This manuscript proposes that tax avoidance can be better understood and mitigated as a sustainability problem. Tax avoidance is not just a financial problem for tax authorities, but one that erodes critical common spaces necessary for the smooth functioning of regulatory compliance, organizational integrity, and society. Defining tax avoidance as a sustainability problem offers a broader and more holistic understanding of the organizational and societal consequences of tax avoidance behavior. Sustainability is also a mature and legitimized concept that can readily (...) incorporate taxation. A variety of established sustainability metrics have the capacity to incorporate anti-tax avoidance measures or publicize firms that engage in fair tax practices. This manuscript concludes that integrating sustainability principles, in conjunction with important extant work on corporate social responsibility and taxation, can advance the goals of decreasing the occurrence and acceptability of tax avoidance. (shrink)

Global supply chains enhance value, but are subject to governance problems and encourage evasive practices that deter sustainability, especially in developing countries. This article proposes that the precontractual environment, where parties are interested in trade but have not yet negotiated formal terms, can enable a unique process for building long-term sustainable relations. We argue that precontractual signals based on relation-specific investments, promises of repeated exchange, and reassuring cheap talk can be leveraged in precontract by the power of framing. We show (...) how these framing signals are amplified in precontract because the lack of credible information, minimal time for reflection, and the role of risk-aversion present in supply chain contract negotiations. The result is a process that is uniquely productive for building long-term and value-generating contractual relations in supply chains, particularly in skeptical or even hostile negotiating contexts. We then show how framed precontractual signals generate a joint contractual surplus through a supernormal profit known as a relational rent. This rent can be invested to improve sustainable practices, an efficient option in a competitive market due to the second order effects that sustainable practices generate. This novel process we propose thus potentially generates superior returns to other trust measures and encourages focus on precontract as a fertile environment for building sustainable investments. (shrink)

Tens of millions of adults and children die each year from illnesses that are treatable or preventable with existing medicines. Each year over 500 million people are infected with malaria, and the disease kills two million people annually. Hundreds of thousands more die annually from a myriad of lesser known diseases including diphtheria, measles, tetanus, and syphilis. Approximately 30 percent of the world’s population, over 1.7 billion people, has inadequate access or no access at all to essential medicines.Not surprisingly, the (...) vast majority of these illnesses are contracted in poor countries. Four million lives could be saved annually through prompt diagnosis and treatment of illnesses in Africa and Southeast Asia alone, and access to pharmaceutical drugs could likely save millions more. Many of the health problems facing the developing world do not arise from lack of understanding of complex diseases. Rather, the problem arises from a striking lack of availability of life-saving medicines for the consumers that need these medicines the most. (shrink)

This manuscript addresses how developing countries can maximize access to essential medicines and minimize unwanted side-effects within the legal environment of a compulsory license regime. While compulsory licensing can play a role in improving public health, external social and political conditions must be considered in order to make licensing an effective practice.

First published in 1923, Lev Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution was the first systematic treatment of art by a Communist Party leader. The international history of its publication and reception has gone hand-in-hand with the development of the Marxist theory of culture. This article highlights several specific concepts in Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution which exerted decisive formative influence on critical theory, including the relative autonomy of culture, a broadening of ideology to include cultural practices, and an innovative treatment of class. I (...) conclude that for Trotsky culture can only be described negatively, as its own constant overcoming, as permanent revolution. (shrink)

Viacheslav Ivanov, the central intellectual force in Russian modernism, achieved through his work an original synthesis of Christianity, Platonism, and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. His powerful intellect exerted an immeasurable influence in modernist Russia and the early Soviet Union, and after emigrating to Italy in 1924 he played an important role in intellectual debates in Western Europe between the wars. In recent years, Ivanov's manifold contributions have been recognized in all major aspects of Russian culture, including poetry, literary theory, (...) philosophy, and theology. In _The Russian Prospero_, Robert Bird uncovers the foundations of Ivanov's poetic and theoretical universe, traces its evolution, and explores its connections to cultural and intellectual currents in international modernism. Blending a close reading of Ivanov's work with a thoughtful analysis of his place within twentieth-century thought, Bird finds that Ivanov's ecstatic creative psychology leads directly to a consideration of history as a continuum of human interpretive activity, and to a conception of art as a historical force. He emphasizes and dramatizes Ivanov's quest to harness the power of art and apply it to concrete life-situations. It is the dilemma of Prospero, who must liberate his attendant spirit Ariel in order to restore full sovereignty over his own creative self and to regain ethical agency. The productive tension that resulted from Ivanov's struggle was a remarkable force in Russian modernism and remains a powerful spur for our own reflections on modernity. Outstanding Academic Title, _Choice_ Magazine “[Bird’s] clear explanations of Ivanov’s ideas and his informed, insightful, astute readings of the poetic works make this book required reading for anyone interested in modern poetry, intellectual history, cultural studies, and philosophy of early 20th century Russian and European thought.... Essential.”—_Choice_ “[Bird] makes a welcome contribution to our understanding of Russian modernism in its broader European context.... In this undertaking he has not only succeeded admirably, but will undoubtedly inspire others to follow him.”—Pamela Davidson, _The Russian Review_ “The most comprehensive overall treatment of Ivanov’s work to date.”—David N. Wells, _The Slavic and East European Journal_. (shrink)

Viacheslav Ivanov's concept of person underwent significant development in the course of his career. In his earliest works the person is a transient form that is to be superseded by union with the supra-personal, transcendent self. In works of his middle period Ivanov posits the person as an image of the transcendent self. Lastly, in the 1910s Ivanov integrated these two concepts into a hermeneutic view of the person as an agent of transcendence.

In this paper Russian Symbolist philosophy is represented primarily by Viacheslav Ivanov (1866--1949), but its conclusions are intended to be valid for other philosophers we classify as Symbolist, including Nikolai Berdiaev and S. L. Frank. It is posited that, by comparing Ivanov''s cosmology, aesthetics, and anthropology to those of Martin Heidegger, one can reconceive of Symbolist philosophy as an existential hermeneutic. This, it is claimed, can help to identify a common basis among the Symbolist philosophers, and also to place Russian (...) thought in the context of modern European philosophy and vice versa. (shrink)

Aleksej Losev''s definition of myth centres onthe concept of detachment. In modern timesdetachment has most often figured in thecontext of philosophical aesthetics, where itis a cognitive category akin to Kant''s``disinterestedness'''' or the Russian formalists''``estrangement.'''' However Losev''s usage alsomakes reference to the ontological sense ofdetachment as contemplativeascent (cf. Meister Eckhardt''sAbgeschiedenheit). Thus, Losev''s concept ofmyth combines both senses of detachment,binding perceptual attitude and being togetherin a double movement of resignation from theworld and union with meaning; this movementliterally makes sense out of reality. (...) Ittherefore bears comparison to the treatment ofdistanciation in contemporary hermeneutics,where detachment is a key condition ofunderstanding. By investigating Losev''sconnections to other Russian thinkers, theauthor makes a case for a distinct Russiantradition of hermeneutic philosophy (V. Ivanov,G. Shpet, A. Bakshy, A. Losev). (shrink)

Slavoj iek's writings on Krzysztof Kies´lowski and Andrej Tarkovskij represent direct challenges to the Central and Eastern European tradition of spiritual art and to dominant aesthetic concepts as such. He refuses to separate the solemn films of Kies´lowski and Tarkovskij from popular culture and stresses their import as ethical statements by their directors. Despite this ethical emphasis, iek makes an important contribution to philosophical aesthetics. He implicitly defines art as a suspension of reality which reveals time in its fragility and (...) potentiality. Defining iek's aesthetics in terms of suspension helps to explain his partiality for Kies´lowski and Tarkovskij and bears comparison to the Russian tradition of philosophical aesthetics, in particular Aleksej Losev and Alexander Bakshy. (shrink)

We provide an overview of a transdisciplinary project about sustainable forest management under climate change. Our project is a partnership with members of the Menominee Nation, a Tribal Nation located in northern Wisconsin, United States. We use immersive virtual experiences, translated from ecosystem model outcomes, to elicit human values about future forest conditions under alternative scenarios. Our project combines expertise across the sciences and humanities as well as across cultures and knowledge systems. Our management structure, governance, and leadership behaviors have (...) both fostered and constrained our work and must be continuously responsive to changing group dynamics. Our project presents opportunities for substantial contributions to society, including insights and knowledge about complementary ways of knowing, skills training, and professional development, and opportunities for reflexive learning about effective transdisciplinary, translational, and transformative scientific processes. (shrink)

A uniquely playful and incisive illustrated collection of Zen teaching stories from one of America's best-known and most-respected Zen masters. A Modern Classic. In the tradition of the great koan collections and the extensive records of ancient masters, Robert Aitken--one of America's best-known and most-respected Zen masters--distills a lifetime of teaching down to its essence. Intriguing, playful, and deceptively easy to read, Zen Master Raven is a brilliant encapsulation of Zen in over a hundred koan-like encounters--featuring curious beginners like (...) Mallard and Mole, to teachers-in-training like Porcupine, to the profound wisdom of masters like Brown Bear, Moose Roshi, and Zen Master Raven himself. (shrink)

I argue that the main theme of the Zhuangzi is that of spiritual transformation. If there is no such theme in the Zhuangzi, it becomes an obscure text with relativistic viewpoints contradicting statements and stories designed to lead the reader to a state of spiritual transformation. I propose to reveal the coherence of the deep structure of the text by clearly dividing relativistic statements designed to break down fixed viewpoints from statements, anecdotes, paradoxes and metaphors designed to lead the reader (...) to a state of spiritual transformation. Without such an analysis, its profound stories such as the butterfly dream and the Great Sage dream will blatantly contradict each other and leave us bereft of the wisdom they presage. Unlike the great works of poetic and philosophic wisdom such as the Dao de Jing and the Symposium, the Zhuangzi will be reduced to a virtually unintelligible, lengthy, disjointed literary ditty, a potpourri of paradoxical puzzles, puns and parables, obscure philosophical conundrums, monstrous interlocutors and historical personages used as mouthpieces authoritatively arguing on behalf of viewpoints humorously opposite to what they historically held. (shrink)

The Zhuangzi begins with Peng, a soaring bird transformed from a bounded fish, which is the first metaphor that points beyond limited standpoints to a higher point of view. The transformation is one-way and symbolizes that there is a higher viewpoint to attain which affords mental freedom and the clarity and scope of great vision. Under the alternate thesis of constant transformation, values and understandings must ceaselessly transform and collapse. All cyclical transformations must collapse into skeptical relativism and confusion. (...) But Peng does not turn back into a fish, and the awakened sage does not fall into a slumber of ignorance and confusion. It is only the thesis of a one-way transformation that leaves the sage in a state of knowledge. (shrink)

Methods in experimental economics are reminiscent of the methods employed by behaviorists in the first half of the twentieth century. Empirical and conceptual progress led the field of psychology away from the principles of behaviorism, and experimental economists should consider whether the criticisms leveled against behaviorists might apply equally to them.

I defend the conception of musical works as indicated temporally initiated types against Julian Dodd's recent argument that all types are eternal and uncreated. In doing so, I develop a new account of both cultural and natural types. While types are in a certain sense determined by the properties that underlie them, not all properties determine types; and properties such as being indicated by Beethoven exist only once the temporally initiated entities that those properties essentially involve exist. A cultural type (...) such as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is a sound pattern that has the essential property of being used in the way specified by Beethoven's singling out of that pattern. (Natural types, such as bird songs or biological species, are patterns having places in actual causal chains in nature.) Given this framework, the Fifth Symphony is an indicated type that was, in a straightforward literal sense, created by Beethoven in 1804–1808. (shrink)

The Kingdom as Jesus sees it breaking in will arrive in disenchanting and disarming form : not as a mighty cedar astride the lofty mountain height but as a lowly garden herb.... It will erupt out of the power of weakness and refuse to perpetuate itself by the weakness of power.

Readers of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) have understandably been stumped trying to decipher Kant’s views on the relation between beauty and art.1 At §43 Kant ends his discussion of “free natural” beauties such as flowers and birds of paradise and begins to formulate a theory of fine art, according to which fine art has as its purpose the expression of “aesthetic ideas.” This theory of fine art, perhaps because it is saddled with examples of second-rate art (including a poem (...) by “the great king” Frederick) and is sketchier than the theory of beauty, has not been given the attention accorded the four “moments”. However, Kant’s theory of fine art is not as “unsophisticated” and “unenlightening” as one commentator thinks.2 It is rough and unfinished, but even so, it lays claim to being, along with Aristotle’s account of the “philosophical” implications of literature, one of the great pre-Hegelian statements on the capacity of art to express ideas. At least, the fact that the Critique of Judgment contains such a theory should stand as a warning to those who blame Kant for “neutering” the capacity of art to have any practical effect by reducing art to a contrivance for producing an enemic “disinterested” pleasure.3 On the contrary: Kant himself may in fact have thought his theory of fine art the capstone of his aesthetics. For at §51 he writes, “We may in general call beauty (whether natural or artistic) the expression of aesthetic ideas.” And here is where the puzzle begins, for it is not at all clear how or why beauty should even apply to the expression of aesthetic ideas — let alone apply in a way such that “we may in general call beauty … the expression of aesthetic ideas.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Who Hears?A Zen Buddhist PerspectiveRobert AitkenWestern psychologists and neurologists have attempted to use their concepts to explain East Asian religions for more than seventy-five years. Carl Jung (1875–1961) wrote a long foreword to Richard Wilhelm's The Secret of the Golden Flower back in 1931, which gave many readers in Europe and the Americas their first glimpse of philosophical Daoism.1 A generation later, Erich Fromm's conversations with D. T. Suzuki (...) were recorded in Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis.2 In our own time, the Dalai Lama's collaborative work with neuroscientists and psychologists has received widespread attention,3 while academia has given James H. Austin's Zen and the Brain hearty approval.4The process of mutual understanding between Western scientists and teachers of East Asian religion is still incomplete, however, and in earlier times it had barely begun. I remember my amusement back in the 1970s, watching a video of monks trailing streams of wires attached to biofeedback instruments while they were walking formally and solemnly. Even in those early days it was apparent to me that for all their academic credentials, the scholars had started with an ignorance of the subject of their study. They were successful in measuring something in the brain relating to a samādhi condition, but while the monks may have grounded themselves more or less in a settled practice, who is to measure their appreciation of the mejiro chirping in the camellia bush just outside? Great masters of Zen, Zhaozhou, and Deshan and their successors did not talk about being settled, any more than neuroanataomists discuss the importance of the alphabet.The chirping of the mejiro might have reminded the monks of a case, a case that would lie in a dimension even further from the world of wires and dials. "Who is the master of hearing that sound?"5 This was the gist of a question by Bassui Tokushō Zenji—a question that became a public case, one kōan among many other kōans that have not been studied by science. It is time for such a study.My directory of Chinese kōans holds more than 5,500 neatly framed traditional stories set forth to guide the student.6 The modern Zen teacher is conversant with some 550 of these kōans, a number that is sufficient if... if.... There are several caveats. If the teacher treats kōans as historical artifacts, then the stories are no [End Page 89] longer kōans, and the teaching is perniciously misleading. Sometimes the teacher has gone only part way in kōan study. The great house of conventional wisdom has fallen, but he or she doesn't know it is ruined and holds forth in the old explanatory way. Sometimes the teacher has completed the long course of study, but elects to pontificate from within the wreckage of the old manor. Finally there are those who abandon the ruins completely for practice on the open road. Here is my gāthā pointing to that way:Stepping forth on the open road,I vow with all beingsTo distinguish the voices of birds,And make good use of my time.Bassui Zenji's kōan "Who is the master of hearing that sound?" could be paraphrased here at the Pālolo Zen Center as "Who is hearing that thrush singing on the railing outside?" If, in the days before I retired, a student were to respond, "I hear the thrush," I would not have approved. Bassui would not have approved. Intimacy would be missing, and intimacy is the Dao. Intimacy is the way of all the Buddhas. There is no Zen without intimacy; intimacy with what? Both the self and the thrush. That was Bassui's intention, you can be sure.Fayan met Dizang while on pilgrimage. Dizang asked, "What are you up to these days?"Fayan said, "I'm going around one pilgrimage, wherever my feet will carry me."Dizang asked, "What to you expect from pilgrimage?"Fayan said, "I don't know."Dizang said, "Not knowing is most intimate." Fayan underwent great realization. 7Zen Buddhism stresses intimacy, while in... (shrink)

The present paper, adopting some of the tools offered by Cognitive Linguistics, namely the mechanisms of conceptual metaphor and metonymy, is a qualitative study of a sociolinguistic nature. Its overall purpose is an attempt at exhibiting a paradigm shift in the representation of women in Anglo-American proverbs. Combining the potential of the cross-fertilisation between Cognitive Linguistics and paremiological studies, the study appertains to the sense-threads embedded in the figurative language of proverbs, with the main focus on a cognitive semantic analysis (...) of selected Anglo-American paremias directed towards women and animals. The main goal of the research is the juxtaposition of the meaning coded in two proverbs of traditional status, as representatives of a larger group of paremiological units (i.e. A woman, a cat, and a chimney should never leave the house; A whistling girl and a crowing hen always come to no good end), reflecting the deep-rooted gender-biased ideology in patriarchal Anglo-American society, with the content of the selected anti-proverb (i.e. The early bird gets up to serve his wife breakfast in bed) and a contemporary proverb (i.e. A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle), serving as sample evidence of the heralds of a paradigm shift in the issue of gender stereotyping stored in paremiological wisdom. The paper shows that the motivation behind the use of the analysed proverbs is to be accounted for by reference to the mechanism of metaphor-metonymy interaction, while the rise of new gender-related proverbs can be regarded as a sign of socio-cultural changes. Specifically, through the medium of modern paremiology, asymmetrical representation of male and female gender, coupled with traditional masculine and feminine characteristics as well as social roles, appears if not endangered then, at least, to be taking a promising path. (shrink)

Classifications of animals and plants have long been represented by hierarchical lists of taxa, but occasional authors have drawn diagrammatic versions of their classifications in an attempt to better depict the "natural relationships" of their organisms. Ornithologists in 19th-century Britain produced and pioneered many types of classificatory diagrams, and these fall into three groups: (a) the quinarian systems of Vigors and Swainson (1820s and 1830s); (b) the "maps" of Strickland and Wallace (1840s and 1850s); and (c) the evolutionary diagrams of (...) the post-Darwin authors (1860 on). The quinarians distinguished between affinity and analogy and used both in their classifications, whereas Strickland rejected the quinarians' belief in numerical regularity and their use of analogy. Wallace's "maps" are easily given an evolutionary interpretation, and his approach was taken up and modified by later evolutionary anatomists. Sharpe returned to Strickland's methods and merely appended a superficial evolutionary interpretation. Contrary to common belief systematics has a rich conceptual history, and many of the conceptual developments in 19th-century systematics were made by ornithologists. (shrink)

Defining culture as social learning means that culture is present in many birds and mammals, suggesting that cetacean culture is not so special and does not require special explanation. Contrary to their own claims, Rendell and Whitehead present culture as having variant forms in different species, and these forms seem inconsistently applied and compared across species.

A ubiquitous feature of the auditory organ in amniotes is the longitudinal mapping of neuronal characteristic frequencies (CFs), which increase exponentially with distance along the organ. The exponential tonotopic map reflects variation in hair cell properties according to cochlear location and is thought to stem from concentration gradients in diffusible morphogenic proteins during embryonic development. While in all amniotes the spatial gradient is initiated by sonic hedgehog (SHH), released from the notochord and floorplate, subsequent molecular pathways are not fully understood. (...) In chickens, BMP7 is one such morphogen, secreted from the distal end of the cochlea. In mammals, the developmental mechanism differs from birds and may depend on cochlear location. A consequence of exponential maps is that each octave occupies an equal distance on the cochlea, a spacing preserved in the tonotopic maps in higher auditory brain regions. This may facilitate frequency analysis and recognition of acoustic sequences. (shrink)

Consciousness is known by the company it keeps. Story is its constant companion. This is the case even when it addresses itself to itself and says what it sees. It is like the pilot of a ship in one tale, but a thinking "I" in another. It is a theater where perceptions come and go, or an aviary where thoughts fly in and out like birds, or a stream. It is the manifestation of an immortal soul, or perhaps the first (...) rumor left behind by the disappearing soul on the air of philosophy. It is an ineffective nothing, a lyric cry in the midst of business, or the whistle of a steam engine. It is a mill, a tablet written on by experience, a telephone switchboard, a hologram, a computer. Anciently and most pertinently here... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and BrutalRobert N. MatuozziA Nietzschean Bestiary: Becoming Animal Beyond Docile and Brutal, edited by Christa Davis Acampora and Ralph R. Acampora ; xxxii & 371 pp. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. $75.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.What if instead of re-reading Nietzsche's corpus, one imagines what it would be like to view his works on the "Nietzsche Network." Imagine a spectator situated (...) in the middle of a vast amphitheatre preparing to watch these simulacra. Gazing up and around a series of giant, flat-screen video monitors arrayed in layers around the interior wall of an amphitheatre, the spectator views and listens to Nietzsche's multi-media texts as, simultaneously, they seductively flash their provocative narratives in flickering streams of high-resolution sounds, words, and images.The Nietzsche Network is a roaring carnival. It consists of colorful, speculative historical dramatizations and equally enticing philosophical tableaux. Dark ambient musical motifs, laced with interludes of explosive, uncontrollable laughter, are a subliminal presence. Lurid detective stories and somber cultural narratives and slashing polemics implicate cultures and ideologies in festivals of cruelty and soul-murder. Poignant genealogical and aphoristic asides on joy [End Page 443] and work and suffering, weird psychological skits starring well-known ensemble casts are accompanied by hoarse oratory, soaring denunciations, and sober etymological digressions. Intermittently, the spectator is startled by abrupt, sometimes strident proclamations, like confessional bulletins shot from nowhere.Nietzsche's siren-like prose exhibits an extraordinary rhetorical range. This is particularly true of the polychromatic works originally published in the gloaming of his career in the period after 1886. Nietzsche's compelling, fluvial style is accounted for in this volume by the kinetic movements of lizards and the halcyon tones of birds, to his study of the ancient Greek and Roman classics (and to the lost musicality of Greek tragedy in particular), and to his emphatic embrace of a kind of plosive, Dionysian philosophical technics.The content of the Nietzsche Network spans thousands of years of human experience and thought. A prequel features a substantial bestiary of traditional animals and emergent biomorphic forms set in a variety of carefully animated zoological dioramas. Among the modernists, has there been another thinker as strangely original and subversive? Allowing for fundamental differences, only Valéry comes to mind. Like the silent, ruminating cow in his "untimely" essay on history, Nietzsche prevents the past from injecting noise into present and future philosophizing. He will be the exemplary philosopher of the other-than-human as he campaigns to re-inscribe human animality into the zoological text of nature. Through explicit pronouncements and in scattered philosophical sorties involving human animality and his (desperate) utopist vision of human perfectibility, Nietzsche attempted to attain—at least conceptually—what Richard Rorty aptly calls the "historical sublime, a future which has broken all relations with the past."This excellent collection of essays on Nietzsche's bestiary demonstrates the surprising persistence of the animal imaginary in his thought. The various pieces also illuminate the multiple thematic and linguistic transformations Nietzsche develops as he enlists animals in his feral, anti-essentialist dialectic on the obscure continuum between "humans," "animals," and "nature." It turns out that a degraded version of Nietzsche's strangest thought experiment on animalism, the übermensch, is perhaps only a few years away from being produced through emerging boutique bioengineering, a prospect that has some commentators on both the left and the right blinking with apprehension. These essays amply demonstrate that Nietzsche's bestial philosophy of human and animal alterity subverts, among other paradigms, the strange Cartesian notion that animals are mechanical automata while humans are transcendental rationalists. As one commentator in this book broadly puts it, Nietzsche shows that the various schemes concocted to put an illusory distance between humans and animals have ended up being an immensely corrupting "pretense" (p. 224).Precursor bestiaries are indicated in this volume, though the medieval tradition originating in the Physiologus is here mostly displaced by a different [End Page 444] menagerie of cultural affiliations. The fabulist Aesop is present, along with Aristotle and Montaigne, though La Fontaine is not, and Pico Mirandola's famous remarks in his Oration on... (shrink)