This book contains the text of the Hulsean Lectures for 1929 on the teachings of Jesus and the apostles. Scott was the first non-clergyman to hold this lectureship, and in these lectures he charts the development and gradual evolution of the teachings of Jesus though their interpretation by later teachers.

This article explores the ethical concept of neutrality through use of a psychiatric clinical vignette. In this case a psychiatry resident is faced with the treatment of a patient who was found by the FBI to be in possession of child pornography. Although not accused of any other crimes, the patient was a fugitive from the law and requesting treatment for pedophilia. Faced with the pressures of limited resources and anxiety about the patient's dangerousness to others, the resident and his (...) supervisor tried to strike a balance between the ethical principles of neutrality and beneficence. Through this vignette, the importance of neutrality, as well as how it can be compromised by other pressures such as expediency and anxiety, is explored. (shrink)

The present study examines the relationships between consumers'' ethical beliefs and personality traits. Based on a survey of 295 undergraduate business students, the authors found that individuals with high needs for autonomy, innovation, and aggression, as well as individuals with a high propensity for taking risks tend to have less ethical beliefs concerning possible consumer actions. Individuals with a high need for social desirability and individuals with a strong problem solving coping style tend to have more ethical beliefs concerning possible (...) consumer actions. The needs for achievement, affiliation, complexity and an emotion solving coping style were not significantly correlated with consumer ethical beliefs. (shrink)

Business ethics and leadership play an increasingly important role for contemporary organizations as employers and employees search for new ways to cope with ongoing changes in organizational environments. Research attention to date has focused upon how to improve process and structural configurations, while there has been scant attention devoted to an examination of the ethical and leadership perspective. This article breaks new ground by exploring the applicability of the Rule of St. Benedict (RSB) to modern employment relationships. A significant proportion (...) of the RSB is directly relevant for today's leaders, as it contains crucial lessons dealing with leadership issues such as ethics, cultivating a consultative climate, encouraging the virtues of humility, obedience ("servant" leadership), justice, discretion, prudence, discernment, and personnel-related issues such as discipline and termination. (shrink)

This essential new text is designed for courses in contemporary moral issues, applied ethics, and leadership. Emphasizing personal choice in the study of ethics, the authors take the reader on a journey of self-discovery rather than a mere academic survey of the field of ethics.A Practical Guide to Ethics: Living and Leading with Integrity helps students develop their skills in ethical decision-making and put those decisions into effective practice. Its unique focus on leadership, especially the moral dimensions of understanding one's (...) own values, teaches students to understand and, through dialog and negotiation, communicate their own beliefs as a step to building coalitions with those who may hold different views. It is also distinctive in combining ethical theory with both multicultural ethics and a practical orientation to moral decision-making and leadership. (shrink)

This study explores the relationships among marketers' deontological norms and their personal values. Based on the review of theoretical works in the area of marketing, hypotheses concerning the relationships among marketers' norms and their personal values were developed and tested. Data were collected from 249 marketing professionals. Results from canonical correlation analysis generally indicate that marketers' norms can be partly explained by personal values. Marketers' pricing and distribution norms, information and contract norms, and norms pertaining to marketers' honesty and integrity (...) were significantly related to the personal values emphasizing "excitement," "warm relationships with others," "fun and enjoyment in life," and "a sense of accomplishment.". (shrink)

Context: The field of psychology consists of many specialist domains of activity, which lack shared foundations. This means that the field as a whole lacks conceptual coherence. Problem: The aim of the article is to show how second-order cybernetics can provide both foundations and a unifying conceptual framework for psychology. Method: The field of psychology is overviewed. There is then a demonstration of how cybernetics can provide both foundations and a unifying conceptual framework. This entails defining some key cybernetics concepts (...) and showing how they have already permeated the field, largely implicitly, and showing how, when made explicit, they can unify the field. Results: I show how concepts from second-order cybernetics can unify “process” and “person” approaches within psychology and can also unify individual psychology and social psychology, a unification that also builds conceptual bridges with sociology. Implications: The results are of value for bringing order to an otherwise inchoate field. They afford better communication between those working in the field, which is likely to give rise to new research questions and more effective ways of tackling them. Constructivist content: Central to the article is a reliance on concepts taken from the constructivist perspective of second-order cybernetics. (shrink)

Niche construction refers to the activities of organisms that bring about changes in their environments, many of which are evolutionarily and ecologically consequential. Advocates of niche construction theory (NCT) believe that standard evolutionary theory fails to recognize the full importance of niche construction, and consequently propose a novel view of evolution, in which niche construction and its legacy over time (ecological inheritance) are described as evolutionary processes, equivalent in importance to natural selection. Here, we subject NCT to critical evaluation, in (...) the form of a collaboration between one prominent advocate of NCT, and a team of skeptics. We discuss whether niche construction is an evolutionary process, whether NCT obscures or clarifies how natural selection leads to organismal adaptation, and whether niche construction and natural selection are of equivalent explanatory importance. We also consider whether the literature that promotes NCT overstates the significance of niche construction, whether it is internally coherent, and whether it accurately portrays standard evolutionary theory. Our disagreements reflect a wider dispute within evolutionary theory over whether the neo-Darwinian synthesis is in need of reformulation, as well as different usages of some key terms (e.g., evolutionary process). (shrink)

To properly understand behavior, we must obtain both ultimate and proximate explanations. Put briefly, ultimate explanations are concerned with why a behavior exists, and proximate explanations are concerned with how it works. These two types of explanation are complementary and the distinction is critical to evolutionary explanation. We are concerned that they have become conflated in some areas of the evolutionary literature on human behavior. This article brings attention to these issues. We focus on three specific areas: the evolution of (...) cooperation, transmitted culture, and epigenetics. We do this to avoid confusion and wasted effort—dangers that are particularly acute in interdisciplinary research. Throughout this article, we suggest ways in which misunderstanding may be avoided in the future. (shrink)

This book is an excellent collection of papers which partly spring from, and partly bear on the Study Group on the Unity of Knowledge held in various universities, October, 1967-March, 1970. The papers all bear on the problem of reduction. In "Unity of Physical Law and Levels of Description," Ilya Prigogine argues that organized structures need physical laws of organization, not of entropy only, to explain their genesis and operation." The editor’s paper, "Reducibility: Another Side Issue," argues, following Polanyi, that (...) living things as machines already transcend physics, since they demand both chemical and engineering principles for their explanation." "How is Mechanism Conceivable?" points out that ordinary ways of talking about and explaining behavior, i.e., as involving intention and purpose, differs in logic from mechanistic explanation. But this difference in logic of the two languages is "never an obstacle to the reduction of one theory to another, indeed, there is always such a noncongruence of the conceptual mesh." Anthony J. P. Kenny’s "The Homunculus Fallacy" argues against "the reckless application of human-being predicates to insufficiently human-like objects." In "Behavior, Belief, and Emotion," A. C. MacIntyre argues for the thesis that "there is no necessary connection between at least some emotions and particular forms of behavior." In "The Critique of Artificial Reason," H. Dreyfus criticizes both the empirical and a priori arguments for optimism underlying the work in artificial intelligence. It displays the underlying philosophical assumption inherent in Western philosophical tradition since Plato. The last two papers concern Polanyi’s theory of knowledge. In "Tacit Knowledge and the Concept of Mind," W. T. Scott shows how Ryle’s "Concept of Mind can be significantly extended by considering certain features of the philosophical position that Michael Polanyi has developed around the concept of tacit knowing." R. S. Cohen’s "Tacit, Social and Hopeful" discusses the difficulties in Polanyi’s epistemology and the merits of the logical reconstruction work in science. Only the papers by Dreyfus and Scott have been previously published. Throughout the collection, the editor has provided useful introductory remarks focusing upon the unifying themes in the collection.—A. S. C. (shrink)

From the perspective of nonlinear science, it is argued that one may accept physicalism and reject substance dualism without being forced into reductionism. This permits a property dualism under which biological and mental phenomena may emerge from intricate positive feedback networks, involving many levels of both the biological and cognitive hierarchies.

From the perspective of nonlinear science, it is argued that one may accept physicalism and reject substance dualism without being forced into reductionism. This permits a property dualism under which biological and mental phenomena may emerge from intricate positive feedback networks, involving many levels of both the biological and cognitive hierarchies.

The SERVE Program at Ignatius University seeks to foster the ethical development of its participants by combining academic study of philosophy and theology with a year-long community service project. This study considered the impact of the SERVE Program upon Ignatius University students majoring in business in comparison to students pursuing majors in the liberal arts, education, and nursing. Findings from this study offer insight into the response of business students to ethical content in comparison to students pursuing degrees in other (...) disciplines. Such findings hold significant implications for business school faculty and administrators committed to the civic and ethical development of individuals pursuing careers in business and private industry. (shrink)

In response to recent suggestions that the phenomena of consciousness may be related to those described by quantum theory, it is argued that distinctive features of brain activity are more typical of nonlinear classical dynamics than of quantum dynamics, which is a linear theory. Thus natural scientists should turn to hierarchies of nonlinear classical systems rather than quantum theory for explanations of the brain's mysterious behaviour.

Should the assessment of decision‐making capacity (DMC) be risk sensitive, that is, should the threshold for DMC vary with risk? The debate over this question is now nearly five decades old. To many, the idea that DMC assessments should be risk sensitive is intuitive and commonsense. To others, the idea is paternalistic or incoherent, or both; they argue that the riskiness of a given decision should increase the epistemic scrutiny in the evaluation of DMC, not increase the threshold for DMC. (...) We respond to the critics’ main concerns by providing a comprehensive account of how risk‐sensitive DMC is coherent, avoids paternalism, and best fulfills the epistemic goal of DMC evaluations. (shrink)

Stakeholder theory is widely recognized as a management theory, yet very little research has considered its implications for individual managerial decision-making. In the two studies reported here, we used stakeholder theory to examine managerial decisions about balancing stakeholder interests. Results of Study 1 suggest that indivisible resources and unequal levels of stakeholder saliency constrain managers’ efforts to balance stakeholder interests. Resource divisibility also influenced whether managers used a within-decision or an across-decision approach to balance stakeholder interests. In Study 2 we (...) examined instrumental and normative implications of these two approaches. We conclude by considering the contributions of this research. (shrink)

_Sonoran Desert, Stuart Hameroff and Alwyn Scott awoke from their_ _siestas to take margaritas in the shade of a ramada. On a nearby_ _table, a tape recorder had accidentally been left on and the following_ _is an unedited transcript of their conversation._.

The extended Church-Turing thesis posits that any computable function can be calculated efficiently by a probabilistic Turing machine. If this thesis held true, the global effort to build quantum computers might ultimately be unnecessary. The thesis would however be strongly contradicted by a physical device that efficiently performs a task believed to be intractable for classical computers. BosonSampling - the sampling from a distribution of n photons undergoing some linear-optical process - is a recently developed, and experimentally accessible example of (...) such a task [1]. (shrink)

_John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ provides a rich sampling of exchanges that could have taken place long ago between the traditions of American pragmatism and continental philosophy had the lines of communication been more open between Dewey and his European contemporaries. Since they were not, Paul Fairfield and thirteen of his colleagues seek to remedy the situation by bringing the philosophy of Dewey into conversation with several currents in continental philosophical thought, from post-Kantian idealism and the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (...) to twentieth-century phenomenology, hermeneutics, and poststructuralism. This unique volume includes discussions comparing and contrasting Dewey with the German philosophers G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer on such topics as phenomenology, naturalism, organicism, contextualism, and poetry. Others investigate a series of connections between Dewey and contemporary French philosophy, including the notions of subjectivity, education, and the critique of modernity in Michel Foucault; language and politics in Jacques Derrida; and the concept of experience in Gilles Deleuze. Also discussed is the question of whether we can identify traces of _Bildung_ in Dewey’s writings on education, and pragmatism’s complex relation to twentieth-century phenomenology and hermeneutics, including the problematic question of whether Heidegger was a pragmatist in any meaningful sense. Presented in intriguing pairings, these thirteen essays offer different approaches to the material that will leave readers with much to deliberate. _ John Dewey and Continental Philosophy_ demonstrates some of the many connections and opportunities for cross-traditional thinking that have long existed between Dewey and continental thought, but have been under-explored. The intersection presented here between Dewey’s pragmatism and the European traditions makes a significant contribution to continental and American philosophy and will spur new and important developments in the American philosophical debate. (shrink)

Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex moral decision-making have a deep connection? What are the moral responsibilities of the artist, critic, and reader? What can religious perspectives—from Catholic to Protestant to Mormon—contribute to literary criticism? Thirty well known contributors reflect on these questions, including iterary theorists Marshall Gregory, James Phelan, (...) and Wayne Booth; philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Richard Hart, and Nina Rosenstand; and authors John Updike, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, and Bernard Malamud. Divided into four sections, with introductory matter and questions for discussion, this accessible anthology represents the most crucial work today exploring the interdisciplinary connections between literature, religion and philosophy. (shrink)