In this study, we investigate whether firms recognised as superior sustainability performers respond differently to climate change regulatory, physical and other risks/opportunities and examine whether such differences predict sustainability performance in subsequent years. Further, we seek to gain insights from climate change programs and strategies of both superior and inferior sustainability performers. Adopting mixed methods, we use a merged sample from the Top500 world’s largest firms and the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations. Our quantitative analyses show that greater awareness of (...) physical and other climate change opportunities is what sets superior performers apart, and that superior future sustainability performance is related to a firm’s stated awareness of these two types of opportunities. Qualitative content analysis of narrative disclosures confirm that superior performers provide more detailed description of climate change strategies that go beyond managing climate change risks. Our study contributes to the limited amount of research highlighting the value of proactively seeking opportunities rather than merely focussing on risk management. (shrink)

We seek insights into potential benefits for firms adopting strategies to improve business sustainability in a carbon-constrained future. We investigate whether lenders incorporate a firm’s exposure to carbon-related risk into lending decisions through the cost of financing, and if so, importantly whether firms can mitigate the penalty by demonstrating an awareness of their carbon risks. We use a sample of 255 firm-year observations from eight industries over the period 2009–2013. We measure carbon-related risk exposure as the firm’s historical carbon emissions (...) and our primary measure of carbon risk awareness is based on the firm’s willingness to respond to the Carbon Disclosure Project survey. We document a positive association between cost of debt and carbon risk for firms failing to respond to the CDP. Further, this association is economically meaningful, with a one standard deviation increase in carbon risk mapping into between a 38 and 62 basis point increase in the cost of debt. Equally, we find that this penalty is effectively negated for firms exhibiting carbon risk awareness. Our results are robust when we consider alternate measures of carbon awareness—disclosure through alternative medium to the CDP and firms’ annual cash investment in new capital assets using “cleaner” technology. Our results highlight not only the importance of carbon awareness as a business strategy for polluting firms, but also its importance to lenders exposed to their clients’ default and reputational risk. The debt market appears to incorporate historical carbon emissions and forward-looking indicators of carbon performance. (shrink)

Banks face a dilemma in choosing between maximising profits and facilitating the sustainable use of resources within a carbon-constrained future. This study provides empirical evidence on this dilemma, investigating whether a bank loan announcement for a firm with high carbon risk conveys information to investors about the firm’s carbon risk exposure collected through a bank’s pre-loan screening and ongoing monitoring. We use a sample of 120 bank loan announcements for ASX-listed firms over the period 2009–2015. We measure high carbon risk (...) exposure based on whether firms meet the reporting threshold of the NGER scheme. We document positive and significant excess loan announcement returns for loan renewals for high carbon risk firms, but not for loan initiations. Further, we document a more significant loan announcement return for renewals with favourable term revisions. Finally, we find no evidence that the market differentiates between domestic and foreign lenders. Taken together, our results suggest that investors perceive that banks incorporate carbon risk considerations into their lending decisions. Our results highlight the value of banks as financial intermediaries given the information asymmetry surrounding firms’ carbon risk exposure, and more generally the need to extend modern banking theory to consider issues such as the impact of banks’ CSR reputation on lending decisions. (shrink)

This reissue of his collection of early essays, Logico-Linguistic Papers, is published with a brand new introduction by Professor Strawson but, apart from minor ...

It is often said that the health promoter must be an expert in generalisation and Debates and Dilemmas in Promoting Health is an illustration of the vast range of issues influencing practice and policy health promotion today.The publication is part of The Open University undergraduate course “Promoting Health: Skills, Perspectives and Practice”. It presents a collection of articles by an impressive range of authors, and although the preface states that these aim to challenge preconceptions and evoke a critical understanding of (...) current health issues, some of these are drawn from other publications and are some years old.The book is divided into four sections and the introduction to each section from the editors attempts to summarise the key points and common themes. Overall, the reader should be left in no doubt about the complexity and lack of definitive answers in modern health promotion.In the years since the defining events of the 1970s and 1980s that gave rise to the Alma Ata Declaration and the Ottawa Charter, health promotion has been increasingly subject to debates, dilemmas, and criticisms. The knowledge base for health advice becomes seemingly ever more complex and the balance between individual, community, and government responsibility appears to be in continual flux. The all-embracing definitions of health with which we work present enormous challenges in a climate of increasing need to demonstrate output and cost effectiveness.The first section, “Key issues in health promotion”, aims to explore some of the current thinking at the heart of health promotion, and offers a number of different perspectives on this thinking. Charles Webster and Jeff …. (shrink)

A complete system of classical Aristotelian logic intended for honors high school and college.

Ohne Rücksicht auf disziplinäre Schranken bringt dieses Buch verschiedene nicht-reduktionistische Lerntheorien miteinander ins Gespräch. In einem offenen Diskurs, der die Konzepte zueinander in Beziehung setzt, werden die unterschiedlichen Perspektiven kritisch abgewogen und hinsichtlich ihrer Stärken und Schwächen diskutiert.

Delo se loteva vprašanja aktualnosti pojma subjekta v filozofiji in politiki skozi analizo tistih avtorjev, ki so ga domnevno najbolj radikalno pokopali: pokaže, da vznik radikalno novega in problematika subjekta zavzema osrednje mesto v Deleuzovi filozofiji, kakor tudi v Lyotardovi pozni misli posvečeni praznini, v Foucaultovi obravnavi biopolitike in biooblasti, v delu Negrija in Hardta o Imperiju, ter nazadnje v Badioujevi predelavi temeljnih filozofskih kategorij biti, resnice in subjekta, na osnovi katerih je dandanes znova možna renesansa filozofije. Ta ima po (...) Badiouju štiri razsežnosti, ki se v delu Vznik subjekta nenehno prepletajo: »V osnovi želja filozofije implicira razsežnost upora: ni filozofije brez nezadovoljstva mišljenja v njegovem soočenju s svetom, kakršen je. Pa vendar želja filozofije vključuje tudi logiko: to je, prepričanje v moč argumenta in uma.«. (shrink)

Drawing the Line examines the ways in which cultural, political, and legal lines are imagined, drawn, crossed, erased, and redrawn in post-apartheid South Africa through literary texts, artworks, and other forms of cultural production. Under the rubric of a philosophy of the limit and with reference to a range of signifying acts and events, this book asks what it takes to recalibrate a sociopolitical scene, shifting perceptions of what counts and what matters, of what can be seen and heard, of (...) what can be valued or regarded as meaningful. The book thus argues for an aesthetics of transitional justice and makes an appeal for a postapartheid aesthetic inquiry, as opposed to simply a political or a legal one. Each chapter brings a South African artwork, text, speech, building, or social encounter into conversation with debates in critical theory and continental philosophy, asking: What challenge do these South African acts of signification and resignification pose to current literary-philosophical debates? (shrink)

This study examines determinants of chairman compensation in a supervisory board setting and, specifically, the relationship between chairman and CEO compensation. Using a sample of publicly listed firms in Sweden, the study indicates that chairman compensation—despite its fixed nature—is reflective of firm performance via a positive relationship to CEO compensation. As CEO compensation is set before chairman compensation, we argue that the chairman may be inclined to conspire with the CEO in earnings management efforts at the expense of monitoring on (...) behalf of investors. Supporting our cronyism argument, we find evidence that the gap between chairman and CEO compensation is less at firms where the chairman had previously served in the executive management team. The close ties between the chairman and CEO compensation add to the understanding of the relative success of the managerial power theory versus the agency theory in explaining CEO compensation. (shrink)

The law relating to the conduct requirement for criminal attempts is confused and incoherent. This article examines this incoherence, rejects the Law Commission's provisional proposals to split the crime of attempt into two separate inchoate offences and suggests a reformulation of the conduct requirement in attempts.

Grounded in nearly a century of scientific research, Mastering Self Control is an academic 'how to' in the mastery of self control. Though most of us have an acute awareness of the goals we want to achieve, we have little insight into how we respond to questions central to successful goal attainment. What is a realistic goal? Can we turn intentions to actions? Why do we need a support system? It is within this context that this volume identifies a series (...) of actionable strategies to push readers to master self-control and consequently optimize goal progress. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of uses of the word ‘we’ in post-apartheid South African fiction. ‘We’ in these novels is typically a contested linguistic site – which tells of the loss of inherited communities, and reflects the ethically complex negotiations of a ‘we’ perhaps still to come. Yet if the internal narratives assert a loss of community, each event of the novel’s being-read inaugurates a new ‘community’ of readers. The paper considers the ethical implications of the act of reading (...) a literary text in post-apartheid South Africa. In the course of the argument, I draw links between African philosophies of community, and Jean-Luc Nancy’s proposition that ‘I’ does not precede ‘we’. Thus I suggest some ways in which philosophies from Africa contribute towards current debates about ‘we’ in contemporary continental philosophy. (shrink)

While Hermann Levin Goldschmidt didn’t read Yiddish anarchists, there seems to have been a convergent evolution in their thinking. Goldschmidt’s looking up to Jewish lore as a source of liberating creativity is commonly encountered in Yiddish anarchist texts. His view of action as a constant response to internal and external challenges in the struggle for an open future is developed by Isaac Nachman Steinberg on the basis of nineteenth-century vitalism. Goldschmidt’s theory of anarchist individualism as willed self-limiting solidarity has a (...) compelling parallel in Hillel Solotaroff’s view of history. His use of impressionism and photography to eternalize the immediacy of human actuality is akin to Rudolf Rocker’s championing of decadent literature. In both cases, the goal of anarchism is not a dictatorship of the former downtrodden, but a continuous and contradictory evolution of freedom in ever-changing contexts. (shrink)

Metz holds that we can use African communal ethics to constitute global economic practices such as appropriation, production, distribution and consumption in such a way that promotes harmonious relations. In this article, I will show that Metz’s reformist approach to constituting the global economic practices is problematic as it fails to deal with the fundamental problem that pertains to a racialised world order that is structurally configured by coloniality of being. I will show that reformist approaches such as Metz’s use (...) of African communal ethics to constitute global economic practices in a way that promotes harmonious relations are undesirable attempts that are opposed and curtailed by a structural racialised logic/ontology of the world that governs and supervises the evolution of the world economic structures and practices in a way which undermines harmonious relations and in a way which causes economic marginalisation and impoverishment of historically disadvantaged indigenous Africans. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Karl Marx’s acerbic observation in the opening lines of The Eighteenth Brumaire that “all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur the first time as tragedy, the second as farce” may be profitably applied to a reconsideration of literary farce sui generis, a genre represented in this article by a long-neglected work of utopian fiction, Archibald Marshall’s Upsidonia (1915). Although Upsidonia’s current disregard is arguably undeserved, the article’s chief interest is not to reclaim the novel on aesthetic (...) grounds but to illuminate the mechanics of what Marx would call its “serious buffoonery.” In its persistent reversal of capitalist principles and relations, Upsidonia naturally invites readers to revisit Marx, whose mordant gambit may serve as a key to Marshall’s own farcical plot and praxis, rooted in return and repetition, the essential maneuvers of farce itself. (shrink)

This introduction by leading scholar Peter Trawny is the first to tackle the Black Notebooks, whose recent publication revealed the extent of Heidegger's anti-Semitism. Trawny directly confronts the most problematic aspects of Heidegger's thought, also fully surveying his work, from early writings to his magnum opus, Being and Time.

"How do we go about weighing evidence, testing hypotheses and making inferences? According to the model of 'inference to the Best explanation', we work out what to inter from the evidence by thinking about what would actually explain that evidence, and we take the ability of a hypothesis to explain the evidence as a sign that the hypothesis is correct. In inference to the Best Explanation, Peter Lipton gives this important and influential idea the development and assessment it deserves." (...) "The second edition has been substantially enlarged and reworked, with a new chapter on the relationship between explanation and Bayesianism, and an extension and defence of the account of contractive explanation. It also includes an expanded defence of the claims that our inferences really are guided by diverse explanatory considerations, and that this pattern of inference can take us towards the truth. This edition of Inference to the Best Explanation has also been updated throughout and incudes a new bibliography."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

Do we have introspective access to our own thoughts? Peter Carruthers challenges the consensus that we do: he argues that access to our own thoughts is always interpretive, grounded in perceptual awareness and sensory imagery. He proposes a bold new theory of self-knowledge, with radical implications for understanding of consciousness and agency.

This book is a comprehensive development and defense of one of the guiding assumptions of evolutionary psychology: that the human mind is composed of a large number of semi-independent modules. The Architecture of the Mind has three main goals. One is to argue for massive mental modularity. Another is to answer a 'How possibly?' challenge to any such approach. The first part of the book lays out the positive case supporting massive modularity. It also outlines how the thesis should best (...) be developed, and articulates the notion of 'module' that is in question. Then the second part of the book takes up the challenge of explaining how the sorts of flexibility and creativity that are distinctive of the human mind could possibly be grounded in the operations of a massive number of modules.Peter Carruthers's third aim is to show how the various components of the mind are likely to be linked and interact with one another - indeed, this is crucial to demonstrating how the human mind, together with its familiar capacities, can be underpinned by a massively modular set of mechanisms. He outlines and defends the basic framework of a perception / belief / desire / planning / motor-control architecture, as well as detailing the likely components and their modes of connectivity. Many specific claims about the place within this architecture of natural language, of a mind-reading system, and others are explained and motivated. A number of novel proposals are made in the course of these discussions, one of which is that creative human thought depends upon a prior kind of creativity of action.Written with unusual clarity and directness, and surveying an extensive range of research in cognitive science, this book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the nature and organization of the mind. (shrink)

Claims about consciousness in animals are often made in support of their moral standing. Peter Carruthers argues that there is no fact of the matter about animal consciousness and it is of no scientific or ethical significance. Sympathy for an animal can be grounded in its mental states, but should not rely on assumptions about its consciousness.

How can phenomenal consciousness exist as an integral part of a physical universe? How can the technicolour phenomenology of our inner lives be created out of the complex neural activities of our brains? Many have despaired of finding answers to these questions; and many have claimed that human consciousness is inherently mysterious. Peter Carruthers argues, on the contrary, that the subjective feel of our experience is fully explicable in naturalistic terms. Drawing on a variety of interdisciplinary resources, he develops (...) and defends a novel account in terms of higher-order thought. He shows that this can explain away some of the more extravagant claims made about phenomenal consciousness, while substantively explaining the key subjectivity of our experience. Written with characteristic clarity and directness, and surveying a wide range of extant theories, this book is essential reading for all those within philosophy and psychology interested in the problem of consciousness. (shrink)

The Centered Mind offers a new view of the nature and causal determinants of both reflective thinking and, more generally, the stream of consciousness. Peter Carruthers argues that conscious thought is always sensory-based, relying on the resources of the working-memory system. This system enables sensory images to be sustained and manipulated through attentional signals directed at midlevel sensory areas of the brain. When abstract conceptual representations are bound into these images, we consciously experience ourselves as making judgments or arriving (...) at decisions. However, our amodal propositional attitudes are never actually among the contents of this stream of conscious reflection. Our beliefs, goals, and decisions are only ever active in the background of consciousness, working behind the scenes. They are never themselves conscious.Drawing on extensive knowledge of the scientific literature on working memory and related topics, Carruthers challenges the central assumptions of many philosophers. In addition to arguing that non-sensory propositional attitudes are never conscious, he also shows that they are never under direct intentional control. Written with his usual clarity and directness, The Centered Mind will be essential reading for all philosophers and cognitive scientists interested in the nature of human thought processes. (shrink)

Since its original publication in 1975, this groundbreaking work has awakened millions of people to the existence of "speciesism"—our systematic disregard of nonhuman animals—inspiring a worldwide movement to transform our attitudes to animals and eliminate the cruelty we inflict on them. In Animal Liberation, author Peter Singer exposes the chilling realities of today’s "factory farms" and product-testing procedures—destroying the spurious justifications behind them, and offering alternatives to what has become a profound environmental and social as well as moral issue. (...) An important and persuasive appeal to conscience, fairness, decency, and justice, it is essential reading for the supporter and the skeptic alike. (shrink)

Do animals have moral rights? In contrast to the philosophical gurus of the animal rights movement, whose opinion has held moral sway in recent years, Peter Carruthers here claims that they do not. He explores a variety of moral theories, arguing that animals lack direct moral significance. This provocative but judiciously argued book will appeal to all those interested in animal rights, whatever their initial standpoint. It will also serve as a lively introduction to ethics, demonstrating why theoretical issues (...) in ethics actually matter. (shrink)