. In this article, I concentrate on Nineteen Eighty-Four, drawing on narratology (its agential (...) system, spacetime descriptions, and composition – ‘the Winston story’, the ‘Goldstein excerpts’, and the Appendix on Newspeak) and history. I conclude that Nineteen Eighty-Four has an interesting, but limited, ‘Tory anarchist’ stance and horizon: in revolt against the rulers, but not believing that the revolt can succeed (in direct polemic with the Communist Manifesto). In Orwell’s view there are ‘three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle and the Low’, but the mindless and passive Low reduce this to the Middle against the High, or intellect and impotence versus cynical power. ‘No economics’ entails here ‘no class struggle’, and a fair amount of misogyny. Orwell’s textural skill was penetrating, but his thematics very limited. Still, he was one of the first to notice the long-duration slide of politics toward fascism, even if he drew a mistaken consequence from it, as evident in his early conflation of Stalinism and Nazism into an untenable ‘totalitarianism’. Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a concerned, appealing, and in some ways useful text, albeit one that ultimately lacks wisdom. (shrink)

The paper traces a three-century-long tradition of a mistaken attribution of the Defence of Eunuchs by Theophylact of Ohrid. Since Peter Lambeck, chief librarian of the Hofbibliothek in Vienna, identified in 1671 the author of the treatise as Theodore Pedagogue, a poorly known tutor to the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, the incorrect attribution was readily adopted and further disseminated by a series of scholars of the next generations. Although the issue of the authorship was successfully resolved as early as 1768 (...) by Angelo Bandini, head of the Laurentian Library in Florence, the information remained unfamiliar to writers of the following centuries, leaving the entrenched error to persist until the late 1970s, on the eve of the first critical editions of the Defence. The article follows the tangled history of the erroneous attribution, attempting to establish a kind of stemmatic regularity between several branches of the abortive tradition. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Men Becoming Gods in "Style"Gioia and Girard on Divinized DesireJoshua Hren (bio)In our secular age we hear seekers of the sacred and religious devotees alike decry the soul-deadening, spirit-dumbing consequences of materialism. René Girard contends that—on the contrary—in the "leveled," horizontal world of a purportedly materialistic modernity this transcendent authority is deviated and distorted but it does not disappear. In his first major work, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, (...) he argues that "the passion that drives men to seize or gain more possessions is not materialistic; it is the triumph of the mediator, the god with the human face."1 In a materialistic age, the gods are "pulled down from the heaven, the sacred flows over the earth" and men become "gods for each other."2Dana Gioia, former businessman and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, is no stranger to the economy of divinized desire. The stakes of our passions—whether we are wrecked by dubious wants or able to shed our infernal imitations—pierce his poetry. Gioia cites Girard as a significant influence alongside St. Augustine and Kierkegaard, though he does not indicate whether his own poetic investigations of mimesis are a direct yield of [End Page 149] his encounter with Girard or the independent discovery of attentive artistic intuition.3The refuge of lies so central to Girard is particularly palpable in Gioia's long narrative poem "Style."4 Charlie, the self-deprecating narrator, divinizes his college friend Tom, a business mogul who "prospered like one chosen by the gods."5 Tom uses his easy money to purchase gaudy metamorphoses, hosting magnificent events with his "flawless" wife Eden. An antihero of the unremarkable variety, Charlie attends all Tom's parties until he stops receiving invitations. When he discovers his deity's disappearance is tied to a terminal illness, he descends into the infernal "slums" of Tom's new hideout, and he finds his former hero hell-bent, ready to commit an arson that will erase his own existence in style. Charlie is confronted with a difficult decision that any coward would waver before. He has the chance to become an atheist—at least with respect to his dying god. After painting a portrait of man-made gods, the poem probes the question of whether and how we can cut short our penchant for great deceits.Charlie opens this narrative poem with an invective directed against himself.Just look at me. Isn't it obvious?I have no style. I'm just a human blur.On me expensive clothes look second-hand.They droop or sag. The color's never right.I wear the wrong apparel to the party.I pick the dullest item on the menu.Each haircut brings some new humiliation.6Crucially, we never receive an audit of this dour self-consciousness. By poem's end, no one has corrected or confirmed Charlie's condemnations. He may be right; his might be the antinomy of Midas's modus operandi. His hyperbolic portrait of Tom's greatness suggests that he is less than just to himself. His preoccupation with something as small as a menu item betrays a brutal obsessiveness. He employs the ascetical word "humiliation" in conjunction with a "haircut"—further revealing his unforgiving inner harshness. Charlie "always loved to visit Tom" precisely because he himself is Pathetic, Inc.7Were René Girard Charlie's older brother, he might sit the sad sap down on a comfortable couch and spell out the difficult truth as follows: The anti-hero "dreams of absorbing and assimilating his mediator's being."8 This highfalutin description of "the Other implies an insuperable revulsion for one's own substance."9 We ought not to take seriously the excuses these types give for their [End Page 150] failings and their fawning, for they "hate themselves on a more essential level than that of 'qualities.'"10 When Charlie disparages his badly cut bangs or his mismatched outfits, he's really incriminating his very being."The desire," Girard argues, "is aimed at the mediator's being."11 Charlie evinces this dynamic when he insists that Tom's "success was existential: / It wasn't what... (shrink)

In this article, we introduce a theory on the dynamic development of affective processes, affect regulation, and the relationship between emotions and sport performance. The theory focusses on how affective processes emerge and develop during competitive sport involvement. Based on Scherer’s component process model, we postulate six components of emotion that interact with each other in a circular fashion: triggering processes, physiological reactions, action tendencies, expressive behaviors, subjective experience, and higher cognitive processes. The theory stresses the dynamics of affective processes (...) and describes the consequences for performance in competitive sports. It assumes that the peculiarities of different sports must be taken into account in order to understand the affective processes, and offers starting points on which strategies can be used to effectively regulate affective states. Consequences for research and practice are derived and discussed. To study the development of affective processes, future research should test the assumptions in ecologically valid contexts, such as real competitions or competition-like situations, using multi-component measures of emotions. (shrink)

The text seeks to provide insight into some of the basic theoretical considerations and problems that the Marxist theory of the state has met. In this sense, it does not pretend to provide an ultimate interpretation of the relation of the state and capital, but to present to a reader a basic argumentation of the main Marxist approaches and the general contribution of the Marxist theory to this problem. In the first part the text highlights some of the key issues (...) that materialist theory of the state should try to offer answers to, while the second part gives a review of a different approaches to this topic. Presented approaches and arguments should be seen more as an ideal-types, and they should introduce a reader to the general directions and problems of the Marxist approach to the state and capital relation. nema. (shrink)

We look at bimodal logics interpreted by cartesian products of topological spaces and discuss the validity of certain bimodal formulae in products of so-called cardinal spaces. This solves an open problem of van Benthem et al.

Thirteen dwarves and a wizard invade the quiet abode of Bilbo Baggins in an effort to recruit him for an expedition, the purported purpose of which is to recover stolen treasure and exact vengeance on Smaug the dragon, the robber who had cruelly killed a large portion of Thorin's family and friends. Although most readers and critics approach J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit as a children's story, an unserious dress-rehearsal-sketch of The Lord of the Rings at best, and in (...) spite of the fact that, as Nicholas Boyle notes, "there is something embarrassing" about discussing Tolkien's work in an academic context, for "it is so obviously not real literature," The Hobbit, with its "Secondary World" of fantastical creatures... (shrink)

The gift of death and the new magic of politics: Hegel and Tolkien on sorcery and secondary worlds -- The political theology of catastrophe: Plato's Athenian Atlantis, Tolkien's Númenoran Atalantë, and the Nazi Reich -- Burglar and bourgeois? Bilbo Baggins' dialectical ethics -- Hobbes, Hobbits, and the modern state of Mordor: myths of power and desire in Leviathan and Tolkien's Legendarium -- Middle-earth and the return of the common good -- Epilogue: from apocalypse to eucatastrophe: "The end of history," happy (...) endings, and the politics of narrative form. (shrink)

Purpose. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the anthropological and socio-philosophical dimensions of human existence of the older age group given the challenges of pandemic threats caused by COVID-19. To this end, it is planned to solve a number of tasks, among which one should distinguish the following: 1) to investigate the manifestations of age discrimination in the context of the social and labor areas of human existence; 2) to focus on the asymmetry of the behavior of society (...) and the state relative to persons of the older age group in the field of healthcare in the context of a pandemic crisis; 3) to represent the anthropological features of changes in the socialization and activity of older people under the current conditions of globalization-pandemic challenges. Theoretical basis. Despite such a broad representation of the age-related issue in public relations, there are still no practical guarantees that would apply to discriminatory aspects of older age groups in various areas of their manifestation. The synergistic evolution of social reality requires substantive analysis of the issue under the current conditions for the transformation of social life, which is affected by globalization crises caused by the pandemic threats of COVID-19. Originality. The stereotypical assumptions underlying legal policy and established social relations are based solely on the application of chronological age. The novelty is in justifying an individual approach to the elderly through the personification of the personal characteristics of a person. The study of anthropological and socio-philosophical dimensions of the existence of a person of the older age group in the face of the challenges of pandemic threats caused by COVID-19 has made it possible to analyze the destructive nature of age discrimination in the context of the social and labor areas of human existence. As well as focus on the asymmetry of the behavior of society and the state in relation to these persons in the field of health care, and emphasize the anthropological features of changes in the socialization and human activity under the current conditions of globalization-pandemic challenges. Conclusions. External threats to human existence call for special attention to the implementation and protection of human rights, freedoms, individual freedoms, and identity. Pandemic threats have transformed all dimensions of human existence, especially for those groups of society that are less socially protected. The pandemic crisis has created additional grounds for discrimination against older people in various areas of human existence. Equalization of persons by age without personifying the personal characteristics of an individual is discrimination on an age basis, which violates the principles of democracy and humanism in the society, leads to stigmatization of the person, is the cause of the anthropological crisis of a person. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This article refurbishes the view of antiutopianism as the ruling orthodoxy of late-capitalist common sense (pragmatics) and writings plus media (narrative). After a half-century descent into a contemporary neofeudalism (Fascism 2.0), the operation of totalized antiutopianism on utopian narrative genres is powerfully evident in the TV series Game of Thrones, a rigidly Social Darwinist fantasy world, reveling in mass slaughters and presupposing neofeudalism: a black fable for lesioned personalities.

ABSTRACT In the introduction to the 2015 reprint of her classical Partial Visions, Angelika Bammer cites the pithy injunction of the American poet and feminist thinker Adrienne Rich: “We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body. In such a world women will truly create new life, bringing forth … the visions, and the thinking necessary to sustain, console, and alter human existence. … Sexuality, politics, intelligence, power, motherhood, work, community, intimacy (...) will develop new meaning; thinking itself will be transformed.” Based on sustaining, consoling, and radically altering the present dire state of human existence, the author leads to two sets of initial arguments: Where Are We, and What Are We Doing Wrong. What follows are samples of possible answers, perhaps representative beyond themselves. (shrink)

The article describes a troubled history of eugenics in the US, from its beginnings at the end of the 19th century, through the whole of the 20th. It is a part of a larger historical study on eugenics. It focuses on Davenport, Laughlin, Estabrook and the Eugenic Record Office, on the early racist eugenicists like Grant and Ross, and on sterilization legislation in the twenties and thirties. The intention however was to put the historical debate into a contemporary context, or (...) at least to show that some eugenic ideas have lived long after everybody thought they were dead. There are some hints and quotations that show it might still be possible to misuse sterilisation in the US today. (shrink)

U članku se opisuje burna povijest eugenike u Sjedinjenim Državama tijekom cijelog 20. stoljeća. Premda je nacistička eugenika notornija po svojim groznim posljedicama, činjenica je da je većina američkih saveznih država imala zakone koji su dopuštali sterilizaciju “nesposobnih” i da je golem broj ljudi prisilno steriliziran. Neki su zakoni ukinuti tek 1967. ali postoje i naznake zakonodavstva o sterilizaciji koje bi mogle dopustiti zloupotrebe karakteristične za rane godine 20. stoljeća. Međutim, glavnina članka opisuje ideološke izjave najvećih američkih eugeničara poput Davenporta, (...) Laughlina, Estabrooka iz Eugenic Record Officea, Granta, Rossa i drugih, kao i socijalne motive koje su eugeniku činili tako popularnom ideologijom sve do Drugog svjetskog rata. Jedna od sugestija članka jest da su eugeničke ideje i dalje latentne u drukčijim oblicima “znanstvenog rasizma” koji traje i danas.The article describes a troubled history of eugenics in the US, from its beginnings at the end of the 19th century, through the whole of the 20th. It is a part of a larger historical study on eugenics. It focuses on Davenport, Laughlin, Estabrook and the Eugenic Record Office, on the early racist eugenicists like Grant and Ross, and on sterilization legislation in the twenties and thirties. The intention however was to put the historical debate into a contemporary context, or at least to show that some eugenic ideas have lived long after everybody thought they were dead. There are some hints and quotations that show it might still be possible to misuse sterilisation in the US today. (shrink)

Autor secira polemiku otvorenu osvrtom Tončija Matulića na knjigu Darka Polšeka Sudbina odabranih objavljenom u Filozofskim istraživanjima 98/2005: 671-693. Okosnica ovoga članka je seciranje Matulićevih stavova kako nema bitne razlike između stare eugenike i nove, i njegovih sveobuhvatnih antiliberalnih, paternalističkih i navodno „bioetičkih“ argumenata. Polšek koristi argumentaciju J. S. Milla iz djela O slobodi i tvrdi da demokratsko i pravedno društvo mora poštivati i „puke želje“ budućih roditelja u ostvarenju njihovih prava da odgajaju djecu, kao i da bude u mogućnosti, (...) između ostalog, izbjeći daleko veće opasnosti kolektivizma i svih vrsta intervencija države u privatne stvari što je i iznjedrilo sve ružne oblike eugenika u prošlosti. Štoviše, Polšek raspravlja o tome da svatko treba poštivati te liberalne principe kako bi ozbiljno shvatio neosporne principe bioetike: osobnu autonomiju, neovisnost i jednakost.The author dissects a polemic by Tonèi Matuliæ against Polšek’s book Sudbina odabranih printed in Filozofska istra®ivanja,98 , pp. 671–693. The main point of the article is a dissection of Matuliæ’s views that thereis no fundamental difference between old eugenics and new, and of his overall anti-liberal, paternalist,and allegedly ‘bioetical’ contentions. Polšek uses J. St. Mill’s arguments from On Libertyand argues that a democratic and a just society has to respect ‘mere wishes‘ of prospective parentswhen fulfilling their right to bear children, as to be able, among other things, to avoid far greaterdangers of collectivism and all sorts of state intervention in private matters, from which ugly formsof eugenics arose in the past. Moreover, Polšek argues that one has to respect these liberal principles in order to take seriously uncontested principlesof bioethics: of personal autonomy, independence, and equality. (shrink)

The most widely used attractive logical account of knowledge uses standard epistemic models, i.e., graphs whose edges are indistinguishability relations for agents. In this paper, we discuss more general topological models for a multi-agent epistemic language, whose main uses so far have been in reasoning about space. We show that this more geometrical perspective affords greater powers of distinction in the study of common knowledge, defining new collective agents, and merging information for groups of agents.

The article is a summary of recent experimental data on anchoring heuristic and models that seek to explain it. Anchoring heuristic represents one of the mechanisms of decision making in situations of limited information or time, by using a comparison standard called – an anchor. Given the supposed wide usage of this heuristic, authors explore the unconscious character of the heuristic and ways of making its biasing effects less prominent. Apart from the standard experimental design in which anchor is directly (...) connected to the judgment in question, evidence shows that people can be anchored indirectly, even when the anchor is perceived unconsciously. Newest data show that anchoring effect should be explained by two distinct processes. In the concluding remarks, authors consider broader implications of anchoring for the field of social cognition.U članku se opisuju noviji eksperimentalni nalazi vezani uz heuristiku sidrenja kao i modeli koji ih objašnjavaju. Heuristika sidrenja označava jedan od načina na koji ljudi donose odluke u nedostatku informacija i/ili vremena, a podrazumijeva korištenje standarda usporedbe kako bi se došlo do željene procjene. S obzirom na pretpostavljenu široku upotrebu ove heuristike, u članku se istražuju teoretska objašnjenja, razjašnjavaju razlozi zbog kojih je utjecaj te heuristike nedostupan svijesti te kako umanjiti njome izazvanu pristranost u razmišljanju. Osim standardnog nacrta kojim se ispituje ovaj fenomen opisani su i dokazi prema kojima sidro može vršiti svoj utjecaj i kad se ne dovodi u direktnu vezu s procjenom, čak i kada je percipirano nesvjesnim putem. Najnoviji skup istraživanja pak pokazuje da se heuristika sidrenja, prvotno zamišljena kao jedinstveni mehanizam, zapravo može podijeliti na dva bitno različita procesa. Zaključno se razmatraju kakve bi implikacije ovaj razvoj u istraživanjima mogao imati za područje socijalne kognicije općenito. (shrink)

Clarke and Beck use behavioural evidence to argue that approximate ratio computations are sufficient for claiming that the approximate number system represents the rationals, and the ANS does not represent the reals. We argue that pure behaviour is a poor litmus test for this problem, and that we should trust the psychophysical models that place ANS representations within the reals.