There is an important part in Schopenhauer's bibliography dedicated to reflections on a good life. Between 1826 and 1829, the German philosopher started to think about a eudemonology, an unfinished project, which relied on the rescue of the thought of ancient philosophers. In his discussions there is a great appreciation for Stoic thinking in order to produce a life as little unhappy as possible. Therefore, it seems relevant to revisit Schopenhauer's ideas and compare them with Seneca, who focused on the (...) same topics: the appropriation of the concepts of praecepta and decreta and their connection with happiness. (shrink)

The Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) field presents not only a landscape of theories but also a proliferation of approaches, which are controversial, complex and unclear. This article tries to clarify the situation, mapping the territory by classifying the main CSR theories and related approaches in four groups: (1) instrumental theories, in which the corporation is seen as only an instrument for wealth creation, and its social activities are only a means to achieve economic results; (2) political theories, which concern themselves (...) with the power of corporations in society and a responsible use of this power in the political arena; (3) integrative theories, in which the corporation is focused on the satisfaction of social demands; and (4) ethical theories, based on ethical responsibilities of corporations to society. In practice, each CSR theory presents four dimensions related to profits, political performance, social demands and ethical values. The findings suggest the necessity to develop a new theory on the business and society relationship, which should integrate these four dimensions. (shrink)

It is common in philosophy of language to recognise two different kinds of linguistic meaning: literal or conventional meaning, on the one hand, versus communicated or conveyed meaning, on the other. However, once we recognise these two types of meaning, crucial questions immediately emerge; for instance, exactly which meanings should we treat as the literal (semantic) ones, and exactly which appeals to a context of utterance yield communicated (pragmatic), as opposed to semantic, content? It is these questions and, specifically, how (...) we should model the relationship between semantic content and utterance context, that is the topic of this chapter. We explore five contemporary answers to this modelling question, considering the benefits and challenges of each, before closing by examining some potential new directions for debates in this area. (shrink)

In spite of the thousands of articles on stakeholder theory, research on value creation has had a shorter history and narrower breadth. Only a few studies have researched value creation from stakeholder perspective looking at how stakeholders appropiate value or the processes or activities by which stakeholders create value. Consequently to date, certain questions still remain unanswered regarding how a firm should treat stakeholders in order to create value. Several questions arise specifically from the stakeholder's side: What does "value" mean (...) for a particular group of stakeholders and how do firms create these different types of value? How do we measure the value created by stakeholders? The purpose of this paper is to answer these questions from Amartya Sen's Capability Approach, identifying and measuring stakeholders' capabilities in the value creation process. Stakeholder Capability is the adequate concept for understanding stakeholder welfare rather than the utility function concept. The empirical evidence comes from an in-depth case study of the company The Grobo Group and its stakeholders. According to the results, the following stakeholder capabilities are relevant to value creation: being employable, being autonomus, being innovative, being entreprenurial, being responsive, being socially integrated, being emphatic, being "green" and being healthy. (shrink)

O esquecimento é uma experiência incómoda da quotidianeidade. Marca de temporalidade e de finitude, tem carácter ontológico e alcance ôntico. Manifesta o caminho da verdade do ser à maneira humana e do ser no mundo de tudo quanto há. Heidegger define esse caminho ontológico incontornável como sendo o da metafísica ocidental, hoje culminante na época da técnica. Mas, numa abordagem meta-ontológica, o fenómeno ontológico de poder esquecer constitui uma possibilidade para o existir de cada um, enquanto projecto. O não-esquecimento compulsivo-obsessivo (...) inibe o a-vir, reduzindo-o a interpretações sedimentadas, pre-determinadas por situações hermenêuticas do sido, congeladas num não-passado. A presente abordagem pretende considerar esta duplicidade do possível e do não-possível, radicada no olvido e na abertura afectiva, ao encontro e ao seu novum, assim habilitado. Para tal, parte de um quadro de Klee e de uma narrativa de Borges, para orientar a leitura de textos de Heidegger, desde 1927 a 1945. (shrink)

The Monty Hall Dilemma (MHD) is a two-step decision problem involving counterintuitive conditional probabilities. The first choice is made among three equally probable options, whereas the second choice takes place after the elimination of one of the non-selected options which does not hide the prize. Differing from most Bayesian problems, statistical information in the MHD has to be inferred, either by learning outcome probabilities or by reasoning from the presented sequence of events. This often leads to suboptimal decisions and erroneous (...) probability judgments. Specifically, decision makers commonly develop a wrong intuition that final probabilities are equally distributed, together with a preference for their first choice. Several studies have shown that repeated practice enhances sensitivity to the different reward probabilities, but does not facilitate correct Bayesian reasoning. However, modest improvements in probability judgments have been observed after guided explanations. To explain these dissociations, the present review focuses on two types of causes producing the observed biases: Emotional-based choice biases and cognitive limitations in understanding probabilistic information. Among the latter, we identify a crucial cause for the universal difficulty in overcoming the equiprobability illusion: Incomplete representation of prior and conditional probabilities. We conclude that repeated practice and/or high incentives can be effective for overcoming choice biases, but promoting an adequate partitioning of possibilities seems to be necessary for overcoming cognitive illusions and improving Bayesian reasoning. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a systematic approach to stakeholder theory based on social capital: the stakeholder social capital approach. Social capital is a relatively novel concept in stakeholder theory, which in previous research was not properly defined or systematically developed. This paper aims to fill this gap by taking into account the specificities of the stakeholder theory, which implies an explicit consideration of values. Therefore, the stakeholder social capital concept is defined by four dimensions (relational, cognitive, structural and evaluative) (...) instead of three (relational, cognitive and structural). I present the stakeholder social capital approach according to Donaldson and Preston's distinction: the descriptive, instrumental and normative. The descriptive perspective implies mapping the stakeholder networks based on the four dimensions and implies a shift toward relationships rather than groups of stakeholders. The instrumental perspective based on the relational view focuses on the drivers of relational rents within the network (relational assets, knowledge routines, complementary resource endowments and effective governance) and the normative perspective aims to foster a relational view of society. (shrink)

Jorge Luis Borges is working for decades now on the execution of the nightmare. Perhaps his most celebrated instance is "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius ". It would take much work to sift the fabricated references in Borges' works from the ones deliberately misread from the over-emphasis on an author's casual remark, etc.

In this paper, I present a systematic approach to stakeholder theory based on social capital: the stakeholder social capital approach. Social capital is a relatively novel concept in stakeholder theory, which in previous research was not properly defined or systematically developed. This paper aims to fill this gap by taking into account the specificities of the stakeholder theory, which implies an explicit consideration of values. Therefore, the stakeholder social capital concept is defined by four dimensions (relational, cognitive, structural and evaluative) (...) instead of three (relational, cognitive and structural). I present the stakeholder social capital approach according to Donaldson and Preston's distinction: the descriptive, instrumental and normative. The descriptive perspective implies mapping the stakeholder networks based on the four dimensions and implies a shift toward relationships rather than groups of stakeholders. The instrumental perspective based on the relational view focuses on the drivers of relational rents within the network (relational assets, knowledge routines, complementary resource endowments and effective governance) and the normative perspective aims to foster a relational view of society. (shrink)

In stakeholder theory, most research on cooperation has been focused on inter-organizational collaboration field centered at the dyadic level, excluding the relational or network data. Relational or network data are important as the firms do not simply respond to each stakeholder individually but to an interaction of influences from the entire stakeholder set. The purpose of this article is to analyze the cooperation process among the firm and its stakeholders by considering the relational data and to describe the role of (...) the firm in such cooperation processes. The empirical evidence is provided by an inductive in-depth case study on the company 'Gas-Nat' and its stakeholders cooperating on the 'natural gas pipeline program' in Argentina. To do so, I combined both quantitative sociometric data and qualitative data from grounded theory and ethnographic observations. This research suggests a stakeholder cooperation model based on structural and relational factors. The results indicate that stakeholder cooperation is not just determined by stakeholder position, but they can vary depending on the political opportunity structure in the network and on the framing process. It was found that network structure may create a context for selective cooperation but doesn't explicitly determine it which is different from the previous research in stakeholder network literature. The role of the firm in the cooperation process was found as a tertius iungens role which implies to join, unite, or connect, and it is different from the existing prominent network literature of tertius gaudens. (shrink)

This paper deals with the question of whether nature sports are to be counted among the (traditional) sports and Kevin Krein’s recent argument, based on sporting excellence, as to why they should. Krein argues that sports as such are ultimately about sporting excellence and because both so-called traditional sports and nature sports fulfil that criterion, nature sports belong in the sport domain. Here, I show that Krein’s argument rests on an equivocation between two concepts of sporting excellence. Sporting excellence in (...) traditional sports is connected to sporting success. Here agon (contest or competition) dictates or frames areté (striving for excellence). This is not the case for sporting excellence in nature sports, as these are not competitions. We are dealing with two different concepts of sporting excellence and Krein’s argument, based on sporting excellence, must be rejected. It gives no basis for including nature sports in the sport domain. (shrink)

(2013). A Passion for Pushing the Limits. World Futures: Vol. 69, The Complexity of Life and Lives of Complexity, pp. 359-381.

The aim of this study was to describe the reasoning of people aged 60 years and over about prioritization in health care with regard to age and willingness to pay. Healthy people (n = 300) and people receiving continuous care and services (n = 146) who were between 60 and 101 years old were interviewed about their views on prioritization in health care. The transcribed interviews were analysed using manifest and latent qualitative content analysis. The participants' reasoning on prioritization embraced (...) eight categories: feeling secure and confident in the health care system; being old means low priority; prioritization causes worries; using underhand means in order to be prioritized; prioritization as a necessity; being averse to anyone having precedence over others; having doubts about the distribution of resources; and buying treatment requires wealth. (shrink)

relevant to the differences between the two speakings, Odile’s words in the first case said what was false, while in the second case they said what was true. Both spoke of the same state of the world, or the same refrigerator in the same condition. So, in the first case, the words said what is false of a refrigerator with but a milk puddle; in the second case they said what is true of such a refrigerator.

The aim of this study was to deepen nurses’ understanding of the importance of carefully managing the first nurse-patient encounter in a psychiatric setting according to each patient’s suffering and future hopes. The study was carried out using an action research approach. The action planned was the implementation of a conceptual model reflecting Eriksson’s caring theory. Data were collected by interviews with nurses and observational notes kept in a research diary. The data analysis followed the procedure of qualitative content analysis. (...) A generalization of the entire learning process shows the first nurse-patient encounter to be a moral commitment in nursing. A theoretical framework of nursing assessment conveying knowledge about the patient as unique and being a whole person can support the nurse in encouraging the patient to enter into a relationship. This insight stimulated the nurses in this study to reflect on the moral responsibility of continuing the relationship and initiating an ongoing nursing process. Awareness of this responsibility made them reflect more on the possibility of nurses taking autonomous actions in order not to abandon the patient and to avoid feeling guilty. (shrink)

It is common in philosophy of language to recognise two different kinds of linguistic meaning: literal or conventional meaning, on the one hand, versus communicated or conveyed meaning, on the other. However, once we recognise these two types of meaning, crucial questions immediately emerge; for instance, exactly which meanings should we treat as the literal (semantic) ones, and exactly which appeals to a context of utterance yield communicated (pragmatic), as opposed to semantic, content? It is these questions and, specifically, how (...) we should model the relationship between semantic content and utterance context, that is the topic of this chapter. We explore five contemporary answers to this modelling question, considering the benefits and challenges of each, before closing by examining some potential new directions for debates in this area. (shrink)

María de Echarri y Dolors Monserdà fueron dos de las figuras más significativas del feminismo católico de principios del siglo XX. La prensa fue uno de los altavoces más importantes para la difusión de las ideas de ambas propagandistas sobre la situación laboral de las obreras, así como la defensa del catolicismo, que les valieron una relevancia social y política muy importante. En este trabajo se repasarán algunos de sus escritos publicados en la prensa que mostrarán su pensamiento social, con (...) el objetivo de plasmar cuáles fueron sus ideas, adscritas a dos movimientos ideológicos: el feminismo conservador y el catolicismo social. (shrink)

Mark Lilla aborda en _Pensadores temerarios_ el intrigante tema de los diversos intelectuales del siglo XX que sucumbieron, en distinto grado, a la fascinación del poder totalitario, sus líderes carismáticos o sus mesiánicas ideologías.

This is the story of an adventurous life of pushing limits to expand our understanding of ourselves in our universe?as an explorer, as a scientist, as a philosopher, as a political animal, as a mother and grandmother, even as an artist?concluding with the realization that all we have to go on is our stories. This is what most differentiates us from other species, even from our own cells: that we tell each other stories of What, How, and Why Things Are (...) as They Are. We do not live as they do in the eternally Now moment, deeply interconnected within All That Is; rather we live in a mental trajectory from deep past to far future, making up stories about ourselves and everything else, coloring our perceptions with these stories and acting them out. We make them up differently in art, science, politics, economics, religion, and whatever, but however much we insist they are truths, they remain the more or less plausible human stories by which we necessarily live our lives individually and collectively. (shrink)

(2000). The Biology of Globalization. World Futures: Vol. 55, Challenges of Evolution at the Turn of the Millennium: Part III: The Chllenges of Globalization and Sustainability, pp. 105-127.

Ervin Laszlo's Science and the Akashic Field is vital to our transition from a long epoch of empire building - of the drive to control Earth's resources by fierce competition in a situation of perceived scarcity - to a future of truly cooperative global family. Laszlo's universe is a far cry from the one Western science has taught us and compatible with my own views as a "post-Darwinian" evolution biologist. In fact, no small number of Western scientists today have defected (...) from the official scientific story of How Things Are to create or adopt various versions of the new scientific worldview Laszlo presents - a worldview rooted in older sciences and cultures such as Vedic, yet ultimately not just timely, but futuristic. These new scientific models, integrating ancient and modern knowledge, represent a paradigm shift greater than the Copernican revolution and are crucial to the next stage in humanity's evolution as a planetary species. (shrink)

Until Process and Reality – An Essay in Cosmology (1929) by Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) was translated into Portuguese, four other works had been previously translated, proving Portuguese people had a persistent interest in the thought of a philosopher who is probably the last and most important speculative thinker of the 20th century. Yet, Processo e Realidade – Ensaio de Cosmologia hopefully stands as a turning point in Whiteheadian reception in Portugal; on the hand, it was publishe...

Inspired by the work of Hannah Arendt, this response article focusses on the tension between hope in the future and lost hope in the present inherent in the modern idea of progress. The backdrop of the Suite ‘Education after Progress’ is some of the interrelated challenges that we are facing today, such as climate change, new pandemics, mass migration, and the rise of populism. Drawing on different philosophical concepts and strands, the five articles in the Suite explore what it would (...) mean to learn and educate beyond the imagery of progress. Thinking beyond, however, is never an easy task and the question becomes how to orient oneself in this new philosophical landscape without losing track of what is educationally important and meaningful. After responding to each article, focussing on five possible connections between them (change, orientation, time, situatedness, and immanence), the response article concludes with the more general question of what place, if any, concepts as the past, conservation, and preservation have in an education ‘after’ progress. (shrink)

Humans have long been characterized as poor probabilistic reasoners when presented with explicit numerical information. Bayesian word problems provide a well-known example of this, where even highly educated and cognitively skilled individuals fail to adhere to mathematical norms. It is widely agreed that natural frequencies can facilitate Bayesian reasoning relative to normalized formats (e.g. probabilities, percentages), both by clarifying logical set-subset relations and by simplifying numerical calculations. Nevertheless, between-study performance on “transparent” Bayesian problems varies widely, and generally remains rather unimpressive. (...) We suggest there has been an over-focus on this representational facilitator (i.e. transparent problem structures) at the expense of the specific logical and numerical processing requirements and the corresponding individual abilities and skills necessary for providing Bayesian-like output given specific verbal and numerical input. We further suggest that understanding this task-individual pair could benefit from considerations from the literature on mathematical cognition, which emphasizes text comprehension and problem solving, along with contributions of online executive working memory, metacognitive regulation, and relevant stored knowledge and skills. We conclude by offering avenues for future research aimed at identifying the stages in problem solving at which correct versus incorrect reasoners depart, and how individual difference might influence this time point. (shrink)

The present paper is about the author’s current research on children’s education in urban contexts. It departs from the rising offer of programmes for school children in out-of-school contexts (e.g. museums, libraries, science centres). It asks what makes these practices educational (and not just interesting, entertaining and/or audience building). Based on Biesta (2006a, 2010) theory of education, the author frames and analyses the educational characteristics of, and possibilities of articulating, in and out-of-school educational practices. This paper aims at understanding if (...) the occasional outing from primary school premises promotes interruptions in the humanist foundations of school. In order to analyse relations between different institutions and professionals (to be) engaged in educational activities and programmes, Nóvoa (2002, 2009) essays will be brought to the discussion, namely his conception of the ‘Public Space of Education’—as a space where culture, education, arts, sports and leisure are shared responsibilities, and where diverse institutions are networked aiming towards societal pluralism. I argue for the possibility of using cities’ public spaces as contexts with a worldly quality to complexify children’s education. Nevertheless, I draw attention to the unbearable educational lightness that these practices may carry if they do not go beyond the praise of chance; as well as to their unsustainable weight if they perpetually repeat school’s normal orders and add up rational discourses. (shrink)

The restrictive grammatical format suggested in GPSG provides an extremely interesting alternative to transformational approaches to grammar. However, we have seen that the way the grammar is currently organized, it will in certain cases fail to give the correct interpretation to sentences with displaced constituents. Whenever a left or rightward displaced constituent contains an element that can stand in an anaphoric relation with some other element in the sentence, i.e. contains a quantifier or a pronoun, the semantic rules as given (...) do not provide the intended reading. It should be made clear, however, that this shortcoming pertains to one particular type of GPSG, namely one whose interpretation procedures make use of lambda abstraction. The problematic cases addressed here do not by themselves invalidate the syntactic framework of a GPSG. It seems quite plausible that one could construct a semantics that does not depend on lambda conversion, in which case the problem addressed in this note is presumably no longer relevant. One such proposal is put forward in Cooper (forthcoming) where a non-movement syntax is combined with interpretation procedures that do not involve translation into a lambda calculus. (shrink)

Over the last decades, understanding the sources of the difficulty of Bayesian problem solving has been an important research goal, with the effects of numerical format and individual numeracy being widely studied. However, the focus on the comprehension of probability numbers has overshadowed the relational reasoning demand of the Bayesian task. This is particularly the case when the statistical data are verbally described since the requested quantitative relation (posterior ratio) is misaligned with the presented ones (prior and likelihood ratios). In (...) this regard, here I develop the proposal that research on Bayesian reasoning might improve by considering the notational alignment framework of mathematical problem-solving. Specifically, this framework can help to understand the sources of the main difficulties underlying Bayesian inferences based on verbal descriptions. In essence, the present proposal supports the general claim in math education regarding the need to foster relational comprehension to avoid misleading alignments and improve problem solving. (shrink)

Action, reason, and causes in Kant -- Can we act without feelings? Respect, sympathy and other forms of love -- A place for affects and passion in the Kantian system -- What can Kant teach us about emotions? -- Physiology and the controlling of affects in Kant's philosophy -- Virtue as a cure for affects and passions -- The beautiful and the good: refinement as an introduction to morality -- Women and emotion -- Evil and passion -- An emotional Kant?