Issues-driven shareholder activism suggests that specific issue characteristics brought by shareholders, a group to which firms are obligated to respond, interact in a way that affects the materiality of the issue in the eyes of the modern corporation. Relevant issue characteristics include: issue type, social significance, and issue life cycle stage.

Facing an increasing number and variety of issues with social salience, firms must determine how to engage with issues that likely have a significant impact on them. Integrating issues management and salience theories, the authors find that firms engage with socially contested issues—where there is a high degree of societal disagreement—in a different manner from issues that have social consensus, or high agreement. Examining social issue resolutions filed by shareholders from 1997 to 2009, the study finds that socially contested issues, (...) as well as those issues with social consensus, are both likely to result in engagement by the firm. For social issues with consensus, a firm is more likely to opt for a low level of shareholder engagement whereas resolutions regarding contested issues lead to engaging shareholders at a higher level. These findings shed new light on the IM and issue salience literature streams that have suggested firms will react differently to these types of issues, even while they remain largely untested. Finally, firms become less engaged with perennial issues over time. rather than more, providing new guidance to researchers, shareholder activists, and firms alike. To the authors’ knowledge, such fined-grained insight into expected levels of firm engagement with social issue salience has not been put forth previously. (shrink)

Through both an historical and philosophical analysis of the concept of possibility, we show how including both potentiality and actuality as part of the real is both compatible with experience and contributes to solving key problems of fundamental process and emergence. The book is organized into four main sections that incorporate our routes to potentiality: (1) potentiality in modern science [history and philosophy; quantum physics and complexity]; (2) Relational Realism [ontological interpretation of quantum physics; philosophy and logic]; (3) Process Physics (...) [ontological interpretation of relativity theory; physics and philosophy]; (4) on speculative philosophy and physics [limitations and approximations; process philosophy]. We conclude that certain fundamental problems in modern physics require complementary analyses of certain philosophical and metaphysical issues, and that such scholarship reveals intrinsic features and limits of determinism, potentiality and emergence that enable, among others, important progress on the quantum theory of measurement problem and new understandings of emergence. (shrink)

Edited by Svetla S. Griffin and Ilaria L.E. Ramelli. Harvard University Press, Hellenic Studies 88, 2019, ca 600 pages. ISBN-10: 0674241320; ISBN-13: 978-0674241329. Contributors: Luc Brisson, Kevin Corrigan, John Dillon, Harold Tarrant, John Turner, John Finamore, Ilaria Ramelli, Karla Pollmann, Carlos Lévy, Lenka Karfíková, Pauliina Remes, Mark J. Edwards, Pier Franco Beatrice, Svetla Slaveva-Griffin, Aaron Johnson, Dimka Gocheva, Olivier Dufault, and Robert Hannah.

This paper presents the results of optical interferometry experiments in which the phase of photons in one arm of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer is modified by applying a transverse constriction. An equivalent quantum interferometry experiment using neutron de Broglie waves is discussed in which the observed phase shift is in the spirit of the force-free phase shift of the Aharonov-Bohm effects. In the optical experiments the experimental results are in excellent agreement with predictions.

American health policy today faces dual problems of too little health coverage at too high a cost. The mix of public and private financing leaves about one seventh of the population without any insurance coverage. At the same time, the coverage Americans do have costs an ever-larger share of our country's productive capacity. This "paradox of excess and deprivation" results from the incremental approach the U.S. has taken to promoting incompatible policy goals of increasing health insurance coverage and medical quality (...) while trying to control costs, without squarely confronting tradeoffs. This essay examines the record of incremental developments and draws lessons for current efforts at reform. (shrink)

Through both an historical and philosophical analysis of the concept of possibility, we show how including both potentiality and actuality as part of the real is both compatible with experience and contributes to solving key problems of fundamental process and emergence. The book is organized into four main sections that incorporate our routes to potentiality: potentiality in modern science [history and philosophy; quantum physics and complexity]; Relational Realism [ontological interpretation of quantum physics; philosophy and logic]; Process Physics [ontological interpretation of (...) relativity theory; physics and philosophy]; on speculative philosophy and physics [limitations and approximations; process philosophy]. We conclude that certain fundamental problems in modern physics require complementary analyses of certain philosophical and metaphysical issues, and that such scholarship reveals intrinsic features and limits of determinism, potentiality and emergence that enable, among others, important progress on the quantum theory of measurement problem and new understandings of emergence. (shrink)

American health policy today faces dual problems of too little coverage at too high a cost. The mix of private and public financing leaves about one seventh of the population without any insurance coverage. At the same time, the coverage Americans do have costs an ever-larger share of our country’s productive capacity. The U.S. pays well above what other countries pay and what many people, health plans, businesses, and governments want to pay. This “paradox of excess and deprivation” results from (...) the incremental approach the U.S. has taken to promoting incompatible policy goals of increasing health insurance coverage and medical quality while trying to control costs, without squarely confronting tradeoffs. This essay examines the record of incremental developments and draws lessons for current efforts at reform. (shrink)

Relational reasoning is a complex form of human cognition involving the evaluation of relations between mental representations of information. Prior studies have modified stimulus properties of relational reasoning problems and examined differences in difficulty between different problem types. While subsets of these stimulus properties have been addressed in separate studies, there has not been a comprehensive study, to our knowledge, which investigates all of these properties in the same set of stimuli. This investigative gap has resulted in different findings across (...) studies which vary in task design, making it challenging to determine what stimulus properties make relational reasoning—and the putative formation of mental models underlying reasoning—difficult. In this article, we present the Multidimensional Relational Reasoning Task, a task which systematically varied an array of stimulus properties within a single set of relational reasoning problems. Using a mixed-effects framework, we demonstrate that reasoning problems containing a greater number of the premises as well as multidimensional relations led to greater task difficulty. The MRRT has been made publicly available for use in future research, along with normative data regarding the relative difficulty of each problem. (shrink)

At Aristotle,MetaphysicsE.1, 1026a14, Schwegler’s conjectural emendation of the manuscript reading ἀχώριστα to χωριστά has been widely adopted. The objects of physical science are therefore here ‘separate’, or ‘independently existent’. By contrast, the manuscripts make them ‘not separate’, construed by earlier commentators as dependent on matter. In this paper, I offer a new defense of the manuscript reading. I review past defenses based on the internal consistency of the chapter, explore where they have left supporters of the emendation unpersuaded, and attempt (...) to strengthen their appeal. I challenge Schwegler’s central case, developed by Ross and others, that the construction μὲν ἀλλ’ οὐκ demands an implausible ‘logical antithesis’ between inseparability and mobility. This is arguably the fundamental obstacle to the manuscript reading, and counterexamples have not to date convinced emenders. I offer a new, systematic review of Aristotle’s use of the phrase, including relevant cases from theRhetoric, to show how its usual meaning in Aristotle supports the transmitted text; I also reply to possible objections. Finally, I explore the implications of this defense for the classification of the sciences in E.1. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Moore’s BeginningsNicholas GriffinConsuelo Preti. The Metaphysical Basis of Ethics: G. E. Moore and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Pp. xx, 268. isbn: 978-0-230-27762-5, us$57.50 (hb); 978-1-137-31907-4, us$44.99 (ebook).For many years now Consuelo Preti has been studying the life and work of G. E. Moore, especially in the period before the First World War when he and Russell were closest. In a series of important (...) publications, she has transformed our knowledge of the early Moore, making full use of his papers, now in the Cambridge University Library after many years in private hands. Of these, the most important, at least for Russell scholars, was the publication of Moore’s two Fellowship dissertations, which she edited with Thomas Baldwin,1 for it was with the second of these that Moore broke free from neo-Hegelianism and took Russell with him. Preti now follows this up with an extensive and detailed account of the dissertations’ intellectual background.Moore submitted two dissertations—both called “The Metaphysical Basis of Ethics”—in an attempt to win a six-year Trinity College Prize Fellowship. The first, in 1897, like most first attempts at a Trinity Prize Fellowship, failed; but the second, the following year, was successful. In his autobiography Moore famously said that he didn’t think “the world or the sciences would ever have suggested to me any philosophical problems. What has suggested philosophical problems to me is things which other philosophers have said about the world [End Page 86] and the sciences.”2 Accordingly, his first dissertation was “an attempt to make sense” of Kant’s “extremely mysterious assertions” about freedom and the second an attempt “to see clearly what Kant meant” by the “very mystifying manner” in which he used the word “reason”.3 This may seem a long way from the metaphysical basis of ethics, but the concept of will was central to Kant’s ethics, so it was natural to inquire in what sense, if any, an action could be said to be freely willed and this in turn to the distinction between actions which were caused and those which were undertaken for a reason.As Moore admits in the preface to the first dissertation, he had not had time to complete it as he intended. As it stands, it consists of a longish introduction, a single very long chapter on “Freedom, with special reference to Kant”,4 and an appendix on Sidgwick’s hedonism. Almost all this material reappears in the second dissertation, but the long chapter was there divided into two, separating Moore’s treatment of Kant from his own views on freedom. (Both Sidgwick and Edward Caird, his examiners in 1897, had complained that it was not easy to tell when he was interpreting Kant and when he was giving his own views.)5 The appendix on Sidgwick’s hedonism is joined by a new one on the dating of Kant’s ethical writings. (Caird had complained that he had not paid enough attention to this in the 1897 dissertation.) There is a new introduction and a brief concluding chapter directly on Kant’s ethics. But, most importantly, Moore opened the 1898 dissertation with two wholly new chapters: “On the meaning of ‘Reason’ in Kant” and “Reason”. It was the second of these, the bulk of which Moore published in Mind in 1899 under the title “The Nature of Judgment”, that inaugurated the revolution in philosophy associated with his name and Russell’s.Preti doesn’t get to this part of the story until her fourth and final chapter. Most of her book is taken up with a wide-ranging and detailed back-story to the dissertations and she begins, reasonably enough, with what has become known (even in English) as the Psychologismusstreit: the quarrel about psychologism. Psychologism was a doctrine defined to be false: an inappropriate appeal to psychological elements in constructing a philosophical position. Of course, the keyword here is “inappropriate”, and substantive debates raged as to which psychological elements were inappropriate to which philosophical projects.6 By the late nineteenth century, most Anglophone... (shrink)

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick Ferré. These essays, informed by the insights of Ferré and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick FerrZ. These essays, informed by the insights of FerrZ and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

The paper traces the development of Russell’s thinking about relations in 1898. Central to the story is what Russell called “the contradiction of relativity” which he thought to be endemic in the mathematical sciences. Through most of the year he tried to deal with it within the constraints of the neo-Hegelian doctrine of internal relations until, towards the end of the year, he abandoned the doctrine and with it neo-Hegelianism. Most importantly, he came to see that the contradiction of relativity (...) showed that it was impossible to treat transitive, asymmetrical relations as internal. The paper also throws new light on Russell’s earliest debts to G. E. Moore. (shrink)

In Holding Health Care Accountable , E. Haavi Morreim differentiates between duties of expertise and resource duties, arguing for tort liability respecting the former and contract liability respecting the latter. Though Morreim's book addresses ordinary clinical medicine, her liability scheme may also be relevant elsewhere. Focusing on disaster medicine, and especially the medical management of violent mass disasters (e.g., where terrorists have deployed weapons of mass destruction), I argue in this essay that Morreim's classification of duties still fits, but that (...) it is difficult to hold government powers accountable for their many resource and expertise duties. This difficulty is compounded by political arrangements that foist under-funded mandates for disaster services on healthcare providers. As a result of such arrangements, hospitals and clinicians are prone to liability for expenditures and clinical interventions that are beyond their scope. This problem can be mitigated, I argue, by examining and clarifying the apparent social compact between society and healthcare. (shrink)

Were terrorists ever to effectively deploy weapons of mass destruction, medical practice would be quickly transformed. Many ordinary clinicians would be asked or required to treat unfamiliar yet serious medical conditions in a setting of overwhelming urgency and impossible odds. Clinical focus would shift from doing good things for a succession of individual patients to considering many patients at once, a change that could beget loss of trust and rapport with patients. Clinicians might also experience restrictions in personal liberties and (...) appropriation of their property. The purpose of this essay is to develop a teleological framework for undertaking this transformation. In ordinary clinical medicine, the elusiveness of the individual telos (i.e., the good for the individual) is acknowledged in procedures (such as social history taking, informed consent and outpatient scheduling) designed to protect patients' (and clinicians') prerogatives to interpret the telos for themselves. In mass casualty scenarios, on the other hand, the telos is standardized and regarded as an Immediate Object (usually as a state of affairs in which survival is maximized and permanent disability is minimized). Clinicians who provide mass casualty care will face a number of ethical challenges that can be negotiated by appealing to the political and ethical rationale, and limits, pertaining to the pursuit of aggregate survival as an Immediate Object. (shrink)