Organisations are increasingly involved in what they call ‘ethical dilemmas’, that is, the conditions under which wrongdoing and righteous deeds must be defined once again because the line between right and wrong has blurred more than ever. In general, human beings have special moral characteristics in the individual and personality dimension that shape their thoughts, speech and behaviour. It is possible that the same people in the same position and organisation could be affected differently, and their ideas, speech and behaviour (...) affect the efficiency and effectiveness of the organisation. Ethics can have positive or negative consequences at each organisational level. One of the effective factors on the occurrence of employees’ ethical behaviours is the role of spirituality in the work environment and humility of leaders. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of humility of Muslim leaders on the moral behaviours of followers and spirituality at work in Islamic society. The statistical population of the study was 370 Muslim employees of International Islamic University Malaysia. After distributing the questionnaires among the statistical population, 352 questionnaires were returned. The validity of the questionnaires was confirmed by the content validity method, and its reliability was confirmed by Cronbach’s alpha. In this research, the structural equation modeling approach and Amos software were used to analyse the data. All hypotheses were confirmed at a 95% significance level. The results showed that the humility of leaders has a positive and significant effect on spirituality in the workplace and work ethic of followers. Spirituality in the workplace has also a positive effect on employees’ work ethic.Contribution: It is recommended that the officials of organisations should pay attention to spirituality in the workplace and the humility of managers and supervisors towards employees in order to promote work ethics. Further, it can be concluded that organisations can increase the ethical behaviours of employees by promoting the components of organisational spirituality. (shrink)

Here the philosopher and physicist David Z Albert argues, among other things, that the difference between past and future can be understood as a mechanical phenomenon of nature and that quantum mechanics makes it impossible to present the entirety of what can be said about the world as a narrative of “befores” and “afters.”.

Albert approaches critical rationalism as an alternative to other philosophical standpoints dominant in Germany: the conceptions of the Frankfurt School, hermeneutical thinking as represented by Gadamer, analytic philosophy, and logical empiricism. The author's purpose is to find a way out of the foundationalism of classical philosophy without falling back on the skeptical views so prevalent in today's philosophical thinking. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from (...) the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can (...) just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students. Table of Contents: Preface 1. Time-Reversal Invariance 2. Thermodynamics 3. Statistical Mechanics 4. The Reversibility Objections and the Past-Hypothesis 5. The Scope of Thermodynamics 6. The Asymmetries of Knowledge and Intervention 7. Quantum Mechanics Appendix: Gedankenexperiments with Heat Engines Index Reviews of this book: The foundations of statistical mechanisms are often presented in physics textbooks in a rather obscure and confused way. By challenging common ways of thinking about this subject, Time and Chance can do quite a lot to improve this situation. --Jean Bricmont, Science Albert is perfecting a style of foundational analysis that is uniquely his own...It has a surgical precision...and it is ruthless with pretensions. The foundations of thermodynamics is a topic that has accumulated a good deal of dead wood; this is a fire that will burn and burn. --Simon W. Saunders, Oxford University As usual with Albert's work, the exposition is brisk and to the point, and exceptionally clear...The book will be an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on the subject of philosophical issues in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, a literature which has been thin on the ground but is now growing as it deserves to. --Lawrence Sklar, University of Michigan. (shrink)

_Time_'s 'Man of the Century', Albert Einstein is the unquestioned founder of modern physics. His theory of relativity is the most important scientific idea of the modern era. In this short book Einstein explains, using the minimum of mathematical terms, the basic ideas and principles of the theory which has shaped the world we live in today. Unsurpassed by any subsequent books on relativity, this remains the most popular and useful exposition of Einstein's immense contribution to human knowledge.

_Time_'s 'Man of the Century', Albert Einstein is the unquestioned founder of modern physics. His theory of relativity is the most important scientific idea of the modern era. In this short book Einstein explains, using the minimum of mathematical terms, the basic ideas and principles of the theory which has shaped the world we live in today. Unsurpassed by any subsequent books on relativity, this remains the most popular and useful exposition of Einstein's immense contribution to human knowledge.

Relativity is the most important scientific idea of the twentieth century. Albert Einstein is the unquestioned founder of modern physics. His Special and General theories of Relativity introduced the idea to the world. In this classic short book he explains clearly, using the minimum amount of mathematical terms, the basic ideas and principles of his theory of Relativity. Unsurpassed by any subsequent books on Relativity, this remains the most popular and useful exposition of Einstein's immense contribution to human knowledge.

Albert and De Ruiter provide an introduction to the Conversation Analytic approach to ‘repair’: the ways in which people detect and deal with troubles in speaking, hearing and understanding in conversation. They explain the basic turn‐taking structures involved, provide examples, explain recent developments in the field and highlight some important points of contact and contrast with work in the Cognitive Sciences.

Charles Sanders Peirce is generally regarded as the founder of pragmatism, and one of the greatest ever American philosophers. Peirce is also widely known for his work on truth, his foundational work in mathematical logic, and an influential theory of signs, or semiotics. Albert Atkin introduces the full spectrum of Peirce’s thought for those coming to his work for the first time. The book begins with an overview of Peirce’s life and work, considering his early and long-standing interest in (...) logic and science, and highlighting important views on the structure of philosophical thought. Atkin then explains Peirce’s accounts of pragmatism and truth examining important later developments to these theories. He then introduces Peirce’s full accounts of semiotics, examines his foundational work on formal and graphical logic, and introduces Peirce’s account of metaphysics, the least understood aspect of his philosophy. The final chapter considers Peirce’s legacy and influence on the thought of philosophers such as John Dewey and Richard Rorty, as well as highlighting areas where Peirce’s ideas could still provide important insights for contemporary philosophers. Including chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading and a glossary, this invaluable introduction and guide to Peirce’s philosophy is essential reading for those new to his work. (shrink)

Human self-consciousness operates at different levels of complexity and at least comprises five different levels of representational processes. These five levels are nonconceptual representation, conceptual representation, sentential representation, meta-representation, and iterative meta-representation. These different levels of representation can be operationalized by taking a first-person-perspective that is involved in representational processes on different levels of complexity. We refer to experiments that operationalize a first-person-perspective on the level of conceptual and meta-representational self-consciousness. Interestingly, these experiments show converging evidence for a recruitment of (...) medial cortical and parietal regions during taking a first-person-perspective, even when operating on different degrees of complexity. These data lend support for the speculative hypothesis, that there exist a neural signature for human self-consciousness that is recruited independent from the degree of representational complexity to be performed. (shrink)

The past twenty-five years have seen a major renewal of interest in the topic of a priori knowledge. In the sixteen essays collected here, which span this entire period, philosopher Albert Casullo documents the complex set of issues motivating the renewed interest, identifies the central epistemological questions, and provides the leading ideas of a unified response to them.

How can we solve the paradox of false-belief understanding: if infants pass the implicit false belief task by nonverbal behavioural responses why do they nonetheless typically fail the explicit FBT till they are 4 years old? Starting with the divide between situational and cognitive accounts of the development of false-belief understanding, we argue that we need to consider both situational and internal cognitive factors together and describe their interaction to adequately explain the development of children’s Theory of Mind ability. We (...) then argue that a further challenge is raised for existing accounts by helping behaviour versions of the FBT. We argue that the common two-stage accounts are inadequate: we need to allow for three central stages in a continuous development. Furthermore, drawing on Perner et al.’s and Perner and Leahy’s : 491–508, 2016) recent mental files account, we provide a new account of the development of these three stages of ToM ability by describing the changes of the structure and organisation of mental files including the systematic triggering role of types of situations. Thereby we aim to establish a situational mental file account as a new and adequate solution to the paradox of false-belief understanding. (shrink)

What exactly do we do when we try to make sense of other people e.g. by ascribing mental states like beliefs and desires to them? After a short criticism of Theory-Theory, Interaction Theory and the Narrative Theory of understanding others as well as an extended criticism of the Simulation Theory in Goldman's recent version (2006), we suggest an alternative approach: the Person Model Theory . Person models are the basis for our ability to register and evaluate persons having mental as (...) well as physical properties. We argue that there are two kinds of person models, nonconceptual person schemata and conceptual person images , and both types of models can be developed for individuals as well as for groups. (shrink)

This paper addresses a family of issues surrounding the biological phenomenon of resistance and its representation in realist ontologies. The treatments of resistance terms in various existing ontologies are examined and found to be either overly narrow, internally inconsistent, or otherwise problematic. We propose a more coherent characterization of resistance in terms of what we shall call blocking dispositions, which are collections of mutually coordinated dispositions which are of such a sort that they cannot undergo simultaneous realization within a single (...) bearer. A definition of ‘protective resistance’ is proposed for use in the Infectious Disease Ontology (IDO) and we show how this definition can be used to characterize the antibiotic resistance in Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). The ontological relations between entities in our MRSA case study are used alongside a series of logical inference rules to illustrate logical reasoning about resistance. A description logic representation of blocking dispositions is also provided. We demonstrate that our characterization of resistance is sufficiently general to cover two other cases of resistance in the infectious disease domain involving HIV and malaria. (shrink)

Hans Albert is the leading critical rationalist in the German-speaking world and the main critic of the hermeneutic tradition. He is well-known for applying the idea of critical reason to various kinds of human practice, including economics, politics, and law. But he has also improved on Popper's methodology by introducing the idea of rational heuristics. This collection of essays presents the core of his work on epistemology, philosophy of the social sciences, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of law. Most (...) of Albert's works have not been available in English. It is enormously useful to have these articles collected in a single volume. (shrink)

I distinguish between two conceptually different kinds of physical space: a space of ordinary material bodies, which is the space of points at which I could imaginably place the tip of my finger, or the center of a billiard-ball, and a space of elementary physical determinables, which is the smallest space of points such that stipulating what is happening at each one of those points, at every time, amounts to an exhaustive physical history of the universe. In all classical physical (...) theories, these two spaces happen to coincide – and what we mean by calling a theory “classical”, and all we mean by calling a theory “classical”, is precisely that these two spaces coincide. But once the distinction between these two spaces in on the table, it becomes clear that there is no logical or conceptual reason why they must coincide – and it turns out that a very simple way of pulling them apart from one another gives us quantum mechanics. (shrink)

As one of the world's most eminent living philosophers, John Perry has covered a remarkable breadth of subjects in his published work, including semantics, indexicality, self-knowledge, personal identity, and consciousness. Looking particularly at the way in which he deals with issues of self, communication, and reality, this volume is organized in seven chapters that highlight a different aspect of Perry's work on the intersection of these subjects. A fundamental work for students and scholars, Identity, Language, and Mind explores questions that (...) are not only essential in understanding Perry's writings, but also contemporary philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss whether intuitive moral judgements have epistemic value. Are they mere expressions of irrational feelings that should be disregarded or should they be taken seriously? In section 2, I discuss the view of some social psychologists that moral intuitions are, like other social intuitions, under certain conditions more reliable than conscious deliberative judgements. In sections 3 and 4, I examine whether intuitive moral judgements can be said not to need inferential justification. I outline a concept of (...) moral intuition as a seeming whose seemingness resides in special, phenomenological features such as a felt veridicality, appropriateness, familiarity, or confidence, and whose justificatory force is influenced by the reliability of the belief-producing procedures and by a subject's competence in applying moral concepts. I argue that subjects can come to realise that the beliefs expressed in their intuitive judgements evoke a sense of non-inferential credibility. In section 5, I first discuss the contribution of moral expertise to the non-inferential credibility of a person's intuitions. Subsequently, I discuss whether Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is right in saying that we can never claim non-inferential justification for our intuitions because they are subject to all kinds of distorting influences. (shrink)

There are differences in the approach to law and ethics in Western philosophy compared to law and ethics in Islamic philosophy. Western philosophy itself is divided into several schools, including natural law philosophy, legal realism or positivistic philosophy, historical philosophy of law, sociological philosophy of law, and utilitarianism. These schools have different views on the position of law and ethics. In the discourse of Islamic philosophy, Law and Ethics or Morality are seen as interrelated principles. While Western philosophy is divided (...) into several schools and dichotomizes between Law and Ethics, in Islamic philosophy they are integrated into the view that law and ethics are a unity and represent the spirit of Islamic teachings. This research aims to explain the role of law and ethics in Western philosophical schools. This research will explain how Western philosophical thought relates to law and ethics, and how the integration of law and ethics occurs in the context of Islamic philosophy. This research is a type of literature review or bibliographic study. The method applied in this research is descriptive analysis using a comparative approach. In the issue of Law and ethics, Western philosophical schools are divided into two views: those that unite law and those that separate law and ethics. The view that unites law and ethics includes natural law philosophy and historical philosophy of law. The view that separates law and ethics includes legal realism, positivism, social jurisprudence, and utilitarianism. Meanwhile, in the context of Islamic philosophy, the relationship between law and ethics is considered an integrated dimension in human life that cannot be separated. (shrink)

Glenn Carruthers presents a very detailed and thorough critique of our multi-factorial twostep account of agency to the effect that it would not succeed in being superior and more general as the comparator model (CM). This critique gives us the opportunity to refine some of our points and to make the overall argument clearer. As Carruthers notes, “This move [the distinction between a feeling of agency (FoA) and a judgment of agency (JoA)] usefully limits the explanatory target of the CM (...) to FoA”. This is exactly right in our view but contrasts with a lot of views present in the empirical literature which neglect this important difference. As a paradigmatic example see the claim by Jeannerod that “agency judgements made by the subject are based on the state of the comparator (Jeannerod, 1999, pp. 17-18) (for further experimental conflation of feeling and judgement of agency see e.g.Daprati et al., 1997; Farrer et al., 2003b). Thus, with this point we are not only fighting straw men but show severe limits of the explanatory force of the comparator model. (shrink)

Self-knowledge is knowledge of one’s own states (or processes) in an indexical mode of presentation. The philosophical debate is concentrating on mental states (or processes). If we characterize self-knowledge by natural language sentences, the most adequate utterance has a structure like “I know that I am in mental state M”. This common sense characterization has to be developed into an adequate description. In this investigation we will tackle two questions: (i) What precisely is the phenomenon referred to by “self-knowledge” and (...) how can we adequately describe a form of self-knowledge which we might realistically enjoy? (ii) Can we have self-knowledge given the fact that the meaning of some words which we utter depends on the environment or the speech community? The theory we defend argues that we have to distinguish the public meaning of utterances, on the one hand, and the mental representations which are constituting a mental state of an individual, on the other. Self-knowledge should be characterized on the level of mental representations while the semantics of utterances self-attributing mental states should be treated separately. Externalism is only true for the public meaning of utterances but not for beliefs and other mental states including self-knowledge. (shrink)

Dieser Band enthält eine Auswahl aus dem großen Bestand an Briefen, die Hans Albert zu Religionsfragen und zur Theologiekritik geschrieben hat. Er gibt neue und überraschende Einblicke in seinen Gedankenaustausch mit renommierten Theologen, Religionsphilosophen und dem Religionskritiker Karlheinz Deschner. Diese Korrespondenz gibt auch Auskunft über biographisch-historische Hintergründe, über die Entwicklung von Alberts Denken sowie über die Rezeption seiner Auffassungen und seine lebhafte Beteiligung an theologischen Auseinandersetzungen. Der von Albert vertretene Kritische Rationalismus ist mit der Forderung nach kritisch-rationaler Prüfung (...) von Überzeugungen aller Art, mit der Zurückweisung der verschiedenen Formen von Rechtfertigungszusammenhängen und mit der Kritik an Immunisierungsstrategien nicht nur eine Herausforderung für die Theologie, sondern auch für eine mit dem christlichen Glauben zu vereinbarende Philosophie. (shrink)

von Lothar Brock Wer dieses Buch zur Hand nimmt, sollte sich einen Autor vorstellen, der einer Gruppe hartgesottener Geschäftsleute aus der Wüste von New Mexico morgens um sieben mit charmanter Leichtigkeit und spärlichen, aber Verbindung stiftenden Gesten einen Vortrag über die EU als einer vorgestellten Gemeinschaft hält und dafür überschwenglich gefeiert wird. Oder einen Theoretiker mit verblüffend praktischen Kenntnissen über Höhenmedizin und der unter bestimmten Umständen lebensrettenden Fähigkeit, panischen Berggefährten den Anblick der Tiefe erträglich zu machen. Oder den lead-Sänger einer (...) ziemlich professionellen Musikgruppe, die sich die öffentliche Pflege des Liedgutes der Rolling Stones zur Aufgabe gemacht hat und als Meister der Reproduktion die Bewunderer des Originals in Taumel versetzt - von Stockholm bis OfIenbach. Auf keinen Fall aber sollte man sich einen Autor vorstellen wie man ihn sich vorstellt, wenn man dieses Buch zur Hand nimmt. Oder doch? Doch! Es könnte ja sein, daß jemand dieses Buch nicht nur als lohnende Strapaze erlebt, sondern auch als Vergnügen, wenn er erst einmal über den Untertitel hinweggekommen ist. Zur Sache:,,Fallen der Welt-Ordnung" - die Fallen oder das Fallen? Das Thema verrät es nicht; denn zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne ist ein weites Feld, auf dem alles mögliche passieren kann. Worum also geht es? Mathias Albert versteht das Arbeitsgebiet der Internationalen Beziehungen (also der Lehre und Forschung über diesen Gegenstandsbereich) als jenen Teilbereich der Sozialwissenschaften, der sich mit der Weltordnung befaßt. (shrink)

Inhalt: I. AUSEINANDERSETZUNG MIT GRUNDPOSITIONEN DER KRITISCHEN GESELLSCHAFTSTHEORIE DER FRANKFURTER SCHULE. Hans ALBERT: Dialektische Denkwege. Jürgen Habermas und der Kritische Rationalismus. William D. FUSFIELD: Some Pseudoscientific Features of Transcendental-Pragmatic Grounding Projects. Evelyn GRÖBL-STEINBACH: Reflektierte versus naive Aufklärung? Kritische Theorie und Kritischer Rationalismus - Versuch einer Bestandsaufnahme. Kurt SALAMUN: Befriedetes Dasein und offene Gesellschaft. Gesellschaftliche Zielvorstellungen in Kritischer Theorie und Kritischem Rationalismus. II. DAS LEIB-SEELE-PROBLEM UND DIE KONZEPTION DER OFFENEN GESELLSCHAFT. Volker GADENNE: Ist der Leib-Seele-Dualismus widerlegt? Arpad SÖLTER: Der europäische (...) Sonderweg zur offenen Gesellschaft. Miroslav PROKOPIJEVIC: Justice in the "Open Society". Wojciech DOMALEWSKI: Zwei Toleranzbegriffe. III. VON DER TOTALITÄREN DER OFFENEN GESELLSCHAFT IN DER EHEMALIGEN SOZIALISTISCHEN LÄNDERN. Dieter WITTRICH: Alltagserfahrung als Politikum. Dariusz ALEKSANDROWICZ: Die sich öffnende Gesellschaft und ihre Feinde. Andreas PICKEL: Schocktherapie als rationale Reformstrategie? Eine Kritik der theoretischen Grundlagen radikaler Marktkonzepte und ein Plädoyer für Reformgradualismus. IV. METHODISCHE PROBLEME DER GESELLSCHAFTSWISSENSCHAFTEN. Herbert KEUTH: Sozialwissenschaften, Werturteile und Verantwortung. Michael SCHMID: Die Logik institutioneller Analyse aus der Sicht des Kritischen Rationalismus. Peter V. ZIMA: Framework ist kein Mythos. Zu Karl R. Poppers Thesen über wissenschaftliche Kommunikation. (shrink)

Universities in North America and Europe increasingly provide financial incentives to encourage collaboration between faculty in different disciplines, based on the premise that this yields more innovative and sophisticated research. Drawing from a wealth of empirical data, the contributors to Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration put that theory to the test. What they find reveals how interdisciplinarity is not living up to its potential, but also suggests how universities might foster more genuinely collaborative and productive research. Chapter 10 is available Open Access (...) here: https: //www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK395883/. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Probability theory is important because of its relevance for decision making, which also means: its relevance for the single case. The propensity theory of objective probability, which addresses the single case, is subject to two problems: Humphreys’ problem of inverse probabilities and the problem of the reference class. The paper solves both problems by restating the propensity theory using (an objectivist version of) Pearl’s approach to causality and probability, and by applying a decision-theoretic perspective. Contrary to a widely held view, (...) decision making on the basis of given propensities can proceed without a subjective-probability supplement to propensities. (shrink)

This article explores a modern approach to childhood that abandons the traditional view of children in western societies as inferior, fragile and vulnerable. The modern approach explored in this paper takes a plural perspective in the conception of children as people who are able to think for themselves and who have the absolute right to participate in the affairs that affect them. This modern approach is related in this study to the free-rangers thesis, in which childhood is interpreted as a (...) process of maturation and not as a stage of life, which is the conception linked to the traditional percepcion of childhood in the western societies. In the framework of formal education, this modern approach to childhood is related to Freire’s liberating education and the proposals for the school of philosophy with children in which philosophical practices are encouraged from an early age, thereby stimulating a much more active role for children in schools and giving their voice due recognition. So, this study highlights the importance of promoting liberating education in schools with the aim of making every effort to subvert the traditional roles of both teachers and pupils in formal education to give a more active role to children. In thi sense, this paper calls for the activity of philosophy whith children and encourages the idea of putting philosophy at the service of schools to give children’s voices greater value. (shrink)

A dramatic illustrated tour of the nation's first five Civil War Battlefield Parks takes readers inside the monuments at Gettysburg, Shiloh, Antietam, Vicksburg, and Chickamauga.

Acceptance speech delivered to the Bernheim Foundation of French Judaism on May 16, 2011. Translated with the author's permission by Scott Davidson.

Acceptance speech delivered to the Bernheim Foundation of French Judaism on May 16, 2011. Translated with the author's permission by Scott Davidson.